The King of Winters

Chapter 57

Argella

The rain still fell, soft and steady. The sound of moisture dripping off the walls was all around her, and every ten feet away or so the music of another little waterfall would call to her flowing from the crenellations.

Argella notched the arrow to her bow, drew it back to her ear and waited and waited and waited for the wind to pass. When the thunder rumbled in the distance and the bright blue flash of the lightning lit the sky behind her, Argella Baratheon loosed her arrow. The arrow took flight, spearing through the storm and riding along with the wind as a falcon might soar up high in the sky. She was happy about the way it went racing until a particularly large gust of wind took the arrow away in its silvery fingers. 

"Stupid wind," she shouted when she saw her arrow scattering across the yard in the wind as an autumn leaf would be scattered in a gust. 

It was vexing her beyond any limits. For years Argella has been trying to brave the storm with her bow and arrow just as tonight and every time it had ended up the same. When she heard the distant roar of the thunder indicating the arrival of another storm, Ella had sneaked away from the dinner, got to her chambers swift as a deer, picked up her bows and arrows and stepped out onto the Drum tower of Storm's End to brave the storms as her ancestor had once done. But unlike Durran she has not had much luck in doing so. But only for now, she thought as she raised up her now. Durran stole the daughters of two gods and then went on to defy both their might. Why shouldn't she do the same? 

The songs said that Storm's End had been raised in ancient days by Durran, the first Storm King, who had won the love of the fair Elenei, daughter of the sea god and the goddess of the wind. On the night of their wedding, Elenei had yielded her maidenhood to a mortal's love and thus doomed herself to a mortal's death, and her grieving parents had unleashed their wrath and sent the winds and waters to batter down Durran's hold. His friends and brothers and wedding guests were crushed beneath collapsing walls or blown out to sea, but Elenei sheltered Durran within her arms so he took no harm, and when the dawn came at last he declared war upon the gods and vowed to rebuild.

Five more castles he built, each larger and stronger than the last, only to see them smashed asunder when the gale winds came howling up Shipbreaker Bay, driving great walls of water before them. His lords pleaded with him to build inland; his priests told him he must placate the gods by giving Elenei back to the sea; even his smallfolk begged him to relent. Durran would have none of it. A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder. No matter how the tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days.

Gods do not forget, and still the gales came raging up the narrow sea. Yet Storm's End endured, through centuries and tens of centuries, a castle like no other. Its great curtain wall was a hundred feet high, unbroken by arrow slit or postern, everywhere rounded, curving, smooth, its stones fit so cunningly together that nowhere was crevice nor angle nor gap by which the wind might enter. That wall was said to be forty feet thick at its narrowest, and near eighty on the seaward face, a double course of stones with an inner core of sand and rubble. Within that mighty bulwark, the kitchens and stables and yards sheltered safe from wind and wave. Of towers, there was but one, a colossal drum tower, windowless where it faced the sea, so large that it was granary and barracks and feast hall and lord's dwelling all in one, crowned by massive battlements that made it look from afar like a spiked fist atop an upthrust arm.

The storm was getting better of her. The seaward side of Storm's End was perched upon a pale white cliff, the chalky stone sloping up steeply to half again the height of the massive curtain wall. It brought all the storms from the sea to break upon the walls of Storm's End. No matter how hard the storms were Storm's End endured, as it had thousands of years before both from the storms of the gods and the storms of men. But no matter how hard she tried her arrows did not fare well against the wind.