he was making some advances on young
Jenna,” Graham said.
“There’s truth to that,” Old Cob said
softly. “I saw it.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at
him, surprised. They’d known Cob all
their lives and had heard all his stories.
Even the most boring of them had been
trotted out three or four times over the
long years. The thought that he might
have held something back was … well
… it was almost unthinkable.
“He was getting all handsy with young
Jenna,” Cob said, not looking up from his
beer. “And she was younger still back
then, mind you.” He paused for a
moment, then sighed. “But I was still old,
and … well … I knew that tinker would
give me a hiding if I tried to stop him. I
could see that plain enough on his face.”
The old man sighed. “I ain’t proud of
that.”
Cob looked up with a vicious little
grin. “Then Martin came round the
corner,” he said. “This was off behind
the old Cooper’s place, remember? And
Martin looked at the fellow, and at Jenna,
who wasn’t crying or nothing, but she
obviously wasn’t happy either. And the
tinker has hold of her wrist …”
Cob shook his head. “When he hit him.
It was like a hammer hitting a ham.
Knocked him right out into the street. Ten
feet, give or take. Then Martin eyed
Jenna, who was crying just a bit then.
More surprised than anything. And
Martin stuck the boot in him. Just once.
Not as hard as he could, either. I could
tell he was just settling up accounts in his
head. Like he was a moneylender
shimming up one side of his scale.”
“That fellow wasn’t any kind of proper
tinker,” Jake said. “I remember him.”
“And I heard things about that priest,”
Graham added.
A few of the others nodded wordlessly.
“What if Jessom comes back?” the
smith’s prentice asked. “I heard some
folk get drunk and take the coin, then turn
all cowardly and jump the rail when they
sober up.”
Everyone seemed to consider that. It
wasn’t a hard thought for any of them. A
band of the king’s guard had come
through town only last month and posted
a notice, announcing a reward for
deserters.
“Tehlu anyway,” Shep said grimly into
his nearly empty mug. “Wouldn’t that be
a great royal pisser of a mess?”
“Jessom’s not coming back,” Bast said
dismissively. His voice had such a note
of certainty that everyone turned to eye
him curiously.
Bast tore off a piece of bread and put it
in his mouth before he realized he was
the center of attention. He swallowed
awkwardly and made a broad gesture
with both hands. “What?” he asked them,
laughing. “Would you come back,
knowing Martin was waiting?”
There was a chorus of negative grunts
and shaken heads.
“You have to be a special kind of
stupid to wreck up Martin’s still,” Old
Cob said.
“Maybe eight years will be enough for
Martin to cool down a bit,” Shep said.
“Not likely,” Jake said.
Later, after the customers were gone,
Bast and the innkeeper sat down in the
kitchen, making their own dinner from the
remainder of the stew and half a loaf of
bread.
“So what did you learn today, Bast?”
the innkeeper asked.
Bast grinned widely. “Today, Reshi, I
found out where Emberlee takes her
bath!”
The innkeeper cocked his head
daughter?”
“Emberlee Ashton!” Bast threw his
arms up into the air and made an
exasperated noise. “She’s only the third
prettiest girl in twenty miles, Reshi!”
“Ah,” the innkeeper said, an honest
smile flickering across his face for the
first time that day. “You’ll have to point
her out to me.”
Bast grinned. “I’ll take you there
tomorrow,” he said eagerly. “I don’t
know if she takes a bath every day, but
it’s worth the gamble. She’s sweet as
cream and broad of beam.” His smile
grew to wicked proportions. “She’s a
milkmaid, Reshi,” he said the last with
heavy emphasis. “A milkmaid. ”
The innkeeper shook his head, even as
his own smile spread helplessly across
his face. Finally he broke into a chuckle
and held up his hand. “You can point her
out to me sometime when she has her
clothes on,” he said pointedly. “That will
do nicely.”
Bast gave a disapproving sigh. “It
would do you a world of good to get out
a bit, Reshi.”
The
innkeeper
shrugged.
“It’s
possible,” he said as he poked idly at his
stew.
They ate in silence for a long while.
Bast tried to think of something to say.
“I did get the carrots, Reshi,” Bast said
as he finished his stew and ladled the
rest of it out of the kettle.
“Better late than never, I suppose,” the
innkeeper said his voice was listless and
grey. “We’ll use them tomorrow.”
Bast shifted in his seat, embarrassed.
“I’m afraid I lost them afterwards,” he
said sheepishly.
This wrung another tired smile from the
innkeeper. “Don’t worry yourself over it,
Bast.” His eyes narrowed then, focusing
on hand that held Bast’s spoon. “What
happened to your hand?”
Bast looked down at the knuckles of his
right hand, they weren’t bloody anymore,
but they were skinned rather badly.
“I fell out of a tree,” Bast said. Not
lying, but not answering the question,
either. It was better not to lie outright.
Even weary and dull, his master was not
an easy man to fool.
“You should be more careful, Bast,” the
innkeeper said, prodding listlessly at his
food. “And with as little as there is to do
around here, it would be nice if you spent
a little more time on your studies.”
