There was no safe anchorage at Pyke, but Theon Greyjoy wished to
look on his father’s castle from the sea, to see it as he had
seen it last, ten years before, when Robert Baratheon’s war
galley had borne him away to be a ward of Eddard Stark. On that day
he had stood beside the rail, listening to the stroke of the oars
and the pounding of the master’s drum while he watched Pyke
dwindle in the distance. Now he wanted to see it grow larger, to
rise from the sea before him.
Obedient to his wishes, the Myraham beat her way past the point
with her sails snapping and her captain cursing the wind and his
crew and the follies of highborn lordlings. Theon drew the hood of
his cloak up against the spray, and looked for home.
The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the
castle seemed one with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges
quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the same salt
waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green
lichen, speckled by the droppings of the same seabirds. The point
of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once
thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had
hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered,
thousands of years past. All that remained were three bare and
barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from
the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while
the angry waves foamed and crashed among them.
Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those islands and
pillars, almost a part of them, its curtain wall closing off the
headland around the foot of the great stone bridge that leapt from
the clifftop to the largest islet, dominated by the massive bulk of
the Great Keep. Farther out were the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody
Keep, each on its own island. Towers and outbuildings clung to the
stacks beyond, linked to each other by covered archways when the
pillars stood close, by long swaying walks of wood and rope when
they did not.
The Sea Tower rose from the outmost island at the point of the
broken sword, the oldest part of the castle, round and tall, the
sheer-sided pillar on which it stood half-eaten through by the
endless battering of the waves. The base of the tower was white
from centuries of salt spray, the upper stories green from the
lichen that crawled over it like a thick blanket, the jagged crown
black with soot from its nightly watchfire.
Above the Sea Tower snapped his father’s banner. The
Myraham was too far off for Theon to see more than the cloth
itself, but he knew the device it bore: the golden kraken of House
Greyjoy, arms writhing and reaching against a black field. The
banner streamed from an iron mast, shivering and twisting as the
wind gusted, like a bird struggling to take flight. And here at
least the direwolf of Stark did not fly above, casting its shadow
down upon the Greyjoy kraken.
Theon had never seen a more stirring sight. In the sky behind
the castle, the fine red tail of the comet was visible through
thin, scuttling clouds. All the way from Riverrun to Seagard, the
Mallisters had argued about its meaning. It is my comet, Theon told
himself, sliding a hand into his fur-lined cloak to touch the
oilskin pouch snug in its pocket. Inside was the letter Robb Stark
had given him, paper as good as a crown.
“Does the castle look as you remember it, milord?”
the captain’s daughter asked as she pressed herself against
his arm.
“It looks smaller,” Theon confessed, “though
perhaps that is only the distance.” The Myraham was a
fat-bellied southron merchanter up from Oldtown, carrying wine and
cloth and seed to trade for iron ore. Her captain was a fat-bellied
southron merchanter as well, and the stony sea that foamed at the
feet of the castle made his plump lips quiver, so he stayed well
out, farther than Theon would have liked. An ironborn captain in a
longship would have taken them along the cliffs and under the high
bridge that spanned the gap between the gatehouse and the Great
Keep, but this plump Oldtowner had neither the craft, the crew, nor
the courage to attempt such a thing. So they sailed past at a safe
distance, and Theon must content himself with seeing Pyke from
afar. Even so, the Myraham had to struggle mightily to keep itself
off those rocks.
“It must be windy there,” the captain’s
daughter observed.
He laughed. “Windy and cold and damp. A miserable hard
place, in truth . . . but my lord father once
told me that hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the
world.”
The captain’s face was as green as the sea when he came
bowing up to Theon and asked, “May we make for port now,
milord?”
“You may,” Theon said, a faint smile playing about
his lips. The promise of gold had turned the Oldtowner into a
shameless lickspittle. It would have been a much different voyage
if a longship from the islands had been waiting at Seagard as
he’d hoped. Ironborn captains were proud and willful, and did
not go in awe of a man’s blood. The islands were too small
for awe, and a longship smaller still. If every captain was a king
aboard his own ship, as was often said, it was small wonder they
named the islands the land of ten thousand kings. And when you have
seen your kings shit over the rail and turn green in a storm, it
was hard to bend the knee and pretend they were gods. “The
Drowned God makes men,” old King Urron Redhand had once said,
thousands of years ago, “but it’s men who make
crowns.”
A longship would have made the crossing in half the time as
well. The Myraham was a wallowing tub, if truth be told, and he
would not care to be aboard her in a storm. Still, Theon could not
be too unhappy. He was here, undrowned, and the voyage had offered
certain other amusements. He put an arm around the captain’s
daughter. “Summon me when we make Lordsport,” he told
her father. “We’ll be below, in my cabin.” He led
the girl away aft, while her father watched them go in sullen
silence.
The cabin was the captain’s, in truth, but it had been
turned over to Theon’s use when they sailed from Seagard. The
captain’s daughter had not been turned over to his use, but
she had come to his bed willingly enough all the same. A cup of
wine, a few whispers, and there she was. The girl was a shade plump
for his taste, with skin as splotchy as oatmeal, but her breasts
filled his hands nicely and she had been a maiden the first time he
took her. That was surprising at her age, but Theon found it
diverting. He did not think the captain approved, and that was
amusing as well, watching the man struggle to swallow his outrage
while performing his courtesies to the high lord, the rich purse of
gold he’d been promised never far from his thoughts.
As Theon shrugged out of his wet cloak, the girl said,
“You must be so happy to see your home again, milord. How
many years have you been away? “
“Ten, or close as makes no matter,” he told her.
“I was a boy of ten when I was taken to Winterfell. as a ward
of Eddard Stark.” A ward in name, a hostage in truth. Half
his days a hostage . . . but no longer. His
life was his own again, and nowhere a Stark to be seen. He drew the
captain’s daughter close and kissed her on her ear.
“Take off your cloak.”
She dropped her eyes, suddenly shy, but did as he bid her. When
the heavy garment, sodden with spray, fell from her shoulders to
the deck, she gave him a little bow and smiled anxiously. She
looked rather stupid when she smiled, but he had never required a
woman to be clever. “Come here,” he told her.
She did. “I have never seen the Iron Islands.”
“Count yourself fortunate.” Theon stroked her hair.
it was fine and dark, though the wind had made a tangle of it.
“The islands are stern and stony places, scant of comfort and
bleak of prospect. Death is never far here, and life is mean and
meager. Men spend their nights drinking ale and arguing over whose
lot is worse, the fisherfolk who fight the sea or the farmers who
try and scratch a crop from the poor thin soil. If truth be told,
the miners have it worse than either, breaking their backs down in
the dark, and for what? Iron, lead, tin, those are our treasures.
Small wonder the ironmen of old turned to raiding.”
The stupid girl did not seem to be listening. “I could go
ashore with you,” she said. “I would, if it please
you . . . ”
“You could go ashore,” Theon agreed, squeezing her
breast, “but not with me, I fear.”
“I’d work in your castle, milord. I can clean fish
and bake bread and churn butter. Father says my peppercrab stew is
the best he’s ever tasted. You could find me a place in your
kitchens and I could make you peppercrab stew.”
“And warm my bed by night?” He reached for the laces
of her bodice and began to undo them, his fingers deft and
practiced. “Once I might have carried you home as a prize,
and kept you to wife whether you willed it or no. The ironmen of
old did such things. A man had his rock wife, his true bride,
ironborn like himself, but he had his salt wives too, women
captured on raids.”
The girl’s eyes grew wide, and not because he had bared
her breasts. “I would be your salt wife, milord.”
“I fear those days are gone.” Theon’s finger
circled one heavy teat, spiraling in toward the fat brown nipple.
“No longer may we ride the wind with fire and sword, taking
what we want. Now we scratch in the ground and toss lines in the
sea like other men, and count ourselves lucky if we have salt cod
and porridge enough to get us through a winter.” He took her
nipple in his mouth, and bit it until she gasped.
“You can put it in me again, if it please you,” she
whispered in his ear as he sucked.
When he raised his head from her breast, the skin was dark red
where his mouth had marked her. “It would please me to teach
you something new. Unlace me and pleasure me with your
mouth.”
“With my mouth?”
His thumb brushed lightly over her full lips. “It’s
what those lips were made for, sweetling. If you were my salt wife,
you’d do as I command.”
She was timid at first, but learned quickly for such a stupid
girl, which pleased him. Her mouth was as wet and sweet as her
cunt, and this way he did not have to listen to her mindless
prattle. Once I would have kept her as a salt wife in truth, he
thought to himself as he slid his fingers through her tangled hair.
Once. When we still kept the Old Way, lived by the axe instead of
the pick, taking what we would, be it wealth, women, or glory. In
those days, the ironborn did not work mines; that was labor for the
captives brought back from the hostings, and so too the sorry
business of farming and tending goats and sheep. War was an
ironman’s proper trade. The Drowned God had made them to
reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire
and blood and song.
Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned Black
Harren, gave Harren’s kingdom back to the weakling rivermen,
and reduced the Iron Islands to an insignificant backwater of a
much greater realm. Yet the old red tales were still told around
driftwood fires and smoky hearths all across the islands, even
behind the high stone halls of Pyke. Theon’s father numbered
among his titles the style of Lord Reaper, and the Greyjoy words
boasted that We Do Not Sow.
It had been to bring back the Old Way more than for the empty
vanity of a crown that Lord Balon had staged his great rebellion.
Robert Baratheon had written a bloody end to that hope, with the
help of his friend Eddard Stark, but both men were dead now. Mere
boys ruled in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror
had forged was smashed and sundered. This is the season, Theon
thought as the captain’s daughter slid her lips up and down
the length of him, the season, the year, the day, and I am the man.
He smiled crookedly, wondering what his father would say when Theon
told him that he, the last-born, babe and hostage, he had succeeded
where Lord Balon himself had failed.
