As still as stone she stood. “I… I was only…”
“
“
The Hound watched her saddle Craven through eyes bright with fever. Not once did he attempt to rise and stop her. But when she mounted, he said, “A real wolf would finish a wounded animal.”
On a bright morning six days later, she came to a place where the Trident began to widen out and the air smelled more of salt than trees. She stayed close to the water, passing fields and farms, and a little after midday a town appeared before her.
And there were ships.
The stable had been burnt, she learned from a boy by the docks, but the woman who’d owned it was still trading behind the sept. Arya found her easily; a big, robust woman with a good horsey smell to her. She liked Craven at first look, asked Arya how she’d come by her, and grinned at her answer. “She’s a well-bred horse, that’s plain enough, and I don’t doubt she belonged to a knight, sweetling,” she said. “But the knight wasn’t no dead brother o’ yours. I been dealing with the castle there many a year, so I know what gentleborn folk is like. This mare is well-bred, but you’re not.” She poked a finger at Arya’s chest. “Found her or stole her, never mind which, that’s how it was. Only way a scruffy little thing like you comes to ride a palfrey.”
Arya bit her lip. “Does that mean you won’t buy her?”
The woman chuckled. “It means you’ll take what I give you, sweetling. Else we go down to the castle, and maybe you get nothing. Or even hanged, for stealing some good knight’s horse.”
A half-dozen other Saltpans folks were around, going about their business, so Arya knew she couldn’t kill the woman. Instead she had to bite her lip and let herself be cheated. The purse she got was pitifully flat, and when she asked for more for the saddle and bridle and blanket, the woman just laughed at her.
The purple galley was still there. If the ship had sailed while she was being robbed, that would have been too much to bear. A cask of mead was being rolled up the plank when she arrived. When she tried to follow, a sailor up on deck shouted down at her in a tongue she did not know. “I want to see the captain,” Arya told him. He only shouted louder. But the commotion drew the attention of a stout grey-haired man in a coat of purple wool, and he spoke the Common Tongue. “I am captain here,” he said. “What is your wish? Be quick, child, we have a tide to catch.”
“I want to go north, to the Wall. Here, I can pay.” She gave him the purse. “The Night’s Watch has a castle on the sea.”
“Eastwatch.” The captain spilled out the silver onto his palm and frowned. “Is this all you have?”
“Take her on as cabin girl,” said a passing oarsman, a bolt of wool over one shoulder. “She can sleep with me.”
“Mind your tongue,” the captain snapped.
“I could work,” said Arya. “I could scrub the decks. I scrubbed a castle steps once. Or I could row…”
“No,” he said, “you couldn’t.” He gave her back her coins. “It would make no difference if you could, child. The north has nothing for us. Ice and war and pirates. We saw a dozen pirate ships making north as we rounded Crackclaw Point, and I have no wish to meet them again. From here we bend our oars for home, and I suggest you do the same.”
The captain was turning away when she said, “What ship is this, my lord?”
He paused long enough to give her a weary smile. “This is the galleas
“Wait,” Arya said suddenly. “I have something else.” She had stuffed it down inside her smallclothes to keep it safe, so she had to dig deep to find it, while the oarsmen laughed and the captain lingered with obvious impatience. “One more silver will make no difference, child,” he finally said.
“It’s not silver.” Her fingers closed on it. “It’s iron. Here.” She pressed it into his hand, the small black iron coin that Jaqen H’ghar had given her, so worn the man whose head it bore had no features.
The captain turned it over and blinked at it, then looked at her again. “This… how…?”
“
SAMWELL
“He sucks harder than mine.” Gilly stroked the babe’s head as she held him to her nipple.
“He’s hungry,” said the blonde woman Val, the one the black brothers called the wildling princess. “He’s lived on goats’ milk up to now, and potions from that blind maester.”
The boy did not have a name yet, no more than Gilly’s did. That was the wildling way. Not even Mance Rayder’s son would get a name till his third year, it would seem, though Sam had heard the brothers calling him “the little prince” and “born-in-battle.”
He watched the child nurse at Gilly’s breast, and then he watched Jon watch.
They had walked from the Nightfort to Deep Lake, and from Deep Lake to Queensgate, following a narrow