A Feast for Crows: Chapters 35–45

The liquor was strange and heady; sweet at first, but with a fiery aftertaste that burned his tongue.

His sisters had been kind to him, and though the other girls would sometimes taunt him, cruel words were easier to shrug off than the blows and buffets he got from the other castle boys.

The man proved to be Tyroshi; short and stout and sweaty, with an unctuous smile that reminded her of Varys and a forked beard dyed green and pink.

A group of merchants appeared before her to beg the throne to intercede for them with the Iron Bank of Braavos.

For the nonce, all she could do was tell the merchants to pay the Braavosi usurers their due.

Six of the Warrior’s Sons escorted him across the city; together they were seven, a holy and propitious number.

She had thought Qyburn must be japing when he had told her that her mooncalf cousin had forsaken castle, lands, and wife and wandered back to the city to join the Noble and Puissant Order of the Warrior’s Sons, yet there he stood with the other pious fools.

Nor was she pleased by the High Sparrow’s endless truculence and ingratitude.

A sudden sickness would be best, but the gods were seldom so obliging.

His face was grey and green and ghastly, his mouth open and distended. Someone had shoved a jagged white rock between his teeth.

If she were highborn, command would come naturally to her, and deference to them.

Four would be a few. Ten would be a surfeit.

His mummer’s show with Edmure and the gallows had only made the Blackfish more obdurate, that was plain.

Edmure Tully had collapsed facedown on the scaffold when Ser Ilyn’s blade sheared the rope in two. A foot of hemp still dangled from the noose about his neck.

The man doffed his hat.

Pycelle’s fear was palpable.

She could only hope that Mace Tyrell's prune-faced harridan of a mother lived long enough to see the trial.

A hint of pink suffused his cheeks.

His voice was kind, solicitous.

That little detail would make the whole story more plausible.

She told him all she had in mind. As Osney listened, apprehension slowly spread across his face.

She knew such garb would discomfit her father when he came to chastise her for making off with Myrcella.

With it were grape leaves stuffed with a mélange of raisins, onions, mushrooms, and fiery dragon peppers.

During the daylight hours she would try to read, but the books that they had given her were deadly dull: ponderous old histories and geographies, annotated maps, a dry-as-dust study of the laws of Dorne, The Seven-Pointed Star and Lives of the High Septons, a huge tome about dragons that somehow made them about as interesting as newts.

She knew them too, but they were deaf to her entreaties. They dragged her back to her cell, kicking and squirming.

Prince Oberyn had armed each of his daughters so they need never be defenseless, but Arianne Martell had no weapon but her guile. And so she smiled and charmed, and asked nothing in return of Cedra, neither word nor nod.

One year King Robert’s brother came to visit and she did her best to seduce him, but she was half a girl and Lord Renly seemed more bemused than inflamed by her overtures.

“I warn you, Arianne, I am out of patience.”
“With me?” That is so like him. “For Lord Tywin and the Lannisters you always had the forbearance of Baelor the Blessed, but for your own blood, none.”

Obara, Nym, and Tyene lack for nothing but their freedom, and Ellaria and her daughters are happily ensconced at the Water Gardens.

Alayne’s heart had been in her throat when she made her own ascent with Lady Lysa and Lord Petyr, and everyone agreed that the descent was even more harrowing, since you were looking down the whole time.

“No more than forty guests. Lord Nestor and his household, the Knight of the Gate, a few lesser lords and their retainers...”

“I don’t want food,” the little lord said, in a reedy, petulant voice.

There are several branches of House Arryn scattered across the Vale, all as proud as they are penurious, save for the Gulltown Arryns, who had the rare good sense to marry merchants. They’re rich, but less than couth, so no one talks about them.

She was twelve, ungainly and uncomfortable, waiting to meet the young knight her father had arranged for her to marry, a boy six years her senior, sure to be a famous champion one day.

Her cell was eight feet long and six feet wide, with no furnishings but a straw-stuffed pallet and a bench for prayer, a ewer of water, a copy of The Seven-Pointed Star, and a candle to read it by.

“There can be no penance without pain. No man should spare himself the scourge, as I told Ser Osney. I seldom feel so close to god as when I am being whipped for mine own wickedness, though my darkest sins are no wise near as black as his.”

We have oubliettes beneath the Casterly Rock that fit a man as tight as a suit of armor. You can’t turn in them, or sit, or reach down to your feet when the rats start gnawing at your toes.

Jeyne was a willowy girl, no more than fifteen or sixteen, more awkward than graceful.

Qyburn’s words were terse and to the point, Cersei’s fevered and fervent.

Sam joined Kojja Mo and three of her archers near the gangplank as the swan ship was tying up, the Summer Islanders resplendent in the feathered cloaks they only wore ashore.