They traveled dawn to dusk, past woods and orchards and neatly
tended fields, through small villages, crowded market towns, and
stout holdfasts. Come dark, they would make camp and eat by the
light of the Red Sword. The men took turns standing watch. Arya
would glimpse firelight flickering through the trees from the camps
of other travelers. There seemed to be more camps every night, and
more traffic on the kingsroad by day.
Morn, noon, and night they came, old folks and little children,
big men and small ones, barefoot girls and women with babes at
their breasts. Some drove farm wagons or bumped along in the back
of ox carts. More rode: draft horses, ponies, mules, donkeys,
anything that would walk or run or roll. One woman led a milk cow
with a little girl on its back. Arya saw a smith pushing a
wheelbarrow with his tools inside, hammers and tongs and even an
anvil, and a little while later a different man with a different
wheelbarrow, only inside this one were two babies in a blanket.
Most came on foot, with their goods on their shoulders and weary,
wary looks upon their faces. They walked south, toward the city,
toward King’s Landing, and only one in a hundred spared so
much as a word for Yoren and his charges, traveling north. She
wondered why no one else was going the same way as them.
Many of the travelers were armed; Arya saw daggers and dirks,
scythes and axes, and here and there a sword. Some had made clubs
from tree limbs, or carved knobby staffs. They fingered their
weapons and gave lingering looks at the wagons as they rolled by,
yet in the end they let the column pass. Thirty was too many, no
matter what they had in those wagons. Look with your eyes, Syrio had said, listen with your ears.
One day a madwoman began to scream at them from the side of the
road. “Fools! They’ll kill you, fools!” She was
scarecrow thin, with hollow eyes and bloody feet.
The next morning, a sleek merchant on a grey mare reined up by
Yoren and offered to buy his wagons and everything in them for a
quarter of their worth. “It’s war, they’ll take
what they want, you’ll do better selling to me, my
friend.” Yoren turned away with a twist of his crooked
shoulders, and spat.
Arya noticed the first grave that same day; a small mound beside
the road, dug for a child. A crystal had been set in the soft
earth, and Lommy wanted to take it until the Bull told him
he’d better leave the dead alone. A few leagues farther on,
Praed pointed out more graves, a whole row freshly dug. After that,
a day hardly passed without one.
One time Arya woke in the dark, frightened for no reason she
could name. Above, the Red Sword shared the sky with half a
thousand stars. The night seemed oddly quiet to her, though she
could hear Yoren’s muttered snores, the crackle of the fire,
even the muffled stirrings of the donkeys. Yet somehow it felt as
though the world were holding its breath, and the silence made her
shiver. She went back to sleep clutching Needle.
Come morning, when Praed did not awaken, Arya realized that it
had been his coughing she had missed. They dug a grave of their own
then, burying the sellsword where he’d slept. Yoren stripped
him of his valuables before they threw the dirt on him. One man
claimed his boots, another his dagger. His mail shirt and helm were
parceled out. His longsword Yoren handed to the Bull. “Arms
like yours, might be you can learn to use this,” he told him.
A boy called Tarber tossed a handful of acorns on top of
Praed’s body, so an oak might grow to mark his place.
That evening they stopped in a village at an ivy-covered inn.
Yoren counted the coins in his purse and decided they had enough
for a hot meal. “We’ll sleep outside, same as ever, but
they got a bathhouse here, if any of you feels the need o’
hot water and a lick o’ soap.”
Arya did not dare, even though she smelled as bad as Yoren by
now, all sour and stinky. Some of the creatures living in her
clothes had come all the way from Flea Bottom with her; it
didn’t seem right to drown them. Tarber and Hot Pie and the
Bull joined the line of men headed for the tubs. Others settled
down in front of the bathhouse. The rest crowded into the common
room. Yoren even sent Lommy out with tankards for the three in
fetters, who’d been left chained up in the back of their
wagon.
Washed and unwashed alike supped on hot pork pies and baked
apples. The innkeeper gave them a round of beer on the house.
“I had a brother took the black, years ago. Serving boy,
clever, but one day he got seen filching pepper from
m’lord’s table. He liked the taste of it, is all. just
a pinch o’ pepper, but Ser Malcolm was a hard man. You get
pepper on the Wall?” When Yoren shook his head, the man
sighed. “Shame. Lync loved that pepper.”
Arya sipped at her tankard cautiously, between spoonfuls of pie
still warm from the oven. Her father sometimes let them have a cup
of beer, she remembered. Sansa used to make a face at the taste and
say that wine was ever so much finer, but Arya had liked it well
enough. it made her sad to think of Sansa and her father.
The inn was full of people moving south, and the common room
erupted in scorn when Yoren said they were traveling the other way.
“You’ll be back soon enough,” the innkeeper
vowed. “There’s no going north. Half the fields are
burnt, and what folks are left are walled up inside their
holdfasts. One bunch rides off at dawn and another one shows up by
dusk.”
