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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots, and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
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"If I had thought to see war again in my lifetime, I should have eaten a few less eels."
Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor
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North, Winterfell
301 AC, Two Months After the Night of Yellow Madness
Wyman Manderly
He did not sleep well, and so he rose before the sun.
That had been Wyman Manderly's way for the past two moons, ever since the night the Godswood had burned with a fire that was not fire at all. A man of his considerable weight had never been known for early rising, but sleep now eluded him the way debtors evaded tax collectors, with impressive creativity and exhausting consistency.
The Great Hall of Winterfell was quiet at this hour, inhabited only by a dying hearth fire and the shadows it threw across the ancient stone. Wyman lowered himself onto the chair at the high table, not the high seat, never the high seat, which remained empty and would remain so until His Majesty returned, and spread the morning's ravens before him like a losing hand of cards.
His steward had placed a bowl of honey cakes beside the correspondence. That was either a kindness or a statement about the quality of the news contained within the letters. After reading the first two, Wyman suspected it was both.
He reached for a honey cake and chewed slowly, eyes moving across the cramped lettering of Lord Stannis's raven. The man wrote as he spoke: without warmth, without poetry, and with a precision that was oddly comforting when all else around you was uncertain.
Deepwood Motte had fallen. The Ironborn who had held it, former Asha Greyjoy's garrison, had been routed after a two-day siege. Stannis was moving southeast, intending to sweep Moat Cailin before the snows made the Neck impassable.
Good news. Real, tangible, measurable good news. Wyman found himself more grateful for that than he would have thought possible six months ago.
He set the letter down and looked at the empty seat.
Two months.
Two months since King Aerion had walked into the burning courtyard of his castle and never returned through any door that Wyman could account for.
Two months since the last soldiers closest to the north wall had watched their king stand over the smoldering ruin of something enormous, something that had burst from the Godswood like a nightmare given form and then simply dissolve. Like snow in a cupped hand. Like morning frost at the first touch of dawn.
Wyman had been there. He had seen the yellow flames and heard the sounds coming from within them, sounds no fire should make, sounds he heard still in the hours between midnight and dawn, when sleep escaped him.
He had smelled the charred remains of the Godswood, that ancient weirwood face now forever lost. He had watched the soldiers around him fall to their knees or scratch at their own faces, and he had felt the whispers pressing at the edge of his own mind like a creditor at a locked door.
He had been terrified.
He was not ashamed to admit this, at least to himself. A lord who could not honestly assess his own terror was a lord who would be surprised at the worst possible moment. And Wyman Manderly had survived too long on the southern shores of the White Knife by being very careful about what surprised him.
What had saved him, he thought, was not courage. It was simply weight, the sheer mass of his body requiring so much effort to move that panic took several moments longer to translate into flight. By the time his legs had considered doing something rash, the young king had already shouted the orders, and training had taken over.
He had evacuated. He had kept people calm. He had organized the rebuilding. And then he had stared at the empty high seat for two moons and pretended, in every waking hour before every lord and soldier and trembling servant who looked to him for certainty, that he was not doing exactly what he was doing.
The story they told was the only story that could be told. The king had been taken by the gods, his gods, whatever strange and powerful things those were, to grow stronger, to prepare for what was coming. The direwolf and the raven had vanished the same night, which lent the tale a certain useful credibility. After all, who sent their animals before them if not a lord preparing to travel?
Some believed it. Some chose to believe it, which was a different thing but equally valuable. A few did not believe it at all and simply kept that opinion to themselves, which was the wisest possible course. Wyman had made certain that the ones who spoke their disbelief too loudly found themselves with a great deal of very necessary and very demanding work to occupy their time.
The northwest quarter of Winterfell was still a ruin. The ancient stones that had survived eight thousand years of winter had not survived one night of the yellow fire. Rebuilding had begun as soon as the snows permitted, but progress was slow.
They lacked masons, lacked materials, and lacked time. They lacked, most fundamentally, the man who had built this particular chapter of Winterfell's history from sheer force of will and abilities that Wyman could not begin to categorize.
What he had instead was the forces that had retreated from the Wall, what remained of the Night's Watch, gaunt men in black who had left their towers empty and sealed as best they could manage and marched south because there was nothing north of them that was theirs to hold anymore.
