When I came in, everyone was eating.
Fjorn and Tove standing near the wall, each with a bowl. The village men scattered around the small space, also standing, also eating. The six on the floor with their backs to the walls, bowls in their laps. The fire smelling of venison and herbs.
Everyone looked when I came in. Then went back to eating.
Tove filled a bowl and held it out without saying anything. I took it and sat near the door.
"Found what you were looking for?" asked Fjorn, still chewing.
"Found it."
He looked at me for a second, chewing slowly.
"I saw your eyes," he said. "You're a Skinchanger, aren't you?"
I knew what it was. I had read about it in Winterfell's library, years ago, in the books few people consulted. Warg. Skinchanger. The one who enters another body and sees through other eyes.
"Maybe," I said, taking a spoonful. "I'm not certain yet."
"We of the Free Folk thought magic had been lost in the South," said Tove, without taking her eyes off the fire.
"Yes and no. It's scarcer there. I felt the difference when I crossed the Wall."
They both nodded at the same time, like people who had already suspected as much but never had confirmation.
Fjorn put his empty bowl on the edge of the hearth and looked at me with the seriousness of someone about to say something they consider important.
"Take care out here, Arthur. You were lucky we're friendlier than most. If you hadn't spoken the Old Tongue or had drawn steel, you'd have an arrow in your eyes right now." He crossed his arms. "And the Free Folk aren't the only threat. The animals out here aren't like the ones in the South. Giant wolves, bears, shadowcats. Everything bigger, everything hungrier." A pause. "And the White Shadows. And their wights."
The fire crackled.
"They don't come out during the day, when the sun is shining. But don't think that means they're gone." There was something different in his voice now, not exactly fear but its close relative, the memory of something he had seen and never forgotten. "The shadows never leave. You might not see them, but they're always at your heels." He looked at the group. "And if any of you happen to die out there, burn the body. Don't bury it. Burn it."
Nobody spoke for a moment.
"Thank you, Fjorn."
I finished the soup.
"For your hospitality. For sharing food, which is scarce on this side." I stood, took a spare castle-forged steel sword from my belt and held it out to him. "Take this."
Fjorn looked at it for a second before accepting. He drew the blade a few centimeters from the sheath, his eyes following the steel with the attention of someone who recognizes quality by its shine.
"These are rare. Only the Crows carry them." He sheathed it again. "Thank you." He nodded.
I took the knife from my belt and held it out to Tove. "This one's for you."
She took it without ceremony, ran her thumb along the blade, looked at the steel. Nodded.
"Time to go."
We came out of the house. Fjorn and Tove came to the door and stood outside while we found our horses.
Sigurd was the first to turn to Fjorn. He extended his forearm in that direct gesture that was his way of saying what he didn't usually put into words.
"Good hunting," said Fjorn, returning the grip.
Sigurd nodded with that short smile that appeared when he approved of someone.
Perseu inclined his head toward Tove with that quiet seriousness. "Thank you for the food and the shelter. You didn't have to."
Tove shrugged as if to say yes, they did have to, but it was the right kind of having to.
Astrid said nothing, but stopped in front of Tove for a second and made a gesture with her head that Tove returned. The two understood each other without needing more.
Belzakar and Morghaz said their farewells to the village men with that unadorned efficiency of the ex-Unsullied, a firm nod, and that was that.
Kevin was last.
"Fjorn." He put a hand on the man's shoulder with that familiarity only Kevin could have with strangers in under half an hour. "You gave us hot food and didn't kill us. That already puts you at the top of my list of favourite people beyond the Wall." He raised a finger. "A list which, for the record, only has you on it so far." He gave a light pat on the shoulder. "Thank you."
Fjorn looked at him for a second with the expression of someone who doesn't quite know what just happened but doesn't mind.
"Don't die," said Fjorn.
"That's the plan."
We mounted.
When the horses started moving, I heard the caw.
I looked. The raven was on the highest branch of the weirwood, black and still, watching me with those three eyes. When it saw I had spotted it, it opened its wings and flew north.
I followed.
We rode with the raven ahead, always ahead, never far enough to lose from sight but never close enough to reach. The forest grew denser as we advanced, the trees older, the branches closing above us in vaulted arches of snow.
The sun went down.
When it became clear the light wouldn't last more than an hour, I stopped Sleipnir.
"We camp here."
No one questioned it.
