The road was little more than two ruts through the weeds.
The good part was, with so little traffic there’d be no
one to point the finger and say which way they’d gone. The
human flood that had flowed down the kingsroad was only a trickle
here.
The bad part was, the road wound back and forth like a snake,
tangling with even smaller trails and sometimes seeming to vanish
entirely only to reappear half a league farther on when they had
all but given up hope. Arya hated it. The land was gentle enough,
rolling hills and terraced fields interspersed with meadows and
woodlands and little valleys where willows crowded close to slow
shallow streams. Even so, the path was so narrow and crooked that
their pace had dropped to a crawl.
It was the wagons that slowed them, lumbering along, axles
creaking under the weight of their heavy loads. A dozen times a day
they had to stop to free a wheel that had stuck in a rut, or double
up the teams to climb a muddy slope. Once, in the middle of a dense
stand of oak, they came face-to-face with three men pulling a load
of firewood in an ox cart, with no way for either to get around.
There had been nothing for it but to wait while the foresters
unhitched their ox, led him through the trees, spun the cart,
hitched the ox up again, and started back the way they’d
come. The ox was even slower than the wagons, so that day they
hardly got anywhere at all.
Arya could not help looking over her shoulder, wondering when
the gold cloaks would catch them. At night, she woke at every noise
to grab for Needle’s hilt. They never made camp without
putting out sentries now, but Arya did not trust them, especially
the orphan boys. They might have done well enough in the alleys of
King’s Landing, but out here they were lost. When she was
being quiet as a shadow, she could sneak past all of them, flitting
out by starlight to make her water in the woods where no one would
see. Once, when Lommy Greenhands had the watch, she shimmied up an
oak and moved from tree to tree until she was right above his head,
and he never saw a thing. She would have jumped down on top of him,
but she knew his scream would wake the whole camp, and Yoren might
take a stick to her again.
Lommy and the other orphans all treated the Bull like someone
special now because the queen wanted his head, though he would have
none of it. “I never did nothing to no queen,” he said
angrily. “I did my work, is all. Bellows and tongs and fetch
and carry. I was s’posed to be an armorer, and one day Master
Mott says I got to join the Night’s Watch, that’s all I
know.” Then he’d go off to polish his helm. It was a
beautiful helm, rounded and curved, with a slit visor and two great
metal bull’s horns. Arya would watch him polish the metal
with an oilcloth, shining it so bright you could see the flames of
the cookfire reflected in the steel. Yet he never actually put it
on his head.
“I bet he’s that traitor’s bastard,”
Lommy said one night, in a hushed voice so Gendry would not hear.
“The wolf lord, the one they nicked on Baelor’s
steps.”
“He is not,” Arya declared. My father only had one
bastard, and that’s Jon. She stalked off into the trees,
wishing she could just saddle her horse and ride home. She was a
good horse, a chestnut mare with a white blaze on her forehead. And
Arya had always been a good rider. She could gallop off and never
see any of them, unless she wanted to. Only then she’d have
no one to scout ahead of her, or watch behind, or stand guard while
she napped, and when the gold cloaks caught her, she’d be all
alone. It was safer to stay with Yoren and the others.
“We’re not far from Gods Eye,” the black
brother said one morning. “The kingsroad won’t be safe
till we’re across the Trident. So we’ll come up around
the lake along the western shore, they’re not like to look
for us there.” At the next spot where two ruts cut cross each
other, he turned the wagons west.
Here farmland gave way to forest, the villages and holdfasts
were smaller and farther apart, the hills higher and the valleys
deeper. Food grew harder to come by. In the city, Yoren had loaded
up the wagons with salt fish, hard bread, lard, turnips, sacks of
beans and barley, and wheels of yellow cheese, but every bite of it
had been eaten. Forced to live off the land, Yoren turned to Koss
and Kurz, who’d been taken as poachers. He would send them
ahead of the column, into the woods, and come dusk they would be
back with a deer slung between them on a pole or a brace of quail
swinging from their belts. The younger boys would be set to picking
blackberries along the road, or climbing fences to fill a sack with
apples if they happened upon an orchard.
Arya was a skilled climber and a fast picker, and she liked to
go off by herself. One day she came across a rabbit, purely by
happenstance. It was brown and fat, with long ears and a twitchy
nose. Rabbits ran faster than cats, but they couldn’t climb
trees half so well. She whacked it with her stick and grabbed it by
its ears, and Yoren stewed it with some mushrooms and wild onions.
