A Feast for Dragons

They were arming them with
spears and shields, putting iron halfhelms on their heads, and arraying them
along the inner wall, a rank of snowy sentinels. “Lord Winter has joined us
with his levies,” one of the sentries outside the Great Hall
japed … until he saw Theon’s face and realized who he was talking to.
Then he turned his head and spat.
    Beyond the tents the big destriers of the knights from White
Harbor and the Twins were shivering in their horse lines. Ramsay had burned the
stables when he sacked Winterfell, so his father had thrown up new ones twice
as large as the old, to accommodate the warhorses and palfreys of his lords’
bannermen and knights. The rest of the horses were tethered in the wards.
Hooded grooms moved amongst them, covering them with blankets to keep them
warm.
    Theon made his way deeper into the ruined parts of the
castle. As he picked through the shattered stone that had once been Maester
Luwin’s turret, ravens looked down from the gash in the wall above, muttering
to one another. From time to time one would let out a raucous scream. He stood
in the doorway of a bedchamber that had once been his own (ankle deep in snow
that had blown in through a shattered window), visited the ruins of Mikken’s
forge and Lady Catelyn’s sept. Beneath the Burned Tower, he passed Rickard
Ryswell nuzzling at the neck of another one of Abel’s washerwomen, the plump
one with the apple cheeks and pug nose. The girl was barefoot in the snow,
bundled up in a fur cloak. He thought she might be naked underneath. When she
saw him, she said something to Ryswell that made him laugh aloud.
    Theon trudged away from them. There was a stair beyond the
mews, seldom used; it was there his feet took him. The steps were steep and
treacherous. He climbed carefully and found himself alone on the battlements of
the inner wall, well away from the squires and their snowmen. No one had given
him freedom of the castle, but no one had denied it to him either. He could go
where he would within the walls.
    Winterfell’s inner wall was the older and taller of the two,
its ancient grey crenellations rising one hundred feet high, with square towers
at every corner. The outer wall, raised many centuries later, was twenty feet
lower, but thicker and in better repair, boasting octagonal towers in place of
square ones. Between the two walls was the moat, deep and wide … and
frozen. Drifts of snow had begun to creep across its icy surface. Snow was
building up along the battlements too, filling the gaps between the merlons and
putting pale, soft caps on every tower top.
    Beyond the walls, as far as he could see, the world was
turning white. The woods, the fields, the kingsroad—the snows were covering all
of them beneath a pale soft mantle, burying the remnants of the winter town,
hiding the blackened walls Ramsay’s men had left behind when they put the
houses to the torch.
The wounds Snow made, snow conceals
, but
that was wrong. Ramsay was a Bolton now, not a Snow, never a Snow.
    Farther off, the rutted kingsroad had vanished, lost amidst
the fields and rolling hills, all one vast expanse of white. And still the snow
was falling, drifting down in silence from a windless sky.
Stannis
Baratheon is out there somewhere, freezing
. Would Lord Stannis try to
take Winterfell by storm?
If he does, his cause is doomed
. The
castle was too strong. Even with the moat frozen over, Winterfell’s defenses
remained formidable. Theon had captured the castle by stealth, sending his best
men to scale the walls and swim the moat under the cover of darkness. The
defenders had not even known they were under attack until it was too late. No
such subterfuge was possible for Stannis.
    He might prefer to cut the castle off from the outside world
and starve out its defenders. Winterfell’s storerooms and cellar vaults were
empty. A long supply train had come with Bolton and his friends of Frey up
through the Neck, Lady Dustin had brought food and fodder from Barrowton, and
Lord Manderly had arrived well provisioned from White Harbor … but
the host was large. With so many mouths to feed, their stores could not last
for long.
Lord Stannis and his men will be just as hungry, though. And
cold and footsore as well, in no condition for a fight … but the
storm will make them desperate to get inside the castle
.
    Snow was falling on the godswood too, melting when it
touched the ground. Beneath the white-cloaked trees the earth had turned