A Dance With Dragons

these king’s men and queen’s men and wildlings … Mole’s Town alone has a thousand useless mouths, and still they come. Three more turned up yesterday at the gates, a dozen the day before. It cannot go on. Settling them on the Gift, that’s well and good, but it is too late to plant crops. We’ll be down to turnips and pease porridge before the year is out. After that we’ll be drinking the blood of our own horses.”
    “Yum,” declared Dolorous Edd. “Nothing beats a hot cup of horse blood on a cold night. I like mine with a pinch of cinnamon sprinkled on top.”
    The Lord Steward paid him no mind. “There will be sickness too,” he went on, “bleeding gums and loose teeth. Maester Aemon used to say that lime juice and fresh meat would remedy that, but our limes were gone a year ago and we do not have enough fodder to keep herds afoot for fresh meat. We should butcher all but a few breeding pairs. It’s past time. In winters past, food could be brought up the kingsroad from the south, but with the war … it is still autumn, I know, but I would advise we go on winter rations nonetheless, if it please my lord.”
    The men will love that. “If we must. We’ll cut each man’s portion by a quarter.” If my brothers are complaining of me now, what will they say when they’re eating snow and acorn paste?
    “That will help, my lord.” The Lord Steward’s tone made it plain that he did not think that it would help enough.
    Dolorous Edd said, “Now I understand why King Stannis let the wild-lings through the Wall. He means for us to eat them.”
    Jon had to smile. “It will not come to that.”
    “Oh, good,” said Edd. “They look a stringy lot, and my teeth are not as sharp as when I was younger.”
    “If we had sufficient coin, we could buy food from the south and bring it in by ship,” the Lord Steward said.
    We could, thought Jon, if we had the gold, and someone willing to sell us food. Both of those were lacking. Our best hope may be the Eyrie. The Vale of Arryn was famously fertile and had gone untouched during the fighting. Jon wondered how Lady Catelyn’s sister would feel about feeding Ned Stark’s bastard. As a boy, he often felt as if the lady grudged him every bite.
    “We can always hunt if need be,” Wick Whittlestick put in. “There’s still game in the woods.”
    “And wildlings, and darker things,” said Marsh. “I would not send out hunters, my lord. I would not.”
    No. You would close our gates forever and seal them up with stone and ice. Half of Castle Black agreed with the Lord Steward’s views, he knew. The other half heaped scorn on them. “Seal our gates and plant your fat black arses on the Wall, aye, and the free folk’ll come swarming o’er the Bridge o’ Skulls or through some gate you thought you’d sealed five hundred years ago,” the old forester Dywen had declared loudly over supper, two nights past. “We don’t have the men to watch a hundred leagues o’ Wall. Tormund Giantsbutt and the bloody Weeper knows it too. Ever see a duck frozen in a pond, with his feet in the ice? It works the same for crows.” Most rangers echoed Dywen, whilst the stewards and builders inclined toward Bowen Marsh.
    But that was a quandary for another day. Here and now, the problem was food. “We cannot leave King Stannis and his men to starve, even if we wished to,” Jon said. “If need be, he could simply take all this at sword-point. We do not have the men to stop them. The wildlings must be fed as well.”
    “How, my lord?” asked Bowen Marsh.
    Would that I knew. “We will find a way.”
    By the time they returned to the surface, the shadows of the afternoon were growing long. Clouds streaked the sky like tattered banners, grey and white and torn. The yard outside the armory was empty, but inside Jon found the king’s squire awaiting him. Devan was a skinny lad of some twelve years, brown of hair and eye. They found him frozen by the forge, hardly daring to move as Ghost sniffed him up and down. “He won’t hurt you,” Jon said, but the boy flinched at the sound of his voice, and that sudden motion made the direwolf bare his teeth. “ No! ” Jon said. “Ghost, leave him be. Away. ” The wolf slunk back to his ox bone, silence on four feet.
    Devan looked as pale as Ghost, his face damp with perspiration. “M-my lord. His Grace c-commands your presence.” The boy was clad in Baratheon gold and black, with the flaming heart of a queen’s man sewn