It was dark in the Skirling Pass. The great stone flanks of the
mountains hid the sun for most of the day, so they rode in shadow,
the breath of man and horse steaming in the cold air. Icy fingers
of water trickled down from the snowpack above into small frozen
pools that cracked and broke beneath the hooves of their garrons.
Sometimes they would see a few weeds struggling from some crack in
the rock or a splotch of pale lichen, but there was no grass, and
they were above the trees now.
The track was as steep as it was narrow, wending its way ever
upward. Where the pass was so constricted that rangers had to go
single file, Squire Dalbridge would take the lead, scanning the
heights as he went, his longbow ever close to hand. It was said he
had the keenest eyes in the Night’s Watch.
Ghost padded restlessly by Jon’s side. From time to time
he would stop and turn, his ears pricked, as if he heard something
behind them. Jon did not think the shadowcats would attack living
men, not unless they were starving, but he loosened Longclaw in its
scabbard even so.
A wind-carved arch of grey stone marked the highest point of the
pass. Here the way broadened as it began its long descent toward
the valley of the Milkwater. Qhorin decreed that they would rest
here until the shadows began to grow again. “Shadows are
friends to men in black,” he said.
Jon saw the sense of that. It would be pleasant to ride in the
light for a time, to let the bright mountain sun soak through their
cloaks and chase the chill from their bones, but they dared not.
Where there were three watchers there might be others, waiting to
sound the alarm.
Stonesnake curled up under his ragged fur cloak and was asleep
almost at once. Jon shared his salt beef with Ghost while Ebben and
Squire Dalbridge fed the horses. Qhorin Halfhand sat with his back
to a rock, honing the edge of his longsword with long slow strokes.
Jon watched the ranger for a few moments, then summoned his courage
and went to him. “My lord,” he said, “you never
asked me how it went. With the girl.”
“I am no lord, Jon Snow.” Qhorin slid the stone
smoothly along the steel with his two-fingered hand.
“She told me Mance would take me, if I ran with
her.”
“She told you true.”
“She even claimed we were kin. She told me a story . . . ”
“ . . . of Bael the Bard and the rose
of Winterfell. So Stonesnake told me. It happens I know the song.
Mance would sing it of old, when he came back from a ranging. He
had a passion for wildling music. Aye, and for their women as
well.”
“You knew him?”
“We all knew him.” His voice was sad. They were friends as well as brothers, Jon realized, and now
they are sworn foes. “Why did he desert?”
“For a wench, some say. For a crown, others would have
it.” Qhorin tested the edge of his sword with the ball of his
thumb. “He liked women, Mance did, and he was not a man whose
knees bent easily, that’s true. But it was more than that. He
loved the wild better than the Wall. It was in his blood. He was
wildling born, taken as a child when some raiders were put to the
sword. When he left the Shadow Tower he was only going home
again.”
“Was he a good ranger?”
“He was the best of us,” said the Halfhand,
“and the worst as well. Only fools like Thoren Smallwood
despise the wildlings. They are as brave as we are, Jon. As strong,
as quick, as clever. But they have no discipline. They name
themselves the free folk, and each one thinks himself as good as a
king and wiser than a maester. Mance was the same. He never learned
how to obey.”
“No more than me,” said Jon quietly.
Qhorin’s shrewd grey eyes seemed to see right through him.
“So you let her go?” He did not sound the least
surprised.
“You know?”
“Now. Tell me why you spared her.”
It was hard to put into words. “My father never used a
headsman. He said he owed it to men he killed to look into their
eyes and hear their last words. And when I looked into
Ygritte’s eyes, I . . . ” Jon
stared down at his hands helplessly. “I know she was an
enemy, but there was no evil in her.”
“No more than in the other two.”
“It was their lives or ours Jon said. “If they had
seen us, if they had sounded that
horn . . . ”
“The wildlings would hunt us down and slay us, true
enough.”
“Stonesnake has the horn now, though, and we took
Ygritte’s knife and axe. She’s behind us, afoot,
unarmed . . . ”
“And not like to be a threat,” Qhorin agreed.
