Ice Castles Quotes

Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.

Jon Snow, is this a proper castle now? Not just a tower?” “It is.” Jon took her hand. “Good,” she whispered. “I wanted t’ see one proper castle, before … before I …” “You’ll see hundred castles. The battle’s done. Maester Aemon will see to you. You’re kissed by fire, remember? Lucky. It will take more than an arrow to kill you. Aemon will draw it out and patch you up, and we’ll get milk of the poppy for the pain.” She just smiled at that. “D’you remember that cave? We should have stayed in that cave. I told you so.” “We’ll go back to the cave,” he said.” You’re not going to die, Ygritte. You’re not.” “Oh.” Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she sighed, dying.

Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?

Frost grows on the window glass, forming whorl patterns of lovely translucent geometry. Breathe on the glass, and you give frost more ammunition. Now it can build castles and cities and whole ice continents with your breath’s vapor. In a few blinks you can almost see the winter fairies moving in . . . But first, you hear the crackle of their wings.

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revalation and wonder.

Bring on your storm, my lord-and recall, if you do, the name of this castle"-Ser Courtnay Penrose at Storm's End.

The gods made the earth for all men t' share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. "My trees," they said, "you can't eat them apples. My stream, you can't fish here. My wood, you're not t' hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I'll chop 'em off, but maybe if you kneel t' me I'll let you have a sniff." You call us thieves, but at least a thief has t' be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler only has t' kneel.

Sam loved to listen to music and make his own songs, to wear soft velvets, to play in the castle kitchen beside the cooks, drinking in the rich smells as he snitched lemon cakes and blueberry tarts. His passions were books and kittens and dancing, clumsy as he was.

I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter. Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.

You weren’t meant for the ice, you weren’t made for the pain. The world that lives inside of me was not the world you were meant to contain. You were meant for castles and living in the sun. Thecold running through me should have made you run. Yet you stay. Holding onto me, yet you stay, reachingout a hand that I push away. The cold is not meant for you yet you stay, you stay, you stay. When I know it’s not right for you. The ice fills my veins and I can’t feel the pain, yet you’re there like the heat that sends me screaming in fear. I can’t feel the warmth I need to feel the ice. I want to hold it all in and numb it till I can’t feel the knife. Your heat threatens to melt it all and I know I can’t bear the pain if the ice melts away. So I push you away and I scream out your name and I know I can’t need you yet you give anyway and I run wishing you would run too. Yet you stay. Holding onto me yet you stay reaching out a hand that I push away. The cold is not meant for you yet you stay, you stay, you stay. When I know it’s not right for you. The blackness is my shield. I pull it closer still. You’re the light that I hide from, the light that I hate. You’re the light to this darkness and I can’t let you stay. I need the dark around me like I need the ice in my veins. The cold is my healer. The cold is my safe place. Youaren’t welcome with your heat you don’t belong beside me. I hate you yet I love, I don’t want you yet I need you. The dark will always be my cloak and you are the threat to unveil my pain, so leave. Leave and erase the memories. I need to face the life that’s meant for me. Don’t stay and ruin all my plans. You can’t have my soul I’m not a man. The empty vessel I dwell in is not meant to feel the heat you bring. I push you away and I push you away. Yet you stay.

I dreamt of a maid at a feast with purple serpents in her hair, venom dripping from their fangs. And later I dreamt that maid again, slaying a savage giant in a castle built of snow.

There are too many steps in this castle, and it seems to me they add a few every night, just to vex me" - Maester Cressen

If walls could keep us small, peasants would all be tiny and kings as large as giants," said Ser Jorah. "I've seen huge men born in hovels, and dwarfs who dwelt in castles.

What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins.

The Castle can be rebuilt, in time. It's not the walls that make a lord, it's the man. - Stannis Baratheon

Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered." A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. "A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out," he said. A scream cut the air. It sounded nonhuman. He took his eyes off the water and looked around. "Hear that pheasant? That's what I like about the Bighorn River," he said. "Do you find viruses beautiful?" "Oh, yeah," he said softly. "Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure." He laid a perfect cast on the water, and eddies took the fly down. (92)

I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid of anything." "Yes, you are, on both counts. You're afraid of everything. In England there are castles with stone walls that go up over a hundred feet, built during a time when it was the strength of your fortress that won battles. Each time I look at you, I marvel at the feat of organic engineering that's allowed you to create such a fortification within a perfect composition of female flesh.

You realize I had half my guard out searching for you?” Eddard Stark said when they were alone. “Septa Mordane is beside herself with fear. She’s in the sept praying for your safe return. Arya, you know you are never to go beyond the castle gates without my leave.” “I didn’t go out the gates,” she blurted. “Well, I didn’t mean to. I was down in the dungeons, only they turned into this tunnel. It was all dark, and I didn’t have a torch or a candle to see by, so I had to follow. I couldn’t go back the way I came on account of the monsters. Father, they were talking about killing you! Not the monsters, the two men. They didn’t see me, I was being still as stone and quiet as a shadow, but I heard them. They said you had a book and a bastard and if one Hand could die, why not a second? Is that the book? Jon’s the bastard, I bet.

