A Clash of Kings

You should have learned by now, none of us get the things we want.

He should thank the gods that Ser Rodrik was not ironborn. The men of the green lands were made of softer stuff, though he was not certain they would prove soft enough.

Knights may keep their truces when dealing with other knights, but they are not so careful of their honor when dealing with those whom they deem outlaw.

The Dothraki distrusted the sea and all that moved upon it. Water that a horse could not drink was water they wanted no part of.

The Bastard's backhand caught him square, and his cheekbone shattered with a sickening crunch beneath the lobstered steel. The world vanished in a red roar of pain.

If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?

Sansa had not heard of Littlefinger doing anything particularly heroic during the battle, but it seemed he was to be rewarded all the same.

"Our honor means no more than our lives, so long as the realm is safe. Are you a man of the Night's Watch?"

"Yes, but–"

"There is no but. You are, or you are not."

Dany found her thoughts returning to the Palace of Dust, one more, as the tongue returns to a space left by a missing tooth.

I went to the warlocks hoping for answers, but instead they've left me with a hundred new questions.

His wits were coming back to him, however slowly. That was good. His wits were all he had.

As shy as a maid on her wedding night, and near as fair. Sometimes a man forgets how pretty a fire can be.

Hush, now, child, I'm much older than you. I can ... die as a I please."

Strange times are bad for trade.

If you want my bones, come get them.

I am trying to set a price on one of the three living dragons in the world ... It seems to me that one-third of all the ships in the world would be fair.

When he slept, he did not dream, not of wolves, nor his brothers, nor anything. Even dreams cannot live up here, he told himself.

"Ser Rodrik had you five-to-one."

"Aye, but he thought us friends. A common mistake."

A small spoon of victory is just the thing to settle the stomach before battle. It makes the men hungry for a larger helping.

Why else do we don these black cloaks, but to die in defense of the realm?

The rite seemed to require that everyone stand, so Tyrion saw nothing but a row of courtly arses.

“What will you do when he crosses?”

“Fight. Kill. Die, maybe.”

“Aren’t you afraid? The gods might send you down to some terrible hell for all the evil you've done.”

“What evil?” He laughed. “What gods?”

“The gods who made us all.”

“All?” he mocked. “Tell me, little bird, what kind of god makes a monster like the Imp, or a halfwit like Lady Tanda’s daughter? If there are gods, they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, and they made the weak for the strong to play with.”

“True knights protect the weak.”

He snorted. “There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can’t protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don’t ever believe any different.”

Sansa backed away from him. “You're awful.”

“I'm honest. It’s the world that’s awful.”

For men the answer was always the same, and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the answer was stonier and harder.

I believe in steel swords, gold coins and men's wits.

"One day I may make you a lord, smuggler. If only to irk Celtigar and Florent. You will not thank me, though. It will mean you must suffer through these councils, and feign interest in the braying of mules."

"Why do you have them, if they serve no purpose?"

"The mules love the sound of their own braying, why else?"

Dead men walk and the trees have eyes again. Why should we balk at wargs and giants?

At sea, heavy steel was as like to cost a man his life as to save it.

The southern sky was aswirl with glowing, shifting colors, the reflection of the great fires that burned below. Baleful green tides moved against the bellies of the clouds, and pools of orange light spread across the heavens. The reds and yellows of common flame warred against the emeralds and jades of wildfire, each color flaring and then fading, birthing armies of short-lived shadows to die again an instant later. Green dawns gave way to orange dusks in half a heartbeat. The air itself smelt burnt, the way a soup kettle sometimes smelled if it were left on the fire too long and all the soup boiled away. Embers drifted through the night air like swarms of fireflies.

My most trusted advisors are a eunuch and a sellsword, and my lady's a whore. What does that say about me?

Mercy, thought Theon as Luwin dropped back. There's a bloody trap. Too much and they call you weak, too little and you're monstrous ... His father thought only in terms of conquest, but what good was it to take a kingdom if you could not hold it? Force and fear could only carry you so far.

When it comes to swords, a queen is only a woman after all.

Two hundred men were not an army, but you didn't need thousands to hold a castle as strong as Winterfell. So long as they knew which end of a spear did the killing, they might make all the difference.

One skull looks much like another ...

After the madness of battle, soldiers often seem to want flesh more than coin.

Children are a battle of a different sort ... A battle without banners or warhorns, but no less fierce ... As hard as birth can be, what comes after is even harder.

The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself, though Jaime had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body. "You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes. You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight, the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing." Battle fever. I am half a man and drunk with slaughter, let them kill me if they can!

