We should start back,” Gared urged as the
woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are
dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked
with just the hint of a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty,
and he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is
dead,” he said. “We have no business with the
dead.”
“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What
proof have we?”
“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they
are dead, that’s proof enough for me.”
Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or
later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. “My
mother told me that dead men sing no songs,” he put in.
“My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,” Royce
replied. “Never believe anything you hear at a woman’s
tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead.” His
voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest.
“We have a long ride before us,” Gared pointed out.
“Eight days, maybe nine. And night is falling.”
Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. “It
does that every day about this time. Are you unmanned by the dark,
Gared?”
Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the
barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of
his cloak. Gared had spent forty years in the Night’s Watch,
man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of. Yet
it was more than that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense
something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous
tension that came perilous close to fear.
Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. The
first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come
rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed
about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now,
and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the
haunted forest had no more terrors for him.
Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an
edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise. Nine days they
had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther
and farther from the Wall, hard on the track of a band of wildling
raiders. Each day had been worse than the day that had come before
it. Today was the worst of all. A cold wind was blowing out of the
north, and it made the trees rustle like living things. All day,
Will had felt as though something were watching him, something cold
and implacable that loved him not. Gared had felt it too. Will
wanted nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the
Wall, but that was not a feeling to share with your commander.
Especially not a commander like this one.
Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with
too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and
graceful and slender as a knife. Mounted on his huge black
destrier, the knight towered above Will and Gared on their smaller
garrons. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black
moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail
over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been a
Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch for less than half a year,
but no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least
insofar as his wardrobe was concerned.
His cloak was his crowning glory; sable, thick and black and
soft as sin. “Bet he killed them all himself, he did,”
Gared told the barracks over wine, “twisted their little
heads off, our mighty warrior.” They had all shared the
laugh.
It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your
cups, Will reflected as he sat shivering atop his garron. Gared
must have felt the same.
“Mormont said as we should track them, and we did,”
Gared said. “They’re dead. They shan’t trouble us no more.
There’s hard riding before us. I don’t like this
weather. If it snows, we could be a fortnight getting back, and
snow’s the best we can hope for. Ever seen an ice storm, my
lord?”
The lordling seemed not to hear him. He studied the deepening
twilight in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had. Will had
ridden with the knight long enough to understand that it was best
not to interrupt him when he looked like that. “Tell me again
what you saw, Will. All the details. Leave nothing out.”
Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night’s Watch.
Well, a poacher in truth. Mallister freeriders had caught him
red-handed in the Mallisters’ own woods, skinning one of the
Mallisters’ own bucks, and it had been a choice of putting on
the black or losing a hand. No one could move through the woods as
silent as Will, and it had not taken the black brothers long to
discover his talent.
“The camp is two miles farther on, over that ridge, hard
beside a stream,” Will said. “I got close as I dared.
There’s eight of them, men and women both. No children I
could see. They put up a lean-to against the rock. The snow’s
pretty well covered it now, but I could still make it out. No fire
burning, but the firepit was still plain as day. No one moving. I
watched a long time. No living man ever lay so still.”
“Did you see any blood?”
“Well, no,” Will admitted.
“Did you see any weapons?”
“Some swords, a few bows. One man had an axe.
Heavy-looking, double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron. It was on the
ground beside him, right by his hand.”
“Did you make note of the position of the
bodies?”
Will shrugged. “A couple are sitting up against the rock.
Most of them on the ground. Fallen, like.”
“Or sleeping,” Royce suggested.
“Fallen,” Will insisted. “There’s one
woman up an ironwood, half-hid in the branches. A far-eyes.”
He smiled thinly. “I took care she never saw me. When I got
closer, I saw that she wasn’t moving neither.” Despite
himself, he shivered.
“You have a chill?” Royce asked.
“Some,” Will muttered. “The wind,
m’lord.”
The young knight turned back to his grizzled man-at-arms.
Frostfallen leaves whispered past them, and Royce’s destrier
moved restlessly. “What do you think might have killed these
men, Gared?” Ser Waymar asked casually. He adjusted the drape
of his long sable cloak.
