He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 19 (Patreon)

XIX

A Second Moon in the Branches

The Wall was colder than Dobbs had imagined.

This was a cold that had weight. It pressed down on you from above and squeezed you from the sides and rose up through the soles of your boots as if the ice itself was trying to claim you, inch by inch, breath by breath. It was the cold of something that had been here since before men had names for cold, and it did not care whether you lived or died. It simply was.

Dobbs stood on the top of the Wall and tried not to think about how far down the ground was.

Seven hundred feet. He had been told the number before he climbed the winch elevator, and it had been an abstraction, a figure in a ledger, the kind of number you heard and nodded at and filed away without feeling. Now he was standing on it, and the number had become a sensation-a vertiginous, stomach-dropping, palm-sweating reality that made his legs feel like wet rope and his breakfast want to revisit his throat. The wind up here was constant and steady and utterly without mercy, flaying the exposed skin of his face with a thousand tiny knives. His black cloak-the black cloak of the Night's Watch, sworn and sealed and his forever, or until he died, or until he deserted and they hunted him down and took his head-snapped and billowed behind him like a banner of surrender.

He had taken the oath yesterday.

The words were still in his mouth, or at least the taste of them was-the flat, metallic tang of vows spoken in the godswood at Castle Black, kneeling before the weirwood stump that passed for an altar among men who had no other gods. The maester-a thin, tired man with a chain that had seen better days and eyes that had seen worse-had spoken the words, and Dobbs and eleven other men had repeated them, and the words had settled onto his shoulders like the cloak itself. Heavy and black and permanent.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins.

It shall not end until my death.

He had meant them. That was the strange thing. He had meant them in the way that a man means something when he has nothing left to mean anything with. His hand-still wrapped in the strip of cloth, still throbbing with the dull, persistent ache of the burn that had not fully healed-would never fully heal, the maester at Crakehall had said, the skin would always be tight, always be thin, always be reminded of what had made it-had gripped the hilt of his sword as he spoke, and the pain had felt right. It had felt like the price of something.

He was a man of the Night's Watch now. His past was dead. His crimes were forgiven, or at least forgotten, buried under seven hundred feet of ice and the weight of a vow that left no room for anything that came before. He was no longer Dobbs the bandit, Dobbs the cutthroat, Dobbs the man who had pissed himself in a clearing while a boy with red eyes dismantled his world. He was simply Dobbs. Brother of the Night's Watch. Defender of the Wall. The last line of defense between the realms of men and whatever lived in the dark beyond it.

He stared east. The Haunted Forest stretched away from the base of the Wall like a black sea-frozen waves of pine and sentinel oak and weirwood, their branches interlocking so thickly that the moonlight could not penetrate the canopy, so that the forest appeared not as a collection of trees but as a single, vast, undifferentiated darkness. It was the darkest thing Dobbs had ever seen. Darker than the inside of his own closed eyes on the long, sleepless nights when the boy's red eyes still visited him in dreams.

"You'll get used to it."

The voice came from his left. Dobbs turned and found the man who had been assigned to walk the Wall with him-standing three feet away with his arms crossed staring north.

His name was Poul. He was thirty-five, thin and wiry, with a narrow face and a receding hairline. He did not talk about why. Nobody at the Wall talked about why. That was one of the things Dobbs had learned in his first week-the past was the past, and the Wall did not care what you had been, only what you were now, and what you were now was cold and bored and standing on top of seven hundred feet of ice in the middle of the night, watching a forest that never moved.

"Used to what?" Dobbs asked. His voice was hoarse. He had not spoken in several hours.

"The dark." Poul nodded north. "The quiet. The feeling that something out there is watching you. You'll get used to it. Everyone does, or they go mad. The ones who go mad usually do it in the first month." He paused. "You're not going mad, are you?"

"I don't think so."