“That’s nothing to us,” Yoren insisted
stubbornly. “Tully or Lannister, makes no matter. The Watch
takes no part.” Lord Tully is my grandfather, Arya thought. It mattered to her,
but she chewed her lip and kept quiet, listening.
“It’s more than Lannister and Tully,” the
innkeeper said. “There’s wild men down from the
Mountains of the Moon, try telling them you take no part. And the
Starks are in it too, the young lord’s come down, the dead
Hand’s son . . . ”
Arya sat up straight, straining to hear. Did he mean Robb?
“I heard the boy rides to battle on a wolf,” said a
yellow-haired man with a tankard in his hand.
“Fool’s talk.” Yoren spat.
“The man I heard it from, he saw it himself. A wolf big as
a horse, he swore.”
“Swearing don’t make it true, Hod,” the
innkeeper said. “You keep swearing you’ll pay what you
owe me, and I’ve yet to see a copper.” The common room
erupted in laughter, and the man with the yellow hair turned
red.
“It’s been a bad year for wolves,” volunteered
a sallow man in a travel-stained green cloak. “Around the Gods
Eye, the packs have grown bolder’n anyone can remember.
Sheep, cows, dogs, makes no matter, they kill as they like, and
they got no fear of men. It’s worth your life to go into
those woods by night.”
“Ah, that’s more tales, and no more true than the
other.”
“I heard the same thing from my cousin, and she’s
not the sort to lie,” an old woman said. “She says
there’s this great pack, hundreds of them, mankillers. The
one that leads them is a she-wolf, a bitch from the seventh
hell.” A she-wolf. Arya sloshed her beer, wondering. Was the Gods Eye
near the Trident? She wished she had a map. It had been near the
Trident that she’d left Nymeria. She hadn’t wanted to,
but Jory said they had no choice, that if the wolf came back with
them she’d be killed for biting Joffrey, even though
he’d deserved it. They’d had to shout and scream and
throw stones, and it wasn’t until a few of Arya’s
stones struck home that the direwolf had finally stopped following
them. She probably wouldn’t even know me now, Arya thought.
Or if she did, she’d hate me.
The man in the green cloak said, “I heard how this
hellbitch walked into a village one day . . . a
market day, people everywhere, and she walks in bold as you please
and tears a baby from his mother’s arms. When the tale
reached Lord Mooton, him and his sons swore they’d put an end
to her. They tracked her to her lair with a pack of wolfhounds, and
barely escaped with their skins. Not one of those dogs came back,
not one.”
“That’s just a story,” Arya blurted out before
she could stop herself. “Wolves don’t eat
babies.”
“And what would you know about it, lad?” asked the
man in the green cloak.
Before she could think of an answer, Yoren had her by the arm.
“The boy’s greensick on beer, that’s all it
is.”
“No I’m not. They don’t eat
babies . . . ”
“Outside, boy . . . and see that you
stay there until you learn to shut your mouth when men are
talking.” He gave her a stiff shove, toward the side door
that led back to the stables. “Go on now. See that the
stableboy has watered our horses.”
Arya went outside, stiff with fury. “They
don’t,” she muttered, kicking at a rock as she stalked
off. It went rolling and fetched up under the wagons.
“Boy,” a friendly voice called out. “Lovely
boy.”
One of the men in irons was talking to her. Warily, Arya
approached the wagon, one hand on Needle’s hilt.
The prisoner lifted an empty tankard, his chains rattling.
“A man could use another taste of beer. A man has a thirst,
wearing these heavy bracelets.” He was the youngest of the
three, slender, fine-featured, always smiling. His hair was red on
one side and white on the other, all matted and filthy from cage
and travel. “A man could use a bath too,” he said, when
he saw the way Arya was looking at him. “A boy could make a
friend.”
“I have friends,” Arya said.
“None I can see,” said the one without a nose. He
was squat and thick, with huge hands. Black hair covered his arms
and legs and chest, even his back. He reminded Arya of a drawing
she had once seen in a book, of an ape from the Summer Isles. The
hole in his face made it hard to look at him for long.
The bald one opened his mouth and hissed like some immense white
lizard. When Arya flinched back, startled, he opened his mouth wide
and waggled his tongue at her, only it was more a stump than a
tongue. “Stop that,” she blurted.
“A man does not choose his companions in the black
cells,” the handsome one with the red-and-white hair said.
Something about the way he talked reminded her of Syrio; it was the
same, yet different too. “These two, they have no courtesy. A
man must ask forgiveness. You are called Arry, is that not
so?”
“Lumpyhead,” said the noseless one. “Lumpyhead
Lumpyface Stickboy. Have a care, Lorath, he’ll hit you with
his stick.”