A dog doesn't need courage to chase off rats ... What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it's all taking favors from ladies and looking fine in gold plate? Knights are for killing.

Bronn had a score of sellswords scattered throughout the crowd with orders to stop any trouble before it started. Perhaps Cersei had similarly disposed her Kettleblacks. Somehow Tyrion did not think it would help much. If the fire was too hot, you could hardly keep the pudding from scorching by tossing a handful of raisins in the pot.

I will say, I think it passing odd that I am loved by one for a kindness I never did, and reviled by so many for my finest act.

Sansa, permit me to share a bit of womanly wisdom with you on this very special day. Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.

Well, let her enjoy her plots. She was much sweeter when she thought she was outwitting him.

In formal battle, discipline is more important than courage.

Shadows are friends to men in black.

I have become the most splendid beggar in the world, but a beggar all the same.

The mountain is your mother ... Cling to her, press her face up against your teats, and she won't drop you.

Surrounded by a circle of Velaryon spearmen, they fought back to back, they made battle as graceful as a dance.

Listen with your ears, not your mouth.

Every man who's tasted my cooking has told me what a good whore I am.

The gods don't care about men, no more than kings care about peasants.

Her whole life had been one long flight, it seemed. She had begun running in her mother's womb.

So many vows . . . they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.

When I was smuggling, I learned that some men believe everything, and some nothing.

Tomorrow's trials concerned her more than yesterday's triumphs.

Whether they believe the story or not, they delight to tell it.

It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.

There are no men like me. There’s only me.

Smugglers do not sound warhorns and raise banners. When they smell danger, they raise sail and run before the wind.

I hear all sorts of things as a fool that I never heard when I was a knight.

The guests laughed, but it was a joyless laughter, the sort that can turn into sobbing in half a heartbeat.

"Tears," she said scornfully as the woman was led from the hall. "The woman's weapon, my lady mother used to call them. The man's weapon is a sword. And that tells us all you need to know, doesn't it?"

There were hundreds in the water, drowning or burning or doing a little of both.

He distrusts everyone, she reflected, and perhaps for good reason.

"I hope you like blackberry tarts."

"I love all sorts of tarts."

"I've known that for a very long time."

There are no shadows in the dark. Shadows are the servants of light, the children of fire. The brightest flame casts the darkest shadows.

The list of the slain was topped by the High Septon, ripped apart as he squealed to his gods for mercy. Starving men take a hard view of priests too fat to walk, Tyrion reflected.

The only way to keep people loyal is to make sure they fear you more than the enemy.

Some of the living swam, some of the dead floated; the ones in heavy mail and plate sank to the bottom, the quick and the dead alike.

Drink ... Perhaps it will give you the courage to deal with truth for a change.

Darkness was a chancy ally at best.

How can I do my duty if I do not know where it lies?

In the sept they pray for the Mother's mercy but on the walls it's the Warrior they pray to, and all in silence. She remembered how Septa Mordane used to tell them that the Warrior and the Mother were only two faces of the same great god. But if there is only one, whose prayers will be heard?

Men came at him. Some he killed, some he wounded, and some went away, but always there were more.

"My nephew is tenderhearted."

"Are you certain he's a Lannister?"

"I'm certain of nothing but winter and battle."

A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic ... and the parts that look like magic often turn out to be the messiest of all.

I told you what needed to be done, and left it to you to decide what it would be ... To lead men you must know them, Jon Snow. I know more of you now than I did this morning.

Cruel lands breed cruel peoples.

They'll kill for that knighthood, but don't think they'll ever die for it.

“Your sons, they...they’re with the gods now.”

“Are they?” Catelyn said sharply. “What god would let this happen?”

Tyrion says that people often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.

... By the time they carried her off her thighs were bloody again. It was as if her own body had betrayed her to Joffrey, unfurling a banner of Lannister crimson for all the world to see.

He thought he could smell smoke, though perhaps it was just the scent of his nerves fraying.

Your prize will be the doom of you.

The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.

Joff had the Antler Men trussed up naked in the square below, antlers nailed to their heads. When they'd been brought before the Iron Throne for justice, he had promised to send them to Stannis. A man was not as heavy as a boulder or a cask of burning pitch, and could be thrown a deal farther.

"If she saw two futures, well ... both cannot be true."

King Stannis pointed a finger. "There you err, Onion Knight. Some lights cast more than one shadow."

Tears are not a woman's only weapon. You've got another one between your legs, and you'd best learn to use it. You'll find men use their swords freely enough. Both kinds of swords.

He loved the wild more than he loved the Wall.

