A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

sons.”
    â€œYour wife has given you seven strong sons. Do you pray to her? It was wood we
burned this morning.”
    â€œThat may be so,” Davos said, “but when I was a boy in Flea Bottom
begging for a copper, sometimes the septons would feed me.”
    â€œ
I
feed you now.”
    â€œYou have given me an honored place at your table. And in return I give you
truth. Your people will not love you if you take from them the gods they have
always worshiped, and give them one whose very name sounds queer on their
tongues.”
    Stannis stood abruptly. “
R’hllor.
Why is that so hard? They will not
love me, you say? When have they ever loved me? How can I lose something I have
never owned?” He moved to the south window to gaze out at the moonlit sea. “I
stopped believing in gods the day I saw the
Windproud
break up across
the bay. Any gods so monstrous as to drown my mother and father would never
have
my
worship, I vowed. In King’s Landing, the High Septon would
prattle at me of how all justice and goodness flowed from the Seven, but all I
ever saw of either was made by men.”
    â€œIf you do not believe in gods—”
    â€œâ€”why trouble with this new one?” Stannis broke in. “I have asked
myself as well. I know little and care less of gods, but the red priestess has
power.”
    Yes, but what sort of power?
“Cressen had wisdom.”
    â€œI trusted in his wisdom and your wiles, and what did they avail me, smuggler?
The storm lords sent you packing. I went to them a beggar and they laughed at
me. Well, there will be no more begging, and no more laughing either. The Iron
Throne is mine by rights, but how am I to take it? There are four kings in the

realm, and three of them have more men and more gold than I do. I have
ships . . . and I have
her.
The red woman. Half my
knights are afraid even to say her name, did you know? If she can do nothing
else, a sorceress who can inspire such dread in grown men is not to be
despised. A frightened man is a beaten man. And perhaps she
can
do
more. I mean to find out.
    â€œWhen I was a lad I found an injured goshawk and nursed her back to health.
Proudwing,
I named her. She would perch on my shoulder and flutter
from room to room after me and take food from my hand, but she would not soar.
Time and again I would take her hawking, but she never flew higher than the
treetops. Robert called her
Weakwing.
He owned a gyrfalcon named
Thunderclap who never missed her strike. One day our great-uncle Ser Harbert
told me to try a different bird. I was making a fool of myself with Proudwing,
he said, and he was right.” Stannis Baratheon turned away from the window, and
the ghosts who moved upon the southern sea. “The Seven have never brought me
so much as a sparrow. It is time I tried another hawk, Davos. A
red
hawk.”

THEON
    T here was no safe anchorage at Pyke, but Theon Greyjoy wished to look on
his father’s castle from the sea, to see it as he had seen it last, ten years
before, when Robert Baratheon’s war galley had borne him away to be a ward of
Eddard Stark. On that day he had stood beside the rail, listening to the stroke
of the oars and the pounding of the master’s drum while he watched Pyke dwindle
in the distance. Now he wanted to see it grow larger, to rise from the sea
before him.
    Obedient to his wishes, the
Myraham
beat her way past the point
with her sails snapping and her captain cursing the wind and his crew and the
follies of highborn lordlings. Theon drew the hood of his cloak up against the
spray, and looked for home.
    The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one
with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same
grey-black stone, wet by the same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading
patches of dark green lichen, speckled by the droppings of the same seabirds.
The point of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once
thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had hammered at
it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past.
All that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering
stacks of rock that

rose from the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry
waves foamed and crashed among them.
    Drear, dark, forbidding, Pyke stood atop those