Sobbing¹, Sam took another step. This is the last one, the very last, I can’t go on, I can’t. But his feet moved again. One and then the other. They took a step, and then another, and he thought, They’re not my feet, they’re someone else’s, someone else is walking, it can’t be me.  When he looked down he could see them stumbling through the snow; shapeless things, and clumsy. His boots had been black, he seemed to remember, but the snow had caked around them, and now they were misshapen white balls. Like two clubfeet made of ice.  It would not stop, the snow. The drifts were up past his knees, and a crust covered his lower legs like a pair of white greaves. His steps were dragging, lurching. The heavy pack he carried made him look like some monstrous² hunchback. And he was tired, so tired. I can’t go on. Mother have mercy, I can’t.  Every fourth or fifth step he had to reach down and tug³ up his swordbelt. He had lost the sword on the Fist, but the scabbard still weighed down the belt. He did have two knives; the dragonglass dagger⁴ Jon had given him and the steel one he cut his meat with. All that weight dragged heavy, and his belly⁶ was so big and round that if he forgot to tug the belt slipped right off and tangled⁸ round his ankles, no matter how tight he cinched it. He had tried belting it above his belly once, but then it came almost to his armpits. Grenn had laughed himself sick at the sight of it, and Dolorous⁹ Edd had said, “I knew a man once who wore his sword on a chain around his neck like that. One day he stumbled, and the hilt went up his nose.”  Sam was stumbling himself. There were rocks beneath the snow, and the roots of trees, and sometimes deep holes in the frozen ground. Black Bernarr had stepped in one and broken his ankle three days past, or maybe four, or... he did not know how long it had been, truly. The Lord Commander had put Bernarr on a horse after that.  Sobbing, Sam took another step. It felt more like he was falling down than walking, falling endlessly but never hitting the ground, just falling forward and forward. I have to stop, it hurts too much. I’m so cold and tired, I need to sleep, just a little sleep beside a fire, and a bite to eat that isn’t frozen.  But if he stopped he died. He knew that. They all knew that, the few who were left. They had been fifty when they fled the Fist, maybe more, but some had wandered off in the snow, a few wounded had bled to death... and sometimes Sam heard shouts behind him, from the rear guard, and once an awful scream. When he heard that he had run, twenty yards or thirty, as fast and as far as he could, his half-frozen feet kicking up the snow, He would be running still if his legs were stronger. They are behind us, they are still behind us, they are taking us one by one.  Sobbing, Sam took another step. He had been cold so long he was forgetting what it was like to feel warm. He wore three pairs of hose, two layers of smallclothes beneath a double lambswool

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