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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
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"My son Wendel came to the Twins a guest. He ate Lord Walder's bread and salt, and hung his sword upon the wall to feast with friends. And they murdered him. Murdered, I say, and may the Freys choke upon their fables."
Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor
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North, Winterfell
301 AC
Tormund Giantsbane
The dragon hadn't moved.
Tormund had been watching it since they filed into the solar, and it was still sitting atop the Great Keep's north tower with its wings folded like a man sitting with crossed arms, its crystal-blue eyes moving slowly across the courtyard below. Not searching. Not hunting. Just watching. The way a very old and very patient thing watched things it did not fear.
He had seen bears do the same thing once on a frozen lakeshore east of the Milkwater. He had been sixteen, and the bear had been looking at him with that same particular regard, unhurried, measuring, entirely certain of the outcome, and he had learned three things very quickly.
The first was that you did not run from bears. The second was that you did not approach bears while they were looking at you like that. The third was that some things in the world were simply larger than you, and the wisest a man could do in their presence was pay close attention and try not to embarrass himself.
He was applying that third lesson now and not to the dragon.
They had been called within the hour. Not enough time to eat, which Tormund considered a significant oversight, but enough to find dry boots, which in the current circumstances was about all a man could reasonably demand.
The solar was smaller than he'd have liked, a kneller room, built for kneller meetings, with walls too close together and a ceiling too low for comfort, but the fire was good, and someone had thought to put out something to drink, which raised his estimation of Lord Manderly considerably.
The king sat at the head of the table.
Tormund had known Jon Snow, and he had heard the explanations about the name Aerion Targaryen and had even largely accepted them, though he still caught himself thinking "Crow" at unguarded moments, long enough to have formed an opinion.
The opinion was this one is different. The Night's Watch was always different from the free folk in ways that were usually tedious, but this one had been different from the Crows too. He had proven that beyond any reasonable argument when he'd stood on the wrong side of the Wall and asked Tormund Giantsbane to trust him.
That was the kind of mad bravery a man could respect.
But the man sitting at the head of Wyman Manderly's table was not quite the same man Tormund had stood beside on the ice outside Hardhome. He was taller; he was sure of it now, not imagining it, and the set of his shoulders had changed. Before, he had held himself with the careful stillness of someone who had learned to think before he moved. Now the stillness was something different. Like a drawn bow. Like a fire that hadn't been told yet what it was allowed to burn.
And the eye.
The golden eye had always been unnerving. Now it glowed with something Tormund couldn't name in any language he spoke, a warmth that was also a pressure, like standing near a forge heating metal you couldn't see. It made him think of that bear again. Of things that didn't need to announce themselves.
Questions burst out of the room before anyone had arranged them into something dignified. Where had he been? What happened in the Godswood? What was that fire and those screams? What is the dragon, and where did it come from?
Aerion let them run for perhaps a minute, long enough to feel respected and short enough to keep control, and then said, simply, "That's a long answer. It can wait until there's time to do it properly. The dragon's name is Smarag. He's mine. That's enough for now."
Silence. Another volley of questions was visibly forming in the faces around the table.
"We don't have the time," Aerion said. Not hard. Just clear.
And that was that.
Among the free folk, when a hunter came back from a great chase, you didn't make him stand in the cold recounting every detail of the trail. You let him eat. You waited. Kneelers never seemed to grasp this.
They always wanted everything immediately, as if the story changed depending on when you heard it. Tormund had learned to find this tiresome. He found it slightly less tiresome when the man doing the deflecting was also the man who had just returned from somewhere unknown on the back of a crystal-blue dragon the size of a small hill.
The map came out. Wyman had a good one, proper marks for roads and rivers and settlements, with the Wall drawn across the top in thick ink and, south of it, the great empty white of the North, dotted with castles.
Aerion set his hands on the table and looked at it.
"Here is what happens next," he said. "Everyone moves south. Not some. Not the fighting men and a careful selection of supplies. Everyone. Soldiers, smallfolk, the free folk, the Night's Watch brothers. All of them. Moving south toward Moat Cailin, which would become the first defensible position against whatever came down from the far north."
