Robb Stark's POV
I had kept him in a little birch box with air holes, with my own baggage, for eleven days.
He was a grain mouse out of the oat wagons. I had Hedwig catch him the second night below Moat Cailin, after the first night's conversation with Howland about fate changing kept me up. I fed him and spent part of every night on my back in the dark, learning how to fit my mind inside him. It was not like Hedwig, and it is nothing like Grey Wind. There was so little room in there. A wolf has something like thoughts and an owl has a cold sort of attention, but a mouse is only a heartbeat and a nose and a fear that never stops, a world made of edges to run along and open spaces to die in. It took me a week to hold him still in the open. It took longer to make him walk toward something he feared. I told no one. I did not give him a name. I took care not to.
The rest was only arrangement. Four nights of Hedwig over the Twins had given me the east keep, the high window on the river side with its shutters open to the summer, the old man's candle, the hour it went out.
I have never gotten used to the flying. Not the height of it. The quiet. A raven beats, and you hear every stroke of it in your own bones; in Hedwig there is nothing, no drum of air, no whistle in the feathers, only the river sliding along underneath and the wind going by like a held breath. Sixty feet of black air and not one sound to give us away. He came in over the sill with the mouse hooked gently in one foot, the way he has carried a hundred voles he meant to eat, and set him down alive on the stone. Then I let go of the wings and went down into the small dark, and the owl, his own again, lifted away to wait on the roof of the sept.
I remember all of it. I don't think I'll be able to forget this one night.
The room was a country. The floor went on forever, and it stank of liniment, old man, and a chamber pot. The snoring came from above like weather. I took him along the wall and up the bed hangings, claw over claw, then across a coverlet that rose and fell. A girl slept on the far side, curled away, small. I had known she would be there. I had seen her through the window. I went past her hair.
His mouth was open. I had known it would be, because it had been the last four nights, and even if it hadn't, I would have made it work. Up close it was a cave with a wet floor. Four or five brown tooth stumps. His breath came out of it hot and sour with wine, in gusts that flattened the whiskers back.
The mouse would not go—everything he was refused it. Not from understanding; nothing in him could understand, but every instinct that had kept ten thousand generations of his kind alive said, that is a mouth, and he locked his legs, his heart went like a drumroll, and he pulled against me with the whole of his tiny will. He was stronger than I had expected. In there, he was nearly as strong as I was.
And for a moment, crouched on an old man's chest with that small heart hammering against me, I did not want to go either. He had eaten out of my hand for eleven days. He had done nothing to anyone. I'm sorry, I thought, and I did not know which of them I meant.
Then I pushed. I put him over the gums and across the tongue, and I drove him headfirst down into the dark at the back, where it narrowed, and I kept his legs working when there was nowhere left for them to go.
The old man woke. I felt the throat close. It clenched around us like a fist, and then again and again, hard and harder, and there was a roaring, and the world heaved and thrashed, and something far off that was a girl screaming. There was no air. There was the sourness of the wine and the bile climbing up to meet us, the fleshy tongue working against his back legs, his tail caught somewhere in the side of a cheek. The mouse's terror by then was not a thing I was riding. There was no I left to ride it. I was only the will, holding one animal down in a wet, wine-soured dark where neither it nor the man whose throat it had crawled into could breathe, and it never did know why. If I let go of him, he might back out. He might be coughed free. So I stayed and held him in it. It took a very long time. I had thought it would be quick. Then something in the dark bit down, or bore down, and his back broke, and his heart went on for a little after that. I know exactly how long, because I was the one counting. When I felt "the senses" truly dimming, I pulled my mind away.
Maester Luwin once told me about the old books and what they say of wargs. That the gift takes pieces of a man and leaves them in the beast. He said I seemed to suffer none of it.
I came back on the cot with both hands at my own throat. I could not get a breath. I knew I was lying in a tent with clean air all around me, but I could not make my chest believe it. When the feeling finally let go, I got as far as the edge of the cot before I was sick, and I kept going long after there was anything left, with Grey Wind whining and shoving his head into my side. I could still smell it, taste it — the soured wine mixed with bile, the flesh and the rot of old teeth, and under all of it the girl's screaming and the gargling sounds the man made.