We Built a Castle Near the Rocks, we built it out of sand. Our fortress was an ice-cream box with turret, tall and grand. Our men were twigs, our gun were straws from which we'd sipped at lunch. We had the best of wars... till someone's foot went CRUNCH! [Joan Walsh Anglund]

Hundreds had come to the castle gates to bear witness to the burning of the Seven. The smell in the air was ugly. Even for soldiers, it was hard not to feel uneasy at such an affront to the gods most had worshiped all their lives.

Titles were cheaper than dirt, and the riverlands were full of ruined castles, standing desolate amidst untended fields and burned villages.

He made plans to keep himself sane, built castles of hope in the dark.

What were you doing to that cat, boy?” Myrcella asked again, sternly. To her brother she said, “He’s a ragged boy, isn’t he? Look at him.” She giggled. “A ragged dirty smelly boy,” Tommen agreed. They don’t know me, Arya realized. They don’t even know I’m a girl. Small wonder; she was barefoot and dirty, her hair tangled from the long run through the castle, clad in a jerkin ripped by cat claws and brown roughspun pants hacked off above her scabby knees. You don’t wear skirts and silks when you’re catching cats. Quickly she lowered her head and dropped to one knee. Maybe they wouldn’t recognize her. If they did, she would never hear the end of it. Septa Mordane would be mortified, and Sansa would never speak to her again from the shame.

The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place.

We must declare this Snow a traitor and a rebel,” agreed Ser Harys Swyft. “The black brothers must remove him.” Grand Maester Pycelle nodded ponderously. “I propose that we inform Castle Black that no more men will be sent to them until such time as Snow is gone.

Thoren Smallwood, a sinewy ranger with a weak chin and a weaker mouth hidden under a thin scraggle of beard, gave Jon and Sam a cool look. He had been one of Alliser Thorne’s henchmen, and had no love for either of them. “The Lord Commander’s place is at Castle Black, lording and commanding,” he told Mormont, ignoring the newcomers, “it seems to me.” “If you are ever Lord Commander, you may do as you please,” Mormont told the ranger, “but it seems to me that I have not died yet, nor have the brothers put you in my place.

I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter.

The music from the castles was louder here. The sound of the drums and horns rolled across the camp. The musicians in the nearer castle were playing a different song than the ones in the castle on the far bank, though, so it sounded more like a battle than a song. “They’re not very good,” Arya observed.

There's a classic iceberg on the port side, with a centre so blue it looks dyed, and ahead of them is a mirage--a fata morgana, towering like an ice castle on the horizon, completely real except for the faint shimmering of its edges. Sailors have been lured to their death by those; they've drawn mountains on maps where no mountains were.

The Red Keep was full of cats: lazy old cats dozing in the sun, cold-eyed mousers twitching their tails, quick little kittens with claws like needles, ladies’ cats all combed and trusting, ragged shadows prowling the midden heaps. One by one Arya had chased them down and snatched them up and brought them proudly to Syrio Forel … all but this one, this one-eared black devil of a tomcat. “That’s the real king of this castle right there,” one of the gold cloaks had told her. “Older than sin and twice as mean. One time, the king was feasting the queen’s father, and that black bastard hopped up on the table and snatched a roast quail right out of Lord Tywin’s fingers. Robert laughed so hard he like to burst. You stay away from that one, child.” He had run her halfway across the castle; twice around the Tower of the Hand, across the inner bailey, through the stables, down the serpentine steps, past the small kitchen and the pig yard and the barracks of the gold cloaks, along the base of the river wall and up more steps and back and forth over Traitor’s Walk, and then down again and through a gate and around a well and in and out of strange buildings until Arya didn’t know where she was. Now at last she had him. High walls pressed close on either side, and ahead was a blank windowless mass of stone. Quiet as a shadow, she repeated, sliding forward, light as a feather. When she was three steps away from him, the tomcat bolted. Left, then right, he went; and right, then left, went Arya, cutting off his escape. He hissed again and tried to dart between her legs. Quick as a snake, she thought.

There were clouds massing in the eastern sky, pierced by shafts of sunlight. They look like two huge castles afloat in the morning sky.

Here every castle had its godswood, and every godswood had its heart tree, and every heart tree its face.

Ser Corliss Penny gave the clan chief an incredulous look. “Do you want to die, Wull?” That seemed to amuse the northman. “I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter.

Tyrion. “None.” “A pity. Well, the threat may serve to keep the Marcher lords close to their castles, at least. What news of my father?” “If Lord Tywin has won across the Red Fork, no word has reached me yet. If he does not hasten, he may be trapped between his foes. The Oakheart leaf and the Rowan tree have been seen north of the Mander.” “No word from Littlefinger?” “Perhaps he never reached

Gradually, strength returned to Yorda's body and she gripped his hand. Ico gripped back. Yorda sat up on the floor, but her eyes were still distant. Suddenly, Ico felt cold. A chill emanated from Yorda's body as he held her in his arms, as though she were a pitcher that had just been filled with ice water. He had the sensation that something else was inside the girl, pushing aside the Yorda he knew.

trays of pastries from his castle kitchens, cream swans and spun-sugar unicorns, lemon cakes in the shape of roses, spiced honey biscuits and blackberry tarts, apple crisps and wheels of buttery cheese.

