The inn was full of people moving south, and the common room erupted in scorn when Yoren said they were traveling the other way. “You’ll be back soon enough,” the innkeeper vowed. “There’s no going north. Half the fields are burnt, and what folks are left are walled up inside their holdfasts. One bunch rides off at dawn and another one shows up by dusk.”
“That’s nothing to us,” Yoren insisted stubbornly. “Tully or Lannister, makes no matter. The Watch takes no part.”
“It’s more than Lannister and Tully,” the innkeeper said. “There’s wild men down from the Mountains of the Moon, try telling
Arya sat up straight, straining to hear. Did he mean
“I heard the boy rides to battle on a wolf,” said a yellow-haired man with a tankard in his hand.
“Fool’s talk.” Yoren spat.
“The man I heard it from, he saw it himself. A wolf big as a horse, he swore.”
“Swearing don’t make it true, Hod,” the innkeeper said. “You keep swearing you’ll pay what you owe me, and I’ve yet to see a copper.” The common room erupted in laughter, and the man with the yellow hair turned red.
“It’s been a bad year for wolves,” volunteered a sallow man in a travel-stained green cloak. “Around the Gods Eye, the packs have grown bolder’n anyone can remember. Sheep, cows, dogs, makes no matter, they kill as they like, and they got no fear of men. It’s worth your life to go into those woods by night.”
“Ah, that’s more tales, and no more true than the other.”
“I heard the same thing from my cousin, and she’s not the sort to lie,” an old woman said. “She says there’s this great pack, hundreds of them, man-killers. The one that leads them is a she-wolf, a bitch from the seventh hell.”
The man in the green cloak said, “I heard how this hellbitch walked into a village one day . . . a market day, people everywhere, and she walks in bold as you please and tears a baby from his mother’s arms. When the tale reached Lord Mooton, him and his sons swore they’d put an end to her. They tracked her to her lair with a pack of wolfhounds, and barely escaped with their skins. Not one of those dogs came back, not one.”
“That’s just a story,” Arya blurted out before she could stop herself. “Wolves don’t eat babies.”
“And what would you know about it, lad?” asked the man in the green cloak.
Before she could think of an answer, Yoren had her by the arm. “The boy’s greensick on beer, that’s all it is.”
“No I’m not. They
“Outside,
Arya went outside, stiff with fury. “They
“Boy,” a friendly voice called out. “Lovely boy.”
One of the men in irons was talking to her. Warily, Arya approached the wagon, one hand on Needle’s hilt.
The prisoner lifted an empty tankard, his chains rattling. “A man could use another taste of beer. A man has a thirst, wearing these heavy bracelets.” He was the youngest of the three, slender, fine-featured, always smiling. His hair was red on one side and white on the other, all matted and filthy from cage and travel. “A man could use a bath too,” he said, when he saw the way Arya was looking at him. “A boy could make a friend.”
“I have friends,” Arya said.
“None I can see,” said the one without a nose. He was squat and thick, with huge hands. Black hair covered his arms and legs and chest, even his back. He reminded Arya of a drawing she had once seen in a book, of an ape from the Summer Isles. The hole in his face made it hard to look at him for long.
The bald one opened his mouth and