Chapter 25: Aria's Failed Rescue

The morning of the twenty-third was cold in the way that King's Crossing was sometimes cold in autumn — not the honest, clean cold of the north, which had the decency to announce itself, but a damp, grey cold that arrived without ceremony and sat in the stones of the castle and in the passages between its walls and did not trouble itself to leave.

Aria had not slept.

This was not, in itself, remarkable. She had not slept properly in nine days, since the evening she had brought the letter to Tyrwick in the north tower library and watched his face go briefly, characteristically still. What was remarkable was that she had spent the hours between midnight and the first grey light not lying in bed with her eyes open, as she had the previous eight nights, but dressed, and sitting on the edge of the bed with her Northern short sword across her knees, and thinking with the concentrated application of a mind that had stopped permitting itself distraction.