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

spirits.
    The alchemist should have come by now. Had it all
been some cruel jape, or had something happened to the man? It would not have
been the first time that good fortune had turned sour on Pate. He had once
counted himself lucky to be chosen to help old Archmaester Walgrave with the
ravens, never dreaming that before long he would also be fetching the man’s
meals, sweeping out his chambers, and dressing him every morning. Everyone said
that Walgrave had forgotten more of ravencraft than most maesters ever knew, so
Pate assumed a black iron link was the least that he could hope for, only to
find that Walgrave could not grant him one. The old man remained an archmaester
only by courtesy. As great a maester as once he’d been, now his robes concealed
soiled smallclothes oft as not, and half a year ago some acolytes found him
weeping in the Library, unable to find his way back to his chambers. Maester
Gormon sat below the iron mask in Walgrave’s place, the same Gormon who had
once accused Pate of theft.
    In the apple tree beside the water, a nightingale began to
sing. It was a sweet sound, a welcome respite from the harsh screams and
endless quork ing of the ravens he had tended all day long. The white
ravens knew his name, and would mutter it to each other whenever they caught
sight of him, “Pate, Pate, Pate,” until he wanted to scream. The big
white birds were Archmaester Walgrave’s pride. He wanted them to eat him when
he died, but Pate half suspected that they meant to eat him too.
    Perhaps it was the fearsomely strong cider—he had not come
here to drink, but Alleras had been buying to celebrate his copper link, and
guilt had made him thirsty—but it almost sounded as if the nightingale were
trilling gold for iron, gold for iron, gold for iron. Which was passing
strange, because that was what the stranger had said the night Rosey brought
the two of them together. “Who are you?” Pate had demanded of him, and the man
had replied, “An alchemist. I can change iron into gold.” And then the coin was
in his hand, dancing across his knuckles, the soft yellow gold shining in the
candlelight. On one side was a three-headed dragon, on the other the head of
some dead king. Gold for iron, Pate remembered, you won’t do better.
Do you want her? Do you love her? “I am no thief,” he had told the man who
called himself the alchemist, “I am a novice of the Citadel.” The alchemist had
bowed his head, and said, “If you should reconsider, I shall return here three
days hence, with my dragon.”
    Three days had passed. Pate had returned to the Quill and
Tankard, still uncertain what he was, but instead of the alchemist he’d found
Mollander and Armen and the Sphinx, with Roone in tow. It would have raised
suspicions not to join them.
    The Quill and Tankard never closed. For six hundred years it
had been standing on its island in the Honeywine, and never once had its doors
been shut to trade. Though the tall, timbered building leaned toward the south
the way novices sometimes leaned after a tankard, Pate expected that the inn
would go on standing for another six hundred years, selling wine and ale and
fearsomely strong cider to rivermen and seamen, smiths and singers, priests and
princes, and the novices and acolytes of the Citadel.
    “Oldtown is not the world,” declared Mollander, too loudly. He
was a knight’s son, and drunk as drunk could be. Since they brought him word of
his father’s death upon the Blackwater, he got drunk most every night. Even in
Oldtown, far from the fighting and safe behind its walls, the War of the Five
Kings had touched them all . . . although Archmaester Benedict insisted that
there had never been a war of five kings, since Renly Baratheon had been slain
before Balon Greyjoy had crowned himself.
    “My father always said the world was bigger than any lord’s castle,”
Mollander went on. “Dragons must be the least of the things a man might find in
Qarth and Asshai and Yi