On the sixteenth day they finally reached the gathering place after a brutal march.
It was a gorge deep in the middle of the Frostfangs called Windsong Gorge.
As the head of the column reached the end of the gorge, thick columns of smoke were already visible in the distance. When they rounded the final bend the valley opened into a vast empty plain.
A long V-shaped river valley stretched ahead. At its far end loomed a colossal blue-white wall of ice jammed tight against the mountains, as if trying to shove the peaks apart.
It was a glacier thousands of feet high. Beneath its glittering ice cliffs lay a majestic lake whose deep blue waters mirrored the surrounding snow-capped peaks like a giant sapphire.
"That's the Great Glacier," Nymo said beside him. "It gave the Frostfangs their name and it's the source of the Milkwater."
It really did look like an enormous rabbit tooth, Lynn thought.
The valley was packed with people—thousands upon thousands—crowded shoulder to shoulder. Some dug large pits in the half-frozen ground while others drilled for battle.
Lynn watched a big group of riders slam into a shield wall. The horses came in every size, the formation was sloppy, and even an untrained eye could see it was a disorganized mob.
The camp had zero order—no ditches, no stakes, nothing. Crude mud huts and hide tents sprouted everywhere like pimples across the face of the land.
A cold wind swept past, carrying the heavy stink of goats, sheep, horses, pigs, and dogs. Black smoke curled upward from a thousand campfires like twisting tendrils.
Even so, more bands of Free Folk kept streaming in from every direction.
Across the lake a dirt mound was moving. Lynn stared until he realized it wasn't dirt at all—it was alive: a slow-moving, shaggy beast with a snake-like trunk.
Riding atop it was something equally massive, though its proportions looked strange—thick legs and hips that didn't quite seem human.
A giant and a woolly mammoth.
If the Thenns hadn't been in such a hurry to find their clan's camp, Lynn would have detoured around the lake for a closer look.
The moment they arrived, Lynn's original group practically dissolved. The Hardfoots, cave dwellers, and Ice River clans split off to find their own people. The Thenns marched straight for the lakeshore where their advance party had already claimed the best ground—roughly four thousand strong. Their camp was noticeably more orderly than the rest.
In the distance Lynn saw a group coming to meet them. Leading the way was a bald man who looked almost like a smaller copy of the dead former Magnar Styr. He wore the same bronze greaves and scale-sewn leather his father had.
"Where is the Magnar?" the bald man asked in a deep voice. "Mance has been waiting for him."
"We ran into white walkers," Kassa said. He pulled Styr's broken sword from the bundle on his back—the blade snapped clean near the hilt. "The Magnar is dead."
The news spread fast. Almost every Thenn poured out of their tents.
To them the Magnar was nearly a god. The fall of one caused immediate panic.
Lynn didn't fully understand the reverence. When Styr died he'd looked brave enough, but nothing particularly divine. Still, this was about clan leadership succession, so he kept his mouth shut.
When people finally noticed the strangely dressed outsider, Kassa seized the moment and loudly announced Lynn's origins, name, titles, and the story of how he had slain a White Walker and avenged the Magnar.
In the end he declared that Lynn Morningstar, Son of the Stars, would forever be the most honored guest of the Thenns.
Styr's son Sigorn showed little grief. Following tradition he respectfully offered Lynn a bronze ingot to thank him for avenging his father. In the metal-scarce lands beyond the Wall, bronze was hard currency.
The Thenns immediately began preparing the ritual to choose their new Magnar. Their brutal customs aside, their internal unity surprised Lynn.
There was no factional power struggle or infighting. They calmly talked it over and decided to compress the ceremony—which normally took more than ten days—into three.
That night the clan's handful of elders gathered. They were a mix of shamans and wise men.
In front of everyone, by firelight, they mixed twelve different herbs and mineral powders into a paste of indescribable color. They chanted over the clay pot all night long in a tongue even older than the Old Tongue.
At dawn the next morning the candidates for Magnar assembled on the open ground: Styr's son Sigorn, "Star Spear" Kassa, and a third man whose face was a map of scars. He was bigger and more heavily built than any Thenn Lynn had seen.
All three were acknowledged as the strongest warriors. Ignoring the freezing cold they stripped naked, washed their bodies with snow, then drank the thick, viscous paste one by one.
Less than a hundred heartbeats later all three lost consciousness.
Their naked bodies were lowered into pre-dug pits and covered with three feet of dirt. The soil wasn't packed tight, but it still didn't look like much of a chance for survival.
Watching from a distance, Lynn finally understood why the Thenns treated their Magnar like a god.
"Becoming Magnar takes extraordinary courage," Nymo explained. "People die all the time. Sometimes they have to run multiple rounds before the gods choose anyone."
Lynn asked what happened if no one volunteered.
Nymo answered proudly, "A strong warrior never refuses this honor."
Lynn almost asked whether he would have had to go through the same process if he'd accepted their earlier offer to become Magnar. He decided to stay quiet and keep his image intact.
Truth was, he probably wouldn't have made it past the "strip naked and wash with snow" part.
Now came the waiting. Whoever crawled out of the earth first would be the new Magnar. They said Styr had stayed underground until the ninth day—the longest any man had endured and the most favored by the gods in recorded memory.
Normally the ritual gave them ten full days. If no one emerged they would dig up the bodies and start another round.
But time was short. The threat of the Others and the coming assault on the Wall meant the Thenns needed a leader fast. The elders had shortened it to three days. It also improved the candidates' chances of survival and kept them from losing too many strong warriors at a critical moment.
Half a day passed with no movement from the burial site. The Thenns lit massive bonfires all around and over a hundred people danced a war dance, trying to awaken the sleeping heroic spirits.
Lynn shook his head and returned to the hide tent they had given him. The scene felt both ridiculous and strangely awe-inspiring.
That paste had to put them into some kind of suspended animation. Otherwise there was no way a naked man could survive being buried in frozen ground and still crawl out later.
Just then Nymo led a one-eyed woman with gray-streaked hair into the tent.
Even with the missing eye, her face still showed she had been strikingly beautiful in her youth. Her clothes and ornaments were noticeably finer and cleaner than the other Thenns'.
"Kuna," Nymo said. "Our best craftswoman."