“A man must be ashamed of the company he keeps,
Arry,” the handsome one said. “This man has the honor
to be Jaqen H’ghar, once of the Free City of Lorath. Would that he
were home. This man’s ill-bred companions in captivity are
named Rorge”—he waved his tankard at the noseless
man—“and Biter.” Biter hissed at her again,
displaying a mouthful of yellowed teeth filed into points. “A
man must have some name, is that not so? Biter cannot speak and
Biter cannot write, yet his teeth are very sharp, so a man calls
him Biter and he smiles. Are you charmed?”
Arya backed away from the wagon. “No.” They
can’t hurt me, she told herself, they’re all chained
up.
He turned his tankard upside down. “A man must
weep.”
Rorge, the noseless one, flung his drinking cup at her with a
curse. His manacles made him clumsy, yet even so he would have sent
the heavy pewter tankard crashing into her head if Arya
hadn’t leapt aside. “You get us some beer, pimple.
Now!”
“You shut your mouth!” Arya tried to think what
Syrio would have done. She drew her wooden practice sword.
“Come closer,” Rorge said, “and I’ll
shove that stick up your bunghole and fuck you bloody.” Fear cuts deeper than swords. Arya made herself approach the
wagon. Every step was harder than the one before. Fierce as a
wolverine, calm as still water. The words sang in her head. Syrio
would not have been afraid. She was almost close enough to touch
the wheel when Biter lurched to his feet and grabbed for her, his
irons clanking and rattling. The manacles brought his hands up
short, half a foot from her face. He hissed.
She hit him. Hard, right between his little eyes.
Screaming, Biter reeled back, and then threw all his weight
against his chains. The links slithered and turned and grew taut,
and Arya heard the creak of old dry wood as the great iron rings
strained against the floorboards of the wagon. Huge pale hands
groped for her while veins bulged along Biter’s arms, but the
bonds held, and finally the man collapsed backward. Blood ran from
the weeping sores on his cheeks.
“A boy has more courage than sense,” the one who had
named himself Jaqen H’ghar observed.
Arya edged backward away from the wagon. When she felt the hand
on her shoulder, she whirled, bringing up her stick sword again,
but it was only the Bull. “What are you doing?”
He raised his hands defensively. “Yoren said none of us
should go near those three.”
“They don’t scare me,” Arya said.
“Then you’re stupid. They scare me.” The
Bull’s hand fell to the hilt of his sword, and Rorge began to
laugh. “Let’s get away from them.”
Arya scuffed at the ground with her foot, but she let the Bull
lead her around to the front of the inn. Rorge’s laughter and
Biter’s hissing followed them. “Want to fight?”
she asked the Bull. She wanted to hit something.
He blinked at her, startled. Strands of thick black hair, still
wet from the bathhouse, fell across his deep blue eyes.
“I’d hurt you.”
“You would not.”
“You don’t know how strong I am.”
“You don’t know how quick I am.”
“You’re asking for it, Arry.” He drew
Praed’s longsword. “This is cheap steel, but it’s
a real sword.”
Arya unsheathed Needle. “This is good steel, so it’s
realer than yours.”
The Bull shook his head. “Promise not to cry if I cut
you?”
“I’ll promise if you will.” She turned
sideways, into her water dancer’s stance, but the Bull did
not move. He was looking at something behind her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Gold cloaks.” His face closed up tight. It couldn’t be, Arya thought, but when she glanced back,
they were riding up the kingsroad, six in the black ringmail and
golden cloaks of the City Watch. One was an officer; he wore a
black enamel breastplate ornamented with four golden disks. They
drew up in front of the inn. Look with your eyes, Syrio’s voice seemed to whisper. Her
eyes saw white lather under their saddles; the horses had been
ridden long and hard. Calm as still water, she took the Bull by the
arm and drew him back behind a tall flowering hedge.
“What is it?” he asked. “What are you doing?
Let go.”
“Quiet as a shadow,” she whispered, pulling him
down.
Some of Yoren’s other charges were sitting in front of the
bathhouse, waiting their turn at a tub. “You men,” one
of the gold cloaks shouted. “You the ones left to take the
black?”
“We might be,” came the cautious answer.
“We’d rather join you boys,” old Reysen said.
“We hear it’s cold on that Wall.”
The gold cloak officer dismounted. “I have a warrant for a
certain boy—”
Yoren stepped out of the inn, fingering his tangled black beard.
“Who is it wants this boy?”
The other gold cloaks were dismounting to stand beside their
horses. “Why are we hiding?” the Bull whispered.
“It’s me they want,” Arya whispered back. His
ear smelled of soap. “You be quiet.”
“The queen wants him, old man, not that it’s your
concern,” the officer said, drawing a ribbon from his belt.
“Here, Her Grace’s seal and warrant.”
Behind the hedge, the Bull shook his head doubtfully. “Why
would the queen want you, Arry?”
She punched his shoulder. “Be quiet!”
