A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

case he found he
did not mind. She was sweet to look up at.
    â€œYou’ll miss me all the time in your Red Keep,” she said as she led him to
her room. “All alone in your cold bed in your Tower of the Hand.”
    â€œToo true.” Tyrion would gladly have kept her with him, but his lord father
had forbidden it.
You will not take the whore to court,
Lord Tywin
had commanded. Bringing her to the city was as much defiance as he dared. All
his authority derived from his father, the girl had to understand that. “You
won’t be far,” he promised. “You’ll have a house, with guards and servants,
and I’ll visit as often as I’m able.”
    Shae kicked shut the door. Through the cloudy panes of the narrow window, he
could make out the Great Sept of Baelor crowning Visenya’s Hill, but Tyrion was
distracted by a different sight. Bending, Shae took her gown by the hem, drew
it over her head, and tossed it aside. She did not believe in smallclothes.
“You’ll never be able to rest,” she said as she stood before him, pink and

nude and lovely, one hand braced on her hip. “You’ll think of me every time
you go to bed. Then you’ll get hard and you’ll have no one to help you and
you’ll never be able to sleep unless you”—she grinned that wicked grin
Tyrion liked so well—“is
that
why they call it the Tower of
the Hand, m’lord?”
    â€œBe quiet and kiss me,” he commanded.
    He could taste the wine on her lips, and feel her small firm breasts pressed
against him as her fingers moved to the lacings of his breeches. “My lion,”
she whispered when he broke off the kiss to undress. “My sweet lord, my giant
of Lannister.” Tyrion pushed her toward the bed. When he entered her, she
screamed loud enough to wake Baelor the Blessed in his tomb, and her nails left
gouges in his back. He’d never had a pain he liked half so well.
    Fool,
he thought to himself afterward, as they lay in the center of
the sagging mattress amidst the rumpled sheets.
Will you never learn, dwarf?
She’s a whore, damn you, it’s your coin she loves, not your cock. Remember
Tysha?
Yet when his fingers trailed lightly over one nipple, it stiffened
at the touch, and he could see the mark on her breast where he’d bitten her in
his passion.
    â€œSo what will you do, m’lord, now that you’re the Hand of the King?” Shae
asked him as he cupped that warm sweet flesh.
    â€œSomething Cersei will never expect,” Tyrion murmured softly against her
slender neck. “I’ll do . . . justice.”

BRAN
    B ran preferred the hard stone of the window seat to the comforts of his
featherbed and blankets. Abed, the walls pressed close and the ceiling hung
heavy above him; abed, the room was his cell, and Winterfell his prison. Yet
outside his window, the wide world still called.
    He could not walk, nor climb nor hunt nor fight with a wooden sword as once he
had, but he could still
look.
He liked to watch the windows begin to
glow all over Winterfell as candles and hearth fires were lit behind the
diamond-shaped panes of tower and hall, and he loved to listen to the
direwolves sing to the stars.
    Of late, he often dreamed of wolves.
They are
talking to me, brother
to brother,
he told himself when the direwolves howled. He could almost
understand them . . . not quite, not truly, but
almost . . .
as if they were singing in a language he
had once known and somehow forgotten. The Walders might be scared of them, but
the Starks had wolf blood. Old Nan told him so. “Though it is stronger in some
than in others,” she warned.
    Summer’s howls were long and sad, full of grief and longing. Shaggydog’s were
more savage. Their voices echoed through the yards and halls until the castle
rang and it seemed as though some great pack of direwolves haunted Winterfell,
instead of only two . . . two where there had once been six.
Do they miss their
brothers and sisters too?
Bran wondered.
Are they calling to Grey
Wind and Ghost, to Nymeria and Lady’s Shade? Do they want them to come home and
be a pack together?
    â€œWho can know the mind of a wolf?” Ser Rodrik Cassel said when Bran asked him
why they howled. Bran’s lady mother had named him castellan of Winterfell in
her absence, and his duties left him little time