“If I had needed her dead, I would have left her with Ebben,
or done the thing myself.”
“Then why did you command it of me?”
“I did not command it. I told you to do what needed to be
done, and left you to decide what that would be.” Qhorin
stood and slid his longsword back into its scabbard. “When I
want a mountain scaled, I call on Stonesnake. Should I need to put
an arrow through the eye of some foe across a windy battlefield, I
summon Squire Dalbridge. Ebben can make any man give up his
secrets. To lead men you must know them, Jon Snow. I know more of
you now than I did this morning.”
“And if I had slain her?” asked Jon.
“She would be dead, and I would know you better than I had
before. But enough talk. You ought be sleeping. We have leagues to
go, and dangers to face. You will need your strength.”
Jon did not think sleep would come easily, but he knew the
Halfhand was right. He found a place out of the wind, beneath an
overhang of rock, and took off his cloak to use it for a blanket.
“Ghost,” he called. “Here. To me.” He
always slept better with the great white wolf beside him; there was
comfort in the smell of him, and welcome warmth in that shaggy pale
fur. This time, though, Ghost did no more than look at him. Then he
turned away and padded around the garrons, and quick as that he was
gone. He wants to hunt, Jon thought. Perhaps there were goats in
these mountains. The shadowcats must live on something. “Just
don’t try and bring down a ’cat,” he muttered.
Even for a direwolf, that would be dangerous. He tugged his cloak
over him and stretched out beneath the rock.
When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of direwolves.
There were five of them when there should have been six, and
they were scattered, each apart from the others. He felt a deep
ache of emptiness, a sense of incompleteness. The forest was vast
and cold, and they were so small, so lost. His brothers were out
there somewhere, and his sister, but he had lost their scent. He
sat on his haunches and lifted his head to the darkening sky, and
his cry echoed through the forest, a long lonely mournful sound. As
it died away, he pricked up his ears, listening for an answer, but
the only sound was the sigh of blowing snow. Jon?
The call came from behind him, softer than a whisper, but strong
too. Can a shout be silent? He turned his head, searching for his
brother, for a glimpse of a lean grey shape moving beneath the
trees, but there was nothing, only . . .
A weirwood.
It seemed to sprout from solid rock, its pale roots twisting up
from a myriad of fissures and hairline cracks. The tree was slender
compared to other weirwoods he had seen, no more than a sapling,
yet it was growing as he watched, its limbs thickening as they
reached for the sky. Wary, he circled the smooth white trunk until
he came to the face. Red eyes looked at him. Fierce eyes they were,
yet glad to see him. The weirwood had his brother’s face. Had
his brother always had three eyes? Not always, came the silent shout. Not before the crow.
He sniffed at the bark, smelled wolf and tree and boy, but
behind that there were other scents, the rich brown smell of warm
earth and the hard grey smell of stone and something else,
something terrible. Death, he knew. He was smelling death. He
cringed back, his hair bristling, and bared his fangs. Don’t be afraid, I like it in the dark. No one can see
you, but you can see them. But first you have to open your eyes.
See? Like this. And the tree reached down and touched him.
And suddenly he was back in the mountains, his paws sunk deep in
a drift of snow as he stood upon the edge of a great precipice.
Before him the Skirling Pass opened up into airy emptiness, and a
long vee-shaped valley lay spread beneath him like a quilt, awash
in all the colors of an autumn afternoon.
A vast blue-white wall plugged one end of the vale, squeezing
between the mountains as if it had shouldered them aside, and for a
moment he thought he had dreamed himself back to Castle Black. Then
he realized he was looking at a river of ice several thousand feet
high. Under that glittering cold cliff was a great lake, its deep
cobalt waters reflecting the snowcapped peaks that ringed it. There
were men down in the valley, he saw now; many men, thousands, a
huge host. Some were tearing great holes in the half-frozen ground,
while others trained for war. He watched as a swarming mass of
riders charged a shield wall, astride horses no larger than ants.