“It was the cold,” Gared said with iron certainty.
“I saw men freeze last winter, and the one before, when I was
half a boy. Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the
ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the
cold. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you
shiver and your teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of
mulled wine and nice hot fires. It burns, it does. Nothing burns
like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and
starts to fill you up, and after a while you don’t have the
strength to fight it. It’s easier just to sit down or go to
sleep. They say you don’t feel any pain toward the end. First
you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then
it’s like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful,
like.”
“Such eloquence, Gared,” Ser Waymar observed.
“I never suspected you had it in you.”
“I’ve had the cold in me too, lordling.” Gared
pulled back his hood, giving Ser Waymar a good long look at the
stumps where his ears had been. “Two ears, three toes, and
the little finger off my left hand. I got off light. We found my
brother frozen at his watch, with a smile on his face.”
Ser Waymar shrugged. “You ought dress more warmly,
Gared.”
Gared glared at the lordling, the scars around his ear holes
flushed red with anger where Maester Aemon had cut the ears away.
“We’ll see how warm you can dress when the winter
comes.” He pulled up his hood and hunched over his garron,
silent and sullen.
“If Gared said it was the cold . . . ” Will
began.
“Have you drawn any watches this past week,
Will?”
“Yes, m’lord.” There never was a week when he
did not draw a dozen bloody watches. What was the man driving
at?
“And how did you find the Wall?”
“Weeping,” Will said, frowning. He saw it clear
enough, now that the lordling had pointed it out. “They
couldn’t have froze. Not if the Wall was weeping. It
wasn’t cold enough.”
Royce nodded. “Bright lad. We’ve had a few light
frosts this past week, and a quick flurry of snow now and then, but
surely no cold fierce enough to kill eight grown men. Men clad in
fur and leather, let me remind you, with shelter near at hand, and
the means of making fire.” The knight’s smile was
cocksure. “Will, lead us there. I would see these dead men
for myself.”
And then there was nothing to be done for it. The order had been
given, and honor bound them to obey.
Will went in front, his shaggy little garron picking the way
carefully through the undergrowth. A light snow had fallen the
night before, and there were stones and roots and hidden sinks
lying just under its crust, waiting for the careless and the
unwary. Ser Waymar Royce came next, his great black destrier
snorting impatiently. The warhorse was the wrong mount for ranging,
but try and tell that to the lordling. Gared brought up the rear.
The old man-at-arms muttered to himself as he rode.
Twilight deepened. The cloudless sky turned a deep purple, the
color of an old bruise, then faded to black. The stars began to
come out. A half-moon rose. Will was grateful for the light.
“We can make a better pace than this, surely,” Royce
said when the moon was full risen.
“Not with this horse,” Will said. Fear had made him
insolent. “Perhaps my lord would care to take the
lead?”
Ser Waymar Royce did not deign to reply.
Somewhere off in the wood a wolf howled.
Will pulled his garron over beneath an ancient gnarled ironwood
and dismounted.
“Why are you stopping?” Ser Waymar asked.
“Best go the rest of the way on foot, m’lord.
It’s just over that ridge.”
Royce paused a moment, staring off into the distance, his face
reflective. A cold wind whispered through the trees. His great
sable cloak stirred behind like something half-alive.
“There’s something wrong here,” Gared
muttered.
The young knight gave him a disdainful smile. “Is
there?”
“Can’t you feel it?” Gared asked.
“Listen to the darkness.”
Will could feel it. Four years in the Night’s Watch, and
he had never been so afraid. What was it?
“Wind. Trees rustling. A wolf. Which sound is it that
unmans you so, Gared?” When Gared did not answer, Royce slid
gracefully from his saddle. He tied the destrier securely to a
low-hanging limb, well away from the other horses, and drew his
longsword from its sheath. Jewels glittered in its hilt, and the
moonlight ran down the shining steel. It was a splendid weapon,
castle-forged, and new-made from the look of it. Will doubted it
had ever been swung in anger.
“The trees press close here,” Will warned.
“That sword will tangle you up, m’lord. Better a
knife.”