Arya was given a whole leg, since it was her rabbit. She shared it
with Gendry. The rest of them each got a spoonful, even the three
in manacles. Jaqen H’ghar thanked her politely for the treat,
and Biter licked the grease off his dirty fingers with a blissful
look, but Rorge, the noseless one, only laughed and said,
“There’s a hunter now. Lumpyface Lumpyhead
Rabbitkiller.”
Outside a holdfast called Briarwhite, some fieldhands surrounded
them in a cornfield, demanding coin for the ears they’d
taken. Yoren eyed their scythes and tossed them a few coppers.
“Time was, a man in black was feasted from Dorne to
Winterfell, and even high lords called it an honor to shelter him
under their roofs,” he said bitterly. “Now cravens like
you want hard coin for a bite of wormy apple.” He spat.
“It’s sweetcorn, better’n a stinking old black
bird like you deserves,” one of them answered roughly.
“You get out of our field now, and take these sneaks and
stabbers with you, or we’ll stake you up in the corn to scare
the other crows away.”
They roasted the sweetcorn in the husk that night, turning the
ears with long forked sticks, and ate it hot right off the cob.
Arya thought it tasted wonderful, but Yoren was too angry to eat. A
cloud seemed to hang over him, ragged and black as his cloak. He
paced about the camp restlessly, muttering to himself.
The next day Koss came racing back to warn Yoren of a camp
ahead. “Twenty or thirty men, in mail and halfhelms,”
he said. “Some of them are cut up bad, and one’s dying,
from the sound of him. With all the noise he was making, I got
right up close. They got spears and shields, but only one horse,
and that’s lame. I think they been there awhile, from the
stink of the place.”
“See a banner?”
“Spotted treecat, yellow and black, on a mud-brown
field.”
Yoren folded a sourleaf into his mouth and chewed.
“Can’t say,” he admitted. “Might be one
side, might be t’other. If they’re hurt that bad,
likely they’d take our mounts no matter who they are. Might
be they’d take more than that. I believe we’ll go wide
around them.” It took them miles out of their way, and cost
them two days at the least, but the old man said it was cheap at
the price. “You’ll have time enough on the Wall. The
rest o’ your lives, most like. Seems to me there’s no
rush to get there. “
Arya saw men guarding the fields more and more when they turned
north again. Often they stood silently beside the road, giving a
cold eye to anyone who passed. Elsewhere they patrolled on horses,
riding their fence lines with axes strapped to their saddles. At
one place, she spotted a man perched up in a dead tree, with a bow
in his hand and a quiver hanging from the branch beside him. The
moment he spied them, he notched an arrow to his bowstring, and
never looked away until the last wagon was out of sight. All the
while, Yoren cursed. “Him in his tree, let’s see how
well he likes it up there when the Others come to take him.
He’ll scream for the Watch then, that he will.”
A day later Dobber spied a red glow against the evening sky.
“Either this road went and turned again, or that sun’s
setting in the north.”
Yoren climbed a rise to get a better look. “Fire,”
he announced. He licked a thumb and held it up. “Wind should
blow it away from us. Still bears watching.”
And watch it they did. As the world darkened, the fire seemed to
grow brighter and brighter, until it looked as though the whole
north was ablaze. From time to time, they could even smell the
smoke, though the wind held steady and the flames never got any
closer. By dawn the fire had burned itself out, but none of them
slept very well that night.
It was midday when they arrived at the
place where the village had been. The fields were a charred
desolation for miles around, the houses blackened shells. The
carcasses of burnt and butchered animals dotted the ground, under
living blankets of carrion crows that rose, cawing furiously, when
disturbed. Smoke still drifted from inside the holdfast. Its timber
palisade looked strong from afar, but had not proved strong
enough.
Riding out in front of the wagons on her horse, Arya saw burnt
bodies impaled on sharpened stakes atop the walls, their hands
drawn up tight in front of their faces as if to fight off the
flames that had consumed them. Yoren called a halt when they were
still some distance off, and told Arya and the other boys to guard
the wagons while he and Murch and Cutjack went in on foot. A flock
of ravens rose from inside the walls when they climbed through the
broken gate, and the caged ravens in their wagons called out to
them with quorks and raucous shrieks.
