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

by George R.R. Martin

to the inn that Moreo had suggested. It was a rambling old place on Eel Alley.

The dagger was on the bedside table. She snatched it up before she unlatched the heavy wooden door.

Their leader smiled at the dagger in her hand and said, “No need for that, m’lady. We’re to escort you to the castle.” “By whose authority?” she said. He showed her a ribbon. Catelyn felt her breath catch in her throat. The seal was a mockingbird, in grey wax. “Petyr,” she said. So soon. Something must have happened to Ser Rodrik. She looked at the head guardsman. “Do you know who I am?” “No, m’lady,” he said. “M’lord Littlefinger said only to bring you to him, and see that you were not mistreated.”

How …? Then she thought, Moreo. The Tyroshi knew who they were and where they were, damn him. She hoped he’d gotten a good price for the information.

He looked contrite. The look brought back vivid memories for Catelyn. He had been a sly child, but after his mischiefs he always looked contrite; it was a gift he had. The years had not changed him much. Petyr had been a small boy, and he had grown into a small man, an inch or two shorter than Catelyn, slender and quick, with the sharp features she remembered and the same laughing grey-green eyes. He had a little pointed chin beard now, and threads of silver in his dark hair, though he was still shy of thirty.

“How did you know I was in the city?” she asked him. “Lord Varys knows all,” Petyr said with a sly smile.

“So it was the King’s Spider who found me.” Littlefinger winced. “You don’t want to call him that. He’s very sensitive. Comes of being an eunuch, I imagine. Nothing happens in this city without Varys knowing. Ofttimes he knows about it before it happens. He has informants everywhere. His little birds, he calls them. One of his little birds heard about your visit. Thankfully, Varys came to me first.” “Why you?” He shrugged. “Why not me? I am master of coin, the king’s own councillor. Selmy and Lord Renly rode north to meet Robert, and Lord Stannis is gone to Dragonstone, leaving only Maester Pycelle and me. I was the obvious choice. I was ever a friend to your sister Lysa, Varys knows that.” “Does Varys know about …” “Lord Varys knows everything … except why you are here.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Why are you here?” “A wife is allowed to yearn for her husband, and if a mother needs her daughters close, who can tell her no?” Littlefinger laughed. “Oh, very good, my lady, but please don’t expect me to believe that. I know you too well. What were the Tully words again?” Her throat was dry. “Family, Duty, Honor,” she recited stiffly. He did know her too well. “Family, Duty, Honor,” he echoed. “All of which required you to remain in Winterfell, where our Hand left you. No, my lady, something has happened. This sudden trip of yours bespeaks a certain urgency. I beg of you, let me help. Old sweet friends should never hesitate to rely upon each other.”

The man who stepped through the door was plump, perfumed, powdered, and as hairless as an egg. He wore a vest of woven gold thread over a loose gown of purple silk, and on his feet were pointed slippers of soft velvet.

His flesh was soft and moist, and his breath smelled of lilacs.

Varys giggled like a little girl. “Oh, yes. I suppose I am guilty. I hope you forgive me, kind lady.” He eased himself down into a seat and put his hands together. “I wonder if we might trouble you to show us the dagger?”

Catelyn Stark stared at the eunuch in stunned disbelief. He was a spider, she thought wildly, an enchanter or worse. He knew things no one could possibly know, unless … “What have you done to Ser Rodrik?” she demanded.

“Ser Rodrik Cassel is master-at-arms at Winterfell,” Varys informed him. “I assure you, Lady Stark, nothing at all has been done to the good knight. He did call here early this afternoon. He visited with Ser Aron Santagar in the armory, and they talked of a certain dagger. About sunset, they left the castle together and walked to that dreadful hovel where you were staying. They are still there, drinking in the common room, waiting for your return. Ser Rodrik was very distressed to find you gone.”

ran a thumb along its edge. Blood welled, and he let out a squeal and dropped the dagger back on the table. “Careful,” Catelyn told him, “it’s sharp.” “Nothing holds an edge like Valyrian steel,” Littlefinger said as Varys sucked at his bleeding thumb and looked at Catelyn with sullen admonition. Littlefinger hefted the knife lightly in his hand, testing the grip. He flipped it in the air, caught it again with his other hand. “Such sweet balance. You want to find the owner, is that the reason for this visit? You have no need of Ser Aron for that, my lady. You should have come to me.” “And if I had,” she said, “what would you have told me?” “I would have told you that there was only one knife like this at King’s Landing.” He grasped the blade between thumb and forefinger, drew it back over his shoulder, and threw it across the room with a practiced flick of his wrist. It struck the door and buried itself deep in the oak, quivering. “It’s mine.”

