"I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood,"

"Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?"

"How else? Though not till I'm done reading." Lord Rodrik went to the window. "You have not asked about your lady mother."

/ was afraid. "How is she?"

"Stronger. She may yet outlive us all. She will certainly outlive you, if you persist in this folly. She eats more than she did when she first came here, and oft sleeps through the night,"

"Good." In her final years on Pyke, Lady Alannys could not sleep. She would wander the halls at night with a candle, looking for her sons. "Maron?" she would call shrilly. "Rodrik, where are you? Theon, my baby, come to mother." Many a time Asha had watched the maester draw splinters from her mother's heels of a morning, after she had crossed the swaying plank bridge to the Sea Tower on bare feet. "I will see her in the morning."

"She will ask for word of Theon."

The Prince of Winterfell."What have you told her?"

"Little and less. There was naught to tell." He hesitated. "You are certain that he is dead?"

"I am certain of nothing."

"You found a body?"

"We found parts of many bodies. The wolves were there before us

… the four-legged sort, but they showed scan! reverence for their two-legged kin. The bones of the slain were scattered, cracked open for their marrow. I confess, it was hard to know what happened there, it seemed as though the northmen fought among themselves."

"Crows will fight over a dead man's flesh, and kill each other for his eyes." Lord Rodrik stared across the sea, watching the play of moonlight on the waves. "We had one king, then five. Now all I see are crows, squabbling over the corpse of Westeros." He fastened the shutters. "Do not go to Old Wyk, Asha. Stay with your mother. We shall not have her long, I fear."

Asha shifted in her seat. "My mother raised me to be bold. If I do not go I willspend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had."