A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

become her favorite. He sang Lord Robert to sleep every night, and tweaked the noses of Lady Lysa’s suitors with verses that made mock of their foibles. Her aunt had showered him with gold and gifts; costly clothes, a gold arm ring, a belt studded with moonstones, a fine horse. She had even given him her late husband’s favorite falcon. It all served to make Marillion unfailingly courteous in Lady Lysa’s presence, and unfailingly arrogant outside it.
    â€œThank you,” Sansa told him stiffly. “I know the way.”
    He would not leave. “My lady said to bring you.”
    Bring me?
She did not like the sound of that. “Are you a guardsman now?” Littlefinger had dismissed the Eyrie’s captain of guards and put Ser Lothor Brune in his place.
    â€œDo you require guarding?” Marillion said lightly. “I am composing a new song, you should know. A song so sweet and sad it will melt even your frozen heart. ‘The Roadside Rose,’ I mean to call it. About a baseborn girl so beautiful she bewitched every man who laid eyes upon her.”
    I am a Stark of Winterfell
, she longed to tell him. Instead she nodded, and let him escort her down the tower steps and along a bridge. The High Hall had been closed as long as she’d been at the Eyrie. Sansa wondered why her aunt had opened it. Normally she preferred the comfort of her solar, or the cozy warmth of Lord Arryn’s audience chamber with its view of the waterfall.
    Two guards in sky-blue cloaks flanked the carved wooden doors of the High Hall, spears in hand. “No one is to enter so long as Alayne is with Lady Lysa,” Marillion told them.
    â€œAye.” The men let them pass, then crossed their spears. Marillion swung the doors shut and barred them with a third spear, longer and thicker than those the guards had borne.
    Sansa felt a prickle of unease. “Why did you do that?”
    â€œMy lady awaits you.”
    She looked about uncertainly. Lady Lysa sat on the dais in a high-backed chair of carved weirwood, alone. To her right was a second chair, taller than her own, with a stack of blue cushions piled on the seat, but Lord Robert was not in it. Sansa hoped he’d recovered. Marillion was not like to tell her, though.
    Sansa walked down the blue silk carpet between rows of fluted pillars slim as lances. The floors and walls of the High Hall were made of milk-white marble veined with blue. Shafts of pale daylight slanted down through narrow arched windows along the eastern wall. Between the windows were torches, mounted in high iron sconces, but none of them was lit. Her footsteps fell softly on the carpet. Outside the wind blew cold and lonely.
    Amidst so much white marble even the sunlight looked chilly, somehow . . . though not half so chilly as her aunt. Lady Lysa had dressed in a gown of cream-colored velvet and a necklace of sapphires and moon-stones. Her auburn hair had been done up in a thick braid, and fell across one shoulder. She sat in the high seat watching her niece approach, her face red and puffy beneath the paint and powder. On the wall behind her hung a huge banner, the moon-and-falcon of House Arryn in cream and blue.
    Sansa stopped before the dais, and curtsied. “My lady. You sent for me.” She could still hear the sound of the wind, and the soft chords Marillion was playing at the foot of the hall.
    â€œI saw what you did,” the Lady Lysa said.
    Sansa smoothed down the folds of her skirt. “I trust Lord Robert is better? I never meant to rip his doll. He was smashing my snow castle, I only . . .”
    â€œWill you play the coy deceiver with me?” her aunt said. “I was not speaking of Robert’s doll. I
saw
you kissing him.”
    The High Hall seemed to grow a little colder. The walls and floor and columns might have turned to ice. “He kissed me.”
    Lysa’s nostrils flared. “And why would he do that? He has a wife who loves him. A woman grown, not a little girl. He has no need for the likes of you. Confess, child. You threw yourself at him. That was the way of it.”
    Sansa took a step backward. “That’s not true.”
    â€œWhere are you going? Are you afraid? Such wanton behavior must be punished, but I will not be hard on you. We keep a whipping boy for Robert, as is the custom in the Free Cities. His health is too delicate for him to bear the rod himself. I shall find some common girl to take your