“Until the tourney on Prince Joffrey’s name day,” he said, crossing the room to wrench the dagger from the wood. “I backed Ser Jaime in the jousting,

“The Imp,” said Littlefinger as Lord Varys watched her face. “Tyrion Lannister.”

Grenn

“Enough!” Ser Alliser Thorne had a voice with an edge like Valyrian steel.

the Aurochs

Lord Snow?” Jon hated that name, a mockery that Ser Alliser had hung on him the first day he came to practice. The boys had picked it up, and now he heard it everywhere. He slid the longsword back into its scabbard. “No,” he replied.

Thorne

was a compact man of fifty years, spare and hard, with grey in his black hair and...

There were almost twenty in the group he trained with, yet not one he could call a friend. Most were two or three years his senior, yet not one was half the fighter Robb had been at fourteen. Dareon was quick but afraid of being hit. Pyp used his sword like a dagger, Jeren was weak as a girl, Grenn slow and clumsy. Halder’s blows were brutally hard but he ran right into your attacks. The more time he spent with them, the more Jon despised them.

So cold, he thought, remembering the warm halls of Winterfell, where the hot waters ran through the walls like blood through a man’s body. There was scant warmth to be found in Castle Black; the walls were cold here, and the people colder.

No one had told him the Night’s Watch would be like this; no one except Tyrion Lannister. The dwarf had given him the truth on the road north, but by then it had been too late. Jon wondered if his father had known what the Wall would be like. He must have, he thought; that only made it hurt the worse. Even his uncle had abandoned him in this cold place at the end of the world. Up here, the genial Benjen Stark he had known became a different person. He was First Ranger, and he spent his days and nights with Lord Commander Mormont and Maester Aemon and the other high officers, while Jon was given over to the less than tender charge of Ser Alliser Thorne.

That night he sought out his uncle in the great timbered common hall and pleaded to go with him. Benjen refused him curtly. “This is not Winterfell,” he told him as he cut his meat with fork and dagger. “On the Wall, a man gets only what he earns. You’re no ranger, Jon, only a green boy with the smell of summer still on you.”

We put aside our old families when we swear our vows. Your father will always have a place in my heart, but these are my brothers now.” He gestured with his dagger at the men around them, all the hard cold men in black.

Ben Stark smiled at that, but he had no smile for his nephew. “How often must I tell you no, Jon? We’ll speak when I return.”

As he watched his uncle lead his horse into the tunnel, Jon had remembered the things that Tyrion Lannister told him on the kingsroad, and in his mind’s eye he saw Ben Stark lying dead, his blood red on the snow. The thought made him sick. What was he becoming? Afterward he sought out Ghost in the loneliness of his cell, and buried his face in his thick white fur.

He missed his true brothers: little Rickon, bright eyes shining as he begged for a sweet; Robb, his rival and best friend and constant companion; Bran, stubborn and curious, always wanting to follow and join in whatever Jon and Robb were doing. He missed the girls too, even Sansa, who never called him anything but “my half brother” since she was old enough to understand what bastard meant. And Arya … he missed her even more than Robb, skinny little thing that she was, all scraped knees and tangled hair and torn clothes, so fierce and willful. Arya never seemed to fit, no more than he had … yet she could always make Jon smile. He would give anything to be with her now, to muss up her hair once more and watch her make a face, to hear her finish a sentence with him.

Grenn loomed over him, thick of neck and red of face,

Todder, a short ugly boy with an unpleasant voice. The recruits all called him Toad. The other two were the ones Yoren had brought north with them, Jon remembered, rapers taken down in the Fingers. He’d forgotten their names. He hardly ever spoke to them, if he could help it. They were brutes and bullies, without a thimble of honor between them.

Grenn was sixteen and a head taller than Jon.

“You make us look bad,” complained Toad. “You looked bad before I ever met you,” Jon told him.

