Chapter 181

Beyond the Wall.

Craster's Keep. Only wildlings could call this hovel a keep, though to them any wall thrown up against the wind counted as a fortress. In truth it was a house perched on a low rise, ringed by a shallow earthen bank, behind which sat a garden plot, a sheep pen, a pigsty, a kennel, a rabbit hutch, and a scattering of storehouses. The men of the Night's Watch had long used it as a waystation for ranging deep into the true north. The arrival of thirty men hauling strange equipment had roused the old wildling's suspicion, though not quite enough to make him act on it.

"A shit plan, a shit situation, and shit company besides," Thorne muttered, working steadily through a wineskin.

The plan was, to put it kindly, far from perfect. Wait for the child to be born, then use it as live bait to draw out a White Walker. Here Jon found himself forced to agree with his "friend": the plan was pure recklessness. From time to time, cries carried out from the wildling's hovel, the sounds of a girl in labor. And the louder the screaming grew, the harder Ser Alliser drank.

"That's enough, Ser Alliser." A man had no business walking into serious work half drunk.

"Shut your mouth, bastard!" Yet the wineskin vanished all the same. "Tonight we've got ourselves a fine chance to become somebody's next masterpiece."

Losing a fight to the White Walkers was an unpleasant business. If the corpses weren't raised as wights, they were arranged instead into some grim work of art. Cruel, deliberate, terrifying, especially given that no one had ever walked away alive from an encounter with them.

"You're afraid."

"Aye, but not of the Others, not of wights, not of ice spiders or whatever other horrors are out there. No, what I fear is what comes along with them." Thorne made no effort to hide it. "Do you remember your last real winter?"

"Yes. It was cold." Back then, young Jon had nearly died of the fever that came with it.

"HA! Cold, in Winterfell, with all those hot springs running under it?!" Thorne's gaze had begun drifting, unfocused. "I spent six months out here once, beyond the Wall. There was strange wildling activity, so we rode out on what was meant to be a two week scouting run. Wildlings know this land better than we ever will. They feel a storm coming long before it arrives... unlike us. The storm caught us in the open, out on a bare field, wind so strong it tore trees up by the roots. Pate and Doss were simply swept away. We never even found their bodies. Roben, Krenn and Tobber froze to death, four more died of one sickness or another. Every day there were fewer of us, and no one knew who the Stranger would take next, and all of it in pitch darkness." He came back from the memory slowly. "No, Lord Snow. It isn't the ice bastards I fear. It's the Long Night."

"My lords," one of the Watch's scouts stepped in, "it's a boy."

"May the gods protect us."

...

Jon and the men around him strained under the weight of waiting. Nothing in the world kills a man quite so thoroughly as waiting does. In any other circumstance, there's some way to act, some way to shape what comes next. Here, there was nothing. Waiting drained their time, their spirit, devoured whatever energy remained, feeding shamelessly off them like some creature that had made them its host.

"How long has it been?" Jon asked the man beside him.

"Twenty minutes." Gren seemed to carry some private, internal clock, always certain of the time down to the minute.

"Let's hope the bastard hasn't gotten himself killed," Thorne said, worrying for his brother in his own peculiar fashion.

The plan was to track these creatures. The dangerous task of doing just that fell to Thoren Smallwood, their senior ranger, second only to Uncle Benjen in skill. He understood every degree of danger involved, yet duty called him to the task regardless. And so thirty riders sat waiting in the black of night for the signal that would set the whole operation into motion.

"Now," Thorne commanded, catching the low chirp of a bird call.

...

The Others, the White Walkers, the Cold Gods, the White Death, they had been called by every name imaginable, yet even after eight thousand years, even reduced to little more than a nursery tale, they were not forgotten. Old Nan had loved frightening the little Stark children with them, and generations of small wolves had lost sleep over her stories. The old woman had always described them as cold, dead things, but no, in that she had been wrong. The Others were not dead. Their bodies were tall, gaunt, and hard as old bone, and pale as milk besides. Their eyes burned blue, a blue that seemed to cut through the night itself. The Others were beautiful, the way death itself is beautiful.

"Hold him!!!"

"Get more rope on him," Thorne bellowed. "Richard, you son of a whore, bring the chains!!!"

Despite every preparation they'd made, despite the creature's supposed helplessness once caught, two men from their party were already dead: one with his neck snapped clean, another thrown badly from his horse. The plan had been simple: capture the Walker, hack off its arms and legs, and haul it back to Castle Black. But something no one had accounted for happened: no weapon of theirs did the creature any harm at all. Blades shattered against its flesh after two or three blows. They were forced to improvise on the spot, burying the monster under enough rope to hold it still by sheer volume alone.

"FUCK!" One of the Watch's brothers went down, choking on his own blood. The dead man rose again and tore out the throat of the friend who'd stood beside him only moments before. A furious scream of pain tore through the night, the ring of steel, the shriek of the dead thing.

"Burn Arnie's body before it rises too!!!" Firelight from burning corpses washed over the clearing. Against all reason, they burned like dry kindling.

"That's it, we've done it," Thorne said, as relieved as Jon himself, elated that they'd actually pulled it off. "Load him up, we're heading back to Castle Black."

"VAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!" The creature's shriek tore out in every direction at once, a sound like breaking ice. They braced themselves for whatever might follow, but by some mercy, nothing came.

"What happened?!" No one had an answer. "Gag it! Now!"

"Fall back!"

...

A few days later, a white cold swallowed the whole company whole. This was no ordinary weather, but something magical: bitterly cold, thick with damp, heavy snow driving on savage winds. It came without warning..

"WIGHTS!!!"

Through the blizzard came the screams of men, the grinding shriek of ice, the pounding of feet, and the howling of the dead.