Dawn came with that cold, low light the North makes before the sun properly appears.
We put out the fire, took down the tents, packed everything, mounted up. Nobody talked much. It was too early and the morning silence had that quality not worth breaking without reason.
We followed the Kingsroad with the lake falling behind us.
A few kilometers ahead Eldric raised his left arm without looking back.
We stopped.
He stayed still on his horse for a second, eyes fixed on something in the Wolfswood to the right. A thin column of smoke rose between the trees, barely visible.
"I'll check," he said, and disappeared into the wood before anyone answered.
We waited in silence. Kevin kept his hand on the bow by instinct. Sigurd drummed his fingers on his thigh once and stopped.
Eldric came back in under five minutes.
"A group of bandits. About ten men." Flat voice, eyes with that expression that already had all the information sorted before speaking. "They just robbed a merchant. I saw two bodies, probably guards. The merchant was likely taken."
I stayed quiet for a moment.
"Get ready," I said. "Time to clear the forest of some pests."
They tied the horses to a trunk out of sight. Everyone checked their own weapons in silence. I drew Truth for a second, ran my thumb along the blade, sheathed it again.
I looked at all of them.
"Kevin, Eldric, stay hidden and give us cover from above." Then the others. "The rest flank from the sides and the back. I draw them from the front."
Nobody spoke.
"I know this is your first real fight. But don't hesitate, because they won't. You were trained for this. There are no second attempts in the field, so there's no room for doubt." I paused. "This won't be the first or the last time you do this. Remember that when the blood starts flowing."
I pulled Razdhan, Belzakar, and Morghaz aside.
"Watch over them," I said, low. "I know we trained everyone to excellence, but the battlefield is unpredictable. That's why I'm asking."
Razdhan looked at me with the calm the years hadn't taken from him.
"You don't need to ask that, Arthur. We were already going to."
"Thank you, my friends."
They took their positions. Kevin and Eldric vanished into the trees, each on a high branch with bow already in hand. The others spread through the wood with the silence eight years of training builds. Razdhan, Belzakar, and Morghaz disappeared like shadows.
I went alone toward the camp.
The bandits were running hot from having just done something and not yet put the knife away. Two of them were eating. Three were gathered around something on the ground that I chose not to look at closely. The others were shouting at each other with the loose energy of people who don't expect to be interrupted.
I walked in whistling.
It took a few seconds for anyone to notice me. When one did, he pointed, and the others went quiet one by one.
"Who are you?" said the biggest one, hand on his knife. "And what do you think you're doing here?"
I drew Truth slowly.
I started walking toward them dragging the tip of the sword along the ground. A few stones sparked.
There was something I learned in a previous life about fear. Not the fear that paralyzes, everyone knows that one. The fear that confuses. When something unexpected happens in the field, the human mind spends a precious second trying to catalogue what it's seeing before it can react. A second is enough time to die.
So I kept walking, slowly, the blade scraping the stones, and I opened my mouth.
Out of the night that covers me,Black as the Pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of the shade,And yet the menace of the yearsFinds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,How charged with punishments the scroll,I am the master of my fate:I am the captain of my soul.
The bandits stood still. A man walking alone toward ten, scraping his sword along the ground and reciting a poem, was not something anyone was prepared for.
One of them broke first. Nervous, rusty sword in hand, he came at me with the anger of someone who's frightened and doesn't want to show it.
"You talk too much, boy." He swung the blade in my direction.
The blade passed within a hair of my face.
I swung Truth.
His head hit the ground before his body understood it was dead. The blood began to spread across the earth.
The silence lasted about three seconds.
Then they all came at once. Nine left.
The first three arrived fastest.
And as fast as they came, they died.
Gut and limb. The sharp smell of blood and the feces that leaks from intestines filled the air with that horrible honesty that battle has and that no book can prepare anyone for. Six left.
In practice four, because two arrows arrived at the same time, each entering through the eye socket of a man and coming out the other side. Fluid and blood ran from what remained of the cavities. Kevin and Eldric.