And the Free Folk who had come with them, thousands of wildlings settling into the southwestern quarter of the castle and the field camps beyond, building fires and raising children and watching the southern-born soldiers with a wariness that was gradually, grudgingly becoming something less hostile.
There was also the matter of the Iron Bank's representative, who had arrived with the Wall's column and installed himself in a guest chamber with the placid patience of a man who had learned to wait out empires.
He reached for another honey cake and found the bowl empty. He had not noticed eating them. With a sigh that came from a deep and well-practiced place, Wyman Manderly began preparing for the morning council.
***********
The council assembled in the solar of the Great Keep, the one room with a hearth large enough to keep everyone's feet from freezing through the strategy of the meeting.
They arrived in the order that spoke volumes about precedence, personality, and what each of them valued.
Mors Umber was first, already seated and already scowling when Wyman entered, as though he had been there since the night before and had simply been waiting to be disappointed by everyone else's lateness. He had the look of a man who had never learned to be comfortable in a chair but refused to stand on principle.
Tormund Giantsbane arrived second in the sense that he came through the door, but the entrance he made was so large in presence that second seemed a poor word for it.
He was a massive man even by the standards of the Free Folk, broad through the chest and shoulders, with a red beard so thick and unruly it seemed to be making an independent attempt to leave his face. He took the chair nearest the fire, stretched his boots toward the flames, and looked around the room with the cheerful menace of a bear that had decided, for today at least, not to maul anyone.
"Still no king," he said. Not a question.
"Still no king," Wyman confirmed, settling into his own seat with the care of a man on excellent terms with his own mortality.
Tormund grunted. The Free Folk camped in the yards, and the empty buildings of the southwest quarter were growing restless, he had mentioned before, with the particular restlessness of people accustomed to movement who had been asked to stay put.
They were not prisoners. Aerion had made that abundantly clear before his departure. But they were also in a stone castle in the middle of the North, in winter, waiting for a king who had dissolved into golden light, and even the most patient of them had begun to ask questions that Wyman had no satisfying answers to.
Iron Emmett arrived next, wrapped in so many layers of black that he resembled a crow that had undergone some dramatic expansion.
He was the most senior of the Night's Watch brothers who had made the march south from the abandoned towers of the Wall, which made him acting Lord Commander by default and by the shared opinion of no one in particular having any better ideas. He took his seat with the expression of a man who had accepted that every day would be worse than the last and had decided to be pleasantly surprised when occasionally proven wrong, which was not often.
"Colder today," he observed, pulling his cloak tighter.
"It's always colder," Mors Umber said.
"Aye. I've noticed that."
Tycho Nestoris entered last, and he did so the way he did everything: precisely, without apology, and with the measured confidence of a man who knew that the institution he represented had outlasted every kingdom currently in this room.
He was a slight man, dressed in ornate but practical Braavosi fashion, his face narrow and watchful, his eyes the kind of steady that came from decades of watching powerful men make promises and then watching carefully what they actually did.
He bowed to Wyman with the correct degree of respect due a regent managing affairs in a king's absence, which was a distinction Tycho evidently understood and tracked with precision.
"Lord Manderly," he said. "I trust the morning finds you well."
"The morning finds me adequately, which at my age is the most I ask of it," Wyman replied. "Shall we begin?"
He noted the absence of Melisandre and did not remark upon it. The red priestess had not attended any of the councils in the two months since Aerion's departure, which Wyman found simultaneously suspicious and deeply relieving.
She kept to her chambers or to the rebuilt section of the yard, burning things in her brazier and watching the flames with an expression that suggested she was seeing things within them that she was not yet ready to share with the merely mortal.
On the one occasion Wyman had asked her directly what she saw, she had looked at him with those red eyes of hers and said, very quietly, that she was watching for the return of the prince who was promised.
He had not asked again.
"The news from Lord Stannis first," Wyman said, setting the raven scroll on the table for those who wished to examine it. "Deepwood Motte has fallen. The Ironborn garrison is routed. He moves for Moat Cailin."
Mors Umber's scowl deepened into what, on his face, passed for satisfaction. "About time. Ironborn scum, holding northern castles. The insult of it." He shook his head. "How many did we lose?"
