A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

me.
Theon dare not push matters too far with his uncle.
The command was his, yes, but his men had a faith in the Drowned God that they
did not have in him, and they were terrified of Aeron Damphair.
I cannot
fault them for that.
    â€œYou’ll lose your head for this, Greyjoy. The crows will eat the jelly of your
eyes.” Benfred tried to spit again, but only managed a little blood. “The
Others bugger your wet god.”
    Tallhart, you’ve spit away your life,
Theon thought. “Stygg, silence
him,” he said.
    They forced Benfred to his knees. Werlag tore the rabbitskin off his belt
and jammed it between his teeth to stop his shouting. Stygg unlimbered his
axe.
    â€œNo,” Aeron Damphair declared. “He must be given to the god. The old
way.”
    What does it matter? Dead is dead.
“Take him, then.”
    â€œYou will come as well. You command here. The offering should come from
you.”
    That was more than Theon could stomach. “You are the priest, Uncle, I leave
the god to you. Do me the same kindness and leave the battles to me.” He waved
his hand, and Werlag and Stygg began to drag their captive off toward the
shore. Aeron Damphair gave his nephew a reproachful look, then followed. Down
to the pebbled beach they would go, to drown Benfred Tallhart in salt water.
The old way.
    Perhaps it’s a kindness,
Theon told himself as he stalked off in the
other direction. Stygg was hardly the most expert of headsmen, and Benfred had
a neck thick as a boar’s, heavy with muscle and fat.
I used to mock him
for it, just to see how angry I could make him,
he remembered. That had
been, what, three years past? When Ned Stark had ridden to Torrhen’s Square to
see Ser Helman, Theon had accompanied him and spent a fortnight in Benfred’s
company.
    He could hear the rough noises of victory from the crook in the road where the
battle had been fought . . . if you’d go so far as to call it a
battle.
More like slaughtering sheep, if truth be

told. Sheep fleeced in steel, but sheep nonetheless.
    Climbing a jumble of stone, Theon looked down on the dead men and dying horses.
The horses had deserved better. Tymor and his brothers had gathered up what
mounts had come through the fight unhurt, while Urzen and Black Lorren silenced
the animals too badly wounded to be saved. The rest of his men were looting the
corpses. Gevin Harlaw knelt on a dead man’s chest, sawing off his finger to get
at a ring.
Paying the iron price. My lord father would approve.
Theon
thought of seeking out the bodies of the two men he’d slain himself to see if
they had any jewelry worth the taking, but the notion left a bitter taste in
his mouth. He could imagine what Eddard Stark would have said. Yet that thought
made him angry too.
Stark is dead and rotting, and naught to me,
he
reminded himself.
    Old Botley, who was called Fishwhiskers, sat scowling by his pile of plunder
while his three sons added to it. One of them was in a shoving match with a fat
man named Todric, who was reeling among the slain with a horn of ale in one
hand and an axe in the other, clad in a cloak of white foxfur only slightly
stained by the blood of its previous owner.
Drunk,
Theon decided,
watching him bellow. It was said that the ironmen of old had oft been
blood-drunk in battle, so berserk that they felt no pain and feared no foe, but
this was a common ale-drunk.
    â€œWex, my bow and quiver.” The boy ran and fetched them. Theon bent the bow
and slipped the string into its notches as Todric knocked down the Botley boy
and flung ale into his eyes.

Fishwhiskers leapt up cursing, but Theon was quicker. He drew on the hand that
clutched the drinking horn, figuring to give them a shot to talk about, but
Todric spoiled it by lurching to one side just as he loosed. The arrow took him
through the belly.
    The looters stopped to gape. Theon lowered his bow. “No drunkards, I said, and
no squabbles over plunder.” On his knees, Todric was dying noisily. “Botley,
silence him.” Fishwhiskers and his sons were quick to obey. They slit Todric’s
throat as he kicked feebly, and were stripping him of cloak and rings and
weapons before he was even dead.
    Now they know I mean what I say.
Lord Balon might have given him the
command, but Theon knew that some of his men saw only a soft boy from the green
lands when they looked at him. “Anyone