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A Song of Blackjack and Hookers (chapter 41)
🕑 Added 2025-09-29 22:09:30 +0000 UTCThe Young Wolf
The lords all wanted something. A few even demanded it outright than hide it behind snowy courtesies, as the Greatjon had. Likely the Lord of Last Hearth would have challenged him further had his lord father’s shadow not lingered over Winterfell.
The great stone throne that once sat the Kings of Winter still hardly fit him, its immense armrests carved in snarling direwolves. If not for Grey Wind’s presence, his heart would not have beat half as calmly as it did now.
All the banners of the north had gathered here. The sunburst of Karstark, the battle-axes of Cerwyn, the black crown and longaxes of Dustin, the flayed man of Bolton, the merman of Manderly, and he was to lead them all to war. It was a jest such as he might have heard Theon make only some moons ago.
He sat not far from him with a smile as brittle as a sword left out in the rain. Robb knew the north loved the ironborn as much as they loved wildlings, but for all Theon could have a black humor, he had never proven false to him.
‘Til this past moon, Father had not spoken a word of what he was to do if Balon Greyjoy crowned himself again. Truly, he did not think he could have done it even if he was commanded to.
Now Renly Baratheon would place Theon on his own father’s throne, but in a form the king of summer no doubt liked more. It had lifted a weight from him, though the pit of uncertainty that was—
“Shaggy!” Rickon’s wild laughter drew his eyes, his black wolf just as wild warning off a cat that had come too close to the haunch of oxbone he had been chewing on.
He hoped Mother would have more luck reigning him in when she returned to Winterfell in some days.
Ghost, still and quiet, was as much a mirror to Jon as Shaggydog was to his youngest brother. It had taken most of the morn to convince Jon to sit with them, and most of a moon to convince him to come south with him. If not for Bran and Uncle Benjen shadowing his words—that the Night’s Watch would still be there in some years—it would not have surprised him if Jon remained stubborn.
Arya was even more sour, if it were possible, picking at her peas as if she was a crow. His sister had only grown more furious with him after he said she was to remain in Winterfell, the same as their lady mother would have when she arrived.
She had softened since, though only after he had talked Ser Rodrik into allowing her to train at arms in the yard, something she seemed to have some uncanny talent for as he named it. Robb couldn’t deny she was better than he was at her age, though it was a closer thing with Jon.
His eyes raked across the assembled lords again, to where Domeric Bolton sat with his lordly father. They had grown closer in the time since he had come to Winterfell, a moon after his own lord father left for King’s Landing, but the history between the Starks and Boltons still weighed on his thoughts.
That and the way the Lord of the Dreadfort stared at him sometimes, his eyes as pale as milk and cold as ice.
Domeric would be one of his foremost bannermen one day, he knew, and it was a good thing that he could stomach him more easily than his sire. His skill with the horse and lance was also something to be mentioned.
Tearing off chunks of black bread, he dipped it into the rich venison pottage while his thoughts wandered. Maester Luwin returned with a letter bearing the Stark seal as he was washing it down with gulpfuls of frosty ale.
He went through its contents quickly. Father would be in Dorne before the turn of the new moon, it seemed. The thought brought with it some nerves he buried as he continued.
His Tully uncle would be waiting with the army he was marshalling near Darry. They would travel up the high road to the Bloody Gate, and from there to the Redfort.
Robb frowned as he reached the end. Grafton had reinforced his numbers with three sellsword companies, placing them anywhere from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand men. He now laid siege to Runestone with demands for Lady Lysa Arryn to be reinstated as Lady of the Eyrie. His own aunt.
It all seemed mad to him still. They were to fight the mountain clans and a third of the Vale, all while another third sat on their hands and pretended not to notice anything amiss.
He put the letter aside, his thoughts wandering on how to do it.
The wildlings would never meet them on the field, but to lead an army into the Mountains of the Morn was also folly. They would be blind, their scouts hunted night and day. His lord father would have told him that to entertain such a campaign is to have already lost and not yet known it.
“You look like Maester Luwin had just assigned you your sums and numbers again,” Theon jested.
Robb sent him a wolfish smile for it. “Which of us has been staring into his winecup for the past hour?”
“Visit one of the brothels in the winter town with me. The whores would tell you there isn’t any answer that can’t be found at its bottom.”
It wasn’t the first time Theon had asked him. “And deprive you of their wisdom?” His eyes turned on the lords again. “I should hear them.”
Grey Wind dutifully followed him as he stood and moved around the hall, hearing all their grievances. Lord Rickard Karstark complained to him of the Skagosi as much as the wildlings, where the Lady Maege Mormont complained to him of the ironborn.
