clash of king 80 to 160

“Hatchlings,” Ser Jorah said.

Stannis had never been enamored of his wife, but he was bristly as a
hedgehog where his honor was concerned and mistrustful by nature.

Tall and thin, with fierce black eyes and a beak of a nose, the priest was garbed in
mottled robes of green and grey and blue, the swirling colors of the Drowned God.

As for their children, the younger ones had been mewling babes for most of his years at
Winterfell.

He was a stout man with a manticore on his shield, and
ornate scrollwork crawling across his steel breastplate.

The Drowned God had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and
write their names in fire and blood and song.

He’d led men in war, hunted with a king, won
honor in tourney melees, ridden with Brynden Blackfish and Greatjon Umber, fought in the
Whispering Wood, bedded more girls than he could name, and yet this uncle was treating him
as though he were still a child of ten.

There had been some niggling phrase .

A year ago, he
had been with Stannis in King’s Landing when King Robert staged a tourney for Prince
Joffrey’s name day.

Thoren Smallwood looked more a
lord than Mormont did, clad in Ser Jaremy Rykker’s gleaming black mail and embossed
breastplate.

His father slid his fingers under the necklace and gave it a yank so hard it was like to take
Theon’s head off, had the chain not snapped first.

The little man bowed and waddled to the door.

The walls were rough unmortared stone ten feet high, with
a wooden catwalk inside the battlements.

Pale green flags drooped from the squat corner towers, each emblazoned
with a shoal of silvery fish.

“See that they light braziers in the other rooms to drive out some of
the chill.

Or that we will laugh ourselves dead when the Imp capers
on the battlements, who can say?

Out
front squatted a waist-high gargoyle, so eroded by rain and salt that his features were all but
obliterated.

Littlefinger’s grey-green eyes met the dwarf’s mismatched stare with no hint of unease.

She had come up from Oldtown
with her father to see her brothers joust.

“What does a smuggler’s son know of the
doings of gods?”

The other rangers called him Giant.

“The smiths are in your audience chamber, waiting your pleasure,” he said as they
crossed the ward.

They left a
trail of dead and dying horses behind them as they went, for Pono, Jhaqo, and the others had
seized the best of Drogo’s herds, leaving to Dany the old and the scrawny, the sickly and the
lame, the broken animals and the ill-tempered.

A ragged wave of shouts gave answer, just as Stannis’s glove began to smolder.

Then she saw the wagon,
and the three men manacled to its bed.

Jon was paired
with dour Eddison Tollett, a squire grey of hair and thin as a pike, whom the other brothers
called Dolorous Edd.

Davos ordered a tankard of ale, turned back to Saan, and said, “How well is the city
defended?”

The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the
rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the
same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen, speckled by
the droppings of the same seabirds.

The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the
rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the
same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen, speckled by
the droppings of the same seabirds.

In a cushioned alcove, a drunken Tyroshi with a purple beard dandled a
buxom young wench on his knee.

The boy wore a cream-colored doublet with a fiery heart sewn on the breast.

Azor Ahai captured a lion, to temper the blade by
plunging it through the beast’s red heart, but once more the steel shattered and split.

Yet when she put the thought into words, her handmaid Doreah quailed.

His buttons were
carved jade monkeys, and atop his wispy white curls perched a jaunty green cap decorated
with a fan of peacock feathers.

The man had made for a colorful spectacle, his red robes flapping
while his blade writhed with pale green flames, but everyone knew there was no true magic to
it, and in the end his fire had guttered out and Bronze Yohn Royce had brained him with a
common mace.

“The maester tells me that we have one
hundred seventeen ravens on hand.

“I will not have my son bedeck himself like a whore.”

After a moment the door was opened from within by a guard in a black iron breastplate
and pot-helm.

Ships lined the strand;
war galleys and fishing vessels, stout carracks and fat-bottomed cogs.

Then he was
retreating, the sword held high, jade-green flames swirling around cherry-red steel.

