Morning mist filled the Moonstone Mountains so thick you could barely see ten steps ahead.
Coby, son of Gern, walked at the head of the column.
Behind him came the last three hundred warriors of his tribe and their families, a silent, exhausted line of people heading home.
He turned and tried to lift their spirits with his voice.
"We're almost there! No plainsmen in sight!"
That was when Old Gi, the one-eyed woman, stopped walking.
Her bony fingers pointed toward the sky.
Coby followed her hand and looked up.
Several ravens were circling overhead, croaking in their hollow, ragged voices.
Old Gi began to mutter.
"Blood."
"I can smell blood, child. This road is not the way home."
Coby cut her off impatiently, scooped her up, and set her on a cart.
"That's the smell of revenge, old mother."
"Our ancestors will see us take back everything."
He pushed the column forward.
They walked into a stretch of gorge flanked on both sides by sheer stone walls. When the last woman, clutching her child, passed into the middle of the pass, a sharp horn blast exploded from above and bounced between the cliffs like thunder.
Coby's heart dropped.
A massive crash came from behind him.
He spun in horror.
Enormous logs and boulders came tumbling down from the cliffs and slammed into the gorge entrance. Stone chips flew. Dust blasted upward in a solid wall and sealed off every trace of the way back.
It's over.
Those two words drove into his head like a blade. The color left his face in an instant.
He had no time for despair. His whole tribe was here.
Survival overrode everything else.
He ripped his axe free.
"Forward! Push through the gorge! Kill them all!"
Three hundred wildlings, terror wringing the last of their courage out of them, let out animal howls and threw themselves at the only exit.
But when they reached it, every single pair of feet stopped cold.
Solomon stood at the center of the opening, motionless atop a boulder, face completely blank.
In front of him was a line of more than forty soldiers.
It looked exactly as it had before, the first time they had met him.
He wore a plain black noble's robe. The slender longsword hung at his side.
The memory crashed back through every wildling at once. Even the warhorses in the column snorted and shied, as though they too remembered the night of fire and slaughter.
The charge collapsed on the spot.
The moment they saw the Black Lion himself, every shred of courage was eaten alive by fear.
They remembered the last time this army had owned them. They remembered their clansmen being torn apart without effort. They remembered the black lion.
Coby stood frozen, his hand trembling around his axe.
He spun back and screamed with everything in his lungs.
"Turn back! Smash through the logs!"
They turned and ran.
That was when the air split open above them.
Brin's longbowmen and the crossbow teams opened fire from the clifftops. Arrows and heavy bolts tore downward through the air with a shrieking whistle.
The leading warrior's beast-hide armor was nothing. A bolt punched straight through him and pinned him to the earth. He never made a sound.
Another bolt cut through the panicking crowd and skewered two wildlings through the chest, threading them together like a spit, bringing them both crashing to the ground.
The narrow gorge was a perfect killing ground.
There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
Screams and wailing filled the walls as the wildlings stumbled, fell, and were caught by death raining down on them from above.
Coby watched his people fall like wheat under a scythe, swinging his axe in wild arcs, trying to knock bolts from the air.
An arrow punched through his arm.
Warm blood ran down into the dirt, mixing with the tears cutting down his face.
The Tree Men were finished.
Then the whistling stopped.
More than a hundred wildling bodies lay scattered through the blood-soaked gorge. The survivors had huddled together like rabbits after a hawk's pass, gasping in ragged terror.
Nothing was left but the wind and the groaning of the wounded.
Coby stood among the dead. He pulled the arrow from his arm and looked across the ground at his people, then looked back at the exit sealed by the rolling logs.
His chest was ash.
The enemy had stopped.
He didn't know why.
That sudden silence scared him more than the slaughter had. Were they going to torture his people now?
Under the desperate eyes of the survivors, Coby understood the truth of it.
There was no road back.
And the road forward led to that figure standing at the mouth of the gorge.
He dropped his axe.
Then he led what remained of his tribe step by step through the bodies, walking the way a man walks toward his own execution, until they came to a stop before Solomon.
Watching Coby arrive with his survivors, Solomon felt something close to quiet resignation settle over him.
If only the Ironborn were this easy to deal with.
He stepped forward, stood before them, and spoke without raising his voice. In those wildlings' ears, it was more frightening than the bolts had been.
He pointed at the bodies in the gorge.
"Swear to me. Or join them."
Coby shook all over.
A violent war raged inside him.
The tradition of the highland clans said this could never happen. No bending of the knee to any king or any plainsman. Not in a thousand years. Never.
As chieftain, he should lead his people to fight to the last man and die with honor, returning to the ancestors.
Surrender was betrayal.
It was a stain on the tribe's name forever.
But then he heard the women behind him crying quietly.
He turned and saw the children's eyes, every one of them swallowed up by pure fear.
He knew.
His people did not want to die.
Maybe, he told himself, maybe the greatest duty of a chieftain was to keep the bloodline alive.
He could only tell himself that.
Slowly, with every shred of shame he possessed pressing down on him, he went to his knees and pressed his forehead to the cold mud.
"Coby, son of Gern, swears loyalty to the war chief who has conquered his tribe. The Black Lion."
The words spent everything left in him.
He looked up, expecting it to end there.
Solomon said nothing.
He raised one hand instead, and several soldiers pushed forward more than a hundred bound prisoners from behind the line. Old men, women, stragglers. Coby knew them. They were freefolk from other clans.
Solomon drew his sword and leveled it toward the prisoners.
"I want to see it with my own eyes."
"Kill them."
"Wash away the crime of invading my land with your clansmen's blood."
"Prove your loyalty."
The Tree Men wildlings went rigid.
Kill other highland freefolk? Even among clans that fought and killed each other constantly, this was different. This was being forced to butcher their own people by an outsider.
They would be cutting themselves off from every other clan forever. Traitors. Lap dogs of the plainsmen.
Coby's head snapped up, his eyes full of disbelief and fury.
Solomon said nothing.
Behind him, Brin had already given the signal. The crossbow teams on the clifftops raised their weapons again in silence, cranking the windlasses, and trained them on Coby and his people without a word.
Coby understood.
Kill those hundred or so prisoners and his people lived.
Or he and the prisoners died together.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, only a wild, desperate blankness remained.
He tore a weapon from the hands of one of the warriors behind him and was the first to rush at the bound prisoners.
Under his lead, the other Tree Men warriors followed.
Even the women. Even some of the older children. They howled like something broken loose and threw themselves forward with their blades.
When the last prisoner fell into the blood, the gorge became absolutely still.
Every Tree Men wildling was soaked red.
Their eyes were hollow.
Their souls looked scraped out.
There was no going back now.
Coby collapsed to his knees, trembling.
Solomon walked to his side and looked down at him for a moment.
Then he spoke in a calm, even voice.
"From today, you are my tribe. I grant you the right to live on my land."
He paused.
"More than that."
"Your tribe will not go hungry. As long as you fight for me, I will see you and your people fed."
"You and your people will live under my protection."
Solomon placed a hand on Coby's shoulder.
"Now."
"You can go home."
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