Even with the shutters firmly bolted against the howling winter wind, an insistent draft pushed its way through and set the candles to guttering. Munkun snatched up the fresh vellum sheet from his desk to spare the creamy white expanse from spatters of wax, and once again resented the fact that the pressures of office had forced him to confine his writing to the dark hours of the night. At this rate, I’ll be as blind as poor Tyland, he thought, my eyes burned out by over-much squinting. Granted, he rarely slept more than an hour or two a night these days, but writing by candle-light put unnecessary strain on his eyes and he would have much preferred to work by the light of day.

Unfortunately, Munkun’s days were entirely consumed with trying to hold Westeros together with parchment and ink, while the lords of the realm – the ones who are still currently breathing, he amended – busied themselves with the next civil war. The job of the Grand Maester of the Citadel ought to be dispense learned advice to the King of Westeros, but in the absence of anyone who cared, the stewards, cooks, pursers, and reeves had turned to him for help, and soon he found himself sending ravens to Highgarden begging for grain shipments and answering the petitions of knight’s widows and not having an hour of daylight left for the great work he was eager to begin.

Eying the candles warily, he dipped his quill in the ink jar, stirring it around a bit to stop the ink from sludging up from the cold, and began to write:

The Dance of the Dragons

Obvious. Generic. Dull. Gods, what was I thinking? Munkun nibbled at the end of his quill. Every maester worth his copper link was no doubt spending their copious spare time trying to write their account of the greatest event in modern Westerosi history. The problem was how to stand above the crowd, to not merely write a history, but the history, the one that generations would remember, and here he was stuck on a title when he alone of all the maesters in the world had been right there in the Red Keep for the whole of the war…what if someone else, some hedge maester or village septon scratched out their paltry chronicle before he ever had the time to finish?

Queasily, he remembered an ugly little rumor about that ugly little man, the obscene capering fool. Ever since he came to court, Mushroom had never missed an opportunity to make his smutty japes at the maester’s expense: that Munkun kept a boy in his chambers for his “pleasant usages,” or that Munkun had accidentally gelded himself while studying anatomy at the Citadel, or that Munkun wore a false beard and was secretly a woman in disguise. The dignity of the Grand Maester’s office wouldn’t allow him to dignify such filth with a response, but in his weaker moments he had sometimes pleasantly imagined the dwarf choking on a pigeon pie – he always gobbles his food, no control over his appetites – and standing over Mushroom as he gasped his last. But at the long table in the Great Hall this evening, Lady Jeyne had mentioned offhandedly that the fool was writing a history, and Munkun had nearly choked himself on rage and terror. The thought of Mushroom’s…gonadal obsessions making their way into the chronicles of history had kept him from his bed and kept him at his desk well into the night, as the drifts of crumpled parchment bore mute witness to.

How to begin, though? He had rejected a number of titles already – The Blacks and the Greens was too dangerously political at a time when the exhausted partisans on both sides still kept their hands on their blades ready for a double-cross; An Account of the Late Unpleasantness was safer, but far too vague. Munkun knew that the central image must be the great aerial duels, the deadly clashes in the air that had set half the kingdom aflame. But when every crossroads minstrel had their own version of what the smallfolk had already dubbed the “Dance of the Dragons,” how was he to stand apart?

The ink was almost dry on the nib when an idea finally hit him: the title should speak to the value of his account, the veracity of the eye-witness and the keeper of the records. Carefully, he added a qualifier:

The Dance of the Dragons: A True-

The quiet of the night was suddenly split with the shouting of men, the rumble of hobnailed boots on stone floors, the clash of metal on metal, and his head snapped to the window. Not another green army, surely? He looked down at the page and saw the inky scar splashed across the page by his startled hand and the anger was too much to bear. He practically ripped his thick wool cloak off the hook and slung it about him, threw open the door, and was halfway down the spiral staircase before he realized he had forgotten to put on shoes. No matter. He forced himself to keep going despite the icy flagstones under his feet and flung open the double doors at the base of the Rookery.

“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?!” Grand Maester Munkun bellowed.

