A Dance with Dragons

by George R. R. Martin

  hunters off her trail.”

  He frowned. “That will make it difficult. She was coming north, you said. Was the lake to her east or to her west?”

  Melisandre closed her eyes, remembering. “West.”

  “She is not coming up the kingsroad, then. Clever girl. There are fewer watchers on the other side, and more cover. And some hidey-holes I have used myself from time—” He broke off at the sound of a warhorn and rose swiftly to his feet. All over Castle Black, Melisandre knew, the same sudden hush had fallen, and every man and boy turned toward the Wall, listening, waiting. One long blast of the horn meant rangers returning, but two…

  The day has come, the red priestess thought. Lord Snow will have to listen to me now.

  After the long mournful cry of the horn had faded away, the silence seemed to stretch out to an hour. The wildling finally broke the spell. “Only one, then. Rangers.”

  “Dead rangers.” Melisandre rose to her feet as well. “Go put on your bones and wait. I will return.”

  “I should go with you.”

  “Do not be foolish. Once they find what they will find, the sight of any wildling will inflame them. Stay here until their blood has time to cool.”

  Devan was coming up the steps of the King’s Tower as Melisandre made her descent, flanked by two of the guards Stannis had left her. The boy was carrying her half-forgotten breakfast on a tray. “I waited for Hobb to pull the fresh loaves from the ovens, my lady. The bread’s still hot.”

  “Leave it in my chambers.” The wildling would eat it, like as not. “Lord Snow has need of me, beyond the Wall.” He does not know it yet, but soon…

  Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. A crowd of crows had gathered around the gate by the time Melisandre and her escort arrived, but they made way for the red priestess. The lord commander had preceded her through the ice, accompanied by Bowen Marsh and twenty spearmen. Snow had also sent a dozen archers to the top of the Wall, should any foes be hidden in the nearby woods. The guards on the gate were not queen’s men, but they passed her all the same.

  It was cold and dark beneath the ice, in the narrow tunnel that crooked and slithered through the Wall. Morgan went before her with a torch and Merrel came behind her with an axe. Both men were hopeless drunkards, but they were sober at this hour of the morning. Queen’s men, at least in name, both had a healthy fear of her, and Merrel could be formidable when he was not drunk. She would have no need of them today, but Melisandre made it a point to keep a pair of guards about her everywhere she went. It sent a certain message. The trappings of power.

  By the time the three of them emerged north of the Wall the snow was falling steadily. A ragged blanket of white covered the torn and tortured earth that stretched from the Wall to the edge of the haunted forest. Jon Snow and his black brothers were gathered around three spears, some twenty yards away.

  The spears were eight feet long and made of ash. The one on the left had a slight crook, but the other two were smooth and straight. At the top of each was impaled a severed head. Their beards were full of ice, and the falling snow had given them white hoods. Where their eyes had been, only empty sockets remained, black and bloody holes that stared down in silent accusation.

  “Who were they?” Melisandre asked the crows.

  “Black Jack Bulwer, Hairy Hal, and Garth Greyfeather,” Bowen Marsh said solemnly. “The ground is half-frozen. It must have taken the wildlings half the night to drive the spears so deep. They could still be close. Watching us.” The Lord Steward squinted at the line of trees.

  “Could be a hundred of them out there,” said the black brother with the dour face. “Could be a thousand.”

  “No,” said Jon Snow. “They left their gifts in the black of night, then ran.” His huge white direwolf prowled around the shafts, sniffing, then lifted his leg and pissed on the spear that held the head of Black Jack Bulwer. “Ghost would have their scent if they were still out there.”

  “I hope the Weeper burned the bodies,” said the dour man, the one called Dolorous Edd. “Elsewise they might come looking for their heads.”

  Jon Snow grasped the spear that bore Garth Greyfeather’s head and wrenched it violently from the ground. “Pull down the other two,” he commanded, and four of the crows hurried to obey.

  Bowen Marsh’s cheeks were red with cold. “We should never have sent out rangers.”

  “This is not the time and place to pick at that wound. Not here, my lord. Not now.” To the men struggling with the spears Snow said, “Take the heads and burn them. Leave nothing but bare bone.” Only then did he seem to notice Melisandre. “My lady. Walk with me, if you would.”

