A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1)

by George R.R. Martin

“Where is Jeyne’s father? Why can’t Ser Boros take her to him instead of Lord Petyr having to do it?” She had promised herself she would be a lady, gentle as the queen and as strong as her mother, the Lady Catelyn, but all of a sudden she was scared again. For a second she thought she might cry. “Where are you sending her? She hasn’t done anything wrong, she’s a good girl.”

but she could feel Littlefinger staring. Something about the way the small man looked at her made Sansa feel as though she had no clothes on. Goosebumps pimpled her skin.

“A child born of traitor’s seed will find that betrayal comes naturally to her,”

Jeyne Poole and all her things were gone when Ser Mandon Moore returned Sansa to the high tower of Maegor’s Holdfast. No more weeping, she thought gratefully. Yet somehow it seemed colder with Jeyne gone, even after she’d built a fire.

The silent presence of the direwolf gave him comfort. The girls do not even have that much, he thought. Their wolves might have kept them safe, but Lady is dead and Nymeria’s lost, they’re all alone.

It was there they buried Lady, while her brothers stalked between the graves like restless shadows. She had gone south, and only her bones had returned.

If I were not the blood of the dragon, she thought wistfully, this could be my home.

Dany smiled shyly. It was sweet to laugh. She felt half a girl again.

The taste in her mouth was one she had known before: fear. For years she had lived in terror of Viserys, afraid of waking the dragon. This was even worse. It was not just for herself that she feared now, but for her baby.

The Usurper has woken the dragon now, she told herself … and her eyes went to the dragon’s eggs resting in their nest of dark velvet. The shifting lamplight limned their stony scales, and shimmering motes of jade and scarlet and gold swam in the air around them, like courtiers around a king.

I shouldn’t be afraid, she told herself. I have nothing to be afraid of, it will all come out well, Joff loves me and the queen does too, she said so.

I must do it now. Gods give me courage. She took one step, then another. Lords and knights stepped aside silently to let her pass, and she felt the weight of their eyes on her. I must be as strong as my lady mother.

Even now, he was a Stark of Winterfell, and his grief and his rage froze hard inside him.

You must be as fierce and hard as the north, Catelyn Tully. You must be a Stark for true now, like your son.

“I am khaleesi, heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the blood of the dragon,” Dany reminded him. “It is not for you to tell me what I cannot do.”

Catelyn was content to wait, to listen to the whispers in the woods and the faint music of the brook, to feel the warm wind in her hair.

she waited as she had waited before, for Brandon and Ned and her father. She was high on the ridge, and the trees hid most of what was going on beneath her. A heartbeat, two, four, and suddenly it was as if she and her protectors were alone in the wood. The rest were melted away into the green.

Someone buffeted her aside. She could still hear Sansa screaming.

The press dissolved around them as people drifted back to their lives. But Arya’s life was gone.

Sansa gave herself to the darkness. She drew the curtains around her bed, slept, woke weeping, and slept again. When she could not sleep she lay under her blankets shivering with grief. Servants came and went, bringing meals, but the sight of food was more than she could bear. The dishes piled up on the table beneath her window, untouched and spoiling, until the servants took them away again.

Perhaps I will die too, she told herself, and the thought did not seem so terrible to her. If she flung herself from the window, she could put an end to her suffering,

Her body would lie on the stones below, broken and innocent, shaming all those who had betrayed her. Sansa went so far as to cross the bedchamber and throw open the shutters … but then her courage left her, and she ran back to her bed, sobbing.

She wondered how she could ever have thought him handsome.

She was only a … a thing to him.

“Life is not a song, sweeting,” he’d told her. “You may learn that one day to your sorrow.” In life, the monsters win,

A kind of madness took over her then, and she heard herself say, “Maybe my brother will give me your head.”

The outer parapet came up to her chin, but along the inner edge of the walk was nothing, nothing but a long plunge to the bailey seventy or eighty feet below. All it would take was a shove, she told herself. He was standing right there, right there, smirking at her with those fat wormlips. You could do it, she told herself. You could. Do it right now. It wouldn’t even matter if she went over with him. It wouldn’t matter at all.

She was a good girl, and always remembered her courtesies.

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind.

“Bring me … egg … dragon’s egg … please …” Her lashes turned to lead, and she was too weary to hold them up.

She had wept in her dream, and the tears had turned to steam on her cheeks. All the grief has been burned out of me,

If I look back I am lost.

I am the dragon’s daughter, and I swear to you, these men will die screaming.

“Give me Cersei Lannister, Lord Karstark, and you would see how gentle a woman can be,”

They thought her mad, Dany realized. Perhaps she was. She would know soon enough. If I look back I am lost.

She was the blood of the dragon, and the fire was in her.

the night came alive with the music of dragons.