The icy wind howled.
Eddard did not turn around.
His voice carried from the figure ahead, steady and clear.
“The soldiers found this deserter of the Night’s Watch in the Wolfswood.
By the law of the North, a deserter is sentenced to death.”
He paused.
“You should be here to witness this.
Learn what it means to respect the law.”
Behind him, Bran sniffled.
Robb straightened his spine even further.
Theon’s mouth twitched like he wanted to say something, then thought better of it.
Aven watched the man of the Night’s Watch.
Two soldiers had forced him to his knees in the frozen mud, his legs sinking into the hard ground.
His body was shaking, not just from the cold.
Eddard walked up to him.
He drew Ice from his hip and set the point against the ground, both hands folded over the pommel.
The posture filled him with gravity.
Those grey eyes looked down at the deserter without warmth.
“Do you have anything left to say?”
The deserter raised his head.
His lips were split in several places, and as he spoke, threads of blood welled from the cracks.
His voice scraped out like sandpaper dragged across rough stone.
“I know…
I know I’m a deserter.” His throat worked; swallowing looked difficult.
“I should have gone back to the Wall…
sent a warning…”
He stopped abruptly.
His pupils dilated.
His gaze passed over Eddard’s shoulder toward the sky beyond, not looking at anything in front of him — looking at something carved into his mind.
Something he wished he had never seen.
Eddard did not rush him.
He simply waited.
To hear a dying man’s last words, that was the mercy a Warden of the North owed the condemned.
The deserter took a long time to return from wherever he had gone.
The wind tunneled beneath his tattered black cloak and moaned.
When he finally spoke again, his voice had dropped even lower, the voice of a man confessing something he himself could barely believe.
“I saw it with my own eyes.”
He swallowed.
“I saw the White Walkers.”
Not a metaphor.
Literally, every person present stopped breathing.
Even the wind seemed to go still for one instant.
Then Theon’s voice rang out, sharp and scornful, carrying the edge of someone desperate to prove he wasn’t afraid.
“Bullshit!”
He stepped half a pace forward, his expression caught between mockery and disdain, the corner of his mouth crooked.
But there was no real laughter in his eyes.
Beneath the deliberate contempt, something else moved.
Unease.
Barely visible, but there.
“Those are just stories!
The kind Old Nan tells children to scare them to sleep!” Theon’s voice rang loud across the empty countryside.
“This deserter wants to save his skin, so he’s invented the most outrageous lie he could think of — ”
“Theon.”
Eddard’s voice was not loud.
Theon shut his mouth instantly.
Eddard looked into the deserter’s eyes.
He held that gaze for a long moment.
Then he shook his head.
He gripped Ice with both hands and drew it up from the ground.
In the flat grey daylight, the Valyrian Steel edge cast no reflection, swallowing the light around it like a blade forged from solid darkness.
The two soldiers pressed the deserter’s head down, baring the pale nape of his neck.
When Eddard Stark spoke, every word fell clean and separate, loud enough for every person present to hear.
“I, Eddard of House Stark, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, sentence you to die.”
Ice rose above his head.
Then it fell.
The sound was nothing like chopping wood.
Nothing like hacking through bone.
It was closer to the sound of tearing heavy canvas soaked through with water, dull, abrupt, carrying a low-frequency impact that put an ache in the teeth.
The deserter’s body went slack and crumpled.
His head tumbled onto the frozen mud, rolled half a turn, and came to rest facing the sky.
Blood surged from the open neck, steaming white in the freezing air, soaking into the brittle yellow grass beneath him and turning it red.
No one spoke.
Behind Aven, Bran let out a tiny sound, stifled, trapped in his throat, and pressed his hand over his mouth.
Eddard crouched and wiped the blade clean on the deserter’s cloak.
He slid Ice back into the sheath at his hip.
“Back to Winterfell,” he said.
Robb moved first, then Theon, his color paler than usual, the smirk at the corner of his mouth completely gone.
Jon walked past the body, glanced at it once, pressed his lips into a thin line, and said nothing.
Bran hadn’t moved.
His eyes were fixed on the headless body, as if something had nailed his feet to the ground.
Aven walked over and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
Bran looked up at him.
There was no fear in those grey eyes, only the brief, blank space that lives between shock and confusion.
The place a seven-year-old goes the first time he watches something die.
“What he said…
the White Walkers…” Bran’s voice came out very small.
“Let’s go.” Aven nudged his shoulder, gentle but firm.
Bran finally moved.
Two steps forward, one glance back, then he picked up his pace and fell in behind Robb.
Everyone was heading back.
Aven was the last one standing there.
He stayed on the blood-soaked grass and looked at the body in the tattered black cloak.
The wind came in from somewhere further north, carrying snow and pine on its breath, snapping at the hem of his clothes.
He thought about the deserter’s last words.
I saw the White Walkers.
He knew it was true.
Not a lie, not the ravings of a dying man grasping for any reason to live.
The White Walkers had slumbered beyond the Wall for thousands of years, and now they were awake.
They were gathering.
Moving south.
Taking every dead wildling, every fallen brother of the Night’s Watch, and putting blue eyes in their skulls.
And here, Winterfell, the North, all of Westeros — no one was ready.
Eddard didn’t believe.
Theon had laughed.
Robb had stayed silent.
Bran was still trying to understand what he had just seen.
Only Aven knew the deserter had told the truth.
The true story of ice and fire had begun with a headless corpse.
He turned and walked toward Winterfell.
His boots pressed into the frozen mud, leaving footprints behind him, some deep, some shallow.
The wind pushed at his back like it was trying to hurry him along, like it was trying to tell him something.
You’re already out of time.
Behind him, the deserter lay in his pool of blood, face turned toward the grey sky, eyes still open.
The wind found its way beneath the hem of his cloak one last time, pulling out a low, hollow moan, like a warning no one had been willing to hear, slowly swallowed by the empty land around it.
➤ Next: Legends