  At last. “If it please the lord commander.”

  As they walked beneath the Wall, she slipped her arm through his. Morgan and Merrel went before them, Ghost came prowling at their heels. The priestess did not speak, but she slowed her pace deliberately, and where she walked the ice began to drip. He will not fail to notice that.

  Beneath the iron grating of a murder hole Snow broke the silence, as she had known he would. “What of the other six?”

  “I have not seen them,” Melisandre said.

  “Will you look?”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  “We’ve had a raven from Ser Denys Mallister at the Shadow Tower,” Jon Snow told her. “His men have seen fires in the mountains on the far side of the Gorge. Wildlings massing, Ser Denys believes. He thinks they are going to try to force the Bridge of Skulls again.”

  “Some may.” Could the skulls in her vision have signified this bridge? Somehow Melisandre did not think so. “If it comes, that attack will be no more than a diversion. I saw towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide. That is where the heaviest blow will fall.”

  “Eastwatch?”

  Was it? Melisandre had seen Eastwatch-by-the-Sea with King Stannis. That was where His Grace left Queen Selyse and their daughter Shireen when he assembled his knights for the march to Castle Black. The towers in her fire had been different, but that was oft the way with visions. “Yes. Eastwatch, my lord.”

  “When?”

  She spread her hands. “On the morrow. In a moon’s turn. In a year. And it may be that if you act, you may avert what I have seen entirely.” Else what would be the point of visions?

  “Good,” said Snow.

  The crowd of crows beyond the gate had swollen to two score by the time they emerged from beneath the Wall. The men pressed close about them. Melisandre knew a few by name: the cook Three-Finger Hobb, Mully with his greasy orange hair, the dim-witted boy called Owen the Oaf, the drunkard Septon Cellador.

  “Is it true, m’lord?” said Three-Finger Hobb.

  “Who is it?” asked Owen the Oaf. “Not Dywen, is it?”

  “Nor Garth,” said the queen’s man she knew as Alf of Runnymudd, one of the first to exchange his seven false gods for the truth of R’hllor. “Garth’s too clever for them wildlings.”

  “How many?” Mully asked.

  “Three,” Jon told them. “Black Jack, Hairy Hal, and Garth.”

  Alf of Runnymudd let out a howl loud enough to wake sleepers in the Shadow Tower. “Put him to bed and get some mulled wine into him,” Jon told Three-Finger Hobb.

  “Lord Snow,” Melisandre said quietly. “Will you come with me to the King’s Tower? I have more to share with you.”

  He looked at her face for a long moment with those cold grey eyes of his. His right hand closed, opened, closed again. “As you wish. Edd, take Ghost back to my chambers.”

  Melisandre took that as a sign and dismissed her own guard as well. They crossed the yard together, just the two of them. The snow fell all around them. She walked as close to Jon Snow as she dared, close enough to feel the mistrust pouring off him like a black fog. He does not love me, will never love me, but he will make use of me. Well and good. Melisandre had danced the same dance with Stannis Baratheon, back in the beginning. In truth, the young lord commander and her king had
more in common than either one would ever be willing to admit. Stannis had been a younger son living in the shadow of his elder brother, just as Jon Snow, bastard-born, had always been eclipsed by his trueborn sibling, the fallen hero men had called the Young Wolf. Both men were unbelievers by nature, mistrustful, suspicious. The only gods they truly worshiped were honor and duty.

  “You have not asked about your sister,” Melisandre said, as they climbed the spiral steps of the King’s Tower.

  “I told you. I have no sister. We put aside our kin when we say our words. I cannot help Arya, much as I—”

  He broke off as they stepped inside her chambers. The wildling was within, seated at her board, spreading butter on a ragged chunk of warm brown bread with his dagger. He had donned the bone armor, she was pleased to see. The broken giant’s skull that was his helm rested on the window seat behind him.

  Jon Snow tensed. “You.”

  “Lord Snow.” The wildling grinned at them through a mouth of brown and broken teeth. The ruby on his wrist glimmered in the morning light like a dim red star.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Breaking my fast. You’re welcome to share.”

