“How in the fucking hells can it get even colder?” Tomas Pyke shouted into the wind.Ralf could barely hear him through the blizzard.
The ranging party moved in a broken line across the white emptiness, each man following the dark shape ahead of him before the storm swallowed it. Pyke led them. Behind him came Mors and Willem, then Edden, Pate, Holter, Aggar, and Ralf. The order changed whenever one of them stumbled, which happened often enough that Ralf had stopped counting.
Snow lashed his face through the gap beneath his hood. It had worked past his scarf, down his collar, and into his boots. His toes had ceased hurting some time ago. That frightened him more than the pain had.
Pyke was right. The cold had changed.
This was Ralf’s third ranging in his years with the Night’s Watch. He knew the cold beyond the Wall. He knew how it crept through wool and boiled leather, how a man might wake after a hard night with two blackened toes and thank the gods it was only two.
This was something else.
The wind felt sharpened. Every breath cut his throat, and the air seemed to take warmth from him faster than his body could make it. Even the snow looked wrong, too fine and pale.
Ahead lay nothing but white. The hills had vanished. The frozen lake they had meant to skirt could have been ten paces away or ten miles. Every familiar marker had been erased beneath the storm.
They should have reached the watch shelter before midday.
Pyke had found no sign of it.
That was only the latest thing that no longer made sense.
Three days earlier, a haze had settled over the party. It was not sickness, at least not one Ralf knew. His memories remained his own, yet some of them no longer fitted together. He could remember crossing a narrow gorge beneath a leaning pine. He could also remember that they had gone around it through the forest.
The others had suffered the same confusion.
Near the Wall, they had found the remains of a wildling camp large enough for fifty people. Yet Ralf, Mors, and Holter had passed through that exact place a week before on their way to fish the nearby lake. There had been no camp. No sign that a wildling had come within miles of the Wall.
Later, they found a stand of dead black trees where Willem swore a hill should have been. Pate remembered the trees and the hill. Aggar remembered neither. Holter insisted they had crossed the same ground twice.
Something was wrong, as though the world itself had somehow changed. All of them could feel it, yet none could explain it.
“There!” Pyke called.
Ralf lifted his head.
Through the moving veil of snow, a dark line appeared ahead.
Trees.
“The wood!” Pyke shouted. “We shelter there!”
The trees broke the worst of the wind, though their branches creaked overhead like old gallows. Pyke chose a hollow beneath a cluster of firs, and they quickly built a shelter.
Ralf crawled beneath it on his hands and knees.
The cramped space filled with damp wool, sour breath, and the stink of men. Pate and Willem gathered whatever dry wood they could find beneath the trees. Holter struck his flint until his fingers shook. The first sparks died. The second caught a scrap of cloth, then a bundle of wood.
A small flame rose.
Every man crowded toward it.
“Fucking fuck,” Pyke muttered, crouching close enough to singe his gloves. “Can’t even shit in cold like this. It’ll freeze in your arse.”
“We’re going to lose our balls to the frost,” Edden said. He pressed himself against Pate, reaching both hands toward the flame. “Wake tomorrow and find them frozen to the ground.”
Aggar grinned through his beard. “Ralf has no cause to worry, then.”
The men laughed.
Ralf glared at them.
Even Pyke smiled.
Dickless Ralf.
Rapist Ralf.
That was what they called him. They would never understand. They had not known Rosie.
None of them had seen the way she used to smile at him or how she would stop to speak with him. She had laughed at his stories. She had asked after his mother when the fever came. Once, at a harvest dance, she had let her hand rest in his for half a song.
What else had he been meant to believe?
For years, he had imagined the house they would share. Their sons would have his eyes and their daughters her hair. He had built their whole life inside his mind, every detail of the future he wanted so badly.
Then he had asked her to marry him.
Rosie had laughed. Not cruelly, she claimed, but that was another lie. She had looked startled, then embarrassed, as though his love were something shameful that had crawled onto her shoe.
I love Mikken, she had said.
Mikken, the blacksmith’s son, with his broad shoulders and clean teeth.
