Roose Bolton's face was a pale moon hanging over him, and the steel in his hand was cold—so cold it felt like a burn. "The Lannisters send their regards," the man whispered, but the voice wasn't Roose's. It was the sound of a thousand frogs croaking in unison, a rhythmic, wet thrumming that shook the world until the Great Hall of the Twins dissolved into grey mist and green water.
Robb Stark opened his eyes.
The ceiling was not stone. It was a woven canopy of reeds and slick, black mud, dripping with a slow, rhythmic persistence. The air was so thick with the scent of peat and stagnant water that he felt he was breathing through a damp cloth. He tried to move his arm, and a white-hot spike of lightning shot from his shoulder down to his fingertips. His breath hitched, turning into a wet, rattling cough that made his broken ribs grate together like jagged shards of glass.
"Easy, boy," a voice said. It was soft, melodic, and held the cadence of the marshes. "If you tear the stitches, the bog-rot will find its way back in."
Robb turned his head. The movement was a labor. Beside his pallet sat a man who looked less like a lord and more like a piece of the swamp itself. He was small, his skin the color of old leather, dressed in mottled greens and browns that seemed to shift as the light from a single, sputtering tallow candle flickered. His eyes were a startling, mossy green, deep-set in a face lined by wind and salt.
"Where..." Robb's voice was a ruin, a dry rasp that hurt his throat. "Raynald?"
The man shook his head slowly. "The river took the knight. We found him snagged on a weir, three miles upstream from where we pulled you. The Freys put four bolts in his back. He's back in the mud now. The Green Fork doesn't give many back."
Robb closed his eyes. Raynald Westerling. A crown for a life. It was a poor exchange. He thought of Jeyne, of the way her hair smelled of crushed lemons, and the thought was a dull ache behind his ribs that no medicine could touch.
"You are at Greywater Watch?" Robb wheezed.
"Greywater moves," the man replied. "You are in a hunter's hold, deep in the Neck. The ironborn hold Moat Cailin to the north, and the Freys have their patrols to the south. But they do not come into the water. The mud eats them." The man stood, his movements fluid and silent. "I am Howland Reed."
The name stirred a memory of his father's voice. The only one who stood with me at the Tower of Joy. Robb tried to sit up, a sudden, desperate urge to be a King again, but the world spun in a dizzying circle of grey and green. He slumped back, his skin slick with a cold, greasy sweat.
"I have to... the North... my mother..."
"Your mother is a ghost's tale now, Robb Stark," Howland said, and there was a brutal honesty in his tone that cut deeper than any blade. "The Twins ran red. The news travels on the wings of ravens, and the ravens say the Young Wolf is dead. They say his head was taken and replaced with that of his wolf."
Robb's hand went instinctively to his neck. He felt the rough, puckered skin of a scar he didn't remember receiving. He felt the absence of the weight of the crown. But mostly, he felt the silence. The space in his mind where Grey Wind had lived for years was a hollow, echoing cavern. It was like losing a limb, or a soul. He felt smaller. Hunted.
"They killed him," Robb whispered. "In the yard. I heard him."
"He died as a wolf should. Fighting." Howland knelt by the pallet and pulled back the damp furs.
Robb's breath caught. His left leg was a nightmare. From the mid-thigh down to the knee, the skin was a sickly, translucent yellow, stretched tight over a swollen mass of purple and black. The scent hit him then—the cloying, sweet stench of gangrene. It was the smell of a battlefield three days after the fighting was done.
"The river-water is foul," Howland said. "It carries the filth of the Twins and the rot of the camps. The wound from the bolt went deep, and the fever took root."
"Cut it off," Robb rasped, his eyes fixed on the ruined meat of his leg. "If it's dead, cut it off."
"We do not waste what the bog provides," the Crannogman said. He reached for a small, earthen jar sitting in the embers of a peat fire. He pulled out a handful of something that moved—long, white, wriggling shapes that writhed in the light.
Maggots.
Robb felt his stomach heave. "No."
"They only eat the dead," Howland said, his voice as calm as a frozen pond. "They are cleaner than a maester's knife. If I cut your leg, you will bleed out on this floor, and I have no wine to dull the pain and no silk to bind the stump. This is the mercy of the mudmen, Robb Stark. Take it, or die a King of Carrion."
