The Wall was too far, surely, and a bleak and bitter place besides. And to reach Riverrun the girl would need to cross the war-torn riverlands and pass through the Lannister siege lines. The Eyrie would be simpler, and Lady Lysa would surely welcome her sister’s daughter.

Ahead, the alley bent. Somehow Brienne had taken a wrong turn. She found herself in a dead end, a small muddy yard where three pigs were rooting round a low stone well. One squealed at the sight of her, and an old woman drawing water looked her up and down suspiciously. “What would you be wanting?”

“I was looking for the Seven Swords.”

“Back the way you come. Left at the sept.”

“I thank you.” Brienne turned to retrace her steps, and walked headfirst into someone hurrying round the bend. The collision knocked him off his feet, and he landed on his arse in the mud. “Pardons,” she murmured. He was only a boy; a scrawny lad with straight, thin hair and a sty beneath one eye. “Are you hurt?” She offered a hand to help him up, but the boy squirmed back away from her on heels and elbows. He could not have been more than ten or twelve, though he wore a chainmail byrnie and had a longsword in a leather sheath slung across his back. “Do I know you?” Brienne asked. His face seemed vaguely familiar, though she could not think from where.

“No. You don’t. You never. ” He scrambled to his feet. “F-f-forgive me. My lady. I wasn’t looking. I mean, I was, but down. I was looking down. At my feet.” The boy took to his heels, plunging headlong back the way he’d come.

Something about him roused all of Brienne’s suspicions, but she was not about to chase him through the streets of Duskendale. Outside the gates this morning, that was where I saw him, she realized. He was riding a piebald rounsey. And it seemed as if she had seen him somewhere else as well, but where?

By the time Brienne found the Seven Swords again, the common room was crowded. Four septas sat closest to the fire, in robes stained and dusty from the road. Elsewhere locals filled the benches, sopping up bowls of hot crab stew with chunks of bread. The smell made her stomach rumble, but she saw no empty seats. Then a voice behind her said, “M’lady, here, have my place.” Not until he hopped off the bench did Brienne realize that the speaker was a dwarf. The little man was not quite five feet tall. His nose was veined and bulbous, his teeth red from sourleaf, and he was dressed in the brown roughspun robes of a holy brother, with the iron hammer of the Smith dangling down about his thick neck.

“Keep your seat,” she said. “I can stand as well as you.”

“Aye, but my head is not so apt to knock upon the ceiling.” The dwarf’s speech was coarse but courteous. Brienne could see the crown of his scalp where he had shaved it. Many holy brothers wore such tonsures. Septa Roelle once told her that it was meant to show that they had nothing to hide from the Father. “Can’t the Father see through hair?” Brienne had asked. A stupid thing to say. She had been a slow child; Septa Roelle often told her so. She felt near as stupid now, so she took the little man’s place at the end of the bench, signaled for stew, and turned to thank the dwarf. “Do you serve some holy house in Duskendale, brother?”

“’Twas nearer Maidenpool, m’lady, but the wolves burned us out,” the man replied, gnawing on a heel of bread. “We rebuilt as best we could, until some sellswords come. I could not say whose men they were, but they took our pigs and killed the brothers. I squeezed inside a hollow log and hid, but t’others were too big. It took me a long time to bury them all, but the Smith, he gave me strength. When that was done I dug up a few coins the elder brother had hid by and set off by myself.”

“I met some other brothers going to King’s Landing.”

“Aye, there’s hundreds on the roads. Not only brothers. Septons too, and smallfolk. Sparrows all. Might be I’m a sparrow too. The Smith, he made me small enough.” He chuckled. “And what’s your sad tale, m’lady?”

“I am looking for my sister. She’s highborn, only three-and-ten, a pretty maid with blue eyes and auburn hair. You may have seen her traveling with a man. A knight, perhaps a fool. There’s gold for the man who helps me find her.”

“Gold?” The brother gave her a red smile. “A bowl of that crab stew would be enough reward for me, but I fear I cannot help you. Fools I’ve met, and plenty, but not so many pretty maids.” He cocked his head and thought a moment. “There was a fool at Maidenpool, now that I think of it. He was clad in rags and dirt, as near as I could tell, but under the dirt was motley.”

Did Dontos Hollard wear motley? No one had told Brienne that he did. but no one had ever said he didn’t, either. Why would the man be in rags, though? Had some misfortune overtaken him and Sansa after they fled King’s Landing? That could well be, with the roads so dangerous. It might not have been him at all. “Did this fool have a red nose, full of broken veins?”

“I could not swear to that. I confess, I paid him little heed. I’d gone to Maidenpool after burying my brothers, thinking that I might find a ship to take me to King’s Landing. I first glimpsed the fool down by the docks. He had a furtive air to him and took care to avoid Lord Tarly’s soldiers. Later, I encountered him again, at the Stinking Goose.”

“The Stinking Goose?” she said, uncertain.

“An unsavory place,” the dwarf admitted. “Lord Tarly’s men patrol the port at Maidenpool, but the Goose is always full of sailors, and sailors have been known to smuggle men aboard their ships, if the price is right. This fool was seeking passage for three across the narrow sea. I oft saw him there, talking with oarsmen off the galleys. Sometimes he would sing a funny song.”

“Seeking passage for three? Not two?”

“Three, m’lady. That I’d swear to, by the Seven.” Three, she thought. Sansa, Ser Dontos. but who would be the third? The Imp? “ Did the fool find his ship?”

“That I could not say,” the dwarf told her, “but one night some of Lord Tarly’s soldiers visited the Goose looking for him, and a few days later I heard another man boasting that he’d fooled a fool and had the gold to prove it. He was drunk, and buying ale for everyone.”

“‘Fooled a fool,’” she said. “What did he mean by that?”

“I could not tell you. His name was Nimble Dick, though, that I do recall.” The dwarf spread his hands. “I fear that’s all that I can offer you, aside from a small man’s prayers.”

True to her word, Brienne bought him his bowl of hot crab stew. and some hot fresh bread and a cup of wine as well. As he ate it, standing by her side, she mulled what he had told her. Could the Imp have joined them? If Tyrion Lannister were behind Sansa’s disappearance, and not Dontos Hollard, it stood to reason that they would need to flee across the narrow sea.

When the little man was done with his bowl of stew, he finished what was left of hers as well. “You should eat more,” he said. “A woman big as you needs t’ keep her strength up. It is not far to Maidenpool, but the road is perilous these days.”

I know. It was on that very road that Ser Cleos Frey had died, and she and Ser Jaime had been taken by the Bloody Mummers. Jaime tried to kill me, she remembered, though he was gaunt and weak, and his wrists were chained. It had been a close thing, even so, but that was before Zollo hacked his hand off. Zollo and Rorge and Shagwell would have raped her half a hundred times if Ser Jaime had not told them she was worth her weight in sapphires.

“M’lady? You look sad. Are you thinking of your sister?” The dwarf patted her on the hand. “The Crone will light your way to her, never fear. The Maiden will keep her safe.”

“I pray that you are right.”

“I am.” He bowed. “But now I must be on my way. I’ve a long way yet to go to reach King’s Landing.”