Kevin went hunting. Sigurd disappeared between the trees after firewood. Belzakar and Morghaz began setting up the tents with their usual methodology. Perseu tended to the horses. Astrid kept watch on the perimeter.
I stayed still.
There was something in the air that hadn't been there before. Not just the cold, which had worsened as the sun dropped. Something else. A smell that didn't belong to the forest, dry and strange, like old ice mixed with something that had stopped being alive a long time ago.
The raven began to caw.
I drew Truth slowly.
I closed my eyes for a second, opened my senses. The tingle of magic was constant here, but there was something mixed into it, that residue of necromancy I had felt before, stronger now, closer.
Something is coming.
The branch snapped to my left.
I turned.
Two blue points glowing between the trees, bright like stars but cold, the wrong colour.
Then two more.
Then more.
Wights.
"Enemies!" I shouted. "They're Wights. Common steel won't kill them, focus on the limbs!"
They came out of the tree line in silence. Ten, maybe twelve, moving with that stiff slowness of something not made to walk but walking anyway, limbs clumsy, stride dragging and uneven. Old skins and flesh that the cold had preserved badly, bones showing where decomposition had done its work. The smell I had sensed before arrived strong now that they were close, cold and strange, like snow carrying something beneath it. The blue eyes didn't blink.
Sigurd came out of the forest with the firewood still in his arm and let everything fall when he saw what was in front of him.
He picked up his axe.
"Finally," he said.
The first Wight that got close to him took the axe diagonally, the blow splitting the body from shoulder to waist. The top half fell one way. The bottom half kept walking for two steps before going down. The second came from the flank and Sigurd didn't even turn, just swung his arm back and took the head off with the rear edge of the axe. The third had its arm torn off at the elbow, then the leg, then what remained was kicked aside so the next one could take its place.
Kevin came back from hunting twenty meters behind and assessed the situation in a second. He dropped the bow and drew his short sword, went in from the flank and went straight for the limbs, cutting knees and ankles, knocking them down one by one where they lay crawling without being able to get up.
The first one to reach me took Truth through the chest, the Valyrian steel going through and out the back. It fell without a spasm, without a sound. Immediate.
"Head or limbs!" I shouted. "Common steel doesn't stop these!"
Perseu came in from the side with his sword, decapitated one with surgical precision, then a second. Astrid covered his flank, sword and shield working together as always, blocking a blow and answering before the Wight understood what had happened.
Belzakar and Morghaz flanked from the opposite side, spears going through skulls with that efficiency that years of Unsullied training never fully leaves a body.
The last one stood about five meters from me, its blue eyes watching me with that absence of expression more unsettling than any rage could be. I went through it from the front, the blade coming out the back.
The silence returned.
I looked around. Everyone standing.
"Anyone hurt?"
Sigurd was cleaning his axe in the snow with that specific satisfaction. "Easier than I expected."
"And the idiots of the Ironborn keep saying what is dead can never die." Kevin looked at the bodies scattered on the ground. "How about that."
Sigurd laughed, looked at the ground around him, and crouched down. He picked up a hand that had been separated from its owner by the axe and was still opening and closing its fingers slowly, with that disturbing autonomy that Wight limbs had even when separated from the body.
He turned to Kevin.
He held the hand up in front of Kevin's face and made it wave.
Kevin looked at the hand. Looked at Sigurd. Looked at the hand again.
"That's not funny."
Sigurd made the hand squeeze the air in Kevin's direction once, then threw it into the fire that Belzakar had just lit. The hand kept moving for a few seconds in the flames before going still.
"Burn the bodies," I said.
Nobody asked why. Fjorn's words were still fresh.
We made a larger fire than we needed and threw the Wights in. The smell was awful, old flesh and the unnatural cold leaving the bodies as the fire consumed them, a dark smoke that the wind carried in the wrong direction.
We stood around it until the last bone stopped moving.
"Good thing it was just Wights," said Kevin. "I'm not remotely interested in meeting their parents."
"For once I agree with you," I said.
Astrid, who had been quiet since the end of the fight, turned to me.
"Shouldn't the White Walkers have been with them?"
"Not necessarily. Wights move on their own when there's none nearby. But staying alert never hurts." I looked at the trees around us, dark now with the night closed in. "If the cold gets suddenly worse than it already is, that's an alert. It means something bigger is nearby."
Nobody answered. But everyone looked at the forest.
The fire crackled.
The three-eyed raven stayed on the nearest branch all night, still, watching the flames.
