WAT
The stone thing came at him again and Wat thrust his spear through its throat and it did not care.
That was no surprise. The grey ones felt nothing. You had to find a crack, a seam, break something they needed—the knee, the neck, the place where a shoulder met an arm—and even then they came on a step or two after they should have stopped, so you learned to move the instant you struck and not admire your work.
Wat wrenched the spear loose and gave ground and the thing followed, dragging one dead leg, its face a smear of features half-encased in stone, and behind it in the smoke, there were more. There were always more.
Wat hated them. He hated this island, he hated the red witch, he hated Stannis Baratheon, and he hated the fear that sat rough in his chest.
He was so afraid he could taste it, a copper taste at the back of his tongue, or perhaps it was from a blow he took. Wat could not rightly say. He was so tired and scared and his hands would not stop shaking. Why would they not stop shaking? They shook on the spear-haft even as he killed what used to be people.
He had wet himself somewhere in the first hour, and he was not ashamed, because the man beside him had done the same, and the man beside him. Fear did not care what a man was.
A grey fist came for his head from the side and he never saw it—but a hand seized his jerkin and hauled him back, and the fist went by close enough to feel, and Wat sprawled and came up and it was a stranger who'd done it, marked like him, already turned away to his own killing.
"Watch yourself man," the man's voice came out rough and his breathing was laboured. They had been fighting for what felt like days. "You got a name?"
"Wat—from flee bottom." It came out stuttered and he hated himself for it.
The big man tripped up a stone man and drove a blade into him. "Is that so? I'm—"
Wat would never know.
The Dragonmount and its spewed contents saw to the man. One second he was there and the next he was paste and red chunks of meat and Wat was covered in blood and not the sort that had kept him alive all this time.
There was no time for Wat to throw up, not that he had much left to, another grey was swinging at him. Wat hacked and hacked at it until lay unmoving.
His arms had gone to lead a long time ago. He kept lifting them anyway. He kept moving forward, there was no where else to go.
He had been born in Flea Bottom, over a pot-shop, and he had never once in nineteen years been past the walls of King's Landing until he got on a boat to come here.
He had watched good king Joffrey, when he was a boy and the king was still a prince, go to the great sept every morning to pray and then give out food and provisions to the worst off.
When he heard Stannis' slanders, he knew he must fight. And when he heard Joffrey's speech and felt the blood on his cheek, he was certain he had made the right decision. It was as the high Septon decreed, there could be no greater cause than this.
The day they set sail had been the happiest day of his life.
It was strange, the things a man thought of, when he was drowning in fear. Wat drove the spear into the grey thing's eye and it dropped and he stepped over it and there was another, and the smoke rolled, and somewhere close a man was screaming. It might have been him, it was hard to tell.
Nothing had made sense since they landed on the island.
There was no day anymore. It had been evening when they waded ashore, the sun low and red over the water. Then the mountain tore itself open and the sky went black with smoke and now there was only this, the dark and the drifting grey fog and the fire from above and the ash, and over it all the comet, bleeding, so that everything a man could see he saw by the colour of blood.
Wat touched his cheek without meaning to. He kept doing that.
The mark was still there. Still wet. Thanks gods for that.
That was the only thing keeping any of them on their feet instead of in the sea. The king had given them his blood and they had all of them been marked on the steps of the Sept, in the sun, with the whole city roaring—and three days on the water and a night in hell had not dried it.
It stayed red. Wet as the moment he was marked. Every man still standing had it bright on his cheek, and Wat had watched, sick, in the first hour of this hell, when a grey hand raked across his own bare arm and left nothing behind. Not a mark. Not a spot of the grey.
The grey had no effect on the blooded. The kings blood and the septons blessing was the only explanation they had.
He bled for us, Wat thought, and the thought steadied him as it had been doing since they landed and faced the horrors that awaited them.
For the unblooded, the unmarked, the fog and the grey men were the worst of the horrors.
A man took a scratch—less than a scratch, a touch, the drag of a grey knuckle across the back of a hand—and it started. A patch of it, hard and dead-coloured. Then it moved. Up the wrist, the arm, faster than anything that colour had a right to move, and the man would look down at it and then his face would go wrong, slack and grey and stupid, and then he wasn't a man, he was one of them, and he turned on whoever stood nearest, and that was your brother a breath ago.
An old sailor had put a name to it, early, before it climbed his own neck. Greyscale. That's greyscale, it should take years to spread, but it don't work like— and then it worked like, and he stopped saying words.
There was no way to stop the spread of the grey and so it was certain death unless you bore good King Joffrey's mark. Those who had been marked could not be infected but a grey hand could still crush a man's skull, and the mountain's fire-rocks came down out of the smoke and turned marked men to red smears same as anyone—the king's blood didn't stop a falling stone. But the grey slid off them. It just slid off.
Wat didn't understand why. He didn't need to. He gave thanks to the seven and good king Joffrey, and did his best not to die.
That was not such an easy feat, especially when the sky came apart.
Wat had learned not to look up. Looking up got you killed by what was at your feet. But he heard it—a grinding shriek overhead, stone scraping stone, wings that had no business holding anything beating the smoke—and he couldn't help the one glance, and he wished after that he hadn't.
They had come off the walls. The castle's own devils, the gargoyles, the leering carved things that had squatted a thousand years over Dragonstone's gates, peeling loose from the black rock and dropping into the fog with their claws spread. One took a man ten feet from Wat, just took him, up and gone, as the man screamed himself hoarse.
And higher, at the edge of what the comet-light showed, the big things moved. The towers. The towers were moving. He didn't let himself understand it. A great stone wing, wide as a sail, lifting slow against the red, and Wat looked back down at the grey thing in front of him because he could not look at that, he could not, no man could look at that and keep his legs.
He killed the grey thing. Another came. He killed that too. You could bring a gargoyle down if enough spears found it, crack the wing at the joint and let it shatter on the rocks.
But the ones up top, the tower-things — that had laid waste to some ships and halted any thought of retreat for the marked — nobody had brought one of those down, not even mad Lord Renly and the other knights who had been doing most of the killing.
Some men had run, at the start, when the mountain opened and the shapes first came grinding out of the fog.
Wat didn't blame them. He'd wanted to run so badly his legs had shook. But by the time he found in him the motivation there was nowhere to go.
The boats were pulling off, carrying the ones without the mark—the villagers, the turned-cloak sailors off Stannis's own ships, all the men with clean cheeks, sent back before the grey could take them and turn them on the rest. Sent to live. To Driftmark. To carry word home.
