Chapter 175: The Last Flame of Winter

“And ride with the Vale and you have declared war on the west and the Trident,” said a man who had been at Howling Mountain Pass and had got out of it. “You did not see their reinforcement come. How fast. How hard.”

“That was an ambush gone wrong! With the Vale inside and us outside, and our numbers, we take Grey Creek at a rush,” Rat-Eye said, greed lighting him. “Take their grain and their weapons and we stand on our own feet. And after that, stay in the Gift or go south, and let it be our choice for once.”

The camp came apart into shouting, the for and the against and the waiting all trampling one another, close enough to blows. Tormund said nothing and gripped the scroll until his knuckles went white, and inside him the argument ran as hard as it ran outside. He did not trust the Vale; the memory of the deception was too fresh to bleach out. And the future the scroll painted for Grey Creek, land taken, free folk turned into somebody’s tenantry, was not one he wanted either. And the pressure was real: the Vale’s soldiers close by, infiltrating, tempting, promising. Grey Creek had thrown back one attack; could it throw back the Vale and a knife in its own back at the same time? How much weight did Jon Snow’s title actually carry, and could it shelter anyone? And if Grey Creek fell, what exactly would the Vale do with free folk who had helped, and with free folk who had not?

Then Old Hake, who had sat silent in the corner where the camp had grudgingly let him sit, got slowly to his feet. He did not shout. He let his clouded eyes, the eyes of a man long used to wind and snow and dying, travel over the arguing men and settle on Tormund.

“Tormund. Brothers.” The hoarse voice cut the noise better than shouting would have. “Arguing feeds no one and stops no swords. Half my blood is the Gift’s and half is off the ice farther north, and no southern lord ever gave me so much as a crust. I carry messages for Grey Creek not for what they pay me, but because my eyes are not blind yet and my heart is not dead yet.”

He drew from his coat a hard black bundle wrapped in leather and broke it open in front of them all: a rough clean flatbread of bran and bean flour. “This came out of a Grey Creek oven. Some of the grain in it came from the queen in the south, some came up from the west, and some was barley the Grey Creek people grew themselves last autumn and got in early because the frost was coming. It tastes of very little. It keeps a man alive.”

He held up half of it. “The rules of Grey Creek were set by Lord Torren and by several of us, elders of the tribes, together. Break them and you are punished; and when the punishment is done, the grain you are owed is not short by a crumb. Break new ground and the first three years’ harvest is yours entire. Take a wound and there are herbs. Die, and someone buries you, and your old and your children keep a ration. That is what I have seen with these eyes and eaten with these teeth. Go to Grey Creek and look. Ask anyone who has wintered there.”

He turned his hand toward Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye. “And the Vale gives you what? A few large promises. A parchment written by no one you can name. A few bags of gifts, gone when they are eaten, with no word of the next. Did the Vale men who died at Howling Mountain Pass carry rations and winter furs for you? And these fatter pastures below the Wall, whose lands are they? And when you have taken them, will the lord they belong to agree? Will the queen with the dragons agree?”

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It went into the fight like cold water into hot oil, and the noise dropped. Men who could not read and had no use for grand principles began to look thoughtful, because on the simple arithmetic of surviving and being cheated, free folk have an animal’s clear sight.

“Grey Creek has too many rules. Grey Creek is also there,” Old Hake went on, and every word landed. “The bread bakes there. The houses stand there. Sick or hurt, someone sees to you. Where are the Vale’s promises kept? What has the Vale made with its hands, besides talk to push us into being their knife? Say we do it. Say we take Grey Creek with them and carry off the grain. What then? Does the Vale army stay in the Gift and hold it with us and share the stores? Or do they take what they came for, walk back behind the Bloody Gate, and leave us standing here for the west’s revenge, and Jon Snow’s, and the dragon queen’s?”

At last he looked at Tormund alone. “You are the head of this people. Do you lead them chasing a freedom and a pasture that no man here can see or touch, and drop them into a deeper hole than the one they scrape a living in now? Or do you lead them to stand with Grey Creek, and with Jon Snow, and with anyone else who does not want the Gift made a battlefield again and does not want the free folk used as somebody’s blade, and find, in this cursed world, a place to live and to keep? You choose.”

Tormund said nothing; but his hand on the scroll loosened. He looked at Old Hake, and then around the fire at the faces. Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye still wanted to answer, and there was less behind it than before. More of the others, particularly the ones with families at their backs who had known real hunger and real dying, showed in their eyes an agreement with the old man, and under it a deep fear of another gamble on someone else’s word.

To live, and to hold a place. On the edge of the Gift that night, those few words outweighed every promise and every slogan on offer.

The wind tightened and drove sparks and cold dust across Shadow Vale. What this camp chose would decide more than the survival of Grey Creek Fort: it would be the first uncertain spark of the conflagration now sweeping the North, and Westeros with it, in what men would afterward call the last flame of winter.

Tormund did not decide that night. He needed time, and better knowledge, and above all he needed to see whether Jon Snow and Grey Creek Fort could actually deliver, in the full storm that was coming, the ground to stand on that they had offered a people who lived in the cracks of other men’s wars.

The storm did not wait for him. As the bonfire in Shadow Vale burned down and the shouting stopped for the night, far to the south behind the Bloody Gate the Vale’s army was completing its final assembly; on the eastern sea, strange sails stood in the dark; in the Red Keep the argument over the latest reports out of the North was reaching its pitch; and the war machine of the west and the Trident, at Arthur Greyoak’s last order, had begun to turn over with a low and lethal sound.

The prologue was finished. The last flame was about to catch. The final chapter of the North’s long winter, and the reckoning of every contradiction and every ambition on the continent, had drawn back its bloody curtain; and every soul caught inside it, from the king on the highest seat to the crofter scratching at frozen ground, would find a place in the fire and the ice that followed, or would be ash.