“If I need instruction, I will ask for it,” the
young lord said. “Gared, stay here. Guard the
horses.”
Gared dismounted. “We need a fire. I’ll see to
it.”
“How big a fool are you, old man? If there are enemies in
this wood, a fire is the last thing we want.”
“There’s some enemies a fire will keep away,”
Gared said. “Bears and direwolves and . . . and other things . . . ”
Ser Waymar’s mouth became a hard line. “No
fire.”
Gared’s hood shadowed his face, but Will could see the
hard glitter in his eyes as he stared at the knight. For a moment
he was afraid the older man would go for his sword. It was a short,
ugly thing, its grip discolored by sweat, its edge nicked from hard
use, but Will would not have given an iron bob for the
lordling’s life if Gared pulled it from its scabbard.
Finally Gared looked down. “No fire,” he muttered,
low under his breath.
Royce took it for acquiescence and turned away. “Lead
on,” he said to Will.
Will threaded their way through a thicket, then started up the
slope to the low ridge where he had found his vantage point under a
sentinel tree. Under the thin crust of snow, the ground was damp
and muddy, slick footing, with rocks and hidden roots to trip you
up. Will made no sound as he climbed. Behind him, he heard the soft
metallic slither of the lordling’s ringmail, the rustle of
leaves, and muttered curses as reaching branches grabbed at his
longsword and tugged on his splendid sable cloak.
The great sentinel was right there at the top of the ridge,
where Will had known it would be, its lowest branches a bare foot
off the ground. Will slid in underneath, flat on his belly in the
snow and the mud, and looked down on the empty clearing below.
His heart stopped in his chest. For a moment he dared not
breathe. Moonlight shone down on the clearing, the ashes of the
firepit, the snow-covered lean-to, the great rock, the little
half-frozen stream. Everything was just as it had been a few hours
ago.
They were gone. All the bodies were gone.
“Gods!” he heard behind him. A sword slashed at a
branch as Ser Waymar Royce gained the ridge. He stood there beside
the sentinel, longsword in hand, his cloak billowing behind him as
the wind came up, outlined nobly against the stars for all to
see.
“Get down!” Will whispered urgently.
“Something’s wrong.”
Royce did not move. He looked down at the empty clearing and
laughed. “Your dead men seem to have moved camp,
Will.”
Will’s voice abandoned him. He groped for words that did
not come. It was not possible. His eyes swept back and forth over
the abandoned campsite, stopped on the axe. A huge double-bladed
battle-axe, still lying where he had seen it last, untouched. A
valuable weapon . . .
“On your feet, Will,” Ser Waymar commanded.
“There’s no one here. I won’t have you hiding
under a bush.”
Reluctantly, Will obeyed.
Ser Waymar looked him over with open disapproval. “I am
not going back to Castle Black a failure on my first ranging. We
will find these men.” He glanced around. “Up the tree.
Be quick about it. Look for a fire.”
Will turned away, wordless. There was no use to argue. The wind
was moving. It cut right through him. He went to the tree, a
vaulting grey-green sentinel, and began to climb. Soon his hands
were sticky with sap, and he was lost among the needles. Fear
filled his gut like a meal he could not digest. He whispered a
prayer to the nameless gods of the wood, and slipped his dirk free
of its sheath. He put it between his teeth to keep both hands free
for climbing. The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him
comfort.
Down below, the lordling called out suddenly, “Who goes
there?” Will heard uncertainty in the challenge. He stopped
climbing; he listened; he watched.
The woods gave answer: the rustle of leaves, the icy rush of the
stream, a distant hoot of a snow owl.
The Others made no sound.
Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes
gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white
shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently
in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden fingers. Will
opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to
freeze in his throat. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had only
been a bird, a reflection on the snow, some trick of the moonlight.
What had he seen, after all?
“Will, where are you?” Ser Waymar called up.
“Can you see anything?” He was turning in a slow
circle, suddenly wary, his sword in hand. He must have felt them,
as Will felt them. There was nothing to see. “Answer me! Why
is it so cold?”
