Chapter Text
Robb reached the gates of Castle Black in the night: he’d chosen the time of their approach deliberately, hoping that if the stronghold had already fallen to the Wildlings, there would at least be some sign, or even fighting still going, to give him warning. But the keep was quiet, with the lights of patrols going steadily back and forth. He sent a party of scouts forward, and not long after the gates swung open, and Grey Wind bounded ahead, with Ghost running out to meet him in the glitter of the torches on the snow. The two of them ran around each other nosing their greetings, and then came back to pace Robb’s horse the rest of the way into the courtyard, where Jon was running out to greet him, much the same way.
Robb swung down from his horse and they embraced. It was like getting his own measure, feeling what the passage of two years had done: both of them taller; a new weight of muscle in Jon’s shoulders and his grip, answered with his own, before they held each other out at arm’s length again. “I knew you’d come,” Jon said, his eyes bright, smiling.
“As you should’ve,” Robb said, grinning back at him, and turned to be presented to Lord Commander Mormont as he came out of the keep; he beckoned his own bannermen forward as well.
But they didn’t waste much time on formalities: a candlemark later he was standing on the top of the Wall, looking down at the vast dark sea of the Wildling army already encamped below, with more men still coming out of the trees to swell their numbers even further. “Lord Bolton,” Robb said, “you’ve men good at close-quarters knife fighting? Put two parties of them along the Wall, to east and west, covering the approaches from either side. Lord Umber, you and your men will cover the castle gates, against an attack from the south.”
“You think he’s sent men up the Wall? Not one in twenty could make that climb,” Lord Glover said.
“Two in three,” Jon said. “I’ve seen them do it.”
“Two in three, or one in twenty; either way,” Robb said, waving to the army below. “Those men down there have come here to throw themselves at the greatest fortification ever built. If they didn’t mean to spend their lives to do it, they wouldn’t be here, and the only chance they have to get through is numbers. If I were the King Beyond The Wall, with that army, I’d send a thousand men up the wall on either side, at least.” He turned to Mormont. “Has this Mance Rayder sent you any demands? Do you know what it is they want?”
“What the Wildlings want when they come to the Wall is to get to the other side,” Lord Mormont said. “As for why—well, a hard winter’s coming, and that may be reason enough. But there are worse things out there than the Wildlings, by far. And we’ve seen signs that they’re abroad in greater numbers than before.”
“White Walkers,” Robb said, half a question. It was easier to believe, standing here upon the heights, than it had been reading Jon’s letter in Winterfell. He’d trusted Jon, about the Wildling army and the Walkers also, and he’d called up the banners and come in answer, but he’d thought—surely there’s some mistake, even as he’d ridden. But here on the terrible heights, with the long gleaming white stretch of the frozen forest stretching northwards—that felt suddenly like the thought of a fool, trying to ignore a death that was coming for him whether he looked it in the face or not.
“I saw one of them last month,” Jon said, low. “In the forest, when we rode out to scout.” His shoulders hunched as he spoke, as if the memory alone had the power to chill him through.
Lord Mormont nodded. “The rangers have seen their signs. They’ve found a dozen Wildling villages in the forest with everyone dead, and the corpses laid out in strange patterns in nearby clearings. And they’ve sighted companies of wights, moving at night. Going north. Mustering in force, we think.”
“And that’s what the Wildlings are fleeing?” Robb said.
“Does it matter?” Lord Bolton asked, in his cool, dry way. “Whether they’re fleeing monsters or winter storms, we still have to stop them.” And he wasn’t wrong; Robb knew it. And yet—
“Mance has asked for parley, for tomorrow morning,” Lord Mormont said. “Halfway between the treeline and the gates.”
“We’ll speak with him, then,” Robb said, and looked down at the sea of struggling yellow stars, the campfires fighting against the cold and dark and the shadows huddled round them, trying to keep warm, the night before their deaths.