"Good. We've already got enough mad ones." Poul shifted his weight. The wind pulled at his cloak, and he ignored it the way a man ignores a fly. "First month's the hardest. After that, the Wall becomes just another place. Just another job. You walk, you watch, you report what you see, which is nothing, and you go to sleep, and you do it again. The sameness of it is what gets most men. Not the cold, not the dark. The sameness."

"How long have you been up here?"

"Six years. " Poul said it without pride or shame, the flat recitation of a man who had made peace with his circumstances long ago. "You stop counting after a while. The days blur together. The Wall stands. You stand on it. That's the whole of it."

Dobbs looked at him. The question that every new man asked and every old man answered was on his tongue, and he hesitated over it the way you hesitate over a loose tooth.

"What did you do?" he asked. "Before."

Poul was quiet for a moment. The wind blew. The forest waited.

"I stole," he said. "Sheep, mostly. A few horses. A merchant's purse once, but that went badly-the merchant had friends, and I had a knife, and the merchant's friend had a longer one." He touched his ribs, on the left side, as if remembering a scar that lived beneath the wool. "They caught me in Lannisport. Stole a gelding from a goldsmith. The goldsmith had friends in the City Watch. They dragged me before the lord's justice, and he gave me the choice. The hand or the black."

"The hand or the black," Dobbs repeated. It was a phrase he had heard a dozen times since arriving at Castle Black. The litany of the Night's Watch. Every man had his version. Some had stolen. Some had killed. Some had done worse. And each of them had stood before a lord's justice and heard similar words, and each of them had looked at the axe and the block and the cold black cloak, and each of them had chosen the cloak.

"The hand or the black," Poul confirmed. "I looked at the block and I looked at the Wall, and I thought-at least the Wall has a roof. Somewhere." He almost smiled. It was the ghost of a smile, the kind that visited a face that had forgotten how to do it properly. "I was wrong about the roof. But I was right about the hand. You can't hold a sword with one hand. Not properly. And up here, you need to hold a sword."

Dobbs looked at his own hands. The left one was fine. The right one-the burned one-was wrapped in cloth, the fingers stiff, the grip weaker than it had been. He could hold a sword. He could swing it. But there was a tightness in the tendons that would never go away, a reminder of a boy's red eyes and a sword hilt that had become a brand, and every time he gripped a weapon he felt it and remembered.

He opened his mouth to tell Poul his own story. The words were there, lined up and ready-the bandits, the merchant, the clearing in the woods, the boy. The story he had told at Crakehall and would tell again if anyone asked, the version with the wine and the dark and the fear that had put coals in a child's eyes. The version that explained the burned hand without explaining anything at all.

He was halfway through drawing breath when the forest moved.

There was no other word for it. The darkness at the base of the Wall-the unbroken, undifferentiated black of the Haunted Forest's canopy-shifted. Darkness itself changing shape, as if something beneath it was pushing upward, pressing the trees aside the way a man pushes through a curtain.

Dobbs saw it first because he was looking east. A point of light-blue-white, faint at first, then brighter-appeared in the darkness. It pulsed once. Twice. And then the ground began to glow.

The glow spread. It started at a single point and radiated outward in concentric rings, each ring wider and brighter than the last, illuminating the forest floor through gaps in the canopy. The trees at the edges of the glow leaned away-physically, visibly, their trunks bending as if a great wind was pressing against them, though the air on the Wall was still.

Then the structure rose.

It came out of the earth the way a blade comes out of a sheath. Crystal and light, emerging from the frozen ground in geometric planes and facets that caught the glow and shattered it into a thousand fragments of blue and white. It grew rather than rose, each new surface appearing with deliberate, measured accuracy, as if the earth were not releasing it but constructing it, drawing it upward into the night.

It was enormous, taller than the trees around it and wider than the clearing it had made. Its shape was something between a crystal and a fortress-faceted and angular, each plane meeting the next at angles that suggested purpose, design, intelligence. Light moved beneath its surfaces in slow, rhythmic pulses, blue-white, like a heartbeat made visible.

Dobbs stopped breathing. So did Poul.

