Chapter 152: Honey and Poison

In the Gift, below the Fist of the First Men, in the place men called Shadow Vale, the winter wind came down like ice knives, howling between bare trees and naked rock, whipping snow hard as iron grit against the low, crowded, disorderly tents. This was the great free folk camp that answered to Tormund, the King-Beyond-the-Wall by courtesy of everyone who liked him, and it was meant to be a place for storing food, resting, and outlasting the cold. The air in it, just now, was anything but restful: a heat of agitation, greed, fear, and stirred-up wildness moving from fire to fire.

Tormund stood before his tent, a patchwork of thick hides and salvaged canvas slightly larger than the rest, red hair a riot, brow folded down. He was looking at several piles of “goods” newly arrived at the camp’s edge under their crust of snow, and at his people crowded around them with too much light in their eyes. The goods had come by night, days ago, carried by agile strangers in heavy studded leather unlike anything the local free folk wore, speaking with odd accents, and explaining themselves as kin from the farther north, the deeper ice. They had brought dozens of oilcloth bundles of new, sharp short spears, hand axes, and bone-tipped arrows; sacks of what they called southern refined salt and grease; and, weightiest of all, enough jerky and coarse-ground grain to feed the whole camp for half a month.

“Tormund!” A scar-faced warrior brandished a new short axe, its edge catching the dim light. “Look at this! With these, what do the crows’ broken fences matter? The fat lands, the warm houses, the endless food, all of it just over the mountains! The kin said if we follow them and bring down the Wall, the whole south is ours! No more waiting to die in this cursed ice!”

“Aye! The southerners are busy bleeding each other white, they’ve no eyes for us! There will never be a better hour!”

“The Watch? There’s hardly a Watch left. I’ve asked. Castle Black holds a few dozen greybeards and cripples!”

“The kin said more of their people are coming behind them. The moment we move, they strike from Eastwatch, and the Wall comes down!”

The shouting rose in waves, and men who had wavered for years felt the sudden weapons and the sudden food and the old hunger to be done with hardship, and their eyes went fevered.

Tormund’s own gut was full of doubt. He wanted a better land for his people, truly; and he trusted the Watch and the southern lords about as far as he could throw a mammoth. But these well-armed kin from nowhere, and the future they painted, too beautiful by half, itched at him in the place where his instincts lived. When he pressed them for detail, they gave him fog, and repeated that the chance must not be missed, that the south lay empty, and hinted, gently, that other bands had received the same gifts and the same invitation, and that a chief who hesitated might find the spoils already spoken for.

Then a commotion broke out at the camp’s edge. A hunting party came in carrying a few scrawny snow hares and a frozen elk, and supporting between them a scout, blood-crusted and half-frozen, one of the men Tormund had quietly sent toward Eastwatch days ago to find these promised follow-on forces.

They laid him by the fire and got hot soup into him, and he came back far enough to speak, hoarse and terrified. “Tormund. Eastwatch. It’s false. All of it. There is no army of kin. In a gully outside Eastwatch I saw, I saw several hundred men. Dressed near enough like us. But they moved in order, in ranks, not like our people ever moved. They were ringed around great wagons under cloth, and the wind took a corner of it, and I saw iron armor. And the moon-and-falcon of the Vale. And their speech, it wasn’t ours, and it wasn’t the far north’s. It was the mountain clans of the Vale. I know that speech. They kept me as a slave when I was young.”

The camp went silent as if struck. All the heat and clamor died like fire under a bucket of meltwater, and what remained was cold, and a horror nobody wanted to hold.

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“Vale men. In our clothes. Playing our kin.” Tormund came up off his heels with the blood roaring in his head. He strode to the gift pile and ripped the oilcloth off a bundle of spears: new hafts, and heads forged with a craft no free folk grindstone had ever owned. He snapped a piece of jerky and put it to his nose: salt, smoke, and underneath, faint, the herb-smell southern storehouses use against vermin.

