A Feast for Dragons

need in the coming struggle, but
the boy would not be moved. “Duck will die for me if need be,” he had said,
“and that’s all I require in my Kingsguard. The Kingslayer was a warrior of
great renown, and the son of a great lord as well.”
    At least I convinced him to leave the other six slots
open, else Duck might have six ducklings trailing after him, each more
blindingly adequate than the last
. “Escort His Grace to my solar,” he
commanded. “At once.”
    Prince Aegon Targaryen was not near as biddable as the boy
Young Griff had been, however. The better part of an hour had passed before he
finally turned up in the solar, with Duck at his side. “Lord Connington,” he
said, “I like your castle.”
    “Your father’s lands are beautiful,” he said. His
silvery hair was blowing in the wind, and his eyes were a deep purple, darker
than this boy’s
. “As do I, Your Grace. Please, be seated. Ser Rolly,
we’ll have no further need of you for now.”
    “No, I want Duck to stay.” The prince sat. “We’ve been
talking with Strickland and Flowers. They told us about this attack on Storm’s
End that you’re planning.”
    Jon Connington did not let his fury show. “And did Homeless
Harry try to persuade you to delay it?”
    “He did, actually,” the prince said, “but I won’t. Harry’s
an old maid, isn’t he? You have the right of it, my lord. I want the attack to
go ahead … with one change. I mean to lead it.”
    ----

    THE SACRIFICE
    On the village green, the queen’s men built their pyre.
    Or should it be the village white?
The snow was
knee deep everywhere but where the men had shoveled it away, to hack holes into
the frozen ground with axe and spade and pick. The wind was swirling from the
west, driving still more snow across the frozen surface of the lakes.
    “You do not want to watch this,” Aly Mormont said.
    “No, but I will.” Asha Greyjoy was the kraken’s daughter,
not some pampered maiden who could not bear to look at ugliness.
    It had been a dark, cold, hungry day, like the day before
and the day before that. They had spent most of it out on the ice, shivering
beside a pair of holes they’d cut in the smaller of the frozen lakes, with
fishing lines clutched in mitten-clumsy hands. Not long ago, they could count
on hooking one or two fish apiece, and wolfswood men more practiced at ice-fishing
were pulling up four or five. Today all that Asha had come back with was a
chill that went bone deep. Aly had fared no better. It had been three days
since either of them had caught a fish.
    The She-Bear tried again. “
I
do not need to
watch this.”
    It is not you the queen’s men want to burn
.
“Then go. You have my word, I will not run. Where would I go? To Winterfell?”
Asha laughed. “Only three days’ ride, they tell me.”
    Six queen’s men were wrestling two enormous pinewood poles
into holes six other queen’s men had dug out. Asha did not have to ask their
purpose. She knew.
Stakes
. Nightfall would be on them soon, and
the red god must be fed.
An offering of blood and fire
, the
queen’s men called it,
that the Lord of Light may turn his fiery eye
upon us and melt these thrice-cursed snows
.
    “Even in this place of fear and darkness, the Lord of Light
protects us,” Ser Godry Farring told the men who gathered to watch as the
stakes were hammered down into the holes.
    “What has your southron god to do with
snow?”
demanded Artos Flint. His black beard was crusted with ice. “This is the wroth
of the old gods come upon us. It is them we should appease.”
    “Aye,” said Big Bucket Wull. “Red Rahloo means nothing here.
You will only make the old gods angry. They are watching from their island.”
    The crofter’s village stood between two lakes, the larger
dotted with small wooded islands that punched up through the ice like the
frozen fists of some drowned giant. From one such island rose a weirwood
gnarled and ancient, its bole and branches white as the surrounding snows.
Eight days ago Asha had walked out with Aly Mormont to have a closer look at
its slitted red eyes and bloody mouth.
It is only sap
, she’d
told herself,
the red sap that flows inside these weirwoods
.
But her eyes were unconvinced; seeing was believing, and what they saw was
frozen blood.
    “You northmen brought these snows upon us,” insisted Corliss
Penny. “You and your demon trees. R’hllor will save us.”
    “R’hllor will doom us,” said Artos Flint.
    A pox on