A Dance with Dragons: Chapters 12–23

When Little Walder pulled him up and Big Walder waved the torch at him to herd him from the cell, he went along as docile as a dog.

Serve and obey and remember your name. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with meek.

Beneath the trees, the ground was blanketed in white, still pristine and unbroken.

This time he took the wight’s head off at the neck, and for half a moment he exulted ... until a pair of dead hands came groping blindly for his throat.

Before them a pale lord in ebon finery sat dreaming in a tangled nest of roots, a woven weirwood throne that embraced his withered limbs as a mother does a child.

Once a man has seen a dragon in flight, let him stay at home and tend his garden in content, someone had written once, for this wide world has no greater wonder.

And of course there was even less chance of his coming on the fragmentary, anonymous, blood-soaked tome sometimes called Blood and Fire and sometimes The Death of Dragons, the only surviving copy of which was supposedly hidden away in a locked vault beneath the Citadel.

“If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.”

Until he knew how matters stood here, it was more prudent to play the common sailor, not the lord.

They came here for refuge, to a city untouched by the fighting, and here I turn up to drag them back into the war.

He did not understand why the gods would take four lads as young and strong as his sons, yet spare their weary father.

And l am the calamity that will change these slavers back into people, Dany had sworn to herself.

Ask yourself, if all men must grub in the dirt for food, how shall any man lift his eyes to contemplate the stars?

I will not abandon Meereen to the fate of Astapor.

When your dragons were small they were a wonder. Grown, they are death and devastation, a flaming sword above the world.

I know all about your vows. Spare me your rectitude, Lord Snow

The Night’s Watch takes no part, a voice said, but another replied, Stannis fights for the realm, the ironmen for thralls and plunder.

Too rich, thought Tyrion, too beautiful. It is never wise to tempt the dragons.

Lose you, and this whole enterprise is undone, and all those years of feverish plotting by the cheesemonger and the eunuch will have been for naught... isn’t that so?

Tyrion kicked the lad’s leg out from under him and leapt over him when he fell, thrusting his torch into the stone man’s face to send him stumbling backwards on his shattered leg, flailing at the flames with stiff grey hands.

Davos had come to White Harbor as an envoy, but they had made him a captive.

As for you, Onion Knight, I have heard sufficient treason for one day.

The swampy ground beyond the causeway was impassable, an endless morass of suckholes, quicksands, and glistening green swards that looked solid to the unwary eye but turned to water the instant you trod upon them, the whole of it infested with venomous serpents and poisonous flowers and monstrous lizard lions with teeth like daggers.

His host is north of you, his father’s to the south, but Lord Ramsay is prepared to be merciful if you yield Moat Cailin to him before the sun goes down.

Men are men and women women, no matter which side of the Wall we were born on. Good men and bad, heroes and villains, men of honor, liars, cravens, brutes ... we have plenty, as do you.

“We’re feeding you as best we can, as much as we can spare. Apples, onions, neeps, carrots ... there’s a long winter ahead for all of us, and our stores are not inexhaustible.”

You’re good at counting, my lord. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my reckoning leaves us sixty-two ahead.

It does make for a splendid story, and the singers will make much of your escape once you take the Iron Throne ... assuming that our fair Daenerys takes you for her consort.

Tommen’s rule is bolstered by all of the alliances that my lord father built so carefully, but soon enough she will destroy them, every one.

Let her hear that her brother Rhaegar’s murdered son is still alive, that this brave boy has raised the dragon standard of her forebears in Westeros once more, that he is fighting a desperate war to avenge his father and reclaim the Iron Throne for House Targaryen, hard-pressed on every side... and she will fly to your side as fast as wind and water can carry her.

“I am more agile when I’m drunk.”

Custom and caution had an iron grip upon us till you awakened us with fire and blood.

Marriage or carnage, those are my choices. A wedding or a war.

“He raced ahead of all his men to see her face the sooner, only to be left languishing whilst she ate lamb and figs with some dried-up old woman.”

“I am the blood of the dragon. Do not presume to teach me lessons.”