The shadow cat lay dead at Vesper’s feet, drained of blood, its pale eyes filming over with frost.
Ten men and a dozen spears would have needed a full day for this.
Half of them wouldn’t have walked away from it.
He didn’t feel proud.
He wasn’t sure what he felt at all.
He gathered the dead wood left over from the ruined camp — neither of them had wanted to waste strength carrying it while they fled for their lives, so it had been left where it lay — and built it into something proper.
Two strikes of the flint did nothing; the third caught, and he sat back on his heels to watch it climb.
He’d felt his new speed today, running from the ruined camp to here.
If he wanted, he could reach the Fist of the First Men before midnight.
No hurry, then.
He’d sit a while, think, and butcher the cat properly instead of leaving good meat and a good hide to rot in the snow.
He worked the knife in long, careful strokes, the way he’d been taught to dress a deer, and let his mind wander while his hands did the rest.
He had wanted a farm once.
A hill of his own, a house, cattle enough to keep a family through winter — the old dream he and Toby used to build out loud in the dark, before the black cloak took the choosing away from him.
He remembered the green recruit who’d asked, at his own vows, whether a man could keep even a scrap of land once he’d sworn.
Just a garden.
Just something small.
The answer was no — nothing, ever, until death released him — and Vesper remembered the boy’s face falling, and how it had put him in mind of Toby and the stream and the hill, and how something in him had gone quiet that night in a way it never quite recovered from.
He’d left not long after, on a scouting order he never meant to return from.
For months he lived like that — no farm, no hill, nothing like the dream he’d carried out through the gate.
Then he found a boy.
Young.
Crippled.
Dressed in cloth finer than half the lords Vesper had ever met wore in their lives.
The boy looked at him like he already knew everything worth knowing about him, which, Vesper had since come to understand, he probably did.
That boy had become the reason Vesper died.
And the reason he came back.
What struck him now, sitting over the fire with a shadow cat’s blood drying on his hands, wasn’t the old grief of it.
It was how close the dream felt again — closer than it had been in years, now that he had all the time in the world, and gold enough, once the boy made good on his promise, to buy the hill outright instead of just dreaming about it.
He looked down.
He’d finished the cat without noticing — flayed, dressed, the good cuts wrapped, the hide rolled into a bundle worth curing into a cloak someday, if he ever found a place to sit still long enough to do it right.
He tied it all together with the last of his cord, shouldered the weight like it was nothing, and started west, toward the Fist of the First Men.
The load should have slowed him.
A man his old size, carrying that much meat and hide and gear, would have been staggering by the second mile.
Vesper barely felt it.
He let himself run once the trees opened up.
The cold went from a bite to nothing against his skin, and the world blurred into long gray streaks of pine and snow.
He’d run like this only once before since the boy remade him, and even then the ease of it startled him fresh — sheer and simple, as if the ground itself were in a hurry to get out of his way.
There was a strange peace in it too.
Running, he didn’t have to think about Toby, or the Wall, or the six years he’d wasted believing in an oath that asked a man to want nothing.
He only had to think about the next tree, the next drift, the next stretch of white going by too fast to properly see.
He thought about the hammer at his hip, the one he’d taken and never had cause to use.
He’d wanted to try it on the shadow cat — see what his new strength could do with a weapon built for crushing instead of cutting — but the cat had died too fast, too clean, before the thought had time to form.
Some other time.
There would be plenty of other times now.
By the time the land began to rise into the broken ring of stone marking the Fist of the First Men, the sun had dropped low enough to turn the snow the colour of a healing bruise.
Vesper slowed to a walk without deciding to — old caution outlasting the six months since he’d needed it — and came up the last slope as quiet as he could manage with a shadow cat’s meat on his back.
That was when he saw the fires.
And the men standing around them, in black.
He stopped where the tree line still gave him cover and watched.