We took turns through the night. Two on watch at a time, two hours each shift, while the others slept. The cold pressed harder after midnight, but not more than expected. Nothing that needed an alert.
The raven stayed on the branch until dawn.
When the sun appeared we packed the tents, put out the fire, mounted up. The raven was already flying when we left camp, always ahead, always at the same pace.
I took out the map Aemon had given me and compared it to the terrain.
We were close to what the Watch called Craster's Keep.
The holdfast sat on a low hill in the middle of the Haunted Forest, enclosed by an earthen dike. The gate was on the southwest side, decorated with the skulls of a bear and a ram, white and old, fixed above the entrance. A stream ran around the north end of the hill. Inside the dike there was a pile of accumulated rubbish, a pigsty, and a sheep pen.
When we approached, women working outside saw the horses and went inside without running, but quickly enough. A man came out shortly after.
Grey hair with a few dark strands still holding on, a flat nose, a slack mouth that gave his face a permanent expression of displeasure. One ear had disappeared, the hole in the side of his head long since scarred over. His teeth, when he opened his mouth, were brown and rotten. He wore a sheepskin jerkin and a roughly stitched fur cloak, and on his wrist a heavy twisted gold ring that seemed out of place on the rest of him.
He stood at the entrance with his arms crossed and looked at us with the expression of someone who had already decided they didn't like us before hearing a word.
"Who the hell are you? You don't look like Crows." He narrowed his eyes. "You look like southerners."
Already don't like this man, I thought.
Sigurd had dismounted with his axe in hand, as he always did when stopping somewhere unfamiliar. When Craster looked at him, Sigurd opened a smile that had nothing friendly about it.
"What are you looking at, big man?" said the old man, his jaw pushing forward. "Think you can't kill me?"
"Why don't you try?" answered Sigurd, tightening his grip on the handle.
"Enough, Sigurd."
Sigurd didn't put the axe away, but he stopped tightening.
I looked the old man up and down with the calm he clearly wasn't expecting.
"Nice place you have here." A pause. "You must be the infamous Craster."
"That's me." The slack mouth closed in a pinch of suspicion. "Why?"
"No reason."
My eyes went to the women behind him. Some barely standing, dark circles, worn clothes. I looked long enough to count how many there were.
"If you keep looking at them, I'll tear your eyes out." His jaw pushed forward slightly, the gesture of someone who makes threats out of habit.
I'd like to see him try, I thought.
"My apologies." I brought my eyes back to him. "Do you know where the Fist of the First Men is?"
"And what do I get if I tell you?" His face closed in calculation, eyes narrowing.
His eyes moved slowly down my body, reading what there was to read. They stopped on the sword. The blue gem set in the pommel caught the little light there was in the grey sky and gave back a deep glow, the kind that doesn't need sun to show.
His eyes changed the moment they found the pommel.
"Give me that sword and I'll tell you."
I looked at him for a second. Then began to laugh, the kind of laugh that doesn't need humour, only absurdity.
"You have any idea what you're saying, old man?"
Craster's face closed. He went from greed to frustration in a second, and there was something in his eyes now that wasn't just anger, it was the specific desperation of someone who had seen something they wanted badly and was watching it disappear before they'd gotten close.
"This is Valyrian steel," I said. "With this sword I could buy a kingdom." I let that settle. "And you want me to trade it for information."
Kevin, who had understood what I was doing, added in that serious tone he used when he wasn't being serious.
"A small kingdom," said Kevin. "But a kingdom."
The old man ran his tongue over his rotten teeth, looked at the sword, looked at me, looked at the sword again.
"In exchange for the sword," he said, with the tone of someone who believes they're offering something of value, "I'll give you my daughter. Haven't touched her yet, haven't taken her as a wife."
The silence that followed was different from the others.
I looked back. The women, all watching from where they stood, one of them still almost a child.
Kevin, who had had a smile on his face since we arrived, no longer did.
"What did you say, old man?" My voice came out low. "Daughter?"
"All my wives are my daughters, you idiot. What's the matter? Don't want her? It's a good deal."
I drew Truth slowly.
Craster stepped back half a pace, his eyes going first to the blade with fear, then back with that greed strong enough to override instinct. When he saw I wasn't advancing, he must have decided I had accepted.
"You can have her," he said, pointing.
A girl. She looked ten years old, maybe less. She stayed where she was, her eyes wide and quiet, the way you learn when the alternative is worse.