The blue-white light of the structure pulsed across the top of the Wall, painting the ice in shades of sapphire and silver, and the two men stood frozen at the parapet and watched a thing that should not exist rise from the Haunted Forest like a dream clawing its way into the waking world.

"Holy fuck," Poul whispered.

It was the most profane and the most honest thing either of them could have said.

The structure continued to rise. It was not finished-half of it still buried in the earth, the upper reaches still growing, new facets crystallizing out of the night air with soft, crystalline sounds that carried across the distance like the chiming of distant bells. The light within it was steady now, pulsing with that same slow rhythm, and where it touched the forest, the forest went still-the trees not moving, the wind not blowing, as if the world itself had paused to take notice.

Dobbs' mouth was open. He could feel the cold air on his tongue and his teeth and the back of his throat, and he could not close it. His burned hand throbbed in time with the pulsing light, and somewhere deep in his chest, in the place where fear lived, something old and animal was screaming at him to run.

"That's-" Poul's voice was barely a whisper. "That's coming out of the ground."

"How many horn blasts does that merit?" Dobbs asked. His voice was high and thin and he did not recognize it as his own.

Poul tore his eyes from the structure and looked at him. His mouth worked. No sound came out.

"I don't fucking know," he said finally.

The words hung in the air between them, and the inadequacy of them-the utter, complete, terrifying inadequacy of the Night's Watch's ancient system of horn blasts in the face of what was happening below-was almost funny. Almost. Dobbs might have laughed if his throat had not closed around the sound.

Two horn blasts.

They came from the east, from the next post along the Wall, where someone else had seen what they were seeing and had acted on instinct before he could think better of it. The sound rolled across the ice, flat and heavy, two long notes that came back distorted off the trees and the pulsing light, as though the thing in the clearing was bending the sound the way it bent everything else around it.

Two blasts. Wildlings.

"That's wrong," Dobbs said. "Two blasts is for-"

"I know what two blasts is for." Poul hadn't moved from the parapet, and his eyes hadn't left the structure. "There isn't a number of horn blasts for this."

More men were coming up now. Within a few minutes there were a dozen black cloaks crowded near Dobbs and Poul, faces raw from the wind, every one of them turned east.

Poul caught the arm of a steward who'd come up with the rest, a thin boy with a face gone the color of tallow. "Go back down. Find the Lord Commander. Tell him to come himself, and don't waste breath telling him what it looks like-there's no good way to say it. Just tell him it's coming up out of the ground."

The boy went, half-running, boots skidding on the ice steps.

The structure didn't rise again in that time. It only pulsed-slow, patient, a heartbeat with no hurry in it-and the men along the parapet watched it the way men watch a riverbank they aren't sure will hold.

Then, far below, the winch began to turn.

The chains sang against the ice, a long grinding note climbing with the cage, and Dobbs watched the whole seven hundred feet of that ascent with his stomach in his throat, because whatever else was true, he did not want to be the one who had to explain the thing on the other side of the Wall to the man arriving to see it fresh.

The cage cleared the lip of the ice, and the Lord Commander was out of it before it had finished settling.

Karl Storm was not a large man-lean and wiry, built by a life that had never once given him the chance to go soft. His dark hair was streaked grey at the temples, and a scar ran from his left brow to his jaw, a pale seam through the stubble left by a blade that had come very close to finishing its work and hadn't. He'd thrown his cloak over one shoulder rather than both, the way a man dresses when he means to be moving again in three heartbeats.

Storm. The name given a highborn bastard of the Stormlands, when the lord whose blood ran in the boy's veins wouldn't spare him one of his own. Nobody at Castle Black knew whose blood that was, and nobody asked. Karl Storm had taken the black three-and-twenty years past, a young man with a sword and no name, and had climbed the ranks the way men climbed them at the Wall-not by birth, but by being the one still standing when the others had fallen, fled, or died. He was not loved. He was not feared. He was respected, which outlasted both.

He didn't ask what had happened. He walked straight through the men-they parted without being told to-and looked east.