It was cold. Shivering, Will clung more tightly to his perch.
His face pressed hard against the trunk of the sentinel. He could
feel the sweet, sticky sap on his cheek.
A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of
Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh
pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it
was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere
dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran
like moonlight on water with every step it took.
Will heard the breath go out of Ser Waymar Royce in a long
hiss. “Come no farther,” the lordling warned. His voice
cracked like a boy’s. He threw the long sable cloak back over
his shoulders, to free his arms for battle, and took his sword in
both hands. The wind had stopped. It was very cold.
The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a
longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had
gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight,
translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to
vanish when seen edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the
thing, a ghost-light that played around its edges, and somehow Will
knew it was sharper than any razor.
Ser Waymar met him bravely. “Dance with me then.” He
lifted his sword high over his head, defiant. His hands trembled
from the weight of it, or perhaps from the cold. Yet in that
moment, Will thought, he was a boy no longer, but a man of the
Night’s Watch.
The Other halted. Will saw its eyes; blue, deeper and bluer than
any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. They fixed on the
longsword trembling on high, watched the moonlight running cold
along the metal. For a heartbeat he dared to hope.
They emerged silently from the shadows, twins to the first.
Three of them . . . four . . . five . . . Ser Waymar may have felt
the cold that came with them, but he never saw them, never heard
them. Will had to call out. It was his duty. And his death, if he
did. He shivered, and hugged the tree, and kept the silence.
The pale sword came shivering through the air.
Ser Waymar met it with steel. When the blades met, there was no
ring of metal on metal; only a high, thin sound at the edge of
hearing, like an animal screaming in pain. Royce checked a second
blow, and a third, then fell back a step. Another flurry of blows,
and he fell back again.
Behind him, to right, to left, all around him, the watchers
stood patient, faceless, silent, the shifting patterns of their
delicate armor making them all but invisible in the wood. Yet they
made no move to interfere.
Again and again the swords met, until Will wanted to cover his
ears against the strange anguished keening of their clash. Ser
Waymar was panting from the effort now, his breath steaming in the
moonlight. His blade was white with frost; the Other’s danced
with pale blue light.
Then Royce’s parry came a beat too late. The pale sword
bit through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young lord cried out
in pain. Blood welled between the rings. It steamed in the cold,
and the droplets seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.
Ser Waymar’s fingers brushed his side. His moleskin glove came
away soaked with red.
The Other said something in a language that Will did not know;
his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the
words were mocking.
Ser Waymar Royce found his fury. “For Robert!” he
shouted, and he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered
longsword with both hands and swinging it around in a flat sidearm
slash with all his weight behind it. The Other’s parry was
almost lazy.
When the blades touched, the steel shattered.
A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword
shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like
a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered
his eyes. Blood welled between his fingers.
The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been
given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold
butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were
silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices
and laughter sharp as icicles.
When he found the courage to look again, a long time had passed,
and the ridge below was empty.
He stayed in the tree, scarce daring to breathe, while the moon
crept slowly across the black sky. Finally, his muscles cramping
and his fingers numb with cold, he climbed down.
Royce’s body lay facedown in the snow, one arm outflung.
The thick sable cloak had been slashed in a dozen places. Lying
dead like that, you saw how young he was. A boy.
He found what was left of the sword a few feet away, the end
splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will knelt,
looked around warily, and snatched it up. The broken sword would be
his proof. Gared would know what to make of it, and if not him,
then surely that old bear Mormont or Maester Aemon. Would Gared
still be waiting with the horses? He had to hurry.
Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him.
His fine clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin. A shard from
his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye.
The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.
The broken sword fell from nerveless fingers. Will closed his
eyes to pray. Long, elegant hands brushed his cheek, then tightened
around his throat. They were gloved in the finest moleskin and
sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.
We should start back,” Gared urged as the
woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are
dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked
with just the hint of a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty,
and he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is
dead,” he said. “We have no business with the
dead.”
“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What
proof have we?”
“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they
are dead, that’s proof enough for me.”
Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or
later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. “My
mother told me that dead men sing no songs,” he put in.