"Moat Cailin holds the gateway," Aerion said. "A handful of men held it once against a hundred thousand Northmen for years. Properly defended with the right forces, it becomes a chokepoint. It gives the civilians time to move further south. It gives us time to deal with the source of the problem."
Tormund's first instinct was resistance. His people had come through the Wall specifically to escape the Others. They had come to the North with the understanding that they would have a place in it. Now they were being told to keep moving south?
But then the second thought came, quieter and older.
The free folk had been moving south for a thousand years. Not because they were weak. Because they were wise enough to know that some things couldn't be stopped with stone and stubbornness; they had to be outrun while someone else dealt with them.
The kneelers with their castles had never understood. They built their stone boxes and planted their banners and announced that this was where they would hold the line, and they were wrong, generation after generation, century after century. This man wasn't drawing a line. He was buying time. And he knew the difference.
"My people will march," Tormund said. The room looked at him. "But not in your columns, eating your soldiers dust with our children trampled underfoot. We move our own way, at our own pace." He kept his voice level.
"Wagons. Ours were left behind or burned. We're carrying people who can't walk a hundred miles in the snow. And the right to hunt as we go, not your grain and your salted pork alone. We know how to feed ourselves from the land, but we need the right to do it."
He met the king's gaze directly.
"Give us those things and we'll move. Fast. We know how to move fast when we need to."
Aerion looked at him for a moment that wasn't quite long enough to be uncomfortable. "How many wagons?"
"Thirty. Forty if you can spare them."
"Thirty-five." He glanced at Wyman, who nodded. "Your people hunt as they go. No one will interfere. The right of passage is yours." He paused.
"And when you reach Moat Cailin, you're not prisoners there, either. Separate camps, separate ground, and your own organization within it. Tormund, I need your people to want to hold that position, not to feel they've been driven into it. If I need to spend the next six hours spelling out every clause of that, I will. But I'd rather you took it on trust."
Tormund studied him for a long moment.
The man he'd known at the Wall would have said the same thing. This man said it differently, less hoping and more stating. As if he were simply describing what was going to happen.
"Fine," Tormund said. "On trust."
He reached for the drink that someone had put out and, for the first time since he'd watched the blue shape descend from the gray morning sky, found that the knot in his chest had loosened somewhat.
He stole another glance out the window at the dragon on the tower.
The crystal eyes, pale and vast and patient, looked back at him. Tormund took a long drink and decided that as strange things went, this one was at least on his side. For now.
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Val
Val had been watching the kneelers ways for long enough to know that their councils were essentially theater, with the interesting parts happening in the margins, in the hesitations before an answer, in agreements that were really disagreements, and in what was not said while everyone was busy saying something else.
This was different.
Part of what made it different was sitting at the head of the table looking at a map with golden light leaking from his left eye socket. But it was not only that. It was also the pace of it. The way Aerion moved from one matter to the next like water finding the downhill path, not fast, but direct, always arriving at the outcome without detours.
He was not asking. He was talking and occasionally pausing to adjust based on what he heard and then talking again.
Val had spent the two months of his absence observing the people who filled the gap.
Wyman Manderly was competent and careful and genuinely grieved about the king's disappearance in a way that was not performance.
Mors Umber was loyal with the particular stubbornness of a man who had staked his reputation on his choice and would defend it past all reason.
Stannis Baratheon, whom she had met briefly before his departure, was precisely as described: entirely without warmth, entirely reliable, entirely focused.
None of them moved like this.
She was watching Aerion himself with a care that went beyond the politics of the meeting.
At the Wall, she had learned to read him partially. She understood his silences, which were a different thing from the silences of other men, with less suppressed speech and more organized thought. She had understood the way he treated her people: not as enemies in the process of becoming allies but as a problem to be solved fairly. She had understood his anger, which was rare and cold and very focused.
She did not entirely understand what was sitting at the head of this table.
He had changed. She had known he would change. She had felt something that night of his departure that she was still not ready to name: a pressure at the very edge of her mind, something vast and searingly bright that had turned toward her for a fraction of a second and then turned away, as if deciding she was not what it was looking for. She had been thinking about that fraction of a second for moons.
