The slippers the Butcher King had sent her had grown too uncomfortable. Dany kicked them off
and sat with one foot tucked beneath her and the other swinging back and forth. It was not a very regal pose,but she was tired of being regal. The crown had given her a headache, and her buttocks had gone
to sleep.
"Ser Barristan," she called, "I know what quality a king needs most."
"Courage, Your Grace?"
"Cheeks like iron," she teased. "All I do is sit."
"Your Grace takes too much on herself. You should allow your councillors to shoulder more of
your burdens."
"I have too many councillors and too few
cushions." Dany turned to Reznak. "How many more?"
" Three-and-twenty, if it please Your Magnificence. With as many claims." The seneschal
consulted some papers. "One calf and three goats. The rest will be sheep or lambs, no doubt."
" Three-and-twenty." Dany sighed. "My dragons have developed a prodigious taste for mutton
since we began to pay the shepherds for their kills. Have these claims been proven?"
"Some men have brought burnt bones."
"Men make fires. Men cook mutton. Burnt bones prove nothing. Brown Ben says there are red
wolves in the hills outside the city, and jack-als and wild dogs. Must we pay good silver for every
lamb
that goes astray between Yunkai and the Skahazadhan?"
"No, Magnificence." Reznak bowed. "Shall I send these rascals away, or will you want them
scourged?"
Daenerys shifted on the bench. "No man should ever fear to come to me." Some claims were
false, she did not doubt, but more were genuine. Her dragons had grown too large to be content with
rats and cats and dogs. The more they eat, the larger they will grow, Ser Barristan had warned her, and
the larger they grow, the more they'll eat. Drogon especially ranged far afield and could easily devour a
sheep a day.
"Pay them for the value of their animals," she told Reznak, "but henceforth claimants must
present themselves at the Temple of the Graces and swear a holy oath before the gods of Ghis."
"It shall be done." Reznak turned to the petitioners. "Her Magnificence the Queen has
consented to compensate each of you for the animals you have lost," he told them in the Ghiscari
tongue. "Present yourselves to my factors on the morrow, and you shall be paid in coin or kind, as you
prefer."
The pronouncement was received in sullen silence. You would think they might be happier, Dany
thought. They have what they came for. Is there no way to please these people?
One man lingered behind as the rest were filing out—a squat man with a windburnt face,
shabbily dressed. His hair was a cap of coarse red-black wire cropped about his ears, and in one hand he
held a sad cloth sack. He stood with his head down, gazing at the marble floor as if he had quite
forgotten where he was. And what does this one want? Dany wondered.
"All kneel for Daenerys Stormborn, the Unburnt, Queen of Meereen, Queen of the Andals and the
Rhoynar and the First Men, Khaleesi of Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Shackles, and Mother of Dragons,"
cried Missandei in her high, sweet voice.
As Dany stood, her tokar began to slip. She caught it and tugged it back in place. "You with the
sack," she called, "did you wish to speak with us? You may approach."
When he raised his head, his eyes were red and raw as open sores. Dany glimpsed Ser Barristan
sliding closer, a white shadow at her side. The man approached in a stumbling shuffle, one step and then
another, clutching his sack. Is he drunk, or ill? she wondered. There was dirt beneath his cracked yellow
fingernails.
"What is it?" Dany asked. "Do you have some grievance to lay before us, some petition? What
would you have of us?"
His tongue flicked nervously over chapped, cracked lips. "I … I brought …"
"Bones?" she said, impatiently. "Burnt bones?"
He lifted the sack, and spilled its contents on the marble.
Bones they were, broken bones and blackened. The longer ones had been cracked open for their
marrow.
"It were the black one," the man said, in a Ghiscari growl, "the winged shadow. He come down
from the sky and … and …"
No. Dany shivered. No, no, oh no.
"Are you deaf, fool?" Reznak mo Reznak demanded of the man. "Did you not hear my
pronouncement? See my factors on the morrow, and you shall be paid for your sheep."
"Reznak," Ser Barristan said quietly, "hold your tongue and open your eyes. Those are no sheep
bones."
No, Dany thought, those are the bones of a child.
The white wolf raced through a black wood, beneath a pale cliff as tall as the sky. The moon ran
with him, slipping through a tangle of bare branches overhead, across the starry sky.
"Snow," the moon murmured. The wolf made no answer. Snow crunched beneath his paws. The
wind sighed through the trees.
Far off, he could hear his packmates calling to him, like to like. They were hunting too. A wild
rain lashed down upon his black brother as he tore at the flesh of an enormous goat, washing the blood
from his side where the goat's long horn had raked him. In another place, his little sister lifted her head
to sing to the moon, and a hundred small grey cousins broke off their hunt to sing with her. The hills
were warmer where they were, and full of food. Many a night his sister's pack gorged on the flesh of
sheep and cows and horses, the prey of men, and sometimes even on the flesh of man himself.
"Snow," the moon called down again, cackling. The white wolf padded along the man trail
beneath the icy cliff. The taste of blood was on his tongue, and his ears rang to the song of the hundred
cousins. Once they had been six, five whimpering blind in the snow beside their dead mother, sucking
cool milk from her hard dead nipples whilst he crawled off alone. Four remained … and one the white
wolf could no longer sense.
"Snow," the moon insisted.
