A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

seek a bride for Prince Rhaegar, who had no sisters to wed. “We
have found the most splendid fool,” he wrote Cressen, a fortnight before he
was to return home from his fruitless mission. “Only a boy, yet nimble as a
monkey and witty as a dozen courtiers. He juggles and riddles and does magic,
and he can sing prettily in four tongues. We have bought his freedom and hope
to bring him home with us. Robert will be delighted with him, and perhaps in
time he will even teach Stannis how to laugh.”
    It saddened Cressen to remember that letter. No one had ever taught Stannis how
to laugh, least of all the boy Patchface. The storm came up suddenly, howling,
and Shipbreaker Bay proved the truth of its name. The lord’s two-masted galley
Windproud
broke up within sight of his castle. From its parapets his
two

eldest sons had watched as their father’s ship was smashed against the rocks
and swallowed by the waters. A hundred oarsmen and sailors went down with Lord
Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife, and for days thereafter every tide left a
fresh crop of swollen corpses on the strand below Storm’s End.
    The boy washed up on the third day. Maester Cressen had come down with the
rest, to help put names to the dead. When they found the fool he was naked, his
skin white and wrinkled and powdered with wet sand. Cressen had thought him
another corpse, but when Jommy grabbed his ankles to drag him off to the burial
wagon, the boy coughed water and sat up. To his dying day, Jommy had sworn that
Patchface’s flesh was clammy cold.
    No one ever explained those two days the fool had been lost in the sea. The
fisherfolk liked to say a mermaid had taught him to breathe water in return for
his seed. Patchface himself had said nothing. The witty, clever lad that Lord
Steffon had written of never reached Storm’s End; the boy they found was
someone else, broken in body and mind, hardly capable of speech, much less of
wit. Yet his fool’s face left no doubt of who he was. It was the fashion in the
Free City of Volantis to tattoo the faces of slaves and servants; from neck to
scalp the boy’s skin had been patterned in squares of red and green
motley.
    â€œThe wretch is mad, and in pain, and no use to anyone, least of all himself,”
declared old Ser Harbert, the castellan of Storm’s End in those years. “The
kindest thing you could do for that one is fill his cup with the milk of the
poppy. A painless

sleep, and there’s an end to it. He’d bless you if he had the wit for it.” But
Cressen had refused, and in the end he had won. Whether Patchface had gotten
any joy of that victory he could not say, not even today, so many years
later.
    â€œThe shadows come to dance, my lord, dance my lord, dance my lord,”
the fool sang on, swinging his head and making his bells clang and clatter.
Bong dong, ring-a-ling, bong dong.
    â€œLord,”
the white raven shrieked.
“Lord, lord,
lord.”
    â€œA fool sings what he will,” the maester told his anxious princess. “You
must not take his words to heart. On the morrow he may remember another song,
and this one will never be heard again.”
He can sing prettily in four
tongues,
Lord Steffon had written . . .
    Pylos strode through the door. “Maester, pardons.”
    â€œYou have forgotten the porridge,” Cressen said, amused. That was most unlike
Pylos.
    â€œMaester, Ser Davos returned last night. They were talking of it in the
kitchen. I thought you would want to know at once.”
    â€œDavos . . . last night, you say? Where is he?”
    â€œWith the king. They have been together most of the night.”
    There was a time when Lord Stannis would have woken him, no matter the hour, to
have him there to give his counsel. “I should have been told,” Cressen
complained. “I should have been woken.” He disentangled his fingers from
Shireen’s. “Pardons, my lady, but I must speak with your lord father. Pylos,
give me your arm. There are too many steps in this castle, and it seems to me
they

add a few every night, just to vex me.”
    Shireen and Patchface followed them out, but the child soon grew restless with
the old man’s creeping pace and dashed ahead, the fool lurching after her with
his cowbells clanging madly.
    Castles are not friendly places for the frail, Cressen was reminded as he
descended