3. A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, pp. 60-82

Bran

The journey with Coldhands through the frozen and silent woods seems endless, and Bran spends much of it inside the body of Summer, though the direwolf is limping from the pain he still feels from the arrow that pierced his hind leg at Queenscrown. At other times, he enters Hodor's body, though Hodor tends to resist his presence at first. They are accompanied on their journey by ravens, though only half a dozen of the birds remain with them at any time, the rest of the flock flying ahead or traveling elsewhere, only to rejoin them at nightfall.

Summer is tantalized by the giant elk on which Coldhands rides, wanting to kill and eat it, but he doesn't "like the way that Coldhands smelled. Dead meat, dry blood, a faint whiff of rot. And cold. Cold all over." But now Coldhands stops to tell them they are being followed by men. He says he will take care of them and tells Meera to lead the others to a fishing village ahead. He returns the way they had come, followed by four ravens.

Meera is annoyed, and doesn't fully trust Coldhands: He has "too many secrets. I don't like it. And I don't like him." She is convinced that they are traveling in circles. "He hides his face, and will not speak a name. Who is he? What is he? Anyone can put on a black cloak. Anyone, or any thing. He does not eat, he never drinks, he does not seem to feel the cold." Bran admits this is true, and adds something else he has noticed: "The scarf over his mouth, it never gets all hard with ice, like Hodor's beard. Not even when he talks." Meera agrees: They have never seen his breath when he speaks.

Bran points out that he saved Sam and Gilly from the wights and that he is taking him to the three-eyed crow. But Meera has come to doubt this too, and asks why the three-eyed crow, who presumably has wings, can't come to them. She is also concerned about Jojen, who is steadily growing weaker. But they continue on the path Coldhands has told them to follow.

It is growing darker and they have not yet reached the village when Bran decides that the best way to find it is to let Summer do so. He slips into the wolf's skin and Summer races across the lake until he finds the scent of humans. But it is a smell of ashes, not of cooking food. They follow the wolf's lead until they reach the deserted village, where there are some buildings that have not been burned and that offer them shelter for the night.

The wildlings have left no food behind, and they eat what they have: crushed acorns. Their provisions are gone, and the lakes and streams are too frozen for Meera to catch fish. Bran returns to Summer, who locates a wolf pack, the leader of which is "an old male with a grizzled white muzzle and a blind eye." They are feeding on dead men, and Bran recognizes some of the bodies as black-cloaked members of the Night's Watch. "The direwolf did not care. They were meat. He was hungry." He confronts the one-eyed wolf and Summer/Bran recognizes him as a warg. They fight, but Summer prevails, and dines on the corpse of his choice.

Bran realizes that Summer now has a pack, but he protests:

No, the boy whispered, we have another pack. Lady's dead and maybe Grey Wind too, but somewhere there's still Shaggydog and Nymeria and Ghost. Remember Ghost?

Then Bran awakes to the warmth and smell of a fire and roasting meat. Coldhands has returned with a pig. Coldhands is there, but he is not eating and he seems to fear the fire. Bran realizes that the dead men Summer and the wolves were feasting on had been killed by Coldhands. When he confronts the ranger with his realization, Coldhands doesn't deny it. And when Bran asks why his hands are black, he replies, "Once the heart has ceased to beat, a man's blood runs down into his extremities, where it thickens and congeals."

Meera challenges him: "Who is this three-eyed crow?" Coldhands says, "A friend. Dreamer, wizard, call him what you will. The last greenseer." Meera asks her brother what they should do, and Jojen replies, "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."

Tyrion

He has left Pentos with Illyrio in a litter carried by eight huge draft horses, accompanied by a guard of eunuchs and a baggage train. They are headed for the Rhoyne, the river that will take Tyrion to Volantis. It is a slower journey than by sea, but a safer one for a dwarf with a price on his literal head. At the river he is to meet a man named Griff, who is supposed to take Tyrion to Volantis where they will meet Daenerys and facilitate her return to Westeros to claim the throne.

Illyrio tells Tyrion how he arranged for Daenerys to marry Khal Drogo. "The frightened child who sheltered in my manse died on the Dothraki sea, and was reborn in blood and fire. This dragon queen who wears her name is a true Targaryen." Now that she has taken Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen, Illyrio says, "Mantarys will be next, if she marches west along the old Valyrian roads. If she comes by sea, well ... her fleet must take on food and water at Volantis."

