A Dance With Dragons

sleet and freezing rain, it’s bloody hard to find dry wood or get your kindling lit, and the cold … some nights our fires just seemed to shrivel up and die. Nights like that, you always find some dead come the morning. ’Less they find you first. The night that Torwynd … my boy, he …” Tormund turned his face away.
    “I know,” said Jon Snow.
    Tormund turned back. “You know nothing. You killed a dead man, aye, I heard. Mance killed a hundred. A man can fight the dead, but when their masters come, when the white mists rise up … how do you fight a mist, crow? Shadows with teeth … air so cold it hurts to breathe, like a knife inside your chest … you do not know, you cannot know … can your sword cut cold ?”
    We will see, Jon thought, remembering the things that Sam had told him, the things he’d found in his old books. Longclaw had been forged in the fires of old Valyria, forged in dragonflame and set with spells. Dragon-steel, Sam called it. Stronger than any common steel, lighter, harder, sharper … But words in a book were one thing. The true test came in battle.
    “You are not wrong,” Jon said. “I do not know. And if the gods are good, I never will.”
    “The gods are seldom good, Jon Snow.” Tormund nodded toward the sky. “The clouds roll in. Already it grows darker, colder. Your Wall no longer weeps. Look.” He turned and called out to his son Toregg. “Ride back to the camp and get them moving. The sick ones and the weak ones, the slugabeds and cravens, get them on their bloody feet. Set their bloody tents afire if you must. The gate must close at nightfall. Any man not through the Wall by then had best pray the Others get to him afore I do. You hear?”
    “I hear.” Toregg put his heels into his horse and galloped back down the column.
    On and on the wildlings came. The day grew darker, just as Tormund said. Clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, and warmth fled. There was more shoving at the gate, as men and goats and bullocks jostled each other out of the way. It is more than impatience, Jon realized. They are afraid. Warriors, spearwives, raiders, they are frightened of those woods, of shadows moving through the trees. They want to put the Wall between them before the night descends.
    A snowflake danced upon the air. Then another. Dance with me, Jon Snow, he thought. You’ll dance with me anon.
    On and on and on the wildlings came. Some were moving faster now, hastening across the battleground. Others—the old, the young, the feeble—could scarce move at all. This morning the field had been covered with a thick blanket of old snow, its white crust shining in the sun. Now the field was brown and black and slimy. The passage of the free folk had turned the ground to mud and muck: wooden wheels and horses’ hooves, runners of bone and horn and iron, pig trotters, heavy boots, the cloven feet of cows and bullocks, the bare black feet of the Hornfoot folk, all had left their marks. The soft footing slowed the column even more. “You need a bigger gate,” Tormund complained again.
    By late afternoon the snow was falling steadily, but the river of wildlings had dwindled to a stream. Columns of smoke rose from the trees where their camp had been. “Toregg,” Tormund explained. “Burning the dead. Always some who go to sleep and don’t wake up. You find them in their tents, them as have tents, curled up and froze. Toregg knows what to do.”
    The stream was no more than a trickle by the time Toregg emerged from the wood. With him rode a dozen mounted warriors armed with spears and swords. “My rear guard,” Tormund said, with a gap-toothed smile. “You crows have rangers. So do we. Them I left in camp in case we were attacked before we all got out.”
    “Your best men.”
    “Or my worst. Every man o’ them has killed a crow.”
    Amongst the riders came one man afoot, with some big beast trotting at his heels. A boar, Jon saw. A monstrous boar. Twice the size of Ghost, the creature was covered with coarse black hair, with tusks as long as a man’s arm. Jon had never seen a boar so huge or ugly. The man beside him was no beauty either; hulking, black-browed, he had a flat nose, heavy jowls dark with stubble, small black close-set eyes.
    “Borroq.” Tormund turned his head and spat. “A skinchanger.” It was not a question. Somehow he knew.
    Ghost turned his head. The falling snow had masked the boar’s scent, but now the white wolf had the smell. He