Chapter 18: The Second Winter and Thessaly's Schism

The cold came in from the east that year, which was wrong. Everyone who had survived a King's Landing winter said so — the old cold came off the Blackwater first, settled into the lower city, pushed up through the streets like water finding its level. This cold arrived sideways, carrying something that was not quite snow and not quite ash and left a grey film on every horizontal surface by morning. Pia scraped it off the administrative hall's window ledge with the flat of a knife and held the residue up to the light and said nothing. She showed it to Aldric. He told her to log it.

Mara had been logging it for eleven days.

She kept a separate section in the back of her second ledger — the one she had not shown the audit committee — cataloguing daily temperature, wind direction, precipitation type, and the date by which each had first deviated from every seasonal precedent she could locate in the archive fragments. The governance records she carried said nothing about weather. The taxation precedent covered harvest shortfalls. The Rivers charter included an emergency provision for flooding. None of them had contemplated the particular grey cold that tasted of iron and left film on knives.