冰与火之歌卷5英文版(A Dance with Dragons) [pdf](可编辑)
冰与火之歌卷5英文版(A Dance with Dragons) [pdf]
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George R. R. Martin
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George R. R. Martin
A DANCE WITH DRAGONS
Book Five of
A Song of Ice and Fire
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Dedication
this one is for my fans
for Lodey, Trebla, Stego, Pod,
Caress, Yags, X-Ray and Mr. X,
Kate, Chataya, Mormont, Mich,
Jamie, Vanessa, Ro,
for Stubby, Louise, Agravaine,
Wert, Malt, Jo,
Mouse, Telisiane, Blackfyre,
Bronn Stone, Coyote’s
Daughter,
and the rest of the madmen and wild women of
the Brotherhood Without Banners
for my website wizards
Elio and Linda, lords of Westeros,
Winter and Fabio of WIC,
and Gibbs of Dragonstone, who started it all
for men and women of Asshai
in Spain
who sang to us of a bear and a maiden fair
and the fabulous fans of Italy
who gave me so much wine
for my readers in Finland, Germany,
Brazil, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands
and all the other distant lands
where you’ve been waiting
for this dance
and for all the friends and fans
I have yet to
meet
thanks for your
patience
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
A CAVIL ON CHRONOLOGY
PROLOGUE
TYRION
DAENERYS
JON
BRAN
TYRION
THE MERCHANT’S MAN
JON
TYRION
DAVOS
JON
DAENERYS
REEK
BRAN
TYRION
DAVOS
DAENERYS
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JON
TYRION
DAVOS
REEK
JON
TYRION
DAENERYS
THE LOST LORD
THE WINDBLOWN
THE WAYWARD BRIDE
TYRION
JON
DAVOS
DAENERYS
MELISANDRE
REEK
TYRION
BRAN
JON
DAENERYS
THE PRINCE OF WINTERFELL
THE WATCHER
JON
TYRION
THE TURNCLOAK
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THE KING’S PRIZE
DAENERYS
JON
THE BLIND GIRL
A GHOST IN WINTERFELL
TYRION
JAIME
JON
DAENERYS
THEON
DAENERYS
JON
CERSEI
THE QUEENSGUARD
THE IRON SUITOR
TYRION
JON
THE DISCARDED KNIGHT
THE SPURNED SUITOR
THE GRIFFIN REBORN
THE SACRIFICE
VICTARION
THE UGLY LITTLE GIRL
CERSEI
TYRION
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THE KINGBREAKER
THE DRAGONTAMER
JON
THE QUEEN’S HAND
DAENERYS
EPILOGUE
WESTEROS
THE BOY KING
THE KING AT THE WALL
KING OF THE ISLES AND THE NORTH
OTHER HOUSES GREAT AND SMALL
HOUSE ARRYN
HOUSE BARATHEON
HOUSE FREY
HOUSE LANNISTER
HOUSE MARTELL
HOUSE STARK
HOUSE TULLY
HOUSE TYRELL
THE SWORN BROTHERS OF THE NIGHT ’S WATCH
the WILDLINGS, or THE FREE FOLK
BEYOND THE WALL
ESSOS BEYOND THE NARROW SEA
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IN BRAAVOS
IN OLD VOLANTIS
ON SLAVER’S BAY
THE QUEEN ACROSS THE WATER
THE SELLSWORDS MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FREE COMPANIES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
About the Type
By George R. R. Martin
Copyright
About the Publisher
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A CAVIL ON CHRONOLOGY
It has been a while between books, I know. So a reminder may be in order.
The book you hold in your hands is the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire . The fourth volume was A
Feast for Crows. However, this volume does not follow that one in
the traditional sense, so much as run in
tandem with it.
Both Dance and Feast take up the story immediately after the events of the third volume in the series, A
Storm of Swords. Whereas Feast focused on events in and around King’s Landing, on the Iron Islands, and
down in Dorne, Dance takes us north to Castle Black and the Wall and beyond , and across the narrow sea
to Pentos and Slaver’s Bay, to pick up the tales of Tyrion Lannister,
Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and all
the other characters you did not see in the preceding volume. Rather than being sequential, the two books
are parallel „ divided geographically, rather than
chronologically.
