Chapter 2

Death was not so easily outrun, however. So when Varamyr came upon the dead woman in the

wood, he knelt to strip the cloak from her, and never saw the boy until he burst from hiding to drive the

long bone knife into his side and rip the cloak out of his clutching fingers. "His mother," Thistle told him

later, after the boy had run off. "It were his mother's cloak, and when he saw you robbing her …"

"She was dead," Varamyr said, wincing as her bone needle pierced his flesh. "Someone smashed

her head. Some crow."

"No crow. Hornfoot men. I saw it." Her needle pulled the gash in his side closed. "Savages, and

who's left to tame them?" No one. If Mance is dead, the free folk are doomed. The Thenns, giants, and

the Hornfoot men, the cave-dwellers with their filed teeth, and the men of the western shore with their

chariots of bone … all of them were doomed as well. Even the crows. They might not know it yet, but

those black-cloaked bastards would perish with the rest. The enemy was coming.

Haggon's rough voice echoed in his head. "You will die a dozen deaths, boy, and every one will

hurt … but when your true death comes, you will live again. The second life is simpler and sweeter, they

say."

Varamyr Sixskins would know the truth of that soon enough. He could taste his true death in the

smoke that hung acrid in the air, feel it in the heat beneath his fingers when he slipped a hand under his

clothes to touch his wound. The chill was in him too, though, deep down in his bones. This time it would

be cold that killed him.

His last death had been by fire. I burned. At first, in his confusion, he thought some archer on

the Wall had pierced him with a flaming arrow … but the fire had been inside him, consuming him. And

the pain …

Varamyr had died nine times before. He had died once from a spear thrust, once with a bear's

teeth in his throat, and once in a wash of blood as he brought forth a stillborn cub. He died his first

death when he was only six, as his father's axe crashed through his skull. Even that had not been so

agonizing as the fire in his guts, crackling along his wings, devouring him. When he tried to fly from it, his

terror fanned the flames and made them burn hotter. One moment he had been soaring above the

Wall, his eagle's eyes marking the movements of the men below. Then the flames had turned his heart

into a blackened cinder and sent his spirit screaming back into his own skin, and for a little while he'd

gone mad. Even the memory was enough to make him shudder.

That was when he noticed that his fire had gone out.

Only a grey-and-black tangle of charred wood remained, with a few embers glowing in the

ashes. There's still smoke, it just needs wood. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Varamyr crept to the

pile of broken branches Thistle had gathered before she went off hunting, and tossed a few sticks onto

the ashes. "Catch," he croaked. "Burn." He blew upon the embers and said a wordless prayer to the

nameless gods of wood and hill and field.

The gods gave no answer. After a while, the smoke ceased to rise as well. Already the little hut

was growing colder. Varamyr had no flint, no tinder, no dry kindling. He would never get the fire burning

again, not by himself. "Thistle," he called out, his voice hoarse and edged with pain. "Thistle!"

Her chin was pointed and her nose flat, and she had a mole on one cheek with four dark hairs

growing from it. An ugly face, and hard, yet he would have given much to glimpse it in the door of the

hut. I should have taken her before she left. How long had she been gone? Two days? Three? Varamyr

was uncertain. It was dark inside the hut, and he had been drifting in and out of sleep, never quite sure

if it was day or night outside. "Wait," she'd said. "I will be back with food." So like a fool he'd waited,

dreaming of Haggon and Bump and all the wrongs he had done in his long life, but days and nights had

passed and Thistle had not returned. She won't be coming back. Varamyr wondered if he had given

himself away. Could she tell what he was thinking just from looking at him, or had he muttered in his

fever dream?

Abomination, he heard Haggon saying. It was almost as if he were here, in this very room. "She

is just some ugly spearwife," Varamyr told him. "I am a great man. I am Varamyr, the warg, the

skinchanger, it is not right that she should live and I should die." No one answered. There was no one

there. Thistle was gone. She had abandoned him, the same as all the rest.

