A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

Ser Meryn Trant for Syrio, the Hound for killing the butcher’s boy Mycah, and
Ser Ilyn and Prince Joffrey and the queen for the sake of her father and Fat
Tom and Desmond and the rest, and even for Lady, Sansa’s wolf. The Tickler was
almost too scary to hate. At times she could almost forget he was still with
them; when he was not asking questions, he was just another soldier, quieter
than most, with a face like a thousand other men.
    Every night Arya would say their names. “Ser Gregor,” she’d

whisper to her stone pillow. “Dunsen, Polliver, Chiswyck, Raff the Sweetling.
The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen
Cersei.” Back in Winterfell, Arya had prayed with her mother in the sept and
with her father in the godswood, but there were no gods on the road to
Harrenhal, and her names were the only prayer she cared to remember.
    Every day they marched, and every night she said her names, until finally the
trees thinned and gave way to a patchwork landscape of rolling hills,
meandering streams, and sunlit fields, where the husks of burnt holdfasts
thrust up black as rotten teeth. It was another long day’s march before they
glimpsed the towers of Harrenhal in the distance, hard beside the blue waters
of the lake.
    It would be better once they got to Harrenhal, the captives told each other,
but Arya was not so certain. She remembered Old Nan’s stories of the castle
built on fear. Harren the Black had mixed human blood in the mortar, Nan used
to say, dropping her voice so the children would need to lean close to hear,
but Aegon’s dragons had roasted Harren and all his sons within their great
walls of stone. Arya chewed her lip as she walked along on feet grown hard with
callus. It would not be much longer, she told herself; those towers could not
be more than a few miles off.
    Yet they walked all that day and most of the next before at last they reached
the fringes of Lord Tywin’s army, encamped west of the castle amidst the
scorched remains of a town. Harrenhal was deceptive from afar, because it was
so
huge.
Its colossal

curtain walls rose beside the lake, sheer and sudden as mountain cliffs, while
atop their battlements the rows of wood-and-iron scorpions looked as small as
the bugs for which they were named.
    The stink of the Lannister host reached Arya well before she could make out the
devices on the banners that sprouted along the lakeshore, atop the pavilions of
the westermen. From the smell, Arya could tell that Lord Tywin had been here
some time. The latrines that ringed the encampment were overflowing and
swarming with flies, and she saw faint greenish fuzz on many of the sharpened
stakes that protected the perimeters.
    Harrenhal’s gatehouse, itself as large as Winterfell’s Great Keep, was as
scarred as it was massive, its stones fissured and discolored. From outside,
only the tops of five immense towers could be seen beyond the walls. The
shortest of them was half again as tall as the highest tower in Winterfell, but
they did not soar the way a proper tower did. Arya thought they looked like
some old man’s gnarled, knuckly fingers groping after a passing cloud. She
remembered Nan telling how the stone had melted and flowed like candlewax down
the steps and in the windows, glowing a sullen searing red as it sought out
Harren where he hid. Arya could believe every word; each tower was more
grotesque and misshapen than the last, lumpy and runneled and
cracked.
    â€œI don’t want to go there,” Hot Pie squeaked as Harrenhal opened its gates to
them. “There’s ghosts in there.”
    Chiswyck heard him, but for once he only smiled. “Baker boy, here’s your
choice. Come join the ghosts, or be one.”
    Hot Pie went in with the rest of them.
    In the echoing stone-and-timber bathhouse, the captives were stripped and made
to scrub and scrape themselves raw in tubs of scalding hot water. Two fierce
old women supervised the process, discussing them as bluntly as if they were
newly acquired donkeys. When Arya’s turn came round, Goodwife Amabel clucked in
dismay at the sight of her feet, while Goodwife Harra felt the callus on her
fingers that long hours of practice with Needle had earned her. “Got those
churning
butter, I’ll wager,” she said. “Some farmer’s whelp, are you? Well,
never you mind, girl, you have