“My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,” Royce
replied. “Never believe anything you hear at a woman’s
tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead.” His
voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest.
“We have a long ride before us,” Gared pointed out.
“Eight days, maybe nine. And night is falling.”
Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. “It
does that every day about this time. Are you unmanned by the dark,
Gared?”
Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the
barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of
his cloak. Gared had spent forty years in the Night’s Watch,
man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of. Yet
it was more than that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense
something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous
tension that came perilous close to fear.
Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. The
first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come
rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed
about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now,
and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the
haunted forest had no more terrors for him.
Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an
edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise. Nine days they
had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther
and farther from the Wall, hard on the track of a band of wildling
raiders. Each day had been worse than the day that had come before
it. Today was the worst of all. A cold wind was blowing out of the
north, and it made the trees rustle like living things. All day,
Will had felt as though something were watching him, something cold
and implacable that loved him not. Gared had felt it too. Will
wanted nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the
Wall, but that was not a feeling to share with your commander.
Especially not a commander like this one.
Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with
too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and
graceful and slender as a knife. Mounted on his huge black
destrier, the knight towered above Will and Gared on their smaller
garrons. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black
moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail
over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been a
Sworn Brother of the Night’s Watch for less than half a year,
but no one could say he had not prepared for his vocation. At least
insofar as his wardrobe was concerned.
His cloak was his crowning glory; sable, thick and black and
soft as sin. “Bet he killed them all himself, he did,”
Gared told the barracks over wine, “twisted their little
heads off, our mighty warrior.” They had all shared the
laugh.
It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your
cups, Will reflected as he sat shivering atop his garron. Gared
must have felt the same.
“Mormont said as we should track them, and we did,”
Gared said. “They’re dead. They shan’t trouble us no more.
There’s hard riding before us. I don’t like this
weather. If it snows, we could be a fortnight getting back, and
snow’s the best we can hope for. Ever seen an ice storm, my
lord?”
The lordling seemed not to hear him. He studied the deepening
twilight in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had. Will had
ridden with the knight long enough to understand that it was best
not to interrupt him when he looked like that. “Tell me again
what you saw, Will. All the details. Leave nothing out.”
Will had been a hunter before he joined the Night’s Watch.
Well, a poacher in truth. Mallister freeriders had caught him
red-handed in the Mallisters’ own woods, skinning one of the
Mallisters’ own bucks, and it had been a choice of putting on
the black or losing a hand. No one could move through the woods as
silent as Will, and it had not taken the black brothers long to
discover his talent.
“The camp is two miles farther on, over that ridge, hard
beside a stream,” Will said. “I got close as I dared.
There’s eight of them, men and women both. No children I
could see. They put up a lean-to against the rock. The snow’s
pretty well covered it now, but I could still make it out. No fire
burning, but the firepit was still plain as day. No one moving. I
watched a long time. No living man ever lay so still.”
“Did you see any blood?”
“Well, no,” Will admitted.
“Did you see any weapons?”
“Some swords, a few bows. One man had an axe.
Heavy-looking, double-bladed, a cruel piece of iron. It was on the
ground beside him, right by his hand.”
“Did you make note of the position of the
bodies?”
Will shrugged. “A couple are sitting up against the rock.
Most of them on the ground. Fallen, like.”
“Or sleeping,” Royce suggested.
“Fallen,” Will insisted. “There’s one
woman up an ironwood, half-hid in the branches. A far-eyes.”
He smiled thinly. “I took care she never saw me. When I got
closer, I saw that she wasn’t moving neither.” Despite
himself, he shivered.
“You have a chill?” Royce asked.
“Some,” Will muttered. “The wind,
m’lord.”
The young knight turned back to his grizzled man-at-arms.
Frostfallen leaves whispered past them, and Royce’s destrier
moved restlessly. “What do you think might have killed these
men, Gared?” Ser Waymar asked casually. He adjusted the drape
of his long sable cloak.
“It was the cold,” Gared said with iron certainty.
