The She-Wolves of Winterfell

A Tale of the Seven Kingdoms

M.V.L.G.

A Song of Ice and Fire is set in the great continent of Westeros, in a world both like and unlike our own, where the seasons may last for years and even decades. Standing hard against the sunset sea at the western edge of the known world, Westeros stretches from the red sands of Dorne in the south to the frozen fields beyond the Wall in the north, where snow falls even in the long summers.

The children of the forest were the first known inhabitants of Westeros, during the Dawn of Days. Then came the First Men, who crossed a land bridge from the larger continent to the east and warred against the children for centuries before finally making peace with them and adopting their nameless, ancient gods. Other invaders followed. The Andals crossed the narrow sea with their iron swords and their Faith of the Seven, sweeping across the southern kingdoms. Only in the far north did the First Men hold, led by the Starks of Winterfell, who threw back the invaders and kept the old gods.

Three hundred years before the opening of A Song of Ice and Fire, a scion of lost Valyria named Aegon Targaryen landed at the mouth of the Blackwater with a small army, his two sister-wives, and three great dragons. He united six of the seven kingdoms by fire and sword, and forged the melted blades of his fallen foes into the Iron Throne. The Targaryen dynasty endured for nearly three hundred years thereafter.

The She-Wolves of Winterfell takes place about a hundred years before the opening of the first of the Ice and Fire novels, during the reign of King Aerys I, with the Targaryen dynasty fraying but not yet broken. It tells the story of Ser Duncan the Tall, a hedge knight of uncertain origin, and his squire Egg, a boy who is rather more than he seems.

Dunk and Egg first met at the great tourney at Ashford Meadow, as told in The Hedge Knight. Their adventures continued at Standfast, a towerhouse in the parched Reach, during the great drought described in The Sworn Sword. Most recently, they traveled to the wedding tourney at Whitewalls, where plots and treasons unfolded around them in The Mystery Knight.

At the end of that tale, Dunk learned that Lord Beron Stark of Winterfell had been wounded fighting ironborn raiders and was calling for swords. Having always dreamed of seeing the Wall, Dunk and Egg turned north — toward Winterfell, and whatever lay beyond.

This is a work of fan fiction, set in the world George R. R. Martin created. The characters of Dunk and Egg, and the world of Westeros, belong to him. This story is written in tribute to his craft, and with gratitude for the tales he has given us.

They had been on the road for three weeks when the stink hit them.

It came up from the south in a warm wet gust, mud and rot and standing water and something underneath, green and foul, like a privy that had never been emptied. Thunder tossed his head and blew hard. Behind them, Rain balked and Egg had to kick him forward, and Maester stopped walking entirely.

“What is that?” Dunk said.

“The Neck, ser.” Egg had his floppy hat pulled low against the drizzle. The brim was sagging on one side and dripping into his left eye, but the boy did not seem to mind. “The causeway runs through it. It’s the only road north.”

“It smells like something died in it.”

“Many things have died in it, ser. The Neck is full of bogs and quicksand. Armies have been swallowed whole.” He said this cheerfully, as if swallowed armies were a thing to look forward to. “The crannogmen live here. House Reed. They have a castle called Greywater Watch that floats.”

“A castle that floats.”

“It moves, ser. No one can find it because it’s never in the same place.”

“A castle that moves.” Dunk looked at the brown water stretching away on both sides of the causeway, flat, still, endless, dotted with tufts of marsh grass and the occasional dead tree. Nothing moved except the insects. “Next you’ll tell me the fish can talk.”

“Not the fish, ser. But the trees—”

“Don’t.”

Egg grinned. Dunk did not.

The causeway was a raised road of packed earth and half-rotted logs, wide enough for a wagon if the wagon was not too wide and the driver was not too drunk. On either side, the bogs pressed close, green-black water that did not flow, reeds taller than Dunk on horseback, and a haze of gnats and mosquitoes that found every gap in clothing and bit without mercy. Dunk slapped at his neck and his hand came away with a smear of blood and a dead gnat the size of a raisin.

“The crannogmen are said to poison their weapons,” Egg offered from behind him. “Frogs, mainly. They milk the frogs and dip their spear points in the—”

“Stop talking about poison.”

“It’s just frogs, ser.”

“I don’t care what it is. Stop.” He slapped another gnat. Something splashed in the reeds to his left, heavy and slow, too big to be a frog. He looked but saw nothing except the reeds swaying where something had pushed through them. His hand went to his sword. “What was that?”

“A lizard-lion, most like.” Egg did not sound concerned. “They live in the bogs. The books say some grow as long as a horse.”

“As long as a horse.”

“A small horse.”

Thunder shifted under him, ears flat, and Dunk decided that the causeway was not wide enough and the reeds were too close and the water was too dark. He had grown up in the alleys of Flea Bottom, where the worst things in the water were turds and dead cats. This was something else. “How long is the Neck?”

“Twenty leagues. Might be more.”

“Twenty leagues of this.”

“There may be an inn at Moat Cailin, ser. If it’s still standing.”

“If.”

“Things rot in the Neck.”

That was true enough. Everything here looked half-rotten: the logs underfoot, the trees, the reeds, the air itself. Maester had not moved in several minutes. The mule stood at the edge of a puddle that had spread across the causeway, brown and shallow, and regarded it with profound suspicion. Egg tugged the lead. The mule did not budge. Egg tugged harder. The mule looked at the puddle. The puddle looked back.

“He won’t cross it,” Egg said.

“It’s an inch deep.”

“He doesn’t care, ser. He has principles.”

Dunk dismounted, walked back to the mule, grabbed the lead rope, and hauled. Maester leaned backward on his haunches. Dunk hauled harder. The mule’s hooves slid in the mud. For a long stupid moment they stood there, a man and a mule in a tug of war at the edge of a puddle in a swamp, and then Maester decided he was done with the argument and walked through the puddle and past Dunk and continued up the causeway as if the whole thing had been his idea.

Egg laughed. Dunk’s boots were full of mud. He squelched back to Thunder and hauled himself into the saddle, swearing. The shield on his back, plain pine, bought off a woodworker two days south for more than it was worth, banged against his spine as he settled.

They reached Moat Cailin by midday.

It was not what he expected. The old man had mentioned it once, “a great fortress at the edge of the North, built by the First Men to hold the causeway,” and Dunk had imagined towers and walls and banners, something like Ashford or Coldmoat but bigger, squatting across the road like a toad on a rock. What he found was a ruin.

Three towers still stood, and a fourth was trying. The tallest leaned to one side like a drunk who had lost his wall, and the shortest had a tree growing out of its top, roots gripping the crumbled stone. The curtain wall was mostly rubble, great blocks of dark basalt, half-swallowed by moss and lichen, tumbled into the bog on either side. Weeds grew between them. A lizard-lion lay on a fallen section of wall, grey-green and still, its snout resting on the stone. It was longer than Maester and considerably less friendly-looking.

“That’s Moat Cailin?” Dunk said.

“What’s left of it. It once had twenty towers and a wooden keep.” Egg pulled his hat off and fanned his face. The bugs were worse here. “The First Men built it to defend the North from the south. No army has ever taken it.”

“An army couldn’t find it.” The ruin looked like it had given up centuries ago and the swamp was slowly eating what remained. “Nobody lives here?”

“No, ser. Not for hundreds of years.”

They rode through. There was no gate, no door, no one to challenge them. A crow sat atop the leaning tower and watched them pass. The lizard-lion opened one eye and closed it again. That was the full extent of Moat Cailin’s garrison.

On the far side of the ruin, the Neck began to thin. The reeds gave way to scrub, the water drained from the road, and the ground started to rise. The air changed. Not warmer, colder, if anything, but drier, cleaner, with a bite to it. Pine trees appeared, dark and tall, and the sky opened up above them, grey and huge.

“We’re in the North,” Egg said.

“We’ve been in the North since the Neck.”

“The real North, ser. The land of the First Men.” His eyes were bright. “Winterfell is ahead. And after that, the Wall.”

“Winterfell first. Lord Beron is calling for swords, and swords cost silver.” They needed work before they needed the Wall. “We stop at Winterfell, we earn some silver, and then we go on.”

“And if Lord Beron doesn’t want us?”

“Then we eat the mule.”

Maester brayed behind them, as if he’d heard.

The road was better here, firmer, wider, with ruts from wagons that meant people used it. The trees on either side were grey birch and dark pine, and the ground was carpeted with brown needles that muffled the horses’ hooves. They had not seen another traveler since the causeway, but now they came upon a thin man in a black cloak riding a bony grey horse in the same direction.

The man heard them and turned in the saddle. He was gaunt and weathered, with a scar across his scalp where hair wouldn’t grow and two missing fingers on his left hand, the stubs healed over smooth and shiny. His cloak had been mended so many times it was more patches than cloth. Night’s Watch black.

“Well met,” the man said. He had a voice like dry leaves. “I’m Halmund. Twenty years on the Wall.” He looked Dunk up and down, all the way up, which took a moment. “You’re a big one.”

“Ser Duncan the Tall. My squire, Egg.” Dunk nodded at the boy. “We’re heading for Winterfell.”

“As am I. Lord Beron’s war has drawn swords from half the realm, and where there’s swords, there’s men who’ve lost their taste for fighting. The Watch needs bodies.” Halmund’s eyes had not left Dunk. “Big bodies, especially. You’d make a fine brother of the Night’s Watch.”

“I’m not taking the black.”

“Pity.” Halmund scratched the scar on his scalp. “You’d fill out a cloak. Where are you bound after Winterfell?”

“The Wall,” Egg said, before Dunk could stop him.

“The Wall!” Halmund’s mouth twitched. It might have been a smile. “You want to see it?”

“Aye,” Dunk said. “See it. Not join it.”

“That’s what they all say.” Halmund spurred his grey horse forward. “I’ll ride ahead, if you don’t mind. Your mule is slow and I’ve a long way to go. Might be I’ll see you at Winterfell.” He looked back once. “The Wall changes a man, ser. Even the ones who don’t take the black.”

He rode on and was soon gone around a bend in the road.

“A queer man,” Egg said.

“He was recruiting.”

“He was doing both, ser.”

A frog jumped from the roadside ditch and landed on Thunder’s neck. The horse shied sideways, snorting, and Dunk grabbed the pommel with one hand and swatted at the frog with the other. The frog leaped again, onto Dunk’s shoulder, then his chest, then off into the bracken. It happened so fast he didn’t have time to yell. Egg was laughing.

“One more word,” Dunk said, “and I’ll clout you in the ear.”

Egg pressed his lips together. His eyes were wet with the effort of not laughing. He lasted about ten seconds. “It was only a frog, ser.”

Dunk did not clout him. He should have, but the boy was right. It was only a frog. And the look on Thunder’s face had been worth a laugh, if Dunk had been the laughing kind.

They rode on. The road went north through the pines, and the air got colder, and the sky got greyer. The drizzle turned to something colder. Dunk pulled his cloak tighter and rode on.

The snow began to fall a league south of Winterfell.

Dunk had never seen snow. He had heard of it, same as he’d heard of dragons or the Wall or lands across the narrow sea, but hearing is not seeing. The flakes came down fat and white and slow, like ash from a fire he could not find. Something was burning. He looked for smoke. There was none. Just the white flakes, falling. One landed on his nose and melted there, cold and wet, and another caught in Thunder’s mane.

“Snow, ser,” said Egg, as if Dunk might need telling. The boy had snow on his hat and his cloak and the tip of his nose, but Egg would sooner freeze than say he was cold. He was like that.

“I know what snow is.” Though in truth he had only known it from tales. “A knight who is cold is just a knight who needs a fire, lad. A knight who is hungry is just a knight who needs a meal. It’s no great mystery.” Or had the old man said it different? Something about the cold getting into your bones . . . Dunk could not remember. Three years dead, and already the words were going.

“It will get colder at the Wall,” Egg said. “My brother Aemon wrote to my—” He caught himself. “They say it snows at the Wall even in summer.”

“They say a lot of things.” Dunk did not want to think about the Wall. He hunched deeper in his cloak. The wind found the rip near the hem and went straight through the wool, and two of his fingers had gone dead inside his gloves, the little ones, always the little ones first. At least the gloves were decent, good leather, bought in a market town south of the Neck for two coppers. He had four coppers left. Not enough for a meal and a bed both, unless the inn was very bad.

Behind them, Maester stopped to crop at a clump of frozen grass on the roadside, braying when Egg pulled his lead.

“Come on,” Egg told the mule. “There’s nothing there worth eating.”

Maester disagreed. He always did. Thunder snorted and shook snow from his mane, showering Dunk’s leg.

“Your mule has more sense than both of us,” Dunk said. “He’s the only one who didn’t want to come north.”

“He’s a mule, ser. He doesn’t want to go anywhere.”

That was fair. Dunk shifted in the saddle. The scar between his eyes was itching again, the one Ser Uthor’s lance had given him, and it always itched worse in the cold. He scratched at it through his hood, trying to find a way to sit where the shield did not dig. The strap had been wearing a raw spot between his shoulder blades for days. He had meant to paint his elm and shooting star on the thing. Tanselle Too-Tall had painted that device for him once, at Ashford . . . she’d had long legs, and clever fingers, and a laugh that . . .

He was not going to think about that.

He’d tried to paint it himself, on the road, with a pot of black pitch and a rag. The elm came out looking like a dead thumb. The shooting star was worse. He scrubbed the mess off with sand and carried the shield bare after that, telling himself he’d find a painter at the next town. He never did.

“Ser,” said Egg. “About the Starks.”

“What about them?”

“There are things you should know before we arrive. Lord Beron is the son of—”

“I know who Lord Beron is,” Dunk said.

“Do you know who his father was?”

“A Stark, I’d wager.”

“Lord Brandon Stark, ser. Beron’s brother Rodwell ruled before him. A fever took him, and he left no children. Brandon was brother to Lord Barthogan Stark, called Barth Blacksword, and to Lord Jonnel Stark, who was—”

“Egg.”

“—the son of Cregan Stark, the Old Man of the North. Cregan had three wives and five sons by them. The eldest was Rickon, who died fighting in Dorne. Then Jonnel, Edric, and Barthogan. Jonnel and Barthogan each ruled, Edric was passed over. Then Brandon, who was the youngest. Lord Beron comes down from Brandon. But Rickon’s line—”

“Egg.“

“—had daughters, and some of those daughters married back into—”

“I don’t need to know about daughters.”

“Brandon also had a bastard,” Egg added quickly. “Lonnel Snow. He’s still alive, I think.”

“I don’t need to know about bastards either.” Dunk looked at the boy. Egg’s eyes were shining under the brim of his hat. They did that whenever lords and lineages came into it, all those things Dunk could not keep straight. “I’m a hedge knight, not a maester. I’ve come to sell my sword, not study a family tree.”

Egg was quiet for a moment. Then: “You might need the family tree more than the sword, ser.”

Dunk did not like the sound of that. He did not like it at all. “Just tell me when you see the castle.”

“You’ll see it first, ser. You’re taller.”

“Then I’ll tell you.”

Dunk tore a piece off the last slab of salt beef and chewed it. It was hard as boot leather and tasted of nothing much, but it was food. It put him in mind of the jerky Rafe used to steal from the butcher’s stall in Flea Bottom. Rafe said it was horse, but Ferret swore it was rat. “Tastes the same,” Rafe said. “A rat is just a small horse with a tail.” Dunk had eaten it anyway. You ate what there was, in Flea Bottom. He had eaten things he did not care to think about: pigeon, cat, the brown soup old Bess boiled up from actual boots she found in a midden heap. Once Pudding swore a bowl of brown was lamb. It was not lamb. Dunk bit into something hard and spat out what might have been a knuckle. He never ate Pudding’s lamb again, and he never asked what it was, and Pudding never said. That was how you got on. You didn’t ask and nobody told you and you kept it down and were glad of it.

A dead sheep lay in the ditch, half-buried in fresh snow, its eyes picked clean by crows and its belly bloated tight. The snow was covering it up. In a day it would be gone.

They rode on. The snow was coming thicker now, not melting where it landed, gathering in the creases of Dunk’s cloak and along Thunder’s crest. The road was frozen mud, rutted deep from wagons. The trees on either side were grey and bare, oaks, mostly, with a soldier pine here and there still wearing its green. The air smelled of pine sap and cold dirt and something sharper underneath, like iron. A crow was calling somewhere, harsh and far off. Then another, and another, and then a whole flock of them burst from a stand of dead trees, wheeling black against the grey sky.

Dunk watched them go. The North was nothing like the stories.

They had not seen another traveler since the crossroads inn where they’d slept two nights past. The beds had cost a penny each and been full of fleas, and the ale had tasted of dishwater, but it beat a ditch. The innkeep had looked at Dunk’s blank shield and snorted. “Got no arms, ser? Or is it a secret?” Dunk had not known what to say to that.

He should have painted something on it. Anything. A turnip. A boot. At least then folk would stop asking.

What was left of the salt beef would not last another day. Dunk had been trying not to think about it. He’d been trying not to think about the money, or the cold, or whether Lord Beron would want a hedge knight or send him back to the road. “Follow the trouble, lad. Where there’s trouble there’s lords, and where there’s lords there’s silver.” Or had the old man said gold? It might have been gold. Dunk could not remember, and it made no matter. He had neither.

“Ser,” Egg said. “Look.”

Dunk looked.

Winterfell rose from the fields ahead of them, and he did not know what he was seeing. There were walls, grey granite, huge, tall enough to make the walls at Ashford look like a garden fence, and behind them towers and turrets in clusters, some round, some square, some crumbling. Banners hung from the battlements, grey and white, though in the falling snow they could have been anything. And above the walls, above the towers, grey columns of steam were rising into the sky, thick and slow, curling up and up until the wind tore them apart.

It was not beautiful. It was old.

“It’s on fire.”

“It’s not on fire, ser. Those are the hot springs. Winterfell is built over hot springs. The water is piped through the walls to—”

“I can see what it is.” He couldn’t, not really. He’d thought it was burning. Any man would have. A whole castle throwing up smoke like a forge, what else would a man think? He stared at it. He had been in the great castles of the Reach and the stormlands, had seen Ashford and Coldmoat and the wreck of Whitewalls, but he had never seen a castle that smoked. It looked alive. Like something underneath the stone was breathing.

“There’s nothing else like it in the Seven Kingdoms.” Egg was quiet now.

No. He did not expect there was.

A track led off the Kingsroad to the castle gate, through what Egg said was the winter town. Most of the houses were shuttered, the chimneys cold. Dunk took one look at all those dark windows and empty doorways and his first thought was plague, or raiders, or something worse. He’d seen enough dead villages on the road south.

“It’s not abandoned, ser,” Egg said, reading his face. “In winter, fifteen thousand people crowd in here. Crofters and farmers and shepherds. But it’s summer now, so . . .”

“Summer.” Dunk looked at the snow on his cloak, at the ice forming in Thunder’s mane, at his own breath steaming white in the air. “Right. Summer.”

They rode through the empty town. Thunder’s hooves rang dull on the frozen ruts, and Maester stopped twice more, and Egg swore at him in a voice no squire ought to use. A few lean dogs watched them pass. A brown one with a torn ear came sniffing at Thunder’s hooves, and the big horse shied sideways until Dunk steadied him. An old woman sat spinning in a doorway, giving Dunk a look that said she had seen a hundred men his size and thought nothing of any of them. A boy was gathering kindling near an inn whose sign had faded past reading. Smoke came from the chimney, and with it the smell of mutton and onions, and Dunk’s stomach made a sound like a gate hinge.

Four coppers. Not near enough for mutton. Might be Lord Beron would feed them. He’d come a long way on might-be’s and not-enough’s.

The castle gatehouse was before them now, tall and dark and heavy, and two men in grey cloaks and leather jerkins were coming out to meet them, with swords on their hips and no spurs on their boots. They were not men-at-arms, not like any Dunk had known. They walked like they owned the ground beneath them, and they looked him over like men deciding whether to buy a horse.

The larger of the two looked him up and down. “Gods, look at the size of you. What’s your business?”

“I am Ser Duncan the Tall.” The words came out smooth and practiced. He’d said them a thousand times. “I’ve come to offer my sword to Lord Beron Stark.”

The guards looked at each other.

“Lord Beron,” the smaller one said, “is not seeing visitors.”

“Not seeing visitors,” Dunk repeated. He had ridden a month through mud and rain and now snow to get here, and spent his last half-groat on flea-ridden beds and dishwater ale, and Lord Beron Stark was not seeing visitors. “I’m no visitor. I’m a knight. Ser Duncan the Tall. I’ve come to fight the ironborn.”

The larger guard looked at him. The smaller guard looked at the larger one. Neither looked impressed.

“The ironborn are on the Stony Shore,” the larger one said. “This is Winterfell. You want to speak to the steward.” He jerked his chin through the gate. “Harwin. He’s inside.”

“Harwin. Right.” Dunk gathered Thunder’s reins and led them through.

