Whitetree, the village was named on Sam’s old maps. Jon
did not think it much of a village. Four tumbledown one-room houses
of unmortared stone surrounded an empty sheepfold and a well. The
houses were roofed with sod, the windows shuttered with ragged
pieces of hide. And above them loomed the pale limbs and dark red
leaves of a monstrous great weirwood.
It was the biggest tree Jon Snow had ever seen, the trunk near
eight feet wide, the branches spreading so far that the entire
village was shaded beneath their canopy. The size did not disturb
him so much as the face . . . the mouth
especially, no simple carved slash, but a jagged hollow large
enough to swallow a sheep. Those are not sheep bones, though. Nor is that a sheep’s
skull in the ashes.
“An old tree.” Mormont sat his horse, frowning.
“Old,” his raven agreed from his shoulder. “Old,
old, old.”
“And powerful.” Jon could feel the power.
Thoren Smallwood dismounted beside the trunk, dark in his plate
and mail. “Look at that face. Small wonder men feared them,
when they first came to Westeros. I’d like to take an axe to
the bloody thing myself.”
Jon said, “My lord father believed no man could tell a lie
in front of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are
lying.”
“My father believed the same,” said the Old Bear.
“Let me have a look at that skull.”
Jon dismounted. Slung across his back in a black leather
shoulder sheath was Longclaw, the hand-and-a-half bastard blade the
Old Bear had given him for saving his life. A bastard sword for a
bastard, the men joked. The hilt had been fashioned new for him,
adorned with a wolf’s-head pommel in pale stone, but the blade
itself was Valyrian steel, old and light and deadly sharp.
He knelt and reached a gloved hand down into the maw. The inside
of the hollow was red with dried sap and blackened by fire. Beneath
the skull he saw another, smaller, the jaw broken off. It was
half-buried in ash and bits of bone.
When he brought the skull to Mormont, the Old Bear lifted it in
both hands and stared into the empty sockets. “The wildlings
burn their dead. We’ve always known that. Now I wished
I’d asked them why, when there were still a few around to
ask.”
Jon Snow remembered the wight rising, its eyes shining blue in
the pale dead face. He knew why, he was certain.
“Would that bones could talk,” the Old Bear
grumbled. “This fellow could tell us much. How he died. Who
burned him, and why. Where the wildlings have gone.” He
sighed. “The children of the forest could speak to the dead,
it’s said. But I can’t.” He tossed the skull back
into the mouth of the tree, where it landed with a puff of fine
ash. “Go through all these houses. Giant, get to the top of
this tree, have a look. I’ll have the hounds brought up too.
Perchance this time the trail will be fresher.” His tone did
not suggest that he held out much hope of the last.
Two men went through each house, to make certain nothing was
missed. Jon was paired with dour Eddison Tollett, a squire grey of
hair and thin as a pike, whom the other brothers called Dolorous
Edd. “Bad enough when the dead come walking,” he said
to Jon as they crossed the village, “now the Old Bear wants
them talking as well? No good will come of that, I’ll
warrant. And who’s to say the bones wouldn’t lie? Why
should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are
likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints—the ground’s
too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more
worms than I do . . . ”
Jon had to stoop to pass through the low door. Within he found a
packed dirt floor. There were no furnishings, no sign that people
had lived here but for some ashes beneath the smoke hole in the
roof. “What a dismal place to live,” he said.
“I was born in a house much like this,” declared
Dolorous Edd. “Those were my enchanted years. Later I fell on
hard times.” A nest of dry straw bedding filled one corner of
the room. Edd looked at it with longing. “I’d give all
the gold in Casterly Rock to sleep in a bed again.”
“You call that a bed?”
“If it’s softer than the ground and has a roof over
it, I call it a bed.” Dolorous Edd sniffed the air. “I
smell dung.”
The smell was very faint. “Old dung,” said Jon. The
house felt as though it had been empty for some time. Kneeling, he
searched through the straw with his hands to see if anything had
been concealed beneath, then made a round of the walls. It did not
take very long. “There’s nothing here.”
Nothing was what he had expected; Whitetree was the fourth
village they had passed, and it had been the same in all of them.
