A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

is horse meat. If you come for whores, there are none. My sister run them off. We have beds, though. Some featherbeds, but more are straw.”
    â€œAnd all have fleas, I don’t doubt,” said Ser Hyle.
    â€œDo you have coin to pay? Silver?”
    Ser Hyle laughed. “Silver? For a night’s bed and a haunch of horse? Do you mean to rob us, child?”
    â€œWe’ll have silver. Else you can sleep in the woods with the dead men.” Willow glanced toward the donkey, and the casks and bundles on his back. “Is that food? Where did you get it?”
    â€œMaidenpool,” said Meribald. Dog barked.
    â€œDo you question all your guests this way?” asked Ser Hyle.
    â€œWe don’t have so many guests. Not like before the war. It’s mostly sparrows on the roads these days, or worse.”
    â€œWorse?” Brienne asked.
    â€œThieves,” said a boy’s voice from the stables. “Robbers.”
    Brienne turned, and saw a ghost.
    Renly.
No hammerblow to the heart could have felled her half so hard. “My lord?” she gasped.
    â€œLord?” The boy pushed back a lock of black hair that had fallen across his eyes. “I’m just a smith.”
    He is not Renly,
Brienne realized.
Renly is dead. Renly died in my arms, a man of one-and-twenty. This is a only a boy.
A boy who looked as Renly had, the first time he came to Tarth.
No, younger. His jaw is squarer, his brows bushier.
Renly had been lean and lithe, whereas this boy had the heavy shoulders and muscular right arm so often seen on smiths. He wore a long leather apron, but under it his chest was bare. A dark stubble covered his cheeks and chin, and his hair was a thick black mop that grew down past his ears. King Renly’s hair had been that same coal black, but his had always been washed and brushed and combed. Sometimes he cut it short, and sometimes he let it fall loose to his shoulders, or tied it back behind his head with a golden ribbon, but it was never tangled or matted with sweat. And though his eyes had been that same deep blue, Lord Renly’s eyes had always been warm and welcoming, full of laughter, whereas this boy’s eyes brimmed with anger and suspicion.
    Septon Meribald saw it too. “We mean no harm, lad. When Masha Heddle owned this inn she always had a honey cake for me. Sometimes she even let me have a bed, if the inn was not full.”
    â€œShe’s dead,” the boy said. “The lions hanged her.”
    â€œHanging seems your favorite sport in these parts,” said Ser Hyle Hunt. “Would that I had some land hereabouts. I’d plant hemp, sell rope, and make my fortune.”
    â€œAll these children,” Brienne said to the girl Willow. “Are they your . . . sisters? Brothers? Kin and cousins?”
    â€œNo.” Willow was staring at her, in a way that she knew well. “They’re just . . . I don’t know . . . the sparrows bring them here, sometimes. Others find their own way. If you’re a woman, why are you dressed up like a man?”
    Septon Meribald answered. “Lady Brienne is a warrior maid upon a quest. Just now, though, she is in need of a dry bed and a warm fire. As are we all. My old bones say it’s going to rain again, and soon. Do you have rooms for us?”
    â€œNo,” said the boy smith. “Yes,” said the girl Willow.
    They glared at one another. Then Willow stomped her foot. “They have
food,
Gendry. The little ones are hungry.” She whistled, and more children appeared as if by magic; ragged boys with unshorn locks crept from under the porch, and furtive girls appeared in the windows overlooking the yard. Some clutched crossbows, wound and loaded.
    â€œThey could call it Crossbow Inn,” Ser Hyle suggested.
    Orphan Inn would be more apt,
thought Brienne.
    â€œWat, you help them with those horses,” said Willow. “Will, put down that rock, they’ve not come to hurt us. Tansy, Pate, run get some wood to feed the fire. Jon Penny, you help the septon with those bundles. I’ll show them to some rooms.”
    In the end they took three rooms adjoining one another, each boasting a featherbed, a chamber pot, and a window. Brienne’s room had a hearth as well. She paid a few pennies more for some wood. “Will I sleep in your room, or Ser Hyle’s?” Podrick asked as she was opening the shutters. “This is not the Quiet Isle,” she told him.