Petyr Baelish returned home with a wound to his pride that hurt worse than the scar beneath his shirt.
Yes, he had gotten rid of Cat's oaf betrothed by burning that letter, but then she ended up with his dull brother anyway. He couldn't even secure Lysa for himself. He had underestimated the lengths that greedy fish Hoster would go to, nearly killing his own daughter.
There was a chance the wolf would die in the desert, but Catelyn would still be beyond him. He needed more power. More influence. Something greater than a cheap blade and a boy's boldness, if he ever meant for her to see him as anything other than a weakling.
The lord of the smallest finger looked back at the two malnourished soldiers trailing behind him. House Baelish kept only five men in service on a good year, and two of those had come south to collect him after his expulsion from Riverrun. They had patchwork chainmail, rusted helms, and secondhand swords. Petyr wondered if he would look more important with no escort at all. This looked more like poverty than dignity.
The road home was never much of a road. It wound through stony hills and damp gullies, hugging the long grey coast where the sea bit at the land in sharp little coves. Above, clouds were gathering in the northeast, dark and low and fast-moving. Petyr saw them first as a bruise on the horizon and knew at once what they promised. A storm was blowing in hard.
Baelish Keep appeared at last where it always had, squat and stubborn upon its sea-worn rise. It was closer to a bloated watchtower than Winterfell. The stones were damp and old. Sea wind had gnawed at every edge. There was nothing grand about it. No towers of pale marble or halls made for feasts and singing.
A servant boy took his horse. Another began some timid greeting about how glad they were to see him returned safe. Petyr brushed past without answering.
The storm clouds moved closer.
By the time he made it inside, the wind had picked up enough to bang against the shutters. Rain had begun to fall in thin, cold needles. Thunder rolled far out over the sea, still distant enough to be dignified.
Petyr began climbing the tower to see his grandmother.
Lady Morna Baelish had been left as castellan when his father rode south in the War of the Ninepenny Kings. It had suited her, in a way. She had always seemed sturdier than the keep itself, able to keep a firm hand on the few affairs reaching this lonely corner of the world. Yet sickness had reduced her now. The servants spoke in hushed voices. They moved like people waiting for a candle to gutter out.
Petyr took the narrow stairs two at a time, then slowed at the top because some part of him suddenly feared what he would find.
Her chamber smelled of salt, nettle tea, and damp wool. A brazier glowed low in the corner. Morna lay heaped in blankets on a bed too large for her shrinking frame, her face all angles now, the skin drawn thin over the bones. Only her eyes looked unchanged—sharp, watchful, amused in places where most dying people had no energy left for amusement.
She saw him in the doorway and lifted two fingers.
"Closer," she rasped. "You look half drowned."
Petyr obeyed and knelt by the bedside. "I suffered no more than a drizzle."
"It will worsen," she said. "Storm's coming. A big one."
Morna studied him for a long moment. "You look defeated," she said.
Petyr stiffened. "I was wounded."
She ignored him, unimpressed. "Even out here we heard about your duel. Foolish boy."
He looked away. Rain ticked at the window now, still polite. Hardly a maelstrom.
"I'm sorry," he said at last, though he was not entirely sure whether he meant for the duel, for his disgrace, or for returning home with nothing in his hands.
Morna clicked her tongue. "Don't start that." She shifted beneath the blankets with a wince. "I'm proud of you, reckless as you were."
Petyr looked back sharply.
She smiled with one side of her mouth. "Did you think I'd want you to roll over when some fancy lordling comes after your beloved? I read all those letters you sent, I know what she meant to you." Her eyes narrowed with fond contempt. "If you want something, boy, don't let someone take it just because of their birth."
Petyr swallowed. "I failed."
"Only if you stop there."
Thunder sounded again, closer this time. The shutters trembled.
Morna's gaze drifted to the window. "Your father wanted to be a proper Andal lord," she said after a while. "Never told you where I came from, did he."
Petyr frowned. "From the Fingers."
That won a dry laugh from her. "That's where he put me after your grandfather died. Not where I began."
She beckoned him closer still, as if the walls themselves might overhear.
"I was born in the Mountains of the Moon," she said. "Among the Sons of the Mist."
Petyr stared in shock.
He knew the mountain clans, of course. Every boy from the Vale did. Savage raiders, the stories said. Goat thieves and stone-throwers and shrieking men in skins.
"You're lying," he said before he could stop himself.
