The King of Winters

Chapter-26

ANDREW 

He dreamed of a cracked stone ceiling and the smells of blood and food and burnt flesh. The air was full of the smell of blood and smoke. Men were groaning and whimpering all around him, and from time to time a scream would pierce the air, thick with pain. When he tried to move, he found himself in the boat unable to move. He saw his mother glowing brightly in the dark that she made him cover his eyes. When he tried to climb out of the boat and move to her, a sharp pain coursed through his body searing through his soul. He hurt so much. Too weak to groan, he lay where he was and shut his eyes. Nearby he could still see the sun he had seen when he was dying. He looked to the golden light and wondered if he was still dying and not dead yet. After a time the room faded. 

He found himself outside the room and into the city, walking through a world without color. Ravens soared through a grey sky on wide black wing, while carrion crows rose from their feasts in furious clouds wherever he set his steps. White maggots burrowed through black corruption. The grey stone streets of the city were red now, and the novices of the House of Black and White grey as fogs; together with the crows they stripped the flesh from the fallen and took their faces. There were corpses strewn all over the streets. The sun was a hot white penny, shining down upon the grey river as it rushed around the swollen corpses of drowned men. From the pyres of the dead rose black columns of smoke and white-hot ashes. My work, thought Andrew Stark. He turned to look back the way he'd come and it was filled with men who had lost limbs, legs, head, face, eye, guts and everything one could lose from their body. 

At first there was no sound in the world, but after a time he began to hear the voices of the dead, soft and terrible. They wept and moaned, they begged for an end to pain, they cried for help and wanted their mothers. Andrew wanted his mother too. He wanted Ashara Dayne, but she was not there. He walked alone amidst grey shadows, trying to remember . . . 

The novices of the faceless men were stripping the dead men of their armor and clothes. All the bright dyes had leached out from the surcoats of the slain; they were garbed in shades of white and grey, and their blood was black and crusty. He watched their naked bodies lifted by arm and leg, to be carried swinging to the pyres to join their fellows. Metal and cloth were thrown in the back of a white wooden wagon, pulled by two tall black horses. 

So many dead, so very many. Their corpses hung limply, their faces slack or stiff or swollen with gas, unrecognizable, hardly human. The garments the novices took from them were decorated with pale red fire and ghostly dragons. Their armor was all dented and gashed, the chainmail riven, broken, slashed. Why did I kill them all? He had never known any of them, none but one and somehow he had missed the one he had known. 

He began to run. The city was not far. He would be safe inside the city, away from all these dead. He did not belong with the dead. He was still a living man. They all were lying dead and deaf and blind but he was alive and well. He ran away from them. He ran and ran and ran until he saw a white tree far away. He ran towards it, faster, as fast as his wounded leg would allow. 

He saw them beneath the tree, curled up together as one as he had seen them once long ago. His father sat leaning against the Heart Tree, though it had grey leaves instead of red and black blood flowing from the carved face's eyes and mouth. His mother sat with her back pressed against his father's chest his arms cradling her against him. They looked so happy, as they had always been together. "Mother," he shouted at them but they did not hear him. "Father," he tried again, this time moving close to them. His father was laughing at something his mother had said but he did not hear him.

"Mother," he shouted louder. "Father." He moved closer to the tree shouting for his parents as he went. They saw him only when he reached them. 

His mother was the first one to see him. She was quick to embrace him tightly. The fragrance of the roses she loved filled his nose and she felt real, real and alive standing before him, hugging him tightly like she had done when he was a boy. "Oh, Andrew, sweetheart, what have they done to you?"