A Dance With Dragons

ankle stabbed at her with every step.
    Small and mean as it was, the longhall was the largest building in the village, so the lords and captains had taken it for themselves, whilst Stannis settled into the stone watchtower by the lakeshore. A pair of guardsmen flanked its door, leaning on tall spears. One lifted the greased door flap for Massey, and Ser Justin escorted Asha through to the blessed warmth within.
    Benches and trestle tables ran along either side of the hall, with room for fifty men … though twice that number had squeezed themselves inside. A fire trench had been dug down the middle of the earthen floor, with a row of smokeholes in the roof above. The wolves had taken to sitting on one side of the trench, the knights and southron lords upon the other.
    The southerners looked a sorry lot, Asha thought—gaunt and hollow-cheeked, some pale and sick, others with red and wind-scoured faces. By contrast the northmen seemed hale and healthy, big ruddy men with beards as thick as bushes, clad in fur and iron. They might be cold and hungry too, but the marching had gone easier for them, with their garrons and their bear-paws.
    Asha peeled off her fur mittens, wincing as she flexed her fingers. Pain shot up her legs as her half-frozen feet began to thaw in the warmth. The crofters had left behind a good supply of peat when they fled, so the air was hazy with smoke and the rich, earthy smell of burning turf. She hung her cloak on a peg inside the door after shaking off the snow that clung to it.
    Ser Justin found them places on the bench and fetched supper for the both of them—ale and chunks of horsemeat, charred black outside and red within. Asha took a sip of ale and fell upon the horse flesh. The portion was smaller than the last she’d tasted, but her belly still rumbled at the smell of it. “My thanks, ser,” she said, as blood and grease ran down her chin.
    “Justin. I insist.” Massey cut his own meat into chunks and stabbed one with his dagger.
    Down the table, Will Foxglove was telling the men around him that Stannis would resume his march on Winterfell three days hence. He’d had it from the lips of one of the grooms who tended the king’s horses. “His Grace has seen victory in his fires,” Foxglove said, “a victory that will be sung of for a thousand years in lord’s castle and peasant’s hut alike.”
    Justin Massey looked up from his horsemeat. “The cold count last night reached eighty.” He pulled a piece of gristle from his teeth and flicked it to the nearest dog. “If we march, we will die by the hundreds.”
    “We will die by the thousands if we stay here,” said Ser Humfrey Clifton. “Press on or die, I say.”
    “Press on and die, I answer. And if we reach Winterfell, what then? How do we take it? Half our men are so weak they can scarce put one foot before another. Will you set them to scaling walls? Building siege towers?”
    “We should remain here until the weather breaks,” said Ser Ormund Wylde, a cadaverous old knight whose nature gave the lie to his name. Asha had heard rumors that some of the men-at-arms were wagering on which of the great knights and lords would be the next to die. Ser Ormund had emerged as a clear favorite. And how much coin was placed on me, I wonder? Asha thought. Perhaps there is still time to put down a wager. “Here at least we have some shelter,” Wylde was insisting, “and there are fish in the lakes.”
    “Too few fish and too many fishermen,” Lord Peasebury said gloomily. He had good reason for gloom; it was his men Ser Godry had just burned, and there were some in this very hall who had been heard to say that Peasebury himself surely knew what they were doing and might even have shared in their feasts.
    “He’s not wrong,” grumbled Ned Woods, one of the scouts from Deepwood. Noseless Ned, he was called; frostbite had claimed the tip of his nose two winters past. Woods knew the wolfwood as well as any man alive. Even the king’s proudest lords had learned to listen when he spoke. “I know them lakes. You been on them like maggots on a corpse, hundreds o’ you. Cut so many holes in the ice it’s a bloody wonder more haven’t fallen through. Out by the island, there’s places look like a cheese the rats been at.” He shook his head. “Lakes are done. You fished them out.”
    “All the more reason to march,” insisted Humfrey Clifton. “If death is our fate, let us die with swords in hand.”
    It was the same