Behind him, Egg made a strangled sound. Dunk turned to find Maester chewing the corner of a grey banner that hung beside the gate, working the cloth between his teeth with the slow contentment of a lord at supper. Egg was hauling at the lead with both hands. The banner was winning.

The smaller guard stared. “Does the beast always eat his hosts?”

“Only when he’s hungry,” Egg said.

Dunk closed his eyes. “He’s very sorry.”

“He doesn’t look sorry,” the guard said. He did not.

The gate was a dark tunnel through the outer wall, wide enough for a wagon but low enough that Dunk had to duck. On the far side was a muddy strip between the two walls, and beyond that, an inner gate into the castle proper. The walls on both sides were massive, grey granite, thick, higher than anything in the south, and Dunk felt small between them in a way he did not care for.

Egg was looking up at the stonework. “The inner wall is a hundred feet high,” he said. “The outer is eighty. Both are—”

“I can see they’re big.”

The courtyard on the other side was not what he had expected. Dunk had imagined a war camp: men drilling, horses saddled, banners snapping, the bustle and noise of an army preparing to march. Lord Beron was calling for swords, everyone said so. But there was no army. No drilling. No banners snapping.

There were women carrying linens. Dogs nosing through slush. A group of men dicing near the armory with their swords propped against the wall, looking bored. A washerwoman was wringing sheets between two posts, and the sheets steamed in the cold air. Ravens cawed from a tower that was thick with them, a black riot of feathers and noise, and beneath everything was a smell: horse dung and wood smoke and cooking meat and something else, something sour and sharp, like vinegar and sickness mixed.

Something was wrong here. He could not have said what, only that this was not a castle at war. It was a castle waiting. Waiting for what, he could not guess.

Steam rose from the ground in a dozen places, curling up from pools and cracks in the stone. It smelled of eggs and iron. The air was warmer here than outside the walls, not warm, but the cold had lost its teeth.

“Where’s this steward?”

“I could ask—”

“Just find him.”

They led Thunder and Rain to the stables and left Maester with a stableboy who gave the mule a look that said he’d seen better animals and pitied this one. The stableboy wanted a copper for oats. Dunk gave it to him. Three coppers left. Three coppers and a war that did not seem to be happening.

The Night’s Watch man from the road was already there, Halmund, leaning against the wall near the gate with his arms crossed, his patched black cloak wrapped tight against the cold. He had beaten them here by days. He was watching the courtyard, not idly, but watching it, his eyes moving from face to face, like a man counting sheep or looking for one that’s strayed.

Halmund’s eyes found Dunk, held him a moment. “You made it, ser.” Then his gaze moved on. Whatever else he was looking for, Dunk was not it. A three-legged dog came over and nosed at the man’s hand. He pushed it away without looking.

In a corner of the yard, tucked between the armory and a storehouse, a crystal caught the grey light: a seven-pointed star, set on a peaked roof no bigger than a shed. A sept, small and plain, looking half-apologetic among the granite. Dunk had not expected a sept in a Northern castle. Egg pulled at his floppy hat. “That’s for the southern wives. Lady Lorra, most like. The Starks keep the old gods.”

“But they married southern women.”

“Some of them. Lady Lorra is from the Vale. Before her, there was a Manderly, and before that . . .” He trailed off. “The Starks are complicated, ser.”

Everything in the North was complicated. Dunk was beginning to think the snow was the simplest thing about it.

They found Harwin in the undercroft beneath the Great Hall, counting barrels of salt fish with a tally stick in one hand and murder in his eyes. He was a stout man of fifty, bald as Egg, with ink-stained fingers and a jaw clenched tight enough to crack walnuts. He did not look up.

“Another mouth,” he said, scratching a number on a barrel lid. “Two mouths, I suppose. Three, with the mule. As if I didn’t have enough to feed. The ironborn burned half the Stony Shore and the fisherfolk came here, a hundred and twelve of them, and they eat and they eat and they don’t leave, and now every hedge knight between here and the Neck decides Lord Beron wants his sword.” He finally looked at Dunk. “You are a hedge knight?”

“I am Ser Duncan the Tall.”

“Never heard of you.” He looked Dunk up and down. “You’re big enough, I’ll grant that. Feed the big ones and they eat even more. Can you fight?”

“He fought in the Trial of Seven at Ashford Meadow,” Egg said. “Prince Baelor himself—”

“Prince Baelor is dead.” Harwin put down his tally stick. “Well. You’ll want bread and salt.”

He said it flat. No ceremony, no gravity, nothing Dunk had heard about in songs about guest right and sacred obligation. A kitchen girl brought a heel of dark bread and a wooden dish with a pinch of grey salt. The bread was coarse, the kind that pulled at your teeth, and the salt was gritty and grey, nothing like the fine white salt they used in the south. Dunk ate. The salt was gritty between his teeth. He brushed the crumbs from his jerkin.

“My thanks.”

“Now you’re under our roof,” Harwin said, and went back to his fish.

Outside, in the cold yard, Egg looked at him. “You know what that was, ser.”

“Bread and salt. I’m not dim.”

“Guest right. It’s sacred in the North, more than anywhere. You ate his bread and his salt. Now they can’t harm you and you can’t harm them and you can’t leave without—”

“I don’t want to leave. I just got here.” Someone had told him about guest right once . . . “When a man shares his bread with you, you share his troubles, lad. Could be that’s a fair trade, or might be it’s not, but you’ve no choice once you’ve eaten.” He was tired and cold and his shoulder ached where the shield strap had been digging in all day, and the sickroom smell drifting from the keep was making his stomach tight. “I want to know why Lord Beron isn’t seeing anyone, and what I’m supposed to do about the ironborn, and where I can get Maester some decent oats that don’t cost a copper a handful. That’s what I want.”

Egg opened his mouth to say something else, something about the Starks, no doubt, or guest right, or some lord Dunk had never heard of, but a voice from behind them stopped him.

“Ser Duncan?”

She stood in the doorway of the Great Keep, and Dunk took her for a servant at first. A housekeeper, maybe, or a lady’s maid, though the brooch at her throat was silver and the fabric of her dress was too fine for servants’ work. Then she stepped into the light and he saw how she held herself, straight, controlled, everything in its place, and knew she was no servant. Her hair was dark and her face was handsome in a tired way, with lines at her mouth and shadows under her eyes. The hollow of her throat showed above the collar, pale and fine. Her hands were folded in front of her, very still. She looked tired. Not the kind of tired that sleep would fix.

“I am Lorra Royce,” she said. “Lady of Winterfell.” The words came out firm and practiced, like she’d said them before. “My husband is Lord Beron Stark.”

“M’lady.” Dunk’s ears went hot. He was in his traveling clothes, filthy, and he could smell himself: the sour stink of his armpits, a month of road sweat ground into wool, and horse on his hands that no amount of wiping would shift. And here was a lord’s wife in good silk with a silver brooch. “I’ve come to serve Lord Beron. To fight the ironborn.”

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes went over him: his height, his shoulders, the mud, the sword, the blank shield on his back. “A knight. A real knight. Anointed?” The word came out with a weight that surprised him.

“Anointed, m’lady. By Ser Arlan of Pennytree.”

Lorra Royce closed her eyes, just for a moment. When she opened them, something in her face had changed. Loosened. “My lord husband was calling for swords, before his wound . . .” She stopped. Her throat moved. “He would want to meet you, ser. Will you come with me?”

Dunk looked at Egg. The boy gave him the smallest nod.

“Lead on, m’lady.”

She turned and walked through the doorway into the keep. Dunk followed, ducking under the lintel. The floors were warm under his boots, the hot springs again, running through the stone. Steam rose from the walls in places, thin wisps of it, and the air smelled of beeswax and poultices and something feverish. They passed a garderobe in the corridor. The smell hit him two paces before the door, sharp and thick, the concentrated stench of a castle’s bowels. He had used worse. He had been worse. From somewhere deeper in the keep, a baby was crying, thin and sharp.

Lorra Royce walked through the sound without turning her head.

Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall. He did not know what was happening in this castle. He’d come for a war and found a sickroom. He’d come to serve a lord and the lord was abed. Everyone was looking at him like he meant something, and he did not know what. A steward counted fish. A woman in silk closed her eyes at the word anointed. A man in black watched the yard like a hawk hunting mice. A boy on a barrel . . .

Dunk stopped. He looked back through the doorway.

The boy was still there. Small, dark-haired, sitting on his barrel in the far corner of the courtyard. He had not moved. He had a leather pouch in his lap, half open, and his fingers were turning something over inside it. A nail, maybe. Or a bit of old iron. His eyes were on Dunk. They had been on Dunk since he rode through the gate. The boy did not blink. He did not wave. He just watched, with a stillness that was not a boy’s stillness.

Dunk turned and followed Lorra Royce into the warmth and the smell of dying.

Lorra Royce led them up a stair and through a passage and past three doors that all looked alike, and Dunk forgot which was which before they’d gone ten steps. The Great Keep was warm, not the damp warmth of a kitchen or a stable, but a deep, steady warmth that came up through the stone floors and seeped from the walls, like the castle itself had a fever. He did not ask why.

“My lord husband’s chamber is just ahead,” Lorra said. She had not stopped talking since the courtyard: which tower was which, how old this passage was, where the kitchens were, where the sept was, which door led to the cellars. Dunk had caught maybe half of it. She spoke like a southern lady, measured, precise, but underneath the words there was something wound tight, like a rope about to fray.

Then she stopped before a door. “Before I show you to your room, ser, I would have you see Lord Beron.”

She pushed the door open, and the warmth hit him first, thick and close after the cold passage, prickling his skin. The walls were sweating. Water beaded on the cold stone above the window, running down in thin streaks. In the corners where the warmth met the cold, green-black mold crept along the mortar joints. Then the smell.

Vinegar and honey and herbs, and underneath all of it, something Dunk knew. A foul sweetness, like meat left in the sun. He had smelled it on the old man, toward the end, coughing blood into a rag in a hedge knight’s bedroll. “Dying is easy, Dunk,” the old man had said, or something near it . . . “it’s the waiting that kills you. The dying man waits for the end, and everyone else waits for the dying man, and nobody says what they’re thinking because there’s nothing to say.”

Lord Beron Stark lay in a great bed under a heap of furs. The bed was carved oak, the candles were beeswax, and the walls were warm to the touch. A rich man’s room. A lord’s room. And the lord in it was dying.

He had been a big man. Dunk could see it in the breadth of his shoulders and the length of his legs, the heavy bones of his wrists. But the flesh had melted off him. His face was grey and slick with sweat, the skin hanging loose at his jaw like wet cloth on a line, and his breathing was a thin rasp that did not change whether anyone was speaking or not. Stained bandages wrapped his middle, with a dark spot seeping through the linen on his right side, brown at the edges, red at the center, spreading outward in rings, and the skin above the linen had gone green-black and shiny. Underneath the vinegar there was a smell, sweet and wrong. It was a wound that had gone bad. Dunk had seen enough of those.

Two women flanked the bed. Lorra took her place on the left, smooth as a dancer finding her mark, and laid her hand over her husband’s. On the right sat a woman thirty years older and half Dunk’s height, small and sharp, swaddled in furs so thick she looked twice her width, with bright eyes in a creased face and a blackthorn cane propped against her chair. She did not rise when Dunk came in.

“My good-mother,” Lorra said. “Lady Alys.”

The old woman looked Dunk up and down. “Big,” she said. “Is he any use?”

“He is a knight. A true knight, anointed,” Lorra said.

“We had true knights before.” Lady Alys settled deeper into her furs. “They ate our food and drank our ale and rode south when it got too cold for their southern blood.” She studied Dunk a moment longer. “Well. He is certainly big.”

Dunk did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

In the corner near the window, a boy sat at a table piled with books. Dunk took him for a scribe at first, thin, pale, with dark Royce hair and ink on his fingers. He had not looked up since Dunk entered the room. He held a quill in his right hand and was writing something, or pretending to. His left hand was under the table. It was shaking.

A girl of eight or nine clung to Lorra’s skirt, pressing her face against her mother’s hip. She had been crying, her eyes were red and her cheeks were puffy, and she kept stealing looks at the bed and then away, at the bed and then away, as if she could make her father better by not looking too long. She wiped her nose on her mother’s skirt.

Near the hearth, a maester in grey robes was grinding herbs in a mortar. His chain clinked softly with each turn of the pestle. He glanced up at Dunk, then back down. He had that look maesters got when visitors were making their work harder.

Nobody in this room looked at the man on the bed. Not straight on. They looked past him, or at each other, or at their own hands. The only eyes on Lord Beron were Dunk’s.

“M’lord.” Dunk knelt. His sword clanked against the stone floor. The stone was hard under his right knee, and the left one, the one that had been bad since Coldmoat, clicked when it bent. “I am Ser Duncan the Tall. I’ve come to serve.”

For a long time there was nothing but the rasp of Beron’s breathing and the clink of the pestle and the girl sniffling against her mother’s hip. Then the lord’s eyes opened. Grey eyes, Stark eyes, but clouded and far away. They moved around the room, past his wife, past the old woman, past his son who would not look up, and found Dunk’s face. For a moment they sharpened. For a moment the lord was there. Then he wasn’t.

“You came,” Beron said. His voice was dry and thin as paper. “For the ironborn . . .”

“Aye, m’lord.”

“The swords . . .” His hand twitched on the furs. His eyes drifted. “The coast . . . the swords need to go to the . . .” His voice trailed off. His eyes closed. He was gone again. Not dead, his chest still rose and fell, but gone somewhere Dunk could not follow. A candle guttered on the bedside table, the wax pooling in a shape like a small fist. The maester reached for a fresh bandage, his chain clinking.

Lorra’s hand tightened over her husband’s. Her face did not change. Across the bed, Lady Alys watched her. The old woman’s face did not change either. They looked at each other across the bed. Dunk could not read the look. Two women who had been sitting in that room for weeks, watching each other and watching the man between them and waiting for the thing that neither of them could stop.

“He has his good hours.” Lorra was still looking at Beron. “In the mornings, sometimes. He knows us. He asks for the children.” Her voice caught. “He asks for Donnor.”

The boy at the table — Donnor, his son, not a scribe, you lunk — did not look up. His quill had stopped moving. His left hand was shaking worse now, and the right had joined it.

Dunk looked back at Egg. The boy stood near the door, hands at his sides, very still. Egg said nothing. That was right. There was nothing to say in a room like this. They had seen men die before, at Ashford and at Whitewalls, but those deaths had been quick: a lance through the chest, a mace to the helm, and it was done. This was something else. This was the slow kind, and there was nothing to do about it but sit.

“I’ll serve however I can, m’lady,” Dunk said to Lorra. It was all he could think of.

Lady Alys made a sound that might have been a laugh. “However he can,” she repeated. “Well. We shall see about that.” She reached for her cane and pushed herself up from the chair, and Dunk noticed she did not lean on it at all. The cane was for show, or for hitting people with. “Come, Berena. Let your mother sit with your father.”

The girl peeled herself from Lorra’s skirt and took the old woman’s hand. At the door, Lady Alys paused. She looked back at Dunk, measuring him one more time. “You’ll want supper, I expect. A man your size must eat like a destrier.” She did not wait for his answer. “Berena, stop that sniffling. Your father is a Stark. Starks do not sniff.”

They went out. The maester was still grinding. Lorra was still holding Beron’s hand. Donnor was still pretending to write.

Dunk stood up, and his knee cracked loud in the quiet room. His stomach growled too, which was worse. The candles burned. Beron’s breathing rasped on, thin and steady, and the room smelled of vinegar and honey and something that would not be treated away, and Dunk stood there in a dying lord’s chamber with no one to fight and nothing to do and no idea what happened next.

Egg wanted to see the godswood.

“We just stood in a dying man’s room, and now you want to go look at trees.”

“Not trees, ser. A heart tree. It has a face carved in it, a real face. The children of the forest—”

“I know about heart trees.” He didn’t, much. “The Northerners pray to trees, Dunk. Trees with faces. Can’t say I understand it, but I’ve met lords who prayed to the Seven and did worse things than any tree ever did.” That sounded right. “Can’t it wait till morning?”

“It’s best at dusk, ser. The red leaves catch the last light and—”

“One more word about leaves and I’ll clout you in the ear.”

“Yes, ser,” Egg said, and led him there anyway.

The godswood was behind the inner wall, through an iron gate that groaned when Egg pushed it. Dunk’s cloak snagged on a hinge and tore where the wool was thinnest, near the collar, adding another hole to a cloak that was already more hole than cloth. Inside was warmer than the courtyard, which made no sense, and darker, and quieter. The noise of the castle, dogs, hammering, a man cursing at a horse, fell away like they’d stepped behind a door, and what was left was the sound of Dunk’s own breathing and the slow drip of water somewhere among the roots. The air was damp and heavy and smelled of old leaves and black earth and something underneath, green and alive, that Dunk had no name for. The ground was soft, thick with rot, and his left boot sank deeper than his right with every step, so he walked lopsided.

The trees were enormous. Oaks and ironwoods and dark pines, their trunks wider than a wagon, their branches knotted overhead so thick the sky was nearly gone. Dunk had been in septs and cellars and once in a cave in the Dornish marches where a septon lived with bats, but this was not like any of those. A sept was built by men. This place was not built by anyone. It had just grown, for a thousand years or ten thousand or however long it was, and no one had told it to stop.

Dunk stopped for a moment. A beetle was climbing a root near his boot, black and shiny, putting one leg in front of the other with a patience that struck him as admirable. It reached the top of the root, paused as if considering the matter, and went back the way it had come. Dunk watched it until it disappeared into a crack in the bark. He did not know why. Some things you just watched.

Egg walked ahead. Dunk followed, his hand resting on his sword hilt out of habit. He felt stupid with it there — what was he going to fight? An oak? — but the godswood pressed in from all sides, dark and close, and his hand would not let go.

Then the trees thinned and opened, and there it was.

The heart tree stood alone in a clearing. The other trees kept their distance, as if they did not want to stand too close. Its bark was white, not pale but white, bone-white, the white of old teeth or dead men’s fingers. Its leaves were red, five-pointed, and they rustled in the still air though there was no wind that Dunk could feel. And it had a face.

It had been carved into the trunk, deep and old, with a long mouth and hollow eyes that wept. The sap that ran from the eyes was red and had crusted in the hollows and run down the bark in long, dried streaks. The face did not look peaceful. It did not look angry. It looked like it had been there a very long time.

Dunk stared at the face. The face stared back.

Queer folk. Aye, and queer trees too.

Before the heart tree lay a pool, black and still, reflecting the red leaves and the white trunk and nothing else. A raven sat on a low branch above the water. It cawed once, sharp and loud, then settled back and folded its wings. It watched them. It did not fly.

“The Starks kneel here.” Egg’s voice had gone quiet. “They pray to the old gods. The nameless gods.”

“Gods with no names.” Dunk turned that over. He prayed to the Warrior before a fight and the Mother when he was afraid and the Smith when something broke, and even that felt like shouting into a well half the time. How did you pray to a god with no name? What did you call it? You couldn’t just say you there. “Queer gods,” he said aloud, and wished he hadn’t. The face seemed to be listening.

Egg stepped forward and laid his hand flat against the trunk.

“Don’t touch that.”

The boy held his palm there a moment. Then he pulled it back and frowned. He looked at his hand as if it had done something without his permission.

“What?” Dunk said.

“It’s warm, ser.”

“Everything here is warm.”

“Maybe.” Egg rubbed his palm on his cloak. He looked at the face again, longer than Dunk liked. Egg’s eyes had gone strange. Dunk did not ask.

A dog growled.

Dunk’s hand tightened on his sword. A boy came out from behind one of the great oaks, twelve or thirteen, sturdy, with a long Stark face and grey Stark eyes and a hunting knife on his belt. A dog walked at his heels, grey and lean, with one ear that stood up and one that flopped, and yellow eyes that found Dunk and held him. The boy put his hand on the dog’s scruff and the growling stopped.

“You’re no Northman,” the boy said.

“I’m a knight.”

The boy looked at him. He did not look impressed, or angry, or curious. He just looked. “We don’t have those here.” He walked back into the trees. The dog followed. Dunk could hear its paws crunching on frozen leaves for a long time after the boy was gone, and then that sound faded too, and the godswood swallowed them.

We don’t have those here.

Dunk stood in the clearing with the white tree weeping behind him and the black pool in front of him and the raven still watching from its branch. He wanted to call after the boy, to tell him he was a knight, anointed, that he had won his trial at Ashford, but what would be the point? The boy hadn’t been rude. He’d just told Dunk what was true. In the North, there were no knights. There were lords and fighters and wolves and trees with faces, but no knights. So what was he? A big man with a sword and a blank shield and a title that . . .

He did not finish that thought.

He stood there. The raven watched. A shadow moved at the edge of the godswood, small, quick, gone when he looked. Could have been a squirrel, or a cat, or one of those lean dogs. Might be the dark-haired boy from the barrel, the one with the leather pouch and the staring eyes. Dunk did not see him clearly enough to know.

