A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

youngest daughter well enough to know there was no arguing with that stubborn jut of jaw. “As you wish,” he said. Surely she would grow tired of this soon. “Try to be careful.”
    â€œI will,” she promised solemnly as she hopped smoothly from her right leg to her left.
    Much later, after he had taken the girls back through the city and seen them both safe in bed, Sansa with her dreams and Arya with her bruises, Ned ascended to his own chambers atop the Tower of the Hand. The day had been warm and the room was close and stuffy. Ned went to the window and unfastened the heavy shutters to let in the cool night air. Across the Great Yard, he noticed the flickering glow of candlelight from Littlefinger’s windows. The hour was well past midnight. Down by the river, the revels were only now beginning to dwindle and die.
    He took out the dagger and studied it. Littlefinger’s blade, won by Tyrion Lannister in a tourney wager, sent to slay Bran in his sleep. Why would the dwarf want Bran dead? Why would
anyone
want Bran dead?
    The dagger, Bran’s fall, all of it was linked somehow to the murder of Jon Arryn, he could feel it in his gut, but the truth of Jon’s death remained as clouded to him as when he had started. Lord Stannis had not returned to King’s Landing for the tourney. Lysa Arryn held her silence behind the high walls of the Eyrie. The squire was dead, and Jory was still searching the whorehouses. What did he have but Robert’s bastard?
    That the armorer’s sullen apprentice was the king’s son, Ned had no doubt. The Baratheon look was stampedon his face, in his jaw, his eyes, that black hair. Renly was too young to have fathered a boy of that age, Stannis too cold and proud in his honor. Gendry had to be Robert’s.
    Yet knowing all that, what had he learned? The king had other baseborn children scattered throughout the Seven Kingdoms. He had openly acknowledged one of his bastards, a boy of Bran’s age whose mother was highborn. The lad was being fostered by Lord Renly’s castellan at Storm’s End.
    Ned remembered Robert’s first child as well, a daughter born in the Vale when Robert was scarcely more than a boy himself. A sweet little girl; the young lord of Storm’s End had doted on her. He used to make daily visits to play with the babe, long after he had lost interest in the mother. Ned was often dragged along for company, whether he willed it or not. The girl would be seventeen or eighteen now, he realized; older than Robert had been when he fathered her. A strange thought.
    Cersei could not have been pleased by her lord husband’s by-blows, yet in the end it mattered little whether the king had one bastard or a hundred. Law and custom gave the baseborn few rights. Gendry, the girl in the Vale, the boy at Storm’s End, none of them could threaten Robert’s trueborn children …
    His musings were ended by a soft rap on his door. “A man to see you, my lord,” Harwin called. “He will not give his name.”
    â€œSend him in,” Ned said, wondering.
    The visitor was a stout man in cracked, mud-caked boots and a heavy brown robe of the coarsest roughspun, his features hidden by a cowl, his hands drawn up into voluminous sleeves.
    â€œWho are you?” Ned asked.
    â€œA friend,” the cowled man said in a strange, low voice. “We must speak alone, Lord Stark.”
    Curiosity was stronger than caution. “Harwin, leave us,” he commanded. Not until they were alone behind closed doors did his visitor draw back his cowl.
    â€œLord Varys?”
Ned said in astonishment.
    â€œLord Stark,” Varys said politely, seating himself. “I wonder if I might trouble you for a drink?”
    Ned filled two cups with summerwine and handed one to Varys. “I might have passed within a foot of you andnever recognized you,” he said, incredulous. He had never seen the eunuch dress in anything but silk and velvet and the richest damasks, and this man smelled of sweat instead of lilacs.
    â€œThat was my dearest hope,” Varys said. “It would not do if certain people learned that we had spoken in private. The queen watches you closely. This wine is very choice. Thank you.”
    â€œHow did you get past my other guards?” Ned asked. Porther and Cayn had been posted outside the tower, and Alyn on the stairs.
    â€œThe Red Keep has ways known only to ghosts and