A Dance With Dragons. Part 2 After The Feast

“Did he? Harry was a bastard, true enough, but whether Jonos sired him is a thornier question. A fair-haired boy, he was, and comely. Jonos is neither.” Lord Tytos got to his feet. “Will you do me the honor of taking supper with me?”

“Some other time, my lord.” The castle was starving; no good would be served by Jaime stealing food from their mouths. “I cannot linger. Riverrun awaits.”

“Riverrun? Or King’s Landing?”

“Both.”

Lord Tytos did not attempt to dissuade him. “Hoster can be ready to depart within the hour.”

He was. The boy met Jaime by the stables, with a bedroll slung over one shoulder and a bundle of scrolls beneath his arm. He could not have been any older than sixteen, yet he was even taller than his father, almost seven feet of legs and shins and elbows, a gangling, gawky boy with a cowlick. “Lord Commander. I’m your hostage, Hoster. Hos, they call me.” He grinned.

Does he think this is a lark? “Pray, who are they?”

“My friends. My brothers.”

“I am not your friend and I am not your brother.” That cleaned the grin off the boy’s face. Jaime turned to Lord Tytos. “My lord, let there be no misunderstanding here. Lord Beric Dondarrion, Thoros of Myr, Sandor Clegane, Brynden Tully, this woman Stoneheart … all these are outlaws and rebels, enemies to the king and all his leal subjects. If I should learn that you or yours are hiding them, protecting them, or assisting them in any way, I will not hesitate to send you your son’s head. I hope you understand that. Understand this as well: I am not Ryman Frey.”

“No.” All trace of warmth had left Lord Blackwood’s mouth. “I know who I am dealing with. Kingslayer.”

“Good.” Jaime mounted and wheeled Honor toward the gate. “I wish you a good harvest and the joy of the king’s peace.”

He did not ride far. Lord Jonos Bracken was waiting for him outside Raventree, just beyond the range of a good crossbow. He was mounted on an armored destrier and had donned his plate and mail, and a grey steel greathelm with a horsehair crest. “I saw them pull the direwolf banner down,” he said when Jaime reached him. “Is it done?”

“Done and done. Go home and plant your fields.”

Lord Bracken raised his visor. “I trust I have more fields to plant than when you went into that castle.”

“Buckle, Woodhedge, Honeytree and all its hives.” He was forgetting one. “Oh, and Crossbow Ridge.”

“A mill,” said Bracken. “I must have a mill.”

“Lord’s Mill.”

Lord Jonos snorted. “Aye, that will serve. For now.” He pointed at Hoster Blackwood, riding back with Peck. “Is this what he gave you for a hostage? You were cozened, ser. A weakling, this one. Water for blood. Never mind how tall he is, any one of my girls could snap him like a rotten twig.”

“How many daughters do you have, my lord?” Jaime asked him.

“Five. Two by my first wife and three by my third.” Too late, he seemed to realize that he might have said too much.

“Send one of them to court. She will have the privilege of attending the Queen Regent.”

Bracken’s face grew dark as he realized the import of those words. “Is this how you repay the friendship of Stone Hedge?”

“It is a great honor to wait upon the queen,” Jaime reminded his lordship. “You might want to impress that on her. We’ll look for the girl before the year is out.” He did not wait for Lord Bracken to reply but touched Honor lightly with his golden spurs and trotted off. His men formed up and followed, banners streaming. Castle and camp were soon lost behind them, obscured by the dust of their hooves.

Neither outlaws nor wolves had troubled them on their way to Raventree, so Jaime decided to return by a different route. If the gods were good, he might stumble on the Blackfish, or lure Beric Dondarrion into an unwise attack.

They were following the Widow’s Wash when they ran out of day. Jaime called his hostage forward and asked him where to find the nearest ford, and the boy led them there. As the column splashed across the shallow waters, the sun was setting behind a pair of grassy hills. “The Teats,” said Hoster Blackwood.

Jaime recalled Lord Bracken’s map. “There’s a village between those hills.”

“Pennytree,” the lad confirmed.

“We’ll camp there for the night.” If there were villagers about, they might have knowledge of Ser Brynden or the outlaws. “Lord Jonos made some remark about whose teats they were,” he recalled to the Blackwood boy as they rode toward the darkening hills and the last light of the day. “The Brackens call them by one name and the Blackwoods by another.”