There'd been an argument about that. Wat had caught the edge of it, near the water—hard words between high lords and men in gilded armour.
Some had said the unmarked couldn't be let off the island at all.
Put a whole shipload of clean men back among the kingdoms, and if even one carries the grey off this rock, you've loosed a plague on the realm. Better they never leave the sand. Better the sword, here, now, than greyscale in King's Landing.
Wat had gone cold to hear it, cold in a different way than the fog made him—these were their own men they were talking of drowning and murdering.
But another had answered, and won, thankfully.
The grey moves too fast to hide, he'd said. You've all seen it. It's on a man and up his arm and into his face before he can say three words—it doesn't creep for years the way the old greyscale does, it runs. So we'll know. Any man carries it off this beach, it'll show before his ship makes the narrow sea, and his own crew will put him over the side. It can't ride quiet in a man the way a slow one can. So let them go.Put them on the ships first, and we who cannot be infected will hold a little and then retreat.
That had been the plan. It had worked for the most part, but when it came their turn to retreat, the great towers of Dragonstone came down with their flapping wings and even greater fog and put a stop to it. So if they could not go back, then their only option was to go forward or wait for death.
Lord Renly had bid them forward.
So it was only the marked left. Only the ones the grey slid off of. The unmarked were dead or dying.
Whatever else killed the marked—and plenty did—it would not be that, and there was a grim iron comfort in it, that they could not be turned against each other, that a man beside you was a man to the end.
The ones tried to make for the ships anyway had not been seen again, and what came out of the fog after was not screaming men, only the wet sounds of it. Wat had stopped his ears with his own pulse and turned back to the line. The line held. It held because a handful of great men made it hold.
He saw the king's uncle everywhere that night. Lord Renly, that had come ashore all green and gold and laughing, a lord out of a tourney, the sort Wat had only ever seen from a hundred feet off in a crowd.
There was no laughing in him now.
He fought like something loosed, a warhammer in both hands, breaking the grey men and the gargoyles apart, and when the hammer wasn't enough he had a dagger out, dark rippled steel, quick into the seams. His face was all ash and sweat and the red mark, and he never stopped shouting. To me! To me! Hold, damn you!
And the old white knight, the one they said was the best sword in the realm, or had been—Ser Barristan Selmy, the Lord Commander, who even a fleebottom rat like him knew, come to guard the king's war in the king's place. He didn't look like much, an old man with white hair gone grey with ash. But Wat watched him hold a whole stretch of the line near-alone for a while, unhurried, no wasted motion in him, putting down grey man after grey man like a mower going up a field, and never once out of breath that Wat could see. Old men were not supposed to fight like that. Wat took a strange comfort from it. If the old knight was still standing, surely he could as well.
The kingslayer in his golden armour and white cloak fought just as well. He seemed to be making a game of it with the old commander of who could litter the island with the most dead. Wat thought him mad but he was thankful for his presence all the same.
There was another as well. The king's shadow, Ser Jon, the men called him—the dark young lord who was always at King Joffrey's side, only the king wasn't truly here and he was, and Wat had no strength to wonder why.
He only saw, in the red flashes, that it wasn't natural.
The dark lord went through the grey men like a scythe through barley and didn't slow and didn't tire, and when a gargoyle stooped at him he shattered its wing off without flinching and was moving before it hit the ground. There was a wolf with him. A white wolf, red-eyed, big as a pony, marked as if it were a man, tearing at the grey men's legs and smashing into the animated stone abominations.
Wat looked at all these great men and the rest of the knights and knew he was less than nothing. The spear he carried was not even his. He should have been dead ten times over with Wil and Pate and the others from his boat.
They're not like us, he thought as he watched the knights. They cannot be men.
But they and the kings blood gave him strength, and he'd learned it was easier to live if he stayed in their orbit or surrounded him with knights in real armour.
Wat blinked and then a grey hand was reaching for his face and there was no more looking or thinking.
They were breaking. Wat felt it before he heard the voice—felt it in the men around him, like rope about to tear.
They had been fighting too long. There was no end to the grey men, it seemed like all of the island and the demon's sellswords had been turned and wouldn't leave them alone. There was no end to the dark and no sign they were truly any closer to what remained of that gods forsaken castle, and a man can only be brave for so long before the well runs dry.
Here and there, men were simply sitting down. Just sitting, in the middle of it, spears across their knees, staring at nothing, past caring who came for them. Wat saw one weeping into his hands.
He saw another simply walk toward the sea, slow, like a man in a dream, and no one stopped him because none of them had it left in them to stop anything.
Wat felt the same thing pulling at his own legs. Sit down. Rest. What's the use. His spear had got so heavy. He wanted to weep, or sleep, or die, anything but lift his arms one more time.
Beside him the man he'd been fighting with—a stranger who'd saved him, hours or minutes ago—had gone grey in the face, not the grey death, just the grey of a man used all the way up.
"I can't," the man said, to no one, to Wat. "I can't do no more." And Wat had no words to give him, because he couldn't either, and he put a hand on the man's shoulder and they leaned on each other and waited for it to be over.
That was when salvation came.
Brave.
It was in his head. Not a sound—there was too much sound, the grinding and the screaming and the mountain—but under all of it, behind it, spoken somewhere in him that no voice could reach. Wat's head came up. Beside him the broken man's head came up too.
He knew it. He'd heard it once, in the square, one voice carrying clean over the cheering masses.
My brave, brave men. Do not falter.
It couldn't be — He came?
Wat's face was wet. Smoke, maybe. Or perhaps it had started to rain.
For a moment he thought he was mad, but all around him, the men who had been sitting were getting to their feet. The one who'd walked toward the sea had stopped, and turned, and was staring back at the beach with his mouth open. Faces lifting into the red dark, all in the same breath, marks bright on every cheek.
Wat saw it hit them as it hit him, saw the hope come back into dead faces like colour into a cheek.
Your king is with you, and it was warm, gods, it was warm, a hand on the back of his neck in all that cold.
I feel your pain. I feel your loss. You have not been forgotten. Know that I see you. Know that you are loved. Know that I believe in you. Every one of you. Wat.
And then Joffrey said his name. Him. A boy from flee bottom, who was nothing. Him. How could the king know my name?
But Wat saw that it wasn't just him. The man he was holding stiffened as well. He saw the same shock on a hundred different faces.
I know you all. I love you all. You have not been forgotten. You have not been abandoned. Come home, my brave men. You are so close now. Kill the witch. Kill the usurper. End this long night and come home.