His climax came on him sudden as a storm, and he filled the
girl’s mouth with his seed. Startled, she tried to pull away,
but Theon held her tight by the hair. Afterward, she crawled up
beside him. “Did I please milord?”
“Well enough,” he told her.
“It tasted salty,” she murmured.
“Like the sea?”
She nodded. “I have always loved the sea,
milord.”
“As I have,” he said, rolling her nipple idly
between his fingers. It was true. The sea meant freedom to the men
of the Iron Islands. He had forgotten that until the Myraham had
raised sail at Seagard. The sounds brought old feelings back; the
creak of wood and rope, the captain’s shouted commands, the
snap of the sails as the wind filled them, each as familiar as the
beating of his own heart, and as comforting. I must remember this,
Theon vowed to himself. I must never go far from the sea again.
“Take me with you, milord,” the captain’s
daughter begged. “I don’t need to go to your castle. I
can stay in some town, and be your salt wife.” She reached
out to stroke his cheek.
Theon Greyjoy pushed her hand aside and climbed off the bunk.
“My place is Pyke, and yours is on this ship.”
“I can’t stay here now.”
He laced up his breeches. “Why not?”
“My father,” she told him. “Once you’re
gone, he’ll punish me, milord. He’ll call me names and
hit me.”
Theon swept his cloak off its peg and over his shoulders.
“Fathers are like that,” he admitted as he pinned the
folds with a silver clasp. “Tell him he should be pleased. As
many times as I’ve fucked you, you’re likely with
child. It’s not every man who has the honor of raising a
king’s bastard.” She looked at him stupidly, so he left
her there.
The Myraham was rounding a wooded point. Below the pine-clad
bluffs, a dozen fishing boats were pulling in their nets. The big
cog stayed well out from them, tacking. Theon moved to the bow for
a better view. He saw the castle first, the stronghold of the
Botleys. When he was a boy it had been timber and wattle, but
Robert Baratheon had razed that structure to the ground. Lord
Sawane had rebuilt in stone, for now a small square keep crowned
the hill. Pale green flags drooped from the squat corner towers,
each emblazoned with a shoal of silvery fish.
Beneath the dubious protection of the fish-ridden little castle
lay the village of Lordsport, its harbor aswarm with ships. When
last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking wasteland,
the skeletons of burnt longships and smashed galleys
littering the stony shore like the bones of dead leviathans,
the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes. After ten
years, few traces of the war remained. The smallfolk had built new
hovels with the stones of the old, and cut fresh sod for their
roofs. A new inn had risen beside the landing, twice the size of
the old one, with a lower story of cut stone and two upper stories
of timber. The sept beyond had never been rebuilt, though; only a
seven-sided foundation remained where it had stood. Robert
Baratheon’s fury had soured the ironmen’s taste for the
new gods, it would seem.
Theon was more interested in ships than gods. Among the masts of
countless fishing boats, he spied a Tyroshi trading galley
off-loading beside a lumbering Ibbenese cog with her black-tarred
hull. A great number of longships, fifty or sixty at the least,
stood out to sea or lay beached on the pebbled shore to the north.
Some of the sails bore devices from the other islands; the blood
moon of Wynch, Lord Goodbrother’s banded black warhorn,
Harlaw’s silver scythe. Theon searched for his uncle
Euron’s Silence. Of that lean and terrible red ship he saw no
sign, but his father’s Great Kraken was there, her bow
ornamented with a grey iron ram in the shape of its namesake.
Had Lord Balon anticipated him and called the Greyjoy banners?
His hand went inside his cloak again, to the oilskin pouch. No one
knew of his letter but Robb Stark; they were no fools, to entrust
their secrets to a bird. Still, Lord Balon was no fool either. He
might well have guessed why his son was coming home at long last,
and acted accordingly.
The thought did not please him. His father’s war was long
done, and lost. This was Theon’s hour—his plan, his glory,
and in time his crown. Yet if the longships are
hosting . . .
It might be only a caution, now that he thought on it. A
defensive move, lest the war spill out across the sea. Old men were
cautious by nature. His father was old now, and so too his uncle
Victarion, who commanded the Iron Fleet. His uncle Euron was a
different song, to be sure, but the Silence did not seem to be in
port. It’s all for the good, Theon told himself. This way, I
shall be able to strike all the more quickly.
As the Myraham made her way landward, Theon paced the deck
restlessly, scanning the shore. He had not thought to find Lord
Balon himself at quayside, but surely his father would have sent
someone to meet him. Sylas Sourmouth the steward, Lord Botley,
perhaps even Dagmer Cleftjaw. It would be good to look on
Dagmer’s hideous old face again. It was not as though they
had no word of his arrival. Robb had sent ravens from Riverrun, and
when they’d found no longship at Seagard, Jason Mallister had
sent his own birds to Pyke, supposing that Robb’s were
lost.
Yet he saw no familiar faces, no honor guard waiting to escort
him from Lordsport to Pyke, only smallfolk going about their small
business. Shorehands rolled casks of wine off the Tyroshi trader,
fisherfolk cried the day’s catch, children ran and played. A
priest in the seawater robes of the Drowned God was leading a pair
of horses along the pebbled shore, while above him a slattern
leaned out a window in the inn, calling out to some passing
Ibbenese sailors.
A handful of Lordsport merchants had gathered to meet the ship.
They shouted questions as the Myraham was tying up.
“We’re out of Oldtown,” the captain called down,
“bearing apples and oranges, wines from the Arbor, feathers
from the Summer Isles. I have pepper, woven leathers, a bolt of
Myrish lace, mirrors for milady, a pair of Oldtown woodharps sweet
as any you ever heard.” The gangplank descended with a creak
and a thud. “And I’ve brought your heir back to
you.”
The Lordsport men gazed on Theon with blank, bovine eyes, and he
realized that they did not know who he was. It made him angry. He
pressed a golden dragon into the captain’s palm. “Have
your men bring my things.” Without waiting for a reply, he
strode down the gangplank. “Innkeeper,” he barked,
“I require a horse.”
“As you say, m’lord,” the man responded,
without so much as a bow. He had forgotten how bold the ironborn
could be. “Happens as I have one might do. Where would you be
riding, m’lord?”
“Pyke.” The fool still did not know him. He should
have worn his good doublet, with the kraken embroidered on the
breast.
“You’ll want to be off soon, to reach Pyke afore
dark,” the innkeeper said. “My boy will go with you and
show you the way.”
“Your boy will not be needed,” a deep voice called,
“nor your horse. I shall see my nephew back to his
father’s house.”
The speaker was the priest he had seen leading the horses along
the shoreline. As the man approached, the smallfolk bent the knee,
and Theon heard the innkeeper murmur, “Damphair.”
Tall and thin, with fierce black eyes and a beak of a nose, the
priest was garbed in mottled robes of green and grey and blue, the
swirling colors of the Drowned God. A waterskin hung under his arm
on a leather strap, and ropes of dried seaweed were braided through
his waist-long black hair and untrimmed beard.
A memory prodded at Theon. in one of his rare curt letters, Lord
Balon had written of his youngest brother going down in a storm,
and turning holy when he washed up safe on shore. “Uncle
Aeron?” he said doubtfully.
“Nephew Theon,” the priest replied. “Your lord
father bid me fetch you. Come.”
“In a moment, Uncle.” He turned back to the Myraham.
“My things,” he commanded the captain.
A sailor fetched him down his tall yew bow and quiver of arrows,
but it was the captain’s daughter who brought the pack with
his good clothing. “Milord.” Her eyes were red. When he
took the pack, she made as if to embrace him, there in front of her
own father and his priestly uncle and half the island.
Theon turned deftly aside. “You have my thanks.”
“Please,” she said, “I do love you well,
milord.”
“I must go.” He hurried after his uncle, who was
already well down the pier. Theon caught him with a dozen long
strides. “I had not looked for you, Uncle. After ten years, I
thought perhaps my lord father and lady mother might come
themselves, or send Dagmer with an honor guard.”
“It is not for you to question the commands of the Lord
Reaper of Pyke.” The priest’s manner was chilly, most
unlike the man Theon remembered. Aeron Greyjoy had been the most
amiable of his uncles, feckless and quick to laugh, fond of songs,
ale, and women. “As to Dagmer, the Cleftjaw is gone to Old
Wyk at your father’s behest, to roust the Stonehouses and the
Drumms.”
“To what purpose? Why are the longships
hosting?”
“Why have longships ever hosted?” His uncle had left
the horses tied up in front of the waterside inn. When they reached
them, he turned to Theon. “Tell me true, nephew. Do you pray
to the wolf gods now?”
Theon seldom prayed at all, but that was not something you
confessed to a priest, even your father’s own brother.
“Ned Stark prayed to a tree. No, I care nothing for
Stark’s gods.”
“Good. Kneel.”
The ground was all stones and mud. “Uncle,
I—”
“Kneel. Or are you too proud now, a lordling of the green
lands come among us?”
Theon knelt. He had a purpose here, and might need Aeron’s
help to achieve it. A crown was worth a little mud and horseshit on
his breeches, he supposed.
“Bow your head.” Lifting the skin, his uncle pulled
the cork and directed a thin stream of seawater down upon
Theon’s head. It drenched his hair and ran over his forehead
into his eyes. Sheets washed down his cheeks, and a finger crept
under his cloak and doublet and down his back, a cold rivulet along
his spine. The salt made his eyes burn, until it was all he could
do not to cry out. He could taste the ocean on his lips. “Let
Theon your servant be born again from the sea, as you were,”
Aeron Greyjoy intoned. “Bless him with salt, bless him with
stone, bless him with steel. Nephew, do you still know the
words?”
“What is dead may never die,” Theon said,
remembering.
“What is dead may never die,” his uncle echoed,
“but rises again, harder and stronger. Stand.”
