The Song Of Ice and Fire (696 page)

Karstark was no lord in truth, Asha had been given to understand, only castellan of Karhold for as long as the true lord remained a captive of the Lannisters. Gaunt and bent and crooked, with a left shoulder half a foot higher than his right, he had a scrawny neck, squinty grey eyes, and yellow teeth. A few white hairs were all that separated him from baldness; his forked beard was equal parts white and grey, but always ragged. Asha thought there was something sour about his smiles. Yet if the talk was true, it was Karstark who would hold Winterfell should they take it. Somewhere in the distant past House Karstark had sprouted from House Stark, and Lord Arnolf had been the first of Eddard Stark’s bannermen to declare for Stannis.

So far as Asha knew, the gods of the Karstarks were the old gods of the north, gods they shared with the Wulls, the Norreys, the Flints, and the other hill clans. She wondered if Lord Arnolf had come to view the burning at the king’s behest, that he might witness the power of the red god for himself.

At the sight of Stannis, two of the men bound to the stakes began to plead for mercy. The king listened in silence, his jaw clenched. Then he said to Godry Farring, “You may begin.”

The Giantslayer raised his arms.
“Lord of Light, hear us.”

“Lord of Light, defend us,”
the queen’s men chanted,
“for the night is dark and full of terrors.”

Ser Godry raised his head toward the darkening sky.
“We thank you for the sun that warms us and pray that you will return it to us, Oh lord, that it might light our path to your enemies.”
Snowflakes melted on his face.
“We thank you for the stars that watch over us by night, and pray that you will rip away this veil that hides them, so we might glory in their sight once more.”

“Lord of Light, protect us,”
the queen’s men prayed,
“and keep this savage dark at bay.”

Ser Corliss Penny stepped forward, clutching the torch with both hands. He swung it about his head in a circle, fanning the flames. One of the captives began to whimper.

“R’hllor,”
Ser Godry sang,
“we give you now four evil men. With glad hearts and true, we give them to your cleansing fires, that the darkness in their souls might be burned away. Let their vile flesh be seared and blackened, that their spirits might rise free and pure to ascend into the light. Accept their blood, Oh lord, and melt the icy chains that bind your servants. Hear their pain, and grant strength to our swords that we might shed the blood of your enemies. Accept this sacrifice, and show us the way to Winterfell, that we might vanquish the unbelievers.”

“Lord of Light, accept this sacrifice,”
a hundred voices echoed. Ser Corliss lit the first pyre with the torch, then thrust it into the wood at the base of the second. A few wisps of smoke began to rise. The captives began to cough. The first flames appeared, shy as maidens, darting and dancing from log to leg. In moments both the stakes were engulfed in fire.

“He was dead,”
the weeping boy screamed, as the flames licked up his legs. “We found him dead … please … we was
hungry
 …” The fires reached his balls. As the hair around his cock began to burn, his pleading dissolved into one long wordless shriek.

Asha Greyjoy could taste the bile in the back of her throat. On the Iron Islands, she had seen priests of her own people slit the throats of thralls and give their bodies to the sea to honor the Drowned God. Brutal as that was, this was worse.

Close your eyes
, she told herself.
Close your ears. Turn away. You do not need to see this
. The queen’s men were singing some paean of praise for
red R’hllor, but she could not hear the words above the shrieks. The heat of the flames beat against her face, but even so she shivered. The air grew thick with smoke and the stink of burnt flesh, and one of the bodies still twitched against the red-hot chains that bound him to the stake.

After a time the screaming stopped.

Wordless, King Stannis walked away, back to the solitude of his watchtower.
Back to his beacon fire
, Asha knew,
to search the flames for answers
. Arnolf Karstark made to hobble after him, but Ser Richard Horpe took him by the arm and turned him toward the longhall. The watchers began to drift away, each to his own fire and whatever meagre supper he might find.

Clayton Suggs sidled up beside her. “Did the iron cunt enjoy the show?” His breath stank of ale and onions.
He has pig eyes
, Asha thought. That was fitting; his shield and surcoat showed a pig with wings. Suggs pressed his face so close to hers that she could count the blackheads on his nose and said, “The crowd will be even bigger when it’s you squirming on a stake.”