The lower courtyard looked like the aftermath of a battlefield: several dozen men – most of them in sea green tabards and surcoats – lay on the ground where they had fallen, in drifts of two or three. A line of men in the same livery knelt on the blood-streaked snow in the shadow of the sea wall, guarded by grim-faced axemen who wore heavy furs and tabards of dirty grey. In the center of the courtyard, swords, spears, and even daggers and belt knives were stacked in rough piles. Where are the Kingsguard? he wondered vainly, before his eyes caught sight of the archers with bows drawn facing the White Sword Tower and the serried ranks of spearmen standing between them and any desperate sally. Though they were strangers to a man, Munkun had seen men like these before. Wild northmen, they had infested the city like ticks on a hound – no, a wolf, he amended – blown south by the winter winds. Dirty and desperate men with belts cinched tight by hunger, they had been balked of a fight by the end of the war. So every day they fought, with former blacks and former greens, with the remnants of the mob who still remembered when they had ruled the streets, with the Goldcloaks who came to break up the fighting, with one another if no other sport presented itself.

With such as these has Lord Stark come to “secure the peace.” Three men peeled away from the crowd in his direction, and these faces the Grand Maester did recognize from court: Lord Stefan Bolton called Butcher Bolton for his boiled leather armor and the many knives that hung from his belt; Ser Torrhen Manderly, as sleek and jovial as a sealion basking in the sun, until you looked in his eyes and saw the cold black calculation of a shark; the bulky, squat man they all referred to as “the” Norrey in his green and yellow tartan, who was supposedly Lord Stark’s goodfather.

“Ah, Grand Maester, there you are,” Ser Torrhen boomed with false bonhomie, leading the trio forward. “So sorry to have disturbed you at…your rest,” he continued, raising a shaggy eyebrow at Munkun’s bare legs. The maester realized in a sickening flash that he had forgotten more than just his shoes in his haste to leave the rookery, and clutched his cloak about him. “You caught us in the midst of arresting these men, nasty business I’m afraid.”

“On what charge and on whose authority?” Munkun demanded, drawing the dignity of his officer about himself, even as he sought to surreptitiously twitch his cloak into an arrangement that would better shield his legs from the biting cold.

“I’m afraid that when my lord Hand ordered my lord Master of Ships taken into custody, these men attempted to prevent a lawful arrest. Naturally, we had to disarm them in order to uphold the law,” the Manderly knight responded with an air of perfect innocence, as if his boots were not splashed with blood that stood in steaming puddles amidst the snow.

“But there is no Hand!” Munkun protested, feeling as if the political terra firma was eroding under his freezing toes. In the wake of the King’s – the late King’s, he amended – death, Lord Corlys had been the closest thing to a Hand, sending offers of peace to Casterly Rock, Storm’s End, and Oldtown, still mighty bulwarks of the Greens despite their grievous defeats, on nothing more than the strength of his name. But the quiet young king, sequestered in his apartments, had as of yet named no one to fill that post.

“There is now,” Lord Stefan drawled with a sardonic air, idly paring a fingernail with a wicked-looking misericorde from the collection around his waist.

“Indeed, Stefan, indeed,” the Manderly knight replied, nodding encouragingly. “And I’m afraid the Hand did give us strict orders that you should accompany us immediately.”

First the Master of Ships and now the Grand Maester?! Munkun sought in vain for something that would stave off arrest. He could plead the neutrality of his office, but that had hardly spared Grand Maester Gerardys from Sunfyre’s gullet, or Grand Maester Gawen from Blackfyre’s edge. Thus are the maesters the first victims of tyrants, he thought miserably. For a second, he glanced backwards toward Maegor’s Holdfast and thought of running to seek shelter at the feet of the boy king, but the three men had carefully bracketed themselves between Munkun and escape. “But I’m not dressed,” he offered, feebly.

The Norrey snorted. “No matter. Cregan said he wanted yeh, so yeh go. Didn’t say nawt about wanting yer finery.”

“We really must insist, Grand Maester,” Ser Torrhen apologized as the three closed in around him. Munkun tried to resist, but the cobblestones were slick under his bare feet and in the end the three men simply grabbed him by elbow and thigh and carried him – like a sack of neeps to market – all the way down the serpentine steps, across the middle bailey where hundreds of Northmen soldiers stood warming their hands around hastily-assembled campfires even as their squires – no, not squires, Northmen have no knights, so what do they call them? – busied themselves hauling the direwolf banner up the walls of the Tower of the Hand. By the time that they had passed through the portcullis to the outer yard, Munkun’s fear of embarrassment overcame his fear of the headman’s axe, and so he consented to walk rather than be carried.