The sound of their mock battle was a rustling of steel leaves,
drifting faintly on the wind. Their encampment had no plan to it;
he saw no ditches, no sharpened stakes, no neat rows of horse
lines. Everywhere crude earthen shelters and hide tents sprouted
haphazardly, like a pox on the face of the earth. He spied untidy
mounds of hay, smelled goats and sheep, horses and pigs, dogs in
great profusion. Tendrils of dark smoke rose from a thousand
cookfires. This is no army, no more than it is a town. This is a whole
people come together.
Across the long lake, one of the mounds moved. He watched it
more closely and saw that it was not dirt at all, but alive, a
shaggy lumbering beast with a snake for a nose and tusks larger
than those of the greatest boar that had ever lived. And the thing
riding it was huge as well, and his shape was wrong, too thick in
the leg and hips to be a man.
Then a sudden gust of cold made his fur stand up, and the air
thrilled to the sound of wings. As he lifted his eyes to the
ice-white mountain heights above, a shadow plummeted out of the
sky. A shrill scream split the air. He glimpsed blue-grey pinions
spread wide, shutting out the sun . . .
“Ghost!” Jon shouted, sitting up. He could still
feel the talons, the pain. “Ghost, to me!”
Ebben appeared, grabbed him, shook him. “Quiet! You mean
to bring the wildlings down on us? What’s wrong with you,
boy?”
“A dream,” said Jon feebly. “I was Ghost, I
was on the edge of the mountain looking down on a frozen river, and
something attacked me. A bird . . . an eagle, I
think . . . ”
Squire Dalbridge smiled. “It’s always pretty women
in my dreams. Would that I dreamed more often.”
Qhorin came up beside him. “A frozen river, you
say?”
“The Milkwater flows from a great lake at the foot of a
glacier,” Stonesnake put in.
“There was a tree with my brother’s face. The
wildlings . . . there were thousands, more than
I ever knew existed. And giants riding mammoths.” From the
way the light had shifted, Jon judged that he had been asleep for
four or five hours. His head ached, and the back of his neck where
the talons had burned through him. But that was in the dream.
“Tell me all that you remember, from first to last,”
said Qhorin Halfhand.
Jon was confused. “It was only a dream.”
“A wolf dream,” the Halfhand said. “Craster
told the Lord Commander that the wildlings were gathering at the
source of the Milkwater. That may be why you dreamed it. Or it may
be that you saw what waits for us, a few hours farther on. Tell
me.” It made him feel half a fool to talk of such things to
Qhorin and the other rangers, but he did as he was commanded. None
of the black brothers laughed at him, however. By the time he was
done, even Squire Dalbridge was no longer smiling.
“Skinchanger?” said Ebben grimly, looking at the
Halfhand. Does he mean the eagle? Jon wondered. Or me? Skinchangers
and wargs belonged in Old Nan’s stories, not in the world he
had lived in all his life. Yet here, in this strange bleak
wilderness of rock and ice, it was not hard to believe.
“The cold winds are rising. Mormont feared as much. Benjen
Stark felt it as well. Dead men walk and the trees have eyes again.
Why should we balk at wargs and giants?”
“Does this mean my dreams are true as well?” asked
Squire Dalbridge. “Lord Snow can keep his mammoths, I want my
women.”
“Man and boy I’ve served the Watch, and ranged as
far as any,” said Ebben. “I’ve seen the bones of
giants, and heard many a queer tale, but no more. I want to see
them with my own eyes.”
“Be careful they don’t see you, Ebben,”
Stonesnake said.
Ghost did not reappear as they set out again. The shadows
covered the floor of the pass by then, and the sun was sinking fast
toward the jagged twin peaks of the huge mountain the rangers named
Forktop. If the dream was true . . . Even the
thought scared him. Could the eagle have hurt Ghost, or knocked him
off the precipice? And what about the weirwood with his
brother’s face, that smelled of death and darkness?
The last ray of sun vanished behind the peaks of Forktop.
