A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, #5)

by George R.R. Martin

Only man stripped the skins from other beasts and wore their hides and hair.

The fur-wrapped bundle she clutched was her pup.

A child’s flesh, he thought, remembering Bump. Human meat. Had he sunk so low as to hunger after human meat?

Abomination. That had always been Haggon’s favorite word. Abomination, abomination, abomination. To eat of human meat was abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and to seize the body of another man was the worst abomination of all. Haggon was weak, afraid of his own power. He died weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of human flesh.

Hundreds more went off with the woods witch who’d had a vision of a fleet of ships coming to carry the free folk south. “We must seek the sea,” cried Mother Mole, and her followers turned east.

No one. If Mance is dead, the free folk are doomed.

His last death had been by fire. I burned. At first, in his confusion, he thought some archer on the Wall had pierced him with a flaming arrow … but the fire had been inside him, consuming him. And the pain …

“I am a great man. I am Varamyr, the warg, the skinchanger, it is not right that she should live and I should die.”

From time to time, some village hero would come with spear in hand to slay the beastling and save a sister or a lover or a daughter. Those he killed, but he never harmed the women.

it seemed only fitting that he should feed them in the end.

The wolf is part of you from that day on, and you’re part of him. Both of you will change.”

This is not so bad as burning. Let me sleep and never wake, let me begin my second life.

He had known what Snow was the moment he saw that great white direwolf stalking silent at his side. One skinchanger can always sense another.

The gods are all around us, in the rocks and streams, in the birds and beasts.

The white world turned and fell away. For a moment it was as if he were inside the weirwood, gazing out through carved red eyes as a dying man twitched feebly on the ground and a madwoman danced blind and bloody underneath the moon, weeping red tears and ripping at her clothes.

I am the wood, and everything that’s in it,

His wolves would save him, he told himself. That was his last thought as a man.

Pale pink icicles hung from her fingertips, ten long knives of frozen blood. And in the pits where her eyes had been, a pale blue light was flickering, lending her coarse features an eerie beauty they had never known in life. She sees me.

A droll fellow, till a mountain fell on him.”

He had dreamed enough for one small life. And of such follies: love, justice, friendship, glory. As well dream of being tall.

Even in his dying, he found a way to shit on me.

Is this your vengeance, Father? Has the Father Above made you his Hand?

“Slavery is forbidden in Pentos, by the terms of the treaty the Braavosi imposed on us a hundred years ago. Still, they will not refuse you.”

It reminded him of how Tysha would riffle his hair during the false spring of their marriage, before he helped his father’s guardsmen rape her.

I could smother myself in flesh. There were worse ways to die.

“What do you say? North or south? Shall I atone for old sins or make some new ones?”

Tyrion Lannister had lived all his life in a world that was too big for him, but in the manse of Illyrio Mopatis the sense of disproportion assumed grotesque dimensions. I am a mouse in a mammoth’s lair, he mused,

Some part of him wanted those mushrooms, even knowing what they were.

What do I have? A life to live? Work to do? Children to raise, lands to rule, a woman to love?

“Very well,” he conceded. “A Lannister is not a lion. Yet I am still my father’s son, and Jaime and Cersei are mine to kill.”

“Do you think King Stannis will give it to you? I am told he is a great one for the law.

“In Volantis they use a coin with a crown on one face and a death’s-head on the other. Yet it is the same coin. To queen her is to kill her.

A savior come from across the sea to bind up the wounds of bleeding Westeros.”