She was a pale husk of a woman, every line of her face etched
with grief.

Arya drew second watch, so she found a straw pallet in the haven.

He at least had the grace to look abashed.

A little farther up the road, they glimpsed a forester’s cabin surrounded by old trees and
neatly stacked logs ready for the splitting, and later a ramshackle stilt-house leaning over the
river on poles ten feet tall, both deserted.

“As to that, Father,” Dale said, “I mislike these water casks they’ve given me for Wraith.

“My liege, Pylos is pleasant enough, but I cannot see the chain about his neck without
mourning for Maester Cressen.”

The dragons were no larger than the scrawny cats she had once seen skulking along the
walls of Magister Illyrio’s estate in Pentos . . . until they unfolded their wings.

The red woman remained a moment to
watch as Devan knelt with Bryen Farring and rolled up the burnt and blackened sword in the
king’s leather cloak.

The Lyseni was a sleek, smiling man whose
flamboyance was a byword on both sides of the narrow sea.

In the sky behind the castle, the fine red tail
of the comet was visible through thin, scuttling clouds.

He should have worn his good doublet, with the
kraken embroidered on the breast.

The maester took up one of the parchments and cleared his throat.

The king plunged into the fire with his teeth clenched, holding the leather cloak before
him to keep off the flames.

They are
building scorpions and spitfires, oh, yes, but the men in the golden cloaks are too few and too
green, and there are no others.

On the way out he
patted the gargoyle on the head and muttered, “Luck.”

He hung a dirk at one hip and a longsword
at the other, in scabbards striped black-and-gold.

The freckled one wore a chain of blue flowers in her honeyed
hair.

The Dreadfort has no claim that I know, but the lands adjoin, and Roose
Bolton is not one to overlook such a chance.”

Some of your sister’s hirelings are mine as well,
unbeknownst to her.

“Treason is vile enough,” she declared
furiously, “but this is barefaced naked villainy, and I do not need that mincing eunuch to tell
me what must be done with villains.”

“Let Theon your servant be born
again from the sea, as you were,” Aeron Greyjoy intoned.

Ser Rodrik tugged at his whiskers.

When the city appeared before her, its walls and towers shimmering white behind a veil
of heat, it looked so beautiful that Dany was certain it must be a mirage.

Dany was horrified.

Any gods so monstrous as to drown my mother and
father would never have my worship, I vowed.

Nonetheless, if we put it about that her daughter is baseborn and
Stannis a cuckold, well . . . the smallfolk are always eager to believe the worst of their lords,
particularly those as stern, sour, and prickly proud as Stannis Baratheon.”

The head fell off the Smith with a puff of ash and embers.

They dressed in flowing silks cinched at the waist with beaded belts.

A new
south tower had risen from the ruins of the old, its stone a paler shade of grey, and as yet
unmarred by patches of lichen.

The man had made for a colorful spectacle, his red robes flapping
while his blade writhed with pale green flames, but everyone knew there was no true magic to
it, and in the end his fire had guttered out and Bronze Yohn Royce had brained him with a
common mace.

He
remembered suddenly how he used to muss Arya’s hair.

Between here and there lay only
swirling sand, wind-scoured rocks, and plants bristly with sharp thorns.

Around his throat he fastened a slender gold chain,
around his waist a belt of bleached white leather.

The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the
rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the
same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen, speckled by
the droppings of the same seabirds.

The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the
rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the
same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen, speckled by
the droppings of the same seabirds.

The fingers were blunt, callused, wiry black hairs grew between the knuckles, there was dirt
under the nail of the thumb.

The gates stood open to him, the rusted iron portcullis drawn up.

After the
open river shore, the closeness of the town unnerved her.

Out
front squatted a waist-high gargoyle, so eroded by rain and salt that his features were all but
obliterated.

Even when he worked up the courage to speak, Pod could never quite manage to look at you.

Do you know the tale of
the forging of Lightbringer?

Theon could still make out the scars left by the stones of Robert Baratheon’s catapults.