He was speaking with Lord Medger Cerwyn when Grey Wind rumbled deep in his maw, golden eyes fixed on something near the doors.
He wasn’t as certain what happened the next moment, but the gloom vanished, and he spied a fleshy figure keeping to the shadows, a crossbow in their hands. He spied their quarry also.
They were too far away for him to reach, but the Heir of the Dreadfort was not. The bolt had just left the crossbow when Robb reached him.
Something warm and wet ran his arm and fingers as he marshaled the guard after the would-be assassin. The sudden clamor of the room made it all the harder to make out their flight.
Yet Winterfell was a fortress with few exits. Where could they go?
That thought seemed set to mock him, for as the hours took them deep into the night and Maester Luwin tended to his injuries, all they had found was a crossbow abandoned in the autumn snows.
“You won’t protest my recklessness, maester?”
The old maester chuckled softly. “Lady Catelyn will take up the slack when she arrives, I assure you.” His chain links clinked slightly as he worked. “It would have cast us into dangerous waters had they succeeded. The heir to the Dreadfort slain in Winterfell’s own halls…”
The days that followed had not found them any assassins either, and soon he was telling the story to his lady mother.
Maester Luwin’s words had proven prophetic.
“The Boltons have a dark reputation,” she voiced, her eyes uncertain, “but to try and slay their heir so brazenly? I cannot imagine who it might be.”
Robb had expected the Lord of the Dreadfort to have taken it all poorly, perhaps even tried to force concessions from him, yet all he had done instead was thank him with another of his queer smiles.
“I worry this is only the beginning,” she continued. “War turns men mad, and I struggle to see an end to it.”
He touched her hand. After all that’s happened with Bran and Aunt Lysa, he did not want this to weigh on her also.
He asked her of the Vale instead, hoping to distract her.
As he listened, the stirrings of a plan had started to form in his mind. He would have to hope the lords of the Vale would be inclined to hear it.
The morning of their departure had found him in the godswood, no less than three guards turning over every leaf.
The pale branches of the heart tree caught on the wind as he sat beneath it deep in thought, staring into the depths of the dark waters ‘neath it. He only stirred when the sound of footsteps found Domeric joining him.
His pale eyes caught on the melancholy face of the heart tree before they turned to him. “I oft found Mother in the godswood at the Dreadfort when she still lived. The days after one of my brothers died in the cradle most of all…”
He had heard something of it. The Lady Bethany Bolton was the daughter of the elderly Lord Ryswell. It was why he imagined her sister, now the Lady Barbrey Dustin, doted on Domeric.
For the Starks she only had scorn hidden in empty courtesies.
“Some part of me is relieved she is not here to worry,” Domeric continued softly. “A queer thing to think, I know.”
“At least we can say we have tasted something of battle now,” he returned.
“You, perhaps. I could not even say what was happening until I saw your arm weeping blood.”
“I’m certain Lord Grafton will oblige you,” Robb jested as he might with Theon. “Half his army will be Essosi sellswords. Some will no doubt have crossbows.”
“Joy.” Those pale eyes smiled slightly when they met his own again, but they also stirred another memory.
The eyes of the would-be assassin. They had been Bolton eyes.
Naella
When she had spoken to the sorcerer last, it had been half a horror, her dreams smeared in yellow. Now the park seemed at peace again, the songs of birds touching her ears as the scents of flowers tickled her nose.
She watched confused when he seemed to reach into thin air and pluck out something like a cloud, except that it was pink.
He handed it to her with a smile. “Cotton candy. You’ll like it.”
Pulling away the smallest piece of it, she placed it in her mouth. Her eyes widened at how quickly it melted, leaving the sweetest taste.
“How is your brother?” he asked next.
The sweetness of the candy helped distract her from her worries. He had bared his heart to her some, speaking of how he wanted to lead a company all across the known world. Naella understood it. Pentos only held bitter memories of hunger for him.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” the sorcerer mentioned. “I was much the same when I was his age.”
She sent him a doubtful look.
“You don’t think I just sprung from my mother’s womb like this, do you?”
She found it hard to imagine him as anything but a sorcerer.
He produced another cloud for her when she had finished devouring hers. This time it was as blue as the sky. Naella only wished she could share it with her brother, a thought that drew a thoughtful hum from the sorcerer.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
She stared at him again, the words tickling at her curiosity as much as the candy tickled at her tongue, or lack of it.
“I could return your tongue also, if you wished it.”
