8: How to train your dragon… Part 2

How to train your dragon… part 2

Jon

On the seventh day, they crossed the high peaks.Full novel: Dragons of Ice and Fire — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠

He had known it was coming. For two days the land had been rising ahead of him, the hills climbing into proper mountains, the mountains climbing into great white spires that scraped the underbelly of the clouds. There was no route around them, none - not without adding months to the journey, time he did not have and would not survive. The only way was through, as the greenseer's ravens more or less indicated with the directionality of their flapping and cawing.

Jon had girded himself as well as he could the night before. He'd eaten everything there was to eat, which amounted to two more of the greenseer's ravens and a couple of withered apples they'd carried with them from gods only knew where, hating every mouthful of it. Ghost had brought down another winter fox later in the day, and between the two of them they'd devoured it down to the bones. He'd checked and rechecked his supplies, made sure Hullen was as well fed as he could manage, and used the snow fox's skin to stitch over the worst of the gaps in his cloak and furs where the wind came through.

He had done everything right, to within the limitations of his time and resources.

He was still not ready for what awaited him at the top of the world.

The ascent through the pass took most of the morning, and it was brutal. The trail, if it could even be called a trail, was nothing but a series of broken ledges and wind-scoured snowfields that climbed without mercy. Hullen managed the first half of it with Jon ahorse, or rather, agoat atop his back. The mountain goat's stubborn competence at clambering up cliffs shone here - its hooves easily found purchase on iced rock and ledges that no horse could have ever managed, not even a northern garron.

Still, Jon had to dismount twice when the 'trail' narrowed to less than two feet of ledge above lethal, terrible drops. Both times he crossed on hands and knees, his heart pounding every step of the way. For the steeper, higher parts of the slope, he had to abandon the goat outright.

Sonagon scaled it all without apparent difficulty. That, at least, was a mercy. Not even this terrain could challenge the dragon: its claws could easily dig deep through ice and into solid stone, making a solid grip out of just about any surface the mountain pass had to offer, letting the dragon move up the near-vertical faces at an unhurried ease.

Then, a few hours past midday, they crested the final ridge, and the world opened up before him.

Gods, Jon thought, awed at the vast sight before him. He couldn't help it.

He had never been anywhere this high in his life. The peaks of the Wall were the highest points he had ever stood upon before, seven hundred feet of ice, and even those had made his head swim a little. But this was different. This was the roof of the world, or near enough. The ridge he stood upon was perhaps six or eight thousand feet above the wastes they'd left behind, perhaps more - he had no real way to judge - and from here he could see in almost every direction to a horizon that was impossibly, almost terrifyingly far away.

The Frostfang mountains were truer to their name than ever: from here it was as if they marched away in every direction like the frozen waves of some impossible sea, peak after jagged white-capped peak following the central spine he now stood upon. The glaciers between them were uncountable in number. To the far west he saw nothing but the frozen wastes. To the far east, beyond the highlands that awaited, he could see a thin green band - the beginnings of the great forest of the far north, had to be.

The northern Frostfangs were as cruel a place as any the gods had ever made, inimical to men, feared by even the hardest wildlings. But still, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.

He stood there for a long moment, breathing hard in the thin air, and he let himself simply admire the world.

"We actually did it," Jon's breath came out quietly, addressed to no one in particular. His voice came out rougher than he'd expected. He hadn't spoken a word since the morning. Left to his own devices, it felt like he could go entire days without speaking, even to himself.

Then he took stock of his companions' situation.

Hullen was struggling. The mountain goat was too stupid and too terrified to do anything but obey, but that only made caring for his health and upkeep all the more urgent a task. The goat's exhaustion had been building for days now - a mountain goat had never been meant to be a mount for a man, and the consequences now were to the degree that a moderate, yet all-encompassing misery radiated from Hullen's unthinking mind, even more so than its fear and cowardliness.

There were moral implications to this he preferred not to dwell on. He could afford no such luxuries here. He needed Hullen's legs more than ever up here - his own bad leg was already aching from the ascent, and there were miles of descent yet to go. Jon apologized silently. This wasn't a good situation for either of them.

Ghost stayed close to his side. The direwolf was loyal to a fault, his closest companion. Hungry, but otherwise in good shape.

As for Phantom - she had, once again, tried to take advantage of a moment's inattention to attempt escape. And once again, he had to drag her back. It was energy he could ill-afford to spare during such tenuous ranging conditions. It was as if the shadowcat treated their entire arrangement as an ongoing negotiation in which she reserved the right to simply leave at any point. He could not entirely blame her. He often felt the same way.

The dragon still paid little heed to him. It was at least consistent in its imperiousness, in its contempt for all things. Even as he watched, the wind struck Sonagon's flanks and parted around the dragon like water around a ship's hull. The dragon couldn't even feel it: it quite enjoyed being in this deadly high place, and might have roosted here in other circumstances.

Then the wind shifted and cut clean through every layer of fur he had, and Jon remembered where he was and what was at stake.

The wind at this height was a physical thing, a constant hard pressure against his chest. He was already short of breath. The air at this height was thin in a way that was faintly alarming - he'd noticed it on the ascent, the way his legs had tired faster than they should have, the way his vision had flickered once or twice when he pushed too hard.

He had no shelter up here. He had no fuel for a fire - there was no wood within a thousand feet of this altitude, nothing but bare rock and ice and wind. Not even a hope of survival if he lingered here, no choice at all but to go on.

Steeling himself, he started the descent.

The path ahead was the spine of the mountain ridge, which ran eastward before him for what looked like miles, and beyond it he could make out a descent, a long canyon of slope falling away into cloud cover, but between here and there was a crossing that would take hours at minimum.

Nothing for it but to keep going.

The descent was, if anything, more treacherous than the ascent. The snow on this southeast-facing slope was different: wetter and heavier, sitting atop ice that had thawed and refrozen so many times it had become almost frictionless. Hullen actually tripped here, which sent them both sliding down in one terrifying incident.

When it happened, the two of them separated over the ice. The mountain goat - scrambling madly on his haunches - managed to right himself before the cliff drop. Jon had to wrench the direction of his sliding into a snowbank on safer ground. His wounded leg took the strain of the descent and final impact hard, sending bright pulses of pain up through his spine.

Damnit, he thought, staring down at a drop of hundreds of feet that had been waiting only a few score feet past where he'd managed to stop himself. That was too close.

The ridge crossing took three hours, all told.

They were among the worst three hours he had ever experienced.

He never stopped. He couldn't let himself stop, or he would have died on that mountainside.

On the eighth day, still high in the mountains, he was nearly killed by an avalanche. And somehow, he was certain, it was the dragon's fault.

Jon never saw exactly what Sonagon did. Perhaps the dragon had stepped in the wrong place, or dislodged something. Perhaps it was just simple dumb coincidence. Possibly, the dragon had done nothing at all other than simply existing. The dragon was simply too big, a walking gargantuan. Its every movement caused the slopes to tremble underfoot, one ceaseless step at a time.

All he knew was that one moment he had been sitting atop Hullen traversing a ridge, then the next there was a sound like the entire mountainside cracking open at once and then Ghost was slamming into Hullen's flank and wrenching Jon and the goat both sideways. Jon reacted by pure instinct, possibly unconsciously feeding off Ghost's own instincts, immediately joining his efforts to the direwolf's and throwing them both behind a large square boulder just as thousands of tons of snow and loose rock came crashing down.

He pressed himself flat against the rock and held on. The noise was total. Chaos and pandemonium. Snow and ice hammered the boulder's face in a continuous roar, and the ground shuddered, and then it was over.

Gods, he cursed to himself. That was too close. He stood up slowly, spitting snow, and looked out.

He didn't see Sonagon at first. His heart leapt into his throat—

And then the dragon emerged from the icy debris like a bad mood given form. The dragon clambered out of the snowy, rocky debris and shook itself like an enormous dog, shedding entire tons of snow and ice.

With that done, the dragon looked around with a restless body language, with an expression that - for all its inhumanity - Jon could have almost called irritated.