But only up to a point.
A Dance with Dragons is a longer book than A Feast for Crows, and covers a longer time period. In the
latter half of this volume, you will notice certain of the viewpoint characters from A Feast for Crows
popping up again. And that means just what you think it means: the narrative has moved past the time frame
of Feast, and the two streams have once again rejoined each other.
Next up, The Winds of Winter. Wherein, I hope, everybody will be shivering together once again„
―George R. R. Martin
April 2011
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PROLOGUE
The night was rank with the smell of man.
The warg stopped beneath a tree and sniffed, his grey-brown fur dappled by shadow. A sigh of piney
wind brought the man-scent to him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag, even wolf.
Those were man-smells too, the warg knew; the stink of old skins,
dead and sour, near drowned beneath the
stronger scents of smoke and blood and rot. Only man stripped the skins from other beasts and wore their
hides and hair.
Wargs have no fear of man, as wolves do. Hate and hunger coiled in his belly, and he gave a low growl,
calling to his one-eyed brother, to his small sly sister. As he raced through the trees, his packmates followed
hard on his heels. They had caught the scent as well. As he ran, he
saw through their eyes too and glimpsed
himself ahead. The breath of the pack puffed warm and white from long grey jaws. Ice had frozen between
their paws, hard as stone, but the hunt was on now, the prey ahead. Flesh, the warg thought, meat.
A man alone was a feeble thing. Big and strong, with good sharp
eyes, but dull of ear and deaf to smells.
Deer and elk and even hares were faster, bears and boars fiercer in a fight. But men in packs were
dangerous. As the wolves closed on the prey, the warg heard the wailing of a pup, the crust of last night’s
snow breaking under clumsy man-paws, the rattle of hardskins and the long grey claws men carried.
Swords, a voice inside him whispered, spears.
The trees had grown icy teeth, snarling down from the bare brown branches. One Eye ripped through the
undergrowth, spraying snow. His packmates followed. Up a hill and down the slope beyond, until the wood
opened before them and the men were there. One was female. The fur-wrapped bundle she clutched was her
pup. Leave her for last, the voice whispered, the males are the danger. They were roaring at each other as
men did, but the warg could smell their terror. One had a wooden tooth
as tall as he was. He flung it, but his
hand was shaking and the tooth sailed high.
Then the pack was on them.
His one-eyed brother knocked the tooth-thrower back into a snowdrift and tore his throat out as he
struggled. His sister slipped behind the other male and took him from the rear. That left the female and her
pup for him.
She had a tooth too, a little one made of bone, but she dropped it when the warg’s jaws closed around her
leg. As she fell, she wrapped both arms around her noisy pup. Underneath her furs the female was just skin
and bones, but her dugs were full of milk. The sweetest meat was on the pup. The wolf saved the choicest
parts for his brother. All around the carcasses, the frozen snow
turned pink and red as the pack filled its
bellies.
Leagues away, in a one-room hut of mud and straw with a thatched roof and a smoke hole and a floor of
hard-packed earth, Varamyr shivered and coughed and licked his lips. His eyes were red, his lips cracked,
his throat dry and parched, but the taste of blood and fat filled his mouth, even as his swollen belly cried for
nourishment. A child’s flesh, he thought,
remembering Bump. Human meat. Had he sunk so low as to
hunger after human meat? He could almost hear Haggon growling at him. “Men may eat the flesh of beasts
and beasts the flesh of men, but the man who eats the flesh of man is an abomination.”
Abomination. That had always been Haggon’s favorite word. Abomination, abomination, abomination.
To eat of human meat was abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and to seize the body
of another man was the worst abomination of all. Haggon was weak, afraid of his own power. He died
weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his heart himself. He
taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of human flesh.
That was as a wolf, though. He had never eaten the meat of men
with human teeth. He would not grudge
his pack their feast, however. The wolves were as famished as he was, gaunt and cold and hungry, and the
prey „ two men and a woman, a babe in arms, fleeing from defeat to death. They would have perished soon
in any case, from exposure or starvation. This way was better,
quicker. A mercy.
