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.

That proved a forlorn hope. Inside the longhall they found the ashes of a fire, floors of hard-packed dirt, a chill that went bone deep. But at least they had a roof above their heads and log walls to keep the wind off. A stream ran nearby, covered with a film of ice. The elk had to crack it with his hoof to drink. Once Bran and Jojen and Hodor were safely settled, Meera and Lyanna fetched back some chunks of broken ice for them to suck on. The melting water was so cold it made Lyanna shudder.

Summer and Visenya did not follow them into the longhall. Lyanna could feel the big wolf's hunger, a shadow of her own. "Go hunt for your brother," she told her, "but you leave the elk alone." Part of her was wishing she could go hunting too. Perhaps she would, later.

Supper was a fistful of acorns, crushed and pounded into paste, so bitter that Lyanna gagged as she tried to keep it down. Jojen Reed did not even make the attempt. Younger and frailer than his sister, he was growing weaker by the day.

"Jojen, you have to eat," Meera told him.

"Later. I just want to rest." Jojen smiled a wan smile. "This is not the day I die, sister. I promise you."

"You almost fell off the elk."

"Almost. I am cold and hungry, that's all."

"Then eat."

"Crushed acorns? My belly hurts, but that will only make it worse. Leave me be, sister. I'm dreaming of roast chicken."

"Dreams will not sustain you. Not even greendreams."

"Dreams are what we have."

All we have. The last of the food that they had brought from the south was ten days gone. Since then hunger walked beside them day and night. Even Summer and Visenya could find no game in these woods. They lived on crushed acorns and raw fish. The woods were full of frozen streams and cold black lakes, and Meera was as good a fisher with her three-pronged frog spear as most men were with hook and line. Some days her lips were blue with cold by the time she waded back to them with her catch wriggling on her tines. It had been three days since Meera caught a fish, however. Lyanna's belly felt so hollow it might have been three years. She would go hunting but she lost the bow and arrow at the Keep.

After they choked down their meagre supper, Meera sat with her back against a wall, sharpening her dagger on a whetstone. Bran looked tired and seemed to have a hard time resting. Hodor squatted down beside the door, rocking back and forth on his haunches and muttering, "Hodor, hodor, hodor."

Lyanna closed her eyes. It was too cold to talk, and they dare not light a fire. Coldhands had warned them against that. These woods are not as empty as you think, he had said. You cannot know what the light might summon from the darkness. The memory made her shiver.

Sleep would not come, could not come. Instead there was wind, the biting cold, moonlight on snow, and fire. She was back inside Visenya, long leagues away, and the night was rank with the smell of blood. The scent was strong. A kill, not far. The flesh would still be warm. Slaver ran between her teeth as the hunger woke inside her. Not elk. Not deer. Not this. The direwolf moved toward the meat, a gaunt grey shadow sliding from tree to tree, through pools of moonlight and over mounds of snow. The wind gusted around her, shifting. She lost the scent, found it, then lost it again. As she searched for it once more, a distant sound made her ears prick up.
Wolf, she knew at once. Visenya stalked toward the sound, wary now. Soon enough the scent of blood was back, but now there were other smells: piss and dead skins, bird shit, feathers, and wolf, wolf, wolf. A pack. She would need to fight for her meat.

They smelled her too. As she moved out from amongst the darkness of the trees into the bloody glade, they were watching her. The female was chewing on a leather boot that still had half a leg in it, but she let it fall at Visenya's approach. The leader of the pack, an old male with a grizzled white muzzle and a blind eye, moved out to meet her, snarling, her teeth bared. Behind her, a younger male showed his fangs as well.

The direwolf's yellow eyes drank in the sights around them. A nest of entrails coiled through a bush, entangled with the branches. Steam rising from an open belly, rich with the smells of blood and meat. A head staring sightlessly up at a horned moon, cheeks ripped and torn down to bloody bone, pits for eyes, neck ending in a ragged stump. A pool of frozen blood, glistening red and black.

