A Dance With Dragons

“You ought to call them the Velvet Teats.” They saw a circle of standing stones that Illyrio claimed had been raised by giants, and later a deep lake. “Here lived a den of robbers who preyed on all who passed this way,” Illyrio said. “It is said they still dwell beneath the water. Those who fish the lake are pulled under and devoured.” The next evening they came upon a huge Valyrian sphinx crouched beside the road. It had a dragon’s body and a woman’s face.
    “A dragon queen,” said Tyrion. “A pleasant omen.”
    “Her king is missing.” Illyrio pointed out the smooth stone plinth on which the second sphinx once stood, now grown over with moss and flowering vines. “The horselords built wooden wheels beneath him and dragged him back to Vaes Dothrak.”
    That is an omen too, thought Tyrion, but not as hopeful. That night, drunker than usual, he broke into sudden song.
    He rode through the streets of the city, down from his hill on high,
O’er the wynds and the steps and the cobbles, he rode to a woman’s sigh.
For she was his secret treasure, she was his shame and his bliss.
    And a chain and a keep are nothing, compared to a woman’s kiss.
     
    Those were all the words he knew, aside from the refrain. Hands of gold are always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm. Shae’s hands had beat at him as the golden hands dug into her throat. He did not remember if they’d been warm or not. As the strength went out of her, her blows became moths fluttering about his face. Each time he gave the chain another twist the golden hands dug deeper. A chain and a keep are nothing, compared to a woman’s kiss. Had he kissed her one last time, after she was dead? He could not remember … though he still recalled the first time they had kissed, in his tent beside the Green Fork. How sweet her mouth had tasted.
    He remembered the first time with Tysha as well. She did not know how, no more than I did. We kept bumping our noses, but when I touched her tongue with mine she trembled. Tyrion closed his eyes to bring her face to mind, but instead he saw his father, squatting on a privy with his bed-robe hiked up about his waist. “Wherever whores go,” Lord Tywin said, and the crossbow thrumm ed.
    The dwarf rolled over, pressing half a nose deep into the silken pillows. Sleep opened beneath him like a well, and he threw himself into it with a will and let the darkness eat him up.

THE MERCHANT’S MAN
     
     
    A dventure stank.
    She boasted sixty oars, a single sail, and a long lean hull that promised speed. Small, but she might serve, Quentyn thought when he saw her, but that was before he went aboard and got a good whiff of her. Pigs, was his first thought, but after a second sniff he changed his mind. Pigs had a cleaner smell. This stink was piss and rotting meat and night-soil, this was the reek of corpse flesh and weeping sores and wounds gone bad, so strong that it overwhelmed the salt air and fish smell of the harbor.
    “I want to retch,” he said to Gerris Drinkwater. They were waiting for the ship’s master to appear, sweltering in the heat as the stench wafted up from the deck beneath them.
    “If the captain smells anything like his ship, he may mistake your vomit for perfume,” Gerris replied.
    Quentyn was about to suggest that they try another ship when the master finally made his appearance, with two vile-looking crewmen at his side. Gerris greeted him with a smile. Though he did not speak the Volantene tongue as well as Quentyn, their ruse required that he speak for them. Back in the Planky Town Quentyn had played the wineseller, but the mummery had chafed at him, so when the Dornishmen changed ships at Lys they had changed roles as well. Aboard the Meadowlark, Cletus Yronwood became the merchant, Quentyn the servant; in Volantis, with Cletus slain, Gerris had assumed the master’s role.
    Tall and fair, with blue-green eyes, sandy hair streaked by the sun, and a lean and comely body, Gerris Drinkwater had a swagger to him, a confidence bordering on arrogance. He never seemed ill at ease, and even when he did not speak the language, he had ways of making himself understood. Quentyn cut a poor figure by comparison— short-legged and stocky, thickly built, with hair the brown of new-turned earth. His forehead was too high, his jaw too square, his nose too broad. A good honest face, a girl had called it once, but you should smile more.
    Smiles had never come easily for Quentyn Martell, any more