Bryen Farring was similarly garbed as he tied a stiff leather cape around His Grace’s neck.

When they look at
our banner, all they see is a tall black ship flying on the wind.

They saw the first house an hour shy of evenfall, a snug little
thatch-roofed cottage surrounded by fields of wheat.

Its fearsome
head made a hood to cover her naked scalp, its pelt a cloak that flowed across her shoulders
and down her back.

The best berths had
been taken by the largest vessels: Stannis’s flagship Fury rocking between Lord Steffon and
Stag of the Sea, Lord Velaryon’s silver-hulled Pride of Driftmark and her three sisters, Lord
Celtigar’s ornate Red Claw, the ponderous Swordfish with her long iron prow.

“The crow gives us his word.”

The gods in the pyre were
scarcely recognizable anymore.

It was said that Vhagar’s breath was so hot that it
could melt a knight’s armor and cook the man inside, that Meraxes swallowed horses whole,
and Balerion . . . his fire was as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns were
swallowed up in their shadow when he passed overhead.”

“Take it, then,”
he spat, his cheek still tingling.

When last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking
wasteland, the skeletons of burnt longships and smashed galleys littering the stony shore like
the bones of dead leviathans, the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes.

In the back of their wagon, Rorge cursed and threatened and told them
to unchain him while Yoren was gone, but no one paid him any mind.

Ships lined the strand;
war galleys and fishing vessels, stout carracks and fat-bottomed cogs.

His buttons were
carved jade monkeys, and atop his wispy white curls perched a jaunty green cap decorated
with a fan of peacock feathers.

He remembered the red priest Thoros of Myr, and the flaming sword he
had wielded in the melee.

Perhaps he hopes that his ugly
face will frighten off attackers, eh?

Dolorous Edd sniffed
the air.

When
he thought of Nissa Nissa, it was his own Marya he pictured, a good-natured plump woman
with sagging breasts and a kindly smile, the best woman in the world.

To her right, a long
pier jutted into the lake, and there were other docks farther east, wooden fingers reaching out
from the town.

His buttons were
carved jade monkeys, and atop his wispy white curls perched a jaunty green cap decorated
with a fan of peacock feathers.

Firelight
glittered off metal helms and spattered their mail and plate with orange and yellow highlights.

“You have no wives, only concubines, and you have been well paid
for every day and every ship.”

The next day two of them came together to audience; the Greatjon’s uncles, blustery men
in the winter of their days with beards as white as the bearskin cloaks they wore.

She never saw his
face, only the dark blood seeping between the links of his hauberk.

He hammered on it with a fist, and cursed when a splinter snagged the fabric of his glove.

The fingers were blunt, callused, wiry black hairs grew between the knuckles, there was dirt
under the nail of the thumb.

Theon could still make out the scars left by the stones of Robert Baratheon’s catapults.

A little farther up the road, they glimpsed a forester’s cabin surrounded by old trees and
neatly stacked logs ready for the splitting, and later a ramshackle stilt-house leaning over the
river on poles ten feet tall, both deserted.

The man had made for a colorful spectacle, his red robes flapping
while his blade writhed with pale green flames, but everyone knew there was no true magic to
it, and in the end his fire had guttered out and Bronze Yohn Royce had brained him with a
common mace.

The air smelled of some
exotic spice, and the floor beneath his feet displayed a mosaic of two women entwined in
love.

Stannis had never been enamored of his wife, but he was bristly as a
hedgehog where his honor was concerned and mistrustful by nature.

She might have struck downriver for the ports at Meereen and Yunkai
and Astapor, but Rakharo warned her that Pono’s khalasar had ridden that way, driving
thousands of captives before them to sell in the flesh marts that festered like open sores on the
shores of Slaver’s Bay.

Little Walder quartered the twin towers of Frey with the
brindled boar of his grandmother’s House and the plowman of his mother’s: Crakehall and
Darry, respectively.

Tyrion tilted his head to the side and gave the man a dose of his mismatched eyes.

