The north went on forever.

Tyrion Lannister knew the maps as well as anyone, but a fortnight on the wild track that passed forthe kingsroad up here had brought home the lesson that the map was one thing and the land quiteanother.

They had left Winterfell on the same day as the king, amidst all the commotion of the royaldeparture, riding out to the sound of men shouting and horses snorting, to the rattle of wagons and thegroaning of the queen’s huge wheelhouse, as a light snow flurried about them. The kingsroad was justbeyond the sprawl of castle and town. There the banners and the wagons and the columns of knightsand freeriders turned south, taking the tumult with them, while Tyrion turned north with Benjen Starkand his nephew.

It had grown colder after that, and far more quiet.

West of the road were flint hills, grey and rugged, with tall watchtowers on their stony summits. Tothe east the land was lower, the ground flattening to a rolling plain that stretched away as far as theeye could see. Stone bridges spanned swift, narrow rivers, while small farms spread in rings aroundholdfasts walled in wood and stone. The road was well trafficked, and at night for their comfort therewere rude inns to be found.

Three days ride from Winterfell, however, the farmland gave way to dense wood, and thekingsroad grew lonely. The flint hills rose higher and wilder with each passing mile, until by the fifthday they had turned into mountains, cold blue-grey giants with jagged promontories and snow ontheir shoulders. When the wind blew from the north, long plumes of ice crystals flew from the highpeaks like banners.

With the mountains a wall to the west, the road veered north by northeast through the wood, aforest of oak and evergreen and black brier that seemed older and darker than any Tyrion had everseen. “The wolfswood,” Benjen Stark called it, and indeed their nights came alive with the howls ofdistant packs, and some not so distant. Jon Snow’s albino direwolf pricked up his ears at the nightlyhowling, but never raised his own voice in reply. There was something very unsettling about thatanimal, Tyrion thought.

There were eight in the party by then, not counting the wolf. Tyrion traveled with two of his ownmen, as befit a Lannister. Benjen Stark had only his bastard nephew and some fresh mounts for theNight’s Watch, but at the edge of the wolfswood they stayed a night behind the wooden walls of aforest holdfast, and there joined up with another of the black brothers, one Yoren. Yoren was stoopedand sinister, his features hidden behind a beard as black as his clothing, but he seemed as tough as anold root and as hard as stone. With him were a pair of ragged peasant boys from the Fingers.

“Rapers,” Yoren said with a cold look at his charges. Tyrion understood. Life on the Wall was saidto be hard, but no doubt it was preferable to castration.

Five men, three boys, a direwolf, twenty horses, and a cage of ravens given over to Benjen Stark byMaester Luwin. No doubt they made a curious fellowship for the kingsroad, or any road.

Tyrion noticed Jon Snow watching Yoren and his sullen companions, with an odd cast to his facethat looked uncomfortably like dismay. Yoren had a twisted shoulder and a sour smell, his hair andbeard were matted and greasy and full of lice, his clothing old, patched, and seldom washed. His twoyoung recruits smelled even worse, and seemed as stupid as they were cruel.

No doubt the boy had made the mistake of thinking that the Night’s Watch was made up of menlike his uncle. If so, Yoren and his companions were a rude awakening. Tyrion felt sorry for the boy.

He had chosen a hard life … or perhaps he should say that a hard life had been chosen for him.

He had rather less sympathy for the uncle. Benjen Stark seemed to share his brother’s distaste forLannisters, and he had not been pleased when Tyrion had told him of his intentions. “I warn you,Lannister, you’ll find no inns at the Wall,” he had said, looking down on him.

“No doubt you’ll find some place to put me,” Tyrion had replied. “As you might have noticed,I’m small.”

One did not say no to the queen’s brother, of course, so that had settled the matter, but Stark hadnot been happy. “You will not like the ride, I promise you that,” he’d said curtly, and since themoment they set out, he had done all he could to live up to that promise.

By the end of the first week, Tyrion’s thighs were raw from hard riding, his legs were crampingbadly, and he was chilled to the bone. He did not complain. He was damned if he would give BenjenStark that satisfaction.

He took a small revenge in the matter of his riding fur, a tattered bearskin, old and musty-smelling.

