A Feast for Dragons

sad. Are you thinking of your sister?” The
dwarf patted her on the hand. “The Crone will light your way to her, never
fear. The Maiden will keep her safe.”
    “I pray that you are right.”
    “I am.” He bowed. “But now I must be on my way. I’ve a long
way yet to go to reach King’s Landing.”
    “Do you have a horse? A mule?”
    “Two mules.” The little man laughed. “There they are, at the
bottom of my legs. They get me where I want t’ go.” He bowed, and waddled to
the door, swaying with each step.
    She remained at the table after he had gone, lingering over
a cup of watered wine. Brienne did not oft drink wine, but once in a great
while she found it helped to settle her belly. And where do I want to go? she asked herself. To Maidenpool, to look for a man named Nimble Dick in a
place called the Stinking Goose?
    When last she had seen Maidenpool, the town had been a
desolation, its lord shut up inside his castle, its smallfolk dead or fled or
hiding. She remembered burned houses and empty streets, smashed and broken
gates. Feral dogs had skulked along behind their horses, whilst swollen corpses
floated like huge pale water lilies atop the spring-fed pool that gave the town
its name. Jaime sang “Six Maids in a Pool,” and laughed when I begged him to
be quiet. And Randyll Tarly was at Maidenpool as well, another reason for
her to avoid the town. She might do better to take ship for Gulltown or
White
Harbor
. I could do both, though. Pay a call on the Stinking Goose and talk to this
Nimble Dick, then find a ship at Maidenpool to take me farther north.
    The common room had begun to empty. Brienne tore a chunk of
bread in half, listening to the talk at the other tables. Most of it concerned
the death of Lord Tywin Lannister. “Murdered by his own son, they say,” a local
man was saying, a cobbler by the look of him, “that vile little dwarf.”
    “And the king is just a boy,” said the oldest of the four
septas. “Who is to rule us till he comes of age?”
    “Lord Tywin’s brother,” said a guardsman. “Or that Lord
Tyrell, might be. Or the Kingslayer.”
    “Not him,” declared the innkeep. “Not that oathbreaker.” He
spat into the fire. Brienne let the bread fall from her hands and wiped the
crumbs off on her breeches. She’d heard enough.
    That night she dreamed herself in Renly’s tent again. All
the candles were guttering out, and the cold was thick around her. Something
was moving through green darkness, something foul and horrible was hurtling
toward her king. She wanted to protect him, but her limbs felt stiff and
frozen, and it took more strength than she had just to lift her hand. And when
the shadow sword sliced through the green steel gorget and the blood began to
flow, she saw that the dying king was not Renly after all but Jaime Lannister,
and she had failed him.
    The captain’s sister found her in the common room, drinking
a cup of milk and honey with three raw eggs mixed in. “You did beautifully,”
she said, when the woman showed her the freshly painted shield. It was more a
picture than a proper coat of arms, and the sight of it took her back through
the long years, to the cool dark of her father’s armory. She remembered how
she’d run her fingertips across the cracked and fading paint, over the green
leaves of the tree, and along the path of the falling star.
    Brienne paid the captain’s sister half again the sum they
had agreed, and slung the shield across one shoulder when she left the inn,
after buying some hardbread, cheese, and flour from the cook. She left the town
by the north gate, riding slowly through the fields and farms where the worst
of the fighting had been, when the wolves came down on Duskendale.
    Lord Randyll Tarly had commanded Joffrey’s army, made up of
westermen and stormlanders and knights from the Reach. Those men of his who had
died here had been carried back inside the walls, to rest in heroes’ tombs
beneath the septs of Duskendale. The northern dead, far more numerous, were
buried in a common grave beside the sea. Above the cairn that marked their
resting place, the victors had raised a rough-hewn wooden marker. HERE LIE THE
WOLVES was all it said. Brienne stopped beside it and said a silent prayer for
them, and for Catelyn Stark and her son Robb and all the men who’d died with
them as well.
    She remembered the night that Lady Catelyn had learned her
sons were dead, the two young boys she’d left at Winterfell to keep