Theon stood, blinking back tears from the salt in his eyes.
Wordless, his uncle corked the waterskin, untied his horse, and
mounted. Theon did the same. They set off together, leaving the inn
and the harbor behind them, up past the castle of Lord Botley into
the stony hills. The priest ventured no further word.
“I have been half my life away from home,” Theon
ventured at last. “Will I find the islands
changed?”
“Men fish the sea, dig in the earth, and die. Women birth
children in blood and pain, and die. Night follows day. The winds
and tides remain. The islands are as our god made them.” Gods, he has grown grim, Theon thought. “Will I find my
sister and my lady mother at Pyke?”
“You will not. Your mother dwells on Harlaw, with her own
sister. It is less raw there, and her cough troubles her. Your
sister has taken Black Wind to Great Wyk, with messages from your
lord father. She will return e’er long, you may be
sure.”
Theon did not need to be told that Black Wind was Asha’s
longship. He had not seen his sister in ten years, but that much he
knew of her. Odd that she would call it that, when Robb Stark had a
wolf named Grey Wind. “Stark is grey and Greyjoy’s
black,” he murmured, smiling, “but it seems we’re
both windy.”
The priest had nothing to say to that.
“And what of you, Uncle?” Theon asked. “You
were no priest when I was taken from Pyke. I remember how you would
sing the old reaving songs standing on the table with a horn of ale
in hand.”
“Young I was, and vain,” Aeron Greyjoy said,
“but the sea washed my follies and my vanities away. That man
drowned, nephew. His lungs filled with seawater, and the fish ate
the scales off his eyes. When I rose again, I saw
clearly.” He is as mad as he is sour. Theon had liked what he remembered
of the old Aeron Greyjoy. “Uncle, why has my father called
his swords and sails?”
“Doubtless he will tell you at Pyke.”
“I would know his plans now.”
“From me, you shall not. We are commanded not to speak of
this to any man.”
“Even to me?” Theon’s anger flared. He’d
led men in war, hunted with a king, won honor in tourney melees,
ridden with Brynden Blackfish and Greatjon Umber, fought in the
Whispering Wood, bedded more girls than he could name, and yet this
uncle was treating him as though he were still a child of ten.
“If my father makes plans for war, I must know of them. I am
not ‘any man,’ I am heir to Pyke and the Iron
Islands.”
“As to that,” his uncle said, “we shall
see.”
The words were a slap in the face. “We shall see? My
brothers are both dead. I am my lord father’s only living
son.”
“Your sister lives.” Asha, he thought, confounded. She was three years older than
Theon, yet still . . . “A woman may
inherit only if there is no male heir in the direct line,” he
insisted loudly. “I will not be cheated of my rights, I warn
you.”
His uncle grunted. “You warn a servant of the Drowned God,
boy? You have forgotten more than you know. And you are a great
fool if you believe your lord father will ever hand these holy
islands over to a Stark. Now be silent. The ride is long enough
without your magpie chatterings.”
Theon held his tongue, though not without struggle. So that is
the way of it, he thought. As if ten years in Winterfell could make
a Stark. Lord Eddard had raised him among his own children, but
Theon had never been one of them. The whole castle, from Lady Stark
to the lowliest kitchen scullion, knew he was hostage to his
father’s good behavior, and treated him accordingly. Even the
bastard Jon Snow had been accorded more honor than he had.
Lord Eddard had tried to play the father from time to time, but
to Theon he had always remained the man who’d brought blood
and fire to Pyke and taken him from his home. As a boy, he had
lived in fear of Stark’s stern face and great dark sword. His
wife was, if anything, even more distant and suspicious.
As for their children, the younger ones had been mewling babes
for most of his years at Winterfell. Only Robb and his baseborn
half brother Jon Snow had been old enough to be worth his notice.
The bastard was a sullen boy, quick to sense a slight, jealous of
Theon’s high birth and Robb’s regard for him. For Robb
himself, Theon did have a certain affection, as for a younger
brother . . . but it would be best not to
mention that. In Pyke, it would seem, the old wars were still being
fought. That ought not surprise him. The Iron Islands lived in the
past; the present was too hard and bitter to be borne. Besides, his
father and uncles were old, and the old lords were like that; they
took their dusty feuds to the grave, forgetting nothing and
forgiving less.
It had been the same with the Mallisters, his companions on the
ride from Riverrun to Seagard. Patrek Mallister was not too ill a
fellow; they shared a taste for wenches, wine, and hawking. But
when old Lord Jason saw his heir growing overly fond of
Theon’s company, he had taken Patrek aside to remind him that
Seagard had been built to defend the coast against reavers from the
Iron islands, the Greyjoys of Pyke chief among them. Their Booming
Tower was named for its immense bronze bell, rung of old to call
the townsfolk and farmhands into the castle when longships were
sighted on the western horizon.
“Never mind that the bell has been rung just once in three
hundred years,” Patrek had told Theon the day after, as he
shared his father’s cautions and a jug of green-apple
wine.
“When my brother stormed Seagard,” Theon said. Lord
Jason had slain Rodrik Greyjoy under the walls of the castle, and
thrown the ironmen back into the bay. “If your father
supposes I bear him some enmity for that, it’s only because
he never knew Rodrik.”
They had a laugh over that as they raced ahead to an amorous
young miller’s wife that Patrek knew. Would that Patrek were
with me now. Mallister or no, he was a more amiable riding companion
than this sour old priest that his uncle Aeron had turned into.
The path they rode wound up and up, into bare and stony hills.
Soon they were out of sight of the sea, though the smell of salt
still hung sharp in the damp air. They kept a steady plodding pace,
past a shepherd’s croft and the abandoned workings of a mine.
This new, holy Aeron Greyjoy was not much for talk. They rode in a
gloom of silence. Finally Theon could suffer it no longer.
“Robb Stark is Lord of Winterfell now,” he said.
Aeron rode on. “One wolf is much like the
other.”
“Robb has broken fealty with the Iron Throne and crowned
himself King in the North. There’s war.”
“The maester’s ravens fly over salt as soon as rock.
This news is old and cold.”
“It means a new day, Uncle.”
“Every morning brings a new day, much like the
old.”
“In Riverrun, they would tell you different. They say the
red comet is a herald of a new age. A messenger from the
gods.”
“A sign it is,” the priest agreed, “but from
our god, not theirs. A burning brand it is, such as our people
carried of old. It is the flame the Drowned God brought from the
sea, and it proclaims a rising tide. It is time to hoist our sails
and go forth into the world with fire and sword, as he
did.”
Theon smiled. “I could not agree more.”
“A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the
storm.” This raindrop will one day be a king, old man. Theon had
suffered quite enough of his uncle’s gloom. He put his spurs
into his horse and trotted on ahead, smiling.
It was nigh on sunset when they reached the walls of Pyke, a
crescent of dark stone that ran from cliff to cliff, with the
gatehouse in the center and three square towers to either side.
Theon could still make out the scars left by the stones of Robert
Baratheon’s catapults. A new south tower had risen from the
ruins of the old, its stone a paler shade of grey, and as yet
unmarred by patches of lichen. That was where Robert had made his
breach, swarming in over the rubble and corpses with his warharnmer
in hand and Ned Stark at his side. Theon had watched from the
safety of the Sea Tower, and sometimes he still saw the torches in
his dreams, and heard the dull thunder of the collapse.
The gates stood open to him, the rusted iron portcullis drawn
up. The guards atop the battlements watched with strangers’
eyes as Theon Greyjoy came home at last.
Beyond the curtain wall were half a hundred acres of headland
hard against the sky and the sea. The stables were here, and the
kennels, and a scatter of other outbuildings. Sheep and swine
huddled in their pens while the castle dogs ran free. To the south
were the cliffs, and the wide stone bridge to the Great Keep. Theon
could hear the crashing of waves as he swung down from his saddle.
A stableman came to take his horse. A pair of gaunt children and some thralls stared at him with
dull eyes, but there was no sign of his lord father, nor anyone
else he recalled from boyhood. A bleak and bitter homecoming, he
thought.
The priest had not dismounted. “Will you not stay the
night and share our meat and mead, Uncle?”
“Bring you, I was told. You are brought. Now I return to
our god’s business.” Aeron Greyjoy turned his horse and
rode slowly out beneath the muddy spikes of the portcullis.
A bentback old crone in a shapeless grey dress approached him
warily. “M’lord, I am sent to show you to
chambers.”
“By whose bidding?”
“Your lord father, m’lord.”
Theon pulled off his gloves. “So you do know who I am. Why
is my father not here to greet me?”
“He awaits you in the Sea Tower, m’lord. When you
are rested from your trip.” And I thought Ned Stark cold. “And who are you?”
“Helya, who keeps this castle for your lord
father.”
“Sylas was steward here. They called him Sourmouth.”
Even now, Theon could recall the winey stench of the old
man’s breath.
“Dead these five years, m’lord.”
“And what of Maester Qalen, where is he?”
“He sleeps in the sea. Wendamyr keeps the ravens
now.” It is as if I were a stranger here, Theon thought. Nothing has
changed, and yet everything has changed. “Show me to my
chambers, woman,” he commanded. Bowing stiffly, she led him
across the headland to the bridge. That at least was as he
remembered; the ancient stones slick with spray and spotted by
lichen, the sea foaming under their feet like some great wild
beast, the salt wind clutching at their clothes.
Whenever he’d imagined his homecoming, he had always
pictured himself returning to the snug bedchamber in the Sea Tower,
where he’d slept as a child. Instead the old woman led him to
the Bloody Keep. The halls here were larger and better furnished,
if no less cold nor damp. Theon was given a suite of chilly rooms
with ceilings so high that they were lost in gloom. He might have
been more impressed if he had not known that these were the very
chambers that had given the Bloody Keep its name. A thousand years
before, the sons of the River King had been slaughtered here,
hacked to bits in their beds so that pieces of their bodies might
be sent back to their father on the mainland.