“A mercy,” he said aloud. His throat was raw, but it felt good to hear a human voice, even his own. The
air smelled of mold and damp, the ground was cold and hard, and his fire was giving off more smoke than
heat. He moved as close to the flames as he dared, coughing and shivering by turns, his side throbbing
where his wound had opened. Blood had soaked his breeches to the knee and dried into a hard brown crust.
Thistle had warned him that might happen. “I sewed it up the
best I could,” she’d said, “but you need to
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rest and let it mend, or the flesh will tear open again.”
Thistle had been the last of his companions, a spearwife tough as an old root, warty, windburnt, and
wrinkled. The others had deserted them along the way. One by one they fell behind or forged ahead, making
for their old villages, or the Milkwater, or Hardhome, or a lonely death in the woods. Varamyr did not
know, and could not care. I should have taken one of them when I had the chance. One of the twins, or the
big man with the scarred face, or the youth with the red hair. He
had been afraid, though. One of the others
might have realized what was happening. Then they would have turned on him and killed him. And
Haggon’s words had haunted him, and so the chance had passed.
After the battle there had been thousands of them struggling through the forest, hungry, frightened,
fleeing the carnage that had descended on them at the Wall. Some had
talked of returning to the homes that
they’d abandoned, others of mounting a second assault upon the gate, but most were lost, with no notion of
where to go or what to do. They had escaped the black-cloaked crows and the knights in their grey steel, but
more relentless enemies stalked them now. Every day left more corpses by the trails. Some died of hunger,
some of cold, some of sickness. Others were slain by those who had
been their brothers-in-arms when they
marched south with Mance Rayder, the King-Beyond-the-Wall.
Mance is fallen, the survivors told each other in despairing voices, Mance is taken, Mance is dead.
“Harma’s dead and Mance is captured, the rest run off and left us,” Thistle had claimed, as she was sewing
up his wound. “Tormund, the Weeper, Sixskins, all them brave raiders.
Where are they now?”
She does not know me, Varamyr realized then, and why should she? Without his beasts he did not look
like a great man. I was Varamyr Six-skins, who broke bread with Mance Rayder. He had named himself
Varamyr when he was ten. A name fit for a lord, a name for songs, a mighty name, and fearsome. Yet he
had run from the crows like a frightened rabbit. The terrible Lord Varamyr had gone craven, but he could
not bear that she should know that, so he told the spearwife that his name was Haggon. Afterward he
wondered why that name had come to his lips, of all those he might have chosen. I ate his heart and drank
his blood, and still he haunts me.
One day, as they fled, a rider came galloping through the woods on a gaunt white horse, shouting that
they all should make for the Milkwater, that the Weeper was gathering warriors to cross the Bridge of Skulls
and take the Shadow Tower. Many followed him; more did not. Later, a dour warrior in fur and amber went
from cookfire to cookfire, urging all the survivors to head north and take refuge in the valley of the Thenns.
Why he thought they would be safe there when the Thenns themselves had fled the place Varamyr never
learned, but hundreds followed him. Hundreds more went off with the woods witch who’d had a vision of a
fleet of ships coming to carry the free folk
south. “We must seek the sea,” cried Mother Mole, and her
followers turned east.
Varamyr might have been amongst them if only he’d been stronger. The sea was grey and cold and far
away, though, and he knew that he would never live to see it. He was
nine times dead and dying, and this
would be his true death. A squirrel-skin cloak, he remembered, he knifed me for a squirrel-skin cloak.
Its owner had been dead, the back of her head smashed into red pulp flecked with bits of bone, but her
cloak looked warm and thick. It was snowing, and Varamyr had lost his own cloaks at the Wall. His
sleeping pelts and woolen smallclothes, his sheepskin boots and fur-lined gloves, his store of mead and
hoarded food, the hanks of hair he took from the women he bedded,
even the golden arm rings Mance had
given him, all lost and left behind. I burned and I died and then I ran, half-mad with pain and terror. The
memory still shamed him, but he had not been alone. Others had run as well, hundreds of them, thousands.
The battle was lost. The knights had come, invincible in their steel,
killing everyone who stayed to fight. It
was run or die.
Death was not so easily outrun, however. So when Varamyr came upon the dead woman in the wood, he
knelt to strip the cloak from her, and never saw the boy until he burst from hiding to drive the long bone
knife into his side and rip the cloak out of his clutching fingers. “His mother,” Thistle told him later, after
the boy had run off. “It were his mother’s cloak, and when he saw
you robbing her „”
“She was dead,” Varamyr said, wincing as her bone needle pierced his flesh. “Someone smashed her
head. Some crow.”