Before he went to sleep himself, he wrote to Father at the small rickety table in Jon’s chambers, which he was sharing; he’d refused to have anyone put out of their rooms so he and his lords could sleep warmer. For the last month and more, the men of the Night’s Watch had been hard at the frantic labor of preparing to face the siege with not half the numbers they’d needed and no certainty of help coming. If Robb had listened to Ser Rodrik and taken the time to muster more men, they’d have been too late. “You cannot come to battle with so little of your strength,” Ser Rodrik had said.
“Better a little than none,” he’d said, and left him to bring the rest, when they were gathered.
I’ve reached the Wall in time, he wrote, and tomorrow we will parley with Mance Rayder and hear his demands. I’ll write again when I can, but we may be at battle tomorrow, so I’ll send this now. They have at least two hundred thousand men, judging by the fires; I’ll know more of their strength in the morning. Ser Rodrik is arranging for supply to come to us from Winterfell; I can hold the siege for at least two months’ time, but we’ll need more grain by then, or we’ll be going into our winter reserves. I’ve told him if he doesn’t hear from me before he marches to join us, he’s to send Arya to my grandfather in Riverrun, until we know the North is safe, and leave enough men behind with Bran to fortify Winterfell. All my love and Jon’s to you, and to Mother and Sansa and Rickon. May the gods watch over and keep you.
He chose his words carefully, and made them as steady and practical as he could: he didn’t want Father to read the message and hear a boy’s frightened voice, calling for his father to come and save him, even though that voice was lurking in some deep pit of his throat. But Father would suffer enough worry, without being given cause to think him unready. He was ready; he’d knelt and sworn the oath of the Warden of the North, before Father had gone, and he meant to be true to his word as long as he lived.
“They’re all well, in the south?” Jon asked softly, when Robb had sent the note flying, and they were lying head to foot in the narrow bed, squeezed in; they’d shared the same way on many a hunting trip, but they’d both grown since the last time. Robb didn’t mind; the wind was an icy whine, creeping in through all the cracks and eaves, and even together with the two wolves huddled around their legs, they wouldn’t sleep any too warm tonight.
“I think as well as Father could be, south of Moat Cailin,” Robb said. “Mother writes that the work tires him, and he quarrels often with the king over his debts. But it’s just as well he’s there now,” he added, stifling the inner child’s voice again, determined to make himself believe it. “We’ll need southern grain to keep that army off our backs.”
#
“What an enormous sea of men it must be,” Queen Cersei said, her voice a parody of concern. “Two hundred thousand men, really? How is such an army being supplied out of the frozen wastes, exactly?”
“If they’ve come to the Wall in those numbers, it’s because they’ve not enough food on the other side, whether they’re on the march or at home,” Ned said, trying to master the anger that always wanted to rise in him when the Lannisters made light of some trouble in the realm. After his first year as Robert's Hand, he’d begun to arrange it so that the queen was there when they spoke, more often than not, to save the trouble of having to talk to her through Robert instead. He knew it was the right course: it was better to see the enemy plain before you and to know the way they came, than to have them lurking in the brush to your flanks. But he found it hard every time to be there with her in her silks and gold, waving away the concerns of other lords and smallfolk alike, unless she could be made to see how her own interest would be hurt.
And it was still harder now, when the desperate letter in his hands had come from Robb himself, waiting there at the Wall for help this woman’s hand could be stretched out to bar from him. “If that army breaches the Wall, they’ll come south, pillaging anyone in their way,” he said to Robert. “They’ll not stop when winter’s coming. They’re already on the move, and they’ll keep going until they find the warm weather and the granaries of the south. Even if you hadn’t any duty to the men at the Wall now,” and the anger beat in his throat as he said the words, an accusation he had to work to keep from sounding so, “it’s nothing but good sense to hold that army off at the cost of a few wagons of grain!” He couldn't stop his voice rising a little by the end: a fraying in the leashing cords he kept upon his own temper as best he could.
