A Feast for Dragons

led by the deep voice of Ser Godry the Giantslayer.
“Show
us your bright sun again, still these winds, and melt these snows, that we may
reach your foes and smite them. The night is dark and cold and full of terrors,
but yours is the power and glory and the light. R’hllor, fill us with your
fire.”
    Later, when Ser Corliss Penny wondered aloud whether an
entire army had ever frozen to death in a winter storm, the wolves laughed.
“This is no winter,” declared Big Bucket Wull. “Up in the hills we say that
autumn kisses you, but winter fucks you hard. This is only autumn’s kiss.”
    God grant that I never know true winter, then
.
Asha herself was spared the worst of it; she was the king’s prize, after all.
Whilst others hungered, she was fed. Whilst others shivered, she was warm.
Whilst others struggled through the snows atop weary horses, she rode upon a
bed of furs inside a wayn, with a stiff canvas roof to keep the snow off,
comfortable in her chains.
    The horses and the common men had it hardest. Two squires
from the stormlands stabbed a man-at-arms to death in a quarrel over who would
sit closest to the fire. The next night some archers desperate for warmth
somehow managed to set their tent afire, which had at least the virtue of
heating the adjacent tents. Destriers began to perish of exhaustion and
exposure. “What is a knight without a horse?” men riddled. “A snowman with a
sword.” Any horse that went down was butchered on the spot for meat. Their
provisions had begun to run low as well.
    Peasebury, Cobb, Foxglove, and other southron lords urged
the king to make camp until the storm had passed. Stannis would have none of
that. Nor would he heed the queen’s men when they came to urge him to make an
offering to their hungry red god.
    That tale she had from Justin Massey, who was less devout
than most. “A sacrifice will prove our faith still burns true, Sire,” Clayton
Suggs had told the king. And Godry the Giantslayer said, “The old gods of the
north have sent this storm upon us. Only R’hllor can end it. We must give him
an unbeliever.”
    “Half my army is made up of unbelievers,” Stannis had
replied. “I will have no burnings. Pray harder.”
    No burnings today, and none tomorrow … but
if the snows continue, how long before the king’s resolve begins to weaken?
Asha had never shared her uncle Aeron’s faith in the Drowned God, but that
night she prayed as fervently to He Who Dwells Beneath the Waves as ever the
Damphair had. The storm did not abate. The march continued, slowing to a
stagger, then a crawl. Five miles was a good day. Then three. Then two.
    By the ninth day of the storm, every camp saw the captains
and commanders entering the king’s tent wet and weary, to sink to one knee and
report their losses for the day.
    “One man dead, three missing.”
    “Six horses lost, one of them mine own.”
    “Two dead men, one a knight. Four horses down. We got one up
again. The others are lost. Destriers, and one palfrey.”
    The cold count
, Asha heard it named. The
baggage train suffered the worst: dead horses, lost men, wayns overturned and
broken. “The horses founder in the snow,” Justin Massey told the king. “Men
wander off or just sit down to die.”
    “Let them,” King Stannis snapped. “We press on.”
    The northmen fared much better, with their garrons and their
bear-paws. Black Donnel Flint and his half-brother Artos only lost one man
between them. The Liddles, the Wulls, and the Norreys lost none at all. One of
Morgan Liddle’s mules had gone astray, but he seemed to think the Flints had
stolen him.
    One hundred leagues from Deepwood Motte to
Winterfell. Three hundred miles as the raven flies. Fifteen days
. The fifteenth
day of the march came and went, and they had crossed less than half the
distance. A trail of broken wayns and frozen corpses stretched back behind
them, buried beneath the blowing snow. The sun and moon and stars had been gone
so long that Asha was starting to wonder whether she had dreamed them.
    It was the twentieth day of the advance when she finally won
free of her ankle chains. Late that afternoon, one of the horses drawing her
wayn died in the traces. No replacement could be found; what draft horses
remained were needed to pull the wagons that held their food and fodder. When
Ser Justin Massey rode up, he told them to butcher the dead horse for meat and
break up the wagon for firewood. Then he removed the fetters around