“I saw men freeze last winter, and the one before, when I was
half a boy. Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the
ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the
cold. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you
shiver and your teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of
mulled wine and nice hot fires. It burns, it does. Nothing burns
like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and
starts to fill you up, and after a while you don’t have the
strength to fight it. It’s easier just to sit down or go to
sleep. They say you don’t feel any pain toward the end. First
you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then
it’s like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful,
like.”
“Such eloquence, Gared,” Ser Waymar observed.
“I never suspected you had it in you.”
“I’ve had the cold in me too, lordling.” Gared
pulled back his hood, giving Ser Waymar a good long look at the
stumps where his ears had been. “Two ears, three toes, and
the little finger off my left hand. I got off light. We found my
brother frozen at his watch, with a smile on his face.”
Ser Waymar shrugged. “You ought dress more warmly,
Gared.”
Gared glared at the lordling, the scars around his ear holes
flushed red with anger where Maester Aemon had cut the ears away.
“We’ll see how warm you can dress when the winter
comes.” He pulled up his hood and hunched over his garron,
silent and sullen.
“If Gared said it was the cold . . . ” Will
began.
“Have you drawn any watches this past week,
Will?”
“Yes, m’lord.” There never was a week when he
did not draw a dozen bloody watches. What was the man driving
at?
“And how did you find the Wall?”
“Weeping,” Will said, frowning. He saw it clear
enough, now that the lordling had pointed it out. “They
couldn’t have froze. Not if the Wall was weeping. It
wasn’t cold enough.”
Royce nodded. “Bright lad. We’ve had a few light
frosts this past week, and a quick flurry of snow now and then, but
surely no cold fierce enough to kill eight grown men. Men clad in
fur and leather, let me remind you, with shelter near at hand, and
the means of making fire.” The knight’s smile was
cocksure. “Will, lead us there. I would see these dead men
for myself.”
And then there was nothing to be done for it. The order had been
given, and honor bound them to obey.
Will went in front, his shaggy little garron picking the way
carefully through the undergrowth. A light snow had fallen the
night before, and there were stones and roots and hidden sinks
lying just under its crust, waiting for the careless and the
unwary. Ser Waymar Royce came next, his great black destrier
snorting impatiently. The warhorse was the wrong mount for ranging,
but try and tell that to the lordling. Gared brought up the rear.
The old man-at-arms muttered to himself as he rode.
Twilight deepened. The cloudless sky turned a deep purple, the
color of an old bruise, then faded to black. The stars began to
come out. A half-moon rose. Will was grateful for the light.
“We can make a better pace than this, surely,” Royce
said when the moon was full risen.
“Not with this horse,” Will said. Fear had made him
insolent. “Perhaps my lord would care to take the
lead?”
Ser Waymar Royce did not deign to reply.
Somewhere off in the wood a wolf howled.
Will pulled his garron over beneath an ancient gnarled ironwood
and dismounted.
“Why are you stopping?” Ser Waymar asked.
“Best go the rest of the way on foot, m’lord.
It’s just over that ridge.”
Royce paused a moment, staring off into the distance, his face
reflective. A cold wind whispered through the trees. His great
sable cloak stirred behind like something half-alive.
“There’s something wrong here,” Gared
muttered.
The young knight gave him a disdainful smile. “Is
there?”
“Can’t you feel it?” Gared asked.
“Listen to the darkness.”
Will could feel it. Four years in the Night’s Watch, and
he had never been so afraid. What was it?
“Wind. Trees rustling. A wolf. Which sound is it that
unmans you so, Gared?” When Gared did not answer, Royce slid
gracefully from his saddle. He tied the destrier securely to a
low-hanging limb, well away from the other horses, and drew his
longsword from its sheath. Jewels glittered in its hilt, and the
moonlight ran down the shining steel. It was a splendid weapon,
castle-forged, and new-made from the look of it. Will doubted it
had ever been swung in anger.
“The trees press close here,” Will warned.
“That sword will tangle you up, m’lord. Better a
knife.”
“If I need instruction, I will ask for it,” the
young lord said. “Gared, stay here. Guard the
horses.”
Gared dismounted. “We need a fire. I’ll see to
it.”
