When she climbed all the way up to the highest branch, Arya
could see chimneys poking through the trees. Thatched roofs
clustered along the shore of the lake and the small stream that
emptied into it, and a wooden pier jutted out into the water beside
a low long building with a slate roof.
She skinnied farther out, until the branch began to sag under
her weight. No boats were tied to the pier, but she could see thin
tendrils of smoke rising from some of the chimneys, and part of a
wagon jutting out behind a stable. Someone’s there. Arya chewed her lip. All the other places
they’d come upon had been empty and desolate. Farms,
villages, castles, septs, barns, it made no matter. If it could
burn, the Lannisters had burned it; if it could die, they’d
killed it. They had even set the woods ablaze where they could,
though the leaves were still green and wet from recent rains, and
the fires had not spread. “They would have burned the lake if
they could have,” Gendry had said, and Arya knew he was
right. On the night of their escape, the flames of the burning town
had shimmered so brightly on the water that it had seemed that the
lake was afire.
When they finally summoned the nerve to steal back into the
ruins the next night, nothing remained but blackened stones, the
hollow shells of houses, and corpses. In some places wisps of pale
smoke still rose from the ashes. Hot Pie had pleaded with them not
to go back, and Lommy called them fools and swore that Ser Amory
would catch them and kill them too, but Lorch and his men had long
gone by the time they reached the holdfast. They found the gates
broken down, the walls partly demolished, and the inside strewn
with the unburied dead. One look was enough for Gendry.
“They’re killed, every one,” he said. “And
dogs have been at them too, look.”
“Or wolves.”
“Dogs, wolves, it makes no matter. It’s done
here.”
But Arya would not leave until they found Yoren. They
couldn’t have killed him, she told herself, he was too hard
and tough, and a brother of the Night’s Watch besides. She
said as much to Gendry as they searched among the corpses.
The axe blow that had killed him had split his skull apart, but
the great tangled beard could be no one else’s, or the garb,
patched and unwashed and so faded it was more grey than black. Ser
Amory Lorch had given no more thought to burying his own dead than
to those he had murdered, and the corpses of four Lannister
men-at-arms were heaped near Yoren’s. Arya wondered how many
it had taken to bring him down. He was going to take me home, she thought as they dug the old
man’s hole. There were too many dead to bury them all, but
Yoren at least must have a grave, Arya had insisted. He was going
to bring me safe to Winterfell, he promised. Part of her wanted to
cry. The other part wanted to kick him.
It was Gendry who thought of the lord’s towerhouse and the
three that Yoren had sent to hold it. They had come under attack as
well, but the round tower had only one entry, a second-story door
reached by a ladder. Once that had been pulled inside, Ser
Amory’s men could not get at them. The Lannisters had piled
brush around the tower’s base and set it afire, but the stone
would not burn, and Lorch did not have the patience to starve them
out. Cutjack opened the door at Gendry’s shout, and when Kurz
said they’d be better pressing on north than going back, Arya
had clung to the hope that she still might reach Winterfell.
Well, this village was no Winterfell, but those thatched roofs
promised warmth and shelter and maybe even food, if they were bold
enough to risk them. Unless it’s Lorch there. He had horses;
he would have traveled faster than us.
She watched from the tree for a long time, hoping she might see
something; a man, a horse, a banner, anything that would help her
know. A few times she glimpsed motion, but the buildings were so
far off it was hard to be certain. Once, very clearly, she heard
the whinny of a horse.
The air was full of birds, crows mostly. From afar, they were no
larger than flies as they wheeled and flapped above the thatched
roofs. To the east, Gods Eye was a sheet of sun-hammered blue that
filled half the world. Some days, as they made their slow way up
the muddy shore (Gendry wanted no part of any roads, and even Hot
Pie and Lommy saw the sense in that), Arya felt as though the lake
were calling her. She wanted to leap into those placid blue waters,
to feel clean again, to swim and splash and bask in the sun. But
she dare not take off her clothes where the others could see, not
even to wash them. At the end of the day she would often sit on a
rock and dangle her feet in the cool water. She had finally thrown
away her cracked and rotted shoes. Walking barefoot was hard at
first, but the blisters had finally broken, the cuts had healed,
and her soles had turned to leather. The mud was nice between her
toes, and she liked to feel the earth underfoot when she
walked.
From up here, she could see a small wooded island off to the
northeast. Thirty yards from shore, three black swans were gliding
over the water, so serene . . . no one had told
them that war had come, and they cared nothing for burning towns
and butchered men. She stared at them with yearning. Part of her
wanted to be a swan. The other part wanted to eat one. She had
broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs
weren’t so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse,
but still not as bad as the pain in your belly after days without
food. Finding bugs was easy, all you had to do was kick over a
rock. Arya had eaten a bug once when she was little, just to make
Sansa screech, so she hadn’t been afraid to eat another.
Weasel wasn’t either, but Hot Pie retched up the beetle he
tried to swallow, and Lommy and Gendry wouldn’t even try.
Yesterday Gendry had caught a frog and shared it with Lommy, and, a
few days before, Hot Pie had found blackberries and stripped the
bush bare, but mostly they had been living on water and acorns.
Kurz had told them how to use rocks and make a kind of acorn paste.
it tasted awful.
She wished the poacher hadn’t died. He’d known more
about the woods than all the rest of them together, but he’d
taken an arrow through the shoulder pulling in the ladder at the
towerhouse. Tarber had packed it with mud and moss from the lake,
and for a day or two Kurz swore the wound was nothing, even though
the flesh of his throat was turning dark while angry red welts
crept up his jaw and down his chest. Then one morning he
couldn’t find the strength to get up, and by the next he was
dead.
They buried him under a mound of stones, and Cutjack had claimed
his sword and hunting horn, while Tarber helped himself to bow and
boots and knife. They’d taken it all when they left. At first
they thought the two had just gone hunting, that they’d soon
return with game and feed them all. But they waited and waited,
until finally Gendry made them move on. Maybe Tarber and Cutjack
figured they would stand a better chance without a gaggle of orphan
boys to herd along. They probably would too, but that didn’t
stop her hating them for leaving.
Beneath her tree, Hot Pie barked like a dog. Kurz had told them
to use animal sounds to signal to each other. An old
poacher’s trick, he’d said, but he’d died before
he could teach them how to make the sounds right. Hot Pie’s
bird calls were awful. His dog was better, but not much.
Arya hopped from the high branch to one beneath it, her hands
out for balance. A water dancer never falls. Lightfoot, her toes
curled tight around the branch, she walked a few feet, hopped down
to a larger limb, then swung hand over hand through the tangle of
leaves until she reached the trunk. The bark was rough beneath her
fingers, against her toes. She descended quickly, jumping down the
final six feet, rolling when she landed.
Gendry gave her a hand to pull her up. “You were up there
a long time. What could you see?”
“A fishing village, just a little place, north along the
shore. Twenty-six thatch roofs and one slate, I counted. I saw part
of a wagon. Someone’s there.”
At the sound of her voice, Weasel came creeping out from the
bushes. Lommy had named her that. He said she looked like a weasel,
which wasn’t true, but they couldn’t keep on calling
her the crying girl after she finally stopped crying. Her mouth was
filthy. Arya hoped she hadn’t been eating mud again.
“Did you see people?” asked Gendry.