“No crow. Hornfoot men. I saw it.” Her needle pulled the gash
in his side closed. “Savages, and who’s
left to tame them?” No one. If Mance is dead,
the free folk are doomed. The Thenns, giants, and the
Hornfoot men, the cave-dwellers with their filed teeth, and the men of the western shore with their chariots
of bone „ all of them were doomed as well. Even the crows. They might not know it yet, but those black-
cloaked bastards would perish with the rest. The enemy was coming.
Haggon’s rough voice echoed in his head. “You will die a dozen
deaths, boy, and every one will hurt „
but when your true death comes, you will live again. The second life is simpler and sweeter, they say.”
Varamyr Sixskins would know the truth of that soon enough. He could taste his true death in the smoke
that hung acrid in the air, feel it in the heat beneath his fingers when he slipped a hand under his clothes to
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touch his wound. The chill was in him too, though, deep down in his bones. This time it would be cold
that killed him.
His last death had been by fire. I burned. At first, in his confusion, he thought some archer on the Wall
had pierced him with a flaming arrow „ but the fire had been inside him, consuming him. And the pain „
Varamyr had died nine times before. He had died once from a spear
thrust, once with a bear’s teeth in his
throat, and once in a wash of blood as he brought forth a stillborn cub. He died his first death when he was
only six, as his father’s axe crashed through his skull. Even that had not been so agonizing as the fire in his
guts, crackling along his wings, devouring him. When he tried to fly
from it, his terror fanned the flames
and made them burn hotter. One moment he had been soaring above the Wall, his eagle’s eyes marking the
movements of the men below. Then the flames had turned his heart into a blackened cinder and sent his
spirit screaming back into his own skin, and for a little while he’d gone mad. Even the memory was enough
to make him shudder.
That was when he noticed that his fire had gone out.
Only a grey-and-black tangle of charred wood
remained, with a few embers glowing in the ashes.
There’s still smoke, it just needs wood. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Varamyr crept to the pile of
broken branches Thistle had gathered before she went off hunting, and tossed a few sticks onto the ashes.
“Catch,” he croaked. “Burn.” He blew upon the embers and said a wordless prayer to the nameless gods of
wood and hill and field.
The gods gave no answer. After a while, the smoke ceased to rise as well. Already the little hut was
growing colder. Varamyr had no flint, no tinder, no dry kindling. He would never get the fire burning again,
not by himself. “Thistle,” he called out, his voice hoarse and edged with pain. “Thistle!”
Her chin was pointed and her nose flat, and she had a mole on one cheek with four dark hairs growing
from it. An ugly face, and hard, yet he would have given much to glimpse it in the door of the hut. I should
have taken her before she left. How long had she been gone? Two days? Three? Varamyr was uncertain. It
was dark inside the hut, and he had been drifting in and out of sleep, never quite sure if it was day or night
outside. “Wait,” she’d said. “I will be back with food.” So like
a fool he’d waited, dreaming of Haggon and
Bump and all the wrongs he had done in his long life, but days and nights had passed and Thistle had not
returned. She won’t be coming back. Varamyr wondered if he had given
himself away. Could she tell what
he was thinking just from looking at him, or had he muttered in his fever dream?
Abomination, he heard Haggon saying. It was almost as if he were
here, in this very room. “She is just
some ugly spearwife,” Varamyr told him. “I am a great man. I am Varamyr, the warg, the skinchanger, it is
not right that she should live and I should die.” No one answered. There was no one there. Thistle was gone.
She had abandoned him, the same as all the rest.
His own mother had abandoned him as well. She cried for Bump, but she never cried for me. The
morning his father pulled him out of bed to deliver him to Haggon, she would not even look at him. He had
shrieked and kicked as he was dragged into the woods, until his father slapped him and told him to be quiet.
“You belong with your own kind,” was all he said when he flung him down at Haggon’s feet.
He was not wrong, Varamyr thought, shivering. Haggon taught me much and more. He taught me how to
hunt and fish, how to butcher a carcass and bone a fish, how to find my way through the woods. And he
taught me the way of the warg and the secrets of the skinchanger, though my gift was stronger than his own.
