—{MIRRI MAZ DUUR}, godswife and maegi, a servant of the Great Shepherd of Lhazar,
—her uncertain allies, past and present:
—XARO XHOAN DAXOS, a merchant prince of Qarth,
—QUAITHE, a masked shadowbinder from Asshai,
—ILLYRIO MOPATIS, a magister of the Free City of Pentos, who brokered her marriage to Khal Drogo,
—CLEON THE GREAT, butcher king of Astapor,
—KHAL MORO, sometime ally of Khal Drogo,
—RHOGORO, his son and khalakka,
—KHAL JOMMO, sometime ally of Khal Drogo.
The Targaryens are the blood of the dragon, descended from the high lords of the ancient Freehold of Valyria, their heritage marked by lilac, indigo, and violet eyes and hair of silver-gold. To preserve their blood and keep it pure, House Targaryen has oft wed brother to sister, cousin to cousin, uncle to niece. The founder of the dynasty, Aegon the Conquerer, took both his sisters to wife and fathered sons on each. The Targaryen banner is a three-headed dragon, red on black, the three heads representing Aegon and his sisters. The Targaryen words are Fire and Blood.
IN BRAAVOS
FERREGO ANTARYON, Sealord of Braavos,
—QARRO VOLENTIN, First Sword of Braavos, his protector,
—BELLEGERE OTHERYS called THE BLACK PEARL, a courtesan descended from the pirate queen of the same name,
—THE VEILED LADY, THE MERLING QUEEN, THE MOONSHADOW, THE DAUGHTER OF THE DUSK, THE NIGHTINGALE, THE POETESS, famous courtesans,
—TERNESIO TERYS, Merchant-Captain of the Titan’s Daughter,
—YORKO and DENYO, two of his sons,
—MOREDO PRESTAYN, Merchant-Captain of the Vixen,
—LOTHO LORNEL, a dealer in old books and scrolls,
—EZZELYNO, a red priest, oft drunk,
—SEPTON EUSTACE, disgraced and defrocked,
—TERRO and ORBELO, a pair of bravos,
—BLIND BEQQO, a fishmonger,
—BRUSCO, a fishmonger,
—his daughters, TALEA and BREA,
—MERALYN, called MERRY, proprietor of the Happy Port, a brothel near the Ragman’s Harbor,
—THE SAILOR’S WIFE, a whore at the Happy Port,
—LANNA, her daughter, a young whore,
—BLUSHING BETHANY, YNA ONE-EYE, ASSADORA OF IBBEN, the whores of the Happy Port,
—RED ROGGO, GYLORO DOTHARE, GYLENO DOTHARE, a scribbler called QUILL, COSSOMO THE CONJURER, patrons of the Happy Port,
—TAGGANARO, a dockside cutpurse and thief,
—CASSO, KING OF THE SEALS, his trained seal,
—LITTLE NARBO, his sometime partner,
—MYRMELLO, JOSS THE GLOOM, QUENCE, ALLAQUO, SLOEY, mummers performing nightly on the Ship,
—S’VRONE, a dockside whore of a murderous bent,
—THE DRUNKEN DAUGHTER, a whore of uncertain temper,
—CANKER JEYNE, a whore of uncertain sex,
—THE KINDLY MAN and THE WAIF, servants of the Many-Faced God at the House of Black and White,
—UMMA, the temple cook,
—THE HANDSOME MAN, THE FAT FELLOW, THE LORDLING, THE STERN FACE, THE SQUINTER, and THE STARVED MAN, secret servants of Him of Many Faces,
—ARYA of House Stark, a girl with an iron coin, also known as ARRY, NAN, WEASEL, SQUAB, SALTY, and CAT
—QUHURU MO, of Tall Trees Town in the Summer Isles, master of the merchantman Cinnamon Wind,
—KOJJA MO, his daughter, the red archer,
—XHONDO DHORU, mate on the Cinnamon Wind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This one was a bitch.
