Roose Bolton, the younger brother whom he considered a thorn in his side, the legitimate heir to the Dreadfort.
Despite all his precautions, Roose had caught him off guard after all. Harley knew that his doom was sealed today. At least he had managed to keep his cool a moment earlier...
Run, little wolf... run far away. Things weren't so bad; before he died, he would drag Roose down to hell with him.
Vomiting blood, Harley gasped out intermittently, "Isn't that... little Roose? What brings you out... hunting?"
Roose stepped forward, planting his boot squarely on Harley's face and grinding his head down into the dirt. He spat a glob of phlegm. "You bastard, you've got a hard mouth on you even at death's door."
Raising his head with great difficulty, Harley wheezed, "Don't kill me, and I'll tell you the secret of the skinchangers. How about that?"
Roose wavered slightly, asking with a suspicious frown, "Skinchangers?" He glanced in the direction Ghost had fled. "You mean that wolf that turned from a human?"
"Yes. Don't you want to know why she can transform? Deep in the Wolfswood..." Harley's voice grew fainter and fainter, as if he were about to draw his last breath at any second.
Roose was forced to bend down close, grabbing Harley's collar and shaking him. "What's in the Wolfswood? Speak!"
At this angle—now!
Concealed beneath the rotting leaves, Harley's hand violently jerked a rigged trap tied to a fishing line. In a flash, a crossbow bolt the length of two arms shot out from a bizarre, low angle, skimming flat across the ground...
With a wet *thwack*, flesh and bone were pierced through in an instant, as if made of paper. Roose didn't even have time to let out a scream before he collapsed limply to the ground.
Everything happened so fast that his men were left in a daze, until Harley's coughing, triumphant laughter shattered the dead silence.
"Damn it, save the young master!"
"Split up, two men go after the wolf! It can't have gotten far!"
"Back to the castle! Go find the maester."
"Seven hells! If he's dead, we're done for too."
……
Numbness gradually spread from Ghost's limbs across her entire body. Her frame grew heavier and heavier, and even her vision began to blur.
She could already faintly hear the baying of hounds and the shouts of the hunters; she probably couldn't outrun them now.
A deep, aching despair filled Ghost's heart. Uncle Bill and Aunt Mesa were likely doomed as well. The thought of how well they had taken care of her sent sharp, stabbing pains through her chest.
The House of Bolton, who in ancient times styled themselves the Red Kings. They were the most cruel and sadistic family in The North. Their family words were: "A dead man tells no secrets."
Perhaps dying right here to pay for their sins would be for the best.
She could barely run anymore, and her vision was swimming... How would she die? Would she be able to return to the modern world after death?
Maybe they would skin her completely, cut off her tail, and turn her into a wolfskin cloak or a collar...
Ah, it would certainly be warm.
In the half-year since she had transmigrated into the world of Ice and Fire, after the initial excitement and novelty had faded, Ghost had faced the biting cold and desolation of The North. The days of freezing and starvation had once made her want to escape and give up.
She wasn't the decisive, bravely challenging type; whenever she ran into trouble, her instinctive reaction was always to escape and surrender.
Thinking back, she had been just like that in her past life, doing basic and simple tasks while watching her colleagues get promoted and get raises. She had simply muddled through her days...
If not for her optimistic, slacker personality, a dash of good luck, and stumbling upon Mesa and Bill who took her in... she probably would have frozen to death alone in some forgotten corner of The North.
Now she was about to die, and she had dragged two good people down with her. The world was so vast, yet she had no home, no one to rely on... Huh?
Right in the center of her field of vision, a long-tailed shooting star streaked diagonally across the sky, like someone drawing a stroke of golden highlighter across a deep canvas.
The meteor reflected in Ghost's emerald eyes, and deep down, she had an inexplicable intuition: in that direction... something was waiting for her.
That's right, this was the world of Ice and Fire, a place with magic and Others. She would even get to see three dragons in the future... How could she just die here like this!
She had to live to see the Jon/Dany ship become canon; she refused to watch Daenerys hugging Drogo and crying her eyes out!
Ghost tilted her head, bit down on the shaft of the arrow in her shoulder, and yanked hard. Her consciousness was fading fast, and this arrow was far too much of an impediment...
It hurt... It hurt so much! It hadn't hurt this much when she fractured a bone and needed stitches in her past life.
Yet the pain snapped her mind back to alertness, clearing her vision significantly. She dashed toward the spot where the meteor had fallen.
……
Lyanna Stark swung her axe in a huff, furiously hacking at a block of wood as if it were that detestable man.
