A Feast for Crows Read Free

drink to that.”
    Alleras smiled back at him. “I only buy for friends. And I am no lord’s son, I’ve told you that. My mother was a trader.”
    Leo’s eyes were hazel, bright with wine and malice. “Your mother was a monkey from the Summer Isles. The Dornish will fuck anything with a hole between its legs. Meaning no offense. You may be brown as a nut, but at least you bathe. Unlike our spotted pig boy.” He waved a hand toward Pate.
    If I hit him in the mouth with my tankard, I could knock out half his teeth,
Pate thought. Spotted Pate the pig boy was the hero of a thousand ribald stories: a good-hearted, empty-headed lout who always managed to best the fat lordlings, haughty knights, and pompous septons who beset him. Somehow his stupidity would turn out to have been a sort of uncouth cunning; the tales always ended with Spotted Pate sitting on a lord’s high seat or bedding some knight’s daughter. But those were stories. In the real world pig boys never fared so well. Pate sometimes thought his mother must have hated him to have named him as she did.
    Alleras was no longer smiling. “You will apologize.”
    “Will I?” said Leo. “How can I, with my throat so dry . . .”
    “You shame your House with every word you say,” Alleras told him. “You shame the Citadel by being one of us.”
    “I know. So buy me some wine, that I might drown my shame.”
    Mollander said, “I would tear your tongue out by the roots.”
    “Truly? Then how would I tell you about the dragons?” Leo shrugged again. “The mongrel has the right of it. The Mad King’s daughter is alive, and she’s hatched herself three dragons.”
    “Three?” said Roone, astonished.
    Leo patted his hand. “More than two and less than four. I would not try for my golden link just yet if I were you.”
    “You leave him be,” warned Mollander.
    “Such a chivalrous Hopfrog. As you wish. Every man off every ship that’s sailed within a hundred leagues of Qarth is speaking of these dragons. A few will even tell you that they’ve seen them. The Mage is inclined to believe them.”
    Armen pursed his lips in disapproval. “Marwyn is unsound. Archmaester Perestan would be the first to tell you that.”
    “Archmaester Ryam says so too,” said Roone.
    Leo yawned. “The sea is wet, the sun is warm, and the menagerie hates the mastiff.”
    He has a mocking name for everyone,
thought Pate, but he could not deny that Marwyn looked more a mastiff than a maester.
As if he wants to bite you.
The Mage was not like other maesters. People said that he kept company with whores and hedge wizards, talked with hairy Ibbenese and pitch-black Summer Islanders in their own tongues, and sacrificed to queer gods at the little sailors’ temples down by the wharves. Men spoke of seeing him down in the undercity, in rat pits and black brothels, consorting with mummers, singers, sellswords, even beggars. Some even whispered that once he had killed a man with his fists.
    When Marwyn had returned to Oldtown, after spending eight years in the east mapping distant lands, searching for lost books, and studying with warlocks and shadowbinders, Vinegar Vaellyn had dubbed him “Marwyn the Mage.” The name was soon all over Oldtown, to Vaellyn’s vast annoyance. “Leave spells and prayers to priests and septons and bend your wits to learning truths a man can trust in,” Archmaester Ryam had once counseled Pate, but Ryam’s ring and rod and mask were yellow gold, and his maester’s chain had no link of Valyrian steel.
    Armen looked down his nose at Lazy Leo. He had the perfect nose for it, long and thin and pointed. “Archmaester Marwyn believes in many curious things,” he said, “but he has no more proof of dragons than Mollander. Just more sailors’ stories.”
    “You’re wrong,” said Leo. “There is a glass candle burning in the Mage’s chambers.”
    A hush fell over the torchlit terrace. Armen sighed and shook his head. Mollander began to laugh. The