Those are brave men" he told Ser Balon in admiration. "Let's go kill them."

Men fight more fiercely for a king who shares their peril than one who hides behind his mother's skirts.

Do you always smell so bad, or did you just finish fucking a pig?

Send two hundred wolves against ten thousand sheep, ser, and see what happens.

Lord Bolton, he used to say a naked man has few secrets, but a flayed man's got none.

But now there were only a hundred men left to guard a thousand doors, and no one seemed to know who should be where, nor care much.

"Won't your guards protect us?"

"And who will protect us from my guards? Loyal sellswords are rare as virgin whores ... Do you have any notion what happens when a city is sacked, Sansa? No, you wouldn't, would you? All you know of life you learned from singers, and there's such a dearth of good sacking songs."

The gods must have been mad to waste manhood on the likes of him ...

One man on a wall was worth ten beneath it.

If it could burn the Lannisters had burned it; if it could die, they'd killed it.

When you have seen your kings shit over the rail and turn green in a storm, it was hard to bend the knee and pretend they were gods.

That was the way of war. The smallfolk were slaughtered, while the highborn were held for ransom.

It is one thing to deceive a king, and quite another to hide from the cricket in the rushes and the little bird in the chimney.

If there is food I eat it, in case there is none on the morrow.

The living should smile, for the dead cannot.

If I could pray with my cock I'd be a lot more religious.

What good is this, I ask you? He who hurries through life hurries to his grave.

"What sort of knight beats helpless maids?"

"The one who serves his king ..."

Every night Arya would say their names. "Ser Gregor," she'd whisper to her stone pillow. "Dunsen, Polliver, Chiswyck, Raff the Sweetling, The Tickler and The Hound. Ser Amory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei." Back in Winterfell, Arya had prayed with her mother in the sept and with her father in the godswood, but there were no gods on the road to Harrenhal, and the names were the only prayer she cared to remember.

So many kings, my tongue grows weary of the word.

A crown was worth a little mud and horseshit on his breeches, he supposed.

Have you ever considered that too many answers are the same as no answer at all? ... When a king dies, fancies sprout like mushrooms in the dark.

He watched them as from a distance, as if he still sat in the window of his bedchamber looking down on the yard below, seeing everything yet a part of nothing.

There was something wild about a godswood; even here, in the heart of the castle in the heart of the city, you could feel the old gods watching with a thousand eyes.

“Kings have no friends,” Stannis said bluntly, “only subjects and enemies.”

"I am not without mercy", thundered he who was notoriously without mercy.

She got dirt in her mouth but she didn't care, the taste was fine, the taste was mud and water and worms and life.

“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.”

"Look across the fields, brother? Do you see all those banners?"

"Do you think a few bolts of cloth will make you king?"

Bad enough when the dead come walking. Now the Old Bear wants them talking as well! ... The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints—the ground’s too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more worms than I do...

“I do not know this Lord of Light,” Davos admitted, “but I knew the gods we burned this morning. The Smith has kept my ships safe, while the Mother has given me seven strong sons.”

“Your wife has given you seven strong sons. Do you pray to her? It was wood we burned this morning.”

That's my cursed luck. I kill the poor.

Let us not get into the habit of names. Names are dangerous.

“He’ll want what kings always want,” she said. “Homage.”

The smallfolk are always eager to believe the worst of their lords.

Why would the gods send a warning if we can't heed it and change what's to come?

The middle wall, forty feet high, was grey granite alive with scenes of war: the clash of sword and shield and spear, arrows in flight, heroes at battle and babes being butchered, pyres of the dead. The innermost wall was fifty feet of black marble, with carvings that made Dany blush until she told herself that she was being a fool. She was no maid; if she could look on the grey wall’s scenes of slaughter, why should she avert her eyes from the sight of men and women giving pleasure to one another?

I stopped believing in gods the day I saw the Windproud break up across the bay. Any gods so monstrous as to drown my mother and father would never have my worship, I vowed. In King’s Landing, the High Septon would prattle at me of how all justice and goodness flowed from the Seven, but all I ever saw of either was made by men.

I was a boy, and what boy does not wish to find secret powers hidden in himself?

"You'd best get a bird ready. Mormont will want to send back word."

"I wish I could send them all. They hate being caged."

"You would too, if you could fly."

One day she would allow herself to be less than strong. But it could not be today.

A frightened man is a beaten man

"My first rule of war, Cat—never give the enemy his wish."