He went very still. His eyes moved over the structure with the same thoroughness Dobbs imagined he'd once given a battlefield-taking in the crystal, the metal, the blue-white light breathing beneath its surfaces, cataloging a threat he had no name for yet.

The structure had gone as still as it ever went-a fortress of light and crystal standing complete in the ruin of the clearing it had made, its pulse slow and even. The glow of it reached all the way to the base of the Wall and painted the ice a deep, even blue.

Someone's teeth were chattering, and it wasn't from the cold.

"Is it the White Walkers?"

The voice came from the back-young, thin, cracking on the last word. Dobbs couldn't see who'd spoken. He only heard the fear in it, raw and unfiltered, the fear of a boy raised on stories about the cold ones who was now looking at something that seemed to have been built by a god.

"The White Walkers are just stories," another voice said, and the confidence in it was paper-thin, the kind a man performs for the men beside him because he can't perform it for himself. "Grandmother's tales. Wet nurse's warnings. There's nothing out there but trees and-"

"What in the seven hells is this, then?" Dobbs said.

The words came out before he could stop them, flat and tight and barely his own, and every man in earshot turned to look at him. Dobbs didn't care. He was watching the structure, and the structure, as far as he could tell, was watching him back.

"Quiet."

Karl Storm's voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.

The Lord Commander studied it a while longer. His scarred face gave nothing away. His hands stayed clasped behind his back, his breathing even, and if he was afraid-and he must have been, because any man who looked at that thing and felt nothing had stopped being human-he didn't let it show.

"I want a scouting party," he said at last. "Four men. Armed. They go into the forest, they find out what that is, and they come back and tell me. No heroics. No engagement. They look, they report, they return."

He paused.

"And I want ravens. To Winterfell. To the Iron Throne. To every lord south of the Neck who can read. Tell them what we've seen here tonight. Tell them I don't know what it means. Tell them the Wall stands, the Watch is vigilant, and we will hold until we have answers."

He turned from the parapet. His eyes went down the line of men and stopped on Dobbs.

"You," he said. "The new one."

Dobbs' stomach dropped.

"My lord-"

“You're on the scouting party."

"My lord, I-"

"That's not a request, brother."

Dobbs closed his mouth. The word brother sat in his chest like a stone. Brotherhood meant duty, and duty meant obedience, and obedience meant walking into the Haunted Forest toward a structure that had risen from the ground like something out of the oldest and most terrifying stories his mother had ever told him.

He looked at the structure. It pulsed. His hand throbbed.

"Yes, my lord," he said.

Two days later, Dobbs stood at the edge of the Haunted Forest with a sword in his hand and three men behind him and the structure somewhere ahead, its blue-white glow visible through the trees like a second moon trapped in the branches.

The forest was wrong. The trees were too still. The air was too heavy. The cold had a quality to it that went beyond temperature.

The four of them moved in a loose formation-swords drawn, eyes scanning, footsteps careful. Dobbs was in front, because Karl Storm had put him in front, because Karl Storm was a bastard who did not know whose blood ran in his veins but knew exactly how to lead men and had decided that the new man with the burned hand and the haunted eyes was the one who should walk point.

Behind him was Ser Mark-a hedge knight who had taken the black after killing a lord's brother in a dispute over a horse. He was forty, hard and silent and competent.

Behind him was Poul, who had not volunteered and had not been given the option of not volunteering. His narrow face was grey, and his hands on his sword were white-knuckled, and he breathed through his mouth in short, shallow gasps that fogged in the cold air.

And behind Poul was Wat-a boy of seventeen, two months into his black, who had been caught stealing bread from a sept in White Harbor and had chosen the Wall because the alternative was losing a hand he needed to work. He was the youngest and the most frightened, and he stayed close to Poul as if proximity to another body could keep the dark at bay.

They had been walking for three hours. The structure's glow was stronger now-bright enough to cast shadows, blue-white and steady, pulsing with that same slow rhythm that Dobbs had felt in his hand from the moment he first saw it. The trees here were older.