You weren’t meant for the ice, you weren’t made for the pain. The world that lives inside of me was not the world you 75 Existence were meant to contain. You were meant for castles and living in the sun. The cold running through me should have made you run. Yet you stay. Holding onto me, yet you stay, reaching out a hand that I push away. The cold is not meant for you yet you stay, you stay, you stay. When I know it’s not right for you. The ice fills my veins and I can’t feel the pain, yet you’re there like the heat that sends me screaming in fear. I can’t feel the warmth I need to feel the ice. I want to hold it all in and numb it till I can’t feel the knife. Your heat threatens to melt it all and I know I can’t bear the pain if the ice melts away. So I push you away and I scream out your name and I know I can’t need you yet you give anyway and I run wishing you would run too. Yet you stay. Holding onto me yet you stay reaching out a hand that I push away. The cold is not meant for you yet you stay, you stay, you stay. When I know it’s not right for you. The blackness is my shield. I pull it closer still. You’re the light that I hide from, the light that I hate. You’re the light to this darkness and I can’t let you stay. I need the dark around me like I need the ice in my veins. The cold is my healer. The cold is my safe place. You aren’t welcome with your heat you don’t belong beside me. I hate you yet I love, I don’t want you yet I need you. The dark will always be my cloak and you are the threat to unveil my pain, so leave. Leave and erase the memories. I need to face the life that’s meant for me. Don’t stay and ruin all my plans. You can’t have my soul I’m not a man. The empty vessel I dwell in is not meant to feel the heat you bring. I push you away and I push you away. Yet you stay.

The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle’s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated “Oh, my Lord, my God” seventy times over.8

Joffrey called out, “Dog!” Sandor Clegane seemed to take form out of the night, so quickly did he appear. He had exchanged his armor for a red woolen tunic with a leather dog’s head sewn on the front. The light of the torches made his burned face shine a dull red. “Yes, Your Grace?” he said. “Take my betrothed back to the castle, and see that no harm befalls her,” the prince told him brusquely. And without even a word of farewell, Joffrey strode off, leaving her there. Sansa could feel the Hound watching her. “Did you think Joff was going to take you himself?” He laughed. He had a laugh like the snarling of dogs in a pit. “Small chance of that.” He pulled her unresisting to her feet. “Come, you’re not the only one needs sleep. I’ve drunk too much, and I may need to kill my brother tomorrow.” He laughed again. He was mocking her, she realized. “No one could withstand him,” she managed at last, proud of herself. It was no lie. Sandor Clegane stopped suddenly in the middle of a dark and empty field. She had no choice but to stop beside him. “Some septa trained you well. You’re like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking -bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite.” “ Take your look.” His fingers held her jaw as hard as an iron trap. His eyes watched hers. Drunken eyes, sullen with anger. She had to look. The right side of his face was gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and a grey eye beneath a heavy brow. His nose was large and hooked, his hair thin, dark. He wore it long and brushed it sideways, because no hair grew on the other side of that face. The left side of his face was a ruin. His ear had been burned away; there was nothing left but a hole. His eye was still good, but all around it was a twisted mass of scar, slick black flesh hard as leather, pocked with craters and fissured by deep cracks.

It's supposed to be very beautiful, the Citadel,' Oak says. 'It is beautiful, Wren?' When the light went through the ice of the castle, it made rainbows that danced along its cold halls. You could almost see through the walls, as though the whole place was one large, cloudy window. When I was brought to it for the first time, I thought it was like living inside a sparkling diamond. 'It's not,' I say. 'It's an ugly place.

My trees, they said, you can’t eat them apples. My stream, you can’t fish here. My wood, you’re not t’ hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I’ll chop ’em off, but maybe if you kneel t’ me I’ll let you have a sniff.

He said on the front step of the Potter house. weeping and cradling his dead wife in his arms. He was still two years from the drunken plunge through the ice of Castle Lake which would kill him, but he was at the end of the last sober day of his life.

Lorelei It is no night to drown in: A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror-sheen, The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping, The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes float Up toward me, troubling the face Of quiet. From the nadir They rise, their limbs ponderous With richness, hair heavier Than sculptured marble. They sing Of a world more full and clear Than can be. Sisters, your song Bears a burden too weighty For the whorled ear's listening Here, in a well-steered country, Under a balanced ruler. Deranging by harmony Beyond the mundane order, Your voices lay siege. You lodge On the pitched reefs of nightmare, Promising sure harborage; By day, descant from borders Of hebetude, from the ledge Also of high windows. Worse Even than your maddening Song, your silence. At the source Of your ice-hearted calling- Drunkenness of the great depths. O river, I see drifting Deep in your flux of silver Those great goddesses of peace. Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell’s chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.

Lake Bled, when we arrived, was no disappointment. It had poured into an alpine valley at the end of one of the Ice Ages and provided early nomads there with a resting place—in thatched houses out on the water. Now it lay like a sapphire in the hands of the Alps, its surface burnished with whitecaps in the late-afternoon breeze. From one steep edge rose a cliff higher than the rest, and on this, one of Slovenia’s great castles roosted, restored by the tourist bureau in unusually good taste. Its crenellations looked down on an island, where a specimen of those modest red-roofed churches of the Austrian type floated like a duck, and boats went out to the island every few hours. The hotel, as usual, was steel and glass, socialist tourism model number five, and we escaped it on the second day for a walk around the lower part of the lake.