The white wolf ran from it, racing toward the cave of night where the sun had hidden, his breath
frosting in the air. On starless nights the great cliff was as black as stone, a darkness towering high abovethe wide world, but when the moon came out it shimmered pale and icy as a frozen stream. The wolf's
pelt was thick and shaggy, but when the wind blew along the ice no fur could keep the chill out. On the
other side the wind was colder still, the wolf sensed. That was where his brother was, the grey brother
who smelled of summer.
"Snow." An icicle tumbled from a branch. The white wolf turned and bared his teeth. "Snow!"
His fur rose bristling, as the woods dissolved around him. "Snow, snow, snow!" He heard the beat of
wings. Through the gloom a raven flew.
It landed on Jon Snow's chest with a thump and a scrabbling of claws. "SNOW!" it screamed into
his face.
"I hear you." The room was dim, his pallet hard. Grey light leaked through the shutters,
promising another bleak cold day. "Is this how you woke Mormont? Get your feathers out of my face."
Jon wriggled an arm out from under his blankets to shoo the raven off. It was a big bird, old and bold
and scruffy, utterly without fear. "Snow," it cried, flapping to his bedpost. "Snow, snow." Jon filled his
fist with a pillow and let fly, but the bird took to the air. The pillow struck the wall and burst, scattering
stuffing everywhere just as Dolorous Edd Tollett poked his head through the door. "Beg pardon," he
said, ignoring the flurry of feathers, "shall I fetch m'lord some breakfast?"
"Corn," cried the raven. "Corn, corn."
"Roast raven," Jon suggested. "And half a pint of ale." Having a steward fetch and serve for him
still felt strange; not long ago, it would have been him fetching breakfast for Lord Commander
Mormont.
"Three corns and one roast raven," said Dolorous Edd. "Very good, m'lord, only Hobb's made
boiled eggs, black sausage, and apples stewed with prunes. The apples stewed with prunes are
excellent, except for the prunes. I won't eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb
chopped them up with chestnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They'll
prune you when you least expect it."
"Later." Breakfast could wait; Stannis could not. "Any trouble from the stockades last night?"
"Not since you put guards on the guards, m'lord."
"Good." A thousand wildlings had been penned up beyond the Wall, the captives Stannis
Baratheon had taken when his knights had smashed Mance Rayder's patchwork host. Many of the
prisoners were women, and some of the guards had been sneaking them out to warm their beds. King's
men, queen's men, it did not seem to matter; a few black brothers had tried the same thing. Men were
men, and these were the only women for a thousand leagues.
"Two more wildlings turned up to surrender," Edd went on. "A mother with a girl clinging to her skirts. She had a boy babe too, all swaddled up in fur, but he was dead."
"Dead," said the raven. It was one of the bird's favorite words. "Dead, dead, dead."
They had free folk drifting in most every night, starved half-frozen creatures who had run from the battle beneath the Wall only to crawl back when they realized there was no safe place to run to.
"Was the mother questioned?" Jon asked. Stannis Baratheon had smashed Mance Rayder's host and
made the King-Beyond-the-Wall his captive … but the wildlings were still out there, the Weeper and
Tormund Giantsbane and thousands more.
"Aye, m'lord," said Edd, "but all she knows is that she ran off during the battle and hid in the
woods after. We filled her full of porridge, sent her to the pens, and burned the babe."
Burning dead children had ceased to trouble Jon Snow; live ones were another matter. Two
kings to wake the dragon. The father first and then the son, so both die kings. The words had been
murmured by one of the queen's men as Maester Aemon had cleaned his wounds. Jon had tried to
dismiss them as his fever talking. Aemon had demurred.
"There is power in a king's blood," the old
master had warned, "and better men than Stannis have done worse things than this." The king can be
harsh and unforgiving, aye, but a babe still on the breast? Only a monster would give a living child to the
flames.
Jon pissed in darkness, filling his chamber pot as the Old Bear's raven muttered complaints. The wolf dreams had been growing stronger, and he found himself remembering them even when awake.
Ghost knows that Grey Wind is dead. Robb had died at the Twins, betrayed by men he'd believed his
friends, and his wolf had perished with him. Bran and Rickon had been murdered too, beheaded at the
behest of Theon Greyjoy, who had once been their lord father's ward … but if dreams did not lie, their
direwolves had escaped. At Queenscrown, one had come out of the darkness to save Jon's life. Summer,
it had to be. His fur was grey, and Shaggydog is black. He wondered if some part of his dead brothers
lived on inside their wolves.
He filled his basin from the flagon of water beside his bed, washed his face and hands, donned a
clean set of black woolens, laced up a black leather jerkin, and pulled on a pair of well-worn boots.
Mormont's raven watched with shrewd black eyes, then fluttered to the window. "Do you take me for
your thrall?" When Jon folded back the window with its thick diamond-shaped panes of yellow glass, the
chill of the morning hit him in the face. He took a breath to clear away the cobwebs of the night as the
raven flapped away. That bird is too clever by half. It had been the Old Bear's companion for long years,
but that had not stopped it from eating Mormont's face once he died.
Outside his bedchamber a flight of steps descended to a larger room furnished with a scarred
pinewood table and a dozen oak-and-leather chairs. With Stannis in the King's Tower and the Lord
Commander's Tower burned to a shell, Jon had established himself in Donal Noye's modest rooms
behind the armory. In time, no doubt, he would need larger quarters, but for the moment these would
serve whilst he accustomed himself to command.