Twilight filled the Skirling Pass. It seemed to grow colder almost
at once. They were no longer climbing. In fact, the ground had
begun to descend, though as yet not sharply. It was littered with
cracks and broken boulders and tumbled heaps of rock. It will be
dark soon, and still no sight of Ghost. It was tearing Jon apart,
yet he dare not shout for the direwolf as he would have liked.
Other things might be listening as well.
“Qhorin,” Squire Dalbridge called softly.
“There. Look.”
The eagle was perched on a spine of rock far above them,
outlined against the darkening sky. We’ve seen other eagles,
Jon thought. That need not be the one I dreamed of.
Even so, Ebben would have loosed a shaft at it, but the squire
stopped him. “The bird’s well out of
bowshot.”
“I don’t like it watching us.”
The squire shrugged. “Nor me, but you won’t stop it.
Only waste a good arrow.”
Qhorin sat in his saddle, studying the eagle for a long time.
“We press on,” he finally said. The rangers resumed
their descent. Ghost, Jon wanted to shout, where are you?
He was about to follow Qhorin and the others when he glimpsed a
flash of white between two boulders. A patch of old snow, he
thought, until he saw it stir. He was off his horse at once. As he
went to his knees,
Ghost lifted his head. His neck glistened wetly, but he made no
sound when Jon peeled off a glove and touched him. The talons had
torn a bloody path through fur and flesh, but the bird had not been
able to snap his neck.
Qhorin Halfhand was standing over him. “How
bad?”
As if in answer, Ghost struggled to his feet.
“The wolf is strong,” the ranger said. “Ebben,
water. Stonesnake, your skin of wine. Hold him still,
Jon.”
Together they washed the caked blood from the direwolf’s
fur. Ghost struggled and bared his teeth when Qhorin poured the wine
into the ragged red gashes the eagle had left him, but Jon wrapped
his arms around him and murmured soothing words, and soon enough
the wolf quieted. By the time they’d ripped a strip from
Jon’s cloak to wrap the wounds, full dark had settled. Only a
dusting of stars set the black of sky apart from the black of
stone. “Do we press on?” Stonesnake wanted to know.
Qhorin went to his garron. “Back, not on.”
“Back?” Jon was taken by surprise.
“Eagles have sharper eyes than men. We are seen. So now we
run.” The Halfhand wound a long black scarf around his face
and swung up into the saddle.
The other rangers exchanged a look, but no man thought to argue.
One by one they mounted and turned their mounts toward home.
“Ghost, come,” he called, and the direwolf followed, a
pale shadow moving through the night.
All night they rode, feeling their way up the twisting pass and
through the stretches of broken ground. The wind grew stronger.
Sometimes it was so dark that they dismounted and went ahead on
foot, each man leading his garron. Once Ebben suggested that some
torches might serve them well, but Qhorin said, “No
fire,” and that was the end of that. They reached the stone
bridge at the summit and began to descend again. Off in the
darkness a shadowcat screamed in fury, its voice bouncing off the
rocks so it seemed as though a dozen other ’cats were giving
answer. Once Jon thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes on a ledge
overhead, as big as harvest moons.
In the black hour before dawn, they stopped to let the horses
drink and fed them each a handful of oats and a twist or two of
hay. “We are not far from the place the wildlings
died,” said Qhorin. “From there, one man could hold a
hundred. The right man.” He looked at Squire Dalbridge.
The squire bowed his head. “Leave me as many arrows as you
can spare, brothers.” He stroked his longbow. “And see
my garron has an apple when you’re home. He’s earned
it, poor beastie.” He’s staying to die, Jon realized.
Qhorin clasped the squire’s forearm with a gloved hand.
“If the eagle flies down for a look at
you . . . ”
“ . . . he’ll sprout some new
feathers.”
The last Jon saw of Squire Dalbridge was his back as he
clambered up the narrow path to the heights.
When dawn broke, Jon looked up into a cloudless sky and saw a
speck moving through the blue. Ebben saw it too, and cursed, but
Qhorin told him to be quiet. “Listen.”
Jon held his breath, and heard it. Far away and behind them, the
call of a hunting horn echoed against the mountains.
“And now they come,” said Qhorin.