She remembered a story Old Nan had told once, about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil giants. He was very brave and smart and he tricked the giants and escaped … but no sooner was he outside the castle than the Others took him, and drank his hot red blood. Now she knew how he must have felt.

No, no, no! The best way to win a boy's heart is to brew a love potion out of rainbows and sunsets that make two lovers sprout wings and fly to a magical castle in the sky, where they get married and eat clouds with spoons, and use stars as ice cubes in their moonlight punch, forever and ever and ever!

It saddened Cressen to remember that letter. No one had ever taught Stannis how to laugh, least of all the boy Patchface. The storm came up suddenly, howling, and Shipbreaker Bay proved the truth of its name. The lord’s two-masted galley Windproud broke up within sight of his castle. From its parapets his two eldest sons had watched as their father’s ship was smashed against the rocks and swallowed by the waters. A hundred oarsmen and sailors went down with Lord Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife, and for days thereafter every tide left a fresh crop of swollen corpses on the strand below Storm’s End.

queen herself noted that Silverwing “does not like this Wall.” Though it was summer and the Wall was weeping, the chill of the ice could still be felt whenever the wind blew, and every gust would make the dragon hiss and snap. “Thrice I flew Silverwing high above Castle Black, and thrice I tried to take her north beyond the Wall,” Alysanne wrote to Jaehaerys, “but every time she veered back south again and refused to go. Never before has she refused to take me where I wished to go. I laughed about it when I came down again, so the black brothers would not realize anything was amiss, but it troubled me then and it troubles me still.

Had a lifetime’s hard-won wisdom fled him along with his health and strength? He was a maester, trained and chained in the great Citadel of Oldtown. What had he come to, when superstition filled his head as if he were an ignorant fieldhand? And yet … and yet … the comet burned even by day now, while pale grey steam rose from the hot vents of Dragonmont behind the castle, and yestermorn a white raven had brought word from the Citadel itself, word long-expected but no less fearful for all that, word of summer’s end. Omens, all. Too many to deny. What does it all mean? he wanted to cry. “Maester Cressen, we have visitors.” Pylos spoke softly, as if loath to disturb Cressen’s solemn meditations. Had he known what drivel filled his head, he would have shouted.

Not very long ago I was driving with my husband on the back roads of Grey County, which is to the north and east of Huron County. We passed a country store standing empty at a crossroads. It had old-fashioned store windows, with long narrow panes. Out in front there was a stand for gas pumps which weren't there anymore. Close beside it was a mound of sumac trees and strangling vines, into which all kinds of junk had been thrown. The sumacs jogged my memory and I looked back at the store. It seemed to me that I had been here once, and the the scene was connected with some disappointment or dismay. I knew that I had never driven this way before in my adult life and I did not think I could have come here as a child. It was too far from home. Most of our drives out of town where to my grandparents'house in Blyth--they had retired there after they sold the farm. And once a summer we drove to the lake at Goderich. But even as I was saying this to my husband I remembered the disappointment. Ice cream. Then I remembered everything--the trip my father and I had made to Muskoka in 1941, when my mother was already there, selling furs at the Pine Tree Hotel north of Gravehurst.

Yesterday I heard some of the castle servants talking about a funeral for one of the stable lads. He went skating last week on the pond in the village, but the ice was not thick enough and he drowned. I like to skate on the ice,too, Papa, have my own pair of bone skates. I could drown crossing the Channel as Uncle Robert fears... or I could drown back in Angers, if I was unlucky like that stable lad." Geoffrey's mouth twitched. "God help me," he said, "I've sired a lawyer!

The gods made the earth for all men t’ share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. My trees, they said, you can’t eat them apples. My stream, you can’t fish here. My wood, you’re not t’ hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I’ll chop ’em off, but maybe if you kneel t’ me I’ll let you have a sniff. You call us thieves, but at least a thief has t’ be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler only has t’ kneel.

Right by the Arctic Circle, the city of Rovaniemi is a key draw for visitors, with various Santa Claus attractions (the red-suited saint officially resides here) and numerous tours and activities, ranging from reindeer-farm visits to snowmobiling safaris, dog sledding with huskies and various high-adrenaline adventures. Rovaniemi has a small ski area, but the best skiing is at Pyhä-Luosto. Elsewhere you can hike, take an ice-breaker cruise, stay in a winter snow castle and go berry picking in summer.

So, where are we going?" Eriku then turns onto the highway, one hand on the wheel, the other shifting gears. "I actually put a lot of thought into it. It was hard to decide on a place where we'd have maximum exposure but also enjoy ourselves. Somewhere the public can take us in, yet there's a lot of crowd control." We pass a billboard with a castle and a princess dressed in an ice-blue gown. I shift in my seat. No. Way. "Are we going to Tokyo Disney?" He smiles. "Life is a song, princess. Let's go make some fake-dating music.

Jon: Sometimes I dream about it. I'm walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening door, shouting names. I don't even know who I'm looking for. Most nights it's my father, but sometimes it's Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle. Sam: Do you ever find anyone in your dream? Jon: No one. The castle is always empty. Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones, That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It's black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don't want to. I'm afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it's not them I'm afraid of. I scream that I'm not a Stark, that this isn't my place, but it's no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream. That's when I always wake.

with walls of bare black stone and four tall narrow windows that looked out to the four points of the compass. In the center of the chamber was the great table from which it took its name, a massive slab of carved wood fashioned at the command of Aegon Targaryen in the days before the Conquest. The Painted Table was more than fifty feet long, perhaps half that wide at its widest point, but less than four feet across at its narrowest. Aegon’s carpenters had shaped it after the land of Westeros, sawing out each bay and peninsula until the table nowhere ran straight. On its surface, darkened by near three hundred years of varnish, were painted the Seven Kingdoms as they had been in Aegon’s day; rivers and mountains, castles and cities, lakes and forests.