Dobbs kept his eyes forward and his sword up and tried not to think about the stories he had heard about the Haunted Forest.

The sound came first-a crashing in the underbrush, heavy and fast, the sound of something very large moving very quickly through the forest. Then the trees shook. Then the smell. Musk and filth and the sour, rancid stench of meat left to rot, thick enough to taste.

The giant burst through the trees to their left, and for one moment-one crystalline, frozen moment-Dobbs mind simply refused to process what his eyes were showing it. The thing was enormous-twelve feet tall, perhaps more, its body a mass of shaggy brown fur thicker below the waist than above, its torso sloped and wide, its arms hanging lower than a man's, ending in hands the size of shovel blades. Its head was thrust forward from its shoulders, its face a squashed-in ruin of horny flesh and square teeth and tiny eyes that gleamed in the blue-white light of the structure's glow. It was snuffling-a wet, constant sound, like a dog tracking a scent-and its eyes moved over the four men with the slow, unfocused attention of a creature that saw poorly and smelled well.

A second giant came from the right.

Dobbs heard Poul scream. He heard Wat shout something-a word, a name, a prayer, he could not tell. He heard Ser Mark's sword clear its scabbard with a sound that was impossibly loud and impossibly small at the same time.

The first giant swung.

The blow caught Ser Mark before he could raise his shield. The impact was not a sound Dobbs could have described-it was not the clang of steel on steel or the thud of a blunt weapon on armor. It was the sound of a man's body meeting a force that did not care about armor or swords or the vows of the Night's Watch, and Ser Mark went sideways into a tree and did not get up.

"Run!" Dobbs shouted. He was already moving-legs pumping, sword forgotten.

The forest blurred. Wat was screaming. Poul was screaming. The giants were making sounds too-deep, rumbling calls to each other, the kind of sounds that large predators made when they had separated their prey and were moving in for the kill.

Dobbs ran until the sounds faded, until the crashing grew distant, until his lungs burned and his legs shook and his heart hammered against his ribs with a force that made his vision swim. He found a hollow where two massive roots arched together over a scoop of bare earth, half-buried already under a season's drift of dead leaves and fallen branches. He crawled into the gap between them, dragged an armful of loose branches across the opening behind him, and lay pressed into the dirt with his hand over his mouth, breathing as quietly as he knew how.

A thin seam of blue-white light still found its way through the branches, and Dobbs kept his eyes fixed on it, watching for what he knew was coming.

He could hear the giant.

It was close. The snuffling was louder now-wet and rhythmic and getting closer. The ground vibrated with each footstep. The stench reached him a moment later, filling the hollow, coating the back of his throat-the same rank musk from the clearing, closer now and far worse. Something crossed the seam of light, and it went dark, and the snuffling was directly above him, and Dobbs squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the giant breathe-heavy and slow, like bellows in a forge-and he knew, with the cold, absolute certainty of a man who has run out of road, that he was going to die.

He thought: Not again. Not like this. Not in the dark. I chose the black to get away from him. And now I'm going to die in the dark anyway, and it won't matter which choice I made, because the dark is the dark and the dead are the dead and-

The giant made a sound. A sound that Dobbs had never heard a living thing make-a short, explosive exhalation of surprise, almost a grunt, cut off at the end as if something had interrupted it. The snuffling stopped. The breathing stopped. The shadow above the hollow shifted-tilted, swayed-and then there was a sound that Dobbs could only describe as the sound of something very large hitting the ground very hard, and the forest shook one final time, and then there was silence.

Dobbs did not move.

He lay in the hollow with his hand over his mouth and the debris over his body and his eyes squeezed shut, and he listened to the silence, and the silence was the loudest thing he had ever heard.

Then the debris was moved. Branch by branch, leaf by leaf, the way a man clears snow from a sleeping child rather than the way a predator digs out prey. Hands-small, human, impossibly careful-reached into the hollow and pushed the last layer of leaves aside, and the blue-white glow of the structure spilled in, and Dobbs opened his eyes.