Despite the chill, the great double doors of the throne room were wide open, spilling light into the darkness. As he crossed the threshold, Munkun was greeted by a sight straight out of his nightmares: the dwarf jester walking in his direction, carrying out a severed head still dripping blood. The shock intensified when the Grand Maester realized that the head, lacking its habitual sardonic sneer, was that of Larys Strong. The Master of Whisperers? The Lord of Harrenhal? Will Stark leave a single one of the Small Council alive?

Munkun was still pondering that question when he was, at last, dragged before the Iron Throne. On the dais below that great rusting monstrosity, a plain wooden trestle bench that had doubtless been dragged across the yard from the Great Hall, served as a temporary seat for the man of the hour. Cregan Stark, the Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North – and Hand of the King, he amended – passed the time by cleaning blood off of his greatsword with a rag. Munkun had never seen the man without the weapon; one would have thought it was too heavy for a man who was just as painfully, raw-bone thin as the lowest of his followers, but over the last week he had observed Lord Stark at practice in the courtyard below his tower, whipping the thing around with one hand like a willow switch.

As he approached, Cregan turned his glare on the maester – grey eyes as hungry and pitiless as a winter storm, Munkun thought – and nodded at his lords to release the man. “Ah. The Maester. Good.” Tossing the bloody rag carelessly onto the bench where it landed on his badge of office, he marched down the steps of the dais, past the cooling corpses of the good and the great. Cregan moved with a stalking gait, head slowly bobbing from side to side, that prompted a disobedient part of the maester’s mind to remind him of old legends, of animals that had learned to walk in men’s skins. Warg!

“You summoned me, my lord?” he managed to get out without his voice breaking.

“Yes.” Cregan leant over him, looking the maester up and down as if measuring him as potential prey. Munkun knew himself to be of decent height, but the Stark still loomed over him, despite the fact that he habitually stooped forwards. All the better to keep his teeth in range, that same disobedient thought chimed in.

“F-for what purpose, may I ask?”

“You’re a maester. Aren’t you? Your job to write everything down. Too much has not been written down, maester. Too many decisions made behind closed doors. Too many deaths in the dark. Better this way. So that no one forgets the price of treason.”

Fear melted away from Munkun like snow in spring, and he found some courage that had frozen over. “And what is all of this, my lord,” he gestured with a broad wave of his hand that took in the headless bodies on the dais, the coffles of men who knelt in chains before the throne. “You have arrested members of the Small Council, you have killed members of the Small Council. What is that if, not treason?”

“Justice,” Cregan snapped, baring his teeth as he stared down the bantam maester. “I am the Hand of the King. Open trial was held. Confessions were given before witnesses – mark their statements down well, maester – and I passed judgement. In the king’s name.”

“The King is but a boy!” Munkun yelled and the sudden crush of silence made him blush. “Please. My lord. This is not how things should be done. Call in the lords of the realm, let them sit in judgement, clear away the bodies at the least.”

“The bodies make men more honest. Who knows why,” Cregan bared his teeth again. “Perhaps fear of consequences puts truth in their mouths. Both are in limited supply in this city. As for your lords, I never bent the knee to them. They have no power over me. I bent the knee to the king and the king alone. If the king is not the law, what are any of us doing here?”

“Is the way of it, then? Cregan Stark as the sole voice of the law, without check, like some Essosi tyrant?” Cregan’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared, and for a second Munkun truly feared that he was on the point of killing him, but all he did was lower his head to whisper in the maester’s ear.

“You do not understand me. Any more than these southron lords did. I hate this place, maester. It stinks of lies and flattery, of the grease of corruption. Your septons can swing their censers and choke the air with perfume to mask the stink, but I am not so easily fooled. So trust me, maester. I do not want to stay here any longer than needs must.” He straightened up and clicked his fingers, summoning his men to his side. “The maester needs paper. Ink. Quills. See to it.”