Later, when Ser Corliss Penny wondered aloud whether an entire army had ever frozen to death in a winter storm, the wolves laughed. “This is no winter,” declared Big Bucket Wull. “Up in the hills we say that autumn kisses you, but winter fucks you hard. This is only autumn’s kiss.”
God grant that I never know true winter, then. Asha herself was spared the worst of it; she was the king’s prize, after all. Whilst others hungered, she was fed. Whilst others shivered, she was warm. Whilst others struggled through the snows atop weary horses, she rode upon a bed of furs inside a wayn, with a stiff canvas roof to keep the snow off, comfortable in her chains.
The horses and the common men had it hardest. Two squires from the stormlands stabbed a man-at-arms to death in a quarrel over who would sit closest to the fire. The next night some archers desperate for warmth somehow managed to set their tent afire, which had at least the virtue of heating the adjacent tents. Destriers began to perish of exhaustion and exposure. “What is a knight without a horse?” men riddled. “A snowman with a sword.” Any horse that went down was butchered on the spot for meat. Their provisions had begun to run low as well.
Peasebury, Cobb, Foxglove, and other southron lords urged the king to make camp until the storm had passed. Stannis would have none of that. Nor would he heed the queen’s men when they came to urge him to make an offering to their hungry red god.
That tale she had from Justin Massey, who was less devout than most. “A sacrifice will prove our faith still burns true, Sire,” Clayton Suggs had told the king. And Godry the Giantslayer said, “The old gods of the north have sent this storm upon us. Only R’hllor can end it. We must give him an unbeliever.”
“Half my army is made up of unbelievers,” Stannis had replied. “I will have no burnings. Pray harder.”
No burnings today, and none tomorrow … but if the snows continue, how long before the king’s resolve begins to weaken? Asha had never shared her uncle Aeron’s faith in the Drowned God, but that night she prayed as fervently to He Who Dwells Beneath the Waves as ever the Damphair had. The storm did not abate. The march continued, slowing to a stagger, then a crawl. Five miles was a good day. Then three. Then two.
By the ninth day of the storm, every camp saw the captains and commanders entering the king’s tent wet and weary, to sink to one knee and report their losses for the day.
“One man dead, three missing.”
“Six horses lost, one of them mine own.”
“Two dead men, one a knight. Four horses down. We got one up again. The others are lost. Destriers, and one palfrey.”
The cold count, Asha heard it named. The baggage train suffered the worst: dead horses, lost men, wayns overturned and broken. “The horses founder in the snow,” Justin Massey told the king. “Men wander off or just sit down to die.”
“Let them,” King Stannis snapped. “We press on.”
The northmen fared much better, with their garrons and their bear-paws. Black Donnel Flint and his half-brother Artos only lost one man between them. The Liddles, the Wulls, and the Norreys lost none at all. One of Morgan Liddle’s mules had gone astray, but he seemed to think the Flints had stolen him.
One hundred leagues from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell. Three hundred miles as the raven flies. Fifteen days. The fifteenth day of the march came and went, and they had crossed less than half the distance. A trail of broken wayns and frozen corpses stretched back behind them, buried beneath the blowing snow. The sun and moon and stars had been gone so long that Asha was starting to wonder whether she had dreamed them.
It was the twentieth day of the advance when she finally won free of her ankle chains. Late that afternoon, one of the horses drawing her wayn died in the traces. No replacement could be found; what draft horses remained were needed to pull the wagons that held their food and fodder. When Ser Justin Massey rode up, he told them to butcher the dead horse for meat and break up the wagon for firewood. Then he removed the fetters around Asha’s ankles, rubbing the stiffness from her calves. “I have no mount to give you, my lady,” he said, “and if we tried to ride double, it would be the end of my horse as well. You must walk.”
Asha’s ankle throbbed beneath her weight with every step. The cold will numb it soon enough, she told herself. In an hour I won’t feel my feet at all. She was only part wrong; it took less time than that. By the time darkness halted the column, she was stumbling and yearning for the comforts of her rolling prison. The irons made me weak. Supper found her so exhausted that she fell asleep at the table.
On the twenty-sixth day of the fifteen-day march, the last of the vegetables was consumed. On the thirty-second day, the last of the grain and fodder. Asha wondered how long a man could live on raw, half-frozen horse meat.
“Branch swears we are only three days from Winterfell,” Ser Richard Horpe told the king that night after the cold count.
“If we leave the weakest men behind,” said Corliss Penny.
“The weakest men are beyond saving,” insisted Horpe. “Those still strong enough must reach Winterfell or die as well.”
“The Lord of Light will deliver us the castle,” said Ser Godry Farring. “If Lady Melisandre were with us—”
Finally, after a nightmarish day when the column advanced a bare mile and lost a dozen horses and four men, Lord Peasebury turned against the northmen. “This march was madness. More dying every day, and for what? Some girl?”
“Ned’s girl,” said Morgan Liddle. He was the second of three sons, so the other wolves called him Middle Liddle, though not often in his hearing. It was Morgan who had almost slain Asha in the fight by Deepwood Motte. He had come to her later, on the march, to beg her pardon … for calling her cunt in his battle lust, not for trying to split her head open with an axe.
“Ned’s girl,” echoed Big Bucket Wull. “And we should have had her and the castle both if you prancing southron jackanapes didn’t piss your satin breeches at a little snow.”
“A little snow?” Peasebury’s soft girlish mouth twisted in fury. “Your ill counsel forced this march upon us, Wull. I am starting to suspect you have been Bolton’s creature all along. Is that the way of it? Did he send you to us to whisper poison in the king’s ear?”
Big Bucket laughed in his face. “Lord Pea Pod. If you were a man, I would kill you for that, but my sword is made of too fine a steel to besmirch with craven’s blood.” He took a drink of ale and wiped his mouth. “Aye, men are dying. More will die before we see Winterfell. What of it? This is war. Men die in war. That is as it should be. As it has always been.”
Ser Corliss Penny gave the clan chief an incredulous look. “Do you want to die, Wull?”
That seemed to amuse the northman. “I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter.
“Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned’s little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.”
“Aye!” shouted Morgan Liddle. “Blood and battle!” Then all the hillmen were shouting, banging their cups and drinking horns on the table, filling the king’s tent with the clangor.
Asha Greyjoy would have welcomed a fight herself. One battle, to put an end to this misery. Steel on steel, pink snow, broken shields and severed limbs,