“Ser?” Egg was watching him. “Should we go back?”

Dunk did not answer right away. He looked at the heart tree one more time. The face wept on. The air tasted clean after the sickroom, cold and green, and the silence was so deep he could hear his own blood in his ears.

“Aye,” he said. “It’s cold.”

It was.

A week passed before the feast.

Dunk spent it doing nothing he understood. He had come for a war, but there was no war. There were errands: Harwin the steward had him carrying barrels one day and moving furniture the next, and once he was sent to the outer wall to help shore up a section of battlement where the mortar had crumbled. “A strong back’s a strong back,” Harwin said. “Makes no matter if there’s a ser in front of it.” Dunk did not argue. The work kept him warm and the meals kept him fed, and fed for free, which was better than three coppers would have managed. He ate in the kitchen with the servants, black bread and porridge and the odd bowl of mutton stew, and told himself he was lucky. The old man would have told him so. “A knight who eats is a knight who fights, Dunk. Never turn down a meal.” He could still hear it, faintly.

Egg, meanwhile, had made himself useful. The boy had a gift for it. He mucked stalls and ran messages and somehow found his way into Maester Caulfield’s tower, where the grey-robed old man was too busy grinding poultices for Lord Beron to chase off a bald boy asking questions. By the third day, Egg knew more about Winterfell than Dunk could learn in a year. He knew which servants answered to Lorra and which to Serena. He knew that the hot springs ran deepest under the Great Keep and that the water in the Glass Gardens was warm enough to grow vegetables in winter. He knew that Lord Beron’s wound had come from an ironborn axe at Sea Dragon Point, and that the maester had packed it with honey and vinegar but the rot had set in anyway, and that some of the soldiers whispered the ironborn coated their blades in filth.

“Do they?”

“Some do, ser. The ironborn are . . .” Egg paused. “Dirty fighters.”

“So are hedge knights, when they have to be.” Dunk scratched between his eyes where the scar itched. “What else?”

“Lord Umber wants to go home. His lands are near the Wall, and wildlings have been raiding. Lady Serena wants her grandsons to inherit. Lady Arsa wants to ride to the coast and fight the ironborn. Lady Myriame wants her dowry back. Lady Lorra wants Donnor to be lord.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “And Lady Alys . . . I’m not sure what Lady Alys wants.”

“That’s the dangerous one, then.”

“Might be, ser.”

Then came the feast.

The Great Hall of Winterfell could hold five hundred, Egg told him. Tonight it held perhaps a hundred and twenty, and the noise of them bounced off the stone walls and up into the smoke-blackened rafters until Dunk’s teeth vibrated with it. The hall was long and wide, with high stone walls and a pitched roof and eight rows of trestle tables running its length. Torches burned in iron brackets, throwing shadows that jumped with every draft. Stone direwolf heads snarled from the walls above. The air was thick with roast meat and wood smoke and wet wool, half the hall’s cloaks were steaming as they dried near the great hearths at either end.

The hall stank of sweat and dog and too many bodies. Someone had scattered sage in the rushes, but the rushes were old and dark and the sage was losing. When the wind gusted through the doors, the privy shaft at the far end sent its own greeting: sharp and sour and impossible to ignore.

Dunk sat somewhere in the middle, on a bench too narrow for his backside at a table too low for his knees, which meant he kept banging his legs and jarring the man beside him. The man was a grey-bearded soldier who smelled of onions and had not stopped talking since the ale was poured. He was telling anyone who would listen about the ironborn raids. “Burned the fisherfolk right out. Women and children and all. The krakens don’t care, they just take what they want and torch the rest. I saw what was left of Crab Point. Nothing. Ash and bones.”

Egg listened. Dunk ate. A serving girl came past with a platter of bread, brown-haired and tall for her age, thin as a spear. She looked up at Dunk and her eyes went wide, and then she was gone into the crowd.

The food was nothing like the south. Black bread, dense and heavy, with a crust that crumbled into crumbs hard enough to crack a tooth. Dunk tore a piece and half of it fell into his lap. Mutton in a thick brown gravy that tasted of onions and turnips and something bitter. Parsnip, Egg said. A hard white cheese that crumbled when he cut it and left a smell on his fingers he could not get rid of, sharp enough to make his eyes water, and he liked cheese well enough. And the ale. The ale was brown and heavy, almost thick enough to chew, with a yeasty weight that settled in his belly and stayed. In the south, ale was thin and pale and tasted of nothing much. This tasted of something, though Dunk could not have said what. Bread, maybe. Bread and dirt and cold weather.

He drank two cups and felt it in his legs. A third and he’d be on the floor. He pushed the cup away and went back to the mutton.

From where he sat, Dunk could see most of the hall, and what he saw was a castle split down the middle and trying not to show it. At the high table, on a raised platform at the far end, Lorra Royce sat in the center wearing a gown of dark blue with silver trim, the runestone brooch at her throat catching the torchlight. Her back was straight and her chin was up and she was making conversation with a thin septon who wore a crystal at his breast and looked even more out of place than Dunk felt. To Lorra’s right sat Donnor, thin and pale, pushing food around his trencher with a fork he never lifted to his mouth. To her left, an empty chair. Beron’s chair. It sat there like a hole in the room, and everyone pretended not to see it.

Below the platform, at the first of the long tables, a different kind of court held sway. Lady Serena Stark sat at its center, white-haired and hard as stone, dressed in plain grey wool with no ornament but a tarnished wolf ring on her left hand. She sat straight as a lance between two of the largest men Dunk had ever seen who were not Dunk himself. Those were her Umber son-in-law’s men, big bearded Northerners with arms like oak limbs. Her Umber grandson sat to her left, thick-necked, red-faced, laughing at something. Her Cerwyn grandson sat to her right, lean and quiet, whittling something under the table with a small knife. His eyes were on his hands, but Dunk had a feeling the man missed nothing.

And at the head of that table, the biggest of them all. Lord Osric Umber. He was taller than Dunk, taller, and wider, and louder, with a beard you could hide a badger in, a nose that had been broken at least twice and healed crooked both times, and a laugh that shook the cups on the table. Beside him sat a woman with a sharp jaw and the long Stark face, who said nothing and missed nothing. His wife, Arrana. He was singing.

It was terrible. A battle song, or what Dunk took for one, bellowed at a volume that made the torches flicker and the soldiers nearest him lean away. The words were about a lord who killed a hundred wildlings with a single axe, or it might have been a bear that killed a hundred lords with a single claw. Dunk could not tell. Neither could anyone else, from the look of it, but nobody was going to tell Lord Umber to stop. A dog under one of the tables started barking along. The man was the size of a gatehouse.

Umber belched, a sound like a door slamming, and reached for another cup. The dogs under the table looked up.

Egg was grinning. “He’s terrible, ser.”

“Aye.”

“Truly terrible.”

“Don’t tell him that. He’ll sit on you.”

Farther down the hall, a handsome, well-fed woman sat at a table of her own, eating honeycakes. One small bite at a time, neat as a cat, with a smile that never left her face. She wore good wool lined with fur and rings on every finger, and every few minutes a servant would lean in and whisper something, and she would nod, still smiling, and take another bite.

“Lady Myriame Manderly.” Egg kept his voice low. “Lord Rodwell’s widow. He was Beron’s older brother. She has no children and no claim and no faction. She wants her dowry back.”

“Then why is she here?” Dunk said.

“Because the dowry is in the Stark treasury, ser, and no one can open the treasury until the succession is settled. So she waits. And eats.”

Myriame caught Dunk looking and raised a honeycake in his direction. Her smile widened. Dunk looked away.

“She’s writing to her family in White Harbor,” said the grey-bearded soldier, leaning past Egg. “Ravens every day, some say. The Manderlys are the richest house in the North. What do you suppose she tells them, eh?”

Dunk supposed he did not want to know.

Lady Alys appeared beside him without warning. She was simply there, on the bench, it creaked under their combined weight, her blackthorn cane hooked over the table’s edge, her furs pulled tight around her, a cup of something hot between her hands. “You must be the knight.”

“I am, m’lady.”

“My eyes are not what they were, child, but you look to be about seven feet of trouble.” She sipped whatever was in her cup. It smelled of herbs and honey. “Where do you come from?”

“Flea Bottom, m’lady.” He said it before he could think not to. He usually said the Crownlands, or just the south.

“Flea Bottom. Is that a real place?”

“Real enough, m’lady. It smells worse than that cheese.”

She laughed, a short, sharp crack of a laugh, like a stick snapping. “I like you, child. You’re honest. Honest men are scarce in this hall.” Her eyes moved over the room: the factions at their tables, the empty chair, the soldiers and the servants and the dogs. “Have I told you about the Long Night? No? I won’t bore you with it now. But remember this: the wolves who fight each other are the ones the cold takes first. The pack survives. The wolf that runs alone . . .” She trailed off and shook her head. “Well. You take my meaning.”

She patted his arm with a small, gnarled hand and was gone before he could answer, tapping her way down the hall with her cane, though Dunk had noticed she forgot the cane when she was angry and walked just fine without it.

At the far end of the hall, a woman in trousers and a leather jerkin was arm-wrestling a man-at-arms across a trestle table. She had short dark hair and a long face and she slammed the man’s hand down so hard the table scraped a foot across the stone floor, then stood and rolled her shoulders. There was a sword on her hip, and she wore it easy, like it belonged there. She was tall for a woman, not as tall as . . .

His hand closed around his cup and he drank.

“Beron’s sister.” Egg was watching her too. “Lady Arsa.”

She was no lady. Not in any way Dunk understood the word. But she sat among the men-at-arms as if she’d been born there, and none of them looked at her like it was strange, and when she called for more ale the serving girl brought it running.

Near the high table, Willam, the boy from the godswood, sat with a trencher of food and his grey dog at his feet. The dog had a mutton bone nearly as long as its head and was working it with grim purpose, one paw holding it flat while its teeth scraped the joint end. When the lean Cerwyn grandson shifted at his table, the dog raised its head and growled, low and soft. Willam put a hand on the dog’s scruff without looking down. The Cerwyn man did not move again.

In the shadows by the door, the Night’s Watch recruiter sat nursing his ale and watching faces. He was talking to a young soldier, a boy, really, not much older than Donnor, with nervous eyes. The recruiter leaned in close and said something that Dunk could not hear. The young soldier went white.

And across the hall, on a bench apart from everyone, Artos sat with his leather pouch in his lap. He was not eating. He was watching Dunk. When Dunk looked at him, the boy did not look away.

The feast went on. More ale. More mutton. Umber sang again, louder and worse, this time a song about a milkmaid and what she milked when the cows had gone dry, and the chorus involved a part of the male body that had no business in a song, though Umber bellowed it with such joy that two of his men joined in. Lorra spoke to the septon and smiled and did not look at the empty chair. Serena sat like a carved thing and ate nothing. Myriame ate another honeycake and called for paper and ink: “I must write to my family,” she said, loud enough for three tables to hear. And Donnor . . .

Donnor sat at the high table with his food untouched. His fork slipped from his fingers and clattered on the trencher, and he flinched at the sound. Nobody spoke to him, and nobody looked at him. A shy boy. He’d known boys like that in Flea Bottom, quiet ones, the kind who stood at the back of the room and hoped no one would notice them. He felt sorry for the lad. A shy boy had no business being lord of anything.

Egg leaned close. “They’re all watching you, ser. Did you notice?”

“Watching me? I’m nobody.”

“You’re a knight, ser. The only anointed knight in the castle. Did any of them ask you what you thought about anything?”

Dunk tried to remember. Nobody had asked him a single question. They had all been telling him things.

“No.”

“No,” Egg agreed.

From across the hall, Lady Serena caught Dunk’s eye. She held his gaze and gave him a slow nod, not a greeting, but something else. A verdict, maybe. She had been watching him all night, and now she had decided something, and the nod said he would find out soon enough.

The torches burned low. The dogs fought over bones. Umber fell asleep in his chair with his mouth open and his beard full of crumbs. Dunk sat and drank the thick Northern ale and watched the wolves of Winterfell watch each other, and did not understand any of it, and could not stop watching all the same.

Two days after the feast, a servant came for Dunk.

She was a southern girl, young and nervous, with a Faith crystal on a cord around her neck and a face that said she’d rather be somewhere else. “Lady Lorra would see you, ser. If you’re not busy.” Dunk was not busy. He had been sitting on a barrel near the stables, mending a torn strap on his saddle with a length of gut he’d begged off Harwin. His fingers were stiff from the cold and he’d pricked his thumb twice. Saddle mending was squire’s work, but Egg was off somewhere in the maester’s tower, asking questions Dunk would not have thought to ask.

He followed the girl through the Great Keep and up a stair, stooping under doorways that were built for smaller men. The passage smelled of beeswax and stone and, faintly, of vinegar and rot from the sickroom above, drifting down through the ceiling stones. At a door on the third floor the girl stopped, knocked, and fled.

“Come in, ser.”

He had expected . . . he did not know what. A hall, maybe, or a council room. What he found was a lady’s chambers, the cleanest room in Winterfell. He left a muddy bootprint on the threshold and tried to wipe the next step on the rushes, which only made it worse. The rushes were fresh, the fire was steady, and the air smelled of lavender, actual lavender, not the thin northern version but the real southern kind, sweet and heavy. A tapestry hung on the wall behind a writing desk, woven, not painted, showing a mountain scene with bronze runes along the border. One corner had been mended with thread that did not match, and the stitch was clumsy, not Lorra’s work. He had seen that pattern before, in a book Egg showed him. Runestone. The seat of House Royce, in the Vale. She had brought a piece of home with her, and hung it where she could see it.

Through the window, the peaked roof of the sept was visible, and the seven-pointed star that crowned it.

Lorra Royce sat by the fire in a high-backed chair, embroidering. She had a flower half-done on blue linen, white petals, delicate work, and her needle moved without her eyes. The firelight caught the curve of her neck where it met her shoulder, and a strand of dark hair had come loose from its pin and lay against her skin. Beside her on a table sat a ledger book, a quill, an inkpot, and a plate of bread and butter she had not touched. The bread was white. Dunk had not tasted white bread since the Reach.

“Sit, if you like. There is bread.”

Dunk did not sit, the chairs looked too fine for a man with mud on his boots and horse on his hands, but he took the bread, because he was hungry and it was white and it was there. He ate standing, feeling large and clumsy and aware of every crumb that fell on her clean rushes. He could smell himself in her clean room: horse and old sweat and the sour tang of wool worn too long. She smelled of lavender. The difference shamed him. Three coppers to his name and he was eating a lady’s bread in a lady’s room. He did not know what that made him. Lucky, maybe. Or stupid.

Donnor was by the fire. Dunk had not seen him at first. The boy was thin enough to disappear behind furniture. He’d been standing at the edge of the hearth, pale and still, in a grey doublet someone had brushed for him, though the collar was too wide for his neck, and with his hair combed flat. He did not look like a lord. He looked like a boy who had been cleaned up and put on display.

“My eldest son,” Lorra said. “Beron’s heir.”

“M’lord.” Dunk nodded at the boy. The boy looked at the fire.

Lorra’s needle stopped. She set the embroidery in her lap, the flower still unfinished, as if it would always be unfinished, and folded her hands over it. “My husband called for swords, ser. You answered. That speaks well of you.” Her voice was measured, careful, like she’d thought about every word before she said it. “You are a knight. A true knight, anointed in the light of the Seven. There are very few of those in this castle. I think perhaps you are the only one.”

“Might be, m’lady.”

“The law of succession is clear.” She did not rush. “Donnor is Beron’s firstborn son. When my lord husband passes — and he will pass, the maester has said as much — Donnor will be Lord of Winterfell. That is the law. In the Vale, it would not even be a question. The eldest son inherits. It is simple and it is right.”

In the Vale. She said it with a longing she probably did not mean to show, a flicker in her eyes, gone before Dunk could be sure he’d seen it. Fifteen years in the North, Egg had told him. Fifteen years of cold and old gods and women who carried swords.

“There are those who would set aside my son’s claim. Who would put a grown man in Donnor’s place. A man with swords and Umber muscle behind him.” She did not name Serena. She did not need to. “My husband spoke Donnor’s name, ser. In one of his lucid hours. I was there. I heard it.”

Dunk remembered Beron’s words, the swords . . . the coast, and how his eyes had drifted. Had the dying lord also said Donnor? Dunk had not been there for that. He had no way to know if Lorra was lying, or remembering what she needed to remember, or telling the truth. All three were possible. He was not wise enough to sort them.

A knock came at the door. The southern girl again, breathless. “M’lady, the cook says the flour barrel’s near empty and he can’t make—”

“Tell him to use oats. We have oats.” Lorra’s voice did not change pitch. The girl vanished. Lorra picked up her needle and resumed stitching, but the thread snapped on the first pull and she had to rethread it, and Dunk saw that this woman ran a castle of a hundred and twenty people with a dying husband and five factions pulling at her skirts, and she did it between stitches, with her hands steady and her voice level.

“I need a knight, ser,” she said. “Not a man with a grudge and an axe. A knight who believes in the law. Donnor’s claim is lawful. All I ask is that you stand behind it.”

Dunk looked at Donnor. The boy had not spoken. He was gripping the edge of the mantelpiece, and his knuckles were white.

“Donnor,” Lorra said, gently. “Tell Ser Duncan what you told me.”

A log shifted in the fire and sent up a spray of sparks. The boy’s mouth opened. “I . . . I will be lord. When my father . . .” He stopped. Swallowed. His hands were shaking. “I will do my duty, ser.”

Dunk felt sorry for him. The boy could not finish a sentence about his own father without his voice giving out. He was shy and frightened and thin as a stick and he would be Lord of Winterfell when the lord upstairs stopped breathing, and none of that was his fault.

But the law was the law. Dunk knew about laws like he knew about the Warrior and the Mother, not deeply, not like a maester would, but in his bones, where things were simple. The firstborn son inherits. That was how it worked. What was the right thing? “Do what’s right, Dunk, and worry about the rest after.” The meaning was clear enough, even if the exact words had gone soft around the edges.

“I’ll stand behind the law, m’lady,” he said. “I can promise you that.”

Lorra’s needle stopped. She looked at him and smiled, small, tired, real. “Thank you, ser. That is all I ask.”

She sent them out with the southern girl. Egg was waiting at the foot of the stair, his hat in his hands, his bald head shining in the torchlight. He fell into step beside Dunk without a word, and they walked through the passage and out into the courtyard, and Egg said nothing, and then they were crossing the yard toward the Guest House, and Egg still said nothing, and Dunk’s shoulders were tightening because the silence was worse than the talking.

“Just say it,” Dunk said.

“Say what, ser?”

“Whatever it is you’re chewing on.”

Egg looked up at him. “Did she ask you what you thought of Donnor, ser?”

Dunk stopped walking. Snow was falling. A dog trotted past with a bone.

“She told you the law was clear,” Egg said. “She told you Donnor was the heir. She told you what she needed.” He paused. “Did she ask you what you thought? About anything?”

Dunk opened his mouth. Closed it. She had not. She had told him, and he had said aye, m’lady, and eaten her white bread, and that had been that.

“One more word and I’ll—”

“Clout me in the ear. I know, ser.”

They walked on. The snow fell, and the castle breathed its steam, and Dunk tried not to think about Donnor by the fire, or the woman who had smiled when he said yes, or what any of it meant. He tried not to think about any of it, and could not stop.

In the stables, Maester brayed at nothing. The snow kept falling.

The invitation came the next evening, brought by a serving man with a giant breaking free of chains sewn on his breast. Lady Serena wished to show Ser Duncan the crypts.

“The crypts.” Dunk looked at the man. “Under the castle.”

“Aye, ser. Best bring a cloak. It’s cold down there.” The man paused. “Colder than up here, I mean.”

Everything in this place was cold. Even the warm parts were cold. He fetched his cloak.

Egg came with him. Dunk did not try to stop the boy. If the old woman was going to bury him in history, he wanted someone beside him who could tell the true from the false. Egg knew more about the Starks than Dunk knew about anything. It was a low wall to clear, but it was something.

They met Lady Serena at the entrance to the crypts, near the First Keep. She was waiting beside an ironwood door, a torch in one hand and a knife in the other. The knife was small, meant for whittling, and a half-finished wooden wolf sat on the stone ledge beside her, pale shavings curling at its base. Four other wolves stood beside it, finished, lined up like sentries. Dunk had not noticed them before. She had left them where anyone coming or going from the dead would see them.

“Ser Duncan.” She looked up at him. She was not a large woman, the top of her head barely reached his chest, but her eyes were grey and hard as the granite walls behind her. She wore plain grey wool, no rings, no brooch, nothing except the wolf ring on her left hand, old tarnished silver, worn smooth. “You’ve eaten Lorra’s white bread and listened to Lorra’s arguments. Now come and hear what the dead have to say.”

She pushed open the ironwood door. The hinges groaned. Cold air rose from below, damp and heavy, smelling of earth and stone and something older, something Dunk could not name. It was not a bad smell. It was just old. Very old.