Yoren fingered the warrant ribbon with its blob of golden wax.
“Pretty.” He spit. “Thing is, the boy’s in
the Night’s Watch now. What he done back in the city
don’t mean piss-all.”
“The queen’s not interested in your views, old man,
and neither am I,” the officer said. “I’ll have
the boy.”
Arya thought about running, but she knew she wouldn’t get
far on her donkey when the gold cloaks had horses. And she was so
tired of running. She’d run when Ser Meryn came for her, and
again when they killed her father. If she was a real water dancer,
she would go out there with Needle and kill all of them, and never
run from anyone ever again.
“You’ll have no one,” Yoren said stubbornly.
“There’s laws on such things.”
The gold cloak drew a shortsword. “Here’s your
law.”
Yoren looked at the blade. “That’s no law, just a
sword. Happens I got one too.”
The officer smiled. “Old fool. I have five men with
me.”
Yoren spat. “Happens I got thirty.”
The gold cloak laughed. “This lot?” said a big lout
with a broken nose. “Who’s first?” he shouted,
showing his steel.
Tarber plucked a pitchfork out of a bale of hay. “I
am.”
“No, I am,” called Cutjack, the plump stonemason,
pulling his hammer off the leather apron he always wore.
“Me.” Kurz came up off the ground with his skinning
knife in hand.
“Me and him.” Koss strung his longbow.
“All of us,” said Reysen, snatching up the tall
hardwood walking staff he carried.
Dobber stepped naked out of the bathhouse with his clothes in a
bundle, saw what was happening, and dropped everything but his
dagger. “Is it a fight?” he asked.
“I guess,” said Hot Pie, scrambling on all fours for
a big rock to throw. Arya could not believe what she was seeing.
She hated Hot Pie! Why would he risk himself for her?
The one with the broken nose still thought it was funny.
“You girls put away them rocks and sticks before you get
spanked. None of you knows what end of a sword to hold.”
“I do!” Arya wouldn’t let them die for her
like Syrio. She wouldn’t! Shoving through the hedge with
Needle in hand, she slid into a water dancer’s stance.
Broken Nose guffawed. The officer looked her up and down.
“Put the blade away, little girl, no one wants to hurt
you.”
“I’m not a girl!” she yelled, furious. What
was wrong with them? They rode all this way for her and here she
was and they were just smiling at her. “I’m the one you
want.”
“He’s the one we want.” The officer jabbed his
shortsword toward the Bull, who’d come forward to stand
beside her, Praed’s cheap steel in his hand.
But it was a mistake to take his eyes off Yoren, even for an
instant. Quick as that, the black brother’s sword was pressed
to the apple of the officer’s throat. “Neither’s
the one you get, less you want me to see if your apple’s ripe
yet. I got me ten, fifteen more brothers in that inn, if you still
need convincing. I was you, I’d let loose of that gutcutter,
spread my cheeks over that fat little horse, and gallop on back to
the city.” He spat, and poked harder with the point of his
sword. “Now.”
The officer’s fingers uncurled. His sword fell in the
dust.
“We’ll just keep that,” Yoren said.
“Good steel’s always needed on the Wall.”
“As you say. For now. Men.” The gold cloaks sheathed
and mounted up. “You’d best scamper up to that Wall of
yours in a hurry, old man. The next time I catch you, I believe I’ll have your head
to go with the bastard boy’s.”
“Better men than you have tried.” Yoren slapped the
rump of the officer’s horse with the flat of his sword and
sent him reeling off down the kingsroad. His men followed.
When they were out of sight, Hot Pie began to whoop, but Yoren
looked angrier than ever. “Fool! You think he’s done
with us? Next time he won’t prance up and hand me no damn
ribbon. Get the rest out o’ them baths, we need to be moving.
Ride all night, maybe we can stay ahead o’ them for a
bit.” He scooped up the shortsword the officer had dropped.
“Who wants this?”
“Me!” Hot Pie yelled.
“Don’t be using it on Arry.” He handed the boy
the sword, hilt first, and walked over to Arya, but it was the Bull
he spoke to. “Queen wants you bad, boy.”
Arya was lost. “Why should she want him?”
The Bull scowled at her. “Why should she want you?
You’re nothing but a little gutter rat!”
“Well, you’re nothing but a bastard boy!” Or
maybe he was only pretending to be a bastard boy.
“What’s your true name?”
“Gendry,” he said, like he wasn’t quite
sure.
“Don’t see why no one wants neither o’
you,” Yoren said, “but they can’t have you
regardless. You ride them two coursers. First sight of a gold
cloak, make for the Wall like a dragon’s on your tail. The
rest o’ us don’t mean spit to them.”
“Except for you,” Arya pointed out. “That man
said he’d take your head too.”
“Well, as to that,” Yoren said, “if he can get
it off my shoulders, he’s welcome to it.”