“Tell me, Lord Stark,” Cersei said, before Robert could speak, “do you fear your supply of grain running short in the North, this coming winter?”
“Of course we do,” Ned said. “We’ve had a summer nine years long. If the winter lasts the same, or even less, our stores will be empty long before the spring.”
“Indeed,” she said. “And what of the stores here in the south? Are they enough to last the people of the south, who after all have grown that grain, through a nine-year winter? That’s what you’re asking us to do, when you demand we send grain north. To make them go hungry sooner in your stead.”
“I am not demanding grain to fill our storehouses!” Ned said. “There’s an army at our gates, an army which we must hold off from the whole realm.”
“The whole realm?” Cersei said. “Would they really go all the way to Dorne, do you think? Surely they’ll stop at Highgarden at the latest. Assuming, of course, that this army of starving savages could survive as much as one good cavalry charge from a Lannister legion.”
“This is folly,” Ned said, unable to keep himself civil. “You speak of letting them pillage their way through half the kingdom as if it were a game. If your father prefers to use his own men to hold the Wall against invasion, rather than supplying mine, he’s welcome to send them to my son. Until they get there, I must send grain!”
“Send them twenty wagons and be done with it!” Robert snapped—half the number that he’d asked for, and Ned’s stomach clenched. Lord Baelish had caught him in the corridors, before he’d reached Robert’s rooms, and had said to him quietly, “I’ve heard the news. A word of advice: ask for double the amount of grain you really need.”
“I’ll not lie to the king,” he’d answered, and Baelish had spread his hands and given him the smile Ned had learned to loathe over all these long months in the capital, the one that told him that he was a fool, and a fool who’d not be taught. And he was. He was a fool, for having come here and taken up this charge, when he’d not be taught to be a liar and a schemer. But he could not change himself, and he could not desert Robert either, his friend and his brother, who had sat down upon this throne of swords for all of them. Even though he missed the North more with every passing day; the North that was his proper place.
He’d dreamed of Winterfell every night since Robb had written to say he was going to the Wall: of Winterfell and of Robb, standing in the castle gates with his arms around Bran and Arya as they rode away. Ned didn’t fear for the North. Robb would do as much as anyone could do. But the weight shouldn’t have come on his shoulders so young. He belonged there, bearing it a while longer. Instead Robb was at the Wall in his stead, and Bran was at Winterfell, and here he was caught in this silken trap, with the faint perfume that trailed the queen everywhere she went, as though she trod on flowers instead of on lives.
But since he wasn’t there, bearing that weight, he had to bear this instead; so when Ned had leashed his temper enough to speak, he said to Robert, quietly, “They have enough to hold for two months. They need forty wagons, to hold for six. Robb has five thousand men to feed.”
“Robert, don’t I remember correctly that your brother held Storm’s End for two years with only five hundred men, against all the armies of the Reach?” Cersei said, in an inquiring tone.
“Storm’s End is a sound fortress and they were starving by the end,” Ned said sharply. “Castle Black has been undermanned and undersupplied for a century. And there is a passage cut through the Wall there wide enough for fifteen men to march abreast. It cannot be held with a small garrison. They will have to push the enemy back from their gates, over and over, until the siege breaks.”
“Gods, will both of you have done!” Robert bellowed. “I’ve already said. Twenty wagons! And if the Wildlings are still there in two months, we’ll all go North and beat the shit out of them together.”
Ned closed his mouth on what more he would have said. Robert could not set out from King’s Landing with an army in two months’ time and come to the Wall in time to do any good. The wagons he would send would arrive too late as it was: they would go to replace what Robb would have to ask their bannermen to send, once he had the promise of replenishment coming.