He was not wrong. The wolves did not love her; she was ironborn and must answer for the crimes of her people, for Moat Cailin and Deepwood Motte and Torrhen’s Square, for centuries of reaving along the stony shore, for all Theon did at Winterfell.

“Unhand me, ser.” Every time Suggs spoke to her, it left her yearning for her axes. Asha was as good a finger dancer as any man on the isles and had ten fingers to prove it.
If only I could dance with this one
. Some men had faces that cried out for a beard. Ser Clayton’s face cried out for an axe between the eyes. But she was axeless here, so the best that she could do was try to wrench away. That just made Ser Clayton grasp her all the tighter, gloved fingers digging into her arm like iron claws.

“My lady asked you to let her go,” said Aly Mormont. “You would do well to listen, ser. Lady Asha is not for burning.”

“She will be,” Suggs insisted. “We have harbored this demon worshiper amongst us too long.” He released his grip on Asha’s arm all the same. One did not provoke the She-Bear needlessly.

That was the moment Justin Massey chose to appear. “The king has other plans for his prize captive,” he said, with his easy smile. His cheeks were red from the cold.

“The king? Or you?” Suggs snorted his contempt. “Scheme all you like, Massey. She’ll still be for the fire, her and her king’s blood. There’s power in king’s blood, the red woman used to say. Power to please our lord.”

“Let R’hllor be content with the four we just sent him.”

“Four baseborn churls. A beggar’s offering. Scum like that will never stop the snow. She might.”

The She-Bear spoke. “And if you burn her and the snows still fall, what then? Who will you burn next? Me?”

Asha could hold her tongue no longer. “Why not Ser Clayton? Perhaps R’hllor would like one of his own. A faithful man who will sing his praises as the flames lick at his cock.”

Ser Justin laughed. Suggs was less amused. “Enjoy your giggle, Massey. If the snow keeps falling, we will see who is laughing then.” He glanced at the dead men on their stakes, smiled, and went off to join Ser Godry and the other queen’s men.

“My champion,” Asha said to Justin Massey. He deserved that much, whatever his motives. “Thank you for the rescue, ser.”

“It will not win you friends amongst the queen’s men,” said the She-Bear. “Have you lost your faith in red R’hllor?”

“I have lost faith in more than that,” Massey said, his breath a pale mist in the air, “but I still believe in supper. Will you join me, my ladies?”

Aly Mormont shook her head. “I have no appetite.”

“Nor I. But you had best choke down some horsemeat all the same, or you may soon wish you had. We had eight hundred horses when we marched from Deepwood Motte. Last night the count was sixty-four.”

That did not shock her. Almost all of their big destriers had failed, including Massey’s own. Most of their palfreys were gone as well. Even the garrons of the northmen were faltering for want of fodder. But what did they need horses for? Stannis was no longer marching anywhere. The sun and moon and stars had been gone so long that Asha was starting to wonder whether she had dreamed them. “I will eat.”

Aly shook her head. “Not me.”

“Let me look after Lady Asha, then,” Ser Justin told her. “You have my word, I shall not permit her to escape.”

The She-Bear gave her grudging assent, deaf to the japery in his tone. They parted there, Aly to her tent, she and Justin Massey to the longhall. It was not far, but the drifts were deep, the wind was gusty, and Asha’s feet were blocks of ice. Her ankle stabbed at her with every step.

Small and mean as it was, the longhall was the largest building in the village, so the lords and captains had taken it for themselves, whilst Stannis settled into the stone watchtower by the lakeshore. A pair of guardsmen flanked its door, leaning on tall spears. One lifted the greased door flap for Massey, and Ser Justin escorted Asha through to the blessed warmth within.

Benches and trestle tables ran along either side of the hall, with room for fifty men … though twice that number had squeezed themselves inside. A fire trench had been dug down the middle of the earthen floor, with a row of smokeholes in the roof above. The wolves had taken to sitting on one side of the trench, the knights and southron lords upon the other.

The southerners looked a sorry lot, Asha thought—gaunt and hollow-cheeked, some pale and sick, others with red and wind-scoured faces. By contrast the northmen seemed hale and healthy, big ruddy men with beards as thick as bushes, clad in fur and iron. They might be cold and hungry too, but the marching had gone easier for them, with their garrons and their bear-paws.

