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stolen,
killed, raped. He had gorged on human flesh and lapped the blood of dying men
as it gushed red and hot from their torn throats. He had stalked foes through
the woods, fallen on them as they slept, clawed their entrails from their
bellies and scattered them across the muddy earth.
How sweet their meat
had
tasted
. “That was the beast, not me,” he said in a
hoarse whisper. “That was the gift you gave me.”
    The gods made no reply. His breath hung pale and misty in
the air. He could feel ice forming in his beard. Varamyr Sixskins closed his
eyes.
    He dreamt an old dream of a hovel by the sea, three dogs
whimpering, a woman’s tears.
    Bump. She weeps for Bump, but she never wept for me
.
    Lump had been born a month before his proper time, and he
was sick so often that no one expected him to live. His mother waited until he
was almost four to give him a proper name, and by then it was too late. The
whole village had taken to calling him Lump, the name his sister Meha had given
him when he was still in their mother’s belly. Meha had given Bump his name as
well, but Lump’s little brother had been born in his proper time, big and red
and robust, sucking greedily at Mother’s teats. She was going to name him after
Father.
Bump died, though. He died when he was two and I was six, three
days before his nameday
.
    “Your little one is with the gods now,” the woods witch told
his mother, as she wept. “He’ll never hurt again, never hunger, never cry. The
gods have taken him down into the earth, into the trees. The gods are all
around us, in the rocks and streams, in the birds and beasts. Your Bump has
gone to join them. He’ll be the world and all that’s in it.”
    The old woman’s words had gone through Lump like a knife.
Bump
sees. He is watching me. He knows
. Lump could not hide from him, could
not slip behind his mother’s skirts or run off with the dogs to escape his
father’s fury.
The dogs
. Loptail, Sniff, the Growler.
They
were good dogs. They were my friends
.
    When his father found the dogs sniffing round Bump’s body,
he had no way of knowing which had done it, so he took his axe to all three.
His hands shook so badly that it took two blows to silence Sniff and four to
put the Growler down. The smell of blood hung heavy in the air, and the sounds
the dying dogs had made were terrible to hear, yet Loptail still came when
father called him. He was the oldest dog, and his training overcame his terror.
By the time Lump slipped inside his skin it was too late.
    No, Father, please
, he tried to say, but
dogs cannot speak the tongues of men, so all that emerged was a piteous whine.
The axe crashed into the middle of the old dog’s skull, and inside the hovel
the boy let out a scream.
That was how they knew
. Two days
later, his father dragged him into the woods. He brought his axe, so Lump
thought he meant to put him down the same way he had done the dogs. Instead
he’d given him to Haggon.
    Varamyr woke suddenly, violently, his whole body shaking.
“Get up,” a voice was screaming, “get up, we have to go. There are hundreds of
them.” The snow had covered him with a stiff white blanket.
So cold
.
When he tried to move, he found that his hand was frozen to the ground. He left
some skin behind when he tore it loose. “Get up,” she screamed again, “they’re
coming.”
    Thistle had returned to him. She had him by the shoulders
and was shaking him, shouting in his face. Varamyr could smell her breath and
feel the warmth of it upon cheeks gone numb with cold.
Now
, he
thought,
do it now, or die
.
    He summoned all the strength still in him, leapt out of his
own skin, and forced himself inside her.
    Thistle arched her back and screamed.
    Abomination
. Was that her, or him, or
Haggon? He never knew. His old flesh fell back into the snowdrift as her
fingers loosened. The spearwife twisted violently, shrieking. His shadowcat
used to fight him wildly, and the snow bear had gone half-mad for a