A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

fell before his lance, along with a dozen of her father’s finest jousters, the flower of the west. By night the prince played his silver harp and made her weep. When she had been presented to him, Cersei had almost drowned in the depths of his sad purple eyes.
He has been wounded,
she recalled thinking,
but I will mend his hurt when we are wed.
Next to Rhaegar, even her beautiful Jaime had seemed no more than a callow boy.
The prince is going to be my husband,
she had thought, giddy with excitement,
and when the old king dies I’ll be the queen.
Her aunt had confided that truth to her before the tourney. “You must be especially beautiful,” Lady Genna told her, fussing with her dress, “for at the final feast it shall be announced that you and Prince Rhaegar are betrothed.”
    Cersei had been so happy that day. Elsewise she would never have dared visit the tent of Maggy the Frog. She had only done it to show Jeyne and Melara that the lioness fears nothing.
I was going to be a queen. Why should a queen be afraid of some hideous old woman?
The memory of that foretelling still made her flesh crawl a lifetime later.
Jeyne ran shrieking from the tent in fear,
the queen remembered,
but Melara stayed and so did I. We let her taste our blood, and laughed at her stupid prophecies. None of them made the least bit of sense.
She was going to be Prince Rhaegar’s wife, no matter what the woman said. Her
father
had promised it, and Tywin Lannister’s word was gold.
    Her laughter died at tourney’s end. There had been no final feast, no toasts to celebrate her betrothal to Prince Rhaegar. Only cold silences and chilly looks between the king and her father. Later, when Aerys and his son and all his gallant knights had departed for King’s Landing, the girl had gone to her aunt in tears, not understanding. “Your father proposed the match,” Lady Genna told her, “but Aerys refused to hear of it. ‘You are my most able servant, Tywin,’ the king said, ‘but a man does not marry his heir to his servant’s daughter.’ Dry those tears, little one. Have you ever seen a lion weep? Your father will find another man for you, a better man than Rhaegar.”
    Her aunt had lied, though, and her father had failed her, just as Jaime was failing her now.
Father found no better man. Instead he gave me Robert, and Maggy’s curse bloomed like some poisonous flower.
If she had only married Rhaegar as the gods intended, he would never have looked twice at the wolf girl.
Rhaegar would be our king today and I would be his queen, the mother of his sons.
    She had never forgiven Robert for killing him.
    But then, lions were not good at forgiving. As Ser Bronn of the Blackwater would shortly learn.

BRIENNE
    I t was Hyle Hunt who insisted that they take the heads. “Tarly will want them for the walls,” he said.
    â€œWe have no tar,” Brienne pointed out. “The flesh will rot. Leave them.” She did not want to travel through the green gloom of the piney woods with the heads of the men she’d killed.
    Hunt would not listen. He hacked through the dead men’s necks himself, tied the three heads together by the hair, and slung them from his saddle. Brienne had no choice but to try and pretend they were not there, but sometimes, especially at night, she could feel their dead eyes on her back, and once she dreamed she heard them whispering to one another.
    It was cold and wet on Crackclaw Point as they retraced their steps. Some days it rained and some days it threatened rain. They were never warm. Even when they made camp, it was hard to find enough dry wood for a fire.
    By the time they reached the gates of Maidenpool, a host of flies attended them, a crow had eaten Shagwell’s eyes, and Pyg and Timeon were crawling with maggots. Brienne and Podrick had long since taken to riding a hundred yards ahead, to keep the smell of rot well behind them. Ser Hyle claimed to have lost all sense of smell by then. “Bury them,” she told him every time they made camp for a night, but Hunt was nothing if not stubborn.
He will most like tell Lord Randyll that he slew all three of them.
    To his honor, though, the knight did nothing of the sort.
    â€œThe stammering squire threw a rock,” he said, when he and Brienne were ushered into Tarly’s presence in the yard of Mooton’s castle. The heads had been presented to a serjeant of the guard, who