A Dance With Dragons

raven flapped its wings. “ Kill, kill. ”
    Sigorn’s father, the old Magnar, had been crushed beneath the falling stair during his attack on Castle Black. I would feel the same if someone asked me to make common cause with the Lannisters, Jon told himself. “Your father tried to kill us all,” he reminded Sigorn. “The Magnar was a brave man, yet he failed. And if he had succeeded … who would hold the Wall?” He turned away from the Thenns. “Winterfell’s walls were strong as well, but Winterfell stands in ruins today, burned and broken. A wall is only as good as the men defending it.”
    An old man with a turnip cradled against his chest said, “You kill us, you starve us, now you want t’ make us slaves.”
    A chunky red-faced man shouted assent. “I’d sooner go naked than wear one o’ them black rags on my back.”
    One of the spearwives laughed. “Even your wife don’t want to see you naked, Butts.”
    A dozen voices all began to speak at once. The Thenns were shouting in the Old Tongue. A little boy began to cry. Jon Snow waited until all of it had died down, then turned to Hairy Hal and said, “Hal, what was it that you told this woman?”
    Hal looked confused. “About the food, you mean? An apple or an onion? That’s all I said. They got to pick.”
    “ You have to pick, ” Jon Snow repeated. “All of you. No one is asking you to take our vows, and I do not care what gods you worship. My own gods are the old gods, the gods of the North, but you can keep the red god, or the Seven, or any other god who hears your prayers. It’s spears we need. Bows. Eyes along the Wall.
    “I will take any boy above the age of twelve who knows how to hold a spear or string a bow. I will take your old men, your wounded, and your cripples, even those who can no longer fight. There are other tasks they may be able to perform. Fletching arrows, milking goats, gathering fire-wood, mucking out our stables … the work is endless. And yes, I will take your women too. I have no need of blushing maidens looking to be protected, but I will take as many spearwives as will come.”
    “And girls?” a girl asked. She looked as young as Arya had, the last time Jon had seen her.
    “Sixteen and older.”
    “You’re taking boys as young as twelve.”
    Down in the Seven Kingdoms boys of twelve were often pages or squires; many had been training at arms for years. Girls of twelve were children. These are wildlings, though. “As you will. Boys and girls as young as twelve. But only those who know how to obey an order. That goes for all of you. I will never ask you to kneel to me, but I will set captains over you, and serjeants who will tell you when to rise and when to sleep, where to eat, when to drink, what to wear, when to draw your swords and loose your arrows. The men of the Night’s Watch serve for life. I will not ask that of you, but so long as you are on the Wall you will be under my command. Disobey an order, and I’ll have your head off. Ask my brothers if I won’t. They’ve seen me do it.”
    “ Off, ” screamed the Old Bear’s raven. “ Off, off, off. ”
    “The choice is yours,” Jon Snow told them. “Those who want to help us hold the Wall, return to Castle Black with me and I’ll see you armed and fed. The rest of you, get your turnips and your onions and crawl back inside your holes.”
    The girl was the first to come forward. “I can fight. My mother was a spearwife.” Jon nodded. She may not even be twelve, he thought, as she squirmed between a pair of old men, but he was not about to turn away his only recruit.
    A pair of striplings followed her, boys no older than fourteen. Next a scarred man with a missing eye. “I seen them too, the dead ones. Even crows are better’n that.” A tall spearwife, an old man on crutches, a moon-faced boy with a withered arm, a young man whose red hair reminded Jon of Ygritte.
    And then Halleck. “I don’t like you, crow,” he growled, “but I never liked the Mance neither, no more’n my sister did. Still, we fought for him. Why not fight for you?”
    The dam broke then. Halleck was a man of note. Mance was not wrong. “Free folk don’t follow names, or little cloth animals sewn on a tunic,” the King-Beyond-the-Wall had told him. “They won’t dance for coins, they don’t care how you style yourself or what that chain of office means or who your grandsire was. They follow strength. They follow the man.”
    Halleck’s cousins followed