Stark had offered it to him in an excess of Night’s Watch gallantry, no doubt expecting him tograciously decline. Tyrion had accepted with a smile. He had brought his warmest clothing with himwhen they rode out of Winterfell, and soon discovered that it was nowhere near warm enough. It wascold up here, and growing colder. The nights were well below freezing now, and when the wind blewit was like a knife cutting right through his warmest woolens. By now Stark was no doubt regrettinghis chivalrous impulse. Perhaps he had learned a lesson. The Lannisters never declined, graciously orotherwise. The Lannisters took what was offered.

Farms and holdfasts grew scarcer and smaller as they pressed northward, ever deeper into thedarkness of the wolfswood, until finally there were no more roofs to shelter under, and they werethrown back on their own resources.

Tyrion was never much use in making a camp or breaking one. Too small, too hobbled, too in-theway.

So while Stark and Yoren and the other men erected rude shelters, tended the horses, and built afire, it became his custom to take his fur and a wineskin and go off by himself to read.

On the eighteenth night of their journey, the wine was a rare sweet amber from the Summer Islesthat he had brought all the way north from Casterly Rock, and the book a rumination on the historyand properties of dragons. With Lord Eddard Stark’s permission, Tyrion had borrowed a few rarevolumes from the Winterfell library and packed them for the ride north.

He found a comfortable spot just beyond the noise of the camp, beside a swift-running stream withwaters clear and cold as ice. A grotesquely ancient oak provided shelter from the biting wind. Tyrioncurled up in his fur with his back against the trunk, took a sip of the wine, and began to read about theproperties of dragonbone. Dragonbone is black because of its high iron content, the book told him. Itis strong as steel, yet lighter and far more flexible, and of course utterly impervious to fire.

Dragonbone bows are greatly prized by the Dothraki, and small wonder. An archer so armed canoutrange any wooden bow.

Tyrion had a morbid fascination with dragons. When he had first come to King’s Landing for hissister’s wedding to Robert Baratheon, he had made it a point to seek out the dragon skulls that hadhung on the walls of Targaryen’s throne room. King Robert had replaced them with banners andtapestries, but Tyrion had persisted until he found the skulls in the dank cellar where they had beenstored.

He had expected to find them impressive, perhaps even frightening. He had not thought to findthem beautiful. Yet they were. As black as onyx, polished smooth, so the bone seemed to shimmer inthe light of his torch. They liked the fire, he sensed. He’d thrust the torch into the mouth of one of thelarger skulls and made the shadows leap and dance on the wall behind him. The teeth were long,curving knives of black diamond. The flame of the torch was nothing to them; they had bathed in theheat of far greater fires. When he had moved away, Tyrion could have sworn that the beast’s emptyeye sockets had watched him go.

There were nineteen skulls. The oldest was more than three thousand years old; the youngest amere century and a half. The most recent were also the smallest; a matched pair no bigger thanmastiff’s skulls, and oddly misshapen, all that remained of the last two hatchlings born onDragonstone. They were the last of the Targaryen dragons, perhaps the last dragons anywhere, andthey had not lived very long.

From there the skulls ranged upward in size to the three great monsters of song and story, thedragons that Aegon Targaryen and his sisters had unleashed on the Seven Kingdoms of old. Thesingers had given them the names of gods: Balerion, Meraxes, Vhaghar. Tyrion had stood betweentheir gaping jaws, wordless and awed. You could have ridden a horse down Vhaghar’s gullet,although you would not have ridden it out again. Meraxes was even bigger. And the greatest of them,Balerion, the Black Dread, could have swallowed an aurochs whole, or even one of the hairymammoths said to roam the cold wastes beyond the Port of Ibben.

Tyrion stood in that dank cellar for a long time, staring at Balerion’s huge, empty-eyed skull untilhis torch burned low, trying to grasp the size of the living animal, to imagine how it must have lookedwhen it spread its great black wings and swept across the skies, breathing fire.

His own remote ancestor, King Loren of the Rock, had tried to stand against the fire when hejoined with King Mern of the Reach to oppose the Targaryen conquest. That was close on threehundred years ago, when the Seven Kingdoms were kingdoms, and not mere provinces of a greaterrealm. Between them, the Two Kings had six hundred banners flying, five thousand mounted knights,and ten times as many freeriders and men-at-arms. Aegon Dragonlord had perhaps a fifth thatnumber, the chroniclers said, and most of those were conscripts from the ranks of the last king he hadslain, their loyalties uncertain.

The hosts met on the broad plains of the Reach, amidst golden fields of wheat ripe for harvest.

When the Two Kings charged, the Targaryen army shivered and shattered and began to run. For a fewmoments, the chroniclers wrote, the con............