His own mother had abandoned him as well. She cried for Bump, but she never cried for me. The

morning his father pulled him out of bed to deliver him to Haggon, she would not even look at him. He

had shrieked and kicked as he was dragged into the woods, until his father slapped him and told him to

be quiet. "You belong with your own kind," was all he said when he flung him down at Haggon's feet.

He was not wrong, Varamyr thought, shivering. Haggon taught me much and more. He taught

me how to hunt and fish, how to butcher a carcass and bone a fish, how to find my way through the

woods. And he taught me the way of the warg and the secrets of the skinchanger, though my gift was

stronger than his own.

Years later he had tried to find his parents, to tell them that their Lump had become the great

Varamyr Sixskins, but both of them were dead and burned. Gone into the trees and streams, gone into

the rocks and earth. Gone to dirt and ashes. That was what the woods witch told his mother, the day

Bump died. Lump did not want to be a clod of earth. The boy had dreamed of a day when bards would

sing of his deeds and pretty girls would kiss him. When I am grown I will be the King-Beyond-the-Wall,

Lump had promised himself. He never had, but he had come close. Varamyr Sixskins was a name men

feared. He rode to battle on the back of a snow bear thirteen feet tall, kept three wolves and a

shadowcat in thrall, and sat at the right hand of Mance Rayder. It was Mance who brought me to this

place. I should not have listened. I should have slipped inside my bear and torn him to pieces.

Before Mance, Varamyr Sixskins had been a lord of sorts. He lived alone in a hall of moss and

mud and hewn logs that had once been Haggon's, attended by his beasts. A dozen villages did him

homage in bread and salt and cider, offering him fruit from their orchards and vegetables from their

gardens. His meat he got himself. Whenever he desired a woman he sent his shadowcat to stalk her, and

whatever girl he'd cast his eye upon would follow meekly to his bed. Some came weeping, aye, but still they came. Varamyr gave them his seed, took a hank of their hair to remember them by, and sent them

back. From time to time, some village hero would come with spear in hand to slay the beastling and save

a sister or a lover or a daughter. Those he killed, but he never harmed the women. Some he even

blessed with children. Runts. Small, puny things, like Lump, and not one with the gift.

Fear drove him to his feet, reeling. Holding his side to staunch the seep of blood from his

wound, Varamyr lurched to the door and swept aside the ragged skin that covered it to face a wall of

white. Snow. No wonder it had grown so dark and smoky inside. The falling snow had buried the hut.

When Varamyr pushed at it, the snow crumbled and gave way, still soft and wet. Outside, the

night was white as death; pale thin clouds danced attendance on a silver moon, while a thousand stars

watched coldly. He could see the humped shapes of other huts buried beneath drifts of snow, and

beyond them the pale shadow of a weirwood armored in ice. To the south and west the hills were a vast

white wilderness where nothing moved except the blowing snow. "Thistle," Varamyr called feebly,

wondering how far she could have gone. "Thistle. Woman. Where are you?"

Far away, a wolf gave howl.

A shiver went through Varamyr. He knew that howl as well as Lump had once known his

mother's voice. One Eye. He was the oldest of his three, the biggest, the fiercest. Stalker was leaner,

quicker, younger, Sly more cunning, but both went in fear of One Eye. The old wolf was fearless,

relentless, savage.

Varamyr had lost control of his other beasts in the agony of the eagle's death. His shadowcat

had raced into the woods, whilst his snow bear turned her claws on those around her, ripping apart four

men before falling to a spear. She would have slain Varamyr had he come within her reach. The bear

hated him, had raged each time he wore her skin or climbed upon her back.

His wolves, though …

My brothers. My pack. Many a cold night he had slept with his wolves, their shaggy bodies piled

up around him to help keep him warm. When I die they will feast upon my flesh and leave only bones to

greet the thaw come spring. The thought was queerly comforting. His wolves had often foraged for him

as they roamed; it seemed only fitting that he should feed them in the end. He might well begin his

second life tearing at the warm dead flesh of his own corpse.