“And Chella told him only cowards kill the vanquished.”  “Braver to leave the man alive, with a chance to cleanse his shame by winning back his ear,” explained Chella, a small dark woman whose grisly neckware was hung with no less than forty-six dried, wrinkled ears. Tyrion had counted them once. “Only so can you prove you do not fear your enemies.”  Shae hooted. “And then m’lord says if he was a Black Ear he’d never sleep, for dreams of one-eared men.”  “A problem I will never need face,” Tyrion said. “I’m terrified of my enemies, so I kill them all.”  Varys giggled. “Will you take some wine with us, my lord?”  “I’ll take some wine.” Tyrion seated himself beside Shae. He understood what was happening here, if Chella and the girl did not. Varys was delivering a message. When he said, I was taken by a sudden urge to meet your young lady, what he meant was, You tried to hide her, but I knew where she was, and who she was, and here I am. He wondered who had betrayed him. The innkeeper, that boy in the stable, a guard on the gate... or one of his own?  “I always like to return to the city through the Gate of the Gods,” Varys told Shae as he filled the wine cups. “The carvings on the gatehouse are exquisite, they make me weep each time I see them. The eyes... so expressive, don’t you think? They almost seem to follow you as you ride beneath the portcullis.”  “I never noticed, m’lord,” Shae replied. “I’ll look again on the morrow, if it please you.”  Don’t bother, sweetling, Tyrion thought, swirling the wine in the cup. He cares not a whit about carvings. The eyes he boasts of are his own. What he means is that he was watching, that he knew we were here the moment we passed through the gates.  “Do be careful, child,” Varys urged. “King’s Landing is not wholly safe these days. I know these streets well, and yet I almost feared to come today, alone and unarmed as I was. Lawless men are everywhere in this dark time, oh, yes. Men with cold steel and colder hearts.” Where I can come alone and unarmed, others can come with swords in their fists, he was saying.  Shae only laughed. “If they try and bother me, they’ll be one ear short when Chella runs them off.”  Varys hooted as if that was the funniest thing he ............