As the sunset was coming closer, Triton started fearing that they won’t be able to make it on time, afraid that he When they were right at the doors of the Snow Queen’s castle, a snowflake storm began.   A wall made of little white specks started swirling and twisting around Gerda, until she felt she couldn’t go on, because her vision was getting blurry, and her head and hands were so cold.   Gerda had to find a way to get past the snowflakes, so she started thinking about the one thing that had kept her going this whole time.   She tried to ignore the coldness and snowflakes coming her way, and started thinking about Kai, “Kai… Kai… I have to find Kai! I have to find my friend!”   Gerda didn’t even notice that at that point she was already in the castle made of ice.

I have never known a boy who did not love the Warrior. I am old, though, and being old, I love the Smith. Without his labor, what would the Warrior defend? Every town has a smith, and every castle. They make the plows we need to plant our crops, the nails we use to build our ships, iron shoes to save the hooves of our faithful horses, the bright swords of our lords. No one could doubt the value of a smith, and so we name one of the Seven in his honor, but we might as easily have called him the Farmer or the Fisherman, the Carpenter or the Cobbler. What he works at makes no matter. What matters is, he works. The Father rules, the Warrior fights, the Smith labors, and together they perform all that is rightful for a man. Just as the Smith is one aspect of the godhead, the Cobbler is one aspect of the Smith. It was he who heard my prayer and healed my feet.

Samwell Tarly looked at him for a long moment, and his round face seemed to cave in on itself. He sat down on the frost-covered ground and began to cry, huge choking sobs that made his whole body shake. Jon Snow could only stand and watch. Like the snowfall on the barrowlands, it seemed the tears would never end. It was Ghost who knew what to do. Silent as shadow, the pale direwolf moved closer and began to lick the warm tears off Samwell Tarly's face. The fat boy cried out, startled... and somehow, in a heartbeat, his sobs turned to laughter. Jon Snow laughed with him. Afterward they sat on the frozen ground, huddled in their cloaks with Ghost between them. Jon told the story of how he and Robb had found the pups newborn in the late summer snows. It seemed a thousand years ago now. Before long he found himself talking of Winterfell. "Sometimes I dream about it," he said. "I'm walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don't even know who I'm looking for. Most nights it's my father, but sometimes it's Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle." The thought of Benjen Stark saddened him; his uncle was still missing. The Old Bear had sent out rangers in search of him. Ser Jaremy Rykker had led two sweeps, and Quorin Halfhand had gone forth from the Shadow Tower, but they'd found nothing aside from a few blazes in the trees that his uncle had left to mark his way. In the stony highlands to the northwest, the marks stopped abruptly and all trace of Ben Stark vanished. "Do you ever find anyone in your dream?" Sam asked. Jon shook his head. "No one. The castle is always empty." He had never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. "Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It's black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don't want to. I'm afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it's not them I'm afraid of. I scream that I'm not a Stark, that this isn't my place, but it's no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream." He stopped, frowning, embarrassed. "That's when I always wake." His skin cold and clammy, shivering in the darkness of his cell. Ghost would leap up beside him, his warmth as comforting as daybreak. He would go back to sleep with his face pressed into the direwolf s shaggy white fur.

-Sometimes I dream about it. I'm walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening door, shouting names. I don't even know who I'm looking for. Most nights it's my father, but sometimes it's Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle. -Do you ever find anyone in your dream? -No one. The castle is always empty. Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones, That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It's black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don't want to. I'm afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it's not them I'm afraid of. I scream that I'm not a Stark, that this isn't my place, but it's no good, I have to go anyway, so I start down, feeling the walls as I descend, with no torch to light the way. It gets darker and darker, until I want to scream. That's when I always wake. Jon and Sam

I’m sorry,” said the kitty. “I’ve wrecked your broomstick ride.” “No matter,” said Witch Mildred. “We’re here. Let’s go inside!” The clock atop the castle read twenty after eight, but the promised buffet table held only emptied plates! “No eye or newt? No sautéed slug? No pickleworm pate? No casserole of cockroach! No spiderweb soufflé! Those greedy gobbling goblins left zilch for us to eat.” Said the starving skeleton, “Why don’t we trick-or-treat?” They passed a lighted cottage, from which rose song and laughter. The mummy boldly rang the bell, All others traipsing after. The children squealed and giggled as they greeted their new guests, for of all the trick-or-treaters, these costumes were the best! The hostess asked the callers to join them at their party. “Check out this spread!” the mummy said. The hostess said, “Eat hearty.” “Taffy apples! Candy corn! Purple punch, ice-cold! My tongue’s not touched such tastiness since I was six years old!” In the corner of the kitchen Witch Mildred found a mop. “I think this will do nicely while my broom is in the shop.” “May I, please?” asked Mildred, and seated her new friends. With a loud “Thank you!” away they flew, in loopy swoops and bends. That night Witch Mildred dreamed of cakes and lemonade, but far more sweet than party treats were the friendships she had made!

