A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

into the shop with their fathers, my master told me I was
to bend the knee, and speak only when they spoke to me, and call them
m’lady.
”
    â€œIf you start calling me m’lady, even
Hot Pie
is going to notice.
And you better keep on pissing the same way too.”
    â€œAs m’lady commands.”
    Arya slammed his chest with both hands. He tripped over a stone and sat down
with a thump. “What kind of lord’s daughter are you?” he said,
laughing.
    â€œ
This
kind.” She kicked him in the side, but it only made him laugh
harder. “You laugh all you like.
I’m
going to see who’s in the
village.” The sun had already fallen below the trees; dusk would be on them in
no time at all. For once it was Gendry who had to hurry after. “You smell
that?” she asked.
    He sniffed the air. “Rotten fish?”
    â€œYou know it’s not.”
    â€œWe better be careful. I’ll go around west, see if there’s some road. There
must be if you saw a wagon. You take the shore. If you need help, bark like a
dog.”
    â€œThat’s stupid. If I need help, I’ll shout
help.
” She darted away,
bare feet silent in the grass. When she glanced back over her shoulder, he was
watching her with that pained look on his face that meant he was thinking.
He’s probably thinking that he shouldn’t be letting m’lady go stealing
food.
Arya just knew he was going to be stupid now.
    The smell grew stronger as she got closer to the village. It did not smell like
rotten fish to her. This stench was ranker, fouler. She wrinkled her
nose.
    Where the trees began to thin, she used the undergrowth, slipping from bush to
bush quiet as a shadow. Every few yards she stopped to listen. The third time,
she heard horses, and a man’s voice as well. And the smell got worse.
Dead
man’s stink, that’s what it is.
She had smelled it before, with Yoren and
the others.
    A dense thicket of brambles grew south of the village. By the time she reached
it, the long shadows of sunset had begun to fade, and the lantern bugs were
coming out. She could see thatched roofs just beyond the hedge. She crept along
until she found a gap and squirmed through on her belly, keeping well hidden
until she saw what made the smell.
    Beside the gently lapping waters of Gods Eye, a long gibbet

of raw green wood had been thrown up, and things that had once been men dangled
there, their feet in chains, while crows pecked at their flesh and flapped from
corpse to corpse. For every crow there were a hundred flies. When the wind blew
off the lake, the nearest corpse twisted on its chain, ever so slightly. The
crows had eaten most of its face, and something else had been at it as well,
something much larger. Throat and chest had been torn apart, and glistening
green entrails and ribbons of ragged flesh dangled from where the belly had
been opened. One arm had been ripped right off the shoulder; Arya saw the bones
a few feet away, gnawed and cracked, picked clean of meat.
    She made herself look at the next man and the one beyond him and the one beyond
him,
telling herself she was hard as a stone. Corpses all, so savaged
and decayed that it took her a moment to realize they had been stripped before
they were hanged. They did not look like naked people; they hardly looked like
people at all. The crows had eaten their eyes, and sometimes their faces. Of
the sixth in the long row, nothing remained but a single leg, still tangled in
its chains, swaying with each breeze.
    Fear cuts deeper than swords.
Dead men could not hurt her, but
whoever had killed them could. Well beyond the gibbet, two men in mail hauberks
stood leaning on their spears in front of the long low building by the water,
the one with the slate roof. A pair of tall poles had been driven into the
muddy ground in front of it, banners drooping from each staff. One looked red
and one paler, white or yellow maybe, but both were limp and with the dusk

settling, she could not even be certain that red one was Lannister crimson.
I don’t need to see the lion, I can see all the dead people, who else
would it be but Lannisters?
    Then there was a shout.
    The two spearmen turned at the cry, and a third man came into view, shoving a
captive before him. It was growing too dark to make out faces, but the prisoner
was wearing a shiny steel helm, and when Arya saw the horns she knew it was