The stair was narrow and cut from the rock, and it wound down in a tight spiral. Dunk cracked his head on an overhang at the second turn and swore. He touched the spot; a bump was already rising, tender and hot. Serena did not slow. Egg followed, one hand on the wall. The air grew colder with each step, not the sharp cold of the wind outside but a wet, pressing cold, the kind that went through wool and leather and settled in the joints and stayed there. Bone-cold. That was what it was. “When the cold gets in your bones, lad, it don’t come out till spring.” Might be that was about knees, not crypts. It didn’t matter. Everything down here was cold.

The crypts opened at the bottom of the stair. Granite pillars marched into the darkness two by two, and between them sat the Lords of Winterfell, stone men on stone thrones, with iron swords across their laps and stone direwolves at their feet. The nearest statues were sharp, their features still clear after however many centuries: long faces, grim mouths, eyes that caught the torchlight and held it. One lord’s iron sword had gone green with verdigris, and another’s had snapped off at the hilt, leaving him to guard his tomb with a stump. Farther back, the faces blurred, worn smooth by damp and time. Farther still, the darkness swallowed them entire, and Dunk could not see where the corridor ended. It might not end. It might go on forever, deeper and deeper into the hill, all the way down to whatever lay beneath.

He had never been in a place like this. The ceiling pressed low and the pillars pressed close, and the stone lords watched with their empty eyes, and the only sounds were footsteps and dripping water and Dunk’s own breathing, louder than he wanted it to be. A drop fell from the ceiling onto the back of his neck, warm, from the hot springs somewhere above, and he flinched like he’d been stung.

“Eight thousand years,” Serena said, and her voice ran down the corridor in echoes. “That is how long the Starks have held Winterfell. Before the Targaryens. Before the Andals. Before the Faith and the septs and the knights.” She looked at Dunk. “Before your kind, ser.”

She led him deeper. Her torch painted the walls in moving orange and black, and the shadows of the stone lords stretched and shrank as she passed. Her knife was out again, and the wooden wolf was in her other hand beside the torch, and her fingers worked it as she walked, small, precise cuts, shaping the head, notching the ears. Her hands never stopped. They were gnarled and old and they moved with a sureness that reminded Dunk of . . .

He did not finish the thought. But for a moment he was back at Ashford, and a girl was painting an elm tree and a shooting star on a shield that did not exist anymore, her brush steady and sure, as if the picture were already there and she was just . . .

He looked at the stone lords and kept walking.

Serena stopped before a statue newer than most. Dust motes swirled in the torchlight where she’d disturbed the air. The stone lord sat straight and stern, with a thick beard and an iron sword across his knees. Someone had left a sprig of dried winter roses at his feet, so old the petals had gone black. The direwolf at his feet had been carved mid-snarl.

“My father,” Serena said. She touched the stone knee, briefly, like testing a wound that might still hurt. “Rickon Stark. Cregan’s firstborn son. He was never lord, but Cregan had a likeness carved for him all the same. A father’s grief.” Her voice was flat. “He died at Sunspear, fighting in Daeron’s foolish conquest of Dorne. He was nine-and-twenty.” She stepped back. “He was Cregan’s heir. Do you understand what that means?”

“It means he should have been lord, m’lady.”

“He should have been lord. And when he died, his daughters, my sister and I, should have come after. That is blood right. That is the elder line.” Her voice was flat and steady, but beneath it something burned. “Instead, Jonnel married my sister Sansa. His own half-niece. To bind her claim to his. She gave him no children. So the lordship passed to Barthogan, who died unwed, and then to Brandon, the youngest of Cregan’s sons. The youngest.” She turned to face Dunk full. The torch threw her shadow huge against the wall. “And from Brandon it passed to Rodwell, and from Rodwell to Beron. Five lords. Fifty years. All of them younger sons and younger sons’ sons, while the blood of the eldest was set aside.”

Dunk looked at the stone face of Rickon Stark. He did not know enough about succession law to say whether she was right. He was a hedge knight. Hedge knights didn’t settle questions of inheritance. They settled questions with swords, and sometimes they couldn’t even do that. But she was talking to him as if he could, and he did not know why.

“I had sons, ser. Twins. Torrhen and Cregard.” Her voice did not change, but the knife stopped. “They died on the Redgrass Field, fighting for a king who forgot them. I have daughters. My daughters married well, Arrana to Lord Umber, Argelle to Lord Cerwyn, and their sons are grown men, battle-tested, with the blood of the elder line.” Her knife kept working the wolf. It had a body now, and legs, and the beginnings of a tail. “I am not asking you to break your word to Lorra. I am asking you to think about whether the law she invokes is just. Whether a line stolen fifty years ago becomes rightful because no one challenged it.”

“The law is the law, m’lady.” The words came out thin. They had sounded solid in Lorra’s chambers, with the lavender and the white bread and the fire. Down here, among the dead lords and the rusted iron, they did not sound like much at all.

Serena watched him like a farrier looking at a lame horse. Not angry. Not unkind. Just knowing.

“You are honest, at least,” she said. “That is more than I expect from most knights.”

She turned and walked deeper into the dark. Dunk followed because he did not know what else to do.

They passed more lords, more wolves, more iron swords rusting on stone laps. Dunk stopped at one and touched the blade. The iron was rough with rust, but the edge still held. Good steel, even after all this time. A sword like this was worth something once . . . ten silver stags, or twenty.

“What are these for?” he asked. “The swords.”

“To keep them in their tombs.” She did not turn. A beat. “Or so the stories say.”

The echo ran down the corridor and died. Egg, walking beside Dunk, said nothing. The boy’s eyes were wide and moving from statue to statue. He knew their names, most like. He knew all the names. But for once he kept them to himself.

They climbed back into the light. The torch guttered and spat as the draft from above hit it. Dunk’s knees ached from the stairs and his head ached from the overhang, and the cold of the crypts clung to his clothes and his skin and would not shake loose. Serena set the finished wolf on the stone ledge beside the others. Five wolves now, standing guard over the door to the dead.

“Think on what I said, ser.” She folded the knife and slipped it into her sleeve. “That is all I ask.”

She walked away. She did not look back.

Another week passed, and Lord Beron did not die.

He did not get better, either. He lay in his great bed and breathed his rattling breath, and the She-Wolves circled and sharpened their claws, and the castle waited. Dunk trained in the yard with the men-at-arms. He ate in the Great Hall and mucked out Thunder’s stall and mended his saddle and sat on barrels watching it snow. He was good at sitting on barrels. He’d been good at it his whole life. Harwin put him to work when there was work, hauling wood, carrying stores, shoring up a crumbling section of the outer wall, and Dunk did it without complaint, because the food was free and the Guest House was warm and he had nothing better to do with his hands.

His three coppers had become two. He’d bought a heel of cheese from a woman in the winter town because the cheese in the Great Hall made his eyes water and he wanted something that didn’t fight back. Two coppers. A hedge knight’s fortune.

Egg spent his days in the maester’s tower, or in the library, or wherever boys went who were too clever for their own good. He came back each evening with some new piece of knowledge that Dunk had not asked for. Lord Umber had lost a son to wildlings three years past. Lord Cerwyn’s wife was kin to the Hornwoods and there was a land dispute. Myriame Manderly’s ravens flew south every other day. Halmund was looking for someone, though no one seemed to know who.

“You’ve been asking a lot of questions,” Dunk told him.

“Someone has to, ser.”

One evening Dunk found Halmund sitting alone in the yard, on a bench near the well, with a cup of ale and a look on his face like a man who had seen things he wished he hadn’t. Up close he looked worse than he had on the road, thinner, and one ear was black at the tip from an old frostbite.

“You’re the big knight,” Halmund said. “Sit, if you like. I won’t recruit you.” He took a pull of his ale. “Not tonight, anyway.”

Dunk sat. He did not know why. Halmund was the one person in Winterfell who didn’t seem to want anything from him except company.

“How long have you been at the Wall?” Dunk asked.

“Twenty years. Took the black when I was your boy’s age, or near enough.” Halmund stared into his cup. “It changes a man, the Wall. Not the cold, though the cold is bad enough. It’s the dark. The dark beyond the Wall. You stand up on that ice, a hundred leagues of it, and you look north, and there’s nothing. Just dark, and trees, and the wind. And you know, you know, that something is looking back at you.”

Dunk felt the hair prickle on his arms. “The wildlings, you mean.”

“Wildlings.” Halmund spat into the dirt between his boots. His mouth twisted. It was not a smile. “Aye. Wildlings. And other things, on the bad nights. Things the maesters say don’t exist.” He drank. “I’ve seen men freeze standing up. I’ve seen the ice crack and swallow a ranger whole. And I’ve heard things in the dark . . .” He stopped. He shook his head. “Never mind. Old men’s stories.”

Old women’s stories. Old men’s stories. Everyone in this castle had a story, and none of them ended well. “What brings you south?”

“Recruiting. The Watch needs men. Always needs men.” Halmund’s eyes moved across the yard, quick and sharp. “And I’m looking for a man who lost his way. A brother who took his vows and forgot them. I’ll find him.” The sharpness in his voice was sudden. “The Wall always gets what’s owed.”

He went back to his ale after that, and Dunk left him sitting in the cold, watching faces in the yard.

It was deep into the third week when Dunk lay in his bed and could not sleep.

The straw pallet itched. Dunk scratched at a bite on his ribs and found a flea between his fingers, fat and dark with blood. He cracked it between his thumbnails. Nothing with straw in it was ever truly empty.

The room was too warm. The heat came up through the stone floor, steady and patient, and no matter how many furs he threw off it kept pressing. Steam curled from a basin near the hearth. The fire had burned to embers. His pillow smelled of tallow and someone else’s hair, the last man who had slept here, whoever he was. Snow fell against the shutters, soft and steady, and the shutters rattled with each gust of wind. One of them did not close true, and a thin line of snow sifted through the gap onto the floor, where it melted on the warm stone before it landed.

“Who’s right?” Dunk asked the ceiling.

Egg did not answer at first. The boy was in the other bed, propped on one elbow, squinting at a book in the ember-light. How he could make out the words in this murk was beyond Dunk.

“Who’s right about what, ser?”

“Don’t play thick. You’re the worst at it.” Dunk rolled onto his side. “Lorra or Serena. Who has the better claim?”

The page-rustling stopped. “By southern law, Donnor. He’s the firstborn son of the sitting lord. Father to son. It’s simple.” A pause. “By blood priority, Serena’s line. Her father was Cregan’s firstborn. Her grandsons carry the elder blood.”

“Doesn’t that mean they’re both right, ser?”

A gust hit the shutters hard enough to rattle the latch. Dunk waited for it to pass.

“And by Northern custom?”

Egg was quiet a moment. “They don’t have a custom for this. That’s the problem. When a lord dies and the succession is unclear, the Northern houses gather and . . . choose. But there’s no rule about how they choose. No law like in the south. They argue and they shout and eventually someone bends the knee, or everyone draws swords.” He paused again. “Usually both.”

Dunk punched his pillow and rolled onto his back. Lorra said the law was clear. Serena said the law was unjust. Alys said the wolves who fought each other died. Arsa sat among the men-at-arms and drank ale and didn’t seem to care who sat in any chair. Myriame ate honeycakes and wrote letters and smiled. And Dunk was a hedge knight from Flea Bottom who could not read.

He thought of a barn outside Duskendale where he and the old man had slept one autumn, years ago. The farmer’s name was Wat or Watt or something close, a stooped fellow with a wen on his neck the size of a plum, and he had charged them a penny for the loft. Dunk had woken in the black of night with a weight on his chest and thought he was dying until the goat bleated in his face. Its breath was foul. The old man had laughed so hard he’d had a coughing fit, and the farmer’s wife came out with a broom and beat the goat off him and then beat Dunk for good measure, as if he’d invited the thing up. They’d left before dawn. The penny was not refunded.

He should not be in the middle of this. They should have ridden past.

But he was. He had eaten their bread and salt. The bread and salt held him. He’d put the chain on himself.

“What did Lord Beron mean, ser?” Egg had closed the book. “When he said the swords should go to the coast.”

“He meant the swords should go to the coast.” Dunk did not want to think about Beron’s mumbling. Every woman in the castle heard what she wanted to hear from the dying man. The swords . . . the coast . . . the boy . . . “Could mean anything.”

“It could mean he wanted someone to fight the ironborn instead of arguing about his chair.”

“One more word and I’ll clout you in the ear.”

“But I’m right, ser.”

Dunk stared at the ceiling. The boy was right. He was always right, the little wretch, and one day that mouth of his would get them both killed, but tonight it just made Dunk tired. A dying man asked for swords and got women quarreling over his empty seat. “Might be you are. Might be it doesn’t matter. A hedge knight doesn’t get to decide who’s right among lords.”

“And you, ser? What do you think?”

“A hedge knight has no business in the quarrels of lords, lad.” Had the old man said that? It sounded right. But the voice in his head was thin, and getting thinner.

Egg was quiet for a while. Outside, beyond the walls and the snow, a wolf howled. The sound was thin and far away and it went on a long time. Then another answered, deeper, from a different direction, and the two of them howled together in the dark.

“Wolves,” Egg said.

“Aye.”

“Real ones. In the wolfswood.”

“I know what they are.”

The howling faded. The wind pushed snow against the shutters. The embers popped and settled.

“Ser?” Egg’s voice was softer now. “Lady Alys told me something at the feast. About the Long Night.”

“Old women’s stories.”

“She said the Long Night lasted a generation. She said the snows were so deep they buried castles to the towers, and things came out of the dark: things with blue eyes and cold hands that could not be killed with iron or fire.”

“Egg.”

“She said the Wall was built after, to keep them out. Eight thousand years ago. Before the Andals. Before the Targaryens. Before . . .” He trailed off.

“Before everything.” Dunk pulled the furs up to his chin. “It’s a story. The old women tell them to scare children.”

“She didn’t sound like she was telling a story, ser. She sounded like she was remembering.”

Dunk did not have an answer for that. He lay in the dark and listened to the wolves and the wind and the hiss of snow, and thought about too many women and too many claims and too many bones in the dark below, and the lord upstairs rattling out his life one breath at a time while everyone waited and no one did a thing about the ironborn burning villages on the coast.

Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall. He closed his eyes. The heat pressed up through the floor, and the wolves sang, and after a while that was a long while he slept.

He dreamed.

Ser Arlan was dying in a field, in a hedge knight’s bedroll that smelled of horse and sweat and the slow rot of a body giving up. The sky was grey. Rain was falling, or it was snow; the drops were cold on Dunk’s face and he could not tell the difference. The dying man’s eyes were open but they saw nothing. His mouth was moving. He was saying something, and Dunk leaned close to hear, but the words were too quiet, always too quiet, and the rain was too loud. The old man’s mouth opened and what came out was not words but blood, black and slow, running down his chin and into the bedroll.

“The cold gets in your bones, lad . . .”

But it was not Ser Arlan’s voice. It was Beron’s voice, thin and papery, and the bedroll was not a bedroll but a great bed, and the field was not a field but a chamber with warm walls and beeswax candles and the smell of vinegar and honey. Beron’s eyes drifted to Dunk’s face and sharpened, briefly, and his mouth opened.

“The swords . . . the coast . . .”

Then the room was darker, and the candles were out, and the bed was gone, and Dunk was standing in the crypts. The stone lords sat on their thrones with their iron swords, and their eyes were not empty anymore. They were watching him. All of them. The nearest faces were clear, long and grim, and the farther faces blurred into the dark, but the eyes were all the same. Watching.

At the end of the corridor, past all the lords and all the wolves and all the rusted iron, a face glowed white in the dark. Not a stone face. A wooden face. The weirwood. It had no body, just a face carved in the dark, with red eyes that wept and a long mouth that might have been laughing or screaming.

The mouth opened. The sound that came out was not a voice. It was the creak of roots splitting stone, and the drip of water in the dark, and somewhere underneath it a word that might have been Wall or might have been war or might have been nothing at all. The red sap ran from its eyes in thick slow streaks, and the stone lords lifted their iron swords . . .

Dunk woke with a jerk, gasping, slick with sweat.

The room was dark. The fire was dead. Steam still rose from the floor, and the heat was under him and around him, and for a moment he did not know where he was, the crypts, the field, the chamber with the dying lord, and then the shutters rattled and the wind moaned and he was in the Guest House at Winterfell, in the North, in a castle full of wolves, and Lord Beron was dying upstairs and the weirwood was a tree, just a tree, with a face that someone had carved a thousand years ago.

His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the warm stone floor and held them there.

He got up and splashed water from the basin on his face. It was warm, everything in Winterfell was warm, even the water, and it did not help much.

From the other bed, Egg’s breathing was slow and even. The boy had not woken.

Outside, the wolves had stopped howling. The snow fell on, and the springs ran hot beneath the stone, and Dunk lay back down and did not close his eyes for a long time.

He found Arsa Stark in the training yard the next morning, beating a man twice her age with a wooden sword.

The man was one of Winterfell’s men-at-arms, grey-bearded, thick through the chest, with arms like a blacksmith’s. He was not enjoying himself. Arsa came at him low and fast, feinting left and cutting right, her feet quick on the frozen dirt. She fought like a terrier, all speed and teeth and no quit in her. She led with her left, which was wrong for a right-handed swordsman, but she made it work. When the man swung for her head she ducked under it and cracked him across the ribs, hard enough that Dunk heard it twenty paces away.

“Yield,” the man grunted, rubbing his side.

“Again.”

“I said yield, woman.”

“And I said again.” She tossed him his practice sword, which he had dropped. Jorren’s boots slipped on the frost as he bent for it. “Pick it up. Your ribs will mend.”

Dunk leaned against the stable wall with his arms crossed, watching. The air smelled of horse and sweat and cold iron, and somewhere behind him a farrier’s hammer rang. She was good. He had seen that at the feast; the arm-wrestling was strength, but this was something else. This was training, years of it. She read the other man’s balance before he shifted, hit the gaps where mail didn’t cover, and kept her feet under her. The men-at-arms watched, too. Not laughing, not calling out. Just watching, quiet, like soldiers who knew they were looking at someone who could hurt them.

She was a woman, though. Dunk noticed that. Thirty or so, lean and hard, in leather and ringmail with her dark hair cropped short for fighting. She had the Stark look: the long face, the grey eyes, and a thin white scar ran from her left ear to the hinge of her jaw where something had once caught her. She was not pretty, not in any way the word meant in the south, but there was something . . . she moved like she had nothing to prove and nothing to lose, and that made him look at her longer than he should have. Sweat darkened the collar of her jerkin and her forearms were thick with muscle, the cords standing out where she’d gripped the practice sword. She was breathing hard from the spar, her chest rising and falling, and Dunk did not know what to do with any of it. He felt his ears warm and looked at his boots.

When Jorren limped off to find a poultice, Arsa saw him.

“You’re the knight.” She wiped sweat from her face with the back of her hand. “The big one.”

“Ser Duncan the Tall.”

“I’ve heard.” She picked up Jorren’s practice sword and tossed it. Dunk caught it one-handed. The grip was cold and damp from frost, too small for his fist, and the balance was off. Someone had gouged a chunk from the flat near the tip, and the weight pulled left. But wood was wood. “Show me what a knight can do. I’ve never fought one.”

They circled. The yard was hard-packed earth, frozen solid, and Dunk’s boots scraped as he shifted his weight. Their breath steamed between them. His shield arm ached, it always ached in the cold, ever since Cockshaw’s dagger had bitten deep at Whitewalls, and his joints were stiff. But a practice sword in his hand was a familiar thing. The most familiar thing left to him, if he was honest.

Arsa came low and fast, feinting left. Dunk did not fall for it. He’d sparred with fast men before, quick men who thought speed was everything and forgot that reach was something too. “Let them come to you, lad. A big man need not chase. Let them run onto your steel.” Might be. It didn’t matter.

He kept his feet planted and turned the blow with his wrist, then stepped inside her reach and shoved with his shoulder. Arsa went back two steps. She had not expected to be moved.

But she was fast. She recovered in a blink and came again, and this time her blade caught him across the forearm, a crack of wood on leather that stung all the way to the elbow.

“One.”

Dunk shifted his stance, wider, lower. Arsa circled, looking for the angle. She tried a high cut. He caught it, turned it, brought his own blade around, but she was already inside his guard, slipping past like water, and instead of catching her clean he clipped her hip as she twisted away. She hissed and drove her practice sword into his belly. Not hard enough to wind him, but hard enough.

“Two.” She was grinning now, a quick, wild thing, there and gone. “You’re slow, ser.”

“You’re small.”

“Aye. And I’m a woman, and I’m no knight, and no septon ever poured oil on my head.” She tossed the practice sword to the rack and rested her hand on the real blade at her hip, good steel, plain-hilted, with a wolf’s head pommel worn smooth from years of gripping. “But I can fight. And the krakens burning villages on the Stony Shore don’t care who anointed me.”

