That was the day without a dawn. Slowly the sky lightened around them, but they never saw the sun. Black turned to grey, and colors crept timidly back into the world. The soldier pines were dressed in somber greens, the broadleafs in russets and faded golds already beginning to brown. They stopped long enough to water the horses and eat a cold, quick breakfast, ripping apart a loaf of the bread that Hot Pie had stolen from the kitchens and passing chunks of hard yellow cheese from hand to hand.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Gendry asked her.
“North,” said Arya.
Hot Pie peered around uncertainly. “Which way is north?”
She used her cheese to point. “That way.”
“But there’s no sun. How do you know?”
“From the moss. See how it grows mostly on one side of the trees? That’s south.”
“What do we want with the north?” Gendry wanted to know.
“The Trident.” Arya unrolled the stolen map to show them. “See? Once we reach the Trident, all we need to do is follow it upstream till we come to Riverrun, here.” Her finger traced the path. “It’s a long way, but we can’t get lost so long as we keep to the river.”
Hot Pie blinked at the map. “Which one is Riverrun?”
Riverrun was painted as a castle tower, in the fork between the flowing blue lines of two rivers, the Tumblestone and the Red Fork. “There.” She touched it. “
“You can read writing?” he said to her, wonderingly, as if she’d said she could walk on water.
She nodded. “We’ll be safe once we reach Riverrun.”
“We will? Why?”
That day Arya quickened their pace, keeping the horses to a trot as long as she dared, and sometimes spurring to a gallop when she spied a flat stretch of field before them. That was seldom enough, though; the ground was growing hillier as they went. The hills were not high, nor especially steep, but there seemed to be no end of them, and they soon grew tired of climbing up one and down the other, and found themselves following the lay of the land, along streambeds and through a maze of shallow wooded valleys where the trees made a solid canopy overhead.
From time to time she sent Hot Pie and Gendry on while she doubled back to try to confuse their trail, listening all the while for the first sign of pursuit.
By midday Hot Pie had begun to complain. His arse was sore, he told them, and the saddle was rubbing him raw inside his legs, and besides he had to get some sleep. “I’m so tired I’m going to fall off the horse.”
Arya looked at Gendry. “If he falls off, who do you think will find him first, the wolves or the Mummers?”
“The wolves,” said Gendry. “Better noses.”
Hot Pie opened his mouth and closed it. He did not fall off his horse. The rain began again a short time later. They still had not seen so much as a glimpse of the sun. It was growing colder, and pale white mists were threading between the pines and blowing across the bare burned fields.
Gendry was having almost as bad a time of it as Hot Pie, though he was too stubborn to complain. He sat awkwardly in the saddle, a determined look on his face beneath his shaggy black hair, but Arya could tell he was no horseman.
She would make much better time on her own, Arya knew, but she could not leave them. They were her pack, her friends, the only living friends that remained to her, and if not for her they would still be safe at Harrenhal, Gendry sweating at his forge and Hot Pie in the kitchens.
Late that afternoon, they emerged from beneath the trees and found themselves on the banks of a river. Hot Pie gave a whoop of delight. “The
Arya chewed her lip. “I don’t think this is the Trident.” The river was swollen by the rain, but even so it couldn’t be much more than thirty feet across. She remembered the Trident as being much wider. “It’s too little to be the Trident,” she told them, “and we didn’t come far enough.”
“Yes we did,” Hot Pie insisted. “We rode all day, and hardly stopped at all. We must have come a long way.”
“Let’s have a look at that map again,” said Gendry.
Arya dismounted, took out the map, unrolled it. The rain pattered against the sheepskin and ran off in rivulets. “We’re someplace here, I think,” she said, pointing, as the boys peered over her shoulders.
“But,” said Hot Pie, “that’s hardly any ways at all. See, Harrenhal’s there by your finger, you’re almost
“There’s miles and miles before we reach the Trident,” she said. “We won’t be there for
Hot Pie looked from the line to the river. “It doesn’t look so little to me.”
Gendry was frowning as well. “The one you’re pointing at runs into that other one, see.”
“The Big Willow,” she read.
“The Big Willow, then. See, and the Big Willow runs into the Trident, so we could follow the one to the other, but we’d need to go downstream, not up. Only if this river
“Rippledown Rill,” Arya read.
“See, it loops around and flows down toward the lake, back to Harrenhal.” He traced the line with a finger.
Hot Pie’s eyes grew wide. “
“We have to know which river this is,” declared Gendry, in his stubbornest voice. “We have to know.”
“Well, we
“Can horses swim?” asked Hot Pie. “It looks