A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

wizard,” or “Look at me, look at me, I’m the rain god.”
    The bold little boy with wild black hair and laughing eyes was a man grown now,
one-and-twenty, and still he played his games.
Look at me, I’m a
king,
Cressen thought sadly.
Oh, Renly, Renly, dear sweet child, do
you know what you are doing? And would you care if you did? Is there anyone who
cares for him but me?
“What reasons did the lords give for their
refusals?” he asked Ser Davos.
    â€œWell, as to that, some gave me soft words and some blunt, some made
excuses, some promises, some only lied.” He shrugged. “In the end words are
just wind.”
    â€œYou could bring him no hope?”
    â€œOnly the false sort, and I’d not do that,” Davos said. “He had the truth
from me.”
    Maester Cressen remembered the day Davos had been knighted, after the siege of
Storm’s End. Lord Stannis and a small garrison had held the castle for close to
a year, against the great host of the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne. Even the sea
was closed against them, watched day and night by Redwyne galleys flying the
burgundy banners of the Arbor. Within Storm’s End, the horses had long since
been eaten, the dogs and cats were gone, and the garrison was down to roots and
rats. Then came a night when the moon was new and black clouds hid the stars.
Cloaked in that darkness, Davos the smuggler had dared the Redwyne cordon and
the rocks of Shipbreaker Bay alike. His little ship had a black hull, black
sails, black oars, and a hold crammed with onions and salt fish. Little enough,
yet it had kept the garrison alive long enough for Eddard Stark to reach
Storm’s End and break the siege.
    Lord Stannis had rewarded Davos with choice lands on Cape Wrath, a small keep,
and a knight’s honors . . . but he had also decreed that he
lose a joint of each finger on his left hand, to pay for all his years of
smuggling. Davos had submitted, on the condition that Stannis wield the knife
himself; he would accept no punishment from lesser hands. The lord had used a
butcher’s

cleaver, the better to cut clean and true. Afterward, Davos had chosen the name
Seaworth for his new-made house, and he took for his banner a black ship on a
pale grey field—with an onion on its sails. The onetime smuggler was
fond of saying that Lord Stannis had done him a boon, by giving him four less
fingernails to clean and trim.
    No, Cressen thought, a man like that would give no false hope, nor soften a
hard truth. “Ser Davos, truth can be a bitter draught, even for a man like
Lord Stannis. He thinks only of returning to King’s Landing in the fullness of
his power, to tear down his enemies and claim what is rightfully his. Yet
now . . .”
    â€œIf he takes this meager host to King’s Landing, it will be only to die. He
does not have the numbers. I told him as much, but you know his pride.” Davos
held up his gloved hand. “My fingers will grow back before that man bends to
sense.”
    The old man sighed. “You have done all you could. Now I must add my voice to
yours.” Wearily, he resumed his climb.
    Lord Stannis Baratheon’s refuge was a great round room with walls of bare black
stone and four tall narrow windows that looked out to the four points of the
compass. In the center of the chamber was the great table from which it took
its name, a massive slab of carved wood fashioned at the command of Aegon
Targaryen in the days before the Conquest. The Painted Table was more than
fifty feet long, perhaps half that wide at its widest point, but less than four
feet across at its narrowest. Aegon’s carpenters had shaped it after the land
of Westeros, sawing out each bay and

peninsula until the table nowhere ran straight. On its surface, darkened by
near three hundred years of varnish, were painted the Seven Kingdoms as they
had been in Aegon’s day; rivers and mountains, castles and cities, lakes and
forests.
    There was a single chair in the room, carefully positioned in the precise place
that Dragonstone occupied off the coast of Westeros, and raised up to give a
good view of the tabletop. Seated in the chair was a man in a tight-laced
leather jerkin and breeches of roughspun brown wool. When Maester Cressen
entered, he glanced up. “I knew
you
would come, old man, whether I
summoned you or no.” There was no hint of