“How big a fool are you, old man? If there are enemies in
this wood, a fire is the last thing we want.”
“There’s some enemies a fire will keep away,”
Gared said. “Bears and direwolves and . . . and other things . . . ”
Ser Waymar’s mouth became a hard line. “No
fire.”
Gared’s hood shadowed his face, but Will could see the
hard glitter in his eyes as he stared at the knight. For a moment
he was afraid the older man would go for his sword. It was a short,
ugly thing, its grip discolored by sweat, its edge nicked from hard
use, but Will would not have given an iron bob for the
lordling’s life if Gared pulled it from its scabbard.
Finally Gared looked down. “No fire,” he muttered,
low under his breath.
Royce took it for acquiescence and turned away. “Lead
on,” he said to Will.
Will threaded their way through a thicket, then started up the
slope to the low ridge where he had found his vantage point under a
sentinel tree. Under the thin crust of snow, the ground was damp
and muddy, slick footing, with rocks and hidden roots to trip you
up. Will made no sound as he climbed. Behind him, he heard the soft
metallic slither of the lordling’s ringmail, the rustle of
leaves, and muttered curses as reaching branches grabbed at his
longsword and tugged on his splendid sable cloak.
The great sentinel was right there at the top of the ridge,
where Will had known it would be, its lowest branches a bare foot
off the ground. Will slid in underneath, flat on his belly in the
snow and the mud, and looked down on the empty clearing below.
His heart stopped in his chest. For a moment he dared not
breathe. Moonlight shone down on the clearing, the ashes of the
firepit, the snow-covered lean-to, the great rock, the little
half-frozen stream. Everything was just as it had been a few hours
ago.
They were gone. All the bodies were gone.
“Gods!” he heard behind him. A sword slashed at a
branch as Ser Waymar Royce gained the ridge. He stood there beside
the sentinel, longsword in hand, his cloak billowing behind him as
the wind came up, outlined nobly against the stars for all to
see.
“Get down!” Will whispered urgently.
“Something’s wrong.”
Royce did not move. He looked down at the empty clearing and
laughed. “Your dead men seem to have moved camp,
Will.”
Will’s voice abandoned him. He groped for words that did
not come. It was not possible. His eyes swept back and forth over
the abandoned campsite, stopped on the axe. A huge double-bladed
battle-axe, still lying where he had seen it last, untouched. A
valuable weapon . . .
“On your feet, Will,” Ser Waymar commanded.
“There’s no one here. I won’t have you hiding
under a bush.”
Reluctantly, Will obeyed.
Ser Waymar looked him over with open disapproval. “I am
not going back to Castle Black a failure on my first ranging. We
will find these men.” He glanced around. “Up the tree.
Be quick about it. Look for a fire.”
Will turned away, wordless. There was no use to argue. The wind
was moving. It cut right through him. He went to the tree, a
vaulting grey-green sentinel, and began to climb. Soon his hands
were sticky with sap, and he was lost among the needles. Fear
filled his gut like a meal he could not digest. He whispered a
prayer to the nameless gods of the wood, and slipped his dirk free
of its sheath. He put it between his teeth to keep both hands free
for climbing. The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him
comfort.
Down below, the lordling called out suddenly, “Who goes
there?” Will heard uncertainty in the challenge. He stopped
climbing; he listened; he watched.
The woods gave answer: the rustle of leaves, the icy rush of the
stream, a distant hoot of a snow owl.
The Others made no sound.
Will saw movement from the corner of his eye. Pale shapes
gliding through the wood. He turned his head, glimpsed a white
shadow in the darkness. Then it was gone. Branches stirred gently
in the wind, scratching at one another with wooden fingers. Will
opened his mouth to call down a warning, and the words seemed to
freeze in his throat. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had only
been a bird, a reflection on the snow, some trick of the moonlight.
What had he seen, after all?
“Will, where are you?” Ser Waymar called up.
“Can you see anything?” He was turning in a slow
circle, suddenly wary, his sword in hand. He must have felt them,
as Will felt them. There was nothing to see. “Answer me! Why
is it so cold?”
