A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

speckled by the droppings of the same sea birds. The point of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once thrust like a sword into the bowels ofthe ocean, but the great waves had hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past. All that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry waves foamed and crashed around them.
    Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those islands and pillars, almost a part of them, its curtain walls closing off the headland to guard the foot of the great stone bridge that leapt from the clifftop to the largest islet, dominated by massive bulk of the Great Keep, whose walls still bore the scars of Robert Baratheon’s assault. Further out were the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody Keep, each on its own stony island at the end of a high, vaulting bridge. Towers and outbuildings clung to the stacks beyond, linked to each other by covered archways when the pillars stood close, by long swaying walks of wood and rope when they did not. The Sea Tower rose from the outmost island at the point of the broken sword, the oldest part of the castle, round and tall, the sheer-sided pillar on which it stood half eaten through by the endless battering of the waves. The base of the tower was white from centuries of salt spray, the upper stories green from the moss that crawled over it like a thick blanket, the jagged crown black with soot from its nightly watchfire.
    Above the Sea Tower snapped his father’s sigil on a long banner with three tails. The
Myraham
was too far off for Theon to see more than the cloth itself, but he knew the device it bore: the golden kraken of House Greyjoy, arms writhing and reaching against the black field. The banner streamed from an iron mast, shivering and twisting as the wind gusted, like a bird struggling to take flight. Best of all, the direwolf of Stark did not fly above, casting its shadow down upon the Greyjoy kraken.
    Theon had never seen a more stirring sight. In the sky behind the castle, the fine red tail of the comet was visible through thin, scuttling clouds. All the way from Riverrun to Seagard, the Mallisters had argued about its meaning.
It is my comet
, Theon told himself, sliding a hand into his fur-lined cloak to touch the oilskin pouch snug in its pocket. Inside was the letter Robb Stark had given him, paper as good as a crown.
    â€œDoes the castle look as you remember it, milord?” the captain’s daughter asked as she pressed herself against his arm.
    â€œIt looks smaller,” Theon confessed, “though perhaps that is only the distance.” The
Myraham
was a fat-belliedsouthron merchanter up from Oldtown, carrying wine and spice and seed to trade for iron ore. Her captain was a fat-bellied southron merchanter as well, and the stony sea that foamed at the feet of the castle made his plump lips quiver, so he stayed well out, further than Theon would have liked. An ironborn captain in a longship would have taken them along the cliffs and under the high bridge that spanned the gap between the gatehouse and the Great Keep, but this plump Oldtowner had neither the craft, the crew, nor the courage to attempt such a thing. So they sailed past at a safe distance, and Theon must content himself with seeing Pyke from afar. Even so, the
Myraham
had to struggle mightily to keep itself off those rocks.
    â€œIt must be windy there,” the captain’s daughter observed.
    He laughed. “Windy and cold and damp. A miserable hard place, in truth … but my lord father once told me that hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the world.”
    The captain’s face was as green as the sea when he came bowing up to Theon and asked, “May we make for port now, milord?”
    â€œYou may,” Theon said, a faint smile playing about his lips. The promise of gold had turned the Oldtowner into a shameless lickspittle. It would have been a much different voyage if a longship from the islands had been waiting at Seagard, as he’d hoped. Ironborn captains were proud and wilful, and did not go in awe of a man’s blood. The islands were too small for awe, and a longship smaller still. If every captain was a king aboard his own ship, as was often said, it was small wonder they named the islands the land of ten thousand kings. And when you have