A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

hand between his thighs and squeezed him through his
breeches. “I don’t think
he
wants to wait till next time,” she
announced. “He wants to come out and count all my freckles, I
think.”
    â€œDancy.” Alayaya stood in the doorway, dark and cool in gauzy green silk.
“His lordship is come to visit me.”
    Tyrion gently disentangled himself from the other girl and stood. Dancy
did not seem to mind. “Next time,” she reminded him. She put a finger in her
mouth and sucked it.
    As the black-skinned girl led him up the stairs, she said, “Poor Dancy. She
has a fortnight to get my lord to choose her. Elsewise she loses her black
pearls to Marei.”
    Marei was a cool, pale, delicate girl Tyrion had noticed once or twice. Green
eyes and porcelain skin, long straight silvery hair, very lovely, but too
solemn by half. “I’d hate to have the poor child lose her pearls on account of
me.”
    â€œThen take her upstairs next time.”
    â€œMaybe I will.”
    She smiled. “I think not, my lord.”
    She’s right,
Tyrion thought,
I won’t. Shae may be only a whore,
but I am faithful to her after my fashion.
    In the turret room, as he opened the door of the wardrobe, he looked at Alayaya
curiously. “What do you do while I’m gone?”
    She raised her arms and stretched like some sleek black cat. “Sleep. I am much
better rested since you began to visit us, my lord. And Marei is teaching us to
read, perhaps soon I will be able to pass the time with a book.”
    â€œSleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.” He gave her a
quick kiss
on the cheek. Then it was down the shaft and through the tunnel.
    As he left the stable on his piebald gelding, Tyrion heard the sound of music
drifting over the rooftops. It was pleasant to

think that men still sang, even in the midst of butchery and famine. Remembered
notes filled his head, and for a moment he could almost hear Tysha as she’d
sung to him half a lifetime ago. He reined up to listen. The tune was wrong,
the words too faint to hear. A different song then, and why not? His sweet
innocent Tysha had been a lie start to finish, only a whore his brother Jaime
had hired to make him a man.
    I’m free of Tysha now,
he thought.
She’s haunted me half my
life, but I don’t need her anymore, no more than I need Alayaya or Dancy or
Marei, or the hundreds like them I’ve bedded with over the years. I have Shae
now. Shae.
    The gates of the manse were closed and barred. Tyrion pounded until the ornate
bronze eye clacked open. “It’s me.” The man who admitted him was one of
Varys’s prettier finds, a Braavosi daggerman with a harelip and a lazy eye.
Tyrion had wanted no handsome young guardsmen loitering about Shae day after
day. “Find me old, ugly, scarred men, preferably impotent,” he had told the
eunuch. “Men who prefer boys. Or men who prefer sheep, for that matter.”
Varys had not managed to come up with any sheeplovers, but he did find a eunuch
strangler and a pair of foul-smelling Ibbenese who were as fond of axes as they
were of each other. The others were as choice a lot of mercenaries as ever
graced a dungeon, each uglier than the last. When Varys had paraded them before
him, Tyrion had been afraid he’d gone too far, but Shae had never uttered a
word of complaint.
And why would she? She has never complained of me, and
I’m more hideous than

all her guards together. Perhaps she does not even see ugliness.
    Even so, Tyrion would sooner have used some of his mountain clansmen to guard
the manse; Chella’s Black Ears perhaps, or the Moon Brothers. He had more faith
in their iron loyalties and sense of honor than in the greed of sellswords. The
risk was too great, however. All King’s Landing knew the wildlings were his. If
he sent the Black Ears here, it would only be a matter of time until the whole
city knew the King’s Hand was keeping a concubine.
    One of the Ibbenese took his horse. “Have you woken her?” Tyrion asked
him.
    â€œNo, m’lord.”
    â€œGood.”
    The fire in the bedchamber had burned down to embers, but the room was still
warm. Shae had kicked off her blankets and sheets as she slept. She lay nude
atop the featherbed, the soft curves of her young body limned in the faint glow
from the hearth. Tyrion stood in the