He hates that he can't fly, Jon thought. It wasn't a new realization, but he felt the dragon's anger more clearly now, bleeding through the thread of warg between them. A frustrated, caged quality. Sonagon was built for the sky, and the sky was closed to him until he could heal. Yet the dragon was still wounded from its endless battles against the dead and there had simply been no time to attend to them. He had seen the arrows and spears still sticking out, the pale blood the dragon sometimes tracked.

And above it all was a sense of hunger. The dragon was hungering more by the day now, and was feeling especially motivated by the vague sense of food coming from the other side of the mountains.

Unfortunately, there was certainly no food to be had here - not when they were this high in the mountains. Even Ghost had barely sensed anything all day apart from the dead that continued to pursue them.

He turned away from the dragon to check Hullen and Ghost. Neither had been hurt. Both were calming themselves. He put a hand on Ghost's shoulder, more to steady himself than anything. His heart was still pounding.

Then he noticed the boulder they'd refuged behind.

Something about it was strange, out of place - it wasn't granite like everything else in the high mountains. He had registered its color under the snow dimly as a sort of solid black, but now that his heart had stopped hammering he crouched and looked properly. The surface was black like tar, and smooth where the snow had scoured it, almost glassy. He wiped away the rest of the snow with his gloved hand and looked closely.

It's obsidian, he realized.

It wasn't a natural formation either. The edges were too deliberate - it wasn't a boulder at all, but a small monolith of some kind. A carved runestone, ancient in make, cut and placed here. He could make out the traces of markings beneath centuries of weathering - runes by the dozens. Their meaning was utterly beyond him: he couldn't read a single character of it.

He didn't understand. What is this doing here? This high in the mountains?

His attention moved past the obsidian runestone, further down the valley.

The avalanche had scoured the slope clean for hundreds of feet below him. Protruding from the debris, he could see shapes that had no business being there. Lines of dark stone, intersecting at hard right angles. Those must be walls: or at least their ancient foundations, exposed to sky for what might have been the first time in years.

The actual walls were long gone. The buildings had rotted away, but their foundations remained.

Clearly, he was in the midst of some other ancient ruin. Jon kept staring with intent, picking out from one detail after another in the valley below.

The ruins went further than the avalanche's reach. He could see the suggestion of dozens more rotted buildings continuing beneath the snow, patterns that hinted at what lay underneath. Dozens of structures, perhaps more. A small town, or at least a large village. Or what had been one.

This high in the mountains, in what might still have been considered an approach to the Lands of Always Winter. It beggared belief at first glance.

We're how high in the mountains? Jon thought. Who builds a town here? Why?

And when? That was the other question, and maybe the harder one. He looked at the obsidian runestone and then back at the exposed ruins and felt the same sensation he'd had at those strange ruins of the elder civilizations, the standing stones and the carved sentinels he'd seen some days ago. As if he was looking down a very deep well of time and not being able to see the bottom.

The Lands of Always Winter had not always been winter. There had been scattered myths and legends to that effect, but he was certain of it now. Whatever cold had first descended to clench these lands in its grip - likely the Long Night - it had come at some point in the ancient past, crept south across the world and simply never left. Over the ages, everything that had come before had been buried under feet and then yards and then fathoms of ice and snow. And whatever people had once lived here, those who had built strange statues and raised monoliths and ringforts and now apparently even towns - they had been swallowed by it so completely that even their faintest memory had been lost to time.

No history he had ever heard had mentioned these far northern peoples. No myth or legend he had ever heard. Not even Old Nan, who seemed to have a story for everything.

Had the First Men truly been the first men? Was he seeing the remnants of the ancestors of all wildlings here, or something else entirely? Something that had been contemporary to, or a part of the elder civilizations of the giants and the children of the forest?

There were no answers to be had. Whoever these people had been, whatever they had been, they had now simply been erased, long forgotten by time.

Progress was miserable on the ninth day.

The dragon's wounds, which had gone uncared for all this time, were finally catching up to it.

They had made some ground in the morning, enough that Jon had let himself feel cautiously hopeful. Sonagon had roused at a reasonable hour, quickly snapped up a pair of rather thin elks the greenseer had mustered from somewhere or another, and had begun moving with something approaching a steady pace.

Jon had taken that as a good sign, and he had been wrong.

Because when the sun was high in the sky, the dragon stopped to rest by an icy canyon. And Sonagon didn't move again for nearly six hours, causing Jon endless frustration.

For the first hour, he tried speaking to the dragon, mostly begging and pleading for it to move. When his patience began to wear thin, he tried warging, extending the barest thread of intent toward Sonagon's mind.

The dragon's massive black eye snapped open immediately. It fixed on him with dangerous hostility, undercut by a low growl - which Jon knew at this point was his sign to back off.

Jon paced the length of the ledge and back, watching the shadows lengthen across the canyon below. He knew better than to simply stand still - he'd learned that doing nothing was its own kind of danger out here, that a lack of motion invited the cold to creep into his flesh, and made him inattentive besides. So he moved, and he thought, and he looked at the dragon's wounds.

He could see more of them now than he'd been able to before, with Sonagon lying still and for once allowing himself to be inspected in broad daylight.

The wounds are even worse than I'd thought. Worse, in some ways, than he'd allowed himself to fully acknowledge while they were moving. There were just… so many. Dozens of injuries, scores of them, too many to casually count: all along the dragon's length, width, and girth. Stretches of pale reptilian skin where scales had been torn away, where broken spears were sticking. Places where arrows had managed to get in between scales. Broader rents in the dragon's flesh. He wasn't sure what he could do about most of the wounds, but some…

I have to do something.

He was starting to suspect these wounds were the reason for the dragon's often laggard pace, its frequent rests. He didn't know if a dragon could even get sick, or if the wounds could fester as they surely would in a man, but he was beginning to strongly suspect the dragon had been moving for all this time as a half-cripple of itself, wounded and bleeding.

He wanted to help the dragon. Needed to help it. But it wasn't letting him.

There was nothing for it. He retreated, and sat down on a boulder at what he'd come to think of as a safe distance - which meant it was the distance at which Sonagon seemed willing to merely watch him when he attempted to reach out with a warg rather than actively express displeasure. He stared some more at the arrow shafts and the broken spears embedded in the beast, and he thought some fairly uncharitable thoughts about dragons in general.

Ghost pressed against his leg. Jon scratched behind the direwolf's ears without looking down.

"Stubborn bloody animal," Jon cursed. None of his half-siblings' direwolves had been even a tenth as utterly rilesome - not even Shaggydog.

He added dragon care to the list of things he knew nothing about, but would have to figure out. He tried thrice more over the course of the afternoon, approaching from different angles, with different approaches. Once with a squirrel in hand (he had no idea how Ghost had even managed to find one in winter) as some kind of offering that he knew even as he did it was a ridiculous idea. He'd need ten thousand of the rodents to even make up one mouthful for the beast.

Each time he tried, the dragon's one visible eye opened. Each time, the growl grew louder. On the third try, Sonagon lifted his head fully off the snow and just… looked at him, not even growling any more. It just pulled its lips back from its iron-black teeth and fixed him with a vicious expression that communicated something between a warning and a promise, with absolute, terrifying clarity.

Jon quickly backed further away then, and rather far at that. "Gods," he scowled. "I'm trying to help you."

The sun was fully behind the western peaks now. The canyon around them was filling with shadows. Jon was trying to estimate how many hours of usable light remained when he felt an impression of fear from Phantom, an impression powerful enough that it turned his stomach cold by association, which meant she was genuinely fearful in turn.

He closed his eyes and leaned into the shadowcat's senses. She was stalking along a ridgeline a league or two to the north and west, creeping in the shadows, and what she was seeing—

Wights. Too many to casually count. Damnit.

It was an entire column of the dead, moving in force. This was no mere scouting party like those had been trickling after them for days. He counted twenty, thirty, even more still emerging from the shadows of the pass where Phantom didn't have a decent line of sight.

After a few minutes, it became clear that hundreds were coming. Through Phantom's eyes he still didn't see an end to their numbers. Climbing up the mountain pass he'd ascended with Sonagon not so long ago. Their numbers filled the pass from wall to wall. Gods damnit.