“No,” Dunk said. He rubbed his stomach where she’d jabbed him. The practice swords on the rack were good oak, straight-grained, better than anything he could have bought with the two coppers left in his purse. “I don’t suppose they do.”

The grin was gone. In its place was something harder. “I don’t care who sits in the stone chair, ser. Lorra can have it for Donnor. Serena can have it for her Umber grandson. Mother can give it to whichever babe she thinks will marry a Karstark. None of it matters. The krakens are raiding the coast and burning crofters’ huts while we sit here arguing about old men’s bones.” She wiped her face again. Her hand came away bloody. She’d split a knuckle somewhere during the spar and not noticed. “Give me twenty men and I’ll ride to the coast and show them steel. That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Dunk looked at her bloody knuckle and her hard grey eyes and her short hair and the sword on her hip, and thought she was no knight. She was better than most knights he had met. “I came here to fight the ironborn.”

“Then we want the same thing.”

She held out her hand, not to shake, but to clasp, forearm to forearm, like soldiers do. Dunk took it. Her grip was hard and calloused, stronger than he’d expected, and she held on a moment longer than she needed to.

From a balcony above the yard, a shadow moved, there and gone before Dunk could see who it was. Arsa’s eyes flicked in that direction. Her jaw tightened for half a heartbeat. Then she was looking at Dunk again, and whatever she had felt was locked down tight.

“Artos,” she called. “Come here.”

The small dark boy swung his legs over the wall, dropped his hands to the stone, and landed light as a cat. Dunk had not seen him. He never did, until the boy wanted to be seen. Artos crossed the yard at a trot, his leather pouch bouncing at his hip.

Arsa put a hand on his shoulder. “You watched?”

Artos nodded.

“Watch his feet,” she said, nodding at Dunk. “A big man’s balance lives in his hips, not his shoulders. If you can move his hips, you can move him. Show him, ser.”

Dunk shifted his weight, side to side, feeling stupid. Artos watched with those grey eyes, the eyes of a boy studying something he meant to learn.

“Good,” Arsa said. “Now. A smaller man can’t beat a bigger man with strength. That’s a fool’s game. You have to be faster, and you have to be closer. Inside his reach, his size means nothing.” She looked at Dunk. “Use his weight against him. The bigger they are . . .” She trailed off and shrugged. “Well. You know how that one ends.”

Artos nodded again. He did not speak. His hand went into the leather pouch, and his fingers closed around something small and hard. Iron. A nail, or a bit of old hinge. Other boys collected feathers or stones. Artos collected iron.

At the far end of the yard, the thin man in the black cloak stood in his usual spot near the gate, watching. Not Dunk, this time. The soldiers drilling near the armory. His eyes moved from face to face, slow and careful, and his mouth was a thin line.

Dunk watched Artos walk away. The boy’s feet were quiet on the frozen ground. He did not look back.

That one would be something. Something dangerous, if he lived long enough.

They held the council in the Great Hall on a grey morning in the fourth week, with the tables pushed against the walls and chairs drawn into a rough circle near the hearth.

Dunk had heard someone, Harwin, he thought, call the Stark women the She-Wolves when he thought they couldn’t hear. The name fit. All five of them were in the hall, and every one of them had her teeth showing.

Lorra Royce sat in the lord’s chair, Beron’s chair, carved stone, with direwolf heads on the arms, wearing dark grey with the silver brooch at her throat. Donnor stood behind her, one hand on the chair’s back, pale and stiff. To Lorra’s left, the septon clutched his crystal, it was cracked down the middle, Dunk noticed, a long fracture that split the seven-pointed star in two, and stared at the floor.

Serena Stark sat opposite, in a wooden chair she’d carried in herself. Plain grey wool, the wolf ring, nothing else. Behind her stood Osric Umber, enormous, arms folded, his face already flushed though the argument had barely started. The chair he’d dragged from the wall was too narrow for him, so he stood. Beside him, Robard Cerwyn, lean, forgettable, whittling a chess piece with his small knife. The blade had a nick near the tip. He had not looked up.

Lady Alys sat nearest the fire in her furs, her cane across her knees. Myriame Manderly sat two chairs over with honeycakes in a linen cloth on her lap, smiling. Arsa stood by the doors, arms crossed, sword on her hip, looking like she’d rather be outside. Willam sat on a bench below the windows with his grey dog at his feet. The dog’s ears were flat.

Dunk sat where he’d been told, on a bench against the back wall, under the mounted direwolf heads, with Egg beside him. His bench was hard, and someone had carved a name into the seat, JORY, deep and crude, cut with a knife point. The rushes on the floor were old and dark and matted. Something small moved in them when Dunk shifted his boot: a flea, most like, or a beetle. He left it alone. His stomach was empty. He had one copper left after the oats for Maester, and if they rode out to fight, Thunder would need grain too. Nobody had spoken to him in an hour.

The argument had begun with Lorra, calm and measured. “Donnor is Beron’s firstborn. The law of succession is clear. I will not have my lord husband’s wishes overturned by a woman who was never Lady of Winterfell.”

“Your lord husband cannot speak his wishes,” Serena said. “He cannot speak at all.”

“He has spoken,” Lorra said. “He said Donnor’s name. I was there.”

“You were there. And no one else.”

“I was there too,” said Lady Alys, mildly.

Every head turned.

“The boy mumbled,” Alys said. She adjusted her furs. “He said the boy, if he said anything. Whether he meant Donnor, or Willam, or the stableboy who brings his broth, I could not say.”

Before Lorra could answer, the door at the far end opened and a servant came through: a young man, one of the kitchen boys, his face tight with something between fear and self-importance. “M’lady,” he said, looking at Lorra, then at Serena, then back again, unsure who to address. “Lord Beron — he woke, m’lady. Just now. He said — he said the boy. He said it twice. The maester heard it. I heard it.” He swallowed. “He said the boy, and then he was gone again.”

Silence. Then everyone spoke at once.

“He means Donnor.” Lorra’s hands tightened on the chair arms. “His firstborn.”

“He means my grandson.” Serena’s chin lifted. “A grown man, battle-tested—”

“He means any of them.” Alys was louder now. “He means a boy. He could mean the dog for all we know. A dying man’s words are not a will, and I’ll thank you both to remember it.”

The hall erupted. Umber’s fist came down on the table and the cups jumped. “Let the lords of the North speak, as our fathers did!” A grizzled man with a bear on his cloak pounded the table beside him. The septon said something about the Seven’s guidance that nobody heard. Myriame took a honeycake.

Through it all, Cerwyn whittled. His knife shaved a curl of pale wood from the chess piece. Then, in a gap between shouts, he spoke, soft, almost gentle.

“The boy needs something, if he is to be lord.” He did not look up. “Good counsel. Strong allies. And the matter of Cerwyn’s northern border might bear discussing. The Hornwood strip. Three leagues of good timber, long disputed.” He blew on the chess piece. “A lord who remembered his friends would find friends when he needed them.”

Willam’s dog raised its head. It looked at Cerwyn, and it growled, not the low rumble from the feast, but a true growl, deep in the throat, with teeth behind it. Willam put a hand on the dog’s scruff and the growling stopped, but the dog’s yellow eyes did not leave Cerwyn’s face.

The dog knew. Dunk was not sure what the dog knew, only that it knew something.

“My lords.” Lorra’s voice cut through. She was standing now, both hands on the arms of Beron’s chair. “The law is clear. I will say it again, and again, and again if I must. Donnor is the heir. What is needed is not a council but a pledge. I am asking every lord in this room to stand behind the law.”

She looked at Dunk.

The whole hall looked at Dunk.

He did not know why. He was nobody: a hedge knight from Flea Bottom sitting on a bench against the wall. But Lorra had asked for knights to stand behind the law, and he was the only knight in the room, and she was looking at him with those tired eyes, and he thought of her white bread and her lavender and her embroidery and the boy behind her who could not finish a sentence, and he stood up.

“The firstborn inherits, m’lords.” His voice was too loud in the hall. “That is the law. In the Reach, in the stormlands, in the Vale . . .” He trailed off. Every face was turned toward him. Serena’s was stone. Umber’s was red. Cerwyn had finally looked up from his whittling. “I don’t know about Northern custom. But a man ought to honor his father’s wish, and Lord Beron—”

“Lord Beron said the boy.” Serena’s voice was ice. “He did not say Donnor. He did not say the law. And he did not ask a hedge knight from Flea Bottom to speak for him.”

The words hit Dunk like a slap. He felt his ears burn.

“A landless knight,” Cerwyn said, quiet, still holding his knife. “With no arms on his shield. That is the champion of the firstborn’s cause.” He looked at Lorra. “Forgive me, my lady, but if Donnor’s strongest voice is a man with no lands, no lord, and no name anyone recognizes . . .” He let the silence finish the sentence.

Dunk sat down. His ears were on fire. He had opened his mouth to help, and he had made it worse. He could see it on every face in the room: on Umber’s satisfaction, on Cerwyn’s thin smile, on Donnor’s devastation. The boy’s face behind his mother’s chair had gone from pale to ashen. Dunk had just told the room that Donnor’s claim rested on the word of a hedge knight, and the room had looked at the hedge knight and seen nothing worth a damn.

Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall. He should have kept his mouth shut. He should have sat on his bench and said nothing and let the She-Wolves sort it out themselves.

The bear-cloak lord turned to him. “You’re a knight, ser. Knights settle disputes. If you’re standing for Donnor, what say you? Can the boy command?”

Dunk looked at Donnor. The boy’s hands were shaking. His mouth was open but nothing was coming out. He looked at his mother and his mother looked at the hall and the hall was waiting and no one was going to help him.

“I’m not that kind of knight, m’lord,” Dunk said.

A door banged open. Cold air rushed through and the hearth fire guttered.

A man staggered through, young, mud-caked, bleeding from a gash along his jaw. Frost clung to his eyebrows. He wore no cloak and his boots were shredded. He made three steps before his legs went, and two soldiers caught him.

“The Stony Shore,” he gasped. “Ironborn . . . Torrhen’s Mill . . . they burned . . .” He coughed and spat red. “They’re coming inland.”

The honeycake fell from Myriame’s hand. The smile was gone.

Umber rose to his full height, and the bench groaned. The dog barked, sharp and wild, and Willam hauled it back by the scruff. Cerwyn’s knife stopped. The grizzled lord was on his feet. Arsa was already buckling her sword belt.

Lady Alys brought her cane down on the stone floor. The crack silenced even the dog.

“Enough,” the old woman said. “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell. At this rate there will be five, and none of them speaking to the others, while the ironborn burn the North around us.” She looked at each of them in turn: Lorra gripping the chair, Serena with her stone face, Myriame staring at her fallen cake, Arsa at the door. “Who commands? Someone must. Or we all die separately.”

The hall looked at Donnor. Donnor stepped forward and caught his foot on the chair leg. He looked at the hall. The hall looked back.

In the corner by the far door, the thin man in black had risen from his bench. His eyes were not on the wounded rider, or the She-Wolves, or Dunk. They were on a young soldier near the armory wall, a boy, barely older than Donnor, with scared eyes and a face gone white. The Night’s Watch man stared at him, and the young soldier stared at the floor.

“I’ll ride.” Arsa’s hand was already on her sword. “Give me men. I don’t care whose.”

The bear-cloak lord looked at Dunk. “What about you, ser? You came to fight. Now’s your chance.”

Dunk stood. The bench scraped loud on the stone. His ears still burned. His hands were shaking. He was the tallest man in the room, and the least useful, and he had just proved it. But this, a wounded man, an enemy coming, people dying on the coast, this he understood. He had always understood this part.

“Aye, m’lord. I’ll ride.”

Egg went to the godswood alone.

He did not tell Dunk. Dunk was in the yard with Harwin, arguing about how many men could be spared for the coast and how many horses they’d need and whether the mule counted, and Egg slipped away while nobody was watching. He was good at not being watched when he wanted to be. It was one of the first things he’d learned, back when he was someone else.

The iron gate was heavier than it looked. His fingers ached where they gripped the bars, the cold of the metal biting through to the bone. He had to lean his whole weight against it, and the hinges groaned loud enough to scare a pair of crows off the inner wall. They flapped away cursing. Egg ducked through and the gate swung shut behind him with a clang that echoed and died.

Inside, the godswood was warm and still. Late afternoon light came slanting through the canopy, turning the air gold where it found a gap in the branches, leaving the rest in green shadow. The ground was thick with leaves, red and brown, and they made no sound under his boots. It was quieter here than anywhere in Winterfell: quieter than the library, quieter than the sept, quieter than Lord Beron’s chamber where nothing moved but the dying man’s chest. Here even the wind stopped. The hot springs breathed up through the earth, and the air smelled of leaf mold and wet stone and something mineral, like the smell of a coin held too long in a sweating hand.

He followed the path to the heart tree.

The path wound between ironwoods and oaks so old their roots had buckled the earth into ridges. Egg stepped over them carefully. Near a stump, a cluster of white mushrooms grew in a ring, fat and fleshy, the caps beaded with moisture. A raven pellet sat on a flat stone beside the path, grey, dry, with tiny bones poking through. Egg looked at it and kept walking. Between two low branches a spider had built a web, and the damp had frozen on the strands, turning them to glass. It caught the late light and held it for a moment, and then a drop fell from the branch above and the web shivered and the light went out.

The heart tree stood in its clearing, white and red, the other trees keeping their distance. The last light caught the leaves and made them glow, not gold but red, like hot coals. The face was in shadow. The long mouth, the weeping eyes. The dried sap was darker now than it had been the first time, or it looked darker. The black pool at the tree’s feet reflected the canopy and nothing else.

Egg stood before it. He did not kneel. He was not sure what he would be kneeling to.

He put his hand on the bark.

Warm. Warmer than before, even, or was he imagining that? He thought about the roots, and how far down they went, and whether the hot springs reached as deep as . . . The hot springs, Dunk had told him. As if that explained anything.

His hand stayed on the bark. The wood was smooth under his palm, not rough like oak or elm, and the warmth came up through it steady and slow, like a pulse. A raven sat on a branch above the pool and watched him. It had a crumb of something in its beak. It did not move.

The air changed. Not in the godswood. In him. A feeling he had no word for, like being stared at by something that could see through his skin. As if the face in the trunk had opened its eyes, though the eyes were just carved hollows, red with sap, and had not changed. As if the tree had taken a breath.

Egg pulled his hand back. He wiped it on his cloak. His fingers were tingling, though that could have been the cold.

He stood there a moment longer. The raven swallowed its crumb and ruffled its feathers and settled again. A leaf fell from the canopy, turning slow in the still air, and landed on the black pool without a sound. The water swallowed it.

Egg walked away. He did not look back at the face, though he wanted to. He pushed through the iron gate and crossed the courtyard, his legs stiff from standing on the cold ground, the warmth of the godswood fading off his skin with every step. The yard smelled of horse piss and woodsmoke. Dunk was sitting on a mounting block, scraping mud from his boot with a stick.

“The trees have faces here, ser. Real faces.”

Dunk did not look up from his boot. “Aye. I saw.”

“I don’t think they’re only carvings.”

Dunk stopped scraping. He looked at Egg. The boy’s face was calm, calm enough, or so Dunk thought. But his mind was on the ironborn and the coast and how many men Arsa could raise, and the trees were just trees.

“Halmund says things come out of the dark at the Wall,” Egg said. “Living things. He told me that.”

“Halmund tells a lot of stories.” Dunk looked at the boy’s face. Something was off. “You all right?”

“Fine, ser.” Egg looked at his hand. The one he had put on the bark. He curled his fingers into his palm. “What about the ironborn, ser? When do we ride?”

“Soon. A day, maybe two. Arsa’s gathering men.”

“Good.” Egg put his hat back on and pulled the brim down low. “That’s good, ser.”

He did not say anything else about the trees.

The next hour was a madness of mud and horses and shouting men.

Dunk had lived through chaos before: at Ashford, when the Trial of Seven became a brawl, and at Whitewalls, when the castle turned on itself. But this was a Northern chaos, louder and colder and full of dogs. Men ran through the courtyard shouting at each other in accents Dunk could barely follow. Horses were being led from the stables half-saddled, and the farrier’s boy was hammering a shoe onto a roan mare that did not want one and was letting him know with both hind legs. The freezing drizzle had turned the yard to muck and horse piss, patches of yellow-brown ice that cracked underfoot and stank when you broke through to the mud beneath. A cart loaded with spears had gotten stuck near the armory and two soldiers were hauling at its wheels while a third cursed them from the seat.

Near the well, a soldier was oiling his mail shirt with a rag no bigger than Dunk’s palm, rubbing the same ring of links over and over as if the whole shirt might rust in the next hour. Another man was on his knees in the mud going through a pile of helms, holding each one up, putting it down, cursing. None of them fit, or he didn’t like the look, or he was the sort who’d spend the whole battle bareheaded and blame someone else for the headache. A boy of ten or twelve ran between the horses with a slopping bucket of water, tripping on his own feet, losing half of it. The horses that got a drink looked no happier than the horses that didn’t.

Dunk found his mail in the Guest House where he had left it, rolled and oiled, at the bottom of his pack. He pulled it on in the small warm room with the hot-spring floor, and the metal was cold as creek water against his skin. The weight settled onto his shoulders like an old debt: familiar, heavy, not going anywhere. His fingers were stiff and he fumbled the buckles twice before he got the gorget closed. Each buckle was a small fight, the cold metal slipping against his thumbs, the leather straps stiff from weeks of sitting idle. He got the last one on the third try and the gorget bit into the soft skin below his jaw. The shield went on his back, lighter than proper oak but all he had. He strapped on his sword belt and checked the edge with his thumb. Good steel. Better than he deserved, most like.

When he came back to the yard, the farrier’s boy had lost the roan mare. She had kicked free and was trotting loose between the stables and the godswood gate, trailing a broken lead rope and a single shoe that rang on the frozen stone every other step. Two men were chasing her. A third had given up and was sitting on an overturned barrel, eating an onion. Nobody had told him to eat an onion. Nobody had told him not to.

The argument had started.

“Donnor will command,” Lorra was saying. She stood on the steps of the Great Keep, her dark hair wet with drizzle, her voice cutting through the noise. Beside her, Donnor stood with a sword belt someone had buckled onto him. The buckle was on the wrong hole, too loose, so the belt sat crooked on his hips and the whole rig shifted when he breathed. The sword was too long for the boy. The tip of the scabbard scraped the stone when he moved. His cloak clasp was half-undone. His fingers went to it, worked at the pin, couldn’t get it seated. He gave up and let it hang.

“Your son has never held a sword in anger.” Umber had his great axe in his fist and looked ready to use it on the next person who spoke. “I’ll not follow a boy who’s never bled.”

“The law—” Lorra said.

“The law means nothing to the dead at Torrhen’s Mill.”

Arsa came through the gate from the inner yard in mail and boiled leather, her sword on her hip, a round wooden shield on her back. Her hair was wet and her jaw was set. She looked at Donnor. She looked at Umber. She looked at the mud and the spear cart and the farrier’s boy dodging hooves.

“Someone must lead, or we all die separately.” She said it flat, without drama. They were Alys’s words from the council, and she used them like a knife, quick and aimed.

“I’ll lead.” Umber’s voice shook the yard.

“You’ll not,” Lorra said. She stepped forward. “This is a Stark matter. Stark men ride for Stark lands.”

“Then let a Stark lead,” said Arsa. She looked at Donnor again. Everyone looked at Donnor.

The boy’s face was the color of old parchment. His mouth opened. His hand went to the sword at his hip, and the sword was too heavy, and the scabbard caught between his legs, and he stumbled. He caught himself on the railing. His mouth was still open.

Nothing came out.

Lorra put a hand on Donnor’s arm. The boy flinched. Behind them, through the door of the Great Keep, Dunk could see a servant carrying a basin of steaming water upstairs, for Beron, who was dying while his son stood in the yard with a sword he could not lift.

Dunk looked away. He could not watch this. The boy was lost and nobody was going to help him. All this arguing about chairs, and nobody riding to the coast.

It was not a question Donnor could answer. It was not a question of law, or blood right, or whose father was whose grandfather’s . . . he lost the thread of it. It was a question of iron, and iron didn’t care who your father was.

He had come here thinking it would be simple. Stop at Winterfell, earn some silver, ride on to the Wall. Swing a sword, earn some coin, and be gone before the snows got worse . . . Every part of that was wrong. There was no lord to fight for. There was no simple. There was a dying man upstairs and a boy who couldn’t speak and women who ran everything and a dog that knew more about the truth than Dunk did.

But the ironborn were real, and people were burning, and that part he could do.

“I’ll ride with Arsa.” He did not shout it. He just said it, and his voice was deep enough that the men nearby heard it, and they turned, and the turning spread. “I’m not a Stark. I’m not a lord. But I can fight, and m’lady Arsa can lead, and Lord Umber can fight beside us, and we can sort out the rest when the krakens are dead.”

