A Dance With Dragons

slab of a man he recognized as Halleck, the brother of Harma Dogshead. Harma’s pigs were gone, though. Eaten, no doubt. Those two in furs were Hornfoot men, as savage as they were scrawny, barefoot even in the snow. There are wolves amongst these sheep, still.
    Val had reminded him of that, on his last visit with her. “Free folk and kneelers are more alike than not, Jon Snow. Men are men and women women, no matter which side of the Wall we were born on. Good men and bad, heroes and villains, men of honor, liars, cravens, brutes … we have plenty, as do you.”
    She was not wrong. The trick was telling one from the other, parting the sheep from the goats.
    The black brothers began to pass out food. They’d brought slabs of hard salt beef, dried cod, dried beans, turnips, carrots, sacks of barley meal and wheaten flour, pickled eggs, barrels of onions and apples. “You can have an onion or an apple,” Jon heard Hairy Hal tell one woman, “but not both. You got to pick.”
    The woman did not seem to understand. “I need two of each. One o’ each for me, t’others for my boy. He’s sick, but an apple will set him right.”
    Hal shook his head. “He has to come get his own apple. Or his onion. Not both. Same as you. Now, is it an apple or an onion? Be quick about it, now, there’s more behind you.”
    “An apple,” she said, and he gave her one, an old dried thing, small and withered.
    “Move along, woman,” shouted a man three places back. “It’s cold out here.”
    The woman paid the shout no mind. “Another apple,” she said to Hairy Hal. “For my son. Please. This one is so little.”
    Hal looked to Jon. Jon shook his head. They would be out of apples soon enough. If they started giving two to everyone who wanted two, the latecomers would get none.
    “Out of the way,” a girl behind the woman said. Then she shoved her in the back. The woman staggered, lost her apple, and fell. The other foodstuffs in her arms went flying. Beans scattered, a turnip rolled into a mud puddle, a sack of flour split and spilled its precious contents in the snow.
    Angry voices rose, in the Old Tongue and the Common. More shoving broke out at another wagon. “It’s not enough, ” an old man snarled. “You bloody crows are starving us to death.” The woman who’d been knocked down was scrabbling on her knees after her food. Jon saw the flash of naked steel a few yards away. His own bowmen nocked arrows to their strings.
    He turned in his saddle. “Rory. Quiet them.”
    Rory lifted his great horn to his lips and blew. AAAAhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
    The tumult and the shoving died. Heads turned. A child began to cry. Mormont’s raven walked from Jon’s left shoulder to his right, bobbing its head and muttering, “ Snow, snow, snow. ”
    Jon waited until the last echoes had faded, then spurred his palfrey forward where everyone could see him. “We’re feeding you as best we can, as much as we can spare. Apples, onions, neeps, carrots … there’s a long winter ahead for all of us, and our stores are not inexhaustible.”
    “You crows eat good enough.” Halleck shoved forward.
    For now. “We hold the Wall. The Wall protects the realm … and you now. You know the foe we face. You know what’s coming down on us. Some of you have faced them before. Wights and white walkers, dead things with blue eyes and black hands. I’ve seen them too, fought them, sent one to hell. They kill, then they send your dead against you. The giants were not able to stand against them, nor you Thenns, the ice-river clans, the Hornfoots, the free folk … and as the days grow shorter and the nights colder, they are growing stronger. You left your homes and came south in your hundreds and your thousands … why, but to escape them? To be safe. Well, it’s the Wall that keeps you safe. It’s us that keeps you safe, the black crows you despise.”
    “Safe and starved,” said a squat woman with a windburned face, a spearwife by the look of her.
    “You want more food?” asked Jon. “The food’s for fighters. Help us hold the Wall, and you’ll eat as well as any crow.” Or as poorly, when the food runs short.
    A silence fell. The wildlings exchanged wary looks. “ Eat, ” the raven muttered. “ Corn, corn. ”
    “Fight for you?” This voice was thickly accented. Sigorn, the young Magnar of Thenn, spoke the Common Tongue haltingly at best. “Not fight for you. Kill you better. Kill all you.”
    The