Chapter 43: Castle Black
They saw the Wall before they reached it.
That was always how it worked, Henry had been told by men who'd made the journey before him — you came around a bend in the road and it was simply there, filling the horizon from one edge to the other, seven hundred feet of ancient ice that had no business existing and existed anyway. The sun hit it and shattered into a thousand points of cold light that danced without warming anything. The sky above it was the same grey it had been for days, but the Wall made the sky look small.
Nobody in the party spoke for a moment.
Even the Gold Cloaks, who had been north for weeks and had developed the studied indifference of men who refused to admit the cold was getting to them, went quiet when it came into view. Tyrion had been in the middle of a sentence about something and stopped. Joffrey sat his horse without moving and looked at it with an expression that had nothing performed about it.
Jon looked at it the way someone looks at a thing they have been told about their entire life and are now recalibrating against the reality.
Ghost sat in the snow beside Jon's horse and regarded the Wall with the equanimity of an animal that has decided the universe contains many large things and this is simply another one.
Castle Black was at the Wall's base, which should have made it impressive by association. It did not. The contrast was, if anything, more striking than the Wall itself — that immensity of ancient ice looming over a collection of stone towers and timber keeps that would not have looked out of place in a minor lordship in the Riverlands.
Wooden palisades for a perimeter. A gatehouse built from timbers rather than cut stone. The grey stone of the Guard Tower was solid enough, marked by decades of wind and frost, but the rest of the castle had the look of an institution that had been improvising its maintenance for longer than was ideal.
The underground passages — the Wormways, Benjen called them — connected the various parts of the castle beneath the snow. In the deep of winter, when the roads above filled in and the wind made surface travel a matter of survival rather than transportation, those tunnels were what kept Castle Black functioning as a single place rather than a collection of isolated buildings. Henry noted their placement and filed it away.
Benjen had ridden ahead to announce the prince's arrival. By the time the column reached the main gate, it was already open.
Jeor Mormont was waiting outside it.
The Lord Commander of the Night's Watch was close to seventy, which on a man who had spent the better part of his life in this climate manifested as a kind of weathered density rather than frailty. His back was straight. His head was bald and caught the flat northern light without apology. His beard was grey-white and substantial, and his eyes, set in a face full of deep lines, were sharp in the way of a man who had been paying close attention to difficult things for a very long time and had not stopped.
A raven sat on his shoulder. It was larger than ravens ordinarily were, its black plumage carrying a faint metallic sheen, its eyes moving over the arriving column with an attention that seemed too considered for a bird.
Behind Mormont, twenty-odd Night's Watch officers stood in two loose lines, black cloaks moving in the wind.
Joffrey dismounted without waiting to be helped. He looked at the assembled brothers and at Mormont and said, with the directness Henry had been working to cultivate in him: "No ceremony. You guard the northern border of the realm. I'm here to see what that means."
Mormont inclined his head. "Your Grace honors us. Night gathers, and now our watch begins."
Henry scanned the welcoming party as he dismounted.
He recognized several faces — men he had pulled from the City Watch rolls for corruption, men who had been skimming wages and running side arrangements and who had been given the choice between the Wall and a cell. They recognized him. He could see it in the way their eyes found him and then immediately found something else to look at, the particular combination of resentment and caution that men develop toward someone who has demonstrated both the willingness and the capacity to ruin them.
He did not acknowledge them. They knew he'd seen them. That was sufficient.
Mormont fell back as the group moved through the gate, positioning himself beside Henry with the ease of a man who has been maneuvering in tight spaces for decades.
"Our first meeting, Ser Henry," he said, keeping his voice for Henry rather than the column. "Though I feel I know something of you already. Jorah mentioned you more than once when he came to see me. Said you were the kind of man worth having at your shoulder in a fight."
Henry thought of Pyke — the sea wall, the chaos of the assault, Jorah Mormont fighting beside him in the outer yard before the morning was fully light. "Ser Jorah is generous. We were in difficult circumstances together. That tends to simplify a man's assessment of the people around him."
"Difficult circumstances show you what's real," Mormont said, in the tone of someone who has verified this personally and repeatedly. He looked at Henry sideways. "I'm told you're a straightforward man."
"I try to be."
"Then I'll ask you directly — the equipment. Benjen said you're bringing decommissioned Watch gear from King's Landing. How does it get to us?"
"We finish the inspection here, then ride to Eastwatch. Your fleet brings us back to King's Landing. The equipment travels on the return trip, unloads at Eastwatch, and you distribute it from there."