They traveled dawn to dusk, past woods and orchards and neatly
tended fields, through small villages, crowded market towns, and
stout holdfasts. Come dark, they would make camp and eat by the
light of the Red Sword. The men took turns standing watch. Arya
would glimpse firelight flickering through the trees from the camps
of other travelers. There seemed to be more camps every night, and
more traffic on the kingsroad by day.
Morn, noon, and night they came, old folks and little children,
big men and small ones, barefoot girls and women with babes at
their breasts. Some drove farm wagons or bumped along in the back
of ox carts. More rode: draft horses, ponies, mules, donkeys,
anything that would walk or run or roll. One woman led a milk cow
with a little girl on its back. Arya saw a smith pushing a
wheelbarrow with his tools inside, hammers and tongs and even an
anvil, and a little while later a different man with a different
wheelbarrow, only inside this one were two babies in a blanket.
Most came on foot, with their goods on their shoulders and weary,
wary looks upon their faces. They walked south, toward the city,
toward King’s Landing, and only one in a hundred spared so
much as a word for Yoren and his charges, traveling north. She
wondered why no one else was going the same way as them.
Many of the travelers were armed; Arya saw daggers and dirks,
scythes and axes, and here and there a sword. Some had made clubs
from tree limbs, or carved knobby staffs. They fingered their
weapons and gave lingering looks at the wagons as they rolled by,
yet in the end they let the column pass. Thirty was too many, no
matter what they had in those wagons. Look with your eyes, Syrio had said, listen with your ears.
One day a madwoman began to scream at them from the side of the
road. “Fools! They’ll kill you, fools!” She was
scarecrow thin, with hollow eyes and bloody feet.
The next morning, a sleek merchant on a grey mare reined up by
Yoren and offered to buy his wagons and everything in them for a
quarter of their worth. “It’s war, they’ll take
what they want, you’ll do better selling to me, my
friend.” Yoren turned away with a twist of his crooked
shoulders, and spat.
Arya noticed the first grave that same day; a small mound beside
the road, dug for a child. A crystal had been set in the soft
earth, and Lommy wanted to take it until the Bull told him
he’d better leave the dead alone. A few leagues farther on,
Praed pointed out more graves, a whole row freshly dug. After that,
a day hardly passed without one.
One time Arya woke in the dark, frightened for no reason she
could name. Above, the Red Sword shared the sky with half a
thousand stars. The night seemed oddly quiet to her, though she
could hear Yoren’s muttered snores, the crackle of the fire,
even the muffled stirrings of the donkeys. Yet somehow it felt as
though the world were holding its breath, and the silence made her
shiver. She went back to sleep clutching Needle.
Come morning, when Praed did not awaken, Arya realized that it
had been his coughing she had missed. They dug a grave of their own
then, burying the sellsword where he’d slept. Yoren stripped
him of his valuables before they threw the dirt on him. One man
claimed his boots, another his dagger. His mail shirt and helm were
parceled out. His longsword Yoren handed to the Bull. “Arms
like yours, might be you can learn to use this,” he told him.
A boy called Tarber tossed a handful of acorns on top of
Praed’s body, so an oak might grow to mark his place.
That evening they stopped in a village at an ivy-covered inn.
Yoren counted the coins in his purse and decided they had enough
for a hot meal. “We’ll sleep outside, same as ever, but
they got a bathhouse here, if any of you feels the need o’
hot water and a lick o’ soap.”
Arya did not dare, even though she smelled as bad as Yoren by
now, all sour and stinky. Some of the creatures living in her
clothes had come all the way from Flea Bottom with her; it
didn’t seem right to drown them. Tarber and Hot Pie and the
Bull joined the line of men headed for the tubs. Others settled
down in front of the bathhouse. The rest crowded into the common
room. Yoren even sent Lommy out with tankards for the three in
fetters, who’d been left chained up in the back of their
wagon.
Washed and unwashed alike supped on hot pork pies and baked
apples. The innkeeper gave them a round of beer on the house.
“I had a brother took the black, years ago. Serving boy,
clever, but one day he got seen filching pepper from
m’lord’s table. He liked the taste of it, is all. just
a pinch o’ pepper, but Ser Malcolm was a hard man. You get
pepper on the Wall?” When Yoren shook his head, the man
sighed. “Shame. Lync loved that pepper.”
Arya sipped at her tankard cautiously, between spoonfuls of pie
still warm from the oven. Her father sometimes let them have a cup
of beer, she remembered. Sansa used to make a face at the taste and
say that wine was ever so much finer, but Arya had liked it well
enough. it made her sad to think of Sansa and her father.
The inn was full of people moving south, and the common room
erupted in scorn when Yoren said they were traveling the other way.
“You’ll be back soon enough,” the innkeeper
vowed. “There’s no going north. Half the fields are
burnt, and what folks are left are walled up inside their
holdfasts. One bunch rides off at dawn and another one shows up by
dusk.”
