A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

know.” Then
he’d go off to polish his helm. It was a beautiful helm, rounded and curved,
with a slit visor and two great metal bull’s horns. Arya would watch him polish
the metal with an oilcloth, shining it so bright you could see the flames of
the cookfire reflected in the steel. Yet he never actually put it on his
head.
    â€œI bet he’s that traitor’s bastard,” Lommy said one night,

in a hushed voice so Gendry would not hear. “The wolf lord, the one they
nicked on Baelor’s steps.”
    â€œHe is not,” Arya declared.
My father only had one bastard, and that’s
Jon.
She stalked off into the trees, wishing she could just saddle her
horse and ride home. She was a good horse, a chestnut mare with a white blaze
on her forehead. And Arya had always been a good rider. She could gallop off
and never see any of them, unless she wanted to. Only then she’d have no one to
scout ahead of her, or watch behind, or stand guard while she napped, and when
the gold cloaks caught her, she’d be all alone. It was safer to stay with Yoren
and the others.
    â€œWe’re not far from Gods Eye,” the black brother said one morning. “The
kingsroad won’t be safe till we’re across the Trident. So we’ll come up around
the lake along the western shore, they’re not like to look for us there.” At
the next spot where two ruts cut cross each other, he turned the wagons
west.
    Here farmland gave way to forest, the villages and holdfasts were smaller and
farther apart, the hills higher and the valleys deeper. Food grew harder to
come by. In the city, Yoren had loaded up the wagons with salt fish, hard
bread, lard, turnips, sacks of beans and barley, and wheels of yellow cheese,
but every bite of it had been eaten. Forced to live off the land, Yoren turned
to Koss and Kurz, who’d been taken as poachers. He would send them ahead of the
column, into the woods, and come dusk they would be back with a deer slung
between them on a pole or a brace of quail swinging from their belts. The
younger boys would be set

to picking blackberries along the road, or climbing fences to fill a sack with
apples if they happened upon an orchard.
    Arya was a skilled climber and a fast picker, and she liked to go off by
herself. One day she came across a rabbit, purely by happenstance. It was brown
and fat, with long ears and a twitchy nose. Rabbits ran faster than cats, but
they couldn’t climb trees half so well. She whacked it with her stick and
grabbed it by its ears, and Yoren stewed it with some mushrooms and wild
onions. Arya was given a whole leg, since it was her rabbit. She shared it with
Gendry. The rest of them each got a spoonful, even the three in manacles. Jaqen
H’ghar thanked her politely for the treat, and Biter licked the grease off his
dirty fingers with a blissful look, but Rorge, the noseless one, only laughed
and said, “There’s a hunter now. Lumpyface Lumpyhead Rabbitkiller.”
    Outside a holdfast called Briarwhite, some fieldhands surrounded them in a
cornfield, demanding coin for the ears they’d taken. Yoren eyed their scythes
and tossed them a few coppers. “Time was, a man in black was feasted from
Dorne to Winterfell, and even high lords called it an honor to shelter him
under their roofs,” he said bitterly. “Now cravens like you want hard coin
for a bite of wormy apple.” He spat.
    â€œIt’s sweetcorn, better’n a stinking old black bird like you deserves,” one
of them answered roughly. “You get out of our field now, and take these sneaks
and stabbers with you, or we’ll stake you up in the corn to scare the other
crows away.”
    They roasted the sweetcorn in the husk that night, turning

the ears with long forked sticks, and ate it hot right off the cob. Arya
thought it tasted wonderful, but Yoren was too angry to eat. A cloud seemed to
hang over him, ragged and black as his cloak. He paced about the camp
restlessly, muttering to himself.
    The next day Koss came racing back to warn Yoren of a camp ahead. “Twenty or
thirty men, in mail and halfhelms,” he said. “Some of them are cut up bad,
and one’s dying, from the sound of him. With all the noise he was making, I got
right up close. They got spears and shields, but only one horse, and that’s
lame. I think they been there awhile, from the stink of