He had pig eyes, small and shiny. “Is that your mommy’s mouth, bastard? What was she, some whore? Tell us her name. Maybe I had her a time or two.” He laughed.

a booming voice cut through the gloom of the armory. “STOP THIS! NOW!” Jon pulled himself to his feet. Donal Noye stood glowering at them. “The yard is for fighting,” the armorer said. “Keep your quarrels out of my armory, or I’ll make them my quarrels. You won’t like that.”

“The Watch has need of every man it can get,” Donal Noye said when they were alone. “Even men like Toad. You won’t win any honors killing him.” Jon’s anger flared. “He said my mother was—” “—a whore. I heard him. What of it?” “Lord Eddard Stark was not a man to sleep with whores,” Jon said icily. “His honor—” “—did not prevent him from fathering a bastard. Did it?” Jon was cold with rage. “Can I go?” “You go when I tell you to go.” Jon stared sullenly at the smoke rising from the brazier, until Noye took him under the chin, thick fingers twisting his head around. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.” Jon looked. The armorer had a chest like a keg of ale and a gut to match. His nose was flat and broad, and he always seemed in need of a shave. The left sleeve of his black wool tunic was fastened at the shoulder with a silver pin in the shape of a longsword. “Words won’t make your mother a whore. She was what she was, and nothing Toad says can change that. You know, we have men on the Wall whose mothers were whores.”

“You think you had it hard, being a high lord’s bastard?” the armorer went on. “That boy Jeren is a septon’s get, and Cotter Pyke is the baseborn son of a tavern wench. Now he commands Eastwatch by the Sea.”

“Life,” Jon repeated bitterly. The armorer could talk about life. He’d had one. He’d only taken the black after he’d lost an arm at the siege of Storm’s End.

it was Donal Noye who’d forged King Robert’s warhammer,

then when he was old, well past thirty, he’d taken a glancing blow from an axe and the wound had festered until the whole arm had to come off. Only then, crippled, had Donal Noye come to the Wall, when his life was all but over.

“They’re not my brothers,” Jon snapped. “They hate me because I’m better than they are.” “No. They hate you because you act like you’re better than they are. They look at you and see a castle-bred bastard who thinks he’s a lordling.” The armorer leaned close. “You’re no lordling. Remember that. You’re a Snow, not a Stark. You’re a bastard and a bully.” “A bully?” Jon almost choked on the word. The accusation was so unjust it took his breath away. “They were the ones who came after me. Four of them.” “Four that you’ve humiliated in the yard. Four who are probably afraid of you. I’ve watched you fight. It’s not training with you. Put a good edge on your sword, and they’d be dead meat; you know it, I know it, they know it. You leave them nothing. You shame them. Does that make you proud?” Jon hesitated. He did feel proud when he won. Why shouldn’t he? But the armorer was taking that away too, making it sound as if he were doing something wrong. “They’re all older than me,” he said defensively. “Older and bigger and stronger, that’s the truth. I’ll wager your master-at-arms taught you how to fight bigger men at Winterfell, though. Who was he, some old knight?” “Ser Rodrik Cassel,” Jon said warily. There was a trap here. He felt it closing around him. Donal Noye leaned forward, into Jon’s face. “Now think on this, boy. None of these others have ever had a master-at-arms until Ser Alliser. Their fathers were farmers and wagonmen and poachers, smiths and miners and oars on a trad...

lifted his eyes to the Wall, blazing blue and crystalline in the sunlight. Even after all these weeks, the sight of it still gave him the shivers.

The largest structure ever built by the hands of man, Benjen Stark had told Jon on the kingsroad when they had first caught sight of the Wall in the distance. “And beyond a doubt the most useless,” Tyrion Lannister had added with a grin, but even the Imp grew silent as they rode closer.

You could see it from miles off, a pale blue line across the northern horizon, stretching away to the east and west and vanishing in the far distance, immense and unbroken.

Almost seven hundred feet high it stood,

His uncle said the top was wide enough for a dozen armored knights to ride abreast.

The gaunt outlines of huge catapults and monstrous wooden cranes stood sentry up there, like the skeletons of great birds, and among them...

It was older than the Seven Kingdoms,

Jon knew that if it fell, the world fell with it.

“Makes you wonder what lies beyond,” a familiar voice said. Jon looked around. “Lannister. I didn’t see—I mean, I thought I was alone.” Tyrion Lannister was bundled in furs so thickly he looked like a very small bear. “There’s much to be said for taking people unawares. You never know what you might learn.”