“All men are so afflicted, from time to time.”
“This dream concerned a witch woman I visited as a child.”
“A woods witch? Most are harmless creatures. They know a little herb-craft and some midwifery, but elsewise…”
“She was more than that. Half of Lannisport used to go to her for charms and potions. She was mother to a petty lord, a wealthy merchant upjumped by my grandsire. This lord’s father had found her whilst trading in the east. Some say she cast a spell on him, though more like the only charm she needed was the one between her thighs. She was not always hideous, or so they said. I don’t recall the woman’s name. Something long and eastern and outlandish. The smallfolk used to call her Maggy.”
“Maegi?”
“Is that how you say it? The woman would suck a drop of blood from your finger, and tell you what your morrows held.”
“Bloodmagic is the darkest kind of sorcery. Some say it is the most powerful as well.”
Cersei did not want to hear that. “This maegi made certain prophecies. I laughed at them at first, but… she foretold the death of one of my bedmaids. At the time she made the prophecy, the girl was one-and-ten, healthy as a little horse and safe within the Rock. Yet she soon fell down a well and drowned.” Melara had begged her never to speak of the things they heard that night in the maegi’s tent. If we never talk about it we’ll soon forget, and then it will be just a bad dream we had, Melara had said. Bad dreams never come true. The both of them had been so young, that had sounded almost wise.
“Do you still grieve for this friend of your childhood?” Qyburn asked. “Is that what troubles you, Your Grace?”
“Melara? No. I can hardly recall what she looked like. It is just… the maegi knew how many children I would have, and she knew of Robert’s bastards. Years before he’d sired even the first of them, she knew. She promised me I should be queen, but said another queen would come…” Younger and more beautiful, she said. “… another queen, who would take from me all I loved.”
“And you wish to forestall this prophecy?”
More than anything, she thought. “Can it be forestalled?”
“Oh, yes. Never doubt that.”
“How?”
“I think Your Grace knows how.”
She did. I knew it all along, she thought. Even in the tent. “If she tries I will have my brother kill her.”
Knowing what needed to be done was one thing, though; knowing how to do it was another. Jaime could no longer be relied on. A sudden sickness would be best, but the gods were seldom so obliging. How then? A knife, a pillow, a cup of heart’s bane? All of those posed problems. When an old man died in his sleep no one thought twice of it, but a girl of six-and-ten found dead in bed was certain to raise awkward questions. Besides, Margaery never slept alone. Even with Ser Loras dying, there were swords about her night and day.
Swords have two edges, though. The very men who guard her could be used to bring her down. The evidence would need to be so overwhelming that even Margaery’s own lord father would have no choice but to consent to her execution. That would not be easy. Her lovers are not like to confess, knowing it would mean their heads as well as hers. Unless…
The next day the queen came on Osmund Kettleblack in the yard, as he was sparring with one of the Redwyne twins. Which one she could not say; she had never been able to tell the two of them apart. She watched the swordplay for a while, then called Ser Osmund aside. “Walk with me a bit,” she said, “and tell me true. I want no empty boasting now, no talk of how a Kettleblack is thrice as good as any other knight. Much may ride upon your answer. Your brother Osney. How good a sword is he?”
“Good. You’ve seen him. He’s not as strong as me nor Osfryd, but he’s quick to the kill.”
“If it came to it, could he defeat Ser Boros Blount?”
“Boros the Belly?” Ser Osmund chortled. “He’s what, forty? Fifty? Half-drunk half the time, fat even when he’s sober. If he ever had a taste for battle, he’s lost it. Aye, Your Grace, if Ser Boros wants for killing, Osney could do it easy enough. Why? Has Boros done some treason?”
“No,” she said. But Osney has.
BRIENNE
They came upon the first corpse a mile from the crossroads.
He swung beneath the limb of a dead tree whose blackened trunk still bore the scars of the lightning that had killed it. The carrion crows had been at work on his face, and wolves had feasted on his lower legs where they dangled near the ground. Only bones and rags remained below his knees… along with one well-chewed shoe, half-covered by mud and mold.
