On the twenty-sixth day of the fifteen-day march, the last of the vegetables was consumed. On the thirty-second day, the last of the grain and fodder. Asha wondered how long a man could live on raw, half-frozen horse meat.
“Branch swears we are only three days from Winterfell,” Ser Richard Horpe told the king that night after the cold count.
“If we leave the weakest men behind,” said Corliss Penny. “The weakest men are beyond saving,” insisted Horpe. “Those still strong enough must reach Winterfell or die as well.”
“The Lord of Light will deliver us the castle,” said Ser Godry Farring. “If Lady Melisandre were with us—”
Finally, after a nightmarish day when the column advanced a bare mile and lost a dozen horses and four men, Lord Peasebury turned against the northmen. “This march was madness. More dying every day, and for what? Some girl?”
“Ned’s girl,” said Morgan Liddle. He was the second of three sons, so the other wolves called him Middle Liddle, though not often in his hearing. It was Morgan who had almost slain Asha in the fight by Deepwood Motte. He had come to her later, on the march, to beg her pardon … for calling her cunt in his battle lust, not for trying to split her head open with an axe.
“Ned’s girl,” echoed Big Bucket Wull. “And we should have had her and the castle both if you prancing southron jackanapes didn’t piss your satin breeches at a little snow.”
“A little snow?” Peasebury’s soft girlish mouth twisted in fury. “Your ill counsel forced this march upon us, Wull. I am starting to suspect you have been Bolton’s creature all along. Is that the way of it? Did he send you to us to whisper poison in the king’s ear?”
Big Bucket laughed in his face. “Lord Pea Pod. If you were a man, I would kill you for that, but my sword is made of too fine a steel to besmirch with craven’s blood.” He took a drink of ale and wiped his mouth. “Aye, men are dying. More will die before we see Winterfell. What of it? This is war. Men die in war. That is as it should be. As it has always been.”
Ser Corliss Penny gave the clan chief an incredulous look. “Do you want to die, Wull?”
That seemed to amuse the northman. “I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter.
“Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned’s little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.”
“Aye!” shouted Morgan Liddle. “Blood and battle!” Then all the hill-men were shouting, banging their cups and drinking horns on the table, filling the king’s tent with the clangor.
Asha Greyjoy would have welcomed a fight herself. One battle, to put an end to this misery. Steel on steel, pink snow, broken shields and severed limbs, and it would all be done.
The next day the king’s scouts chanced upon an abandoned crofters’ village between two lakes—a mean and meagre place, no more than a few huts, a longhall, and a watchtower. Richard Horpe commanded a halt, though the army had advanced no more than a half-mile that day and they were hours shy of dark. It was well past moonrise before the baggage train and rear guard straggled in. Asha was amongst them.
“There are fish in those lakes,” Horpe told the king. “We’ll cut holes in the ice. The northmen know how it’s done.”
Even in his bulky fur cloak and heavy armor, Stannis looked like a man with one foot in the grave. What little flesh he’d carried on his tall, spare frame at Deepwood Motte had melted away during the march. The shape of his skull could be seen under his skin, and his jaw was clenched so hard Asha feared his teeth might shatter. “Fish, then,” he said, biting off each word with a snap. “But we march at first light.”
Yet when light came, the camp woke to snow and silence. The sky turned from black to white, and seemed no brighter. Asha Greyjoy awoke cramped and cold beneath the pile of sleeping furs, listening to the She-Bear’s snores. She had never known a woman to snore so loudly, but she had grown used to it whilst on the march, and even took some comfort in it now. It was the silence that troubled her. No trumpets blew to rouse the men to mount up, form column, prepare to march. No warhorns summoned forth the northmen. Something is wrong.
Asha crawled out from under her sleeping furs and pushed her way out of the tent, knocking aside the wall of snow that had sealed them in during the night. Her irons clanked as she climbed to her feet and took a breath of the icy morning air. The snow was still falling, even more heavily than when she’d crawled inside the tent. The lakes had vanished, and the woods as well. She could see the shapes of other tents and lean-tos and the fuzzy orange glow of the beacon fire burning atop the watchtower, but not the tower itself. The storm had swallowed the rest.
Somewhere ahead Roose Bolton awaited them behind the walls of Winterfell, but Stannis Baratheon’s host sat snowbound and unmoving, walled in by ice and snow, starving.
DAENERYS
The candle was almost gone. Less than an inch remained, jutting from a pool of warm melted wax to cast its light over the queen’s bed. The flame had begun to gutter.
It will go out before much longer, Dany realized, and when it does another night will be at its end.
Dawn always came too soon.
She had not slept, could not sleep, would not sleep. She had not even dared to close her eyes, for fear it would be morning when she opened them again. If only she had the power, she would have made their nights go on forever, but the best that she could do was stay awake to try and savor every last sweet moment before daybreak turned them into no more than fading memories.
Beside her, Daario Naharis was sleeping as peacefully as a newborn babe. He had a gift for sleeping, he’d boasted, smiling in that cocksure way of his. In the field, he would sleep in the saddle oft as not, he claimed, so as to be well rested should he come upon a battle. Sun or storm, it made no matter. “A warrior who cannot sleep soon has no strength to fight,” he said. He was never vexed by nightmares either. When Dany told him how Serwyn of the Mirror Shield was haunted by the ghosts of all the knights he’d killed, Daario only laughed. “If the ones I killed come bother me, I will kill them all again.” He has a sellsword’s conscience, she realized then. That is to say, none at all.
Daario lay upon his stomach, the light linen coverlets tangled about his long legs, his face half-buried in the pillows.
Dany ran her hand down his back, tracing the line of his spine. His skin was smooth beneath her touch, almost hairless. His skin is silk and satin. She loved the feel of him beneath her fingers. She loved to run her fingers through his hair, to knead the ache from his calves after a long day in the saddle, to cup his cock and feel it harden against her palm.
If she had been some ordinary woman, she would gladly have spent her whole life touching Daario, tracing his scars and making him tell her how he’d come by every one. I would give up my crown if he asked it of me, Dany thought … but he had not asked it, and never would. Daario might whisper words of love when the two of them were as one, but she knew it was the dragon queen he loved. If I gave up my crown, he would not want me. Besides, kings who lost their crowns oft lost their heads as well, and she could see no reason why it would be any different for a queen.