A Feast for Dragons

simpler and sweeter, they say.”
    Varamyr Sixskins would know the truth of that soon enough.
He could taste his true death in the smoke that hung acrid in the air, feel it
in the heat beneath his fingers when he slipped a hand under his clothes to
touch his wound. The chill was in him too, though, deep down in his bones. This
time it would be cold that killed him.
    His last death had been by fire.
I burned
.
At first, in his confusion, he thought some archer on the Wall had pierced him
with a flaming arrow … but the fire had been
inside
him, consuming him. And the pain …
    Varamyr had died nine times before. He had died once from a
spear thrust, once with a bear’s teeth in his throat, and once in a wash of
blood as he brought forth a stillborn cub. He died his first death when he was
only six, as his father’s axe crashed through his skull. Even that had not been
so agonizing as the fire in his guts, crackling along his wings,
devouring
him. When he tried to fly from it, his terror fanned the flames and made them
burn hotter. One moment he had been soaring above the Wall, his eagle’s eyes
marking the movements of the men below. Then the flames had turned his heart
into a blackened cinder and sent his spirit screaming back into his own skin,
and for a little while he’d gone mad. Even the memory was enough to make him
shudder.
    That was when he noticed that his fire had gone out.
    Only a grey-and-black tangle of charred wood remained, with
a few embers glowing in the ashes.
There’s still smoke, it just needs
wood
. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Varamyr crept to the pile
of broken branches Thistle had gathered before she went off hunting, and tossed
a few sticks onto the ashes. “Catch,” he croaked.
“Burn.”
He
blew upon the embers and said a wordless prayer to the nameless gods of wood
and hill and field.
    The gods gave no answer. After a while, the smoke ceased to
rise as well. Already the little hut was growing colder. Varamyr had no flint,
no tinder, no dry kindling. He would never get the fire burning again, not by
himself. “Thistle,” he called out, his voice hoarse and edged with pain.
“Thistle!”
    Her chin was pointed and her nose flat, and she had a mole
on one cheek with four dark hairs growing from it. An ugly face, and hard, yet
he would have given much to glimpse it in the door of the hut.
I should
have taken her before she left
. How long had she been gone? Two days?
Three? Varamyr was uncertain. It was dark inside the hut, and he had been
drifting in and out of sleep, never quite sure if it was day or night outside.
“Wait,” she’d said. “I will be back with food.” So like a fool he’d waited,
dreaming of Haggon and Bump and all the wrongs he had done in his long life,
but days and nights had passed and Thistle had not returned.
She won’t
be coming back
. Varamyr wondered if he had given himself away. Could
she tell what he was thinking just from looking at him, or had he muttered in
his fever dream?
    Abomination
, he heard Haggon saying. It was
almost as if he were here, in this very room. “She is just some ugly
spearwife,” Varamyr told him. “I am a great man. I am Varamyr, the warg, the
skinchanger, it is not right that she should live and I should die.” No one
answered. There was no one there. Thistle was gone. She had abandoned him, the
same as all the rest.
    His own mother had abandoned him as well.
She cried
for Bump, but she never cried for me
. The morning his father pulled
him out of bed to deliver him to Haggon, she would not even look at him. He had
shrieked and kicked as he was dragged into the woods, until his father slapped
him and told him to be quiet. “You belong with your own kind,” was all he said
when he flung him down at Haggon’s feet.
    He was not wrong
, Varamyr thought,
shivering.
Haggon taught me much and more. He taught me how to hunt and
fish, how to butcher a carcass and bone a fish, how to find my way through the
woods. And he taught me the way of the warg and the secrets of the skinchanger,
though my gift was stronger than his own
.
    Years later he had tried to find his parents, to tell them
that their Lump had become the great Varamyr Sixskins, but both of them were
dead and burned.
Gone into the trees and streams, gone into the rocks
and earth. Gone to dirt and ashes
. That was what the woods witch told
his mother, the day Bump died. Lump did not want to be a clod of earth. The boy
had dreamed of a day when bards