“What does he have in his mouth?” asked Podrick.
Brienne had to steel herself to look. His face was grey and green and ghastly, his mouth open and distended. Someone had shoved a jagged white rock between his teeth. A rock, or…
“Salt,” said Septon Meribald.
Fifty yards farther on they spied the second body. The scavengers had torn him down, so what remained of him was strewn on the ground beneath a frayed rope looped about the limb of an elm. Brienne might have ridden past him, unawares, if Dog had not sniffed him out and loped into the weeds for a closer smell.
“What do you have there, Dog?” Ser Hyle dismounted, strode after the dog, and came up with a halfhelm. The dead man’s skull was still inside it, along with some worms and beetles. “Good steel,” he pronounced, “and not too badly dinted, though the lion’s lost his head. Pod, would you like a helm?”
“Not that one. It’s got worms in it.”
“Worms wash out, lad. You’re squeamish as a girl.”
Brienne scowled at him. “It is too big for him.”
“He’ll grow into it.”
“I don’t want to,” said Podrick. Ser Hyle shrugged, and tossed the broken helm back into the weeds, lion crest and all. Dog barked and went to lift his leg against the tree.
After that, hardly a hundred yards went by without a corpse. They dangled under ash and alder, beech and birch, larch and elm, hoary old willows and stately chestnut trees. Each man wore a noose around his neck, and swung from a length of hempen rope, and each man’s mouth was packed with salt. Some wore cloaks of grey or blue or crimson, though rain and sun had faded them so badly that it was hard to tell one color from another. Others had badges sewn on their breasts. Brienne spied axes, arrows, several salmon, a pine tree, an oak leaf, beetles, bantams, a boar’s head, half a dozen tridents. Broken men, she realized, dregs from a dozen armies, the leavings of the lords.
Some of the dead men had been bald and some bearded, some young and some old, some short, some tall, some fat, some thin. Swollen in death, with faces gnawed and rotten, they all looked the same. On the gallows tree, all men are brothers. Brienne had read that in a book, though she could not recall which one.
It was Hyle Hunt who finally put words to what all of them had realized. “These are the men who raided Saltpans.”
“May the Father judge them harshly,” said Meribald, who had been a friend to the town’s aged septon.
Who they were did not concern Brienne half so much as who had hanged them. The noose was the preferred method of execution for Beric Dondarrion and his band of outlaws, it was said. If so, the so-called lightning lord might well be near.
Dog barked, and Septon Meribald glanced about and frowned. “Shall we keep a brisker pace? The sun will soon be setting, and corpses make poor company by night. These were dark and dangerous men, alive. I doubt that death will have improved them.”
“There we disagree,” said Ser Hyle. “These are just the sort of fellows who are most improved by death.” All the same, he put his heels into his horse, and they moved a little faster.
Farther on the trees began to thin, though not the corpses. The woods gave way to muddy fields, tree limbs to gibbets. Clouds of crows rose screeching from the bodies as the travelers came near, and settled again once they had passed. These were evil men, Brienne reminded herself, yet the sight still made her sad. She forced he
rself to look at every man in turn, searching for familiar faces. A few she thought she recognized from Harrenhal, but their condition made it hard to be certain. None had a hound’s head helm, but few had helms of any sort. Most had been stripped of arms, armor, and boots before they were strung up.
When Podrick asked the name of the inn where they hoped to spend the night, Septon Meribald seized upon the question eagerly, perhaps to take their minds off the grisly sentinels along the roadside. “The Old Inn, some call it. There has been an inn there for many hundreds of years, though this inn was only raised during the reign of the first Jaehaerys, the king who built the kingsroad. Jaehaerys and his queen slept there during their journeys, it is said. For a time the inn was known as the Two Crowns in their honor, until one innkeep built a bell tower, and changed it to the Bellringer Inn. Later it passed to a crippled knight named Long Jon Heddle, who took up ironworking when he grew too old to fight. He forged a new sign for the yard, a three-headed dragon of black iron that he hung from a wooden post. The beast was so big it had to be made in a dozen pieces, joined with rope and wire. When the wind blew it would clank and clatter, so the inn became known far and wide as the Clanking Dragon.”
