A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

city, she could see that even from afar, not like King’s Landing on its three high hills. The only hills here were the ones that men had raised of brick and granite, bronze and marble. Something else was missing as well, though it took her a few moments to realize what it was.
The city has no walls.
But when she said as much to Denyo, he laughed at her. “Our walls are made of wood and painted purple,” he told her. “Our
galleys
are our walls. We need no other.”
    The deck creaked behind them. Arya turned to find Denyo’s father looming over them in his long captain’s coat of purple wool. Tradesman-Captain Ternesio Terys wore no whiskers and kept his grey hair cut short and neat, framing his square, windburnt face. On the crossing she had oft seen him jesting with his crew, but when he frowned men ran from him as if before a storm. He was frowning now. “Our voyage is at an end,” he told Arya. “We make for the Chequy Port, where the Sealord’s customs officers will come aboard to inspect our holds. They will be half a day at it, they always are, but there is no need for you to wait upon their pleasure. Gather your belongings. I shall lower a boat, and Yorko will put you ashore.”
    Ashore.
Arya bit her lip. She had crossed the narrow sea to get here, but if the captain had asked she would have told him she wanted to stay aboard the
Titan’s Daughter.
Salty was too small to man an oar, she knew that now, but she could learn to splice ropes and reef the sails and steer a course across the great salt seas. Denyo had taken her up to the crow’s nest once, and she hadn’t been afraid at all, though the deck had seemed a tiny thing below her.
I can do sums too, and keep a cabin neat.
    But the galleas had no need of a second boy. Besides, she had only to look at the captain’s face to know how anxious he was to be rid of her. So Arya only nodded. “Ashore,” she said, though ashore meant only strangers.
    â€œValar dohaeris.”
He touched two fingers to his brow. “I beg you remember Ternesio Terys and the service he has done you.”
    â€œI will,” Arya said in a small voice. The wind tugged at her cloak, insistent as a ghost. It was time she was away.
    Gather your belongings,
the captain had said, but there were few enough of those. Only the clothes she was wearing, her little pouch of coins, the gifts the crew had given her, the dagger on her left hip and Needle on her right.
    The boat was ready before she was, and Yorko was at the oars. He was the captain’s son as well, but older than Denyo and less friendly.
I never said farewell to Denyo,
she thought as she clambered down to join him. She wondered if she would ever see the boy again.
I should have said farewell.
    The
Titan’s Daughter
dwindled in their wake, while the city grew larger with every stroke of Yorko’s oars. A harbor was visible off to her right, beyond a sinking point of land where the tops of half-drowned buildings thrust themselves above the water: a tangle of piers and quays crowded with big-bellied whalers out of Ibben, swan ships from the Summer Isles, and more galleys than a girl could count. Another harbor, more distant, was off to her left. Arya had never seen so many big buildings all together in one place. King’s Landing had the Red Keep and the Great Sept of Baelor and the Dragonpit, but Braavos seemed to boast a score of temples and towers and palaces that were as large or even larger.
I will be a mouse again,
she thought glumly,
the way I was in Harrenhal before I ran away.
    The city had seemed like one big island from where the Titan stood, but as Yorko rowed them closer she saw that it was many small islands close together, linked by arched stone bridges that spanned innumerable canals. Beyond the harbor she glimpsed streets of grey stone houses, built so close they leaned one upon the other. To Arya’s eyes they were queer-looking, four and five stories tall and very skinny, with sharp-peaked tile roofs like pointed hats. She saw no thatch, and only a few timbered houses of the sort she knew in Westeros.
They have no trees,
she realized.
Braavos is all stone, a grey city in a green sea.
    Yorko swung them north of the docks and down the gullet of a great canal, a broad green waterway that ran straight into the heart of the city. They passed under the arches of a carved stone bridge, decorated with half a hundred kinds of fish