ARYA

Rickon was getting worse and worse with every hour that passed. He never whined, and he certainly never wept. Indeed, he never gave any sign that he was in any pain at all, but she knew, sure as sunrise. She knew, too, that they could not continue to delude themselves forever. Sooner or later, something would happen. And though neither of them knew what it was, they both had a pretty good idea.

Maybe Gendry did too. He walked in front, using his sword as a scythe to chop apart the dense vegetation where it o'ersprawled the path through the marshland. Branches of thorn and bramble fell by the wayside in his wake. Only sparingly did he glance back to speak with them, and even then it was only guttural. There was nothing to be said.

They had walked for the better part of five days, through the muddy wilds of the Neck. Stringy weeds overgrew the path on both sides, and here and there were dead flowers with broken necks, and lilies swimming in scum. In places the path vanished completely, and they had to spend hours finding where it resurfaced from the darkness. They always walked in this formation, with Gendry in front, always guarded, swinging his sword to clear the way; Arya second, ironically the beating heart of the column, calling words of encouragement that sounded strange and foreign to her ears. And Rickon lagging behind, limping in places, his face screwed up with pain, but still going, always going.

They walked, and they walked, and they walked. Sometimes, in those long silent times when no one spoke, the trees spoke to her, in place of human voices. They never said much: their knowledge of man's tongue was limited to Arya and north and a few other words, but it was the voice, not what it said, that intrigued her. The voice was not lonesome, but a choir of a thousand other voices, all merging together as one as they spoke. But there was one that spoke maybe a second before the other echoes, and she was sure she knew it. Sometimes she still thought it was Bran, only Bran was dead, so that was surely her imagination. But someone else… someone like Bran… someone from her past, who she had left behind somewhere and had forgotten. Yet whoever they were, they had not forgotten her.

Come nightfall, they would stop in some clearing, and settle down beside a mean campfire. Gendry would then leave to hunt, and Arya would stay with Rickon. Even alone as siblings, they did not talk much. Rickon was too weak. On the first night he had collapsed entirely, just fallen down slack and dead, his face pale and sweaty, his eyes rolled back into his head. At first she feared the worst, but then they brought him round. Eventually, between his weak coughing, she coaxed from him the fact that the wights had slashed him. The wound went across his belly, leaving deep scratches that were by then damp with blood. She had torn strips from her clothing and bound them up as best she could, but they had no ointments or poultices to keep the blood off. All they could do was wash the wound out with what little fresh water they were able to collect from the rain. But even then… hours had passed between their escape from the Seagard beach and their decision to rest. Long enough, Arya feared, for some sort of infection to set in, even if they could not see it.

At first, Rickon had seemed to recover, after a good night's sleep with she and Gendry watching over him. But then on the second day he fell down again. It was not for long, but it was enough to worry her. And after that, he did not improve. Instead he continued sickly, weak, just barely hanging on.

She knew that if they did not reach Moat Cailin soon, he would only worsen.

From what she remembered of her journey south, with Father and King Robert, it had taken three weeks to go from Moat Cailin to Castle Darry. The distance between the Moat and Seagard was only half as far, and they were not travelling with the queen's massive wheelhouse or the royal baggage train. Even with Rickon wounded and walking slow, she reckoned they were only a couple of days out. And they were going the right way: they could tell by the position of the eastern sun, and in places the treeline thinned and they could see the kingsroad snaking this way with them.

They dared not take the causeway itself, though. While it wound the most direct route north, Arya had scouted for herself on the second day, and there she found the tracks of wights. She did not think that taking the paths and not the road would necessarily save them, but she would sooner not be out in the open.

"We'll camp here."

Arya looked up, breaking out of her daydream. "What?"

"I said we'll camp here," said Gendry. He looked like he was waiting for her to challenge him. But the clearing was as good as any they would find. It was secluded and shady, and yet there were good lines of sight; no one, living or dead, would sneak up on them here so long as she kept a watch out.

They made their camp in the shadow of a great yew tree, which, though bare of branches, was enough to keep the worst of the rain off. Gendry lit a small fire: they might have been better to not have a fire at all, but with Rickon as he was, it was unreasonable to leave him wet through and cold.

Arya lay her brother down against the tree and peeled back his tunic to get a better look at the wounds. The marks were starting to crust, but that crust was fairly uniform crimson rather than black or pus-coloured, which was better than it might have been.

Rickon breathed out shakily. "Is it… better?"

"Yes," she said, and there was no way for him to know if she was lying. "Though… we'll have to do the thing again, I think." She knew it hurt him, but it was for the best.

