Chapter 225

The Vale. Gulltown. 301 AC.

Axel Arryn.

The Snow had clearly been hoping for more substantial help, but he had little cause to complain; I had been quite sincere with him. He seemed to have expected that the moment I laid eyes on a dead man, I would rush off to rally the banners, pacify Westeros, and help the northerners solve every one of their problems free of charge. Jon, clever as he was, remained just a touch naive. Call the wolf pup whatever you like, but Starks would always be Starks. For the petty kings of Westeros to set aside every grudge, join hands, and march off to fight the "true enemy" together... I honestly couldn't say what it would take.

I had already granted Snow a great deal: the Falcon Bank had extended the Starks a loan at a purely symbolic rate of interest, I had allowed them to purchase grain at prewar prices (the war, and the approaching winter, had driven food prices up considerably), I had promised to send three thousand men, offered up my contacts in Essos, taken on the obligation of helping mine dragonglass and ship it north by sea, set aside several workshops for producing obsidian weapons, and arranged a handful of smaller economic measures to let the northerners breathe a little easier.

For several hours they tried to convince me that something close to the Dagor Dagorath itself was brewing beyond the Wall, but frankly, I didn't believe a word of it. That trick might have worked on ordinary people with no experience of magic, but not on me. Magic was nothing new to me, a dead man walking would hardly surprise me, and mythical creatures even less so, and my conversation with Snow only left me more convinced that the problem was being blown out of proportion. The reasoning was simple enough: nothing had been heard of the White Walkers in eight thousand years, and in that span of time enough people had died beyond the Wall to repopulate all of Westeros and Essos combined, yet since the Wall still stood and the continent had not turned into one vast graveyard, the Walkers had clearly not spent those thousands of years preparing for war against mankind; they had simply been idle. Consider further: by Jon's own account, a man named Mance Rayder had spent nearly twenty years gathering the wildling tribes together. That had not been some foolish desire to style himself King beyond the Wall; no, the truth was simpler than that. He feared the Walkers and used that fear as a way to unite the wildlings.

How much strength would mythical creatures and tireless undead really need to deal with mankind? Drawing on my own experience from my past life, I could say with confidence: not much at all. When the Nazgûl seized Minas Ithil, it took only a few years to drive every last Gondorian out of their territory entirely. Villages, fortresses, and a steady stream of reinforcements from Minas Tirith were plainly a far greater challenge than chasing down savages for whom bronze weapons represented the height of technology. A closer parallel was the collapse of Arnor. Cardolan, one of the fragments of that fallen kingdom, had held out against the forces of Angmar for a long time, slowly losing ground. The surviving Dúnedain fled and stubbornly held out at Tyrn Gorthad (the burial mounds) with help from the Elves, but the Great Plague struck the kingdom hard, and the mass rising of the dead at Tyrn Gorthad put an end to Cardolan for good. In time the name of the place was forgotten, and the common folk simply came to call it the Barrow downs.

I had never made a habit of taking my enemies for fools, not until they gave me good reason to think otherwise. If the White Walkers were not idiots, they had a reason for gathering all the wildlings into one mass, and there were two explanations that struck me as most plausible. The first: they had gathered them simply to wipe them all out in a single stroke. Not the fastest method, perhaps, but the most reliable way to bring the whole of the Far North under their control. The second: the Walkers meant to send the wildlings in as the first wave. Whether to break whatever wards protected the Wall or simply to wear mankind down first, it made little difference; the wildlings would make fine cannon fodder either way. Afterward, they could raise both the dead wildlings and the dead defenders of the Wall alike. Nothing but advantages either way.

The second explanation struck me as the more likely one, which was why my help to the North had not been quite so comprehensive. There was no sense in marching nearly thirty thousand knights against bands of wildlings. That would simply bleed the Vale dry. And let's be honest, even if every kingdom suddenly made peace and threw its full strength at the Wall, what would they actually do there? Simply standing around would be idiotic, and marching north on campaign would be an even greater idiocy. Far better to hasten the destruction of the wildlings and turn the Wall itself into an impregnable bastion against the Others. It might not hurt to go to the Wall myself, either, to look into the magic of the Children of the Forest, and perhaps add something of my own to it.

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