A Feast for Dragons

Spend too
much time in the clouds and you never want to come back down again. I know
skinchangers who’ve tried hawks, owls, ravens. Even in their own skins, they
sit moony, staring up at the bloody blue.”
    Not all skinchangers felt the same, however. Once, when Lump
was ten, Haggon had taken him to a gathering of such. The wargs were the most
numerous in that company, the wolf-brothers, but the boy had found the others
stranger and more fascinating. Borroq looked so much like his boar that all he
lacked was tusks, Orell had his eagle, Briar her shadowcat (the moment he saw
them, Lump wanted a shadowcat of his own), the goat woman Grisella …
    None of them had been as strong as Varamyr Sixskins, though,
not even Haggon, tall and grim with his hands as hard as stone. The hunter died
weeping after Varamyr took Greyskin from him, driving him out to claim the
beast for his own.
No second life for you, old man
. Varamyr
Threeskins, he’d called himself back then. Greyskin made four, though the old
wolf was frail and almost toothless and soon followed Haggon into death.
    Varamyr could take any beast he wanted, bend them to his
will, make their flesh his own. Dog or wolf, bear or badger …
    Thistle
, he thought.
    Haggon would call it an abomination, the blackest sin of
all, but Haggon was dead, devoured, and burned. Mance would have cursed him as
well, but Mance was slain or captured.
No one will ever know. I will be
Thistle the spearwife, and Varamyr Sixskins will be dead
. His gift
would perish with his body, he expected. He would lose his wolves, and live out
the rest of his days as some scrawny, warty woman … but he would
live.
If she comes back. If I am still strong enough to take her
.
    A wave of dizziness washed over Varamyr. He found himself
upon his knees, his hands buried in a snowdrift. He scooped up a fistful of
snow and filled his mouth with it, rubbing it through his beard and against his
cracked lips, sucking down the moisture. The water was so cold that he could
barely bring himself to swallow, and he realized once again how hot he was.
    The snowmelt only made him hungrier. It was food his belly
craved, not water. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind was rising,
filling the air with crystal, slashing at his face as he struggled through the
drifts, the wound in his side opening and closing again. His breath made a
ragged white cloud. When he reached the weirwood tree, he found a fallen branch
just long enough to use as a crutch. Leaning heavily upon it, he staggered
toward the nearest hut. Perhaps the villagers had forgotten something when they
fled … a sack of apples, some dried meat, anything to keep him alive
until Thistle returned.
    He was almost there when his crutch snapped beneath his
weight, and his legs went out from under him.
    How long he sprawled there with his blood reddening the snow
Varamyr could not have said.
The snow will bury me
. It would be
a peaceful death.
They say you feel warm near the end, warm and sleepy
.
It would be good to feel warm again, though it made him sad to think that he
would never see the green lands, the warm lands beyond the Wall that Mance used
to sing about. “The world beyond the Wall is not for our kind,” Haggon used to
say. “The free folk fear skinchangers, but they honor us as well. South of the
Wall, the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs.”
    You warned me
, Varamyr thought,
but
it was you who showed me Eastwatch too
. He could not have been more
than ten. Haggon traded a dozen strings of amber and a sled piled high with
pelts for six skins of wine, a block of salt, and a copper kettle. Eastwatch
was a better place to trade than Castle Black; that was where the ships came,
laden with goods from the fabled lands beyond the sea. The crows knew Haggon as
a hunter and a friend to the Night’s Watch, and welcomed the news he brought of
life beyond their Wall. Some knew him for a skinchanger too, but no one spoke
of that. It was there at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea that the boy he’d been first
began to dream of the warm south.
    Varamyr could feel the snowflakes melting on his brow.
This
is not so bad as burning. Let me sleep and never wake, let me begin my second
life
. His wolves were close now. He could feel them. He would leave
this feeble flesh behind, become one with them, hunting the night and howling
at the moon. The warg would become a true wolf.
Which, though?
    Not Sly. Haggon would have called it abomination, but
Varamyr