A Dance With Dragons

brought a load of hides and timber down the White Knife, “with three hundred spear-men and a hundred archers. Some Hornwood men have joined them, and Cerwyns too.” That was worst of all.
    “Lord Wyman best send some men to fight if he knows what’s good for him,” said the old fellow at the end of the table. “Lord Roose, he’s the Warden now. White Harbor’s honor bound to answer his summons.”
    “What did any Bolton ever know o’ honor?” said the Eel’s proprietor as he filled their cups with more brown wine.
    “Lord Wyman won’t go no place. He’s too bloody fat.”
    “I heard how he was ailing. All he does is sleep and weep, they say. He’s too sick to get out o’ his bed most days.”
    “Too fat, you mean.”
    “Fat or thin’s got naught to do with it,” said the Eel’s proprietor. “The lions got his son.”
    No one spoke of King Stannis. No one even seemed to know that His Grace had come north to help defend the Wall. Wildlings and wights and giants had been all the talk at Eastwatch, but here no one seemed to be giving them so much as a thought.
    Davos leaned into the firelight. “I thought the Freys killed his son. That’s what we heard in Sisterton.”
    “They killed Ser Wendel,” said the proprietor. “His bones are resting in the Snowy Sept with candles all around them, if you want to have a look. Ser Wylis, though, he’s still a captive.”
    Worse and worse. He had known that Lord Wyman had two sons, but he’d thought that both of them were dead. If the Iron Throne has a hostage … Davos had fathered seven sons himself, and lost four on the Blackwater. He knew he would do whatever gods or men required of him to protect the other three. Steffon and Stannis were thousands of leagues from the fighting and safe from harm, but Devan was at Castle Black, a squire to the king. The king whose cause may rise or fall with White Harbor.
    His fellow drinkers were talking about dragons now. “You’re bloody mad,” said an oarsman off Storm Dancer. “The Beggar King’s been dead for years. Some Dothraki horselord cut his head off.”
    “So they tell us,” said the old fellow. “Might be they’re lying, though. He died half a world away, if he died at all. Who’s to say? If a king wanted me dead, might be I’d oblige him and pretend to be a corpse. None of us has ever seen his body.”
    “I never saw Joffrey’s corpse, nor Robert’s,” growled the Eel’s proprietor. “Maybe they’re all alive as well. Maybe Baelor the Blessed’s just been having him a little nap all these years.”
    The old fellow made a face. “Prince Viserys weren’t the only dragon, were he? Are we sure they killed Prince Rhaegar’s son? A babe, he was.”
    “Wasn’t there some princess too?” asked a whore. She was the same one who’d said the meat was grey.
    “Two,” said the old fellow. “One was Rhaegar’s daughter, t’other was his sister.”
    “Daena,” said the riverman. “That was the sister. Daena of Dragon-stone. Or was it Daera?”
    “Daena was old King Baelor’s wife,” said the oarsman. “I rowed on a ship named for her once. The Princess Daena. ”
    “If she was a king’s wife, she’d be a queen.”
    “Baelor never had a queen. He was holy.”
    “Don’t mean he never wed his sister,” said the whore. “He just never bedded her, is all. When they made him king, he locked her up in a tower. His other sisters too. There was three.”
    “Daenela,” the proprietor said loudly. “That was her name. The Mad King’s daughter, I mean, not Baelor’s bloody wife.”
    “ Daenerys, ” Davos said. “She was named for the Daenerys who wed the Prince of Dorne during the reign of Daeron the Second. I don’t know what became of her.”
    “I do,” said the man who’d started all the talk of dragons, a Braavosi oarsman in a somber woolen jack. “When we were down to Pentos we moored beside a trader called the Sloe-Eyed Maid, and I got to drinking with her captain’s steward. He told me a pretty tale about some slip of a girl who come aboard in Qarth, to try and book passage back to Westeros for her and three dragons. Silver hair she had, and purple eyes. ‘I took her to the captain my own self,’ this steward swore to me, ‘but he wasn’t having none of that. There’s more profit in cloves and saffron, he tells me, and spices won’t set fire to your sails.’ ”
    Laughter swept the cellar. Davos did not join in. He knew what had befallen the Sloe-Eyed