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Ned frowned. “You sit in council and talk of ugly women and steel kisses, and now you expect me to believe that you tried to protect the girl? How big a fool do you take me for?” “Well, quite an enormous one, actually,” said Littlefinger, laughing.
“Take off your helm. I would look on your face again.” “The years have not improved it, I fear,” Brynden Tully said, but when he lifted off the helm,
Catelyn saw that he lied. His features were lined and weathered, and time had stolen the auburn from his hair and left him only grey, but the smile was the same, and the bushy eyebrows fat as caterpillars, and the laughter in his deep blue eyes.
“A woman can rule as wisely as a man,” Catelyn said. “The right woman can,” her uncle said with a sideways glance.
“My brother is undoubtedly arrogant,” Tyrion Lannister replied.
Her uncle swung off his horse. “What madness is this?” he said bluntly. Brynden Tully had never been a man to blunt the edge of his words.
A wiry girl of seventeen or eighteen years stepped up beside Lord Nestor. Her dark hair was cropped short and straight around her head, and she wore riding leathers and a light shirt of silvered ringmail. She bowed to Catelyn, more gracefully than her lord.
“Do you have a name, child?” “Mya Stone, if it please you, my lady,” the girl said.
Winter is coming, child, she wanted to tell her. The words were on her lips; she almost said them. Perhaps she was becoming a Stark at last.
“Robert will never keep to one bed,” Lyanna had told him at Winterfell, on the night long ago when their father had promised her hand to the young Lord of Storm’s End. “I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale.”
“Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature.”
He thought of the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying, and the price he’d paid to keep them.
Riding through the rainy night, Ned saw Jon Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own. If the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they fill men with such lusts?
“Viserys says he could sweep the Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers.” Ser Jorah snorted. “Viserys could not sweep a stable with ten thousand brooms.”
“What … what if it were not Viserys?” she asked. “If it were someone else who led them? Someone stronger? Could the Dothraki truly conquer the Seven Kingdoms?”
“Your brother Rhaegar brought as many men to the Trident,” Ser Jorah admitted, “but of that number, no more than a tenth were knights. The rest were archers, freeriders, and foot soldiers armed with spears and pikes. When Rhaegar fell, many threw down their weapons and fled the field. How long do you imagine such a rabble would stand against the charge of forty thousand screamers howling for blood? How well would boiled leather jerkins and mailed shirts protect them when the arrows fall like rain?” “Not long,” she said, “not well.”
He nodded. “Mind you, Princess, if the lords of the Seven Kingdoms have the wit the gods gave a goose, it will never come to that.
He is a strong man, brave … and rash enough to meet a Dothraki horde in the open field.
In the songs, the white knights of the Kingsguard were ever noble, valiant, and true, and yet King Aerys had been murdered by one of them, the handsome boy they now called the Kingslayer, and a second, Ser Barristan the Bold, had gone over to the Usurper. She wondered if all men were as false in the Seven Kingdoms.
No doubt he was smiling. He smiled a lot, as if the world were a secret joke that only he was clever enough to understand.
“Grey Wind was restless too,” Robb said. His auburn hair had grown shaggy and unkempt, and a reddish stubble covered his jaw, making him look older than his fifteen years. “Sometimes I think they know things … sense things …” Robb sighed. “I never know how much to tell you, Bran. I wish you were older.”
Bran felt a sudden dread. Dark wings, dark words, Old Nan always said, and of late the messenger ravens had been proving the truth of the proverb.
Bran had sort of liked the little man, yet the name Lannister sent cold fingers creeping up his spine. There was something about the Lannisters, something he ought to remember, but when he tried to think what, he felt dizzy and his stomach clenched hard as a stone.
Jory Cassel
Robb lifted his face to the snow, and the flakes melted on his cheeks.
“Bran, I promise you, whatever might happen, I will not let this be forgotten.”
Young Robert pointed down, his hand trembling. “You’re a liar. Mother, I want to see him fly.”
Tyrion Lannister sighed. His sister was not without a certain low cunning, but her pride blinded her.
She would see the insult in this, not the opportunity. And 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.
“Is this how justice is done in the Vale?” Tyrion roared, so loudly that Ser Vardis froze for an instant. “Does honor stop at the Bloody Gate? You accuse me of crimes, I deny them, so you throw me into an open cell to freeze and starve.” He lifted his head, to give them all a good look at the bruises Mord had left on his face. “Where is the king’s justice? Is the Eyrie not part of the Seven Kingdoms? I stand accused, you say. Very well. I demand a trial! Let me speak, and let my truth or falsehood be judged openly, in the sight of gods and men.”
