A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

scattered here and there were red with rust. Jaime could not count the broken wine jars.
The man cares for naught but killing,
he thought, as Ser Ilyn emerged from a bedchamber that reeked of overflowing chamber pots. “His Grace bids me win back his riverlands,” Jaime told him. “I would have you with me . . . if you can bear to give up all of this.”
    Silence was his answer, and a long, unblinking stare. But just as he was about to turn and take his leave, Payne had given him a nod.
And here he rides.
Jaime glanced at his companion.
Perhaps there is yet hope for the both of us.
    That night they made camp beneath the hilltop castle of the Hayfords. As the sun went down, a hundred tents sprouted beneath the hill, along the banks of the stream that ran beside it. Jaime set the sentries himself. He did not expect trouble this close to the city, but his uncle Stafford had once thought himself safe on the Oxcross too. It was best to take no chances.
    When the invitation came down from the castle for him to sup with Lady Hayford’s castellan, Jaime took Ser Ilyn with him, along with Ser Addam Marbrand, Ser Bonifer Hasty, Red Ronnet Connington, Strongboar, and a dozen other knights and lordlings. “I suppose I ought to wear the hand,” he said to Peck before making his ascent.
    The lad fetched it straightaway. The hand was wrought of gold, very lifelike, with inlaid nails of mother-of-pearl, its fingers and thumb half closed so as to slip around a goblet’s stem.
I cannot fight, but I can drink,
Jaime reflected as the lad was tightening the straps that bound it to his stump. “Men shall name you Goldenhand from this day forth, my lord,” the armorer had assured him the first time he’d fitted it onto Jaime’s wrist.
He was wrong. I shall be the Kingslayer till I die.
    The golden hand was the occasion for much admiring comment over supper, at least until Jaime knocked over a goblet of wine. Then his temper got the best of him. “If you admire the bloody thing so much, lop off your own sword hand and you can have it,” he told Flement Brax. After that there was no more talk about his hand, and he managed to drink some wine in peace.
    The lady of the castle was a Lannister by marriage, a plump toddler who had been wed to his cousin Tyrek before she was a year old. Lady Ermesande was duly trotted out for their approval, all trussed up in a little gown of cloth-of-gold, with the green fretty and green pale wavy of House Hayford rendered in tiny beads of jade. But soon enough the girl began to squall, whereupon she was promptly whisked off to bed by her wet nurse.
    â€œHas there been no word of our Lord Tyrek?” her castellan asked as a course of trout was served.
    â€œNone.” Tyrek Lannister had vanished during the riots in King’s Landing whilst Jaime himself was still captive at Riverrun. The boy would be fourteen by now, assuming he was still alive.
    â€œI led a search myself, at Lord Tywin’s command,” offered Addam Marbrand as he boned his fish, “but I found no more than Bywater had before me. The boy was last seen ahorse, when the press of the mob broke the line of gold cloaks. Afterward . . . well, his palfrey was found, but not the rider. Most like they pulled him down and slew him. But if that’s so, where is his body? The mob let the other corpses lie, why not his?”
    â€œHe would be of more value alive,” suggested Strongboar. “Any Lannister would bring a hefty ransom.”
    â€œNo doubt,” Marbrand agreed, “yet no ransom demand was ever made. The boy is simply gone.”
    â€œThe boy is dead.” Jaime had drunk three cups of wine, and his golden hand seemed to be growing heavier and clumsier by the moment.
A hook would serve me just as well.
“If they realized whom they’d killed, no doubt they threw him in the river for fear of my father’s wrath. They know the taste of that in King’s Landing. Lord Tywin always paid his debts.”
    â€œAlways,” Strongboar agreed, and that was the end of that.
    Yet afterward, alone in the tower room he had been offered for the night, Jaime found himself wondering. Tyrek had served King Robert as a squire, side by side with Lancel. Knowledge could be more valuable than gold, more deadly than a dagger. It was Varys he thought of then, smiling and smelling of lavender. The eunuch had agents and informers all over the city. It would have