Read Online A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin - Free Book Online Page A

Syrio Forel had taught her, and Jaqen’s words too,
valar morghulis
.
    The rain stopped and started again and stopped once more and started, but they had good cloaks to keep the water off. Arya kept them moving at a slow steady pace. It was too black beneath the trees to ride any faster; the boys were no horsemen, neither one, and the soft broken ground was treacherous with half-buried roots and hidden stones. They crossed another road, its deep ruts filled with runoff, but Arya shunned it. Up and down the rolling hills she took them, through brambles and briars and tangles of underbrush, along the bottoms of narrow gullies where branches heavy with wet leaves slapped at their faces as they passed.
    Gendry’s mare lost her footing in the mud once, going down hard on her hindquarters and spilling him from the saddle, but neither horse nor rider was hurt, and Gendry got that stubborn look on his face and mounted right up again. Not long after, they came upon three wolves devouring the corpse of a fawn. When Hot Pie’s horse caught the scent, he shied and bolted. Two of the wolves fled as well, but the third raised his head and bared his teeth, prepared to defend his kill. “Back off,” Arya told Gendry. “Slow, so you don’t spook him.” They edged their mounts away, until the wolf and his feast were no longer in sight. Only then did she swing about to ride after Hot Pie, who was clinging desperately to the saddle as he crashed through the trees.
    Later they passed through a burned village, threading their way carefully between the shells of blackened hovels and past the bones of a dozen dead men hanging from a row of apple trees. When Hot Pie saw them he began to pray, a thin whispered plea for the Mother’s mercy, repeated over and over. Arya looked up at the fleshless dead in their wet rotting clothes and said her own prayer.
Ser Gregor
, it went,
Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei
. She ended it with
valar morghulis
, touched Jaqen’s coin where it nestled under her belt, and then reached up and plucked an apple from among the dead men as she rode beneath them. It was mushy and overripe, but she ate it worms and all.
    That was the day without a dawn. Slowly the sky lightened around them, but they never saw the sun. Black turned to grey, and colors crept timidly back into the world. The soldier pines were dressed in somber greens, the broadleafs in russets and faded golds already beginning to brown. They stopped long enough to water the horses and eat a cold, quick breakfast, ripping apart a loaf of the bread that Hot Pie had stolen from the kitchens and passing chunks of hard yellow cheese from hand to hand.
    “Do you know where we’re going?” Gendry asked her.
    “North,” said Arya.
    Hot Pie peered around uncertainly. “Which way is north?”
    She used her cheese to point. “That way.”
    “But there’s no sun. How do you know?”
    “From the moss. See how it grows mostly on one side of the trees? That’s south.”
    “What do we want with the north?” Gendry wanted to know.
    “The Trident.” Arya unrolled the stolen map to show them. “See? Once we reach the Trident, all we need to do is follow it upstream till we come to Riverrun, here.” Her finger traced the path. “It’s a long way, but we can’t get lost so long as we keep to the river.”
    Hot Pie blinked at the map. “Which one is Riverrun?”
    Riverrun was painted as a castle tower, in the fork between the flowing blue lines of two rivers, the Tumblestone and the Red Fork. “There.” She touched it. “
Riverrun
, it reads.”
    “You can read writing?” he said to her, wonderingly, as if she’d said she could walk on water.
    She nodded. “We’ll be safe once we reach Riverrun.”
    “We will? Why?”
    Because Riverrun is my grandfather’s castle, and my brother Robb will be there
, she wanted to say. She bit her lip and rolled up the map. “We just