A Feast for Dragons Read Online Free PDF

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
,