A Feast for Dragons

She would not have gone
to strangers.
    In King’s Landing, Brienne had found one of Sansa’s former
maids doing washing in a brothel. “I served with Lord Renly before m’lady
Sansa, and both turned traitor,” the woman Brella complained bitterly. “No lord
will touch me now, so I have to wash for whores.” But when Brienne asked about
Sansa, she said, “I’ll tell you what I told Lord Tywin. That girl was always
praying. She’d go to sept and light her candles like a proper lady, but near
every night she went off to the godswood. She’s gone back north, she has.
That’s where her gods are.”
    The north was huge, though, and Brienne had no notion which
of her father’s bannermen Sansa might have been most inclined to trust. Or
would she seek her own blood instead? Though all of her siblings had been
slain, Brienne knew that Sansa still had an uncle and a bastard half brother on
the Wall, serving in the Night’s Watch. Another uncle, Edmure Tully, was a
captive at the Twins, but his uncle Ser Brynden still held Riverrun. And
Lady Catelyn’s younger sister ruled the Vale. Blood calls to blood. Sansa might well have run to one of them. Which one, though?
    The Wall was too far, surely, and a bleak and bitter place
besides. And to reach Riverrun the girl would need to cross the war-torn
riverlands and pass through the Lannister siege lines. The Eyrie would be
simpler, and Lady Lysa would surely welcome her sister’s daughter . . .
    Ahead, the alley bent. Somehow Brienne had taken a wrong
turn. She found herself in a dead end, a small muddy yard where three pigs were
rooting round a low stone well. One squealed at the sight of her, and an old
woman drawing water looked her up and down suspiciously. “What would you be
wanting?”
    “I was looking for the Seven Swords.”
    “Back the way you come. Left at the sept.”
    “I thank you.” Brienne turned to retrace her steps, and
walked headfirst into someone hurrying round the bend. The collision knocked
him off his feet, and he landed on his arse in the mud. “Pardons,” she
murmured. He was only a boy; a scrawny lad with straight, thin hair and a sty
beneath one eye. “Are you hurt?” She offered a hand to help him up, but the boy
squirmed back away from her on heels and elbows. He could not have been more
than ten or twelve, though he wore a chainmail byrnie and had a longsword in a
leather sheath slung across his back. “Do I know you?” Brienne asked. His face
seemed vaguely familiar, though she could not think from where.
    “No. You don’t. You never . . .” He scrambled to his feet.
“F-f-forgive me. My lady. I wasn’t looking. I mean, I was, but down. I was
looking down. At my feet.” The boy took to his heels, plunging headlong back
the way he’d come.
    Something about him roused all of Brienne’s suspicions, but
she was not about to chase him through the streets of Duskendale. Outside
the gates this morning, that was where I saw him, she realized. He was
riding a piebald rounsey. And it seemed as if she had seen him somewhere
else as well, but where?
    By the time Brienne found the Seven Swords again, the common
room was crowded. Four septas sat closest to the fire, in robes stained and
dusty from the road. Elsewhere locals filled the benches, sopping up bowls of
hot crab stew with chunks of bread. The smell made her stomach rumble, but she
saw no empty seats. Then a voice behind her said, “M’lady, here, have my
place.” Not until he hopped off the bench did Brienne realize that the speaker
was a dwarf. The little man was not quite five feet tall. His nose was veined
and bulbous, his teeth red from sourleaf, and he was dressed in the brown
roughspun robes of a holy brother, with the iron hammer of the Smith dangling
down about his thick neck.
    “Keep your seat,” she said. “I can stand as well as you.”
    “Aye, but my head is not so apt to knock upon the ceiling.”
The dwarf’s speech was coarse but courteous. Brienne could see the crown of his
scalp where he had shaved it. Many holy brothers wore such tonsures. Septa
Roelle once told her that it was meant to show that they had nothing to hide
from the Father. “Can’t the Father see through hair?” Brienne had asked. A
stupid thing to say. She had been a slow child; Septa Roelle often told her
so. She felt near as stupid now, so she took the little man’s place at the end
of the bench, signaled for stew, and turned to thank the dwarf. “Do you serve
some holy