A Feast for Dragons

the ground and tossed it hand to hand.
    “Throw the apple,” urged Alleras the Sphinx. He slipped an
arrow from his quiver and nocked it to his bowstring.
    “I should like to see a dragon.” Roone was the youngest of
them, a chunky boy still two years shy of manhood. “I should like that very
much.”
    And I should like to sleep with Rosey’s arms around me, Pate
thought. He shifted restlessly on the bench. By the morrow the girl could well
be his. I will take her far from Oldtown, across the narrow sea to one of the
Free Cities. There were no maesters there, no one to accuse him.
    He could hear Emma’s laughter coming through a shuttered
window overhead, mingled with the deeper voice of the man she was entertaining.
She was the oldest of the serving wenches at the Quill and Tankard, forty if
she was a day, but still pretty in a fleshy sort of way. Rosey was her
daughter, fifteen and freshly flowered. Emma had decreed that Rosey’s
maidenhead would cost a golden dragon. Pate had saved nine silver stags and a
pot of copper stars and pennies, for all the good that would do him. He would
have stood a better chance of hatching a real dragon than saving up enough coin
to make a golden one.
    “You were born too late for dragons, lad,” Armen the Acolyte
told Roone. Armen wore a leather thong about his neck, strung with links of
pewter, tin, lead, and copper, and like most acolytes he seemed to believe that
novices had turnips growing from their shoulders in place of heads. “The last
one perished during the reign of King Aegon the Third.”
    “The last dragon in Westeros, ” insisted Mollander.
    “Throw the apple,” Alleras urged again. He was a comely
youth, their Sphinx. All the serving wenches doted on him. Even Rosey would
sometimes touch him on the arm when she brought him wine, and Pate had to gnash
his teeth and pretend not to see.
    “The last dragon in Westeros was the last dragon,”
said Armen doggedly. “That is well known.”
    “The apple, ” Alleras said. “Unless you mean to eat
it.”
    “Here.” Dragging his clubfoot, Mollander took a short hop,
whirled, and whipped the apple sidearm into the mists that hung above the
Honeywine. If not for his foot, he would have been a knight like his father. He
had the strength for it in those thick arms and broad shoulders. Far and fast
the apple flew . . .
    . . . but not as fast as the arrow that whistled after it, a
yard-long shaft of golden wood fletched with scarlet feathers. Pate did not see
the arrow catch the apple, but he heard it. A soft chunk echoed back
across the river, followed by a splash.
    Mollander whistled. “You cored it. Sweet.”
    Not half as sweet as Rosey. Pate loved her hazel eyes
and budding breasts, and the way she smiled every time she saw him. He loved
the dimples in her cheeks. Sometimes she went barefoot as she served, to feel
the grass beneath her feet. He loved that too. He loved the clean fresh smell
of her, the way her hair curled behind her ears. He even loved her toes. One
night she’d let him rub her feet and play with them, and he’d made up a funny
tale for every toe to keep her giggling.
    Perhaps he would do better to remain on this side of the
narrow sea. He could buy a donkey with the coin he’d saved, and he and Rosey
could take turns riding it as they wandered Westeros. Ebrose might not think
him worthy of the silver, but Pate knew how to set a bone and leech a fever.
The smallfolk would be grateful for his help. If he could learn to cut hair and
shave beards, he might even be a barber. That would be enough, he told
himself, so long as I had Rosey. Rosey was all that he wanted in the
world.
    That had not always been so. Once he had dreamed of being a
maester in a castle, in service to some open-handed lord who would honor him
for his wisdom and bestow a fine white horse on him to thank him for his
service. How high he’d ride, how nobly, smiling down at the smallfolk when he
passed them on the road . . .
    One night in the Quill and Tankard’s common room, after his
second tankard of fearsomely strong cider, Pate had boasted that he would not
always be a novice. “Too true,” Lazy Leo had called out. “You’ll be a former
novice, herding swine.”
    He drained the dregs of his tankard. The torchlit terrace of
the Quill and Tankard was an island of light in a sea of mist this morning.
Downriver, the distant beacon of the Hightower floated in the damp of night
like a hazy orange moon, but the light did