But Robert knew all of that as well as any man. He was only refusing to help when the price was a quarrel with his queen, and Tywin Lannister behind her. Who would be glad to see the North starve in winter, holding off an army from their gates, because he thought it meant an increase in his own power, if any other lords were weakened, instead of wanting to be one strength among many. The queen even had a little smile of satisfaction on her face as she went out, exchanging a look with her smirking brother at the door.
And the Kingslayer leaned over as Ned came out into the corridor and said, “You must be proud of your boy, Lord Stark. An army command at his age—that’s quite impressive. Even if he’s just fighting wild men from beyond the Wall. Of course… boys that age do have a hard time listening to their more seasoned officers. I do hope he won’t try a sortie out in the open or anything like that. Will you be sending him any advice? I’d be happy to discuss a plan of battle with you.”
Ned looked at him, the golden smiling knight in his fine armor, safe behind red walls, and thought longingly again of the Wall, of crisp cold air in his nostrils, of his son. “Robb will do what needs doing. And he won’t need your help to do it.”
“Yes, just our grain, I gather?” Ser Jaime said, as though he’d harvested the crops himself, and the kingdom’s reserves belonged to him. “I’m sure he'll do fine. Do let me know how things go? I’ll be most interested to hear.”
#
Robb went back up to the top of the Wall early in the morning, just before the late dawning, to be there when the sun came up: he wanted a better look at the Wildling army before the parley, to understand what he was up against before he spoke with the commander. Jon came up with him, and a few of the senior bannermen. The thin wintry light came creeping only slowly towards them over the frozen ground, crawling from the east with reluctance, as though the dark did not want to go, and the sun was so small and pale and hazed it looked more like the moon.
But finally the light did come, and Robb squinted down against the glare at the camp of Wildlings below. It had begun to come alive and stir with morning, and figures coming out of the tents and furry huddles they’d slept in to move around the camp. “Are those—” he said, and then, “Those are women, in the back.” He turned in alarm to Lord Mormont—who only nodded, grimly.
“Aye,” he said. “They’ve all come. They mean to get through or die trying,” as though that were all that it meant, all that it should mean, that there were mothers with babes in arms, and children so small they could barely walk, gathered desperate enough to die outside their walls.
“I didn’t come here to butcher women and children!” Robb said.
Mormont only said wearily, “We’ve tried to offer sanctuary before. If you let the women through, they go to the unused castles on the Wall, and open a way for the men to come in. We haven’t the men to man them all.”
“What in the shades of the Wolfswood is that?” Lord Glover said abruptly: a massive figure was coming out of the trees, pushing the upper branches out of the way of his head the way a man might push away the thin stems of bushes as he walked by them in the woods; he came out of the forest and stood with the other Wildlings, the height of four men at least.
“Giant,” one of the rangers said, laconically. “There’s not many left, but a few are marching with the Wildlings.” A second was coming through the trees behind the first.
By the time they rode out of the gates and met Mance Rayder halfway across the snow field for the parley, there were five of the giants sitting together like enormous shaggy boulders around a bonfire to one side of the camp, with a couple of mammoths beside them. It was hard not to stare at them; closer in they became no less strange.
When Robb dragged his gaze from them to look at the King Beyond The Wall, he saw a man of stature: broad-shouldered, with a gaunt weathered face and deep eyes that had seen more than one battle, his garb ragged and patched. And when Mance Rayder looked back, Robb knew from his face, without the man saying a word, that he saw a boy, and a well-fed rich boy at that, with expensive armor and an easy life, blocking his way out of hunger and privation.
Mance spoke without rancor, though—but he hadn’t any terms to offer; he was only asking them to step aside and let them through. “We’ve got nothing to lose,” he said, simply. “The only reason I’ve been able to weld this army together out of a hundred tribes, all of them hating each other, is because we all know we’ll die if we don’t get south for winter.”
“Why?” Robb said. “Winters have come and gone, and many of them, in the lives of most of the men behind you. You haven’t marched on the Wall in force before now. If you didn’t starve then, why now?”