Morna's eyes flashed. "I never spoke of it because your father was ashamed. He wanted to be a good little lord with good little manners. He wanted his line washed clean." Her mouth twisted. "And now he's dead in a southern war, cut down for his Andal honor."
Petyr thought about how close he came to sharing his father's fate. It was thanks to Cat that Brandon hadn't killed him.
Morna reached for his wrist. Her hand felt bird-light.
"Learn this now," she said. "Never let an enemy know you are there before you strike. Chivalry is for fools who think the world cares how clean their hands are."
Petyr nodded, resonating with the truth in her words.
"Do you know why our house bears a giant on its banner?" she asked.
He blinked. "Because my grandfather was Braavosi. That's what Father said. The titan of Braavos."
"That's the public answer," Morna replied. "A respectable one. Respectable lies are the most useful kind."
Lightning flashed beyond the shutters, pale and sharp. Thunder followed soon after, no longer distant.
"It is also because of a song I sang to your grandfather," she said.
Then she sang, and Petyr listened without breathing.
Her voice had once been strong; Petyr could hear the ghost of it even now. Age and sickness had pared it down to something frayed and thin, yet the tune still carried an odd power, old as rain on stone. It was not courtly. One couldn't dance to it. It moved like something trudging through snow with grief on its back.
Ooooooh, I am the last of the giants,
my people are gone from the earth.
The last of the great mountain giants,
who ruled all the world at my birth.
Oh the small folk have stolen my forests,
they've stolen my rivers and hills.
And they've built a great wall through my valleys,
and fished all the fish from my rills.
In stone halls they burn their great fires,
in stone halls they forge their sharp spears.
Whilst I walk alone in the mountains,
with no true companion but tears.
They hunt me with dogs in the daylight,
they hunt me with torches by night.
For these men who are small can never stand tall,
whilst giants still walk in the light.
Oooooooh, I am the LAST of the giants,
so learn well the words of my song.
For when I am gone the singing will fade,
and the silence shall last long and long.
The storm broke in earnest by the second verse. Rain hammered the keep. Wind moaned in the cracks. Thunder rolled so hard the brazier rattled.
Still Morna sang on, her eyes half closed, as if she were not in her bed at all but somewhere high in the peaks of her girlhood, beneath dark pines and older gods.
When she finished, the room seemed emptier for the silence that followed.
"That was their song," she said. "My people's."
"Your grandfather was a sellsword," Morna said. "Braavosi. Hired by the Vale lords to fight my clan. During one raid I was taken alive. He meant to kill me with the others." Her mouth curved faintly at the memory. "So I sang when he placed his blade to me neck."
Petyr could see it as she spoke: torchlight, steel, blood on stones, a young woman stubborn enough to answer death with music.
"He told me his city was built from many peoples," Morna said. "That it was a shame for mine to die. Then he spared me." Another breath. "Later he took me to wife. For my voice, he said. I think perhaps he liked my temper too."
Outside, lightning flashed again, lighting her gaunt face like carved driftwood.
"Do you think there are true giants still out there?" he asked before he knew he meant to.
Morna's gaze drifted toward the ceiling, or perhaps beyond it. "Maybe," she said. "In the far north. Beyond the mountains and the Wall. In places where men haven't chopped the world into neat little lordships yet." Her eyes returned to him. "Or maybe they're all dead."
"But anyone can be a giant," she said, and now her voice was thin enough that Petyr had to lean close to hear it. "If they refuse to be small just because other men call them so. If they never give up on their ambition."
Petyr felt the storm in his bones. He thought back on his disgrace at Riverrun. The blood he had spilled for Catelyn and the laughter that followed behind him. He would not be little just because Edmure Tully said so.
He bent over her hand and said, with all the fierceness fourteen years could muster, "One day I will be a giant. I swear it."
Morna smiled then. "I know," she whispered.
Lightning flared white through the shutters. Thunder struck almost at once, so loud the chamber shook.
"I am not long for this world, and there is much I have to teach you of my people." Morna Baelish said. "You know our house name? Your grandfather took it from the story I told him of Bael the Bard."
Petyr frowned. "Our house name comes from a bard?"
"A king of the free folk," she clarified. "Or a wildling raider, if you ask the Andal maesters. A singer, a warrior, and a man clever enough to shame a lord in his own hall." Her eyes glimmered with the old amusement. "That is the sort of giant I think you may become."
Petyr stayed kneeling beside the bed while the storm hit the Fingers in full force, listening eagerly to all the tales his grandmother had to tell.