A Feast for Crows полностью

The bailey opened up before her, overgrown. To her left was the main gate, and the collapsed shell of what might have been a stable. Saplings were poking out of half the stalls and growing up through the dry brown thatch of its roof. To her right she saw rotted wooden steps descending into the darkness of a dungeon or a root cellar. Where the keep had been was a pile of collapsed stones, overgrown with green and purple moss. The yard was all weeds and pine needles. Soldier pines were everywhere, drawn up in solemn ranks. In their midst was a pale stranger; a slender young weirwood with a trunk as white as a cloistered maid. Dark red leaves sprouted from its reaching branches. Beyond was the emptiness of sky and sea where the wall had collapsed.

and the remnants of a fire.

The whispers nibbled at her ears, insistent. Brienne knelt beside the fire. She picked up a blackened stick, sniffed at it, stirred the ashes. Someone was trying to keep warm last night. Or else they were trying to send a signal to a passing ship.

“Halloooooo,” called Nimble Dick. “Anyone here?”

“Be quiet,” Brienne told him.

“Someone might be hiding. Wanting to get a look at us before they show themself.” He walked to where the steps went down beneath the ground, and peered down into the darkness. “Hallooooo,” he called again. “Anyone down there?”

Brienne saw a sapling sway. From the bushes slid a man, so caked with dirt that he looked as if he had sprouted from the earth. A broken sword was in his hand, but it was his face that gave her pause, the small eyes and wide flat nostrils.

She knew that nose. She knew those eyes. Pyg, his friends had called him.

Everything seemed to happen in a heartbeat. A second man slipped over the lip of the well, making no more noise than a snake might make slithering across a pile of wet leaves. He wore an iron halfhelm wrapped in stained red silk, and had a short, thick throwing spear in hand. Brienne knew him too. From behind her came a rustling as a head poked down through the red leaves. Crabb was standing underneath the weirwood. He looked up and saw the face. “Here,” he called to Brienne. “It’s your fool.”

“Dick,” she called urgently, “to me.”

Shagwell dropped from the weirwood, braying laughter. He was garbed in motley, but so faded and stained that it showed more brown than grey or pink. In place of a jester’s flail he had a triple morningstar, three spiked balls chained to a wooden haft. He swung it hard and low, and one of Crabb’s knees exploded in a spray of blood and bone. “That’s funny,” Shagwell crowed as Dick fell. The sword she’d given him went flying from his hand and vanished in the weeds. He writhed on the ground, screaming and clutching at the ruins of his knee. “Oh, look,” said Shagwell, “it’s Smuggler Dick, the one who made the map for us. Did you come all this way to give us back our gold?”

“Please,” Dick whimpered, “please don’t, my leg. ”

“Does it hurt? I can make it stop.”

“Leave him be,” said Brienne.

“DON’T!” shrieked Dick, lifting bloody hands to shield his head. Shagwell whirled the spiked ball once around his head and brought it down in the middle of Crabb’s face. There was a sickening crunch. In the silence that followed, Brienne could hear the sound of her own heart.

“Bad Shags,” said the man who’d come creeping from the well. When he saw Brienne’s face, he laughed. “You again, woman? What, come to hunt us down? Or did you miss our friendly faces?”

Shagwell danced from foot to foot and spun his flail. “It’s me she come for. She dreams of me every night, when she sticks her fingers up her slit. She wants me, lads, the big horse missed her merry Shags! I’m going to fuck her up the arse and pump her full of motley seed, until she whelps a little me.”

“You need to use a different hole for that, Shags,” said Timeon, in his Dornish drawl.

“I best use all her holes, then. Just to make certain.” He moved to her right as Pyg was circling around to her left, forcing her back toward the ragged edge of the cliff. Passage for three, Brienne remembered. “There are only three of you.”