“I didn’t say we’d starve,” Mance said. “We live in winter every day. We know how to survive it. But we can’t survive what’s coming now.”
“And what’s that?”
Mance said, “They already know,” with a jerk of his chin towards Mormont and the men of the Night’s Watch who’d come with him. “And I expect you know, too, if you let yourself. The White Walkers aren’t a fairy story, north of the Wall. We see them now and then, even in ordinary times. And in ordinary times, we and they keep our distance. The nights are theirs, and the days are ours. They don’t like the sun. So they stay far to the north, and sleep beneath the ice in summer.
“But when there’s a winter so bad that the long nights come—the nights that last a month, or even a year—the Walkers come south with them. And this winter’s going to be a very bad one. The long nights have already started, up in the Thenn country, and you’ll have them south of the Wall, too, before it’s over. How far south, I can’t say. But far enough. The White Walkers are coming for us, and they’re coming for you. The Night’s King is riding, and they’re raising him an army of the dead.”
“You’ve seen him?” Lord Mormont asked sharply.
“Three of our scouts,” Mance said. “They sighted him in the Frostfangs two weeks ago. He and a company of Walkers were riding towards the Thenn backcountry. And we’ve heard nothing more from the tribes in the area since then.”
Robb looked back at Lord Mormont, whose face had gone grave. “Do you give credence to this report?” he asked quietly.
Mormont stared at Mance, then heaved a long breath. “I can’t swear it’s true. Our rangers rarely ride to Thenn country. It’s closed off from us. We wouldn’t have heard if something had happened. But we do know the White Walkers are abroad.”
“Aye. We’ve sighted fifteen of them so far this winter,” Mance said. “And the unburned dead come back to us at night.” He shrugged a little. “I don’t know if even the Wall can stop the Night’s King, but I do know that nothing else this side of the Wall can. So we might as well die trying, and if you won’t let us through, we’ll just keep coming until we kill you all.” Strangely, it almost wasn’t a threat, he said it so simply, without any malice. There wasn’t any taunting or bloodlust behind it, as if he didn’t need such things to drive him to war, with the spur of necessity in his sides instead.
Robb was half sorry. He would have been grateful to feel threatened: without it, anger was hard to rouse, and pity wanted to come in its stead. He could scarcely imagine fighting only to deny them the shelter of the Wall itself. “Are you asking then to be taken in to our lands, and given places with our lords?”
Mance smiled a little. “We’re the Free Folk. I know I’m called the King Beyond The Wall, but none of these men behind me have sworn themselves to serve me. They’re following me because they trust me to lead them well. If I ever stop, or lose their trust, they’ll go their own way. So no. We won’t bend the knee, to you or to any man.”
“If you’ve no homes and no way to live, and you’ll not follow our laws to be given them, then you’re asking me to let you through to pillage from those who are already there,” Robb said.
Mance spread his hands, a dismissive gesture, as if this wasn’t any difficulty at all. “The Gift is all but empty. Let us through, and we’ll go there and make our own way.”
“Make your own way?” Robb said, incredulous. “It’s winter! Do you mean to eat snow? Every house of the North has years of stores packed away to make it through to spring, and still we’re likely to go hungry by the end. If you won’t give your service in exchange for a share, you can’t get anything else unless you take it by force.”
“We’re skilled huntsmen and trappers, and we know how to make do with little. And you have better steel than we do,” Mance said. “You can defend yourselves if we try to raid your houses and keeps.”
Well, he was an honest man: he wasn’t even trying to promise that they wouldn’t. Robb did feel anger sparking, then: so it was a threat. The man wasn’t asking for mercy, but for them to yield everything to him in fear, while he kept his own neck straight and proud. “Not every crofter and village, I can’t. Perhaps you’re taking me for a fool, or a man who cares nothing for the smallfolk so long as I’m safe behind the walls of Winterfell, but I’m neither.”
