Chapter 12: The Salt and Sorrows of White Harbor
The brief, bloody dawn that broke over the charnel house of the Last Hearth offered no respite, only a chilling clarity. Aegon Targaryen's final, contemptuous dismissal echoed in Torrhen's mind, a counterpoint to the moans of the wounded and the ever-present, unnatural cold. The Dragon King, throned in distant southern sunlight, had decreed the North entirely on its own. So be it. The wolf would tend to its own pack, its own territory.
White Harbor. The news from Lord Leobald Manderly was a fresh stab of ice in Torrhen's gut. An amphibious assault by the Others – figures walking on unnaturally frozen seas – was a nightmare scenario he had feared but now had to confront. If the North's largest port and wealthiest city fell, it would not only be a devastating blow to morale and resources but would also give the Others a significant foothold to push deeper inland, potentially bypassing many of the North's traditional inland defenses.
"Lord Umber," Torrhen said, his voice raspy from battle-shouts and fatigue, his gaze fixed on the grim-faced giant who had fought so valiantly. "The Last Hearth has bled, but it stands. You and your men have bought the North precious time. Reinforce your defenses. See to your wounded. The dead… burn them all. Every last one. We cannot risk them rising again."
"And you, Stark?" Umber asked, wiping frozen blood from his beard with a mailed fist. "White Harbor, you said?"
"Aye. The ice demons have learned to walk on water, it seems. A new trick we must counter." Torrhen turned to his depleted Winter Guard. They were exhausted, many wounded, their eyes haunted by the horrors they had witnessed, yet a grim resolve burned within them. They had faced the unthinkable and survived. They had seen their new weapons work. They had seen their Lord Stark fight amongst them, sharing their peril. "Ser Mark Ryswell, you will remain here with a detachment of the First Cohort and fifty of our best archers. Assist Lord Umber. Hold this position at all costs. It is the northeastern anchor of our defense."
"And you, my lord?" Ser Mark asked, his face etched with concern.
"I take the swiftest of our remaining riders, the rest of the First Cohort, and every firelance we have left, and ride for White Harbor. Lyanna, you come with me. Your… sight… will be crucial. Ghost, as always, you are our vanguard."
The decision was agonizing. Splitting his already diminished forces was a risk. Leaving the Last Hearth, even reinforced, felt like abandoning a hard-won gain. But White Harbor was too critical to lose. He dispatched ravens to other Northern lords – the Glovers of Deepwood Motte, the Tallharts of Torrhen's Square, the Flints of Widow's Watch – apprising them of the dual coastal threats and urging them to redouble their vigilance, to send any men they could spare not to Winterfell, but to converge on a central rallying point he designated in the eastern Wolfswood, a contingency should both the Last Hearth and White Harbor face prolonged sieges.
The journey south from the Umber lands towards White Harbor was a grim passage through a land rapidly succumbing to the Long Night's grip. The unnatural winter intensified daily. Rivers that should have still flowed freely were choked with ice. Ancient forests stood skeletal and silent, the snow beneath their boughs undisturbed by any sign of animal life. Villages they passed were either deserted, their inhabitants having fled south on Torrhen's earlier warnings, or stood as silent, frozen tombs, wisps of unnatural mist clinging to their eaves, a sure sign the Others had passed through. Each such discovery was a fresh stab of grief and rage.
Torrhen pushed his riders relentlessly, knowing every hour counted. Lyanna, riding beside him, often swayed with fatigue, her eyes dark-ringed from the constant strain of reaching out with the weirwood network. The news she gleaned was fragmented, terrifying.
"The cold… it's like a living tide, brother," she'd whisper, her breath pluming. "It flows down the coast from the north, and also… inland, from the east, from the sea towards White Harbor. The Manderlys are holding the river mouth, the White Knife… but the sea itself… it freezes where it should not. And there are… so many… a great host moving across the ice."
