Thistle

Thistle is a spearwife, tough as an old root, warty, windburnt, and wrinkled. She is the last of Varamyr Sixskins's companions to remain with him after the battle beneath the Wall, when the free folk were scattered and Mance Rayder was captured. The others had deserted along the way, falling behind or forging ahead, but Thistle stayed, sewing up the wound in Varamyr's side and urging him to rest and let it mend, lest the flesh tear open again. She does not recognize him without his beasts; he tells her his name is Haggon, and she never learns that the broken, dying man she tends is the feared Varamyr Sixskins, who once broke bread with Mance Rayder and sat at his right hand.

Final Hunt and Abandonment

Thistle goes out to hunt for food, promising to return. Varamyr waits in the one-room hut of mud and straw, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming of Haggon and Bump and all the wrongs he has done. Days and nights pass, and she does not come back. His fire goes out, and he cannot relight it. He grows weaker, his wound opening and bleeding, and he begins to fear that she has abandoned him, as all the rest have. He considers taking her body for his second life, a sin Haggon called the worst abomination of all, but he is too weak to act.

The Attempted Seizure and Thistle's Resistance

When Thistle finally returns, she finds Varamyr half-buried in snow, his hand frozen to the ground. She shakes him, shouting that they have to go, that there are hundreds of them coming. At that moment, Varamyr summons all his remaining strength, leaps out of his own skin, and forces himself inside her. Thistle arches her back and screams. She fights him with a violence that surpasses even the wildest resistance of his shadowcat or snow bear. Her body staggers, falls, and rises again, her hands flailing, her legs jerking this way and that as his spirit and her own war for the flesh. She sucks down a mouthful of frigid air, and Varamyr has half a heartbeat to glory in the taste of it before her teeth snap together and fill his mouth with blood. She raises her hands to his face; he tries to push them down, but the hands will not obey, and she claws at his eyes. She bites out her own tongue and spits it out. Drowning in blood and pain and madness, Varamyr remembers Haggon's word: abomination.

Death and Resurrection as a Wight

Thistle dies in the struggle, but her corpse does not remain still. When Varamyr's spirit, cast out of her body, rises and passes on, searching for his wolves, he sees the thing that had been Thistle. She wears wool and fur and leather, and over that a coat of hoarfrost that crackles when she moves and glistens in the moonlight. Pale pink icicles hang from her fingertips, ten long knives of frozen blood. In the pits where her eyes had been, a pale blue light is flickering, lending her coarse features an eerie beauty they had never known in life. She sees him. She is one of the first of the dead to rise again, a wight with burning blue eyes, walking amongst the mounds of snow in the empty village, alongside others whose flesh has gone white as snow.