The outriders came on them an hour from the Green Fork, as the
wayn was slogging down a muddy road.
“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” the Hound
warned her as the three spurred toward them; a knight and two
squires, lightly armored and mounted on fast palfreys. Clegane
cracked his whip at the team, a pair of old drays that had known
better days. The wayn was creaking and swaying, its two huge wooden
wheels squeezing mud up out of the deep ruts in the road with every
turn. Stranger followed, tied to the wagon.
The big bad-tempered courser wore neither armor, barding, nor
harness, and the Hound himself was garbed in splotchy green
roughspun and a soot-grey mantle with a hood that swallowed his
head. So long as he kept his eyes down you could not see his face,
only the whites of his eyes peering out. He looked like some
down-at-heels farmer. A big farmer, though. And under the roughspun
was boiled leather and oiled mail, Arya knew. She looked like a
farmer’s son, or maybe a swineherd. And behind them were four
squat casks of salt pork and one of pickled pigs’ feet.
The riders split and circled them for a look before they came up
close. Clegane drew the wayn to a halt and waited patiently on
their pleasure. The knight bore spear and sword while his squires
carried longbows. The badges on their jerkins were smaller versions
of the sigil sewn on their master’s surcoat; a black
pitchfork on a golden bar sinister, upon a russet field. Arya had
thought of revealing herself to the first outriders they
encountered, but she had always pictured grey-cloaked men with the
direwolf on their breasts. She might have risked it even if
they’d worn the Umber giant or the Glover fist, but she did
not know this pitchfork knight or whom he served. The closest thing
to a pitchfork she had ever seen at Winterfell was the trident in
the hand of Lord Manderly’s merman.
“You have business at the Twins?” the knight
asked.
“Salt pork for the wedding feast, if it please you,
ser.” The Hound mumbled his reply, his eyes down, his face
hidden.
“Salt pork never pleases me.” The pitchfork knight
gave Clegane only the most cursory glance, and paid no attention at
all to Arya, but he looked long and hard at Stranger. The stallion
was no plow horse, that was plain at a glance. One of the squires
almost wound up in the mud when the big black courser bit at his
own mount. “How did you come by this beast?” the
pitchfork knight demanded.
“M’lady told me to bring him, ser,” Clegane
said humbly. “He’s a wedding gift for young Lord
Tully.”
“What lady? Who is it you serve?”
“Old Lady Whent, ser.”
“Does she think she can buy Harrenhal back with a
horse?” the knight asked. “Gods, is there any fool like
an old fool?” Yet he waved them down the road. “Go on
with you, then.”
“Aye, m’lord.” The Hound snapped his whip
again, and the old drays resumed their weary trek. The wheels had
settled deep into the mud during the halt, and it took several
moments for the team to pull them free again. By then the outriders
were riding off. Clegane gave them one last look and snorted.
“Ser Donnel Haigh,” he said. “I’ve taken
more horses off him than I can count. Armor as well. Once I near
killed him in a mêlée.”
“How come he didn’t know you, then?” Arya
asked.
“Because knights are fools, and it would have been beneath
him to look twice at some poxy peasant.” He gave the horses a
lick with the whip. “Keep your eyes down and your tone
respectful and say ser a lot, and most knights will never see you.
They pay more mind to horses than to smallfolk. He might have known
Stranger if he’d ever seen me ride him.” He would have known your face, though. Arya had no doubt of
that. Sandor Clegane’s burns would not be easy to forget, once
you saw them. He couldn’t hide the scars behind a helm,
either; not so long as the helm was made in the shape of a snarling
dog.
That was why they’d needed the wayn and the pickled
pigs’ feet. “I’m not going to be dragged before
your brother in chains,” the Hound had told her, “and
I’d just as soon not have to cut through his men to get to
him. So we play a little game.”
A farmer chance-met on the kingsroad had provided them with
wayn, horses, garb, and casks, though not willingly. The Hound had
taken them at swordpoint. When the farmer cursed him for a robber,
he said, “No, a forager. Be grateful you get to keep your
smallclothes. Now take those boots off. Or I’ll take your
legs off. Your choice.” The farmer was as big as Clegane, but
all the same he chose to give up his boots and keep his legs.
