A Feast for Dragons

had almost
walked straight through it. From the ice, the village looked no different than
a dozen other spots along the lakeshore. Buried under drifts of snow, the round
stone houses could just as easily have been boulders or hillocks or fallen
logs, like the deadfall that Jojen had mistaken for a building the day before,
until they dug down into it and found only broken branches and rotting logs.
    The village was empty, abandoned by the wildlings who had
once lived there, like all the other villages they had passed. Some had been
burned, as if the inhabitants had wanted to make certain they could not come
creeping back, but this one had been spared the torch. Beneath the snow they
found a dozen huts and a longhall, with its sod roof and thick walls of
rough-hewn logs.
    “At least we will be out of the wind,” Bran said.
    “Ho
dor,”
said Hodor.
    Meera slid down from the elk’s back. She and her brother
helped lift Bran out of the wicker basket. “Might be the wildlings left some
food behind,” she said.
    That proved a forlorn hope. Inside the longhall they found
the ashes of a fire, floors of hard-packed dirt, a chill that went bone deep.
But at least they had a roof above their heads and log walls to keep the wind
off. A stream ran nearby, covered with a film of ice. The elk had to crack it
with his hoof to drink. Once Bran and Jojen and Hodor were safely settled,
Meera fetched back some chunks of broken ice for them to suck on. The melting
water was so cold it made Bran shudder.
    Summer did not follow them into the longhall. Bran could
feel the big wolf’s hunger, a shadow of his own. “Go hunt,” he told him, “but
you leave the elk alone.” Part of him was wishing he could go hunting too.
Perhaps he would, later.
    Supper was a fistful of acorns, crushed and pounded into
paste, so bitter that Bran gagged as he tried to keep it down. Jojen Reed did
not even make the attempt. Younger and frailer than his sister, he was growing
weaker by the day.
    “Jojen, you have to eat,” Meera told him.
    “Later. I just want to rest.” Jojen smiled a wan smile.
“This is not the day I die, sister. I promise you.”
    “You almost fell off the elk.”
    “Almost. I am cold and hungry, that’s all.”
    “Then eat.”
    “Crushed acorns? My belly hurts, but that will only make it
worse. Leave me be, sister. I’m dreaming of roast chicken.”
    “Dreams will not sustain you. Not even greendreams.”
    “Dreams are what we have.”
    All we have
. The last of the food that they
had brought from the south was ten days gone. Since then hunger walked beside
them day and night. Even Summer could find no game in these woods. They lived
on crushed acorns and raw fish. The woods were full of frozen streams and cold
black lakes, and Meera was as good a fisher with her three-pronged frog spear
as most men were with hook and line. Some days her lips were blue with cold by
the time she waded back to them with her catch wriggling on her tines. It had
been three days since Meera caught a fish, however. Bran’s belly felt so hollow
it might have been three years.
    After they choked down their meagre supper, Meera sat with
her back against a wall, sharpening her dagger on a whetstone. Hodor squatted
down beside the door, rocking back and forth on his haunches and muttering,
“Hodor, hodor, hodor.”
    Bran closed his eyes. It was too cold to talk, and they dare
not light a fire. Coldhands had warned them against that.
These woods
are not as empty as you think
, he had said.
You cannot know
what the light might summon from the darkness
. The memory made him
shiver, despite the warmth of Hodor beside him.
    Sleep would not come, could not come. Instead there was
wind, the biting cold, moonlight on snow, and fire. He was back inside Summer,
long leagues away, and the night was rank with the smell of blood. The scent
was strong.
A kill, not far
. The flesh would still be warm.
Slaver ran between his teeth as the hunger woke inside him.
Not elk. Not
deer. Not this
.
    The direwolf moved toward the meat, a gaunt grey shadow
sliding from tree to tree, through pools of moonlight and over mounds of snow.
The wind gusted around him, shifting. He lost the scent, found it, then lost it
again. As he searched for it once more, a distant sound made his ears prick up.
    Wolf
, he knew at once. Summer stalked toward
the sound, wary now. Soon enough the scent of blood was back, but now there
were other smells: piss and dead skins, bird shit,