It was dark in the Skirling Pass. The great stone flanks of the
mountains hid the sun for most of the day, so they rode in shadow,
the breath of man and horse steaming in the cold air. Icy fingers
of water trickled down from the snowpack above into small frozen
pools that cracked and broke beneath the hooves of their garrons.
Sometimes they would see a few weeds struggling from some crack in
the rock or a splotch of pale lichen, but there was no grass, and
they were above the trees now.
The track was as steep as it was narrow, wending its way ever
upward. Where the pass was so constricted that rangers had to go
single file, Squire Dalbridge would take the lead, scanning the
heights as he went, his longbow ever close to hand. It was said he
had the keenest eyes in the Night’s Watch.
Ghost padded restlessly by Jon’s side. From time to time
he would stop and turn, his ears pricked, as if he heard something
behind them. Jon did not think the shadowcats would attack living
men, not unless they were starving, but he loosened Longclaw in its
scabbard even so.
A wind-carved arch of grey stone marked the highest point of the
pass. Here the way broadened as it began its long descent toward
the valley of the Milkwater. Qhorin decreed that they would rest
here until the shadows began to grow again. “Shadows are
friends to men in black,” he said.
Jon saw the sense of that. It would be pleasant to ride in the
light for a time, to let the bright mountain sun soak through their
cloaks and chase the chill from their bones, but they dared not.
Where there were three watchers there might be others, waiting to
sound the alarm.
Stonesnake curled up under his ragged fur cloak and was asleep
almost at once. Jon shared his salt beef with Ghost while Ebben and
Squire Dalbridge fed the horses. Qhorin Halfhand sat with his back
to a rock, honing the edge of his longsword with long slow strokes.
Jon watched the ranger for a few moments, then summoned his courage
and went to him. “My lord,” he said, “you never
asked me how it went. With the girl.”
“I am no lord, Jon Snow.” Qhorin slid the stone
smoothly along the steel with his two-fingered hand.
“She told me Mance would take me, if I ran with
her.”
“She told you true.”
“She even claimed we were kin. She told me a story . . . ”
“ . . . of Bael the Bard and the rose
of Winterfell. So Stonesnake told me. It happens I know the song.
Mance would sing it of old, when he came back from a ranging. He
had a passion for wildling music. Aye, and for their women as
well.”
“You knew him?”
“We all knew him.” His voice was sad. They were friends as well as brothers, Jon realized, and now
they are sworn foes. “Why did he desert?”
“For a wench, some say. For a crown, others would have
it.” Qhorin tested the edge of his sword with the ball of his
thumb. “He liked women, Mance did, and he was not a man whose
knees bent easily, that’s true. But it was more than that. He
loved the wild better than the Wall. It was in his blood. He was
wildling born, taken as a child when some raiders were put to the
sword. When he left the Shadow Tower he was only going home
again.”
“Was he a good ranger?”
“He was the best of us,” said the Halfhand,
“and the worst as well. Only fools like Thoren Smallwood
despise the wildlings. They are as brave as we are, Jon. As strong,
as quick, as clever. But they have no discipline. They name
themselves the free folk, and each one thinks himself as good as a
king and wiser than a maester. Mance was the same. He never learned
how to obey.”
“No more than me,” said Jon quietly.
Qhorin’s shrewd grey eyes seemed to see right through him.
“So you let her go?” He did not sound the least
surprised.
“You know?”
“Now. Tell me why you spared her.”
It was hard to put into words. “My father never used a
headsman. He said he owed it to men he killed to look into their
eyes and hear their last words. And when I looked into
Ygritte’s eyes, I . . . ” Jon
stared down at his hands helplessly. “I know she was an
enemy, but there was no evil in her.”
“No more than in the other two.”
“It was their lives or ours Jon said. “If they had
seen us, if they had sounded that
horn . . . ”
“The wildlings would hunt us down and slay us, true
enough.”
“Stonesnake has the horn now, though, and we took
Ygritte’s knife and axe. She’s behind us, afoot,
unarmed . . . ”
“And not like to be a threat,” Qhorin agreed.