Rosie had kept speaking, telling him she was sorry and that he would find someone else. As though he wanted someone else. As though all those smiles and all the time they had spent together meant nothing simply because she had decided they meant nothing.
Then the rage had come.
Ralf had taken what, in his mind, had always belonged to him.
The entire village had come for him afterward. Mikken himself had held the knife while the others pinned Ralf down and mutilated him.
They would have hanged him if Lord Glover had not intervened.
The Wall or death.
It was not fair. It was not justice. What had he done wrong? It was not his fault.
It was Rosie’s fault.
Aggar was still smirking at him across the fire.
“Keep laughing,” Ralf said. “Perhaps the cold will freeze your tongue before I cut it out.”
“You don’t have the balls to do that, Ralf. Literally,” Aggar replied.
A few of the men chuckled, but Pyke silenced them with a look.
“We have enough trouble without stabbing each other.”
Ralf lowered his gaze to the fire.
The flame struggled in the draught, bending almost flat whenever the wind found a gap in the shelter. They fed it splinters, needles, and strips cut from a broken arrow shaft. Slowly, feeling returned to Ralf’s fingers as a deep, throbbing ache.
They waited.
The blizzard weakened by slow degrees. The wind lost some of its fury, and the cloth above them ceased snapping. Snow still fell beyond the shelter, but the trees had become visible through it.
Ralf must have drifted toward sleep, because the sound entered his thoughts before he understood that it was real.
Crunch.
A pause.
Crunch.
His eyes opened.
The others remained gathered around the fire. Edden’s head had fallen against Pate’s shoulder. Willem sat with his arms folded over his knees. Aggar was scraping ice from his beard.
Crunch.
This time, Mors looked up.
“You hear that?”
Pyke raised one hand.
Every man went still.
At first, Ralf thought it was only snow falling from the branches. Those sounds came with soft crashes and the hiss of powder.
This sound repeated itself.
Crunch.
Scrape.
Crunch.
Something was walking outside.
Pyke reached for his sword. The quiet rasp of steel leaving leather passed through the shelter, and the others followed.
“Could be a deer,” Holter whispered.
“No,” Mors said.
Ralf strained to listen.
The footfalls moved somewhere beyond the trees, hidden by snow and mist.
Then came another sound beneath them.
A dry clicking.
It reminded Ralf of bones thrown into a cooking pot, except these did not strike once and settle. They scraped against one another with every movement.
Click.
Scrape.
Click.
The noise stopped.
Pyke crawled out from beneath the shelter.
“Up,” he ordered. “All of you. Weapons ready.”
Ralf followed, sword in hand.
The cold struck him at once. Beyond the trees, the world remained a white haze, the blizzard weakened but not gone.
They spread into a rough circle.
Ralf turned slowly, searching between the trunks. Every dark shape became a crouching man until he stared long enough to recognize bark and branch. His sword felt clumsy in his stiff fingers.
Nothing moved.
Then he saw it.
A figure stood in the whiteness beyond the nearest trees.
Tall. Thin. Too still.
Ralf could not see its face, only the suggestion of shoulders and a head within the blowing snow.
He blinked.
The figure was gone.
“There,” he said.
No one answered.
Ralf pointed with his sword. “There was someone there.”
Pyke faced the direction he indicated and raised his blade.
“Come out!” he shouted into the storm. “Come out, you wildling fucks!”
Pyke’s challenge was answered.
At first, there were only three, half-seen between the trees. Then another appeared to Ralf’s left, followed by two more behind it. Dark silhouettes gathered throughout the white haze, their movements slow and uneven. Some leaned as they walked. Others dragged one leg through the snow, leaving crooked furrows behind them.
The clicking returned.
Bone scraped against bone. Something wet pulled apart and joined again with every step.
“Gods,” Edden whimpered. “We’re surrounded.”
Ralf counted six shapes, then ten, then lost track. The storm revealed them only to hide them again, but the circle kept drawing closer.
His sword trembled in his hand.
There had to be a path through them. Between the two firs behind Pate, perhaps. The snow looked undisturbed there. If he ran before the others, the creatures might fall upon Pyke first. Tomas Pyke had always called himself a leader. Let him lead them now.
Ralf shifted one foot toward the gap.