It is real, all of it, he thought, the wars, the intrigues, the great bloody game, and me in the center of it ... me, the dwarf, the monster, the one they scorned and laughed at, but now I hold it all, the city, the girl. This was what I was made for, and gods forgive me, but I love it.

If you step in a nest of snakes, does it matter which one bites you first?

Have you noticed that the rain stopped the instant I had a roof above me? It will start again now that I'm back out. Gods and dogs alike delight to piss on me.

Arya watched them die and said nothing. What good did it do you to be brave? ... There were no brave people on that march, only scared and hungry ones.

Dawn came cruel, a dagger of light.

The talk at the walls had all been of troubles in the city of late. People were crowding in, running from the war, and many had no way to live save robbing and killing each other.

The longer he lived, the more Tyrion realized that nothing was simple and little was true.

As for those she served with, she did not even want to even know their names. That only made it hurt worse when they died.

... for a moment the forest seemed a deep green sea, storm-tossed and heaving, eternal and unknowable.

If it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend kings have the power?

Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?

If it's softer than ground and has a roof over it, I call it a bed.

Part of her wanted to be a swan. The other part wanted to eat one. She had broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs weren't so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse, but not so bad as the pain in your belly from days without food.

This world is twisted beyond hope, when lowborn smugglers must vouch for the honor of kings

The morning air was dark with the smoke of burning gods.

“Tell me, Bronn. If I told you to kill a babe . . . an infant girl, say, still at her mother’s breast . . . would you do it? Without question?” “Without question? No.” The sellsword rubbed thumb and forefinger together. “I'd ask how much.”

She thought she had known what it meant to be afraid, but she learned better in the storehouse beside the Gods Eye.

A man like Petyr Baelish, who had a gift for rubbing two golden dragons together to make a third, was invaluable to his Hand.

Pity filled Catelyn's heart. Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman?

Gods do not forget ...

Knights and lordlings, they take each other captive and pay ransoms, but they don't care if the likes of you yield or not.

Boys believe nothing can hurt them, his doubt whispered. Grown men know better.

"The smiths are in your audience chamber, waiting your pleasure", he said as they crossed the ward.

"Waiting my pleasure. I like the ring of that, Bronn. You almost sound like a proper courtier. Next you'll be kneeling."

"Fuck you, dwarf."

"That's Shae's task."

A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the storm.

King is only a word, but fealty, loyalty, service ... those I must have.

"Why do you let people call you a dog? You won't let anyone call you a knight."

"I like dogs better than knights ... A hound will die for you, but never lie to you."

Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure to hide the flavor of their own incompetence.

Can a whore truly love anyone, I wonder?

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

Some men are born to be killed.

"Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."

"So power is a mummer's trick?"

"A shadow on the wall," Varys murmured, "yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow."

The Iron Islands lived in the past; the present was too hard and bitter to be borne.

When there are no battles to fight, men start to think of hearth and harvest.

"... [W]hen you've known me longer, you'll learn that I mean everything I say."

"Even the lies?"

"Especially the lies."

“Maester Luwin says there’s nothing in dreams that a man need fear.”

“There is,” said Jojen.

“What?”

“The past. The future. The truth.”

When a pirate grows rich enough, they make him a prince.

Paint stripes on a toad, he does not become a tiger.

"You think I'm wrong to keep the rangers close?"

"It's not for me to say, my lord."

"It is if you're asked."

Catelyn was finding that kings do not listen half so attentively as sons.

I'm terrified of my enemies, so I kill them all.

Some men want whores on the eve of battle, and some want gods. Jon wondered who felt better afterward.

Only cowards kill the vanquished

Schemes are like fruit, they require a certain ripening

“I’ll have the boy.” ... “You’ll have no one,” Yoren said stubbornly. “There’s laws on such things.” The gold cloak drew a shortsword. “Here’s your law.” Yoren looked at the blade. “That’s no law, just a sword. Happens I got one too.”

The world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.

Crowns do queer things to the heads beneath them.

Many called her beautiful. She was not beautiful. She was red, and terrible, and red.

Prince Tommen was not so obedient. “I’m supposed to ride against the straw man.”“Not today.”“But I want to ride!”“I don’t care what you want.”“Mother said I could ride.” “She said,” Princess Myrcella agreed. “Mother said,” mocked the king. “Don’t be childish.” “We’re children,” Myrcella declared haughtily. “We’re supposed to be childish.”The Hound laughed. “She has you there.”

There's no shame in fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it.

"The Watch needs good men" he told them as they set out, "but you lot will have to do."

Doubtless fresh rats were to be preferred to old stale rotten rats ... When times grew lean, even bakers found sellswords cheaper than bread, he reflected.