“Mostly just roofs,” Arya admitted, “but some
chimneys were smoking, and I heard a horse.” The Weasel put
her arms around her leg, clutching tight. Sometimes she did that
now.
“If there’s people, there’s food,” Hot
Pie said, too loudly. Gendry was always telling him to be more
quiet, but it never did any good. “Might be they’d give
us some.”
“Might be they’d kill us too,” Gendry
said.
“Not if we yielded,” Hot Pie said hopefully.
“Now you sound like Lommy.”
Lommy Greenhands sat propped up between two thick roots at the
foot of an oak. A spear had taken him through his left calf during
the fight at the holdfast. By the end of the next day, he had to
limp along one-legged with an arm around Gendry, and now he
couldn’t even do that. They’d hacked branches off trees
to make a litter for him, but it was slow, hard work carrying him
along, and he whimpered every time they jounced him.
“We have to yield,” he said. “That’s
what Yoren should have done. He should have opened the gates like
they said.”
Arya was sick of Lommy going on about how Yoren should have
yielded. It was all he talked about when they carried him, that and
his leg and his empty belly.
Hot Pie agreed. “They told Yoren to open the gates, they
told him in the king’s name. You have to do what they tell
you in the king’s name. It was that stinky old man’s
fault. If he’d of yielded, they would have left us
be.”
Gendry frowned. “Knights and lordlings, they take each
other captive and pay ransoms, but they don’t care if the
likes of you yield or not.” He turned to Arya. “What
else did you see?”
“If it’s a fishing village, they’d sell us
fish, I bet,” said Hot Pie. The lake teemed with fresh fish,
but they had nothing to catch them with. Arya had tried to use her
hands, the way she’d seen Koss do, but fish were quicker than
pigeons and the water played tricks on her eyes.
“I don’t know about fish.” Arya tugged at the
Weasel’s matted hair, thinking it might be best to hack it
off. “There’s crows down by the water.
Something’s dead there.”
“Fish, washed up on shore,” Hot Pie said. “If
the crows eat it, I bet we could.”
“We should catch some crows, we could eat them,”
said Lommy. “We could make a fire and roast them like
chickens.”
Gendry looked fierce when he scowled. His beard had grown in
thick and black as briar. “I said, no fires.”
“Lommy’s hungry,” Hot Pie whined, “and I
am too.”
“We’re all hungry,” said Arya.
“You’re not,” Lommy spat from the ground.
“Worm breath.”
Arya could have kicked him in his wound. “I said I’d
dig worms for you too, if you wanted.”
Lommy made a disgusted face. “If it wasn’t for my
leg, I’d hunt us some boars.”
“Some boars,” she mocked. “You need a
boarspear to hunt boars, and horses and dogs, and men to flush the
boar from its lair.” Her father had hunted boar in the
wolfswood with Robb and Jon. Once he even took Bran, but never
Arya, even though she was older. Septa Mordane said boar hunting
was not for ladies, and Mother only promised that when she was
older she might have her own hawk. She was older now, but if she
had a hawk she’d eat it.
“What do you know about hunting boars?” said Hot
Pie.
“More than you.”
Gendry was in no mood to hear it. “Quiet, both of you, I
need to think what to do.” He always looked pained when he
tried to think, like it hurt him something fierce.
“Yield,” Lommy said.
“I told you to shut up about the yielding. We don’t
even know who’s in there. Maybe we can steal some
food.”
“Lommy could steal, if it wasn’t for his leg,”
said Hot Pie. “He was a thief in the city.”
“A bad thief,” Arya said, “or he
wouldn’t have got caught.”
Gendry squinted up at the sun. “Evenfall will be the best
time to sneak in. I’ll go scout come dark.”
“No, I’ll go,” Arya said. “You’re
too noisy.”
Gendry got that look on his face. “We’ll both
go.”
“Arry should go,” said Lommy. “He’s
sneakier than you are.”
“We’ll both go, I said.”
“But what if you don’t come back? Hot Pie
can’t carry me by himself, you know he
can’t . . . ”
“And there’s wolves,” Hot Pie said. “I
heard them last night, when I had the watch. They sounded
close.”
Arya had heard them too. She’d been asleep in the branches
of an elm, but the howling had woken her. She’d sat awake for
a good hour, listening to them, prickles creeping up her spine.
“And you won’t even let us have a fire to keep them
off,” Hot Pie said. “It’s not right, leaving us
for the wolves.”
“No one is leaving you,” Gendry said in disgust.
“Lommy has his spear if the wolves come, and you’ll be
with him. We’re just going to go see, that’s all;
we’re coming back.”
“Whoever it is, you should yield to them,” Lommy
whined. “I need some potion for my leg, it hurts
bad.”
“If we see any leg potion, we’ll bring it,”
Gendry said. “Arry, let’s go, I want to get near before
the sun is down. Hot Pie, you keep Weasel here, I don’t want
her following.”
“Last time she kicked me.”
“I’ll kick you if you don’t keep her
here.” Without waiting for an answer, Gendry donned his steel
helm and walked off.
Arya had to scamper to keep up. Gendry was five years older and
a foot taller than she was, and long of leg as well. For a while he
said nothing, just plowed on through the trees with an angry look
on his face, making too much noise. But finally he stopped and
said, “I think Lommy’s going to die.”
She was not surprised. Kurz had died of his wound, and
he’d been a lot stronger than Lommy. Whenever it was
Arya’s turn to help carry him, she could feel how warm his
skin was, and smell the stink off his leg. “Maybe we could
find a maester . . . ”
“You only find maesters in castles, and even if we found
one, he wouldn’t dirty his hands on the likes of
Lommy.” Gendry ducked under a low-hanging limb.
“That’s not true.” Maester Luwin would have
helped anyone who came to him, she was certain.
“He’s going to die, and the sooner he does it, the
better for the rest of us. We should just leave him, like he says.
If it was you or me hurt, you know he’d leave us.” They
scrambled down a steep cut and up the other side, using roots for
handholds. “I’m sick of carrying him, and I’m
sick of all his talk about yielding too. If he could stand up,
I’d knock his teeth in. Lommy’s no use to anyone. That
crying girl’s no use either.”
“You leave Weasel alone, she’s just scared and
hungry is all.” Arya glanced back, but the girl was not
following for once. Hot Pie must have grabbed her, like Gendry had
told him.
“She’s no use,” Gendry repeated stubbornly.
“Her and Hot Pie and Lommy, they’re slowing us down,
and they’re going to get us killed. You’re the only one
of the bunch who’s good for anything. Even if you are a
girl.”
Arya froze in her steps. “I’m not a girl!”
“Yes you are. Do you think I’m as stupid as they
are?”
“No, you’re stupider. The Night’s Watch
doesn’t take girls, everyone knows that.”
“That’s true. I don’t know why Yoren brought
you, but he must have had some reason. You’re still a
girl.”
“I am not!”
“Then pull out your cock and take a piss. Go
on.”
“I don’t need to take a piss. If I wanted to I
could.”
“Liar. You can’t take out your cock because you
don’t have one. I never noticed before when there were thirty
of us, but you always go off in the woods to make your water. You
don’t see Hot Pie doing that, nor me neither. If you’re
not a girl, you must be some eunuch.”
“You’re the eunuch.”
