clash of king 20-80

A few wore the red cloaks and mail of Lannister menat-
arms, but more were freeriders and sellswords, armored in oddments and bristling with
sharp steel . . . and there were others, monstrous savages out of one of Old Nan’s tales, the
scary ones Bran used to love.

She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and Bran and
Rickon . . . but it was Jon Snow she thought of most.

The carpenters had erected a gallery and lists in the outer bailey.

“You did well,” she told her son in the gallery that led from the rear of the hall, “though
that business with the wolf was japery more befitting a boy than a king.”

His manacles made
him clumsy, yet even so he would have sent the heavy pewter tankard crashing into her head
if Arya hadn’t leapt aside.

“Look at that up-jumped oaf,” Joff hooted, loud enough for half the yard to hear.

Varys slithered to his feet, smiling in that unctuous way he had.

Joffrey had a look in
his eyes that Sansa remembered well, the same look he’d had at the Great Sept of Baelor the
day he pronounced death on Lord Eddard Stark.

Sansa was watching it from her
tower window when Ser Arys Oakheart arrived to escort her down to the tourney grounds.

Lord Hoster’s smith had done his work well, and Robb’s crown looked
much as the other was said to have looked in the tales told of the Stark kings of old; an open
circlet of hammered bronze incised with the runes of the First Men, surmounted by nine black
iron spikes wrought in the shape of longswords.

Scars covered his arm
halfway to the elbow, and the mottled pink flesh still felt tight and tender, but it was healing.

Now there were three kings in the land,
and war raged beyond the Trident while the city filled with desperate men.

Men froze by winter and sweltered in summer.

The eunuch Varys took the letter and turned it in his delicate powdered hands.

Yoren even sent Lommy out with tankards for the three in fetters, who’d been
left chained up in the back of their wagon.

Arya sloshed her beer, wondering.

That night she lay upon her thin blanket on the hard ground, staring up at the great red
comet.

He
kicked at the little golden spear and sent it skittering across the floor.

He could see the comet hanging above the Guards Hall and the Bell Tower, and farther
back the First Keep, squat and round, its gargoyles black shapes against the bruised purple
dusk.

His fingers
drummed against the roughhewn planks of the table.

Arya scuffed at the ground with her foot, but she let the Bull lead her around to the front
of the inn.

“How I have yearned to have that eunuch’s tongue pulled out with hot pincers,” Cersei
replied.

“This,”
he said reverently, “is the account of a journey from the Shadow Tower all the way to Lorn
Point on the Frozen Shore, written by a ranger named Redwyn.

The land was gentle enough, rolling hills and
terraced fields interspersed with meadows and woodlands and little valleys where willows
crowded close to slow shallow streams.

“Will you joust
today, my lord?” she asked him.

Today he
made quite the dashing figure, with his white silk cloak fastened at the shoulder by a golden
leaf, and a spreading oak tree worked upon the breast of his tunic in shining gold thread.

Jowly, balding Janos Slynt looked rather like a frog, a smug frog who had
gotten rather above himself.

Chains rattled as the portcullis
was drawn upward, and the great gates opened to the creak of iron hinges.

“It is the sword that slays the season,” he replied, and soon
after the white raven came from Oldtown bringing word of autumn, so doubtless he was right.

“Got sourleaf back at the wagons,” he said as they made their way back to the road.

Sansa
was appalled, wondering if the gods had heard her vengeful prayer.

“That’s just a story,” Arya blurted out before she could stop herself.

“Her Grace does not wish to be disturbed,” Ser Mandon repeated slowly, as if Tyrion
were a dullard who had not heard him the first time.

“I’m supposed to
ride against the straw man.”

The stonemasons are strengthening the walls, carpenters are building scorpions and
catapults by the hundred, fletchers are making arrows, the smiths are forging blades, and the
Alchemists’ Guild has pledged ten thousand jars of wildfire.”

Someone had
fastened a pair of antlers to the knight’s head.

Tyrion slid the parchment from his sleeve.

The great stinking fool loved it.

The gold cloaks sheathed and mounted up.

Speckled grey they rose, and moss-spotted, yet thick and strong and higher
than any wolf could hope to leap.

I am not interested in treasonous
table talk, Lord Varys.”

This is a tournament of gnats.”

One day
she came across a rabbit, purely by happenstance.

Bran asked Septon Chayle about the comet while they were sorting through some scrolls
snatched from the library fire.

They are talking to me, brother to brother, he told
himself when the direwolves howled.

The king was shaded beneath a crimson canopy, one leg thrown negligently over the
carved wooden arm of his chair.

Tyrion paused to admire the pair of
Valyrian sphinxes that guarded the door, affecting an air of casual confidence.

He fared better than his twin, vanquishing an
elderly knight whose mount was bedecked with silver griffins against a striped blue-and-white
field.

“Every time you look at him, he twitches,” the Bull told her as she walked beside his
donkey.

