**OTTO HIGHTOWER**
*The Tower of the Hand — Dusk*
From the window of his solar, Otto Hightower watched the Northmen go out through the Gate of the Gods.
Two hundred of them, grey cloaks and grey faces, marching so quietly that the whores along the wall had given up calling to them halfway down the hill. Behind the spears rumbled a wagon with a bear in it. Behind the wagon rode the King's master of horse, wearing the look of a man who had been told to see a thing through and was beginning to suspect it would see him through first.
Then the dragons rose, Caraxes like a red banner torn loose in a gale and something pale climbing to meet him out of the northern hills, and every soul in King's Landing who owned a window went to it. Otto did not look away. A man in his place could not afford to. When it was over he found his hands locked behind his back so hard that the knuckles ached.
*Three times in one afternoon.*
He counted it as he would have counted a ledger. The spy, lost. The ordinance, which Wylde had lost for him. The letter, which he ought never to have questioned, and which Mellos had settled with a squint and a crooked finger. Three cuts, and not one made with a blade. And at the gate the boy had wished him a pleasant quiet, as though Otto were a man on holiday. What stuck in him like a fishbone was that the neatest of the lot had been the rat.
A rat. Made a fool of by a rat, before the King, by a boy of eighteen who had accepted a servant's chair at the edge of the table, remarked that chairs were not what he'd come south to collect, and somehow turned it into the seat every man in the room was pretending not to look at.
And then the girl had come down into the yard and knotted a scrap of red silk about his arm, and called herself his queen.
*Your future queen.* Loud enough for the stableboys. Otto had stood six paces off with his face schooled, and he had felt what that face wanted to do, and it had been a long while since he'd had to fight it over anything.
He sat. A cold supper waited on the desk, cheese and a heel of bread. There were things to weigh first.
A Stark. Not Lord Rickard, who had knelt to Viserys years ago and did not send ravens lightly. Not Lord Rickard's heir, some child not yet breeched whose name Otto had never troubled to learn. This was Bennard Stark's boy, a cadet with no seat, no fleet, and no gold Otto's people could find. He had a war he'd ended in three days that had ground Daemon and Corlys down for three years, and a dragon made of ice.
That was the trouble. Otto could dismiss a cadet. He could not dismiss the dragon.
And he had no candidate of his own, which was the true failure. For years he had let the Lannisters and the Baratheons and the Arryns circle the Princess like moths round a lamp, all fluttering and none landing, since a married Rhaenyra with a strong husband was worse than an unmarried one. It had never occurred to him that the strong husband might come in by the window.
He had told the council none of what he truly knew, because what he knew was thin. An hour ago, while the yard was filling, a man had come up the back stair with his cap in his hands. Not Willem. Willem had not been seen since midnight, and Otto had begun, uncharitably, to hope the fool was dead, since the alternative was that he was somewhere sober and ashamed. This was a lesser watcher, who walked the alleys behind the Street of Silk for a silver stag a week, and who had gone the wrong way home and met a direwolf.
"Big as a pony, my lord. Black. Sat in the mouth of the alley like it had been hired." It had snarled, and snapped its jaws, and somewhere behind it in the dark a voice had told him to run. "A boy's voice. Young. Kept trying to make it deep."
*Kept trying to make it deep.*
Otto had made him say it twice. Then he had given him a stag and sent him down the stairs and sat for some time without moving.
It was not proof. A frightened man's tale would not stand against the King's fondness for a Northern hero, and against the King's fondness for his daughter it would not stand at all. He could not lay it on the council table. But he could keep it. He kept a great many things.
The door opened a hand's breadth, and Petyr's pale face appeared in it. Petyr only came in unbidden when it was fire or Lord Beesbury.
"It's Lord Beesbury, my lord."
"Of course it is."
"He asks whether the Northern lord's cat is to be retained." Petyr consulted a slip of paper as though it might have changed its mind. "He says the grain stores haven't been so quiet in ten years. He asks whether the Crown might, ah, purchase her."
"Purchase."
"He was most particular that he meant no insult to the cat."
"The cat has gone north to be a heroine of the realm, Petyr. Tell Lord Beesbury the Crown's rats must make do with the Crown's cats."
"He'll be very sad, my lord."
"He will be in excellent company."
Petyr went out. Otto looked at the cheese for some time and, having nothing better to do with it, ate some.