Some of the sails bore devices from the other
islands; the blood moon of Wynch, Lord Goodbrother’s banded black warhorn, Harlaw’s
silver scythe.

Mere boys ruled
in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror had forged was smashed and sundered.

Stannis snorted.

Ser Amory raised a languid fist, and a spear
came hurtling from the fire-bright shadows behind.

When he was a boy it had been timber and wattle, but Robert Baratheon had razed that
structure to the ground.

A ward in name, a hostage in truth.

They were small, withered things, yet her people
grabbed for them greedily, jostling and pushing at each other, stuffing the fruit into their
cheeks and chewing blissfully.

A pair of gaunt children and some
thralls stared at him with dull eyes, but there was no sign of his lord father, nor anyone else he
recalled from boyhood.

The fire had started to dwindle by the time Melisandre and the squires departed with the
precious sword.

A bentback old crone in a shapeless grey dress approached him warily.

Perhaps he is loath to part with the warm
burrow between her thighs, even for a night.

Reek, they call the man.

It heartened her to see him smile.

She never saw his
face, only the dark blood seeping between the links of his hauberk.

With him had come a long tail of retainers: knights,
squires, lesser lords and ladies, heralds, musicians, even a juggler, all aglitter with banners
and surcoats in what seemed half a hundred colors.

The
wood was damp and moldy, the iron studs rusted.

Bryen Farring was similarly garbed as he tied a stiff leather cape around His Grace’s neck.

She tried to imagine what it would
feel like, to straddle a dragon’s neck and soar high into the air.

The scales gilded
bright as the sun, the plate enameled a deep Lannister crimson.

When last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking
wasteland, the skeletons of burnt longships and smashed galleys littering the stony shore like
the bones of dead leviathans, the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes.

The other shrugged.

Maester Luwin’s voice cracked through the clangor of the yard as loud as a
thunderclap.

“As a babe I suckled on icicles, boy.

“Under the sea, smoke rises in bubbles,
and flames burn green and blue and black,” Patchface sang somewhere.

Their dappled grey coursers were swift, strong, and beautifully trained.

Even as
Davos spoke, he thought, This world is twisted beyond hope, when lowborn smugglers must
vouch for the honor of kings.

In the sky behind the castle, the fine red tail
of the comet was visible through thin, scuttling clouds.

Its contents
spilled onto the rug with a muffled thunk of metal on wool.

At a place where six alleys came together, Dany passed an empty marble plinth.

Now we scratch in the ground and toss lines in the sea like other men, and count
ourselves lucky if we have salt cod and porridge enough to get us through a winter.”

“We shouldn’t stay here,” she blurted.

Stannis untied his singed leather cape and listened in silence.

Across the tent, Rhaegal unfolded green wings to flap and flutter a half-foot before
thumping to the carpet.

A
waterskin hung under his arm on a leather strap, and ropes of dried seaweed were braided
through his waist-long black hair and untrimmed beard.

“Those were my
enchanted years.

Out
front squatted a waist-high gargoyle, so eroded by rain and salt that his features were all but
obliterated.

“Innkeeper,” he barked, “I require a horse.”

He grimaced.

Aeron Greyjoy had been the
most amiable of his uncles, feckless and quick to laugh, fond of songs, ale, and women.

Theon had
watched from the safety of the Sea Tower, and sometimes he still saw the torches in his
dreams, and heard the dull thunder of the collapse.

The houses were roofed with sod, the windows shuttered with ragged
pieces of hide.

Ser Rodrik sat on his right hand and Maester Luwin to his left, armed
with quills and inkpots and a sheaf of blank parchment to write down all that transpired.

It was astonishing to see how angry Cersei could wax over
accusations she knew perfectly well to be true.

Every dock teemed with sailors
loading provisions, and every inn was packed with soldiers dicing or drinking or looking for a
whore . . . a vain search, since Stannis permitted none on his island.

Come forth, your sword awaits you!