Ghost, ranging ahead, would often return with disturbing signs – strangely frozen sea birds far inland, or patches of snow that radiated an unnatural chill and made his hackles rise. The direwolf was an unerring barometer of the Others' proximity.
During their brief, infrequent rests, huddled around sputtering fires that seemed to give little warmth against the encroaching cold, Torrhen's mind worked feverishly. The battle at the Last Hearth had taught him much. Dragonglass was effective, but the wights were numerous. Firelances were devastating, but their charges were finite and the risk of friendly fire in close-quarters was high. The Others themselves were terrifyingly powerful, their ice weapons capable of shattering steel, their cold magic a debilitating aura.
"We need more than just sharp points and bright flames," he mused aloud one evening, staring into the struggling fire, Lyanna sharing a thin blanket with him for warmth. "The Other I wounded… the black ichor, the way its ice-form seemed to melt and sputter around the heat-runes on my dagger… there's a clue there. Their physical forms are constructs of ice, animated by their cold magic. If we can disrupt that magic, or introduce an element that destabilizes the ice itself…"
Flamel's alchemical knowledge, usually focused on transmutation and elixirs, also contained sections on elemental deconstruction, on substances that reacted violently with specific elemental states. He recalled experiments with super-cooled solutions, with salts that could drastically lower the freezing point of water, or conversely, cause rapid, uncontrolled crystallization.
"Lyanna," he said suddenly, his eyes alight with a new, desperate idea. "The fire-salts we use on my dagger and in the firelance charges… what if we could disperse them more widely? Not as a concentrated flame, but as a… corrosive dust? Something that would cling to their icy forms, reacting, melting, disrupting their cohesion even without direct flame?"
Lyanna, her teeth chattering slightly despite her furs, considered it. "Like… like throwing salt on a frozen path to make it melt, but… more powerful? More aggressive?"
"Precisely. And perhaps… something to counter their aura of cold. Flamel wrote of 'thermic balms,' substances that generate intense, localized heat through rapid chemical reaction when exposed to air or moisture. If our front-line troops could wear pouches of such a balm, or if we could project it…"
These were desperate, untested theories, but desperation was their constant companion. He dictated notes to a shivering young Bryen, who now looked less like a maester-in-training and more like a traumatized survivor, to be sent back to Winterfell's remaining alchemists and smiths. The North needed not just warriors, but innovators, if it was to survive.
They reached the outskirts of White Harbor after four grueling days of riding. The city, usually a bustling port, was eerily quiet, yet thrumming with a frantic, besieged energy. Smoke plumed from a hundred makeshift forges. The great timber-and-stone walls that faced the sea, and the mouth of the White Knife river, were swarming with Manderly soldiers, their silver merman banners snapping defiantly in the biting wind. Torrhen could see the gleam of his newly implemented chain booms across the river mouth, and the dark, glistening surfaces of the ice-slick barricades Lord Manderly had begun to erect along the most vulnerable sections of the seawall.
But beyond those defenses, the sight was horrifying. The sea itself, for miles out from the coast, was a sheet of jagged, unnatural white ice, buckled and ridged as if frozen in mid-storm. And across that impossible ice bridge, a vast, dark tide of figures was advancing – thousands upon thousands of wights, a relentless army of the dead, their forms barely distinguishable in the grey, snowy gloom, their numbers dwarfing what they had faced at the Last Hearth. And among them, like malevolent shepherds, glinted the pale forms of several Others, their chilling blue light stark against the desolation.
Lord Leobald Manderly, his usually jovial face drawn and pale, met them at the city gates. "Lord Stark! By the mercy of the Old Gods and the New, you've come! We are… hard-pressed. They appeared three days ago, walking out of a fog bank that froze the sea before it. We've held the river mouth so far, our ships are trapped in the ice but their archers and scorpion crews are fighting bravely. But the seawall… they test it constantly. Their numbers are… endless."
"They always are," Torrhen said grimly. "What of the Others themselves?"