“You know I’m not.” Gendry smiled. “You
want me to take out my cock and prove it? I don’t have
anything to hide.”
“Yes you do,” Arya blurted, desperate to escape the
subject of the cock she didn’t have. “Those gold cloaks
were after you at the inn, and you won’t tell us
why.”
“I wish I knew. I think Yoren knew, but he never told me.
Why did you think they were after you, though?”
Arya bit her lip. She remembered what Yoren had said, the day he
had hacked off her hair. This lot, half o’ them would turn
you over to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few
silvers. The other half’d do the same, only they’d rape
you first. Only Gendry was different, the queen wanted him too.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me,” she said
warily.
“I would if I knew, Arry . . . is that
really what you’re called, or do you have some girl’s
name?”
Arya glared at the gnarled root by her feet. She realized that
the pretense was done. Gendry knew, and she had nothing in her
pants to convince him otherwise. She could draw Needle and kill him
where he stood, or else trust him. She wasn’t certain
she’d be able to kill him, even if she tried; he had his own
sword, and he was a lot stronger. All that was left was the truth.
“Lommy and Hot Pie can’t know,” she said.
“They won’t,” he swore. “Not from
me.”
“Arya.” She raised her eyes to his. “My name
is Arya. Of House Stark.”
“Of House . . . ” It took him a moment before he said, “The
King’s Hand was named Stark. The one they killed for a
traitor.”
“He was never a traitor. He was my father.”
Gendry’s eyes widened. “So that’s why you
thought . . . ”
She nodded. “Yoren was taking me home to
Winterfell.”
“I . . . you’re highborn then,
a . . . you’ll be a
lady . . . ”
Arya looked down at her ragged clothes and bare feet, all
cracked and callused. She saw the dirt under her nails, the scabs
on her elbows, the scratches on her hands. Septa Mordane
wouldn’t even know me, I bet. Sansa might, but she’d
pretend not to. “My mother’s a lady, and my sister, but
I never was.”
“Yes you were. You were a lord’s daughter and you
lived in a castle, didn’t you? And
you . . . gods be good, I
never . . . ” All of a sudden Gendry
seemed uncertain, almost afraid. “All that about cocks, I
never should have said that. And I been pissing in front of you and
everything, I . . . I beg your pardon, m’lady.”
“Stop that!” Arya hissed. Was he mocking her?
“I know my courtesies, m’lady,” Gendry said,
stubborn as ever. “Whenever highborn girls came into the shop
with their fathers, my master told me I was to bend the knee, and
speak only when they spoke to me, and call them
m’lady.”
“If you start calling me m’lady, even Hot Pie is
going to notice. And you better keep on pissing the same way
too.”
“As m’lady commands.”
Arya slammed his chest with both hands. He tripped over a stone
and sat down with a thump. “What kind of lord’s
daughter are you?” he said, laughing.
“This kind.” She kicked him in the side, but it only
made him laugh harder. “You laugh all you like. I’m
going to see who’s in the village.” The sun had already
fallen below the trees; dusk would be on them in no time at all.
For once it was Gendry who had to hurry after. “You smell
that?” she asked.
He sniffed the air. “Rotten fish?”
“You know it’s not.”
“We better be careful. I’ll go around west, see if
there’s some road. There must be if you saw a wagon. You take
the shore. If you need help, bark like a dog.”
“That’s stupid. If I need help, I’ll shout
help.” She darted away, bare feet silent in the grass. When
she glanced back over her shoulder, he was watching her with that
pained look on his face that meant he was thinking. He’s
probably thinking that he shouldn’t be letting m’lady
go stealing food. Arya just knew he was going to be stupid now.
The smell grew stronger as she got closer to the village. It did
not smell like rotten fish to her. This stench was ranker, fouler.
She wrinkled her nose.
Where the trees began to thin, she used the undergrowth,
slipping from bush to bush quiet as a shadow. Every few yards she
stopped to listen. The third time, she heard horses, and a
man’s voice as well. And the smell got worse. Dead
man’s stink, that’s what it is. She had smelled it
before, with Yoren and the others.
A dense thicket of brambles grew south of the village. By the
time she reached it, the long shadows of sunset had begun to fade,
and the lantern bugs were coming out. She could see thatched roofs
just beyond the hedge. She crept along until she found a gap and
squirmed through on her belly, keeping well hidden until she saw
what made the smell.
Beside the gently lapping waters of Gods Eye, a long gibbet of
raw green wood had been thrown up, and things that had once been
men dangled there, their feet in chains, while crows pecked at
their flesh and flapped from corpse to corpse. For every crow there
were a hundred flies. When the wind blew off the lake, the nearest
corpse twisted on its chain, ever so slightly. The crows had eaten
most of its face, and something else had been at it as well,
something much larger. Throat and chest had been torn apart, and
glistening green entrails and ribbons of ragged flesh dangled from
where the belly had been opened. one arm had been ripped right off
the shoulder; Arya saw the bones a few feet away, gnawed and
cracked, picked clean of meat.
She made herself look at the next man and the one beyond him and
the one beyond him, telling herself she was hard as a stone.
Corpses all, so savaged and decayed that it took her a moment to
realize they had been stripped before they were hanged. They did
not look like naked people; they hardly looked like people at all.
The crows had eaten their eyes, and sometimes their faces. Of the
sixth in the long row, nothing remained but a single leg, still
tangled in its chains, swaying with each breeze. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Dead men could not hurt her, but
whoever had killed them could. Well beyond the gibbet, two men in
mail hauberks stood leaning on their spears in front of the long
low building by the water, the one with the slate roof. A pair of
tall poles had been driven into the muddy ground in front of it,
banners drooping from each staff. One looked red and one paler,
white or yellow maybe, but both were limp and with the dusk
settling, she could not even be certain that red one was Lannister
crimson. I don’t need to see the lion, I can see all the dead
people, who else would it be but Lannisters?
Then there was a shout.
The two spearmen turned at the cry, and a third man came into
view, shoving a captive before him. It was growing too dark to make
out faces, but the prisoner was wearing a shiny steel helm, and
when Arya saw the horns she knew it was Gendry. You stupid stupid
stupid STUPID! she thought. If he’d been here she would have
kicked him again.
The guards were talking loudly, but she was too far away to make
out the words, especially with the crows gabbling and flapping
closer to hand. One of the spearmen snatched the helm off
Gendry’s head and asked him a question, but he must not have
liked the answer, because he smashed him across the face with the
butt of his spear and knocked him down. The one who’d
captured him gave him a kick, while the second spearman was trying
on the bull’s-head helm. Finally they pulled him to his feet
and marched him off toward the storehouse. When they opened the
heavy wooden doors, a small boy darted out, but one of the guards
grabbed his arm and flung him back inside. Arya heard sobbing from
inside the building, and then a shriek so loud and full of pain
that it made her bite her lip.
The guards shoved Gendry inside with the boy and barred the
doors behind them. Just then, a breath of wind came sighing off the
lake, and the banners stirred and lifted. The one on the tall staff
bore the golden lion, as she’d feared. On the other, three
sleek black shapes ran across a field as yellow as butter. Dogs,
she thought. Arya had seen those dogs before, but where?
It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that
they had Gendry. Even if he was stubborn and stupid, she had to get
him out. She wondered if they knew that the queen wanted him.