“Should we go in after them?” Arya asked Gendry
after Yoren and the others had been gone a long time.
“Yoren said wait.” Gendry’s voice sounded
hollow. When Arya turned to look, she saw that he was wearing his
helm, all shiny steel and great curving horns.
When they finally returned, Yoren had a little girl in his arms,
and Murch and Cutjack were carrying a woman in a sling made of an
old torn quilt. The girl was no older than two and she cried all
the time, a whimpery sound, like something was caught in her
throat. Either she couldn’t talk yet or she had forgotten
how. The woman’s right arm ended in a bloody stump at her
elbow, and her eyes didn’t seem to see anything, even when
she was looking right at it. She talked, but she only said one
thing. “Please,” she cried, over and over.
“Please. Please.” Rorge thought that was funny. He
laughed through the hole in his face where his nose had been, and
Biter started laughing too, until Murch cursed them and told them
to shut up.
Yoren had them fix the woman a place in the back of a wagon.
“And be quick about it,” he said. “Come dark,
there’ll be wolves here, and worse.”
“I’m scared,” Hot Pie murmured when he saw the
one-armed woman thrashing in the wagon.
“Me too,” Arya confessed.
He squeezed her shoulder. “I never truly kicked no boy to
death, Arry. I just sold my mommy’s pies, is all.”
Arya rode as far ahead of the wagons as she dared, so she
wouldn’t have to hear the little girl crying or listen to the
woman whisper, “Please.” She remembered a story Old Nan
had told once, about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil
giants. He was very brave and smart and he tricked the giants and
escaped . . . but no sooner was he outside the
castle than the Others took him, and drank his hot red blood. Now
she knew how he must have felt.
The one-armed woman died at evenfall. Gendry and Cutjack dug her
grave on a hillside beneath a weeping willow. When the wind blew,
Arya thought she could hear the long trailing branches whispering,
“Please. Please. Please.” The little hairs on the back
of her neck rose, and she almost ran from the graveside.
“No fire tonight,” Yoren told them. Supper was a
handful of wild radishes Koss found, a cup of dry beans, water from
a nearby brook. The water had a funny taste to it, and Lommy told
them it was the taste of bodies, rotting someplace upstream. Hot
Pie would have hit him if old Reysen hadn’t pulled them
apart.
Arya drank too much water, just to fill her belly with
something. She never thought she’d be able to sleep, yet
somehow she did. When she woke, it was pitch-black and her bladder
was full to bursting. Sleepers huddled all around her, wrapped in
blankets and cloaks. Arya found Needle, stood, listened. She heard
the soft footfalls of a sentry, men turning in restless sleep,
Rorge’s rattling snores, and the queer hissing sound that Biter made when he slept. From a different wagon came the steady
rhythmic scrape of steel on stone as Yoren sat, chewing sourleaf
and sharpening the edge of his dirk.
Hot Pie was one of the boys on watch. “Where you
going?” he asked when he saw Arya heading for the trees.
Arya waved vaguely at the woods.
“No you’re not,” Hot Pie said. He had gotten
bolder again now that he had a sword on his belt, even though it
was just a shortsword and he handled it like a cleaver. “The
old man said for everyone to stay close tonight.”
“I need to make water,” Arya explained.
“Well, use that tree right there.” He pointed.
“You don’t know what’s out there, Arry. I heard
wolves before.”
Yoren wouldn’t like it if she fought with him. She tried
to look afraid. “Wolves? For true?”
“I heard,” he assured her.
“I don’t think I need to go after all.” She
went back to her blanket and pretended to sleep until she heard Hot
Pie’s footsteps going away. Then she rolled over and slipped
off into the woods on the other side of the camp, quiet as a
shadow. There were sentries out this way too, but Arya had no
trouble avoiding them. Just to make sure, she went out twice as far
as usual. When she was sure there was no one near, she skinned down
her breeches and squatted to do her business.
She was making water, her clothing tangled about her ankles,
when she heard rustling from under the trees. Hot Pie, she thought
in panic, he followed me. Then she saw the eyes shining out from
the wood, bright with reflected moonlight. Her belly clenched tight
as she grabbed for Needle, not caring if she pissed herself,
counting eyes, two four eight twelve, a whole
pack . . .