“Close together!” Pyke shouted. “Backs inward. Blades out. Whatever comes through those trees, we cut it down.”
The command held the party together. Mors moved to Pyke’s right. Willem and Holter guarded the rear. Even Edden raised his sword, though he gripped it with both hands to keep it steady.
Ralf remained near the edge of their circle, still watching the gap.
Then the nearest shape stepped out of the storm.
Whatever thoughts he had of escape vanished.
It wore the remains of a black cloak.
The cloth hung in frozen strips from one shoulder, exposing a chest split open from throat to stomach. Grey ribs showed through the wound. No blood flowed from it. There was scarcely enough flesh left to bleed.
Its face had been eaten away below the nose. Teeth grinned from a ruined jaw, and within its sunken eyes burned two points of blue light.
Another corpse followed.
This one was little more than a skeleton held together by blackened tendons and scraps of frozen skin. A rusted sword remained clenched in one bony hand, though Ralf could not understand how its fingers still held it.
More emerged across the clearing.
Dead wildlings wrapped in rotting furs. A man wearing the remains of a Night’s Watch cloak. Women with broken arrows lodged in their bodies. One corpse dragged its entrails through the snow, while another walked with its head hanging sideways from a strip of flesh.
They were dead.
All of them.
Yet they kept coming.
Edden screamed.
He turned and ran between the trees.
“Hold!” Pyke roared. “Edden, get back here!”
A bowstring snapped.
The arrow struck Edden between the shoulders and punched through his chest. He looked down at the bloody point as though unable to understand how it had appeared there.
Then the dead reached him.
Three corpses dragged him into the snow. Edden kicked and screamed as one tore at his face with broken teeth. Another drove its fingers beneath his jaw and pulled until flesh split from bone.
His screams became a bubbling whine.
The dead crashed into the brothers.
Pyke met the first with a downward cut that split its skull to the teeth. It fell, the blue light fading from its eyes, and he turned the same motion into a strike against another.
“Cut off their heads!” he shouted.
Mors drove his sword through a corpse’s chest. The thing caught the blade between its ribs and pulled itself along the steel until its teeth reached his shoulder. Mors screamed and released the sword. Willem hacked the corpse’s arm away, but two more closed upon them before either man could recover.
Pate fought better than Ralf had ever seen him fight.
He severed the spine of one dead man, then smashed the pommel of his sword through the face of another. For a moment, Ralf thought Pate might clear an opening for them.
A spearhead burst from Pate’s stomach.
He stared at it, his mouth working without sound. The corpse behind him twisted the shaft and lifted. Pate’s boots left the ground as the spear tore upward through his belly.
The dead threw him aside.
Holter disappeared beneath grasping hands. Aggar died when an axe split his collarbone and buried itself in his chest. Willem tried to reach him, only to slip in the blood and vanish among the bodies.
Ralf found his feet.
He did not remember deciding to run.
One moment, he stood among his dying brothers. The next, he was forcing himself between the trees, branches clawing at his hood while screams followed him through the snow.
Pyke shouted something behind him.
Perhaps it was Ralf’s name. Perhaps it was another order.
Ralf did not turn.
He wanted to live.
He staggered through a drift and nearly fell. His breath came in ragged gasps. The sword dragged at his side, too heavy to lift but too precious to abandon.
The trees thinned ahead.
An open stretch of white waited beyond the trees. If he crossed it, perhaps he could lose the dead among the hills. Perhaps he could find the Wall.
Ralf broke from the trees and stopped.
Three figures stood ahead of him.
They were taller than any men he had ever seen, each close to seven feet in height. White folds of flesh clung tightly to their bodies, and their eyes were black pits filled with blue light.
Each held a sword. The blades were thin and translucent. Cold rolled from them with enough force to sting Ralf’s exposed skin.
White Walkers.
The cold ones.
The stories his mother had told him returned all at once. She had spoken of pale demons who rode dead horses and hunted men beyond the Wall. She had told him how Brandon the Builder had raised the Wall to keep them out and protect those who lived beneath it.
Now Ralf stared at them.
His mother had been right.
The nearest creature tilted its head.
