A Feast for Dragons

His
gargantuan master had fallen off into drunken sleep during the third game, his
goblet slipping from his yellowed fingers to spill its contents on the carpet,
but perhaps he would be pleased when he awakened.
    When the supreme commander Yurkhaz zo Yunzak departed, supported
by a pair of burly slaves, that seemed to be a general signal for the other
guests to take their leaves as well. After the tent had emptied out, Nurse
reappeared to tell the servers that they might make their own feast from the
leavings. “Eat quickly. All this must be clean again before you sleep.”
    Tyrion was on his knees, his legs aching and his bloody back
screaming with pain, trying to scrub out the stain that the noble Yezzan’s
spilled wine had left upon the noble Yezzan’s carpet, when the overseer tapped
his cheek gently with the end of his whip. “Yollo. You have done well. You and
your wife.”
    “She is not my wife.”
    “Your whore, then. On your feet, both of you.”
    Tyrion rose unsteadily, one leg trembling beneath him. His
thighs were knots, so cramped that Penny had to lend him a hand to pull him to
his feet. “What have we done?”
    “Much and more,” said the overseer. “Nurse said you would be
rewarded if you pleased your father, did he not? Though the noble Yezzan is
loath to lose his little treasures, as you have seen, Yurkhaz zo Yunzak
persuaded him that it would be selfish to keep such droll antics to himself.
Rejoice! To celebrate the signing of the peace, you shall have the honor of
jousting in the Great Pit of Daznak. Thousands will come see you! Tens of
thousands! And, oh, how we shall laugh!”
    ----

    JAIME
    Raventree Hall was old. Moss grew thick between its ancient
stones, spiderwebbing up its walls like the veins in a crone’s legs. Two huge
towers flanked the castle’s main gate, and smaller ones defended every angle of
its walls. All were square. Drum towers and half-moons held up better against
catapults, since thrown stones were more apt to deflect off a curved wall, but
Raventree predated that particular bit of builder’s wisdom.
    The castle dominated the broad fertile valley that maps and
men alike called Blackwood Vale. A vale it was, beyond a doubt, but no wood had
grown here for several thousand years, be it black or brown or green. Once,
yes, but axes had long since cleared the trees away. Homes and mills and
holdfasts had risen where once the oaks stood tall. The ground was bare and
muddy, and dotted here and there with drifts of melting snow.
    Inside the castle walls, however, a bit of the forest still
remained. House Blackwood kept the old gods, and worshiped as the First Men had
in the days before the Andals came to Westeros. Some of the trees in their
godswood were said to be as old as Raventree’s square towers, especially the
heart tree, a weirwood of colossal size whose upper branches could be seen from
leagues away, like bony fingers scratching at the sky.
    As Jaime Lannister and his escort wound through the rolling
hills into the vale, little remained of the fields and farms and orchards that
had once surrounded Raventree—only mud and ashes, and here and there the
blackened shells of homes and mills. Weeds and thorns and nettles grew in that
wasteland, but nothing that could be called a crop. Everywhere Jaime looked he
saw his father’s hand, even in the bones they sometimes glimpsed beside the
road. Most were sheep bones, but there were horses too, and cattle, and now and
again a human skull, or a headless skeleton with weeds poking up through its
rib cage.
    No great hosts encircled Raventree, as Riverrun had been
encircled. This siege was a more intimate affair, the latest step in a dance
that went back many centuries. At best Jonos Bracken had five hundred men about
the castle. Jaime saw no siege towers, no battering rams, no catapults. Bracken
did not mean to break the gates of Raventree nor storm its high, thick walls.
With no prospect of relief in sight, he was content to starve his rival out. No
doubt there had been sorties and skirmishes at the start of the siege, and
arrows flying back and forth; half a year into it, everyone was too tired for
such nonsense. Boredom and routine had taken over, the enemies of discipline.
    Past time this was ended
, thought Jaime
Lannister. With Riverrun now safely in Lannister hands, Raventree was the
remnant of the Young Wolf’s short-lived kingdom. Once it yielded, his work
along the Trident would be done, and he would be free