A Feast for Dragons

old bridge. By the time he reached the other side,
the eastern sky was turning pink. The world is wide, he told himself. If
I bought that donkey, I could still wander the roads and byways of the Seven
Kingdoms, leeching the smallfolk and picking nits out of their hair. I could
sign on to some ship, pull an oar, and sail to Qarth by the Jade Gates to see
these bloody dragons for myself. I do not need to go back to old Walgrave and
the ravens.
    Yet somehow his feet turned back toward the Citadel.
    When the first shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds to
the east, morning bells began to peal from the Sailor’s Sept down by the
harbor. The Lord’s Sept joined in a moment later, then the Seven Shrines from
their gardens across the Honeywine, and finally the Starry Sept that had been
the seat of the High Septon for a thousand years before Aegon landed at King’s
Landing. They made a mighty music. Though not so sweet as one small
nightingale.
    He could hear singing too, beneath the pealing of the bells.
Each morning at first light the red priests gathered to welcome the sun outside
their modest wharfside temple. For the night is dark and full of terrors. Pate had heard them cry those words a hundred times, asking their god R’hllor
to save them from the darkness. The Seven were gods enough for him, but he had
heard that Stannis Baratheon worshiped at the nightfires now. He had even put
the fiery heart of R’hllor on his banners in place of the crowned stag. If
he should win the Iron Throne, we’ll all need to learn the words of the red
priests’ song, Pate thought, but that was not likely. Tywin Lannister had
smashed Stannis and R’hllor upon the Blackwater, and soon enough he would
finish them and mount the head of the Baratheon pretender on a spike above the
gates of King’s Landing.
    As the night’s mists burned away, Oldtown took form around
him, emerging ghostlike from the predawn gloom. Pate had never seen King’s
Landing, but he knew it was a daub-and-wattle city, a sprawl of mud streets,
thatched roofs, and wooden hovels. Oldtown was built in stone, and all its
streets were cobbled, down to the meanest alley. The city was never more
beautiful than at break of day. West of the Honeywine, the Guildhalls lined the
bank like a row of palaces. Upriver, the domes and towers of the Citadel rose
on both sides of the river, connected by stone bridges crowded with halls and houses.
Downstream, below the black marble walls and arched windows of the Starry Sept,
the manses of the pious clustered like children gathered round the feet of an
old dowager.
    And beyond, where the Honeywine widened into Whispering
Sound, rose the Hightower, its beacon fires bright against the dawn. From where
it stood atop the bluffs of
Battle
Island
,
its shadow cut the city like a sword. Those born and raised in Oldtown could
tell the time of day by where that shadow fell. Some claimed a man could see
all the way to the Wall from the top. Perhaps that was why Lord Leyton had not
made the descent in more than a decade, preferring to rule his city from the
clouds.
    A butcher’s cart rumbled past Pate down the river road, five
piglets in the back squealing in distress. Dodging from its path, he just
avoided being spattered as a townswoman emptied a pail of night soil from a
window overhead. When I am a maester in a castle I will have a horse to
ride, he thought. Then he tripped upon a cobble and wondered who he was
fooling. There would be no chain for him, no seat at a lord’s high table, no
tall white horse to ride. His days would be spent listening to ravens quork and scrubbing shit stains off Archmaester Walgrave’s smallclothes.
    He was on one knee, trying to wipe the mud off his robes,
when a voice said, “Good morrow, Pate.”
    The alchemist was standing over him.
    Pate rose. “The third day . . . you said you would be at the
Quill and Tankard.”
    “You were with your friends. It was not my wish to intrude
upon your fellowship.” The alchemist wore a hooded traveler’s cloak, brown and
nondescript. The rising sun was peeking over the rooftops behind his shoulder,
so it was hard to make out the face beneath his hood. “Have you decided what
you are?”
    Must he make me say it? “I suppose I am a thief.”
    “I thought you might be.”
    The hardest part had been getting down on his hands and
knees to pull the strongbox from underneath Archmaester Walgrave’s bed. Though
the box was stoutly made and bound with iron, its