A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

on
some
of his uncles, nephews, and cousins at the Twins, the ones he happened to like or trust, or more likely the ones he thought would prove useful to him.
The rest of us he’ll shove out to fend for ourselves
.
    The prospect worried Merrett more than words could say. He would be forty in less than three years, too old to take up the life of a hedge knight . . . even if he’d
been
a knight, which as it happened he wasn’t. He had no land, no wealth of his own. He owned the clothes on his back but not much else, not even the horse he was riding. He wasn’t clever enough to be a maester, pious enough to be a septon, or savage enough to be a sellsword.
The gods gave me no gift but birth, and they stinted me there
. What good was it to be the son of a rich and powerful House if you were the
ninth
son? When you took grandsons and great-grandsons into account, Merrett stood a better chance of being chosen High Septon than he did of inheriting the Twins.
    I have no luck
, he thought bitterly.
I have never had any bloody luck
. He was a big man, broad around the chest and shoulders if only of middling height. In the last ten years he had grown soft and fleshy, he knew, but when he’d been younger Merrett had been almost as robust as Ser Hosteen, his eldest full brother, who was commonly regarded as the strongest of Lord Walder Frey’s brood. As a boy he’d been packed off to Crakehall to serve his mother’s family as a page. When old Lord Sumner had made him a squire, everyone had assumed he would be Ser Merrett in no more than a few years, but the outlaws of the Kingswood Brotherhood had pissed on those plans. While his fellow squire Jaime Lannister was covering himself in glory, Merrett had first caught the pox from a camp follower, then managed to get captured by a
woman
, the one called the White Fawn. Lord Sumner had ransomed him back from the outlaws, but in the very next fight he’d been felled by a blow from a mace that had broken his helm and left him insensible for a fortnight. Everyone gave him up for dead, they told him later.
    Merrett hadn’t died, but his fighting days were done. Even the lightest blow to his head brought on blinding pain and reduced him to tears. Under these circumstances knighthood was out of the question, Lord Sumner told him, not unkindly. He was sent back to the Twins to face Lord Walder’s poisonous disdain.
    After that, Merrett’s luck had only grown worse. His father had managed to make a good marriage for him, somehow; he wed one of Lord Darry’s daughters, back when the Darrys stood high in King Aerys’s favor. But it seemed as if he no sooner had deflowered his bride than Aerys lost his throne. Unlike the Freys, the Darrys had been prominent Targaryen loyalists, which cost them half their lands, most of their wealth, and almost all their power. As for his lady wife, she found him a great disappointment from the first, and insisted on popping out nothing but girls for years; three live ones, a stillbirth, and one that died in infancy before she finally produced a son. His eldest daughter had turned out to be a slut, his second a glutton. When Ami was caught in the stables with no fewer than
three
grooms, he’d been forced to marry her off to a bloody
hedge knight
. That situation could not possibly get any worse, he’d thought . . . until Ser Pate decided he could win renown by defeating Ser Gregor Clegane. Ami had come running back a widow, to Merrett’s dismay and the undoubted delight of every stablehand in the Twins.
    Merrett had dared to hope that his luck was finally changing when Roose Bolton chose to wed
his
Walda instead of one of her slimmer, comelier cousins. The Bolton alliance was important for House Frey and his daughter had helped secure it; he thought that must surely count for something. The old man had soon disabused him. “He picked her because she’s
fat
,” Lord Walder said. “You think Bolton gave a mummer’s fart that she was your whelp? Think he sat about thinking, ‘
Heh
, Merrett Muttonhead, that’s the very man I need for a good-father’? Your Walda’s a sow in silk, that’s why he picked her, and I’m not like to thank you for it. We’d have had the same alliance at half the price if your little porkling put down her spoon from time to time.”
    The final humiliation had been delivered with a smile, when Lame Lothar had summoned him to