A Feast for Dragons

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 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