Howland didn't wait for consent. He pressed the writhing mass into the open, weeping sore on Robb's thigh.
Robb screamed. It wasn't a loud sound; his lungs didn't have the strength for it. It was a thin, high-pitched whine that broke against the walls of the hut. He felt the tiny, cold mouths beginning their work, a thousand pinpricks of sensation that seemed to vibrate through his very bone. He tried to thrash, but Howland's small hands held him with a strength that was unnatural.
"Look at the fire," Howland commanded. "Don't look at the meat."
Robb stared at the peat fire. It was a low, smoldering orange, casting long, dancing shadows against the reed walls. He thought of Winterfell. He thought of the Great Hall, the way the stone stayed cool even in the height of summer. He thought of Bran and Rickon, and the hollowness in his chest grew until it threatened to swallow him whole. They are dead. Everyone is dead. I am the only one left, and I am being eaten by worms in a swamp.
The pain settled into a rhythmic throb. He could feel the fever humming in his blood, a low-grade vibration that made his teeth chatter. Howland began to apply a poultice of crushed moss and stinking grease over the maggot-filled wound, binding it tight with strips of boiled linen.
"Why?" Robb asked after the world had stopped spinning. "Why save me? I lost the war. I broke my word. I led my men to a slaughterhouse."
Howland sat back on his heels, his face shadowed. "Your father was my friend. More than a friend. We were brothers in the shadow of the mountains. When the message came from the reeds that a boy in a wolf's surcoat was drifting in the fork, I knew the Old Gods weren't finished with you."
"The Old Gods have turned their faces away," Robb said. He felt a tear track through the grime on his cheek, hot and shameful. "They let them kill my wolf. They let them kill my mother."
"The gods are in the trees and the water, Robb. They do not care about the quarrels of kings. They care about the balance." Howland reached into his tunic and pulled out a small, blackened object. He set it on the edge of the pallet.
It was a piece of stone, carved into the shape of a wolf's head. It was a piece of the Winterfell crypts, smoothed by time and touch.
"You are not a King here," Howland said. "You are a Stark. And the North remembers what was done. My people have watched the Boltons march past the Moat. We have watched the Freys hang our brothers from the bridge. They think the war is over because they have the castle and the crown. They are fools."
Robb looked at the stone wolf. He felt the maggots working in his leg, eating the death so that the life might remain. He felt the cold dampness of the Neck seeping into his pores. He wasn't the Young Wolf anymore. That boy had died at the wedding, his heart pierced by a bolt and his pride shattered by a broken vow.
This new thing—this creature of fever and mud—felt different. He felt a slow, cold anger beginning to coil in his gut, a snake waking up from a long winter. It wasn't the hot, impulsive rage that had made him execute Rickard Karstark. It was something heavier. Something patient.
"I can't lead an army," Robb said, gesturing to his bound leg and his trembling hands.
"You don't need an army to kill a man in his bed," Howland replied. "You don't need a crown to burn a field. The lion and the flayed man are used to fighting knights in steel. They are not used to fighting the ground beneath their feet."
Howland stood and moved toward the door of the hut, a narrow slit that opened onto a world of grey fog and twisted black trees.
"Rest now. The fever will break, or it will take you. If it takes you, we will sink you in the dark water and you will become part of the marsh. If it breaks..." Howland paused, his silhouette sharp against the mist. "If it breaks, we begin the hunt."
Robb lay in the silence, the only sound the dripping of the roof and the wet, squelching noise of the maggots in his thigh. He closed his eyes and didn't see Jeyne's face. He didn't see his mother's.
He saw Walder Frey's throat. He saw the bridge of the Twins. He saw the snow falling on a world that had gone cold and grey.
I will not die in the mud, he promised the silence. I will be the rot that takes them.
He drifted into a shallow, fitful sleep, his hand clutching the stone wolf until his knuckles went white. Outside, the marsh-birds cried out in the fog, a lonely, haunting sound that echoed across the vast, indifferent emptiness of the Neck.