A Feast for Dragons

the
sons
of the boys he’d known?
    The great hall was dim and smoky. Rows of torches burned to left
and right, grasped by skeletal human hands jutting from the walls. High
overhead were wooden rafters black from smoke, and a vaulted ceiling lost in
shadow. The air was heavy with the smells of wine and ale and roasted meat.
Reek’s stomach rumbled noisily at the scents, and his mouth began to water.
    Little Walder pushed him stumbling past the long tables
where the men of the garrison were eating. He could feel their eyes upon him.
The best places, up near the dais, were occupied by Ramsay’s favorites, the
Bastard’s Boys. Ben Bones, the old man who kept his lordship’s beloved hunting
hounds. Damon, called Damon Dance-for-Me, fair-haired and boyish. Grunt, who
had lost his tongue for speaking carelessly in Lord Roose’s hearing. Sour Alyn.
Skinner. Yellow Dick. Farther down, below the salt, were others that Reek knew
by sight if not by name: sworn swords and serjeants, soldiers and gaolers and
torturers. But there were strangers too, faces he did not know. Some wrinkled
their noses as he passed, whilst others laughed at the sight of him.
Guests
,
Reek thought,
his lordship’s friends, and I am brought up to amuse them
.
A shiver of fear went through him.
    At the high table the Bastard of Bolton sat in his lord
father’s seat, drinking from his father’s cup. Two old men shared the high
table with him, and Reek knew at a glance that both were lords. One was gaunt,
with flinty eyes, a long white beard, and a face as hard as a winter frost. His
jerkin was a ragged bearskin, worn and greasy. Underneath he wore a ringmail
byrnie, even at table. The second lord was thin as well, but twisted where the
first was straight. One of his shoulders was much higher than the other, and he
stooped over his trencher like a vulture over carrion. His eyes were grey and
greedy, his teeth yellow, his forked beard a tangle of snow and silver. Only a
few wisps of white hair still clung to his spotted skull, but the cloak he wore
was soft and fine, grey wool trimmed with black sable and fastened at the
shoulder with a starburst wrought in beaten silver.
    Ramsay was clad in black and pink—black boots, black belt
and scabbard, black leather jerkin over a pink velvet doublet slashed with dark
red satin. In his right ear gleamed a garnet cut in the shape of a drop of
blood. Yet for all the splendor of his garb, he remained an ugly man, big-boned
and slope-shouldered, with a fleshiness to him that suggested that in later
life he would run to fat. His skin was pink and blotchy, his nose broad, his
mouth small, his hair long and dark and dry. His lips were wide and meaty, but
the thing men noticed first about him were his eyes. He had his lord father’s
eyes—small, close-set, queerly pale.
Ghost grey
, some men
called the shade, but in truth his eyes were all but colorless, like two chips
of dirty ice.
    At the sight of Reek, he smiled a wet-lipped smile. “There
he is. My sour old friend.” To the men beside him he said, “Reek has been with
me since I was a boy. My lord father gave him to me as a token of his love.”
    The two lords exchanged a look. “I had heard your serving
man was dead,” said the one with the stooped shoulder. “Slain by the Starks,
they said.”
    Lord Ramsay chuckled. “The ironmen will tell you that what
is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger. Like Reek. He
smells of the grave, though, I grant you that.”
    “He smells of nightsoil and stale vomit.” The
stoop-shouldered old lord tossed aside the bone that he’d been gnawing on and
wiped his fingers on the tablecloth. “Is there some reason you must needs
inflict him upon us whilst we’re eating?”
    The second lord, the straight-backed old man in the mail
byrnie, studied Reek with flinty eyes. “Look again,” he urged the other lord.
“His hair’s gone white and he is three stone thinner, aye, but this is no
serving man. Have you forgotten?”
    The crookback lord looked again and gave a sudden snort. “
Him?
Can it be? Stark’s ward. Smiling, always smiling.”
    “He smiles less often now,” Lord Ramsay confessed. “I may
have broken some of his pretty white teeth.”
    “You would have done better to slit his throat,” said the
lord in mail. “A dog who turns against his master is fit for naught but
skinning.”
    “Oh, he’s been skinned, here and there,” said Ramsay.
    “Yes, my lord. I was bad, my lord.