Chapter 179

The Wall. 299 AC.

Jon Snow.

For the first time in three hundred years, the Wall was as crowded as a ransacked anthill. Everyone hurried somewhere, doing something, helping someone, and the key castles along its length had begun filling with life again. In a brief lull, Jon watched it all and could honestly say he had done everything in his power. Through diplomacy, through appeals to duty, to honor, to love of the North, and through unconcealed threats of what awaited traitors, he had rallied every house in the North and gathered nearly four thousand fighting men. Add the brothers of the Night's Watch, and it came to some five thousand able to bear arms.

It was far more than Jon had expected, yet the grim thoughts would not leave him. What good were five thousand men against an army of fifty thousand, trailed by mythical horrors crawling up out of the deepest pit of some distant realm of eternal frost? Wildlings were only men, after all, and died like any other. But how did one kill a dead man? No one knew, and that alone was terrifying.

"When will Lord Stark arrive?" Even asking the question left the Quiet Wolf's bastard feeling queasy.

"Lord Stark is occupied restoring order along the North's farthest borders. He will reach the Wall within two months at the latest." At this the old Lord Commander only snorted and said nothing, unlike the man standing beside him.

"Let us hope that when Lord Stark finally deigns to arrive, we are still alive to greet him." Thorne held no reverence for anyone.

The northern army that had marched south to fight for King Stannis had, in truth, ceased to exist. Only two or three thousand men remained, a pitiful remnant beside their original numbers. To keep enough men on the Wall, Jon had been forced to strip the North's borders bare, leaving them open to every manner of rabble.

"Have we learned anything more about the wights, Lord Commander?" The question weighed heavily on Jon. One could not fight what one did not understand.

"I am afraid not. All we have to show for it is a severed hand." The Old Bear was in no better temper; too many men had died for so meager a result. "The wildling prisoners gave us nothing under questioning."

If wildlings were only men, and died like any other, then how did one kill something already dead? Hundreds of scouts sent out, a handful of skirmishes, and none of it had advanced their cause. It had confirmed only one weakness: wights feared fire and burned in it with unnatural speed. Everything else seemed to harm them only in passing, if at all.

They needed proof that these mythical creatures truly existed, for even Jon, who had fought them with his own hands, still could not fully believe in the walking horror. The whole expedition was presently using the homestead of some wildling named Craster as a waystation, striking out from there on scouting runs. Their goal was simple enough to state: capture at least one wight alive, or as alive as such a thing could be.

"Perhaps I should lend some of my own men to the rangers?"

"Pointless. Those soft lordlings would accomplish nothing, sooner die somewhere out in the snow." Thorne offered his invariably important opinion with his usual sardonic smile.

From the very first day, he and Ser Alliser Thorne had shared something like mutual affection, if loathing could be called that. Jon despised the old knight, and Thorne despised Snow in turn, needling him at every opportunity. There was no counting how many times the Lord Commander had talked his subordinate down, sparing that ugly face an introduction to the back of a steel gauntlet.

"I would not have suggested it if the results had been any different." Jon had long since stopped being the tongue-tied boy unable to answer a verbal jab. "Perhaps if you carried out your own duties properly, things might look different."

"I lack your gift for handling rabble, Lord Snow." Thorne oversaw the combat training of every new brother who joined the Watch, and naturally he took poorly to having his work criticized by a bastard he despised.

"ENOUGH!" Lord Mormont's patience finally broke. "We have matters far more pressing than your endless bickering. An army of wildlings marches on us, the White Walkers behind them, and the two of you..." The Lord Commander was the one man on the Wall with the standing to bring them both to heel.

The matter of the White Walkers was no simpler. If there had been encounters with them, no one had lived to tell of it. No survivors had ever turned up, only those unsettling arrangements of corpses laid out in spirals, the work of no living hand. Jon admitted, if only to himself, that he feared the monsters children were frightened with in bedtime tales, but something about what had happened at Castle Black had convinced him, for a time, that only the recently dead could rise as wights. That, it turned out, was wrong. The dark magic cared nothing for how fresh or how decayed a corpse might be. Jon had read enough to know better, and his hair stood on end when he tried to reckon the number of dead wildlings accumulated over eight thousand years. The thought gnawed at his spirit and dragged him toward despair, until, unexpectedly, it was Ser Alliser who pulled him back. The very man he traded barbs with day after day had eased his mind by telling him the wildlings held to a custom of burning their dead. It helped, a little. Not much.

"...Stonedoor is already being resettled. Icemark and Deep Lake are underway, we'll have them finished within two weeks." At least there was good news somewhere. "Greyguard is being restored, but that one will give us trouble, it's far too ruined, and the supply trains from Winterfell have dried up." Had Thorne forgotten that the North was at war?

"...We don't have the resources to repair every castle. The key ones will have to be enough."

"...We need all of them..."

"...We'll never have enough men to hold them all. Better to spend our time on something more useful..."

A knock sounded at the door of the small chamber. At Lord Mormont's word, a Night's Watch brother from among the recent recruits hurried in. New arrivals were easy enough to spot: unblemished skin marked a newcomer, while flaking, cracked, wind-burned faces belonged to those who had already spent a long stretch on the Wall.

"Lord Commander, Ser Alliser, and..." The man faltered. Jon was no minor figure among them, yet he held no official title or rank, and such awkward pauses happened often enough because of it.

"Never mind that, speak," Jon urged him.

"It's... the ranging party has returned, and Tarly is with them... He says he saw a White Walker." It took only a moment for the words to sink in before the order came, as inevitable as it was.

"Bring Tarly here, now!!!"