Chapter 10: Maester Winston
Blind Belon's body hung from the gallows in the castle yard, his sea-blue robes moving in the wind off the water. He did not rise again, harder and stronger. He simply hung.
The spot beneath those gallows hadn't been empty long. A northern slave — some poor soul taken in the last raid — had occupied it until recently, strung up by Belon's order as a warning to the others after he'd tried to steal a fishing boat and run. Belon had apparently never considered the possibility that the gallows might eventually be for him.
The wounded ironborn prisoners were locked in the dungeon and left there.
In the yard, the men gathered their dead.
Seventeen of them. Eight hunters from the Barrowton villages. Six fishermen. Three sailors who'd been with Henry since White Harbor. They laid them out in a row in the courtyard, and the silence around them was the particular silence of men who are not yet ready to talk about what they're looking at.
Not all seventeen had died by ironborn steel. Three had taken wounds so severe that recovery was simply not a question — a gut wound that had gone septic in the hours after the fighting, a man whose skull had been caved in by a thrown axe, a fisherman whose leg had been crushed so thoroughly that the bleeding couldn't be stopped. Henry had ended each of those himself, cleanly, with his sword. It was the last thing he could do for them and he'd done it without hesitation, though his hands had not been entirely steady afterward.
Eight more men would go home without the full use of their bodies — missing fingers, a ruined eye, one man whose sword hand would never properly close again.
One hundred and eighty-five men had sailed from the North. Seventeen lay in the yard of Blacktyde Keep, and eight more would never work a field or pull a net or grip a weapon the same way again.
Maewyn moved through the yard directing the men and the freed slaves in gathering and arranging the remains. Henry watched him kneel beside a young fisherman — no older than sixteen, by the look of him — and carefully fold the boy's torn sleeve back into place before wrapping the body in coarse canvas, his movements unhurried and deliberate, as if the boy were sleeping and deserved not to be disturbed.
An older man stood nearby, watching. His face was the face of a man who has already done all his crying and arrived somewhere quieter on the other side of it.
"That's my son," he said, when Henry came close. His voice was steady. "I'd ask your leave to take him home. He shouldn't be buried here." A pause. "His mother was killed in the village — those men killed her. I buried her behind the house. He's been afraid of being alone since he was small. He should be with her."
Henry said yes without making him ask twice.
At dusk, the whole company gathered in the courtyard. Henry stood with them and looked at the wrapped bodies and said very little, because he couldn't think of anything that matched the weight of what he was looking at, and he wasn't going to fill the silence with words that didn't.
"We bring them home," he said finally. "Every one of them. Carve their names when we get back. Make sure people know why they died and what they did."
There was no septon. No Silent Sisters. No grave pit or heart tree or any of the proper forms for the North or the South. They were in an ironborn castle on an ironborn island, and they made do with canvas and whatever quiet they could hold for a few minutes.
"Couldn't find the other half of Weim's head," a hunter said, from somewhere to Henry's left, his voice cracking at the end of the sentence. He pressed his hands over his face.
Nobody said anything. There wasn't anything to say.
"The North remembers, my lord," a fisherman said after a while.
"Aye," Henry said. "It does."
At first light the following morning, Henry stood on the walls and watched Corlen put out to sea.
The longship carried the wrapped dead, the badly wounded, and the freed slaves — northmen and others, taken in raids over the years, blinking in the morning light like men relearning what it felt like to move without permission. On the return trip, Corlen would bring back the warhorses left behind in Barrowton.
The men remaining had worked through the night. White pennants now flew from Blacktyde Keep's towers — plain sailcloth with Red Lions painted on in whatever pigment the castle's maester had managed to find. They weren't elegant. They announced clearly enough that the keep had changed hands.
Henry turned from the wall to the thin, bald man standing beside him.
Maester Winston was perhaps fifty, though starvation had aged him past that. Maewyn had found him in the dungeon — found him in the corner of his cell, to be precise, in the process of catching and eating a rat, which was the only reason he'd been recognizable as a living person at all. The ironborn had thrown him in the moment Balon declared the Old Way restored, which was the moment a maester stopped being a useful curiosity and became an obvious heretic. He'd been down there for months.
He had been fed, cleaned up, and given back his maester's chain, and he now stood very straight in a way that suggested he was determined not to look like a man who had recently been eating rats in the dark.
"The raven?" Henry asked.
"Sent, my lord. Flying for Winterfell." Winston bowed with a precision that suggested he'd spent some of his dungeon time reminding himself how to do it properly. "Based on the correspondence I reviewed in the keep's records, I believe the King and Lord Stark have reached Lannisport by now. Winterfell will relay whatever orders Lord Stark sends."
"Good." Henry looked back at the sea. "My name goes on nothing that passes through Lannisport. Anything addressed to Lord Stark comes through Winterfell."
"Understood, my lord."
Henry glanced down at the chain around Winston's neck — the links of different metals, each one representing a field in which the Citadel had judged him competent. He ran his eye down them. Ravenry. History. Architecture. Economics. Medicine. Several others.
"Have you studied the higher mysteries?" he asked.
Winston's back stiffened as if he'd been poked. "Certainly not." He said it with the reflexive firmness of a man who has given this answer many times. "Superstition dressed up in academic robes. An insult to genuine scholarship."
"Ah." Henry looked away.
Winston watched him do it. Then, in a rather different voice — quieter, with the particular quality of a man deciding to stop performing — he said, "My lord. I have, in point of fact, looked at several books on the subject. In a purely academic capacity. I made nothing of it. I've never lit a glass candle. I want to be clear about that." He paused. "But I looked."
Henry turned back.
"I mention it," Winston said, with great dignity and a slight tremor in his jaw, "because I want you to take me with you when you leave. After you go, the ironborn will be back eventually, and when they are — a maester who follows the Seven will not last long on a Drowned God island." He reached up and touched his chain with one thin hand. "I am competent in everything you see here. I can manage a castle's accounts, treat wounds in the field, decode correspondence, educate children, design fortifications, advise on military matters, and I am not entirely useless with a blade. I am asking you not to leave me here."
Henry looked at him for a long moment.
"If I ever hold a seat of my own," he said, "I'll write to the Citadel and name you as its maester."
Winston closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, his posture had changed in some subtle way — less performance in it. "Thank you, my lord."
"Don't thank me yet. We still have to get off this island."
From the top of the keep's tower above them, Maewyn's voice came down sharp and sudden, cutting through the morning quiet.
"Ships! Ships in the distance — flying white banners — white cloaks! My lord, it's the Kingsguard!"
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