A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

teeth. Slaver filled his
mouth. He had eaten no more than half a day past, but there was no joy in dead
meat, even deer. He could hear the squirrels chittering and rustling above him,
safe among their leaves, but they knew better than to come down to where his
brother and he were prowling.
    He could smell his brother too, a familiar scent, strong and earthy, his scent
as black as his coat. His brother was loping around the walls, full of fury.
Round and round he went, night after day after night, tireless,
searching . . . for prey, for a way out, for his mother, his
littermates, his pack . . . searching, searching, and never
finding.
    Behind the trees the walls rose, piles of dead man-rock that loomed all about
this speck of living wood. Speckled grey they rose, and moss-spotted, yet thick
and strong and higher than any wolf could hope to leap. Cold iron and splintery
wood closed off the only holes through the piled stones that hemmed them in.
His brother would stop at every hole and bare his fangs in rage, but the ways
stayed closed.
    He had done the same the first night, and learned that it

was no good. Snarls would open no paths here. Circling the walls would not push
them back. Lifting a leg and marking the trees would keep no men away. The
world had tightened around them, but beyond the walled wood still stood the
great grey caves of man-rock.
Winterfell,
he remembered, the sound
coming to him suddenly. Beyond its sky-tall man-cliffs the true world was
calling, and he knew he must answer or die.

ARYA
    T hey traveled dawn to dusk, past woods and orchards and neatly tended
fields, through small villages, crowded market towns, and stout holdfasts. Come
dark, they would make camp and eat by the light of the Red Sword. The men took
turns standing watch. Arya would glimpse firelight flickering through the trees
from the camps of other travelers. There seemed to be more camps every night,
and more traffic on the kingsroad by day.
    Morn, noon, and night they came, old folks and little children, big men
and small ones, barefoot girls and women with babes at their breasts. Some
drove farm wagons or bumped along in the back of ox carts. More rode: draft
horses, ponies, mules, donkeys, anything that would walk or run or roll. One
woman led a milk cow with a little girl on its back. Arya saw a smith pushing a
wheelbarrow with his tools inside, hammers and tongs and even an anvil, and a
little while later a different man with a different wheelbarrow, only inside
this one were two babies in a blanket. Most came on foot, with their goods on
their shoulders and weary, wary looks upon their faces. They walked south,
toward the city, toward King’s Landing, and only one in a hundred spared so
much as a word for Yoren and his charges, traveling north. She wondered why no
one else was going the same way as them.
    Many of the travelers were armed; Arya saw daggers and

dirks, scythes and axes, and here and there a sword. Some had made clubs from
tree limbs, or carved knobby staffs. They fingered their weapons and gave
lingering looks at the wagons as they rolled by, yet in the end they let the
column pass. Thirty was too many, no matter what they had in those
wagons.
    Look with your eyes,
Syrio had said,
listen with your
ears.
    One day a madwoman began to scream at them from the side of the road. “Fools!
They’ll kill you, fools!” She was scarecrow thin, with hollow eyes and bloody
feet.
    The next morning, a sleek merchant on a grey mare reined up by Yoren and
offered to buy his wagons and everything in them for a quarter of their worth.
“It’s war, they’ll take what they want, you’ll do better selling to me, my
friend.” Yoren turned away with a twist of his crooked shoulders, and
spat.
    Arya noticed the first grave that same day; a small mound beside the road, dug
for a child. A crystal had been set in the soft earth, and Lommy wanted to take
it until the Bull told him he’d better leave the dead alone. A few leagues
farther on, Praed pointed out more graves, a whole row freshly dug. After that,
a day hardly passed without one.
    One time Arya woke in the dark, frightened for no reason she could name. Above,
the Red Sword shared the sky with half a thousand stars. The night seemed oddly
quiet to her, though she could hear Yoren’s muttered snores, the crackle of the
fire, even the muffled stirrings of the donkeys. Yet