Mormont was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that processes information rather than resisting it. Then he nodded, once. "That works."
The raven on his shoulder made a sound and shifted its weight. Then it left Mormont's shoulder and landed on Henry's.
Both men looked at it.
The bird settled, ruffled once, and fixed Henry with one black eye at close range.
"Henry," it said. Then again: "Henry."
Mormont watched this with an expression of genuine amusement. "He does that occasionally. Decides he likes someone." He tilted his head at the bird. "He's been with me longer than most of the men here. Smarter than several of them."
Henry raised his hand and ran two fingers along the raven's breast feathers. The bird accepted this and did not move. "He's a good judge of character, then."
"I like to think so." Mormont smiled, the lines in his face deepening. "Call me Jeor."
"Henry."
They walked in comfortable silence for a moment, the column moving around them.
"Nine hundred and sixty men," Joffrey said, from ahead.
Henry looked up. Mormont had moved to answer the prince's question, half a step back from his shoulder, head inclined.
"Counting Rangers, Builders, and Stewards," Mormont confirmed. The words came out level, but something in his jaw said what he was not putting into his tone. "When the need arises, we put everyone in the line. Builders and Stewards included."
"And nineteen castles along the Wall," Joffrey said. He was not performing the thought — he was working through the arithmetic and finding it troubling, which was the correct response to arithmetic that troubled you.
"Nineteen, yes." Mormont looked at the Wall above them, briefly. "Three with garrisons. Shadow Tower in the west, Castle Black in the center, Eastwatch in the east. The other sixteen are empty." A pause. "The wind moves through them freely."
Joffrey absorbed this. He looked at Henry, and Henry gave him nothing — no guidance, no expression. The boy needed to form his own view of what he was seeing.
Henry watched him do it.
The Night's Watch soldier serving as guide stopped before a round tower and bowed.
"Your Grace. The King's Tower — Castle Black's quarters for distinguished guests."
It was about a hundred feet tall, built from pale grey stone, the mortar cracked in the way of something that had stood through a great many winters and would stand through a great many more but was not getting any younger. Narrow windows. A door that had been rehung at some point, the hinges newer than the stone around them. Someone had made efforts to maintain it, which made the age of everything else more visible by contrast.
It had not hosted a king in a century. The name was what remained of that fact.
Joffrey looked at it for a moment. Not long — long enough.
"My men won't fit," he said. He turned to Mormont. "Where do your brothers eat?"
"The Shieldhall, Your Grace. Stone walls, large enough—"
"I'll stay there. With my escort." He said it simply, without the performance of generosity, which made it more convincing than performance would have. "The King's Tower can stay empty a while longer. It's managed this long."
Mormont looked at him. Henry recognized the expression — it was the expression of a man revising an estimate in real time and not entirely sure what to do with the revision.
"As you wish, Your Grace," Mormont said.
They walked on toward the Shieldhall, the Wall rising above everything, the cold finding every gap in every layer of clothing, the raven still on Henry's shoulder and apparently satisfied with its decision.
That evening, Henry stood on the Wall.
The lift had taken them up in stages — the mechanism was old but maintained, the ropes thick and well-tarred against the cold. At the top the wind was different than it was at ground level, stronger and more direct, the kind of wind that had crossed hundreds of miles of open frozen country without anything to slow it down and was not particularly interested in the people standing in its path.
The view south was Westeros — the Haunted Forest dark and dense below, the Kings Road a pale line threading through it, the country opening out beyond. The view north was something else entirely. Flat and white and immense, the landscape beyond the Wall ran to a horizon that seemed further away than horizons had any right to be. The Haunted Forest extended into it and then thinned and then stopped, and beyond that was a whiteness that went on until the eye gave up trying to find the end of it.
Joffrey stood beside him, not speaking.
The wind moved around them. The Wall under their feet was solid in a way that stone was not solid, a density that came from age and cold and something that might have been intention, as though the thing had decided to be permanent and had simply refused every force that disagreed.
"There are things beyond that," Henry said, after a while. Not explaining, not presenting a case. Just stating a fact in the direction of someone who would need to know it eventually.
Joffrey looked north for a long moment.
"The Wildlings," he said.
"Among other things."
The boy turned to look at him. Waiting for more. Henry looked north and said nothing further, and after a while Joffrey looked north again too.
The cold was absolute. The Wall was absolute. The dark beyond the Wall was absolute.
The raven, who had followed them up on Mormont's shoulder and transferred to a convenient piece of ironwork nearby, watched the darkness in the north with its black eyes and said nothing at all.
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