A Feast for Dragons

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 Sixskins, 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