Men. The stink of them filled the world. Alive, they had been as many as the fingers on a man's paw, but now they were none. Dead. Done. Meat. Cloaked and hooded, once, but the wolves had torn their clothing into pieces in their frenzy to get at the flesh. Those who still had faces wore thick beards crusted with ice and frozen snot. The falling snow had begun to bury what remained of them, so pale against the black of ragged cloaks and breeches. Black.

Long leagues away, the girl stirred uneasily.

Black. Night's Watch. They were Night's Watch. The direwolf did not care. They were meat. She was hungry.

The eyes of the three wolves glowed yellow. The direwolf swung her head from side to side, nostrils flaring, then bared her fangs in a snarl. The younger male backed away. The direwolf could smell the fear in him. Tail, she knew. But the one-eyed wolf answered with a growl and moved to block his advance. Head. And he does not fear me though I am twice his size. Their eyes met.

Warg!

Fire, she thought, smoke. Her nose twitched to the smell of roasting meat. And then the forest fell away, and she was back in the longhall again, back in her body, staring at a fire.

Bran was turning a chunk of raw red flesh above the flames, letting it char and spit. "Just in time," he said.

Lyanna rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and sat up against the wall to sit. Meera spoke "You almost slept through supper. The ranger found a sow."

Behind her, Hodor was tearing eagerly at a chunk of hot charred flesh as blood and grease ran down into his beard. Wisps of smoke rose from between his fingers. "Hodor," he muttered between bites, "hodor, hodor."

Lyanna's sword lay on the earthen floor beside her. Jojen Reed nipped at his own joint with small bites, chewing each chunk of meat a dozen times before swallowing.

The ranger killed a pig. Coldhands stood beside the door, a raven on his arm, both staring at the fire. Reflections from the flames glittered off four black eyes. He does not eat, Lyanna remembered, and he fears the flames.

"You said no fire," she reminded the ranger.

"The walls around us hide the light, and dawn is close. We will be on our way soon."

"What happened to the men? The foes behind us?"

"They will not trouble you."

"Who were they? Wildlings?"

Meera and Bran turned the meat to cook the other side. Hodor was chewing and swallowing, muttering happily under his breath. Only Jojen seemed aware of what was happening as Coldhands turned his head to stare at Lyanna. "They were foes."

Men of the Night's Watch. "You killed them. You and the ravens. Their faces were all torn, and their eyes were gone."

Coldhands did not deny it.

"They were your brothers. I saw. The wolves had ripped their clothes up, but I could still tell. Their cloaks were black. Like your hands."

Coldhands said nothing.

"Who are you? Why are your hands black?" Lyanna demanded.

The ranger studied his hands as if he had never noticed them before. "Once the heart has ceased to beat, a man's blood runs down into his extremities, where it thickens and congeals." His voice rattled in his throat, as thin and gaunt as he was. "His hands and feet swell up and turn as black as pudding. The rest of him becomes as white as milk."

Meera Reed rose, her frog spear in her hand, a chunk of smoking meat still impaled upon its tines. "Show us your face."

The ranger made no move to obey.

"He's dead." Lyanna could taste the bile in his throat. "Meera, he's some dead thing. The monsters cannot pass so long as the Wall stands and the men of the Night's Watch stay true, that's what Old Nan used to say. He came to meet us, but he could not go to the Wall. He sent Sam instead, with that wildling girl."

Meera's gloved hand tightened around the shaft of her frog spear.

"Who sent you?" Lyanna questioned again "Who is this three-eyed crow?"

"A friend. Dreamer, wizard, call him what you will. The last greenseer."

The longhall's wooden door banged open. Outside, the night wind howled, bleak and black. The trees were full of ravens, screaming. Coldhands did not move.

"A monster," Bran said.

The ranger looked at Bran as if the rest of them did not exist. "Your monster, Brandon Stark."

"Yours," the raven echoed, from his shoulder. Outside the door, the ravens in the trees took up the cry, until the night wood echoed to the murderer's song of "Yours, yours, yours. "

"Jojen, did you dream this?" Meera asked her brother. "Who is he? What is he? What do we do now?"

"We go with the ranger," said Jojen. "We have come too far to turn back now, Meera. We would never make it back to the Wall alive. We go with Bran's monster, or we die."