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In

Of course, he thought, if he ever thought about it at all, that he would be remembered for some of the many small works he wrote and published, mostly travel chronicles, though not necessarily travel chronicles in the modern sense, but little books that are still charming today and, how shall I say, highly perceptive, anyway as perceptive as they could be, little books that made it seem as if the ultimate purpose of each of his trips was to examine a particular garden, gardens sometimes forgotten, forsaken, abandoned to their fate, and whose beauty my distinguished forebear knew how to find amid the weeds and neglect. His little books, despite their, how shall I say, botanical trappings, are full of clever observations and from them one gets a rather decent idea of the Europe of his day, a Europe often in turmoil, whose storms on occasion reached the shores of the family castle, located near Gorlitz, as you’re likely aware. Of course, my forebear wasn’t oblivious to the storms, no more than he was oblivious to the vicissitudes of, how shall I say, the human condition. And so he wrote and published, and in his own way, humbly but in fine German prose, he raised his voice against injustice. I think he had little interest in knowing where the soul goes when the body dies, although he wrote about that too. He was interested in dignity and he was interested in plants. About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive. He had a great sense of humor, although some passages of his books contradict me there. And since he wasn’t a saint or even a brave man, he probably did think about posterity. The bust, the equestrian statue, the folios preserved forever in a library. What he never imagined was that he would be remembered for lending his name to a combination of three flavors of ice cream.

The first signal of the change in her behavior was Prince Andrew’s stag night when the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson dressed as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash his party. Instead they drank champagne and orange juice at Annabel’s night club before returning to Buckingham Palace where they stopped Andrew’s car at the entrance as he returned home. Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, a point not neglected by several censorious Members of Parliament. For a time this boisterous mood reigned supreme within the royal family. When the Duke and Duchess hosted a party at Windsor Castle as a thank you for everyone who had helped organize their wedding, it was Fergie who encouraged everyone to jump, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. There were numerous noisy dinner parties and a disco in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle at Christmas. Fergie even encouraged Diana to join her in an impromptu version of the can-can. This was but a rehearsal for their first public performance when the girls, accompanied by their husbands, flew to Klosters for a week-long skiing holiday. On the first day they lined up in front of the cameras for the traditional photo-call. For sheer absurdity this annual spectacle takes some beating as ninety assorted photographers laden with ladders and equipment scramble through the snow for positions. Diana and Sarah took this silliness at face value, staging a cabaret on ice as they indulged in a mock conflict, pushing and shoving each other until Prince Charles announced censoriously: “Come on, come on!” Until then Diana’s skittish sense of humour had only been seen in flashes, invariably clouded by a mask of blushes and wan silences. So it was a surprised group of photographers who chanced across the Princess in a Klosters café that same afternoon. She pointed to the outsize medal on her jacket, joking: “I have awarded it to myself for services to my country because no-one else will.” It was an aside which spoke volumes about her underlying self-doubt. The mood of frivolity continued with pillow fights in their chalet at Wolfgang although it would be wrong to characterize the mood on that holiday as a glorified schoolgirls’ outing. As one royal guest commented: “It was good fun within reason. You have to mind your p’s and q’s when royalty, particularly Prince Charles, is present. It is quite formal and can be rather a strain.

* He also had every Masters of the Universe action figure including Rattlor and Two Bad and Zoar the fighting falcon, however—and this is very important—he did not have Castle Grayskull. So one time he and his friends told me I couldn’t play with them because I was a girl and Masters of the Universe were for boys and I went home crying and told my parents, and even though money was tight, even though they weren’t fans of Barbie-type plastic toys, even though they believed in solving problems with logic and discussion (“Use your head,” they’d say, “your words”), we went straight to Kmart and bought Teela and Evil-Lyn and the Sorceress. (Where are their pants? I wondered. Aren’t they cold?) And—the icing on my six-year-old fuck you cake—that ginormous plastic castle. I was hot shit on the block, I tell you what. Know what else? I shared.

The little restaurant was renowned for its soups and sandwiches and was filled to capacity with lunchtime regulars, who were as dependable as kids around an ice-cream truck.

Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle. Who knows?

If, for example, you and I were anteaters, rather than two people sitting in the corner of a bar, I might feel more comfortable with your silence, with your motionless hands holding your glass, with your glazed fish eyes fixing now on my balding head and now on my navel, we might be able to understand each other better in a meeting of restless snouts sniffing halfheartedly at the concrete for nonexistent insects, we might come together, under cover of darkness, in acts of sexual coitus as sad as Lisbon nights, when the Neptunes in the lakes slough off the mud and slime and scan the deserted squares with blank, eager, rust-colored eyes. Perhaps you would finally tell me about yourself. Perhaps behind your Cranach brow there lies sleeping a secret fondness for rhinoceroses. Perhaps, if you felt my body, you would discover that I had been suddenly transformed into a unicorn, and I would embrace you, and you would flap startled arms, like a butterfly transfixed by a pin, your voice grown husky with desire. We would buy tickets for the train that travels around the zoo, from creature to creature, with its clockwork engine, an escapee from some provincial haunted castle, and we would wave, as we passed, at the grotto-cum-crib of those recycled carpets—the polar bears. We would observe with an ophthalmological eye the baboons' anal conjunctivitis, like eyelids inflamed with combustible hemorrhoids. We would kiss outside the lions' den, where the lions—moth-eaten old overcoats—would curl their lips to reveal toothless gums. I would stroke your breasts in the oblique shade cast by the foxes, you would buy me an ice cream on a stick from the clowns' enclosure, where they, eyebrows permanently arched, exchanged blows to the tragic accompaniment of a saxophone. And that way we would have recovered a little of the childhood that belongs to neither of us and that insists on whizzing down the children's slide with a laugh that reaches us now as an occasional faint, almost angry echo.

