Chapter 27: Jon Arrives with Two Kinds of Evidence

The gate guards at King's Crossing had turned away, in the previous twelve months, a wool merchant who claimed his bales were carrying a message for the queen, a self-styled prophet from the eastern settlements who required only ten minutes with the Small Council, and a remarkably persistent goat. They had not, in that same period, encountered anyone who rode up to their gate in the manner of the young man who arrived on the morning of the twenty-third, leading a second horse with a crate lashed to its back and an expression that suggested he had not slept in four days and did not particularly expect to sleep again soon.

The first guard, whose name was Breckett and whose professional instincts had been sharpened by twelve years of gate duty, stepped forward with the intention of conducting the standard inquiry. He got as far as "Your business at—" before the young man's eyes stopped him.

They were grey eyes, northern in the particular way that the north has of stamping its winters on a person's face, and they were looking at the castle in the manner of a man who has arrived somewhere he knew he would arrive and finds the arrival no less terrible for having known it.