A Feast for Crows

“Is that what they say?” Cersei smiled. “How foolish. I have never looked upon you as a rival, not even for a moment.”

“I am so pleased to hear that.” The girl did not seem to realize that she had been cut. “You and Tommen must come with us the next time. I know His Grace would love it. The Blue Bard played for us, and Ser Tallad showed us how to fight with a staff the way the smallfolk do. The woods are so beautiful in autumn.”

“My late husband loved the forest too.” In the early years of their marriage, Robert was forever imploring her to hunt with him, but Cersei had always begged off. His hunting trips allowed her time with Jaime. Golden days and silver nights. It was a dangerous dance that they had danced, to be sure. Eyes and ears were everywhere within the Red Keep, and one could never be certain when Robert would return. Somehow the peril had only served to make their times together that much more thrilling. “Still, beauty can sometimes mask deadly danger,” she warned the little queen. “Robert lost his life in the woods.”

Margaery smiled at Ser Loras; a sweet sisterly smile, full of fondness. “Your Grace is kind to fear for me, but my brother keeps me well protected.”

Go and hunt, Cersei had urged Robert, half a hundred times. My brother keeps me well protected. She recalled what Taena had told her earlier, and a laugh came bursting from her lips.

“Your Grace laughs so prettily.” Lady Margaery gave her a quizzical smile. “Might we share the jest?”

“You will,” the queen said. “I promise you, you will.”

THE REAVER

The drums were pounding out a battle beat as the Iron Victory swept forward, her ram cutting through the choppy green waters. The smaller ship ahead was turning, oars slapping at the sea. Roses streamed upon her banners; fore and aft a white rose upon a red escutcheon, atop her mast a golden one on a field as green as grass. The Iron Victory raked her side so hard that half the boarding party lost their feet. Oars snapped and splintered, sweet music to the captain’s ears.

He vaulted over the gunwale, landing on the deck below with his golden cloak billowing behind him. The white roses drew back, as men always did at the sight of Victarion Greyjoy armed and armored, his face hidden behind his kraken helm. They were clutching swords and spears and axes, but nine of every ten wore no armor, and the tenth had only a shirt of sewn scales. These are no ironmen, Victarion thought. They still fear drowning.

“Get him!” one man shouted. “He’s alone!”

“COME!” he roared back. “Come kill me, if you can.”

From all sides the rosey warriors converged, with grey steel in their hands and terror behind their eyes. Their fear was so ripe Victarion could taste it. Left and right he laid about, hewing off the first man’s arm at the elbow, cleaving through the shoulder of the second. The third buried his own axehead in the soft pine of Victarion’s shield. He slammed it into the fool’s face, knocked him off his feet, and slew him when he tried to rise again. As he was struggling to free his axe from the dead man’s rib cage, a spear jabbed him between the shoulder blades. It felt as though someone had slapped him on the back. Victarion spun and slammed his axe down onto the spearman’s head, feeling the impact in his arm as the steel went crunching through helm and hair and skull. The man swayed for half a heartbeat, till the iron captain wrenched the steel free and sent his corpse staggering loose-limbed across the deck, looking more drunk than dead.

By then his ironborn had followed him down onto the deck of the broken longship. He heard Wulfe One-Ear let out a howl as he went to work, glimpsed Ragnor Pyke in his rusted mail, saw Nute the Barber send a throwing axe spinning through the air to catch a man in the chest. Victarion slew another man, and another. He would have killed a third, but Ragnor cut him down first. “Well struck,” Victarion bellowed at him.

When he turned to find the next victim for his axe, he spied the other captain across the deck. His white surcoat was spotted with blood and gore, but Victarion could make out the arms upon his breast, the white rose within its red escutcheon. The man bore the same device upon his shield, on a white field with a red embattled border. “You!” the iron captain called across the carnage. “You of the rose! Be you the lord of Southshield?”

The other raised his visor to show a beardless face. “His son and heir. Ser Talbert Serry. And who are you, kraken?”

“Your death.” Victarion bulled toward him.

Serry leapt to meet him. His longsword was good castle-forged steel, and the young knight made it sing. His first cut was low, and Victarion deflected it off his axe. His second caught the iron captain on the helm before he got his shield up. Victarion answered with a sidearm blow of his axe. Serry’s shield got in the way. Wooden splinters flew, and the white rose split lengthwise with a sweet sharp crack. The young knight’s longsword hammered at his thigh, once, twice, thrice, screaming against the steel. This boy is quick, the iron captain realized. He smashed his shield in Serry’s face and sent him staggering back against the gunwale. Victarion raised his axe and put all his weight behind his cut, to open the boy from neck to groin, but Serry spun away. The axehead crashed through the rail, sending splinters flying, and lodged there when he tried to pull it free. The deck moved under his feet, and he stumbled to one knee.

Ser Talbert cast away his broken shield and slashed down with his longsword. Victarion’s own shield had twisted half around when he stumbled. He caught Serry’s blade in an iron fist. Lobstered steel crunched, and a stab of pain made him grunt, yet Victarion held on. “I am quick as well, boy,” he said as he ripped the sword from the knight’s hand and flung it into the sea.

Ser Talbert’s eyes went wide. “My sword…”

Victarion caught the lad about the throat with a bloody fist. “Go and get it,” he said, forcing him backwards over the side into the bloodstained waters.

That won him a respite to pull his axe loose. The white roses were falling back before the iron tide. Some tried to flee belowdecks, as others cried for quarter. Victarion could feel warm blood trickling down his fingers beneath the mail and leather and lobstered plate, but that was nothing. Around the mast a thick knot of foemen fought on, standing shoulder to shoulder in a ring. These few are men, at least. They would sooner die than yield. Victarion would grant some of them that wish. He beat his axe against his shield and charged them.

The Drowned God had not shaped Victarion Greyjoy to fight with words at kingsmoots, nor struggle against furtive sneaking foes in endless bogs. This was why he had been put on earth; to stand steel-clad with an axe red and dripping in his hand, dealing death with every blow.

They hacked at him from front and back, but their swords might have been willow switches for all the harm they did him. No blade could cut through Victarion Greyjoy’s heavy plate, nor did he give his foes the time to find the weak points at the joints, where only mail and leather warded him. Let three men assail him, or four, or five; it made no matter. He slew them one at a time, trusting in his steel to protect him from the others. As each foe fell he turned his wroth upon the next.

The last man to face him must have been a smith; he had shoulders like a bull, and one much more muscular than the other. His armor was a studded brigandine and a cap of boiled leather. The only blow he landed completed the ruin of Victarion’s shield, but the cut the captain dealt in answer split his head in two. Would that I could deal with the Crow’s Eye as simply. When he jerked his axehead free again, the smith’s skull seemed to burst. Bone and blood and brain went everywhere, and the corpse fell forward, up against his legs. Too late to plead for quarter now, Victarion thought as he untangled himself from the dead man.

By then the deck was slick beneath his feet, and the dead and the dying lay in heaps on every side. He threw his shield away and sucked in air. “Lord Captain,” he heard the Barber say beside him, “the day is ours.”

All around the sea was full of ships. Some were burning, some were sinking, some had been smashed to splinters. Between the hulls the water was thick as stew, full of corpses, broken oars, and men clinging to the wreckage. In the distance, half a dozen of southron longships were racing back toward the Mander. Let