A Feast for Dragons

head
before its carved red face. Even here he could hear the drumming,
boom
DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM
. Like distant thunder, the sound
seemed to come from everywhere at once.
    The night was windless, the snow drifting straight down out
of a cold black sky, yet the leaves of the heart tree were rustling his name.
“Theon,” they seemed to whisper, “Theon.”
    The old gods
, he thought.
They know
me. They know my name. I was Theon of House Greyjoy. I was a ward of Eddard
Stark, a friend and brother to his children
. “Please.” He fell to his
knees. “A sword, that’s all I ask. Let me die as Theon, not as Reek.” Tears
trickled down his cheeks, impossibly warm. “I was ironborn. A son … a
son of Pyke, of the islands.”
    A leaf drifted down from above, brushed his brow, and landed
in the pool. It floated on the water, red, five-fingered, like a bloody hand.
“… Bran,” the tree murmured.
    They know. The gods know. They saw what I did
.
And for one strange moment it seemed as if it were Bran’s face carved into the
pale trunk of the weirwood, staring down at him with eyes red and wise and sad.
Bran’s ghost
, he thought, but that was madness. Why should Bran
want to haunt him? He had been fond of the boy, had never done him any harm.
It
was not Bran we killed. It was not Rickon. They were only miller’s sons, from
the mill by the Acorn Water
. “I had to have two heads, else they would
have mocked me … laughed at me … they …”
    A voice said, “Who are you talking to?”
    Theon spun, terrified that Ramsay had found him, but it was
just the washerwomen—Holly, Rowan, and one whose name he did not know. “The
ghosts,” he blurted. “They whisper to me. They … they know my name.”
    “Theon Turncloak.” Rowan grabbed his ear, twisting. “You had
to have two heads, did you?”
    “Elsewise men would have
laughed
at him,”
said Holly.
    They do not understand
. Theon wrenched free.
“What do you want?” he asked.
    “You,” said the third washerwoman, an older woman, deep-voiced,
with grey streaks in her hair.
    “I told you. I want to touch you, turncloak.” Holly smiled.
In her hand a blade appeared.
    I could scream
, Theon thought.
Someone
will hear. The castle is full of armed men
. He would be dead before
help reached him, to be sure, his blood soaking into the ground to feed the
heart tree.
And what would be so wrong with that?
“Touch me,”
he said. “Kill me.” There was more despair than defiance in his voice. “Go on.
Do me, the way you did the others. Yellow Dick and the rest. It was you.”
    Holly laughed. “How could it be us? We’re women. Teats and
cunnies. Here to be fucked, not feared.”
    “Did the Bastard hurt you?” Rowan asked. “Chopped off your
fingers, did he? Skinned your widdle toes? Knocked your teeth out? Poor lad.”
She patted his cheek. “There will be no more o’ that, I promise. You prayed,
and the gods sent us. You want to die as Theon? We’ll give you that. A nice
quick death, ’twill hardly hurt at all.” She smiled. “But not till you’ve sung
for Abel. He’s waiting for you.”
    ----

    TYRION
    Lot ninety-seven.” The auctioneer snapped his whip. “A pair
of dwarfs, well trained for your amusement.”
    The auction block had been thrown up where the broad brown
Skahazadhan flowed into Slaver’s Bay. Tyrion Lannister could smell the salt in
the air, mingled with the stink from the latrine ditches behind the slave pens.
He did not mind the heat so much as he did the damp. The very air seemed to
weigh him down, like a warm wet blanket across his head and shoulders.
    “Dog and pig included in lot,” the auctioneer announced.
“The dwarfs ride them. Delight the guests at your next feast or use them for a
folly.”
    The bidders sat on wooden benches sipping fruit drinks. A
few were being fanned by slaves. Many wore
tokar
s, that
peculiar garment beloved by the old blood of Slaver’s Bay, as elegant as it was
impractical. Others dressed more plainly—men in tunics and hooded cloaks, women
in colored silks. Whores or priestesses, most like; this far east it was hard
to tell the two apart.
    Back behind the benches, trading japes and making mock of
the proceedings, stood a clot of westerners.
Sellswords
, Tyrion
knew. He spied longswords, dirks and daggers, a brace of throwing axes, mail beneath
their cloaks. Their hair and beards and faces marked most for men of the Free
Cities, but here and there were a few who