“If I had needed her dead, I would have left her with Ebben,
or done the thing myself.”
“Then why did you command it of me?”
“I did not command it. I told you to do what needed to be
done, and left you to decide what that would be.” Qhorin
stood and slid his longsword back into its scabbard. “When I
want a mountain scaled, I call on Stonesnake. Should I need to put
an arrow through the eye of some foe across a windy battlefield, I
summon Squire Dalbridge. Ebben can make any man give up his
secrets. To lead men you must know them, Jon Snow. I know more of
you now than I did this morning.”
“And if I had slain her?” asked Jon.
“She would be dead, and I would know you better than I had
before. But enough talk. You ought be sleeping. We have leagues to
go, and dangers to face. You will need your strength.”
Jon did not think sleep would come easily, but he knew the
Halfhand was right. He found a place out of the wind, beneath an
overhang of rock, and took off his cloak to use it for a blanket.
“Ghost,” he called. “Here. To me.” He
always slept better with the great white wolf beside him; there was
comfort in the smell of him, and welcome warmth in that shaggy pale
fur. This time, though, Ghost did no more than look at him. Then he
turned away and padded around the garrons, and quick as that he was
gone. He wants to hunt, Jon thought. Perhaps there were goats in
these mountains. The shadowcats must live on something. “Just
don’t try and bring down a ’cat,” he muttered.
Even for a direwolf, that would be dangerous. He tugged his cloak
over him and stretched out beneath the rock.
When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of direwolves.
There were five of them when there should have been six, and
they were scattered, each apart from the others. He felt a deep
ache of emptiness, a sense of incompleteness. The forest was vast
and cold, and they were so small, so lost. His brothers were out
there somewhere, and his sister, but he had lost their scent. He
sat on his haunches and lifted his head to the darkening sky, and
his cry echoed through the forest, a long lonely mournful sound. As
it died away, he pricked up his ears, listening for an answer, but
the only sound was the sigh of blowing snow. Jon?
The call came from behind him, softer than a whisper, but strong
too. Can a shout be silent? He turned his head, searching for his
brother, for a glimpse of a lean grey shape moving beneath the
trees, but there was nothing, only . . .
A weirwood.
It seemed to sprout from solid rock, its pale roots twisting up
from a myriad of fissures and hairline cracks. The tree was slender
compared to other weirwoods he had seen, no more than a sapling,
yet it was growing as he watched, its limbs thickening as they
reached for the sky. Wary, he circled the smooth white trunk until
he came to the face. Red eyes looked at him. Fierce eyes they were,
yet glad to see him. The weirwood had his brother’s face. Had
his brother always had three eyes? Not always, came the silent shout. Not before the crow.
He sniffed at the bark, smelled wolf and tree and boy, but
behind that there were other scents, the rich brown smell of warm
earth and the hard grey smell of stone and something else,
something terrible. Death, he knew. He was smelling death. He
cringed back, his hair bristling, and bared his fangs. Don’t be afraid, I like it in the dark. No one can see
you, but you can see them. But first you have to open your eyes.
See? Like this. And the tree reached down and touched him.
And suddenly he was back in the mountains, his paws sunk deep in
a drift of snow as he stood upon the edge of a great precipice.
Before him the Skirling Pass opened up into airy emptiness, and a
long vee-shaped valley lay spread beneath him like a quilt, awash
in all the colors of an autumn afternoon.
A vast blue-white wall plugged one end of the vale, squeezing
between the mountains as if it had shouldered them aside, and for a
moment he thought he had dreamed himself back to Castle Black. Then
he realized he was looking at a river of ice several thousand feet
high. Under that glittering cold cliff was a great lake, its deep
cobalt waters reflecting the snowcapped peaks that ringed it. There
were men down in the valley, he saw now; many men, thousands, a
huge host. Some were tearing great holes in the half-frozen ground,
while others trained for war. He watched as a swarming mass of
riders charged a shield wall, astride horses no larger than ants.