Umber looked at him. The big lord’s face was red and his axe was still in his fist. For a moment Dunk thought the axe might come for him, Umber had that look, the one big men got when someone told them what to do and they hadn’t decided yet whether to hit or listen. Then he laughed, a boom that scattered the crows off the armory roof. “The hedge knight has more sense than the lot of you.” He swung the axe up onto his shoulder. “I’ll ride with the woman. And the big man. Gods help the ironborn.”

“Aye, m’lord,” Dunk said.

Arsa did not smile. She nodded once and turned to the yard. “Saddle up. Twenty riders. I want every man armed and mounted before the drizzle turns to snow.”

One of the Umber men told another he hoped the ironborn women were better looking than the last lot. “I heard kraken women have beards,” the other said. Behind the stable wall, a young soldier was bent over, vomiting quietly. Nobody said anything about it. Men dealt with fear in their own way: some joked, some prayed, some puked. Dunk had done all three.

In the corner of the courtyard, near a pile of broken weapons someone had been sorting for the smith, the thin man in black was talking to the young soldier. Halmund had the boy by the arm, not rough, but firm, like a man gripping a horse he didn’t trust not to bolt. The boy’s face was white and wet. Halmund leaned close and said something Dunk couldn’t hear.

Egg was watching. He tugged Dunk’s sleeve. “The Night’s Watch man, ser. He found who he was looking for.”

“Not our problem.” Dunk tightened his sword belt. “You’re staying here.”

“Ser—”

“You’re staying. That’s the end of it.”

The boy’s jaw set. He looked like he wanted to say a dozen things. He said none of them. Dunk put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. It just seemed like a thing a man ought to do before he rode off to fight. Egg’s shoulder was thin under the cloak, thin and hard, and Dunk let go before either of them had to say anything about it.

Egg nodded, short and sharp, and walked away with his hat pulled low.

By the armory wall, Willam Stark was saddling a grey horse with quiet, certain hands. His dog sat beside him, watching the yard. The boy had a hunting knife on his belt and a look on his face that said he intended to ride.

Arsa saw him. She crossed the yard in four strides. “No.”

“I can fight,” the boy said.

“You’re thirteen.”

“My father fought the ironborn,” Willam said. “He was—”

“Your father is dying of it.” She put a hand on his shoulder and held it there. “Stay. Watch the gates. If we don’t come back, Winterfell will need you more than we do.”

Willam looked at her hand, then at her face. He took his hand from the saddle. His dog pressed against his leg.

On the ground near the armory, a broken arrowhead lay in the mud, half-buried. A small hand reached down and picked it up. Artos turned it over between his fingers, iron, rusted, shaped like a leaf, and slipped it into his pouch without a word. He was watching Dunk. He was always watching Dunk.

Dunk led Thunder through the gate. The big horse snorted at the drizzle and tossed his head. His hooves slid on the wet stone, and Dunk had to pull him short before he stepped on a chicken that had wandered into the gatehouse from somewhere and stood there, wet and stupid, looking at the war like it had nothing to do with her.

Behind him came Arsa on a dark mare, and Umber on a destrier nearly as large as Thunder, and twenty riders in leather and mail and fur, with spears and swords and one man carrying a banner with a grey direwolf that hung limp in the wet air. The man with the onion had joined them. He had the onion in one hand and a spear in the other, and the look on his face said he did not plan to give up either one. The wounded rider had been carried inside. The spear cart was still stuck in the mud.

Winterfell’s steam rose behind them, pale against the grey sky. Dunk did not look back.

The rain started on the second day.

Not snow this time: rain, cold and steady, coming in sideways when the wind gusted. It found the seams in Dunk’s cloak and ran down his neck and pooled in the small of his back where his mail sat heaviest. Thunder plodded through the mud with his head down, his mane plastered flat, his hooves throwing up clods with every step. The road was a brown river. Somewhere behind them, the supply wagon’s axle was creaking in a way that said it would not last the day.

Twenty riders. Dunk counted them when they left and he counted them again at the first stop, when a man’s horse threw a shoe and they had to wait while he hammered it back on with a rock. Twenty riders, most of them Umber men, big, bearded, grim, with iron halfhelms and leather that stank of tallow. One of them had put his helm on backward and rode half a league before the man beside him noticed. Another had a cough that came up from somewhere deep, wet and rattling, and he coughed into his fist every few minutes like a man trying to be quiet about dying. They did not talk much. They rode with their chins down and their hands on their weapons and their eyes on the road.

Arsa rode at the head of the column on her dark mare, straight-backed, no banner, no fanfare. She had traded her ringmail for a heavier shirt of iron links that went past her hips and a half-helm with a nasal that made her long face look longer. Behind her rode Umber on his enormous destrier, his great axe slung across his saddlebow. The axe head was as wide as Egg’s chest. Umber was singing.

He was singing about a woman from White Harbor who married a sailor and waited for him on the docks for thirty years. The tune was simple. The words were filthy: the current verse concerned what the sailor’s wife did with the harbor master while her husband was at sea, and where she spread her legs, and how the harbor master’s anchor found its port. Umber’s voice cracked on the high notes and went flat on the low ones and the men near him flinched with every verse.

Arsa glanced back. “If the ironborn don’t hear us coming, it’s because they’ve gone deaf.”

“They should be so lucky.” Umber did not stop singing. He just sang louder. A crow that had been following the column veered off and landed in a tree, as if it had heard enough.

Dunk pulled a strip of salt beef from his saddlebag and chewed it as he rode. It tasted like boot sole and salt, mostly salt. He broke the bread and a weevil fell out, small, dark, curled up dead from the baking. He picked it off his leg and ate the bread. You did not waste bread over a weevil. In Flea Bottom you did not waste bread over anything. A hot bowl of brown would have cost a penny in Flea Bottom, but Flea Bottom was a thousand leagues south and the penny was not in his purse. He chewed and swallowed and the beef sat in his stomach like a stone.

Rain like this reminded him of a night near the God’s Eye, years ago, when the storm came so fast he barely got Thunder under a bridge before the sky split open. He’d sat under that bridge for hours, wet and cold, listening to the rain hammer the stones. A goat wandered out of the dark and stood beside him, dripping. They’d looked at each other. The goat chewed something. Dunk sat. Neither of them spoke, which was the best conversation he’d had in a week. Eventually the rain stopped and the goat walked off into the mud without looking back. Dunk had never told anyone about the goat. It was not much of a story.

Rain was running down inside his collar now, cold as a knife, finding the gap between his mail and his neck. His fingers had gone numb on the reins. The shield on his back pulled at his right shoulder with every step Thunder took, a dull ache that would be worse tomorrow.

Dunk rode between Arsa and Umber, which put him in the middle of two people who had been on opposite sides of a council table two days ago. Arsa had backed no faction. Umber had backed Serena’s grandsons. Now they were riding together through the rain to fight the same enemy, and neither of them seemed to think that was strange. Two days ago they were shouting at each other across a table. Now they were riding together. Dunk supposed that was the North.

Rain like this put him in mind of the Kingsroad south of Maidenpool, years ago, when the old man’s horse threw a shoe in a stretch of mud so deep it sucked the boot right off Dunk’s foot. They’d had to walk for two days because the next smith was in a village whose name Dunk forgot the moment they left it. Some place with a creek. The old man sang the whole way, every mile, every song he knew, which was a great many songs and not one of them done well. He sang “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” four times running and got half the words wrong each time, different halves. By the second day Dunk would have paid a silver stag for silence. Ser Arlan just laughed and started on “Six Maids in a Pool.” He was worse at that one. Umber was bad, but the old man had been worse, and that was saying something.

He thought about Egg. The boy had not argued when Dunk told him to stay. That was worse than arguing. Dunk had been ready for shouting, for tears, for the kind of sulk that lasted three days and came with silence and slammed doors. Instead Egg just pulled his hat down and walked away, and the silence he left behind was the kind that meant . . . well. Dunk knew what it meant. The boy was angry. He’d get over it. Or he wouldn’t.

He would have clouted the boy in the ear if he’d pushed. He was glad he hadn’t had to.

Thunder stumbled on a root hidden in the mud and Dunk grabbed the pommel. The man with the cough hacked again behind him, louder this time. Nobody looked. One of the Umber men reined up, unlaced his breeches, and pissed from the saddle into the ditch without breaking stride. The steam rose off the mud. The man behind him cursed and pulled his horse wide.

“The real battle’s the one you don’t expect, lad.” The words came to him from somewhere: the old man, or someone like the old man, or a voice Dunk had made up and given to a dead man because a dead man couldn’t argue back. He didn’t know anymore. It didn’t matter. The battle ahead was the one he expected, and he was riding toward it, and that was enough.

The rain came harder. A rider in the rear of the column swore when his horse stumbled in a rut and nearly threw him. Umber finished his song about the sailor’s wife and started another one about a goat. This one was worse: it had a verse about what the goat did with the farmer’s wife, and another about what the farmer did when he caught them, and none of it bore repeating. Even the horses seemed to suffer.

“My first fight,” Umber said, unprompted, to no one in particular, “was a clansman with a stone axe. Up past the Last River. I was four-and-ten and big as a barn and the clansman was no bigger than a goat, and he near took my ear off.” He touched the side of his head. There was a notch in the ear, old and white. “I sat in the snow afterward and cried like a babe. My father kicked me until I stopped.”

“Did it work, m’lord?” Dunk asked.

“I stopped crying. Didn’t stop bleeding for another hour.”

Dunk’s horse shied at a puddle that had spread across the road. He pulled him straight. His numb fingers could barely feel the reins.

“Shut up and ride,” Arsa called back without turning. “Both of you.”

The old man had ridden through worse rain than this. Dunk could never keep the stories straight. It didn’t matter. The rain was real enough now . . .

They passed a collapsed stone wall, the stones green with lichen and scattered into the bracken. A dead tree stood alone in a field, split down the middle by lightning, its two halves leaning apart like a man who’d been cut in two and didn’t know it yet. Smoke rose from a crofter’s hut half a mile off the road, peat smoke, thin and brown, with a smell that carried. Nobody came out to see them pass. Nobody in the North came out to see anything, from what Dunk could tell.

Dunk wished for hot food. A bowl of something, anything: stew, porridge, he did not care. Something that had been near a fire. The salt beef was doing nothing for the cold in his chest.

“You fight well, for a woman.” Umber said it without preamble, looking at Arsa, the rain running down his beard and dripping off his chin.

Arsa did not look back. “You sing badly, for a man.”

Umber laughed. It was the first real laugh of the ride, a boom that rolled through the rain and made the nearest horse shy. “I like you, wolf-girl. You’ll do.”

“I’ll do what needs doing.” She reined up and stood in the stirrups, scanning the road ahead. The land was changing, flatter, wetter, the trees thinning out to scrubby brush and heath. The oaks had given way to twisted pines, then the pines to nothing at all, just brown grass bent flat by the wind and pools of standing water in every hollow. The air smelled different too: salt and rot and something cold underneath, like the sea had been dead a long time and its ghost was still hanging about. In the distance, grey and faint, a line that might have been the sea. “Torrhen’s Mill is three leagues on. We’ll be there by nightfall.”

Dunk flexed his fingers on the reins. His hands were numb and the leather was slippery with rain. His shield rode heavy on his back, the pine slick and dark with water. No sigil. No device. Just wood and a man behind it.

Behind them, the supply wagon creaked and groaned, its axle holding but only just. Inside the wagon, under a heap of canvas and salt beef and spare spear shafts, something shifted, but the rain was too loud and the wagon too noisy, and nobody heard it.

The road went west. The rain fell. The column rode on into the grey.

They smelled Torrhen’s Mill before they saw it.

Smoke. Not cook-fire smoke, the heavy black smoke of things that were not meant to burn. Thatch and timber and wool and flesh. It came from the west on the sea wind, thick enough to taste, and the horses did not like it. Thunder tossed his head and blew hard. Two of the Umber horses tried to stop, and their riders had to kick them forward.

The village was past a low rise of scrubland and gorse, set in a curve of the coast where a mill stream emptied into the sea. From the crest of the rise Dunk could see what was left of it. Six cottages, maybe eight. Hard to tell, because three were still burning and two were ash and one had no roof. The mill itself was a stone shell with flames licking from the windows. A longship was beached in the shallows, its dragon prow jutting from the surf. Another was anchored offshore, dark against the grey water.

A door hung from a single hinge on the nearest cottage, swinging in the wind, banging against the frame. The sound carried up the rise, a slow, stupid thud, over and over. In the mud between the cottages lay a dead goat, bloated, its legs stiff. Fishing nets had been dragged from somewhere and tangled in the gorse along the waterline, snarled with seaweed and scraps of cloth. A child’s wooden horse, no bigger than Dunk’s fist, sat upright in a puddle near the road.

The bodies were by the millstream. A woman’s hand, palm up, white fingers spread, reaching for nothing. An overturned cart with its wheel still turning, slow and pointless. A man face-down in the shallows with an axe wound that had opened him from shoulder to hip. Dunk did not count them. He looked, and then he stopped looking, because looking did nothing for the dead and he needed his eyes for the living.

“Thirty,” Arsa said from beside him. She had her half-helm on and her shield up and she was counting the ironborn like a butcher counting carcasses. “Thirty, might be more. Two crews.”

Umber did not count. Umber drew his axe and gave a roar that scattered the gulls off the beach, and spurred his destrier down the slope. His men followed. The column broke apart like a fist opening its fingers.

Dunk jammed his greathelm on. The world shrank. The helm cut his vision to a slot, and the sound went strange: muffled, hollow, his own breathing loud and close. The nasal guard bisected everything. He could see the burning cottages, the beach, the ironborn turning to face them, but only in pieces. The slot showed him one thing at a time.

He drew his sword and kicked Thunder into a canter.

The ironborn were not what he expected.

He had fought tourney knights and hedge knights and men-at-arms and once a puppeteer’s champion made of wood and paint. The ironborn were none of those. They wore furs and salt-stained leather and halfhelms with noseguards, and they carried axes, short-hafted, single-bitted, the kind made for hooking a shield and ripping it away. They moved wrong. Not wrong. Different. Low, loose, ready to go in any direction. They did not stand in lines. They did not hold positions. They came at you from the sides.

The first one came at Dunk from the left. He caught the axe on his shield, the impact went through his arm and into his shoulder and the pine cracked but held, and he swung his longsword in a flat arc that should have taken the man in the neck. The ironborn ducked. He DUCKED. The sword went over him and Dunk’s momentum carried him half out of the saddle, and by the time he got himself straight the man was gone, rolling under Thunder’s legs, and Thunder reared and came down hard on frozen mud.

Dunk the lunk. He had swung for a man he assumed was slow. The man in furs was big, as wide as Dunk through the shoulders, with a braided beard and arms like boat timbers, and big men were slow. Everyone knew that. Big men were slow because big men were heavy and heavy men could not move fast.

This one moved fast.

He came again from the right, inside Thunder’s reach, and the axe bit into Dunk’s shield arm above the elbow. The pain was white and sudden and he heard himself yell, a stupid sound, not a battle cry, just a man who had been cut, and the blood came hot and fast, running down his forearm into his glove.

He dropped the shield. He could not hold it. The pine panel fell into the mud, blank face down, and the ironborn stepped on it as he came for the killing stroke.

Dunk caught the axe on his sword. Steel on iron, a shriek that hurt his teeth. The man was strong, the blow drove Dunk’s blade back toward his own face, but Dunk was stronger. He was always stronger. He shoved the axe aside and brought his pommel around into the man’s mouth. Teeth broke. The ironborn went down. Dunk hit him again because the first time was not enough, and then he was past, and Thunder was carrying him into the smoke, and there were more of them, always more.

The fight became pieces.

An ironborn with a spear, jabbing at Thunder’s chest. Dunk cut the spear shaft and the man’s hand with it. A cottage wall collapsing in a shower of sparks. The smoke rolled through and Dunk lost sight of everything for three heartbeats, four, and when the wind shifted he was in a different part of the village and could not have said how he got there. An ironborn grabbed Thunder’s reins, a wiry man, bald, salt sores on his face, and tried to haul the horse sideways. Dunk kicked him in the chest. The man went down and Thunder trampled him and Dunk did not look back.

He could not find Arsa. The helm slot showed him burning thatch, a riderless horse running in circles with its stirrups flapping, two Umber men hacking at an ironborn who was already down. He heard Umber’s roar from somewhere, behind, ahead, he couldn’t tell, the smoke turned everything around. A horse went down screaming to his right, an ugly sound, worse than a man’s scream because the horse had done nothing to earn it. Its rider was pinned under it, crawling, dragging a leg that bent wrong.

Umber somewhere to the left now, his axe rising and falling, roaring something about the Umbers and Last Hearth. Arsa on foot, she had lost her horse or left it, moving between two ironborn so fast Dunk could barely follow. She went low and her blade went up, through the gap between a man’s arm and his ribs, and the man folded over her sword like wet cloth. She pulled the blade free and turned for the next one without stopping.

She was no knight. She was better than any knight Dunk had ever seen, and he had seen Prince Baelor at Ashford.

Something hit him in the back. Not hard, a glancing blow, an axe that had been aimed at his spine and struck the mail instead. He turned and the ironborn was already gone, ducking under Thunder’s belly, and Dunk could not reach him. He could feel the bruise forming under the mail, a hot spot between his shoulder blades. His arm was still bleeding. His shield was gone. The helm was full of sweat and smoke and his own ragged breathing.

A scream. Not a man’s scream, high and thin and young. Dunk turned in the saddle and the helm’s slot showed him Umber with his back to the surf and an ironborn coming at him from behind, axe raised, and between them a boy, small, dark-haired, ten years old, standing on the supply wagon with a broken spear shaft in his hand and his mouth open.

“BEHIND YOU!”

Umber turned. The axe came down where his head had been and hit his shoulder instead, a glancing blow that staggered him but did not drop him. Umber brought his own axe around in a backhand that took the ironborn’s legs out from under him. The man fell screaming. Umber finished him.

Then Umber saw Artos.

“WHO BROUGHT THIS CHILD?”

Nobody answered because nobody had. The boy had brought himself, in the supply wagon, under the canvas and the salt beef and the spare spear shafts, for three leagues in the cold rain.

Artos stood on the wagon with his broken spear shaft and his leather pouch at his hip and his grey eyes wide. He was shaking. He was not crying.

The fight was ending. It ended not all at once but in pieces, like the fight itself. One ironborn threw down his axe and ran. Then two more. Then a knot of them broke from behind the mill and went for the longship in the shallows, splashing through the surf, throwing weapons, climbing the sides. An Umber man cut one down in the water and the sea turned pink around him. Some of the other Umber men followed into the surf and there was ugly work done there, waist-deep in the cold sea, but Dunk did not follow. His arm was bleeding and his shield was gone and his head hurt from the helm and he could not lift his sword above his shoulder.

He slid from Thunder’s back and sat down in the mud. His mouth was dry as dust and his tongue felt thick. One of Umber’s men came past and held out a waterskin. Dunk took it and drank. The water was warm and tasted of old leather, but it was wet and he drank until the man pulled it back. The horse stood over him, breathing hard, his flanks heaving. Blood on his hooves. Not his. Dunk looked at his arm. The cut was long, from above the elbow nearly to the wrist, and the sleeve of his mail was sliced through. The blood was slowing now, going thick and dark. His glove was slippery with it. When he made a fist the blood squeezed between his fingers. The pain had changed: not the sharp white thing it was when the axe bit, but a heavy dull weight that sat in the bone and would not move. It would need sewing. He pressed his hand over the worst of it and watched the village burn.

The old man had taken a wound like this once, near Dorne. Or was it the Reach? Dunk could not remember. The old man survived that one. He’d wrapped it in a strip torn from his cloak and ridden two more days before he found a maester to sew it, and the maester said he should have come sooner. Ser Arlan laughed at that.

Six cottages. Maybe eight. The survivors were coming out now: from behind the mill, from a ditch beyond the road, from a root cellar whose door was half-buried in ash. An old man with burns on his hands came out first. He looked at the Umber riders and the dead ironborn in the mud. “Thank you,” he said. Then he spat. His house was ash. The thanks and the spit cost him the same. A woman carrying a baby came after, and she held the baby so tight the child was screaming, red-faced, furious, and the woman would not let go. She could not let go. Near the ditch, a girl sat in the ash with her shift torn open and her arms around her knees and her eyes looking at nothing. A man sat beside her, rocking. His right hand ended at the wrist in a stump wrapped in a rag already soaked through. Dunk looked and then he looked away, because some things you saw once and carried forever. Two children, maybe three. They looked at the dead ironborn and the Northern riders and the burning mill and their faces were blank.

The people they saved. A handful. The people who had died before they arrived. More. Dunk could see them in the mud by the millstream, and in the road, and by the cottage with the door that was still banging on its hinge . . . He did not count them. Counting would make it real.