But Greyjoys were not murdered in Pyke except once in a great
while by their brothers, and his brothers were both dead. It was
not fear of ghosts that made him glance about with distaste. The
wall hangings were green with mildew, the mattress musty-smelling
and sagging, the rushes old and brittle. Years had come and gone
since these chambers had last been opened. The damp went bone deep.
“I’ll have a basin of hot water and a fire in this
hearth,” he told the crone. “See that they light
braziers in the other rooms to drive out some of the chill. And
gods be good, get someone in here at once to change these
rushes.”
“Yes, m’lord. As you command.” She fled.
After some time, they brought the hot water he had asked for. It
was only tepid, and soon cold, and seawater in the bargain, but it
served to wash the dust of the long ride from his face and hair and
hands. While two thralls lit his braziers, Theon stripped off his
travel-stained clothing and dressed to meet his father. He chose
boots of supple black leather, soft lambswool breeches of
silvery-grey, a black velvet doublet with the golden kraken of the
Greyjoys embroidered on the breast. Around his throat he fastened a
slender gold chain, around his waist a belt of bleached white
leather. He hung a dirk at one hip and a longsword at the other, in
scabbards striped black-and-gold. Drawing the dirk, he tested its
edge with his thumb, pulled a whetstone from his belt pouch, and
gave it a few licks. He prided himself on keeping his weapons
sharp. “When I return, I shall expect a warm room and clean
rushes,” he warned the thralls as he drew on a pair of black
gloves, the silk decorated with a delicate scrollwork tracery in
golden thread.
Theon returned to the Great Keep through a covered stone
walkway, the echoes of his footsteps mingling with the ceaseless
rumble of the sea below. To get to the Sea Tower on its crooked
pillar, he had to cross three further bridges, each narrower than
the one before. The last was made of rope and wood, and the wet
salt wind made it sway underfoot like a living thing. Theon’s
heart was in his mouth by the time he was halfway across. A long
way below, the waves threw up tall plumes of spray as they crashed
against the rock. As a boy, he used to run across this bridge, even
in the black of night. Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his
doubt whispered. Grown men know better.
The door was grey wood studded with iron, and Theon found it
barred from the inside. He hammered on it with a fist, and cursed
when a splinter snagged the fabric of his glove. The wood was damp
and moldy, the iron studs rusted.
After a moment the door was opened from within by a guard in a
black iron breastplate and pothelm. “You are the
son?”
“Out of my way, or you’ll learn who I am.” The
man stood aside. Theon climbed the twisting steps to the solar. He
found his father seated beside a brazier, beneath a robe of musty
sealskins that covered him foot to chin. At the sound of boots on
stone, the Lord of the Iron Islands lifted his eyes to behold his
last living son. He was smaller than Theon remembered him. And so
gaunt. Balon Greyjoy had always been thin, but now he looked as
though the gods had put him in a cauldron and boiled every spare
ounce of flesh from his bones, until nothing remained but hair and
skin. Bone thin and bone hard he was, with a face that might have
been chipped from flint. His eyes were flinty too, black and sharp,
but the years and the salt winds had turned his hair the grey of a
winter sea, flecked with whitecaps. Unbound, it hung past the small
of the back.
“Nine years, is it?” Lord Balon said at last.
“Ten,” Theon answered, pulling off his torn
gloves.
“A boy they took,” his father said. “What are
you now?”
“A man,” Theon answered. “Your blood and your
heir.”
Lord Balon grunted. “We shall see.”
“You shall,” Theon promised.
“Ten years, you say. Stark had you as long as I. And now
you come as his envoy.”
“Not his,” Theon said. “Lord Eddard is dead,
beheaded by the Lannister queen.”
“They are both dead, Stark and that Robert who broke my
walls with his stones. I vowed I’d live to see them both in
their graves, and I have.” He grimaced. “Yet the cold
and the damp still make my joints ache, as when they were alive. So
what does it serve?”
“It serves.” Theon moved closer. “I bring a
letter—”
“Did Ned Stark dress you like that?” his father
interrupted, squinting up from beneath his robe. “Was it his
pleasure to garb you in velvets and silks and make you his own
sweet daughter?”
Theon felt the blood rising to his face. “I am no
man’s daughter. If you mislike my garb, I will change
it.”
“You will.” Throwing off the furs, Lord Balon pushed
himself to his feet. He was not so tall as Theon remembered.
“That bauble around your neck—was it bought with gold or
iron?”
Theon touched the gold chain. He had forgotten. It has been so
long . . . In the Old Way, women might decorate
themselves with ornaments bought with coin, but a warrior wore only
the jewelry he took off the corpses of enemies slain by his own
hand. Paying the iron price, it was called.
“You blush red as a maid, Theon. A question was asked. Is
it the gold price you paid, or the iron?”
“The gold,” Theon admitted.
His father slid his fingers under the necklace and gave it a
yank so hard it was like to take Theon’s head off, had the
chain not snapped first. “My daughter has taken an axe for a
lover,” Lord Balon said. “I will not have my son bedeck
himself like a whore.” He dropped the broken chain onto the
brazier, where it slid down among the coals. “It is as I
feared. The green lands have made you soft, and the Starks have
made you theirs. “
“You’re wrong. Ned Stark was my gaoler, but my blood
is still salt and iron.”
Lord Balon turned away to warm his bony hands over the brazier.
“Yet the Stark pup sends you to me like a well-trained raven,
clutching his little message.”
“There is nothing small about the letter I bear,”
Theon said, “and the offer he makes is one I suggested to
him.”
“This wolf king heeds your counsel, does he?” The
notion seemed to amuse Lord Balon.
“He heeds me, yes. I’ve hunted with him, trained
with him, shared meat and mead with him, warred at his side. I have
earned his trust. He looks on me as an older brother,
he—”
“No.” His father jabbed a finger at his face.
“Not here, not in Pyke, not in my hearing, you will not name
him brother, this son of the man who put your true brothers to the
sword. Or have you forgotten Rodrik and Maron, who were your own
blood?”
“I forget nothing.” Ned Stark had killed neither of
his brothers, in truth. Rodrik had been slain by Lord Jason
Mallister at Seagard, Maron crushed in the collapse of the old
south tower . . . but Stark would have done for
them just as quick had the tide of battle chanced to sweep them
together. “I remember my brothers very well,” Theon
insisted. Chiefly he remembered Rodrik’s drunken cuffs and
Maron’s cruel japes and endless lies. “I remember when
my father was a king too.” He took out Robb’s letter
and thrust it forward. “Here. Read
it . . . Your Grace.”
Lord Balon broke the seal and unfolded the parchment. His black
eyes flicked back and forth. “So the boy would give me a
crown again,” he said, “and all I need do is destroy
his enemies.” His thin lips twisted in a smile.
“By now Robb is at the Golden Tooth,” Theon said.
“Once it falls, he’ll be through the hills in a day.
Lord Tywin’s host is at Harrenhal, cut off from the west. The
Kingslayer is a captive at Riverrun. Only Ser Stafford Lannister
and the raw green levies he’s been gathering remain to oppose
Robb in the west. Ser Stafford will put himself between
Robb’s army and Lannisport, which means the city will be
undefended when we descend on it by sea. If the gods are with us,
even Casterly Rock itself may fall before the Lannisters so much as
realize that we are upon them.”
Lord Balon grunted. “Casterly Rock has never
fallen.”
“Until now.” Theon smiled. And how sweet that will
be.
His father did not return the smile. “So this is why Robb
Stark sends you back to me, after so long? So you might win my
consent to this plan of his?”
“It is my plan, not Robb’s,” Theon said
proudly. Mine, as the victory will be mine, and in time the crown.
“I will lead the attack myself, if it please you. As my
reward I would ask that you grant me Casterly Rock for my own seat,
once we have taken it from the Lannisters.” With the Rock, he
could hold Lannisport and the golden lands of the west. It would
mean wealth and power such as House Greyjoy had never known.
“You reward yourself handsomely for a notion and a few
lines of scribbling.” His father read the letter again.
“The pup says nothing about a reward. Only that you speak for
him, and I am to listen, and give him my sails and swords, and in
return he will give me a crown.” His flinty eyes lifted to
meet his son’s. “He will give me a crown,” he
repeated, his voice growing sharp.
“A poor choice of words, what is meant
is—”
“What is meant is what is said. The boy will give me a
crown. And what is given can be taken away.” Lord Balon
tossed the letter onto the brazier, atop the necklace. The
parchment curled, blackened, and took flame.
Theon was aghast. “Have you gone mad?”
His father laid a stinging backhand across his cheek.
“Mind your tongue. You are not in Winterfell now, and I am
not Robb the Boy, that you should speak to me so. I am the Greyjoy,
Lord Reaper of Pyke, King of Salt and Rock, Son of the Sea Wind,
and no man gives me a crown. I pay the iron price. I will take my
crown, as Urron Redhand did five thousand years ago.”
Theon edged backward, away from the sudden fury in his
father’s tone. “Take it, then,” he spat, his
cheek still tingling. “Call yourself King of the Iron
islands, no one will care . . . until the wars
are over, and the victor looks about and spies the old fool perched
off his shore with an iron crown on his head.”
Lord Balon laughed. “Well, at the least you are no craven.
No more than I’m a fool. Do you think I gather my ships to
watch them rock at anchor? I mean to carve out a kingdom with fire
and sword . . . but not from the west, and not
at the bidding of King Robb the Boy. Casterly Rock is too strong,
and Lord Tywin too cunning by half. Aye, we might take Lannisport,
but we should never keep it. No. I hunger for a different
plum . . . not so juicy sweet, to be sure, yet
it hangs there ripe and undefended.” Where? Theon might have asked, but by then he knew.
