A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

be someone with real power, someone who had no part of our plot yet might have reason to be sympathetic to us.
She considered appealing to her own mother, but Lady Mellario was far away in Norvos. Besides, Prince Doran had not listened to his lady wife for many years.
Not her either. I need a lord, one great enough to cow my father into releasing me.
    The most powerful of the Dornish lords was Anders Yronwood, the Bloodroyal, Lord of Yronwood and Warden of the Stone Way, but Arianne knew better than to look for help from the man who had fostered her brother Quentyn.
No.
Drey’s brother Ser Deziel Dalt had once aspired to marry her, but he was much too dutiful to go against his prince. Besides, whilst the Knight of Lemonwood might intimidate a petty lord, he did not have the strength to sway the Prince of Dorne.
No.
The same was true of Spotted Sylva’s father.
No.
Arianne finally decided that she had but two real hopes: Harmen Uller, Lord of Hellholt, and Franklyn Fowler, Lord of Skyreach and Warden of the Prince’s Pass.
    Half of the Ullers are half-mad,
the saying went,
and the other half are worse.
Ellaria Sand was Lord Harmen’s natural daughter. She and her little ones had been locked away with the rest of the Sand Snakes. That would have made Lord Harmen wroth, and the Ullers were dangerous when wroth.
Too dangerous, perhaps.
The princess did not want to put any more lives in danger.
    Lord Fowler might be a safer choice. The Old Hawk, he was called. He had never gotten on with Anders Yronwood; there was bad blood between their Houses going back a thousand years, from when the Fowlers had chosen Martell over Yronwood during Nymeria’s War. The Fowler twins were famous friends of Lady Nym as well, but how much weight would that carry with the Old Hawk?
    For days Arianne wavered as she composed her secret letter. “Give the man who brings this to you a hundred silver stags,” she began. That should ensure that the message was delivered. She wrote where she was, and pleaded for rescue. “Whoever shall deliver me from this cell, he shall not be forgotten when I wed.”
That should bring the heroes running.
Unless Prince Doran had attainted her, she remained the lawful heir to Sunspear; the man who married her would one day rule Dorne by her side. Arianne could only pray that her rescuer would prove younger than the greybeards her father had offered her over the years. “I want a consort with teeth,” she had told him when she refused the last.
    She dare not ask for parchment for fear of rousing the suspicions of her captors, so she wrote the letter on the bottom of a page torn from
The Seven-Pointed Star,
and pressed it into Cedra’s hand on her next bath day. “There’s a place beside the Threefold Gate where the caravans take on supplies before crossing the deep sand,” Arianne told her. “Find some traveler headed for the Prince’s Pass, and promise him a hundred silver stags if he will put this in Lord Fowler’s hand.”
    â€œI will.” Cedra hid the message in her bodice. “I’ll find someone before the sun goes down, princess.”
    â€œGood,” she said. “Tell me how it went on the morrow.”
    The girl did not return upon the morrow, however. Nor on the day that followed. When it was time for Arianne to bathe, it was Morra and Mellei who filled her tub, and stayed to wash her back and brush her hair. “Has Cedra taken ill?” the princess asked them, but neither would reply.
She has been caught
was all that she could think.
What else could it be?
That night she hardly slept, for fear of what might come next.
    When Timoth brought her breakfast the next morning, Arianne asked to see Ricasso rather than her father. Plainly she could not compel Prince Doran to attend her, but surely a mere seneschal would not ignore a summons from the rightful heir to Sunspear.
    He did, though. “Did you tell Ricasso what I said?” she demanded the next time she saw Timoth. “Did you tell him I had need of him?” When the man refused to answer her, Arianne seized a flagon of red wine and upended it over his head. The serving man retreated dripping, his face a mask of wounded dignity.
My father means to leave me here to rot,
the princess decided.
Or else he is making plans to marry me off to some disgusting old fool and intends to keep me locked away until the bedding.
    Arianne Martell had grown up expecting