A boy stood there.

Ten years old. Dark-haired. Blue eyes, the blue of a summer sky, calm and steady and entirely unafraid. He wore clothes Dobbs did not recognize-dark fabric that shifted color in the light, blue to black to blue, with a symbol on its chest.

He was standing in a crater of flattened earth and broken branches, and at his feet, the giant lay on its back. Twelve feet of fur and muscle and horn and bone, sprawled across the forest floor like a puppet with its strings cut, its tiny eyes closed, its squashed-in face slack. It was breathing. Slowly, deeply, the breathing of something unconscious rather than dead. But it was down, and the boy was standing over it, and the boy had not a mark on him.

Dobbs stared.

The boy looked at him with those blue eyes, and there was recognition in them.

"You need to leave," the boy said.

His voice was quiet. Calm. The voice of a child, and not the voice of a child, and Dobbs' burned hand throbbed once and he knew-he knew with the bone-deep certainty of a man who had seen this boy's eyes go red across a fire in the dark-that this was the same creature. The same impossible thing in a child's skin, standing in the Haunted Forest beyond the Wall, as if they were old acquaintances who kept meeting in the worst possible places.

"The other two," Dobbs said. His voice was a croak. "Poul. Wat. Are they-"

"They're alive," the boy said. "I found them. They're hiding half a mile east, in a ravine. They're frightened but unharmed." He paused. "The knight is dead."

"You need to take him with you," the boy said, and there was something in his voice that Dobbs had not heard before. Not sadness, exactly. Something heavier. The weight of someone who had seen death and understood it and could not prevent it, even with all the things he could do. "His body. He deserves to be returned to the Wall."

Dobbs stared at him. The boy stared back. And in the silence of the Haunted Forest, with the unconscious giant at their feet and the blue-white glow of the alien fortress painting the trees in shades of sapphire, Dobbs understood something that he would carry with him for the rest of his life, however short or long that might be.

The boy was not here for him. The boy was not here for the giant. The boy was here because of the structure-because of whatever it was, whatever it meant, whatever had called him across the world to this frozen, haunted place at the edge of the map. The boy had his own purpose, his own road, his own things that had nothing to do with Dobbs or the Night's Watch or the Wall. And in the middle of all of that-in the middle of whatever vast, incomprehensible business had brought a creature of impossible power to the lands beyond the Wall-the boy had stopped. Had heard them. Had come. Had saved them.

Not because he had to. Not because it served whatever purpose had brought him here. Because they were in trouble, and he could help, and that was enough.

"The body," Dobbs said. "Where?"

"Half a mile north. I'll show you." The boy extended his hand.

Dobbs looked at the hand. Small. Human. He took it.

The boy pulled him out of the hollow with a strength that had no business existing in a frame that size. Dobbs' feet found the ground, and he stood, and his legs shook, and the boy let go of his hand and turned north.

"Follow me," the boy said. "Stay close."

Dobbs did not need to be told twice.

They found Ser Mark where the giant had thrown him. The knight's body was crumpled, his cloak torn, his armor dented, his face peaceful in a way that living faces never were. His sword was still in his hand. He had died with it drawn, and whatever else could be said about Ser Mark-and Dobbs did not know what else could be said, because he had not known the man well enough to say anything-he had died fighting.

The boy stood over the body for a moment. His face was very still. Then he bent down and, with a gentleness that seemed impossible in something that had just knocked out a giant, closed Ser Mark's eyes.

Dobbs watched, and something in his chest ached.

They found Poul and Wat in the ravine. Poul was sitting with his back against the wall of the gully, his sword across his knees, his eyes wide and fixed on the forest above. Wat was curled in a ball beside him, shaking. When they saw Dobbs, Poul's face went through relief and confusion in rapid succession, and Wat let out a sound that was half sob and half laugh and scrambled to his feet.

The boy was gone. Dobbs had not seen him leave. One moment the boy was beside him, guiding him through the trees, and the next he was simply absent, as if the forest had swallowed him. There was no sound of departure, no rustle of leaves, no snap of twigs. Just presence, and then absence, and the space where he had been was empty.

