A Feast for Dragons

Justin Massey
said on the fourth day of the march, the day the snow began to fall. Only a few
small flurries at first. Cold and wet, but nothing they could not push through
easily.
    But it snowed again the next day, and the day after, and the
day after that. The thick beards of the wolves were soon caked with ice where
their breath had frozen, and every clean-shaved southron boy was letting his
whiskers grow out to keep his face warm. Before long the ground ahead of the
column was blanketed in white, concealing stones and twisted roots and
deadfalls, turning every step into an adventure. The wind picked up as well,
driving the snow before it. The king’s host became a column of snowmen,
staggering through knee-high drifts.
    On the third day of snow, the king’s host began to come
apart. Whilst the southron knights and lordlings struggled, the men of the
northern hills fared better. Their garrons were sure-footed beasts that ate
less than palfreys, and much less than the big destriers, and the men who rode
them were at home in the snow. Many of the wolves donned curious footwear.
Bear-paws, they called them, queer elongated things made with bent wood and
leather strips. Lashed onto the bottoms of their boots, the things somehow
allowed them to walk on top of the snow without breaking through the crust and
sinking down to their thighs.
    Some had bear-paws for their horses too, and the shaggy
little garrons wore them as easily as other mounts wore iron
horseshoes … but the palfreys and destriers wanted no part of them.
When a few of the king’s knights strapped them onto their feet nonetheless, the
big southern horses balked and refused to move, or tried to shake the things
off their feet. One destrier broke an ankle trying to walk in them.
    The northmen on their bear-paws soon began to outdistance
the rest of the host. They overtook the knights in the main column, then Ser
Godry Farring and his vanguard. And meanwhile, the wayns and wagons of the
baggage train were falling farther and farther behind, so much so that the men
of the rear guard were constantly chivvying them to keep up a faster pace.
    On the fifth day of the storm, the baggage train crossed a
rippling expanse of waist-high snowdrifts that concealed a frozen pond. When
the hidden ice cracked beneath the weight of the wagons, three teamsters and
four horses were swallowed up by the freezing water, along with two of the men
who tried to rescue them. One was Harwood Fell. His knights pulled him out
before he drowned, but not before his lips turned blue and his skin as pale as
milk. Nothing they did could seem to warm him afterward. He shivered violently
for hours, even when they cut him out of his sodden clothes, wrapped him in
warm furs, and sat him by the fire. That same night he slipped into a feverish
sleep. He never woke.
    That was the night that Asha first heard the queen’s men
muttering about a sacrifice—an offering to their red god, so he might end the
storm. “The gods of the north have unleashed this storm on us,” Ser Corliss
Penny said.
    “False gods,” insisted Ser Godry, the Giantslayer.
    “R’hllor is with us,” said Ser Clayton Suggs.
    “Melisandre is not,” said Justin Massey.
    The king said nothing. But he heard. Asha was certain of that.
He sat at the high table as a dish of onion soup cooled before him, hardly
tasted, staring at the flame of the nearest candle with those hooded eyes,
ignoring the talk around him. The second-in-command, the lean tall knight named
Richard Horpe, spoke for him. “The storm must break soon,” he declared.
    But the storm only worsened. The wind became a lash as cruel
as any slaver’s whip. Asha thought she had known cold on Pyke, when the wind
came howling off the sea, but that was nothing compared to this.
This is
a cold that drives men mad
.
    Even when the shout came down the line to make camp for the
night, it was no easy thing to warm yourself. The tents were damp and heavy,
hard to raise, harder to take down, and prone to sudden collapse if too much
snow accumulated on top of them. The king’s host was creeping through the heart
of the largest forest in the Seven Kingdoms, yet dry wood became difficult to
find. Every camp saw fewer fires burning, and those that were lit threw off
more smoke than heat. Oft as not food was eaten cold, even raw.
    Even the nightfire shrank and grew feeble, to the dismay of
the queen’s men.
“Lord of Light, preserve us from this evil,”
they prayed,