A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

seen your kings shit over the rail and turn green in a storm, it was hard to bend the knee and pretend they were a god. “The Drowned God makes men,” old King Urron Redhand had once said, thousands of years ago, “but it’s men who make crowns.”
    The
Myraham
was rounding a wooded point. Below the pine-clad bluffs, a dozen fishing boats were pulling in their nets. The big merchanter stayed well out from them, tacking. Theon moved to the bow for a better view. He saw the castle first, the stronghold of the Botleys, a lesser house sworn to his father. When he was a boy it had been timber and wattle, but Robert Baratheon had razed that structure to the ground. Lord Sawane had rebuilt in stone, for now a small square keep crowned the hill. Pale green flags drooped from the squat corner towers; the Botley banner, he knew, emblazoned with a shoal of silvery fish.
    Beneath the dubious protection of the fish-ridden little castle lay the village of Lordsport, its harbor aswarm with ships. When last he’d seen Lordsport, it had been a smoking wasteland, the skeletons of burnt galleys lying black on the stony shore like the bones of dead leviathans, the houses no more than broken walls and cold ashes. After ten years, few traces of the war remained. The smallfolk had built new hovels with the stones of the old, and cut fresh sod for their roofs. A new inn had risen beside the landing, twice the size of the old one, with a lower story of cut stone and two upper stories of timber. The sept beyond had never been rebuilt, though; only a seven-sided foundation remained to show where it had stood. Robert Baratheon’s fury had soured the ironmen’s taste for the new gods, it would seem.
    Theon was more interested in ships than gods. Among the masts of countless fishing boats, he spied a Tyroshi trading galley offloading beside a lumbering Ibbanese cog with her black-tarred hull. A great number of longships, fifty or sixty at the least, stood out to sea or lay beached on the pebbled shore to the north.
So many
, he thought, uneasy. Theon could not recall ever seeing this many longships in Lordsport before, save on the eve of his father’s ill-fated rebellion. And some of the sails bore devices from the other islands; the blood moon of Wynch, Lord Goodbrother’s banded black warhorn, Harlaw’s silver scythe. He searched for a glimpse of his uncle Euron’s
Silence
. Of that lean and terrible red ship he saw no sign, but his father’s
Great Kraken
was there, looming over the lesser craft, her bow ornamented with a grey iron ram in the shape of its namesake.
    Had Lord Balon anticipated him and called the Greyjoy banners when he received Robb’s message from Riverrun? His hand went inside his cloak again, to the oilskin pouch. No one knew of his letter but Robb Stark; they were no fools, and only a fool entrusted his secrets to a bird. Still, Lord Balon was no fool either. He might well have guessed why his son was coming home at long last, and acted accordingly.
    The thought did not please him. His father’s war was long done, and lost. This was Theon’s hour—his plan, his glory, and in time, his crown.
Yet if the longships are hosting …
    It might be only a caution, now that he thought on it. A defensive move, lest the war spill out across the sea. Old men were cautious by nature. His father was old now, and so too his uncle Victarion, who commanded the Iron Fleet. His uncle Euron was a different song, to be sure, but the
Silence
did not seem to be in port.
It is for the good
, Theon toldhimself.
This way, I shall be able to strike all the more quickly
.
    As the
Myraham
made her way landward, Theon paced the deck restlessly, scanning the shore. He had not thought to find Lord Balon himself waiting at quayside, but surely his father would have sent someone to meet him. Old Sylas Sourmouth the steward, or perhaps Lord Botley or Dagmer Cleftjaw. They knew he was coming. Robb had sent word before Theon left Riverrun, and when they’d found no longship waiting at Seagard, Lord Jason Mallister had sent his own birds to Pyke, supposing that Robb’s were lost.
    Yet he saw no familiar faces on the landing, no honor guard of riders to escort him from Lordsport to Pyke, only smallfolk going about their small business. Shorehands rolled casks of wine off the Tyroshi trader, fisherfolk cried the day’s catch, children ran and played. A priest in the seawater robes