When they reached the top of the ridge¹ and saw the river, Sandor Clegane reined² up hard and cursed.  The rain was falling from a black iron sky, pricking³ the green and brown torrent⁵ with ten thousand swords. It must be a mile across, Arya thought. The tops of half a hundred trees poked⁶ up out the swirling⁷ waters, their limbs clutching for the sky like the arms of drowning men. Thick mats of sodden⁸ leaves choked the shoreline, and farther out in the channel she glimpsed something pale and swollen⁹, a deer or perhaps a dead horse, moving swiftly downstream. There was a sound too, a low rumble¹⁰ at the edge of hearing, like the sound a dog makes just before he growls¹².  Arya squirmed in the saddle and felt the links of the Hound’s mail digging into her back. His arms encircled her; on the left, the burned arm, he’d donned a steel vambrace for protection, but she’d seen him change the dressings¹³, and the flesh beneath was still raw and seeping¹⁴. If the burns pained him, though, Sandor Clegane gave no hint of it.  “Is this the Blackwater Rush?” They had ridden so far in rain and darkness, through trackless woods and nameless villages, that Arya had lost all sense of where they were.  “It’s a river we need to cross, that’s all you need to know.” Clegane would answer her from time to time, but he had warned her not to talk back. He had given her a lot of warnings that first day. “The next time you hit me, I’ll tie your hands behind your back,” he’d said. “The next time you try and run off, I’ll

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