A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

temptation too, I must confess it. Well, I was a boy,
and what boy does not secretly wish to find hidden powers in himself? I got no
more for my efforts than a thousand boys before me, and a thousand since. Sad
to say, magic does not work.”
    â€œSometimes it does,” Bran protested. “I had that dream, and Rickon did too.
And there are mages and warlocks in the east . . .”
    â€œThere are men who
call
themselves mages and warlocks,”
Maester Luwin said. “I had a friend at the Citadel who could pull a rose out
of your ear, but he was no more magical than I was. Oh, to be sure, there is
much we do not understand. The years pass in their hundreds and their
thousands, and what does any man see of life but a few summers, a few winters?
We look at mountains and call them eternal, and so they
seem . . . but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall,
rivers change their courses, stars fall from the sky, and great cities sink
beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.
    â€œPerhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What
little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in
the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was
the last ember, and Valyria is gone. The dragons are no more, the giants are
dead, the children of the forest forgotten with all their lore.
    â€œNo, my prince. Jojen Reed may have had a dream or two that he believes came
true, but he does not have the greensight. No living man has that
power.”
    Bran said as much to Meera Reed when she came to him at dusk as he sat in his
window seat watching the lights flicker to life. “I’m sorry for what happened
with the wolves. Summer shouldn’t have tried to hurt Jojen, but Jojen shouldn’t
have said all that about my dreams. The crow lied when he said I could fly, and
your brother lied too.”
    â€œOr perhaps your maester is wrong.”
    â€œHe isn’t. Even my father relied on his counsel.”
    â€œYour father listened, I have no doubt. But in the end, he decided for
himself. Bran, will you let me tell you about a dream Jojen dreamed of you and
your fosterling brothers?”
    â€œThe Walders aren’t my brothers.”
    She paid that no heed. “You were sitting at supper, but instead of a servant,
Maester Luwin brought you your food. He served you the king’s cut off the
roast, the meat rare and bloody, but with a savory smell that made everyone’s
mouth water. The meat he served the Freys was old and grey and dead. Yet they
liked their supper better than you liked yours.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œYou will, my brother says. When you do, we’ll talk again.”
    Bran was almost afraid to sit to supper that night, but when he did, it was
pigeon pie they set before him. Everyone else was served the same, and he
couldn’t see that anything was wrong with the food they served the Walders.
Maester Luwin has the truth of it,
he told himself. Nothing bad was
coming to Winterfell, no matter what Jojen said. Bran was
relieved . . . but disappointed too. So long as there was
magic, anything could happen. Ghosts could walk, trees could talk, and broken
boys could grow up to be knights. “But there isn’t,” he said aloud in the
darkness of his bed. “There’s no magic, and the stories are just
stories.”
    And he would never walk, nor fly, nor be a knight.

TYRION
    T he rushes were scratchy under the soles of his bare feet. “My cousin
chooses a queer hour to come visiting,” Tyrion told a sleep-befuddled Podrick
Payne, who’d doubtless expected to be well roasted for waking him. “See him to
my solar and tell him I’ll be down shortly.”
    It was well past midnight, he judged from the black outside the window.
Does Lancel think to find me drowsy and slow of wit at this hour?
he
wondered.
No, Lancel scarce thinks at all, this is Cersei’s doing.
His sister would be disappointed. Even abed, he worked well into the
morning—reading by the flickering light of a candle, scrutinizing the
reports of Varys’s whisperers, and poring over Littlefinger’s books of accounts
until the columns blurred and his eyes ached.
    He splashed some tepid water on his face from the basin beside his bed and took
his time squatting in the garderobe, the night air cold