The sound of their mock battle was a rustling of steel leaves,
drifting faintly on the wind. Their encampment had no plan to it;
he saw no ditches, no sharpened stakes, no neat rows of horse
lines. Everywhere crude earthen shelters and hide tents sprouted
haphazardly, like a pox on the face of the earth. He spied untidy
mounds of hay, smelled goats and sheep, horses and pigs, dogs in
great profusion. Tendrils of dark smoke rose from a thousand
cookfires. This is no army, no more than it is a town. This is a whole
people come together.
Across the long lake, one of the mounds moved. He watched it
more closely and saw that it was not dirt at all, but alive, a
shaggy lumbering beast with a snake for a nose and tusks larger
than those of the greatest boar that had ever lived. And the thing
riding it was huge as well, and his shape was wrong, too thick in
the leg and hips to be a man.
Then a sudden gust of cold made his fur stand up, and the air
thrilled to the sound of wings. As he lifted his eyes to the
ice-white mountain heights above, a shadow plummeted out of the
sky. A shrill scream split the air. He glimpsed blue-grey pinions
spread wide, shutting out the sun . . .
“Ghost!” Jon shouted, sitting up. He could still
feel the talons, the pain. “Ghost, to me!”
Ebben appeared, grabbed him, shook him. “Quiet! You mean
to bring the wildlings down on us? What’s wrong with you,
boy?”
“A dream,” said Jon feebly. “I was Ghost, I
was on the edge of the mountain looking down on a frozen river, and
something attacked me. A bird . . . an eagle, I
think . . . ”
Squire Dalbridge smiled. “It’s always pretty women
in my dreams. Would that I dreamed more often.”
Qhorin came up beside him. “A frozen river, you
say?”
“The Milkwater flows from a great lake at the foot of a
glacier,” Stonesnake put in.
“There was a tree with my brother’s face. The
wildlings . . . there were thousands, more than
I ever knew existed. And giants riding mammoths.” From the
way the light had shifted, Jon judged that he had been asleep for
four or five hours. His head ached, and the back of his neck where
the talons had burned through him. But that was in the dream.
“Tell me all that you remember, from first to last,”
said Qhorin Halfhand.
Jon was confused. “It was only a dream.”
“A wolf dream,” the Halfhand said. “Craster
told the Lord Commander that the wildlings were gathering at the
source of the Milkwater. That may be why you dreamed it. Or it may
be that you saw what waits for us, a few hours farther on. Tell
me.” It made him feel half a fool to talk of such things to
Qhorin and the other rangers, but he did as he was commanded. None
of the black brothers laughed at him, however. By the time he was
done, even Squire Dalbridge was no longer smiling.
“Skinchanger?” said Ebben grimly, looking at the
Halfhand. Does he mean the eagle? Jon wondered. Or me? Skinchangers
and wargs belonged in Old Nan’s stories, not in the world he
had lived in all his life. Yet here, in this strange bleak
wilderness of rock and ice, it was not hard to believe.
“The cold winds are rising. Mormont feared as much. Benjen
Stark felt it as well. Dead men walk and the trees have eyes again.
Why should we balk at wargs and giants?”
“Does this mean my dreams are true as well?” asked
Squire Dalbridge. “Lord Snow can keep his mammoths, I want my
women.”
“Man and boy I’ve served the Watch, and ranged as
far as any,” said Ebben. “I’ve seen the bones of
giants, and heard many a queer tale, but no more. I want to see
them with my own eyes.”
“Be careful they don’t see you, Ebben,”
Stonesnake said.
Ghost did not reappear as they set out again. The shadows
covered the floor of the pass by then, and the sun was sinking fast
toward the jagged twin peaks of the huge mountain the rangers named
Forktop. If the dream was true . . . Even the
thought scared him. Could the eagle have hurt Ghost, or knocked him
off the precipice? And what about the weirwood with his
brother’s face, that smelled of death and darkness?
The last ray of sun vanished behind the peaks of Forktop.