One of the guards took off his helm and donned Gendry’s
instead. It made her angry to see him wearing it, but she knew
there was nothing she could do to stop him. She thought she heard
more screams from inside the windowless storehouse, muffled by the
masonry, but it was hard to be certain.
She stayed long enough to see the guard changed, and much more
besides. Men came and went. They led their horses down to the
stream to drink. A hunting party returned from the wood, carrying a
deer’s carcass slung from a pole. She watched them clean and
gut it and build a cookfire on the far side of the stream, and the
smell of cooking meat mingled queerly with the stench of
corruption. Her empty belly roiled and she thought she might retch.
The prospect of food brought other men out of the houses, near all
of them wearing bits of mail or boiled leather. When the deer was
cooked, the choicest portions were carried to one of the
houses.
She thought that the dark might let her crawl close and free
Gendry, but the guards kindled torches off the cookfire. A squire
brought meat and bread to the two guarding the storehouse, and
later two more men joined them and they all passed a skin of wine
from hand to hand. When it was empty the others left, but the two
guards remained, leaning on their spears.
Arya’s arms and legs were stiff when she finally wriggled
out from under the briar into the dark of the wood. It was a black
night, with a thin sliver of moon appearing and disappearing as the
clouds blew past. Silent as a shadow, she told herself as she moved
through the trees. In this darkness she dared not run, for fear of
tripping on some unseen root or losing her way. On her left Gods
Eye lapped calmly against its shores. on her right a wind sighed
through the branches, and leaves rustled and stirred. Far off, she
heard the howling of wolves.
Lommy and Hot Pie almost shit themselves when she stepped out of
the trees behind them. “Quiet,” she told them, putting
an arm around Weasel when the little girl came running up.
Hot Pie stared at her with big eyes. “We thought you left
us.” He had his shortsword in hand, the one Yoren had taken
off the gold cloak. “I was scared you was a wolf.”
“Where’s the Bull?” asked Lommy.
“They caught him,” Arya whispered. “We have to
get him out. Hot Pie, you got to help. We’ll sneak up and
kill the guards, and then I’ll open the door.”
Hot Pie and Lommy exchanged a look. “How many?”
“I couldn’t count,” Arya admitted.
“Twenty at least, but only two on the door.”
Hot Pie looked as if he were going to cry. “We can’t
fight twenty.”
“You only need to fight one. I’ll do the other and
we’ll get Gendry out and run.”
“We should yield,” Lommy said. “Just go in and
yield.”
Arya shook her head stubbornly.
“Then just leave him, Arry,” Lommy pleaded.
“They don’t know about the rest of us. If we hide,
they’ll go away, you know they will. It’s not our fault
Gendry’s captured.”
“You’re stupid, Lommy,” Arya said angrily.
“You’ll die if we don’t get Gendry out.
Who’s going to carry you?”
“You and Hot Pie.”
“All the time, with no one else to help? We’ll never
do it. Gendry was the strong one. Anyhow, I don’t care what
you say, I’m going back for him.” She looked at Hot
Pie. “Are you coming?”
Hot Pie glanced at Lommy, at Arya, at Lommy again.
“I’ll come,” he said reluctantly.
“Lommy, you keep Weasel here.”
He grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her close.
“What if the wolves come?”
“Yield,” Arya suggested.
Finding their way back to the village seemed to take hours. Hot
Pie kept stumbling in the dark and losing his way, and Arya had to
wait for him and double back. Finally she took him by the hand and
led him along through the trees. “Just be quiet and
follow.” When they could make out the first faint glow of the
village fires against the sky, she said, “There’s dead
men hanging on the other side of the hedge, but they’re
nothing to be scared of, just remember fear cuts deeper than
swords. We have to go real quiet and slow.” Hot Pie
nodded.
She wriggled under the briar first and waited for him on the far
side, crouched low. Hot Pie emerged pale and panting, face and arms
bloody with long scratches. He started to say something, but Arya
put a finger to his lips. On hands and knees, they crawled along
the gibbet, beneath the swaying dead. Hot Pie never once looked up,
nor made a sound.
Until the crow landed on his back, and he gave a muffled gasp.
“Who’s there?” a voice boomed suddenly from the
dark.
Hot Pie leapt to his feet. “I yield!” He threw away
his sword as dozens of crows rose shrieking and complaining to flap
about the corpses. Arya grabbed his leg and tried to drag him back
down, but he wrenched loose and ran forward, waving his arms.
“I yield, I yield.”
She bounced up and drew Needle, but by then men were all around
her. Arya slashed at the nearest, but he blocked her with a
steel-clad arm, and someone else slammed into her and dragged her
to the ground, and a third man wrenched the sword from her grasp.
When she tried to bite, her teeth snapped shut on cold dirty
chainmail. “Oho, a fierce one,” the man said, laughing.
The blow from his iron-clad fist near knocked her head off.
They talked over her as she lay hurting, but Arya could not seem
to understand the words. Her ears rang. When she tried to crawl
off, the earth moved beneath her. They took Needle. The shame of
that hurt worse than the pain, and the pain hurt a lot. Jon had
given her that sword. Syrio had taught her to use it.
Finally someone grabbed the front of her jerkin, yanked her to
her knees. Hot Pie was kneeling too, before the tallest man Arya
had ever seen, a monster from one of Old Nan’s stories. She
never saw where the giant had come from. Three black dogs raced
across his faded yellow surcoat, and his face looked as hard as if
it had been cut from stone. Suddenly Arya knew where she had seen
those dogs before. The night of the tourney at King’s
Landing, all the knights had hung their shields outside their
pavilions. “That one belongs to the Hound’s
brother,” Sansa had confided when they passed the black dogs
on the yellow field. “He’s even bigger than Hodor,
you’ll see. They call him the Mountain That Rides.”
Arya let her head droop, only half aware of what was going on
around her. Hot Pie was yielding some more. The Mountain said,
“You’ll lead us to these others,” and walked off.
Next she was stumbling past the dead men on their gibbet, while Hot
Pie told their captors he’d bake them pies and tarts if they
didn’t hurt him. Four men went with them. One carried a
torch, one a longsword; two had spears.
They found Lommy where they’d left him, under the oak.
“I yield,” he called out at once when he saw them.
He’d flung away his own spear and raised his hands, splotchy
green with old dye. “I yield. Please.”
The man with the torch searched around under the trees.
“Are you the last? Baker boy said there was a
girl.”
“She ran off when she heard you coming,” Lommy said.
“You made a lot of noise.” And Arya thought, Run,
Weasel, run as far as you can, run and hide and never come
back.
“Tell us where we can find that whoreson Dondarrion, and
there’ll be a hot meal in it for you.”
“Who?” said Lommy blankly.
“I told you, this lot don’t know no more than those
cunts in the village. Waste o’bloody time.”
One of the spearmen drifted over to Lommy. “Something
wrong with your leg, boy?”
“It got hurt.”
“Can you walk?” He sounded concerned.
“No,” said Lommy. “You got to carry
me.”
“Think so?” The man lifted his spear casually and
drove the point through the boy’s soft throat. Lommy never
even had time to yield again. He jerked once, and that was all.
When the man pulled his spear loose, blood sprayed out in a dark
fountain. “Carry him, he says,” he muttered,
chuckling.