“That’s nothing to us,” Yoren insisted
stubbornly. “Tully or Lannister, makes no matter. The Watch
takes no part.” Lord Tully is my grandfather, Arya thought. It mattered to her,
but she chewed her lip and kept quiet, listening.
“It’s more than Lannister and Tully,” the
innkeeper said. “There’s wild men down from the
Mountains of the Moon, try telling them you take no part. And the
Starks are in it too, the young lord’s come down, the dead
Hand’s son . . . ”
Arya sat up straight, straining to hear. Did he mean Robb?
“I heard the boy rides to battle on a wolf,” said a
yellow-haired man with a tankard in his hand.
“Fool’s talk.” Yoren spat.
“The man I heard it from, he saw it himself. A wolf big as
a horse, he swore.”
“Swearing don’t make it true, Hod,” the
innkeeper said. “You keep swearing you’ll pay what you
owe me, and I’ve yet to see a copper.” The common room
erupted in laughter, and the man with the yellow hair turned
red.
“It’s been a bad year for wolves,” volunteered
a sallow man in a travel-stained green cloak. “Around the Gods
Eye, the packs have grown bolder’n anyone can remember.
Sheep, cows, dogs, makes no matter, they kill as they like, and
they got no fear of men. It’s worth your life to go into
those woods by night.”
“Ah, that’s more tales, and no more true than the
other.”
“I heard the same thing from my cousin, and she’s
not the sort to lie,” an old woman said. “She says
there’s this great pack, hundreds of them, mankillers. The
one that leads them is a she-wolf, a bitch from the seventh
hell.” A she-wolf. Arya sloshed her beer, wondering. Was the Gods Eye
near the Trident? She wished she had a map. It had been near the
Trident that she’d left Nymeria. She hadn’t wanted to,
but Jory said they had no choice, that if the wolf came back with
them she’d be killed for biting Joffrey, even though
he’d deserved it. They’d had to shout and scream and
throw stones, and it wasn’t until a few of Arya’s
stones struck home that the direwolf had finally stopped following
them. She probably wouldn’t even know me now, Arya thought.
Or if she did, she’d hate me.
The man in the green cloak said, “I heard how this
hellbitch walked into a village one day . . . a
market day, people everywhere, and she walks in bold as you please
and tears a baby from his mother’s arms. When the tale
reached Lord Mooton, him and his sons swore they’d put an end
to her. They tracked her to her lair with a pack of wolfhounds, and
barely escaped with their skins. Not one of those dogs came back,
not one.”
“That’s just a story,” Arya blurted out before
she could stop herself. “Wolves don’t eat
babies.”
“And what would you know about it, lad?” asked the
man in the green cloak.
Before she could think of an answer, Yoren had her by the arm.
“The boy’s greensick on beer, that’s all it
is.”
“No I’m not. They don’t eat
babies . . . ”
“Outside, boy . . . and see that you
stay there until you learn to shut your mouth when men are
talking.” He gave her a stiff shove, toward the side door
that led back to the stables. “Go on now. See that the
stableboy has watered our horses.”
Arya went outside, stiff with fury. “They
don’t,” she muttered, kicking at a rock as she stalked
off. It went rolling and fetched up under the wagons.
“Boy,” a friendly voice called out. “Lovely
boy.”
One of the men in irons was talking to her. Warily, Arya
approached the wagon, one hand on Needle’s hilt.
The prisoner lifted an empty tankard, his chains rattling.
“A man could use another taste of beer. A man has a thirst,
wearing these heavy bracelets.” He was the youngest of the
three, slender, fine-featured, always smiling. His hair was red on
one side and white on the other, all matted and filthy from cage
and travel. “A man could use a bath too,” he said, when
he saw the way Arya was looking at him. “A boy could make a
friend.”
“I have friends,” Arya said.
“None I can see,” said the one without a nose. He
was squat and thick, with huge hands. Black hair covered his arms
and legs and chest, even his back. He reminded Arya of a drawing
she had once seen in a book, of an ape from the Summer Isles. The
hole in his face made it hard to look at him for long.
The bald one opened his mouth and hissed like some immense white
lizard. When Arya flinched back, startled, he opened his mouth wide
and waggled his tongue at her, only it was more a stump than a
tongue. “Stop that,” she blurted.
“A man does not choose his companions in the black
cells,” the handsome one with the red-and-white hair said.
Something about the way he talked reminded her of Syrio; it was the
same, yet different too. “These two, they have no courtesy. A
man must ask forgiveness. You are called Arry, is that not
so?”
“Lumpyhead,” said the noseless one. “Lumpyhead
Lumpyface Stickboy. Have a care, Lorath, he’ll hit you with
his stick.”