OK, so I was basically Elsa from Frozen! Maybe I could build an ice castle next to the school. I pointed my hand to the sky and iced again.

regular deliveries of ice blocks from the local purveyor.

All singers were half mad. In songs the hero always saved the maiden from the monster's castle. But life was not a song... And there are no heroes here; only whores.

Do you ever find anyone in your dream?" Sam asked. Jon shook his head. "No one. The castle is always empty.

Thunder rumbled softly in the distance, but above him the clouds were breaking up. Jon searched the sky until he found the Ice Dragon, then turned the mare north for the Wall and Castle Black. The throb of pain in his thigh muscle made him wince as he put his heels into the old man’s horse. I am going home, he told himself. But if that was true, why did he feel so hollow? He rode till dawn, while the stars stared down like eyes.

In 2002, a joint federal, state, and local investigation was launched called Operation Ice Palace, which targeted The Castle, a head shop housed in a cavernous corrugated metal warehouse shaped like a medieval fort complete with a moat and a drawbridge.

Maybe I've been watching too many Disney features, Hildy, but I can't help thinking you need to find the truth within your-self. That's the only way you're going to believe it-and discover the strength to build your own beautiful ice castle in the sky!

This was, well, a fairy-tale castle, all icing-sugar battlements and tiny, towering turrets.

Sustained perhaps by the thought of an end to his ordeal, the General tackled this via crucis with scarcely a groan. Helped by Manoli and me when he stumbled and then by the guerrillas that shimmered like ghosts out of the vacancy, he moved across the landscape in a sort of trance. But, tormenting as our journey was, the dazzle of the moon and, when it set, of a blaze of stars that was nearly as bright, undermined this commotion of rock and then, by a planetary device in collusion with the optical tricks of which, at some moments, Crete seems to be composed — involving manipulated reflection and focus, levitation, geometrical shifts and a dissolving of solids balanced by a solidification of shadow — filled the hollow, then porous and finally transparent island under foot with lunar and stellar properties and, while hoisting it several leagues in the air, simultaneously, with moves as quiet as an opening gambit followed by those advances of knights and bishops, fast and stealthy as grandmother’s steps, which lead to penultimate castling and a sudden luminous checkmate, regrouped all the mountain tops of Crete within touching distance. The valleys and foothills had dropped away from this floe of triangles; they drifted in the windless cold starlight with the pallor, varying with their distance, of ice or ivory.

The Lord Commander had given him his orders when they made their camp on the Fist. “You’re no fighter. We both know that, boy. If it happens that we’re attacked, don’t go trying to prove otherwise, you’ll just get in the way. You’re to send a message. And don’t come running to ask what the letter should say. Write it out yourself, and send one bird to Castle Black and another to the Shadow Tower.” The Old Bear pointed a gloved finger right in Sam’s face. “I don’t care if you’re so scared you foul your breeches, and I don’t care if a thousand wildlings are coming over the walls howling for your blood, you get those birds off, or I swear I’ll hunt you through all seven hells and make you damn sorry that you didn’t.” And Mormont’s own raven had bobbed its head up and down and croaked, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.

You’re no man. You’re a monster.” Tapping on the ice urged her to turn, but she stared out over the swampy lands surrounding her castle, refusing to give him any satisfaction. “As are you. You may have a beautiful face, and a lovely body, but your mind is as dark as the bottomless pits of the abyss.

The walls would have shamed any proper castle, and the ornamental iron spikes along the top looked strangely naked without heads to adorn them. Tyrion pictured how his sister’s head might look up there, with tar in her golden hair and flies buzzing in and out of her mouth. Yes, and Jaime must have the spike beside her, he decided. No one must ever come between my brother and my sister.

Dairy Queen’s Frozen Hot Chocolate: A hot chocolate blended with ice to give it a frosty crunch. 191 McDonald’s Big Mac Poutine: McDonald’s classic golden fries topped with their famous Big Mac sauce. 192 Wendy’s Grand Slam: Also known as the Meat Cube, this burger has a total of four patties. 193 White Castle’s Seasoned Fries: You can get your fries with additional seasoning free of charge. 194 Starbucks Nutella Misto: Order a Caffè Misto with a shot of chocolate and hazelnut topped with caramel drizzle. 195

Wild things belong in the wild, not in a castle.