  “I’ll not break bread with you.”

  “Your loss. The loaf’s still warm. Hobb can do that much, at least.” The wildling ripped off a bite. “I could visit you as easily, my lord. Those guards at your door are a bad jape. A man who has climbed the Wall half a hundred times can climb in a window easy enough. But what good would come of killing you? The crows would only choose someone worse.” He chewed, swallowed. “I heard about your rangers. You should have sent me with them.”

  “So you could betray them to the Weeper?”

  “Are we talking about betrayals? What was the name of that wildling wife of yours, Snow? Ygritte, wasn’t it?” The wildling turned to Melisandre. “I will need horses. Half a dozen good ones. And this is nothing I can do alone. Some of the spearwives penned up at Mole’s Town should serve. Women would be best for this. The girl’s more like to trust them, and they will help me carry off a certain ploy I have in mind.”

  “What is he talking about?” Lord Snow asked her.

  “Your sister.” Melisandre put her hand on his arm. “You cannot help her, but he can.”

  Snow wrenched his arm away. “I think not. You do not know this creature. Rattleshirt could wash his hands a hundred times a day and he’d still have blood beneath his nails. He’d be more like to rape and murder Arya than to save her. No. If this was what you have seen in your fires, my lady, you must have ashes in your eyes. If he tries to leave Castle Black without my leave, I’ll take his head off myself.”

  He leaves me no choice. So be it. “Devan, leave us,” she said, and the squire slipped away and closed the door behind him.

  Melisandre touched the ruby at her neck and spoke a word.

  The sound echoed queerly from the corners of the room and twisted like a worm inside their ears. The wildling heard one word, the crow another. Neither was the word that left her lips. The ruby on the wildling’s wrist darkened, and the wisps of light and shadow around him writhed and faded.

  The bones remained—the rattling ribs, the claws and teeth along his arms and shoulders, the great yellowed collarbone across his shoulders. The broken giant’s skull remained a broken giant’s skull, yellowed and cracked, grinning its stained and savage grin.

  But the widow’s peak dissolved. The brown mustache, the knobby chin, the sallow yellowed flesh and small dark eyes, all melted. Grey fingers crept through long brown hair. Laugh lines appeared at the corners of his mouth. All at once he was bigger than before, broader in the chest and shoulders, long-legged and lean, his face clean-shaved and wind-burnt.

  Jon Snow’s grey eyes grew wider. “Mance?”

  “Lord Snow.” Mance Rayder did not smile.

  “She burned you.”

  “She burned the Lord of Bones.”

  Jon Snow turned to Melisandre. “What sorcery is this?”

  “Call it what you will. Glamor, seeming, illusion. R’hllor is Lord of Light, Jon Snow, and it is given to his servants to weave with it, as others weave with thread.”

  Mance Rayder chuckled. “I had my doubts as well, Snow, but why not let her try? It was that, or let Stannis roast me.”

  “The bones help,” said Melisandre. “The bones remember. The strongest glamors are built of such things. A dead man’s boots, a hank of hair, a bag of fingerbones. With whispered words and prayer, a man’s shadow can be drawn forth from such and draped about another like a cloak. The wearer’s essence does not change, only his seeming.”

  She made it sound a simple thing, and easy. They need never know how difficult it had been, or how much it had cost her. That was a lesson Melisandre had learned long before Asshai; the more effortless the sorcery appears, the more men fear the sorcerer. When the flames had licked at Rattleshirt, the ruby at her throat had grown so hot that she had feared her own flesh might start to smoke and blacken. Thankfully Lord Snow had delivered her from that agony with his arrows. Whilst Stannis had seethed at the defiance, she had shuddered with relief.

  “Our false king has a prickly manner,” Melisandre told Jon Snow, “but he will not betray you. We hold his son, remember. And he owes you his very life.”

  “Me?” Snow sounded startled.

