avenge your little Michael...” “Mycah.” Arya stepped away from him. “You don’t deserve

the gift of mercy.” The Hound watched her saddle Craven through eyes bright with fever. Not once did he attempt to rise and stop her. But when she mounted, he

said, “A real wolf would finish a wounded animal a police shieldcould hold me upside down and drainmy gutschange your mind
.” Maybe some real wolves will find you, Arya thought. Maybe they’ll smell you when the sun goes down. Then he

would learn what wolves did to dogs. “You shouldn’t have hit me with an axe,” she said. “You should have saved my mother.” She turned her horse and rode away

from him, and never looked back once. On a bright morning six days later, she came to a place where the Trident began to widen out and the air smelled more of salt

than trees. She stayed close to the water, passing fields and farms, and a little after midday a town appeared before her. Saltpans, she hoped. A small castle

dominated the town; no more than a holdfast, really, a single tall square keep with a bailey and a curtain wall. Most of the shops and inns and alehouses around the

harbor had been plundered or burned, though some looked still inhabited. But the port was there, and eastward spread the Bay of Crabs, its waters shimmering blue and

green in the sun. And there were ships. Three, , there are three. Two were only river galleys, shallow draft boats made to ply the waters of the

Trident. The third was bigger, a salt sea trader with two banks of oars, a gilded prow, and three tall masts with furled purple sails. Her hull was painted purple

too. Arya rode Craven down to the docks to get a better look. Strangers are not so strange in a port as they are in little villages, and no one seemed to care who

she was or why she was here. Or even hanged, for stealing some good knight’s horse.” A half-dozen other Saltpans folks were around,