The clans were many. All with their own peculiarities and customs. Some recognized chieftains. Others were led by clan mothers or magnars. Some lived in peace. Others existed in a perpetual state of conflict, warring against each other and themselves. Some clans lived in small villages. Others built halls and sometimes even managed to hold them for a generation. Some still were loners that went where whim took them, held down only by their own needs. She’d met many of them these past four years. Some were fought with. Some were treated with. Some were stolen from, in food and tools and women. Some stole from them too before being driven off, or more often beaten down and absorbed by killing the men and impregnating the women. The clan had swelled in size, in men and women and children that didn’t understand each other half the time because of all the different tongues. Even so, she’d heard mutterings about old gods and cold gods and tribes that lived in a hidden valley somewhere far to the North. The men were always scornful and wary about those last ones. Almost as much as for the dwellers of the ice rivers, the dark gods of the cave dwellers, and the frozen shores at both ends of the Wall. But all of the tribes shared three deep-set beliefs: they hated the Night’s Watch, they did not kneel, and they placed immense importance on a man keeping his word once given.
It was all one big pile of shit. A fat, stinking turd dumped by a lying sack of shit in the steaming snow.
They claimed honor but raided in the dead of night. They kept their word but promised only ill unless beaten down first. They called themselves free folk but made wives out of kidnapped women. They claimed not to pledge allegiance to any one bloodline or kneel or suffer kings, but every other song was about lineage. Their boasts always went back to their mother, and their mother’s mother, and whichever King they were ever so surely descended from. Joramun, the Horned Lord, Raymun Redbeard, Bael the Bard.
And then there was their
law and
custom…
She remembered it as if it was happening right in front of her. Two lads with not a fight to their name arguing about some lay or song. The Game of Thrones and Kneelers, she thought it might be called. One of them talked about the heroes. The second tried to lecture the first about the heroes. A nearby man idly mused how the heroes weren’t heroes at all since they didn’t actually decide anything that happened. The first lad disagreed with the man. The second told the man to take his miserable self elsewhere if he hated the song so much. The man jokingly told the lad that people might start to worry about his wits if he misjudged other people so badly. Then proceeded to blithely explain why the boys were wrong about everything. The second lad challenged the man to a contest of wits and lost. Badly. The man waited to see if he’d be challenged to a contest of arms, but neither lad proved brave enough. The group dispersed.
Then the first lad and a friend that hadn’t even been involved went and complained on behalf of the second lad to the Callow Bear himself. Not that they were brave enough to call Gerrick Kingsblood that to his face anymore, now that he was chieftain despite the paltry difference in age between them. They were plenty brave to twist words and speak poison into his ear though. Both of them had challenged the wise man in the past and lost. Repeatedly. And oh, how they smarted over it even now.
So what did the great chief then do? He listened to the two and banished the man from their tribe for his ‘insult.’ Didn’t ask for his version of the story. Or even the rude boy, even though he was the only one in the mess that actually
had done insult. And when the man went and asked why he was getting punished for the boys’ foolishness, and why the lad wasn’t getting the same treatment for his own insult, the great chief had his late father’s shieldmen beat him up. Told him it was too late to come ‘whining’ now, and how dare he abuse his trust? But since he whined so well, he’d give the lads a talking to and the man could come back to the tribe in a sennight. If he was still alive by then, he’d earned his place among them. Such magnanimity, so just was he the Kingsblood, isn’t it just so? Never mind that it was the middle of winter!
She plunged into the memory. Sunk her teeth deep into it. Just like her father had told her after mother died and she spent days just a breath away from wanting to fall to pieces and join her.
Get angry he’d told her.
Get angry at something else. Something that made your blood boil. Not too old that you forgot how it felt. Not too new that there’s anything you can do about it. Find it. Sink your teeth into it until there’s no room in your head for anything else. It’s exhausting, but it’ll get you through the day even when you feel like jumping from a tower. And when night comes, you’ll be so tired that you’ll sleep it all away too, terrors or not.
