A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

he died. He did not mind. Someone must take
his place, and sooner than he would like . . .
    He let the younger man settle him behind his books and papers. “Go bring her.
It is ill to keep a lady waiting.” He waved a hand, a feeble gesture of haste
from a man no longer capable of hastening. His flesh was wrinkled and spotted,
the skin so papery thin that he could see the web of veins and the shape of
bones beneath. And how they trembled, these hands of his that had once been so
sure and deft . . .
    When Pylos returned the girl came with him, shy as ever. Behind her, shuffling
and hopping in that queer sideways walk of his, came her fool. On his head was
a mock helm fashioned from an old tin bucket, with a rack of deer antlers
strapped to the crown and hung with cowbells. With his every lurching step, the
bells rang, each with a different voice,
clang-a-dang bong-dong
ring-a-ling clong clong clong.
    â€œWho comes to see us so early, Pylos?” Cressen said.
    â€œIt’s me and Patches, Maester.” Guileless blue eyes blinked at him. Hers was
not a pretty face, alas. The child had her lord father’s square jut of jaw and
her mother’s unfortunate ears, along with a disfigurement all her own, the
legacy of the bout of greyscale that had almost claimed her in the crib. Across
half one cheek and well down her neck, her flesh was stiff and dead, the skin
cracked and flaking, mottled black and grey and stony to the touch. “Pylos
said we might see the white raven.”
    â€œIndeed you may,” Cressen answered. As if he would ever

deny her. She had been denied too often in her time. Her name was Shireen. She
would be ten on her next name day, and she was the saddest child that Maester
Cressen had ever known.
Her sadness is my shame,
the old man thought,
another mark of my failure.
“Maester Pylos, do me a kindness and
bring the bird down from the rookery for the Lady Shireen.”
    â€œIt would be my pleasure.” Pylos was a polite youth, no more than
five-and-twenty, yet solemn as a man of sixty. If only he had more humor, more
life
in him; that was what was needed here. Grim places needed
lightening, not solemnity, and Dragonstone was grim beyond a doubt, a lonely
citadel in the wet waste surrounded by storm and salt, with the smoking shadow
of the mountain at its back. A maester must go where he is sent, so Cressen had
come here with his lord some twelve years past, and he had served, and served
well. Yet he had never loved Dragonstone, nor ever felt truly at home here. Of
late, when he woke from restless dreams in which the red woman figured
disturbingly, he often did not know where he was.
    The fool turned his patched and piebald head to watch Pylos climb the steep
iron steps to the rookery. His bells rang with the motion. “Under the sea, the
birds have scales for feathers,” he said,
clang-a-langing.
“I know, I know, oh, oh, oh.”
    Even for a fool, Patchface was a sorry thing. Perhaps once he could evoke gales
of laughter with a quip, but the sea had taken that power from him, along with
half his wits and all his memory. He was soft and obese, subject to twitches
and trembles,

incoherent as often as not. The girl was the only one who laughed at him now,
the only one who cared if he lived or died.
    An ugly little girl and a sad fool, and maester makes
three . . . now there is a tale to make men weep.
“Sit
with me, child.” Cressen beckoned her closer. “This is early to come calling,
scarce past dawn. You should be snug in your bed.”
    â€œI had bad dreams,” Shireen told him. “About the dragons. They were coming
to eat me.”
    The child had been plagued by nightmares as far back as Maester Cressen could
recall. “We have talked of this before,” he said gently. “The dragons cannot
come to life. They are carved of stone, child. In olden days, our island was
the westernmost outpost of the great Freehold of Valyria. It was the Valyrians
who raised this citadel, and they had ways of shaping stone since lost to us. A
castle must have towers wherever two walls meet at an angle, for defense. The
Valyrians fashioned these towers in the shape of dragons to make their fortress
seem more fearsome, just as they crowned their walls with a thousand gargoyles
instead of simple crenellations.” He took her small pink hand in his own frail
spotted one