The people were gone, vanished with their scant possessions and
whatever animals they may have had. None of the villages showed any
signs of having been attacked. They were
simply . . . empty. “What do you think
happened to them all?” Jon asked.
“Something worse than we can imagine,” suggested
Dolorous Edd. “Well, I might be able to imagine it, but
I’d sooner not. Bad enough to know you’re going to come
to some awful end without thinking about it aforetime.”
Two of the hounds were sniffing around the door as they
reemerged. Other dogs ranged through the village. Chett was cursing
them loudly, his voice thick with the anger he never seemed to put
aside. The light filtering through the red leaves of the weirwood
made the boils on his face look even more inflamed than usual. When
he saw Jon his eyes narrowed; there was no love lost between
them.
The other houses had yielded no wisdom. “Gone,”
cried Mormont’s raven, flapping up into the weirwood to perch
above them. “Gone, gone, gone.”
“There were wildlings at Whitetree only a year ago.”
Thoren Smallwood looked more a lord than Mormont did, clad in Ser
Jaremy Rykker’s gleaming black mail and embossed breastplate.
His heavy cloak was richly trimmed with sable, and clasped with the
crossed hammers of the Rykkers, wrought in silver. Ser
Jaremy’s cloak, once . . . but the wight
had claimed Ser Jaremy, and the Night’s Watch wasted
nothing.
“A year ago Robert was king, and the realm was at
peace,” declared Jarman Buckwell, the square stolid man who
commanded the scouts. “Much can change in a year’s
time.”
“One thing hasn’t changed,” Ser Mallador Locke
insisted. “Fewer wildlings means fewer worries. I won’t
mourn, whatever’s become of them. Raiders and murderers, the
lot of them.”
Jon heard a rustling from the red leaves above. Two branches
parted, and he glimpsed a little man moving from limb to limb as
easily as a squirrel. Bedwyck stood no more than five feet tall,
but the grey streaks in his hair showed his age. The other rangers
called him Giant. He sat in a fork of the tree over their heads and
said, “There’s water to the north. A lake, might be. A
few flint hills rising to the west, not very high. Nothing else to
see, my lords.”
“We might camp here tonight,” Smallwood
suggested.
The Old Bear glanced up, searching for a glimpse of sky through
the pale limbs and red leaves of the weirwood. “No,” he
declared. “Giant, how much daylight remains to us?”
“Three hours, my lord.”
“We’ll press on north,” Mormont decided.
“If we reach this lake, we can make camp by the shore,
perchance catch a few fish. Jon, fetch me paper, it’s past
time I wrote Maester Aemon.”
Jon found parchment, quill, and ink in his saddlebag and brought
them to the Lord Commander. At Whitetree, Mormont scrawled. The
fourth village. All empty. The wildlings are gone. “Find
Tarly and see that he gets this on its way,” he said as he
handed Jon the message. When he whistled, his raven came flapping
down to land on his horse’s head. “Corn,” the
raven suggested, bobbing. The horse whickered.
Jon mounted his garron, wheeled him about, and trotted off.
Beyond the shade of the great weirwood the men of the Night’s
Watch stood beneath lesser trees, tending their horses, chewing
strips of salt beef, pissing, scratching, and talking. When the
command was given to move out again, the talk died, and they
climbed back into their saddles. Jarman Buckwell’s scouts
rode out first, with the vanguard under Thoren Smallwood heading
the column proper. Then came the Old Bear with the main force, Ser
Mallador Locke with the baggage train and packhorses, and finally
Ser Ottyn Wythers and the rear guard. Two hundred men all told,
with half again as many mounts.
By day they followed game trails and streambeds, the
“ranger’s roads” that led them ever deeper into
the wilderness of leaf and root. At night they camped beneath a
starry sky and gazed up at the comet. The black brothers had left
Castle Black in good spirits, joking and trading tales, but of late
the brooding silence of the wood seemed to have sombered them all.
Jests had grown fewer and tempers shorter. No one would admit to
being afraid—they were men of the Night’s Watch, after
all—but Jon could feel the unease. Four empty villages, no
wildlings anywhere, even the game seemingly fled. The haunted
forest had never seemed more haunted, even veteran rangers
agreed.