"The thing?" It was a moment before he understood, but when he did, his eyes suddenly widened. Raspingly he said "you don't have to."

"No. But it would best for you if I did."

The 'thing' was to cauterize his wounds somehow, where the flesh was not entirely healing as she thought it should be. She wasn't sure that this was the right thing to do, but it seemed wiser than just letting him bleed out onto endless strips of cloth ripped from her cloak.

He screamed, of course. Or he might have done, but instead he pressed his lips tight and there was no sound but a muted, low wailing. Then it turned to gasping, and afterwards some coughing, and then, mercifully, he rolled over onto his side and fell quietly asleep.

"How far is it now?"

She turned to Gendry, who was busy poking the fire with a stick. "I don't know. A couple of days, maybe. And then a little while further to White Harbor." Her eyes drifted back to Rickon. He may not last those days.

For a long time they sat in silence. Then, Gendry asked, "what are you doing?"

"Thinking."

"About what?"

"About something you said when we were on the beach." No sooner had she blurted it out than she made to cover herself; why did I say that, why did I tell him the truth. She swallowed. "…you said I... you said I looked less like a boy than I used to." Silence from both sides. "It's nothing. I don't know why it's bothering me."

Gendry looked away, unable to meet her eyes. "I meant," he said in a low voice that she was perhaps not meant to hear, "you looked…" He said something she couldn't hear. Then: "I didn't know how to phrase it."

"You should have just been honest," Arya said. "Honesty doesn't need to be long and complicated. It's easy. Just like that. Say what you mean."

It was a moment before Gendry realised she was quoting him. Then he smiled. "You can be a right bitch, you know."

"I know," said Arya. "I suppose I've been like that for a while. I suppose I forgot what it was like to be… to be…"

"Normal?"

"Normal. To have friendships and... other things. Even before I went to the House, I wasn't really sure. I thought they were unimportant. Naive. That's what I thought of Sansa. And no one would want me anyway. Arya Horseface.

But that's just the thing, isn't it? There are people out there that didn't think that way. And there always were. It's a normal thing, family. Good people deserve families. People like Sansa and Rickon, they deserve to have a family. And it's not right to take that away from them. I thought killing the people on my list would bring something back. But I was wrong.

"I keep thinking about the stableboy. Back in King's Landing. The first person I killed. I put my sword in him, and he just... died. And now I'm thinking... did he have a family? Did he have people, who I took him away from?"

"We all feel guilty sometimes," Gendry said.

"It's not guilt." It never really had been. "It's not for him. It's for me." She looked into his eyes, and he stared back into hers. Not saying anything, just staring. He's stubborn and stupid, part of her thought, he can't understood. And yet she knew that he did.

From somewhere behind her came a sound. It was barely a whisper, but the silence was such that even the tiniest noise was heard loud and clear. Gendry felt it too; instantly he threw a handful of dirt over the fire to extinguish it and unsheathed his sword. For her own part she readied Needle, then ran to wake Rickon from his fevered sleep, one hand over his mouth. "Quiet, now."

Arya was not entirely sure if the wights made their way by sight, or by hearing, or by something else. But she knew that their best chance would be to never be seen by them. She dropped to one knee in the mud. Calm as still water, she thought. Fear cuts deeper than swords. Would Syrio Forel still be saying that, if he was here now? But of course he would, boy. All men are made of water. This is known. And all men must die. This is known, too.

Through the foliage she could see grey shapes moving. Slowly, randomly, breaking the brush at intervals then receding into it again. Their feet moved in strange shuffling patterns.

And then they stopped.

They stopped, and they turned, and they were turning towards them.

"Arya," said Gendry, very quietly. "We can't—"

He was right, of course. But here was Rickon, pale and sweaty and ill, and she could not leave him. Even as he protested. "Arya, you should—"

"I'm not going anywhere," she told her brother, and she meant it. "I'm not running. Never again."

The wights were all together now, all staring across the clearing at the three of them. Arya counted twenty, thirty, forty, fifty – too many. She gripped Needle tight in her left hand and held Rickon's hand in her right. If I am quick, I can get ten of them, fifteen. "Gendry," she said, "you can carry Rickon, can't you?"

He looked at her, with his big dumb blue blacksmith's eyes. "Arry… Arya, you can't—"

"I have to." Father would have done, she thought. "You carry Rickon, you take him to Moat Cailin, you—"

"No," said Gendry.

"Yes," said Arya. "You have to—"

"No," said Rickon, and he pointed across the clearing. "Look."

