A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

the realm, it must be tried.
    Across rain-sodden fields and stony ridges, she could see the great castle of
Storm’s End rearing up against the sky, its back to the unseen sea. Beneath
that mass of pale grey stone, the encircling army of Lord Stannis Baratheon
looked as small and insignificant as mice with banners.
    The songs said that Storm’s End had been raised in ancient days by Durran, the
first Storm King, who had won the love of the fair Elenei, daughter of the sea
god and the goddess of the wind. On the night of their wedding, Elenei had
yielded her maidenhood to a mortal’s love and thus doomed herself to a mortal’s
death, and her grieving parents had unleashed their wrath and sent the winds
and waters to batter down Durran’s hold. His friends and brothers and wedding
guests were crushed beneath collapsing walls or blown out to sea, but Elenei
sheltered Durran within her arms so he took no harm, and when the dawn came at
last he declared war upon the gods and vowed to rebuild.
    Five more castles he built, each larger and stronger than the last, only to see
them smashed asunder when the gale winds came howling up Shipbreaker Bay,
driving great walls of water before them. His lords pleaded with him to build
inland; his priests told him he must placate the gods by giving Elenei back to
the sea; even his smallfolk begged him to relent. Durran would have none of it.
A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the
forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that
a small boy told him

what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder. No matter how the
tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after
storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and
fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days.
    Gods do not forget, and still the gales came raging up the narrow sea. Yet
Storm’s End endured, through centuries and tens of centuries, a castle like no
other. Its great curtain wall was a hundred feet high, unbroken by arrow slit
or postern, everywhere rounded, curving,
smooth,
its stones fit so
cunningly together that nowhere was crevice nor angle nor gap by which the wind
might enter. That wall was said to be forty feet thick at its narrowest, and
near eighty on the seaward face, a double course of stones with an inner core
of sand and rubble. Within that mighty bulwark, the kitchens and stables and
yards sheltered safe from wind and wave. Of towers, there was but one, a
colossal drum tower, windowless where it faced the sea, so large that it was
granary and barracks and feast hall and lord’s dwelling all in one, crowned by
massive battlements that made it look from afar like a spiked fist atop an
upthrust arm.
    â€œMy lady,” Hal Mollen called. Two riders had emerged from the tidy little
camp beneath the castle, and were coming toward them at a slow walk. “That
will be King Stannis.”
    â€œNo doubt.” Catelyn watched them come.
Stannis it must be, yet that is
not the Baratheon banner.
It was a bright yellow, not the rich gold of
Renly’s standards, and the device it bore was

red, though she could not make out its shape.
    Renly would be last to arrive. He had told her as much when she set out. He did
not propose to mount his horse until he saw his brother well on his way. The
first to arrive must wait on the other, and Renly would do no waiting.
It
is a sort of game kings play,
she told herself. Well, she was no king, so
she need not play it. Catelyn was practiced at waiting.
    As he neared, she saw that Stannis wore a crown of red gold with points
fashioned in the shape of flames. His belt was studded with garnets and yellow
topaz, and a great square-cut ruby was set in the hilt of the sword he wore.
Otherwise his dress was plain: studded leather jerkin over quilted doublet,
worn boots, breeches of brown roughspun. The device on his sun-yellow banner
showed a red heart surrounded by a blaze of orange fire. The crowned stag was
there, yes . . . shrunken and enclosed within the heart. Even
more curious was his standard bearer—a woman, garbed all in reds, face
shadowed within the deep hood of her scarlet cloak.
A red priestess,
Catelyn thought, wondering. The sect was numerous and powerful in the Free
Cities and the distant east, but there were few in the Seven