It's a long way from Meereen to Volantis, Tyrion observes, but Illyrio is sure that those who survive the journey "through deserts, mountains, swamps, and demon-haunted ruins" will be the stronger for it. And at Volantis, Tyrion and Griff will have arranged for "fresh forces and sufficient ships to carry them all across the sea to Westeros." Tyrion is justifiably dubious, but Illyrio isn't about to reveal his motives for aiding Daenerys.

Tyrion asks how Illyrio became acquainted with Varys, and is told that they were boys together in Pentos. Varys had fled from arrest for thievery in Myr, and when he met Illyrio they set up a lucrative business: Varys would fence stolen goods to Illyrio who would sell them back at a profit to the people from whom they were stolen. Eventually, Varys trained a network of "mice" -- the "little birds" he relied on in King's Landing -- who would slip into places and read letters and ledgers and charts, gathering information that could be used for blackmail. "Secrets are worth more than silver or sapphires, Varys claimed." Illyrio grew wealthy, and Varys's talents led him to the service of Aerys Targaryen.

Tyrion asks about Griff and learns that he is a Westerosi-born sellsword, but that Illyrio trusts him. He also learns that the Golden Company, a hired army currently under contract to Myr, is marching toward Volantis, and that Illyrio plans to enlist them in Daenerys's cause. "They were exiles and sons of exiles, dispossessed and unforgiven ... yet formidable fighters still." As the Golden Company is made up of Westerosi, they will follow Daenerys on the hope of returning to their homeland. Tyrion also learns from Illyrio that Griff "has a son he dotes on. Young Griff, the boy is called. There never was a nobler lad."  

The journey grows long and monotonous, since there are no towns or cities along the road, and Tyrion has nothing to do but eat, drink, and sleep. He does a great deal of all of those.

1. A Dance With Dragons, by George R.R. Martin, pp. 3-30

Prologue

Varamyr, the wildling warg, hunts with his wolf pack and feasts on human flesh, though his father, Haggon, had denounced such a thing as "abomination." Varamyr justifies it, however, because he does so as a wolf, never as a human being. He is alone and wounded, after fleeing the battle at the Wall with thousands of others.

His wound had been tended by the spearwife, Thistle, who hadn't recognized Varamyr without his entourage of animals into whose bodies he can enter. He had been Varamyr Sixskins, a trusted follower of Mance Rayder, but the King-Beyond-the-Wall had been captured in the battle, and was thought to be dead.

The wood witch known as Mother Mole had led off many of the survivors eastward, where she claimed to have had a vision of a fleet of ships coming to their rescue. He was too weak to follow, however. He had been wounded by a boy who attacked him when Varamyr was taking a squirrel-skin cloak from the body of the boy's mother. Now he knows that he is dying, but he has experienced death many times before, most recently when, in the body of an eagle, he had been killed by a flaming arrow shot by a man on the Wall. He can still remember the pain of burning.

His real father had given him to Haggon to raise, and Varamyr -- who had been named "Lump" but chose a more heroic-sounding name -- now remembers how Haggon "taught me the way of the warg and the secrets of the skinchanger, though my gift was stronger than his own."

Varamyr Sixskins was a name men feared. He rode to battle on the back of a snow bear thirteen feet tall, kept three wolves and a shadowcat in thrall, and sat at the right hand of Mance Rayder. It was Mance who brought me to this place. I should not have listened. I should have slipped inside my bear and torn him to pieces. 

He leaves his hut to call for Thistle, though he knows she has gone on without him. He hears a wolf howl and recognizes it as One Eye, the biggest and fiercest of his three wolves. When the eagle died, he had lost control of his animals.

His only chance to survive now is to enter the body of Thistle and let Varamyr Sixskins die. He would no longer be a warg, however, and "would lose his wolves, and live out the rest of his days as some scrawny, warty woman ... but he would live." He goes out into the snowy landscape to find her, but he is weak and feverish. He finds a weirwood branch to use as a crutch and heads toward another hut in the deserted village, but the crutch snaps and leaves him bleeding in the snow.

As he lies there, letting the snow cover him, he hears the wolves and thinks of entering one of them. Haggon has told him that eventually the warg who becomes an animal forgets his human life. Varamyr knows that when he entered the eagle that had once been Orell's, after Jon Snow killed Orell, he could feel Orell's anger: "his hate for his killer had been so strong that Varamyr fund himself hating the beastling boy as well." He had recognized Jon as a warg when he saw him with his direwolf. "The gift was strong in Snow, but the youth was untaught, still fighting his nature when he should have gloried in it."

