A Dance With Dragons

squeezed his arm. “If we ran away, I could be your wife, or your … your whore … whatever you wanted. You could be my man.”
    Theon wrenched his arm away from her. “I’m no … I’m no one’s man.” A man would help her. “Just … just be Arya, be his wife. Please him, or … just please him, and stop this talk about being someone else.” Jeyne, her name is Jeyne, it rhymes with pain. The music was growing more insistent. “It is time. Wipe those tears from your eyes.” Brown eyes. They should be grey. Someone will see. Someone will remember. “Good. Now smile.”
    The girl tried. Her lips, trembling, twitched up and froze, and he could see her teeth. Pretty white teeth, he thought, but if she angers him, they will not be pretty long. When he pushed the door open, three of the four candles fluttered out. He led the bride into the mist, where the wedding guests were waiting.
    “Why me?” he had asked when Lady Dustin told him he must give the bride away.
    “Her father is dead and all her brothers. Her mother perished at the Twins. Her uncles are lost or dead or captive.”
    “She has a brother still.” She has three brothers still, he might have said. “Jon Snow is with the Night’s Watch.”
    “A half-brother, bastard-born, and bound to the Wall. You were her father’s ward, the nearest thing she has to living kin. It is only fitting that you give her hand in marriage.”
    The nearest thing she has to living kin. Theon Greyjoy had grown up with Arya Stark. Theon would have known an imposter. If he was seen to accept Bolton’s feigned girl as Arya, the northern lords who had gathered to bear witness to the match would have no grounds to question her legitimacy. Stout and Slate, Whoresbane Umber, the quarrelsome Ryswells, Hornwood men and Cerywn cousins, fat Lord Wyman Manderly … not one of them had known Ned Stark’s daughters half so well as he. And if a few entertained private doubts, surely they would be wise enough to keep those misgivings to themselves.
    They are using me to cloak their deception, putting mine own face on their lie. That was why Roose Bolton had clothed him as a lord again, to play his part in this mummer’s farce. Once that was done, once their false Arya had been wedded and bedded, Bolton would have no more use for Theon Turncloak. “Serve us in this, and when Stannis is defeated we will discuss how best to restore you to your father’s seat,” his lordship had said in that soft voice of his, a voice made for lies and whispers. Theon never believed a word of it. He would dance this dance for them because he had no choice, but afterward … He will give me back to Ramsay then, he thought, and Ramsay will take a few more fingers and turn me into Reek once more. Unless the gods were good, and Stannis Baratheon descended on Winterfell and put all of them to the sword, himself included. That was the best he could hope for.
    It was warmer in the godswood, strange to say. Beyond its confines, a hard white frost gripped Winterfell. The paths were treacherous with black ice, and hoarfrost sparkled in the moonlight on the broken panes of the Glass Gardens. Drifts of dirty snow had piled up against the walls, filling every nook and corner. Some were so high they hid the doors behind them. Under the snow lay grey ash and cinders, and here and there a blackened beam or a pile of bones adorned with scraps of skin and hair. Icicles long as lances hung from the battlements and fringed the towers like an old man’s stiff white whiskers. But inside the godswood, the ground remained unfrozen, and steam rose off the hot pools, as warm as baby’s breath.
    The bride was garbed in white and grey, the colors the true Arya would have worn had she lived long enough to wed. Theon wore black and gold, his cloak pinned to his shoulder by a crude iron kraken that a smith in Barrowton had hammered together for him. But under the hood, his hair was white and thin, and his flesh had an old man’s greyish undertone. A Stark at last, he thought. Arm in arm, the bride and he passed through an arched stone door, as wisps of fog stirred round their legs. The drum was as tremulous as a maiden’s heart, the pipes high and sweet and beckoning. Up above the treetops, a crescent moon was floating in a dark sky, half-obscured by mist, like an eye peering through a veil of silk.
    Theon Greyjoy was no stranger to this godswood. He had played here as a boy, skipping stones across the cold black pool