Winter Town.
The Woodsmoke was loud with ale and lies.
Adventurers packed the benches, talking over one another, each man trying to make his last scrape beyond the Wall sound larger than the one before.
“Caught a blizzard that would have frozen a mammoth,” one of them said.
“I knew I’d be dead before it broke.
Luck put me on a giantess, dead asleep.
I crawled in.
Warm as a holdfast in there.
Stank like a grave.
Worst of it was she woke and took me for her pup.
Nursed me three months before I got loose.” He grinned into his cup.
“Some nights I still miss the taste.
Thank the gods she was in a sweet humor.
Her husband would have pulled me apart like a pullet.” “A giant,” someone said.
“And she didn’t eat you.” “You froze, dreamed of your mother’s tit, and woke up proud of it.” The table hounded him for it.
Being told the truth was a dream sat worse with him than the storm had.
“Believe what you like.
There are giants, and beyond the Wall there are Others you can’t kill.” “Others.” A man snorted.
“A tale for children.
Who’s seen an Other in a thousand years?” “You—you—” The braggart’s mouth fell open.
His eyes went wide.
He pointed at the door as if it had grown teeth.
Every head in the room turned.
The giant was near thirteen feet of iron.
Plate covered him from throat to boot.
He stood in the doorway like a tower that had learned to walk, and the metal sang when he shifted.
His bare head tipped, trying the lintel.
The door was a little more than ten feet.
It caught him.
He snarled and put a fist through the beam.
Timber burst.
He came in through the hole he had made.
Stools scraped.
Iron rasped.
Half the room had a sword in hand before the dust had settled.
The size of him did that by itself.
“Easy,” a young voice said.
“We only want rooms.” An highborn boy came in behind a ring of men in steel.
The giant, it was plain, belonged to him.
By the time Domeric Bolton crossed the threshold, his people had already done what they were paid to do.
They had cleared a space, set a clean round table, and closed around him in a circle that would take more than drunk courage to break.
The giant did not sit a chair.
No chair would have held him.
He sat on a table instead.
Even then he rose ten feet off the floor.
The room looked from the giant to the boy and back again.
What sort of lord kept a thing like that at his shoulder?
Domeric was tall for his age.
That much, at least, the Dreadfort had given him.
He wore a dark, well-cut doublet, lace at the throat and at the cuffs, the sort of cloth that told a room who paid for it.
The rest of him ran the other way: pale, long-limbed, quiet, a book still in his hand.
Only the eyes were wrong for the lace.
They were dark and sharp enough to flay with.
His men began hauling in the chests.
The innkeep took one look at the cut of the clothes and the size of the escort and found rooms that had been clean an hour ago.
Someone was sent for the horses.
The staring did not stop.
“A lord.” “What’s a lord doing in a hole like this?
Hasn’t he got a castle?” “Keep the chair he sat in, innkeep.
Some fool will buy it.” The hush lasted only as long as fear did.
Then the Woodsmoke was itself again, and the talk had a new bone to chew.
A lord in Winter Town was a rare enough piece of meat.
Three painted girls decided they were pretty enough to try.
Bare shoulders, bare throats, winter roses of cheap scent.
Domeric watched them come with something like interest, and they took that for leave to press closer.
Ser Wendel put them back.
He did it without raising his voice, which was saying something.
In the shoving, the best-looking of them spat a string of Winter Town filth at him.
Ser Wendel did not so much as turn his head.
He had other things to keep.
“My lord Domeric.” His voice filled the space it was given: loud, rough, a round face under a bare scalp and a thick beard.
“I’m listening, Ser Wendel.” Domeric drank.
The wine was cheap.
In a room that smelled of spilled ale and skin-paint he found, against his will, a kind of warmth the Dreadfort never offered.
The castle of his father was cold stone and quieter sins.
This was only a nameless inn.
It sat easier.
A thin look crossed his face and was gone.
Three years in this world, and the name sat on him now as if he had been born to it.
Westeros.
The story he had already known.
He had opened his eyes as the trueborn son of Lord Roose Bolton of the Dreadfort, heir to the house of the Flayed Man, the old Red Kings of the North.
He had a bastard brother the yard already called the Little Flayer.
In the tale as it had been written, that brother would poison him and Maester Uther would call it a sickness of the stomach.
Domeric had not waited for the cup.
He had taken a pretext, broken Ramsay Snow’s legs, and put him in a cell without a window, with a well-chosen bitch for company.
He knew the rest of the road as well.
Lord Eddard Stark would ride south to King’s Landing and take the Hand’s chain.
The North would go with him into the meat grinder that would be called the War of the Five Kings.
House Bolton would hold the North for a season and then be cut out of it, root and name.
That ending did not suit him.
The boy whose body he wore had not been useless.
He had known his histories, sat a horse, and played as well as a northern lord’s son was expected to play.
Lord Redfort of the Redfort had even said there was a tourney champion in him if the boy wanted the work.