“Is the dragon sign still there?” asked Podrick.
“No,” said Septon Meribald. “When the smith’s son was an old man, a bastard son of the fourth Aegon rose up in rebellion against his trueborn brother and took for his sigil a black dragon. These lands belonged to Lord Darry then, and his lordship was fiercely loyal to the king. The sight of the black iron dragon made him wroth, so he cut down the post, hacked the sign into pieces, and cast them into the river. One of the dragon’s heads washed up on the Quiet Isle many years later, though by that time it was red with rust. The innkeep never hung another sign, so men forgot the dragon and took to calling the place the River Inn. In those days, the Trident flowed beneath its back door, and half its rooms were built out over the water. Guests could throw a line out their window and catch trout, it’s said. There was a ferry landing here as well, so travelers could cross to Lord Harroway’s Town and Whitewalls.”
“We left the Trident south of here, and have been riding north and west… not toward the river but away from it.”
“Aye, my lady,” the septon said. “The river moved. Seventy years ago, it was. Or was it eighty? It was when old Masha Heddle’s grandfather kept the place. It was her who told me all this history. A kindly woman, Masha, fond of sourleaf and honey cakes. When she did not have a room for me, she would let me sleep beside the hearth, and she never sent me on my way without some bread and cheese and a few stale cakes.”
“Is she the innkeep now?” asked Podrick.
“No. The lions hanged her. After they moved on, I heard that one of her nephews tried opening the inn again, but the wars had made the roads too dangerous for common folk to travel, so there was little custom. He brought in whores, but even that could not save him. Some lord killed him as well, I hear.”
Ser Hyle made a wry face. “I never dreamed that keeping an inn could be so deadly dangerous.”
“It is being common-born that is dangerous, when the great lords play their game of thrones,” said Septon Meribald. “Isn’t that so, Dog?” Dog barked agreement.
“So,” said Podrick, “does the inn have a name now?”
“The smallfolk call it the crossroads inn. Elder Brother told me that two of Masha Heddle’s nieces have opened it to trade once again.” He raised his staff. “If the gods are good, that smoke rising beyond the hanged men will be from its chimneys.”
“They could call the place the Gallows Inn,” Ser Hyle said.
By any name the inn was large, rising three stories above the muddy roads, its walls and turrets and chimneys made of fine white stone that glimmered pale and ghostly against the grey sky. Its south wing had been built upon heavy wooden pilings above a cracked and sunken expanse of weeds and dead brown grass. A thatch-roofed stable and a bell tower were attached to the north side. The whole sprawl was surrounded by a low wall of broken white stones overgrown by moss.
At least no one has burned it down. At Saltpans, they had found only death and desolation. By the time Brienne and her companions were ferried over from the Quiet Isle, the survivors had fled and the dead had been given to the ground, but the corpse of the town itself remained, ashen and unburied. The air still smelled of smoke, and the cries of the seagulls floating overhead sounded almost human, like the lamentations of lost children. Even the castle had seemed forlorn and abandoned. Grey as the ashes of the town around it, the castle consisted of a square keep girded by a curtain wall, built so as to overlook the harbor. It was closed tight as Brienne and the others led their horses off the ferry, nothing moving on its battlements but banners. It took a quarter hour of Dog barking and Septon Meribald knocking on the front gate with his quarterstaff before a woman appeared above them to demand their business.
By that time the ferry had departed and it had begun to rain. “I am a holy septon, good lady,” Meribald had shouted up, “and these are honest travelers. We seek shelter from the rain, and a place by your fire for the night.” The woman had been unmoved by his appeals. “The closest inn is at the crossroads, to the west,” she replied. “We want no strangers here. Begone.” Once she vanished, neither Meribald’s prayers, Dog’s barks, nor Ser Hyle’s curses could bring her back. In the end they had spent the night in the woods, beneath a shelter made of woven branches.
There was life at the crossroads inn, though. Even before they reached the gate, Brienne heard the sound: a hammering, faint but steady. It had a steely ring.