The dead didn't sleep, didn't rest. And these ones were moving by day, for once - which surely had something to do with the heavy, grey overcast sky that no sunlight could get through. Were the Others blocking the sun so they could set a faster pace? Or was this just truly bad luck?

Then, amidst the column of the marching dead, he saw a shape that did not move like the rest.

Fear chilled Jon's heart.

It was a white walker.

It emerged from around the corner of the pass, riding astride an enormous ice spider. The cold that radiated from its form was visible even to the naked eye as a distortion in the air, a cold beyond cold that froze even this chilled air. Like an icy star in the shape of a sculpture of a man, something idealized and without flaw or infirmity, without weakness or mortality.

The ice spider was enormous, and it bore a saddle unlike any he had ever seen before. It was larger than any horse, and its pale blue-and-white body skittered over the ice with a terribly fluid efficiency - eight legs finding purchase on ice-glazed rock without hesitation, better than even Hullen could manage. But only a fraction of his attention was on the mount - all his focus, all his fear, was on its rider.

He realized it slowly. This white walker… there was something in this Other he recognized in particular. Something in the set of its shoulders, somewhat broader than those of its peers - it had been one of the five hunting after Sonagon, only to be distracted by the greenseer's sacrifice of those giants…

His thoughts felt distant, weak. Had this… been one of the Others he'd fought on the glacier… ?

The next realization poured on top of the first, like ice over a river of fear.

That's the one that killed me. The one that left me for dead. Left him face-down in the snow with a wound that should have killed him, had been meant to kill him. Staring at this Other, he was certain of it to the pit of his soul. It's him.

Fear clenched his heart. Phantom was terrified near out of her mind. She wanted to run, with every fiber of her being - but he forced her to watch a little longer, trying to see if there was any end to the dead coming behind the Other—

The white walker's head turned.

Not toward its column of the dead, not toward the heights ahead in its path.

Its head turned upwards, to the high ridge overlooking the canyon.

Directly at Phantom.

Jon felt its attention like a hand closing around his own throat. Not a physical sensation - he didn't know what this feeling was, it was something worse. There was recognition in that focus. The white walker wasn't just looking at but through the shadowcat, and it knew. It knew what was behind the shadowcat's eyes.

It sees me.

Jon tried to pull back, tried to wrench himself loose, and found for a horrible instant that he couldn't - that the weight of that gaze was somehow pinning him in place, the connection between himself and the paralyzed, terrified shadowcat tightening rather than releasing under the pressure—

The white walker reached over its shoulder.

This one carried a greatbow as well, not just the sword it kept sheathed to its side. The bow was made of some other kind of ice, not quite like the ice in their blades - he didn't know what it was. But like their blades, it glowed pale blue, pale and faintly luminous in the day's waning shadows. It swiftly, but smoothly, nocked an arrow without looking away from the shadowcat, drew, and loosed.

Jon's fear cracked into desperation. DOWN!

The shadowcat threw itself to the side. The inhumanly powerful arrowshot crossed many hundreds of feet in the span of an instant and missed by the skin of Phantom's teeth. He felt the chill pass right over her fur. The shadowcat's sheer terror threw him out of her skin—

And then he was blinking his own eyes open in the chill air. His throat was dry. His heart was pounding, he was panting for breath.

There was no time.

They're coming. The leading forces of the Others were already picking their way upwards toward his position in the high mountains, following a trail that, given another few hours, would bring them around to the base of the canyon and quite possibly bring the white walker within his own eyesight by this time tomorrow.

He stood up, crossed to the dragon at a pace that left no room for the usual caution, stopped twelve feet from Sonagon's head, and begged the dragon. "We have to go. Sonagon." He raised his voice to a shout. "We have to go! They're coming!"

The dragon's eye opened. Once more, it growled. Jon closed his eyes, swallowing the frustration that threatened to well up past his teeth. He had to make the dragon understand.

This was different from trying to warg. He didn't reach for the dragon's mind, didn't try to slip inside it. Instead he simply visualized the coming threat - imagined it, as vividly as he could, all the hundreds of dead and their terrible master climbing up the pass and willing Sonagon to see it too. How many there were, how quickly they were coming, how close they were.

He held the image, all but throwing it as hard as he could at the dragon's mind until his head ached.

Sonagon was still for a long moment. Then, slowly, the dragon's head snaked upwards, and turned northward. He watched the dragon's nostrils flare, sniffing.

Whatever Sonagon smelled on the wind confirmed something, because the dragon made a sound Jon hadn't heard before - a short, clipped snort, he could have almost called it contemptuous - and began, with agonizing slowness, to rise.

Move, Jon begged. Please just move.

Sonagon rose, and moved.

They made perhaps two more leagues before full dark, which was perhaps twenty too few for Jon to feel even a modicum of comfort. The canyon receded behind them, and the terrain opened into another mountain pass, this one covered with broken highland forest that offered some cover and very little else of use.

This time, this night, Jon didn't stop moving even after daylight had bled away into darkness. The clouds had receded and there was enough moonlight for him to see by. The greenseer's ravens certainly agreed with his assessment, judging from their flapping and cawing - he had to keep moving. The dead were too close to stop moving.

Jon didn't stop cursing, quietly and continuously - under his breath, fighting back the exhaustion that crept in by the hour - as he forced Hullen to keep moving, no matter how much the goat wanted to stop and sleep.

He had Phantom ranging wide, watching the progress of the column of the dead. They were moving faster than he'd hoped - the dead had no exhaustion to manage, no wounds slowing them, no need to stop and eat or rest or think. They would close the distance by nightfall tomorrow or the day after. He had perhaps a day, perhaps a little more, to think of something.

He was certain now, absolutely certain, that the dragon's wounds were sapping its strength. The arrows had to come out. The spear had to come out. Whatever was left embedded in the dragon's body needed to be seen to. But how? When? How to convince it to cooperate?

Not tonight in any case. Tonight there was only the dark, and the cold, and the leagues still left to make before he could let either of them stop moving.

With all he had in him, Jon drove himself and the dragon and his second skins on south. He might have gotten less than two hours of sleep that entire night.

The only thing that kept Jon alive on the tenth day was his second skins. The roaming dead were closer than ever now, coming from several directions at once. Without the shadowcat he would have been far less able to predict and anticipate and sneak around them. Without the goat, Jon would have been left crippled by his twice-poisoned leg, and would have no doubt frozen to death on some mountainside or another. And without Ghost, Jon wouldn't have been able to survive at all.

He had left Phantom trailing behind to watch for pursuers coming over the mountains, keeping her back along the pass they had taken so she could ambush any wights that could be ambushed alone and in the dark. The shadowcat was well-suited to that work - she moved through the mountains at night better than any of them, and wights made for poor opponents against an ambush predator that didn't need to kill them cleanly, only maim and scatter them. Whatever wights her efforts slowed down were well-worth the absence of her questionable company.

But Ghost stayed close, and it was Ghost that kept Jon alive.

Jon started warging into the direwolf more than ever now, relying on Ghost more and more. He used Ghost to scout the route ahead, to check what lay around a corner or beyond a ridgeline before committing Hullen's failing legs to it. Ghost would alert him about the route ahead, even bring Jon meat while he was busy chasing after Sonagon. Ghost could catch prey - snow hares, one time a treecat, and bring the dead prey back in his jaws.

The problem was that snow hares made for extremely lean game, especially in these winter conditions when even they were desperate for food. Qhorin had recounted tales of rangers afield who had starved to death with bellies full of nothing but hare: a man can't live for long on such lean fare, he had said. The wildlings say that a man who eats only hare will become weak, and they have the right of it, boy. Meat without fat can be almost a poison.

The dead ranger's words echoed again and again in Jon's ears. He was hungry, always hungry now, but when Ghost brought him another hare, he did not gorge himself. He dissected it. He ate only the choicest pieces, the fattiest organs. He boiled rich broth from the bones… and all the rest, nearly all the meat that might fill his belly and satiate that empty pit in his gut?

It went to Ghost. And there hadn't been much to spare even from the start.