And she thought about Mance. She would not ask about Mance here.
The strategy settled into its shape. Everyone south of Moat Cailin, Stannis commands the march. She noted how Aerion handled Tormund's demands directly, practically, without the condescension she had braced for from a kneeler lord. He solved the problem rather than dismissing it.
She filed this away. She also noted Iron Emmett, who sat two places from Tormund and had not spoken yet, the ranking officer of what was left of the Night's Watch, taking in everything with the level attention of a man who had spent years training others to pay the same attention. Edd sat beside him, with the expression of a man who had made peace with being the most junior person in any room he entered.
Then Aerion said, "I won't be leading the march."
Silence.
"Stannis commands it. Wyman coordinates." He looked at the table, choosing his next words with the particular care of a man who has learned that certain statements change the temperature of the room. "I'm going south first. Ahead of everyone. But not to Moat Cailin."
He turned the map and placed two fingers on the Riverlands. The crossing. The twin towers were marked there.
Val watched the faces. Wyman's expression did not change, but his eyes sharpened. She understood why; there was history there, the kind that made old men wake at night and stare at the ceiling. Mors Umber's hands found the edge of the table and gripped it. Edd looked briefly at the ceiling with the expression of a man confirming to himself something he had already suspected.
"The Freys held the gate when the Red Wedding happened," Aerion said, with the flatness of someone stating the weather. "Their seat is the Twins, a crossing any army moving south will need. As long as the Freys hold it, we have a threat at our backs. I'm going to remove that threat."
Val considered this. She had no particular feeling about Freys one way or another, kneeler politics, or the intricate blood feuds of people who had grown up in stone boxes and learned to hate their neighbors across river crossings. The logic was perfectly clear regardless. A rear threat is a threat. You remove threats before they become emergencies.
She also noted, He said remove the threat, not burn the Twins to the waterline. He might mean the same thing. He might mean something more precise. The ambiguity was interesting.
"And after?" she said.
He looked at her. "Iron Islands. Euron Greyjoy is the Ironborn's cutting edge. The islands are their source. I'll deal with both."
She held his gaze. He did not look away first; neither did she. This was the thing she had always respected about him; even from the Wall, he looked at her the way he looked at Tormund or Mors Umber as a person whose judgment had weight.
She believed him. Not because the delivery was confident, she had known enough confident men to know that confidence and capacity were different things. She believed him because the dragon on the tower existed, and yesterday morning it had not.
But there was a question that no one had raised, and it needed raising.
"Who decides what happens to the North while you're doing all this?"
The room looked at her.
"Stannis leads the march. Wyman coordinates. That's clear." She kept her voice even. But if Stannis falls in the field. If a decision is needed that wasn't anticipated. Who has the authority to act in your name?"
A silence with real weight in it, the weight of a question everyone had been carefully stepping around because raising it meant acknowledging the possibility behind it.
Aerion looked at her for a moment. Then he answered, and he was specific.
Wyman was regent, with authority over political matters in the king's absence. Stannis commanded the military movement, but major strategic changes required Wyman's agreement. And for the free folk…
"I need a liaison between your people and Stannis's forces," Aerion said. "Not a subordinate to him. Not someone who answers to him. Someone who coordinates with him. Who ensures that what your people need is communicated and what Stannis needs from them gets communicated back?"
"I don't take titles," Val said.
"I'm not offering one. I'm offering a function."
She considered this. Among the free folk, this was not an unusual role, a voice between two groups, not bound by either, accountable to both. She had done it in smaller ways before.
"All right," she said.
It was at this point that Tycho Nestoris, who had been sitting very quietly throughout the proceedings writing things in his slim folio with the focused attention of a man transcribing history rather than attending it, looked up.
"Your Grace," he said. "The matter of the Iron Bank's collateral remains unresolved." He did not phrase it as a question. "Before your departure for the south, I would request clarity on what security you can offer for the loan. Beyond the promise of a sovereign."
A pause. Aerion looked at Tycho Nestoris across the table. The room waited.
