A Feast for Dragons

guests waited to see how Yurkhaz no Yunzak responded
before joining in. The supreme commander appeared so frail that Tyrion was
afraid laughing might kill him. When Penny’s helm was struck off and flew into
the lap of a sour-faced Yunkishman in a striped green-and-gold
tokar
,
Yurkhaz cackled like a chicken. When said lord reached inside the helm and drew
out a large purple melon dribbling pulp, he wheezed until his face turned the
same color as the fruit. He turned to his host and whispered something that
made their master chortle and lick his lips … though there was a hint
of anger in those slitted yellow eyes, it seemed to Tyrion.
    Afterward the dwarfs stripped off their wooden armor and the
sweat-soaked clothing beneath and changed into the fresh yellow tunics that had
been provided them for serving. Tyrion was given a flagon of purple wine, Penny
a flagon of water. They moved about the tent filling cups, their slippered feet
whispering over thick carpets. It was harder work than it appeared. Before long
his legs were cramping badly, and one of the cuts on his back had begun to
bleed again, the red seeping through the yellow linen of his tunic. Tyrion bit
his tongue and kept on pouring.
    Most of the guests paid them no more mind than they did the
other slaves … but one Yunkishman declared drunkenly that Yezzan
should make the two dwarfs fuck, and another demanded to know how Tyrion had
lost his nose.
I shoved it up your wife’s cunt and she bit it off
,
he almost replied … but the storm had persuaded him that he did not
want to die as yet, so instead he said, “It was cut off to punish me for
insolence, lord.”
    Then a lord in a blue
tokar
fringed with
tiger’s eyes recalled that Tyrion had boasted of his skill at
cyvasse
on the auction block. “Let us put him to the test,” he said. A table and set of
pieces was duly produced. A scant few moments later, the red-faced lord shoved
the table over in fury, scattering the pieces across the carpets to the sound
of Yunkish laughter.
    “You should have let him win,” Penny whispered.
    Brown Ben Plumm lifted the fallen table, smiling. “Try me
next, dwarf. When I was younger, the Second Sons took contract with Volantis. I
learned the game there.”
    “I am only a slave. My noble master decides when and who I
play.” Tyrion turned to Yezzan. “Master?”
    The yellow lord seemed amused by the notion. “What stakes do
you propose, Captain?”
    “If I win, give this slave to me,” said Plumm.
    “No,” Yezzan zo Qaggaz said. “But if you can defeat my
dwarf, you may have the price I paid for him, in gold.”
    “Done,” the sellsword said. The scattered pieces were picked
up off the carpet, and they sat down to play.
    Tyrion won the first game. Plumm took the second, for double
the stakes. As they set up for their third contest, the dwarf studied his
opponent. Brown-skinned, his cheeks and jaw covered by a close-cropped bristly
beard of grey and white, his face creased by a thousand wrinkles and a few old
scars, Plumm had an amiable look to him, especially when he smiled.
The
faithful retainer
, Tyrion decided.
Every man’s favorite nuncle,
full of chuckles and old sayings and roughspun wisdom
. It was all
sham. Those smiles never touched Plumm’s eyes, where greed hid behind a veil of
caution.
Hungry, but wary, this one
.
    The sellsword was nearly as bad a player as the Yunkish lord
had been, but his play was stolid and tenacious rather than bold. His opening
arrays were different every time, yet all the same—conservative, defensive,
passive.
He does not play to win
, Tyrion realized.
He
plays so as not to lose
. It worked in their second game, when the
little man overreached himself with an unsound assault. It did not work in the
third game, nor the fourth, nor the fifth, which proved to be their last.
    Near the end of that final contest, with his fortress in
ruins, his dragon dead, elephants before him and heavy horse circling round his
rear, Plumm looked up smiling and said, “Yollo wins again. Death in four.”
    “Three.” Tyrion tapped his dragon. “I was lucky. Perhaps you
should give my head a good rub before our next game, Captain. Some of that luck
might rub off on your fingers.”
You will still lose, but you might give
me a better game
. Grinning, he pushed back from the
cyvasse
table, picked up his wine flagon, and returned to pouring with Yezzan zo Qaggaz
considerably richer and Brown Ben Plumm considerably impoverished.