A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

tree.
No prayers are answered here,
she often thought, though some days she felt so lonely she had to try. Only the wind answered her, sighing endlessly around the seven slim white towers and rattling the Moon Door every time it gusted.
It will be even worse in winter,
she knew.
In winter this will be a cold white prison.
    And yet the thought of leaving frightened her almost as much as it frightened Robert. She only hid it better. Her father said there was no shame in being afraid, only in showing your fear. “All men live with fear,” he said. Alayne was not certain she believed that. Nothing frightened Petyr Baelish.
He only said that to make me brave.
She would need to be brave down below, where the chance of being unmasked was so much greater. Petyr’s friends at court had sent him word that the queen had men out looking for the Imp and Sansa Stark.
It will mean my head if I am found,
she reminded herself as she descended a flight of icy stone steps.
I must be Alayne all the time, inside and out.
    Lothor Brune was in the winch room, helping the gaoler Mord and two serving men wrestle chests of clothes and bales of cloth into six huge oaken buckets, each big enough around to hold three men. The great chain winches were the easiest way to reach the waycastle Sky, six hundred feet below them; elsewise you had to descend the natural stone chimney from the undercellar.
Or go the way Marillion went, and Lady Lysa before him.
    â€œBoy out of bed?” Ser Lothor asked.
    â€œThey’re bathing him. He will be ready within the hour.”
    â€œWe best hope he is. Mya won’t wait past midday.” The winch room was unheated, so his breath misted with every word.
    â€œShe’ll wait,” Alayne said. “She has to wait.”
    â€œDon’t be so certain, m’lady. She’s half mule herself, that one. I think she’d leave us all to starve before she’d put those animals at risk.” He smiled when he said it.
He always smiles when he speaks of Mya Stone.
Mya was much younger than Ser Lothor, but when her father had been brokering the marriage between Lord Corbray and his merchant’s daughter, he’d told her that young girls were always happiest with older men. “Innocence and experience make for a perfect marriage,” he had said.
    Alayne wondered what Mya made of Ser Lothor. With his squashed nose, square jaw, and nap of woolly grey hair, Brune could not be called comely, but he was not
ugly
either.
It is a common face but an honest one.
Though he had risen to knighthood, Ser Lothor’s birth had been very low. One night he had told her that he was kin to the Brunes of Brownhollow, an old knightly family from Crackclaw Point. “I went to them when my father died,” he confessed, “but they shat on me, and said I was no blood of theirs.” He would not speak of what happened after that, except to say that he had learned all he knew of arms the hard way. Sober, he was a quiet man, but a strong one.
And Petyr says he’s loyal. He trusts him as much as he trusts anyone.
Brune would be a good match for a bastard girl like Mya Stone, she thought.
It might be different if her father had acknowledged her, but he never did. And Maddy says that she’s no maid either.
    Mord took up his whip and cracked it, and the first pair of oxen began to lumber in a circle, turning the winch. The chain uncoiled, rattling as it scraped across the stone, the oaken bucket swaying as it began its long descent to Sky.
Poor oxen,
thought Alayne. Mord would cut their throats and butcher them before he left, and leave them for the falcons. Whatever part remained when the Eyrie was reopened would be roasted up for the spring feast, if it had not spoiled. A good supply of hard frozen meat foretold a summer of plenty, old Gretchel claimed.
    â€œM’lady,” Ser Lothor said, “you’d best know. Mya didn’t come up alone. Lady Myranda’s with her.”
    â€œOh.”
Why would she ride all the way up the mountain, just to ride back down again?
Myranda Royce was the Lord Nestor’s daughter. The one time that Sansa had visited the Gates of the Moon, on the way up to the Eyrie with her aunt Lysa and Lord Petyr, she had been away, but Alayne had heard much of her since from the Eyrie’s soldiers and serving girls. Her mother was long dead, so Lady Myranda kept her father’s castle for him; it was a much livelier court when she was