There was no safe anchorage at Pyke, but Theon Greyjoy wished to
look on his father’s castle from the sea, to see it as he had
seen it last, ten years before, when Robert Baratheon’s war
galley had borne him away to be a ward of Eddard Stark. On that day
he had stood beside the rail, listening to the stroke of the oars
and the pounding of the master’s drum while he watched Pyke
dwindle in the distance. Now he wanted to see it grow larger, to
rise from the sea before him.
Obedient to his wishes, the Myraham beat her way past the point
with her sails snapping and her captain cursing the wind and his
crew and the follies of highborn lordlings. Theon drew the hood of
his cloak up against the spray, and looked for home.
The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the
castle seemed one with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges
quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the same salt
waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green
lichen, speckled by the droppings of the same seabirds. The point
of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once
thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had
hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered,
thousands of years past. All that remained were three bare and
barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from
the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while
the angry waves foamed and crashed among them.
Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those islands and
pillars, almost a part of them, its curtain wall closing off the
headland around the foot of the great stone bridge that leapt from
the clifftop to the largest islet, dominated by the massive bulk of
the Great Keep. Farther out were the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody
Keep, each on its own island. Towers and outbuildings clung to the
stacks beyond, linked to each other by covered archways when the
pillars stood close, by long swaying walks of wood and rope when
they did not.
The Sea Tower rose from the outmost island at the point of the
broken sword, the oldest part of the castle, round and tall, the
sheer-sided pillar on which it stood half-eaten through by the
endless battering of the waves. The base of the tower was white
from centuries of salt spray, the upper stories green from the
lichen that crawled over it like a thick blanket, the jagged crown
black with soot from its nightly watchfire.
Above the Sea Tower snapped his father’s banner. The
Myraham was too far off for Theon to see more than the cloth
itself, but he knew the device it bore: the golden kraken of House
Greyjoy, arms writhing and reaching against a black field. The
banner streamed from an iron mast, shivering and twisting as the
wind gusted, like a bird struggling to take flight. And here at
least the direwolf of Stark did not fly above, casting its shadow
down upon the Greyjoy kraken.
Theon had never seen a more stirring sight. In the sky behind
the castle, the fine red tail of the comet was visible through
thin, scuttling clouds. All the way from Riverrun to Seagard, the
Mallisters had argued about its meaning. It is my comet, Theon told
himself, sliding a hand into his fur-lined cloak to touch the
oilskin pouch snug in its pocket. Inside was the letter Robb Stark
had given him, paper as good as a crown.
“Does the castle look as you remember it, milord?”
the captain’s daughter asked as she pressed herself against
his arm.
“It looks smaller,” Theon confessed, “though
perhaps that is only the distance.” The Myraham was a
fat-bellied southron merchanter up from Oldtown, carrying wine and
cloth and seed to trade for iron ore. Her captain was a fat-bellied
southron merchanter as well, and the stony sea that foamed at the
feet of the castle made his plump lips quiver, so he stayed well
out, farther than Theon would have liked. An ironborn captain in a
longship would have taken them along the cliffs and under the high
bridge that spanned the gap between the gatehouse and the Great
Keep, but this plump Oldtowner had neither the craft, the crew, nor
the courage to attempt such a thing. So they sailed past at a safe
distance, and Theon must content himself with seeing Pyke from
afar. Even so, the Myraham had to struggle mightily to keep itself
off those rocks.
“It must be windy there,” the captain’s
daughter observed.
He laughed. “Windy and cold and damp. A miserable hard
place, in truth . . . but my lord father once
told me that hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the
world.”
The captain’s face was as green as the sea when he came
bowing up to Theon and asked, “May we make for port now,
milord?”
“You may,” Theon said, a faint smile playing about
his lips. The promise of gold had turned the Oldtowner into a
shameless lickspittle. It would have been a much different voyage
if a longship from the islands had been waiting at Seagard as
he’d hoped. Ironborn captains were proud and willful, and did
not go in awe of a man’s blood. The islands were too small
for awe, and a longship smaller still. If every captain was a king
aboard his own ship, as was often said, it was small wonder they
named the islands the land of ten thousand kings. And when you have
seen your kings shit over the rail and turn green in a storm, it
was hard to bend the knee and pretend they were gods. “The
Drowned God makes men,” old King Urron Redhand had once said,
thousands of years ago, “but it’s men who make
crowns.”
A longship would have made the crossing in half the time as
well. The Myraham was a wallowing tub, if truth be told, and he
would not care to be aboard her in a storm. Still, Theon could not
be too unhappy. He was here, undrowned, and the voyage had offered
certain other amusements. He put an arm around the captain’s
daughter. “Summon me when we make Lordsport,” he told
her father. “We’ll be below, in my cabin.” He led
the girl away aft, while her father watched them go in sullen
silence.
The cabin was the captain’s, in truth, but it had been
turned over to Theon’s use when they sailed from Seagard. The
captain’s daughter had not been turned over to his use, but
she had come to his bed willingly enough all the same. A cup of
wine, a few whispers, and there she was. The girl was a shade plump
for his taste, with skin as splotchy as oatmeal, but her breasts
filled his hands nicely and she had been a maiden the first time he
took her. That was surprising at her age, but Theon found it
diverting. He did not think the captain approved, and that was
amusing as well, watching the man struggle to swallow his outrage
while performing his courtesies to the high lord, the rich purse of
gold he’d been promised never far from his thoughts.
As Theon shrugged out of his wet cloak, the girl said,
“You must be so happy to see your home again, milord. How
many years have you been away? “
“Ten, or close as makes no matter,” he told her.
“I was a boy of ten when I was taken to Winterfell. as a ward
of Eddard Stark.” A ward in name, a hostage in truth. Half
his days a hostage . . . but no longer. His
life was his own again, and nowhere a Stark to be seen. He drew the
captain’s daughter close and kissed her on her ear.
“Take off your cloak.”
She dropped her eyes, suddenly shy, but did as he bid her. When
the heavy garment, sodden with spray, fell from her shoulders to
the deck, she gave him a little bow and smiled anxiously. She
looked rather stupid when she smiled, but he had never required a
woman to be clever. “Come here,” he told her.
She did. “I have never seen the Iron Islands.”
“Count yourself fortunate.” Theon stroked her hair.
it was fine and dark, though the wind had made a tangle of it.
“The islands are stern and stony places, scant of comfort and
bleak of prospect. Death is never far here, and life is mean and
meager. Men spend their nights drinking ale and arguing over whose
lot is worse, the fisherfolk who fight the sea or the farmers who
try and scratch a crop from the poor thin soil. If truth be told,
the miners have it worse than either, breaking their backs down in
the dark, and for what? Iron, lead, tin, those are our treasures.
Small wonder the ironmen of old turned to raiding.”
The stupid girl did not seem to be listening. “I could go
ashore with you,” she said. “I would, if it please
you . . . ”
“You could go ashore,” Theon agreed, squeezing her
breast, “but not with me, I fear.”
“I’d work in your castle, milord. I can clean fish
and bake bread and churn butter. Father says my peppercrab stew is
the best he’s ever tasted. You could find me a place in your
kitchens and I could make you peppercrab stew.”
“And warm my bed by night?” He reached for the laces
of her bodice and began to undo them, his fingers deft and
practiced. “Once I might have carried you home as a prize,
and kept you to wife whether you willed it or no. The ironmen of
old did such things. A man had his rock wife, his true bride,
ironborn like himself, but he had his salt wives too, women
captured on raids.”
The girl’s eyes grew wide, and not because he had bared
her breasts. “I would be your salt wife, milord.”
“I fear those days are gone.” Theon’s finger
circled one heavy teat, spiraling in toward the fat brown nipple.
“No longer may we ride the wind with fire and sword, taking
what we want. Now we scratch in the ground and toss lines in the
sea like other men, and count ourselves lucky if we have salt cod
and porridge enough to get us through a winter.” He took her
nipple in his mouth, and bit it until she gasped.
“You can put it in me again, if it please you,” she
whispered in his ear as he sucked.
When he raised his head from her breast, the skin was dark red
where his mouth had marked her. “It would please me to teach
you something new. Unlace me and pleasure me with your
mouth.”
“With my mouth?”
His thumb brushed lightly over her full lips. “It’s
what those lips were made for, sweetling. If you were my salt wife,
you’d do as I command.”
She was timid at first, but learned quickly for such a stupid
girl, which pleased him. Her mouth was as wet and sweet as her
cunt, and this way he did not have to listen to her mindless
prattle. Once I would have kept her as a salt wife in truth, he
thought to himself as he slid his fingers through her tangled hair.
Once. When we still kept the Old Way, lived by the axe instead of
the pick, taking what we would, be it wealth, women, or glory. In
those days, the ironborn did not work mines; that was labor for the
captives brought back from the hostings, and so too the sorry
business of farming and tending goats and sheep. War was an
ironman’s proper trade. The Drowned God had made them to
reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire
and blood and song.
Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned Black
Harren, gave Harren’s kingdom back to the weakling rivermen,
and reduced the Iron Islands to an insignificant backwater of a
much greater realm. Yet the old red tales were still told around
driftwood fires and smoky hearths all across the islands, even
behind the high stone halls of Pyke. Theon’s father numbered
among his titles the style of Lord Reaper, and the Greyjoy words
boasted that We Do Not Sow.
It had been to bring back the Old Way more than for the empty
vanity of a crown that Lord Balon had staged his great rebellion.
Robert Baratheon had written a bloody end to that hope, with the
help of his friend Eddard Stark, but both men were dead now. Mere
boys ruled in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror
had forged was smashed and sundered. This is the season, Theon
thought as the captain’s daughter slid her lips up and down
the length of him, the season, the year, the day, and I am the man.
He smiled crookedly, wondering what his father would say when Theon
told him that he, the last-born, babe and hostage, he had succeeded
where Lord Balon himself had failed.