“And he’s got Thenns fighting with him,” one of the Night’s Watch men spoke up, pointing to one of the ragged banners standing over the ragged groups of men. “They eat the flesh of other men.”
Mance said with an air of reproach, “The Thenns don’t kill men for their flesh. They eat the flesh of enemies they’ve defeated in battle, to take their power into themselves. It’s respect, not hunger.”
“I don’t care why they do it!” Robb said, his gorge rising. “They’ll not do it to my people or in my lands while I’m there to bar the way, and I’ll be there so long as I draw breath. Hear me, Mance Rayder: if you and your men want the right to live by your own ways, without any respect for ours, then you can stay in your own lands, and defend them from your enemies as best you can. And if you mean to conquer ours, then you’ve no right to ask for our compassion. If you only asked for parley to know if we were cowards, who’d stand aside because you have numbers in your favor, the answer is we’re not.”
Mance didn’t take the words to heart: he only received them with a faint smiling in his mouth, the way a man would smile at a child who was playing at being grown-up, who didn’t understand what he was doing. Robb had a moment’s hot impulse, born of his own pride, to turn and ride back to Castle Black, and let the wave come crashing in—but that was false pride, and he didn’t have the right to indulge it; not at the cost of the lives of the men at his back, or even those of the women and children behind Rayder’s.
So instead he drew a breath and kept his voice level as he went on. “And if you asked for parley because you wanted to give time to the men you’ve sent over the Wall to try and flank us,” and was rewarded by seeing the smile go slipping from Mance’s face, “then I’ve set good men with good steel in their way. They’ll not break through. And I’ve more men on the march, coming soon, with all the supply we’ll need to keep holding the siege against you for as long as it takes.”
Robb waited until the smiling was all gone, hoping he now had a chance to make Mance understand that this wasn’t going to be a quick victory, against an unready boy, and perhaps bring him to a true parley. He added quietly, with force behind it, “You’re a chief of the Wildlings, and were once a ranger of the Night’s Watch. You know that work, your people and your country. If I were to ride out beyond the Wall alone, I’m certain I’d soon fall to dangers that you’d make light of. But I’m a Stark of Winterfell. I’ve been trained for war and siege since birth. That is my work, and though I’m young, I know it. And when I tell you that I can and will hold this fortress against your army, despite your numbers, for longer than it’ll take your men to starve, I’m not bragging. So if you truly fear what is at your back—”
He stopped, because the giants were moving: their heads had all come up, and the biggest one of them was getting to his feet, with a club in his hand the size of an oak, studded with iron. Robb took his reins in one hand and put his hand on his hilt. “Archers, ready!” he heard Ser Alliser shout behind him.
“Hold!” Mance said, and stepped in the way, holding his hands up before the giant. “Mag! This is a parley. We cannot—”
The giant stopped and bent towards him, and said in a low voice like the deep notes of a great horn, “We…remember.”
“What?” Mance said.
“When the Night’s King rides,” the giant said, each word slow as cold honey pouring, “the King in the North must answer. The King in the North…whose name is Stark.” And he stepped past Rayder, and went down slowly to one knee, with an impact that made the ground tremble, and put his club down before Robb’s horse.
“What in the name of the gods,” Lord Commander Mormont muttered, and Robb stared at the ancient craggy face lowered to a level with his own: strange and misshapen as if it had been formed by a child out of packed snow, the deep dark eyes looking at him. A strange chill was running up his spine to spark at the base of his skull, sending out shivers that trembled through his whole body. The other giants were rising, one after another coming forward and going to one knee behind the first, and they all spoke together, a terrible resonance, “The King in the North whose name is Stark.”
He would have liked to believe it was some sort of trick, but Mance Rayder looked as dismayed as if they’d clubbed him over the head, and the Wildling men at his back were all muttering to one another, stirred up. Robb said slowly, to the strangeness that was the giant’s face, “I am not a king, but I am Lord Stark of Winterfell. What is it that you want of me?”