"We've seen at least five of them, my lord. They direct the attacks. Our archers have tried… but they are swift, and their ice armor turns aside most shafts. We lost two small patrol boats that were frozen in place before they could retreat – their crews… they rose again within minutes." The horror of that was stark in Manderly's eyes.
Torrhen's arrival, with his battle-hardened Winter Guard and the legendary Ghost, sent a ripple of hope through the besieged city. He quickly assessed the defenses, his strategic mind absorbing the layout, the disposition of Manderly's forces, the choke points, the vulnerabilities. White Harbor was a labyrinth of narrow streets and sturdy stone buildings, but its long seawall was its Achilles' heel against this new, horrifying form of amphibious assault.
"Lord Manderly, your men have done valiantly," Torrhen said. "But we must consolidate. The seawall is too long to defend equally. We focus our strength at the main gates, the key bastions, and the areas where the ice is thickest, closest to the walls. Use the firelances sparingly, only when they mass for a major breach. Dragonglass arrows for any Others that come within range. And we need to prepare secondary lines of defense within the city itself – barricades in the streets, fallback positions."
The attack, when it came in earnest that evening, was a relentless, terrifying onslaught. The wights, driven by the cold will of their masters, swarmed across the frozen sea and hurled themselves against the city walls. The ice-slick barricades proved surprisingly effective, sending many of the clumsy creatures sliding back, but others, with unnatural strength, began to form living ladders of their own bodies. Manderly archers, reinforced by Torrhen's Winter Guard, rained volleys of arrows down, both conventional and dragonglass-tipped. The screams of men and the unearthly shrieks of the wights blended into a horrifying chorus.
Torrhen took command of the defense of the main Sea Gate, where one of the Others, a towering figure wreathed in an aura of biting frost, seemed to be directing a concentrated assault. He had his men douse the gate and the surrounding walls with the fire-retardant oils he'd developed. When the wights, some carrying crude ice rams, charged, he ordered his firelances to unleash their fury. Jets of alchemical flame turned the attackers into shrieking pyres, the heat momentarily pushing back the oppressive cold.
Ghost was a whirlwind of white death, tearing through any wights that managed to get close, his snarls a counterpoint to the Other's chilling presence. Torrhen himself fought with Ice, its Valyrian steel a dark flame against the blue glow of the enemy. He felt the Other's malevolent gaze upon him, a psychic pressure that sought to crush his will. He fought back with every ounce of his training, every scrap of Flamel's ancient mental disciplines, shielding his mind, focusing his rage into deadly precision.
Lyanna, stationed in a high tower overlooking the battle, was his eyes in the storm. "Brother, to your left! A group is trying to scale the wall using a grappling hook fashioned from frozen ropes and bones! And the Other… it's preparing some kind of… ice spear!"
Torrhen whirled, dispatching a wight that was clawing at him, and saw the Other across the chaotic melee. It was indeed shaping a massive shard of ice in its hand, its blue eyes fixed on him with murderous intent. Before it could launch its deadly projectile, a volley of dragonglass-tipped arrows, fired by a disciplined squad of Winter Guard archers Torrhen had positioned for just such an opportunity, slammed into its torso. The Other shrieked, a sound that cracked the very air, staggering back, its icy armor shattering in places, revealing the shimmering, unstable core beneath. It did not fall, but it was clearly wounded, its concentration broken.
The battle for White Harbor raged through the night and into the next day, a relentless cycle of desperate defense and overwhelming assault. The defenders were pushed to their limits, exhaustion and horror taking their toll. Ammunition for the firelances dwindled. The supply of dragonglass arrows was not inexhaustible. Men fell, and the fear that they would rise again to join the enemy was a constant, gnawing terror.
During a brief lull, as the tide of wights momentarily receded under a particularly fierce barrage of fire and dragonglass, Torrhen received an unexpected piece of intelligence. A half-frozen fisherman, one of the few survivors from a small village up the coast that had been annihilated days earlier, had been found clinging to a piece of wreckage that had drifted into the now ice-choked harbor. He was delirious, but before he succumbed to his injuries and the cold, he babbled a chilling tale.