A true ranger would have had some fat-rich pemmican on them to water down the hare's stringy meat with, make up the lean meat's difference with a secondary source of fat, but he had none. So he stayed hungry. But he kept moving.

Despite the shortfalls, the meat was what kept him moving. Having a supply of food, any food at all was enormous. Lifesaving. There was so, so little to forage at this time of year in the mountains, with the snows so thick on the ground. There was almost no other fare to be had. The deep reaches of the Frostfangs in late autumn were as close to lifeless as any place he had ever been. The snows were so thick on the ground that foraging was nearly hopeless - he had to know where to look, and even then the return barely justified the effort.

Sonagon helped him more than the dragon knew, or likely would have cared even if it did know. The dragon's lumbering movements through the mountain forests were catastrophic for anything in their path - Sonagon would roll great boulders over with his foot without noticing, or the dragon would merely sweep its tail and bring down trees that had stood for centuries. Three times Jon followed in the dragon's wake and found squirrel caches torn open and scattered in the snow, thick with hazelnuts and acorns and chestnuts that the critters had spent all autumn assembling. And the squirrels themselves, hibernating and disoriented, ready for the taking. One time the dragon knocked down a tree with a bee's hive hidden within, and the honey and grubs within kept him fed for half the day on their own.

But these were strokes of luck, and luck in the Frostfangs was not something a man could rely upon.

Surviving in the mountains was a costly balancing of attrition against survival: and the mountains were slowly winning the battle. One meal at a time, one degree of cold at a time, one night of inadequate shelter at a time, they were winning. Jon could feel it in his body when he stood up after resting - the way his legs took a moment longer to respond than they should, the way his hands ached before the cold had truly gotten into them. He was burning more than he was replacing, he had been for days, and the debt was accumulating in ways he couldn't keep borrowing against indefinitely.

He wasn't without his advantages. Still, Jon knew it couldn't last; Ghost needed at least as much food as he did, and he was getting weary too. Not even a direwolf could find much to hunt in this sparse, mountainous terrain: Ghost could barely keep himself adequately fed, let alone support a weakened human.

…And the dead were always coming, forever and always. Sometimes Phantom caught glimpses of hundreds of them, trudging through the snow in the distance. They had ascended the pass and gotten past the canyon too, were following his trail, moving even by daylight under the permanently-overcast, likely unnaturally-overcast skies. Keeping ahead of their scouting units was so often just a matter of hours. He didn't see any white walkers again, but he was certain they were out there.

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He had to keep moving ceaselessly. There was no time for rest, often not even enough time for foraging for the food he so desperately needed - let alone time for the sleep he needed even more intensely.

This couldn't last, not forever. If they didn't get to a gentler region soon, these mountains would be the death of him.

He had heard stories, from Ygritte mostly, and once or twice from older Thenns and cave dwellers in Mance's camp, of secret places high in the Frostfangs.

The stories had varied. Mountain meadows that would never quite freeze until the deepest depths of winter. Hot springs where a man could find warmth seeping forth from the earth no matter the time of year. Hidden vales where a hunter might find animal life that hadn't entirely fled or gone into hibernation, where a forager might still find elk and deer eating real grass and other gentle plant life - secret places that were still green even when the outside world had entirely given way before the white of winter.

To some, the practical-minded like Ygritte, they were places of respite, sheltered and south-facing and low enough amidst the peaks to be protected from the worst of the cold winds. Hidden vales so protected from winter they were considered almost akin to sanctuaries. To others, like the Thenns who considered them sacred, they were places of peace and worship, secret sanctuaries where those who brought violence were sinners against the Old Gods, who were always watching.

Ygritte had believed that the Thenns knew of dozens of such places - she had said they used these hidden vales as waypoints and winter holdfasts all across the mountain paths of the northern Frostfangs… and she had also said they would always, always refuse to share what they knew, considering it sacred knowledge never to be shared with outsiders not of the Thenn. Whatever knowledge the Thenns held was kept bitterly close to their hearts, passed down through generations of hard-won ranging lore within the clans of their people.

Whatever the truth, wildlings not of the Thenn saw these secret places with superstition: strange things sometimes happened in them, it was said: that a man who entered one might leave… changed. That all who entered them were watched closely by the Old Gods.

Ygritte, possibly japing, had even said that finding one of these secret places was said to be akin to finding your own little season of spring - like the tales of the children of the forest, as Old Nan had once told him. A few of that old woman's myths from his boyhood had said the children could, when they truly needed to, work grand magics that could change the seasons, even call down summer in the deeps of winter.

That particular tale of the children of the forest had certainly been an outlandish exaggeration, like the stories of Symeon Star-Eyes or the Hammer of Waters. But he had also heard far more believable tales of the oases of the sands of Dorne: places of water and life and refuge amidst that far land's baking red sands, which certainly existed, and were jealously guarded by Dorne's lords.

And the mountains, too, had their own kind of oasis, for those wildlings who knew their secret ways.

On the twelfth day, he found one. Though it was not his own skills that led him to it.

The greenseer's ravens had been more insistent than usual that morning. There were at least a dozen of the birds flapping about and cawing.

He had learned to read the birds at this point, the different ways they would shriek and cluster and dive, and it was clear they weren't warning him of the dead, precisely - there was none of that particular urgency right now. This was something else.

A few birds landed on Hullen's horns, then flapped away: not to the southeast, as had been his plan, but southwestwards - baffling, and entirely contrary to his plans. Jon glowered up at the birds, and one of them actually landed on his shoulder.

"That's the wrong way," Jon said, glowering directly at this one now. He sensed nothing wrong with the path ahead from his second skins. "Why—"

The raven actually batted him across the cheek with its wing. "West, West!" it cawed directly into his ear.

"Gods!" He shook the bird off, grumbling about his ringing ear. "Fine." The greenseer was clearly exerting more control than usual if he was bothering to communicate through his birds directly.

Whatever was going on, the greenseer's birds were diverting him from the usual path: They were taking him somewhere off the path, deliberately and with some urgency. He followed, albeit with some grumbling from atop Hullen when the birds circled back when he didn't follow quickly enough, cawing at him with a quality that he could only describe as impatient.

Despite his efforts, Jon still couldn't sense anything immediately wrong from either Ghost or Phantom.

He's guided me this far, Jon thought, shrugging internally. He followed the birds despite his instincts, because refusing the greenseer's guidance was a form of stupidity he couldn't afford. It was said that Bloodraven had a thousand eyes and one. And I only have six - it wasn't like the goat or the dragon counted.

Still, Jon was feeling distinctly skeptical as the birds pulled him along a trail he would never have chosen himself: a narrow cleft between two cliff faces that looked, from the outside, like nothing more than a shallow crack in the rock, barely wide enough for a man on a goat.

The cleft ran for perhaps two hundred yards, so narrow in places that Hullen's horns scraped the stone on both sides and Jon had to flatten himself against the goat's back to fit beneath a tight overhang. He had the sense that if men had ever used this path, they had been particularly small men.

A few dozen paces into the tunnel, his interest began to perk up. The howling mountain winds fell farther and farther behind, until he could no longer hear them at all. From ahead came the faint sound of rushing waters, growing louder with every step.

Then the path turned, opened into a wider space of sun and sky, and Jon stopped breathing for a moment.

It was a perfect vale. Small, no more than perhaps a third of a mile across, a tiny refuge cradled in a deep bowl of mountain on all sides.

It looked… idyllic. A vale with walls so steep and high that they blocked the wind entirely, noticeably warmer by far than the mountain trail he'd just left behind. The silence here was shocking after weeks in the mountain's perpetual howl. It was as if he was surrounded by a silence so deep it was almost physical, broken only by the murmuring sound of moving water.

Water. His eyes flickered to the slight, pure-blue streams threading along the sides and running through the center of the vale. There wasn't just liquid water here, but water of a shocking purity, like that which came directly off glaciers. Moving water, unfrozen, winding through the vale's various contours before vanishing under a southern shelf of rock. A thin steam rose from the water, a faint but unmistakable sign of particular warmth.

But even more than that, it was the impossibility of the vale itself that seized his attention.

