A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

dangerous.
One slip and I am dead.
“Oswell . . . my lord, Oswell rowed me from King’s Landing the night that I escaped. He must know who I am.”
    â€œIf he’s half as clever as a sheep pellet, you would think so. Ser Lothor knows as well. But Oswell has been in my service a long time, and Brune is close-mouthed by nature. Kettleblack watches Brune for me, and Brune watches Kettleblack.
Trust no one,
I once told Eddard Stark, but he would not listen. You are Alayne, and you must be Alayne
all the time.
” He put two fingers on her left breast. “Even here. In your heart. Can you do that? Can you be my daughter in your heart?”
    â€œI . . .”
I do not know, my lord,
she almost said, but that was not what he wanted to hear.
Lies and Arbor gold,
she thought. “I am Alayne, Father. Who else would I be?”
    Lord Littlefinger kissed her cheek. “With my wits and Cat’s beauty, the world will be yours, sweetling. Now off to bed.”
    Gretchel had laid a fire in her hearth and plumped her featherbed. Sansa undressed and slipped beneath the blankets.
He will not sing tonight,
she prayed,
not with Lord Nestor and the others in the castle. He would not dare.
She closed her eyes.
    Sometime during the night she woke, as little Robert climbed up into her bed.
I forgot to tell Lothor to lock him in again,
she realized. There was nothing to be done for it, so she put her arm around him. “Sweetrobin? You can stay, but try not to squirm around. Just close your eyes and sleep, little one.”
    â€œI will.” He cuddled close and laid his head between her breasts. “Alayne? Are you my mother now?”
    â€œI suppose I am,” she said. If a lie was kindly meant, there was no harm in it.

THE KRAKEN’S DAUGHTER
    T he hall was loud with drunken Harlaws, distant cousins all. Each lord had hung his banner behind the benches where his men were seated.
Too few,
thought Asha Greyjoy, looking down from the gallery,
too few by far.
The benches were three-quarters empty.
    Qarl the Maid had said as much, when the
Black Wind
was approaching from the sea. He had counted the longships moored beneath her uncle’s castle, and his mouth had tightened. “They have not come,” he observed, “or not enough of them.” He was not wrong, but Asha could not agree with him, out where her crew might hear. She did not doubt their devotion, but even ironborn will hesitate to give their lives for a cause that’s plainly lost.
    Do I have so few friends as this?
Amongst the banners, she saw the silver fish of Botley, the stone tree of the Stonetrees, the black leviathan of Volmark, the nooses of the Myres. The rest were Harlaw scythes. Boremund placed his upon a pale blue field, Hotho’s was girdled within an embattled border, and the Knight had quartered his with the gaudy peacock of his mother’s House. Even Sigfryd Silverhair showed two scythes counterchanged on a field divided bendwise. Only
the
Lord Harlaw displayed the silver scythe plain upon a night-black field, as it had flown in the dawn of days: Rodrik, called the Reader, Lord of the Ten Towers, Lord of Harlaw, Harlaw of Harlaw . . . her favorite uncle.
    Lord Rodrik’s high seat was vacant. Two scythes of beaten silver crossed above it, so huge that even a giant would have difficulty wielding them, but beneath were only empty cushions. Asha was not surprised. The feast was long concluded. Only bones and greasy platters remained upon the trestle tables. The rest was drinking, and her uncle Rodrik had never been partial to the company of quarrelsome drunks.
    She turned to Three-Tooth, an old woman of fearful age who had been her uncle’s steward since she was known as Twelve-Tooth. “My uncle is with his books?”
    â€œAye, where else?” The woman was so old that a septon had once said she must have nursed the Crone. That was when the Faith was still tolerated on the isles. Lord Rodrik had kept septons at Ten Towers, not for his soul’s sake but for his books. “With the books, and Botley. He was with him too.”
    Botley’s standard hung in the hall, a shoal of silver fish upon a pale green field, though Asha had not seen his
Swiftfin
amongst the other longships. “I had heard my nuncle Crow’s Eye had old Sawane Botley drowned.”
    â€œLord
Tristifer
Botley, this one is.”
    Tris.
She wondered what had happened to Sawane’s elder son,