A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

one.”
    â€œOn the morrow I want you to pay a call on my good-daughter,” Cersei said as Dorcas was dressing her for bed.
    â€œLady Margaery is always happy to see me.”
    â€œI know.” The queen did not fail to note the style that Taena used when referring to Tommen’s little wife. “Tell her I’ve sent seven beeswax candles to the Baelor’s Sept in memory of our dear High Septon.”
    Taena laughed. “If so, she will send seven-and-seventy candles of her own, so as not to be outmourned.”
    â€œI will be very cross if she does not,” the queen said, smiling. “Tell her also that she has a secret admirer, a knight so smitten with her beauty that he cannot sleep at night.”
    â€œMight I ask Your Grace which knight?” Mischief sparkled in Taena’s big dark eyes. “Could it be Ser Osney?”
    â€œIt could be,” the queen said, “but do not offer up that name freely. Make her worm it out of you. Will you do that?”
    â€œIf it please you. That is all I wish, Your Grace.”
    Outside a cold wind was rising. They stayed up late into the morning, drinking Arbor gold and telling one another tales. Taena got quite drunk and Cersei pried the name of her secret lover from her. He was a Myrish sea captain, half a pirate, with black hair to the shoulders and a scar that ran across his face from chin to ear. “A hundred times I told him no, and he said yes,” the other woman told her, “until finally I was saying yes as well. He was not the sort of man to be denied.”
    â€œI know the sort,” the queen said with a wry smile.
    â€œHas Your Grace ever known a man like that, I wonder?”
    â€œRobert,” she lied, thinking of Jaime.
    Yet when she closed her eyes, it was the other brother that she dreamt of, and the three wretched fools with whom she had begun her day. In the dream it was Tyrion’s head they brought her in their sack. She had it bronzed, and kept it in her chamber pot.

THE IRON CAPTAIN
    T he wind was blowing from the north as the
Iron Victory
came round the point and entered the holy bay called Nagga’s Cradle.
    Victarion joined Nute the Barber at her prow. Ahead loomed the sacred shore of Old Wyk and the grassy hill above it, where the ribs of Nagga rose from the earth like the trunks of great white trees, as wide around as a dromond’s mast and twice as tall.
    The bones of the Grey King’s Hall.
Victarion could feel the magic of this place. “Balon stood beneath those bones, when first he named himself a king,” he recalled. “He swore to win us back our freedoms, and Tarle the Thrice-Drowned placed a driftwood crown upon his head. ‘
BALON!’
they cried. ‘
BALON! BALON KING!
’”
    â€œThey will shout your name as loud,” said Nute.
    Victarion nodded, though he did not share the Barber’s certainty.
Balon had three sons, and a daughter he loved well.
    He had said as much to his captains at Moat Cailin, when first they urged him to claim the Seastone Chair. “Balon’s sons are dead,” Red Ralf Stonehouse had argued, “and Asha is a woman. You were your brother’s strong right arm, you must pick up the sword that he let fall.” When Victarion reminded them that Balon had commanded him to hold the Moat against the northmen, Ralf Kenning said, “The wolves are broken, lord. What good to win this swamp and lose the isles?” And Ralf the Limper added, “The Crow’s Eye has been too long away. He knows us not.”
    Euron Greyjoy, King of the Isles and the North.
The thought woke an old rage in his heart, but still . . .
    â€œWords are wind,” Victarion told them, “and the only good wind is that which fills our sails. Would you have me fight the Crow’s Eye? Brother against brother, ironborn against ironborn?” Euron was still his elder, no matter how much bad blood might be between them.
No man is as accursed as the kinslayer.
    But when the Damphair’s summons came, the call to kingsmoot, then all was changed.
Aeron speaks with the Drowned God’s voice,
Victarion reminded himself,
and if the Drowned God wills that I should sit the Seastone Chair . . .
The next day he gave command of Moat Cailin to Ralf Kenning and set off overland for the Fever River where the Iron Fleet lay amongst the reeds and willows. Rough seas and fickle winds had delayed him, but only one ship had