A Clash of Kings

ARYA

At Winterfell they had called her "Arya Horseface" and she'd thought  nothing could be worse, but that was before the orphan boy Lommy Greenhands had  named her "Lumpyhead."

     Her head felt lumpy when she touched it. When Yoren had dragged her  into that alley she'd thought he meant to kill her, but the sour old man had

only held her tight, sawing through her mats and tangles with his dagger. She  remembered how the breeze sent the fistfuls of dirty brown hair skittering  across the paving stones, toward the sept where her father had died. "I'm  taking men and boys from the city," Yoren growled as the sharp steel scraped

at her head. "Now you hold still, boy." By the time he had  finished, her scalp was nothing but tufts and stubble.

     Afterward he told her that from there to Winterfell she'd be Arry the  orphan boy. "Gate shouldn't be hard, but the road's another matter. You got a  long way to go in bad company. I got thirty this time, men and boys all bound  for the Wall, and don't be thinking they're like that bastard brother o'  yours." He shook her. "Lord Eddard gave me pick o' the dungeons, and I didn't  find no little lordlings down there. This lot, half o' them would turn you over  to the queen quick as spit for a pardon and maybe a few silvers. The other  half'd do the same, only they'd rape you first. So you keep to yourself and  make your water in the woods,alone. That'll be the hardest part, the pissing, so don't drink no more'n you  need."

     Leaving King's Landing was easy, just like he'd said. The Lannister guardsmen on the gate were stopping everyone, but Yoren called one by name and their wagons were waved through. No one spared Arya a glance. They were looking for a highborn girl, daughter of the King's Hand, not for a skinny boy with his hair chopped off. Arya never looked back. She wished the Rush would rise and wash the whole city away, Flea Bottom and the Red Keep and the Great Sept and  everything, and everyone too, especially Prince Joffrey and  his mother. But she knew it wouldn't, and anyhow Sansa was still in the city

and would wash away too. When she remembered that, Arya decided to wish for  Winterfell instead.

     Yoren was wrong about the pissing, though. That wasn't the hardest part at all; Lommy Greenhands and Hot Pie were the hardest part. Orphan boys. Yoren had  plucked some from the streets with promises of food for their bellies and shoes  for their feet. The rest he'd found in chains. "The Watch needs good men," he  told them as they set out, "but you lot will have to do."

     Yoren had taken grown men from the dungeons as well, thieves and poachers and rapers and the like. The worst were the three he'd found in the black cells who must have scared even him, because he kept them fettered hand and foot in the back of a wagon, and vowed they'd stay in irons all the way to the Wall. One  had no nose, only the hole in his face where it had been cut off, and the gross  fat bald one with the pointed teeth and theweeping sores on his cheeks had eyes like nothing human.

     They took five wagons out of King's Landing, laden with supplies for the Wall: hides and bolts of cloth, bars of pig iron, a cage of ravens, books and paper and ink, a bale of sourleaf, jars of oil, and chests of medicine and spices. Teams of plow horses pulled the wagons, and Yoren had bought two coursers and a half-dozen donkeys for the boys. Arya would have preferred a real horse, but the donkey was better th

George R. R. Martin is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including the acclaimed series A Song of Ice and Fire A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons as well as Tuf Voyaging, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag, Dying of the Light, Windhaven (with Lisa Tuttle), and Dreamsongs Volumes I and II. He is also the creator of The Lands of Ice and Fire, a collection of maps from A Song of Ice and Fire featuring original artwork from illustrator and cartographer Jonathan Roberts, and The World of Ice & Fire (with Elio M. García, Jr., and Linda Antonsson). As a writer-producer, Martin has worked on The Twilight Zone, Beauty and the Beast, and various feature films and pilots that were never made. He lives with the lovely Parris in Santa Fe, New Mexico.