As he rode, Jon peeled off his glove to air his burned fingers.
Ugly things. He remembered suddenly how he used to muss
Arya’s hair. His little stick of a sister. He wondered how
she was faring. It made him a little sad to think that he might
never muss her hair again. He began to flex his hand, opening and
closing the fingers. If he let his sword hand stiffen and grow
clumsy, it well might be the end of him, he knew. A man needed his
sword beyond the Wall.
Jon found Samwell Tarly with the other stewards, watering his
horses. He had three to tend: his own mount, and two packhorses,
each bearing a large wire-and-wicker cage full of ravens. The birds
flapped their wings at Jon’s approach and screamed at him
through the bars. A few shrieks sounded suspiciously like words.
“Have you been teaching them to talk?” he asked
Sam.
“A few words. Three of them can say snow.”
“One bird croaking my name was bad enough,” said
Jon, “and snow’s nothing a black brother wants to hear
about.” Snow often meant death in the north.
“Was there anything in Whitetree?”
“Bones, ashes, and empty houses.” Jon handed Sam the
roll of parchment. “The Old Bear wants word sent back to
Aemon.”
Sam took a bird from one of the cages, stroked its feathers,
attached the message, and said, “Fly home now, brave one.
Home.” The raven quorked something unintelligible back at
him, and Sam tossed it into the air. Flapping, it beat its way
skyward through the trees. “I wish he could carry me with
him.”
“Still?”
“Well,” said Sam, “yes,
but . . . I’m not as frightened as I was,
truly. The first night, every time I heard someone getting up to
make water, I thought it was wildlings creeping in to slit my
throat. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, I might never open
them again,
only . . . well . . . dawn
came after all.” He managed a wan smile. “I may be
craven, but I’m not stupid. I’m sore and my back aches
from riding and from sleeping on the ground, but I’m hardly
scared at all. Look.” He held out a hand for Jon to see how
steady it was. “I’ve been working on my
maps.” The world is strange, Jon thought. Two hundred brave men had
left the Wall, and the only one who was not growing more fearful
was Sam, the self-confessed coward. “We’ll make a
ranger of you yet,” he joked. “Next thing, you’ll
want to be an outrider like Grenn. Shall I speak to the Old
Bear?”
“Don’t you dare!” Sam pulled up the hood of
his enormous black cloak and clambered awkwardly back onto his
horse. It was a plow horse, big and slow and clumsy, but better
able to bear his weight than the little garrons the rangers rode.
“I had hoped we might stay the night in the village,”
he said wistfully. “It would be nice to sleep under a roof
again.”
“Too few roofs for all of us.” Jon mounted again,
gave Sam a parting smile, and rode off. The column was well under
way, so he swung wide around the village to avoid the worst of the
congestion. He had seen enough of Whitetree.
Ghost emerged from the undergrowth so suddenly that the garron
shied and reared. The white wolf hunted well away from the line of
march, but he was not having much better fortune than the foragers
Smallwood sent out after game. The woods were as empty as the
villages, Dywen had told him one night around the fire.
“We’re a large party,” Jon had said. “The
game’s probably been frightened away by all the noise we make
on the march.”
“Frightened away by something, no doubt,” Dywen
said.
Once the horse had settled, Ghost loped along easily beside him.
Jon caught up to Mormont as he was wending his way around a
hawthorn thicket. “Is the bird away?” the Old Bear
asked.
“Yes, my lord. Sam is teaching them to talk.”
The Old Bear snorted. “He’ll regret that. Damned
things make a lot of noise, but they never say a thing worth
hearing.”
They rode in silence, until Jon said, “If my uncle found
all these villages empty as well—”
“—he would have made it his purpose to learn why,” Lord
Mormont finished for him, “and it may well be someone or
something did not want that known. Well, we’ll be three
hundred when Qhorin joins us. Whatever enemy waits out here will
not find us so easy to deal with. We will find them, Jon, I promise
you.” Or they will find us, thought Jon.