"She's not even nine name days old yet." he said.
I looked at the child.
I looked at the arm pointing at her.
The movement was fast. Truth cut the air and the arm in the same stroke, clean, without hesitation.
The hand and forearm hit the ground before Craster understood what had happened.
It took about five seconds.
Then came the scream.
"YOU BASTARD! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO, YOU CUT MY ARM YOU SON OF A BITCH!"
He grabbed the stump with his remaining hand, blood running through his fingers in the snow, his knees buckling. The women behind him stirred, some pulling back, others moving toward him by instinct.
I looked down at him with Truth still in hand.
I pointed at the oldest woman among those standing behind him.
"What did he mean by daughters?" I asked, with the cold that didn't come from the air.
"YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE, YOU BASTARD?" Craster was still trying to press the stump with his remaining hand, his face twisted with pain and rage. "THINK THE CROWS WILL LET THIS GO? I'M FRIENDS WITH THE NIGHT'S WATCH, WHEN THEY HEAR WHAT YOU DID THEY'LL GUT YOU!"
"Shut your mouth." I didn't look at him. "Or the next one is your tongue."
He swallowed the rest of what he was going to say.
"Go on," I said to the oldest woman. "Tell me."
She stood still, her eyes going from me to him and back. That silence of someone who has learned that speaking has consequences.
"Nothing will happen to you."
She looked at the arm on the ground. Then at me.
"Me, her and her." She pointed to the two beside her. "We are his wives. When we get pregnant and girls are born, they grow up and become his wives too." Her voice caught. "The boys..."
"The boys?"
She needed a second.
"He takes them. And sacrifices them to the Cold Gods."
The silence that followed had a weight different from all the others.
I stayed still for a moment. The anger rose slowly in my chest, the kind that makes no noise, the kind that is more dangerous than the kind that does. Behind me I felt the group harden, I didn't need to look to know. We'd been together for years. Even Belzakar and Morghaz, who had seen things most men wouldn't survive to recount, went still.
"Son of a bitch," whispered Sigurd, in a voice I had never heard from him before.
"Astrid. Belzakar. Morghaz." I didn't take my eyes off Craster. "Escort the women inside."
One of the older wives stepped forward, her eyes wet and her voice coming out broken.
"What are you going to do to us? Please, don't kill him. We'll die without him."
I looked at her.
"What I'm going to do is no longer your concern." I lowered my voice, not in threat, but the way you speak to someone who has been afraid so long they've forgotten what it was not to be. "And you're not going to die. We're going to take care of you from now on." I gestured to Astrid, Belzakar, and Morghaz. "These three will stay with you. You can trust them."
Astrid went to the women with her usual calm, unhurried. Belzakar and Morghaz followed.
The oldest woman looked at Astrid for a second. Then let her in.
When they went inside, I turned to Craster.
He was on his knees in the snow, the stump pressed against his chest, his face wet with pain and rage mixed together, his rotten teeth clenched.
"You know what's going to happen to you, don't you?" I asked.
"JUST DO IT, BASTARD!" His teeth clenched, his face twisted. "KILL ME!"
"I will." I drove Truth into the ground between us, the blade sinking a few handspans into the frozen earth. I crouched down slowly until I was level with him. "But first answer some questions."
"I'M NOT TELLING YOU ANYTHING!"
I drew the dagger from my chest without hurrying. Black handle of dragonbone, Valyrian steel blade. I began to turn it between my fingers, slowly, without looking at it.
"Have you heard of the Boltons?"
He didn't answer, but his eyes went to the dagger and stayed there.
"The old Red Kings." The voice came out quiet, effortless. "Who submitted to the Kings of Winter."
"The Boltons are the old enemies of my house." I stopped turning it. Left the dagger still between my fingers, the point aimed upward. "Which, by the way, is the Starks of Winterfell. The Kings of Winter."
I saw in his eyes the moment it clicked. The pain in the stump was still there, but the fear came on top of it and stayed.
"The Red Kings had a philosophy." I knelt in front of him in the snow, slowly, without taking my eyes off his. "Which I personally don't appreciate." I tilted my head slightly. "But may have to use."
His breathing was shallow. The stump kept bleeding.
"Know what it is, Craster?"
His jaw trembled. He didn't answer.
"A naked man has few secrets." I raised the dagger and pressed the blade slowly against his throat, the pressure of someone in no hurry. A thin red line opened where the cold steel touched the skin. "But a flayed man has none."