A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

cock was out, jutting upward from his breeches like a fat pink mast. It looked so silly standing there that he might have laughed, but Gilly pushed him back onto her pallet, hiked her skirts up around her thighs, and lowered herself onto him with a little whimpery sound. That was even better than her nipples.
She’s so wet,
he thought, gasping.
I never knew a woman could get so wet down there.
“I am your wife now,” she whispered, sliding up and down on him. And Sam groaned and thought,
No, no, you can’t be, I said the words, I said the words,
but the only word he said was, “Yes.”
    Afterward she went to sleep with her arms around him and her face across his chest. Sam needed sleep as well, but he was drunk on rum and mother’s milk and Gilly. He knew he ought to crawl back to his own hammock in the men’s cabin, but she felt so good curled up against him that somehow he could not move.
    Others came in, men and women both, and he listened to them kissing and laughing and mating with one another.
Summer Islanders. That’s how they mourn. They answer death with life.
Sam had read that somewhere, a long time ago. He wondered if Gilly knew, if Kojja Mo had told her what to do.
    He breathed the fragrance of her hair and stared at the lantern swinging overhead.
Even the Crone herself could not lead me safely out of this.
The best thing he could do would be to slip away and jump into the sea.
If I’m drowned, no one need ever know that I shamed myself and broke my vows, and Gilly can find herself a better man, one who is not some big fat coward.
    He awoke the next morning in his own hammock in the men’s cabin, with Xhondo bellowing about the wind.
“Wind is up,”
the mate kept shouting.
“Wake and work, Black Sam. Wind is up.”
What Xhondo lacked in vocabulary he made up for in volume. Sam rolled from his hammock to his feet, and regretted it at once. His head was fit to split, one of the blisters on his palm had torn open in the night, and he felt as if he were about to retch.
    Xhondo had no mercy, though, so all that Sam could do was struggle back into his blacks. He found them on the deck beneath his hammock, all bundled up in one damp heap. He sniffed at them to see how foul they were, and inhaled the smell of salt and sea and tar, wet canvas and mildew, fruit and fish and blackbelly rum, strange spices and exotic woods, and a heady bouquet of his own dried sweat. But Gilly’s smell was on them too, the clean smell of her hair and the sweet smell of her milk, and that made him glad to wear them. He would have given much and more for warm dry socks, though. Some sort of fungus had begun to grow between his toes.
    The chest of books had not been near enough to buy passage for four from Braavos to Oldtown. The
Cinnamon Wind
was shorthanded, however, so Quhuru Mo had agreed that he would take them, provided that they worked their way. When Sam had protested that Maester Aemon was too weak, the boy a babe in arms, and Gilly terrified of the sea, Xhondo only laughed, “Black Sam is big fat man. Black Sam will work for four.”
    If truth be told, Sam was so fumble-fingered that he doubted he was even doing the work of one good man, but he did try. He scrubbed decks and rubbed them smooth with stones, he hauled on anchor chains, he coiled rope and hunted rats, he sewed up torn sails, patched leaks with bubbling hot tar, boned fish and chopped fruit for the cook. Gilly tried as well. She was better in the rigging than Sam was, though from time to time the sight of so much empty water still made her close her eyes.
    Gilly,
Sam thought,
what am I going to do with Gilly?
    It was a long hot sticky day, made longer by his pounding head. Sam busied himself with ropes and sails and the other tasks that Xhondo set him, and tried not to let his eyes wander to the cask of rum that held old Maester Aemon’s body . . . or to Gilly. He could not face the wildling girl right now, not after what they’d done last night. When she came up on deck he went below. When she went forward he went aft. When she smiled at him he turned away, feeling wretched.
I should have jumped into the sea whilst she was still asleep,
he thought.
I have always been a craven, but I was never an oathbreaker till now.
    If Maester Aemon had not died, Sam could have asked him what to do. If Jon Snow had been aboard, or even Pyp and Grenn, he might have turned to them. Instead he had