Howland learned the ways of the singers by moving slowly, noticing what others missed, and keeping his questions small. The isle taught him from the moment he set foot on it. There were paths only if one looked from ankle height. There were rules that no one named, yet every child obeyed. He set himself to those first.
Iron stayed at the shore. Maple pressed a bundle of bark cords into his hands and showed him where to hang hooks and buckles so they would not scrape a root. Fire lived only in bowls of clay lined with wet sand. Voices dropped when the wind fell. When the wind rose, no one spoke at all, as if the air itself had a right to be heard first.
The old tongue came back to his mouth like a river that had never truly left its bed. His mother had given him the bones of it. Here the singers put meat on those bones and taught him how it should sing.
There were greetings he learned to match to the hour. Palm to chest at dawn. Fingers to bark at noon. Palm to root at dusk. At night one bowed to shadows rather than faces. Names were not thrown like stones. They were placed, and only when needed.
He watched the way the children ate. The smallest took leaves for the oldest first. The oldest touched each dish to the earth. Fish heads faced the lake. No one wasted salt. Maple laughed at him when he reached for a knife without asking the root beneath if it would be offended. He learned to press his palm to bark for a breath and thank it for being solid under his feet.
They taught him to be quiet with his hands. In deep groves words were for the trees. The living traded meaning with wrists and fingers. Two taps meant heed the wind. Three meant stillness. A flat palm turned meant the path bent ahead. Maple corrected him when his thumb betrayed impatience. Dacey teased that he could weave a fine cloak with those finger movements. Howland felt his cheeks warm but continued to learn the singer's hand signs.
He gave as well as he took. He plaited reeds into tight little boats and taught the children how to send them in slow spirals along back eddies for fun. He showed Maple how crannogfolk sealed the seams of a pelt tent with animal fat so rain ran smoothly off. He told Thistle that in the Neck they measured year-turns by frog calls, not by calendars, and the greenseer tipped his head as if a puzzle piece had clicked.
Thistle gave him songs in return. Not visions, not in the way Lyanna dreamed. The old singer sat with his thin back against bark and made a sound like wind carrying words along a long hall. No names. Never that. He drew with images, and Howland learned to read the pictures the way a tracker reads a crossing.
A town of stone patched by wood. Bells with more voices than men. Steps that wore to slants in heavy rain. Narrow lanes where a man could swing from roof to roof with hands and knees if he were desperate enough. A river that ran close enough to smell yet did not wash the town's feet clean. Thistle's red eyes flicked to Howland's as he sang these things. The crannogman held his tongue until the last note settled.
Howland answered in the old tongue so he would not break the song. "A sept at the heart. A market that spills into streets. A place with high ground for a bell-tower. Riverlands by the stones and the smell." He made a small, respectful pause. "Rain that does not carry the trouble away."
Thistle did not praise or correct. He sang again with the same thin strength he always had. This time he shared details of men. Not faces, but features. A host that moved loud until it chose to move quiet. A hammer that was not a tool but a weapon. The hammer belonged to a man whose laughter startled birds and who wore antlers when they did not snag in doorways. Another figure, a fiery-haired reckless youth, ran a finger along the map and kept his jaw clenched whenever someone shouted. A third was all caution and height and birds. The Antler. The Flame. The Falcon. The singer did not call them that. Howland did, to hold them in place in his head.
Howland offered his interpretation of the song back to the greenseer. "Roofs that can hide a man. A red beast that is bird and cat both, who stalks the trapped stag. Wolves and falcons follow the scent of blood."
Thistle touched the bark beside him as if closing a page. For him, that was as near to praise as the singer would get.
When the song faded, Howland sought Maple. If Thistle was river-silt, Maple was the water that brought it. She gathered what the island heard from wings and paws and fins and made a weaving out of it. He asked, as he had learned to ask, for what the geese had seen when they skimmed near the eastern shore. Maple's eyes went half-lidded. "Lines of men on foot. Some carry ladders made of ash poles. Others pull carts with wood that smells of pitch and the sea. Rain followed them. It flattened the dog prints and made the men curse."
"What of the herons?" Howland asked. "They fish the backwaters when they are troubled."
"They left the muddy shallows and went to the reeds near the mouth of the Blue Fork," Maple said. "There were too many boots in the small channels."
He went to another singer, an older one whose hair leafed like willow switches in spring, and asked for the crows. They had counted helms. Those they associated with an upcoming meal. They had counted campfires by night. Too many for peace. An otter slid by his ankles as he stood at the water and Maple, amused, translated the way she would for a child. "The sleek one says the river tasted of boiled leather and fear where it rounds the last bend before the market town. He bit a strap to test it. It tasted like a southron boot."
He tied those strands together as he would tie a fishnet. A stone sept town with many bells. Rain. Ladders. Pitch. Boots in narrow alleys. A stag with a hammer. A red-haired man with maps who hated to shout because it meant the plan was failing. When he said the word Stoney in the old tongue, Maple's ears flicked. When he added Sept in the common tongue aloud, she nodded as if that were the right coin for the right stall at last.
He did not name the antlered man. He did not have to. Storm's End had only one lord who turned loud beginnings into fortune with a laugh and a song. The falcon could be no other than the Eyrie's lord. The fiery one would be the latest in the revolving door of Targaryen lackeys. Whomever Aerys was ordering about until a new replacement caught his fancy.
Howland returned to Maple and asked the last set of questions that troubled him. "Has the lake heard of the wolf-girl, the hammer's promised, or the falcon's wards?" Maple listened to creatures that cared about gossip even less than he typically did: owls, who judged by quiet; frogs, who remembered rhythms better than words; and pike, who knew when the shallows grew murky from too many feet. No tales of such detail reached them. All the owls knew was that men left their dead unburied. The pike reported more anchors than last season. That was enough to put a stone behind his ribs.
He found Lyanna that night near Grandmother's roots. Dacey crouched nearby, oiling a strap. Both looked up when he sat, and both kept their mouths closed until he drew breath.
"I do not bring visions," he said. "Only a reading. The singers' stories tell of a town with many bells. The children's fliers saw ladders and pitch and men in the alleys. The swimmers say there are more anchors on the eastern shore than there should be. Taken together it smells like a war."
"For Robert," Lyanna said, voice flat.
"For a hammer-hearted lord," Howland answered, careful not to drown the names they would need to carry later. "I know not why, but the red griffin will hunt for the stag. The falcon lord will move, and a wolf with him."
Dacey cinched the strap and checked its give. "And us?"
"The isle will keep," Howland said. He felt the truth of that in his chest. Grandmother's limbs did not sway for men's folly. "Men will not. If we wait until every crow on the shore caws a warning, we will lose any chance to do good."
Lyanna's gaze went up through the leaves. He saw the way she asked the tree before she asked herself. When she looked back the decision sat in her shoulders. "We will go," she said. "We will see with our own eyes. I don't know why this conflict is happening, but I need to make sure my family is safe. But we stick to the shadows. Rhaegar, Robert, or Rickard, none of them get to determine my life."
"Dawn," Dacey said, and set their hours.
Howland lay awake a while after the fire fell to coals. He went back over the knots in his mind. The songs had given him no promises. That was mercy. Promises meant inflexibility, and inflexibility was deadly. He had words, winds, footfalls, and the way rain sharpens or smudges a track. That was enough. He closed his eyes and listened to the lake gulp the shore. The bells he had never heard yet rang in the space where thought becomes sleep. They were not warning bells or wedding bells. They were iron and air. He would let them be that until the world forced them to mean more.