A Feast for Dragons

and one roast raven,” said Dolorous Edd. “Very
good, m’lord, only Hobb’s made boiled eggs, black sausage, and apples stewed
with prunes. The apples stewed with prunes are excellent, except for the
prunes. I won’t eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb chopped
them up with chestnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook,
my lord. They’ll prune you when you least expect it.”
    “Later.” Breakfast could wait; Stannis could not. “Any
trouble from the stockades last night?”
    “Not since you put guards on the guards, m’lord.”
    “Good.” A thousand wildlings had been penned up beyond the
Wall, the captives Stannis Baratheon had taken when his knights had smashed
Mance Rayder’s patchwork host. Many of the prisoners were women, and some of
the guards had been sneaking them out to warm their beds. King’s men, queen’s
men, it did not seem to matter; a few black brothers had tried the same thing.
Men were men, and these were the only women for a thousand leagues.
    “Two more wildlings turned up to surrender,” Edd went on. “A
mother with a girl clinging to her skirts. She had a boy babe too, all swaddled
up in fur, but he was dead.”
    “Dead,”
said the raven. It was one of the
bird’s favorite words.
“Dead, dead, dead.”
    They had free folk drifting in most every night, starved
half-frozen creatures who had run from the battle beneath the Wall only to
crawl back when they realized there was no safe place to run to. “Was the
mother questioned?” Jon asked. Stannis Baratheon had smashed Mance Rayder’s
host and made the King-Beyond-the-Wall his captive … but the
wildlings were still out there, the Weeper and Tormund Giantsbane and thousands
more.
    “Aye, m’lord,” said Edd, “but all she knows is that she ran
off during the battle and hid in the woods after. We filled her full of
porridge, sent her to the pens, and burned the babe.”
    Burning dead children had ceased to trouble Jon Snow; live
ones were another matter.
Two kings to wake the dragon. The father first
and then the son, so both die kings
. The words had been murmured by
one of the queen’s men as Maester Aemon had cleaned his wounds. Jon had tried
to dismiss them as his fever talking. Aemon had demurred. “There is power in a
king’s blood,” the old maester had warned, “and better men than Stannis have
done worse things than this.”
The king can be harsh and unforgiving,
aye, but a babe still on the breast? Only a monster would give a living child
to the flames
.
    Jon pissed in darkness, filling his chamber pot as the Old
Bear’s raven muttered complaints. The wolf dreams had been growing stronger,
and he found himself remembering them even when awake.
Ghost knows that
Grey Wind is dead
. Robb had died at the Twins, betrayed by men he’d
believed his friends, and his wolf had perished with him. Bran and Rickon had
been murdered too, beheaded at the behest of Theon Greyjoy, who had once been
their lord father’s ward … but if dreams did not lie, their
direwolves had escaped. At Queenscrown, one had come out of the darkness to
save Jon’s life.
Summer, it had to be. His fur was grey, and Shaggydog
is black
. He wondered if some part of his dead brothers lived on
inside their wolves.
    He filled his basin from the flagon of water beside his bed,
washed his face and hands, donned a clean set of black woolens, laced up a
black leather jerkin, and pulled on a pair of well-worn boots. Mormont’s raven
watched with shrewd black eyes, then fluttered to the window. “Do you take me
for your thrall?” When Jon folded back the window with its thick diamond-shaped
panes of yellow glass, the chill of the morning hit him in the face. He took a
breath to clear away the cobwebs of the night as the raven flapped away.
That
bird is too clever by half
. It had been the Old Bear’s companion for
long years, but that had not stopped it from eating Mormont’s face once he
died.
    Outside his bedchamber a flight of steps descended to a
larger room furnished with a scarred pinewood table and a dozen oak-and-leather
chairs. With Stannis in the King’s Tower and the Lord Commander’s Tower burned
to a shell, Jon had established himself in Donal Noye’s modest rooms behind the
armory. In time, no doubt, he would need larger quarters, but for the moment
these would serve whilst he accustomed himself to command.
    The grant that the king had presented him for signature was
on the table