One of them came padding out from under the trees. He stared at
her, and bared his teeth, and all she could think was how stupid
she’d been and how Hot Pie would gloat when they found her
half-eaten body the next morning. But the wolf turned and raced
back into the darkness, and quick as that the eyes were gone.
Trembling, she cleaned herself and laced up and followed a distant
scraping sound back to camp, and to Yoren. Arya climbed up into the
wagon beside him, shaken. “Wolves,” she whispered
hoarsely. “In the woods.”
“Aye. They would be.” He never looked at her.
“They scared me.”
“Did they?” He spat. “Seems to me your kind
was fond o’ wolves.”
“Nymeria was a direwolf.” Arya hugged herself.
“That’s different. Anyhow, she’s gone. Jory and I
threw rocks at her until she ran off, or else the queen would have
killed her.” It made her sad to talk about it. “I bet
if she’d been in the city, she wouldn’t have let them
cut off Father’s head.”
“Orphan boys got no fathers,” Yoren said, “or
did you forget that?” The sourleaf had turned his spit red,
so it looked like his mouth was bleeding. “The only wolves we
got to fear are the ones wear manskin, like those who done for that
village.”
“I wish I was home,” she said miserably. She tried
so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but
sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all.
The black brother peeled a fresh sourleaf from the bale in the
wagon and stuffed it into his mouth. “Might be I should of
left you where I found you, boy. All of you. Safer in the city,
seems to me.”
“I don’t care. I want to go home.”
“Been bringing men to the Wall for close on thirty
years.” Froth shone on Yoren’s lips, like bubbles of
blood. “All that time, I only lost three. Old man died of a
fever, city boy got snakebit taking a shit, and one fool tried to
kill me in my sleep and got a red smile for his trouble.” He
drew the dirk across his throat, to show her. “Three in
thirty years.” He spat out the old sourleaf. “A ship
now, might have been wiser. No chance o’ finding more men on
the way, but still . . . clever man, he’d
go by ship, but me . . . thirty years I been
taking this kingsroad.” He sheathed his dirk. “Go to
sleep, boy. Hear me?”
She did try. Yet as she lay under her thin blanket, she could
hear the wolves howling . . . and another
sound, fainter, no more than a whisper on the wind, that might have
been screams.
The road was little more than two ruts through the weeds.
The good part was, with so little traffic there’d be no
one to point the finger and say which way they’d gone. The
human flood that had flowed down the kingsroad was only a trickle
here.
The bad part was, the road wound back and forth like a snake,
tangling with even smaller trails and sometimes seeming to vanish
entirely only to reappear half a league farther on when they had
all but given up hope. Arya hated it. The land was gentle enough,
rolling hills and terraced fields interspersed with meadows and
woodlands and little valleys where willows crowded close to slow
shallow streams. Even so, the path was so narrow and crooked that
their pace had dropped to a crawl.
It was the wagons that slowed them, lumbering along, axles
creaking under the weight of their heavy loads. A dozen times a day
they had to stop to free a wheel that had stuck in a rut, or double
up the teams to climb a muddy slope. Once, in the middle of a dense
stand of oak, they came face-to-face with three men pulling a load
of firewood in an ox cart, with no way for either to get around.
There had been nothing for it but to wait while the foresters
unhitched their ox, led him through the trees, spun the cart,
hitched the ox up again, and started back the way they’d
come. The ox was even slower than the wagons, so that day they
hardly got anywhere at all.
Arya could not help looking over her shoulder, wondering when
the gold cloaks would catch them. At night, she woke at every noise
to grab for Needle’s hilt. They never made camp without
putting out sentries now, but Arya did not trust them, especially
the orphan boys. They might have done well enough in the alleys of
King’s Landing, but out here they were lost. When she was
being quiet as a shadow, she could sneak past all of them, flitting
out by starlight to make her water in the woods where no one would
see. Once, when Lommy Greenhands had the watch, she shimmied up an
oak and moved from tree to tree until she was right above his head,
and he never saw a thing. She would have jumped down on top of him,
but she knew his scream would wake the whole camp, and Yoren might
take a stick to her again.
Lommy and the other orphans all treated the Bull like someone
special now because the queen wanted his head, though he would have
none of it. “I never did nothing to no queen,” he said
angrily. “I did my work, is all. Bellows and tongs and fetch
and carry. I was s’posed to be an armorer, and one day Master
Mott says I got to join the Night’s Watch, that’s all I
know.” Then he’d go off to polish his helm. It was a
beautiful helm, rounded and curved, with a slit visor and two great
metal bull’s horns. Arya would watch him polish the metal
with an oilcloth, shining it so bright you could see the flames of
the cookfire reflected in the steel. Yet he never actually put it
on his head.