"You hear that?" Wat had the man beside him by the arm, the broken one, shaking him. "The king. You hear him?"
"I hear him." The man was crying and grinning both, teeth lit red, the used-up look gone off him as though it had never been. "He's here. He's with us. Gods be good, he came for us—"
Down the ragged line it went, a broken hoarse cry rising out of men who'd had nothing left a breath before, men on their feet again who'd been sitting down to die, because the king had come to them, somehow, someway, by some power of the seven the king was here, Joffrey was here, and not one of them thought he stood alone now.
The stranger hauled Wat up straight and Wat hauled him, and they laughed, the two of them, wild and streaming, and turned back to the grey with their arms gone somehow light again.
"What's your name?" Wat said as they laughed. He had stopped asking some time ago, what need did he have for names when he was to die here.
But the king knew his, he who was nothing, and the king had bid them to win and come home. Wat had no excuse now.
"Adam." The man cried. "And you?"
"Wat. My name is Wat—"
A shout cut over him, it was Lord Renly in his green and gold and antlered helm. He had climbed a shelf of black rock with the hammer in his fist and the comet burning behind his head, and his voice tore out over the rejuvenated men.
"You heard him! Your King! The High Septon said this was a blessed day. He was right! Blessed, this day, above every day there ever was!" He swung the hammer at the fog, the falling fire, the walking stone. "Look what we face! No man ever faced its like, living or dead—and you still stand!"
They roared back at him. It was an ugly sound and a glad one.
"They'll sing of this day ten thousand years from now! And every man of you that's marked—living or dead—you've been made into a thing that this world has never had, for no soul breathing has seen this night but us, and our king who is here with us! They will remember us as heroes! There are no men like us in all the earth! We are peerless! We are the marked men! We do not break!" He flung the hammer up at the bleeding sky. "Now ADVANCE! For the king! For Joffrey! Kill the demon. Kill the witch and let's go HOME!"
And they went screaming, each man with the king's name on their lips, the king's blood on their cheeks and the king's strength in their hearts.
They drowned out the noise from Dragonmount, screaming as they ran, "Joffrey! Joffrey! JOFFREY!"
Broken, bleeding, half of them already dead, fire coming down out of the smoke on their heads—they got their legs under them and went up toward the black castle, into the stone and the grey and the fog. And they went together.
When a man fell, two more had him under the arms and dragged him on, or dragged him back if there was no saving him but there might be saving his body from the fire.
When a grey fist came out of the smoke at a man's blind side, someone shouted, someone shoved, someone took the blow that was meant for another.
Wat pulled a boy younger than himself out from under a toppling gargoyle and never learned his name.
A one-eyed spearman he'd never seen before threw an arm across Wat's chest and stopped him walking into a fissure that had opened, glowing, in the black rock, and only said, "Watch your feet, brother," and was gone into the smoke.
They held each other up. That was how they moved forward. Not one man strong, but thousands leaning inwards, because their king was with them and there was nothing else left to do but win or die.
Wat went. He'd have followed that voice down the mountain's own throat.
He fought and fought and fought. He didn't count. He could not count that high in any case and it would have distracted him.
Wat was still afraid. That was the part no song would ever get right, he thought—that the courage didn't chase the fear off, the two just lived in him together, the fear in his hands and his bladder and his hammering chest, and the going-forward on top of it anyway.
Something cracked his ribs and he kept moving. Something opened his leg and he kept moving. A blow came off his skull and filled his eyes with white and a brother caught him before he went down, held him up till the beach stopped spinning, and let him go, and they both fought on.
He didn't know anymore if it was the king's blood on him or just the men around him not letting him fall. He fought next to men he'd never see by daylight and he loved them, plain and hard, because they were marked like him, they were alive like him, they were fighting against foul Stannis and his red witch like him.
Wat fought and bled and fought some more.
The end came out of the sky.
He'd been watching his feet. So he never saw it. A shriek, a rush of stone, a weight like a wall coming down—and then something had punched through him and he was on his back on the sand and the sand was cool and there was no pain, only a great stillness where the pain should have been, and he knew what that meant.
So it was the sky after all.
Someone was pulling at him. A brother, trying to drag him back the way they'd dragged all the others, and Wat wanted to tell him don't, it's no use, save your strength, but the words wouldn't come and after a moment the hands went away to some other man who could still be saved.
He wasn't afraid. That surprised him, after being afraid so long. It had all gone out of him with the pain. He lay looking up at the burning mountain and found he didn't have it in him to be afraid anymore.
The king had promised his name would be remembered. Carved in the Sept, read out a thousand years on. Wat, of Flea Bottom, that had never mattered to a living soul.
Remembered.
The king had promised his mother would be kept. Fed, roofed, safe from the gutter, all her days.
The king kept his promises. He had remembered his name. Wat knew all would be well.
His hand found his cheek. The blood was still there. Still wet.
Joffrey. The King. He thought, He was with us.
Then he wasn't thinking anything, and the comet flared, and the ground drank him, and off in the burning dark his brave brothers went on without him.
SHIREEN
She dreamed of shadows with wings.
They came in the night sky over Dragonstone, black against black, wheeling, so many of them she could not count, winged shapes that were the castle and were not the castle, peeling up off the towers and beating out over the water. All around them in the air little birds were burning.
Below them the sea was on fire.
Men made of stone walked up out of the burning water, grey men with cracked grey faces, and where they walked the ground turned grey behind them.
And there was blood. So much blood, running down the black rock, pooling in the hollows, and Shireen stood in the middle of it and could not move, and the shadows wheeled overhead, and somewhere a red light was rising in the east that was not the sun.
The dawn, something said in the dream. Soon comes the dawn.
But the sky was still red, red as fire and blood, and Shireen did not think dawns were meant to be red, and she opened her mouth to scream—
—and woke, tangled in her blankets, her heart going hard.
Grey morning at the window. Only morning.
Shireen lay still and breathed until her heart quieted, like old Maester Cressen had taught her, when the dreams came. Nothing there. Only a dream.
But the shadows stayed behind her eyes a while, wheeling, and she did not like them, and she was glad when the door opened and it was her mother.
"Awake already? Good." Selyse Baratheon crossed to the bed and drew back the blinds the rest of the way, letting in the thin light. "Up, up. We'll have you bathed and dressed. Today is a special day."
Shireen sat up, pushing the hair from her face, careful as always of the left side of it where the grey stone had eaten her cheek and jaw and neck when she was a babe, the dead skin that never felt anything at all.
"Special how, Mother?"
