Chapter 21: The Northern Raven Storm

The first raven arrived before the morning market opened.

Pia found it in the message cage at the top of the administrative tower, sitting with the stillness of a bird that had flown until it could not fly anymore and then simply stopped. It was a northern bird — she could tell by the band, the dark grey of it, the particular thickness of the leg ring that Watch-trained handlers used because the cold made fingers clumsy and the rings needed to be worked one-handed. The message cylinder was Manderly blue. She unrolled the strip of parchment inside and read it three times before she went to find Aldric, because she was seventeen and had learned that arriving with information she had only half-understood was worse than arriving late.

The message was from the Maester of White Harbor. It was eight lines. The last two lines described something she read a fourth time and then stopped reading, because reading it again was not going to change what it said.