Chapter 3

Dogs were the easiest beasts to bond with; they lived so close to men that they were almost

human. Slipping into a dog's skin was like putting on an old boot, its leather softened by wear. As a boot

was shaped to accept a foot, a dog was shaped to accept a collar, even a collar no human eye could see. Wolves were harder. A man might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, but no man could truly tame a

wolf. "Wolves and women wed for life," Haggon often said. "You take one, that's a marriage. The wolf is

part of you from that day on, and you're part of him. Both of you will change."

Other beasts were best left alone, the hunter had declared. Cats were vain and cruel, always

ready to turn on you. Elk and deer were prey; wear their skins too long, and even the bravest man became a coward. Bears, boars, badgers, weasels … Haggon did not hold with such. "Some skins you

never want to wear, boy. You won't like what you'd become." Birds were the worst, to hear him tell it.

"Men were not meant to leave the earth. Spend too much time in the clouds and you never want to

come back down again. I know skinchangers who've tried hawks, owls, ravens. Even in their own skins,

they sit moony, staring up at the bloody blue."

Not all skinchangers felt the same, however. Once, when Lump was ten, Haggon had taken him

to a gathering of such. The wargs were the most numerous in that company, the wolf-brothers, but the

boy had found the others stranger and more fascinating. Borroq looked so much like his boar that all he

lacked was tusks, Orell had his eagle, Briar her shadowcat (the moment he saw them, Lump wanted a

shadowcat of his own), the goat woman Grisella …

None of them had been as strong as Varamyr Sixskins, though, not even Haggon, tall and grim

with his hands as hard as stone. The hunter died weeping after Varamyr took Greyskin from him, driving

him out to claim the beast for his own. No second life for you, old man. Varamyr Threeskins, he'd called

himself back then. Greyskin made four, though the old wolf was frail and almost toothless and soon

followed Haggon into death.

Varamyr could take any beast he wanted, bend them to his will, make their flesh his own. Dog or

wolf, bear or badger …

Thistle, he thought.

Haggon would call it an abomination, the blackest sin of all, but Haggon was dead, devoured,

and burned. Mance would have cursed him as well, but Mance was slain or captured. No one will ever

know. I will be Thistle the spearwife, and Varamyr Sixskins will be dead. His gift would perish with his

body, he expected. He would lose his wolves, and live out the rest of his days as some scrawny, warty

woman … but he would live. If she comes back. If I am still strong enough to take her.

A wave of dizziness washed over Varamyr. He found himself upon his knees, his hands buried in

a snowdrift. He scooped up a fistful of snow and filled his mouth with it, rubbing it through his beard

and against his cracked lips, sucking down the moisture. The water was so cold that he could barely

bring himself to swallow, and he realized once again how hot he was.

The snowmelt only made him hungrier. It was food his belly craved, not water. The snow had

stopped falling, but the wind was rising, filling the air with crystal, slashing at his face as he struggled

through the drifts, the wound in his side opening and closing again. His breath made a ragged white

cloud. When he reached the weirwood tree, he found a fallen branch just long enough to use as a

crutch. Leaning heavily upon it, he staggered toward the nearest hut. Perhaps the villagers had

forgotten something when they fled … a sack of apples, some dried meat, anything to keep him alive

until Thistle returned.

He was almost there when his crutch snapped beneath his weight, and his legs went out from

under him.

How long he sprawled there with his blood reddening the snow Varamyr could not have said.

The snow will bury me. It would be a peaceful death. They say you feel warm near the end, warm and

sleepy. It would be good to feel warm again, though it made him sad to think that he would never see

the green lands, the warm lands beyond the Wall that Mance used to sing about. "The world beyond the

Wall is not for our kind," Haggon used to say. "The free folk fear skinchangers, but they honor us as well.

South of the Wall, the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs."

You warned me, Varamyr thought, but it was you who showed me Eastwatch too. He could not

have been more than ten. Haggon traded a dozen strings of amber and a sled piled high with pelts for six

skins of wine, a block of salt, and a copper kettle. Eastwatch was a better place to trade than Castle

Black; that was where the ships came, laden with goods from the fabled lands beyond the sea. The

crows knew Haggon as a hunter and a friend to the Night's Watch, and welcomed the news he brought

of life beyond their Wall. Some knew him for a skinchanger too, but no one spoke of that. It was there at

Eastwatch-by-the-Sea that the boy he'd been first began to dream of the warm south.