Asha peeled off her fur mittens, wincing as she flexed her fingers. Pain shot up her legs as her half-frozen feet began to thaw in the warmth. The crofters had left behind a good supply of peat when they fled, so the air was hazy with smoke and the rich, earthy smell of burning turf. She hung her cloak on a peg inside the door after shaking off the snow that clung to it.

Ser Justin found them places on the bench and fetched supper for the both of them—ale and chunks of horsemeat, charred black outside and red within. Asha took a sip of ale and fell upon the horse flesh. The portion was smaller than the last she’d tasted, but her belly still rumbled at the smell of it. “My thanks, ser,” she said, as blood and grease ran down her chin.

“Justin. I insist.” Massey cut his own meat into chunks and stabbed one with his dagger.

Down the table, Will Foxglove was telling the men around him that Stannis would resume his march on Winterfell three days hence. He’d had it from the lips of one of the grooms who tended the king’s horses. “His Grace has seen victory in his fires,” Foxglove said, “a victory that will be sung of for a thousand years in lord’s castle and peasant’s hut alike.”

Justin Massey looked up from his horsemeat. “The cold count last night reached eighty.” He pulled a piece of gristle from his teeth and flicked it to the nearest dog. “If we march, we will die by the hundreds.”

“We will die by the thousands if we stay here,” said Ser Humfrey Clifton. “Press on or die, I say.”

“Press on
and
die, I answer. And if we reach Winterfell, what then? How do we take it? Half our men are so weak they can scarce put one foot before another. Will you set them to scaling walls? Building siege towers?”

“We should remain here until the weather breaks,” said Ser Ormund
Wylde, a cadaverous old knight whose nature gave the lie to his name. Asha had heard rumors that some of the men-at-arms were wagering on which of the great knights and lords would be the next to die. Ser Ormund had emerged as a clear favorite.
And how much coin was placed on me, I wonder?
Asha thought.
Perhaps there is still time to put down a wager
. “Here at least we have some shelter,” Wylde was insisting, “and there are fish in the lakes.”

“Too few fish and too many fishermen,” Lord Peasebury said gloomily. He had good reason for gloom; it was his men Ser Godry had just burned, and there were some in this very hall who had been heard to say that Peasebury himself surely knew what they were doing and might even have shared in their feasts.

“He’s not wrong,” grumbled Ned Woods, one of the scouts from Deepwood. Noseless Ned, he was called; frostbite had claimed the tip of his nose two winters past. Woods knew the wolfwood as well as any man alive. Even the king’s proudest lords had learned to listen when he spoke. “I know them lakes. You been on them like maggots on a corpse, hundreds o’ you. Cut so many holes in the ice it’s a bloody wonder more haven’t fallen through. Out by the island, there’s places look like a cheese the rats been at.” He shook his head. “Lakes are done. You fished them out.”

“All the more reason to march,” insisted Humfrey Clifton. “If death is our fate, let us die with swords in hand.”

It was the same argument as last night and the night before.
Press on and die, stay here and die, fall back and die
.

“Feel free to perish as you wish, Humfrey,” said Justin Massey. “Myself, I would sooner live to see another spring.”

“Some might call that craven,” Lord Peasebury replied.

“Better a craven than a cannibal.”

Peasebury’s face twisted in sudden fury. “You—”

“Death is part of war, Justin.” Ser Richard Horpe stood inside the door, his dark hair damp with melting snow. “Those who march with us will have a share in all the plunder we take from Bolton and his bastard, and a greater share of glory undying. Those too weak to march must fend for themselves. But you have my word, we shall send food once we have taken Winterfell.”

“You will not take Winterfell!”

“Aye, we will,” came a cackle from the high table, where Arnolf Karstark sat with his son Arthor and three grandsons. Lord Arnolf shoved himself up, a vulture rising from its prey. One spotted hand clutched at his son’s shoulder for support. “We’ll take it for the Ned and for his daughter. Aye,
and for the Young Wolf too, him who was so cruelly slaughtered. Me and mine will show the way, if need be. I’ve said as much to His Good Grace the king.
March
, I said, and before the moon can turn, we’ll all be bathing in the blood of Freys and Boltons.”