What do you think?
Rate this book
852 pages, Hardcover
First published October 17, 2005
"Death is not the worst thing," the kindly man replied. "It is His gift to us, an end to want and pain. On the day that we are born the Many-Faced God sends each of us a dark angel to walk through life beside us. When our sins and our sufferings grow too great to be borne, the angel takes us by the hand to lead us to the nightlands, where the stars burn ever bright. Those who come to drink from the black cup are looking for their angels. If they are afraid, the candles soothe them. When you smell our candles burning, what does it make you think of, my child?"
Winterfell, she might have said. I smell snow and smoke and pine needles. I smell stables. I smell Hodor laughing, and Jon and Robb battling in the yard, Sansa singing about some stupid lady fair. I smell the crypts, where the stone kings sit, I smell hot bread baking, I smell the godswood. I smell my wolf, my smell her fur, almost as if she were still beside me. "I don't smell anything," she said, to see what he would say.
. . . and she leapt to meet his rush, both hands on her sword hilt. His headlong charge brought him right onto her point, and Oathkeeper punched through cloth and mail and leather and more cloth, deep into his bowels and out his back, rasping as it scraped along his spine. His axe fell from limp fingers, and the two of them slammed together, Brienne's face mashed up against the dog's head helm. She felt the cold wet metal against her cheek. Rain ran down the steel in rivers, and when the lightening flashed again she saw pain and fear and rank disbelief through the eye slits. "Sapphires," she whispered at him, as she gave her blade a hard twist that made him shudder. His weight sagged heavily against her, and all at once it was a corpse that she embraced, there in the black rain. She stepped back and let him fall . . .
“Words are like arrows, Arianne. Once loosed, you cannot call them back.”
“He was beastly tired, but it was hard to stop. One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.”
“History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.”
“History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.”