A Feast for Dragons

both your gods
, thought Asha
Greyjoy.
    Ser Godry the Giantslayer surveyed the stakes, shoving one
to make certain it was firmly placed. “Good. Good. They will serve. Ser
Clayton, bring forth the sacrifice.”
    Ser Clayton Suggs was Godry’s strong right hand.
Or
should it be his withered arm?
Asha did not like Ser Clayton. Where
Farring seemed fierce in his devotion to his red god, Suggs was simply cruel.
She had seen him at the nightfires, watching, his lips parted and his eyes
avid.
It is not the god he loves, it is the flames
, she
concluded. When she asked Ser Justin if Suggs had always been that way, he
grimaced. “On Dragonstone he would gamble with the torturers and lend them a
hand in the questioning of prisoners, especially if the prisoner were a young
woman.”
    Asha was not surprised. Suggs would take a special delight
in burning her, she did not doubt.
Unless the storms let up
.
    They had been three days from Winterfell for nineteen days.
One
hundred leagues from Deepwood Motte to Winterfell. Three hundred miles as the
raven flies
. But none of them were ravens, and the storm was
unrelenting. Each morning Asha awoke hoping she might see the sun, only to face
another day of snow. The storm had buried every hut and hovel beneath a mound
of dirty snow, and the drifts would soon be deep enough to engulf the longhall
too.
    And there was no food, beyond their failing horses, fish
taken from the lakes (fewer every day), and whatever meagre sustenance their foragers
could find in these cold, dead woods. With the king’s knights and lords
claiming the lion’s share of the horsemeat, little and less remained for the
common men. Small wonder then that they had started eating their own dead.
    Asha had been as horrified as the rest when the She-Bear
told her that four Peasebury men had been found butchering one of the late Lord
Fell’s, carving chunks of flesh from his thighs and buttocks as one of his
forearms turned upon a spit, but she could not pretend to be surprised. The
four were not the first to taste human flesh during this grim march, she would
wager—only the first to be discovered.
    Peasebury’s four would pay for their feast with their lives,
by the king’s decree … and by burning end the storm, the queen’s men
claimed. Asha Greyjoy put no faith in their red god, yet she prayed they had
the right of that. If not, there would be other pyres, and Ser Clayton Suggs
might get his heart’s desire.
    The four flesh-eaters were naked when Ser Clayton drove them
out, their wrists lashed behind their backs with leathern cords. The youngest
of them wept as he stumbled through the snow. Two others walked like men
already dead, eyes fixed upon the ground. Asha was surprised to see how
ordinary they appeared.
Not monsters
, she realized,
only
men
.
    The oldest of the four had been their serjeant. He alone
remained defiant, spitting venom at the queen’s men as they prodded him along
with their spears. “Fuck you all, and fuck your red god too,” he said. “You
hear me, Farring?
Giantslayer?
I laughed when your fucking
cousin died, Godry. We should have eaten him too, he smelled so good when they
roasted him. I bet the boy was nice and tender. Juicy.” A blow from a spear
butt drove the man to his knees but did not silence him. When he rose he spat
out a mouthful of blood and broken teeth and went right on. “The cock’s the
choicest part, all crisped up on the spit. A fat little sausage.” Even as they
wrapped the chains around him, he raved on. “Corliss Penny, come over here.
What sort of name is Penny? Is that how much your mother charged? And you,
Suggs, you bleeding bastard, you—”
    Ser Clayton never said a word. One quick slash opened the
serjeant’s throat, sending a wash of blood down his chest.
    The weeping man wept harder, his body shaking with each sob.
He was so thin that Asha could count every rib. “No,” he begged, “please, he
was dead, he was dead and we was hungry,
please
 …”
    “The serjeant was the clever one,” Asha said to Aly Mormont.
“He goaded Suggs into killing him.” She wondered if the same trick might work
twice, should her own turn come.
    The four victims were chained up back-to-back, two to a
stake. There they hung, three live men and one dead one, as the Lord of Light’s
devout stacked split logs and broken branches under their feet, then doused the
piles with lamp oil. They had to be swift about it. The snow was falling
heavily, as ever, and