Brothers of the Night’s Watch didn’t come to the Fist of the First Men without reason — nobody sane came here at all anymore, not since the wights, not since whatever had happened to the last watch stationed on this hill.
Six of them, out this far, in this cold, meant something more than routine.
Men didn’t bring shovels and pickaxes on patrol.
He counted six by their voices before he saw a single face — six men working shovels and pickaxes into ground that fought them at every stroke, cursing in the flat, tired way men curse when they’ve been at a task for hours with no end in sight.
One of the diggers grumbled that the last watch stationed here had no proper ditch to fall back on if the dead came calling, and got told to shut his mouth and keep digging.
Ordinary work, or as ordinary as anything got this far north — a defensive trench, waist-deep and half again as wide, meant to give men something to stand behind if the night ever turned on them the way it had turned on the last poor souls posted to this hill.
Vesper crept along the tree line, keeping low though he doubted he needed to anymore.
The wind was against him — luck, not skill — and it was that same wind that undid him, carrying the smell of raw shadow cat meat straight into the middle of their camp. This chapter was copied from novelping dot com without permission.
One of the diggers straightened, nose working, head turning slowly toward the trees.
Vesper went still.
Too late.
Their eyes met across thirty feet of broken snow, and the man’s face changed — surprise first, then something colder and far more certain.
Vesper knew him, a hard, humorless officer he’d crossed paths with more than once back at Castle Black.
The man had never liked him, for reasons Vesper had never bothered learning and didn’t much care to now.
“That’s him,” the officer said, low, to the others, and five more heads came up out of the half-dug hole.
“That’s the deserter.”
They didn’t hesitate the way honest men might have.
Swords came out with the practiced hiss of men who’d drilled the motion a thousand times, and they spread as they came, fanning into a loose circle — six who knew better than to let a lone man choose which of them to face first.
Vesper sighed.
He hadn’t wanted this tonight.
He’d wanted a fire and a quiet wait for Cael’s group, not six dead brothers on his conscience before morning.
His hand found his belt anyway, then the hilt of his knife.
He drew it half free, reconsidered, let it fall back into its sheath, and reached instead for the hammer.
He’d wondered, on the run here, what it would do in his new hands.
He supposed he was about to find out.
Two came at him at once, from opposite sides, the way trained men are taught when they have the numbers for it.
Vesper’s new senses stretched the moment long enough for him to see both blades and choose between them.
He took the first man’s sword on the hammer’s haft — the shock of it jarred up through his arm hard enough to ache — and felt the second blade open a shallow line across his ribs before he could clear it.
It hardly slowed him, hardly hurt, not the way it should have.
He knocked the first man’s blade wide, stepped inside his reach before the man could reset his footing, and crushed his temple with the hammer’s head before the other four could close the gap.
He caught the second man’s sword-arm mid-swing.
The other four closed together, shouting to each other now, trying to box him the way they should have from the start.
It wasn’t enough.
Vesper moved between them faster than trained eyes could track, hammer rising and falling, the black wool of his sleeve going slick and dark, and by the time the last of them broke for the tree line, three more were already down.
He caught that last man before he’d gone ten feet.
When it was over he stood breathing hard, out of habit rather than need, six men dead in the snow around him and the smell of blood everywhere at once.
He looked down at what was left of them and held the thought a moment before it could slip away: these had been his own brothers once, sworn under the same words he’d sworn.
Six months ago he would have called this the worst thing a man could do.
Now it barely registered as a cost.
That frightened him more than the blood did.
He knelt by the first man without deciding to.
The hunger took him the way it always did — sudden, total — and he drank until there was nothing left to take.
The first taste only sharpened the hunger instead of easing it; the blood was warm, better than horn-drink, better than the shadow cat’s blood an hour before.
When he came back to himself he was already crawling toward the second body, some part of him reasoning that if one had tasted that good, five more would only be better — and it was that thought, cold and calculating and not entirely his own, that finally stopped him.