My thanks and appreciation go out once again to those stalwart souls, my editors: Nita Taublib, Joy Chamberlain, Jane Johnson, and especially Anne Lesley Groell, for her counsel, her good humor, and her vast forbearance.
Thanks also to my readers, for all their kind and supportive e-mails, and for their patience. A special tip of the helm to Lodey of the Three Fists, Pod the Devil Bunny, Trebla and Daj the Trivial Kings, sweet Caress of the Wall, Lannister the Squirrel Slayer, and the rest of the Brotherhood Without Banners, that half-mad drunken fellowship of brave knights and lovely ladies who throw the best parties at worldcon, year after year after year. And let me sound a fanfare too for Elio and Linda, who seem to know the Seven Kingdoms better than I do, and help me keep my continuity straight. Their Westeros website and concordance is a joy and a wonder.
And thanks to Walter Jon Williams for guiding me across more salty seas, to Sage Walker for leeches and fevers and broken bones, to Pati Nagle for HTML and spinning shields and getting all my news up quickly, and to Melinda Snodgrass and Daniel Abraham for service that was truly above and beyond the call of duty. I get by with a little help from my friends.
No words could suffice for Parris, who has been there on the good days and the bad ones for every bloody page. All that needs be said is that I could not sing this Song without her.
A Dance with Dragons is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by George R. R. Martin.
Endpaper and interior maps
copyright © by Jeffrey L. Ward
Heraldic crests by Virginia Norey
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Martin, George R. R.
A dance with dragons / George R. R. Martin.
p. cm — (A song of ice and fire; bk. 5)
eISBN: 978-0-553-90565-6
I. Title.
PS3563.A7239D36 2011
813’.54—dc22 2011015508
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1_r10
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Cavil on Chronology
Maps
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Epilogue
Appendix
Westeros
The Boy King
The King at the Wall
King of the Isles and the North
Other Houses Great and Small
House Arryn
House Baratheon
House Frey
House Lannister
House Martell
House Stark
House Tully
House Tyrell
The Sworn Brothers of the Night’s Watch
The Wildings, or the Free Folk
Beyond the Wall
Essos Beyond the Narrow Sea
In Braavos
In Old Volantis
On Slaver’s Bay
The Queen Across the Water
The Sellswords Men and Women of the Free Companies
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
this one is for my fans
for Lodey, Trebla, Stego, Pod,
Caress, Yags, X-Ray and Mr. X,
Kate, Chataya, Mormont, Mich,
Jamie, Vanessa, Ro,
for Stubby, Louise, Agravaine,
Wert, Malt, Jo,
Mouse, Telisiane, Blackfyre,
Bronn Stone, Coyote’s Daughter,
and the rest of the madmen and wild women of
the Brotherhood Without Banners
for my website wizards
Elio and Linda, lords of Westeros,
Winter and Fabio of WIC,
and Gibbs of Dragonstone, who started it all
for men and women of Asshai in Spain
who sang to us of a bear and a maiden fair
and the fabulous fans of Italy
who gave me so much wine
for my readers in Finland, Germany,
Brazil, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands
and all the other distant lands
where you’ve been waiting for this dance
and for all the friends and fans
I have yet to meet
thanks for your patience
A CAVIL ON CHRONOLOGY
It has been a while between books, I know. So a reminder may be in order.
The book you hold in your hands is the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire. The fourth volume was A Feast for Crows. However, this volume does not follow that one in the traditional sense, so much as run in tandem with it.
Both Dance and Feast take up the story immediately after the events of the third volume in the series, A Storm of Swords. Whereas Feast focused on events in and around King’s Landing, on the Iron Islands, and down in Dorne, Dance takes us north to Castle Black and the Wall (and beyond), and across the narrow sea to Pentos and Slaver’s Bay, to pick up the tales of Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and all the other characters you did not see in the preceding volume. Rather than being sequential, the two books are parallel … divided geographically, rather than chronologically.
But only up to a point.