"You'll see." Her mother was smiling. That was the strange. Her mother did not smile, not often, not truly—her long stern face was made for disapproval, and Shireen had learned every shade of it.
But these last days her mother had worn a smile Shireen had never seen on her before, a bright hard hungry smile, and she wore it now. "A great and holy day. Your father's day. A joyous day. Come."
Shireen did not understand, but she got up, and was bathed and dressed, and did not understand any better after.
They broke their fast in the small hall, the three of them and the fool.
Her father sat at the head of the table and ate as though the food had done him some injury—jaw working, grinding, never settling.
Stannis Baratheon had never been a merry man. Shireen loved him, and feared him a little, and had spent her whole small life studying his moods as Ser Davos told her sailors studied the stars, and she could somewhat read her father now.
He had been in a black temper for days. Worse than his usual. His teeth ground and ground.
Her mother, across from him, had never seemed happier.
That was wrong, the two of them, the Lady lit up like a candle and the Lord dark as a thundercloud, side by side.
No, that's not right. It was king and queen now, Shireen reminded herself. Although it didn't truly make sense to her. How could father be the king when cousin Joffrey was king?
Only her mother said Joffrey was a bastard, like Edric, and would be the end of them all.
Shireen didn't believe that. She remembered Joffrey. He was always nice and snuck her sweets when her mother wasn't looking. He would play with her hair and read her stories and carried her everywhere on his back. He never made a fuss over the dry, dead skin that worked down her cheek. That was all before he left her.
But mother said Joffrey was a bastard and a thief who had killed uncle Robert and stolen father's throne. Shireen didn't know what to believe.
There was talk that it might come to fighting, and that made her sad. And it reminded Shireen of her nightmares. And that made her sadder. She did not want anyone to die.
Shireen picked at her eggs and looked at her angry father and her happy mother.
It's the argument, Shireen thought. It started with the argument.
She had heard it, some nights past. Her father's voice and Ser Davos's, raised, behind a heavy door. She had not heard all the words, only some, but they were hard and angry, and Ser Davos saying was No over and over, No, Your Grace, you cannot, you must not, this is madness, I beg you—
And then Shireen had crept away, because her mother told her never to eavesdrop and that was not for her to hear.
She had not seen Ser Davos since. Not once. When she asked, her mother smiled and said he had gone away, on a mission for the king, over the water. But Ser Davos always said goodbye to her before he sailed. Always. He had never once gone without finding her first, to muss her hair and tell her to mind her lessons.
He had not said goodbye.
Shireen looked at the empty places at the table and felt the wrongness of the morning settle deeper.
"Where's Edric?" she asked.
Her father's jaw stopped. Just for a moment. Then it went on grinding, harder. Her mother's lips thinned to a line, as it always did at the mention of Edric's name, but oddly, the smile came back. "Edric is unwell this morning, sweetling. A touch of chill. He's keeping to his chamber." She spread honey on her bread, precise. "You'll see him later. Don't fret over it."
"Oh." Shireen frowned down at her plate. She hoped he was not too poorly. But it was strange. Edric never got sick. Edric was the healthiest, gladdest, strongest boy she knew.
Edric never sickened. He said the sea air kept him well. That the Storm king's blood in his veins threw away all illnesses. He'd said it just yesterday, laughing, when they'd walked the walls together.
A touch of chill, Shireen thought, and did not believe it, and did not know why she didn't.
Patchface capered up then, his bells clanging, his motley faded and his great tattooed face split in its idiot grin, and Shireen was glad, because he broke the black quiet at the table.
But what he sang was not glad. It was one of the scary ones she hated that reminded her of her dreams.
"Under the sea the day is dark," the fool sang, dancing, the bells going clang-a-lang. "The shadows come to dance, my lord, they do, they do, they do. The fire wakes and the stone walks and the little birds all burn. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh." He spun, and his dead eyes found Shireen, and for just a moment there was nothing of the fool in them at all. "It is always cold under the sea, little princess. But soon it will be warm. Soon it will be so warm. I know, I know, oh, oh, oh."
The bells shivered. Shireen's skin crawled.
"Enough." Her father did not shout. He never shouted. But the word fell like an axe and the fool flinched and went still. "Take that thing out. I'll have quiet at my own table."
They took Patchface out. His bells rang all the way down the corridor, fainter and fainter. The little birds all burn. Shireen did not touch the rest of her food.
Her lessons went badly.
Maester Pylos could not sit still. He was a good teacher, not as good as old Cressen who she dearly missed, but he was patient, and kind, but this morning he was neither—twitchy, distracted, his eyes going again and again to the narrow window, his fingers drumming the table.
When Shireen read her passage wrong, he did not correct her. He did not seem to hear it. When she asked him what was the matter, he startled as though she'd shouted, and said nothing, child, nothing, read on, and looked at the window again.
Everyone was strange today.
The whole castle. Strange and waiting, like the held breath before a storm broke.
And there were the men in the yard. She saw them from the schoolroom window, when Pylos gave her leave to rest her eyes.
Men in the great courtyard, building something. Hauling wood, lengths of it, and setting up a tall post in the center, and stacking the wood around its foot in a careful ring.
Shireen watched them work and felt the cold come into her belly, because she knew what they were building. She had seen it built before.
A pyre.
There was to be another burning.
She turned away from the window and did not want to look anymore. The last time, the people had screamed so. She could hear it still, sometimes, in the night—the screaming, and the red woman's voice going on and on beneath it, calm and sweet, singing to her god while the men burned.
Shireen had asked her mother, after, why they had to burn people. Why they could not just be hanged, or sent away, if they were bad.
Because they are traitors and criminals, her mother had said, and your father is the king, and the king must dispense the gods' justice. The Lord of Light asks for fire, Shireen. Fire cleanses. Fire is the only true death, and those who feed it light the way for all of us. You should be glad to see it. One day you will understand.
Shireen did not want to understand. She turned from the window, and picked up her book, and tried to read, and could not, because down in the yard the men were building the thing that people screamed on, and somewhere in the castle Edric was unwell and Ser Davos had gone without goodbye and her mother would not stop smiling.
They brought her out as the light was failing.
Most of the castle came—the household, the servants, the guards off the walls, some other hard men Ser Davos had brought across the sea, herded out into the great courtyard in the red light of evening, and the comet burning overhead, bigger than she had ever seen it, a red wound torn down the western sky.
Shireen stood with her mother's hand hard on her shoulder and did not know why they had brought her, only that the pyre stood tall and ready in the middle of the yard, and beside it was a black candle — warped and twisted, near as tall as her with flames every colour — and something terrible was coming, she knew, because today had been all wrong.