When she climbed all the way up to the highest branch, Arya
could see chimneys poking through the trees. Thatched roofs
clustered along the shore of the lake and the small stream that
emptied into it, and a wooden pier jutted out into the water beside
a low long building with a slate roof.
She skinnied farther out, until the branch began to sag under
her weight. No boats were tied to the pier, but she could see thin
tendrils of smoke rising from some of the chimneys, and part of a
wagon jutting out behind a stable. Someone’s there. Arya chewed her lip. All the other places
they’d come upon had been empty and desolate. Farms,
villages, castles, septs, barns, it made no matter. If it could
burn, the Lannisters had burned it; if it could die, they’d
killed it. They had even set the woods ablaze where they could,
though the leaves were still green and wet from recent rains, and
the fires had not spread. “They would have burned the lake if
they could have,” Gendry had said, and Arya knew he was
right. On the night of their escape, the flames of the burning town
had shimmered so brightly on the water that it had seemed that the
lake was afire.
When they finally summoned the nerve to steal back into the
ruins the next night, nothing remained but blackened stones, the
hollow shells of houses, and corpses. In some places wisps of pale
smoke still rose from the ashes. Hot Pie had pleaded with them not
to go back, and Lommy called them fools and swore that Ser Amory
would catch them and kill them too, but Lorch and his men had long
gone by the time they reached the holdfast. They found the gates
broken down, the walls partly demolished, and the inside strewn
with the unburied dead. One look was enough for Gendry.
“They’re killed, every one,” he said. “And
dogs have been at them too, look.”
“Or wolves.”
“Dogs, wolves, it makes no matter. It’s done
here.”
But Arya would not leave until they found Yoren. They
couldn’t have killed him, she told herself, he was too hard
and tough, and a brother of the Night’s Watch besides. She
said as much to Gendry as they searched among the corpses.
The axe blow that had killed him had split his skull apart, but
the great tangled beard could be no one else’s, or the garb,
patched and unwashed and so faded it was more grey than black. Ser
Amory Lorch had given no more thought to burying his own dead than
to those he had murdered, and the corpses of four Lannister
men-at-arms were heaped near Yoren’s. Arya wondered how many
it had taken to bring him down. He was going to take me home, she thought as they dug the old
man’s hole. There were too many dead to bury them all, but
Yoren at least must have a grave, Arya had insisted. He was going
to bring me safe to Winterfell, he promised. Part of her wanted to
cry. The other part wanted to kick him.
It was Gendry who thought of the lord’s towerhouse and the
three that Yoren had sent to hold it. They had come under attack as
well, but the round tower had only one entry, a second-story door
reached by a ladder. Once that had been pulled inside, Ser
Amory’s men could not get at them. The Lannisters had piled
brush around the tower’s base and set it afire, but the stone
would not burn, and Lorch did not have the patience to starve them
out. Cutjack opened the door at Gendry’s shout, and when Kurz
said they’d be better pressing on north than going back, Arya
had clung to the hope that she still might reach Winterfell.
Well, this village was no Winterfell, but those thatched roofs
promised warmth and shelter and maybe even food, if they were bold
enough to risk them. Unless it’s Lorch there. He had horses;
he would have traveled faster than us.
She watched from the tree for a long time, hoping she might see
something; a man, a horse, a banner, anything that would help her
know. A few times she glimpsed motion, but the buildings were so
far off it was hard to be certain. Once, very clearly, she heard
the whinny of a horse.
The air was full of birds, crows mostly. From afar, they were no
larger than flies as they wheeled and flapped above the thatched
roofs. To the east, Gods Eye was a sheet of sun-hammered blue that
filled half the world. Some days, as they made their slow way up
the muddy shore (Gendry wanted no part of any roads, and even Hot
Pie and Lommy saw the sense in that), Arya felt as though the lake
were calling her. She wanted to leap into those placid blue waters,
to feel clean again, to swim and splash and bask in the sun. But
she dare not take off her clothes where the others could see, not
even to wash them. At the end of the day she would often sit on a
rock and dangle her feet in the cool water. She had finally thrown
away her cracked and rotted shoes. Walking barefoot was hard at
first, but the blisters had finally broken, the cuts had healed,
and her soles had turned to leather. The mud was nice between her
toes, and she liked to feel the earth underfoot when she
walked.
From up here, she could see a small wooded island off to the
northeast. Thirty yards from shore, three black swans were gliding
over the water, so serene . . . no one had told
them that war had come, and they cared nothing for burning towns
and butchered men. She stared at them with yearning. Part of her
wanted to be a swan. The other part wanted to eat one. She had
broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs
weren’t so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse,
but still not as bad as the pain in your belly after days without
food. Finding bugs was easy, all you had to do was kick over a
rock. Arya had eaten a bug once when she was little, just to make
Sansa screech, so she hadn’t been afraid to eat another.
Weasel wasn’t either, but Hot Pie retched up the beetle he
tried to swallow, and Lommy and Gendry wouldn’t even try.
Yesterday Gendry had caught a frog and shared it with Lommy, and, a
few days before, Hot Pie had found blackberries and stripped the
bush bare, but mostly they had been living on water and acorns.
Kurz had told them how to use rocks and make a kind of acorn paste.
it tasted awful.
She wished the poacher hadn’t died. He’d known more
about the woods than all the rest of them together, but he’d
taken an arrow through the shoulder pulling in the ladder at the
towerhouse. Tarber had packed it with mud and moss from the lake,
and for a day or two Kurz swore the wound was nothing, even though
the flesh of his throat was turning dark while angry red welts
crept up his jaw and down his chest. Then one morning he
couldn’t find the strength to get up, and by the next he was
dead.
They buried him under a mound of stones, and Cutjack had claimed
his sword and hunting horn, while Tarber helped himself to bow and
boots and knife. They’d taken it all when they left. At first
they thought the two had just gone hunting, that they’d soon
return with game and feed them all. But they waited and waited,
until finally Gendry made them move on. Maybe Tarber and Cutjack
figured they would stand a better chance without a gaggle of orphan
boys to herd along. They probably would too, but that didn’t
stop her hating them for leaving.
Beneath her tree, Hot Pie barked like a dog. Kurz had told them
to use animal sounds to signal to each other. An old
poacher’s trick, he’d said, but he’d died before
he could teach them how to make the sounds right. Hot Pie’s
bird calls were awful. His dog was better, but not much.
Arya hopped from the high branch to one beneath it, her hands
out for balance. A water dancer never falls. Lightfoot, her toes
curled tight around the branch, she walked a few feet, hopped down
to a larger limb, then swung hand over hand through the tangle of
leaves until she reached the trunk. The bark was rough beneath her
fingers, against her toes. She descended quickly, jumping down the
final six feet, rolling when she landed.
Gendry gave her a hand to pull her up. “You were up there
a long time. What could you see?”
“A fishing village, just a little place, north along the
shore. Twenty-six thatch roofs and one slate, I counted. I saw part
of a wagon. Someone’s there.”
At the sound of her voice, Weasel came creeping out from the
bushes. Lommy had named her that. He said she looked like a weasel,
which wasn’t true, but they couldn’t keep on calling
her the crying girl after she finally stopped crying. Her mouth was
filthy. Arya hoped she hadn’t been eating mud again.
“Did you see people?” asked Gendry.