The head fell off the Smith with a puff of ash and embers.

In the last match, I broke nine lances against Jaime Lannister to no result, and King
Robert gave me the champion’s laurel.

In King’s Landing, the High Septon would
prattle at me of how all justice and goodness flowed from the Seven, but all I ever saw of
either was made by men.”

It drenched his hair and ran over his forehead into his
eyes.

Gasps and shrieks of pleasure were
coming from behind one of the closed doors, giggles and whispers from another.

Dany went to Ser Jorah one morning as they made camp
amidst a jumble of black wind-scoured stones.

Some went
reluctantly, yet they went . . . and one scarred old man returned a brief time later, hopping and
grinning, his hands overflowing with figs.

The best berths had
been taken by the largest vessels: Stannis’s flagship Fury rocking between Lord Steffon and
Stag of the Sea, Lord Velaryon’s silver-hulled Pride of Driftmark and her three sisters, Lord
Celtigar’s ornate Red Claw, the ponderous Swordfish with her long iron prow.

He waddled over to the piebald gelding and took a look
at his teeth.

“And I’ve brought
your heir back to you.”

A serving girl pushed her way through, swatting at the hands that groped her as she
passed.

He laced up his breeches.

Evil King Harren
had walled himself up inside, so Aegon unleashed his dragons and turned the castle into a
pyre.

He began to flex his hand, opening and closing the fingers.

It is time to hoist our sails and go forth into the world with fire and
sword, as he did.”

His eyes were flinty too, black and sharp, but the years and the
salt winds had turned his hair the grey of a winter sea, flecked with whitecaps.

A swift strike, like a hawk plummeting at a hare, and the great
city will be ours.

Sylas Sourmouth the steward, Lord Botley, perhaps even
Dagmer Cleftjaw.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
THEON
There was no safe anchorage at Pyke, but Theon Greyjoy wished to look on his father’s
castle from the sea, to see it as he had seen it last, ten years before, when Robert Baratheon’s
war galley had borne him away to be a ward of Eddard Stark.

“Treason is vile enough,” she declared
furiously, “but this is barefaced naked villainy, and I do not need that mincing eunuch to tell
me what must be done with villains.”

“Well, at the least you are no craven.

He went straight to the Mother, grasped the sword with his gloved
hand, and wrenched it free of the burning wood with a single hard jerk.

Melt down every horseshoe in this city if you must.”

Minced lamb with pepper and roasted gull
stuffed with mushrooms and fennel and onion.

He reached for the laces of her bodice and began to undo
them, his fingers deft and practiced.

It was only tepid, and soon
cold, and seawater in the bargain, but it served to wash the dust of the long ride from his face
and hair and hands.

The pale man with the blue lips replied in guttural Dothraki, “I am Pyat Pree, the great
warlock.”

His uncle grunted.

Cursing,
the king thrust the point of the sword into the damp earth and beat out the flames against his
leg.

A pair of gaunt children and some
thralls stared at him with dull eyes, but there was no sign of his lord father, nor anyone else he
recalled from boyhood.

It was fine and dark, though the wind
had made a tangle of it.

One hundred seventeen ravens will
carry one hundred seventeen copies of my letter to every corner of the realm, from the Arbor
to the Wall.

He seemed utterly unconcerned that someone might overhear
him, eating his grapes and dribbling the seeds out onto his lip, flicking them off with a finger.

He poked
a hole beside the line of the river, under the circle.

Theon could hear the crashing of waves as he swung
down from his saddle.

They kept a steady
plodding pace, past a shepherd’s croft and the abandoned workings of a mine.

The hall of the Mormonts is built of huge logs and surrounded by an earthen
palisade.

So long as the meat was seared, they gulped down several
times their own weight every day, and at last began to grow larger and stronger.

In a
heartbeat, all of them were pulling on clothes and snatching for whatever weapons they
owned.

Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned Black Harren, gave
Harren’s kingdom back to the weakling rivermen, and reduced the Iron Islands to an
insignificant backwater of a much greater realm.

