New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤 ✦ What were the odds?
Aeg knew exactly what Maester Aemon meant.
The Hand of the King was dead, which meant the main story had begun.
On any other day, that would have been a landmark moment.
Right now, he had no room in his head for it.
Nearly ten days and nights of flight had exhausted him.
Holding himself together before the senior officers of the Night’s Watch had required little physical effort, but answering their questions, weighing every word, and maintaining the appearance of composure had drained what little mental strength he had left.
By the time two rangers half-carried him to the room set aside for confinement, he barely made it to the bed before falling asleep.
The so-called confinement lasted several days.
It was half imprisonment, half enforced rest, and Aeg welcomed it like a gift.
He ate, slept, woke, ate again, and skipped training altogether.
After a few dozen hours of doing absolutely nothing, he finally felt almost human.
Once he had recovered, it was time to worry about his future again.
* * * Littlefinger had already killed the former Hand.
During the king’s coming visit to the North, Robert would invite Eddard Stark, Warden of the North, to take the office.
After that, the game of thrones would truly begin.
Most of that had little to do with one black brother at the edge of the world.
The one part that touched him was this: the dead Jon Arryn had been Warden of the East, Lord of the Eyrie, and liege lord to Ser Waymar Royce and House Royce.
No one could say how Bronze Yohn would react to learning that his liege lord was dead and his son had vanished.
If Aeg was very lucky, perhaps the man would be too occupied to hunt down the black brother who had supposedly gotten his son killed.
Aeg laughed at himself under his breath.
Betting his life on another man’s distraction or mercy was foolish anywhere.
In this world, it was almost suicidal.
House Royce’s anger was distant for the moment.
A more immediate problem sat right in front of him.
Benjen Stark had been summoned back to Winterfell by his elder brother for the king’s welcome feast.
Once Benjen returned to the Wall, he would lead rangers north to search for the Others and Ser Waymar Royce.
And when that happened, Aeg, the man who had seen the place and survived, would almost certainly be ordered to guide them.
Would he die with the ranging party, the way the original rangers had died?
Or would he share Benjen Stark’s fate and be turned by the children of the forest into some half-living thing?
Neither future appealed to him.
He had to do something.
From the black brother who brought his meals, Aeg learned that Gared had woken from his stupor.
He decided to visit after lunch, on the pretext of checking on him.
If they had a chance to speak alone, he might be able to ask about crossing the Gorge.
His freedom was restricted, and he could neither take a horse from the stables nor leave Castle Black, but walking within the castle grounds was still allowed.
Before he could put the plan into motion, the senior officers summoned him again.
‘Are we leaving already?’ Aeg entered the council chamber with his stomach tight.
The scene looked painfully like the interrogation from a few days earlier.
The only difference was the man now sitting where the accused had sat.
“Will?
You’re alive?” “Aeg!” Will turned, his voice full of ragged relief.
He looked terrible.
Aeg and Gared had taken the only two remaining horses.
Waymar Royce’s mount had actually run back to Castle Black on its own even earlier than theirs, which meant Will had reached the Wall without a horse and without supplies.
He had needed more time and suffered more on the way.
If not for the fieldcraft he had learned as a hunter, and the simple fact that the Others had not found him, he never would have made it back alive.
Will had never been a large man, but now he looked little more than skin over bone.
Half a bowl of hot porridge sat on the table before him.
Apparently, he had been questioned while eating.
“The Seven save me,” Will said.
“Without you, I’d be dead.” * * * “What?” Aeg did not understand.
Will had survived by his own skill.
What did that have to do with him?
“That day, I hid in a tree and watched Ser Waymar get cut down by those things.
I waited a long time after they left before I climbed down.” Will lifted the bowl in both shaking hands and drank another mouthful of porridge, hissing when it burned him.
“I was about to look for something to bring back as proof.
Then he…
Ser Waymar stood up.
He was cut to pieces, but his eyes were glowing blue, and he reached for my throat.
It was…
gods, it was horrible.
If you hadn’t warned me to be careful of the dead, I never would have reacted in time.” So that was it.
A throwaway warning Aeg had blurted out in terror had saved a comrade who should have died.
But why had they called him here now?
He looked around and noticed several objects on the table before the Watch’s officers.
Judging by the hilt, it was Ser Waymar Royce’s sword.
The blade had been forged from better steel than the Watch’s common weapons, and it had endured more clashes against the Other’s weapon.
The result was that it had shattered even more completely.
Only the hilt, a short section near the base, and about a hand’s length of the tip remained intact; the middle of the blade had splintered like a tree struck by lightning.
Will deserved credit for this.
After watching the Others kill a man and then seeing the dead rise, he had still managed to gather most of the broken fragments and carry them back over miles of wilderness to the Wall.
Now Waymar’s broken sword—or more accurately, his shattered sword—had been laid out and roughly assembled, whether by Lord Commander Mormont or someone else.
As Aeg had said days earlier, the fracture lines met cleanly, piece against piece, like cracked glass.
Once fitted back together, the blade showed almost no deformation at all.
✦ ✦ ✦ Want to keep going?
I hope this chapter gave you another reason to stay with the story.
There’s still plenty ahead, and things are only starting to unfold.