The sky was grey when we prepared, that low cold light the North has before the sun decides to appear. We packed the food, filled the waterskins, and went to the gate.
The tunnel at the base of the Wall had three separate iron gates, each with bolts and chains, arrow slits open in the stone ceiling above each passage. The outer door was solid oak, nearly a foot thick. Built to outlast any man who crossed it.
We waited while they opened one by one, the sound of iron echoing inside the stone.
Qorgyle was at my side.
"Take care out there, boy." The usual harshness, but something else underneath. "I don't want to give bad news to your father. Stay away from the wildlings. And from the other things that crawl out there."
"I'm going to Whitetree first."
He looked at me. "May I ask why?"
"You may."
He held my gaze for a second. He recognized the silence for what it was.
"Whitetree," he said after. "There are wildlings living there. More open to strangers than most." His eyes swept the group once. "Open doesn't mean tame."
"I'm grateful, Lord Commander. If I return by Westwatch-by-the-Bridge, I'll send word."
Aemon was a few steps behind, leaning against the doorframe with the chain at his neck and his clouded eyes turned toward the Wall, as if he could feel the other side even without seeing it.
"Farewell."
He inclined his head.
I mounted. The others mounted behind me.
The tunnel was longer from the inside. The darkness between the gates was almost complete, only the torches on the walls throwing long shadows across the ice. The horses' hooves sounded different in here, more contained, as if the space were squeezing the sound. Sleipnir didn't stop once.
On the other side, the Haunted Forest.
The cold arrived first. Not the cold of the North I had known since childhood, the kind that bites but is familiar. This one cut differently, deeper, as if the air here didn't know what skin was.
And with the cold came something else.
South of the Wall I had always felt magic as something distant, the presence of the weirwoods, the old blood of the First Men in the earth, a faint tingling that was easy to ignore. The Wall filtered it. Held it back. On this side that was gone.
As we advanced the feeling grew. More alive, more direct, the magic of the earth rising through the body like a root finding water. Clean on the surface.
But there was something else underneath.
Almost nothing. The kind of thing most people would never notice, that even someone with magical sensitivity could spend their whole life without perceiving. A residue, not a presence. Like the smell of something that burned in a room hours ago, when there's no visible smoke left but the air still holds the memory. I thought of old conversations, Lévi, Crowley, Faust, long nights discussing what magic leaves behind when someone uses it in ways the earth doesn't approve of. What they called miasma. The residue of necromancy, not the practice itself but its echo, what stays impregnated in a place after the rituals end and the dead return or don't.
That echo was everywhere here.
I closed my senses. Kept only the minimum open.
We followed the path toward Whitetree.
Kevin rode ahead, reading the terrain. The rest of us rode in silence.
Hours later, the tree appeared.
It was enormous. Not the usual size of weirwoods, but a size that made the ones around it look recent. The trunk was nearly eight feet wide, the bark white as old bone, the branches opening in every direction and shading everything below. The face was different from the ones I had seen in the South. Deeper. The irregular mouth was wide enough to swallow a whole sheep.
Below, between the roots, a village. Four dry-stone houses covered with turf, leather windows, packed earth floors. A pen. A well. Smoke rising from the holes in the roofs.
We dismounted.
Sleipnir followed without me pulling the reins, as he had done since Winterfell. I walked toward the tree with my hand on Truth's pommel.
An arrow struck the earth in front of me.
I stopped.
Men came out from the trees with weapons in hand. Layered furs and leather, hoods covering half their faces, eyes that measured distance before anything else. The one with the bow stepped forward.
"What are southerners doing in the true North?"
I answered in the Old Tongue.
"Ek sōk þa weirwudu. Ek berr-hand, ek willa-friþ."
[I seek the weirwood. I come with open hands. I want peace.]
The man went still. So did the others. The kind of silence that happens when a situation has gone off the expected course.
He lowered the bow, not all the way, but enough.
"Hvaðan kunnir þú þessa tungu?"
[Where do you know this tongue from?]
"Suðrmaðr er, en kann þessa tungu."
[A southerner who knows the old tongue.]
He looked at me for a time. Then looked at the group, his eyes stopping on Sigurd for a second with the recognition of someone who sees that size and does the math.
"Hverr ert þú, suðrmaðr?"
[Who are you, man of the south?]
I took my hand off the pommel and opened both arms at my sides.
I knew the name Stark was known even here. That was why I didn't use it.
"Ek em Arthur Pendragon."
The man lowered his bow completely.
"We hunted a deer. Come eat." He turned without waiting.
We followed.
A woman came out of the door before we reached it and went to meet the man. They exchanged words in low voices. She looked at the group, made the calculation of space and food, nodded.
"My name is Fjorn." He gestured at the door. "Come in if you want to get warm."
Fjorn went to the pen with two men.
The woman went in first.
The inside was low and warm, a fire that had been burning for hours. Dry-stone walls with hides nailed up against the wind, packed earth floor, smell of smoke and animal and something that had cooked earlier.
"My name is Tove," said the woman, without looking up, moving something near the fire.
I left the others with her and went back out.
Fjorn was at the pen with the men, already working on the deer.
I went to the tree.
Up close the white bark had a texture that was neither quite stone nor quite wood, each crack and knot looking more carved than grown. The face watched me with those deep red eyes, the mouth open in an expression that was not sadness or rage. It was just old. The roots came out of the trunk thick as arms and disappeared into the earth.
I pressed my palm against the trunk.
The world went away.
