Read Online A Feast for Dragons by George R. R. Martin - Free Book Online Page B

Throne, we’ll all need to learn the words of the red
priests’ song, Pate thought, but that was not likely. Tywin Lannister had
smashed Stannis and R’hllor upon the Blackwater, and soon enough he would
finish them and mount the head of the Baratheon pretender on a spike above the
gates of King’s Landing.
    As the night’s mists burned away, Oldtown took form around
him, emerging ghostlike from the predawn gloom. Pate had never seen King’s
Landing, but he knew it was a daub-and-wattle city, a sprawl of mud streets,
thatched roofs, and wooden hovels. Oldtown was built in stone, and all its
streets were cobbled, down to the meanest alley. The city was never more
beautiful than at break of day. West of the Honeywine, the Guildhalls lined the
bank like a row of palaces. Upriver, the domes and towers of the Citadel rose
on both sides of the river, connected by stone bridges crowded with halls and houses.
Downstream, below the black marble walls and arched windows of the Starry Sept,
the manses of the pious clustered like children gathered round the feet of an
old dowager.
    And beyond, where the Honeywine widened into Whispering
Sound, rose the Hightower, its beacon fires bright against the dawn. From where
it stood atop the bluffs of
Battle
Island
,
its shadow cut the city like a sword. Those born and raised in Oldtown could
tell the time of day by where that shadow fell. Some claimed a man could see
all the way to the Wall from the top. Perhaps that was why Lord Leyton had not
made the descent in more than a decade, preferring to rule his city from the
clouds.
    A butcher’s cart rumbled past Pate down the river road, five
piglets in the back squealing in distress. Dodging from its path, he just
avoided being spattered as a townswoman emptied a pail of night soil from a
window overhead. When I am a maester in a castle I will have a horse to
ride, he thought. Then he tripped upon a cobble and wondered who he was
fooling. There would be no chain for him, no seat at a lord’s high table, no
tall white horse to ride. His days would be spent listening to ravens quork and scrubbing shit stains off Archmaester Walgrave’s smallclothes.
    He was on one knee, trying to wipe the mud off his robes,
when a voice said, “Good morrow, Pate.”
    The alchemist was standing over him.
    Pate rose. “The third day . . . you said you would be at the
Quill and Tankard.”
    “You were with your friends. It was not my wish to intrude
upon your fellowship.” The alchemist wore a hooded traveler’s cloak, brown and
nondescript. The rising sun was peeking over the rooftops behind his shoulder,
so it was hard to make out the face beneath his hood. “Have you decided what
you are?”
    Must he make me say it? “I suppose I am a thief.”
    “I thought you might be.”
    The hardest part had been getting down on his hands and
knees to pull the strongbox from underneath Archmaester Walgrave’s bed. Though
the box was stoutly made and bound with iron, its lock was broken. Maester
Gormon had suspected Pate of breaking it, but that wasn’t true. Walgrave had
broken the lock himself, after losing the key that opened it.
    Inside, Pate had found a bag of silver stags, a lock of
yellow hair tied up in a ribbon, a painted miniature of a woman who resembled
Walgrave (even to her mustache), and a knight’s gauntlet made of lobstered
steel. The gauntlet had belonged to a prince, Walgrave claimed, though he could
no longer seem to recall which one. When Pate shook it, the key fell out onto
the floor.
    If I pick that up, I am a thief, he remembered
thinking. The key was old and heavy, made of black iron; supposedly it opened
every door at the Citadel. Only the archmaesters had such keys. The others
carried theirs upon their person or hid them away in some safe place, but if
Walgrave had hidden his, no one would ever have seen it again. Pate snatched up
the key and had been halfway to the door before turning back to take the silver
too. A thief was a thief,