Some part of her spurned the thought on principle. She had chosen to give her tongue, a bargain struck in blood…
“A bargain they betrayed as easily as spilling a cup of Arbor gold.”
The anger and resentment still stewed in her belly. She had not even reached Westeros when the fat cheesemonger threw her brother out on the streets, and that was only after deeming him too plain for the pillow houses.
Half her dreams these past moons saw her carving His Corpulence like an Ibbenese butcher carved a whale.
“Illyrio Mopatis might have escaped Khal Drogo, but he burns at being deprived of all the means he once possessed.” A smile caught on his lips. “Nor will he ever see his son on the Iron Throne.”
She still struggled to find even a whisper of the spider. Not in Pentos or Myr. Not in Tyrosh.
“Not in Volantis either, I am sorry to say. Yet the Braavosi have reason to see you succeed now.”
Naella had made herself useful to them, but she was not blind to the reality. Any of her fellows could take her place if she overstepped.
“You have accomplished more than I had when I was three-and-ten. Take heart in that.”
She met his eyes, the green gone out of them. She still wondered sometimes what it would have been like to have a father.
He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear for it. Soon her lessons began anew.
There was nothing she wouldn’t use to avenge herself on the spider.
She didn’t wake with the sun, for she slept in a room with no windows, but it did kiss her cheeks when she departed, her brother still deep in his dreams. There were a few matters she was to see to today.
For the thousand changes Pentos had seen these past few moons, the slums remained. Though it could at least be said that the worst of it had died with every magister that danced with the Many-Faced God.
That was another thing she had learned of the Braavosi. Some of them loved death even more than they loved coin.
What would Myr be like, she wondered. She was to take a ship there on the new moon. The Braavosi trusted their new friends as much as a shepherd trusted a hungry wolf, if not less.
The news that had reached them from the Disputed Lands changed as easily as the rains, and she suspected that any whispers would only grow more unreliable after the army near a hundred thousand strong from Volantis reached it.
The eyes of the Sealord were not on the Disputed Lands, however, but Tyrosh. Volantis did yet dare contest the Braavosi at sea, leaving the city to starve as the Braavosi endeavored that not a single bushel of grain reach it.
As she passed through the sprawling bazaars at the heart of Pentos, she spied none of the Lyseni silks and Volantene wines that she remembered. Instead there were Ibbenese furs and oils and queer pale spirits from Saath.
When she left, a few things had passed her hands. Much the same happened at the docks, in the winesinks and whorehouses the sailors made their home at shore.
Baerys had returned before her. He had grown taller now that they didn’t need to starve themselves to navigate the narrow tunnels of the Red Keep, his cheeks less gaunt. She could even call him handsome now, though she wouldn’t. His pride had also grown, and she wouldn’t feed it.
Her brother she woke with a treat, a candy from Dorne that smelled of peaches and lemons.
Some of the others had returned while she watched him devour it, and she soon dived into everything they had gathered, separating the wheat from the chaff. It would join the rest she had collected for the agent of the Iron Bank that would meet her soon.
Baerys left with her brother around noon. They had become close, not unlike an older brother to him. While it annoyed her sometimes, she allowed it.
She left an hour later for the harbor again. The man she was to meet stepped from a galley in the sombre colors of Braavos, his black eyes not so much looking at her as past her.
A queer banker in her opinion.
Valar morghulis, she signed.
“Valar dohaeris,” he whispered. They walked in silence back to their hideaway.
He held himself as proudly as any Braavosi, but something seemed false to her, every movement too measured. Like a mummer.
Inside he read through everything quietly, only asking her a few questions to clarify a detail or confirm a name.
“I find myself satisfied,” he finally said in half a drawl. “The Iron Bank will call on you soon. You will depart for Myr after.”
Her brows furrowed. Was that not why he was here?
He stood again, and as he did he passed a hand down his face. Where it went, he changed. His eyes turned a haunting purple, his cheekbones shifting higher. His sallow skin turned pale as cream, and when he shook his head, his hair turned silver.
A man as Valyrian as she had ever seen stood before her now. The name did not take long to come to her. A Faceless Man was what stood before her.
All the pieces suddenly fitted into place.
“A girl walks with the Many-Faced God,” he spoke in the manner of a Lorathi, his voice high and songlike. “A girl is blessed.”
Naella watched him leave as quietly as he had come. Was that a warning? A jest? A queer farewell?
She doubted he would tell her even if she chased him down and asked. Instead she sighed and put it out of mind.
It was no stranger than spiders and sorcerers…