The
law and
custom of the
free folk. Reward whiny fools for their lies, punish the wise for the restraint of
only giving as good as they got, and then wonder why your tribe is all fools and cheats and schemers. When the only lesson you teach is that one should never hold you to your own standards because they’re a steaming pile of shit, no wonder wildlings didn’t have thrones or laws or even a strip of land between them, creatures like them weren’t fit to rule a dungheap, let alone a kingdom and if she had to smell his rancid breath and taste his tongue one more time she’d-
A snarl. A choked gasp. A gust of cold wind put out the fire.
Marra gasped as a great weight bowled the man and wrenched him off and out of her.
She curled upon herself, groping blindly. For sheets, and furs, and more. The grunting snarls of beast mixed with the snarling grunts of man in the darkness. Growls and grunts and Old Tongue spat in reply and challenge all at once. The fray seemed to rampage in and out of the tent, but she hadn’t the ears for any of it. Shadows whirled viciously over the curtain walls. Man and wolf and axe and fang. She even thought she saw wings, for a moment, before they were gone like the haze of every dream she ever had except the ones that always warned her down and made her endure her captivity and humiliation for just that little bit longer. Tooth and claw and axe bit back and forth in the darkness, threatening to throw her to the ground yet again.
The bone knife she’d secreted away bore into her raper’s neck from behind, straight through the spine.
Gerrick Kingsblood toppled forward, dead before he hit the ground.
The yurt grew still.
There were screams and shouts and the clamour of weapons everywhere outside.
Marra couldn’t care about it. She just stood there, a crude coat of fur her only shield against the cold as she stared down at the remains of the one who fancied himself the heir to Raymun Redbeard. She barely saw him in the pitch darkness, or anything else. But she could imagine him well enough after all that time. The wildling who’d ever so bravely run off with his men – and
her – while his father died to her uncle and the clan champion to her father. So many times she’d wanted to knife him. Yearned for it. Planned it. Every time she’d get a dream that warned her not to. Made her feel just a little bit forbearing. Reminded her she’d be killed for murder and kinslaying and gave her the strength to take it just a little bit longer.
Warm fur brushed against her, then cold fur speckled with grains of ice. Cold and crisp upon her skin. Hoarfrost. She thought of home, where her father was eternally exasperated at her, her uncles spoiled her, and her grandfather called her silly maid.
She wondered why she’d ever let her dreams turn her meek at all. She’d always claimed she’d die before being taken. And she’d never lied.
The great beast was at the mouth of the tent now. Looking at her. A sudden gust of wind blew open the tent flaps, illuminating its outline stark clear for a brief spell. It was a wolf. A wolf as big as a horse. The flaps settled back, casting it and her back into darkness.
The wolf settled back on its haunches and stayed there, barring her only way out as the sounds of battle outside grew louder. The faint glare of moonlight on snow just barely illuminated the great beast’s outline. The top was a black shadow. The bottom glimmered white like icedust. She weighed the benefits of trying to cut and crawl under the curtain walls and flee. But having just the outline to see made it that much easier to know when a killer monster twitches in disapproval at what you’re thinking.
The beast sat there until the chaos outside died down. Just sat there. Quietly. Even when she went and stoked the firepit for lack of anything else to do in the cold. As she piled wood, it sat there. As her shivering hands struck knife on flint, it sat there. When the sparks crackled new flame to life, still it sat there. Stared at her. Its grey eyes seemed made of quicksilver that burned like cold stars as they reflected the sparks as if the glare didn’t bother it none.
Its pelt was strange, Marra thought as the flames took fully and gave her light to see by. Pitch black from head to spine. Snow white from tail to trunk. Split perfectly in half shoulder to haunch. The frost speckled amidst the white glimmered in the dancing light like a carpet of gemstones. The black had not a speck upon it at all.
The yurt fell apart around her just as she was finally gathering her clothes, torn down by men she’d never seen before. They looked victorious and lustful, then startled and respectful, bowing to the great beast before backing away and leaving them be.