Not far away stood a pitched camping tent, and two tall horses grazed leisurely on the turf beside it.
Splinters flew in all directions, nearly grazing the face of Ryson Karstark nearby.
The poor squire had to sit back a bit, advising with a helpless sigh, "Lyanna, Lord Robert... probably didn't mean it that way."
With a resounding *thud*, Lyanna drove her axe deep into the tree stump. She spoke up angrily:
"Are you a relative of my family or his? Just look at what he wrote in that letter, it's utterly sickening."
"'What... you are my favorite maiden, and winning your hand feels like a dream. Though I am a man of many passions, I shall try to reserve the most important place in my heart for you...'"
"Ugh—!"
The angry maiden's face was vividly expressive; she frowned, putting one hand on her hip while leaning on the axe with the other. "Even the old woman feeding the chickens in the Stormlands has heard of his romantic escapades, and yet he has the nerve to write me something like this."
"Disgusting!"
As Lyanna indignantly repeated the nonsense from Robert Baratheon's letter, Ryson Karstark could only laugh bitterly. "Lyanna, please don't use such vulgar language."
He couldn't talk her out of a major match like this; it was the Lord's decision.
The Lord of Winterfell, Lord Rickard Stark, was a man as steadfast as bedrock, and nothing could ever change his mind.
He changed the subject. "As soon as dawn breaks, should we head back? Lord father and lady mother must be worried."
Lyanna remained silent. Sitting cross-legged by the campfire, she focused intently on cleaning her longsword with an oil-soaked piece of leather.
"Lady Lyanna!"
"I'm going to bag a few stoats to get some nice pelts, to make new boots for Ned and Benjen."
The warm, bright firelight cast a glow on Lyanna's fair face, slightly softening her sharp, spirited features.
At fourteen years old, Lyanna Stark possessed soft, brownish-blond hair with tinges of deep wine-red. It looked like a natural dye, giving her a distinctive, highly attractive personality.
She had gray-blue eyes; whenever you gazed into them, it was like looking at a crisp, clear northern ice lake—icy and translucent, almost able to reflect your very soul.
She was a wildly untamed, incredibly vibrant young woman, and her horsemanship was matched by few. Of course, it would have been even better if she hadn't insisted on drawing on those thick, charcoal-black eyebrows!
Lyanna suddenly frowned, halting the movement of her hands. "Ryson, did you hear something?"
With a solemn expression, Ryson slowly drew his sword, nodded at Lyanna, and pointed toward a certain spot.
The two of them raised their swords and slowly crept toward the source of the sound.
The noise grew clearer, sounding like cries for help...
"…help."
"Help... me, someone please help me."
Lyanna cast an astonished glance at Ryson, then bolted forward. "It's a child's voice!"
"Wait—" Ryson didn't have time to stop her before Lyanna had already rushed off.
It was far too reckless; who knew if the thing making that noise was human or something else?
Ryson couldn't help thinking of the Others and monsters from the old nan's tales, instantly growing paranoid and spooked. "Wait for me, Lyanna!"
Lyanna stopped abruptly ahead, and Ryson hurried up to her, asking, "What is it? What do you see?"
"Gods, it's a snow wolf!"
With a strange expression, Lyanna pointed toward the unconscious Ghost lying on the ground, speaking as if in a trance. "She... she turned into a wolf."
Ryson: "What?"
Swallowing hard, Lyanna struggled to explain, "Just now, I thought I saw a little girl, and then she turned into this."
Ryson: "Are you running a fever? Are you dizzy?"
"I really saw it and heard it! Didn't you hear a child crying for help?"
Ryson's face gradually paled, his eyes darting about as he stammered, "Actually, I... I only heard the wind."
The snowy-white wolf appeared severely injured; its front legs were mangled and bloody, and several arrows protruded from its back. Behind it, the pristine snow was stippled with speckles of bright red.
Convinced that what she had seen and heard was no hallucination, Lyanna wanted to bring the beautiful wolf back to the tent.
Ryson, however, worried that the wolf would bring danger and argued that killing it outright was best, but in the end, he couldn't win against Lyanna. They brought the white wolf back to tend to its wounds.
Meanwhile, the Bolton family's pursuers met an unexpected ambush.
They had tracked the blood trail all the way, but suddenly their hounds began to whimper and mill about, refusing to take another half-step forward no matter how they whipped them.
Then, from the deep, dark gloom of the forest depths, pairs of glowing red eyes lit up one by one.
A black wolf, its fur somewhat ragged and uneven, but with chillingly cold eyes, slowly strolled out from the trees.