The four remaining were still running when Sigurd and Perseu came out of the wood.
Sigurd caught the first one with the axe horizontal. The man was split at the waist, the bottom half staying upright for a second before falling, the top half going the other way.
Perseu drove his sword into the second man's throat with such precision that the tip came out through the back of the neck. He twisted. Pulled. The head came with it.
Two left.
The two looked at what remained of their companions, looked at us, and turned to run.
A dagger entered the first one's jaw and came out through the skull. Rhoslyn, from somewhere to the right.
The other took one step and stopped. He looked down. Astrid's sword was buried in his chest to the hilt, driven so precisely that he hadn't yet understood what had happened. He dropped to his knees, then to his side.
Razdhan and Belzakar appeared beside the girls as though they had been there the whole time.
Morghaz emerged from the wood behind us, a head in his hand. He dropped it on the ground between us.
"There were eleven."
I looked at him.
"One was hiding behind a tree."
I did a quick count with my eyes. Everyone standing, everyone whole.
"Is everyone all right?"
Nods. Nobody was bleeding.
Sigurd looked at the field around him, eyebrows raised. Bodies in various states of integrity scattered across twenty meters.
"I thought it would be more exciting," he said. "It fell short of my expectations."
"I'm glad it did."
He looked at me.
"Means we trained you well."
Sigurd went quiet for a moment, looking at the ground. Then the corner of his mouth moved.
"Fair."
We found the merchant behind one of the tents.
It was what I had chosen not to look at closely when I walked in.
I stood still for a moment. Then I turned back to the camp.
There was a cart caught between the trees with the horse still hitched, nervous with the smell of blood but unharmed. Supplies, food, bundles tied with rope. The bandits' plunder, probably from more than one target. The bandits' horses were tied further ahead, eight of them.
"Take everything," I said. "And the horses. We go to the nearest village."
Nobody questioned it.
Sigurd and Perseu untied and led the horses. Kevin and Eldric loaded what was scattered back onto the cart. Razdhan took the reins. We moved through the wood to the road and then along the road until the first chimney smoke appeared on the horizon.
The village was small, the kind the winter hurts more than the rest. Low houses, wooden fence, children who stopped running when they saw us coming with a cart and a line of horses.
An old man came to the front with the caution of someone who had learned that strangers arriving in a hurry rarely bring good things.
I explained what had happened. Short, without embellishment.
He looked at us for a moment, then at the cart, then back at us.
"You'll need this more than we do," I said.
The old man went quiet for a second. Then he called someone inside with a gesture, and before I could say anything else three people were unloading the cart with the efficiency of people who don't waste what they receive.
Later, when the sun was already low, the old man came back to me.
"Stay the night."
It wasn't a request. It was the only thing he had to offer.
I accepted.
The old man's family made a stew.
They used some of the supplies from the cart and a hare Kevin had caught along the way, and the result smelled good enough to make Sigurd stop talking for a few minutes while he ate, which was the highest praise he knew how to give a meal.
We sat with them for a long while. They were simple people, the kind the North produces in quantity and the rest of the Seven Kingdoms rarely notices exist. The old man had a name and a history, and when the conversation warmed with the fire he started talking.
He had fought for the North during the War of the Ninepenny Kings. He told it with the specific pride of someone who has carried something inside for years without much opportunity to take it out. House Stark, the North, the way his people don't need fanfare to know who they are. He said all of this without knowing I was a Stark.
I didn't say anything.
I told him what we were doing, the clearing of bandits across the North, what had happened in the forest earlier. The old man listened carefully and then went quiet for a moment.
"For some reason, lately the banditry has increased even more." He shook his head. "More than usual. More than the winter explains."
I filed that away.