Her father stood before them all in his kingly grey and gold, his jaw set like stone. And beside him, in her red robes, with the great ruby at her throat that seemed to pulse in the failing light, stood the red woman.
Melisandre of Asshai was speaking to the king, low, but Shireen was near enough to catch it.
"—soon, Your Grace. Before full dark. The bastard's fleet will be touching the island." The red woman's voice was smooth as warm milk. "And it is as I foretold. The Royal fleet has turned, and the lords of the narrow sea with them. They come flying the false king's colours and the white flag of cravens."
Bastard? Shireen thought. Does she mean cousin Joffrey?
"Then I should have hanged the lot of them when I had them under my roof." Her father's teeth ground. "Velaryon. Celtigar. Bar Emmon. Sunglass. All of them, false."
"Peace, Your Grace. We knew they would turn. It changes nothing." The ruby pulsed, shining red like blood. "Let them come. Let them land, and see. When the power of R'hllor is loosed on this island tonight, when they behold Azor Ahai reborn wreathed in the fire of the Lord, they will fall to their knees and denounce the bastard. Those who came to fight you will beg to serve you. This is not the loss of a battle, my king. This is the hour the whole world learns what you are. From this rock we take the Seven Kingdoms, and it begins tonight, with the fire, with the king's blood that wakes the stone."
The king's blood. What king's blood? What does she mean?
And then they brought the prisoner out to the pyre, and she saw. Shireen felt her heart wrench in her chest.
"No," Shireen said. "No, no—that's Edric, that's Edric—"
They had him bound, her cousin, her friend, his hands lashed behind the post and the wood stacked to his knees, and he was weeping, his face all tears and terror in the red light. Not unwell. Not a touch of chill. Here. On the pyre.
"Edric!" She wailed and lunged, and her mother's hands clamped down, hard, both arms around her, holding her fast. "Let me go—Mother, let me go—that's Edric, you have to stop it, you have to—Father! Father, please—"
"Hush now. Hush." Her mother's voice was in her ear, and it was gentle, and that was the most horrible thing of all, how gentle it was. "This is a great thing, Shireen. A holy thing. You must be brave and watch."
"He's my friend—"
"He is an abomination." The gentleness did not waver. "He should never have drawn breath. He is Robert's bastard, got in adultery, and his birth has cursed this family, sweetling. He is the reason you have no brothers and must live with grey stone in your sweet face. His getting was a sin against the gods and against your father. But the Lord of Light is merciful, and even a sinful life can be made to mean something. His blood is king's blood, Shireen. Robert's blood, and Robert was a king. Given to the fire, it will wake a power that will win your father his throne and cleanse the realm. Do you see? At last he can be of use. At last his poor cursed life will have a purpose." Her mother's fingers bit into her skin, squeezing her so tight hurt. "You should be glad for him."
Shireen was crying now, great heaving sobs, with big fat tears rolling down her cheeks and she could not stop, and she could not get free.
The red woman lifted her arms and began to chant, words in no tongue Shireen knew, harsh and rolling, and her servants came forward with torches.
Edric saw the torches and began to scream.
"No—no, please, Uncle, please, I'm sorry—" Shireen didn't know what he was sorry for, he had never done anything to hurt anyone. The torches went into the wood, and flames soon began to lick up at his legs. "UNCLE! I'm sorry—Aunt Selyse, please, I'll be good, I'll never—please don't, please, I don't want to—Shireen! Shireen, help—"
Her father's jaw worked and worked. He did not look at the boy. He did not look at his nephew. He turned his face away, instead, up toward the burning comet, and his teeth ground, and he said nothing, and did nothing, and let it all happen.
Shireen cried and thought of Edric as it climbed. Of the day he came to Dragonstone, another child at last in that grim grey castle, and how he had grinned at her and not once looked away from the grey stone on her face, not once, when everyone looked away. Of the two of them on the walls, and all around the island, hunting for dragon eggs, playing at kings and knights and maidens.
He had been a brother to her. She had only ever had five friends in all her life—the fool, who was sad; and Ser Davos, who had gone; and the golden prince Joffrey, who had come once and been kind to her and sailed away; Old Maester Cressen who was gone and Edric, who was here, who was hers, who laughed and never flinched at her ruined face.
And they were burning him.
The flames crept upwards and he shrieked, a sound she would hear for the rest of her life. The red woman chanted louder, her face rapt, her ruby blazing. And the strange candle beside her shining all the brighter
Her father would not look. Her mother held her and murmured that it was holy, it was good, be brave, be brave.
"Please," Shireen sobbed, to her mother, to her father, to the red woman, to the gods, to anyone. "Please, please, he didn't do anything, please stop, please—"
No one stopped it. The fire climbed. Edric burned, and screamed, and Shireen screamed with him, and no one in all that watching crowd lifted a hand.
And then the mountain screamed too.
The Dragonmont tore itself open with a roar that knocked half the courtyard to its knees.
The whole island heaved. The ground bucked under Shireen's feet, the castle walls groaned, dust and stone rained down from the battlements, and up behind the castle the broken mountain vomited fire into the bleeding sky, a column of it, red and gold and white, so bright it turned the evening to a hellish noon.
The heat from it rolled across the yard. Somewhere a tower cracked. People were screaming now, all of them, not just Edric—screaming and falling and scrambling.
And the red woman's face, for the first time Shireen had ever seen, was not smooth and certain.
Melisandre stared up at the erupting mountain with her mouth open and her eyes wide, and she looked confused, and she looked, for one instant, afraid.
Shireen did not care to question why. Her mother's grip had gone loose.
In all the shaking and the screaming and the falling ash, the queen's arms had come open, her hands flying up to shield her head, her eyes on the burning mountain—and Shireen was free.
"SHIREEN!"
She heard someone scream her name but she couldn't hear who and did not care.
She did not think. There was no thinking left in her. She saw only Edric in the fire, still twitching, still screaming, and so she ran—ran across the bucking stones, into the heat, into the flames, reaching for her friend, her brother, the only one who had not left her.
She ran into the fire. And for a moment—one strange, floating moment—there was no pain at all.
Shireen had time to be surprised by it. The flames were all around her, gold and roaring, and she felt only warmth, only a great gentle warmth, as though the fire knew her and would not hurt her, as though she had come home.
It doesn't hurt, she thought, wondering, reaching through the gold for Edric's charred hand. Why doesn't it hurt?
Then the dead grey skin on her neck began to crack.
