A Feast for Dragons

to him.
    Tyrion glanced at it. “I cannot use a stirrup winch. My legs
are not long enough. A crank would serve me better.” Though, if truth be told,
he did not want a crossbow. They took too long to reload. Even if he lurked by
the latrine ditch waiting for some enemy to take a squat, the chances of his
losing more than one quarrel would not be good.
    Instead he picked up a morningstar, gave it a swing, put it
down again.
Too heavy
. He passed over a warhammer (too long), a
studded mace (also too heavy), and half a dozen longswords before he found a
dirk he liked, a nasty piece of steel with a triangular blade. “This might
serve,” he said. The blade had a bit of rust on it, but that would only make it
nastier. He found a wood-and-leather sheath that fit and slipped the dirk
inside.
    “A little sword for a little man?” joked Penny.
    “It’s a dirk and made for a big man.” Tyrion showed her an
old longsword. “This is a sword. Try it.”
    Penny took it, swung it, frowned. “Too heavy.”
    “Steel weighs more than wood. Chop through a man’s neck with
that thing, though, and his head is not like to turn into a melon.” He took the
sword back from her and inspected it more closely. “Cheap steel. And notched.
Here, see? I take back what I said. You need a better blade to hack off heads.”
    “I don’t
want
to hack off heads.”
    “Nor should you. Keep your cuts below the knee. Calf,
hamstring, ankle … even giants fall if you slice their feet off. Once
they’re down, they’re no bigger than you.”
    Penny looked as though she was about to cry. “Last night I
dreamed my brother was alive again. We were jousting before some great lord,
riding Crunch and Pretty Pig, and men were throwing roses at us. We were so
happy …”
    Tyrion slapped her.
    It was a soft blow, all in all, a little flick of the wrist,
with hardly any force behind it. It did not even leave a mark upon her cheek.
But her eyes filled with tears all the same.
    “If you want to dream, go back to sleep,” he told her. “When
you wake up, we’ll still be escaped slaves in the middle of a siege. Crunch is
dead. The pig as well, most like. Now find some armor and put it on, and never
mind where it pinches. The mummer show is over. Fight or hide or shit yourself,
as you like, but whatever you decide to do, you’ll do it clad in steel.”
    Penny touched the cheek he’d slapped. “We should never have
run. We’re not sellswords. We’re not any kind of swords. It wasn’t so bad with
Yezzan. It wasn’t. Nurse was cruel sometimes but Yezzan never was. We were his
favorites, his … his …”
    “
Slaves
. The word you want is
slaves.”
    “Slaves,” she said, flushing. “We were his
special
slaves, though. Just like Sweets. His treasures.”
    His pets
, thought Tyrion.
And he
loved us so much that he sent us to the pit, to be devoured by lions
.
    She was not all wrong. Yezzan’s slaves ate better than many
peasants back in the Seven Kingdoms and were less like to starve to death come
winter. Slaves were chattels, aye. They could be bought and sold, whipped and
branded, used for the carnal pleasure of their owners, bred to make more
slaves. In that sense they were no more than dogs or horses. But most lords
treated their dogs and horses well enough. Proud men might shout that they
would sooner die free than live as slaves, but pride was cheap. When the steel
struck the flint, such men were rare as dragon’s teeth; elsewise the world
would not have been so full of slaves.
There has never been a slave who
did not choose to be a slave
, the dwarf reflected.
Their choice
may be between bondage and death, but the choice is always there
.
    Tyrion Lannister did not except himself. His tongue had
earned him some stripes on the back in the beginning, but soon enough he had
learned the tricks of pleasing Nurse and the noble Yezzan. Jorah Mormont had
fought longer and harder, but he would have come to the same place in the end.
    And Penny, well …
    Penny had been searching for a new master since the day her
brother Groat had lost his head.
She wants someone to take care of her,
someone to tell her what to do
.
    It would have been too cruel to say so, however. Instead
Tyrion said, “Yezzan’s special slaves did not escape the pale mare. They’re
dead, the lot of them. Sweets was the first to go.” Their mammoth master had
died on the day of their escape, Brown Ben Plumm had told him. Neither he nor
Kasporio nor any of the