The truth of it is, the soul is a savage creature, and the heart a wild thing. Why else would our ribs be cages?
Yoren couldn't remember where he'd heard the saying, no more than he could remember who said it. But it'd stuck with him through the years. He'd come to believe it, too, especially once he met the little Stark girl, Arya. Now she was Arry, but that didn't change a thing. She was a small thing, a stick of a girl that was easy to pass off as a boy. She was friends with the blacksmith bastard, Waters, for reasons that Yoren could not fathom. But whenever he saw the little Stark, he was always brought back to the saying.
The soul is a savage creature, and the heart a wild thing.
He can see it in her eyes, a darkness that flickered and danced and shifted. She isn't just a Stark. She's a wolf, in her soul and heart. A savage creature, a wild thing. Even if everything hadn't gone to shit the way it had, she would still be so. She'd never be a lady. He'd heard the whispers, too, the murmurs that the Starks weren't just people, they were wargs, skinchangers of old. It wouldn't have surprised him, not with that one.
The camp was quiet for the night, except for the hissing of the rapers in their cage. Yoren could see Arry laying near to the bastard, both on their sides facing each other. They were twitching and muttering in their sleep, the way dogs ran in their dreaming. Every now and again, the bastard boy would kick slightly, and when he did, she would bare her teeth and growl a little, like they were sharing a dream.
Sometimes Yoren wondered if the Starks were truly the only wargs in this camp.
The pack was hunting. They were hungry, so very hungry. Their alpha had been killed, lost to them, and in the following disarray, they had nearly starved. But now they were coming together under a new alpha, the powerful son of the old leader. Their prey was ahead, a herd of the great southern stags. Their target, the one to be separated from the herd, was a young bull stag, the others being either too small or too old to provide for the pack. They loped forward on deadly paws, snow hissing beneath their tracks. The stags all lifted their heads, turning to view the pack. Bull stag met the eye of alpha wolf.
Come, the young bull stag seemed to say, come if you want. Come if you will. I have met your kind before. I have always prevailed. I'll trample you to bloody scraps.
The pack glided from a trot to a run. The hart tossed his head with a snort of rage and fled, the herd making a run for it as well, slow at first but gaining speed with each bound. But the great direwolves kept pace. He could not outrun these wolves, the great direwolves of a frozen North. Suddenly one wolf, a yearling male, pulled ahead of the pack, fleet footed and sharp-fanged. He leapt and snapped at the stag's hocks. The hart veered away from the snapping teeth, away from his herd.
There was no place for the hart to flee to, trapped between the deep gorge and the frozen river. They had herded him into a bottleneck. There was no way out. There was an outcropping of rocks, totally incongruous with the rest of the idyllic landscape, a pile of black stone. When he reached the outcrop, the stag turned with incredible swiftness to face the wolves; he lowered his massive head and bellowed a challenge, pawing the ground with one hard forehoof. Even if the enormous beast was an herbivore, a well-aimed kick or toss of the head could result in broken ribs, crushed skulls, or impalement. The muscles in the hart's neck, well-developed from lifting a skull weighted by massive antlers and dominance fights with other males, could throw an anvil 20 feet in the air.
The direwolves did not miss a step, still streaking along the ground, blurs of fur and fangs towards the beast. As one circled around, teeth snapping at its hamstrings, the hart snorted and bellowed, kicking and bucking. There would be no running away, no giving up the hunt to try another day. This was kill or be killed. The hart was an enraged juggernaut; nothing wanted to be in its path. The direwolves were. The swift young male lunged at the bull's hocks again and again, trying to hamstring the beast; 'round and 'round they went, a wild melee of wolf and stag.
Every time the direwolves lunged, they were met with kicking heels, flailing hooves, and swinging antlers, and they had to leap away to avoid their deaths. But sooner or later, one of them would have to make a mistake. The hart reared and brought his heavy fore-hooves down with deadly force. He slipped on the snow; he didn't fall, but he staggered. In a second, the young male wolf was back on his haunches and in the air. He landed on the hart's shoulders and clamped his jaws on the back of the hart's neck where the spine was thinnest, just below the head.
The massive stag roared in pain and rage, whirling in a frenzied circle as he tried to throw the direwolf off, rearing and plunging almost like a horse. The young wolf held on with grim determination, tightening his jaws on the hart's neck. The muscle and fat was not easy to bite through, but he kept her hold. When the enraged animal threw his head back trying to remove the young male, another saw her opportunity and sprung, and the she-wolf's powerful teeth locked onto the bull's exposed throat. The pained aurochs cried out again, lifting and lowering his head, trying to dislodge the direwolf by battering the she-wolf against the snowy ground. But both held on with a ferocious stubbornness. A fully-grown direwolf had one of the strongest bites in the world. A single snap could take off a cow's tail—or a man's hand—and they could exert enough force in their bite to snap the human thighbone, the largest, strongest bone in the body. And the direwolves bit down. Blood gushed out and bone crunched. What killed the stag, the puncturing of the arteries in his throat or the crushing of his spine, none of them knew. But the bull collapsed, over a tonne of muscle, bone, and fat falling to the ground, blood steaming in the cold air.
The pack circled around and around, howling their victory to the brittle winter skies.
The wolf which fancied himself a bull and which others fancied a stag very nearly punched a girl in the face, jerked out of sleep so sharply it was reflex to lash out. He could still feel the raw meat in his mouth, steaming in the cold. Gendry looked across at the form beside him and wondered what she dreamt, the daughter of wolves.
The warrior girl that was now a boy sat up with a startled growl, flailing as she came sharply back to herself. The taste of blood was heavy on her tongue, thick and gaggingly copper-sweet. Arya thought of the stag collapsing with his throat in her mouth, and a savage smile came to her lips. In the distance, a direwolf howled.
The wild queen masquerading as a lady woke with a howl in her throat, still able to feel the cold crunch of frost beneath her paws—no, her feet. She had feet, she was a person, not a wolf. She was not a wolf. She was Sansa Stark, she was a lady; the thought brought a sharp pang of longing for her direwolf.
The lost prince named a bastard came awake on the floor, flailing out of bed, one hand grasping for Longclaw as a snarl caught in his throat. The sharp bite of the cold floor snapped Jon awake, a shiver rapidly chasing away the heat of adrenalin. Ghost looked at him with bloody eyes and wagged his heavy tail.
The broken prince sat upright in bed so quickly his head swum, the glare of winter sunlight still bright in his eyes as he blinked in the darkness of his room. Bran looked down at his useless legs and recalled the speed with which he'd chased the hart, snapping at its heels. His heart burned. Summer growled low in his chest.
The King in the North jerked out of sleep with a strangled noise, a dagger in hand without having remembered drawing it. He glanced around his tent but saw nobody there other than himself and Gray Wind. The direwolf lay near the entrance, his burning eyes fixed on Robb. He picked up his crown from where it lay.
The false king woke not with a howl but with a scream. He sat upright, his heart in his mouth, the sweat-damp sheets tangled and twisted around him. His pulse raced and his hands shook. Joffrey felt along his throat and neck, assuring that there were no bites, no fangs sunk in his flesh. For the first time, he regretted having Stark executed and began to fear what would come of the others left alive.