"Your plans must change. You come too late."

"Late and hungry." She stretched her long legs out beneath the table, and turned the pages of the nearest book, a septon's discourse on Maegor the Gruel's war against the Poor Fellows. "Oh, and thirsty too. A horn of ale would go down well, nuncle."

Lord Rodrik pursed his lips. "You know I do not permit food nor drink in my library. The books-"

"-might suffer harm." Asha laughed.

Her uncle frowned. "You do like to provoke me."

"Oh, don't look so aggrieved. I have never met a man I didn't provoke, you should know that well enough by now. But enough of me. You are well?"

He shrugged. "Well enough. My eyes grow weaker. I have sent to Myr for a lens to help me read."

"And how fares my aunt?"

Lord Rodrik sighed. "Still seven years my elder, and convinced Ten Towers should be hers. Gwynesse grows forgetful, but that she does not forget. She mourns for her dead husband as deeply as she did the day he died, though she cannot always recall his name."

"I am not certain she ever knew his name." Asha closed the septon's book with a thump. "Was my father murdered?"

"So your mother believes"

There were times when she would gladly have murdered him herself, she thought. "And what does my nuncle believe?"

"Balon fell to his death when a rope bridge broke beneath him. A storm was rising, and the bridge was swaying and twisting with each gust of wind." Rodrik shrugged. "Or so we are told. Your mother had a bird from Maester Wendamyr."

Asha slid her dirk out of its sheath, and began to clean the dirt from beneath her fingernails. "Three years away, and the Crow's Eye returns the very day my father dies."