He was close enough to smell the second man’s blood cooling in the snow before he made himself stop.
His hand was already on the man’s collar.
He could feel his own fangs still out, aching, some low animal part of him arguing that no one would ever know, that five more bodies would go into the same hole regardless of what was left inside them, that it changed nothing but the waste.
He knelt there gripping the dead man’s collar for a long, ugly moment, breathing hard, before he let go and sat back on his heels.
Five bodies lay untouched in the snow.
Vesper looked at them and felt, for one unwelcome second, something close to loss — a small, ugly voice cataloguing all that blood going to waste in the cold ground.
It frightened him more than the six dead men did, more than the fight itself.
He hadn’t expected the boy’s gift to want so much, or to want it so quietly, or to make the wanting feel so reasonable.
Stopping had cost him something he didn’t yet have a name for.
He picked up a fallen shovel and went to bury them before he could change his mind.
The hole needed to be deep enough for six, and Vesper dug it that way — no stone, no snags, just cold packed earth giving way under a rhythm no living man could have matched.
He laid the six brothers in together with their swords and the ruined shovel, filled it back in, and stamped the snow flat until the ground looked untouched.
The dig site itself sat maybe twenty paces off, closer to the old fort’s broken outer wall — a long shallow trench going nowhere in particular, the ordinary work of men told to make the hill safer and given no better reason than that.
He sat back on his heels when it was done and let himself breathe, more from habit than need.
It was only then that he remembered something Cael had mentioned hours before: a cache of dragonglass buried somewhere beneath the Fist of the First Men.
He hadn’t put much stock in it at the time.
But he had nothing better to do with the hours before Cael’s group arrived, and no need of sleep to interrupt him.
Worth a night’s searching.
There was no map, no mark, nothing to go on but a secondhand story and the shape of the hill itself.
If it came to nothing, he’d have lost nothing but time he hadn’t needed for sleep anyway.
He started near the brothers’ trench, reasoning that a hill worth fortifying was a hill worth burying something valuable on, and worked outward in slow, widening rings, sinking the shovel every few feet and testing the ground the way a man tests ice, listening for anything that didn’t sound like frozen dirt.
Two hours, and the ground near the old trench looked like something had been rooting through it.
His arms didn’t tire the way they should have, but his patience did, and sometime past midnight he stopped, built the fire back up, and sat with it — not resting so much as letting the cold clear his head, the way a man paces off frustration instead of pushing straight through it.
When he stood again his knees had stiffened from sitting, an old habit of the body that hadn’t caught up to what he now was.
He picked a new arc to search, farther out, closer to where the old fort’s wall bent toward the north face of the hill — steeper ground, less likely, but ground no one else had touched that night.
He worked through what remained of the dark in that same patient rhythm, pit after pit, losing count somewhere past a dozen, while the sky behind him went from black to the deep blue-grey an hour before dawn, and then, slower than he expected, to the flat pale light of morning.
He kept at it past sunrise, past the point where a living man would have quit from cold and hunger alone, shifting his search another quarter turn around the hill each time a stretch of ground came up empty.
It was well into the morning, the sun a thin white disc behind grey cloud, when the blade finally rang wrong under his hands — not the dull crunch of frozen earth, but something flatter, harder, deliberate.
He knelt and cleared the last of the snow away with his bare hands.
It was a slab of dark, close-grained rock, and cut into its face was a spiral, deep and deliberate — the kind of mark that didn’t happen by accident and hadn’t been carved by any hand Vesper recognized.
He’d seen a shape like it once before, scratched into a weirwood trunk on the far side of the Wall, and had been told it was older than the Wall itself.
He didn’t know much more than that, and didn’t much like not knowing.
He lifted the stone easily — his new strength made light work of what should have taken two men and a length of rope — and beneath it found a bundle wrapped in cloth, buried deeper and more carefully than any grave the Watch had dug that night.
He unwrapped it slowly.
