Read A Feast for Dragons for Free Online Page A

bring himself to swallow, and he realized once again how hot he was.
    The snowmelt only made him hungrier. It was food his belly
craved, not water. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind was rising,
filling the air with crystal, slashing at his face as he struggled through the
drifts, the wound in his side opening and closing again. His breath made a
ragged white cloud. When he reached the weirwood tree, he found a fallen branch
just long enough to use as a crutch. Leaning heavily upon it, he staggered
toward the nearest hut. Perhaps the villagers had forgotten something when they
fled … a sack of apples, some dried meat, anything to keep him alive
until Thistle returned.
    He was almost there when his crutch snapped beneath his
weight, and his legs went out from under him.
    How long he sprawled there with his blood reddening the snow
Varamyr could not have said.
The snow will bury me
. It would be
a peaceful death.
They say you feel warm near the end, warm and sleepy
.
It would be good to feel warm again, though it made him sad to think that he
would never see the green lands, the warm lands beyond the Wall that Mance used
to sing about. “The world beyond the Wall is not for our kind,” Haggon used to
say. “The free folk fear skinchangers, but they honor us as well. South of the
Wall, the kneelers hunt us down and butcher us like pigs.”
    You warned me
, Varamyr thought,
but
it was you who showed me Eastwatch too
. He could not have been more
than ten. Haggon traded a dozen strings of amber and a sled piled high with
pelts for six skins of wine, a block of salt, and a copper kettle. Eastwatch
was a better place to trade than Castle Black; that was where the ships came,
laden with goods from the fabled lands beyond the sea. The crows knew Haggon as
a hunter and a friend to the Night’s Watch, and welcomed the news he brought of
life beyond their Wall. Some knew him for a skinchanger too, but no one spoke
of that. It was there at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea that the boy he’d been first
began to dream of the warm south.
    Varamyr could feel the snowflakes melting on his brow.
This
is not so bad as burning. Let me sleep and never wake, let me begin my second
life
. His wolves were close now. He could feel them. He would leave
this feeble flesh behind, become one with them, hunting the night and howling
at the moon. The warg would become a true wolf.
Which, though?
    Not Sly. Haggon would have called it abomination, but
Varamyr had often slipped inside her skin as she was being mounted by One Eye.
He did not want to spend his new life as a bitch, though, not unless he had no
other choice. Stalker might suit him better, the younger
male … though One Eye was larger and fiercer, and it was One Eye who
took Sly whenever she went into heat.
    “They say you forget,” Haggon had told him, a few weeks
before his own death. “When the man’s flesh dies, his spirit lives on inside
the beast, but every day his memory fades, and the beast becomes a little less
a warg, a little more a wolf, until nothing of the man is left and only the
beast remains.”
    Varamyr knew the truth of that. When he claimed the eagle
that had been Orell’s, he could feel the other skinchanger raging at his
presence. Orell had been slain by the turncloak crow Jon Snow, and his hate for
his killer had been so strong that Varamyr found himself hating the beastling
boy as well. He had known what Snow was the moment he saw that great white
direwolf stalking silent at his side. One skinchanger can always sense another.
Mance should have let me take the direwolf. There would be a second life
worthy of a king
. He could have done it, he did not doubt. The gift
was strong in Snow, but the youth was untaught, still fighting his nature when
he should have gloried in it.
    Varamyr could see the weirwood’s red eyes staring down at
him from the white trunk.
The gods are weighing me
. A shiver
went through him. He had done bad things, terrible things. He had