A Feast for Dragons Read Online Free PDF Page B

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