“I learned loads of things today,
Reshi,” Bast protested.
The innkeeper sat up, looking more
attentive. “Really?” he said. “Impress me
then.”
Bast thought for a moment. “Nettie
Williams found a wild hive of bees
today,” he said. “And she managed to
catch the queen …”
George R. R. Martin
Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy
Award-winner
George
R.
R.
Martin, New York Times bestselling
author of the landmark A Song of
Ice and Fire fantasy series, has
been
called
“the
American
Tolkien.”
Born in Bayonne, New
Jersey, George R. R. Martin
made his first sale in 1971,
and soon established himself
as one of the most popular
SF writers of the seventies.
He quickly became a
mainstay of the Ben Bova
Analog with stories such as
“With Morning Comes
Mistfall,” “And Seven Times
Never Kill Man,” “The
Second Kind of Loneliness,”
“The Storms of Windhaven”
(in collaboration with Lisa
Tuttle, and later expanded by
them into the novel
Windhaven ), “Override,” and
others, although he also sold
to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy,
Orbit, and other markets. One
of his Analog stories, the
striking novella “A Song for
Lya,” won him his first Hugo
Award, in 1974.
By the end of the seventies,
he had reached the height of
his influence as a science-
fiction writer and was
producing his best work in
that category with stories
such as the famous
“Sandkings,” his best-known
story, which won both the
Nebula and the Hugo in
1980 (he’d later win another
Nebula in 1985 for his story
“Portraits of His Children”),
“The Way of Cross and
Dragon,” which won a Hugo
Award in the same year
(making Martin the first
author ever to receive two
Hugo Awards for fiction in
the same year,
“Bitterblooms,” “The Stone
City,” “Starlady,” and
others. These stories would
be collected in Sandkings, one
of the strongest collections of
the period. By now, he had
mostly moved away from
Analog although he would
have a long sequence of
stories about the droll
interstellar adventures of
Havalend Tuf (later collected
in Tuf Voyaging ) running
throughout the eighties in the
Stanley Schmidt Analog, as
well as a few strong
individual pieces such as the
novella “Nightflyers”—most
of his major work of the late
seventies and early eighties,
though, would appear in
Omni . The late seventies and
the eighties also saw the
publication of his memorable
novel Dying of the Light , his
only solo SF novel, while his
stories were collected in A
Song for Lya, Sandkings, Songs of
Stars and Shadows, Songs the
Dead Men Sing, Nightflyers, and
Portraits of His Children. By the
beginning of the eighties,
he’d moved away from SF
and into the horror genre,
publishing the big horror
novel Fevre Dream, and
winning the Bram Stoker
Award for his horror story
“The Pear-Shaped Man”
and the World Fantasy
Award for his werewolf
novella “The Skin Trade.”
By the end of that decade,
though, the crash of the
horror market and the
commercial failure of his
ambitious horror novel
Armageddon Rag had driven
him out of the print world
and to a successful career in
television instead, where for
more than a decade he
worked as story editor or
producer on such shows as
new Twilight Zone and Beauty
and the Beast.
After years away, Martin
made a triumphant return to
the print world in 1996 with
the publication in 1996 of
the immensely successful
fantasy novel A Game of
Thrones, the start of his Song
of Ice and Fire sequence. A
freestanding novella taken
from that work, “Blood of
the Dragon,” won Martin
another Hugo Award in
1997. Further books in the
Song of Ice and Fire series
— A Clash of Kings, A Storm of
Swords, A Feast for Crows, and
A Dance with Dragons— have
made it one of the most
popular, acclaimed, and
bestselling series in all of
modern fantasy. Recently, the
books were made into an
HBO TV series, Game of
Thrones, which has become
one of the most popular and
acclaimed shows on
television, and made Martin
a recognizable figure well
outside of the usual genre
boundaries, even inspiring a
satirical version of him on
Saturday Night Live . Martin’s
most recent books are the
latest book in the Ice and
Fire series, A Dance With
Dragons, a massive two-
volume retrospective
collection spanning the
entire spectrum of his career,
Dreamsongs, a novella
collection, Starlady and Fast-
Friend, a novel written in
collaboration with Gardner
Dozois and Daniel Abraham,
Hunter’s Run, and, as editor,
several anthologies edited in
collaboration with Gardner
Dozois, including Warriors,
Songs of the Dying Earth, Songs of
Love and Death, Down These
Strange Streets, and Dangerous
Women, as well as several new
volumes in his long-running
Wild Cards anthology series,
Wild Cards: Busted Flush and
Wild Cards: Inside Straight. In
2012, Martin was given the
Life Achievement Award by
the World Fantasy
Convention. A World of Ice and
Fire , a comprehensive history
of Westeros and the lands
beyond, will be released in
fall of 2014.
Here he takes us to the
turbulent land of Westeros,
home to his Ice and Fire
series, for the story of that
swashbuckling rogue
Daemon Targaryen, the
Prince who never became a
King—although his ambition
to become one would plunge
the entire world into war.
Document Outline
The Lightning Tree Morning: The Narrow Road
Afternoon: Birds and Bees
Evening: Lessons
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