“I bet he’s that traitor’s bastard,”
Lommy said one night, in a hushed voice so Gendry would not hear.
“The wolf lord, the one they nicked on Baelor’s
steps.”
“He is not,” Arya declared. My father only had one
bastard, and that’s Jon. She stalked off into the trees,
wishing she could just saddle her horse and ride home. She was a
good horse, a chestnut mare with a white blaze on her forehead. And
Arya had always been a good rider. She could gallop off and never
see any of them, unless she wanted to. Only then she’d have
no one to scout ahead of her, or watch behind, or stand guard while
she napped, and when the gold cloaks caught her, she’d be all
alone. It was safer to stay with Yoren and the others.
“We’re not far from Gods Eye,” the black
brother said one morning. “The kingsroad won’t be safe
till we’re across the Trident. So we’ll come up around
the lake along the western shore, they’re not like to look
for us there.” At the next spot where two ruts cut cross each
other, he turned the wagons west.
Here farmland gave way to forest, the villages and holdfasts
were smaller and farther apart, the hills higher and the valleys
deeper. Food grew harder to come by. In the city, Yoren had loaded
up the wagons with salt fish, hard bread, lard, turnips, sacks of
beans and barley, and wheels of yellow cheese, but every bite of it
had been eaten. Forced to live off the land, Yoren turned to Koss
and Kurz, who’d been taken as poachers. He would send them
ahead of the column, into the woods, and come dusk they would be
back with a deer slung between them on a pole or a brace of quail
swinging from their belts. The younger boys would be set to picking
blackberries along the road, or climbing fences to fill a sack with
apples if they happened upon an orchard.
Arya was a skilled climber and a fast picker, and she liked to
go off by herself. One day she came across a rabbit, purely by
happenstance. It was brown and fat, with long ears and a twitchy
nose. Rabbits ran faster than cats, but they couldn’t climb
trees half so well. She whacked it with her stick and grabbed it by
its ears, and Yoren stewed it with some mushrooms and wild onions.
Arya was given a whole leg, since it was her rabbit. She shared it
with Gendry. The rest of them each got a spoonful, even the three
in manacles. Jaqen H’ghar thanked her politely for the treat,
and Biter licked the grease off his dirty fingers with a blissful
look, but Rorge, the noseless one, only laughed and said,
“There’s a hunter now. Lumpyface Lumpyhead
Rabbitkiller.”
Outside a holdfast called Briarwhite, some fieldhands surrounded
them in a cornfield, demanding coin for the ears they’d
taken. Yoren eyed their scythes and tossed them a few coppers.
“Time was, a man in black was feasted from Dorne to
Winterfell, and even high lords called it an honor to shelter him
under their roofs,” he said bitterly. “Now cravens like
you want hard coin for a bite of wormy apple.” He spat.
“It’s sweetcorn, better’n a stinking old black
bird like you deserves,” one of them answered roughly.
“You get out of our field now, and take these sneaks and
stabbers with you, or we’ll stake you up in the corn to scare
the other crows away.”
They roasted the sweetcorn in the husk that night, turning the
ears with long forked sticks, and ate it hot right off the cob.
Arya thought it tasted wonderful, but Yoren was too angry to eat. A
cloud seemed to hang over him, ragged and black as his cloak. He
paced about the camp restlessly, muttering to himself.
The next day Koss came racing back to warn Yoren of a camp
ahead. “Twenty or thirty men, in mail and halfhelms,”
he said. “Some of them are cut up bad, and one’s dying,
from the sound of him. With all the noise he was making, I got
right up close. They got spears and shields, but only one horse,
and that’s lame. I think they been there awhile, from the
stink of the place.”
“See a banner?”
“Spotted treecat, yellow and black, on a mud-brown
field.”
Yoren folded a sourleaf into his mouth and chewed.
