A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

learned to juggle yet?”
    â€œNo,” said Jon, smiling, “but Grenn held his own against Halder this morning, and Pyp is no longer dropping his sword quite so often as he did.”
    â€œPyp?”
    â€œPypar is his real name. The small boy with the large ears. He saw me working with Grenn and asked for help. Thorne had never even shown him the proper way to grip a sword.” He turned to look north. “I have a mile of Wall to guard. Will you walk with me?”
    â€œIf you walk slowly,” Tyrion said.
    â€œThe watch commander tells me I must walk, to keep my blood from freezing, but he never said how fast.”
    They walked, with Ghost pacing along beside Jon like a white shadow. “I leave on the morrow,” Tyrion said.
    â€œI know.” Jon sounded strangely sad.
    â€œI plan to stop at Winterfell on the way south. If there is any message that you would like me to deliver …”
    â€œTell Robb that I’m going to command the Night’s Watch and keep him safe, so he might as well take up needlework with the girls and have Mikken melt down his sword for horseshoes.”
    â€œYour brother is bigger than me,” Tyrion said with a laugh. “I decline to deliver any message that might get me killed.”
    â€œRickon will ask when I’m coming home. Try to explain where I’ve gone, if you can. Tell him he can have all my things while I’m away, he’ll like that.”
    People seemed to be asking a great deal of him today, Tyrion Lannister thought. “You could put all this in a letter, you know.”
    â€œRickon can’t read yet. Bran …” He stopped suddenly. “I don’t know what message to send to Bran. Help him, Tyrion.”
    â€œWhat help could I give him? I am no maester, to ease his pain. I have no spells to give him back his legs.”
    â€œYou gave me help when I needed it,” Jon Snow said.
    â€œI gave you nothing,” Tyrion said. “Words.”
    â€œThen give your words to Bran too.”
    â€œYou’re asking a lame man to teach a cripple how to dance,” Tyrion said. “However sincere the lesson, the result is likely to be grotesque. Still, I know what it is to love a brother, Lord Snow. I will give Bran whatever small help is in my power.”
    â€œThank you, my lord of Lannister.” He pulled off his glove and offered his bare hand. “Friend.”
    Tyrion found himself oddly touched. “Most of my kin are bastards,” he said with a wry smile, “but you’re the first I’ve had to friend.” He pulled a glove off with his teeth and clasped Snow by the hand, flesh against flesh. The boy’s grip was firm and strong.
    When he had donned his glove again, Jon Snow turned abruptly and walked to the low, icy northern parapet. Beyond him the Wall fell away sharply; beyond him there was only the darkness and the wild. Tyrion followed him, and side by side they stood upon the edge of the world.
    The Night’s Watch permitted the forest to come no closer than half a mile of the north face of the Wall. The thickets of ironwood and sentinel and oak that had once grown there had been harvested centuries ago, to create a broad swath of open ground through which no enemy could hope to pass unseen. Tyrion had heard that elsewhere along the Wall, between the three fortresses, the wildwood had come creeping back over the decades, that there were places where grey-green sentinels and pale white weirwoods had taken root in the shadow of the Wall itself, but Castle Black had a prodigious appetite for firewood, and here the forest was still kept at bay by the axes of the black brothers.
    It was never far, though. From up here Tyrion could see it, the dark trees looming beyond the stretch of open ground, like a second wall built parallel to the first, a wall of night. Few axes had ever swung in
that
black wood, where even the moonlight could not penetrate the ancient tangle of root and thorn and grasping limb. Out there the trees grew huge, and the rangers said they seemed to brood and knew not men. It was small wonder the Night’s Watch named it the haunted forest.
    As he stood there and looked at all that darkness withno fires burning anywhere, with the wind blowing and the cold like a spear in his guts, Tyrion Lannister felt as though he could almost believe the talk of the Others, the enemy in the night. His jokes of grumkins and snarks no