The floor of the vale was green. Green or near-enough. He saw actual grass, northern piper's grass, and more - wildflowers, coldsnaps and frostfires growing under thin snow. Life enough that his eyes, so long denied any color but black and white and endless shades of grey, simply couldn't accept it immediately. The snow here was thin where it lay at all, dusting the tops of things rather than burying them, and what it left exposed was… grass, unambiguous and alive, along with the remnants of these various autumn wildflowers that had somehow survived the winter cold up to now.

The vale had a lake, overlooked by a small stand of multiple weirwoods. He hadn't noticed it at first because of the more immediately shocking sights, but there it was, tucked against the western wall - steaming, likely as warm as it looked, he suspected. Fed by something underground, a hot spring perhaps, which would explain everything - the open water, the warmth, the grass, the blooms.

He had heard of places like this, but only in stories. If he had ever seen anything that might have compared… only Winterfell's godswood came to mind.

He dismounted from Hullen's back, stood for a long moment and stared, just taking it all in. He took in a long breath of air that, impossibly, was at least twenty degrees warmer than anything he'd felt in weeks.

The fear and desperation he'd felt every moment for the last days, knowing they were being endlessly pursued by the white walkers, endlessly at the edge of starvation… it all eased in his chest now, much of it.

Hullen needed no encouragement. The moment Jon relaxed his grip on the warg, the goat picked its way carefully down the vale's sloped entrance and put its head down into the grass with a single-minded devotion that Jon found genuinely amusing. He let the goat go entirely. Hullen had earned it. He watched the starving animal work its way along the stream's bank with methodical thoroughness, until the sound of falling rocks from the side drew his attention.

Sonagon simply climbed over the cliffs they'd tunneled through, scaling over and then descending the many hundreds of feet of almost-sheer cliff like some enormous wall-clinging lizard. The lake drew the dragon immediately - Sonagon went to it without hesitation, waded in, and then slowly, with a long exhalation of cold mist, lowered himself until only his head and the ridge of his spine were visible above the dark water.

Sonagon's eyes closed. The dragon's expression, insofar as a dragon could be said to have an expression, was the closest thing to contentment Jon had ever seen on him.

Then the ravens called him.

He had been aware of them settling around the vale as they'd entered, the usual complement that followed him, the six or eight birds who served as the greenseer's distant eyes. But he saw dozens now. They were gathering now, all of them, on and around the small copse of weirwoods in the center of the vale. He turned and looked properly.

The weirwoods he'd noted before, several in count. And in their center, the heart tree where the ravens seemed to be gathering.

Grimacing every step of the way, he limp-walked to the tree and stood before it, looking down at its carved face.

It wasn't a large weirwood: no more than twenty feet tall, likely stunted by altitude and thin soil cover. Its trunk was thicker than it had any right to be given its height, which suggested extreme age for a weirwood. The bark was mostly smooth, pale white bark gleaming around a carved face; a face that was broader and flatter than most he'd seen, but otherwise unremarkable, as was the tree apart from a few various trinkets and curios of likely-Thenn make lying around. All long-abandoned, all certainly useless.

What truly drew his attention was the greenseer's ravens. They had alighted on every branch by the score. They covered the ground around the roots. They perched on the thicker roots themselves. They all but covered every single surface the tree offered. Hundreds of them, ravens and crows both.

And they were all, every single one, looking at him. Something in their cawing was making the back of his neck prickle.

He wants me to warg into the tree, Jon realized.

Ghost was still at his side, looking on curiously. Jon gave the direwolf a look. "Go find something worth eating, if you can," Jon told him. "Not another hare. Something with fat on it." Ghost's head turned over to him, silent red eyes staring into his. "I'm serious."

The direwolf soundlessly ambled away, stopped to sniff at the air, then was bounding away at speed. There were a few stands of trees in this mountain vale, and streams aplenty: there had to be something out there to eat, Jon figured.

Then he turned back to the weirwood.

What the greenseer wanted was straightforward enough. But he wasn't certain he could do it. Almost despite himself, his eyes slid to the weirwood's carved face. Its hollow eyes stared back.

He had warged into the greenseer's trained ravens with difficulty, into Ghost with ease, into Hullen and Phantom with varying degrees of struggle. But a weirwood was not an animal. It had no senses he recognized, no mind that could be touched in the same way as an animal's. To enter a weirwood was more akin to entering another world, one that he lacked the skill or the power to really traverse. A realm of dreams, far beyond his ability to navigate or control.

It was different for the greenseer. He could warg through weirwoods all across the land, Jon knew that much - Bloodraven had watched the world through their eyes for however many decades. But the greenseer was an existence Jon could not compare himself to. A thousand eyes and one, the legends had said of Lord Brynden Rivers. A sorcerer in life - and now, caught between life and death, the man was both something far more, and something far less.

Jon let out a breath, shrugged. Nothing for it. He sat down at the base of the trunk, leaned into the roots, and closed his eyes.

He tried, at first, to reach out to the tree the same way he'd initially controlled Hullen, or what few ravens he had tried. It was a now-familiar process of reaching inward and then outward, loosening his grip on his own skin, following the thread of connection until he was somewhere else. But there was no thread here that he recognized. Hullen, Ghost, the ravens, they were warm and immediate, presences he could at least find without great effort (control was another matter).

This was different. The weirwood was cold and vast, silent in a way that had no animal quality to it at all. He kept reaching and finding nothing, just the cold of the ground and the sound of the stream's water and the rustling of ravens overhead.

He tried again. And again.

He lost track of how long he sat there. The sun tracked across the sky. He became aware of Ghost returning at some point, depositing prey, returning to the hunt, then coming back again - that time, the direwolf came and lay down beside him without disturbing him, warm against his side, and the warmth helped him settle deeper. He stopped trying to find the weirwood the way he found animals and instead simply… let himself be still. The greenseer had gone to pains to teach him this… centering of himself, in the caves, but it wasn't at all intuitive to him. Yet in the end he let his breathing slow, he let the particular quality of the silence in this vale, which was different from the silence of the open mountains, different from the silence of the forest, fill him from the outside in.

He started to feel something, like a distant star on the horizon. A heartbeat within the weirwood, as slow and ponderous as the turning of seasons. He reached out to it, as gently as could be—

…

And then, without transition or warning, he was somewhere else.

The vale. The same vale… but different.

It was summer, or near enough: the grass was lush and long, the stream running high and clear with snowmelt, the lake dark blue rather than grey-black. Wildflowers everywhere, real ones, in blues and purples and whites and the pale yellows of early season blooms. The weirwood was far smaller, scarcely more than a sapling, yet its branches were spread wider, its bark was brighter and its leaves redder, as if it was somehow more present, more alive. The terrain was slightly different to the eye, more cragged perhaps, or less weathered down.

There were figures in the vale.

Giants. Two of them, larger than any he'd seen before by far - these ones had to be at least twenty feet high, with less fur, and cragged skin like stone - sitting near the stream with a comfortable ease. Their faces were broad and weathered and oddly gentle, despite the harshness of their features, and they spoke in a gravelly rumbling tone that was as much felt as heard. It sounded like some even older version of the Old Tongue.

And across from them, perched on stones at the stream's edge, were children of the forest. A dozen of them perhaps, sitting crosslegged on the green grass, small as human children, which meant they looked like mice before the immense giants. And yet they were speaking with the giants, speaking and nothing more, with a comfort and ease that gave him the impression these… people, visited this place regularly.

He couldn't understand what either side was saying to the other. But he sensed no hostility - it seemed some kind of exchange, objects passing between the giants' massive fingers and the packs they wore, being given to the children and vice versa.

They're trading with one another, he thought. He saw furs, and dried herbs, and other things he couldn't identify. One of them was laughing at something a giant had said. He had never heard a child of the forest laugh before, even after spending weeks in the greenseer's caves. The laugh was high and strange and absolutely genuine.

Jon watched them for a while, trying to make sense of what he was seeing… and then he looked up, and knew only a deeper confusion.

There were two moons in the sky.

