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For Stannis, today wasn't the worst day of his life. He had survived far bloodier fights.
In a strict sense it wasn't even a defeat.
His losses were light—most of them to that fire-breathing beast. The wildlings themselves had barely scratched his army.
But the retreat turned ugly. Wildling fighters kept hurling themselves at the rearguard with suicidal fury, forcing him to send cavalry to beat them back.
The dragon circling overhead kept his horsemen from clustering or chasing too deep, so both sides spent the rest of the day trading bloody little clashes until the sun finally dropped.
They made camp in an abandoned wildling village.
To Stannis it barely qualified as a village.
Four single-room stone huts—no mortar—ringed an empty sheepfold and a well. Three of the huts had already collapsed. The only intact one had a turf roof and windows covered with ragged hides. His squires had swept it out and turned it into the king's temporary hall.
The wildling who built the place could never have imagined that one day a true southern king would sleep under its leaky roof.
Above the huts stood a huge, twisted weirwood, its leaves dark red, its bark bone-white. It was the largest heart tree Stannis had ever seen, the trunk nearly eight feet across, branches spreading over the whole settlement.
What truly unsettled him wasn't the tree's size. It was the face carved into the trunk—especially the mouth. Not a simple slit, but a jagged hole wide enough to swallow a sheep. The inside was packed with cold ash. Someone had burned something in there.
One of the knights poking through the ashes found it wasn't animal bones. It was a human skull.
"Evil rites," a few of the men who had turned to the Lord of Light muttered.
To them, only burning the living counted as true devotion. Whoever had been stuffed in that mouth had clearly been dead before the fire started—the skull was only half there.
Ser Richard Horpe leaned in close, whispering urgently, trying to talk Stannis into pressing the attack again.
He insisted the dragon was still small and clearly afraid of arrows. A few more determined charges and the wildlings would shatter. The Wall would be liberated, the North would owe Stannis its gratitude, and every lord would bend the knee.
Horpe was lean, short-cropped black hair, hard eyes, a face pitted with pox scars and old blade cuts. His loyalty was unquestionable. Still, exhaustion showed on Stannis's face because almost everyone else disagreed.
Ser Norbert Grandison, Ser Benethon Scales, dour Ser Dalton, Ser Lambert Waxley, Ser Perkin Follard, and Lord Sweett all spoke against it.
"The horses are spooked and the men are talking," Ser Dalton said tightly. "Lady Melisandre promised the king was Azor Ahai reborn, that he would wake dragons from stone. Instead the soldiers saw a dragon fighting for the wildlings."
"Seven gods," he added, "now even the wildlings have one. Are dragons sprouting in the fields like turnips? Can any fool pick one up?"
No one bothered correcting his slip—praying to the Seven instead of R'hllor. The complaint cut straight to the fear in every man's chest.
A dragon had never been part of anyone's battle plan. The last dragon stories they had heard were vague tales about the Targaryen girl across the Narrow Sea—three dragons, supposedly, like Aegon the Conqueror. Most had laughed it off as a sailor's yarn.
The room buzzed. Ser Perkin Follard even suggested the dragon queen might have conquered the lands beyond the Wall first. Lord Sweett shot that down and proposed they wait for Melisandre to finish reading the flames.
Everyone agreed.
At that moment the red woman herself stood before the weirwood, staring into the fresh fire kindled inside the carved mouth. Nothing burned hotter or clearer for prophecy than weirwood flames.
Every man had seen the dragon attack her. Her guards died screaming in the fire; Melisandre walked out naked, skin and hair untouched. To them it was living proof of the Lord of Light's power. Without that miracle, the sight of an enemy dragon might have broken her authority.
A long time later she left the tree and walked into the stone hut.
The room was packed with lords and knights. They watched her with hungry eyes, desperate for any word from the god.
"I must speak with His Grace alone," she said.
There was grumbling, but the king's glare and their faith in R'hllor sent them filing out through the narrow doorway.
Once the hut held only the king and the priestess, Stannis let his irritation show.
"My lady," he said through clenched teeth, "has the Lord of Light sent any guidance?"
Stannis was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, his skin toughened by years under the sun. Though not yet thirty-five, he had only a thin strip of black hair left, like the shadow of a crown circling the back of his head. His beard was trimmed short and neat, framing a square jaw and hollow cheeks.
He had lost at least ten pounds since sailing from Dragonstone.
Melisandre lowered herself gracefully onto the crude bed of mud and straw as if it were silk and velvet. She wore only a simple gray-blue knight's surcoat with nothing underneath, yet she showed no sign of cold.
"I warned you," she said, shaking her head. "This is ground tainted by ancient false gods. My link to the Lord of Light is weak here."
"In the flames I saw only darkness, and in that darkness a few scattered stars. Nothing more."
Stannis rested his clenched fist against his chin.
"It was a necessary military decision, my lady. If we had not circled behind them, Mance Rayder and this so-called Son of the Stars would have taken the Wall outright. Once they dug in, we would need tens of thousands of men and lose at least one man in five to retake it."
"You should have won the North first," Melisandre insisted.
"Without a clear victory, how do you expect those stubborn northerners to bend the knee? Their heads are as hard as privy stones. If the Starks had known how to bend even a little, they would not have lost two lords and an heir in King's Landing."
The king's face tightened with frustration. He thought the priestess read flames well enough but understood nothing of politics.