She felt it—felt it where she had never felt anything, the greyscale that had eaten her cheek since she was a babe, the stone that was dead and had no feeling in it.
It cracked. It split. Something moved under it, from her neck, along her jaw, up toward her ruined cheek, waking, burning, burning in the dead grey places that had been numb her whole life, and the walls of Dragonstone shook and shook around her, and the fire roared, and the mountain roared, and the scales on her face burst and the little girl opened her mouth—
—and screamed.
JON
The gargoyles came thicker the nearer they got to the castle, and Jon Snow had long since stopped counting them.
He fought back to back with Ser Jaime in the shadow of the crumbling gatehouse, and the stone devils came down out of the smoke without end, and the two of them killed and killed and could not make the dark any emptier.
Jon's arms were past aching. His sword had shattered hours ago; he fought now with a dead man's longaxe, and still they came.
"You know," the kingslayer said, cleaving a gargoyle's wing at the joint so it dropped screeching, "when the king asked me to guard his war, I pictured something more dignified. A siege. A parley. A dramatic duel at the end." He put his shoulder into a stone thing and sent it tumbling. "Something more like Pyke. Man that was a battle. Thoros charged right past me with his flaming sword." Jaime smiled wistfully, half lost in memories of another battle. "I sort of wish he was here."
"You don't," Jon said. "Some of the others would have likely killed him after seeing the red witch's sorcery. And, Jaime?"
"What?"
"Save your breath." Jon ducked under a grey man's swing and forced his long axe in the part where the arm met chest.
"I've breath enough to die complaining. It's the only dignity they've left me." But the Kingslayer was grinning under the ash and the king's red mark, that reckless golden grin, and Jon understood, distantly, that the man was not afraid, or was so far past afraid it came round to the same thing. There was a madness that looked like courage. Half the men still standing had it now.
Jon did not. Jon only had the pull.
He had felt it since they landed—since the black sand and the moment the mountain tore itself open and something reached into his chest and turned him to face the castle. Forward. Come to me. He did not trust it. He had learned, in a night without end, that thinking was the thing that broke a man, so he did not think about the voice in the stone.
He only followed it, up the beach and through the outer walls and into the bones of Dragonstone, killing everything the pull put in his way.
Jon and the other knights held the front, throwing themselves into the worst of it so the levies behind might live. That was the shape the battle had taken once the plan died on the beach. The knights in plate spending themselves like coin to buy the poor men in boiled leather a little time, and the poor men loving them for it, and following them into the abyss.
It was not chivalry, as such as it was survival.
Something waits in the dark beneath the stone, the masked woman had told him, a life ago, in a dream. He was almost to it now.
They broke into the inner courtyard as the night wore toward its blackest, and there she was.
The yard opened before them—walls half-fallen, gargoyles peeling off the battlements, stone men lurching in the murk—and in the center of it stood a thing Jon's eye went to and could not leave.
A candle. A twisted candle of black stone, taller than a man, burning with a light that was wrong, that threw the shadows the wrong way and did not gutter in all that wind. Beside it, the black smoking bones of a pyre. And besides that, a woman.
Red robes, red hair, a great red stone at her throat that pulsed like a beating heart. Even across that ruined yard, ash-choked and past sense, Jon felt the pull of her, beautiful and wrong. She was chanting, her arms lifted, her face rapt in the candle's crooked light. But something else drew Jon's eye.
Her belly was swollen.
Great and round and heavy, as though she were come to her term and as he cut toward her through the stone men, she sank down in the filth of the yard, drew up her knees, and opened them.
She's birthing, some appalled corner of him said. In the middle of a battle, she's—
She gave birth to a shadow.
Between one blink and the next it came out of her. Dark and boneless and wrong, and it rose, and grew, and took a shape that was almost a man—a tall thin shadow with a shadow-sword—and it went through the nearest knights like a scythe through standing corn.
Jon saw men in good plate fall with their armour opened as though it were linen, saw the blood run black in the candle-light through steel that should have turned any edge.
The shadow did not slow. It did not tire. It cut down a half-dozen men in the time it took Jon to draw breath, and its path was straight and sure, and it was going for Renly.
"RENLY!" His voice tore out of him. It seemed to come from a hundred others at the same time as well. "Behind you—"
Renly turned. Gods be thanked, he turned in time—got his warhammer up and caught the shadow's first cut on the haft, and the haft sheared clean through like a green reed, and Renly reeled back with half a hammer in one hand and the king's dagger already in the other. Valyrian steel, dark and rippling. He met the second cut with it. The two blades came together, and the sound—
Jon felt it in his teeth and his spine and the bones of his skull. It was not a sound steel made. It was ice cracking on a black lake in deep winter, it was something tearing that ought never tear, and it rang across the yard and off the broken walls, and Jon threw himself toward it, leaving the others behind, hacking through anything between, and could not get there fast enough.
The shadow pressed and Renly gave ground. They clashed again and again and again, but the outcome was clear. Renly Baratheon was a fine sword and was wielding Valyrian steel, but neither mattered against a thing that was not there. The shadow's blade slid past the dagger and went into his side.
"NO!"
Renly folded around the steel. But he saw Jon coming—their eyes caught across the last few feet—and with the last clean motion left in him he flung the king's dagger.
It came point-first, tumbling, through the smoke, and Jon caught it wrong in his haste, closed his hand round the blade instead of the hilt. The edge bit deep into his palm and his fingers and the blood came hot and fast. He felt none of it. The shadow had its back to him, bent over Renly to finish him but it seemed to sense him coming.
It turned, but then Jon was looking through another set of eyes for but a second and then ghost was at the shadows heel, teeth struggling to find purchase in the thing that was both there and not.
Jon knew the moment when he saw it and reversed the dagger in his ruined hand, drove up off his back foot with everything left in him, and took the shadow's head from its shoulders.
It did not bleed. It came apart like smoke in a wind and was gone, and there was only the cold, and the candle throwing its wrong light, and Renly on the stones with black blood welling between his fingers.
"Get him back," Jon rasped, and hands were already there, marked men dragging their lord out of the press toward the walls, and Renly's head lolled and his eyes found Jon's a last time. His mouth moved. Jon could not hear it over the din, but he read the shape of it well enough.
Go.
Jon turned his bleeding hand round the hilt of the dagger and went.
The stone men were thinner near the candle. Jon cut through what there was, and one of them gave him pause where a hundred had not.
It was half-buried in a broken wall. Embedded in it, as though the collapsing stone had caught the man as he turned and made him part of itself, so that only his head and one shoulder and a reaching arm were free of the rock.
