The hood came off.
The cotton came out of her ears.
Benita took the room in at a glance and the glance was enough.
Fire.
Blood.
Marks on the floor.
She made a sound that wanted to be a shout and came out raw.
“What are you doing to me?” No one answered.
The wood had been laid in a pattern that meant nothing good.
It caught.
Animal blood crawled across the stone in lines a sane man would not have drawn.
Flame leaned.
Domeric’s shadow climbed the wall and danced there like something that had never been a boy.
She screamed when the dagger moved.
He took an inch of her from the chest.
Skin.
Wet.
Still hers by the blood and his by the cut.
He stood.
His hands cut signs in the air.
The words that followed did not belong to the Seven or to the First Men.
Pale light woke in the scrap of hide he held.
The fire threw the shadow harder.
The air filled with a screaming that had no throats in the room to explain it.
Her life hit him in pieces.
Faces.
Rooms.
Knives.
A house dying.
A wish with a name on it.
It went through him like a second pulse and did not ask permission.
When the shards stopped, letters stood in the air of his sight.
[Unearthing] Benita Antaryon Fallen noble.
Faceless apprentice of the House of Black and White, Braavos.
Title: none Strength: 48 Agility: 35 Spirit: 42 Combat index: 125 Note: A ruined house of the Free Cities across the Narrow Sea.
You already hold her secret.
Win her revenge and you may win her service.
That was the thing he lived on in Westeros.
The Unearthing.
The country had dragons in it, and Others, and children of the forest, and sorcerers, and the Lord of Light, and gods old and new.
When the red comet came, those old powers would stand up and be counted.
A man needed more than a good seat on a horse.
He still did not know what the Unearthing was.
A gift that had come with him through the dark, or a Bolton black art so old the house had forgotten why it flayed.
Touch a body.
Take skin if you liked the theater.
The panel came anyway.
Fear thickened the take: shards of memory, the secret a person kept in the deepest room.
The turret, the fire, the blood-signs, the ugly little prayer—he had built all of it to feed that fear.
The work itself needed only skin under his hand.
A proper flaying rite made the mind believe the rest.
He wondered, not for the first time, whether the Boltons of a thousand years back had worn their enemies’ faces for more than the scream.
Then the world’s magic had ebbed, and the art had gone dull, and the Dreadfort had been left with a custom that frightened men and told them nothing.
He rubbed his jaw and turned her shards over.
A fallen name.
A betrayal.
Revenge.
Service, if the revenge was paid.
It had the shape of a princess’s tale.
He cared less about the poetry than about the number.
One hundred twenty-five.
A common man grown to his strength sat at ten in each measure and thirty on the index.
A knight with years in him reached sixty.
The girl on the cross had come into an inn with more than double that and a pretty lie in her mouth.
His plan shifted in his hands.
He had wanted Karstark proof out of her head and then her body in the yard as a witness, sentenced when the judgment closed.
Lords did not weep for hired knives.
He wanted the knife instead.
She was still small in the House that had made her.
She was not small in what she could become.
If he had not doubted her at the Woodsmoke, she might have finished him.
She could also open a door into the Faceless Men that no honest banner would ever knock on.
People were the rare metal in Westeros.
If the Iron Throne was the last room he meant to stand in, he could not afford to be delicate about the tools.
He would need knights who charged a line and did not count the cost.
He would need the other sort as well: the ones who worked in the dark and did not ask the Seven to watch.
“What did you do to me?” She had felt it.
Something taken from a place she had thought sealed.
“A small magic,” Domeric said.
“Magic—” The word made her jerk against the cross.
Unknown things frightened people more than the known ones that killed them.
“You hate the taste of it, Benita Antaryon.” Her voice broke on the surname.
“How do you know that name?” “I have the rest as well.
What you are.
What was done.
The revenge you kept warm.
The wish.
The one you want dead more than you want your next hour.” “Demon.
The Many-Faced God will have you for it.” “If I am, I can still pay what your god has not.
You die here and who hears it?
Your house, your years, the work you swallowed—gone like a name written on water.” He put his hand in her gold hair, then on the skin the rope and the knife had left him, and let the breath out slow.
“I will give the choice back once.
Death.
Or you kneel and you are mine.” She said nothing for a long time.
“You can give me the revenge,” she said at last.
The doubt was still in her eyes.
“Truly.” “The far side of the Narrow Sea is not mine yet.
It will be.
Killing a man for you is a small lift once I am there.” “And I am to take that on your mouth.” “Call it a bargain.
If you find I cannot buy what I promised, you walk.
Tell me now, Benita Antaryon.” The quiet held.
Then a low voice, steady enough to cut with.
“I will serve.” He took her off the cross.
A cloak went around her.
She was bare under it, and the turret had used her up.
She crossed the stone on her own feet anyway, one step and then the next, until she stood in front of him.
Domeric Bolton.
Trueborn of the Dreadfort.
Tall.
Pale.
Eyes like a freeze in a river.
That face was the first thing in her life that had felt like the end of the road.
“Kneel.” The longsword came out and found her shoulder.
“I, Benita Antaryon, swear service.
Under the Many-Faced God I give my master a loyalty with no second name.” She went down and put her mouth on his boot.
Bran Stark was not yet seven, and the thing he loved best in Winterfell was the climb.
The broken tower was his favorite lie.
Lightning had taken it more than a hundred years before his father was born, burned it, and dropped the top third into rubble.
No one had built it back.
Lord Eddard sent men into the foot of it now and then to rake out the rats.
The crown of the ruin belonged to Bran and the crows.
Today the tower had a voice in it.
He heard the words and his hands nearly left the stone.
“I, Benita Antaryon, swear service—” Fire.
Crooked marks on the floor.
A girl with gold hair on her knees.
A tall back between Bran and the rest.
He hung in the air, full of the kind of hunger that gets boys killed.
Then the eyes found him.
Ice.
Wrong.
The sound he made was small.
The wall went out from under the idea of him.
A long arm shut on his wrist.
The world came back in pieces.
He got his feet.
He saw the face.
“Ser Domeric.
It’s you.” Relief made him grin like a fool.
“Climbing again.
Shall I tell Lady Catelyn?” “I wasn’t—don’t tell Mother—” Domeric hauled him onto the stones and put a hand in his hair and ruined it, the way men did when they meant a lesson to feel like kindness.
“Listen to me.
If you have no strength, do not look at another man’s secret.
Luck charges for that, and it charges high.”