Years later he had tried to find his parents, to tell them that their Lump had become the great Varamyr
Sixskins, but both of them were dead and burned. Gone into the trees and streams, gone into the rocks and
earth. Gone to dirt and ashes. That was what the woods witch told
his mother, the day Bump died. Lump
did not want to be a clod of earth. The boy had dreamed of a day when bards would sing of his deeds and
pretty girls would kiss him. When I am grown I will be the King-Beyond-the-Wall, Lump had promised
himself. He never had, but he had come close. Varamyr Sixskins was a name men feared. He rode to battle
on the back of a snow bear thirteen feet tall, kept three wolves and
a shadowcat in thrall, and sat at the right
hand of Mance Rayder. It was Mance who brought me to this place. I should not have listened. I should
have slipped inside my bear and torn him to pieces.
Before Mance, Varamyr Sixskins had been a lord of sorts. He lived alone in a hall of moss and mud and
hewn logs that had once been Haggon’s, attended by his beasts. A
dozen villages did him homage in bread
and salt and cider, offering him fruit from their orchards and vegetables from their gardens. His meat he got
himself. Whenever he desired a woman he sent his shadowcat to stalk her, and whatever girl he’d cast his
eye upon would follow meekly to his bed. Some came weeping, aye, but still they came. Varamyr gave
them his seed, took a hank of their hair to remember them by, and sent them back. From time to time, some
village hero would come with spear in hand to slay the beastling and save a sister or a lover or a daughter.
Those he killed, but he never harmed the women. Some he even blessed with children. Runts. Small, puny
things, like Lump, and not one with the gift.
Fear drove him to his feet, reeling. Holding his side to staunch the seep of blood from his wound,
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Varamyr lurched to the door and swept aside the ragged skin that covered it to face a wall of white.
Snow. No wonder it had grown so dark and smoky inside. The falling snow had buried the hut.
When Varamyr pushed at it, the snow crumbled and gave way, still soft and wet. Outside, the night was
white as death; pale thin clouds danced attendance on a silver moon, while a thousand stars watched coldly.
He could see the humped shapes of other huts buried beneath drifts of snow, and beyond them the pale
shadow of a weirwood armored in ice. To the south and west the hills were a vast white wilderness where
nothing moved except the blowing snow. “Thistle,” Varamyr called feebly, wondering how far she could
have gone. “Thistle. Woman. Where are you?”
Far away, a wolf gave howl.
A shiver went through Varamyr. He knew that howl as well as Lump had once known his mother’s
voice. One Eye. He was the oldest of his three, the biggest, the fiercest. Stalker was leaner, quicker,
younger, Sly more cunning, but both went in fear of One Eye. The old
wolf was fearless, relentless, savage.
Varamyr had lost control of his other beasts in the agony of the eagle’s death. His shadowcat had raced
into the woods, whilst his snow bear turned her claws on those around her, ripping apart four men before
falling to a spear. She would have slain Varamyr had he come within
her reach. The bear hated him, had
raged each time he wore her skin or climbed upon her back.
His wolves, though „
My brothers. My pack. Many a cold night he had slept with his wolves, their shaggy bodies piled up
around him to help keep him warm. When I die they will feast upon my flesh and leave only bones to greet
the thaw come spring. The thought was queerly comforting. His wolves had often foraged for him as they
roamed; it seemed only fitting that he should feed
them in the end. He might well begin his second life
tearing at the warm dead flesh of his own corpse.
Dogs were the easiest beasts to bond with; they lived so close to men that they were almost human.
Slipping into a dog’s skin was like putting on an old boot, its leather softened by wear. As a boot was
shaped to accept a foot, a dog was shaped to accept a collar, even a collar no human eye could see. Wolves
were harder. A man might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, but no man could truly tame a wolf. “Wolves
and women wed for life,” Haggon often said. “You take one, that’s a marriage. The wolf is part of you from
that day on, and you’re part of him. Both of you will change.”
Other beasts were best left alone, the hunter had declared. Cats were vain and cruel, always ready to turn
on you. Elk and deer were prey; wear their skins too long, and even the bravest man became a coward.