Jon nearly passed it by in his effort to reach the sorceress. But it was shuddering and making more noise than any of the stone men he had encountered thus far.
He looked and saw the hair—black, coarse, going grey at the temples, the honest grey of a man's years and not the plague's. And in the ruined stone face, one eye. One blue eye, blue as a cold winter sky. It moved. It found him. It knew him, and it hated him, and there was nothing of the mindless stone thing in that hatred at all.
Jon knew that eye. He had seen its like across a hundred high tables. It was a Baratheon eye, Robert's own eye, set in a harder colder face.
Stannis.
The would-be king, three parts turned to stone, caught fast in his own crumbling walls, glaring out of the wreck of himself with the one eye left to him.
And in Jon's skull the voice came back, the voice that had spoken to them all in the breaking hour, warm and terrible, with a command he was in position to fulfill.
Kill the usurper.
Stannis's jaw ground. Jon saw it—stone grinding upon stone, the old habit outliving the man, the grim clench of a mouth that had never in life known how to yield. The blue eye burned at him. The cracked lips shaped something, a word, a curse, a prayer; Jon never knew which and did not particularly care and did not let himself wonder because wondering was thinking and thinking too long got you killed on this island.
He set the dagger to the blue eye and pushed it home. Then, because they would likely need it later, he took the stone head off the buried shoulders and let it fall among the rubble.
The yard shuddered.
All across the courtyard the stone men stuttered in their steps; the gargoyles faltered in the air; for the space of a breath the whole nightmare lost the thread of itself.
Jon did not understand what part the usurper had played in the red witch's magic and for a moment had hope that that would be all. That the ground would stop shaking and the mountain would stop screaming.
It was a foolish hope.
Melisandre screamed, and every stone thing and flying devil left in that yard turned as one and came for him.
They should have had him. One man, spent past spending, one hand slick with his own blood on a dagger's hilt, and the whole dying castle turned against him.
His brothers would not let them have him.
Ser Barristan reached him first, and never had Jon been more glad to see him, sliding through the carnage like water finding the low ground, putting himself at Jon's back.
"You look like you could use some help, my boy." Said the old man.
Then Jaime at his shoulder, and Garlan Tyrell, Loras' steadier brother — representing the roses whilst his younger brother guarded the king — and a handful of the others who could reach him, what the night had left of them, closing round Jon in a ring of battered steel.
"Any particular reason she wants you dead most of all, Snow?" Jaime took off a reaching stone man's hand and pushed it back with kick.
"That was Stannis' head I took back there." Jon called over the scrapping of stone and the Dragonmounts ever present roar. The words rippled through the men around him.
Beric Dondarrion rasped. "Swear it on the king—"
Then another knight. "He's lying—"
And another. "Say you speak true—"
"I do." Jon frowned, he did not like the doubt but he understood it all the same. "Stannis Baratheon is dead."
Jaime laughed, delighted. "Just the red bitch left then. Renly gave you command, we'll follow you. Let's end this and go home."
Jon wanted to argue that bearing the dagger and having command were not one and the same but he held his tongue. They set toward the witch and the candle, and his brothers made a moving wall of their own bodies and carried him forward inside it, and they took the blows he did not, and broke under them, and each time one broke another stepped into the gap.
"Go, Snow!" Garlan was laughing, or snarling; Jon could not tell which and doubted the man could either. "We'll hold the ugly ones! Go and kill that woman—"
Jon broke out of the ring three strides from her and put the Valyrian dagger through her heart.
It went in clean. He felt it grate on a rib and find the beating thing behind, and he twisted it and drove it again, and she looked down at the dark steel standing out of her breast, and then up into his face, and she did not die.
There was no blood. She smiled at him—a slow, pitying, dreadful smile—and Jon's stomach dropped through the black stones of the yard, because he had put good Valyrian steel through a witch's heart twice over and she only smiled at him, as one did a child acting particularly stupid.
She raised one red hand, and a tower answered it.
One of the great stone dragons broke off its wheeling in the smoke and came down—called down—and struck the courtyard, and the world was noise and grit and flying rock. Jon was lifted off his feet and flung and hit the ground hard enough to empty him out.
For a while there was nothing at all.
Then he was on his hands and knees in the rubble, deaf, half-blind, his mouth full of blood and grit, and he could not remember for a moment where he was or why.
His hand found his cheek. The mark. Still there. Still wet. The one fixed thing in a night that had come apart, and he touched it then, without deciding to, for whatever was in it, and something steadied. He brought his hand down and found the dagger fallen in the stones, picked it up by the blade, and he pushed himself up.
The witch was not looking at him.
She was looking past him, at the candle, and the certainty had gone out of her face.
A stone man was walking to it.
Just one, half-cased in grey, lurching like all the rest—but there was purpose in it that none of the others had, a straight and deliberate purpose, and it was making for the twisted flame.
"Davos?" Melisandre's voice cracked on the word. For the first time she sounded like a woman and not a power. "You—how? You were bound—how did you—"
The stone man did not answer her. He reached up to his own grey ruined face with a grey ruined hand—and took hold of the skin at his jaw, and peeled.
Jon's stomach turned.
The man drew the greyscale off his own face like a wet mask coming loose—not flaking, not sloughing, but lifting away whole, the dead grey hide of a man called Davos' face and throat coming free in one terrible piece, greyscale and skin and features together, the way you'd skin a hare. But there was no blood, and no raw meat beneath.
There was another body. Another face.
A stranger's face. Lean and smooth and unremarkable and wholly, perfectly untouched—no grey, no plague, no wound, as though the sickness that had eaten the outer skin had never so much as brushed the man beneath it.
It was not that the greyscale had healed. It was that the greyscale had belonged to someone else. The grey face hung from the stranger's hand, empty, still wearing Davos Seaworth's frightened dead eyes, and the man who had worn it looked out with a face that had never been this Davos at all.
Jon had never seen its like. But today had been a strange day. Jon began to laugh softly.
Why not? Jon thought with mad hysteria. Something in him had come loose.
"NOW, boy!" the strange man(?) roared, and its eyes—a stranger's eyes in a stranger's face—found Jon's across the ruin. "Now, Now, NOW!"
And it cast the empty grey face aside and threw itself upon the candle.
Melisandre flung out her hand and screamed a word that hurt Jon's ears to hear—but the faceless thing had its arms around the black stone already, and it wrenched, and it tore, its whole spare body shaking with the effort, and with a crack like the spine of the world breaking the twisted candle snapped in two.
Its wrong light went out.