"A dragon," Aerion said. "And this." Golden lightning, which he had harnessed, appeared in his hand and danced across his arm for a moment. This was a man who had control over the forces of nature.
The room went absolutely quiet.
Tycho Nestoris looked at him. His eyes moved briefly to the window, where the faint outline of Smarag's wing was visible against the gray winter sky. Then they returned to the folio in front of him.
"That," he said, in a tone entirely devoid of the appropriate emotion, "will be sufficient."
He wrote something. He closed the folio.
Val almost smiled.
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Dolorous Edd Tollett
Edd had been at enough of these meetings to know that the part where everything sounded reasonable was usually followed by the part where someone pointed out why it wasn't. He'd been waiting for that second part since the council began.
It hadn't arrived.
He was not sure whether this meant the plan was genuinely good or whether they were all moving too fast to notice the problems. In his experience, plans that looked airtight in warm rooms had a tendency to develop significant gaps the moment they encountered actual weather, actual soldiers, and actual supply wagons losing actual wheels in actual snowdrifts. He stored this observation for later.
Iron Emmett sat two places down from him, straight-backed as ever, with the slightly compressed expression of a man who had spent years as a training master and could not stop evaluating the quality of everything around him, even the way other men breathed.
He was the ranking officer of what remained of the Night's Watch, a fact that no one had formally declared but which had settled itself into the room's understanding the moment they sat down. Edd was content with this arrangement. He had spent his entire time in the Watch being content with other people having the arrangement and had found it in many ways preferable.
There was, however, a question sitting in the middle of the room that nobody had touched yet, and if Emmett wasn't going to raise it, Edd was going to have to.
"The Night's Watch," Edd said.
Everyone looked at him. This was the third time today he had said something and earned the full attention of the room, which was more than his normal annual average.
"Technically," Edd continued, "we're deserters."
A brief, held silence.
"We abandoned the Wall. Our oaths required us to hold it. We didn't hold it. There are words for what that makes us, and none of them are flattering." He kept his voice level.
"I'm not raising this for myself. I'm raising it because men who've worn black for ten or twenty years need to know what they are now. Are they soldiers? Free men? Are they going to be hanged when some southern lord with an actual legal claim decides to make a point of it somewhere south of Moat Cailin?"
The room was quiet.
Aerion looked down the table, not at Edd but at Iron Emmett. The training master met his gaze and gave a single nod: yes, this is the question.
"The Night's Watch has served its purpose," Aerion said. "The Wall is gone. The men who served it are released from their oaths and are from this moment soldiers of the North." He addressed this to Emmett directly. "Does that sit well with you?"
Iron Emmett considered for a moment with the brief, thorough deliberation of a man who had spent years evaluating decisions made under pressure. "It does," he said. "The Watch held as long as there was something to hold. There isn't." A pause. "The men will want to hear it from you before the march. Formally."
"Before I leave," Aerion said. "You have my word."
Emmett nodded. That was that.
Edd looked at the ceiling briefly. He had spent eleven years under oaths that were now, apparently, void. He felt he should feel something more definitive about this. Mostly what he felt was that eleven years was a long time to have spent somewhere cold.
He pushed forward before he could think about it too long. "What do you actually know about the Others?"
The king looked at him.
"Not strategy," Edd clarified. "Not plans and chokepoints. What do you know about them? You were gone two months. You came back on a crystal dragon. It seems possible you learned something during that time that might be relevant to the central problem of everyone currently in this room."
A pause that was different from the other pauses in the meeting.
"They can be slowed," Aerion said. "Their source is far north. Far enough that mobilizing in full force will take them a season. We have time. Not unlimited time." He stopped.
Edd waited.
"I've fought worse things," Aerion said. He said it the way someone mentions that it is cold outside, not dramatically, simply as information.
Edd stared at him for a moment.
He tried to construct in his mind an entity worse than an Other. He had faced Others on the ice beyond the Wall, and he was fairly certain that his personal accounting of terrifying things placed them near the very top.
What this man had apparently encountered in two months of absence that exceeded that accounting was something Edd decided, with the instinct of a man who had survived a long time by knowing which questions not to ask, was better left unexplored.
