A Feast for Dragons

a story, aye, a man might laugh at that,
but when oarsmen off four different ships tell the same tale in four different
tongues . . .”
    “The tales are not the same,” insisted Armen.
“Dragons in Asshai, dragons in Qarth, dragons in Meereen, Dothraki dragons,
dragons freeing slaves . . . each telling differs from the last.”
    “Only in details.” Mollander grew more stubborn when he
drank, and even when sober he was bullheaded. “All speak of dragons, and
a beautiful young queen.”
    The only dragon Pate cared about was made of yellow gold. He
wondered what had happened to the alchemist. The third day. He said he’d be
here.
    “There’s another apple near your foot,” Alleras called to
Mollander, “and I still have two arrows in my quiver.”
    “Fuck your quiver.” Mollander scooped up the windfall. “This
one’s wormy,” he complained, but he threw it anyway. The arrow caught the apple
as it began to fall and sliced it clean in two. One half landed on a turret
roof, tumbled to a lower roof, bounced, and missed Armen by a foot. “If you cut
a worm in two, you make two worms,” the acolyte informed them.
    “If only it worked that way with apples, no one would ever
need go hungry,” said Alleras with one of his soft smiles. The Sphinx was
always smiling, as if he knew some secret jape. It gave him a wicked look that
went well with his pointed chin, widow’s peak, and dense mat of close-cropped
jet-black curls.
    Alleras would make a maester. He had only been at the
Citadel for a year, yet already he had forged three links of his maester’s
chain. Armen might have more, but each of his had taken him a year to earn.
Still, he would make a maester too. Roone and Mollander remained pink-necked
novices, but Roone was very young and Mollander preferred drinking to reading.
    Pate, though . . .
    He had been five years at the Citadel, arriving when he was
no more than three-and-ten, yet his neck remained as pink as it had been on the
day he first arrived from the westerlands. Twice had he believed himself ready.
The first time he had gone before Archmaester Vaellyn to demonstrate his
knowledge of the heavens. Instead he learned how Vinegar Vaellyn had earned
that name. It took Pate two years to summon up the courage to try again. This
time he submitted himself to kindly old Archmaester Ebrose, renowned for his
soft voice and gentle hands, but Ebrose’s sighs had somehow proved just as
painful as Vaellyn’s barbs.
    “One last apple,” promised Alleras, “and I will tell you
what I suspect about these dragons.”
    “What could you know that I don’t?” grumbled Mollander. He
spied an apple on a branch, jumped up, pulled it down, and threw. Alleras drew
his bowstring back to his ear, turning gracefully to follow the target in
flight. He loosed his shaft just as the apple began to fall.
    “You always miss your last shot,” said Roone.
    The apple splashed down into the river, untouched.
    “See?” said Roone.
    “The day you make them all is the day you stop improving.”
Alleras unstrung his longbow and eased it into its leather case. The bow was
carved from goldenheart, a rare and fabled wood from the Summer Isles. Pate had
tried to bend it once, and failed. The Sphinx looks slight, but there’s
strength in those slim arms, he reflected, as Alleras threw a leg across the
bench and reached for his wine cup. “The dragon has three heads,” he announced
in his soft Dornish drawl.
    “Is this a riddle?” Roone wanted to know. “Sphinxes always
speak in riddles in the tales.”
    “No riddle.” Alleras sipped his wine. The rest of them were
quaffing tankards of the fearsomely strong cider that the Quill and Tankard was
renowned for, but he preferred the strange, sweet wines of his mother’s
country. Even in Oldtown such wines did not come cheap.
    It had been Lazy Leo who dubbed Alleras “the Sphinx.” A
sphinx is a bit of this, a bit of that: a human face, the body of a lion, the
wings of a hawk. Alleras was the same: his father was a Dornishman, his mother
a black-skinned Summer Islander. His own skin was dark as teak. And like the
green marble sphinxes that flanked the Citadel’s main gate, Alleras had eyes of
onyx.
    “No dragon has ever had three heads except on shields and
banners,” Armen the Acolyte said firmly. “That was a heraldic charge, no more.
Furthermore, the Targaryens are all dead.”
    “Not all,” said Alleras. “The Beggar King had a sister.”
    “I thought her head