A dozen black glass daggers caught what little sun there was and threw it back sharp and green-black, edges still keen enough to open a man to the bone despite however many years they’d spent in the ground.
He picked one up and turned it in the light — lighter than steel, colder to the touch, just as the old men on the Wall had always claimed.
He’d never seen dragonglass before, only heard it spoken of in stories and the muttered conversations of older brothers, always as something the Watch had too little of and needed badly.
Here was more of it in one place than he’d ever imagined.
A handful of arrowheads lay beneath the daggers, worked from the same glass, wickedly barbed, enough to fletch out a full quiver twice over.
He ran his thumb along one edge and thought of the White Walker he’d fled days before, and what a dozen blades like this might have done to it that steel never could.
Beneath the arrowheads, wrapped separately, was a horn — old, yellowed, banded in tarnished silver, longer than his forearm.
He gave it a glance, turned it once in his hands the way he might any old find, and set it aside with the rest.
Plain enough, as these things went.
An old hunting horn some wildling chieftain had probably prized once, nothing about it to mark it out from a dozen others he might have seen traded at market.
“By the Seven,” he murmured, to no one.
“The cache was real.”
He wrapped the daggers and arrowheads back into the cloth, the horn tucked alongside, and dragged the spiraled slab clear of the hole rather than lower it back over empty ground — no sense burying a marker over nothing.
He set it against the ruined outer wall instead, half in the fort’s shadow, and filled the hole in behind him, smoothing the snow until nothing on the hillside marked where the night’s digging had happened.
By the time he finished, morning had settled in fully, pale sun sitting low and thin over the hill.
Vesper made his way into the ruined fort crowning the hill, more from habit for shelter than any real need of it.
He washed himself as best the last of the snow allowed, scrubbing dried blood from his hands and collar, and set the bundle down carefully to one side, out of the wind.
He built a second fire, smaller than the first, and set to cooking what remained of the shadow cat’s meat.
He didn’t need it — hadn’t, really, since the change — but there was something steadying in the smell of meat over a flame, something that still felt like his own hands doing an honest, ordinary thing, and after a full night’s digging he wanted that more than he wanted to admit.
It tasted good all the same, rich and familiar, even though he could feel plainly enough that it filled nothing in him the way it used to.
Cael and the others would be along before much longer, if they’d kept the pace Vesper expected.
He had nothing to do until they arrived but sit with the fire, and the dozen dragonglass blades laid out beside it, and the strange spiralled stone he’d propped against the wall outside, and turn over in his mind all the questions the night had left him.
A dozen blades that could kill what steel couldn’t — that was worth more to the Watch, worth more to everyone north of the Wall, than anything else the bundle held.
He thought he’d have answers once Cael arrived.
The day stretched on without them.
He kept the fire alive, feeding it just enough wood to keep the worst of the cold from settling into the ruined fort.
The shadow cat’s hide lay beside him, and after a while he grew tired of merely looking at it.
Left as it was, it would stiffen and spoil long before they found anywhere fit to work it properly.
He scraped away the last clinging scraps of flesh and fat with slow, careful strokes of his knife, working from neck to tail the way an old ranger had once shown him with deer hides.
The work was familiar enough that his hands hardly needed his thoughts.
Satisfied, he rubbed coarse salt into the leather, folded it flesh-side in, and tied it into a tight bundle.
Not finished — that would take smoke, oil, and more time than they could spare — but it would keep.
After that there was little left to do.
He sharpened the dragonglass blades one by one, more from habit than necessity; their edges scarcely needed it, but idle hands had always made him restless.
Now and then he walked the broken walls of the old fort, scanning the endless white below.
Nothing moved but the wind and the occasional raven drifting over the trees.
Hours slipped past.
The pale winter sun climbed as high as it meant to, then began sinking again.
When darkness finally settled across the Fist, Vesper let the fire burn low and lay back beneath his cloak.
For the first time since becoming a vampire, sleep came easily.
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