A Feast for Dragons

them now.”
    “Such tidings as we bear are for your ears alone, Damphair,”
the Sparr said. “These are not matters I would speak of here before these
others.”
    “ These others are my drowned men, god’s servants,
just as I am. I have no secrets from them, nor from our god, beside whose holy
sea I stand.”
    The horsemen exchanged a look. “Tell him,” said the Sparr,
and the youth in the red cloak summoned up his courage. “The king is dead,” he
said, as plain as that. Four small words, yet the sea itself trembled when he
uttered them.
    Four kings there were in Westeros, yet Aeron did not need to
ask which one was meant. Balon Greyjoy ruled the
Iron
Islands
,
and no other. The king is dead. How can that be? Aeron had seen his
eldest brother not a moon’s turn past, when he had returned to the
Iron
Islands
from harrying the
Stony
Shore
.
Balon’s grey hair had gone half-white whilst the priest had been away, and the
stoop in his shoulders was more pronounced than when the longships sailed. Yet
all in all the king had not seemed ill.
    Aeron Greyjoy had built his life upon two mighty pillars.
Those four small words had knocked one down. Only the Drowned God remains to
me. May he make me as strong and tireless as the sea. “Tell me the manner
of my brother’s death.”
    “His Grace was crossing a bridge at Pyke when he fell and
was dashed upon the rocks below.”
    The Greyjoy stronghold stood upon a broken headland, its
keeps and towers built atop massive stone stacks that thrust up from the sea.
Bridges knotted Pyke together; arched bridges of carved stone and swaying spans
of hempen rope and wooden planks. “Was the storm raging when he fell?” Aeron
demanded of them.
    “Aye,” the youth said, “it was.”
    “The Storm God cast him down,” the priest announced. For a
thousand thousand years sea and sky had been at war. From the sea had come the
ironborn, and the fish that sustained them even in the depths of winter, but
storms brought only woe and grief. “My brother Balon made us great again, which
earned the Storm God’s wrath. He feasts now in the Drowned God’s watery halls,
with mermaids to attend his every want. It shall be for us who remain behind in
this dry and dismal vale to finish his great work.” He pushed the cork back
into his waterskin. “I shall speak with your lord father. How far from here to
Hammerhorn?”
    “Six leagues. You may ride pillion with me.”
    “One can ride faster than two. Give me your horse, and the
Drowned God will bless you.”
    “Take my horse, Damphair,” offered Steffarion Sparr.
    “No. His mount is stronger. Your horse, boy.”
    The youth hesitated half a heartbeat, then dismounted and
held the reins for the Damphair. Aeron shoved a bare black foot into a stirrup
and swung himself onto the saddle. He was not fond of horses—they were
creatures from the green lands and helped to make men weak—but necessity
required that he ride. Dark wings, dark words. A storm was brewing, he
could hear it in the waves, and storms brought naught but evil. “Meet with me
at Pebbleton beneath Lord Merlyn’s tower,” he told his drowned men, as he
turned the horse’s head.
    The way was rough, up hills and woods and stony defiles,
along a narrow track that oft seemed to disappear beneath the horse’s hooves.
Great Wyk was the largest of the
Iron
Islands
,
so vast that some of its lords had holdings that did not front upon the holy
sea. Gorold Goodbrother was one such. His keep was in the Hardstone Hills, as
far from the Drowned God’s realm as any place in the isles. Gorold’s folk
toiled down in Gorold’s mines, in the stony dark beneath the earth. Some lived
and died without setting eyes upon salt water. Small wonder that such folk
are crabbed and queer.
    As Aeron rode, his thoughts turned to his brothers.
    Nine sons had been born from the loins of Quellon Greyjoy,
the Lord of the
Iron
Islands
.
Harlon, Quenton, and Donel had been born of Lord Quellon’s first wife, a woman
of the Stonetrees. Balon, Euron, Victarion, Urrigon, and Aeron were the sons of
his second, a Sunderly of Saltcliffe. For a third wife Quellon took a girl from
the green lands, who gave him a sickly idiot boy named Robin, the brother best
forgotten. The priest had no memory of Quenton or Donel, who had died as
infants. Harlon he recalled but dimly, sitting grey-faced and still in a
windowless tower room and speaking in whispers that grew fainter every day as
the greyscale turned