He spoke of seeing not just the walking dead, but "ice spiders, big as hounds," that scuttled across the frozen sea alongside the Others, their many eyes glowing with the same blue light. And he spoke of a ship, a great, dark ship with sails like tattered shadows, that seemed to move without wind, from which the Others appeared to be disembarking further out on the ice.
Ice spiders. Torrhen felt a fresh wave of cold dread. Another nightmare from the old tales made real. And a ship… it implied a level of organization, a method of transport beyond just walking across the frozen plains, that was deeply unsettling. It meant the Others were not just a mindless force of nature; they were an invading army with a terrifyingly alien form of logistics.
This new information forced another grim calculation. If the Others had ships, they could land anywhere along the coast, bypassing even fortified ports like White Harbor eventually. The entire coastline of the North was vulnerable.
He looked at his sister, Lyanna, her face smudged with soot, her eyes burning with a mixture of exhaustion and fierce determination. She had been instrumental in the defense, her weirwood-enhanced senses giving them precious warnings, her very presence seeming to bolster the morale of those around her. Her quiet magic was growing, adapting to the crisis. He had seen her trace runes of warding in the air that seemed to momentarily repel wights, or whisper words to a struggling archer that steadied his hand.
"They are adapting, Lya," Torrhen said, his voice heavy. "They are learning. And they have resources we haven't even dreamed of."
"Then we must adapt too, brother," Lyanna replied, her voice surprisingly strong. "We must learn faster. Fight harder."
Just then, a great cry went up from the southern battlements of the city. A new wave of wights, larger than any before, was surging across the ice towards a section of the wall that was less heavily defended, where the Manderly forces were thinnest. And with them came two Others, their forms shimmering with cold light, their ice swords raised.
Torrhen knew, with a sickening certainty, that his current forces at that section would not hold. He had already committed most of his Winter Guard to the Sea Gate. To pull them away would risk a breach there. He was faced with an impossible choice: sacrifice one section of the city to save another, or risk losing it all.
The assassin in him whispered of brutal triage. Flamel's pragmatism weighed the odds. The Lord of Winterfell felt the crushing weight of responsibility for every life within those walls.
"Lord Manderly," Torrhen barked, his decision made in a fraction of a second, cold and hard. "The southern bastion is about to be overwhelmed. We cannot reinforce it in time. Order your men there to fall back to the second line of barricades we prepared in the Fishmarket. We will make our stand there. But we must… create a firebreak."
Manderly looked horrified. "A firebreak, my lord? You mean… burn a part of my city?" The Fishmarket district was crowded with wooden buildings, homes to thousands.
"It is either a part of your city, Lord Manderly, or all of it, and all of us within it," Torrhen said, his voice like a winter wind. "Those wights cannot be allowed to gain a foothold within the main walls. We need to channel them, delay them, burn them. It is the only way." He turned to a grim-faced officer of his Winter Guard. "Captain Voran, take your remaining firelance squads and twenty archers with fire arrows. You know what to do. Delay their advance into the Fishmarket for as long as possible, then light the pyres we prepared. Create a wall of flame they cannot pass. It will buy us time to rally a defense at the Market Square."
It was a horrific order. Sacrificing a part of the city, condemning homes and livelihoods to flame, to create a desperate, burning chokepoint. But it was the only tactical option left to prevent a complete overrun. The King Who Knelt was now ordering his own people's homes to be burned, to save them from a worse fate. The irony was a taste of ash in his mouth.
As Captain Voran and his men rushed to carry out the terrible order, Torrhen looked out over the besieged city of White Harbor, the unnatural ice pressing in, the tide of the dead surging, the cries of the living and the shrieks of the damned filling the air. He had won a skirmish at the Last Hearth. But here, at the edge of the frozen sea, the true scale of the Long Night was revealing itself. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the core, that this battle was far from over. It was merely the next bloody chapter in a war that threatened to consume the world.