“Mostly just roofs,” Arya admitted, “but some
chimneys were smoking, and I heard a horse.” The Weasel put
her arms around her leg, clutching tight. Sometimes she did that
now.
“If there’s people, there’s food,” Hot
Pie said, too loudly. Gendry was always telling him to be more
quiet, but it never did any good. “Might be they’d give
us some.”
“Might be they’d kill us too,” Gendry
said.
“Not if we yielded,” Hot Pie said hopefully.
“Now you sound like Lommy.”
Lommy Greenhands sat propped up between two thick roots at the
foot of an oak. A spear had taken him through his left calf during
the fight at the holdfast. By the end of the next day, he had to
limp along one-legged with an arm around Gendry, and now he
couldn’t even do that. They’d hacked branches off trees
to make a litter for him, but it was slow, hard work carrying him
along, and he whimpered every time they jounced him.
“We have to yield,” he said. “That’s
what Yoren should have done. He should have opened the gates like
they said.”
Arya was sick of Lommy going on about how Yoren should have
yielded. It was all he talked about when they carried him, that and
his leg and his empty belly.
Hot Pie agreed. “They told Yoren to open the gates, they
told him in the king’s name. You have to do what they tell
you in the king’s name. It was that stinky old man’s
fault. If he’d of yielded, they would have left us
be.”
Gendry frowned. “Knights and lordlings, they take each
other captive and pay ransoms, but they don’t care if the
likes of you yield or not.” He turned to Arya. “What
else did you see?”
“If it’s a fishing village, they’d sell us
fish, I bet,” said Hot Pie. The lake teemed with fresh fish,
but they had nothing to catch them with. Arya had tried to use her
hands, the way she’d seen Koss do, but fish were quicker than
pigeons and the water played tricks on her eyes.
“I don’t know about fish.” Arya tugged at the
Weasel’s matted hair, thinking it might be best to hack it
off. “There’s crows down by the water.
Something’s dead there.”
“Fish, washed up on shore,” Hot Pie said. “If
the crows eat it, I bet we could.”
“We should catch some crows, we could eat them,”
said Lommy. “We could make a fire and roast them like
chickens.”
Gendry looked fierce when he scowled. His beard had grown in
thick and black as briar. “I said, no fires.”
“Lommy’s hungry,” Hot Pie whined, “and I
am too.”
“We’re all hungry,” said Arya.
“You’re not,” Lommy spat from the ground.
“Worm breath.”
Arya could have kicked him in his wound. “I said I’d
dig worms for you too, if you wanted.”
Lommy made a disgusted face. “If it wasn’t for my
leg, I’d hunt us some boars.”
“Some boars,” she mocked. “You need a
boarspear to hunt boars, and horses and dogs, and men to flush the
boar from its lair.” Her father had hunted boar in the
wolfswood with Robb and Jon. Once he even took Bran, but never
Arya, even though she was older. Septa Mordane said boar hunting
was not for ladies, and Mother only promised that when she was
older she might have her own hawk. She was older now, but if she
had a hawk she’d eat it.
“What do you know about hunting boars?” said Hot
Pie.
“More than you.”
Gendry was in no mood to hear it. “Quiet, both of you, I
need to think what to do.” He always looked pained when he
tried to think, like it hurt him something fierce.
“Yield,” Lommy said.
“I told you to shut up about the yielding. We don’t
even know who’s in there. Maybe we can steal some
food.”
“Lommy could steal, if it wasn’t for his leg,”
said Hot Pie. “He was a thief in the city.”
“A bad thief,” Arya said, “or he
wouldn’t have got caught.”
Gendry squinted up at the sun. “Evenfall will be the best
time to sneak in. I’ll go scout come dark.”
“No, I’ll go,” Arya said. “You’re
too noisy.”
Gendry got that look on his face. “We’ll both
go.”
“Arry should go,” said Lommy. “He’s
sneakier than you are.”
“We’ll both go, I said.”
“But what if you don’t come back? Hot Pie
can’t carry me by himself, you know he
can’t . . . ”
“And there’s wolves,” Hot Pie said. “I
heard them last night, when I had the watch. They sounded
close.”
Arya had heard them too. She’d been asleep in the branches
of an elm, but the howling had woken her. She’d sat awake for
a good hour, listening to them, prickles creeping up her spine.
“And you won’t even let us have a fire to keep them
off,” Hot Pie said. “It’s not right, leaving us
for the wolves.”
“No one is leaving you,” Gendry said in disgust.
“Lommy has his spear if the wolves come, and you’ll be
with him. We’re just going to go see, that’s all;
we’re coming back.”
“Whoever it is, you should yield to them,” Lommy
whined. “I need some potion for my leg, it hurts
bad.”
“If we see any leg potion, we’ll bring it,”
Gendry said. “Arry, let’s go, I want to get near before
the sun is down. Hot Pie, you keep Weasel here, I don’t want
her following.”
“Last time she kicked me.”
“I’ll kick you if you don’t keep her
here.” Without waiting for an answer, Gendry donned his steel
helm and walked off.
Arya had to scamper to keep up. Gendry was five years older and
a foot taller than she was, and long of leg as well. For a while he
said nothing, just plowed on through the trees with an angry look
on his face, making too much noise. But finally he stopped and
said, “I think Lommy’s going to die.”
She was not surprised. Kurz had died of his wound, and
he’d been a lot stronger than Lommy. Whenever it was
Arya’s turn to help carry him, she could feel how warm his
skin was, and smell the stink off his leg. “Maybe we could
find a maester . . . ”
“You only find maesters in castles, and even if we found
one, he wouldn’t dirty his hands on the likes of
Lommy.” Gendry ducked under a low-hanging limb.
“That’s not true.” Maester Luwin would have
helped anyone who came to him, she was certain.
“He’s going to die, and the sooner he does it, the
better for the rest of us. We should just leave him, like he says.
If it was you or me hurt, you know he’d leave us.” They
scrambled down a steep cut and up the other side, using roots for
handholds. “I’m sick of carrying him, and I’m
sick of all his talk about yielding too. If he could stand up,
I’d knock his teeth in. Lommy’s no use to anyone. That
crying girl’s no use either.”
“You leave Weasel alone, she’s just scared and
hungry is all.” Arya glanced back, but the girl was not
following for once. Hot Pie must have grabbed her, like Gendry had
told him.
“She’s no use,” Gendry repeated stubbornly.
“Her and Hot Pie and Lommy, they’re slowing us down,
and they’re going to get us killed. You’re the only one
of the bunch who’s good for anything. Even if you are a
girl.”
Arya froze in her steps. “I’m not a girl!”
“Yes you are. Do you think I’m as stupid as they
are?”
“No, you’re stupider. The Night’s Watch
doesn’t take girls, everyone knows that.”
“That’s true. I don’t know why Yoren brought
you, but he must have had some reason. You’re still a
girl.”
“I am not!”
“Then pull out your cock and take a piss. Go
on.”
“I don’t need to take a piss. If I wanted to I
could.”
“Liar. You can’t take out your cock because you
don’t have one. I never noticed before when there were thirty
of us, but you always go off in the woods to make your water. You
don’t see Hot Pie doing that, nor me neither. If you’re
not a girl, you must be some eunuch.”
“You’re the eunuch.”
