A Feast for Dragons

might be in the next town, or on a ship to
Asshai; one seemed as likely as the other.
    Even if Sansa Stark had wanted to go home, how would she get
there? The kingsroad was not safe; even a child would know that. The ironborn
held Moat Cailin athwart the Neck, and at the Twins sat the Freys, who had
murdered Sansa’s brother and lady mother. The girl could go by sea if she had
the coin, but the harbor at King’s Landing was still in ruins, the river a
jumble of broken quays and burned and sunken galleys. Brienne had asked along
the docks, but no one could remember a ship leaving on the night King Joffrey
died. A few trading ships were anchoring in the bay and off-loading by boat,
one man told her, but more were continuing up the coast to Duskendale, where
the port was busier than ever.
    Brienne’s mare was sweet to look upon and kept a pretty
pace. There were more travelers than she would have thought. Begging brothers
trundled by with their bowls dangling on thongs about their necks. A young
septon galloped past upon a palfrey as fine as any lord’s, and later she met a
band of silent sisters who shook their heads when Brienne put her question to
them. A train of oxcarts lumbered south with grain and sacks of wool, and later
she passed a swineherd driving pigs, and an old woman in a horse litter with an
escort of mounted guards. She asked all of them if they had seen a highborn
girl of three-and-ten years with blue eyes and auburn hair. None had. She asked
about the road ahead as well. “’Twixt here and Duskendale is safe enough,” one
man told her, “but past Duskendale there’s outlaws, and broken men in the
woods.”
    Only the soldier pines and sentinels still showed green; the
broadleaf trees had donned mantles of russet and gold, or else uncloaked
themselves to scratch against the sky with branches brown and bare. Every gust
of wind drove swirling clouds of dead leaves across the rutted road. They made
a rustling sound as they scuttled past the hooves of the big bay mare that
Jaime Lannister had bestowed on her. As easy to find one leaf in the wind as
one girl lost in Westeros. She found herself wondering whether Jaime had
given her this task as some cruel jape. Perhaps Sansa Stark was dead, beheaded
for her part in King Joffrey’s death, buried in some unmarked grave. How better
to conceal her murder than by sending some big stupid wench from Tarth to find
her?
    Jaime would not do that. He was sincere. He gave me the
sword, and called it Oathkeeper. Anyway, it made no matter. She had
promised Lady Catelyn that she would bring back her daughters, and no promise
was as solemn as one sworn to the dead. The younger girl was long dead, Jaime
claimed; the Arya the Lannisters sent north to marry Roose Bolton’s bastard was
a fraud. That left only Sansa. Brienne had to find her.
    Near dusk she saw a campfire burning by a brook. Two men sat
beside it grilling trout, their arms and armor stacked beneath a tree. One was
old and one was somewhat younger, though far from young. The younger rose to
greet her. He had a big belly straining at the laces of his spotted doeskin
jerkin. A shaggy untrimmed beard covered his cheeks and chin, the color of old
gold. “We have trout enough for three, ser,” he called out.
    It was not the first time Brienne had been mistaken for a
man. She pulled off her greathelm, letting her hair spill free. It was yellow,
the color of dirty straw, and near as brittle. Long and thin, it blew about her
shoulders. “I thank you, ser.”
    The hedge knight squinted at her so earnestly that she
realized he must be nearsighted. “A lady, is it? Armed and armored? Illy, gods
be good, the size of her.”
    “I took her for a knight as well,” the older knight said,
turning the trout.
    Had Brienne been a man, she would have been called big; for
a woman, she was huge. Freakish was the word she had heard all her life.
She was broad in the shoulder and broader in the hips. Her legs were long, her
arms thick. Her chest was more muscle than bosom. Her hands were big, her feet
enormous. And she was ugly besides, with a freckled, horsey face and teeth that
seemed almost too big for her mouth. She did not need to be reminded of any of
that. “Sers,” she said, “have you seen a maid of three-and-ten upon the road?
She has blue eyes and auburn hair, and may have been in company with a portly
red-faced man of forty years.”
    The nearsighted hedge knight scratched his head. “I recall
no such maid.