Bears, boars, badgers, weasels „ Haggon did not hold with such. “Some skins you never want to wear, boy.
You won’t like what you’d become.” Birds were the worst, to hear him tell it. “Men were not meant to leave
the earth. Spend too much time in the clouds
and you never want to come back down again. I know
skinchangers who’ve tried hawks, owls, ravens. Even in their own
skins, they sit moony, staring up at the
bloody blue.”
Not all skinchangers felt the same, however. Once, when Lump was ten, Haggon had taken him to a
gathering of such. The wargs were the most numerous in that company,
the wolf-brothers, but the boy had
found the others stranger and more fascinating. Borroq looked so much like his boar that all he lacked was
tusks, Orell had his eagle, Briar her shadowcat the moment he saw them, Lump wanted a shadowcat of his
own , the goat woman Grisella „
None of them had been as strong as Varamyr Sixskins, though, not even Haggon, tall and grim with his
hands as hard as stone. The hunter died weeping after Varamyr took Greyskin from him, driving him out to
claim the beast for his own. No second life for you, old man. Varamyr Threeskins, he’d called himself back
then. Greyskin made four, though the old wolf was frail and almost toothless and soon followed Haggon
into death.
Varamyr could take any beast he wanted, bend them to his will, make their flesh his own. Dog or wolf,
bear or badger „
Thistle, he thought.
Haggon would call it an abomination, the blackest sin of all, but Haggon was dead, devoured, and
burned. Mance would have cursed him as well, but Mance was slain or captured. No one will ever know. I
will be Thistle the spearwife, and Varamyr Sixskins will be dead. His gift would perish with his body, he
expected. He would lose his wolves, and live out the rest of his days as some scrawny, warty woman „ but
he would live. If she comes back. If I am still strong enough to take her.
A wave of dizziness washed over Varamyr. He found himself upon his knees, his hands buried in a
snowdrift. He scooped up a fistful of snow and filled his mouth with it, rubbing it through his beard and
against his cracked lips, sucking down the moisture. The water was so cold that he could barely bring
himself to swallow, and he realized once again how hot he was.
The snowmelt only made him hungrier. It was food his belly craved, not water. The snow had stopped
falling, but the wind was rising, filling the air with crystal,
slashing at his face as he struggled through the
drifts, the wound in his side opening and closing again. His breath made a ragged white cloud. When he
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reached the weirwood tree, he found a fallen branch just long
enough to use as a crutch. Leaning heavily
upon it, he staggered toward the nearest hut. Perhaps the villagers had forgotten something when they fled
„ a sack of apples, some dried meat, anything to keep him alive until Thistle returned.
He was almost there when his crutch snapped beneath his weight, and his legs went out from under him.
How long he sprawled there with his blood reddening the snow Varamyr could not have said. The snow
will bury me. It would be a peaceful death. They say you feel warm near the end, warm and sleepy. It would
be good to feel warm again, though it made him sad to think that he would never see the green lands, the
warm lands beyond the Wall that Mance used to sing about. “The world beyond the Wall is not for our
kind,” Haggon used to say. “The free folk fear skinchangers, but
they honor us as well. South of the Wall,
the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs.”
You warned me, Varamyr thought, but it was you who showed me Eastwatch too. He could not have been
more than ten. Haggon traded a dozen strings of amber and a sled piled high with pelts for six skins of wine,
a block of salt, and a copper kettle. Eastwatch was a better place to trade than Castle Black; that was where
the ships came, laden with goods from the fabled lands beyond the
sea. The crows knew Haggon as a hunter
and a friend to the Night’s Watch, and welcomed the news he brought of life beyond their Wall. Some knew
him for a skinchanger too, but no one spoke of that. It was there at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea that the boy he’d
been first began to dream of the warm south.
Varamyr could feel the snowflakes melting on his brow. This is not so bad as burning. Let me sleep and
never wake, let me begin my second life. His wolves were close now.
He could feel them. He would leave
this feeble flesh behind, become one with them, hunting the night and howling at the moon. The warg would
become a true wolf. Which, though?
Not Sly. Haggon would have called it abomination, but Varamyr had often slipped inside her skin as she
was being mounted by One Eye. He did not want to spend his new life
as a bitch, though, not unless he had
no other choice. Stalker might suit him better, the younger male „ though One Eye was larger and fiercer,
and it was One Eye who took Sly whenever she went into heat.