Ralf’s sword slipped from his fingers and sank into the snow.
“No.”
His knees struck the ground.
Tears froze against his cheeks almost as soon as they fell. No. He did not deserve this.
“I did nothing,” he sobbed. “I did nothing wrong.”
The cold ones advanced. They did not hurry. They did not need to. Ralf could not persuade his legs to stand.
He closed his eyes and trembled, waiting for the end.
Then he heard something enormous burst from the white haze behind them.
Ralf opened his eyes.
The creature struck the nearest cold one with a roar.
Ralf recoiled, throwing his arms over his head. The new creature was shaped like a man only in the loosest sense. It stood as tall as the cold ones, with white fur covering its body, thickest around its neck and spine. Its head belonged to a monstrous wolf, its jaws filled with teeth large enough to tear through a man’s skull.
The wolf-thing seized the first cold one by the chest.
The cold one slashed upward. Its ice sword opened a deep wound across the beast’s ribs, releasing a spray of dark blood that steamed in the frozen air.
The creature barely slowed.
It drove one clawed hand through the cold one’s chest and tore sideways.
The pale body shattered.
The other two attacked together.
One blade struck the wolf-creature across the shoulder. The second stabbed into its side. Frost spread from both wounds.
The beast roared.
Its wounds closed fast enough for Ralf to watch the torn flesh draw together beneath the blood. The creature lunged before the cold ones could strike again. It knocked one sword aside with its forearm, seized the wielder by the throat, and slammed it into the ground.
A claw passed through its face.
The last cold one raised its sword.
The wolf-creature leapt.
They vanished together into the snow for a moment. Then the pale head flew free, spinning once before shattering against a tree.
Silence followed.
Ralf remained where he had fallen, unable to breathe.
The wolf-creature turned its long head toward the woods, where the dead had killed most of his brothers of the Watch.
The beast dropped to all fours and charged into the trees.
A corpse flew from the haze moments later, its body torn in half. Then came roars, snapping bones, and the heavy impacts of bodies striking trees.
The dead were no longer hunting.
Something else was hunting them.
Ralf crawled toward his sword.
He did not intend to help. He did not care whether the wolf-thing saved Pyke or ate him.
His fingers had almost reached the hilt when two hands seized him from behind.
Ralf screamed.
He kicked and twisted, expecting dead fingers to close around his throat. Instead, he heard a living voice curse beside his ear.
“Hold him!”
Another pair of hands tore the sword away.
Ralf looked up.
Two wildlings stood over him, wrapped in white furs, their faces streaked with white paint.
One pressed a bone knife beneath his jaw.
“Heh, crow. Where were you going?”
Ralf could not believe his luck.
First the dead. Then the cold ones from his mother’s tales. Then some half-man, half-wolf horror. Now wildlings.
What had he ever done to deserve this?
“Let me go, you fools!” He twisted against their grip. “There are monsters in these woods. We have to run!”
“Monsters?” the second wildling asked.
The two men exchanged amused looks.
Then they dragged him toward the clearing where the damned wolf-man had fought the dead.
Ralf dug his heels into the snow, but the wildlings were stronger, and his legs still felt hollow from terror. More figures emerged through the thinning storm, men and women wrapped in furs and armed with spears, axes, knives, and bows.
There were dozens of them.
Some watched Ralf with open contempt. Others paid him no attention, their eyes fixed upon the woods where the wolf-creature had gone.
The sounds of fighting had stopped.
Then the great shape returned through the snow.
Ralf recoiled so violently that the wildlings nearly lost their grip.
“There!” he screamed. “It’s there! Run, you fucking savages!”
No one ran.
Several of the wildlings laughed.
The beast slowed as it approached them. Blood darkened the fur across its chest and arms, though the wounds Ralf had seen were already healed. It stood upright, its wolfish head turning toward Ralf.
Then its body began to change.
The long jaws pulled inward with a wet grinding sound. Its teeth shortened. The pointed ears sank into its skull as the white fur retreated beneath its skin. Its shoulders narrowed, bones shifting beneath flesh until the monstrous frame became that of a tall, powerfully built man.
When the change was finished, a naked man stood where the wolf had been.