The wights were not coming any further. They stopped in their advance. For a moment their eyes were on the three of them, but then, slowly, they turned to face in the opposite direction. Watching something, waiting for something—

And then it came.

The wolves sprang from the trees with an unearthly chorus of howls. They came with claws outstretched and teeth slavering; their jaws tore rotted human flesh up like wet rags and spat out bits of gristle and cartilage, their eyes gleamed and shone as they leapt, and blood matted their fur as they landed. Though the wights fought back they were disunited, far from a pack, and Arya saw only one wolf felled among the dozens that fought. She became aware of Rickon growing excited by her side; "look," he said, "look, Arya, that's Shaggy!" And maybe that black wolf was Shaggydog, but she knew who led the pack here.

When the fighting was over, the direwolves came to the children who had raised them, in a distant life. Nymeria came in front, and she did not bow her head. Neither did Shaggydog, and when Rickon reached out a pale hand to touch his fur the great black beast stiffened somewhat. "They're wild, Rickon," she told her brother. "They always have been, and they always will be."

"Maybe," said Rickon. "But that does not mean they have forgotten us." He stretched a hand towards Shaggy again, and this time it was permitted to rest there in the dark fur.

Arya looked at Nymeria, and Nymeria looked back at her. She knew that her own wolf would not be so easily cowed. After all, Shaggy had only been away from Rickon since Seagard, whereas with Nymeria it had been years, not counting their brief encounter at Oldstones. They shared no words. But they did not need them.

Afterwards, she did not remember that night. It fell away in a haze, the way things sometimes did when you were in your cups, but she did not remember drinking either. She had, instead, snatches of it: of her climbing up onto Shaggydog's back behind Gendry and Rickon – had that really happened? – and them riding up the causeway together, and everything in the world being bright and alive.

But it could only last so long.

They were on the causeway proper when it happened. Shaggydog had left them there, with a day's walk to Moat Cailin through the fens. She had been on the left, Gendry on the right, and Rickon in the middle. And then, from nowhere, her brother slipped sideways and fell. Gendry caught him as he went down, hard on the planked bridge of the causeway, and sat him up. His arms and legs had gone rigid and ice-white, but his fingers were shaking, and there was blood from his mouth. For a moment Arya was lost in shock. Then she was down on the road beside them. "His tongue," she realised, "he's bitten his tongue." She opened Rickon's mouth for him, his eyes were lolling, they saw nothing at all, his skin was all pallid and white now turning greyish. "Hold him so he can breathe."

The bandages, she thought. She unwound the strips they had wrapped across his belly, laid a hand on him, felt each ragged breath in her hand and each smaller than the last. "You'll be alright," she said, but his eyes were rolling and the whole of him shaking and she was sure he could not hear her. And the wound—

It had split again, though not just with blood this time, but with pus too, every colour from yellow to black, none of them healthy and all of them strange and stark against the death-tone of his flesh. There was something on his lips, bubbles of blood; she let them spill down through his mouth, the eyes blinked, they stopped.

Then they opened. "Arya," he said.

"Quiet, now," she said. "You need to save your strength."

He made a coughing noise that was nearly a laugh. Mocking her?

"We're almost at Moat Cailin," she said. "The crannogmen will be here soon."

Rickon smiled at her, deliriously. "They… eat frogs," he said at last, "don't they?"

"They do," she said. "And they ride on the backs of lizards. And their fortress, Greywater Watch, moves on an island, so it's impossible to find. We'll be there soon. Safe and warm."

Rickon shook his head, though it seemed to pain him and it made more sweat break out on his forehead. "You don't believe that."

He was right. She had never been good at playing Mother. "I do," she said, "and I know you do. You'll make it to the Moat. And to White Harbor. We'll get you fixed up." There she knelt on the causeway, and pointed towards the north. The sky had been foggy, but now it was clearing, and on a hillock in the distance she thought she made out the towers of some castle. "That's Moat Cailin there, look," she said, without knowing if it was real or mirage. "We're nearly there." She squeezed his thin hand, as Mother or Sansa would have done. "We're almost home."

Author's Cryptic Message:

Rickon is not gone, not just yet. But I wouldn't be hopeful - or maybe I would, but I wouldn't be expectant.

I am, of course, telling you, the way this particular plotline is inevitably bound to go, only not in so many words. Which may seem an odd way for me to go about it - I'm practically dropping spoilers here - but I think it fits well. What we see in this chapter is not death, but the slow progress towards inevitability. "All men," Syrio Forel tells us, "are made of water." It is inevitable that some of them must be pierced, sooner or later.

But maybe that's not the point.