A Feast for Dragons

Haggon.
    Varamyr woke suddenly, violently, his whole body shaking.
“Get up,” a voice was screaming, “get up, we have to go. There are hundreds of
them.” The snow had covered him with a stiff white blanket.
So cold
.
When he tried to move, he found that his hand was frozen to the ground. He left
some skin behind when he tore it loose. “Get up,” she screamed again, “they’re
coming.”
    Thistle had returned to him. She had him by the shoulders
and was shaking him, shouting in his face. Varamyr could smell her breath and
feel the warmth of it upon cheeks gone numb with cold.
Now
, he
thought,
do it now, or die
.
    He summoned all the strength still in him, leapt out of his
own skin, and forced himself inside her.
    Thistle arched her back and screamed.
    Abomination
. Was that her, or him, or
Haggon? He never knew. His old flesh fell back into the snowdrift as her
fingers loosened. The spearwife twisted violently, shrieking. His shadowcat
used to fight him wildly, and the snow bear had gone half-mad for a time,
snapping at trees and rocks and empty air, but this was worse. “Get out,
get
out!”
he heard her own mouth shouting. Her body staggered, fell, and
rose again, her hands flailed, her legs jerked this way and that in some
grotesque dance as his spirit and her own fought for the flesh. She sucked down
a mouthful of the frigid air, and Varamyr had half a heartbeat to glory in the
taste of it and the strength of this young body before her teeth snapped
together and filled his mouth with blood. She raised her hands to his face. He
tried to push them down again, but the hands would not obey, and she was
clawing at his eyes.
Abomination
, he remembered, drowning in
blood and pain and madness. When he tried to scream, she spat their tongue out.
    The white world turned and fell away. For a moment it was as
if he were inside the weirwood, gazing out through carved red eyes as a dying
man twitched feebly on the ground and a madwoman danced blind and bloody
underneath the moon, weeping red tears and ripping at her clothes. Then both
were gone and he was rising, melting, his spirit borne on some cold wind. He
was in the snow and in the clouds, he was a sparrow, a squirrel, an oak. A
horned owl flew silently between his trees, hunting a hare; Varamyr was inside
the owl, inside the hare, inside the trees. Deep below the frozen ground, earthworms
burrowed blindly in the dark, and he was them as well.
I am the wood,
and everything that’s in it
, he thought, exulting. A hundred ravens
took to the air, cawing as they felt him pass. A great elk trumpeted,
unsettling the children clinging to his back. A sleeping direwolf raised his
head to snarl at empty air. Before their hearts could beat again he had passed
on, searching for his own, for One Eye, Sly, and Stalker, for his pack. His
wolves would save him, he told himself.
    That was his last thought as a man.
    True death came suddenly; he felt a shock of cold, as if he
had been plunged into the icy waters of a frozen lake. Then he found himself
rushing over moonlit snows with his packmates close behind him. Half the world
was dark.
One Eye
, he knew. He bayed, and Sly and Stalker gave
echo.
    When they reached the crest the wolves paused.
Thistle
,
he remembered, and a part of him grieved for what he had lost and another part
for what he’d done. Below, the world had turned to ice. Fingers of frost crept
slowly up the weirwood, reaching out for each other. The empty village was no
longer empty. Blue-eyed shadows walked amongst the mounds of snow. Some wore
brown and some wore black and some were naked, their flesh gone white as snow.
A wind was sighing through the hills, heavy with their scents: dead flesh, dry
blood, skins that stank of mold and rot and urine. Sly gave a growl and bared
her teeth, her ruff bristling.
Not men. Not prey. Not these
.
    The things below moved, but did not live. One by one, they raised
their heads toward the three wolves on the hill. The last to look was the thing
that had been Thistle. She wore wool and fur and leather, and over that she
wore a coat of hoarfrost that crackled when she moved and glistened in the
moonlight. Pale pink icicles hung from her fingertips, ten long knives of
frozen blood. And in the pits where her eyes had been, a pale blue light was
flickering, lending her coarse features an eerie beauty they had never known in
life.
    She sees me
.

----
    Prologue
    D ragons,” said Mollander. He snatched a
withered apple off