For now.
"The Wall," he said instead. "It's empty. All of it. A hundred leagues of abandoned towers and open gates. Anything can walk through."
"Nothing can be done about the Wall right now," Aerion said. "Moat Cailin gives us more time than three hundred miles of ice we can't defend. The choice isn't between defending the Wall or not defending it. The choice is between using the time we have or wasting it."
Edd thought about the Wall. About all the names of all the men he'd known there, the ones who had made it this far and the ones who hadn't. About the weight of it: eight thousand years of the same purpose, passed from hand to hand like a torch, and then simply not passed anymore.
"Right," he said.
He let it go. He had become fairly proficient at letting things go. You had to be in this line of work. In the previous line of work.
The strategy settled into its final shape. Stannis commanded the march. Wyman managed Winterfell. Val would coordinate between the free folk and Stannis's forces. Then Aerion turned to the movement itself.
"Emmett," he said. "You have command of the former brothers. They're the most disciplined body we have for the march; keep them that way." He looked at Tormund.
"Tormund knows how to move large numbers of people through open country fast, without roads when necessary." Then he looked at Edd. "And I need someone who knows supply lines. Someone who's kept a garrison running on not enough of everything for years."
Edd blinked. "That is a fair description of the Night's Watch commissariat."
"Supply, logistics, coordination with Wyman's stewards. The march doesn't fail for want of food or wagons." A pause. "Can you do that?"
"I've done it with less," Edd said. "Usually while something was trying to kill me."
"Something may still be trying to kill you."
"At least it'll be familiar."
Something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed Aerion's face and vanished. He turned back to the map.
Edd opened his mouth. Then closed it.
He looked at Tormund, who was scratching his beard in a way that suggested either deep thought or insects, and at Wyman Manderly, who was already composing a separate list with the focused energy of a man calculating how many oat sacks fit on a wagon.
He looked at Iron Emmett, who had already begun making his own notes with the methodical precision of a man who had spent years transforming raw recruits into something useful.
"All right," Edd said.
The council broke with the practical efficiency of people who had a great deal to do and had just been told to start doing it. Edd filed out with the rest into the cold air of the yard and stood for a moment while the others dispersed around him.
He looked up at Smarag.
The dragon looked back at him with two cool blue eyes approximately the size of wagon wheels, containing, as far as Edd could tell, no particular feeling about Edd one way or the other.
"I've seen worse," Edd told himself.
He probably hadn't. He turned and went inside to begin figuring out the supply wagons, because someone was going to have to, and the list of people with the relevant experience had grown, in recent months, quite short.
He almost believed it would work.
He kept this information to himself.
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By the Fire
The fire was good, which was the main thing.
They had been debating for the better part of an hour whose fault it was that the firewood pile ended up on the west side of the yard instead of the east side, where the camp had settled, and no one had reached a conclusion that satisfied everyone, but the fire was good now regardless, and that made the debate largely theoretical.
There were six of them: Aldric, who had been a brother of the Night's Watch for seventeen years and was now something else that didn't have a name yet; Pylen, who had been a brother for six years and thought about it less philosophically.
Hedda, who was old enough to have grandchildren and in fact had grandchildren who were somewhere in the camp south of the outer gate; and Dalla's Knife, who was twenty-two and had been called Dalla's Knife since an incident involving a reindeer and three feet of ice that he refused to discuss.
Ser Willam of somewhere in the Stony Shore, whose house name Aldric had misplaced; and a girl called Mira, who was perhaps fifteen and had attached herself to the group at some point during the march from the Wall without anyone particularly deciding to allow it and who had been sitting in the same spot for two hours without complaint, which, in Aldric's opinion, demonstrated more survival instinct than most of the grown men he'd known in the Watch.
They had all seen the dragon land. Some of them had seen it better than others.
Aldric had been up on the wall, the Winterfell wall, not the Wall, when it came over the tree line to the north. He had been there because Pylen had owed him a watch shift and had not been there because Pylen was nowhere to be found, so Aldric had gone up himself and been standing with his hands on the cold stone when the shape appeared against the gray sky. He had described it twice already.