Whitetree, the village was named on Sam’s old maps. Jon
did not think it much of a village. Four tumbledown one-room houses
of unmortared stone surrounded an empty sheepfold and a well. The
houses were roofed with sod, the windows shuttered with ragged
pieces of hide. And above them loomed the pale limbs and dark red
leaves of a monstrous great weirwood.
It was the biggest tree Jon Snow had ever seen, the trunk near
eight feet wide, the branches spreading so far that the entire
village was shaded beneath their canopy. The size did not disturb
him so much as the face . . . the mouth
especially, no simple carved slash, but a jagged hollow large
enough to swallow a sheep. Those are not sheep bones, though. Nor is that a sheep’s
skull in the ashes.
“An old tree.” Mormont sat his horse, frowning.
“Old,” his raven agreed from his shoulder. “Old,
old, old.”
“And powerful.” Jon could feel the power.
Thoren Smallwood dismounted beside the trunk, dark in his plate
and mail. “Look at that face. Small wonder men feared them,
when they first came to Westeros. I’d like to take an axe to
the bloody thing myself.”
Jon said, “My lord father believed no man could tell a lie
in front of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are
lying.”
“My father believed the same,” said the Old Bear.
“Let me have a look at that skull.”
Jon dismounted. Slung across his back in a black leather
shoulder sheath was Longclaw, the hand-and-a-half bastard blade the
Old Bear had given him for saving his life. A bastard sword for a
bastard, the men joked. The hilt had been fashioned new for him,
adorned with a wolf’s-head pommel in pale stone, but the blade
itself was Valyrian steel, old and light and deadly sharp.
He knelt and reached a gloved hand down into the maw. The inside
of the hollow was red with dried sap and blackened by fire. Beneath
the skull he saw another, smaller, the jaw broken off. It was
half-buried in ash and bits of bone.
When he brought the skull to Mormont, the Old Bear lifted it in
both hands and stared into the empty sockets. “The wildlings
burn their dead. We’ve always known that. Now I wished
I’d asked them why, when there were still a few around to
ask.”
Jon Snow remembered the wight rising, its eyes shining blue in
the pale dead face. He knew why, he was certain.
“Would that bones could talk,” the Old Bear
grumbled. “This fellow could tell us much. How he died. Who
burned him, and why. Where the wildlings have gone.” He
sighed. “The children of the forest could speak to the dead,
it’s said. But I can’t.” He tossed the skull back
into the mouth of the tree, where it landed with a puff of fine
ash. “Go through all these houses. Giant, get to the top of
this tree, have a look. I’ll have the hounds brought up too.
Perchance this time the trail will be fresher.” His tone did
not suggest that he held out much hope of the last.
Two men went through each house, to make certain nothing was
missed. Jon was paired with dour Eddison Tollett, a squire grey of
hair and thin as a pike, whom the other brothers called Dolorous
Edd. “Bad enough when the dead come walking,” he said
to Jon as they crossed the village, “now the Old Bear wants
them talking as well? No good will come of that, I’ll
warrant. And who’s to say the bones wouldn’t lie? Why
should death make a man truthful, or even clever? The dead are
likely dull fellows, full of tedious complaints—the ground’s
too cold, my gravestone should be larger, why does he get more
worms than I do . . . ”
Jon had to stoop to pass through the low door. Within he found a
packed dirt floor. There were no furnishings, no sign that people
had lived here but for some ashes beneath the smoke hole in the
roof. “What a dismal place to live,” he said.
“I was born in a house much like this,” declared
Dolorous Edd. “Those were my enchanted years. Later I fell on
hard times.” A nest of dry straw bedding filled one corner of
the room. Edd looked at it with longing. “I’d give all
the gold in Casterly Rock to sleep in a bed again.”
“You call that a bed?”
“If it’s softer than the ground and has a roof over
it, I call it a bed.” Dolorous Edd sniffed the air. “I
smell dung.”
The smell was very faint. “Old dung,” said Jon. The
house felt as though it had been empty for some time. Kneeling, he
searched through the straw with his hands to see if anything had
been concealed beneath, then made a round of the walls. It did not
take very long. “There’s nothing here.”