“Name your champion, Imp … if you think you can find a man to die for you.” “If it is all the same to you, I’d sooner find one to kill for me.” Tyrion looked over the long hall. No one moved. For a long moment he wondered if it had all been a colossal blunder. Then there was a stirring in the rear of the chamber. “I’ll stand for the dwarf,” Bronn called out.
He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood. In the dream his friends rode with him, as they had in life. Proud Martyn Cassel, Jory’s father; faithful Theo Wull; Ethan Glover, who had been Brandon’s squire; Ser Mark Ryswell, soft of speech and gentle of heart; the crannogman, Howland Reed; Lord Dustin on his great red stallion. Ned had known their faces as well as he knew his own once, but the years leech at a man’s memories, even those he has vowed never to forget. In the dream they were only shadows, grey wraiths on horses
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“Ser Willem Darry is fled to Dragonstone, with your queen and Prince Viserys. I thought you might have sailed with him.”
“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light. “No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.”
As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death. “Lord Eddard,” Lyanna called again. “I promise,” he whispered. “Lya, I promise …”
“Jory and the others …” “I gave them over to the silent sisters, to be sent north to Winterfell. Jory would want to lie beside his grandfather.” It would have to be his grandfather, for Jory’s father was buried far to the south. Martyn Cassel had perished with the rest. Ned had pulled the tower down afterward, and used its bloody stones to build eight cairns upon the ridge. It was said that Rhaegar had named that place the tower of joy, but for Ned it was a bitter memory.
“If the gods are good, I shall not be here on your return. You commanded me to return to Winterfell, remember?” Robert stood up, grasping one of the bedposts to steady himself. “The gods are seldom good, Ned.
Alyssa Arryn had seen her husband, her brothers, and all her children slain, and yet in life she had never shed a tear. So in death, the gods had decreed that she would know no rest until her weeping watered the black earth of the Vale, where the men she had loved were buried. Alyssa had been dead six thousand years now, and still no drop of the torrent had ever reached the valley floor far below. Catelyn wondered how large a waterfall her own tears would make when she died. “Tell me the rest of it,” she said.
“They will call you men of Night’s Watch now, but you are bigger fools than the Mummer’s Monkey here if you believe that. You are boys still, green and stinking of summer, and when the winter comes you will die like flies.”
Bran lying broken, Robb with snow in his hair, Arya raining kisses on him after he’d given her Needle.
The thought of her made him sad. He wondered who she had been, what she had looked like, why his father had left her. Because she was a whore or an adulteress, fool. Something dark and dishonorable, or else why was Lord Eddard too ashamed to speak of her?
A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people.” Maester Aemon smiled. “And so?” “The Night’s Watch needs all sorts too. Why else have rangers and stewards and builders? Lord Randyll couldn’t make Sam a warrior, and Ser Alliser won’t either. You can’t hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn’t mean tin is useless. Why shouldn’t Sam be a steward?”
Chiggen would have done the same for me … and he was no friend, only a man I rode with. Make no mistake, dwarf. I fought for you, but I do not love you.”
“Oh, dreadful,” murmured Varys. “How cruel can men be?”
“A false knight!” Ser Marq said. “Lord Tywin’s mad dog.”
“Still, I chanced to see Ser Ilyn in the back of the hall, staring at us with those pale eyes of his, and I must say, he did not look pleased, though to be sure it is hard to tell with our silent knight. I hope he outgrows his disappointment as well. He does so love his work …”
“Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that one day to your sorrow.”
“My son Bran …” To her credit, Cersei did not look away. “He saw us. You love your children, do you not?” Robert had asked him the very same question, the morning of the melee. He gave her the same answer. “With all my heart.” “No less do I love mine.” Ned thought, If it came to that, the life of some child I did not know, against Robb and Sansa and Arya and Bran and Rickon, what would I do? Even more so, what would Catelyn do, if it were Jon’s life, against the children of her body? He did not know. He prayed he never would.
The seed is strong, Jon Arryn had cried on his deathbed, and so it was. All those bastards, all with hair as black as night. Grand Maester Malleon recorded the last mating between stag and lion, some ninety years ago, when Tya Lannister wed Gowen Baratheon, third son of the reigning lord. Their only issue, an unnamed boy described in Malleon’s tome as a large and lusty lad born with a full head of black hair, died in infancy. Thirty years before that a male Lannister had taken a Baratheon maid to wife. She had given him three daughters and a son, each black-haired. No matter how far back Ned
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“A thousand other women might have loved him with all their hearts. What did he do to make you hate him so?” Her eyes burned, green fire in the dusk, like the lioness that was her sigil. “The night of our wedding feast, the first time we shared a bed, he called me by your sister’s name. He was on top of me, in me, stinking of wine, and he whispered Lyanna.”
