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Started reading
May 14, 2025
“I’d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand men, and their horses too if that was what it took to get my army.
George R.R. Martin *really* wants us to hate this guy. He succeeded.
“I am yours to command, Your Grace. Always.” They were words he had to say, and so he said them, apprehensive about what might come next.
Half of them don’t dare tell me the truth, and the other half can’t find it.
Ned knew the saying. “What the king dreams,” he said, “the Hand builds.” “I bedded a fishmaid once who told me the lowborn have a choicer way to put it. The king eats, they say, and the Hand takes the shit.”
“I will turn fifteen on my next name day, and Maester Luwin says bastards grow up faster than other children.” “That’s true enough,” Benjen said with a downward twist of his mouth.
Bran was not impressed. There were crows’ nests atop the broken tower, where no one ever went but him, and sometimes he filled his pockets with corn before he climbed up there and the crows ate it right out of his hand. None of them had ever shown the slightest bit of interest in pecking out his eyes.
When she pulled up before Magister Illyrio, she said, “Tell Khal Drogo that he has given me the wind.”
“Would that we could,” Ned said, “but we have duties now, my liege … to the realm, to our children, I to my lady wife and you to your queen. We are not the boys we were.” “You were never the boy you were,” Robert grumbled. “More’s the pity.
“So the slaver has become a spy,” Ned said with distaste. He handed the letter back. “I would rather he become a corpse.” “Varys tells me that spies are more useful than corpses,”
“Your Grace, may I speak frankly?” “I seem unable to stop you,” Robert grumbled.
Frustrated, Arya threw down the brush. “Bad wolf!” she shouted. Sansa couldn’t help but smile a little. The kennelmaster once told her that an animal takes after its master.
“Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” he heard his own voice saying, small and far away. And his father’s voice replied to him. “That is the only time a man can be brave.”
Ser Gregor Clegane, the Mountain That Rides, thundered past them like an avalanche.
Sandor Clegane and his immense brother, Ser Gregor the Mountain, seemed unstoppable as well, riding down one foe after the next in ferocious style.
Ned inspected the bruise himself. “I hope Forel is not being too hard on you,” he said. Arya stood on one leg. She was getting much better at that of late. “Syrio says that every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better.”
Ned ran his fingers through his hair. Any decent master-at-arms could give Arya the rudiments of slash-and-parry without this nonsense of blindfolds, cartwheels, and hopping about on one leg, but he knew his youngest daughter well enough to know there was no arguing with that stubborn jut of jaw.
For that, Mord gave him a kick, driving a steel-toed boot hard into Tyrion’s ribs on the way out. “I take it back!” he gasped as he doubled over on the straw. “I’ll kill you myself, I swear it!” The heavy iron-bound door slammed shut. Tyrion heard the rattle of keys. For a small man, he had been cursed with a dangerously big mouth, he reflected as he crawled back to his corner of what the Arryns laughably called their dungeon.
Jaime was even worse, rash and headstrong and quick to anger. His brother never untied a knot when he could slash it in two with his sword.
“You won’t dare when I’m married to Joffrey. You’ll have to bow to me and call me Your Grace.” She shrieked as Arya flung the orange across the table. It caught her in the middle of the forehead with a wet squish and plopped down into her lap. “You have juice on your face, Your Grace,” Arya said.
The Dothraki believed the stars were horses made of fire, a great herd that galloped across the sky by night.
“He slew the boar. His entrails were sliding from his belly, yet somehow he slew the boar.” His voice was full of wonder. “Robert was never a man to leave the battleground so long as a foe remained standing,” Ned told him.
what you suggest is treason.” “Only if we lose.”
They had ridden past the end of the world; somehow that changed everything. Every shadow seemed darker, every sound more ominous. The trees pressed close and shut out the light of the setting sun. A thin crust of snow cracked beneath the hooves of their horses, with a sound like breaking bones.
Even in the wolfswood, you never found more than two or three of the white trees growing together; a grove of nine was unheard of. The forest floor was carpeted with fallen leaves, bloodred on top, black rot beneath. The wide smooth trunks were bone pale, and nine faces stared inward.
“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”
Cursing, the Greatjon flung a flagon of ale into the fire and bellowed that Robb was so green he must piss grass.
“My lord father taught me that it was death to bare steel against your liege lord,” Robb said, “but doubtless you only meant to cut my meat.” Bran’s bowels went to water as the Greatjon struggled to rise, sucking at the red stumps of fingers … but then, astonishingly, the huge man laughed. “Your meat,” he roared, “is bloody tough.”
So be it. I’ll wear my irons and hold my tongue. A man who won’t listen can’t hear.”
Pyp grinned. “The Night’s Watch is thousands of years old,” he said, “but I’ll wager Lord Snow’s the first brother ever honored for burning down the Lord Commander’s Tower.” The others laughed, and even Jon had to smile.
I know my men … and my boys too. Honor set you on the kingsroad … and honor brought you back.” “My friends brought me back,” Jon said. “Did I say it was your honor?”
When dead men come hunting in the night, do you think it matters who sits the Iron Throne?” “No.” Jon had not thought of it that way.
“Peace is sweet, my lady … but on what terms? It is no good hammering your sword into a plowshare if you must forge it again on the morrow.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The devil is in the details, they say. A book this size has a lot of devils, any one of which will bite you if you don’t watch out. Fortunately, I know a lot of angels.
I sent him a royal command!” “And he ignored you,” Tyrion pointed out. “He has quite a large army, he can do that.
“Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I’d feel sad about it.” “I will take that as high praise.”
What did your lords make of it, I wonder?” Stannis snorted. “Celtigar pronounced it admirable. If I showed him the contents of my privy, he would declare that admirable as well. The others bobbed their heads up and down like a flock of geese, all but Velaryon, who said that steel would decide the matter, not words on parchment.
“Windy and cold and damp. A miserable hard place, in truth … but my lord father once told me that hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the world.”
“His time was past,” her handmaid Irri declared. “No man should live longer than his teeth.” The others agreed.
The dragons were no larger than the scrawny cats she had once seen skulking along the walls of Magister Illyrio’s estate in Pentos … until they unfolded their wings. Their span was three times their length, each wing a delicate fan of translucent skin, gorgeously colored, stretched taut between long thin bones. When you looked hard, you could see that most of their body was neck, tail, and wing.