It was cold. Shivering, Will clung more tightly to his perch.
His face pressed hard against the trunk of the sentinel. He could
feel the sweet, sticky sap on his cheek.
A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of
Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh
pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it
was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere
dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran
like moonlight on water with every step it took.
Will heard the breath go out of Ser Waymar Royce in a long
hiss. “Come no farther,” the lordling warned. His voice
cracked like a boy’s. He threw the long sable cloak back over
his shoulders, to free his arms for battle, and took his sword in
both hands. The wind had stopped. It was very cold.
The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a
longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had
gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight,
translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to
vanish when seen edge-on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the
thing, a ghost-light that played around its edges, and somehow Will
knew it was sharper than any razor.
Ser Waymar met him bravely. “Dance with me then.” He
lifted his sword high over his head, defiant. His hands trembled
from the weight of it, or perhaps from the cold. Yet in that
moment, Will thought, he was a boy no longer, but a man of the
Night’s Watch.
The Other halted. Will saw its eyes; blue, deeper and bluer than
any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. They fixed on the
longsword trembling on high, watched the moonlight running cold
along the metal. For a heartbeat he dared to hope.
They emerged silently from the shadows, twins to the first.
Three of them . . . four . . . five . . . Ser Waymar may have felt
the cold that came with them, but he never saw them, never heard
them. Will had to call out. It was his duty. And his death, if he
did. He shivered, and hugged the tree, and kept the silence.
The pale sword came shivering through the air.
Ser Waymar met it with steel. When the blades met, there was no
ring of metal on metal; only a high, thin sound at the edge of
hearing, like an animal screaming in pain. Royce checked a second
blow, and a third, then fell back a step. Another flurry of blows,
and he fell back again.
Behind him, to right, to left, all around him, the watchers
stood patient, faceless, silent, the shifting patterns of their
delicate armor making them all but invisible in the wood. Yet they
made no move to interfere.
Again and again the swords met, until Will wanted to cover his
ears against the strange anguished keening of their clash. Ser
Waymar was panting from the effort now, his breath steaming in the
moonlight. His blade was white with frost; the Other’s danced
with pale blue light.
Then Royce’s parry came a beat too late. The pale sword
bit through the ringmail beneath his arm. The young lord cried out
in pain. Blood welled between the rings. It steamed in the cold,
and the droplets seemed red as fire where they touched the snow.
Ser Waymar’s fingers brushed his side. His moleskin glove came
away soaked with red.
The Other said something in a language that Will did not know;
his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the
words were mocking.
Ser Waymar Royce found his fury. “For Robert!” he
shouted, and he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered
longsword with both hands and swinging it around in a flat sidearm
slash with all his weight behind it. The Other’s parry was
almost lazy.
When the blades touched, the steel shattered.
A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword
shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like
a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered
his eyes. Blood welled between his fingers.
The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been
given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold
butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were
silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices
and laughter sharp as icicles.
When he found the courage to look again, a long time had passed,
and the ridge below was empty.
He stayed in the tree, scarce daring to breathe, while the moon
crept slowly across the black sky. Finally, his muscles cramping
and his fingers numb with cold, he climbed down.
Royce’s body lay facedown in the snow, one arm outflung.
The thick sable cloak had been slashed in a dozen places. Lying
dead like that, you saw how young he was. A boy.
He found what was left of the sword a few feet away, the end
splintered and twisted like a tree struck by lightning. Will knelt,
looked around warily, and snatched it up. The broken sword would be
his proof. Gared would know what to make of it, and if not him,
then surely that old bear Mormont or Maester Aemon. Would Gared
still be waiting with the horses? He had to hurry.
Will rose. Ser Waymar Royce stood over him.
His fine clothes were a tatter, his face a ruin. A shard from
his sword transfixed the blind white pupil of his left eye.
The right eye was open. The pupil burned blue. It saw.
The broken sword fell from nerveless fingers. Will closed his
eyes to pray. Long, elegant hands brushed his cheek, then tightened
around his throat. They were gloved in the finest moleskin and
sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.