A Dance with Dragons is a longer book than A Feast for Crows, and covers a longer time period. In the latter half of this volume, you will notice certain of the viewpoint characters from A Feast for Crows popping up again. And that means just what you think it means: the narrative has moved past the time frame of Feast, and the two streams have once again rejoined each other.
Next up, The Winds of Winter. Wherein, I hope, everybody will be shivering together once again.…
—George R. R. Martin
April 2011
Click here to view the maps in greater detail: http://atrandom.com/dwdmaps/
PROLOGUE
The night was rank with the smell of man.
The warg stopped beneath a tree and sniffed, his grey-brown fur dappled by shadow. A sigh of piney wind brought the man-scent to him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag, even wolf. Those were man-smells too, the warg knew; the stink of old skins, dead and sour, near drowned beneath the stronger scents of smoke and blood and rot. Only man stripped the skins from other beasts and wore their hides and hair.
Wargs have no fear of man, as wolves do. Hate and hunger coiled in his belly, and he gave a low growl, calling to his one-eyed brother, to his small sly sister. As he raced through the trees, his packmates followed hard on his heels. They had caught the scent as well. As he ran, he saw through their eyes too and glimpsed himself ahead. The breath of the pack puffed warm and white from long grey jaws. Ice had frozen between their paws, hard as stone, but the hunt was on now, the prey ahead. Flesh, the warg thought, meat.
A man alone was a feeble thing. Big and strong, with good sharp eyes, but dull of ear and deaf to smells. Deer and elk and even hares were faster, bears and boars fiercer in a fight. But men in packs were dangerous. As the wolves closed on the prey, the warg heard the wailing of a pup, the crust of last night’s snow breaking under clumsy man-paws, the rattle of hardskins and the long grey claws men carried.
Swords, a voice inside him whispered, spears.
The trees had grown icy teeth, snarling down from the bare brown branches. One Eye ripped through the undergrowth, spraying snow. His packmates followed. Up a hill and down the slope beyond, until the wood opened before them and the men were there. One was female. The fur-wrapped bundle she clutched was her pup. Leave her for last, the voice whispered, the males are the danger. They were roaring at each other as men did, but the warg could smell their terror. One had a wooden tooth as tall as he was. He flung it, but his hand was shaking and the tooth sailed high.
Then the pack was on them.
His one-eyed brother knocked the tooth-thrower back into a snowdrift and tore his throat out as he struggled. His sister slipped behind the other male and took him from the rear. That left the female and her pup for him.
She had a tooth too, a little one made of bone, but she dropped it when the warg’s jaws closed around her leg. As she fell, she wrapped both arms around her noisy pup. Underneath her furs the female was just skin and bones, but her dugs were full of milk. The sweetest meat was on the pup. The wolf saved the choicest parts for his brother. All around the carcasses, the frozen snow turned pink and red as the pack filled its bellies.
Leagues away, in a one-room hut of mud and straw with a thatched roof and a smoke hole and a floor of hard-packed earth, Varamyr shivered and coughed and licked his lips. His eyes were red, his lips cracked, his throat dry and parched, but the taste of blood and fat filled his mouth, even as his swollen belly cried for nourishment. A child’s flesh, he thought, remembering Bump. Human meat. Had he sunk so low as to hunger after human meat? He could almost hear Haggon growling at him. “Men may eat the flesh of beasts and beasts the flesh of men, but the man who eats the flesh of man is an abomination.”
Abomination. That had always been Haggon’s favorite word. Abomination, abomination, abomination. To eat of human meat was abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and to seize the body of another man was the worst abomination of all. Haggon was weak, afraid of his own power. He died weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of human flesh.
That was as a wolf, though. He had never eaten the meat of men with human teeth. He would not grudge his pack their feast, however. The wolves were as famished as he was, gaunt and cold and hungry, and the prey … two men and a woman, a babe in arms, fleeing from defeat to death. They would have perished soon in any case, from exposure or starvation. This way was better, quicker. A mercy.
A Game of Thrones 5-Book Bundle: A Song of Ice and Fire Series: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons (Song of Ice & Fire) Page 407