The Stark would be gone for months. Men who rode toward the Wall did not always ride back, as the boy had freely admitted, and Otto did not wish him dead, or not yet, or not by any hand of his. He wished only to be ready for either. The Hightowers had lit the way for a thousand years. Nobody had ever said they must be pleased about where it led.
He pulled a fresh sheet toward him, and after a moment wrote *Alicent*.
---
**HARWIN STRONG**
*The Gold Cloaks' Yard — Dusk*
The dummy had been a good dummy once. Oak post, straw and sacking, a helm nailed on for a head. Ser Harwin Strong had been at it the better part of an hour, and the helm lay in the dirt, and the post had a lean that would not be mended without a carpenter.
"It's dead, ser," said Sergeant Mott from the rail. "Been dead since the first bell. If you want to kill it again I could fetch the other one."
"I'm not killing it. I'm having a conversation with it."
"Ah. Well, it's losing."
The recruits along the rail laughed, and Harwin let them. In the barracks they called him Breakbones, and he had long since given up explaining that it had been one bone, one man's forearm, and that the man had been trying to stab him at the time.
*She chose him.*
He hit the post. His knuckles were bleeding through the wraps.
The joke was that he'd known exactly what he was looking at. He'd known since the night before, when a lad had come tearing out of a crowd on the Street of Silk with a stolen skewer in his fist and very nearly run him over, and Harwin had caught him by the shoulders and looked down into a pair of violet eyes under a laundry cap. The Prince had strolled up behind, not even winded. And behind the Prince, a shadow with grey eyes had looked Harwin over like a man pricing a horse.
*Liberating street vendor food.* It was the best line he'd ever come up with, and he had wasted it on a girl who'd been thinking about somebody else the whole time.
He leaned his forehead on the post. Harwin had raided the Stepstones himself at seventeen. Three weeks he'd had, and come home with a pox, one tooth fewer, and a tattoo of a mermaid that looked uncomfortably like his father's cousin Ysolde. The Stark had taken the lot in three days and then, to add insult, been polite about it.
"Ser Harwin."
The voice was flat as a board. Ser Criston Cole stood at the edge of the yard in his white cloak, hands folded, looking like something carved out of a material that did not bend.
"Ser Criston. Come to spar? I've a dummy here that's very nearly finished."
"I've come about the Street of Silk. Your men walk it. Was anything unusual seen last night?"
Harwin managed not to blink. It was almost a triumph. "You'd have to ask the men."
"I'm asking you, ser."
"It's the Street of Silk, ser. Everyone on it is someone who shouldn't be. That's the appeal."
Ser Criston did not smile. Harwin was not certain he had the equipment.
"I'm asking seriously."
"I know you are. It's what makes it funny." Harwin picked at a wrap. "Quiet night. Cats. One of the lads swore he saw a wolf, but he'd had a skinful. Big black bugger, he said, went off into the dark. Probably a dog."
"A wolf."
"Probably a dog."
Ser Criston looked at him for a long moment. Harwin looked back with the mild, open face that had got him out of a dozen Riverlands bedrooms, and felt the instant the other man decided not to ask a third time.
"Thank you, ser."
He ought to have gone. Instead he turned toward the northern wall, where the dragons had vanished, and said in a different voice, "She's never given it to anyone."
"The favor?"
"Not in all the tourneys. Not to any knight who ever rode for her." The folded hands had tightened. "I don't know why I'm telling you this."
"Nor do I," said Harwin, gently, because he suddenly did. *Oh, ser. You as well.* "I've a jug of Arbor gold in my quarters that I was going to drown myself in. There's room for a second."
"The Kingsguard does not drink."
"Since when?"
"I have the dawn watch."
"You have the dawn watch every dawn."
"That," said Ser Criston, "is rather the point of a vow." And he went away across the yard, straight as a spear, leaving Harwin with the distinct impression he'd just had a conversation with a sword.
"Seven hells," Harwin told the dummy. "He's worse off than I am."
"Who is, ser?" said Mott.
"Nobody. Put the Gate of the Gods on a double watch tonight."
"Against what?"
"Dragons, Mott. If one sneezes I'd like witnesses."
He picked the helm out of the dirt and set it on the post, and it fell off again, and he left it there. His brother Larys would want the whole tale by supper. Harwin meant to tell Larys nothing whatever, since anything told to Larys was in somebody else's ear by morning, and Rhaenyra deserved one friend in the Keep who could keep his mouth shut.