Domeric had taken the hint and lived on the practice yard until the sword felt like a fact instead of an ornament.
Then he had talked his father into a holding.
The Lonely Hills lay on the ugly edge between Bolton land and Karstark land: thin soil, worse roads, broken men in the high passes, clans in the stones, wildlings who had slipped the Wall and seen no reason to slip back.
Sane lords left it alone.
Domeric had asked for it.
There was coal in the open hill and iron worth the digging.
Westerosi smiths could make a serviceable edge.
They could not make enough of them, and what they made was poorer than it needed to be.
In the life before this one, Domeric had been a student of metal.
The Lonely Hills were the gift the story had left on the table.
Plot would give him a seat at the coming game.
He did not mean to sit it with only memory for a blade.
Steel was simpler than a crown and harder to argue with.
Lonehill forged what the hills gave up and sent it out as arms and plowshares: to the Riverlands, the Vale, the Crownlands, as far as Dorne, across the Narrow Sea to Braavos.
Gold and grain and the dull useful things a holding actually runs on came back the other way.
He broke the clans that would not bend, folded in the wildling bands that would, and put both to work.
In three years the hills had taken on weight.
Clansmen and wildlings stayed because the pots were full and the pay was real.
Smallfolk out of Karhold began to walk the same road.
The North was a hard country in a hard world, as bad in its season as the Iron Islands or Dorne.
After a long summer, winter would kill lords in their own halls, and old men would walk out into the snow so the young would eat.
Steel bought Lonehill out of some of that.
It also bought him the hatred of House Karstark.
People are a lord’s count.
Lose enough of them and Karhold would be a name on an empty gate.
Rickard Karstark came with banners to teach the lesson.
Lonehill made its own mail.
The Dreadfort did not mind lending weight.
The lesson went the other way.
Lord Rickard and his blood were still in the mineworks, digging because the ransom had not been paid in full.
War between lords is never only the field.
Torrhen Karstark, the youngest, had put the grievance in writing and sent it to Winterfell, to Eddard Stark, Warden of the North.
That was why Domeric was drinking bad wine in Winter Town.
Winterfell was half a day’s ride.
“You know why the lord called us,” Wendel said, not quite asking.
“To put a point on the Karstarks and us.” “Then it’s a judgment.
We shouldn’t have—” He stopped.
He had led the men who cracked Karhold, taken Rickard’s household, and lifted a handsome count of gold dragons out of the castle besides.
The rest of the sentence would not have helped him.
“It won’t fall the way you think,” Domeric said.
“Lord Eddard will stand with us.” “If the gods are kind.” Wendel did not look like a man who trusted that sentence.
The Karstarks were Stark kin in all but name.
Rickard Karstark had bled for Eddard Stark more than once.
The Boltons had been the wolves’ oldest wound.
They had worn the red crown.
They had beaten Starks in the field and hung Stark skins in the Dreadfort to remember it.
So why, Wendel wanted to know, would the Lord of Winterfell take a Bolton’s part?
He very nearly took the boy by the collar and shook the answer out of him.
Then he looked at Domeric’s eyes and left the collar alone.
Roose Bolton’s heir had the same look Roose did.
It did not invite hands.
“Why run the girl off?” Domeric said.
He was working through a piece of roast with unhurried care.
“I would have spoken with her.” “That?
I didn’t think you looked at that sort.” Wendel drowned the rest of the thought in ale and, because he was Wendel, found a more respectable woman to put on the table.
“You’re the age for it, anyway.
My brother Wylis has a daughter.
Wynafryd.
You’ve met her.
They say the two of you keep letters.” Domeric saw her as the letters had left her: a girl of White Harbor, brown hair worked into a great many braids.
“We write,” he said.
“And?
The old man’s fond of you.
Says you don’t even feel northern.” Wendel rubbed his bare scalp, hurried on before the words could sour.
“That’s praise, coming from him.
‘The Bolton boy’s got manners and a mind.
Not the usual northern meat.’ That’s my father, word for word.” Talk of Lord Wyman, who was as round as his son, opened Wendel like a tapped barrel.
Domeric’s mouth tightened.
Wyman Manderly was not wrong about the North.
When Domeric had first woken here he had believed the songs: that northern men were straight and brave by breed.
They were not.
Straightness and bravery were accidents in any age.
In a country this old and this dark they were rarer than that.
He had taken the impression off Eddard Stark and the children Eddard had raised.
That was a poor sample.
The Starks were not the North, and Eddard’s brood was not even the whole of the Starks.
Roose Bolton—the Leech Lord, the Flayer—was a northern lord as the North actually made them.
Eddard was the sport.
He had been sent south to the Vale as a boy, a second son who was never meant to sit Winterfell, and he had learned the Vale’s idea of a knight instead of the North’s idea of a man.
“Well?” Wendel clapped his shoulder, aunt-faced and hopeful.
“Say the word and Wynafryd’s your wife.
White Harbor’s granddaughter.
It could be done before the snow thinks twice.”