A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

of
that,
I’ll warrant. And
who’s to say the bones wouldn’t lie? Why should death make a man truthful, or
even clever? The dead are likely dull fellows, full of tedious
complaints—the ground’s too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why
does
he
get more worms than I do . . .”
    Jon had to stoop to pass through the low door. Within he found a packed dirt
floor. There were no furnishings, no sign that people had lived here but for
some ashes beneath the smoke hole in the roof. “What a dismal place to live,”
he said.
    â€œI was born in a house much like this,” declared Dolorous Edd. “Those were
my enchanted years. Later I fell on hard times.” A nest of dry straw bedding
filled one corner of the room. Edd looked at it with longing. “I’d give all
the gold in Casterly Rock to sleep in a bed again.”
    â€œYou call that a bed?”
    â€œIf it’s softer than the ground and has a roof over it, I call it a bed.”
Dolorous Edd sniffed the air. “I smell dung.”
    The smell was very faint. “Old dung,” said Jon. The house felt as though it
had been empty for some time. Kneeling, he searched through the straw with his
hands to see if anything had

been concealed beneath, then made a round of the walls. It did not take very
long. “There’s nothing here.”
    Nothing was what he had expected; Whitetree was the fourth village they had
passed, and it had been the same in all of them. The people were gone, vanished
with their scant possessions and whatever animals they may have had. None of
the villages showed any signs of having been attacked. They were
simply . . . empty. “What do you think happened to them all?”
Jon asked.
    â€œSomething worse than we can imagine,” suggested Dolorous Edd. “Well,
I
might be able to imagine it, but I’d sooner not. Bad enough to know
you’re going to come to some awful end without thinking about it
aforetime.”
    Two of the hounds were sniffing around the door as they reemerged. Other dogs
ranged through the village. Chett was cursing them loudly, his voice thick with
the anger he never seemed to put aside. The light filtering through the red
leaves of the weirwood made the boils on his face look even more inflamed than
usual. When he saw Jon his eyes narrowed; there was no love lost between
them.
    The other houses had yielded no wisdom.
“Gone,”
cried Mormont’s
raven, flapping up into the weirwood to perch above them.
“Gone, gone,
gone.”
    â€œThere were wildlings at Whitetree only a year ago.” Thoren Smallwood looked
more a lord than Mormont did, clad in Ser Jaremy Rykker’s gleaming black mail
and embossed breastplate. His heavy cloak was richly trimmed with sable, and
clasped with the crossed

hammers of the Rykkers, wrought in silver. Ser Jaremy’s cloak,
once . . . but the wight had claimed Ser Jaremy, and the
Night’s Watch wasted nothing.
    â€œA year ago Robert was king, and the realm was at peace,” declared Jarman
Buckwell, the square stolid man who commanded the scouts. “Much can change in
a year’s time.”
    â€œOne thing hasn’t changed,” Ser Mallador Locke insisted. “Fewer wildlings
means fewer worries. I won’t mourn, whatever’s become of them. Raiders and
murderers, the lot of them.”
    Jon heard a rustling from the red leaves above. Two branches parted, and he
glimpsed a little man moving from limb to limb as easily as a squirrel. Bedwyck
stood no more than five feet tall, but the grey streaks in his hair showed his
age. The other rangers called him Giant. He sat in a fork of the tree over
their heads and said, “There’s water to the north. A lake, might be. A few
flint hills rising to the west, not very high. Nothing else to see, my
lords.”
    â€œWe might camp here tonight,” Smallwood suggested.
    The Old Bear glanced up, searching for a glimpse of sky through the pale limbs
and red leaves of the weirwood. “No,” he declared. “Giant, how much daylight
remains to us?”
    â€œThree hours, my lord.”
    â€œWe’ll press on north,” Mormont decided. “If we reach this lake, we can make
camp by the shore, perchance catch a few fish. Jon, fetch me paper, it’s past
time I wrote Maester Aemon.”
    Jon found parchment, quill, and ink