  “Who else, my lord? Only his life’s blood could pay for his crimes, your laws said, and Stannis Baratheon is not a man to go against the law… but as you said so sagely, the laws of men end at the Wall. I told you that the Lord of Light would hear your prayers. You wanted a way to save your little sister and still hold fast to the honor that means so much to you, to the vows you swore before your wooden god.” She pointed with a pale finger. “There he stands, Lord Snow. Arya’s deliverance. A gift from the Lord of Light… and me.”

  REEK

  He heard the girls first, barking as they raced for home. The drum of hoofbeats echoing off flagstone jerked him to his feet, chains rattling. The one between his ankles was no more than a foot long, shortening his stride to a shuffle. It was hard to move quickly that way, but he tried as best he could, hopping and clanking from his pallet. Ramsay Bolton had returned and would want his Reek on hand to serve him.

  Outside, beneath a cold autumnal sky, the hunters were pouring through the gates. Ben Bones led the way, with the girls baying and barking all around him. Behind came Skinner, Sour Alyn, and Damon Dance-for-Me with his long greased whip, then the Walders riding the grey colts Lady Dustin had given them. His lordship himself rode Blood, a red stallion with a temper to match his own. He was laughing. That could be very good or very bad, Reek knew.

  The dogs were on him before he could puzzle out which, drawn to his scent. The dogs were fond of Reek; he slept with them oft as not, and sometimes Ben Bones let him share their supper. The pack raced across the flagstones barking, circling him, jumping up to lick his filthy face, nipping at his legs. Helicent caught his left hand between her teeth and worried it so fiercely Reek feared he might lose two more fingers. Red Jeyne slammed into his chest and knocked him off his feet. She was lean, hard muscle, where Reek was loose, grey skin and brittle bones, a white-haired starveling.

  The riders were dismounting by the time he pushed Red Jeyne off and struggled to his knees. Two dozen horsemen had gone out and two dozen had returned, which meant the search had been a failure. That was bad. Ramsay did not like the taste of failure. He will want to hurt someone.

  Of late, his lord had been forced to restrain himself, for Barrowton was full of men House Bolton needed, and Ramsay knew to be careful around the Dustins and Ryswells and his fellow lordlings. With them he was always courteous and smiling. What he was behind closed doors was something else.

  Ramsay Bolton was attired as befit the lord of the Hornwood and heir to the Dreadfort. His mantle was stitched together from wolfskins and clasped against the autumn chill by the yellowed teeth of the wolf’s head on his right shoulder. On one hip he wore a
falchion, its blade as thick and heavy as a cleaver; on the other a long dagger and a small curved flaying knife with a hooked point and a razor-sharp edge. All three blades had matched hilts of yellow bone. “Reek,” his lordship called down from Blood’s high saddle, “you stink. I can smell you clear across the yard.”

  “I know, my lord,” Reek had to say. “I beg your pardon.”

  “I brought you a gift.” Ramsay twisted, reached behind him, pulled something from his saddle, and flung it. “Catch!”

  Between the chain, the fetters, and his missing fingers, Reek was clumsier than he had been before he learned his name. The head struck his maimed hands, bounced away from the stumps of his fingers, and landed at his feet, raining maggots. It was so crusted with dried blood as to be unrecognizable.

  “I told you to catch it,” said Ramsay. “Pick it up.”

  Reek tried to lift the head up by the ear. It was no good. The flesh was green and rotting, and the ear tore off between his fingers. Little Walder laughed, and a moment later all the other men were laughing too. “Oh, leave him be,” said Ramsay. “Just see to Blood. I rode the bastard hard.”

  “Yes, my lord. I will.” Reek hurried to the horse, leaving the severed head for the dogs.

  “You smell like pigshit today, Reek,” said Ramsay.

  “On him, that’s an improvement,” said Damon Dance-for-Me, smiling as he coiled his whip.

  Little Walder swung down from the saddle. “You can see to my horse too, Reek. And to my little cousin’s.”

  “I can see to my own horse,” said Big Walder. Little Walder had become Lord Ramsay’s best boy and grew more like him every day, but the smaller Frey was made of different stuff and seldom took part in his cousin’s games and cruelties.

  Reek paid the squires no mind. He led Blood off toward the stables, hopping aside when the stallion tried to kick him. The hunters strode into the hall, all but Ben Bones, who was cursing at the dogs to stop them fighting over the severed head.