Twilight filled the Skirling Pass. It seemed to grow colder almost
at once. They were no longer climbing. In fact, the ground had
begun to descend, though as yet not sharply. It was littered with
cracks and broken boulders and tumbled heaps of rock. It will be
dark soon, and still no sight of Ghost. It was tearing Jon apart,
yet he dare not shout for the direwolf as he would have liked.
Other things might be listening as well.
“Qhorin,” Squire Dalbridge called softly.
“There. Look.”
The eagle was perched on a spine of rock far above them,
outlined against the darkening sky. We’ve seen other eagles,
Jon thought. That need not be the one I dreamed of.
Even so, Ebben would have loosed a shaft at it, but the squire
stopped him. “The bird’s well out of
bowshot.”
“I don’t like it watching us.”
The squire shrugged. “Nor me, but you won’t stop it.
Only waste a good arrow.”
Qhorin sat in his saddle, studying the eagle for a long time.
“We press on,” he finally said. The rangers resumed
their descent. Ghost, Jon wanted to shout, where are you?
He was about to follow Qhorin and the others when he glimpsed a
flash of white between two boulders. A patch of old snow, he
thought, until he saw it stir. He was off his horse at once. As he
went to his knees,
Ghost lifted his head. His neck glistened wetly, but he made no
sound when Jon peeled off a glove and touched him. The talons had
torn a bloody path through fur and flesh, but the bird had not been
able to snap his neck.
Qhorin Halfhand was standing over him. “How
bad?”
As if in answer, Ghost struggled to his feet.
“The wolf is strong,” the ranger said. “Ebben,
water. Stonesnake, your skin of wine. Hold him still,
Jon.”
Together they washed the caked blood from the direwolf’s
fur. Ghost struggled and bared his teeth when Qhorin poured the wine
into the ragged red gashes the eagle had left him, but Jon wrapped
his arms around him and murmured soothing words, and soon enough
the wolf quieted. By the time they’d ripped a strip from
Jon’s cloak to wrap the wounds, full dark had settled. Only a
dusting of stars set the black of sky apart from the black of
stone. “Do we press on?” Stonesnake wanted to know.
Qhorin went to his garron. “Back, not on.”
“Back?” Jon was taken by surprise.
“Eagles have sharper eyes than men. We are seen. So now we
run.” The Halfhand wound a long black scarf around his face
and swung up into the saddle.
The other rangers exchanged a look, but no man thought to argue.
One by one they mounted and turned their mounts toward home.
“Ghost, come,” he called, and the direwolf followed, a
pale shadow moving through the night.
All night they rode, feeling their way up the twisting pass and
through the stretches of broken ground. The wind grew stronger.
Sometimes it was so dark that they dismounted and went ahead on
foot, each man leading his garron. Once Ebben suggested that some
torches might serve them well, but Qhorin said, “No
fire,” and that was the end of that. They reached the stone
bridge at the summit and began to descend again. Off in the
darkness a shadowcat screamed in fury, its voice bouncing off the
rocks so it seemed as though a dozen other ’cats were giving
answer. Once Jon thought he saw a pair of glowing eyes on a ledge
overhead, as big as harvest moons.
In the black hour before dawn, they stopped to let the horses
drink and fed them each a handful of oats and a twist or two of
hay. “We are not far from the place the wildlings
died,” said Qhorin. “From there, one man could hold a
hundred. The right man.” He looked at Squire Dalbridge.
The squire bowed his head. “Leave me as many arrows as you
can spare, brothers.” He stroked his longbow. “And see
my garron has an apple when you’re home. He’s earned
it, poor beastie.” He’s staying to die, Jon realized.
Qhorin clasped the squire’s forearm with a gloved hand.
“If the eagle flies down for a look at
you . . . ”
“ . . . he’ll sprout some new
feathers.”
The last Jon saw of Squire Dalbridge was his back as he
clambered up the narrow path to the heights.
When dawn broke, Jon looked up into a cloudless sky and saw a
speck moving through the blue. Ebben saw it too, and cursed, but
Qhorin told him to be quiet. “Listen.”
Jon held his breath, and heard it. Far away and behind them, the
call of a hunting horn echoed against the mountains.
“And now they come,” said Qhorin.