Evenfall found them still trudging toward the Green Fork and
Lord Frey’s twin castles. I am almost there, Arya thought.
She knew she ought to be excited, but her belly was all knotted up
tight. Maybe that was just the fever she’d been fighting, but
maybe not. Last night she’d had a bad dream, a terrible
dream. She couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed of now,
but the feeling had lingered all day. If anything, it had only
gotten stronger. Fear cuts deeper than swords. She had to be strong
now, the way her father told her. There was nothing between her and
her mother but a castle gate, a river, and an
army . . . but it was Robb’s army, so
there was no real danger there. Was there?
Roose Bolton was one of them, though. The Leech Lord, as the
outlaws called him. That made her uneasy. She had fled Harrenhal to
get away from Bolton as much as from the Bloody Mummers, and
she’d had to cut the throat of one of his guards to escape.
Did he know she’d done that? Or did he blame Gendry or Hot
Pie? Would he have told her mother? What would he do if he saw her?
He probably won’t even know me. She looked more like a
drowned rat than a lord’s cupbearer these days. A drowned boy
rat. The Hound had hacked handfuls of her hair off only two days
past. He was an even worse barber than Yoren, and he’d left
her half bald on one side. Robb won’t know me either, I bet.
Or even Mother. She had been a little girl the last time she saw
them, the day Lord Eddard Stark left Winterfell.
They heard the music before they saw the castle; the distant
rattle of drums, the brazen blare of horns, the thin skirling of
pipes faint beneath the growl of the river and the sound of the
rain beating on their heads. “We’ve missed the
wedding,” the Hound said, “but it sounds as though the
feast is still going. I’ll be rid of you soon.” No, I’ll be rid of you, Arya thought.
The road had been running mostly northwest, but now it turned
due west between an apple orchard and a field of drowned corn
beaten down by the rain. They passed the last of the apple trees
and crested a rise, and the castles, river, and camps all appeared
at once. There were hundreds of horses and thousands of men, most
of them milling about the three huge feast tents that stood side by
side facing the castle gates, like three great canvas longhalls.
Robb had made his camp well back from the walls, on higher, drier
ground, but the Green Fork had overflown its bank and even claimed
a few carelessly placed tents.
The music from the castles was louder here. The sound of the
drums and horns rolled across the camp. The musicians in the nearer
castle were playing a different song than the ones in the castle on
the far bank, though, so it sounded more like a battle than a song.
“They’re not very good,” Arya observed.
The Hound made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“There’s old deaf women in Lannisport complaining of
the din, I’ll warrant. I’d heard Walder Frey’s
eyes were failing, but no one mentioned his bloody ears.”
Arya found herself wishing it were day. If the sun was out and
the wind was blowing, she would have been able to see the banners
better. She would have looked for the direwolf of Stark, or maybe
the Cerwyn battleaxe or the Glover fist. But in the gloom of night
all the colors looked grey. The rain had dwindled down to a fine
drizzle, almost a mist, but an earlier downpour had left the
banners wet as dishrags, sodden and unreadable.
A hedge of wagons and carts had been drawn up along the
perimeter to make a crude wooden wall against any attack. That was
where the guards stopped them. The lantern their sergeant carried
shed enough light for Arya to see that his cloak was a pale pink,
spotted with red teardrops. The men under him had the Leech
Lord’s badge sewn over their hearts, the flayed man of the
Dreadfort. Sandor Clegane gave them the same tale he’d used
on the outriders, but the Bolton sergeant was a harder sort of nut
than Ser Donnel Haigh had been. “Salt pork’s no fit
meat for a lord’s wedding feast,” he said
scornfully.
“Got pickled pigs’ feet too, ser.”
“Not for the feast, you don’t. The feast’s
half done. And I’m a northman, not some milksuck southron
knight.”