Even if the friend had lost.
---
**ALICENT HIGHTOWER**
*The Queen's Chambers — Evening*
Aegon would not sleep.
He was three months old, fat and red-faced, with a fuzz of silver-gold on his head and the lungs of a Braavosi fishwife, and he had been shrieking since the bells for supper. The wet nurse had walked him. A septa had sung to him, and he had looked at her with such contempt that the poor woman had gone off to pray. Now Alicent stood in the middle of the room in her nightdress with her son bawling against her shoulder, and it was the first moment all day she'd been left alone to think.
Rhaenyra had tied the favor herself.
That was what stayed with her. Not the words, though they had been bold enough to make her breath catch. Not her father's face, which she had read like a page of large print. Not the court, gasping like a parlor of septas who had found a man in the cellar. It was the knot. Rhaenyra had stepped in close and made it quickly, like someone who had thought about the exact sequence for some time and decided how it would go.
*She chose him. Not because it was clever. Because she wanted to.*
She had spoken against him at breakfast, because it was expected of a queen. *How fortunate, to have choice,* she had said, and meant it as a complaint, and in the yard she had watched someone else take it. She had seen Rhaenyra smile, and it was a smile she'd not seen in years. It was the one Rhaenyra used to wear in the godswood when she had made Alicent laugh in the middle of a sermon by pinching her nose and whistling like Septa Marlow through her teeth. Rhaenyra had been thirteen and Alicent sixteen, the two of them lying on their backs in the grass with a stolen pear tart between them, and Alicent had laughed so hard she'd got the hiccups, and Rhaenyra had said, *Don't die, I'll be blamed.* It had been the happiest afternoon of her life.
Aegon hiccupped.
"You too," said Alicent. "Wonderful."
There was a knock, and her father came in without waiting. He wore the Hand's chain and carried nothing, which was how she knew he had come to say something he didn't want written down.
"Father."
"Alicent." He regarded the child with the polite interest of a man inspecting cargo. "He's loud."
"He's a Targaryen. They say it's in the blood."
"So I have heard." He clasped his hands behind him and looked at the fire. "The Princess made a great show today. You were her friend, once."
There it was. She shifted Aegon to her other shoulder. "I was."
"A friendship is a coin like any other. A queen does well to know what hers will buy."
"Then I'm afraid I've spent mine."
"You might yet find you have change." He said it lightly, and it was the lightness she hated. "The girl will be wanting allies. She may look to you. If she confides in you, if she speaks of her plans, of the Stark, of the King's—"
At which Aegon, who had been quiet for several breaths and had plainly been gathering himself, was sick down the front of the Hand of the King.
It was a considerable effort. It went across the chain and the collar and one sleeve. Otto looked down at himself. He did not move. He did not speak. He stood in his good robes and let it happen with the dignity of a man being flogged in public.
Alicent put her face into the blanket and shook.
"You find this amusing."
"No, Father."
"You are making a noise."
"It's a cough."
He took out a handkerchief. He dabbed. He said nothing for so long that she had nearly got herself in hand, and then he said, quite mildly, "He has a gift for the moment."
Which set her off again.
But when she had wiped her eyes, and he had folded the ruined handkerchief into a neat square as though it might be needed for evidence, his face had gone back to what it always was, and she was tired.
"You'll be civil to her," Otto said.
"I am always civil, Father. It's the one thing you taught me that I'm good at."
He went very still. It was the nearest thing to a flinch she had ever seen from him, and she felt no satisfaction in it at all.
"I'm not asking you to spy."
"You're asking me to be friendly. With you it's the same thing." She kept her voice low, for Aegon's sake. "I won't lie to her. I won't lie to the King. I'll do what I must for my son, you know I will. But I won't go to her in the dark and be her friend so you can have it afterward in writing."
She thought he would argue. He was very good at arguing, and she had never once won. But he only looked at her, and then, unexpectedly, at Aegon, asleep against her neck with one small fist pressed to his cheek.
"Get some rest," he said, and went out, leaving a faint sour smell behind.
She stood listening to his footsteps go. Then she laid Aegon in the cradle and went to the little shrine in the corner where the seven candles were kept. One for the Mother, for Aegon. One for the Maiden, because there were prayers girls needed, even grown ones. She stood with the third in her hand for a long while, unable to decide what to ask the Crone about a man whose gods lived in trees.