Steam rose from his skin into the cold air. Old scars crossed his chest, along with several fresh wounds that were already sealing.
A wildling woman stepped forward and wrapped a heavy fur cloak around his shoulders.
He fastened it without looking away from Ralf.
There was something familiar about his face.
Ralf stared as the man approached, searching through his memories. He had seen this man before. That long northern face. Those grey eyes. The man whose arrival at the Wall had fed gossip for weeks.
Then recognition struck.
The disgraced prince.
Brandon Stark.
The crown prince of Winterfell who had come to take the black, only to vanish beyond the Wall before speaking his vows.
That was all the Watch had talked about for moons. Some said the prince had lost his nerve. Others claimed he had joined the wildlings. The less charitable brothers said the disgrace of House Stark had found one more way to shame his blood.
Then the Lord Commander had forbidden any further talk.
No search party had been sent. No ravens had flown south, at least none Ralf knew of. The brothers had been ordered to forget that Brandon Stark had ever come to the Wall.
Perhaps this was why.
Perhaps the Lord Commander had known the prince was a monster.
The man stopped before Ralf.
“What is your name?”
“Ralf.”
The prince studied him.
“Did anything strange happen three days ago?”
Ralf stared at him.
Brandon’s jaw tightened. “At the Wall. South of it. Anywhere you know. Did men begin remembering things differently?”
Ralf thought of the wildling camp that had not been there. He thought of the haze inside his head whenever he tried to remember the past week.
He said nothing.
The prince continued, more to himself than to Ralf.
“Why?” The word slipped from Ralf’s mouth.
“Because none of us can remember any events from south of the Wall during the last six years.”
Six years?
Ralf’s thoughts snagged on the number.
What was the fool talking about?
Brandon stepped closer. “When did you leave the Wall?”
“Six days ago.” Ralf swallowed. “What you mean, six years?”
The prince looked confused. “I left the Wall six years ago.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Brandon stared at him.
“You fled only moons ago,” Ralf said. “Everyone knows it. You came to take the black, then ran before speaking your vows.”
The wildling behind Ralf twisted his arm higher.
Pain shot through his shoulder.
Ralf screamed.
“Do not make fools of us or our king, crow,” the man said.
King?
Ralf looked from the wildling to Brandon Stark.
The prince did not rebuke the title.
Brandon turned slightly away, his eyes settling upon something beyond the trees.
“Hircine was right,” he murmured.
The name meant nothing to Ralf.
Hircine.
Some wildling god, perhaps. They had strange gods beyond the Wall. Perhaps these people meant to sacrifice him to this Hircine.
Ralf stared at the man who had once been a prince and was now a king beyond the Wall. The disgraced prince had not merely deserted. He had crowned himself king of the savages.
Brandon looked at him again.
“You said moons. You are certain?”
Ralf nodded quickly.
The king beyond the Wall glanced toward the wildlings around him, his expression hardening.
“We return to camp,” he said. “Bring Ralf as well. We march for the Wall as soon as the storm breaks.”
One of the wildlings frowned. “The Wall? Why?”
“I need to know what happened, assuming Ralf is not lying.” Brandon’s gaze remained fixed upon him. “We all know something has changed. Something none of us can explain.”
He looked toward the south.
“I need to speak with the Lord Commander… With my brothers in Winterfell.”
He paused.
“And most of all, with the Dragonborn.”
Ralf knew that title.
Everyone did.
King Harald Stormcrown. The sorcerer king in the south. The man some brothers called a god.
Why would a wildling king want him?
The grip upon Ralf’s arms loosened as the men prepared to move.
Ralf tore himself free and ran.
He managed three steps.
A wildling woman moved into his path. Ralf saw an axe rise and threw up his hands, certain she meant to split his skull.
She turned the weapon at the last moment.
The heavy haft struck him above the temple.
The snow rushed up to meet him, and the last thing Ralf heard was the wildlings laughing as darkness swallowed him whole.
.
.
Setting up the endgame, where Dagon and Bal move against Harald together.
The coming mega-war will have Harald surrounded on all sides, and the Dragon Break has given the princes a massive advantage.