“The Night’s King…” the giant said to him, “rides now.”
Mance Rayder had said the same thing, and Lord Mormont had believed him; Jon had seen a White Walker with his own eyes. But now Robb realized that in his heart, he’d nevertheless still been thinking as Lord Bolton had said: that it didn’t truly matter. It had only been some cause for mercy, if he could find a way to give it. And if he couldn’t, then there would have been a battle to be fought today—a battle that he understood, against men of flesh and blood. The work he knew, and was ready for.
But when the giant spoke, his voice struck into Robb with the hard, cold understanding that had stirred in him first on the Wall: the sense that he was a fool, a child hiding his face, pretending that the thing he wasn’t ready to face wouldn’t be able to harm him. “The Night’s King is coming to the Wall?” he asked, low, and the giant nodded once, a little way down and up again, a slow pendulous movement. “Do you know when?”
The giant was silent, breathing in and out, and then he said finally, “When the long night comes.”
“The first night when the sun doesn’t rise,” Robb said. He turned to Lord Mormont. “How quickly have the days been growing short, here at the Wall? Can your maester tell us?”
Lord Mormont said slowly, staring at the giants himself, “For the last month, we’ve been losing three minutes of daylight each day. And last Godsday was seven hours and twenty-four minutes long.” And all of them together, almost as one, turned to look at the sun: hanging low over the trees, as if it already meant to begin turning downwards soon, not two hours past daybreak.
“But that won’t stay the same,” one of the other Night’s Watch said earnestly, the big young man from House Tarly who dogged Jon’s heels everywhere in the keep. “What I mean is, we’ll start losing the time quicker, as we get closer to winter. There’s a formula Maester Aemon taught me. You take the length of the night, and—”
“Sam. How long?” Jon interrupted.
Sam paused and frowned down, moving a finger a little in the air as if he were seeing a page in front of his face, muttering, “Carry the four… by six… ninety—ninety eight.” He straightened up, a smile of having done a piece of work. “Ninety-eight days.” And then the smile fell off his face as he saw theirs. “Ninety-eight days! It’s not even four months.”
Jon looked at Robb. “Is that enough time for help to come?”
“First we’d better take the help that has already come,” Robb said, and wheeled his horse back around to Mance Rayder, who looked back at him with a different face than he’d worn before, his eyes gone darker and his mouth hard, as if he too felt that the world had wandered away from underneath their feet, and changed itself for another. “Mance Rayder, here are my terms. You and your people must bend the knee to pass the Wall. That’s part of my duty, as Warden of the North, and I can’t forswear it. But I can make you this offer: you need only do it, and follow our ways, for as long as you stay south of the Wall. When winter ends, or sooner if you wish, I promise you this choice: to stay for good, keeping your oaths, or to go back north and return to your own ways, freed from them in honor.
“And if you agree, then in return for your pledge of service, I’ll pledge this in return: what we have, we’ll share. Your women and children, and any old and frail among you, will all have shelter in our holdfasts and our keeps, with our own kin. I’ll divide them among my bannermen, and send them south under my protection. You and your men will stand with us here at the Wall, and together we’ll fight to keep those we love, and all the realms of men, safe from the Night’s King for as long as our strength lasts. I hope the kingdoms of the south will send men and supply to aid us, but if they don’t, we’ll arm you and feed you as well as we can from our own stores, and if we go hungry, we’ll all go hungry together. Will you accept these terms?”
Rayder was still staring at the giants, unsmiling. But finally he turned to look at Robb and said, “I can’t say that’s not fair. More than I’d have expected a southern lord to offer.” He was silent a moment, and then he shook his head. “This is something I haven’t the right to accept for us all. I’ll have to speak with the leaders of the tribes. But you’ll have our answer before the sun goes down,” and when he looked over at the low-hanging sun, Robb thought his answer would be yes.