House Florent
had declared for Renly.

Within, they found a pair of iron bars the
size of saplings, with postholes in the ground and metal brackets on the gate.

“That bauble around your neck—was it bought with gold or iron?”

The Lordsport men gazed on Theon with blank, bovine eyes, and he realized that they did
not know who he was.

The sounds brought old feelings back; the creak of wood and rope, the
captain’s shouted commands, the snap of the sails as the wind filled them, each as familiar as
the beating of his own heart, and as comforting.

How long the city had been deserted she could not know, but the white walls, so
beautiful from afar, were cracked and crumbling when seen up close.

I’m sore and my back aches from riding and from sleeping on the ground, but I’m
hardly scared at all.

Though His Grace frowns so whenever he does see me
that I tremble to come before him.

While I was fighting Braavosi on the Rhoyne, Lynesse moved into the
manse of a merchant prince named Tregar Ormollen.

The scales gilded
bright as the sun, the plate enameled a deep Lannister crimson.

Patrek Mallister was not too ill a fellow; they shared a taste for wenches, wine, and
hawking.

Mere boys ruled
in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror had forged was smashed and sundered.

Arya yanked down Hot Pie by the back of his tunic.

He had a lightning bolt on his
shield and her father had sent him out to behead the Hound’s brother.

For ten years Ser Axell had
served as castellan of Dragonstone while Stannis sat on Robert’s council in King’s Landing,
but of late he had emerged as the foremost of the queen’s men.

Tall and thin, with fierce black eyes and a beak of a nose, the priest was garbed in
mottled robes of green and grey and blue, the swirling colors of the Drowned God.

The inn is crowded, and you are not
Salladhor Saan, he reminded himself.

“I will
not be cheated of my rights, I warn you.”

Her
mouth was as wet and sweet as her cunt, and this way he did not have to listen to her mindless
prattle.

His buttons were
carved jade monkeys, and atop his wispy white curls perched a jaunty green cap decorated
with a fan of peacock feathers.

A sudden clap of
sound made Arya reach for Needle, but it was only a shutter banging in the wind.

A thousand years before, the sons of the
River King had been slaughtered here, hacked to bits in their beds so that pieces of their
bodies might be sent back to their father on the mainland.

The gaggle of smiths, armorers, and ironmongers that Bronn had collected fell
to their knees.

The smallfolk had built new hovels with the stones of
the old, and cut fresh sod for their roofs.

“A hundred days and a hundred nights he labored on the third blade, and as it glowed
white-hot in the sacred fires, he summoned his wife.

The speaker was the priest he had seen leading the horses along the shoreline.

When she leaned back the
trickles ran down the back of her neck and under her collar.

All
that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose
from the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry waves foamed and
crashed among them.

Chiefly he
remembered Rodrik’s drunken cuffs and Maron’s cruel japes and endless lies.

Her captain was a fat-bellied southron merchanter as well, and
the stony sea that foamed at the feet of the castle made his plump lips quiver, so he stayed
well out, farther than Theon would have liked.

Even now, Theon could recall the
winey stench of the old man’s breath.

He hung a dirk at one hip and a longsword
at the other, in scabbards striped black-and-gold.

Thoren Smallwood dismounted beside the trunk, dark in his plate and mail.

Jon found parchment, quill, and ink in his saddlebag and brought them to the Lord
Commander.

Obedient to his wishes, the Myraham beat her way past the point with her sails snapping
and her captain cursing the wind and his crew and the follies of highborn lordlings.

When the heavy garment,
sodden with spray, fell from her shoulders to the deck, she gave him a little bow and smiled
anxiously.

A dozen feet down the tunnel she heard the sound, like the roar
of some monstrous beast, and a cloud of hot smoke and black dust came billowing up behind
her, smelling of hell.

“Hodor!” he kept
shouting, cringing and covering himself, but he had never raised a hand against his
tormentors.

“I smell dung.”