Night had fallen heavy over the Tree Men camp, and the firelight made every tired, hollow face look red and raw.
Coby sat in the shadows at the edge of the camp, leaning against a tree and watching his people silently share the smoked meat and bread Solomon had sent.
He didn't know whether what he'd done was right or wrong.
He only knew his people were still alive.
And the price had been brutal.
They were all cursed now.
Everything around him was silent except for a few small children who didn't understand what had happened. They chased each other around with food in their mouths, laughing in a muffled, long-lost way.
They didn't know.
They only knew they were eating well.
But to Coby, those laughs felt like boiling water thrown into his face. Hot. Burning. Painful.
For that laughter, he and their parents had knelt to a plains lord and bowed their heads.
For that laughter, he and their parents had killed their own kin, bound and helpless in the hands of the plainsmen.
"Son of Gern, Coby."
A voice came from behind him.
Coby looked up.
Solomon walked toward him, with Brin and Rosso Brun behind him. Their armor reflected the firelight with a cold shine.
Coby stood at once.
His life and death were in this man's hands now.
He stepped forward and bowed low with respect.
Solomon's gaze swept over the wildlings eating nearby. His expression did not change.
"So it seems you like my gift."
Coby's voice was dry.
"Yes, Black Lion chief. Your generosity will never be forgotten by the Tree Men. Nor by Coby, son of Gern."
Solomon did not bother correcting the title.
He did not circle around the matter either.
Instead, he took a simple parchment map from inside his cloak and spread it open in the firelight.
"Then I need you to do something for me."
"There are other clans coming back. Your job is to find them."
Coby's heart dropped. His face froze. A chill ran through him.
Solomon ignored the change in his expression and tapped a spot on the map with one finger.
"Tell them you found a safe valley with plenty of food."
"Invite them to gather there and form an alliance against me."
Coby stared at the place Solomon was pointing to.
Dry Wind Gorge.
He knew that place well.
It had been one of their old homes when they still roamed the mountains. The entrance was narrow as a bottle mouth. The inside opened wide and the terrain was brutal. But the only way in or out was that one narrow opening.
Coby's breathing quickened.
Blood seemed to freeze in his veins.
He did not know what the Black Lion was planning, but he could feel it.
That place was going to become a trap.
A natural grave.
Solomon's voice was soft, but it went into Coby like a blade.
"The women and children of your tribe will stay here. I will protect them."
"When I see the result I want, I will give you your true reward."
"A reward that will leave you no room for regret."
Coby's lips moved, but no sound came out.
This was a promise.
And the most vicious threat.
Not far away, one of his clansmen was tearing bread apart carefully and feeding it to a child.
Coby took a long breath, then another, and finally dropped to one knee.
"Yes... Black Lion chief."
The dense forests of the Moonstone Mountains were drowned in fog.
Visibility was almost nothing.
Coby led more than fifty of his people through the trees at a fast pace, moving with no hesitation at all.
The mountains were their home.
They were born mountain warriors.
Solomon's scouts had already given him precise information, so he had no trouble finding the Stone Fist and Moonhowl clans, who were struggling through the woods.
A burly man as broad as a bear leapt out from behind a tree. He was the chief of Stone Fist.
"Son of Gern, Coby!"
"I thought the plains Black Lion had slaughtered you! Where are your people?!"
From another direction came an old man with wrinkled skin and cloudy eyes, leaning on a bone staff. He was the chief of Moonhowl.
He glanced around warily, then looked at Stone Fist's chief, irritated by the loud shouting.
"Idiot! Do you want to bring the Black Lion down on us?"
Coby forced a smile.
He spread his arms and stepped forward.
"My people! Coby, son of Gern, has found a good place!"
He held back the guilt boiling inside him and wove his lie in the most sincere voice he could manage.
"There are many caves there! Clean water! And I hid a lot of grain!"
"The Black Lion's main force has gone down to the plains! The mountains are safe now!"
"I came to find you because we should unite and drive the Black Lion out first! Push those damned invaders back!"
The Stone Fist chief's eyes lit up.
Enough food.
Since leaving home and fighting other clans in the valleys, life had been terrible.
But the Moonhowl chief narrowed his suspicious eyes.
"You? You have that much grain?"
Coby said nothing.
He motioned for his people to take off their hide bags and show them.
When the bags were opened, they were full of smoked meat and neatly packed bread.
The smell of food spread instantly through the cold, damp air.
The wildlings of both clans rushed forward at once, greed flashing in their eyes.
The Stone Fist chief snatched a piece of smoked meat and bit into it hard, saliva running down his beard.
"Food! Real food! Son of Gern, Coby! You didn't lie to us!"
They had gone too long without seeing anything this good.
To survive, they had even had to abandon the old and weak of their own tribes and let the mountain ancestors take them.
The Moonhowl chief stared at the food and swallowed.
They had come back because they couldn't carve out living space for themselves against the other wildling clans who lived on the valley side and knew the valleys too well.
At last he nodded.
Hunger and greed crushed his last bit of reason.
"Fine! We'll go with you!"
After the three clans joined together, they formed a huge column and marched toward Dry Wind Gorge.
Coby walked in front.
He deliberately slowed the pace.
At a fork in the road, he stopped.
He pointed toward a hidden trail.
"For safety, let all the women, children, and old folk who can't fight take this path with our supplies."
"It's safer there."
"We warriors don't fear battle. We'll go ahead and clear the camp in the valley, then check the surrounding area."
The chiefs of Stone Fist and Moonhowl agreed immediately. They had no reason to doubt him.