*I'm glad you have someone,* she thought, at Rhaenyra, wherever she was in this great cold castle. *I'm not certain I'm allowed to be. But I am.*
She lit it for the Crone anyway. Just in case.
---
**JASON LANNISTER**
*The Lannister Apartments — Night*
"A *Stark*," said Lord Jason Lannister to the ceiling.
His manservant, who had spent fifteen years perfecting the art of becoming furniture whenever his master was in this mood, went on refolding a shirt that was already folded.
Jason stood in the middle of the chamber in a doublet of cloth of gold, because there was no point being a Lannister if you didn't look like one, and replayed the courtyard for perhaps the twentieth time. The girl in her riding leathers. The red silk. The gasp that had gone round the yard like a wave. He had stood in the third rank of the court, and he'd heard every word.
He poured wine and drank it. It did nothing.
The door opened behind him, and he did not need to turn. Only one man in the Seven Kingdoms had that exact stride.
"You look like a man who's been told his wine is watered," said Ser Tyland Lannister.
"I've been told nothing. I was there."
"So was the whole yard. The stableboys cheered."
"The stableboys."
"They were very moved." Tyland lowered himself into a chair with the ease of a man who had never in his life been the heir to anything. They were twins, gold hair and a good jaw apiece, and it had been Jason's lot to be born half a heartbeat first and Tyland's to have made his peace with it. Jason wore gold. Tyland wore grey. That, more or less, was the difference. "I did wonder what she'd do if a real man came along. I hadn't thought she'd do it *loudly*."
"I had a third conversation planned."
"You had a first conversation planned. You just kept having the second one over."
"She's looked at me twice."
"She looked at you like a girl reading the menu in a tavern she's already decided not to eat in."
"I sent her a hawk."
"She sent back the hawk."
"She sent a note."
"'Thank you, no.'"
"It was a *very* good hawk, Tyland."
"I don't doubt it." Tyland poured himself a cup. "Sit down, brother. You're wearing a hole in the carpet, and it's only borrowed."
Jason sat. It wasn't the dragon that troubled him, or even the Stark. It was that she hadn't *calculated*. He had watched a good many women choose a man, and they always looked as if they were adding a column of figures, even when they were in love. Rhaenyra had simply looked, and put out her hand.
"I could have given her Casterly Rock," he said. "Gold enough to buy that dragon a saddle."
"She has every dragon she wants. I don't think mines were the point."
"Then what was?"
Tyland turned the cup in his fingers. He was the cleverer of the two, and had been since the cradle, and had held his tongue about it all his life. "Try being kind," he said at last. "It's cheaper than gold and a good deal rarer at court."
"I am kind."
"You're *generous*. It isn't the same."
Jason opened his mouth, and the window went white.
It came from the north, over the hills beyond the wall, a great sheet of fire that lit the undersides of the clouds orange, and then a second glare that answered it, cold and blue like winter lightning. They collided. There was a sound like a hundred forges breathing out at once, and something began to fall on the northern hills that looked, from this distance, exactly like warm rain.
He crossed to the window without noticing he had risen. Two shapes wheeled over the dark countryside, one red, one pale, and they were plainly *fighting.* A jet of flame. A wave of frost. Steam boiled up into a white cloud, and out of it one of them screamed and the other roared without any sound at all, and Jason felt it in his teeth.
"By the Seven," he said.
"Perhaps they don't like each other," said Tyland, coming to stand beside him.
"Perhaps. Perhaps the Wall won't have to do it after all."
"Brother."
"What? I said nothing."
"You said it with your whole face."
Jason shut his mouth. He felt, unexpectedly, a little ashamed, which passed. He was a Lannister, and Lannisters were practical people, and practical people considered every possibility.
"Try not to look so hopeful," Tyland said mildly. "It isn't kind."
"I'm looking at the fire."
"Yes," said Tyland. "So I see."
---
**HARION**
*The Kingsroad — Midnight*
It was Frost's fault, and Harion meant to be very clear about that when the blaming began.
They had made nine miles in six hours. The wagon had broken an axle before the third milestone, despite Denys having doubled the axles and tripled the wheels and stood over the wheelwrights in the Keep's yard with a face like a man at a hanging. What he had not done, it emerged, was double the road. North of King's Landing the Kingsroad was two dirt tracks winding back and forth on themselves like a drunkard's path, and the bear, with the serene indifference of a large creature handed a new bed, had gone to sleep in the wagon halfway down the first hill and refused to be moved.