"Dobbs-what-how-"

"We need to go," Dobbs said. "Now. The giant's down. Both of them. But we need to move."

"Down?" Poul's eyes were huge. "Both of them? How are they-"

"It doesn't matter. Help me with Ser Mark."

Poul looked at the body. His face tightened. He did not ask questions. He sheathed his sword, took Ser Mark's shoulders, and together they lifted the dead man and began the long walk back through the forest toward the Wall.

Wat walked behind them, his eyes on the trees, his hand on his sword. He was seventeen and he was terrified and he was trying very hard not to show it. Dobbs could see the effort in the set of his jaw and the rigid line of his shoulders and the way his eyes moved-too fast, too wide, seeing shadows everywhere.

"The thing that knocked out the giants. Must have been one of The Children of the Forest," Wat said, and there was awe in his voice now. "It must have been. The Children still live in the deep woods. They're supposed to be gone, but the stories say they're still here, hiding, watching. One of them saved us."

Poul was quiet for a long time. His boots crunched on the frozen ground, and Ser Mark's body was heavy between them, and the blue-white glow of the structure was fading behind the trees as they put distance between themselves and whatever it was.

"I've heard a lot of stories about the Children of the Forest," Poul said finally. "My grandmother told them to me when I was a boy. She said they were small and quick and clever, and they knew the secrets of the trees and the rivers and the stars." He paused. "She never said they could knock out a twelve-foot giant with their bare hands."

"Maybe the stories got it wrong," Wat said.

Dobbs said nothing. He carried Ser Mark's shoulders and watched the forest and felt the burned hand throbbing and did not speak. The boy's face was behind his eyes-blue eyes, calm face, the symbol on his chest.

The boy. The thing that had dismantled his world in a clearing outside Crakehall and then let him live, and then let him live again, and was now somewhere behind them in the Haunted Forest, doing whatever it was that creatures of impossible power did beyond the Wall.

He did not tell Poul or Wat what he knew.

They reached the edge of the forest. The Wall rose before them, vast and white and familiar, and the torches of Castle Black were visible on the southern side, small and orange and impossibly welcoming.

They stepped out of the trees and onto the cleared ground that surrounded the Wall-a strip of bare earth and stumps, maintained by the Watch to prevent the forest from creeping too close. The night sky opened above them, vast and black and full of stars, and the air was cold and clean and tasted of ice.

Dobbs turned to look back.

The structure was still visible-a glow in the distance, blue-white, pulsing through the canopy of the Haunted Forest like a heartbeat in the dark. It was fainter now, or perhaps the distance had made it seem so. But it was there.

He was about to turn away when the ground shook.

The glow dimmed. Dobbs watched as the blue-white light faded from bright to faint to barely-there, the pulsing slowing, the rhythm stretching out until each pulse was a distinct event separated by long, dark silences. The tops of the structure's crystal spires-just visible above the treeline-began to sink, sliding downward with the same smooth, measured precision with which they had risen, the forest canopy closing over them like water over a sinking stone.

The last pulse came. Faint. A single heartbeat of blue-white light that reached the edge of the forest and touched the cleared ground and was gone.

The structure was gone. The forest was dark. The night was still.

Dobbs stood at the edge of the Haunted Forest with a dead man on his shoulder and two frightened men. The forest looked back. It did not offer explanations. It did not offer comfort.

He turned away.

He did not look back again. He walked toward the Wall, toward the gate, toward the torchlight and the waiting men and the questions that would come and that he would not answer, because the answers he had were impossible and the answers he didn't have were worse.

He did not know why the boy was here. He did not know what the structure was, or what it meant. He did not know if he would ever see the boy again.

He did not know any of these things.

And standing at the gate of Castle Black, with the dead weight of a brother on his shoulder and the cold wind of the far north on his face and the dark forest at his back, Dobbs decided something.

He decided that he would sleep easier if he didn't know.