A Feast for Dragons

and holy septons, pigs and whores, rats and rebels, he would have
burned them all. When the fires guttered out and only ash and cinders remained,
he would have sent his men in to find the bones of Robert Baratheon. Later,
when Stark and Tully turned up with their host, he would have offered pardons
to the both of them, and they would have accepted and turned for home with
their tails between their legs.”
    He was not wrong
, Jon Connington reflected,
leaning on the battlements of his forebears.
I wanted the glory of
slaying Robert in single combat, and I did not want the name of butcher. So
Robert escaped me and cut down Rhaegar on the Trident
. “I failed the
father,” he said, “but I will not fail the son.”
    By the time Connington made his descent, his men had
gathered the castle garrison and surviving smallfolk together in the yard.
Though Ser Ronnet was indeed off north somewhere with Jaime Lannister,
Griffin’s Roost was not quite bereft of griffins. Amongst the prisoners were
Ronnet’s younger brother Raymund, his sister Alynne, and his natural son, a
fierce red-haired boy they called Ronald Storm. All would make for useful
hostages if and when Red Ronnet should return to try and take back the castle
that his father had stolen. Connington ordered them confined to the west tower,
under guard. The girl began to cry at that, and the bastard boy tried to bite
the spearman closest to him. “Stop it, the both of you,” he snapped at them.
“No harm will come to any of you unless Red Ronnet proves an utter fool.”
    Only a few of the captives had been in service here when Jon
Connington had last been lord: a grizzled serjeant, blind in one eye; a couple
of the washerwomen; a groom who had been a stableboy during Robert’s Rebellion;
the cook, who had grown enormously fat; the castle armorer. Griff had let his
beard grow out during the voyage, for the first time in many years, and to his
surprise it had come in mostly red, though here and there ash showed amidst the
fire. Clad in a long red-and-white tunic embroidered with the twin griffins of
his House, counterchanged and combatant, he looked an older, sterner version of
the young lord who had been Prince Rhaegar’s friend and
companion … but the men and women of Griffin’s Roost still looked at
him with strangers’ eyes.
    “Some of you will know me,” he told them. “The rest will
learn. I am your rightful lord, returned from exile. My enemies have told you I
am dead. Those tales are false, as you can see. Serve me as faithfully as you
have served my cousin, and no harm need come to any of you.”
    He brought them forward one by one, asked each man his name,
then bid them kneel and swear him their allegiance. It all went swiftly. The
soldiers of the garrison—only four had survived the attack, the old serjeant
and three boys—laid their swords at his feet. No one balked. No one died.
    That night in the great hall the victors feasted on roast
meats and fresh-caught fish, washed down with rich red wines from the castle
cellars. Jon Connington presided from the Griffin’s Seat, sharing the high
table with Homeless Harry Strickland, Black Balaq, Franklyn Flowers, and the
three young griffins they had taken captive. The children were of his blood and
he felt that he should know them, but when the bastard boy announced, “My
father’s going to kill you,” he decided that his knowledge was sufficient, ordered
them back to their cells, and excused himself.
    Haldon Halfmaester had been absent from the feast. Lord Jon
found him in the maester’s tower, bent over a pile of parchments, with maps
spread out all around him. “Hoping to determine where the rest of the company
might be?” Connington asked him.
    “Would that I could, my lord.”
    Ten thousand men had sailed from Volon Therys, with all
their weapons, horses, elephants. Not quite half that number had turned up thus
far on Westeros, at or near their intended landing site, a deserted stretch of
coast on the edge of the rainwood … lands that Jon Connington knew
well, as they had once been his.
    Only a few years ago, he would never have dared attempt a
landing on Cape Wrath; the storm lords were too fiercely loyal to House
Baratheon and to King Robert. But with both Robert and his brother Renly slain,
everything was changed. Stannis was too harsh and cold a man to inspire much in
the way of loyalty, even if he had not been half a world away, and the
stormlands had little reason to love