He was being asked to describe it again.
"Blue," he said. "Crystal-blue. Like, you know when deep water catches light from below? That kind of blue. And the scales had things growing out of them, not soft things, hard things. Like stones embedded in the skin. They should have made it look ugly." He paused, staring at the fire. "They didn't."
"This one wasn't fire," Dalla's Knife said. "It was crystal. Blue."
"No," Hedda agreed. "It wasn't."
Ser Willam of the Stony Shore, who had been listening with the faintly glazed expression of a man whose understanding of the world had been revised repeatedly over the past several months and was struggling to keep pace, said: "None of this was in any maester's lessons I had."
Hedda looked at him. "No," she said. "I expect not."
The fire crackled. Mira, without announcing her intention, produced a flask of something that smelled like pine resin and cold water and sent it around the group with the quiet efficiency of someone used to making herself useful in small ways.
Pylen, who had appeared out of the dark about an hour ago without explanation or apology, stared at the fire. "Moat Cailin," he said.
"What about it?" Aldric said.
"That's where we're going. All of us." Pylen continued staring at the fire. "You know what Moat Cailin is? It's the end of the North. The place where the North stops and the rest of the world begins."
Dalla's Knife said, "So we're leaving the North."
Pylen said, "We left the North when we left the Wall."
A silence that was not unhappy. Just honest.
The flask came back to Aldric. He took a drink and thought about eleven years on a cold stone structure that was now empty and open to whatever wanted to walk through it. He thought about all the names of all the men he'd known there. He thought about being on the wrong side of a wall that no longer meant anything and deciding that this meant not much had changed.
It was easier to think about the dragon.
"The king's going to destroy the Freys," Ser Willam said, apparently emerging from his own private chain of thought.
"Heard that," Aldric said.
"And then the Iron Islands."
"Heard that too."
Dalla's Knife: "One man."
"One man on a crystal dragon," Aldric said, "who came back from somewhere we can't name after two months gone, and he's taller than I remember, and that golden eye of his glows like something is burning behind it." He turned the flask in his hands. "I've stopped having normal thoughts about him."
Something that might have been a laugh made its way around the fire briefly and was released into the cold air.
Hedda said, "The Free Folk have a saying. It does not translate easily into the southern tongue. The meaning is something close to: the mountain moves when it chooses to." She looked at the fire steadily. "We say it of weirwoods. Of the cold itself. Of anything powerful enough that it does not need to explain itself to smaller things." A pause. "I have been saying it about him since the Wall."
The flask completed another circuit.
"He's going to beat them," Aldric said.
He heard himself say it and noted the surprise in his own voice.
"The Lannisters?" Pylen said. "Probably."
"The Others."
The group went quiet. Everyone looked at him.
He shrugged, because it was that or have to back it up with reasoning he wasn't entirely sure he had. "I'm just saying it plainly. Whatever he went off and did for two months, he came back bigger, harder, and with a dragon that could eat this camp for breakfast. He looked at that map the way a man looks at something he's already solved and is explaining to you." He shook his head. "He didn't look like a man hoping."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
The fire. The cold. Somewhere in the camp three fires over, someone laughed at something. The ordinary sounds of ten thousand people existing in proximity, the small sounds of survival continuing.
Mira looked up.
Above them, on the battlements of the Great Keep, two points of pale blue light glowed steadily against the dark. They had been there since the sun went down and the stars came out. Patient. Utterly still. The dragon's eyes, watching over the camp with the calm that very large and very old things had, the calm of something that had come from far away and intended to stay.
"You know," said Dalla's Knife, very quietly, "I almost believe it."
"Almost?" Aldric said.
The young man pulled his cloak tighter and did not take his eyes from the blue lights above. "Ask me again in Summer."
Hedda looked up too. The pale blue held steady against the dark, patient and quiet, watching over all of them without asking anything in return.
She almost smiled.
Someone, Aldric thought it was Ser Willam but couldn't be certain, added a log to the fire. The flask found its way back to the beginning. The night settled around them: cold and very long, as northern nights in winter always were. But the fire was good.
Above them, the crystal eyes watched on.