A Feast for Dragons

spears across their shoulders, archers carrying unstrung
bows and sheaves of arrows, freeriders, grooms leading warhorses. The Frey men
wore the badge of the two towers, those from White Harbor displayed merman and
trident. They shouldered through the storm in opposite directions and eyed each
other warily as they passed, but no swords were drawn. Not here.
It may
be different out there in the woods
.
    Half a dozen seasoned Dreadfort men guarded the doors of the
Great Keep. “Another bloody bath?” said their serjeant when he saw the pails of
steaming water. He had his hands tucked up into his armpits against the cold.
“She had a bath last night. How dirty can one woman get in her own bed?”
    Dirtier than you know, when you share that bed with
Ramsay
, Theon thought, remembering the wedding night and the things
that he and Jeyne had been made to do. “Lord Ramsay’s command.”
    “Get in there, then, before the water freezes,” the serjeant
said. Two of the guards pushed open the double doors.
    The entryway was nigh as cold as the air outside. Holly
kicked snow from her boots and lowered the hood of her cloak. “I thought that
would be harder.” Her breath frosted the air.
    “There are more guards upstairs at m’lord’s bedchamber,”
Theon warned her. “Ramsay’s men.” He dare not call them the Bastard’s Boys, not
here. You never knew who might be listening. “Keep your heads down and your
hoods up.”
    “Do as he says, Holly,” Rowan said. “There’s some will know
your face. We don’t need that trouble.”
    Theon led the way up the stairs.
I have climbed these
steps a thousand times before
. As a boy he would run up; descending,
he would take the steps three at a time, leaping. Once he leapt right into Old
Nan and knocked her to the floor. That earned him the worst thrashing he ever
had at Winterfell, though it was almost tender compared to the beatings his
brothers used to give him back on Pyke. He and Robb had fought many a heroic
battle on these steps, slashing at one another with wooden swords. Good
training, that; it brought home how hard it was to fight your way up a spiral
stair against determined opposition. Ser Rodrik liked to say that one good man
could hold a hundred, fighting down.
    That was long ago, though. They were all dead now. Jory, old
Ser Rodrik, Lord Eddard, Harwin and Hullen, Cayn and Desmond and Fat Tom, Alyn
with his dreams of knighthood, Mikken who had given him his first real sword.
Even Old Nan, like as not.
    And Robb. Robb who had been more a brother to Theon than any
son born of Balon Greyjoy’s loins.
Murdered at the Red Wedding,
butchered by the Freys. I should have been with him. Where was I? I should have
died with him
.
    Theon stopped so suddenly that Willow almost plowed into his
back. The door to Ramsay’s bedchamber was before him. And guarding it were two
of the Bastard’s Boys, Sour Alyn and Grunt.
    The old gods must wish us well
. Grunt had no
tongue and Sour Alyn had no wits, Lord Ramsay liked to say. One was brutal, the
other mean, but both had spent most of their lives in service at the Dreadfort.
They did as they were told.
    “I have hot water for the Lady Arya,” Theon told them.
    “Try a wash yourself, Reek,” said Sour Alyn. “You smell like
horse piss.” Grunt grunted in agreement. Or perhaps that noise was meant to be
a laugh. But Alyn unlocked the door to the bedchamber, and Theon waved the
women through.
    No day had dawned inside this room. Shadows covered all. One
last log crackled feebly amongst the dying embers in the hearth, and a candle
flickered on the table beside a rumpled, empty bed.
The girl is gone
,
Theon thought.
She has thrown herself out a window in despair
.
But the windows here were shuttered against the storm, sealed up by crusts of
blown snow and frost. “Where is she?” Holly asked. Her sisters emptied their
pails into the big round wooden tub. Frenya shut the chamber door and put her
back against it.
“Where is she?”
Holly said again. Outside a
horn was blowing.
A trumpet. The Freys, assembling for battle
.
Theon could feel an itching in his missing fingers.
    Then he saw her. She was huddled in the darkest corner of
the bedchamber, on the floor, curled up in a ball beneath a pile of wolfskins.
Theon might never have spotted her but for the way she trembled. Jeyne had
pulled the furs up over herself to hide.
From us? Or was she expecting
her lord husband?
The thought that Ramsay might be coming made