Denys had ridden beside it the whole way, whispering. He had been meant to turn back at the first village, but nobody had yet found the moment to tell him so. Harion suspected the whispering was a prayer, and that it was going badly.
"Nine miles," said Daemon.
"Aye."
"Nine miles, wolf. We'd be at the Neck by now if you'd let me fly."
"You'd be at the Neck by yourself."
"That's what I said." Daemon dropped down beside the fire in a swirl of black cloak and pulled the stopper from a wineskin. "Ride Frost all the way to the Wall. Let the bear and your two hundred sullen friends catch us up at leisure."
"And the Watch gets an ice dragon and no plan."
"They get a dragon. Plans are what you tell yourself afterward."
"Give over, Daemon."
"Give *over*?" Daemon looked delighted. "Say that again."
"No."
"It's like listening to a rock try to talk. I had half a mind to hate you, you know. Then you started saying *nowt.*"
"I've never said nowt in my life."
"You said it this morning. To the horse."
Harion opened his mouth and shut it, because it was possible. Padfoot, sprawled at his feet with his nose on his paws, made a sound suspiciously like a laugh.
The camp was going up around them on a low hill above a farm, and the Northmen were at their work with the terrible efficiency of men who did not speak. Three hundred yards below, a farmhouse sat dark in the moonlight beside a barn and a pasture full of cattle standing in the grass like grey boulders. Harion noticed them and thought nothing of it.
The red silk was still knotted about his forearm above the glove. He had touched it perhaps forty times since the Keep. He was trying to stop.
*BROTHER-MINE.*
It came down out of the north like the first breath of winter, and he was on his feet.
*HUNGRY.*
*Frost, no. Wait. There's a—*
*HUNGRY. HUNTING.*
*Not the farm. Those are folk's cows, lass. That's somebody's supper. We're guests.*
*SUPPER IS SUPPER.*
She came down out of the dark in a long slow glide, forty feet of moonlit ice with her wings swept back, and the fire guttered and the frost ran across the grass. Somewhere in the wagon the bear woke, and a very deep, happy rumble began.
And from the opposite quarter, out of the dark, came Caraxes, trailing a thin ribbon of fire like a torch dragged across the sky.
It might have been fine. There were thirty cattle in that pasture and two very large dragons, and the arithmetic was generous. But both of them chose the same animal, a fat red-brown bull that had been standing at the fence as though it owned the place, and both arrived at the same instant, and Frost's claws closed on the hindquarters as the Blood Wyrm's jaws closed on the head.
There was a moment of perfect stillness. The bull said something.
"Oh, seven fucking hells," said Daemon.
Caraxes screamed. Frost did not scream. She opened her mouth, and something very cold came out of it, and the pasture went white in a widening ring, grass and fence-rails and a startled ewe frozen mid-bleat. Caraxes answered with fire. Where they met, the night burst. A great gout of steam went up, and in the middle of it the two dragons rose, locked together, tearing at each other over what was left of the bull, and the air filled with sparks and sleet at once.
"*Sōvēs!*" Daemon was bellowing. "Caraxes, you idiot, put it down! *Sōvēs!*"
Caraxes did not put it down.
*MINE,* said Frost, in Harion's skull, with a dreadful calm. *FOUND FIRST. FIRE-WORM IS RUDE.*
*Frost. Listen to me.*
*FIRE-WORM TAKES.*
*It's a cow!*
*MINE COW.*
"Get on your dragon!" Daemon was running for the pasture, one hand on Dark Sister. "Do something, Stark. Do wolfy things!"
Harion was already running, Padfoot at his heel and behind him the noise of a bear breaking out of a wagon. He cleared the fence in a leap. Overhead the dragons had torn loose from the bull and were lunging at each other in earnest, jet of fire against jet of frost, their shadows sprawling across the field and the steam rolling down like fog.
He had a memory of a broom, a crag, and a Hungarian Horntail with murder in its eye. *You've outflown one,* said the borrowed part of him, dryly. *Now you've only got to talk one down.* Harion thought that was easy for a dead boy to say.
A gout of Caraxes's fire went tumbling across the pasture straight at the farmhouse.
