A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2)

by George R.R. Martin

Davos was a slight man, his low birth written plain upon a common face.

but the world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.

This lot, half o’ them would turn you over to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few silvers. The other half’d do the same, only they’d rape you first. So you keep to yourself

Lommy Greenhands wasn’t even hurt, yet he stayed as far away from Arya as he could get. “Every time you look at him, he twitches,” the Bull told her, as she walked beside his donkey.

“Viserys. The last son of Mad King Aerys. He’s been going about the Free Cities since before I was born, calling himself a king. Well, mother says the Dothraki finally crowned him. With molten gold.”

“I lose,” he shouted. “Fetch me some wine.” The king stood. “A cask from the cellars! I’ll see him drowned in it.”

“He and Jaime are the only survivors of Aerys Targaryen’s seven.

that ugly iron chair.”

Iron Throne

He hinted that Lord Arryn suspected or … well, believed …” “That you were fucking our sweet Jaime?” She slapped him. “Did you think I was blind as father?” Tyrion rubbed his cheek. “Who you lay with is no matter to me … although it doesn’t seem quite just that you should open your legs for one brother and not the other.” She slapped him. “Be gentle, Cersei, I’m only jesting with you. If truth be told, I’d sooner have a nice whore. I never understood what Jaime saw in you, apart from his own reflection.” She slapped him. His cheeks were red and burning, yet he smiled. “If you keep doing that, I may get angry.”

Have you seen the comet?” “I’m short, not blind,” Tyrion said.

Shut up Varys

“Your wolves have more wit than your maester,” the wildling woman said. “They know truths the grey man has forgotten.”

Arya noticed the first grave that same day; a small mound beside the road, dug for a child. A crystal had been set in the soft earth, and Lommy wanted to take it until the Bull told him he’d better leave the dead alone.

I got me ten, fifteen more brothers in that inn, if you still need convincing. I was you, I’d let loose of that gutcutter, spread my cheeks over that fat little horse, and gallop on back to the city.”

Catelyn raised her eyes, to where the faint red line of the comet traced a path across the deep blue sky like a long scratch across the face of god.

“Was there ever a war where only one side bled?”

but what does gold mean to a frothing dog like Gregor Clegane?

“And King Harren learned that thick walls and high towers are small use against dragons,” the tale always ended. “For dragons fly.”

Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.” “So power is a mummer’s trick?” “A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And oftimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

and one fool tried to kill me in my sleep and got a red smile for his trouble.” He drew the dirk across his throat, to show her.

When a pirate grows rich enough, they make him a prince. It had been Davos who had made the journey to Lys to recruit the old rogue to Lord Stannis’s cause.

“What good is this, I ask you? He who hurries through life hurries to his grave.”

Sound advice

This world is twisted beyond hope, when lowborn smugglers must vouch for the honor of kings.

Stannis stood abruptly. “R’hllor. Why is that so hard? They will not love me, you say? When have they ever loved me? How can I lose something I have never owned?” He moved to the south window to gaze out at the moonlit sea. “I stopped believing in gods the day I saw the Windproud break up across the bay. Any gods so monstrous as to drown my mother and father would never have my worship, I vowed. In King’s Landing, the High Septon would prattle at me of how all justice and goodness flowed from the Seven, but all I ever saw of either was made by men.” “If you do not believe in gods—” “—why trouble with this new one?” Stannis broke in. “I have asked myself as well. I know little and care less of gods, but the red priestess has power.” Yes, but what sort of power?

Delicious display

and I have her. The red woman. Half my knights are afraid even to say her name, did you know? If she can do nothing else, a sorceress who can inspire such dread in grown men is not to be despised. A frightened man is a beaten man.

“I told you there was bodies,” Lommy announced. “I could taste them in that water.”

“The gods made our bodies as well as our souls, is it not so? They give us voices, so we might worship them with song. They give us hands, so we might build them temples. And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.” “Remind me to tell the High Septon,” said Tyrion. “If I could pray with my cock, I’d be much more religious.”

When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.”

despite the frailty of her sex …” Oh, yes, she’s a frail dove, just ask Eddard Stark.

“He’s the best of them. But watch him, he falls into a rhythm, delivering the same strokes in the same order each time he attacks.” He grinned. “That will be the death of him, the day he faces me.”

People were crowding in, running from the war, and many had no way to live save by robbing and killing each other.

“Good. The longer Cersei waits, the angrier she’ll become, and anger makes her stupid. I much prefer angry and stupid to composed and cunning.”

“I should have been born a man. I would have no need of any of you then. None of this would have been allowed to happen.

One day, she promised herself as she lay abed, one day she would allow herself to be less than strong. But not today. It could not be today.

“A tourney,” Hal Mollen declared. He had a penchant for loudly announcing the obvious.

“Ser Colen,” Catelyn said to her escort, “who is this man, and why do they mislike him so?” Ser Colen frowned. “Because he is no man, my lady. That’s Brienne of Tarth, daughter to Lord Selwyn the Evenstar.” “Daughter?” Catelyn was horrified.

Pity filled Catelyn’s heart. Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman?

“Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.”

At sixteen, he was cursed with all the certainty of youth, unleavened by any trace of humor or self-doubt, and wed to the arrogance that came so naturally to those born blond and strong and handsome.

ancient beyond memory of man

skin as black as polished jet.

The only way he knows how to describe black men

The years pass in their hundreds and their thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters? We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they seem … but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.

Tyrion reflected on the men who had been Hand before him, who had proved no match for his sister’s wiles. How could they be? Men like that … too honest to live, too noble to shit, Cersei devours such fools every morning when she breaks her fast. The only way to defeat my sister is to play her own game, and that was something the Lords Stark and Arryn would never do.

“And both of them kings now,” Weese said. “Realm’s got more kings than a castle’s got rats.”

I’m the ghost in Harrenhal, she thought.

Elenei had yielded her maidenhood to a mortal’s love and thus doomed herself to a mortal’s death,

Cersei Lannister is laughing herself breathless, Catelyn thought wearily.

That she is

“Fear is better than love, mother says.” Joffrey pointed at Sansa. “She fears me.” The Imp sighed. “Yes, I see. A pity Stannis and Renly aren’t twelve-year-old girls as well.

No it won’t, you stupid man, Sansa thought, but she drank the dreamwine anyway,

Slay

Catelyn had not eaten today. Perhaps that had been unwise. She told herself that there had been no time, but the truth was that food had lost its savor in a world without Ned. When they took his head off, they killed me too.

They killed me too

and like their dragons the Targaryens answered to neither gods nor men.