“A forge,” Ser Hyle said. “Either they have themselves a smith, or the old innkeep’s ghost is making another iron dragon.” He put his heels into his horse. “I hope they have a ghostly cook as well. A crisp roast chicken would set the world aright.”
The inn’s yard was a sea of brown mud that sucked at the hooves of the horses. The clang of steel was louder here, and Brienne saw the red glow of the forge down past the far end of the stables, behind an oxcart with a broken wheel. She could see horses in the stables too, and a small boy was swinging from the rusted chains of the weathered gibbet that loomed above the yard. Four girls stood on the inn’s porch, watching him. The youngest was no more than two, and naked. The oldest, nine or ten, stood with her arms protectively about the little one. “Girls,” Ser Hyle called to them, “run and fetch your mother.”
The boy dropped from the chain and dashed off toward the stables. The four girls stood fidgeting. After a moment one said, “We have no mothers,” and another added, “I had one but they killed her.” The oldest of the four stepped forward, pushing the little one behind her skirts. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Honest travelers seeking shelter. My name is Brienne, and this is Septon Meribald, who is well-known through the riverlands. The boy is my squire, Podrick Payne, the knight Ser Hyle Hunt.”
The hammering stopped suddenly. The girl on the porch looked them over, wary as only a ten-year-old can be. “I’m Willow. Will you be wanting beds?”
“Beds, and ale, and hot food to fill our bellies,” said Ser Hyle Hunt as he dismounted. “Are you the innkeep?”
She shook her head. “That’s my sister Jeyne. She’s not here. All we have to eat is horse meat. If you come for whores, there are none. My sister run them off. We have beds, though. Some featherbeds, but more are straw.”
“And all have fleas, I don’t doubt,” said Ser Hyle.
“Do you have coin to pay? Silver?”
Ser Hyle laughed. “Silver? For a night’s bed and a haunch of horse? Do you mean to rob us, child?”
“We’ll have silver. Else you can sleep in the woods with the dead men.” Willow glanced toward the donkey, and the casks and bundles on his back. “Is that food? Where did you get it?”
“Maidenpool,” said Meribald. Dog barked.
“Do you question all your guests this way?” asked Ser Hyle.
“We don’t
have so many guests. Not like before the war. It’s mostly sparrows on the roads these days, or worse.”
“Worse?” Brienne asked.
“Thieves,” said a boy’s voice from the stables. “Robbers.”
Brienne turned, and saw a ghost.
Renly. No hammerblow to the heart could have felled her half so hard. “My lord?” she gasped.
“Lord?” The boy pushed back a lock of black hair that had fallen across his eyes. “I’m just a smith.”
He is not Renly, Brienne realized. Renly is dead. Renly died in my arms, a man of one-and-twenty. This is a only a boy. A boy who looked as Renly had, the first time he came to Tarth. No, younger. His jaw is squarer, his brows bushier. Renly had been lean and lithe, whereas this boy had the heavy shoulders and muscular right arm so often seen on smiths. He wore a long leather apron, but under it his chest was bare. A dark stubble covered his cheeks and chin, and his hair was a thick black mop that grew down past his ears. King Renly’s hair had been that same coal black, but his had always been washed and brushed and combed. Sometimes he cut it short, and sometimes he let it fall loose to his shoulders, or tied it back behind his head with a golden ribbon, but it was never tangled or matted with sweat. And though his eyes had been that same deep blue, Lord Renly’s eyes had always been warm and welcoming, full of laughter, whereas this boy’s eyes brimmed with anger and suspicion.
Septon Meribald saw it too. “We mean no harm, lad. When Masha Heddle owned this inn she always had a honey cake for me. Sometimes she even let me have a bed, if the inn was not full.”
“She’s dead,” the boy said. “The lions hanged her.”
“Hanging seems your favorite sport in these parts,” said Ser Hyle Hunt. “Would that I had some land hereabouts. I’d plant hemp, sell rope, and make my fortune.”
“All these children,” Brienne said to the girl Willow. “Are they your… sisters? Brothers? Kin and cousins?”
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