THE HIDDEN PAINTING THE AMUSEMENT PARK MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE MIXED-UP ZOO THE CAMP-OUT MYSTERY THE MYSTERY GIRL THE MYSTERY CRUISE THE DISAPPEARING FRIEND MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING GHOST MYSTERY IN THE SNOW THE PIZZA MYSTERY THE MYSTERY HORSE THE MYSTERY AT THE DOG SHOW THE CASTLE MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE LOST VILLAGE THE MYSTERY ON THE ICE THE MYSTERY OF THE PURPLE POOL THE GHOST SHIP MYSTERY THE MYSTERY IN WASHINGTON, DC THE CANOE TRIP MYSTERY THE MYSTERY OF THE HIDDEN BEACH THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING CAT THE MYSTERY AT SNOWFLAKE INN THE MYSTERY ON STAGE THE DINOSAUR MYSTERY T

I think we’re bonded to each other? I think you’re my mate, and the thought of that terrifies me, so I stupidly ran through the castle at night even though I know I shouldn’t since it isn’t safe.

Beyond the labyrinth, four spires explode up from the castle, alabaster ice splintering the leaden sky.

Each tower sports a circular walk at the apex, but there are no guards manning them. The castle is enormous, a fair chunk of the White Mansion, but the bulk of it is concealed behind forty-foot-high walls of silvery, metal-laced ice. With the exception of the slopes of snow-drifted roofs, flying buttresses, and the currently empty promenade that crowns the main hall, I can see none of the enormous courtyard I’ve read about in my files which is capable of comfortably accommodating tens of thousands of Fae. Last time I was here, the walls had collapsed and the castle was a dripping, icicle-drenched ruin, abandoned for millennia; all of it little more than a misshapen sloe of ice.

I WANTED TO BUILD AN ICE CASTLE LIKE ELSA! Okay?” Kate looked away, red in her cheeks.

And the girls, Ned!” he exclaimed, his eyes sparkling. “I swear, women lose all modesty in the heat. They swim naked in the river, right beneath the castle. Even in the streets, it’s too damn hot for wool or fur, so they go around in these short gowns, silk if they have the silver and cotton if not, but it’s all the same when they start sweating and the cloth sticks to their skin, they might as well be naked.” The king laughed happily.

The year was 1968, and Susan was sixteen years old. She’d come to Disneyland with her family, but as soon as they’d entered the gates, she waved goodbye to her mother, brother, and grandparents, saying she’d meet up with them later at the ice cream parlor on Main Street. She hurried down the street and across the bridge to the Sleeping Beauty Castle before her mother had a chance to protest. She knew she’d later be in trouble for running off but didn’t care; she wanted to be alone and away from her family for at least part of the day.

His eyes weren't closed like they used to be when he'd make Danny tell about an ice castle on Pluto where a band of pirates lived. But wanting to be told a story, entertained, however that looks on a person's face--Danny saw this now and remembered it. It filled him with relief.

Tyrion had only the vaguest memory of Theon Greyjoy from his time with the Starks. A callow youth, always smiling, skilled with a bow; it was hard to imagine him as Lord of Winterfell. The Lord of Winterfell would always be a Stark. He remembered their godswood; the tall sentinels armored in their grey-green needles, the great oaks, the hawthorn and ash and soldier pines, and at the center the heart tree standing like some pale giant frozen in time. He could almost smell the place, earthy and brooding, the smell of centuries, and he remembered how dark the wood had been even by day. That wood was Winterfell. It was the north. I never felt so out of place as I did when I walked there, so much an unwelcome intruder. He wondered if the Greyjoys would feel it too. The castle might well be theirs, but never that godswood. Not in a year, or ten, or fifty.

Ned Stark’s tree, he thought, and Stark’s wood, Stark’s castle, Stark’s sword, Stark’s gods. This is their place, not mine. I am a Greyjoy of Pyke, born to paint a kraken on my shield and sail the great salt sea. I should have gone with Asha. On their iron spikes atop the gatehouse, the heads waited. Theon gazed at them silently while the wind tugged on his cloak with small ghostly hands. The miller’s boys had been of an age with Bran and Rickon, alike in size and coloring, and once Reek had flayed the skin from their faces and dipped their heads in tar, it was easy to see familiar features in those misshapen lumps of rotting flesh. People were such fools. If we’d said they were rams’ heads, they would have seen horns.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell’s chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.

She’s gone missing, my prince. I fear Daiseeum’s the castle’s latest victim.

They wheeled in golden carts covered in snacks and treats as pretty as treasure in a chest. There were cookies shaped like castles, tarts topped in glistening pastel fruit, poached pears in a swirling golden sauce, candied dates wearing miniature crowns, and oysters on ice with pink pearls that glistened under the light.

To him aruna would be viewed as surrender at best and humiliation at worst, locked as he was in the ice-castle of his pride.

Vaysh, will you just step out of your ice-castle for one second and look!

In my dream, I found myself standing in a castle where the Fair Young Maiden was imprisoned. As I stood before her jail cell wondering how to get her out of there, Ice Machine in the corner chimed in, “No need for such heroics, my boy. She lets them think what they think.” Wherein, the Fair Young Maiden touched one of the bars and bent its shape so that it moved aside. Then she moved between the bars, where she stood before me smiling.

The direwolf twisted free of Jon’s grasp, his ears pricked up. And suddenly he was bounding away. He loped through a tangle of brush, leapt a deadfall, and raced down the hillside, a pale streak among the trees. Off to Castle Black? Jon wondered. Or off after a hare? He wished he knew. He feared he might prove just as poor a warg as a sworn brother