Jon had one glimpse of the faceless thing then, in the last of that dying glow—crouched over the broken candle.
Then the dust rolled between them, and when it thinned the no-man was gone, gone as though it had never stood there, and Jon never saw where, and somehow was not surprised.
And Jon saw the red witch change.
It lasted a heartbeat, no more. For that heartbeat the beautiful red woman was gone, and there was something else standing in the pooled red robes—something ancient past reckoning, bent and withered, skin like cracked river-mud in a drought, eyes sunk so deep in the ruined face they were only glints far down in the dark. A crone. A corpse that had forgotten to lie down.
A blink and then the red woman was back—but wrong now, grasping, her feet unsure under her, her hands clutching at the air as though the air had been holding her up and had let go. The ruby at her throat was flickering, a flame burning low.
Jon did not stop to understand any of it. Understanding was thinking and thinking broke a man; he had seen it a hundred times this night. He crossed the last of the ground between them instead and drove the dagger into her heart again.
As it pierced her skin a third time, Joffrey's blade caught fire in his fist.
It kindled as he forced it home—the dark rippled steel running all at once with a bright flame, a white and gold, a fire that lit the whole ruined yard, and burned hotter than any flame Jon had felt but somehow did not hurt him at all.
It went into her and through her and out the other side, and Melisandre of Asshai gasped, and arched, and this time she did not smile.
She looked at him in shock and confusion. Her red red eyes filled with tears. "You?"
She seemed to take all of him in, the blade in his hand, the ruined castle they were in, the ash that fell all around them and roar from the mount behind them.
Melisandre blinked, her eyes filled with an intense clarity and said softly, "oh".
And came apart the way her shadow-child had. Not blood. Ash, and smoke, and a red light guttering out, and then nothing at all—empty robes settling into the dust, and the great ruby winking dark, a coal drowned in cold water.
The night ended between one breath and the next.
All across the yard the stone men crumbled—simply came apart, fell to gravel and grit and dust, dropped where they stood and did not rise. And the gargoyles still aloft did not fall. They flew home. Up they spiraled, to the broken battlements and the ruined towers, and folded their wings, and settled back into the black rock, and went still, and were only carvings again, snarling stone faces that had never moved and never would, as though the whole long night had dreamed them.
The fog thinned. The smoke tore and lifted. The wind off the sea came clean for the first time in that endless dark. The mount ceased its screaming and for the first time since they touched the beach, the ground did not shake. And in the east, over the water, the sun was coming up.
Real dawn. Pale and gold and ordinary and impossible, the first honest light in a night that had felt like it would swallow the world, spilling across the black island and the broken fleet and the ruined yard and the ruined men.
They were going down where they stood, the marked men—folding onto the bloody stones, some weeping, some laughing like madmen, most only staring, at the sunrise, or at the dead witch's empty robes, or at the dark young lord standing over them with a burning blade in his fist.
The silence rang after all that noise. And in the silence a thousand hollowed eyes turned, slowly, to Jon. He was too tired to flinch.
Jon heard something move at the burned-out pyre. He turned, the flaming dagger lifting in his hand.
A child stepped out of the ashes.
A girl, small—and bald, every hair burned from her head, the girl's was skin was smooth and pale and perfect as new porcelain, unmarked, unburnt, faintly aglow in the young light. Her eyes were a startling blue in that smooth pale face. The same blue that had glared at him with hatred and sadness from a head of stone.
She looked at the blood and the ruin and all the terrible staring men, and she was shaking, and she began to sob.
The words seemed to tumble out of her.
"I'm sorry. I tried to stop them—but I didn't have— the red woman was in control— and, and—"
Stannis' girl, someone said, hushed. Shireen.
And then, lower, uglier, from more than one throat at once: There's no grey on her. She had it—half her face, all knew it—and now look. Now there's none. She walked out of the fire whole.
A witch, someone breathed. Another witch. She's the cause of it, she called it all up, she—
She is her fathers daughter—
Kill her. Kill her now. Kill her before—
Jon frowned. He was tired past the far end of tiredness. His hand warm around a blade that had fire dancing across it. And he did not feel wholly himself—felt, in some strange and distant way, as though something moved his limbs a half-beat before he chose to move them, as though he watched from just behind his own eyes while his body did what it would.
But their words forced him into action. Because these men, these tired, scared, brave men were working themselves up into a frenzy and were about to do something unforgivable. And for what? Because of who her father was? They thought her the cause of this night of misery? Or did they think her liable to repeat his mistakes?
Jon thought of his dreams, of wearing the Last Dragon's skin and gifting a wolf maid a crown of winter roses.
If this little girl had to be killed because her blood was tainted, because her father was Stannis Baratheon, and she was like to follow in his footsteps, what did that say of him?
Were men doomed to repeat the mistakes of their parents? Of all the ancestors that came before them? Jon could not believe it was so.
Jon Snow crossed the yard toward the girl. The men fell back before him, out of his path, he could not say why but there was something in the way they looked at him now that was not far from the way they had looked at the gargoyles.
The girl shrank from him, from the fire in his hand, her thin shoulders drawing up. Jon knelt in the ash. He unclasped his what remained of his cloak one-handed, the dagger still guttering in the other, and he swept the ragged black wool around her small shaking shoulders and drew it closed at her throat.
She stared at him. Terror first, and then, under it, something breaking open—a wild disbelieving hope, the look of a child who has stopped expecting kindness and been handed it anyway. Her eyes filled and spilled over, and she wept, silent and shuddering, and Jon put his bleeding hand a moment against her bald head, gently. Ghost padded over, his white coat grey with ash and nudged the girl. Licking at her face and tears until she giggled.
Jon rose. He turned with the girl huddled in his cloak against his leg, and the fire still whispering pale along the dagger. He walked to where he had left it and picked up the head by its black and greying hair, and looked out over the broken men in the broken yard under the new and rising sun.
When he opened his mouth, the words that came up out of him did not feel wholly like his own—they rose in him certain and ringing, so that some far part of Jon Snow listened in plain surprise as well as his own voice made them.
"Let the ravens fly," he said. "Dragonstone has fallen. The demon, the usurper, known as Stannis Baratheon, is dead. And his red witch with him." The dagger flared white in his fist. He turned Stannis's head by its hair and flung it away. "There is one king in all the Seven Kingdoms. One, and no other. And he sits the Iron Throne."
The men took it up hoarse and broken and relieved and climbing. As they did the sun cleared the water, and the last of the smoke blew out to sea. After a long night such as that, the dawn was a blessing.