𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐄𝐘𝐄𝐒, game of thrones

Chapter Twenty-Three

Hours passed in silence. Ahead, shadows began to steal between the trees, the long fingers of the dusk. Dark came early this far north. Lyanna had come to dread that. Each day seemed shorter than the last, and where the days were cold, the nights were bitter cruel.

Meera halted them again. "We should have come on the village by now." Her voice sounded hushed and strange.

"Could we have passed it?" Bran asked. "I hope not. We need to find shelter before nightfall."

She was not wrong. Jojen's lips were blue, Meera's cheeks dark red. Lyanna's own face had gone numb. Hodor's beard was solid ice, and Bran's nose and cheeks were red. Snow caked his legs almost to the knee. No one was as strong as Hodor, no one. If even his great strength was failing ...

"Summer and Visenya can find the village," Bran said suddenly.

"I'll do it" Lyanna said it right away before Bran insisted because he spent most of his time in Summer's skin.

"Let her do it" Jojen shivered, "she needs to get used to it and learn it well"

As she slipped inside Visenya's skin, the dead woods came to sudden life. Where before there had been silence, now she heard: wind in the trees, Hodor's breathing, the elk pawing at the ground in search of fodder. Familiar scents filled his nostrils: wet leaves and dead grass, the rotted carcass of a squirrel decaying in the brush, the sour stink of man-sweat, the musky odor of the elk. Food. Meat. The elk sensed his interest. He turned his head toward the direwolf, wary, and lowered his great antlers. He is not prey, the girl whispered to the beast who shared her skin. Leave him. Run.

Visenya ran. Across the lake she raced, her paws kicking up sprays of snow behind her. The trees stood shoulder to shoulder, like men in a battle line, all cloaked in white. Over roots and rocks the direwolf sped, through a drift of old snow, the crust crackling beneath her weight. Her paws grew wet and cold. The next hill was covered with pines, and the sharp scent of their needles filled the air. When she reached the top, she turned in a circle, sniffing at the air, then raised her head and howled.

The smells were there. Mansmells.
Ashes, Lyanna thought, old and faint, but ashes. It was the smell of burnt wood, soot, and charcoal. A dead fire.
She shook the snow off her muzzle. The wind was gusting, so the smells were hard to follow. The wolf turned this way and that, sniffing. All around were heaps of snow and tall trees garbed in white. The wolf let her tongue loll out between her teeth, tasting the frigid air, her breath misting as snow-flakes melted on her tongue. When she trotted toward the scent, Hodor lumbered after him at once. The elk took longer to decide, so Lyanna returned reluctantly to her own body and said, "That way. Follow Visenya. I smelled it."

As the first sliver of a crescent moon came peeking through the clouds, they finally stumbled into the village by the lake. They had almost walked straight through it. From the ice, the village looked no different than a dozen other spots along the lakeshore. Buried under drifts of snow, the round stone houses could just as easily have been boulders or hillocks or fallen logs, like the deadfall that Jojen had mistaken for a building the day before, until they dug down into it and found only broken branches and rotting logs. The village was empty, abandoned by the wildlings who had once lived there, like all the other villages they had passed. Some had been burned, as if the inhabitants had wanted to make certain they could not come creeping back, but this one had been spared the torch. Beneath the snow they found a dozen huts and a longhall, with its sod roof and thick walls of rough-hewn logs.

"At least we will be out of the wind," Bran said.

"Hodor, " said Hodor.

Meera and Lyanna slid down from the elk's back. They and Jojen helped lift Bran out of the wicker basket. "Might be the wildlings left some food behind," Meera said.