“By noon,the tide had turned. The drakars emblazoned with wolf and dragon joined the fleet of the Hawk as they set sail for the city of the king.”

“The Hawk of Essex looked out toward the sea and thought for a moment that he had stepped back in time. As it had more than two years before, a Viking war fleet was bearing down on his shore.He called to his wife, who was, after all, Norse and whom he knew had a good grasp of things. "Would you agree that Wolf and Dragon are reasonable men?"Krysta lifted their son from the basin in which she had been bathing him, grinned at the baby's eager kicks, and wrapped him snugly in a blanket before joining Hawk at the window. "Eminently reasonable."He looked again over the sea. "Something has stirred them." Buckling on his sword,he went to find out what it was.”

“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”

“One thing all the stories agreed on: King Robert was dead. The bells in the seven towers of the Great Sept of Baelor had tolled for a day and a night, the thunder of their grief rolling across the city in a bronze tide. They only rang the bells like that for the death of a king, a tanner's boy told Arya.”

“There was time after that to eat the very fine meal Cymbra and Magda prepared with Rycca's able assistance, to linger over the table as Dragon spun stories, and for lovers to dream the night away in each other's arms.But on the morning tide, while yet a ghostly mist lingered over the water, shouts rang out on the quays, oars slipped into their locks, and sails billowed as a dozen war-armed dragon ships sailed for England.”

“[Jonah Griggs] is similar to a hawke and a wolf and Will Trombal – he mates for life.”