A Feast for Dragons

the throat before a warhorn sounded the alarum from the
castle proper.
    The first raven took flight as their grapnels were arcing
above the curtain wall, the second a few moments later. Neither bird had flown
a hundred yards before an arrow took it down. A guard inside dumped down a
bucket of oil on the first men to reach the gates, but as he’d had no time to
heat it, the bucket caused more damage than its contents. Swords were soon
ringing in half a dozen places along the battlements. The men of the Golden
Company clambered through the merlons and raced along the wallwalks, shouting
“A
griffin! A griffin!,”
the ancient battle cry of House
Connington, which must have left the defenders even more confused.
    It was over within minutes. Griff rode up the throat on a
white courser beside Homeless Harry Strickland. As they neared the castle, he
saw a third raven flap from the maester’s tower, only to be feathered by Black
Balaq himself. “No more messages,” he told Ser Franklyn Flowers in the yard.
The next thing to come flying from the maester’s tower was the maester. The way
his arms were flapping, he might have been mistaken for another bird.
    That was the end of all resistance. What guards remained had
thrown down their weapons. And quick as that, Griffin’s Roost was his again,
and Jon Connington was once more a lord.
    “Ser Franklyn,” he said, “go through the keep and kitchens
and roust out everyone you find. Malo, do the same with the maester’s tower and
the armory. Ser Brendel, the stables, sept, and barracks. Bring them out into
the yard, and try not to kill anyone who does not insist on dying. We want to
win the stormlands, and we won’t do that with slaughter. Be sure you look under
the altar of the Mother, there’s a hidden stair there that leads down to a
secret bolt-hole. And another under the northwest tower that goes straight down
to the sea. No one is to escape.”
    “They won’t, m’lord,” promised Franklyn Flowers.
    Connington watched them dash off, then beckoned to the
Halfmaester. “Haldon, take charge of the rookery. I’ll have messages to send
out tonight.”
    “Let us hope they left some ravens for us.”
    Even Homeless Harry was impressed by the swiftness of their
victory. “I never thought that it would be so easy,” the captain-general said,
as they walked into the great hall to have a look at the carved and gilded
Griffin Seat where fifty generations of Conningtons had sat and ruled.
    “It will get harder. So far we have taken them unawares.
That cannot last forever, even if Black Balaq brings down every raven in the
realm.”
    Strickland studied the faded tapestries on the walls, the
arched windows with their myriad diamond-shaped panes of red and white glass,
the racks of spears and swords and warhammers. “Let them come. This place can
stand against twenty times our number, so long as we are well provisioned. And
you say there is a way in and out by sea?”
    “Below. A hidden cove beneath the crag, which appears only
when the tide is out.” But Connington had no intention of “letting them come.”
Griffin’s Roost was strong but small, and so long as they sat here they would
seem small as well. But there was another castle nearby, vastly larger and
impregnable.
Take that, and the realm will shake
. “You must
excuse me, Captain-General. My lord father is buried beneath the sept, and it
has been too many years since last I prayed for him.”
    “Of course, my lord.”
    Yet when they parted, Jon Connington did not go to the sept.
Instead his steps led him up to the roof of the east tower, the tallest at
Griffin’s Roost. As he climbed he remembered past ascents—a hundred with his
lord father, who liked to stand and look out over woods and crags and sea and
know that all he saw belonged to House Connington, and one (only one!) with Rhaegar
Targaryen. Prince Rhaegar was returning from Dorne, and he and his escort had
lingered here a fortnight.
He was so young then, and I was younger.
Boys, the both of us
. At the welcoming feast, the prince had taken up
his silver-stringed harp and played for them.
A song of love and doom
,
Jon Connington recalled,
and every woman in the hall was weeping when he
put down the harp
. Not the men, of course. Particularly not his own
father, whose only love was land. Lord Armond Connington spent the entire evening
trying to win the prince to his side in his dispute with Lord Morrigen.
    The door to the roof of the tower was