Varamyr could feel the snowflakes melting on his brow. This is not so bad as burning. Let me

sleep and never wake, let me begin my second life. His wolves were close now. He could feel them. He

would leave this feeble flesh behind, become one with them, hunting the night and howling at the

moon. The warg would become a true wolf. Which, though?

Not Sly. Haggon would have called it abomination, but Varamyr had often slipped inside her skin

as she was being mounted by One Eye. He did not want to spend his new life as a bitch, though, not

unless he had no other choice. Stalker might suit him better, the younger male … though One Eye was

larger and fiercer, and it was One Eye who took Sly whenever she went into heat.

"They say you forget," Haggon had told him, a few weeks before his own death. "When the

man's flesh dies, his spirit lives on inside the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast

becomes a little less a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is left and only the beast

remains."

Varamyr knew the truth of that. When he claimed the eagle that had been Orell's, he could feel

the other skinchanger raging at his presence. Orell had been slain by the turncloak crow Jon Snow, and

his hate for his killer had been so strong that Varamyr found himself hating the beastling boy as well. He

had known what Snow was the moment he saw that great white direwolf stalking silent at his side. One

skinchanger can always sense another. Mance should have let me take the direwolf. There would be a

second life worthy of a king. He could have done it, he did not doubt. The gift was strong in Snow, but

the youth was untaught, still fighting his nature when he should have gloried in it.

Varamyr could see the weirwood's red eyes staring down at him from the white trunk. The gods

are weighing me. A shiver went through him. He had done bad things, terrible things. He had stolen,

killed, raped. He had gorged on human flesh and lapped the blood of dying men as it gushed red and hot

from their torn throats. He had stalked foes through the woods, fallen on them as they slept, clawed

their entrails from their bellies and scattered them across the muddy earth. How sweet their meat had

tasted. "That was the beast, not me," he said in a hoarse whisper. "That was the gift you gave me."

The gods made no reply. His breath hung pale and misty in the air. He could feel ice forming in

his beard. Varamyr Sixskins closed his eyes.

He dreamt an old dream of a hovel by the sea, three dogs whimpering, a woman's tears.

Bump. She weeps for Bump, but she never wept for me.

Lump had been born a month before his proper time, and he was sick so often that no one

expected him to live. His mother waited until he was almost four to give him a proper name, and by

then it was too late. The whole village had taken to calling him Lump, the name his sister Meha had

given him when he was still in their mother's belly. Meha had given Bump his name as well, but Lump's

little brother had been born in his proper time, big and red and robust, sucking greedily at Mother's

teats. She was going to name him after Father. Bump died, though. He died when he was two and I was

six, three days before his nameday.

"Your little one is with the gods now," the woods witch told his mother, as she wept. "He'll

never hurt again, never hunger, never cry. The gods have taken him down into the earth, into the trees.

The gods are all around us, in the rocks and streams, in the birds and beasts. Your Bump has gone to join

them. He'll be the world and all that's in it."

The old woman's words had gone through Lump like a knife. Bump sees. He is watching me. He

knows. Lump could not hide from him, could not slip behind his mother's skirts or run off with the dogs

to escape his father's fury. The dogs. Loptail, Sniff, the Growler. They were good dogs. They were my

friends.

When his father found the dogs sniffing round Bump's body, he had no way of knowing which

had done it, so he took his axe to all three. His hands shook so badly that it took two blows to silence

Sniff and four to put the Growler down. The smell of blood hung heavy in the air, and the sounds the

dying dogs had made were terrible to hear, yet Loptail still came when father called him. He was the

oldest dog, and his training overcame his terror. By the time Lump slipped inside his skin it was too late.