The larger, the familiar moon, was the same pale circle he had always known. The other, though, was mysterious to him: a far smaller circle, halfway across the sky from the other, yet far brighter, almost solid white rather than pale grey.

He stared up at that small, bright coin in the sky - utterly baffled.

Is any of this real? Jon wondered. Is this truly something that happened? Or is this just a dream dressed up to look like history?

There were no answers to be had. Could memories of times past degrade, even in the weirwoods? He let the questions go and looked back down…

And then the scene stopped.

It didn't end, per se: it stopped, as if it had all been a strange river that had suddenly frozen mid-flow. The giants were frozen mid-gesture, the children were paused mid-expression. Even the weirwood's leaves had stopped rippling in the unfelt wind.

Then, the three-eyed crow appeared as if it had been there all along.

The crow was sitting on a root of the weirwood beside him - or whatever smaller version of the weirwood was present here in this summer's dream of a beautiful, perfect vale. Possibly the same as the winter-gripped vale that was on the outside. He wouldn't have had doubts but for the issue of the moons.

Jon saw nothing of the greenseer's true form. Just the crow, looking at him with all three eyes.

"You made it," the greenseer said. "Truly, boy, I did not know if you would survive this long."

The greenseer's voice in this place was different than it had been in the cave; less labored, younger and unweighted by the labors of carrying a dying body. The voice had a certain weight and resonance here that was hard to explain, as if the voice wasn't coming from the crow's own tiny throat, but from everything, from every corner of the earth and sky in this summer's dream of some ancient past.

Jon found his own voice, which even to him sounded so faint and meager in comparison. "You sent me after the dragon yourself. Is that a surprise?"

"I gave you a chance," the greenseer said, with a faint, wry humor. "A chance to escape with it, nothing more. I did not know if you would succeed. Your success was your own doing. And the dragon's." He paused, considering. "Especially the dragon's. The loyalty of such a beast is not an easy thing to win, and you have barely begun. But you have begun."

The summer scene held its frozen moment around them, eerie in its beauty, beautiful in its unreality.

"This place. The giants and the children," Jon said, observing the scene around them. "They used to meet here. Did they… trade here?" he ventured to guess.

"Yes. Over fourteen thousand years ago, this vale was created for that purpose," the greenseer said softly. There was something in that tone that wasn't quite melancholy - something somewhere between nostalgia, grief, and yearning. "This was a meeting point between tribes, a place of peace. A sanctuary, for those who wished it. Before men came and brought war, as men always do, and made such things impossible."

Jon didn't even know where to start with his questions. But one word, in particular, had stood out to him: "…Created?"

The three-eyed crow sighed. "There was a time when magic was not such a faded force in the world, Jon. There is more to Westeros' history than even the historians among the maesters have ever imagined. Nearly all of it has been lost. Even in our oldest myths, barely shadows of the memory of that era still linger. Things that would be considered miracles today, or simply impossible, were once almost commonplace. You live in a time that knows only the last faded whispers of the old powers."

Jon didn't even know what to say. The sadness in the greenseer's voice was so thick it was almost physical. In other circumstances, with any other old man in the world, he might have offered comfort. But how could he do that here when he didn't even know what the greenseer was grieving for?

"…There is so much I don't know," Jon said, after the pause. "I'm sorry."

The crow tutted softly. "All knowledge is interconnected, Jon. Knowns and unknowns, and the unknowns beyond our sight. The truly wise know that ignorance is a perpetual state of being. Knowledge simply helps you gain awareness of the shape of your ignorance. Keep asking questions, and keep wondering. There is nothing to be sorry for."

Jon took some heart from those words. "You said you were the last greenseer. But you also said that the old powers were rising again. Could there not be more?"

"…Perhaps," the greenseer sighed. "My last student abandoned the path, took his talents down a darker road. As for finding another, well…" the crow's voice lowered to a mutter. "There is hope, perhaps."

The vision shook around them. The vale of the past fractured, like a broken pane of glass. Everything turned greyer, faded out. Jon felt a sudden, distant pain - his true body had just shuddered.

"Your time runs out," the greenseer's tone turned more severe, more urgent. "You cannot linger, neither in this vision nor in this vale. I know this place I've brought you to offers rest. But the enemy is not resting. They know where you are. There are wights moving by the thousands over the pass north of you - an army of them, or what passes for an army among the dead." the three-eyed crow's eyes, all of them, bored into Jon's. "And the Others themselves are among them. The ones that hunted the dragon. I distracted them for a time, but they do not abandon a pursuit."

"All five of them?" Jon gasped, holding a hand to his head. Hold on, he cursed to himself, trying to keep his grip on this vision. "I knew of the one."

"Yes. And another three coming to intercept your path from the southeast - those ones were diverted from the haunted forest to block your path, or perhaps they intend to set an ambush." The three-eyed crow's grave tone turned slightly wry. "I do believe you have infuriated them. It is a rare thing, for the quarry of the white walkers to escape. They've diverted a vast portion of their forces that would have otherwise been harrying the forest's wildlings. If you had continued on the same path, you would have found yourself surrounded, with no hope of escape."

Jon felt fear seep into his chest like blood. Others from both sides? He would have been hemmed into the mountains, caught like a bug in a bottle. "How long do we have? We…" Jon's voice turned pained, as he tried to hold on to the vision. "We need rest."

"If you leave tomorrow at first light, enough." The greenseer's voice didn't offer comfort. "If you linger to midday, you will surely die. There is no true rest in the lands north of the Wall, not any more."

Jon had to bite back a grimace. "Fine."

"You must make haste to the south," the crow ordered. "That is your duty. The dragon is your responsibility, your blessing and your burden. You must care for its needs, and remove it from these lands without delay."

Midday tomorrow at the latest. That meant that, no matter how soon he left, Jon would be putting scarce hours between himself and at least half a dozen white walkers. It sounded suicidal. "You said you were doing what you could to delay them," Jon demanded. "What does that mean? What can you do, from where you are?"

There was a long pause. The crow looked at him for a long moment, quorked. "When you leave at first light, watch the pass behind you. Use the southern exit. There is a bridge. Use it."

The vision twisted around him, fracturing further. Jon's head was pounding. The three-eyed crow offered no elaboration. "That's all you'll tell me?"

"That is all you need to know," the greenseer's visage said lightly. "There is much I will not tell you. You know this."

Jon's vision swam, as the scene of the ancient vale began to darken yet further around them. "Have I not earned some trust by now?" He staggered, had to force himself to remain upright. "I can better work with you if you keep me informed on your plans."

The crow's three eyes blinked, one after another. "There is much I will not tell you, Jon. That will not change. You question why. It is because, should you die, the Others hold the power not only to raise you but to steal your memories, as easily as a farmer scything their wheat at the harvest."

Jon felt a new kind of chill. "No. Truly?"

The crow tutted. "Sleep tonight. Rest the animals. Let the dragon recover as much as one night can recover him. Eat whatever you can, with whatever this place offers you. And then go, Jon Snow, and do not look back until you are clear of the bridge."

The vale of millennia ago began to dissolve at its edges, bleeding away to darkness, the frozen figures fading with all the rest.

"What are you going to do?" Jon asked quickly, before it was all gone. "How could you possibly stop an army of them?"

"I have told you all you need to know," the crow said distantly, as if the sound was stretching through a widening chasm - but there was something like amusement in its soft voice. "And yet, I expect you will be surprised when you see it. I guided you to this vale for a reason. Survive what is coming, Jon."

…

As the greenseer had said, there was no time for rest.

Jon opened his eyes. He blinked away the last traces of the vision and found that not much time had passed on the outside.

The vale was still warm around him. The ravens had mostly all dispersed, pecking at whatever food they themselves could find in the vale. Ghost hadn't returned as yet, but Jon got the sense through their connection that the direwolf had scented something interesting either in or near one of the streams, a rich musk that carried the impression of some burrowing rodent of unusual size.

Whatever it was, his direwolf was currently digging after it. He left Ghost to it. He was exhausted after warging into the weirwood, but there was no time for rest, none.

He sat for a moment, gathering himself. Then he rose and went to see to Sonagon.

