New chapter is live.
Settle in, take your time, and let’s see what waits in the dark 🖤 ✦ By law, a deserter from the Night’s Watch was an outlaw.
Every lord in the Seven Kingdoms had a duty to hunt him down and execute him.
That was especially true in the North, where House Stark and its bannermen had the closest ties to the Watch and showed deserters no mercy.
Unless Aeg fled north and joined the wildlings, the result of running was easy enough to imagine.
But the whole point of escaping the Night’s Watch would be to get as far away as possible from mankind’s natural enemy.
Why would he run farther north?
Going south was another matter.
If he truly meant to flee, he would need to prepare.
First, a good horse.
Then food, different clothes, and the right chance to leave the Watch’s territory in a hurry while avoiding every village and settled road along the way.
If he could cross the Neck and get out of the North, the plan would be almost halfway to success.
After that, he would head straight for the warmer, safer south.
The farther south he went, the less the lords and nobles cared about the Night’s Watch.
If he could reach the fertile Riverlands or the Reach and find a place willing to accept him without asking too many questions, he could begin a new life in another world.
The plan was simple enough.
The problem was that this was a feudal age with poor roads and almost no movement of people.
A man with an obviously foreign face and no legal identity would have a hard time escaping cleanly.
A very hard time.
Aeg shook his head, forcing the thoughts away.
This was not the time.
The horses’ hooves thudded softly through the snow.
Tree trunks and branches soon swallowed the sunlight as the four riders entered the vast, frozen forest beyond the Wall.
“Damn wildlings,” Gared muttered.
“The colder it gets, the more trouble they cause.” “They wouldn’t be wildlings if they knew how to stay quiet,” Aeg said, brushing a few snowflakes from his sleeve.
Because the Night’s Watch lacked men and supplies, and because the wildlings could not be allowed to learn their patterns, the Watch had long since abandoned fixed patrol schedules.
Instead, patrols went out at irregular intervals, usually in response to a specific sighting.
Two nights ago, a brother standing watch on the Wall had reported firelight a few miles to the north.
That was the reason the Lord Commander and the First Ranger had ordered this patrol.
Without that little problem, the four of them would have finished morning drills by now and been warming themselves by a fire indoors.
“Enough chatter,” Waymar said without looking back.
“Spread out left and right.
Advance in line, and don’t miss anything suspicious.” Will and Gared both shrugged at the order and made faces at his back.
From oldest to youngest, they were Gared, Will, Aeg, and Waymar.
Yet the youngest man among them was in command.
The other three could hardly be pleased.
The young noble from the Vale was the third son of the Lord of Runestone.
With little chance of inheriting the title, he had chosen to join the Night’s Watch.
His father had escorted him to the Wall in person, along with an entire wagonload of luggage.
The other brothers often mocked the story over drinks.
The great Ser Waymar Royce had not come to serve.
He had come for a holiday.
Every man of the Night’s Watch was supposed to be a brother to every other, yet a young recruit with neither experience nor reputation had been placed over their heads.
This was even Ser Waymar Royce’s first time leading a patrol.
How were the other men supposed to respect him, let alone be convinced by him?
Resentment was resentment, but discipline still mattered.
The three men obeyed, spreading out into a line as they began searching the forest ahead.
Before long, they found signs of human activity near the area where the sentry had spotted the light.
It had not snowed the day before, so the wildlings’ tracks, the ash left by their fire, and the rest of their trail remained clear.
“They’ve moved on,” Gared said, looking toward Waymar.
He seemed to want to say more, then stopped.
* * * The Night’s Watch had been born after the Long Night.
During that winter, which lasted a generation, the Others had swept south through the kingdoms of the First Men and nearly destroyed humanity.
When that disaster ended, the Wall and the black-cloaked order were founded to fight the Others and defend mankind.
It was easy to imagine what the Watch had once been.
Joining an armed force sworn to protect all humanity had been one of the highest honors on the continent.
Even with strict requirements, volunteers had come in endless numbers.
But as the Others retreated into the Lands of Always Winter and gradually vanished from memory, the generation that had survived the Long Night died out.
Once that happened, the Watch’s importance and treatment were bound to decline.
Even so, for a long time the Wall still protected the Seven Kingdoms from wildling raids, so the Watch continued to matter.
Then came Aegon’s Conquest and the rise of the Targaryen dynasty.
The new dynasty did not set out to harm the Night’s Watch, but the unification of the realm meant fewer wars—and fewer defeated nobles and soldiers taking the black.
With the Others forgotten and wildling raids dismissed as a northern problem, the Watch’s influence and manpower continued to decline.
Nobles and knights no longer wished to devote their lives to a seemingly meaningless vigil.
Recruits dwindled, standards fell, and after centuries of decay, the Night’s Watch became the sorry thing it was today.
✦ ✦ ✦ 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.