A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

mussels from their shells. He had been looking for a new partner ever since the Drunken Daughter put her knife through Little Narbo’s hand. “I give you more than Brusco, and you would not smell like fish.”
    â€œCasso likes the way I smell,” she said. The King of Seals barked, as if to agree. “Is Narbo’s hand no better?”
    â€œThree fingers do not bend,” complained Tagganaro, between mussels. “What good is a cutpurse who cannot use his fingers? Narbo was good at picking pockets, not so good at picking whores.”
    â€œMerry says the same.” Cat was sad. She liked Little Narbo, even if he was a thief. “What will he do?”
    â€œPull an oar, he says. Two fingers are enough for that, he thinks, and the Sealord’s always looking for more oarsmen. I tell him, ‘Narbo, no. That sea is colder than a maiden and crueler than a whore. Better you should cut off the hand, and beg.’ Casso knows I am right. Don’t you, Casso?”
    The seal barked, and Cat had to smile. She tossed another cockle his way before she went off on her own.
    The day was nearly done by the time Cat reached the Happy Port, across the alley from where the Ship was anchored. Some of the mummers sat up atop the listing hulk, passing a skin of wine from hand to hand, but when they saw Cat’s barrow they came down for some oysters. She asked them how it went with
Seven Drunken Oarsmen.
Joss the Gloom shook his head. “Quence finally came on Allaquo abed with Sloey. They went at one another with mummer swords, and both of them have left us. We’ll only be five drunken oarsmen tonight, it would seem.”
    â€œWe shall strive to make up in drunkenness what we lack in oarsmen,” declared Myrmello. “I for one am equal to the task.”
    â€œLittle Narbo wants to be an oarsman,” Cat told them. “If you got him, you’d have six.”
    â€œYou had best go see Merry,” Joss told her. “You know how sour she gets without her oysters.”
    When Cat slipped inside the brothel, though, she found Merry sitting in the common room with her eyes shut, listening to Dareon play his woodharp. Yna was there too, braiding Lanna’s fine long golden hair.
Another stupid love song.
Lanna was always begging the singer to play her stupid love songs. She was the youngest of the whores, only ten-and-four. Merry asked three times as much for her as for any of the other girls, Cat knew.
    It made her angry to see Dareon sitting there so brazen, making eyes at Lanna as his fingers danced across the harp strings. The whores called him the black singer, but there was hardly any black about him now. With the coin his singing brought him, the crow had transformed himself into a peacock. Today he wore a plush purple cloak lined with vair, a striped white-and-lilac tunic, and the parti-colored breeches of a bravo, but he owned a silken cloak as well, and one made of burgundy velvet that was lined with cloth-of-gold. The only black about him was his boots. Cat had heard him tell Lanna that he’d thrown all the rest in a canal. “I am done with darkness,” he had announced.
    He is a man of the Night’s Watch,
she thought, as he sang about some stupid lady throwing herself off some stupid tower because her stupid prince was dead.
The lady should go kill the ones who killed her prince. And the singer should be on the Wall.
When Dareon had first appeared at the Happy Port, Arya had almost asked if he would take her with him back to Eastwatch, until she heard him telling Bethany that he was never going back. “Hard beds, salt cod, and endless watches, that’s the Wall,” he’d said. “Besides, there’s no one half as pretty as you at Eastwatch. How could I ever leave you?” He had said the same thing to Lanna, Cat had heard, and to one of the whores at the Cattery, and even to the Nightingale the night he played at the House of Seven Lamps.
    I wish I had been here the night the fat one hit him.
Merry’s whores still laughed about that. Yna said the fat boy had gone red as a beet every time she touched him, but when he started trouble Merry had him dragged outside and thrown in the canal.
    Cat was thinking about the fat boy, remembering how she had saved him from Terro and Orbelo, when the Sailor’s Wife appeared beside her. “He sings a pretty song,” she murmured softly, in the Common Tongue of Westeros.