The dragon lay submerged in the vale's lake without change. Only the ridge of Sonagon's spine and the upper third of his body were properly visible. The dragon's eyes were still closed, with the water steaming faintly around what was exposed of his hulking form. In the vale's grey light the dragon was an enormous pale shape just beneath the surface, motionless save for the slow rise and fall of his breathing.

Jon walked the lakefront, pacing the full length of the shore as Sonagon's bulk allowed it, and for the first time since their flight from the Others he let himself really, properly look at the dragon from up close, close enough and for long enough that in other circumstances the dragon could have easily turned snappish.

This time, he didn't look in awe, but with a more discerning eye: he was searching for the injuries. For the wounds he had known for days were there, but simply hadn't had the time to see after, that the dragon hadn't allowed him to treat. The wounds he suspected were sapping the dragon's strength, and sometimes driving it into prolonged periods of pain and unrestful sleep.

Those periods of quietude - when the dragon had refused to move at all - had nearly gotten him killed more than once now. This was the only time he might have to do something.

His pacing continued, and he began to see the scope of the dragon's wounds. Even those few he could see scattered across the upper third of the dragon's body were nasty. Wounds that seemed concentrated along the dragon's hide where the scales thinned, along and behind the base of the tail, in its… armpits, or wingpits, or whatever those were called, and especially behind its skull and along its upper neck.

He kept pacing, continuing his inspections, and still more wounds revealed themselves.

Arrows jutted from between Sonagon's scales along his right flank, a cluster of four or five just ahead of the waterline, their shafts black with old blood and frost. He could see the broken haft of a spear near the base of the dragon's neck, snapped off close to the skin but the head still buried within.

Further back, along the dragon's upper flank where the haunches met the belly, he could see hints almost obscured by the waterline of a concerningly large wound, where the scales had been stripped away entirely across an area larger than Jon himself, leaving behind rent flesh and torn pale skin. Whatever had done it had been… quite large, left deep parallel gouges that had frozen and refrozen until the wound was a mess of dark ice and crusted white blood. What kind of beast could have done that? Even if a mammoth had stood up and grown claws, he couldn't imagine what might have managed to damage the dragon so deeply.

He was seeing less than half of the dragon's body, and had already marked dozens of wounds. He had known it was bad. He hadn't known it was this bad.

No wonder Sonagon's energy has been flagging. The dragon's injuries were sapping its strength.

Gods only might know how many wounds were still hidden below the waterline. Jon crouched and tried to make out what he could of what was under the water. Even squinting, he couldn't make out much - but he espied a few more arrows, another broken spear or two.

Damnit. Sonagon needed treatment. But how was he supposed to help, with Sonagon sleeping in the…

Jon looked at the water itself now. He took off the glove from his burned hand and crouched lower, dipped two fingers in.

It truly is a hot spring, he realized. The water was warm - not merely free enough of the cold to flow unfrozen, but genuinely and improbably warm. It wasn't as warm as Winterfell's hot springs - perhaps slightly lukewarm, like bathwater that had been sitting for a little while too long.

And yet.

He stared at his fingers, then back at the water. Then he looked at Sonagon, and the dragon's countless wounds. The arrows, at the various broken spears, at the gouged and ruined skin.

I can use this.

Without wasting further time, Jon began to undress.

It was not a pleasant process. His furs came off in frost-stiffened layers, one at a time - even in this chill, his furs were stiffer than they should have been. They had been poorly maintained up to this point in this ranging; he simply hadn't had the time or resources to do more than patch in the holes. Doubtless each and every article of clothing was thick with blood and grime and sweat and worse.

The last of his underclothes came off hard, and the air against his naked skin was sharp enough to make him hiss through his teeth. He stripped down to nothing, folded his clothes as best he could on a flat rock, and waded in before he could think too hard about what he was doing.

The warmth of the water closed around him. A groan escaped him as he adjusted to the water. The water around him turned brown as months of grime washed away. For a moment he simply stood there, neck-deep, savoring the moment as the steam rose around him in the cold air.

Then he waded toward the dragon.

It had been years since he'd last truly gone swimming - he'd been taught how in Winterfell's moat and in the Long Lake, and hadn't had much opportunity to practice since, not even in Ygritte's cave. But there was no forgetting something so basic.

Sonagon's eye opened as he approached. One enormous black eye, reflecting the steaming grey water. And Jon's own pale shape moving through the slight current.

Jon stopped, and reached out with a thin thread of warg, willing the dragon to understand. I'm here to help. Please let me help.

The eye stayed open. The dragon didn't growl, or make any other movement. It gave no reaction at all that he could interpret. It just stared at him, waiting.

"Easy," Jon said out loud as well, probably pointlessly. "I'm going to try to help. I swear." He tried to communicate more of his intent. I'm going to look at those places on your body that are stinging and bleeding. All of them. Please help me. He moved closer, hand extended, giving the dragon every chance to react. "It'll hurt. I know it'll hurt. But you're bleeding. It all has to come out."

The black eye watched him. The dragon didn't react otherwise, didn't so much as twitch. It didn't growl. Jon took that as the only good sign he might be able to get. The mental impressions he was feeling were too difficult to interpret.

The first time Jon touched one of Sonagon's wounds - an arrow embedded between the scales on the dragon's right hind leg - Sonagon hissed and flinched. It took half an entire hour of reassurance before Jon was allowed to come near it again, and he was starting to get worried about the amount of time left in the day as it was - the sun was past its peak.

Then, he found the second arrow, in one of the numerous places where the dragon's scales had been torn away.

He gripped the shaft near the skin and pulled, steadily, not jerking. Sonagon's whole body tensed. But the dragon didn't growl, or snap at him. Jon kept pulling, feeling the resistance give incrementally, until the arrowhead came free with a sucking resistance and the wound welled pale white.

Jon pulled the arrow out as gingerly as possible. He was vaguely surprised to see that Sonagon's blood was thick, thicker than a man's, and pale in color - the dragon's blood was white like milk, so white it was barely visible on its scales - and that the blood ran so cold that the wound would freeze shut. Still, Jon pulled out four more arrows, as well as the broken blade of an axe, and slowly he was allowed near the other injuries.

The blood was startling every time - as thick as cream and colder than sin, barely managing to flow before the frost sealed the wound shut.

Jon moved to the next, and the next, and all the ones that came after that were within his sight abovewater.

He worked methodically along the visible wounds, moving through the warm water from one to the next, speaking quietly as he went. Not words of any particular meaning - he was just trying to keep up a steady, comforting sound of a voice - the same tone he'd used with spooked horses at Winterfell. Sonagon bore it all, for once without scaring him off or threatening to bite him in two.

The spear haft near the neck was the worst of it. The head had gone deep, driven in at an angle between two scales that had already been damaged, and it had been in long enough that the flesh had begun to close around it. Jon had to work his fingers in alongside the shaft to keep the wound open while he drew it out, and by the time it came free his hand was white with cold blood and he was breathing hard. Sonagon's growl vibrated through the water and into Jon's chest. But the dragon didn't move.

"There's no end to it," Jon muttered.

Many of the injuries were either low enough that he had to dive down underwater to find and deal with them, or high enough up on the dragon's massive body that he had to climb its scales like a ladder, going up to twenty feet above the water to reach them - even with most of its body still submerged.

It was perilous work, particularly given Sonagon's temperament. The dragon's actual scales were hard, harder than iron and perhaps as strong as actual steel by his tests; Jon had already found he couldn't damage them with anything short of Dark Sister. But the wights had somehow known to stab under the scales, especially focusing on those places where enough scales had been lost to battle. So many of their efforts had been focused on stabbing into those gaps between damaged and absent scales, the unarmored places that revealed the dragon's pale skin below.

From those places, and from everywhere else, Jon pulled out everything from broken sword tips to ice spider fangs, and he cleaned and tended the wounds as best he could. Bandages were nearly impossible due to the dragon's size, so Jon just had to make do.

He found most of the wounds below the waterline: the worst were two lance tips, another twenty or so arrows, a broken sword that had somehow wedged itself under a scale along the lower belly. That one he had to dive for, holding his breath in the warm dark, working blind by touch until he felt the iron edge and worked it free. He came up gasping, and found Sonagon's eye still watching him from above.