She remembered the splendor of it: the
field of pavilions along the river with a knight’s shield hung before each door, the long rows
of silken pennants waving in the wind, the gleam of sunlight on bright steel and gilded spurs.

“Your Grace,” barked Lord Umber, the Greatjon, ever the loudest of Robb’s northern
bannermen . . . and the truest and fiercest as well, or so he insisted.

The inn was full of people moving south, and the common room erupted in scorn when
Yoren said they were traveling the other way.

The stonemasons are strengthening the walls, carpenters are building scorpions and
catapults by the hundred, fletchers are making arrows, the smiths are forging blades, and the
Alchemists’ Guild has pledged ten thousand jars of wildfire.”

“Glory to your betrothed,” Ser Arys answered at once.

She yearned to see her mother again, and Robb and Bran and
Rickon . . . but it was Jon Snow she thought of most.

Cersei lashed out.

The innkeeper, he
assumed . . . until Shae called Tyrion by name and the intruder rose.

The others obeyed without question . . . except for the Hound, but Joff never
asked the Hound to punish her.

“Strong,” his own bird said, preening.

Clegane stepped close to the king, one hand on the hilt of his longsword.

When he lowered her back to the ground, the little man kissed her lightly on the brow
and came waddling across the yard toward Joffrey.

Ser Hobber trotted in
from the east, riding a black stallion caparisoned in burgundy and blue.

“He is the dragon’s heir—and crimson is the color of House Lannister, another
sign.

With his bulging brow and mismatched eyes, he was still the ugliest man she had ever
chanced to look upon.

Finally a chestnut stallion trotted into view
in a swirl of crimson and scarlet silks, but Ser Dontos was not on it.

Had I stayed a smuggler, Allard would have ended on the
Wall.

I was saddened and horrified by
their most untimely deaths.”

Yoren turned away with a twist of
his crooked shoulders, and spat.

Slynt’s jowls quivered when he frowned.

He
had let his beard grow to cover his pushed-in face, until it was a bristly tangle of yellow and
black hair, coarse as wire.

Yoren tossed back her stick sword.

Other times he would have sworn they were up on the
curtain walls, loping round like sentries.

Any of the six will do, but I’d choose Allar Deem.

He had watched wistfully while the Walders contested with Turnip the cook’s boy and
Joseth’s girls Bandy and Shyra.

Morros wore a checkered black-and-gold cloak over black armor inlaid with golden
scrollwork.

Riding out in front of the wagons on her horse, Arya saw burnt bodies impaled on
sharpened stakes atop the walls, their hands drawn up tight in front of their faces as if to fight
off the flames that had consumed them.

The king was clad in a
gilded breastplate with a roaring lion engraved upon its chest, as if he expected the war to
engulf them at any moment.

They would never have
gotten that honorific through Ser Jaime Lannister’s perfect teeth.

Fool, he thought to himself afterward, as they lay in the center of the sagging mattress
amidst the rumpled sheets.

CHAPTER NINE
ARYA
The road was little more than two ruts through the weeds.

All that about the thunder of the
drums, sunlight flashing on armor, magnificent destriers snorting and prancing?

The guards on the walls muttered curses, hounds in the
kennels barked furiously, horses kicked at their stalls, the Walders shivered by their fire, and
even Maester Luwin complained of sleepless nights.

The Hound had never taken a knight’s vows.

Their rooftops had been
his secret places, and the crows atop the broken tower his special friends.

All that about the thunder of the
drums, sunlight flashing on armor, magnificent destriers snorting and prancing?

The stonemasons are strengthening the walls, carpenters are building scorpions and
catapults by the hundred, fletchers are making arrows, the smiths are forging blades, and the
Alchemists’ Guild has pledged ten thousand jars of wildfire.”

He fell silent as a column of Lannister
guardsmen marched past, in crimson cloaks and lion-crested helms.

Once he does so, I shall release my own captives taken in the Whispering Wood and the
Battle of the Camps, save Jaime Lannister alone, who will remain my hostage for his father’s
good behavior.”

His brother would stop at every hole and bare
his fangs in rage, but the ways stayed closed.

Tommen’s breathless laughter echoed off the walls as Tyrion
clapped him on the backplate, and Sansa was startled to see that the two were of a height.

“Yet I fear the triumph will have no savor.

Tyrion waved at the flagon, frowning.

She remembered the splendor of it: the
field of pavilions along the river with a knight’s shield hung before each door, the long rows
of silken pennants waving in the wind, the gleam of sunlight on bright steel and gilded spurs.

She followed him out onto the stone balcony that jutted three-sided from the solar like
the prow of a ship.

Her eyes saw white lather
under their saddles; the horses had been ridden long and hard.

His boots were dusty and spattered with dried mud.

The Walders might be scared of them, but the Starks had wolf blood.

Yet it rankled, to sit
here and make a mummer’s show of justice by punishing the sorry likes of Janos Slynt and
Allar Deem, while his sister continued on her savage course.