“We’ve been played!” The roar that came out of him was a wounded animal’s. He hurled the jerky into the snow. “The poison snakes of the Vale! They want us to break ourselves on the Wall’s iron gate and pull their chestnuts out of the fire! When we and the Watch have torn each other dead, they march north with clean banners, to put down the rebellion, to drive out the wildlings, and the whole world nods along!”

Rage and hindsight went through the camp like grass fire. The warriors who had been shouting for the south a moment before had nothing in their faces now but the shame of the fooled, and the will to kill something about it.

“Kill the messengers!” “Drag them out and settle it!” “They don’t get to win this!” “Tormund, what do we do?”

Tormund pulled the ice air into his lungs until his head cleared. If the Vale had dared this much, there was more behind it. Men dressed as free folk storming the Wall would hang the blame on the free folk whether they won or died, and after that the Vale’s army would come north with perfect justification, and his people would get no land, only the enmity of every kingdom and a pit with no bottom.

And then the whistles sounded again from the pickets, and the outer guards came stumbling in pale. “Tormund! From the south! A big column of horse! The banners, it’s the Karstarks of Karhold! And with them, men we’ve never seen, grey-green cloaks, moving fast as wolves!”

Karstark. And grey-green strangers. Tormund’s chest tightened. Alfie Karstark, that eastern lord with no special love for the Watch or the Starks either one, riding deep into the Gift with an army, now, and those silent others with him.

There was no time to think it through. He took up his long axe and roared at his people: “Weapons! But not against the south! We clean our own house first! Find the Vale filth and drag every last one into the light!”

Almost on his word, short, savage bursts of fighting broke out in the camp’s far corners: the hidden messengers and their bought men, seeing the game exposed, trying to silence witnesses or cut their way clear in the confusion. They had underestimated how fast enraged free folk close distance, and they had not known they were already marked, watched for days by Grey Shadow’s people and Karstark scouts alike. It was over quickly. Seven or eight of the Vale imposters died where they stood; the last few were taken bleeding.

So when Lord Alfie Karstark rode into Shadow Vale at the head of hundreds of Karhold horse and as many swift, grey-green-painted Battanian veteran skirmishers, what met him was Tormund directing his people as they bound the Vale captives, amid scattered gifts and the signs of a short, ugly fight.

“Tormund!” Alfie looked down from the saddle, voice booming, murder in it and, underneath, something like strange respect. “So you weren’t fool enough to swallow the Vale’s honey and its poison in the same bite! These carrion were here to march you into hell and sell the North to the Eyrie on the way!”

Tormund kept his axe in both hands and his eyes on the silent, elite-looking strangers behind the Karhold banners. “Karstark. What brings your army into the Gift? And who are these?”

“I came because someone smelled this rot long before the Vale’s vipers finished cooking it.” Alfie’s smile was thin, and he tipped his head at the grey-green ranks. “As for them, call them friends who couldn’t stand by. Tormund, short version: the Vale is impersonating you. They mean to storm the Watch in your skins, hang it on your people, and bring their army north over your corpses. Their vanguard and their bought men have already been cleaned out, at Eastwatch, and at Queenscrown. But the main troupe, the ones directing this mummer’s show, is still on its way. So. Two roads. Stay here, wait for the Vale host, and be erased as rebellious wildlings alongside these bodies. Or work with me, wreck their play on its opening night, and make the true enemy pay the bill.”

Tormund’s eyes went from Alfie to the Battanians to the terrified captives in the snow, and the sums did themselves. Karstark was almost certainly telling the truth. The Vale had failed here, and the Vale did not quit. His people were in this whether they chose it or not. And working with Karstark might be riding a tiger, but at least the enemy in front of him had a face now; and these Battanians carried something he half-recognized and could not name, nothing like southern lords’ arrogance, more like kin, men shaped by hard country, who respected strength and kept their oaths.

“Work with you how?” he said, low.

Alfie’s smile turned cruel, and he nudged a Vale captive with his boot. “Simple. These actors are going to help us send their director a very big gift.”