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First Published by Ace Books in the volume Dragons of Light 1980
Published by HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 1
Copyright © George R.R. Martin 1980
George R.R. Martin asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
Illustrations copyright © Luis Royo 2014
Designed by Heather Saunders
Cover illustration © Luis Royo. Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014. Game of ThronesSM The Original Series based on A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R.R. Martin © 2011 Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. HBO and related service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of
the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the
required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008118853
Ebook Edition © December 2014 ISBN: 9780008118860 Version: 2014-11-18
TO PHIPPS,
who thought of it first,
with all my love
CONTENTS
She was never quite sure whether it was the cold that brought the ice dragon or the ice dragon that brought the cold. That was the sort of question that often troubled her brother Geoff, who was two years older than her and insatiably curious, but Adara did not care about such things. So long as the cold and the snow and the ice dragon all arrived on schedule, she was happy.
She always knew when they were due because of her birthday. Adara was a winter child, born during the worst freeze that anyone could remember, even Old Laura, who lived on the next farm and remembered things that had happened before anyone else was born. People still talked about that freeze. Adara often heard them.
They talked about other things as well. They said it was the chill of that terrible freeze that had killed her mother, stealing in during her long night of labor past the