Nothing was what he had expected; Whitetree was the fourth
village they had passed, and it had been the same in all of them.
The people were gone, vanished with their scant possessions and
whatever animals they may have had. None of the villages showed any
signs of having been attacked. They were
simply . . . empty. “What do you think
happened to them all?” Jon asked.
“Something worse than we can imagine,” suggested
Dolorous Edd. “Well, I might be able to imagine it, but
I’d sooner not. Bad enough to know you’re going to come
to some awful end without thinking about it aforetime.”
Two of the hounds were sniffing around the door as they
reemerged. Other dogs ranged through the village. Chett was cursing
them loudly, his voice thick with the anger he never seemed to put
aside. The light filtering through the red leaves of the weirwood
made the boils on his face look even more inflamed than usual. When
he saw Jon his eyes narrowed; there was no love lost between
them.
The other houses had yielded no wisdom. “Gone,”
cried Mormont’s raven, flapping up into the weirwood to perch
above them. “Gone, gone, gone.”
“There were wildlings at Whitetree only a year ago.”
Thoren Smallwood looked more a lord than Mormont did, clad in Ser
Jaremy Rykker’s gleaming black mail and embossed breastplate.
His heavy cloak was richly trimmed with sable, and clasped with the
crossed hammers of the Rykkers, wrought in silver. Ser
Jaremy’s cloak, once . . . but the wight
had claimed Ser Jaremy, and the Night’s Watch wasted
nothing.
“A year ago Robert was king, and the realm was at
peace,” declared Jarman Buckwell, the square stolid man who
commanded the scouts. “Much can change in a year’s
time.”
“One thing hasn’t changed,” Ser Mallador Locke
insisted. “Fewer wildlings means fewer worries. I won’t
mourn, whatever’s become of them. Raiders and murderers, the
lot of them.”
Jon heard a rustling from the red leaves above. Two branches
parted, and he glimpsed a little man moving from limb to limb as
easily as a squirrel. Bedwyck stood no more than five feet tall,
but the grey streaks in his hair showed his age. The other rangers
called him Giant. He sat in a fork of the tree over their heads and
said, “There’s water to the north. A lake, might be. A
few flint hills rising to the west, not very high. Nothing else to
see, my lords.”
“We might camp here tonight,” Smallwood
suggested.
The Old Bear glanced up, searching for a glimpse of sky through
the pale limbs and red leaves of the weirwood. “No,” he
declared. “Giant, how much daylight remains to us?”
“Three hours, my lord.”
“We’ll press on north,” Mormont decided.
“If we reach this lake, we can make camp by the shore,
perchance catch a few fish. Jon, fetch me paper, it’s past
time I wrote Maester Aemon.”
Jon found parchment, quill, and ink in his saddlebag and brought
them to the Lord Commander. At Whitetree, Mormont scrawled. The
fourth village. All empty. The wildlings are gone. “Find
Tarly and see that he gets this on its way,” he said as he
handed Jon the message. When he whistled, his raven came flapping
down to land on his horse’s head. “Corn,” the
raven suggested, bobbing. The horse whickered.
Jon mounted his garron, wheeled him about, and trotted off.
Beyond the shade of the great weirwood the men of the Night’s
Watch stood beneath lesser trees, tending their horses, chewing
strips of salt beef, pissing, scratching, and talking. When the
command was given to move out again, the talk died, and they
climbed back into their saddles. Jarman Buckwell’s scouts
rode out first, with the vanguard under Thoren Smallwood heading
the column proper. Then came the Old Bear with the main force, Ser
Mallador Locke with the baggage train and packhorses, and finally
Ser Ottyn Wythers and the rear guard. Two hundred men all told,
with half again as many mounts.
By day they followed game trails and streambeds, the
“ranger’s roads” that led them ever deeper into
the wilderness of leaf and root. At night they camped beneath a
starry sky and gazed up at the comet. The black brothers had left
Castle Black in good spirits, joking and trading tales, but of late
the brooding silence of the wood seemed to have sombered them all.
