A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

tourneys past. A comely lad in a pretty cloak, he was. Slight and callow.”
    â€œThat was before he died,” said young Ser Arwood Frey. “Death changed him, the smallfolk say. You can kill him, but he won’t stay dead. How do you fight a man like that? And there’s the Hound as well. He slew twenty men at Saltpans.”
    Strongboar guffawed. “Twenty fat innkeeps, maybe. Twenty serving men pissing in their breeches. Twenty begging brothers armed with bowls. Not twenty knights. Not
me.
”
    â€œThere is a knight at Saltpans,” Ser Arwood insisted. “He hid behind his walls whilst Clegane and his mad dogs ravaged through his town. You have not seen the things he did, ser. I have. When the reports reached the Twins, I rode down with Harys Haigh and his brother Donnel and half a hundred men, archers and men-at-arms. We thought it was Lord Beric’s work, and hoped to find his trail. All that remains of Saltpans is the castle, and old Ser Quincy so frightened he would not open his gates, but shouted down at us from his battlements. The rest is bones and ashes. A whole town. The Hound put the buildings to the torch and the people to the sword and rode off laughing. The women . . . you would not believe what he did to some of the women. I will not speak of it at table. It made me sick to see.”
    â€œI cried when I heard,” said Lady Amerei.
    Jaime sipped his wine. “What makes you certain it was the Hound?” What they were describing sounded more like Gregor’s work than Sandor’s. Sandor had been hard and brutal, yes, but it was his big brother who was the real monster in House Clegane.
    â€œHe was seen,” Ser Arwood said. “That helm of his is not easily mistaken, nor forgotten, and there were a few who survived to tell the tale. The girl he raped, some boys who hid, a woman we found trapped beneath a blackened beam, the fisherfolk who watched the butchery from their boats . . .”
    â€œDo not call it butchery,” Lady Mariya said softly. “That gives insult to honest butchers everywhere. Saltpans was the work of some fell beast in human skin.”
    This is a time for beasts,
Jaime reflected,
for lions and wolves and angry dogs, for ravens and carrion crows.
    â€œEvil work.” Strongboar filled his cup again. “Lady Mariya, Lady Amerei, your distress has moved me. You have my word, once Riverrun has fallen I shall return to hunt down the Hound and kill him for you. Dogs do not frighten me.”
    This one should.
Both men were large and powerful, but Sandor Clegane was much quicker, and fought with a savagery that Lyle Crakehall could not hope to match.
    Lady Amerei was thrilled, however. “You are a true knight, Ser Lyle, to help a lady in distress.”
    At least she did not call herself “a maiden.”
Jaime reached for his cup and knocked it over. The linen tablecloth drank the wine. As the red stain spread, his companions all pretended not to notice.
High table courtesy,
he told himself, but it tasted just like pity. He rose abruptly. “My lady. Pray excuse me.”
    Lady Amerei looked stricken. “Would you leave us? There’s venison to come, and capons stuffed with leeks and mushrooms.”
    â€œVery fine, no doubt, but I could not eat another bite. I need to see my cousin.” Bowing, Jaime left them to their food.
    Men were eating in the yard as well. The sparrows had gathered round a dozen cookfires to warm their hands against the chill of dusk and watch fat sausages spit and sizzle above the flames. There had to be a hundred of them.
Useless mouths.
Jaime wondered how many sausages his cousin had laid by and how he intended to feed the sparrows once they were gone.
They will be eating rats by winter, unless they can get a harvest in.
This late in autumn, the chances of another harvest were not good.
    He found the sept off the castle’s inner ward; a windowless, seven-sided, half-timbered building with carved wood doors and a tiled roof. Three sparrows sat upon its steps. When Jaime approached, they rose. “Where you going, m’lord?” asked one. He was the smallest of the three, but he had the biggest beard.
    â€œInside.”
    â€œHis lordship’s in there, praying.”
    â€œHis lordship is my cousin.”
    â€œWell, then, m’lord,” said a different sparrow, a huge bald man with a seven-pointed star painted over one eye, “you won’t want