“They say you forget,” Haggon had told him, a few weeks before his own death. “When the man’s
flesh dies, his spirit lives on inside the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast becomes a little
less a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is left
and only the beast remains.”
Varamyr knew the truth of that. When he claimed the eagle that had been Orell’s, he could feel the other
skinchanger raging at his presence. Orell had been slain by the turncloak crow Jon Snow, and his hate for
his killer had been so strong that Varamyr found himself hating the
beastling boy as well. He had known
what Snow was the moment he saw that great white direwolf stalking silent at his side. One skinchanger can
always sense another. Mance should have let me take the direwolf. There would be a second life worthy of a
king. He could have done it, he did not doubt. The gift was strong in Snow, but the youth was untaught, still
fighting his nature when he should have gloried in it.
Varamyr could see the weirwood’s red eyes staring down at him from the white trunk. The gods are
weighing me. A shiver went through him. He had done bad things, terrible things. He had stolen, killed,
raped. He had gorged on human flesh and lapped the blood of dying men as it gushed red and hot from their
torn throats. He had stalked foes through the woods, fallen on them as they slept, clawed their entrails from
their bellies and scattered them across the muddy earth. How sweet their meat had tasted. “That was the
beast, not me,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “That was the gift you gave me.”
The gods made no reply. His breath hung pale and misty in the air. He could feel ice forming in his
beard. Varamyr Sixskins closed his eyes.
He dreamt an old dream of a hovel by the sea, three dogs whimpering, a woman’s tears.
Bump. She weeps for Bump, but she never wept for me.
Lump had been born a month before his proper time, and he was sick so often that no one expected him
to live. His mother waited until he was almost four to give him a proper name, and by then it was too late.
The whole village had taken to calling him Lump, the name his sister Meha had given him when he was still
in their mother’s belly. Meha had given Bump his name as well, but Lump’s little brother had been born in
his proper time, big and red and robust, sucking greedily at Mother’s teats. She was going to name him after
Father. Bump died, though. He died when he was two and I was six, three days before his nameday.
“Your little one is with the gods now,” the woods witch told his mother, as she wept. “He’ll never hurt
again, never hunger, never cry. The gods have taken him down into the earth, into the trees. The gods are all
around us, in the rocks and streams, in the birds and beasts. Your
Bump has gone to join them. He’ll be the
world and all that’s in it.”
The old woman’s words had gone through Lump like a knife. Bump sees. He is watching me. He knows.
Lump could not hide from him, could not slip behind his mother’s skirts or run off with the dogs to escape
his father’s fury. The dogs. Loptail, Sniff, the Growler. They were
good dogs. They were my friends.
When his father found the dogs sniffing round Bump’s body, he had no way of knowing which had done
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it, so he took his axe to all three. His hands shook so badly
that it took two blows to silence Sniff and
four to put the Growler down. The smell of blood hung heavy in the air, and the sounds the dying dogs had
made were terrible to hear, yet Loptail still came when father called him. He was the oldest dog, and his
training overcame his terror. By the time Lump slipped inside his skin it was too late.
No, Father, please, he tried to say, but dogs cannot speak the tongues of men, so all that emerged was a
piteous whine. The axe crashed into the middle of the old dog’s skull, and inside the hovel the boy let out a
scream. That was how they knew. Two days later, his father dragged him into the woods. He brought his
axe, so Lump thought he meant to put him down the same way he had done the dogs. Instead he’d given
him to Haggon.
Varamyr woke suddenly, violently, his whole body shaking. “Get
up,” a voice was screaming, “get up,
we have to go. There are hundreds of them.” The snow had covered him with a stiff white blanket. So cold.
When he tried to move, he found that his hand was frozen to the ground. He left some skin behind when he
tore it loose. “Get up,” she screamed again, “they’re coming.”
Thistle had returned to him. She had him by the shoulders and was shaking him, shouting in his face.
Varamyr could smell her breath and feel the warmth of it upon cheeks gone numb with cold. Now, he
thought, do it now, or die.
He summoned all the strength still in him, leapt out of his own skin, and forced himself inside her.
Thistle arched her
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