It was long, tiring and awkward work because of Sonagon's size. Jon spent all day working on it, until there was scarcely any light left in the sky.

Eventually, though, Sonagon began to actively… cooperate. The dragon even stood up in the lake for a time to give him easier access to the wounds under its belly. Later, it unfurled its wings slightly, and let Jon see the painful gashes on its right wing that stopped the dragon from flying. There were cuts straight through leathery skin, even arrows sticking through its wings. Those wounds were much more difficult and awkward to treat. Jon cut out the arrows and even tried to bandage what he could, but there was little he could do for the long gashes through its wings.

Maybe if I had a very large needle and rope strong enough, and I was feeling very, very brave, I could try to stitch them shut, Jon thought despondently, swimming under the worst of the tears - a long cut in the membrane of the right wing that was at least thirty entire feet long. Perhaps it was technically possible, but he simply lacked the resources. Would the wing's wounds ever heal? If a bird's wings were clipped badly enough, then it could be grounded for life. Were dragons similar?

Still, Sonagon wasn't a bird. There were signs that the rents and tears in Sonagon's wings were growing back by themselves.

Jon supposed it made sense - dragons surely had to have some way of eventually healing from wing injuries, otherwise their sheer lifespan wouldn't have made sense when even slight holes on a wing would have been long term fatal. As far as he could tell, the muscles in Sonagon's wings could contract, folding the membranes in on themselves, and the wounds would eventually close as they regrew.

Jon was reminded how hard it had been looking after Ghost, back when the direwolf had been a pup. He remembered his father warning him how much care any animal required. Jon supposed that a fully-grown dragon would require a thousand times more care than a wolf.

But a wolf isn't a dragon. The wings are a dragon's true vulnerability, Jon realized. They were big targets, hard to protect. And if they were damaged enough they would strip the dragon from the sky.

In the end, as the light waned, he found exactly ninety-seven wounds scattered across the dragon's gargantuan body. Jon knew because he had counted and inspected every single one.

Sonagon finally relaxed, then. The dragon seemed as relieved as he was that it was over as it returned to its sleep.

With what little light remained, he spent the time he could inspecting the dragon and its injuries. Trying to learn everything about it, trying to think how he could help it heal. Even as the dragon snored, and the last of day turned to twilight, Jon was still inspecting its body, his thoughts twisting. Desperately regretting that he hadn't read more on dragons as a boy.

I've been doing this wrong, Jon sighed, realizing. I've been trying to take control of him with skinchanging, just expecting the dragon to follow my commands.

Sonagon had different expectations; you had to look after it before it would allow you to control it.

"My duty," Jon said, to the vale's quietude, as he finally allowed himself to rest. "My responsibility." My blessing and my burden. "It's my duty to look after him…"

As dawn broke on the thirteenth morning, Jon opened his eyes.

He'd slept better that night than he had in weeks. Ghost had found several hibernating beavers, and between the two of them - after he'd recovered from warging into the weirwood - they'd both managed to fall asleep with full bellies.

His body still wanted to rest more. But the time for rest was over. He stood up from where he'd been sleeping against the weirwood's bark. The vale was still dark, and there was no horizon to see - not in this deep bowl in the mountains - but he could see a weak light bleeding into the grey cloud cover directly overhead.

Ghost was rousing: his direwolf had slept the night pressed against his side, steady and warm. Across the vale, Sonagon was still in the lake, motionless in sleep. Jon prayed it wouldn't take long to rouse the dragon. They had to move.

It still took the better part of an hour to rouse the dragon. The delay almost physically pained him, but there was nothing for it: the dragon was hungry and snappish, wounded and irritable and crippled. It was a wonder he could manage to influence any control over it at all.

They left before the sun was fully up, putting the vale behind them as they entered a rather large tunnel, by far larger than the northern one had been - surely this one had been built for giants, once, though Sonagon still had to squeeze through. The presence of weirwood roots threaded into the tunnel's roof and walls didn't escape his notice.

Then, they were back in the cold mountain air, with the southern route ahead.

The sky bridge came into view perhaps a quarter-mile on.

It was so large he hadn't noticed it at first, taking it as just another part of the landscape. But he saw it clearly now: a wide span of black rock crossing an apparently bottomless chasm. He took a careful look over the edge and saw no bottom at all, just the terrifying shadows of a ravine so deep and black it seemed to go all the way to some stony hell.

The bridge itself was ancient and massive, and certainly had never been built by man: he saw no seam of cut stone, not a hint of either brick or mortar. As far as he could tell it had simply been… grown out of the mountainside, doubtlessly by some ancient magics: yet it was still broad and solid enough that Sonagon could trot across it without so much as a tremble.

The bridge was held, he realized now, looking at its underside as they crossed, by a dense latticework of weirwood roots. Just like the tunnel they'd crossed through.

He got them all across. Hullen first, then himself, then Ghost, then Sonagon's great weight last.

Jon put two hundred yards between himself and the far end, and then he waited.

He didn't have to wait long. Scarcely seconds passed before the roots began to move.

It was slow at first. Slow, but inexorable. The white roots that threaded through the underside of the bridge began to withdraw. Jon watched them go, faster now, those thick pale tendrils that had been in place for millennia upon millennia were retracting with speed, snaking backward, pulling free, pulling home, back into whatever depths of the mountain they had spent their long ages growing through.

The bridge groaned.

Then, all at once, without further warning, it cracked and came crashing down.

"Gods!" Thousands of tons of stone dropped into the chasm with a concussive crack that kept going on, and on, and on and on, like an endless peal of thunderclaps. An utterly terrific noise. Jon had to cover his ears - it was as if the earth itself was splitting open. A pressure wave hit him in the chest even at this distance and rattled his teeth. It felt as if the impacts were rattling the roots of the mountain itself, unendingly and mercilessly.

It didn't end there either. The tunnel was still in the process of collapsing.

In less than two minutes, it was over.

A cloud of pulverized stone and ice billowed outward and upward from the chasm, white and grey and vast, spreading across the mountainside and rolling down into the ravine below. He just stared, awed and morbidly fascinated by the sheer destruction.

Where the bridge had been, where the path behind it had wound back toward the tunnel and the vale beyond, there was nothing. Only a bottomless chasm, and a new part of the mountain itself, a vast disorder of displaced rock still loudly settling into its new configuration. Parts of the surrounding cliffs themselves had collapsed amidst the destruction.

The crossing was gone. More than gone. The path itself by which he might have been pursued no longer existed.

Jon sat on Hullen's back in the silence that followed, breathing the cold air, and kept staring in awe.

That bridge was over ten thousand years old, it had to be. The greenseer destroyed it all, just like that, he thought, and the thought was staggering. Then something else abruptly came over him: something with a quality of feeling he couldn't have easily named, something he hadn't expected: a sadness verging on grief. Something in his chest pulled tight at the thought of the destruction of that beautiful vale, ancient of days. Doubtlessly it had been destroyed as well, he could hear yet more crashing ongoing from further on.

The greenseer had said the old world was dying. But never had he expected to see such a violent end, to such a place of beauty, so swiftly and suddenly or at all.

Ghost nudged his leg. Sonagon had already turned away, the dragon's attention had already moved on to the path ahead.

Jon let out a long breath and looked away from the rubble.

Whatever white walkers were crossing the northern pass right now had just lost their route through. Not because they had been stopped - he harbored no illusions that stone or other mortal impediments could stop a white walker - but because the path no longer existed, and finding another would cost them time.

That was all. Time, in a situation where every hour mattered.

It would have to be enough.

He turned Hullen's head south and moved on, and he did not look back again.

The Frostfangs didn't end for another week at minimum, possibly two, and the haunted forest beyond them was not the safety it might once have seemed - it had its own dead, its own dangers, and no guarantee of food enough for a man and a direwolf and a dragon. But there was south ahead of him, and there was time, and there was one fewer path behind him for the dead to follow.

For now, that was enough. He had escaped from the white walkers, at least for now.

He was still alive.