His climax came on him sudden as a storm, and he filled the
girl’s mouth with his seed. Startled, she tried to pull away,
but Theon held her tight by the hair. Afterward, she crawled up
beside him. “Did I please milord?”
“Well enough,” he told her.
“It tasted salty,” she murmured.
“Like the sea?”
She nodded. “I have always loved the sea,
milord.”
“As I have,” he said, rolling her nipple idly
between his fingers. It was true. The sea meant freedom to the men
of the Iron Islands. He had forgotten that until the Myraham had
raised sail at Seagard. The sounds brought old feelings back; the
creak of wood and rope, the captain’s shouted commands, the
snap of the sails as the wind filled them, each as familiar as the
beating of his own heart, and as comforting. I must remember this,
Theon vowed to himself. I must never go far from the sea again.
“Take me with you, milord,” the captain’s
daughter begged. “I don’t need to go to your castle. I
can stay in some town, and be your salt wife.” She reached
out to stroke his cheek.
Theon Greyjoy pushed her hand aside and climbed off the bunk.
“My place is Pyke, and yours is on this ship.”
“I can’t stay here now.”
He laced up his breeches. “Why not?”
“My father,” she told him. “Once you’re
gone, he’ll punish me, milord. He’ll call me names and
hit me.”
Theon swept his cloak off its peg and over his shoulders.
“Fathers are like that,” he admitted as he pinned the
folds with a silver clasp. “Tell him he should be pleased. As
many times as I’ve fucked you, you’re likely with
child. It’s not every man who has the honor of raising a
king’s bastard.” She looked at him stupidly, so he left
her there.
The Myraham was rounding a wooded point. Below the pine-clad
bluffs, a dozen fishing boats were pulling in their nets. The big
cog stayed well out from them, tacking. Theon moved to the bow for
a better view. He saw the castle first, the stronghold of the
Botleys. When he was a boy it had been timber and wattle, but
Robert Baratheon had razed that structure to the ground. Lord
Sawane had rebuilt in stone, for now a small square keep crowned
the hill. Pale green flags drooped from the squat corner towers,
each emblazoned with a shoal of silvery fish.
Beneath the dubious protection of the fish-ridden little castle
lay the village of Lordsport, its harbor aswarm with ships. When
last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking wasteland,
the skeletons of burnt longships and smashed galleys
littering the stony shore like the bones of dead leviathans,
the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes. After ten
years, few traces of the war remained. The smallfolk had built new
hovels with the stones of the old, and cut fresh sod for their
roofs. A new inn had risen beside the landing, twice the size of
the old one, with a lower story of cut stone and two upper stories
of timber. The sept beyond had never been rebuilt, though; only a
seven-sided foundation remained where it had stood. Robert
Baratheon’s fury had soured the ironmen’s taste for the
new gods, it would seem.
Theon was more interested in ships than gods. Among the masts of
countless fishing boats, he spied a Tyroshi trading galley
off-loading beside a lumbering Ibbenese cog with her black-tarred
hull. A great number of longships, fifty or sixty at the least,
stood out to sea or lay beached on the pebbled shore to the north.
Some of the sails bore devices from the other islands; the blood
moon of Wynch, Lord Goodbrother’s banded black warhorn,
Harlaw’s silver scythe. Theon searched for his uncle
Euron’s Silence. Of that lean and terrible red ship he saw no
sign, but his father’s Great Kraken was there, her bow
ornamented with a grey iron ram in the shape of its namesake.
Had Lord Balon anticipated him and called the Greyjoy banners?
His hand went inside his cloak again, to the oilskin pouch. No one
knew of his letter but Robb Stark; they were no fools, to entrust
their secrets to a bird. Still, Lord Balon was no fool either. He
might well have guessed why his son was coming home at long last,
and acted accordingly.
The thought did not please him. His father’s war was long
done, and lost. This was Theon’s hour—his plan, his glory,
and in time his crown. Yet if the longships are
hosting . . .
It might be only a caution, now that he thought on it. A
defensive move, lest the war spill out across the sea. Old men were
cautious by nature. His father was old now, and so too his uncle
Victarion, who commanded the Iron Fleet. His uncle Euron was a
different song, to be sure, but the Silence did not seem to be in
port. It’s all for the good, Theon told himself. This way, I
shall be able to strike all the more quickly.
As the Myraham made her way landward, Theon paced the deck
restlessly, scanning the shore. He had not thought to find Lord
Balon himself at quayside, but surely his father would have sent
someone to meet him. Sylas Sourmouth the steward, Lord Botley,
perhaps even Dagmer Cleftjaw. It would be good to look on
Dagmer’s hideous old face again. It was not as though they
had no word of his arrival. Robb had sent ravens from Riverrun, and
when they’d found no longship at Seagard, Jason Mallister had
sent his own birds to Pyke, supposing that Robb’s were
lost.
Yet he saw no familiar faces, no honor guard waiting to escort
him from Lordsport to Pyke, only smallfolk going about their small
business. Shorehands rolled casks of wine off the Tyroshi trader,
fisherfolk cried the day’s catch, children ran and played. A
priest in the seawater robes of the Drowned God was leading a pair
of horses along the pebbled shore, while above him a slattern
leaned out a window in the inn, calling out to some passing
Ibbenese sailors.
A handful of Lordsport merchants had gathered to meet the ship.
They shouted questions as the Myraham was tying up.
“We’re out of Oldtown,” the captain called down,
“bearing apples and oranges, wines from the Arbor, feathers
from the Summer Isles. I have pepper, woven leathers, a bolt of
Myrish lace, mirrors for milady, a pair of Oldtown woodharps sweet
as any you ever heard.” The gangplank descended with a creak
and a thud. “And I’ve brought your heir back to
you.”
The Lordsport men gazed on Theon with blank, bovine eyes, and he
realized that they did not know who he was. It made him angry. He
pressed a golden dragon into the captain’s palm. “Have
your men bring my things.” Without waiting for a reply, he
strode down the gangplank. “Innkeeper,” he barked,
“I require a horse.”
“As you say, m’lord,” the man responded,
without so much as a bow. He had forgotten how bold the ironborn
could be. “Happens as I have one might do. Where would you be
riding, m’lord?”
“Pyke.” The fool still did not know him. He should
have worn his good doublet, with the kraken embroidered on the
breast.
“You’ll want to be off soon, to reach Pyke afore
dark,” the innkeeper said. “My boy will go with you and
show you the way.”
“Your boy will not be needed,” a deep voice called,
“nor your horse. I shall see my nephew back to his
father’s house.”
The speaker was the priest he had seen leading the horses along
the shoreline. As the man approached, the smallfolk bent the knee,
and Theon heard the innkeeper murmur, “Damphair.”
Tall and thin, with fierce black eyes and a beak of a nose, the
priest was garbed in mottled robes of green and grey and blue, the
swirling colors of the Drowned God. A waterskin hung under his arm
on a leather strap, and ropes of dried seaweed were braided through
his waist-long black hair and untrimmed beard.
A memory prodded at Theon. in one of his rare curt letters, Lord
Balon had written of his youngest brother going down in a storm,
and turning holy when he washed up safe on shore. “Uncle
Aeron?” he said doubtfully.
“Nephew Theon,” the priest replied. “Your lord
father bid me fetch you. Come.”
“In a moment, Uncle.” He turned back to the Myraham.
“My things,” he commanded the captain.
A sailor fetched him down his tall yew bow and quiver of arrows,
but it was the captain’s daughter who brought the pack with
his good clothing. “Milord.” Her eyes were red. When he
took the pack, she made as if to embrace him, there in front of her
own father and his priestly uncle and half the island.
Theon turned deftly aside. “You have my thanks.”
“Please,” she said, “I do love you well,
milord.”
“I must go.” He hurried after his uncle, who was
already well down the pier. Theon caught him with a dozen long
strides. “I had not looked for you, Uncle. After ten years, I
thought perhaps my lord father and lady mother might come
themselves, or send Dagmer with an honor guard.”
“It is not for you to question the commands of the Lord
Reaper of Pyke.” The priest’s manner was chilly, most
unlike the man Theon remembered. Aeron Greyjoy had been the most
amiable of his uncles, feckless and quick to laugh, fond of songs,
ale, and women. “As to Dagmer, the Cleftjaw is gone to Old
Wyk at your father’s behest, to roust the Stonehouses and the
Drumms.”
“To what purpose? Why are the longships
hosting?”
“Why have longships ever hosted?” His uncle had left
the horses tied up in front of the waterside inn. When they reached
them, he turned to Theon. “Tell me true, nephew. Do you pray
to the wolf gods now?”
Theon seldom prayed at all, but that was not something you
confessed to a priest, even your father’s own brother.
“Ned Stark prayed to a tree. No, I care nothing for
Stark’s gods.”
“Good. Kneel.”
The ground was all stones and mud. “Uncle,
I—”
“Kneel. Or are you too proud now, a lordling of the green
lands come among us?”
Theon knelt. He had a purpose here, and might need Aeron’s
help to achieve it. A crown was worth a little mud and horseshit on
his breeches, he supposed.
“Bow your head.” Lifting the skin, his uncle pulled
the cork and directed a thin stream of seawater down upon
Theon’s head. It drenched his hair and ran over his forehead
into his eyes. Sheets washed down his cheeks, and a finger crept
under his cloak and doublet and down his back, a cold rivulet along
his spine. The salt made his eyes burn, until it was all he could
do not to cry out. He could taste the ocean on his lips. “Let
Theon your servant be born again from the sea, as you were,”
Aeron Greyjoy intoned. “Bless him with salt, bless him with
stone, bless him with steel. Nephew, do you still know the
words?”
“What is dead may never die,” Theon said,
remembering.
“What is dead may never die,” his uncle echoed,
“but rises again, harder and stronger. Stand.”
