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 innkeep 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 innkeep 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 innkeep 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 stable boy 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 illbred 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,
