A Feast for Dragons

If so, it
would be his undoing. The captains and the kings had come a long way to this
feast and would not choose the first dish set before them. They will want to
taste and sample, a bite of him, a nibble of the other, until they find the one
that suits them best.
    Euron must have known that as well. He stood with his arms
crossed amongst his mutes and monsters. Only the wind and the waves answered
Aeron’s call.
    “The ironborn must have a king,” the priest insisted, after
a long silence. “I ask again. Who shall be king over us? ”
    “I will,” came the answer from below.
    At once a ragged cry of “Gylbert! Gylbert King!” went up.
The captains gave way to let the claimant and his champions ascend the hill to
stand at Aeron’s side beneath the ribs of Nagga.
    This would-be king was a tall spare lord with a melancholy
visage, his lantern jaw shaved clean. His three champions took up their
position two steps below him, bearing his sword and shield and banner. They
shared a certain look with the tall lord, and Aeron took them for his sons. One
unfurled his banner, a great black longship against a setting sun. “I am
Gylbert Farwynd, Lord of the Lonely Light,” the lord told the kingsmoot.
    Aeron knew some Farwynds, a queer folk who held lands on the
westernmost shores of Great Wyk and the scattered isles beyond, rocks so small
that most could support but a single household. Of those, the Lonely Light was
the most distant, eight days’ sail to the northwest amongst rookeries of seals
and sea lions and the boundless grey oceans. The Farwynds there were even
queerer than the rest. Some said they were skinchangers, unholy creatures who
could take on the forms of sea lions, walruses, even spotted whales, the wolves
of the wild sea.
    Lord Gylbert began to speak. He told of a wondrous land
beyond the Sunset Sea, a land without winter or want, where death had no
dominion. “Make me your king, and I shall lead you there,” he cried. “We will
build ten thousand ships as Nymeria once did and take sail with all our people
to the land beyond the sunset. There every man shall be a king and every wife a
queen.”
    His eyes, Aeron saw, were now grey, now blue, as changeable
as the seas. Mad eyes, he thought, fool’s eyes. The vision he
spoke of was doubtless a snare set by the Storm God to lure the ironborn to
destruction. The offerings that his men spilled out before the kingsmoot
included sealskins and walrus tusks, arm rings made of whalebone, warhorns
banded in bronze. The captains looked and turned away, leaving lesser men to help
themselves to the gifts. When the fool was done talking and his champions began
to shout his name, only the Farwynds took up the cry, and not even all of them.
Soon enough the cries of “Gylbert! Gylbert King!” faded away to silence. The
gull screamed loudly above them, and landed atop one of Nagga’s ribs as the
Lord of the Lonely Light made his way back down the hill.
    Aeron Damphair stepped forward once more. “I ask again. Who
shall be king over us? ”
    “Me!” a deep voice boomed, and once more the crowd parted.
    The speaker was borne up the hill in a carved driftwood
chair carried on the shoulders of his grandsons. A great ruin of a man, twenty
stones heavy and ninety years old, he was cloaked in a white bearskin. His own
hair was snow white as well, and his huge beard covered him like a blanket from
cheeks to thighs, so it was hard to tell where the beard ended and the pelt
began. Though his grandsons were great strapping men, they struggled with his
weight on the steep stone steps. Before the Grey King’s Hall they set him down,
and three remained below him as his champions.
    Sixty years ago, this one might well have won the favor of
the moot, Aeron thought, but his hour is long past.
    “Aye, me!” the man roared from where he sat, in a voice as
huge as he was. “Why not? Who better? I am Erik Ironmaker, for them who’s
blind. Erik the Just. Erik Anvil-Breaker. Show them my hammer, Thormor.” One of
his champions lifted it up for all to see; a monstrous thing it was, its haft
wrapped in old leather, its head a brick of steel as large as a loaf of bread.
“I can’t count how many hands I’ve smashed to pulp with that hammer,” Erik
said, “but might be some thief could tell you. I can’t say how many heads I’ve
crushed against my anvil neither, but there’s some widows could. I could tell
you all the deeds I’ve done in battle, but I’m