It was snowing, Marra noticed distantly as she clothed and armed herself and wrapped her feet. Not for the first time she missed her boots, but they’d long since been bartered away for salt and honey. So had her dress and hair clasps and silver locket. There was nothing left to remind her of home. She watched as a large snowflake descended from the clouded sky of winter’s dusk. Landed on the wolf’s black snout. It vanished in a puff of steam between one moment and the next.
The wolf looked away from her suddenly, baring its fags up at the treeline. Turning to follow its gaze, Marra thought she spotted something up in the balsam’s branches. She thought she saw a pair of glowing eyes on a branch up high, as big as harvest moons.
The direwolf howled. The eyes vanished. Crows scattered and fled at the sound.
Eventually, the fight died down. Not because the attackers fled, but because the defenders fell or knelt where they stood, throwing down their crude weapons of wood and stone and bone.
Victorious cheers went up all around her.
The direwolf stood and turned, pausing to gaze at her meaningfully.
What else could she do but follow?
She was led to the far side of camp, past tribesmen she knew and many she didn’t. Men wearing furs and wielding long spears. Some wore bone and stone and scavenged ringmail. Some walked barefoot in the freezing winter, their soles turned hard and black. A least two different tribes by their looks, and the way they clustered and carried themselves.
Her count went up to three when she saw the rest. The ones all the others deferred to. Tall and mighty and clad in bronze. Bronze helms, bronze axes, short stabbing spears with leaf-shaped heads, bronze swords, leather shirts sewn with bronze discs and scales, and shields of black boiled leather with bronze rims and bosses.
The wolf led her past them too, straight through a circle of men that parted ahead of them. Marra found herself in front of what used to be her late raper’s throne at the center of their winter settlement, carved from a beech stump as wide as a bear, with sconces on both sides, both filled with burning fires.
There was a wholly different man sitting on it now.
“So this is it, then?” His accent was thick, but he spoke in the common tongue.
His voice was not unpleasant, Marra decided.
The man stood from his conquered throne. He was tall and lean, garbed in bronze scale armor, bronze greaves, a bronze helm, and a weirwood spear with an ornate bronze head. There was a bronze-banded warhorn hanging off his belt. His eyes were grey, perhaps. She couldn’t tell in that light. His hair and beard, though, those she could see well. Long, rugged and almost passably groomed, colored like clearest honey.
“I’ve come to lead a most puzzling life this past year, I’ll grant that.” The man said as he approached. “But a clan war for
this is passing strange, even for me.” His words changed to Old Tongue then. “Any insight for me this time, Haggon?”
“No more than every other time, magnar,” a tall, grim man replied. His voice was almost as rough as his hard hands. They were bunched in the fur of a much smaller wolf, grey and quiet. “Godbeasts keep their own counsel, now as they ever did.”
“Of course they do,” the Magnar of Thenn snorted, throwing the direwolf a look of wry vexation. He turned, though, to address someone else. The banished man, Marra realized on noticing him. “Do
you have any insight, exile? Speak plainly, now. I will be very displeased if it turns out to be something I should have known before.”
“She’s the Umber’s granddaughter.”
Marra waited to see if her heart would stop and skip. It didn’t. She’d not had a dream to warn her to be meek and long-suffering about
this.
The Magnar of Thenn turned much more interested eyes on her. “Is she really?” The man approached and grabbed her by the chin.
She stabbed him in the hand.
Tried, at least. He moved faster than her, grabbed her by the wrist and turned her around, clutching her to his chest from behind. One armed. Leaned down to speak right in her ear. “A middling try. Sloppy, but middling.”
Marra bristled. “Try to steal me and I’ll rip your cock off.”
“I take no man’s leavings.” The utter arse, how dare he!? “But you’ll be my guest all the same. We have
much to talk about,
my lady. You, the Godswolf and I. Much to talk about indeed.”
It wasn’t the time or place to be reminded of that lesson, but Marra was reminded of it all the same.
If fear didn’t work, other things could go and make her heart go stop and skip just fine.
“-. END BOOK I .-“