“A man must be ashamed of the company he keeps,
Arry,” the handsome one said. “This man has the honor
to be Jaqen H’ghar, once of the Free City of Lorath. Would that he
were home. This man’s ill-bred companions in captivity are
named Rorge”—he waved his tankard at the noseless
man—“and Biter.” Biter hissed at her again,
displaying a mouthful of yellowed teeth filed into points. “A
man must have some name, is that not so? Biter cannot speak and
Biter cannot write, yet his teeth are very sharp, so a man calls
him Biter and he smiles. Are you charmed?”
Arya backed away from the wagon. “No.” They
can’t hurt me, she told herself, they’re all chained
up.
He turned his tankard upside down. “A man must
weep.”
Rorge, the noseless one, flung his drinking cup at her with a
curse. His manacles made him clumsy, yet even so he would have sent
the heavy pewter tankard crashing into her head if Arya
hadn’t leapt aside. “You get us some beer, pimple.
Now!”
“You shut your mouth!” Arya tried to think what
Syrio would have done. She drew her wooden practice sword.
“Come closer,” Rorge said, “and I’ll
shove that stick up your bunghole and fuck you bloody.” Fear cuts deeper than swords. Arya made herself approach the
wagon. Every step was harder than the one before. Fierce as a
wolverine, calm as still water. The words sang in her head. Syrio
would not have been afraid. She was almost close enough to touch
the wheel when Biter lurched to his feet and grabbed for her, his
irons clanking and rattling. The manacles brought his hands up
short, half a foot from her face. He hissed.
She hit him. Hard, right between his little eyes.
Screaming, Biter reeled back, and then threw all his weight
against his chains. The links slithered and turned and grew taut,
and Arya heard the creak of old dry wood as the great iron rings
strained against the floorboards of the wagon. Huge pale hands
groped for her while veins bulged along Biter’s arms, but the
bonds held, and finally the man collapsed backward. Blood ran from
the weeping sores on his cheeks.
“A boy has more courage than sense,” the one who had
named himself Jaqen H’ghar observed.
Arya edged backward away from the wagon. When she felt the hand
on her shoulder, she whirled, bringing up her stick sword again,
but it was only the Bull. “What are you doing?”
He raised his hands defensively. “Yoren said none of us
should go near those three.”
“They don’t scare me,” Arya said.
“Then you’re stupid. They scare me.” The
Bull’s hand fell to the hilt of his sword, and Rorge began to
laugh. “Let’s get away from them.”
Arya scuffed at the ground with her foot, but she let the Bull
lead her around to the front of the inn. Rorge’s laughter and
Biter’s hissing followed them. “Want to fight?”
she asked the Bull. She wanted to hit something.
He blinked at her, startled. Strands of thick black hair, still
wet from the bathhouse, fell across his deep blue eyes.
“I’d hurt you.”
“You would not.”
“You don’t know how strong I am.”
“You don’t know how quick I am.”
“You’re asking for it, Arry.” He drew
Praed’s longsword. “This is cheap steel, but it’s
a real sword.”
Arya unsheathed Needle. “This is good steel, so it’s
realer than yours.”
The Bull shook his head. “Promise not to cry if I cut
you?”
“I’ll promise if you will.” She turned
sideways, into her water dancer’s stance, but the Bull did
not move. He was looking at something behind her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Gold cloaks.” His face closed up tight. It couldn’t be, Arya thought, but when she glanced back,
they were riding up the kingsroad, six in the black ringmail and
golden cloaks of the City Watch. One was an officer; he wore a
black enamel breastplate ornamented with four golden disks. They
drew up in front of the inn. Look with your eyes, Syrio’s voice seemed to whisper. Her
eyes saw white lather under their saddles; the horses had been
ridden long and hard. Calm as still water, she took the Bull by the
arm and drew him back behind a tall flowering hedge.
“What is it?” he asked. “What are you doing?
Let go.”
“Quiet as a shadow,” she whispered, pulling him
down.
Some of Yoren’s other charges were sitting in front of the
bathhouse, waiting their turn at a tub. “You men,” one
of the gold cloaks shouted. “You the ones left to take the
black?”
“We might be,” came the cautious answer.
“We’d rather join you boys,” old Reysen said.
“We hear it’s cold on that Wall.”
The gold cloak officer dismounted. “I have a warrant for a
certain boy—”
Yoren stepped out of the inn, fingering his tangled black beard.
“Who is it wants this boy?”
The other gold cloaks were dismounting to stand beside their
horses. “Why are we hiding?” the Bull whispered.
“It’s me they want,” Arya whispered back. His
ear smelled of soap. “You be quiet.”
“The queen wants him, old man, not that it’s your
concern,” the officer said, drawing a ribbon from his belt.
“Here, Her Grace’s seal and warrant.”
Behind the hedge, the Bull shook his head doubtfully. “Why
would the queen want you, Arry?”
She punched his shoulder. “Be quiet!”
