A Feast for Dragons

you hear. Especially
where House Lannister is concerned.”
    “They say all Lannisters are twisty snakes.”
    “Snakes?” Tyrion laughed. “That sound you hear is my lord
father, slithering in his grave. We are
lions
, or so we like to
say. But it makes no matter, Kem. Step on a snake or a lion’s tail, you’ll end
up just as dead.”
    By then they had reached the armory, such as it was. The
smith, this fabled Hammer, proved to be a freakish-looking hulk with a left arm
that appeared twice as thick as his right. “He’s drunk more than not,” Kem
said. “Brown Ben lets it go, but one day we’ll get us a real armorer.” Hammer’s
apprentice was a wiry red-haired youth called Nail.
Of course. What
else?
mused Tyrion. Hammer was sleeping off a drunk when they reached
the forge, just as Kem had prophesied, but Nail had no objection to the two
dwarfs clambering through the wagons. “Crap iron, most of it,” he warned them,
“but you’re welcome to anything you can use.”
    Under roofs of bent wood and stiffened leather, the wagon
beds were heaped high with old weaponry and armor. Tyrion took one look and
sighed, remembering the gleaming racks of swords and spears and halberds in the
armory of the Lannisters below Casterly Rock. “This may take a while,” he
declared.
    “There’s sound steel here if you can find it,” a deep voice
growled. “None of it is pretty, but it will stop a sword.”
    A big knight stepped down from the back of a wagon, clad
head to heel in company steel. His left greave did not match his right, his
gorget was spotted with rust, his vambraces rich and ornate, inlaid with niello
flowers. On his right hand was a gauntlet of lobstered steel, on his left a
fingerless mitt of rusted mail. The nipples on his muscled breastplate had a
pair of iron rings through them. His greathelm sported a ram’s horns, one of
which was broken.
    When he took it off, he revealed the battered face of Jorah
Mormont.
    He looks every inch a sellsword and not at all like
the half-broken thing we took from Yezzan’s cage
, Tyrion reflected.
His bruises had mostly faded by now, and the swelling in his face had largely
subsided, so Mormont looked almost human once again … though only
vaguely like himself. The demon’s mask the slavers had burned into his right
cheek to mark him for a dangerous and disobedient slave would never leave him.
Ser Jorah had never been what one might call a comely man. The brand had
transformed his face into something frightening.
    Tyrion grinned. “As long as I look prettier than you, I will
be happy.” He turned to Penny. “You take that wagon. I’ll start with this one.”
    “It will go faster if we look together.” She plucked up a
rusted iron halfhelm, giggled, and stuck it on her head. “Do I look fearsome?”
    You look like a mummer girl with a pot on her head
.
“That’s a halfhelm. You want a greathelm.” He found one, and swapped it for the
halfhelm.
    “It’s too big.” Penny’s voice echoed hollowly inside the
steel. “I can’t see out.” She took the helm off and flung it aside. “What’s
wrong with the halfhelm?”
    “It’s open-faced.” Tyrion pinched her nose. “I am fond of
looking at your nose. I would rather that you kept it.”
    Her eyes got big. “You like my nose?”
    Oh, Seven save me
. Tyrion turned away and
began rooting amongst some piles of old armor toward the back of the wagon.
    “Are there any other parts of me you like?” Penny asked.
    Perhaps she meant that to sound playful. It sounded sad
instead. “I am fond of all of your parts,” Tyrion said, in hopes of ending any
further discussion of the subject, “and even fonder of mine own.”
    “Why should we need armor? We’re only mummers. We just
pretend
to fight.”
    “You pretend very well,” said Tyrion, examining a shirt of
heavy iron mail so full of holes that it almost looked moth-eaten.
What
sort of moths eat chainmail?
“Pretending to be dead is one way to
survive a battle. Good armor is another.”
Though there is precious
little of that here, I fear
. At the Green Fork, he had fought in
mismatched scraps of plate from Lord Lefford’s wagons, with a spiked bucket
helm that made it look as if someone had upended a slops pail over his head.
This company steel was worse. Not just old and ill fitting, but dinted,
cracked, and brittle.
Is that dried blood, or only rust?
He
sniffed at it but still could not be sure.
    “Here’s a crossbow.” Penny showed it