A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

given him, to make a man of him.
    Victarion wanted to use the dusky woman once again, but found himself unable. “Fetch me another skin of wine,” he told her, “then get out.” When she returned with a skin of sour red, the captain took it up on deck, where he could breathe the clean sea air. He drank half the skin and poured the rest into the sea for all the men who’d died.
    The
Iron Victory
lingered for hours off the mouth of the Mander. As the greater part of the Iron Fleet got under way for Oakenshield, Victarion kept
Grief, Lord Dagon, Iron Wind,
and
Maiden’s Bane
about him as a rear guard. They pulled survivors from the sea, and watched
Hardhand
sink slowly, dragged under by the wreck that she had rammed. By the time she vanished beneath the waters Victarion had the count he’d asked for. He had lost six ships, and captured eight-and-thirty. “It will serve,” he told Nute. “To the oars. We return to Lord Hewett’s Town.”
    His oarsmen bent their backs toward Oakenshield, and the iron captain went belowdecks once again. “I could kill him,” he told the dusky woman. “Though it is a great sin to kill your king, and a worse one to kill your brother.” He frowned. “Asha should have given me her voice.” How could she have ever hoped to win the captains and the kings, her with her pinecones and her turnips?
Balon’s blood is in her, but she is still a woman.
She had run after the kingsmoot. The night the driftwood crown was placed on Euron’s head, she and her crew had melted away. Some small part of Victarion was glad she had.
If the girl keeps her wits about her, she will wed some northern lord and live with him in his castle, far from the sea and Euron Crow’s Eye.
    â€œLord Hewett’s Town, Lord Captain,” a crewman called.
    Victarion rose. The wine had dulled the throbbing in his hand. Perhaps he would have Hewett’s maester look at it, if the man had not been killed. He returned to deck as they came around a headland. The way Lord Hewett’s castle sat above the harbor reminded him of Lordsport, though this town was twice as big. A score of longships prowled the waters beyond the port, the golden kraken writhing on their sails. Hundreds more were beached along the shingles and drawn up to the piers that lined the harbor. At a stone quay stood three great cogs and a dozen smaller ones, taking on plunder and provisions. Victarion gave orders for the
Iron Victory
to drop anchor. “Have a boat made ready.”
    The town seemed strangely still as they approached. Most of the shops and houses had been looted, as their smashed doors and broken shutters testified, but only the sept had been put to the torch. The streets were strewn with corpses, each with a small flock of carrion crows in attendance. A gang of sullen survivors moved amongst them, chasing off the black birds and tossing the dead into the back of a wagon for burial. The notion filled Victarion with disgust. No true son of the sea would want to rot beneath the ground. How would he ever find the Drowned God’s watery halls, to drink and feast for all eternity?
    The
Silence
was amongst the ships they passed. Victarion’s gaze was drawn to the iron figurehead at her prow, the mouthless maiden with the windblown hair and outstretched arm. Her mother-of-pearl eyes seemed to follow him.
She had a mouth like any other woman, till the Crow’s Eye sewed it shut.
    As they neared the shore, he noticed a line of women and children herded up onto the deck of one of the great cogs. Some had their hands bound behind their backs, and all wore loops of hempen rope about their necks. “Who are they?” he asked the men who helped tie up their boat.
    â€œWidows and orphans. They’re to be sold as slaves.”
    â€œSold?” There were no slaves in the Iron Islands, only thralls. A thrall was bound to service, but he was not chattel. His children were born free, so long as they were given to the Drowned God. And thralls were never bought nor sold for gold. A man paid the iron price for thralls, or else had none. “They should be thralls, or salt wives,” Victarion complained.
    â€œIt’s by the king’s decree,” the man said.
    â€œThe strong have always taken from the weak,” said Nute the Barber. “Thralls or slaves, it makes no matter. Their men could not defend them, so now they are ours, to do with