“You know I’m not.” Gendry smiled. “You
want me to take out my cock and prove it? I don’t have
anything to hide.”
“Yes you do,” Arya blurted, desperate to escape the
subject of the cock she didn’t have. “Those gold cloaks
were after you at the inn, and you won’t tell us
why.”
“I wish I knew. I think Yoren knew, but he never told me.
Why did you think they were after you, though?”
Arya bit her lip. She remembered what Yoren had said, the day he
had hacked off her hair. This lot, half o’ them would turn
you over to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few
silvers. The other half’d do the same, only they’d rape
you first. Only Gendry was different, the queen wanted him too.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me,” she said
warily.
“I would if I knew, Arry . . . is that
really what you’re called, or do you have some girl’s
name?”
Arya glared at the gnarled root by her feet. She realized that
the pretense was done. Gendry knew, and she had nothing in her
pants to convince him otherwise. She could draw Needle and kill him
where he stood, or else trust him. She wasn’t certain
she’d be able to kill him, even if she tried; he had his own
sword, and he was a lot stronger. All that was left was the truth.
“Lommy and Hot Pie can’t know,” she said.
“They won’t,” he swore. “Not from
me.”
“Arya.” She raised her eyes to his. “My name
is Arya. Of House Stark.”
“Of House . . . ” It took him a moment before he said, “The
King’s Hand was named Stark. The one they killed for a
traitor.”
“He was never a traitor. He was my father.”
Gendry’s eyes widened. “So that’s why you
thought . . . ”
She nodded. “Yoren was taking me home to
Winterfell.”
“I . . . you’re highborn then,
a . . . you’ll be a
lady . . . ”
Arya looked down at her ragged clothes and bare feet, all
cracked and callused. She saw the dirt under her nails, the scabs
on her elbows, the scratches on her hands. Septa Mordane
wouldn’t even know me, I bet. Sansa might, but she’d
pretend not to. “My mother’s a lady, and my sister, but
I never was.”
“Yes you were. You were a lord’s daughter and you
lived in a castle, didn’t you? And
you . . . gods be good, I
never . . . ” All of a sudden Gendry
seemed uncertain, almost afraid. “All that about cocks, I
never should have said that. And I been pissing in front of you and
everything, I . . . I beg your pardon, m’lady.”
“Stop that!” Arya hissed. Was he mocking her?
“I know my courtesies, m’lady,” Gendry said,
stubborn as ever. “Whenever highborn girls came into the shop
with their fathers, my master told me I was to bend the knee, and
speak only when they spoke to me, and call them
m’lady.”
“If you start calling me m’lady, even Hot Pie is
going to notice. And you better keep on pissing the same way
too.”
“As m’lady commands.”
Arya slammed his chest with both hands. He tripped over a stone
and sat down with a thump. “What kind of lord’s
daughter are you?” he said, laughing.
“This kind.” She kicked him in the side, but it only
made him laugh harder. “You laugh all you like. I’m
going to see who’s in the village.” The sun had already
fallen below the trees; dusk would be on them in no time at all.
For once it was Gendry who had to hurry after. “You smell
that?” she asked.
He sniffed the air. “Rotten fish?”
“You know it’s not.”
“We better be careful. I’ll go around west, see if
there’s some road. There must be if you saw a wagon. You take
the shore. If you need help, bark like a dog.”
“That’s stupid. If I need help, I’ll shout
help.” She darted away, bare feet silent in the grass. When
she glanced back over her shoulder, he was watching her with that
pained look on his face that meant he was thinking. He’s
probably thinking that he shouldn’t be letting m’lady
go stealing food. Arya just knew he was going to be stupid now.
The smell grew stronger as she got closer to the village. It did
not smell like rotten fish to her. This stench was ranker, fouler.
She wrinkled her nose.
Where the trees began to thin, she used the undergrowth,
slipping from bush to bush quiet as a shadow. Every few yards she
stopped to listen. The third time, she heard horses, and a
man’s voice as well. And the smell got worse. Dead
man’s stink, that’s what it is. She had smelled it
before, with Yoren and the others.
A dense thicket of brambles grew south of the village. By the
time she reached it, the long shadows of sunset had begun to fade,
and the lantern bugs were coming out. She could see thatched roofs
just beyond the hedge. She crept along until she found a gap and
squirmed through on her belly, keeping well hidden until she saw
what made the smell.
Beside the gently lapping waters of Gods Eye, a long gibbet of
raw green wood had been thrown up, and things that had once been
men dangled there, their feet in chains, while crows pecked at
their flesh and flapped from corpse to corpse. For every crow there
were a hundred flies. When the wind blew off the lake, the nearest
corpse twisted on its chain, ever so slightly. The crows had eaten
most of its face, and something else had been at it as well,
something much larger. Throat and chest had been torn apart, and
glistening green entrails and ribbons of ragged flesh dangled from
where the belly had been opened. one arm had been ripped right off
the shoulder; Arya saw the bones a few feet away, gnawed and
cracked, picked clean of meat.
She made herself look at the next man and the one beyond him and
the one beyond him, telling herself she was hard as a stone.
Corpses all, so savaged and decayed that it took her a moment to
realize they had been stripped before they were hanged. They did
not look like naked people; they hardly looked like people at all.
The crows had eaten their eyes, and sometimes their faces. Of the
sixth in the long row, nothing remained but a single leg, still
tangled in its chains, swaying with each breeze. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Dead men could not hurt her, but
whoever had killed them could. Well beyond the gibbet, two men in
mail hauberks stood leaning on their spears in front of the long
low building by the water, the one with the slate roof. A pair of
tall poles had been driven into the muddy ground in front of it,
banners drooping from each staff. One looked red and one paler,
white or yellow maybe, but both were limp and with the dusk
settling, she could not even be certain that red one was Lannister
crimson. I don’t need to see the lion, I can see all the dead
people, who else would it be but Lannisters?
Then there was a shout.
The two spearmen turned at the cry, and a third man came into
view, shoving a captive before him. It was growing too dark to make
out faces, but the prisoner was wearing a shiny steel helm, and
when Arya saw the horns she knew it was Gendry. You stupid stupid
stupid STUPID! she thought. If he’d been here she would have
kicked him again.
The guards were talking loudly, but she was too far away to make
out the words, especially with the crows gabbling and flapping
closer to hand. One of the spearmen snatched the helm off
Gendry’s head and asked him a question, but he must not have
liked the answer, because he smashed him across the face with the
butt of his spear and knocked him down. The one who’d
captured him gave him a kick, while the second spearman was trying
on the bull’s-head helm. Finally they pulled him to his feet
and marched him off toward the storehouse. When they opened the
heavy wooden doors, a small boy darted out, but one of the guards
grabbed his arm and flung him back inside. Arya heard sobbing from
inside the building, and then a shriek so loud and full of pain
that it made her bite her lip.
The guards shoved Gendry inside with the boy and barred the
doors behind them. Just then, a breath of wind came sighing off the
lake, and the banners stirred and lifted. The one on the tall staff
bore the golden lion, as she’d feared. On the other, three
sleek black shapes ran across a field as yellow as butter. Dogs,
she thought. Arya had seen those dogs before, but where?
It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that
they had Gendry. Even if he was stubborn and stupid, she had to get
him out. She wondered if they knew that the queen wanted him.
