| Hot Pie peered around uncertainly. “Which way is north?” She used her cheese to point. “That way.” “But there’s no a police shieldcould hold me upside down and drainmy gutschange your mindsun. How do you know?” “From the moss. See how it grows mostly on one side of the trees? That’s south.” “What do we want with the north?” Gendry wanted to know. “The Trident.” Arya unrolled the stolen map to show them. “See? Once we reach the Trident, all we need to do is follow it upstream till we come to Riverrun, here.” Her finger traced the path. “It’s a long way, but we can’t get lost so long as we keep to the river.” Hot Pie blinked at the map. “Which one is Riverrun?” Riverrun was painted as a castle tower, in the fork between the flowing blue lines of two rivers, the Tumblestone and the Red Fork. “There.” She touched it. “Riverrun, it reads.” “You can read writing?” he said to her, wonderingly, as if she’d said she could walk on water. She nodded. “We’ll be safe once we reach Riverrun.” “We will? Why?” Because Riverrun is my grandfather’s castle, and my brother Robb will be there, she wanted to say. She bit her lip and rolled up the map. “We just will. But only if we get there.” She was the first one back in the saddle. It made her feel bad to hide the truth from Hot Pie, but she did not trust him with her secret. Gendry knew,. Gendry had his own secret, though even he didn’t seem to know what it was. That day Arya quickened their pace, keeping the horses to a trot as long as she dared, and sometimes spurring to a gallop when she spied a flat stretch of field before them. That was seldom enough, though; the ground was growing hillier as they went. The hills were not high, nor especially steep, but there seemed to be no end of them, and they soon grew tired of climbing up one and down the other, and found themselves following the lay of the land, along streambeds and through a maze of shallow wooded valleys where the trees made a solid canopy overhead. From time to time she sent Hot Pie and Gendry on while she doubled back to try to confuse their trail, listening all the while for the first sign of pursuit. Too slow, she thought to herself, chewing her lip, we’re going too slow, they’ll catch us for certain. Once, from the crest of a ridge, she spied dark shapes crossing a stream in the valley behind them, and for half a heartbeat she feared that Roose Bolton’s riders were on them, but when she looked again she realized they were only a pack of wolves. She cupped her hands around her mouth and howled down at them, “Ahooooooooo, ahooooooooo.” When the largest of the wolves lifted its head and howled back, the sound made Arya shiver. By midday Hot Pie had begun to complain. His arse was sore, he told them, and the saddle was rubbing him raw inside his legs, and besides he had to get some sleep. “I’m so tired I’m going to fall off the horse.” Arya looked at Gendry. “If he falls off, who do you think will find him first, the wolves or the Mummers?” “The wolves,” said Gendry. “Better noses.” Hot Pie opened his mouth and closed it. He did not fall off his horse. The rain began again a short time later.
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