The King of Winters

Chapter 46

Will threaded his way through a thicket, then started up the slope to the low ridge where he had found his vantage point under a sentinel tree. Under the thin crust of snow, the ground was damp and muddy, slick footing, with rocks and hidden roots to trip you up. Will made no sound as he climbed.

His heart leapt in fear as he reached the top. Moonlight shone down on the clearing, the ashes of the fire pit, fresh fallen snow covered the great rock, the little half-frozen stream... And corpses or what was left of them. Whoever did this thing was stone of heart. The dead bodies were all ripped and the parts of their bodies were arranged in a weird pattern. 

Will got back up in fear and turned to face a child impaled to a tree, dead and frozen. He rushed back to his horse and raced back to the tree to meet his brothers. Luckily, they were already back when he came back. 

Will told his brothers of what he saw. They never interrupted him and heard the entire thing in silence. 

" What do you expect?" Ser Waymar told him when he was finished. "They're savages. One lot steal a goat from another lot and before you know it they're ripping each other to pieces." 

"I've never seen Wildlings do a thing like this," Will said. "I've never seen a thing like this, not ever in my life."

"How close did you get?" Royce asked him. 

"Close as any man could." 

"We should head back to the Wall," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.

"Do the dead frighten you?" Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Gared did not rise to the bait. He had seen the lordlings come and go. "Our orders were to track the Wildlings. We tracked them," he said. "They won't trouble us no more."

"You don't think they'll ask us how they died?" the commander said. "Get back on your horse."

Will could see the tightness around Gared's mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. Gared had spent many years in the Night's Watch, and he was not accustomed to being made light of. Yet it was more than that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear.

Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness the southron called the Haunted Forest had no more terrors for him.

Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise.

"Whatever did this to them could do the same to us," Will tried to argue.  

The lordling seemed not to hear him. He studied the deepening twilight in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had. Will had ridden with the knight long enough to understand that it was best not to interrupt him when he looked like that.

The young knight turned back to his grizzled man-at-arms. Frost fallen leaves whispered past them, and Royce's destrier moved restlessly. "What do you think might have killed these men, Gared?" Ser Waymar asked casually. He adjusted the drape of his long sable cloak.

"It was the cold," Gared said with iron certainty. "I saw men freeze last winter, and the one before, when I was half a boy. Everyone talks about snows forty foot deep, and how the ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the cold. It steals up on you quieter than Will, and at first you shiver and your teeth chatter and you stamp your feet and dream of mulled wine and nice hot fires. It burns, it does. Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don't have the strength to fight it. It's easier just to sit down or go to sleep. They say you don't feel any pain toward the end. First you go weak and drowsy, and everything starts to fade, and then it's like sinking into a sea of warm milk. Peaceful, like."