“I was told to see the steward, or the
cook . . . ”
“Castle’s closed. The lordlings are not to be
disturbed.” The sergeant considered a moment. “You can
unload by the feast tents, there.” He pointed with a mailed
hand. “Ale makes a man hungry, and old Frey won’t miss
a few pigs’ feet. He don’t have the teeth for such
anyhow. Ask for Sedgekins, he’ll know what’s to be done
with you.” He barked a command, and his men rolled one of the
wagons aside for them to enter.
The Hound’s whip spurred the team toward the tents. No one
seemed to pay them any mind. They splashed past rows of brightly
colored pavilions, their walls of wet silk lit up like magic
lanterns by lamps and braziers inside; pink and gold and green they
glimmered, striped and fretty and chequy, emblazoned with birds and
beasts, chevrons and stars, wheels and weapons. Arya spotted a
yellow tent with six acorns on its panels, three over two over one.
Lord Smallwood, she knew, remembering Acorn Hall so far away, and
the lady who’d said she was pretty.
But for every shimmering silk pavilion there were two dozen of
felt or canvas, opaque and dark. There were barracks tents too, big
enough to shelter two score footsoldiers, though even those were
dwarfed by the three great feast tents. The drinking had been going
on for hours, it seemed. Arya heard shouted toasts and the clash of
cups, mixed in with all the usual camp sounds, horses whinnying and
dogs barking, wagons rumbling through the dark, laughter and
curses, the clank and clatter of steel and wood. The music grew
still louder as they approached the castle, but under that was a
deeper, darker sound: the river, the swollen Green Fork, growling
like a lion in its den.
Arya twisted and turned, trying to look everywhere at once,
hoping for a glimpse of a direwolf badge, for a tent done up in
grey and white, for a face she knew from Winterfell. All she saw
were strangers. She stared at a man relieving himself in the reeds,
but he wasn’t Alebelly. She saw a half-dressed girl burst
from a tent laughing, but the tent was pale blue, not grey like
she’d thought at first, and the man who went running after
her wore a treecat on his doublet, not a wolf. Beneath a tree, four
archers were slipping waxed strings over the notches of their
longbows, but they were not her father’s archers. A maester
crossed their path, but he was too young and thin to be Maester
Luwin. Arya gazed up at the Twins, their high tower windows glowing
softly wherever a light was burning. Through the haze of rain, the
castles looked spooky and mysterious, like something from one of
Old Nan’s tales, but they weren’t Winterfell.
The press was thickest at the feast tents. The wide flaps were
tied back, and men were pushing in and out with drinking horns and
tankards in their hands, some with camp followers. Arya glanced
inside as the Hound drove past the first of the three, and saw
hundreds of men crowding the benches and jostling around the casks
of mead and ale and wine. There was hardly room to move inside, but
none of them seemed to mind. At least they were warm and dry. Cold
wet Arya envied them. Some were even singing. The fine misty rain
was steaming all around the door from the heat escaping from
inside. “Here’s to Lord Edmure and Lady Roslin,”
she heard a voice shout. They all drank, and someone yelled,
“Here’s to the Young Wolf and Queen Jeyne.” Who is Queen Jeyne? Arya wondered briefly. The only queen she
knew was Cersei.
Firepits had been dug outside the feast tents, sheltered beneath
rude canopies of woven wood and hides that kept the rain out, so
long as it fell straight down. The wind was blowing off the river,
though, so the drizzle came in anyway, enough to make the fires
hiss and swirl. Serving men were turning joints of meat on spits
above the flames. The smells made Arya’s mouth water.
“Shouldn’t we stop?” she asked Sandor Clegane.
“There’s northmen in the tents.” She knew them by
their beards, by their faces, by their cloaks of bearskin and
sealskin, by their half-heard toasts and the songs they sang;
Karstarks and Umbers and men of the mountain clans. “I bet
there are Winterfell men too.” Her father’s men, the
Young Wolf’s men, the direwolves of Stark.
“Your brother will be in the castle,” he said.
“Your mother too. You want them or not?”
“Yes,” she said. “What about Sedgekins?”
The sergeant had told them to ask for Sedgekins.
“Sedgekins can bugger himself with a hot poker.”
Clegane shook out his whip, and sent it hissing through the soft
rain to bite at a horse’s flank. “It’s your
bloody brother I want.”