  Big Walder followed him into the stables, leading his own mount. Reek stole a look at him as he removed Blood’s bit. “Who was he?” he said softly, so the other stablehands would not hear.

  “No one.” Big Walder pulled the saddle off his grey. “An old man we met on the road, is all. He was driving an old nanny goat and four kids.”

  “His lordship slew him for his goats?”

  “His lordship slew him for calling him Lord Snow. The goats were good, though. We milked the mother and roasted up the kids.”

  Lord Snow. Reek nodded, his chains clinking as he wrestled with Blood’s saddle straps. By any name, Ramsay’s no man to be around when he is in a rage. Or when he’s not. “Did you find your cousins, my lord?”

  “No. I never thought we would. They’re dead. Lord Wyman had them killed. That’s what I would have done if I was him.”

  Reek said nothing. Some things were not safe to say, not even in the stables with his lordship in the hall. One wrong word could cost him another toe, even a finger. Not my tongue, though. He will never take my tongue. He likes to hear me plead with him to spare me from the pain. He likes to make me say it.

  The riders had been sixteen days on the hunt, with only hard bread and salt beef to eat, aside from the occasional stolen kid, so that night Lord Ramsay commanded that a feast be laid to celebrate his return to Barrowton. Their host, a grizzled one-armed petty lord by the name of Harwood Stout, knew better than to refuse him, though by now his larders must be well nigh exhausted. Reek had heard Stout’s servants muttering at how the Bastard and his men were eating through the winter stores. “He’ll bed Lord Eddard’s little girl, they say,” Stout’s cook complained when she did not know that Reek was listening, “but we’re the ones who’ll be fucked when the snows come, you mark my words.”

  Yet Lord Ramsay had decreed a feast, so feast they must. Trestle tables were set up in Stout’s hall, an ox was slaughtered, and that night as the sun went down the empty-handed hunters ate roasts and ribs, barley bread, a mash of carrots and pease, washing it all down with prodigious quantities of ale.

  It fell to Little Walder to keep Lord Ramsay’s cup filled, whilst Big Walder poured for the others at the high table. Reek was chained up beside the doors lest his odor put the feasters off their appetites. He would eat later, off whatever scraps Lord Ramsay thought to send him. The dogs enjoyed the run of the hall, however, and provided the night’s best entertainment, when Maude and Grey Jeyne tore into one of Lord Stout’s hounds over an especially meaty bone that Will Short had tossed them. Reek was the only man in the hall who did not watch the three dogs fight. He kept his eyes on Ramsay Bolton.

  The fight did not end until their host’s dog was dead. Stout’s old hound never stood a mummer’s chance. He had been one against two, and Ramsay’s bitches were young, strong, and savage. Ben Bones, who liked the dogs better than their master, had told Reek they were all named after peasant girls Ramsay had hunted, raped, and killed back when he’d still been a bastard, running with the first Reek. “The ones who give him good sport, anywise. The ones who weep and beg and won’t run don’t get to come back as bitches.” The next litter to come out of the Dreadfort’s kennels would include a Kyra, Reek did not doubt. “He’s trained ’em to kill wolves as well,” Ben Bones had confided. Reek said nothing. He knew which wolves the girls were meant to kill, but he had no wish to watch the girls fighting over his severed toe.

  Two serving men were carrying off the dead dog’s carcass and an old woman had fetched out a mop and rake and bucket to deal with the blood-soaked rushes when the doors to the hall flew open in a wash of wind, and a dozen men in grey mail and iron halfhelms stalked through, shouldering past Stout’s pasty-faced young guards in their leather brigandines and cloaks of gold and russet. A sudden silence seized the feasters… all but Lord Ramsay, who tossed aside the bone he had been gnawing, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, smiled a greasy, wet-lipped smile, and said, “Father.”

  The Lord of the Dreadfort glanced idly at the remnants of the feast, at the dead dog, at the hangings on the walls, at Reek in his chains and fetters. “Out,” he told the feasters, in a voice as soft as a murmur. “Now. The lot of you.”

  Lord Ramsay’s men pushed back from the tables, abandoning cups and trenchers.