I was on a high branch. I saw myself down below, standing with my hand on the tree, eyes open and white, head slightly tilted. The village small from here, the turf houses nearly buried in snow, the smoke from the roofs rising in thin threads through the still air. The ground was white everywhere, old packed snow between the weirwood's roots. Further out, the horses tied up, Sleipnir larger than the others with his coat thickened by the cold, puffs of steam from his nostrils. The Haunted Forest spreading in every direction, the trees loaded with snow on their branches, the silence of the kind that only exists when everything is covered in white. I turned my head and saw the Wall behind, immense, its ice nearly blending into the grey sky.
The vision shifted.
I was close to the ground, between roots and dead leaves covered in thin snow. The smell was everything, the whole world arrived through the nose before it reached the eyes. Cold wet earth. Old urine of something large that had passed. Fungus. The smell of something dead at a distance, too far to be danger but close enough not to forget. The cold of the snow came through my paws with every step. A leaf fell from a nearby tree and my heart lurched, my paws carried me under the roots before I understood what I had done. I stayed there, chest heaving fast, ears raised, waiting for something that didn't come. I was hungry. I was cold. I didn't know how I had gotten here.
It shifted.
The wind arrived first, sharp and clean. I opened my wings and it carried me, the treetops loaded with snow far below passing fast. I saw from both sides at once, every white branch, every shadow moving in the white. I tilted my body and dove, the frozen air screaming through my feathers, and at the last instant opened everything and landed on a branch that bent under the weight and shed snow in a cloud of powder. The cold was good. The height was good. I stayed a while looking down without needing a reason to stay.
It shifted.
Back on the ground, but different. I was still. My nose in the air, processing layer by layer, what was old and what was new, what was moving and what had passed hours ago. The cold didn't bother me, it was just another layer of information. There was something to the east that hadn't been there yesterday. I kept scenting until I was certain of what it was. Then I moved slowly, without hurry, in the right direction.
It shifted, and there was no body.
I was in a cave.
The tunnels were narrow and low, the walls covered in paintings in ochre and charcoal. Figures in battle, spears and arrows, four-legged creatures larger than horses. Silhouettes with limbs in the wrong places. Further in, another painting, different from the others by the care with which it had been made. Men mounted on something that was not a horse, eight long articulated legs like those of a spider, the bodies of the mounts large enough to carry a man with room to spare. And the men, each of them painted with two blue dots in place of their eyes, blue made from some pigment that had held its color after millennia. I looked for a second. Then kept walking. The weirwood roots came down through the cracks in the stone, thin as fingers, reaching for deeper earth.
I walked.
The smell arrived before anything else. Old bone and still earth, the cold damp of stone. And over everything, bird droppings. Strong, acrid, nearly suffocating. The kind of smell that sticks in the nose and won't leave. Deeper still, something rotted so long ago it had become part of the air.
The tunnels branched, descended, climbed again.
I reached a large chamber.
It echoed. As wide as Winterfell's great hall, the ceiling and floor covered in stalactites and stalagmites like a stone forest. More roots on the walls. Skulls in niches, rows of them, of varied shapes and sizes. Side chambers full of skeletons. Pits that descended without a visible bottom.
On the floor, between the stones, smaller skeletons. The size of children but with three fingers on the hands and skulls wider at the brow, the eye sockets larger than any human's.
Children of the Forest.
And among them, others. Enormous. The cranium thick and protruding in a way that human bone never does.
Giants.
I kept going.
The sound of water came first. It grew with every step until it became a low roar. The tunnel opened at the edge of an abyss and six hundred feet below, a river ran black and fast in the dark at the bottom.
A natural stone bridge crossed it. Narrow, no railing, the rock worn smooth by old moisture. I crossed.
On the other side, a chamber.
Roots covered everything, walls, ceiling, floor, a tangle so dense the stone beneath barely showed. Moss on the thicker trunks. Pale mushrooms at the joints. The smell here was different, more alive, more green, but still heavy.
And at the center, on a throne of interwoven roots that had grown around a human form over the course of centuries, a man.
Pale as old snow. Thin to the point where the skin seemed to cover only bone. Black robes rotted, woven long ago and never replaced. White fine hair hanging down the roots to the floor. The skin of the neck and cheek stained dark red. One eye absent, the socket taken by the roots that had grown inward. The other red.
Roots grew through his entire body. Up his leg. Over his shoulders. Along the hand resting on the throne's arm.
"Hello, Arthur."
The voice was slow and dry, from someone who speaks little. Each syllable arrived with space before and after, as if the words had to be found before they could be said, retrieved from somewhere deep where they had been stored for far too long.
"We meet at last."
The red eye didn't blink. The roots around the body moved slightly, or perhaps it was only perception, that kind of movement that exists at the edge of vision and disappears when you look directly at it.
"Who are you?"
He didn't answer immediately. He watched me with that single red eye for a time that was difficult to measure in here. When he spoke again, his lips barely parted.
"Follow the raven. Come find me, Arthur."
The vision shifted.
I opened my eyes.
My palms still against the white bark. The cold of the tree had that coldness that goes beyond temperature, the kind that seems to enter through the hand and travel up the arm. The village was quiet around me, smoke rising from the roofs, the smell of venison coming from the pen.
How long had I been standing there?
"What the hell was that," I said quietly.
*CRAA*
The raven was on a branch about ten meters away. Black, still, watching me.
Three eyes.
We stayed like that for a time. Then it opened its wings and vanished among the trees, heading north.