"He does not say precisely. He lists the dead only as 'acceptable.'" Wyman paused. "Which, from Lord Stannis, suggests fewer than he expected and more than he'd like to report."
"Stannis is a hard man," Tormund said from his chair by the fire, not disapprovingly. "He doesn't waste."
"No," Wyman agreed. "He does not."
This was, in its quiet way, the most remarkable development of the past two months. Stannis Baratheon, who had arrived in the North claiming a throne and received instead a king to kneel to, had fulfilled every oath he had sworn with a reliability that bordered on mechanical.
He had organized the evacuation from the burning courtyard. He had administered the rationing during the lean weeks that followed. He had taken the bulk of their fighting force south when the plans dictated and left Winterfell in competent hands without complaint and without any of the quiet maneuvers for power that Wyman had privately prepared contingencies for.
The man was either extraordinarily honorable or extraordinarily calculating. Wyman suspected both were true simultaneously and that Stannis had decided they were not in conflict.
"And the Wall?" Wyman said, looking to Edd.
The acting Lord Commander's expression did not change, which in itself was a kind of eloquence. "We're gone. Wholly gone. Shadow Tower, Eastwatch, Castle Black, and all the lesser forts between them. Abandoned and sealed as best we could manage." He paused. "The sealing won't hold long. Nothing holds them long."
A particular quiet gathered in the room, the kind that assembles itself around facts that everyone knows but that strike differently when stated plainly in the cold morning air.
"How long before they move?" Mors asked.
"Before what?" Edd replied. "Before the Wall itself comes down? I couldn't say. Before they're in force this side of it?" He considered. "They weren't massing when we left. They were waiting. The way a man waits when he knows time is on his side."
"Time is not on our side," Tycho Nestoris said. It was the first time he had spoken since the meeting began, and every head turned toward him. "Forgive the observation. I mean only that delays compound themselves. This is true of debts, of armies, and of enemies who calculate that patience costs them nothing." He offered a thin smile. "The Iron Bank has considerable experience with patience wielded as a weapon."
"Which brings us," Wyman said carefully, "to the question of the bank's role in what comes next."
Tycho opened his slim leather folio. "Indeed. I have waited two months to allow the present uncertainties to resolve before pressing my institution's interests. I am pressing them now."
The room settled into a different kind of listening.
"His Majesty Aerion, before his absence began, had entered a preliminary dialogue with my institution through Lord Stannis's intermediary," Tycho continued. "The terms discussed were preliminary. The Iron Bank does not consider them binding. But the framework remains useful."
He folded his hands with great care. "Simply stated: the Iron Bank does not lend to absent kings. Nor to regents. We lend to proven sovereigns who demonstrate the capacity and intention to repay."
"And you do not know," Wyman said slowly, "whether our king will return."
"I do not know whether he is alive," Tycho said, with the particular neutrality of a man who had learned to treat mortality as a financial variable rather than a sorrow.
"I am, however, observant. There are people in this castle who believe very strongly in his return. The red priestess was the most vocal on this subject when I arrived. There is also the matter of the events that preceded his disappearance." He paused.
"The northwest quarter burned with a fire no man I have spoken to can explain. The Godswood's heart tree is destroyed. These are not the marks of an ordinary event. They are the marks of something that does not yet have a name in any ledger I have maintained."
He looked directly at Wyman.
"I will tell you plainly, Lord Manderly. The Iron Bank has outlasted dozens of kingdoms because we were never surprised by the existence of extraordinary things. We were merely surprised by extraordinary things that failed to eventually resolve into something measurable."
He closed the folio. "I believe this situation will so resolve itself. If your king returns, the terms we discussed will form the basis of our arrangement. If he does not return within a reasonable period, we will need to discuss the structure of his debt differently."
"How long is reasonable?" Wyman asked.
Tycho considered with the care of a man to whom consideration was an art. "I will extend our patience by another month. Perhaps six weeks, if circumstances warrant. After that, the Iron Bank will need to treat the obligation as the debt of a realm rather than of an individual sovereign. This creates a different and, I will be candid, more complicated set of arrangements."
"Six weeks," Mors Umber muttered under his breath with a particular contempt usually reserved for taxes and cowardice.
"I appreciate the bank's flexibility," Wyman said, and he meant it. Six weeks was not nothing. It was also not enough.