The outriders came on them an hour from the Green Fork, as the
wayn was slogging down a muddy road.
“Keep your head down and your mouth shut,” the Hound
warned her as the three spurred toward them; a knight and two
squires, lightly armored and mounted on fast palfreys. Clegane
cracked his whip at the team, a pair of old drays that had known
better days. The wayn was creaking and swaying, its two huge wooden
wheels squeezing mud up out of the deep ruts in the road with every
turn. Stranger followed, tied to the wagon.
The big bad-tempered courser wore neither armor, barding, nor
harness, and the Hound himself was garbed in splotchy green
roughspun and a soot-grey mantle with a hood that swallowed his
head. So long as he kept his eyes down you could not see his face,
only the whites of his eyes peering out. He looked like some
down-at-heels farmer. A big farmer, though. And under the roughspun
was boiled leather and oiled mail, Arya knew. She looked like a
farmer’s son, or maybe a swineherd. And behind them were four
squat casks of salt pork and one of pickled pigs’ feet.
The riders split and circled them for a look before they came up
close. Clegane drew the wayn to a halt and waited patiently on
their pleasure. The knight bore spear and sword while his squires
carried longbows. The badges on their jerkins were smaller versions
of the sigil sewn on their master’s surcoat; a black
pitchfork on a golden bar sinister, upon a russet field. Arya had
thought of revealing herself to the first outriders they
encountered, but she had always pictured grey-cloaked men with the
direwolf on their breasts. She might have risked it even if
they’d worn the Umber giant or the Glover fist, but she did
not know this pitchfork knight or whom he served. The closest thing
to a pitchfork she had ever seen at Winterfell was the trident in
the hand of Lord Manderly’s merman.
“You have business at the Twins?” the knight
asked.
“Salt pork for the wedding feast, if it please you,
ser.” The Hound mumbled his reply, his eyes down, his face
hidden.
“Salt pork never pleases me.” The pitchfork knight
gave Clegane only the most cursory glance, and paid no attention at
all to Arya, but he looked long and hard at Stranger. The stallion
was no plow horse, that was plain at a glance. One of the squires
almost wound up in the mud when the big black courser bit at his
own mount. “How did you come by this beast?” the
pitchfork knight demanded.
“M’lady told me to bring him, ser,” Clegane
said humbly. “He’s a wedding gift for young Lord
Tully.”
“What lady? Who is it you serve?”
“Old Lady Whent, ser.”
“Does she think she can buy Harrenhal back with a
horse?” the knight asked. “Gods, is there any fool like
an old fool?” Yet he waved them down the road. “Go on
with you, then.”
“Aye, m’lord.” The Hound snapped his whip
again, and the old drays resumed their weary trek. The wheels had
settled deep into the mud during the halt, and it took several
moments for the team to pull them free again. By then the outriders
were riding off. Clegane gave them one last look and snorted.
“Ser Donnel Haigh,” he said. “I’ve taken
more horses off him than I can count. Armor as well. Once I near
killed him in a mêlée.”
“How come he didn’t know you, then?” Arya
asked.
“Because knights are fools, and it would have been beneath
him to look twice at some poxy peasant.” He gave the horses a
lick with the whip. “Keep your eyes down and your tone
respectful and say ser a lot, and most knights will never see you.
They pay more mind to horses than to smallfolk. He might have known
Stranger if he’d ever seen me ride him.” He would have known your face, though. Arya had no doubt of
that. Sandor Clegane’s burns would not be easy to forget, once
you saw them. He couldn’t hide the scars behind a helm,
either; not so long as the helm was made in the shape of a snarling
dog.
That was why they’d needed the wayn and the pickled
pigs’ feet. “I’m not going to be dragged before
your brother in chains,” the Hound had told her, “and
I’d just as soon not have to cut through his men to get to
him. So we play a little game.”
A farmer chance-met on the kingsroad had provided them with
wayn, horses, garb, and casks, though not willingly. The Hound had
taken them at swordpoint. When the farmer cursed him for a robber,
he said, “No, a forager. Be grateful you get to keep your
smallclothes. Now take those boots off. Or I’ll take your
legs off. Your choice.” The farmer was as big as Clegane, but
all the same he chose to give up his boots and keep his legs.