“Aye, my lord. For a hundred years or so. Before that, they were the Mother’s Teats, or just the Teats. There are two of them, and it was thought that they resembled …”

“I can see what they resemble.” Jaime found himself thinking back on the woman in the tent and the way she’d tried to hide her large, dark nipples. “What changed a hundred years ago?”

“Aegon the Unworthy took Barba Bracken as his mistress,” the bookish boy replied. “She was a very buxom wench, they say, and one day when the king was visiting at the Stone Hedge he went out hunting and saw the Teats and …”

“… named them for his mistress.” Aegon the Fourth had died long before Jaime had been born, but he recalled enough of the history of his reign to guess what must have happened next. “Only later he put the Bracken girl aside and took up with a Blackwood, was that the way of it?”

“Lady Melissa,” Hoster confirmed. “Missy, they called her. There’s a statue of her in our godswood. She was much more beautiful than Barba Bracken, but slender, and Barba was heard to say that Missy was flat as a boy. When King Aegon heard, he …”

“… gave her Barba’s teats.” Jaime laughed. “How did all this begin, between Blackwood and Bracken? Is it written down?”

“It is, my lord,” the boy said, “but some of the histories were penned by their maesters and some by ours, centuries after the events that they purport to chronicle. It goes back to the Age of Heroes. The Blackwoods were kings in those days. The Brackens were petty lords, renowned for breeding horses. Rather than pay their king his just due, they used the gold their horses brought them to hire swords and cast him down.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Five hundred years before the Andals. A thousand, if the True History is to be believed. Only no one knows when the Andals crossed the narrow sea. The True History says four thousand years have passed since then, but some maesters claim that it was only two. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.”

Tyrion would like this one. They could talk from dusk to dawn, arguing about books. For a moment his bitterness toward his brother was forgotten, until he remembered what the Imp had done. “So you are fighting over a crown that one of you took from the other back when the Casterlys still held Casterly Rock, is that the root of it? The crown of a kingdom that has not existed for thousands of years?” He chuckled. “So many years, so many wars, so many kings … you’d think someone would have made a peace.”

“Someone did, my lord. Many someones. We’ve had a hundred peaces with the Brackens, many sealed with marriages. There’s Blackwood blood in every Bracken, and Bracken blood in every Blackwood. The Old King’s Peace lasted half a century. But then some fresh quarrel broke out, and the old wounds opened and began to bleed again. That’s how it always happens, my father says. So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever last. So we go on century after century, with us hating the Brackens and them hating us. My father says there will never be an end to it.”

“There could be.”

“How, my lord? The old wounds never heal, my father says.”

“My father had a saying too. Never wound a foe when you can kill him. Dead men don’t claim vengeance.”

“Their sons do,” said Hoster, apologetically.

“Not if you kill the sons as well. Ask the Casterlys about that if you doubt me. Ask Lord and Lady Tarbeck, or the Reynes of Castamere. Ask the Prince of Dragonstone.” For an instant, the deep red clouds that crowned the western hills reminded him of Rhaegar’s children, all wrapped up in crimson cloaks.

“Is that why you killed all the Starks?”

“Not all,” said Jaime. “Lord Eddard’s daughters live. One has just been wed. The other …” Brienne, where are you? Have you found her? “… if the gods are good, she’ll forget she was a Stark. She’ll wed some burly blacksmith or fat-faced innkeep, fill his house with children, and never need to fear that some knight might come along to smash their heads against a wall.”

“The gods are good,” his hostage said, uncertainly.

You go on believing that. Jaime let Honor feel his spurs.

Pennytree proved to be a much larger village than he had anticipated. The war had been here too; blackened orchards and the scorched shells of broken houses testified to that. But for every home in ruins three more had been rebuilt. Through the gathering blue dusk Jaime glimpsed fresh thatch upon a score of roofs, and doors made of raw green wood. Between a duck pond and a blacksmith’s forge, he came upon the tree that gave the place its name, an oak ancient and tall. Its gnarled roots twisted in and out of the earth like a nest of slow brown serpents, and hundreds of old copper pennies had been nailed to its huge trunk.

Peck stared at the tree, then at the empty houses. “Where are the people?”