Across the room Sigurd was already snoring on the floor with a mead skin loose in his hand, which had slipped while he slept. Perseu had cleaned his weapons from the earlier fight with his usual method and was now outside tending to the horses. Kevin was sharpening his arrowheads while whistling something without a defined melody. Astrid and Rhoslyn were talking with the woman and the couple's daughter near the fire, and Rhoslyn was sewing something in her lap with the concentration she reserved for few subjects. For weeks I had watched that project appear and disappear in her hands without her ever showing what it was.
"What is that?" I asked once.
"A surprise," she said, without looking up.
I didn't ask again.
Eldric had gone to sleep, or at least had stopped being visible, which in his case was the same thing. Razdhan, Belzakar, and Morghaz talked among themselves in High Valyrian in the corner, the kind of easy conversation three men have when they no longer need to prove anything to anyone.
The fire went low. One by one they slept.
In the morning the woman already had breakfast ready when we woke. We ate, thanked them, and set off with that early-day silence the previous days had made familiar.
The following days passed with the rhythm of the road, small villages, forests, the North opening on both sides with that vastness that keeps reminding you of the size of what you're trying to cross.
The farewell came when the road divided.
Eldric and Razdhan were going with Rhoslyn to the Dreadfort, to the northeast. We continued toward Last Hearth.
We stopped the horses at the fork. Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Rhoslyn took out the bundle she had been sewing for weeks and began to hand them out.
A long hooded coat for each of them, made of leather so dark it was almost black. The kind of piece that sits right on the shoulders. And on the back of each one, embroidered in silver thread on the dark leather, a Weirwood tree. The twisted trunk with the carved face in the wood, eyes open, branches spreading with red leaves like flames, and roots descending and intertwining at the base. Two ravens perched in the branches, one on each side. Runes circling the whole design like a crown. At the base of the trunk, in crimson thread that contrasted with everything else, a single word: Yggdrasil.
Sigurd looked at the coat in his hand for a second with an expression he didn't normally let anyone see. Then he put it on without saying anything, which for Sigurd was the equivalent of a speech.
"Thank you," said Astrid, simply, looking at Rhoslyn with those blue eyes without their usual coldness.
"How long did this take you?" said Kevin, examining the embroidery with an attention he rarely gave anything that wasn't an arrow.
"Long enough." Rhoslyn looked at the coat in Kevin's hands for a second. "I already had the tree embroidered for weeks. But when I heard Arthur talking about the Yggdrasil on the road, I added the ravens, the runes, and the name. It felt right."
"It's the best gift I've ever received." He said it with the genuine smile, not the calculated one. "And I've received some good things."
Perseu held the coat for a moment, ran his fingers over the embroidered Weirwood, and inclined his head toward her with that quiet seriousness.
"I'll wear this until it falls apart," he said.
Razdhan took the coat in both hands, looked at the embroidery for a moment, and gripped Rhoslyn's shoulder once. She knew the weight of that coming from him.
Morghaz put his on without ceremony, but ran his hand over the embroidered Weirwood before fastening it, which was more than he usually showed toward anything.
Eldric looked at the coat for a second with that expression that gave little away. Then he looked at Rhoslyn.
"Thank you," he said, with his usual brevity. But it was real, and she knew how to tell the difference.
I took mine last. Good leather, precise embroidery, the seven Weirwood roots running down the back as though they had grown there.
I put it on.
"Thank you, Rhoslyn."
She nodded and went to check the saddle straps without saying anything, which was her way of closing a subject she had liked too much to comment on.
I went to Eldric.
"If you need to send a message when you reach the Dreadfort, route it through Last Hearth."
He nodded.
I turned to Rhoslyn.
She looked at me with those green eyes that never rested, and for a second there was something in them she didn't usually let show.
"It'll be all right," I said.
"I know," she answered. "Just come and get us in King's Landing when the time comes."
Razdhan gave me a nod. Belzakar and Morghaz stayed at our side.
The three horses followed the northeastern path until they disappeared around the bend.
We stood at the fork for one more second.
"Let's go," I said.
And we rode north.