Evenfall found them still trudging toward the Green Fork and
Lord Frey’s twin castles. I am almost there, Arya thought.
She knew she ought to be excited, but her belly was all knotted up
tight. Maybe that was just the fever she’d been fighting, but
maybe not. Last night she’d had a bad dream, a terrible
dream. She couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed of now,
but the feeling had lingered all day. If anything, it had only
gotten stronger. Fear cuts deeper than swords. She had to be strong
now, the way her father told her. There was nothing between her and
her mother but a castle gate, a river, and an
army . . . but it was Robb’s army, so
there was no real danger there. Was there?
Roose Bolton was one of them, though. The Leech Lord, as the
outlaws called him. That made her uneasy. She had fled Harrenhal to
get away from Bolton as much as from the Bloody Mummers, and
she’d had to cut the throat of one of his guards to escape.
Did he know she’d done that? Or did he blame Gendry or Hot
Pie? Would he have told her mother? What would he do if he saw her?
He probably won’t even know me. She looked more like a
drowned rat than a lord’s cupbearer these days. A drowned boy
rat. The Hound had hacked handfuls of her hair off only two days
past. He was an even worse barber than Yoren, and he’d left
her half bald on one side. Robb won’t know me either, I bet.
Or even Mother. She had been a little girl the last time she saw
them, the day Lord Eddard Stark left Winterfell.
They heard the music before they saw the castle; the distant
rattle of drums, the brazen blare of horns, the thin skirling of
pipes faint beneath the growl of the river and the sound of the
rain beating on their heads. “We’ve missed the
wedding,” the Hound said, “but it sounds as though the
feast is still going. I’ll be rid of you soon.” No, I’ll be rid of you, Arya thought.
The road had been running mostly northwest, but now it turned
due west between an apple orchard and a field of drowned corn
beaten down by the rain. They passed the last of the apple trees
and crested a rise, and the castles, river, and camps all appeared
at once. There were hundreds of horses and thousands of men, most
of them milling about the three huge feast tents that stood side by
side facing the castle gates, like three great canvas longhalls.
Robb had made his camp well back from the walls, on higher, drier
ground, but the Green Fork had overflown its bank and even claimed
a few carelessly placed tents.
The music from the castles was louder here. The sound of the
drums and horns rolled across the camp. The musicians in the nearer
castle were playing a different song than the ones in the castle on
the far bank, though, so it sounded more like a battle than a song.
“They’re not very good,” Arya observed.
The Hound made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“There’s old deaf women in Lannisport complaining of
the din, I’ll warrant. I’d heard Walder Frey’s
eyes were failing, but no one mentioned his bloody ears.”
Arya found herself wishing it were day. If the sun was out and
the wind was blowing, she would have been able to see the banners
better. She would have looked for the direwolf of Stark, or maybe
the Cerwyn battleaxe or the Glover fist. But in the gloom of night
all the colors looked grey. The rain had dwindled down to a fine
drizzle, almost a mist, but an earlier downpour had left the
banners wet as dishrags, sodden and unreadable.
A hedge of wagons and carts had been drawn up along the
perimeter to make a crude wooden wall against any attack. That was
where the guards stopped them. The lantern their sergeant carried
shed enough light for Arya to see that his cloak was a pale pink,
spotted with red teardrops. The men under him had the Leech
Lord’s badge sewn over their hearts, the flayed man of the
Dreadfort. Sandor Clegane gave them the same tale he’d used
on the outriders, but the Bolton sergeant was a harder sort of nut
than Ser Donnel Haigh had been. “Salt pork’s no fit
meat for a lord’s wedding feast,” he said
scornfully.
“Got pickled pigs’ feet too, ser.”
“Not for the feast, you don’t. The feast’s
half done. And I’m a northman, not some milksuck southron
knight.”