“Can’t say,” he admitted. “Might be one
side, might be t’other. If they’re hurt that bad,
likely they’d take our mounts no matter who they are. Might
be they’d take more than that. I believe we’ll go wide
around them.” It took them miles out of their way, and cost
them two days at the least, but the old man said it was cheap at
the price. “You’ll have time enough on the Wall. The
rest o’ your lives, most like. Seems to me there’s no
rush to get there. “
Arya saw men guarding the fields more and more when they turned
north again. Often they stood silently beside the road, giving a
cold eye to anyone who passed. Elsewhere they patrolled on horses,
riding their fence lines with axes strapped to their saddles. At
one place, she spotted a man perched up in a dead tree, with a bow
in his hand and a quiver hanging from the branch beside him. The
moment he spied them, he notched an arrow to his bowstring, and
never looked away until the last wagon was out of sight. All the
while, Yoren cursed. “Him in his tree, let’s see how
well he likes it up there when the Others come to take him.
He’ll scream for the Watch then, that he will.”
A day later Dobber spied a red glow against the evening sky.
“Either this road went and turned again, or that sun’s
setting in the north.”
Yoren climbed a rise to get a better look. “Fire,”
he announced. He licked a thumb and held it up. “Wind should
blow it away from us. Still bears watching.”
And watch it they did. As the world darkened, the fire seemed to
grow brighter and brighter, until it looked as though the whole
north was ablaze. From time to time, they could even smell the
smoke, though the wind held steady and the flames never got any
closer. By dawn the fire had burned itself out, but none of them
slept very well that night.
It was midday when they arrived at the
place where the village had been. The fields were a charred
desolation for miles around, the houses blackened shells. The
carcasses of burnt and butchered animals dotted the ground, under
living blankets of carrion crows that rose, cawing furiously, when
disturbed. Smoke still drifted from inside the holdfast. Its timber
palisade looked strong from afar, but had not proved strong
enough.
Riding out in front of the wagons on her horse, Arya saw burnt
bodies impaled on sharpened stakes atop the walls, their hands
drawn up tight in front of their faces as if to fight off the
flames that had consumed them. Yoren called a halt when they were
still some distance off, and told Arya and the other boys to guard
the wagons while he and Murch and Cutjack went in on foot. A flock
of ravens rose from inside the walls when they climbed through the
broken gate, and the caged ravens in their wagons called out to
them with quorks and raucous shrieks.
“Should we go in after them?” Arya asked Gendry
after Yoren and the others had been gone a long time.
“Yoren said wait.” Gendry’s voice sounded
hollow. When Arya turned to look, she saw that he was wearing his
helm, all shiny steel and great curving horns.
When they finally returned, Yoren had a little girl in his arms,
and Murch and Cutjack were carrying a woman in a sling made of an
old torn quilt. The girl was no older than two and she cried all
the time, a whimpery sound, like something was caught in her
throat. Either she couldn’t talk yet or she had forgotten
how. The woman’s right arm ended in a bloody stump at her
elbow, and her eyes didn’t seem to see anything, even when
she was looking right at it. She talked, but she only said one
thing. “Please,” she cried, over and over.
“Please. Please.” Rorge thought that was funny. He
laughed through the hole in his face where his nose had been, and
Biter started laughing too, until Murch cursed them and told them
to shut up.
Yoren had them fix the woman a place in the back of a wagon.
“And be quick about it,” he said. “Come dark,
there’ll be wolves here, and worse.”
“I’m scared,” Hot Pie murmured when he saw the
one-armed woman thrashing in the wagon.
“Me too,” Arya confessed.
He squeezed her shoulder. “I never truly kicked no boy to
death, Arry. I just sold my mommy’s pies, is all.”
Arya rode as far ahead of the wagons as she dared, so she
wouldn’t have to hear the little girl crying or listen to the
woman whisper, “Please.” She remembered a story Old Nan
had told once, about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil
giants. He was very brave and smart and he tricked the giants and
escaped . . . but no sooner was he outside the
castle than the Others took him, and drank his hot red blood. Now
she knew how he must have felt.
The one-armed woman died at evenfall. Gendry and Cutjack dug her
grave on a hillside beneath a weeping willow. When the wind blew,
Arya thought she could hear the long trailing branches whispering,
“Please. Please. Please.” The little hairs on the back
of her neck rose, and she almost ran from the graveside.
“No fire tonight,” Yoren told them. Supper was a
handful of wild radishes Koss found, a cup of dry beans, water from
a nearby brook. The water had a funny taste to it, and Lommy told
them it was the taste of bodies, rotting someplace upstream. Hot
Pie would have hit him if old Reysen hadn’t pulled them
apart.