Tormund, who had been following the exchange with the expression of a man trying to navigate a conversation in a language he mostly understood, now leaned forward.
"My people didn't come through the Wall to sit in a stone box and wait. We came because the king said we'd be safe here. And we are safe. But safe isn't useful. My people need to move, to do something that uses what they know."
He looked around the table. "Let us range north. Let us watch. The dead don't move fast, but they move steadily. We can give you warning."
Wyman looked at the wildling chieftain for a moment. It was a good idea. The fact that it came from a man whose people had been raiding across the Wall for centuries did not make it less so. "We will discuss deployment after the council."
Tormund gave a single nod, apparently satisfied.
Emmet cleared his throat. He reached into his cloak and produced a small scroll. "There's one more matter. This was found in the Lord Commander's quarters at Castle Black. We believe it was written sometime before…" He trailed off and set it on the table without finishing the sentence.
Wyman took it and opened it. He recognized the handwriting immediately from the documents the king had signed during his months at Winterfell: angular, slightly cramped, and pressed hard enough to suggest a man writing in haste or urgency.
It said only, 'If I am gone and you are reading this, do not mourn too long. The Wall is the last thing I would have wanted to be the end of anyone. Go south. Go to Winterfell. Tell them I said to keep going.'
No date. No further instruction.
Wyman read it twice. Then he set it carefully down on the table and looked at it for a moment, as one looks at something small that carries a great deal of unexpected weight.
"Keep going," he said quietly. "Simple enough."
"Simple is what I like," Tormund said.
Mors Umber, who had been studying the table surface with the intensity of a man trying to find something to hit, made a low sound in his chest. "He's coming back," the old lord said, without looking up. "I've watched a lot of men go, and I've watched the ones who didn't come back. The ones who leave notes like that..." He shook his head slowly. "Those ones come back."
Wyman did not know if that was hard-won wisdom or wishful thinking. He suspected Mors Umber did not know either, but that after sixty years of war and loss in the service of the North, the old man had earned the right to say it either way.
"Is there anything further?" Wyman asked.
There was not, or at least there was nothing that could not be held until they had either more information or more patience for complexity.
The council rose. Wyman remained seated, watching them file out, composing in his mind the reply he would send to Stannis's raven about Deepwood Motte, thinking about six weeks and the Iron Bank and the Others moving steadily southward through an abandoned country that had once been guarded by a thousand feet of ice and thousands of men who had understood what they were guarding against.
He was still sitting there, reed pen in hand, when the shout came from outside.
Not a warning cry. Not the sharp alarm of a sentry calling danger. Something altogether different, the particular, helpless shout of a man confronted with something so far beyond his categories of understanding that the only response available was raw and ragged volume.
Then another voice. Then many, all at once, a wave of sound that broke against the solar window and brought Wyman to his feet before he was aware of having decided to stand.
He moved with a speed that surprised him. It had been a long time since Wyman Manderly had moved quickly in the service of anything except the table, but something in the quality of that shouting communicated urgency below the level of thought, in some older part of the mind that remembered what it meant to hear men make that sound.
The courtyard of Winterfell was full of people looking up.
He looked up.
Against the gray winter sky of the North, something vast was descending through the low clouds. At first his mind insisted it was a formation of cloud and shadow. Then the shape resolved, and his mind stopped offering suggestions and simply watched.
It was enormous.
Crystal-blue scales caught what little winter light the overcast allowed, and where the scales ran thin or were interrupted, jagged shards erupted from the hide like monstrous jewels, more mineral than flesh, carrying some inner cold light of their own.
The wings spread across the sky, and when they beat, the downdraft swept snow from the courtyard in great sheets and made every banner in the yard crack like a breaking bone. The sound of it was something Wyman felt as much as heard, deep and resonant and entirely unlike anything that belonged to this world, carrying in it the echo of somewhere else.
It landed in the far end of the yard with a weight that sent tremors through the ancient stone beneath Wyman's feet. Men scattered back. The Free Folk, he noticed, did not scatter; they watched with wide and hungry eyes, as though they had heard stories and never dared believe them and now found they had been right to believe.
The crystal dragon settled its wings with a sound like a thousand glass chimes and lowered its great head, and the crystalline eyes that turned to survey the courtyard glowed with cold, uncanny light.
