A Feast for Dragons

For his mother’s sake, and mine. And keep him away from
the red woman. She knows who he is. She sees things in her fires.”
    Arya
, he thought, hoping it was so. “Ashes
and cinders.”
    “Kings and dragons.”
    Dragons again
. For a moment Jon could almost
see them too, coiling in the night, their dark wings outlined against a sea of flame.
“If she knew, she would have taken the boy away from us. Dalla’s boy, not your
monster. A word in the king’s ear would have been the end of it.”
And of
me. Stannis would have taken it for treason
. “Why let it happen if she
knew?”
    “Because it suited her. Fire is a fickle thing. No one knows
which way a flame will go.” Val put a foot into a stirrup, swung her leg over
her horse’s back, and looked down from the saddle. “Do you remember what my
sister told you?”
    “Yes.”
A sword without a hilt, with no safe way to
hold it
. But Melisandre had the right of it. Even a sword without a
hilt is better than an empty hand when foes are all around you.
    “Good.” Val wheeled the garron toward the north. “The first
night of the full moon, then.” Jon watched her ride away wondering if he would
ever see her face again.
I am no southron lady
, he could hear
her say,
but a woman of the free folk
.
    “I don’t care what she says,” muttered Dolorous Edd, as Val
vanished behind a stand of soldier pines. “The air
is
so cold
it hurts to breathe. I would stop, but that would hurt worse.” He rubbed his
hands together. “This is going to end badly.”
    “You say that of everything.”
    “Aye, m’lord. Usually I’m right.”
    Mully cleared his throat. “M’lord? The wildling princess,
letting her go, the men may say—”
    “—that I am half a wildling myself, a turncloak who means to
sell the realm to our raiders, cannibals, and giants.” Jon did not need to
stare into a fire to know what was being said of him. The worst part was, they
were not wrong, not wholly. “Words are wind, and the wind is always blowing at
the Wall. Come.”
    It was still dark when Jon returned to his chambers behind
the armory. Ghost was not yet back, he saw.
Still hunting
. The
big white direwolf was gone more oft than not of late, ranging farther and
farther in search of prey. Between the men of the Watch and the wildlings down
in Mole’s Town, the hills and fields near Castle Black had been hunted clean,
and there had been little enough game to begin with.
Winter is coming
,
Jon reflected.
And soon, too soon
. He wondered if they would
ever see a spring.
    Dolorous Edd made the trek to the kitchens and soon was back
with a tankard of brown ale and a covered platter. Under the lid Jon discovered
three duck’s eggs fried in drippings, a strip of bacon, two sausages, a blood
pudding, and half a loaf of bread still warm from the oven. He ate the bread
and half an egg. He would have eaten the bacon too, but the raven made off with
it before he had the chance. “Thief,” Jon said, as the bird flapped up to the
lintel above the door to devour its prize.
    “Thief,”
the raven agreed.
    Jon tried a bite of sausage. He was washing the taste from
his mouth with a sip of ale when Edd returned to tell him Bowen Marsh was
without. “Othell’s with him, and Septon Cellador.”
    That was quick
. He wondered who was telling
tales and if there was more than one. “Send them in.”
    “Aye, m’lord. You’ll want to watch your sausages with this
lot, though. They have a hungry look about them.”
    Hungry
was not the word Jon would have used.
Septon Cellador appeared confused and groggy and in dire need of some scales
from the dragon that had flamed him, whilst First Builder Othell Yarwyck looked
as if he had swallowed something he could not quite digest. Bowen Marsh was
angry. Jon could see it in his eyes, the tightness around his mouth, the flush
to those round cheeks.
That red is not from cold
. “Please sit,”
he said. “May I offer you food or drink?”
    “We broke our fast in the commons,” said Marsh.
    “I could do with more.” Yarwyck eased himself down onto a
chair. “Good of you to offer.”
    “Perhaps some wine?” said Septon Cellador.
    “Corn,”
screamed the raven from the lintel.
“Corn,
corn.”
    “Wine for the septon and a plate for our First Builder,” Jon
told Dolorous Edd. “Nothing for the bird.” He turned back to his visitors.
“You’re here about Val.”
    “And other matters,” said Bowen Marsh. “The men have
concerns, my lord.”
    And