I did not try to sleep after that. There was no way in any of the seven hells I would sleep now. I lay on the cot until the sickness settled into something I could stand up under, and then I sat, and then I was up and dressing in the dark before I had decided to be. Torvin was awake at the flap. He is always awake at the flap. He looked at me and handed me a waterskin; he did not speak or ask, which I have come to value in him more than the axe.
"Walk with me."
The camp was quiet the way thirty-six thousand men are quiet, which is not very quiet. Snoring from the tents, a horse blowing on the lines, the sentries' low back-and-forth, somewhere a man coughing up his lungs. The grass was heavy with dew and soaked me to the knee before we had gone a hundred yards, and the air had that sour, standing smell the river country gets before dawn, mud and wet ash and the latrine trenches, and under it, from the picket line, Manny. I breathed it and was glad of it. Anything was better than what still filled my senses whenever my thoughts drifted too much.
I went to the head of the bridge road because it was where I had said I would be. That wasn't all my reasoning. I couldn't stand being in a tent or any enclosed space then. I feared I might retch. I had told Stevron Frey dawn, and I had told Black Walder dawn, and it was going to be dawn, and I was not sure if a single Frey would ride out to meet me, but I could not have stayed in that tent if the old gods or the Seven themselves had ordered it. So I stood in the wet grass with my hands behind my back and the Twins a black shape against a sky going grey, and I watched the east keep, that one high window, until I could not look at it any longer, and then I watched the river instead.
Jory found me there and sent for the trestle, the bread, and the jug without being told to. The lords came out one by one as the light grew, grumbling, the Greatjon still buckling on his belt. I heard Wyman whisper something to Maege—that, for the Freys' sake, he hoped they did not disappoint Robb twice. Nobody asked me why I looked the way I did. They had all seen me after nights spent reading and drawing maps, and I suppose that is what they took it for.
The sun came up behind us. Across the water a bell began to ring, slow, one stroke and a long space and another, and I knew what it was for before any of them did, and I drank water from the jug and rinsed my mouth and spat in the grass.
Then the gate opened, and eight riders came out in black.
I nearly retched again, hours later, when Black Walder stood in front of me in that meadow and told me what the maester had drawn out with his forceps. The sour air, the wetness, the darkness, the weight of it bearing down. It all came back clear as if I was still in it. It was enough to make me sick for weeks. It is a lot different, I found, to think of a thing, to plan it, to foresee a use for what you can do — and then to actually do it. I had thought it would be clever, and perhaps it still was. But I fear I do not know if I could make myself do it again. I told Stevron I was sorry. I doubt it was one he would care for, but I gave it anyway, because truly I was.
Howland Reed told me a day would come when every road was bad. This was not that day. There were other roads at the Twins I could have taken. I could have stormed the Twins, or tried to cross upriver, or left them behind and gone elsewhere; perhaps I could have gone down the near bank and met Tywin head-on. But I had been thinking, ever since the Moat, about how fate could change, so I chose this road, so I would be the one to change it. I did not know for certain that Stevron would let me pass. It was a gamble, and one I was willing to take, to be my own changer of fate, because I would not tempt it by letting the late Lord Frey live another day.
There was a red wedding once, in a story only I have read, in a hall I will now never enter. It will never be held. Fate can take a great deal back from me, yet it cannot take that one back now that I have changed it.
Stevron Frey is a better man than his father, and four thousand of his men are marching with me. My mother will have two Frey children at her table by autumn. Both things are so.
My food, the one Olyvar had set out for me, went cold on the table. A little after midnight I gave up on sleep and lay in the dark on the west bank of the Green Fork, with thirty-six thousand men around me and the road to Riverrun open.
As I lay there, I found my hands drifting up to my throat once more. I do not remember bringing them up, or even the feeling of it. But the gasping — that I felt my body attempting. It wasn't deep, the way a man breathes after exertion. It was small and quick, and it almost made me retch again. I forced deep breaths through my clenched throat, trying to calm my racing mind and regain myself. By the time I did, I was soaked in sweat once more.
I knew this one would scar. I only hoped it would scar over soon.
But at least I could breathe.