The village had had a name. He did not know it. It had had a name and a mill and a fishing fleet and children who played with wooden horses, and now it was smoke and mud and a woman who would not put her baby down. The ironborn had come for salt fish and timber and whatever else they could carry. They took what they wanted and burned the rest. But what Dunk noticed most was what was missing. The old women were here. The children were here. The young women were not. The boats were gone. The smith’s tools were gone. The krakens had taken the strong and the young and the fair, and left the rest to starve or freeze or find their way to Winterfell. An old woman sat on the ground beside the ditch, dry-eyed, staring at the sea. Her daughter was on one of those longships. She did not say it. She did not need to.

What good was a knight who came too late?

The smoke rose. The surf washed the beach. An Umber man sat in the shallows, holding his side, coughing red. Another was pulling a dead ironborn through the mud by his ankles, leaving a dark trail. A third stood over a body and did not move, just stood, his sword hanging from his hand. He had a look on his face that Dunk had seen before, on men who had killed for the first time and did not know yet whether to be sick or proud. Arsa was cleaning her blade on a dead man’s fur. She had a cut on her cheek, a thin line of blood, and she had not noticed or did not care. Artos had climbed down from the wagon and was walking through the wreckage. He bent and picked something from the ground, a hinge, or a nail, or a bit of iron chain, and put it in his pouch. His hands were steady now.

Two gulls were fighting over a fish head near the waterline, screaming at each other, stabbing with their beaks. A crab crawled sideways across the wet sand below them, slow and careful, going about its business as if none of this had happened. The longship rocked in the shallows, empty now, its oars shipped, bumping against the sand with each small wave. Bump. Bump. Bump. Dunk watched it. He watched the gulls and the crab and the longship and the smoke going up, and he pressed his hand against his wound, and he said nothing to anyone.

The ride back was slower than the ride out.

They had left one man dead at the village, a big Umber rider named Gared, who took an ironborn axe through the collarbone and bled out in the surf before anyone could reach him. They loaded his body across a bay mare that did not want the weight. The horse shied and stamped and had to be held by two men while a third heaved Gared’s body over the saddle. Blood ran down the stirrup leather and dripped into the mud. The man who tied the ropes had Gared’s blood on his hands and wiped them on his breeches, and the stain stayed. Two more were wounded badly enough to be strapped across their saddles. Dunk’s arm was the third-worst injury. It would not kill him. It just hurt. One of Umber’s men had found his shield in the mud near the millstream and strapped it to a packhorse. The pine was gouged and cracked at the rim but it had held. Still blank. Still his.

The column stank. Twenty men who had been fighting smelled different from twenty men who had been riding. The sweat was sharper, sour with fear, and underneath it was blood and horse and the iron tang of mail worn too long against wet skin. Gared’s body on the bay mare ahead had its own smell already, though the cold was slowing it. Wounds stank. Dead men stank worse. Dunk breathed through his mouth and tried not to think about it.

The night was clear and cold and full of stars. The rain had passed while they were fighting, and the sky had opened up, scattered with more stars than Dunk had ever seen. There were no stars like this in King’s Landing. Too much smoke, too many torches, too many people. Here the sky went on forever, and the stars were close enough to touch, if a man could reach that high.

He could not reach that high. He could barely hold his reins. His left arm was bandaged from above the elbow to the wrist, the cloth already stiff with dried blood. The cut throbbed with each beat of Thunder’s hooves, a dull pulse that went worse when the road was rough and better when it was smooth and never stopped.

There was more. A bruise across his ribs where a blow had been turned by mail, already going green at the edges. A raw scrape where the gorget had bitten into his neck. His right hand was a claw. The fingers had locked around the sword grip and did not want to uncurl.

Someone passed a waterskin up the column. Dunk took it and drank. The water tasted like leather and was nearly gone. A mouthful, two, and the skin went flat. He passed it back.

Arsa rode beside him. She had not said much since the fight. A few orders to the men, a word to Umber about the route, nothing else. The blood on her sword had dried to a brown crust and she had not cleaned it yet. Her face was dark under her half-helm and she rode easy in the saddle, loose and balanced, as if the killing had cost her nothing. But her hands were tight on the reins, and every few minutes her eyes went to a rider ahead of them, one of Umber’s men, young, broad-shouldered, riding with his helm off and his hair wet from the sea. She looked at him and looked away. Looked again and looked away. Dunk saw it. He said nothing. There were things you saw and kept, and things you asked about, and a man learned the difference or he learned to eat his teeth.

After an hour she pulled her horse alongside Thunder and looked at his arm. “Let me see that.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. Hold still.” She leaned from her saddle and unwound the bandage with rough, quick fingers. The cold hit the wound and Dunk hissed. She peeled the cloth back and studied the cut by starlight, turning his arm without gentleness. Her hands were callused and competent, the hands of a woman who sewed men as easily as she sewed cloth, if she sewed cloth at all, which Dunk doubted.

Her fingers on the wound were not gentle. Other hands had been gentle with him. Long-fingered hands, a painter’s hands, at Ashford, in a tent that smelled of linseed oil and pigment . . . His own hand tightened on the reins and Thunder snorted.

“Stop squirming.” Arsa was wrapping a fresh strip of linen around his arm, pulling it tight. “You’re worse than Artos.”

“He’s ten.”

“Aye. He squirms less.” She tied the knot and gave his arm a pat that was more slap than comfort. “It needs sewing. The maester can do it when we’re back. Don’t use that arm till then.”

“I’ll try not to joust anyone on the way home.”

She almost smiled. Almost. The half-helm hid most of it, but the corner of her mouth moved.

They rode. Umber was ahead with his men, a dark mass of horses and iron against the stars. He was not singing. That was how Dunk knew the big man was tired. When Umber stopped singing, something was wrong. One of his riders had Artos on his horse, the boy slumped against the man’s chest, asleep. He had fought sleep for the first hour, sitting straight on a borrowed saddle with his jaw set and his eyes open, until exhaustion took him mid-stride and he sagged like a sack of grain. The soldier had caught him without breaking pace and pulled the boy across his lap, and Artos had not woken.

Arsa was looking at the sleeping boy. “He shouted that warning.”

“Aye.”

Thunder stumbled on a rut and Dunk grabbed the pommel. The jolt went through his bad arm and he bit down on nothing.

“Umber would be dead without it,” Arsa said.

“Aye.” Dunk shifted in the saddle. His back was stiff and his legs ached from gripping the horse and the cold was in his bones and would not come out.

“He’ll be something, that one.”

Dunk looked at Artos, small, filthy, his face slack with sleep, his leather pouch pressed between his hip and the soldier’s leg. He had brought himself to a battle in a supply wagon and saved a lord with a shout and a broken spear shaft. Before sleep took him, the boy had walked among the dead at Torrhen’s Mill, looking at their faces one by one, and Dunk had not seen him flinch. “He’s ten.”

“That’s when it starts.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. The horses walked. The stars turned. An owl called from somewhere in the dark, a low, hollow sound. Another answered from farther off, higher pitched, and for a moment the two of them went back and forth, calling and answering, patient as old women at a market stall. Dunk watched the dark where the sound came from. He had watched owls once, in the Kingswood. Or was it the Rainwood? Somewhere with trees. They had enormous eyes and they turned their heads all the way around, which was a thing he’d rather not think about.

Egg would have known what kind of owls they were. The boy would want to hear about the fight when they got back. He’d ask a hundred questions, how many ironborn, how big, what weapons, how did it feel. Dunk would threaten to clout him in the ear . . . and Egg would ask the hundred-and-first.

The bay mare carrying Gared’s body had fallen behind the column. Gared’s face was waxen and gray. Cold dead did not turn green like summer dead, it just went pale and hard and still. The blood had settled into the lowest parts of his body, pooled and darkened under the skin. His fingers had curled into claws. One of Umber’s men rode back to lead the mare forward. The horse tossed her head and the body shifted on the saddle, one arm swinging loose.

“You’re a good fighter, ser.”

Dunk looked at her. The starlight caught her half-helm and the thin scar from her ear to her jaw. “I’m a knight, m’lady. It’s what I do.”

“Aye,” she said. A pause. “And I’m a wolf. Same thing, different words.”

Same thing, different words. He turned it over. Might be she was right. His arm hurt and the road was dark and he was too tired to argue with it.

The old man would have liked her. Or would he? Dunk did not know what the old man thought of women who carried swords. He had never asked.

Later, when the road was dark and the column was quiet, he thought about how she had moved in the fight, low and fast, the blade part of her arm. He thought about her forearms and the sweat on her collar and the scar at her jaw. The thought came and he did not push it away fast enough. His ears went warm in the dark.

His arm throbbed. The mail on the left side was ruined, sliced clean through, the links gaping where the axe had bitten. Good mail, or it had been. He could not afford new links. He could not afford anything. One copper in his purse and a sliced hauberk and a cracked shield and winter coming on. A hedge knight’s fortune.

The road turned south. In the distance, pale against the dark sky, a column of steam rose from the earth. Winterfell.

They rode toward it, and the stars turned overhead, and the owl called once more and was silent.

Egg was waiting at the gate when they rode in.

The boy did not run. He did not call out. He took Thunder’s reins from Dunk before Dunk had both feet on the ground, quick and quiet, as he always did, a good squire, quick and quiet. He led the horse toward the stables without a word. But his eyes had gone to the bandage on Dunk’s arm, and stayed there, and his hands on the reins were not steady.

Dunk followed him to the stable. Egg unsaddled Thunder and checked his hooves and filled the feed bag and did everything a good squire does, and he did not speak. His face was closed tight. His jaw was set.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Dunk said.

Egg hung the saddle on its peg. “The maester needs to see it.”

“Aye.”

“Fourteen stitches, the Umber man told me. He rode ahead.” Egg was brushing Thunder now, short hard strokes, not looking at Dunk. “He said you lost your shield.”

“I got it back.”

“He said an ironborn nearly took your arm off.”

“He was exaggerating.”

Egg stopped brushing. He stood there with his hand on Thunder’s flank, and his face was tight, and then his chin trembled, once, and he pressed his lips together, and he said, “You could have died, ser.”

“I didn’t.”

“You could have. And I was here. Sitting on a barrel. Waiting.” His voice was steady but his eyes were not. “I’m your squire, ser. You should have let me come.”

He had left the boy behind because axes and twelve-year-old boys did not go well together. He did not say that. He put his good hand on the boy’s bald head and left it there a moment, and Egg’s eyes closed, and neither of them said anything.

“Come on,” Dunk said. “I need the maester, and you need your hat. You’ll freeze.”

Egg put his hat on. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, quickly, as if it hadn’t happened. Then he fell into step beside Dunk, close enough that their elbows bumped, and that was all right. That was enough.

They held the second council the morning after.

The Great Hall had been cleaned: fresh rushes on the floor, the torches replaced, the dogs chased out. Beeswax candles burned on the high table, and the cold morning light came through the high windows in long pale shafts that found the dust and made it glow. It looked almost like a proper hall of state, if you did not notice the mud stains on the stone where the wounded rider had collapsed days before, or the Umber man in the corner with his arm in a sling and a look on his face like he wanted to hit someone.

Dunk sat on his bench against the wall. His arm throbbed under the bandage. The maester had sewn it the night before, fourteen stitches, each one a small bright agony, and told him not to use it for a fortnight. The stitches pulled when he breathed. He had his shield arm propped on his knee and his good hand flat on the bench, and he was not going to open his mouth. He had learned that much.

The She-Wolves took their places. Lorra in Beron’s chair, wearing the same dark grey, the embroidery in her lap, the same half-finished flower she had been working on when she recruited him. Her needle moved but her eyes were on the room. Serena in her wooden chair, unchanged. Between them, a carved wooden wolf sat on the council table. Serena had placed it there, gently, before anyone else arrived. It was the size of a fist, pale wood, its snout raised.

Alys sat by the fire. She was not eating, not knitting, not telling stories. She sat with her cane in her lap and her bright eyes moving from face to face, and he had never seen her sit this still. The old woman was ready.

Myriame was eating. She had a plate of sugared almonds balanced on the arm of her chair and she was eating them one at a time, delicately, with two fingers. She had put on rings. Every finger glittered.

Arsa stood by the door. She had not taken off her armor.

Donnor sat at the high table in the lord’s chair that Lorra had vacated for him. She stood behind him now, a hand on his shoulder. The boy looked small in the chair. His feet did not quite reach the floor. His hands gripped the direwolf armrests, and his knuckles were white, and he was trying very hard to sit up straight. He was trying so hard it hurt to look at him.

Alys spoke first.

“We have buried a man named Gared.” Her voice was low and clear. “We have wounded men in the yard. The ironborn are beaten at Torrhen’s Mill, but they will come again. The Stony Shore is not defended. The Wall needs men. Last Hearth needs its lord.” She looked at Umber. “And Winterfell needs a Stark.”

For a moment, nobody argued. The fighting had burned the argument out of them. Then Serena broke the silence.

“My grandsons have Stark blood. They have Umber blood and Cerwyn blood and the blood of the First Men. Donnor is a boy who reads books.” She said it flat, like a woman who has said a thing a hundred times. Behind her, her grandsons stood with their arms crossed, the Umber one broad and bearded though he could not have been past twenty, the Cerwyn one thinner, with a whittling knife in his belt and sawdust on his sleeves. The Umber grandson’s hand drifted to his sword hilt. Umber saw it. He crossed the room in three strides and clapped the boy on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. The hand came off the hilt.

“The law gives Winterfell to Donnor,” Alys said, as if Serena had not spoken. “The blood gives it to Serena’s grandsons. Both claims have merit. Neither claim will hold without the other’s consent.”

A draft came through the hall and the torch by the door bent sideways. Dunk shifted on the bench.

“Then give the boy a regent and let Donnor rule in name.” Lorra’s needle stopped. “My son is the heir. The law is clear. A regent, myself, or the council, to guide him, but the authority must be his.”

“Authority.” Serena’s mouth thinned. “What authority? He cannot speak a sentence in front of ten men.”

Lorra’s face went white. Her needle went through the fabric and her knuckle with it. A bead of blood appeared on her finger and she did not look at it.

“The treasury,” Myriame said, still eating. She picked up another almond, turned it between her fingers, and bit it in half. “If we are discussing authority, perhaps we should discuss what it costs. The North’s coffers are not what they were.”

The Cerwyn grandson was picking at a heel of bread, tearing it into small pieces and dropping them on the floor. He did not seem to know he was doing it.

A minor lord at the back, the one from some river holding whose sigil Dunk had never learned, stood up and said something about the ironborn raiding the Stony Shore and what was anyone going to do about it. Nobody answered him. He stood there for a moment and sat down.

Dunk’s wound throbbed under the bandage. A dog scratched at the hall door, wanting in. The scratching went on and on. Nobody let it in. A candle guttered on the high table and the light shifted and Donnor’s shadow on the wall behind him grew and shrank and grew again. The boy had not spoken. His knuckles were still white on the armrests.

“We have seen what happens when the wolves fight each other.” Alys tapped her cane on the stone, once. The sound carried. The dog stopped scratching. “So we will not fight.”

She laid it out. Donnor inherits. The law is satisfied. But the real power flows to a council, and after that Dunk lost the thread because his arm was itching under the bandage and he scratched at it and missed whoever was getting what, and by the time he caught up again Cerwyn had the timber and Myriame had her dowry and Arsa had a command of her own and he was not sure how they’d got there.

Lords fight with words and hedge knights fight with swords. The old man had said that. Or something near it. Dunk could not remember the exact words, only the shape of them. The old man sitting by a fire somewhere, wine on his breath, talking about lords like a farrier talks about horses. It did not matter. The words were close enough.

The fire popped again. Someone’s stomach growled, the minor lord, or one of his men. Nobody had eaten a proper meal since the ride.

“And the Manderly dowry,” Myriame said, not looking up from her almonds. “I trust that will be settled.”

“It will.” Alys did not smile. “White Harbor’s gold will be returned, with interest. The North can afford to pay its debts, if the North survives long enough to pay them.”

Myriame popped an almond into her mouth. She did not object. Her letters had done their work. Manderly money had been part of the reckoning all along, and everyone in the room knew it, and Myriame knew they knew, and she ate her almonds and said nothing more.

Serena’s face was stone. Her grandsons stood behind her, arms crossed, the elder Stark blood in their veins giving them a claim she had spent decades building. She had not won. Donnor would sit the seat. Her line would not.

But Umber was staying. The coastal defense was real. The council gave her a voice she had never had under Beron. And her grandsons were young, and Donnor was weak, and the carved wolf on the table would still be there in ten years . . . or twenty . . . waiting.

“I accept,” Serena said. Her voice gave away nothing. She placed one hand on the carved wolf and left it there.

Then Alys turned to Willam.

The boy was sitting on the bench below the windows, his grey dog at his feet. He had been quiet through all of it, the terms, the arguments, the almonds. His hunting knife was on his belt and his hands were still. He was thirteen years old, and every person in the room had been thinking about him for weeks, and nobody had asked him what he wanted.

“Donnor is your brother,” Alys said. Her voice had changed. Not louder, softer. “And your lord. Will you serve him?”

The room went quiet. Someone coughed, the Cerwyn grandson, or one of his men, and the sound died in the rafters. The candle flames did not move. Even Myriame stopped chewing.

Willam did not answer. He sat on the bench and looked at the floor. His dog looked up at him. The dog’s tail moved once, a slow sweep across the stone, and stopped. Willam put his hand on the dog’s head and left it there. A breath. Two. The fire cracked and settled.

Then he stood. Slowly, like a man who has decided something and is not going to hurry. He looked at Donnor, his thin, pale, older brother, sitting in a chair too large for him with his feet not touching the floor and his knuckles white on the armrests. The boy who read books at his dying father’s bedside.

Willam walked to the high table. His boots on the stone were the only sound, each step landing flat and steady, the gait of a boy who moved like a man grown. The hall was not large but the walk was long. His dog rose and followed, nails clicking on the stone. He stopped in front of the chair and looked at Donnor’s face, and Donnor looked back, and Dunk could not have said what passed between the brothers.

Willam knelt.

“I will.”

Two words. His voice did not shake. His dog sat beside him and put its head on its paws. The boy’s face was still. He did not look at anyone but Donnor.

The room was quiet. Dunk’s stomach growled, loud enough that the Cerwyn grandson glanced at him.

Dunk watched from his bench against the wall. His throat was tight.

Willam rose and put his hand on Donnor’s shoulder, briefly, the way you’d steady a horse that was about to shy. Donnor flinched, then didn’t. The dog sat between them and looked from one brother to the other.

Umber was silent. His great arms hung at his sides and his mouth was closed, which was not a thing Dunk had seen often. He caught Dunk’s eye across the hall and gave a short nod. Dunk nodded back. “M’lord,” he said, low enough that only the big man heard. The Cerwyn grandson had stopped whittling. The shaving was still curled around his blade.

Lorra was crying. Not loud, just tears, running down her face, and no sound at all. The embroidery slid from her lap and fell to the floor. The half-finished flower, white petals on blue linen, the same piece she had been working on since Dunk first saw her. It lay on the fresh rushes, unfinished.

Serena’s mouth curved. Not a smile. Thinner than that, and sharper. She touched the carved wolf on the table with one finger.

At the back of the hall, a servant dropped a cup. The clatter on the stone was loud as a sword stroke and everyone in the room flinched, Dunk, the lords, even Alys, who gripped her cane and then relaxed. The servant knelt and picked the cup up and backed away, white-faced. The moment held. Then it broke. Chairs scraped. Voices came, low and careful. The Umber men moved toward the door. Myriame brushed almond dust from her rings. A steward came forward with a ledger. The business of a castle that had decided something and must now live with it.

No one cheered. No one looked satisfied. He tried to work out who had won and who had lost, and gave up before he started. Egg would have understood it. Egg would have explained it to him with that look on his face, the one that said you should know this already, ser, and Dunk would have clouted him in the ear for it, and the boy would have been right. He was a hedge knight. This was lords’ work.

He did not see it. Not yet. But he saw Donnor, still in the chair, still gripping the armrests, and he said, “M’lord,” because the boy was a lord now, and someone ought to say it like they meant it.

Near the door, the thin man in black was pulling on his gloves. He had the young soldier with him, the deserter, pale and quiet, his wrists bound with rope. Halmund caught Dunk’s eye and nodded.

“The Wall always gets what’s owed, ser.”

“Aye,” Dunk said. He watched them go. He did not envy the deserter, but he did not pity him either. A man made his choices.

He walked out into the snow. The deserter went with him. The door closed behind them, and the cold air that had come through lingered for a moment, and then the hall was warm again.

A Northern lord, the one with the bear on his cloak, whose name Dunk had never learned, clapped a hand on Dunk’s shoulder as he passed. “You’ve been a good guest, ser.” He said it plain, but the words had a weight to them. The bread and salt was finished. The chain was off.

“Thank you, m’lord,” Dunk said.

The steward Harwin found him after. He had a purse, small, leather, heavy for its size. “From the Stark treasury,” Harwin said, with the expression of a man handing over his own teeth. “For the fight at Torrhen’s Mill. Don’t spend it all in one place.” Dunk opened it. Silver. Four stags and a handful of coppers. More money than he’d had since Ashford. “My thanks,” he said. Harwin grunted and went back to counting fish.

