“You’d do it in an instant, if it meant your life. You were quick enough to silence your friend Chiggen when he caught that arrow in his belly.” Bronn had yanked back the man’s head by the hair and driven the point of his dirk in under the ear, and afterward told Catelyn Stark that the other sellsword had died of his wound.
“He was good as dead,” Bronn said, “and his moaning was bringing them down on us. Chiggen would have done the same for me … and he was no friend, only a man I rode with. Make no mistake, dwarf. I fought for you, but I do not love you.”
“It was your blade I needed,” Tyrion said, “not your love.” He dumped his armful of wood on the ground.
Bronn grinned. “You’re bold as any sellsword, I’ll give you that. How did you know I’d take your part?”
“Know?” Tyrion squatted awkwardly on his stunted legs to build the fire. “I tossed the dice. Back at the inn, you and Chiggen helped take me captive. Why? The others saw it as their duty, for the honor of the lords they served, but not you two. You had no lord, no duty, and precious little honor, so why trouble to involve yourselves?” He took out his knife and whittled some thin strips of bark off one of the sticks he’d gathered, to serve as kindling. “Well, why do sellswords do anything? For gold. You were thinking Lady Catelyn would reward you for your help, perhaps even take you into her service. Here, that should do, I hope. Do you have a flint?”
Bronn slid two fingers into the pouch at his belt and tossed down a flint. Tyrion caught it in the air.
“My thanks,” he said. “The thing is, you did not know the Starks. Lord Eddard is a proud, honorable, and honest man, and his lady wife is worse. Oh, no doubt she would have found a coin or two for you when this was all over, and pressed it in your hand with a polite word and a look of distaste, but that’s the most you could have hoped for. The Starks look for courage and loyalty and honor in the men they choose to serve them, and if truth be told, you and Chiggen were lowborn scum.” Tyrion struck the flint against his dagger, trying for a spark. Nothing.
Bronn snorted. “You have a bold tongue, little man. One day someone is like to cut it out and make you eat it.”
“Everyone tells me that.” Tyrion glanced up at the sellsword. “Did I offend you? My pardons … but you are scum, Bronn, make no mistake. Duty, honor, friendship, what’s that to you? No, don’t trouble yourself, we both know the answer. Still, you’re not stupid. Once we reached the Vale, Lady Stark had no more need of you … but I did, and the one thing the Lannisters have never lacked for is gold. When the moment came to toss the dice, I was counting on your being smart enough to know where your best interest lay. Happily for me, you did.” He slammed stone and steel together again, fruitlessly.
“Here,” said Bronn, squatting, “I’ll do it.” He took the knife and flint from Tyrion’s hands and struck sparks on his first try. A curl of bark began to smolder.
“Well done,” Tyrion said. “Scum you may be, but you’re undeniably useful, and with a sword in your hand you’re almost as good as my brother Jaime. What do you want, Bronn? Gold? Land? Women? Keep me alive, and you’ll have it.”
Bronn blew gently on the fire, and the flames leapt up higher. “And if you die?”
“Why then, I’ll have one mourner whose grief is sincere,” Tyrion said, grinning. “The gold ends when I do.”
The fire was blazing up nicely. Bronn stood, tucked the flint back into his pouch, and tossed Tyrion his dagger. “Fair enough,” he said. “My sword’s yours, then … but don’t go looking for me to bend the knee and m’lord you every time you take a shit. I’m no man’s toady.”
“Nor any man’s friend,” Tyrion said. “I’ve no doubt you’d betray me as quick as you did Lady Stark, if you saw a profit in it. If the day ever comes when you’re tempted to sell me out, remember this, Bronn—I’ll match their price, whatever it is. I like living. And now, do you think you could do something about finding us some supper?”
“Take care of the horses,” Bronn said, unsheathing the long dirk he wore at his hip. He strode into the trees.
An hour later, the horses had been rubbed down and fed, the fire was crackling away merrily, and a haunch of a young goat was turning above the flames, spitting and hissing. “All we lack now is some good wine to wash down our kid,” Tyrion said.
“That, a woman, and another dozen swords,” Bronn said. He sat cross-legged beside the fire, honing the edge of his longsword with an oilstone. There was something strangely reassuring about the rasping sound it made when he drew it down the steel. “It will be full dark soon,” the sellsword pointed out. “I’ll take first watch … for all the good it will do us. It might be kinder to let them kill us in our sleep.”
“Oh, I imagine they’ll be here long before it comes to sleep.” The smell of the roasting meat made Tyrion’s mouth water.
Bronn watched him across the fire. “You have a plan,” he said flatly, with a scrape of steel on stone.
“A hope, call it,” Tyrion said. “Another toss of the dice.”
“With our lives as the stake?”
Tyrion shrugged. “What choice do we have?” He leaned over the fire and sawed a thin slice of meat from the kid. “Ahhhh,” he sighed happily as he chewed. Grease ran down his chin. “A bit tougher than I’d like, and in want of spicing, but I’ll not complain too loudly. If I were back at the Eyrie, I’d be dancing on a precipice in hopes of a boiled bean.”
“And yet you gave the turnkey a purse of gold,” Bronn said.
“A Lannister always pays his debts.”
Even Mord had scarcely believed it when Tyrion tossed him the leather purse. The gaoler’s eyes had gone big as boiled eggs as he yanked open the drawstring and beheld the glint of gold. “I kept the silver,” Tyrion had told him with a crooked smile, “but you were promised the gold, and there it is.” It was more than a man like Mord could hope to earn in a lifetime of abusing prisoners. “And remember what I said, this is only a taste. If you ever grow tired of Lady Arryn’s service, present yourself at Casterly Rock, and I’ll pay you the rest of what I owe you.” With golden dragons spilling out of both hands, Mord had fallen to his knees and promised that he would do just that.
Bronn yanked out his dirk and pulled the meat from the fire. He began to carve thick chunks of charred meat off the bone as Tyrion hollowed out two heels of stale bread to serve as trenchers. “If we do reach the river, what will you do then?” the sellsword asked as he cut.
“Oh, a whore and a featherbed and a flagon of wine, for a start.” Tyrion held out his trencher, and Bronn filled it with meat. “And then to Casterly Rock or King’s Landing, I think. I have some questions that want answering, concerning a certain dagger.”
The sellsword chewed and swallowed. “So you were telling it true? It was not your knife?”
Tyrion smiled thinly. “Do I look a liar to you?”
By the time their bellies were full, the stars had come out and a half-moon was rising over the mountains. Tyrion spread his shadowskin cloak on the ground and stretched out with his saddle for a pillow. “Our friends are taking their sweet time.”
“If I were them, I’d fear a trap,” Bronn said. “Why else would we be so open, if not to lure them in?”
Tyrion chuckled. “Then we ought to sing and send them fleeing in terror.” He began to whistle a tune.
“You’re mad, dwarf,” Bronn said as he cleaned the grease out from under his nails with his dirk.
“Where’s your love of music, Bronn?”
“If it was music you wanted, you should have gotten the singer to champion you.”
Tyrion grinned. “That