He did not think. *Protego.* It went out of him like a breath, and the air over the byre roof shivered, and the flames struck an invisible dome and slid down it in rivers of orange light. Something in his skull cracked with the strain. Blood ran into his mouth. He spat and ran on. *Aguamenti,* and a torrent burst out of the sky over the burning fence and drowned it, hissing.
Frost dropped low, skimming the pasture, wings scything the air, fifteen feet away and closing.
*Ten feet, no more. It's going to be ten feet, and it's going to hurt.*
He Apparated.
The field jerked out from under him, and there was a moment of pure nothing, and he landed on hands and knees on a spine of ice and gripped it with everything he had. Frost banked, and the world tipped, and something very large and very furious roared past his ear. He'd had a number of bad ideas in his two lives. This was the one that worked.
*Frost.*
*BROTHER-MINE.* She was shaking with fury, and under the fury she was hungry, and under that she was a very old and very young thing that had never had to share.
*Look at me.* He leaned along her neck and pressed his forehead to the cold scales. *There's thirty cattle down there. He can have his. You can have yours. There's a whole bloody herd.*
*BUT THAT ONE—*
*I'll find you a mammoth.*
A silence.
*WHAT IS MAMMOTH.*
*Big. Hairy. Cold. Lives up past the Wall.* He had no notion whether this was accurate. *Giants ride them. You can have one of your own. A big one.*
*HAIRY?*
*Very.*
The fury drained out of her the way tide leaves a beach. She leveled off, and let out a slow silent breath, and the ice at her jaws melted.
*MAMMOTH,* she said, with great dignity. *VERY WELL.*
Beside them Caraxes shrieked once more and swung up and away. Daemon, on his back, was shouting something in High Valyrian that had the rhythm of an insult, and the red dragon shuddered and rolled and at last, sulkily, let go.
By the time they came down, the sky was clear. A warm, faintly sulphurous drizzle had been falling out of the steam on the whole camp, and two hundred Northmen sat by their fires in wet cloaks with their stew held over their heads. Not one had got up. An old sergeant with a face like a pickled walnut lifted his spoon in salute as Harion came down the hill.
Frost had the front half of the bull. Caraxes had the back. They lay a little apart in the trampled pasture, both eating, like two elderly relatives at a wedding who have been made to sit at the same table. As Harion watched, Frost's tail slid out slowly and came to rest across Caraxes's, and Caraxes, without lifting his head, allowed it.
"Ice and fire," said Daemon. He was covered in soot and he was grinning. "My brother will be *insufferable.*"
"Don't."
"I'm merely saying."
"Don't say it."
"He'll want to make a model."
Harion put his face in his hands. His nose was still bleeding, and his skull felt like a cracked cup, and he was, all in all, wonderfully content.
"There's also a farm," he said.
There was. Its door had opened, and a woman stood in it in her nightgown with a cleaver in one fist and a lantern in the other, three small children on the stair behind her staring at the dragons with the pure terrible joy of the very young. She looked at the frozen pasture. She looked at the scorched fence, and the barn, half frost and half soot. She looked at the bull, or what remained.
"That," she said, "was Lord Hobb."
"I'm sorry?" said Harion.
"The bull. He had eleven get last spring." Her lantern did not waver. "Which of you is paying?"
Daemon opened his purse. He took out three gold dragons and looked at them, and then, with the air of a man deeply moved, took out three more. "The Crown," he said, "is grateful for your cow."
She weighed them in her palm. She bit one. She looked at Harion, who had blood on his lip and a snow-white owl on his shoulder and a direwolf leaning on his leg, and at the two dragons lying tail to tail in her pasture, and her mouth twitched.
"Fair," she said. "There's the barn as well."
"I had rather thought there might be."
Daemon gave her three more.
It was as she shut the door, and Harion was finally letting himself sit in the wet grass, that Padfoot's ears went flat. He glanced round. On a fencepost forty yards off, black against the moon, a raven sat with its head cocked, watching. It was the sort of bird you'd see anywhere.
It watched him a moment longer. Then it was gone.
He sent Hedwig after it out of habit. She came back a minute later, puzzled, and ruffled her feathers.
*JUST A BIRD,* she said, in the small thought-voice that was always faintly indignant. *NOTHING. ODD.*
*Right,* Harion thought. *Just a bird.*
He looked north, at the black road running away toward a Wall he had not seen since before the Stepstones and a war he couldn't yet see the shape of. Fourteen hundred miles, near enough. He put his hand over the red silk on his arm.
And, very faintly, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he laughed.
---
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