Four stags. He could get his mail mended for that, or buy a proper cloak, or eat a hot meal at a real inn with ale that didn’t taste of dishwater. He could not do all three. He sat there working the numbers and getting them wrong and working them again.

Dunk sat on his bench and watched the She-Wolves of Winterfell accept what had been decided, and the candles burned, and outside the snow kept falling.

They sent for Dunk in the middle of the night.

He did not know why. He was not family. He was not a lord, not a maester, not a septon. He was a hedge knight from Flea Bottom with a sewn-up arm and no business in a dying man’s chamber. But the servant came, and the servant said come, and Dunk came.

The corridor was warm and still. The stone was warm under his hand when he steadied himself against it. His boots were loud on the floor, too loud, the heavy thud of a big man in a quiet place. A torch guttered in its sconce as he passed, throwing his shadow long and crooked against the wall. The castle was dead quiet. No dogs, no servants calling, no sound from the yard.

The room was the same as before. The same warm walls, the same beeswax candles, the same smell of vinegar and poultice and something underneath that was past treating. The maester was in the corner, his chain still, his hands still, his face the face of a man who had done everything he could and knew it was not enough. He did not look up.

Lorra sat on the left side of the bed, holding her husband’s hand. She had been crying, her eyes were red and swollen, but she was not crying now. She was past that. She had cried herself out. Now she was just sitting. Her embroidery was gone. She had not brought it.

Alys sat on the right, wrapped in her furs. The cane rested on her knee. She was not speaking, not telling stories, not giving advice. She was sitting with a son who was dying, and she was not going to look away.

Donnor was at the table by the window. His books were open. The same books, the same ones that had been open the first time he entered this room, weeks ago. Donnor had never closed them. He had been searching for something in those pages, a remedy, a cure, a name for what was killing his father, and he had not found it, and he had not stopped looking. His hands were flat on the table and his eyes were on the pages and he was not reading.

A candle flame bent in some draft Dunk could not feel, and the shadows on the wall shifted and settled.

Berena was on the bed. She had climbed up beside her father and curled against his side, her small body pressed to his, her face hidden. A crown of dried flowers lay on the pillow near Beron’s head, wildflowers, woven clumsily, the petals brown and curling. She had made it for him. It had been fresh once.

Egg stood near the door. He had come with Dunk, or before him. Dunk was not sure. The boy was still and quiet and his hat was in his hands.

Beron breathed. The sound filled the room, a thin, dry rattle, steady as a clock that was winding down. It had not changed since the first time Dunk heard it. In and out. In and out. The candles burned and the walls were warm and the lord of Winterfell breathed his slow, rattling breath, and everyone in the room listened to it because there was nothing else to listen to and because they knew it would stop.

Dunk stood at the foot of the bed. He did not know where else to stand. He was too large for this room, too rough, too much of the outside in a place that had shrunk to the space between one breath and the next. His arm ached under the bandage. His boots had mud on them from the yard. He should have cleaned them. It seemed wrong to bring mud into a room where a man was dying. There was a crack in the plaster near the ceiling, thin and branching, like a river on a map if maps were made of plaster. The bedpost was dark wood, knotted, with a gouge near the top that might have been made by a ring or a belt buckle. A candle flame bent when the maester shifted his weight, then straightened. Dunk looked at these things because he could not look at the bed. Ser Arlan had died on a hillside somewhere in the Reach, slow and quiet. Dunk had woken and the old man was cold and still, and the birds were singing, and that was the whole of it. He had seen men die before, on the road, in the lists, in the dirt outside an inn whose name he . . . but this was different. This was slow.

Beron’s eyes opened.

They moved around the room, slow, clouded, finding each face and losing it. Lorra. Alys. Donnor at his table. Berena pressed against his ribs. They found Dunk last.

His lips moved. A sound came out, not a word, not quite. A shape of a word, formed by a mouth that had almost forgotten how. Dunk leaned closer. The sound came again. It might have been Donnor. It might have been Willam. It might have been winter, or just the rattle of a chest that was giving up its air.

Dunk heard it. He was the closest. He would never tell anyone what it sounded like, and because it wasn’t his to tell.

Beron’s eyes closed. His chest rose once more. And then it didn’t.

The breathing had stopped, and the room was too quiet.

Lorra said his name. “Beron.” Just that. Not a cry, not a wail. His name, spoken to a man who could no longer hear it, because she needed to say it one more time.

Alys reached across the bed and placed her gnarled hand over Lorra’s. “He’s gone, child.” Her voice was steady. She had buried two lords of Winterfell before this one. She would not bury another. “He’s gone.”

Berena began to cry. A thin, high sound, muffled by her father’s side. She did not lift her face.

Donnor had not moved. His hands were on the table, flat on the open books. His eyes were on the pages. He was Lord of Winterfell now. The words the council had spoken and the knee his brother had bent had been words and gestures for a living lord’s succession. This was the thing itself. His father was dead and the seat was his and the books were still open.

There should be a septon. There should be silent sisters to wash the body and bind the jaw, and candles, and a crystal held over the breast. Lorra’s septon was somewhere in the castle, but this was not a death for the Seven. There were no silent sisters in Winterfell and no anointing oils. The Northerners did not embalm their dead. Beron would go to the crypts, where a stonemason would carve his likeness in granite and an iron sword would be laid across his stone knees, and that would be all. No prayers. No songs. Just stone and iron and the silence of the old gods.

Dunk knelt. His left knee complained and his right followed. The stone was hard under them, but warm. The stone warm beneath him, even here, even now. His arm pulled where the stitches were. There was probably something a knight was meant to do at a lord’s deathbed. A prayer, a gesture, some ritual the old man had never taught him. He knelt because kneeling was all he had.

“M’lord.” His voice was rough. He cleared his throat. “M’lord.”

It was not enough. It was never going to be enough. He wondered if anyone had fed Maester. The mule would be standing in his stall with his ears flat, waiting, and nobody would think to feed him because nobody thought about mules when lords were dying.

All men must die. The old man used to say that, or something like it. Dunk could not remember the words exactly. He could remember the sound of the old man’s voice, though, rough and dry, and the way he would cough after he said it and spit and say something about his knees.

He stayed on his knees until Lorra rose, and Alys rose, and the maester came forward with a cloth to cover the lord’s face. Then he stood, and his left knee cracked, and Berena flinched at the sound, and he walked out of the room and down the warm corridor and into the cold night air, and he breathed.

He was halfway across the yard before he knew where he was going.

He had not planned it. He had not slept, had sat on the edge of his bed in the Guest House through the dark hours, listening to Egg breathe and to the wind and to the sound of a castle in mourning, which was no sound at all. The room was too warm. The hot-spring floors did that, pushed heat up through the stone until the air sat heavy on his chest. Egg’s breathing was slow and even, the breathing of a boy who could sleep through anything. Dunk’s stomach was empty and his eyes were gritty and every time he closed them he saw Gared’s body going across the saddle, the arm swinging loose. The floor ticked as the stone cooled and warmed and cooled again.

When the first grey light came through the shutters he stood up and pulled on his boots and walked out into the frost. The cold hit his face and he stood in the yard for a moment, blinking. Frost covered the stones, white and thin. A single torch burned by the stable gate, guttering in some wind he could not feel. Nobody else was awake. The castle was still.

The iron gate was cold under his hand. It groaned when he pushed it, and the sound ran through the godswood and died. Inside, the air was still. The ground was pale with it, the leaf mold stiff, cracking under his boots. His breath came in clouds. The wound in his arm ached, a dull steady pull that went worse with every step, and his left knee clicked.

The heart tree was where he had left it.

That was a stupid thought. Trees did not move. But the godswood felt different at dawn than it had at dusk. The red leaves were lit from behind by the first light, not glowing like embers this time but thin, like blood held up to a candle. The white bark was grey in the half-light. The face was in shadow, the long mouth dark, the eyes darker. The black pool at the tree’s feet reflected nothing. No leaves, no sky. Just black.

He stood before it. The third time. He had not come here to pray. He did not know how to pray to a tree, and he suspected the tree did not care. He had come because nobody was here. That was good enough.

His legs gave. Not dramatically, his left knee buckled, the one that clicked, and he went down on both knees in the frost and the leaf mold and stayed there because getting up seemed like a lot of effort. The cold soaked through his breeches. His arm throbbed. He was tired in a way that sleep would not fix. Tired of the castle and the women and the dead lord upstairs and the boy who was now lord and the ironborn and the mud and the blood and the argument that never ended. Tired of councils.

The old man would not have understood this place. He had been a southerner to his bones: the Seven, the septs, the tourney fields, the green hills of the Reach. He would have looked at the weirwood and seen a tree with a face and nothing more. He would have been wrong, or right. The old man was dead and the tree was alive and Dunk was on his knees between them.

Dunk the lunk, thick as a castle wall.

The words came from where they always came, the place inside him where he kept his failures, his fumbles, the long list of things he should have done differently and didn’t. He had said them a hundred times. He had heard them said. They were true. He was thick. He was slow. He could not even read.

The cold had soaked through to his knees now. His breath came in clouds that hung in the still air and faded.

But he had ridden out when the ironborn came. He had stood in the mud and swung a sword and bled for people he did not know. He had knelt at a lord’s deathbed and said m’lord because he had nothing else to say. He had sat through councils he could not follow and eaten bread and salt that bound him and kept his word because it was his word and what else was he going to do.

The raven on the branch above shifted its weight from one foot to the other. Dunk’s arm ached.

He looked at the face. The face looked back. The eyes wept their red tears, same as they had wept for a thousand years or ten thousand. The mouth was open. It was not laughing. It was not screaming. It was just open.

The raven had something in its beak now, a nut, or a bit of bread. It cracked it open, ate, and ruffled its feathers. It did not seem to care that Dunk was there.

He stood up. His knees ached and his arm throbbed and his cloak was damp with frost. He looked at the heart tree one last time. The face looked the same as before. It always did.

He walked away through the godswood, and the gate groaned behind him, and the frost crunched under his boots, and he did not look back.

They packed in the morning.

There was not much to pack. Dunk’s mail, sliced and useless on the left side. His sword, cleaned and oiled. The sword had been the old man’s once. His bedroll. A spare tunic that was more patch than tunic. A woman at an inn south of the Neck had given it to him. He could not remember her name or the name of the inn, only that the tunic was too small and the woman was kind. The saddlebags, one pocket torn since Whitewalls and never sewn because Dunk was no good with a needle, nearly empty. They’d eaten through the salt beef weeks ago and the cheese was a memory. There was also a smooth black stone he’d picked up near the God’s Eye, round and flat, good for skipping. He did not know why he still carried it. At the bottom of the pack, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, a braid of red hair. He saw it when he moved the tunic. He did not touch it. He wrapped the cloth back over it and put the tunic on top and cinched the pack shut.

Four stags and a handful of coppers. More than he’d had in months, and most of it would go to cloaks before they left. A sewn-up arm and a horse that needed shoeing and a mule that needed everything. Harwin had given them bread for the road, black bread, the hard Northern kind, and a slab of salt beef and a skin of ale. “Don’t say I never fed you,” the steward said, handing it over with the expression of a man parting with a kidney.

Dunk tore off a chunk of the bread and bit into it. It was dense and dark and tasted of rye and ash and something bitter he could not name. The crust was hard enough to crack a tooth if a man was not careful. He chewed and swallowed and tore off another piece and ate that too. The salt beef was no better, grey and stiff, more salt than beef, the kind of meat a man ate because he had it and not because he wanted it. The ale was thin and sour. He drank it anyway. It was food and it was his and he would not waste it.

Egg was rolling his bedroll tight, precise and quick, as always, his books already bundled and strapped. His floppy hat sat on the bed. Dunk looked at it. The hat had been new in Stoney Sept. Now it was sweat-stained and rain-warped and the brim drooped on one side. The boy looked different without it. Older, sharper, his bald head catching the light from the window. He did not look like a stableboy anymore. He did not look like who he really was, either. He looked like something in between.

Dunk picked up his shield.

The wood was plain and bare. No elm, no shooting star, no gallows pine. Just pine, scratched and dented, with a long gouge across the face where an ironborn axe had bitten at Torrhen’s Mill. The axe had not gone through. The wood had held. He ran his thumb over the gouge and then over the blank face, feeling the grain, the roughness where the bark had been stripped. A girl had painted this device for him once . . . no. Not this shield. The other one, the one that had split at Coldmoat. And the one after that, with the hanged man, had shattered at Whitewalls. This one had nothing. Just wood.

He checked it for cracks. There were two, small, near the rim. It would hold for a while. He strapped it to his back.

“Ser.” Egg was sitting on the bed, his pack beside him, his books in his lap. “They say there’s a dragon sleeping beneath Winterfell. That’s why the springs are hot.”

“There’s no dragon under Winterfell, Egg.”

“No, ser.” The boy looked at his hands. “But there’s something. The bark was warm. The water runs hot through the walls. The ground steams.” He was quiet for a moment. “My brother Aemon, he’s at the Citadel now, ser. In Oldtown. He says the maesters have books about dragons. Old books, from before the Doom.”

“Books.” Dunk buckled his sword belt. The wound in his arm pulled when he bent to cinch it and he sucked air through his teeth. “I never got much from books.”

“You can’t read, ser.”

Outside, a horse stamped in the yard and someone shouted something Dunk could not make out.

“That’s what I said,” said Dunk.

Egg almost smiled. He put his hat on and pulled the brim low. Dunk hoisted the pack onto his good shoulder. The weight of it settled into his back and his stitches pulled again.

“Where next?”

“North. The Wall.”

North. Toward the cold, and the ice, and a wall taller than anything he’d ever seen. He had always wanted to see it. The old man had talked about it once, a wall of ice so high the clouds broke against it. “I never saw it myself, Dunk. Might be you will.” Or had the old man said that about something else? It did not matter. He would see it for both of them.

He did not say any of that. “North” was enough. The road north. Frozen ruts and Maester stopping every half mile and the bread running out and his arm going stiff in the cold.

They went to the winter town before they left. A trader’s wife had Northern cloaks for sale, heavy grey wool, lined with sheepskin, with hoods that came down past the chin. Dunk bought two with the Stark silver, and haggled badly, and the trader’s wife threw in a pair of fur-lined gloves for Egg when she saw the boy’s bald head and floppy hat. “He’ll freeze without them,” she said. “Where are you heading?” “North,” said Dunk. She looked at him. “The Wall?” “Aye.” She shook her head and charged him an extra copper for the gloves.

They walked out into the courtyard. Thunder was saddled and waiting, his breath steaming. Rain stood beside him, ears pricked. Maester was lying down. The mule had found a patch of straw near the stable wall and decided to rest, and no amount of pulling was going to change his mind until he was ready.

“Get up,” Egg told the mule. Maester did not get up. “Get UP.” The mule looked at him with ancient, patient contempt. He had found something on the ground, a frozen beetle, or a bit of old turnip, and was nosing at it with the grave attention of a maester examining a text. The investigation took some time. Egg pulled at the lead. The mule ignored him. Egg pulled harder. The mule continued his examination. Egg called him three names that would have earned a clout in the ear if Dunk had been close enough to deliver one.

Dunk almost laughed. Almost. His arm hurt too much for laughing.

Maester finished his investigation, found the beetle wanting, and rose with the dignity of a lord who has been inconvenienced. Egg pulled and Dunk pushed and they led the animals through the yard toward the gate. The castle was stirring around them. Smoke rose from the kitchens. A servant carried a pail of water across the yard. Somewhere, a dog barked.

Nobody came to see them off. That was fine. They had been guests, and the guest right was done, and there was nothing more to say.

The snow began to fall as they left Winterfell behind.

Not heavy, a soft, light snow, the kind that drifted rather than fell, flakes small and dry as dust. It settled on Dunk’s cloak and in Thunder’s mane and on the brim of Egg’s floppy hat, and the road ahead was white and the trees on either side were white and the sky was the grey of old iron.

They rode north through the wolfswood. The road was better than it had been when they came. The ruts were frozen solid now, smooth enough for the horses, though Maester still found things to complain about. Thunder snorted at the cold and shook his head, sending a spray of snow off his mane. His hooves rang on the frozen ruts like iron on iron. The mule stopped twice in the first mile to inspect patches of dead grass, and Egg hauled him along with the grim patience of a boy who had been fighting this war for years and expected to fight it for years more.

The stitches in his arm pulled with every step Thunder took. He had stuffed the sliced mail into a saddlebag, hoping to find an armorer in some town along the way, though an armorer who would work for one copper was not a thing that existed. The shield on his back tapped against his mail with every step Thunder took, a dull, flat sound, like a knuckle on a door that no one was going to open.

The cold sat in his fingers and his knees and the back of his neck where the cloak did not reach, and his right shoulder ached from carrying the shield, and his left arm ached from everything else, and there was a stone in his boot that had been there since Winterfell and he had not stopped to shake it out because stopping meant getting Maester started again and that was never worth the trouble.

The wolfswood thinned as they went. The tall dark pines gave way to birch and ash, then to bare heath and scrubby fields where the snow lay in long white strips between the furrows. A frozen stream crossed the road, the ice grey and clouded. Thunder stepped across it without slowing. Rain followed, picking his way more carefully. Maester stopped in the middle and stood there. Egg swore at him. The mule drank from a crack in the ice, taking his time, and then walked on as if the delay had been Egg’s fault.

Past the stream the land opened up. Farmland, or what would be farmland in spring. Stone walls divided the fields into long parcels. A farmhouse stood back from the road with its chimney smoking, and a dog chained in the yard barked at them twice and lay down. A crow followed them for half a mile, hopping from fence post to fence post, keeping pace. Then it lost interest and veered off into the grey.

“There’s a fork ahead, ser,” Egg said. “The kingsroad is east.”

“I know where the kingsroad is,” Dunk said.

“We should bear east at the fork.”

“I said I know.”

“You went west at the last fork, ser. That was the wrong way.”

Dunk did not answer. He had gone west at the last fork. It had been the wrong way. He was not going to say so.

“I could read the milestones for you, ser. If there are milestones.”

“There aren’t milestones. It’s the North,” Dunk said.

“Exactly, ser.”

They rode in silence for a while.

“The salt beef is mostly salt, ser.”

“Aye.”

“And the bread is mostly bark.”

“Eat it anyway,” said Dunk. He pulled a strip of the salt beef from the saddlebag and chewed it. It tasted like it had been cured in a salt mine and forgotten there for a year. He chewed and swallowed and his jaw ached from the effort.

“I’m eating it. I’m just saying.” Egg chewed. His hat was dripping into his left eye and he kept tilting his head to shake the water off, which made him look like a bird with a cramp. “Do you think Maester has a plan, ser? Or does he just stop whenever he feels like punishing us?”

“Maester doesn’t have plans. Maester has opinions,” Dunk said.

“He has a lot of those.”

Thunder picked his way around a patch of ice on the road, careful and deliberate. Dunk patted his neck with his good hand. The horse was warm under the snow.

A fence post stood at the edge of a fallow field with a boot hung on it, just one boot, upside down, the leather cracked and dark with weather. No fence. No other boot. Just a post and a boot and the snow coming down. Dunk looked at it as they passed and wondered who puts a boot on a fence post, and why, and whether the man who did it had one boot or three.

An old cart sat in the ditch beside the road, half-buried in snow, its wheels gone and its bed rotting. It had been there a long time. Egg yanked Maester’s lead before the mule could stop beside it.

After a while, Dunk looked back.

Winterfell stood on its rise behind them, dark against the grey sky, and the steam rose from within its walls in pale slow columns that curled and broke apart in the wind. From here it looked like it was breathing. The same thing he had thought the first time he saw it, riding in from the south with snow on his nose and four coppers in his purse and no idea what . . . well. He knew now.

He had come for the Wall. The Wall was still ahead.

“They’ve been here eight thousand years, ser,” Egg said. He was looking back too, his hat brim tilted against the snow. “The Starks. Longer than anyone.”

“Aye.”

“Longer than the Targaryens.”

Dunk looked at the boy. Egg’s face gave nothing away.

“The Wall is as old,” Egg said. “Might be older.”

“Aye,” Dunk said. He looked at Egg, the floppy hat, the bald head beneath it, the too-large cloak, the ears. “I’m glad you’re here, Egg.”

“Your cloak is torn, ser. Did you know? Near the hem.”

“I know.”

“I could mend it tonight if we find a—”

“I said I know.” Dunk looked at the road. He had said what he wanted to say and the boy had heard it and that was enough and more than enough.

They rode on. A wolf howled somewhere in the trees, far off. Then silence. The road went on through the white and grey and the snow came down soft and steady, and the castle breathed behind them, and Maester stopped once more to sniff at something, and Egg swore at him, and Dunk watched the road ahead and did not look back again.

His arm ached. His purse was heavier than it had been, which was not saying much. The road was long and the snow was coming and he did not know where they would sleep tonight or what they would eat tomorrow. He had slept in worse places. Probably.

The snow fell, and the road went north.