No, Father, please, he tried to say, but dogs cannot speak the tongues of men, so all that

emerged was a piteous whine. The axe crashed into the middle of the old dog's skull, and inside the

hovel the boy let out a scream. That was how they knew. Two days later, his father dragged him into the

woods. He brought his axe, so Lump thought he meant to put him down the same way he had done the

dogs. Instead he'd given him to Haggon.

Varamyr woke suddenly, violently, his whole body shaking. "Get up," a voice was screaming,

"get up, we have to go. There are hundreds of them." The snow had covered him with a stiff white

blanket. So cold. When he tried to move, he found that his hand was frozen to the ground. He left some

skin behind when he tore it loose. "Get up," she screamed again, "they're coming."

Thistle had returned to him. She had him by the shoulders and was shaking him, shouting in his

face. Varamyr could smell her breath and feel the warmth of it upon cheeks gone numb with cold. Now,

he thought, do it now, or die.

He summoned all the strength still in him, leapt out of his own skin, and forced himself inside

her.

Thistle arched her back and screamed.

Abomination. Was that her, or him, or Haggon? He never knew. His old flesh fell back into the

snowdrift as her fingers loosened. The spear-wife twisted violently, shrieking. His shadowcat used to

fight him wildly, and the snow bear had gone half-mad for a time, snapping at trees and rocks and

empty air, but this was worse. "Get out, get out!" he heard her own mouth shouting. Her body

staggered, fell, and rose again, her hands flailed, her legs jerked this way and that in some grotesque

dance as his spirit and her own fought for the flesh. She sucked down a mouthful of the frigid air, and

Varamyr had half a heartbeat to glory in the taste of it and the strength of this young body before her

teeth snapped together and filled his mouth with blood. She raised her hands to his face. He tried to

push them down again, but the hands would not obey, and she was clawing at his eyes. Abomination, he

remembered, drowning in blood and pain and madness. When he tried to scream, she spat their tongue

out.

The white world turned and fell away. For a moment it was as if he were inside the weirwood,

gazing out through carved red eyes as a dying man twitched feebly on the ground and a madwoman

danced blind and bloody underneath the moon, weeping red tears and ripping at her clothes. Then both

were gone and he was rising, melting, his spirit borne on some cold wind. He was in the snow and in the

clouds, he was a sparrow, a squirrel, an oak. A horned owl flew silently between his trees, hunting a

hare; Varamyr was inside the owl, inside the hare, inside the trees. Deep below the frozen ground,

earthworms burrowed blindly in the dark, and he was them as well. I am the wood, and everything

that's in it, he thought, exulting. A hundred ravens took to the air, cawing as they felt him pass. A great

elk trumpeted, unsettling the children clinging to his back. A sleeping direwolf raised his head to snarl at

empty air. Before their hearts could beat again he had passed on, searching for his own, for One Eye, Sly,

and Stalker, for his pack. His wolves would save him, he told himself.

That was his last thought as a man.

True death came suddenly; he felt a shock of cold, as if he had been plunged into the icy waters

of a frozen lake. Then he found himself rushing over moonlit snows with his packmates close behind

him. Half the world was dark. One Eye, he knew. He bayed, and Sly and Stalker gave echo.

When they reached the crest the wolves paused. Thistle, he remembered, and a part of him

grieved for what he had lost and another part for what he'd done. Below, the world had turned to ice.

Fingers of frost crept slowly up the weirwood, reaching out for each other. The empty village was no

longer empty. Blue-eyed shadows walked amongst the mounds of snow. Some wore brown and some

wore black and some were naked, their flesh gone white as snow. A wind was sighing through the hills,

heavy with their scents: dead flesh, dry blood, skins that stank of mold and rot and urine. Sly gave a

growl and bared her teeth, her ruff bristling. Not men. Not prey. Not these.

The things below moved, but did not live. One by one, they raised their heads toward the three

wolves on the hill. The last to look was the thing that had been Thistle. She wore wool and fur and

leather, and over that she wore a coat of hoarfrost that crackled when she moved and glistened in the

moonlight. Pale pink icicles hung from her fingertips, ten long knives of frozen blood. And in the pits

where her eyes had been, a pale blue light was flickering, lending her coarse features an eerie beauty

they hadnever known in life.

She sees me.