A Clash of Kings Read Free

that one is fill his cup with the milk of the poppy. A painless sleep, and thereâ™ an end to it. Heâ™ bless you if he had the wit for it.âBut Cressen had refused, and in the end he had won. Whether Patchface had gotten any joy of that victory he could not say, not even today, so many years later.
    “ The shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord ,” the fool sang on, swinging his head and making his bells clang and clatter. Bong dong, ring-a-ling, bong dong .
    “ Lord ,” the white raven shrieked. “ Lord, lord, lord .”
    “A fool sings what he will,” the maester told his anxious princess. “You must not take his words to heart. On the morrow he may remember another song, and this one will never be heard again.” He can sing prettily in four tongues , Lord Steffon had written . . .
    Pylos strode through the door. “Maester, pardons.”
    “You have forgotten the porridge,” Cressen said, amused. That was most unlike Pylos.
    “Maester, Ser Davos returned last night. They were talking of it in the kitchen. I thought you would want to know at once.”
    “Davos . . . last night, you say? Where is he?”
    “With the king. They have been together most of the night.”
    There was a time when Lord Stannis would have woken him, no matter the hour, to have him there to give his counsel. “I should have been told,” Cressen complained. “I should have been woken.” He disentangled his fingers from Shireen’s. “Pardons, my lady, but I must speak with your lord father. Pylos, give me your arm. There are too many steps in this castle, and it seems to me they add a few every night, just to vex me.”
    Shireen and Patchface followed them out, but the child soon grew restless with the old man’s creeping pace and dashed ahead, the fool lurching after her with his cowbells clanging madly.
    Castles are not friendly places for the frail, Cressen was reminded as he descended the turnpike stairs of SeaDragonTower. Lord Stannis would be found in the Chamber of the Painted Table, atop the Stone Drum, Dragonstone’s central keep, so named for the way its ancient walls boomed and rumbled during storms. To reach him they must cross the gallery, pass through the middle and inner walls with their guardian gargoyles and black iron gates, and ascend more steps than Cressen cared to contemplate. Young men climbed steps two at a time; for old men with bad hips, every one was a torment. But Lord Stannis would not think to come to him, so the maester resigned himself to the ordeal. He had Pylos to help him, at the least, and for that he was grateful.
    Shuffling along the gallery, they passed before a row of tall arched windows with commanding views of the outer bailey, the curtain wall, and the fishing village beyond. In the yard, archers were firing at practice butts to the call of “Notch, draw, loose.” Their arrows made a sound like a flock of birds taking wing. Guardsmen strode the wallwalks, peering between the gargoyles on the host camped without. The morning air was hazy with the smoke of cookfires, as three thousand men sat down to break their fasts beneath the banners of their lords. Past the sprawl of the camp, the anchorage was crowded with ships. No craft that had come within sight of Dragonstone this past half year had been allowed to leave again. Lord Stannis’s Fury , a triple-decked war galley of three hundred oars, looked almost small beside some of the big-bellied carracks and cogs that surrounded her.
    The guardsmen outside the Stone Drum knew the maesters by sight, and passed them through. “Wait here,” Cressen told Pylos, within. “It’s best I see him alone.”
    “I1t is a long climb, Maester.”
    Cressen smiled. “You think I have forgotten? I have climbed these steps so often I know each one by name.”
    Halfway up, he regretted his decision. He had stopped to catch his breath and ease the pain in his hip when he heard the scuff of boots on stone, and came face-to-face with