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 further 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 was 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 innkeep 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 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