Yoren fingered the warrant ribbon with its blob of golden wax.
“Pretty.” He spit. “Thing is, the boy’s in
the Night’s Watch now. What he done back in the city
don’t mean piss-all.”
“The queen’s not interested in your views, old man,
and neither am I,” the officer said. “I’ll have
the boy.”
Arya thought about running, but she knew she wouldn’t get
far on her donkey when the gold cloaks had horses. And she was so
tired of running. She’d run when Ser Meryn came for her, and
again when they killed her father. If she was a real water dancer,
she would go out there with Needle and kill all of them, and never
run from anyone ever again.
“You’ll have no one,” Yoren said stubbornly.
“There’s laws on such things.”
The gold cloak drew a shortsword. “Here’s your
law.”
Yoren looked at the blade. “That’s no law, just a
sword. Happens I got one too.”
The officer smiled. “Old fool. I have five men with
me.”
Yoren spat. “Happens I got thirty.”
The gold cloak laughed. “This lot?” said a big lout
with a broken nose. “Who’s first?” he shouted,
showing his steel.
Tarber plucked a pitchfork out of a bale of hay. “I
am.”
“No, I am,” called Cutjack, the plump stonemason,
pulling his hammer off the leather apron he always wore.
“Me.” Kurz came up off the ground with his skinning
knife in hand.
“Me and him.” Koss strung his longbow.
“All of us,” said Reysen, snatching up the tall
hardwood walking staff he carried.
Dobber stepped naked out of the bathhouse with his clothes in a
bundle, saw what was happening, and dropped everything but his
dagger. “Is it a fight?” he asked.
“I guess,” said Hot Pie, scrambling on all fours for
a big rock to throw. Arya could not believe what she was seeing.
She hated Hot Pie! Why would he risk himself for her?
The one with the broken nose still thought it was funny.
“You girls put away them rocks and sticks before you get
spanked. None of you knows what end of a sword to hold.”
“I do!” Arya wouldn’t let them die for her
like Syrio. She wouldn’t! Shoving through the hedge with
Needle in hand, she slid into a water dancer’s stance.
Broken Nose guffawed. The officer looked her up and down.
“Put the blade away, little girl, no one wants to hurt
you.”
“I’m not a girl!” she yelled, furious. What
was wrong with them? They rode all this way for her and here she
was and they were just smiling at her. “I’m the one you
want.”
“He’s the one we want.” The officer jabbed his
shortsword toward the Bull, who’d come forward to stand
beside her, Praed’s cheap steel in his hand.
But it was a mistake to take his eyes off Yoren, even for an
instant. Quick as that, the black brother’s sword was pressed
to the apple of the officer’s throat. “Neither’s
the one you get, less you want me to see if your apple’s ripe
yet. I got me ten, fifteen more brothers in that inn, if you still
need convincing. I was you, I’d let loose of that gutcutter,
spread my cheeks over that fat little horse, and gallop on back to
the city.” He spat, and poked harder with the point of his
sword. “Now.”
The officer’s fingers uncurled. His sword fell in the
dust.
“We’ll just keep that,” Yoren said.
“Good steel’s always needed on the Wall.”
“As you say. For now. Men.” The gold cloaks sheathed
and mounted up. “You’d best scamper up to that Wall of
yours in a hurry, old man. The next time I catch you, I believe I’ll have your head
to go with the bastard boy’s.”
“Better men than you have tried.” Yoren slapped the
rump of the officer’s horse with the flat of his sword and
sent him reeling off down the kingsroad. His men followed.
When they were out of sight, Hot Pie began to whoop, but Yoren
looked angrier than ever. “Fool! You think he’s done
with us? Next time he won’t prance up and hand me no damn
ribbon. Get the rest out o’ them baths, we need to be moving.
Ride all night, maybe we can stay ahead o’ them for a
bit.” He scooped up the shortsword the officer had dropped.
“Who wants this?”
“Me!” Hot Pie yelled.
“Don’t be using it on Arry.” He handed the boy
the sword, hilt first, and walked over to Arya, but it was the Bull
he spoke to. “Queen wants you bad, boy.”
Arya was lost. “Why should she want him?”
The Bull scowled at her. “Why should she want you?
You’re nothing but a little gutter rat!”
“Well, you’re nothing but a bastard boy!” Or
maybe he was only pretending to be a bastard boy.
“What’s your true name?”
“Gendry,” he said, like he wasn’t quite
sure.
“Don’t see why no one wants neither o’
you,” Yoren said, “but they can’t have you
regardless. You ride them two coursers. First sight of a gold
cloak, make for the Wall like a dragon’s on your tail. The
rest o’ us don’t mean spit to them.”
“Except for you,” Arya pointed out. “That man
said he’d take your head too.”
“Well, as to that,” Yoren said, “if he can get
it off my shoulders, he’s welcome to it.”