Theon stood, blinking back tears from the salt in his eyes.
Wordless, his uncle corked the waterskin, untied his horse, and
mounted. Theon did the same. They set off together, leaving the inn
and the harbor behind them, up past the castle of Lord Botley into
the stony hills. The priest ventured no further word.
“I have been half my life away from home,” Theon
ventured at last. “Will I find the islands
changed?”
“Men fish the sea, dig in the earth, and die. Women birth
children in blood and pain, and die. Night follows day. The winds
and tides remain. The islands are as our god made them.” Gods, he has grown grim, Theon thought. “Will I find my
sister and my lady mother at Pyke?”
“You will not. Your mother dwells on Harlaw, with her own
sister. It is less raw there, and her cough troubles her. Your
sister has taken Black Wind to Great Wyk, with messages from your
lord father. She will return e’er long, you may be
sure.”
Theon did not need to be told that Black Wind was Asha’s
longship. He had not seen his sister in ten years, but that much he
knew of her. Odd that she would call it that, when Robb Stark had a
wolf named Grey Wind. “Stark is grey and Greyjoy’s
black,” he murmured, smiling, “but it seems we’re
both windy.”
The priest had nothing to say to that.
“And what of you, Uncle?” Theon asked. “You
were no priest when I was taken from Pyke. I remember how you would
sing the old reaving songs standing on the table with a horn of ale
in hand.”
“Young I was, and vain,” Aeron Greyjoy said,
“but the sea washed my follies and my vanities away. That man
drowned, nephew. His lungs filled with seawater, and the fish ate
the scales off his eyes. When I rose again, I saw
clearly.” He is as mad as he is sour. Theon had liked what he remembered
of the old Aeron Greyjoy. “Uncle, why has my father called
his swords and sails?”
“Doubtless he will tell you at Pyke.”
“I would know his plans now.”
“From me, you shall not. We are commanded not to speak of
this to any man.”
“Even to me?” Theon’s anger flared. He’d
led men in war, hunted with a king, won honor in tourney melees,
ridden with Brynden Blackfish and Greatjon Umber, fought in the
Whispering Wood, bedded more girls than he could name, and yet this
uncle was treating him as though he were still a child of ten.
“If my father makes plans for war, I must know of them. I am
not ‘any man,’ I am heir to Pyke and the Iron
Islands.”
“As to that,” his uncle said, “we shall
see.”
The words were a slap in the face. “We shall see? My
brothers are both dead. I am my lord father’s only living
son.”
“Your sister lives.” Asha, he thought, confounded. She was three years older than
Theon, yet still . . . “A woman may
inherit only if there is no male heir in the direct line,” he
insisted loudly. “I will not be cheated of my rights, I warn
you.”
His uncle grunted. “You warn a servant of the Drowned God,
boy? You have forgotten more than you know. And you are a great
fool if you believe your lord father will ever hand these holy
islands over to a Stark. Now be silent. The ride is long enough
without your magpie chatterings.”
Theon held his tongue, though not without struggle. So that is
the way of it, he thought. As if ten years in Winterfell could make
a Stark. Lord Eddard had raised him among his own children, but
Theon had never been one of them. The whole castle, from Lady Stark
to the lowliest kitchen scullion, knew he was hostage to his
father’s good behavior, and treated him accordingly. Even the
bastard Jon Snow had been accorded more honor than he had.
Lord Eddard had tried to play the father from time to time, but
to Theon he had always remained the man who’d brought blood
and fire to Pyke and taken him from his home. As a boy, he had
lived in fear of Stark’s stern face and great dark sword. His
wife was, if anything, even more distant and suspicious.
As for their children, the younger ones had been mewling babes
for most of his years at Winterfell. Only Robb and his baseborn
half brother Jon Snow had been old enough to be worth his notice.
The bastard was a sullen boy, quick to sense a slight, jealous of
Theon’s high birth and Robb’s regard for him. For Robb
himself, Theon did have a certain affection, as for a younger
brother . . . but it would be best not to
mention that. In Pyke, it would seem, the old wars were still being
fought. That ought not surprise him. The Iron Islands lived in the
past; the present was too hard and bitter to be borne. Besides, his
father and uncles were old, and the old lords were like that; they
took their dusty feuds to the grave, forgetting nothing and
forgiving less.
It had been the same with the Mallisters, his companions on the
ride from Riverrun to Seagard. Patrek Mallister was not too ill a
fellow; they shared a taste for wenches, wine, and hawking. But
when old Lord Jason saw his heir growing overly fond of
Theon’s company, he had taken Patrek aside to remind him that
Seagard had been built to defend the coast against reavers from the
Iron islands, the Greyjoys of Pyke chief among them. Their Booming
Tower was named for its immense bronze bell, rung of old to call
the townsfolk and farmhands into the castle when longships were
sighted on the western horizon.
“Never mind that the bell has been rung just once in three
hundred years,” Patrek had told Theon the day after, as he
shared his father’s cautions and a jug of green-apple
wine.
“When my brother stormed Seagard,” Theon said. Lord
Jason had slain Rodrik Greyjoy under the walls of the castle, and
thrown the ironmen back into the bay. “If your father
supposes I bear him some enmity for that, it’s only because
he never knew Rodrik.”
They had a laugh over that as they raced ahead to an amorous
young miller’s wife that Patrek knew. Would that Patrek were
with me now. Mallister or no, he was a more amiable riding companion
than this sour old priest that his uncle Aeron had turned into.
The path they rode wound up and up, into bare and stony hills.
Soon they were out of sight of the sea, though the smell of salt
still hung sharp in the damp air. They kept a steady plodding pace,
past a shepherd’s croft and the abandoned workings of a mine.
This new, holy Aeron Greyjoy was not much for talk. They rode in a
gloom of silence. Finally Theon could suffer it no longer.
“Robb Stark is Lord of Winterfell now,” he said.
Aeron rode on. “One wolf is much like the
other.”
“Robb has broken fealty with the Iron Throne and crowned
himself King in the North. There’s war.”
“The maester’s ravens fly over salt as soon as rock.
This news is old and cold.”
“It means a new day, Uncle.”
“Every morning brings a new day, much like the
old.”
“In Riverrun, they would tell you different. They say the
red comet is a herald of a new age. A messenger from the
gods.”
“A sign it is,” the priest agreed, “but from
our god, not theirs. A burning brand it is, such as our people
carried of old. It is the flame the Drowned God brought from the
sea, and it proclaims a rising tide. It is time to hoist our sails
and go forth into the world with fire and sword, as he
did.”
Theon smiled. “I could not agree more.”
“A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the
storm.” This raindrop will one day be a king, old man. Theon had
suffered quite enough of his uncle’s gloom. He put his spurs
into his horse and trotted on ahead, smiling.
It was nigh on sunset when they reached the walls of Pyke, a
crescent of dark stone that ran from cliff to cliff, with the
gatehouse in the center and three square towers to either side.
Theon could still make out the scars left by the stones of Robert
Baratheon’s catapults. A new south tower had risen from the
ruins of the old, its stone a paler shade of grey, and as yet
unmarred by patches of lichen. That was where Robert had made his
breach, swarming in over the rubble and corpses with his warharnmer
in hand and Ned Stark at his side. Theon had watched from the
safety of the Sea Tower, and sometimes he still saw the torches in
his dreams, and heard the dull thunder of the collapse.
The gates stood open to him, the rusted iron portcullis drawn
up. The guards atop the battlements watched with strangers’
eyes as Theon Greyjoy came home at last.
Beyond the curtain wall were half a hundred acres of headland
hard against the sky and the sea. The stables were here, and the
kennels, and a scatter of other outbuildings. Sheep and swine
huddled in their pens while the castle dogs ran free. To the south
were the cliffs, and the wide stone bridge to the Great Keep. Theon
could hear the crashing of waves as he swung down from his saddle.
A stableman came to take his horse. A pair of gaunt children and some thralls stared at him with
dull eyes, but there was no sign of his lord father, nor anyone
else he recalled from boyhood. A bleak and bitter homecoming, he
thought.
The priest had not dismounted. “Will you not stay the
night and share our meat and mead, Uncle?”
“Bring you, I was told. You are brought. Now I return to
our god’s business.” Aeron Greyjoy turned his horse and
rode slowly out beneath the muddy spikes of the portcullis.
A bentback old crone in a shapeless grey dress approached him
warily. “M’lord, I am sent to show you to
chambers.”
“By whose bidding?”
“Your lord father, m’lord.”
Theon pulled off his gloves. “So you do know who I am. Why
is my father not here to greet me?”
“He awaits you in the Sea Tower, m’lord. When you
are rested from your trip.” And I thought Ned Stark cold. “And who are you?”
“Helya, who keeps this castle for your lord
father.”
“Sylas was steward here. They called him Sourmouth.”
Even now, Theon could recall the winey stench of the old
man’s breath.
“Dead these five years, m’lord.”
“And what of Maester Qalen, where is he?”
“He sleeps in the sea. Wendamyr keeps the ravens
now.” It is as if I were a stranger here, Theon thought. Nothing has
changed, and yet everything has changed. “Show me to my
chambers, woman,” he commanded. Bowing stiffly, she led him
across the headland to the bridge. That at least was as he
remembered; the ancient stones slick with spray and spotted by
lichen, the sea foaming under their feet like some great wild
beast, the salt wind clutching at their clothes.
Whenever he’d imagined his homecoming, he had always
pictured himself returning to the snug bedchamber in the Sea Tower,
where he’d slept as a child. Instead the old woman led him to
the Bloody Keep. The halls here were larger and better furnished,
if no less cold nor damp. Theon was given a suite of chilly rooms
with ceilings so high that they were lost in gloom. He might have
been more impressed if he had not known that these were the very
chambers that had given the Bloody Keep its name. A thousand years
before, the sons of the River King had been slaughtered here,
hacked to bits in their beds so that pieces of their bodies might
be sent back to their father on the mainland.