Arya drank too much water, just to fill her belly with
something. She never thought she’d be able to sleep, yet
somehow she did. When she woke, it was pitch-black and her bladder
was full to bursting. Sleepers huddled all around her, wrapped in
blankets and cloaks. Arya found Needle, stood, listened. She heard
the soft footfalls of a sentry, men turning in restless sleep,
Rorge’s rattling snores, and the queer hissing sound that Biter made when he slept. From a different wagon came the steady
rhythmic scrape of steel on stone as Yoren sat, chewing sourleaf
and sharpening the edge of his dirk.
Hot Pie was one of the boys on watch. “Where you
going?” he asked when he saw Arya heading for the trees.
Arya waved vaguely at the woods.
“No you’re not,” Hot Pie said. He had gotten
bolder again now that he had a sword on his belt, even though it
was just a shortsword and he handled it like a cleaver. “The
old man said for everyone to stay close tonight.”
“I need to make water,” Arya explained.
“Well, use that tree right there.” He pointed.
“You don’t know what’s out there, Arry. I heard
wolves before.”
Yoren wouldn’t like it if she fought with him. She tried
to look afraid. “Wolves? For true?”
“I heard,” he assured her.
“I don’t think I need to go after all.” She
went back to her blanket and pretended to sleep until she heard Hot
Pie’s footsteps going away. Then she rolled over and slipped
off into the woods on the other side of the camp, quiet as a
shadow. There were sentries out this way too, but Arya had no
trouble avoiding them. Just to make sure, she went out twice as far
as usual. When she was sure there was no one near, she skinned down
her breeches and squatted to do her business.
She was making water, her clothing tangled about her ankles,
when she heard rustling from under the trees. Hot Pie, she thought
in panic, he followed me. Then she saw the eyes shining out from
the wood, bright with reflected moonlight. Her belly clenched tight
as she grabbed for Needle, not caring if she pissed herself,
counting eyes, two four eight twelve, a whole
pack . . .
One of them came padding out from under the trees. He stared at
her, and bared his teeth, and all she could think was how stupid
she’d been and how Hot Pie would gloat when they found her
half-eaten body the next morning. But the wolf turned and raced
back into the darkness, and quick as that the eyes were gone.
Trembling, she cleaned herself and laced up and followed a distant
scraping sound back to camp, and to Yoren. Arya climbed up into the
wagon beside him, shaken. “Wolves,” she whispered
hoarsely. “In the woods.”
“Aye. They would be.” He never looked at her.
“They scared me.”
“Did they?” He spat. “Seems to me your kind
was fond o’ wolves.”
“Nymeria was a direwolf.” Arya hugged herself.
“That’s different. Anyhow, she’s gone. Jory and I
threw rocks at her until she ran off, or else the queen would have
killed her.” It made her sad to talk about it. “I bet
if she’d been in the city, she wouldn’t have let them
cut off Father’s head.”
“Orphan boys got no fathers,” Yoren said, “or
did you forget that?” The sourleaf had turned his spit red,
so it looked like his mouth was bleeding. “The only wolves we
got to fear are the ones wear manskin, like those who done for that
village.”
“I wish I was home,” she said miserably. She tried
so hard to be brave, to be fierce as a wolverine and all, but
sometimes she felt like she was just a little girl after all.
The black brother peeled a fresh sourleaf from the bale in the
wagon and stuffed it into his mouth. “Might be I should of
left you where I found you, boy. All of you. Safer in the city,
seems to me.”
“I don’t care. I want to go home.”
“Been bringing men to the Wall for close on thirty
years.” Froth shone on Yoren’s lips, like bubbles of
blood. “All that time, I only lost three. Old man died of a
fever, city boy got snakebit taking a shit, and one fool tried to
kill me in my sleep and got a red smile for his trouble.” He
drew the dirk across his throat, to show her. “Three in
thirty years.” He spat out the old sourleaf. “A ship
now, might have been wiser. No chance o’ finding more men on
the way, but still . . . clever man, he’d
go by ship, but me . . . thirty years I been
taking this kingsroad.” He sheathed his dirk. “Go to
sleep, boy. Hear me?”
She did try. Yet as she lay under her thin blanket, she could
hear the wolves howling . . . and another
sound, fainter, no more than a whisper on the wind, that might have
been screams.