A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

had given no more thought to
burying his own dead than to those he had murdered, and the corpses of four
Lannister men-at-arms were heaped near Yoren’s. Arya wondered how many it had
taken to bring him down.
    He was going to take me home,
she thought as they dug the old man’s
hole. There were too many dead to bury them all, but Yoren at least must have a
grave, Arya had insisted.
He was going to bring me safe to Winterfell, he
promised.
Part of her wanted to cry. The other part wanted to kick
him.
    It was Gendry who thought of the lord’s towerhouse and the three that
Yoren had sent to hold it. They had come under attack as well, but the round
tower had only one entry, a second-story door reached by a ladder. Once that
had been pulled inside, Ser Amory’s men could not get at them. The Lannisters
had piled brush around the tower’s base and set it afire, but the stone would
not burn, and Lorch did not have the patience to starve them out. Cutjack
opened the door at Gendry’s shout, and when Kurz said they’d be better pressing
on north than going back, Arya had clung to the hope that she still might reach
Winterfell.
    Well, this village was no Winterfell, but those thatched roofs promised warmth
and shelter and maybe even food, if they were bold enough to risk them.
Unless it’s Lorch there. He had horses; he would have traveled faster than
us.
    She watched from the tree for a long time, hoping she might see something; a
man, a horse, a banner, anything that would help her know. A few times she
glimpsed motion, but the buildings were so far off it was hard to be certain.
Once, very clearly, she heard the whinny of a horse.
    The air was full of birds, crows mostly. From afar, they were no larger than
flies as they wheeled and flapped above the thatched roofs. To the east, Gods
Eye was a sheet of sun-hammered blue that filled half the world. Some days, as
they made their slow way up the muddy shore (Gendry wanted no part of any
roads, and even Hot Pie and Lommy saw the sense in that), Arya felt as though
the lake were calling her. She wanted to leap into those

placid blue waters, to feel clean again, to swim and splash and bask in the
sun. But she dare not take off her clothes where the others could see, not even
to wash them. At the end of the day she would often sit on a rock and dangle
her feet in the cool water. She had finally thrown away her cracked and rotted
shoes. Walking barefoot was hard at first, but the blisters had finally broken,
the cuts had healed, and her soles had turned to leather. The mud was nice
between her toes, and she liked to feel the earth underfoot when she
walked.
    From up here, she could see a small wooded island off to the northeast. Thirty
yards from shore, three black swans were gliding over the water, so
serene . . . no one had told them that war had come, and they
cared nothing for burning towns and butchered men. She stared at them with
yearning. Part of her wanted to be a swan. The other part wanted to eat one.
She had broken her fast on some acorn paste and a handful of bugs. Bugs weren’t
so bad when you got used to them. Worms were worse, but still not as bad as the
pain in your belly after days without food. Finding bugs was easy, all you had
to do was kick over a rock. Arya had eaten a bug once when she was little, just
to make Sansa screech, so she hadn’t been afraid to eat another. Weasel wasn’t
either, but Hot Pie retched up the beetle he tried to swallow, and Lommy and
Gendry wouldn’t even try. Yesterday Gendry had caught a frog and shared it with
Lommy, and, a few days before, Hot Pie had found blackberries and stripped the
bush bare, but mostly they had been living on water and acorns. Kurz had told
them how to use rocks

and make a kind of acorn paste. It tasted
awful.
    She wished the poacher hadn’t died. He’d known more about the woods than all
the rest of them together, but he’d taken an arrow through the shoulder pulling
in the ladder at the towerhouse. Tarber had packed it with mud and moss from
the lake, and for a day or two Kurz swore the wound was nothing, even though
the flesh of his throat was turning dark while angry red welts crept up his jaw
and down his chest. Then one morning he couldn’t find the strength to get up,
and by the next he was dead.
    They buried him under a mound of stones, and Cutjack had claimed his sword and