Coby watched the old and weak, burdened with heavy packs, disappearing slowly down the smaller path under the protection of only a handful of clansmen.
His heart bled.
He knew this was the last mercy he could give them.
Along the road, the wildling warriors headed toward death were in high spirits.
They slapped Coby on the shoulder and spoke excitedly about the future.
They talked about dividing food, surviving the winter, even retaking the plainsmen's land.
Coby only kept smiling and nodding in silence.
Every nod felt like cutting his own flesh with a knife.
Several times he nearly screamed the truth.
But every time he closed his eyes, he saw Solomon's cold, expressionless eyes.
He saw the black mouths of the crossbows on the cliffs.
He saw the faces of his tribe.
Over and over, he told himself the same thing.
For survival.
For the Tree Men.
By dusk, they finally reached Dry Wind Gorge.
More than six hundred warriors from Stone Fist and Moonhowl filed into the pass.
The wildlings let down their guard completely, just as Coby had said they would.
There really was plenty of timber and dry grass piled in the gorge.
There were also several large sacks of grain in the corners.
Everything was exactly as he had described it.
A perfect temporary refuge.
The wildlings relaxed at once.
They lit bonfires.
Huge flames shot into the sky.
They danced and drank around them, cheering for the good days to come and for the return of their homes.
Coby and his people sat quietly nearest the exit, drinking only water.
As the night deepened, most of the revelers were either drunk or asleep.
Coby stood.
He looked at his own people.
Then toward the noisy gorge.
He moved his lips without sound.
Then he led every last Tree Men warrior away, without alerting anyone, and slipped out of Dry Wind Gorge.
The moment they climbed to the top of the pass, a sharp horn blast tore through the night sky.
Then came the arrows.
Countless flaming shafts fell from the dark cliff walls on both sides like a rain of falling stars.
Boom.
The whole gorge lit up.
Night turned to day.
Coby turned back in tears and watched the gorge floor ignite in an instant.
Dry Wind Gorge had become a giant burning furnace.
Hidden in the timber and beneath the ground were not just grain, but huge amounts of oil.
The flames were a greedy dragon, devouring everything.
Shrieks of despair rose into the sky, heart-rending and desperate, but they were quickly swallowed by the roar of fire.
The lives that had just been celebrating now became human torches, scrambling and running through the sea of flame before collapsing helplessly.
Coby stood in the cold wind above them.
Firelight flickered across his face, bright and dark, bright and dark.
His expression never changed.
But he knew that starting tonight, there would be no more alliance of highland clans in the Moonstone Mountains.
No more place for the Tree Men.
Only cursed traitors.
Only the Tree Men who had bent the knee to the Black Lion, Solomon.
On the high ground across the gorge, Rosso Brun had gone pale.
He stared at the hellscape of fire below and felt his stomach churn.
He lowered his head, gripped the seven-pointed star pendant at his chest, and kept whispering prayers to the Seven.
He did not truly believe in them.
It was mostly just to fit into Westerosi nobility.
But even now, he chose to bow his head and not look directly at it.
He had fought countless battles.
Killed countless men.
Cut off countless limbs.
But this kind of efficient destruction by flame, this monstrous scene, still made his soul tremble.
The soldiers around him, especially the earliest followers of Solomon, the ones whose families had been butchered and whose homes had been destroyed by wildlings, had grim satisfaction on their faces.
They had followed Solomon for this very moment.
They shouted and cursed and laughed.
They seized crossbows from the new settlers who stood frozen in shock and fired bolt after bolt at the figures trying to escape the edges of the fire, pinning them to the ground and rock walls, driving them back into the flames to be burned.
Solomon stood in front, expressionless.
Firelight danced in his black eyes.
Once again, flames gave him a vision.
Once again, he saw something in them.
But this time, he looked at it calmly, trying to make out the meaning.
To Rosso Brun and the soldiers, it looked as though their lord was simply admiring a painting made of wildling death and fire.
It made Rosso's respect for the young lord deepen even further.
He swallowed.
To remain this calm in the middle of all this...
Even the great lords might not compare to him.
The next morning, when the fog lifted and the first sunlight fell into the gorge, it had become a field of ash.
The air was thick with the stench of burnt flesh.
The charred bodies of wildlings lay twisted and piled in ugly shapes, and smoke was still rising from the heaps.
A few wildlings who had survived through sheer stubbornness crawled out from under corpses, from collapsed caves, from between cracks in the rock.
Their bodies were burned.
Their clothes were ruined.
Their eyes were empty.
They looked like demons crawling out of hell.
They stared at the scene before them in wordless despair.
Solomon's cold voice rang out, flat and unshaken even though the sight had startled him too.
"Gather them in the middle."
The soldiers surged down like wolves and drove the survivors brutally into the center of the gorge.
Men, women, and children were separated by force.
There were not many left.
Only about a hundred.
A soldier came to report.
"My lord, the count is done. Forty-three male wildlings. Fifty-two female wildlings. And several children."
Solomon walked slowly down from the high ground.
His shoes crunched over hot ash.
Everyone watched him.
He forced himself to calm down and step away from what he had just seen.
He stopped before the survivors and swept his gaze across faces filled with fear, numbness, and hatred.
He looked at a female wildling weeping uncontrollably as she held a male warrior in her arms.
Then he looked at a male wildling nearby trying to rise, only to fall again because a crossbow bolt had shattered his leg.
Solomon turned to the soldiers beside him and gave the final order.
"Anything taller than a cartwheel, leave none."
He paused.
Then, after a moment of thought:
"Anything that can speak, leave none."
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