When he was a boy known as Lump, which is what his sister had called him when his mother was pregnant, he had been weak and sickly. He was born prematurely, but when he was four his mother had another boy, whom his sister called Bump. He had been a robust boy, but he was killed by a dog when he was two. His father couldn't tell which of the dogs had done it, so he killed all three. Lump had slipped into the oldest, Loptail, to try to save him, but he was too late. When his father killed Loptail with his axe, Lump had screamed, revealing that he was a warg. That was when his father took him to Haggon.

Thistle returns and finds Varamyr, who seizes the opportunity to enter her skin, though she fights him furiously. In the struggle, she bites off her tongue: "When he tried to scream, she spat their tongue out." Then he is completely free of both bodies and finds himself inhabiting everything around: "I am the wood, and everything that's in it, he thought, exulting." He finds his wolf pack: "His wolves would save him, he told himself. That was his last thought as a man." His human body dies, and he finds himself racing withe pack: "Half the world was dark," and he knows he has become the wolf known as One Eye.

They reach the crest of a hill and look back at the village, which is no longer empty: "Blue-eyed shadows walked amongst the mounds of snow. Some wore brown and some wore black and some were naked, their flesh grown white as snow." The wights look at the wolves on the hill, and the last of them to look up "was the thing that had been Thistle."

Tyrion

He is on a ship crossing the narrow sea that separates Westeros from the Free Cities, but doesn't know where he's going. Varys had led him out of the castle through the tunnels to the Blackwater and he had made his way to the ship, on which he has spent time drinking. When they reach port, he is loaded into an empty wine barrel and hauled -- and sometimes rolled -- ashore. Finally, the cask is opened and he finds himself in a cellar, confronting a very fat man who, he soon learns, is Illyrio Mopatis. He has come to Pentos.

He is taken to a hot bath where he falls asleep, and waked in a soft feather bed. His room looks out onto a garden surrounded by a high wall. Illyrio Mopatis arrives to welcome him and to say, "Explore the manse and grounds as you like, but on no account stray beyond the walls. it is best that no man knows you were here." The word "were" alerts Tyrion to the fact that he is not going to stay there, but Illyrio postpones the planning session to the evening.

He wanders the house, but as he doesn't speak the language is unable to make conversation with any of the servants he encounters, so he contents himself with drinking. In the garden he finds some poisonous mushrooms growing from a paving tile. There were seven of them -- "Perhaps the Seven were trying to tell hims something" -- so he picks them, wraps them in a glove that he finds hanging on a washline, and puts them in his pocket. Then he passes out drunk on a bench.

He wakes in his bed again, where a blond girl tells him that his bath is ready and that Magister Illyrio expects him at dinner. She washes him, and offers to return after dinner, but he refuses: "I am done with women." She offers to send him a boy if he prefers, but he declines. Then he tells her he has changed his mind and to wait for him in his bed, naked. "He gave her a leer, hoping for a taste of fear, but all she gave him is was revulsion." So he tells her that he strangled his last whore. "This time, when he grinned, he got the fear he wanted."

At dinner, Illyrio tells him the news: "There are troubles in the east. Astapor has fallen, and Meereen. Ghiscari slave cities that were old when the world was young." When he offers Tryion a dish of mushrooms, Tyrion declines, insisting that Illyrio take some first. Illyrio says he is "too suspicious," and observes that the pain from mushroom poisoning is not great: "Better a mushroom than a sword through your neck, is it not so? Why die with the taste of blood in your mouth when it could be butter and garlic?" Then Illyrio eats one of the mushrooms and pronounces it "Delicious." Tyrion is "irritated" when he learns that the mushrooms aren't poisoned.

Dinner proceeds with more delicacies, most of which Tyrion declines, though he drinks glass after glass of wine. Illyrio tells him, "There are those in Westeros who would say that killing Lord Lannister was merely a good beginning." When Tyrion indicates that he would like to kill Jaime and Cersei as well, Illyrio says, "The queen has offered a lordship to the man who brings her your head, no matter how humble his birth."

Knowing that Tyrion stands to inherit Casterly Rock because Jaime is a member of the kingsguard, Illyrio asks if Stannis would grant it to him if he became king. Tyrion also learns from Illyrio that Stannis is at the Wall, which puzzles him. Tyrion says he had thought of going to Dorne to support Myrcella's claim to the throne, but Illyrio tells him, "The road to Casterly Rock does not go through Dorne, my little friend. Nor does it run beneath the Wall. Yet there is such a road, I tell you." He tells Tyrion there is another claimant to the throne of Westeros: "Stronger than Tommen, gentler than Stannis, with a better claim than the girl Myrcella. A savior come from across the sea to bind up the wounds of bleeding Westeros."

Tyrion is skeptical and asks who this "savior" is. Illyrio replies, "A dragon with three heads."