But Greyjoys were not murdered in Pyke except once in a great
while by their brothers, and his brothers were both dead. It was
not fear of ghosts that made him glance about with distaste. The
wall hangings were green with mildew, the mattress musty-smelling
and sagging, the rushes old and brittle. Years had come and gone
since these chambers had last been opened. The damp went bone deep.
“I’ll have a basin of hot water and a fire in this
hearth,” he told the crone. “See that they light
braziers in the other rooms to drive out some of the chill. And
gods be good, get someone in here at once to change these
rushes.”
“Yes, m’lord. As you command.” She fled.
After some time, they brought the hot water he had asked for. It
was only tepid, and soon cold, and seawater in the bargain, but it
served to wash the dust of the long ride from his face and hair and
hands. While two thralls lit his braziers, Theon stripped off his
travel-stained clothing and dressed to meet his father. He chose
boots of supple black leather, soft lambswool breeches of
silvery-grey, a black velvet doublet with the golden kraken of the
Greyjoys embroidered on the breast. Around his throat he fastened a
slender gold chain, around his waist a belt of bleached white
leather. He hung a dirk at one hip and a longsword at the other, in
scabbards striped black-and-gold. Drawing the dirk, he tested its
edge with his thumb, pulled a whetstone from his belt pouch, and
gave it a few licks. He prided himself on keeping his weapons
sharp. “When I return, I shall expect a warm room and clean
rushes,” he warned the thralls as he drew on a pair of black
gloves, the silk decorated with a delicate scrollwork tracery in
golden thread.
Theon returned to the Great Keep through a covered stone
walkway, the echoes of his footsteps mingling with the ceaseless
rumble of the sea below. To get to the Sea Tower on its crooked
pillar, he had to cross three further bridges, each narrower than
the one before. The last was made of rope and wood, and the wet
salt wind made it sway underfoot like a living thing. Theon’s
heart was in his mouth by the time he was halfway across. A long
way below, the waves threw up tall plumes of spray as they crashed
against the rock. As a boy, he used to run across this bridge, even
in the black of night. Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his
doubt whispered. Grown men know better.
The door was grey wood studded with iron, and Theon found it
barred from the inside. He hammered on it with a fist, and cursed
when a splinter snagged the fabric of his glove. The wood was damp
and moldy, the iron studs rusted.
After a moment the door was opened from within by a guard in a
black iron breastplate and pothelm. “You are the
son?”
“Out of my way, or you’ll learn who I am.” The
man stood aside. Theon climbed the twisting steps to the solar. He
found his father seated beside a brazier, beneath a robe of musty
sealskins that covered him foot to chin. At the sound of boots on
stone, the Lord of the Iron Islands lifted his eyes to behold his
last living son. He was smaller than Theon remembered him. And so
gaunt. Balon Greyjoy had always been thin, but now he looked as
though the gods had put him in a cauldron and boiled every spare
ounce of flesh from his bones, until nothing remained but hair and
skin. Bone thin and bone hard he was, with a face that might have
been chipped from flint. His eyes were flinty too, black and sharp,
but the years and the salt winds had turned his hair the grey of a
winter sea, flecked with whitecaps. Unbound, it hung past the small
of the back.
“Nine years, is it?” Lord Balon said at last.
“Ten,” Theon answered, pulling off his torn
gloves.
“A boy they took,” his father said. “What are
you now?”
“A man,” Theon answered. “Your blood and your
heir.”
Lord Balon grunted. “We shall see.”
“You shall,” Theon promised.
“Ten years, you say. Stark had you as long as I. And now
you come as his envoy.”
“Not his,” Theon said. “Lord Eddard is dead,
beheaded by the Lannister queen.”
“They are both dead, Stark and that Robert who broke my
walls with his stones. I vowed I’d live to see them both in
their graves, and I have.” He grimaced. “Yet the cold
and the damp still make my joints ache, as when they were alive. So
what does it serve?”
“It serves.” Theon moved closer. “I bring a
letter—”
“Did Ned Stark dress you like that?” his father
interrupted, squinting up from beneath his robe. “Was it his
pleasure to garb you in velvets and silks and make you his own
sweet daughter?”
Theon felt the blood rising to his face. “I am no
man’s daughter. If you mislike my garb, I will change
it.”
“You will.” Throwing off the furs, Lord Balon pushed
himself to his feet. He was not so tall as Theon remembered.
“That bauble around your neck—was it bought with gold or
iron?”
Theon touched the gold chain. He had forgotten. It has been so
long . . . In the Old Way, women might decorate
themselves with ornaments bought with coin, but a warrior wore only
the jewelry he took off the corpses of enemies slain by his own
hand. Paying the iron price, it was called.
“You blush red as a maid, Theon. A question was asked. Is
it the gold price you paid, or the iron?”
“The gold,” Theon admitted.
His father slid his fingers under the necklace and gave it a
yank so hard it was like to take Theon’s head off, had the
chain not snapped first. “My daughter has taken an axe for a
lover,” Lord Balon said. “I will not have my son bedeck
himself like a whore.” He dropped the broken chain onto the
brazier, where it slid down among the coals. “It is as I
feared. The green lands have made you soft, and the Starks have
made you theirs. “
“You’re wrong. Ned Stark was my gaoler, but my blood
is still salt and iron.”
Lord Balon turned away to warm his bony hands over the brazier.
“Yet the Stark pup sends you to me like a well-trained raven,
clutching his little message.”
“There is nothing small about the letter I bear,”
Theon said, “and the offer he makes is one I suggested to
him.”
“This wolf king heeds your counsel, does he?” The
notion seemed to amuse Lord Balon.
“He heeds me, yes. I’ve hunted with him, trained
with him, shared meat and mead with him, warred at his side. I have
earned his trust. He looks on me as an older brother,
he—”
“No.” His father jabbed a finger at his face.
“Not here, not in Pyke, not in my hearing, you will not name
him brother, this son of the man who put your true brothers to the
sword. Or have you forgotten Rodrik and Maron, who were your own
blood?”
“I forget nothing.” Ned Stark had killed neither of
his brothers, in truth. Rodrik had been slain by Lord Jason
Mallister at Seagard, Maron crushed in the collapse of the old
south tower . . . but Stark would have done for
them just as quick had the tide of battle chanced to sweep them
together. “I remember my brothers very well,” Theon
insisted. Chiefly he remembered Rodrik’s drunken cuffs and
Maron’s cruel japes and endless lies. “I remember when
my father was a king too.” He took out Robb’s letter
and thrust it forward. “Here. Read
it . . . Your Grace.”
Lord Balon broke the seal and unfolded the parchment. His black
eyes flicked back and forth. “So the boy would give me a
crown again,” he said, “and all I need do is destroy
his enemies.” His thin lips twisted in a smile.
“By now Robb is at the Golden Tooth,” Theon said.
“Once it falls, he’ll be through the hills in a day.
Lord Tywin’s host is at Harrenhal, cut off from the west. The
Kingslayer is a captive at Riverrun. Only Ser Stafford Lannister
and the raw green levies he’s been gathering remain to oppose
Robb in the west. Ser Stafford will put himself between
Robb’s army and Lannisport, which means the city will be
undefended when we descend on it by sea. If the gods are with us,
even Casterly Rock itself may fall before the Lannisters so much as
realize that we are upon them.”
Lord Balon grunted. “Casterly Rock has never
fallen.”
“Until now.” Theon smiled. And how sweet that will
be.
His father did not return the smile. “So this is why Robb
Stark sends you back to me, after so long? So you might win my
consent to this plan of his?”
“It is my plan, not Robb’s,” Theon said
proudly. Mine, as the victory will be mine, and in time the crown.
“I will lead the attack myself, if it please you. As my
reward I would ask that you grant me Casterly Rock for my own seat,
once we have taken it from the Lannisters.” With the Rock, he
could hold Lannisport and the golden lands of the west. It would
mean wealth and power such as House Greyjoy had never known.
“You reward yourself handsomely for a notion and a few
lines of scribbling.” His father read the letter again.
“The pup says nothing about a reward. Only that you speak for
him, and I am to listen, and give him my sails and swords, and in
return he will give me a crown.” His flinty eyes lifted to
meet his son’s. “He will give me a crown,” he
repeated, his voice growing sharp.
“A poor choice of words, what is meant
is—”
“What is meant is what is said. The boy will give me a
crown. And what is given can be taken away.” Lord Balon
tossed the letter onto the brazier, atop the necklace. The
parchment curled, blackened, and took flame.
Theon was aghast. “Have you gone mad?”
His father laid a stinging backhand across his cheek.
“Mind your tongue. You are not in Winterfell now, and I am
not Robb the Boy, that you should speak to me so. I am the Greyjoy,
Lord Reaper of Pyke, King of Salt and Rock, Son of the Sea Wind,
and no man gives me a crown. I pay the iron price. I will take my
crown, as Urron Redhand did five thousand years ago.”
Theon edged backward, away from the sudden fury in his
father’s tone. “Take it, then,” he spat, his
cheek still tingling. “Call yourself King of the Iron
islands, no one will care . . . until the wars
are over, and the victor looks about and spies the old fool perched
off his shore with an iron crown on his head.”
Lord Balon laughed. “Well, at the least you are no craven.
No more than I’m a fool. Do you think I gather my ships to
watch them rock at anchor? I mean to carve out a kingdom with fire
and sword . . . but not from the west, and not
at the bidding of King Robb the Boy. Casterly Rock is too strong,
and Lord Tywin too cunning by half. Aye, we might take Lannisport,
but we should never keep it. No. I hunger for a different
plum . . . not so juicy sweet, to be sure, yet
it hangs there ripe and undefended.” Where? Theon might have asked, but by then he knew.