A Dance With Dragons

The night was rank with the smell of man.
The warg stopped beneath a tree and sniffed, his grey-brown fur dappled by shadow. A sigh of
piney wind brought the man-scent to him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag,
even wolf. Those were man-smells too, the warg knew; the stink of old skins, dead and sour, near
drowned beneath the stronger scents of smoke and blood androt. Only man stripped the skins from
other beasts and wore their hides and hair.
Wargs have no fear of man, as wolves do. Hate and hunger coiled in his belly, and he gave a low
growl, calling to his one-eyed brother, to his small sly sister. As he raced through the trees, his
packmates followed hard on his heels. They had caught the scent as well. As he ran, he saw through
their eyes too andglimpsed himself ahead. The breath of the pack puffed warm and white from long
grey jaws. Ice had frozen between their paws, hard as stone, but the hunt was on now, the prey ahead.
Flesh, the warg thought, meat.
A man alone was a feeble thing. Big and strong, with good sharp eyes, but dull of ear and deaf to
smells. Deer and elk and even hares were faster, bears and boars fiercer in a fight.But men in packs
were dangerous. As the wolves closed on the prey, the warg heard the wailing of a pup, the crust of last
night’s snow breaking under clumsy man-paws, the rattle of hardskins and the long grey claws men
carried.
Swords, a voice inside him whispered, spears.
The trees had grown icy teeth, snarling down from the bare brown branches. One Eye ripped
through the undergrowth,spraying snow. His packmates followed. Up a hill and down the slope beyond,
until the wood opened before them and the men were there. One was female. The fur-wrapped bundle
she clutched was her pup. Leave her for last, the voice whispered, the males are the danger. They were
roaring at each other as men did, but the warg could smell their terror. One had a wooden tooth as tall
as he was. He flungit, but his hand was shaking and the tooth sailed high.
Then the pack was on them.
His one-eyed brother knocked the tooth-thrower back into a snowdrift and tore his throat out as
he struggled. His sister slipped behind the other male and took him from the rear. That left the female
and her pup for him.
She had a tooth too, a little one made of bone, but she dropped it when the warg’s jawsclosed
around her leg. As she fell, she wrapped both arms around her noisy pup. Underneath her furs the
female was just skin and bones, but her dugs were full of milk. The sweetest meat was on the pup. The
wolf saved the choicest parts for his brother. All around the carcasses, the frozen snow turned pink and
red as the pack filled its bellies.
Leagues away, in a one-room hut of mud and strawwith a thatched roof and a smoke hole and a
floor of hard-packed earth, Varamyr shivered and coughed and licked his lips. His eyes were red, his lips
cracked, his throat dry and parched, but the taste of blood and fat filled his mouth, even as his swollen
belly cried for nourishment. A child’s flesh, he thought, remembering Bump. Human meat. Had he sunk
so low as to hunger after human meat? Hecould almost hear Haggon growling at him. “Men may eat
the flesh of beasts and beasts the flesh of men, but the man who eats the flesh of man is an
abomination.”
Abomination. That had always been Haggon’s favorite word. Abomination, abomination,
abomination. To eat of human meat was abomination, to mate as wolf with wolf was abomination, and
to seize the body of another man was the worstabomination of all. Haggon was weak, afraid of his own
power. He died weeping and alone when I ripped his second life from him. Varamyr had devoured his
heart himself. He taught me much and more, and the last thing I learned from him was the taste of
human flesh.
That was as a wolf, though. He had never eaten the meat of men with human teeth. He would
not grudge his pack their feast, however. The...