A figure slid from its back.
He had grown.
That was the first thing Wyman registered, absurdly, before anything else. Aerion Targaryen had always been rather tall, even before whatever the gods were doing to him had begun to accelerate.
But the man who landed in the courtyard of Winterfell with the ease of someone stepping off a garden stair was taller than Wyman remembered, and the change in him was not only height. He was harder.
Not in the way of a man made cruel by hardship, but in the way of steel that has passed through heat and come out tempered to something purer and more dangerous than what it was before.
The armor he wore was different, dark and strange, marked with golden lines that caught the torchlight and seemed almost to breathe. The left eye, where the fragment of whatever divine power had claimed him rested, glowed with a faint golden warmth that pulsed once, slowly, as he looked around the courtyard.
He was taking in the faces. Taking in the ruin of the northwest quarter. Taking in the dragon behind him and the crowd before him, and his expression was the controlled, unreadable thing of a man who had learned to hold himself very still while processing a great deal.
His gaze found Tormund, who grinned like a man who had won a considerable wager. Found Mors Umber, whose face said nothing at all, which, from the old lord, meant everything. Found Tycho Nestoris, who had followed Wyman outside and was now studying the dragon with the focused attention of a man calculating its value in several different currencies.
And then Aerion's gaze found Wyman.
Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor, regent of Winterfell in his king's absence, twice the weight he should be and three times more tired than he had any right to admit, stood in the snow of the courtyard and looked at the young man that Eddard Stark had raised without knowing who he was.
He felt something loosen in his chest that had been knotted there for sixty-two days, something that had no name in the language of politics or finance or military strategy, something that was simply and entirely relief.
"Your Grace," Wyman said. His voice came out steadier than he deserved. He bent as deeply as his knees would allow, which was not deep, but would have to do.
He heard footsteps in the snow approaching him. A hand closed briefly on his shoulder.
"Lord Manderly." Aerion's voice was the same. Perhaps a shade deeper, or perhaps it simply carried more weight behind it now, the weight of wherever he had been and whatever he had done there. It drew Wyman upright. "How bad is it?"
Wyman looked at him. At the dragon behind him, which had settled into stillness and watched the entire yard with crystalline eyes that gleamed like cold lanterns. At the crowd of soldiers and Free Folk and Night's Watch brothers and one very attentive Iron Bank representative, all of them standing in the snow, all of them looking at their king.
And he heard it then, the sound that had been building since the moment Aerion landed, a murmur that had grown into something less controlled and more human, the sound of a crowd that had been holding its breath for two months and had only now remembered how to exhale.
It moved through the yard like wind through summer grass. He heard it from the men on the walls above, and from the southernmost camp where the Free Folk fires burned, where word was already traveling.
"Six weeks," Wyman said at last. "We have six weeks to make an acceptable case to the Iron Bank. Stannis has taken Deepwood Motte and moves on Moat Cailin. The Wall is abandoned. The Others wait, which is the most frightening thing about them. And there are four thousand Free Folk in your southwest quarter who have been remarkably patient."
He paused, considering whether to continue.
"Also," he added, "the honey cakes are good. I ate all of them this morning. I'm afraid there are none left."
The corner of the king's mouth moved. Just barely. "I'll manage. I'm starving." His gaze moved once more across the assembled yard, taking in the faces that were turned toward him, and something in his expression shifted in a way that Wyman could not quite name, something that was not quite grief and not quite determination but held pieces of both.
"Then let's get to work," the king said.
It was not a speech. There was no great declaration, no invocation of gods or ancestors or the sacred duty of the North. There were four words spoken quietly in the cold air of a damaged courtyard to a crowd of people who had been waiting for anything at all.
They were enough.
Wyman Manderly watched the yard come alive around his returning king and allowed himself exactly one moment, just one, brief and private, swallowed before anyone could see it, to be grateful.
Tomorrow would bring its own accounting. The Others were coming, the Ironborn still held half the North's western shores, the Iron Bank wanted its answer in six weeks, and the dragon settling its enormous crystal-blue wings in the far corner of the yard would require explanation to approximately every person in Westeros.
But for this moment, the seat of winter had its lord again.
That was enough to begin.