One of the guards took off his helm and donned Gendry’s
instead. It made her angry to see him wearing it, but she knew
there was nothing she could do to stop him. She thought she heard
more screams from inside the windowless storehouse, muffled by the
masonry, but it was hard to be certain.
She stayed long enough to see the guard changed, and much more
besides. Men came and went. They led their horses down to the
stream to drink. A hunting party returned from the wood, carrying a
deer’s carcass slung from a pole. She watched them clean and
gut it and build a cookfire on the far side of the stream, and the
smell of cooking meat mingled queerly with the stench of
corruption. Her empty belly roiled and she thought she might retch.
The prospect of food brought other men out of the houses, near all
of them wearing bits of mail or boiled leather. When the deer was
cooked, the choicest portions were carried to one of the
houses.
She thought that the dark might let her crawl close and free
Gendry, but the guards kindled torches off the cookfire. A squire
brought meat and bread to the two guarding the storehouse, and
later two more men joined them and they all passed a skin of wine
from hand to hand. When it was empty the others left, but the two
guards remained, leaning on their spears.
Arya’s arms and legs were stiff when she finally wriggled
out from under the briar into the dark of the wood. It was a black
night, with a thin sliver of moon appearing and disappearing as the
clouds blew past. Silent as a shadow, she told herself as she moved
through the trees. In this darkness she dared not run, for fear of
tripping on some unseen root or losing her way. On her left Gods
Eye lapped calmly against its shores. on her right a wind sighed
through the branches, and leaves rustled and stirred. Far off, she
heard the howling of wolves.
Lommy and Hot Pie almost shit themselves when she stepped out of
the trees behind them. “Quiet,” she told them, putting
an arm around Weasel when the little girl came running up.
Hot Pie stared at her with big eyes. “We thought you left
us.” He had his shortsword in hand, the one Yoren had taken
off the gold cloak. “I was scared you was a wolf.”
“Where’s the Bull?” asked Lommy.
“They caught him,” Arya whispered. “We have to
get him out. Hot Pie, you got to help. We’ll sneak up and
kill the guards, and then I’ll open the door.”
Hot Pie and Lommy exchanged a look. “How many?”
“I couldn’t count,” Arya admitted.
“Twenty at least, but only two on the door.”
Hot Pie looked as if he were going to cry. “We can’t
fight twenty.”
“You only need to fight one. I’ll do the other and
we’ll get Gendry out and run.”
“We should yield,” Lommy said. “Just go in and
yield.”
Arya shook her head stubbornly.
“Then just leave him, Arry,” Lommy pleaded.
“They don’t know about the rest of us. If we hide,
they’ll go away, you know they will. It’s not our fault
Gendry’s captured.”
“You’re stupid, Lommy,” Arya said angrily.
“You’ll die if we don’t get Gendry out.
Who’s going to carry you?”
“You and Hot Pie.”
“All the time, with no one else to help? We’ll never
do it. Gendry was the strong one. Anyhow, I don’t care what
you say, I’m going back for him.” She looked at Hot
Pie. “Are you coming?”
Hot Pie glanced at Lommy, at Arya, at Lommy again.
“I’ll come,” he said reluctantly.
“Lommy, you keep Weasel here.”
He grabbed the little girl by the hand and pulled her close.
“What if the wolves come?”
“Yield,” Arya suggested.
Finding their way back to the village seemed to take hours. Hot
Pie kept stumbling in the dark and losing his way, and Arya had to
wait for him and double back. Finally she took him by the hand and
led him along through the trees. “Just be quiet and
follow.” When they could make out the first faint glow of the
village fires against the sky, she said, “There’s dead
men hanging on the other side of the hedge, but they’re
nothing to be scared of, just remember fear cuts deeper than
swords. We have to go real quiet and slow.” Hot Pie
nodded.
She wriggled under the briar first and waited for him on the far
side, crouched low. Hot Pie emerged pale and panting, face and arms
bloody with long scratches. He started to say something, but Arya
put a finger to his lips. On hands and knees, they crawled along
the gibbet, beneath the swaying dead. Hot Pie never once looked up,
nor made a sound.
Until the crow landed on his back, and he gave a muffled gasp.
“Who’s there?” a voice boomed suddenly from the
dark.
Hot Pie leapt to his feet. “I yield!” He threw away
his sword as dozens of crows rose shrieking and complaining to flap
about the corpses. Arya grabbed his leg and tried to drag him back
down, but he wrenched loose and ran forward, waving his arms.
“I yield, I yield.”
She bounced up and drew Needle, but by then men were all around
her. Arya slashed at the nearest, but he blocked her with a
steel-clad arm, and someone else slammed into her and dragged her
to the ground, and a third man wrenched the sword from her grasp.
When she tried to bite, her teeth snapped shut on cold dirty
chainmail. “Oho, a fierce one,” the man said, laughing.
The blow from his iron-clad fist near knocked her head off.
They talked over her as she lay hurting, but Arya could not seem
to understand the words. Her ears rang. When she tried to crawl
off, the earth moved beneath her. They took Needle. The shame of
that hurt worse than the pain, and the pain hurt a lot. Jon had
given her that sword. Syrio had taught her to use it.
Finally someone grabbed the front of her jerkin, yanked her to
her knees. Hot Pie was kneeling too, before the tallest man Arya
had ever seen, a monster from one of Old Nan’s stories. She
never saw where the giant had come from. Three black dogs raced
across his faded yellow surcoat, and his face looked as hard as if
it had been cut from stone. Suddenly Arya knew where she had seen
those dogs before. The night of the tourney at King’s
Landing, all the knights had hung their shields outside their
pavilions. “That one belongs to the Hound’s
brother,” Sansa had confided when they passed the black dogs
on the yellow field. “He’s even bigger than Hodor,
you’ll see. They call him the Mountain That Rides.”
Arya let her head droop, only half aware of what was going on
around her. Hot Pie was yielding some more. The Mountain said,
“You’ll lead us to these others,” and walked off.
Next she was stumbling past the dead men on their gibbet, while Hot
Pie told their captors he’d bake them pies and tarts if they
didn’t hurt him. Four men went with them. One carried a
torch, one a longsword; two had spears.
They found Lommy where they’d left him, under the oak.
“I yield,” he called out at once when he saw them.
He’d flung away his own spear and raised his hands, splotchy
green with old dye. “I yield. Please.”
The man with the torch searched around under the trees.
“Are you the last? Baker boy said there was a
girl.”
“She ran off when she heard you coming,” Lommy said.
“You made a lot of noise.” And Arya thought, Run,
Weasel, run as far as you can, run and hide and never come
back.
“Tell us where we can find that whoreson Dondarrion, and
there’ll be a hot meal in it for you.”
“Who?” said Lommy blankly.
“I told you, this lot don’t know no more than those
cunts in the village. Waste o’bloody time.”
One of the spearmen drifted over to Lommy. “Something
wrong with your leg, boy?”
“It got hurt.”
“Can you walk?” He sounded concerned.
“No,” said Lommy. “You got to carry
me.”
“Think so?” The man lifted his spear casually and
drove the point through the boy’s soft throat. Lommy never
even had time to yield again. He jerked once, and that was all.
When the man pulled his spear loose, blood sprayed out in a dark
fountain. “Carry him, he says,” he muttered,
chuckling.