“I was told to see the steward, or the
cook . . . ”
“Castle’s closed. The lordlings are not to be
disturbed.” The sergeant considered a moment. “You can
unload by the feast tents, there.” He pointed with a mailed
hand. “Ale makes a man hungry, and old Frey won’t miss
a few pigs’ feet. He don’t have the teeth for such
anyhow. Ask for Sedgekins, he’ll know what’s to be done
with you.” He barked a command, and his men rolled one of the
wagons aside for them to enter.
The Hound’s whip spurred the team toward the tents. No one
seemed to pay them any mind. They splashed past rows of brightly
colored pavilions, their walls of wet silk lit up like magic
lanterns by lamps and braziers inside; pink and gold and green they
glimmered, striped and fretty and chequy, emblazoned with birds and
beasts, chevrons and stars, wheels and weapons. Arya spotted a
yellow tent with six acorns on its panels, three over two over one.
Lord Smallwood, she knew, remembering Acorn Hall so far away, and
the lady who’d said she was pretty.
But for every shimmering silk pavilion there were two dozen of
felt or canvas, opaque and dark. There were barracks tents too, big
enough to shelter two score footsoldiers, though even those were
dwarfed by the three great feast tents. The drinking had been going
on for hours, it seemed. Arya heard shouted toasts and the clash of
cups, mixed in with all the usual camp sounds, horses whinnying and
dogs barking, wagons rumbling through the dark, laughter and
curses, the clank and clatter of steel and wood. The music grew
still louder as they approached the castle, but under that was a
deeper, darker sound: the river, the swollen Green Fork, growling
like a lion in its den.
Arya twisted and turned, trying to look everywhere at once,
hoping for a glimpse of a direwolf badge, for a tent done up in
grey and white, for a face she knew from Winterfell. All she saw
were strangers. She stared at a man relieving himself in the reeds,
but he wasn’t Alebelly. She saw a half-dressed girl burst
from a tent laughing, but the tent was pale blue, not grey like
she’d thought at first, and the man who went running after
her wore a treecat on his doublet, not a wolf. Beneath a tree, four
archers were slipping waxed strings over the notches of their
longbows, but they were not her father’s archers. A maester
crossed their path, but he was too young and thin to be Maester
Luwin. Arya gazed up at the Twins, their high tower windows glowing
softly wherever a light was burning. Through the haze of rain, the
castles looked spooky and mysterious, like something from one of
Old Nan’s tales, but they weren’t Winterfell.
The press was thickest at the feast tents. The wide flaps were
tied back, and men were pushing in and out with drinking horns and
tankards in their hands, some with camp followers. Arya glanced
inside as the Hound drove past the first of the three, and saw
hundreds of men crowding the benches and jostling around the casks
of mead and ale and wine. There was hardly room to move inside, but
none of them seemed to mind. At least they were warm and dry. Cold
wet Arya envied them. Some were even singing. The fine misty rain
was steaming all around the door from the heat escaping from
inside. “Here’s to Lord Edmure and Lady Roslin,”
she heard a voice shout. They all drank, and someone yelled,
“Here’s to the Young Wolf and Queen Jeyne.” Who is Queen Jeyne? Arya wondered briefly. The only queen she
knew was Cersei.
Firepits had been dug outside the feast tents, sheltered beneath
rude canopies of woven wood and hides that kept the rain out, so
long as it fell straight down. The wind was blowing off the river,
though, so the drizzle came in anyway, enough to make the fires
hiss and swirl. Serving men were turning joints of meat on spits
above the flames. The smells made Arya’s mouth water.
“Shouldn’t we stop?” she asked Sandor Clegane.
“There’s northmen in the tents.” She knew them by
their beards, by their faces, by their cloaks of bearskin and
sealskin, by their half-heard toasts and the songs they sang;
Karstarks and Umbers and men of the mountain clans. “I bet
there are Winterfell men too.” Her father’s men, the
Young Wolf’s men, the direwolves of Stark.
“Your brother will be in the castle,” he said.
“Your mother too. You want them or not?”
“Yes,” she said. “What about Sedgekins?”
The sergeant had told them to ask for Sedgekins.
“Sedgekins can bugger himself with a hot poker.”
Clegane shook out his whip, and sent it hissing through the soft
rain to bite at a horse’s flank. “It’s your
bloody brother I want.”