Jests had grown fewer and tempers shorter. No one would admit to
being afraid—they were men of the Night’s Watch, after
all—but Jon could feel the unease. Four empty villages, no
wildlings anywhere, even the game seemingly fled. The haunted
forest had never seemed more haunted, even veteran rangers
agreed.
As he rode, Jon peeled off his glove to air his burned fingers.
Ugly things. He remembered suddenly how he used to muss
Arya’s hair. His little stick of a sister. He wondered how
she was faring. It made him a little sad to think that he might
never muss her hair again. He began to flex his hand, opening and
closing the fingers. If he let his sword hand stiffen and grow
clumsy, it well might be the end of him, he knew. A man needed his
sword beyond the Wall.
Jon found Samwell Tarly with the other stewards, watering his
horses. He had three to tend: his own mount, and two packhorses,
each bearing a large wire-and-wicker cage full of ravens. The birds
flapped their wings at Jon’s approach and screamed at him
through the bars. A few shrieks sounded suspiciously like words.
“Have you been teaching them to talk?” he asked
Sam.
“A few words. Three of them can say snow.”
“One bird croaking my name was bad enough,” said
Jon, “and snow’s nothing a black brother wants to hear
about.” Snow often meant death in the north.
“Was there anything in Whitetree?”
“Bones, ashes, and empty houses.” Jon handed Sam the
roll of parchment. “The Old Bear wants word sent back to
Aemon.”
Sam took a bird from one of the cages, stroked its feathers,
attached the message, and said, “Fly home now, brave one.
Home.” The raven quorked something unintelligible back at
him, and Sam tossed it into the air. Flapping, it beat its way
skyward through the trees. “I wish he could carry me with
him.”
“Still?”
“Well,” said Sam, “yes,
but . . . I’m not as frightened as I was,
truly. The first night, every time I heard someone getting up to
make water, I thought it was wildlings creeping in to slit my
throat. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes, I might never open
them again,
only . . . well . . . dawn
came after all.” He managed a wan smile. “I may be
craven, but I’m not stupid. I’m sore and my back aches
from riding and from sleeping on the ground, but I’m hardly
scared at all. Look.” He held out a hand for Jon to see how
steady it was. “I’ve been working on my
maps.” The world is strange, Jon thought. Two hundred brave men had
left the Wall, and the only one who was not growing more fearful
was Sam, the self-confessed coward. “We’ll make a
ranger of you yet,” he joked. “Next thing, you’ll
want to be an outrider like Grenn. Shall I speak to the Old
Bear?”
“Don’t you dare!” Sam pulled up the hood of
his enormous black cloak and clambered awkwardly back onto his
horse. It was a plow horse, big and slow and clumsy, but better
able to bear his weight than the little garrons the rangers rode.
“I had hoped we might stay the night in the village,”
he said wistfully. “It would be nice to sleep under a roof
again.”
“Too few roofs for all of us.” Jon mounted again,
gave Sam a parting smile, and rode off. The column was well under
way, so he swung wide around the village to avoid the worst of the
congestion. He had seen enough of Whitetree.
Ghost emerged from the undergrowth so suddenly that the garron
shied and reared. The white wolf hunted well away from the line of
march, but he was not having much better fortune than the foragers
Smallwood sent out after game. The woods were as empty as the
villages, Dywen had told him one night around the fire.
“We’re a large party,” Jon had said. “The
game’s probably been frightened away by all the noise we make
on the march.”
“Frightened away by something, no doubt,” Dywen
said.
Once the horse had settled, Ghost loped along easily beside him.
Jon caught up to Mormont as he was wending his way around a
hawthorn thicket. “Is the bird away?” the Old Bear
asked.
“Yes, my lord. Sam is teaching them to talk.”
The Old Bear snorted. “He’ll regret that. Damned
things make a lot of noise, but they never say a thing worth
hearing.”
They rode in silence, until Jon said, “If my uncle found
all these villages empty as well—”
“—he would have made it his purpose to learn why,” Lord
Mormont finished for him, “and it may well be someone or
something did not want that known. Well, we’ll be three
hundred when Qhorin joins us. Whatever enemy waits out here will
not find us so easy to deal with. We will find them, Jon, I promise
you.” Or they will find us, thought Jon.