Chapter 39: The Winter is Coming
Roland stood on the wall and looked north.
The land between the wall and the forest was empty — the way everything was empty in the days before the Months of the Demons. The cleared ground that his militia had spent the autumn finishing was grey with frost. The stakes were in place, the pit emplacements covered with their breakaway planking, the powder charges stored in their components in the warehouse on the east side of the cluster where a single ignition could not set them all off at once. He had done everything he could do with what he had.
The wall itself was solid. He had walked every section of it twice. The mortar was cured and tight; the battlements gave the defenders cover to the shoulder while standing and full cover while crouching; the firing steps were level. Van’er’s pike section — sixty fighters now, up from the original hundred by attrition and reassignment to other posts — had drilled on these specific twelve yards of wall three times this week alone. They did not move like soldiers yet. They moved like a body that had been told what to do often enough that it had stopped thinking about each instruction.
That would have to be enough.
He heard Carter behind him and turned. The chief knight had the duty report in his hand, which was routine, and the expression of a man who had reviewed the numbers without being reassured by them, which was also routine.
“The two rehearsals went well,” Carter said. He meant the exercises where the militia held formation through a simulated assault — logs dragged up from behind on ropes, with the defenders supposed to maintain the compression of the pike line without breaking it. The first run they had broken twice. The second run they had held. “Iron Axe’s team knows their positions.”
“Good.”
“The food reserves trouble me.” He handed over the tally sheet. “If the Months run long—”
“They don’t.” Roland looked at the sheet. “Six weeks. Every historical record agrees. We have food for eight.” He handed it back. “Barov is worried. Tell him the wall is more likely to be the problem than the pantry.”
Carter said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
At the base of the north wall, behind the second storage building, Brian sat in the frozen grass beside a mound of new earth.
There was no marker yet. He had asked about one, and the carpenter had said two weeks — he was backed up with wall repairs. Brian had brought a river stone from the Chishui bank and set it at the head of the mound. It was not a carved stone. It did not have a name on it. It was just a stone that he had carried here from somewhere Greyhound had been, so that this place would have something from that place.
He did not think of himself as a sentimental man. He had spent too many years on the wall patrol for that. Men died; you mourned them in the moment and then you got back on the patrol line, because the line did not hold itself. But Greyhound had not died on the patrol line. He had died for refusing something, which was different. He had been offered a choice between his loyalty and his neck, and he had chosen his loyalty, and it had cost him his neck. That kind of death required a different category of thinking.
He was still working out the category.
His hand had mostly healed. The crossbow bolt had gone through the meat below his collarbone, not the joint, and Nana had worked on him twice in the week after — careful, patient sessions that had left him drowsy and warm in a way he associated with fever breaking rather than treatment. He had tried once to describe to Carter what it felt like when the healing worked. Carter had looked at him with a carefully neutral expression and said he was glad Brian was recovering.
He placed his hand on the river stone. Cold. Solid.
“You’d have hated the pike drilling,” he said to the mound. “Standing in a line. You always said lines were for people without lateral movement.” He was quiet a moment. “I don’t have a lateral movement anymore. I have a position on the wall and a recovery percentage that the witch assessed at maybe eighty percent before the Months start. So.” He patted the stone once. “I’ll tell you how it goes.”
He stood. His shoulder ached in the cold — it would for a while, Nana had told him, because cold constricted the repaired tissue differently than the surrounding muscle, and the body needed time to integrate. She had explained this with the specific focus she brought to all of it, as though if she described the mechanism clearly enough he would find the discomfort easier to accept. He had found, oddly, that this was true.
Inside the castle, Anna was sitting beside Nana on the bed in the upper room.
They were not talking. Anna had her hand over Nana’s and Nana was looking at the window — the grey sky, the first real cold pressing against the glass, a wind that rattled the frame.
“The devil’s bite,” Nana said. It was a thing the older witches said, or so Nightingale had told Anna: the adulthood trial was sometimes described that way, in the Witch Cooperation Association’s private language. A bite that either killed you or didn’t, and there was no way to know in advance which way it went for any particular witch. “Has Nightingale told you what it feels like? When it starts?”
“No,” Anna said.
“She wouldn’t.”
“She would if I asked.” Anna looked at her. “But I haven’t asked.”
Nana turned her hand over under Anna’s and held it. “Are you afraid?”
Anna considered this. She thought about the room she had lived in before the castle. She thought about the prison cell. She thought about the first morning she had sat in this castle’s garden and been told she could practice her fire without anyone stopping her. She thought about fish cake and the warmth of a room that was not threatening her from any direction.
“No,” she said. It was true. That was the strange part.
“How?” Nana asked. Not skeptically — she wanted to know.
Anna thought about how to explain something she didn’t fully understand herself. “Because whatever happens after it, I’ve already had this.” She looked at their joined hands. “I’ve already been somewhere I chose to be. That’s not nothing.”
Nana was quiet for a long time. The wind moved against the window.
“I think I’m afraid,” Nana said. “For you.”
“I know.” Anna turned her hand over and held Nana’s properly, the way she had seen people hold hands when they meant it. “That means you care. It’s all right to care.”
The first snowflake arrived at dusk.
Roland was in the watchtower with Nightingale, reviewing nothing in particular — he had been reviewing things since before midday and had run out of things to review, but standing on the watchtower was more useful than pacing his study, because from here he could see the cleared ground and the forest edge and the militia positions along the wall. It made the review feel like something other than waiting.
The flake came down out of the grey sky and landed on his outstretched hand and did not melt.
“You lied to him,” Nightingale said. She was beside him, not quite looking at him, watching the sky in the direction the flake had come from. “Pine. You told him the wall wouldn’t fall. You don’t know that.”
“No,” Roland said. “I don’t.”
“But you said it.”
“He needed to stay. His daughter is the only healer we have.” He closed his hand around the flake and felt the cold become water. “If I had told him I wasn’t certain, he would have taken her to Longsong and she would have been discovered by the Church before spring.”
“So you lied.”
“I told him the most likely outcome given the preparation we’ve done.” He opened his hand. The melted snow was barely visible on his palm. “I believe in the wall. I don’t lie about the things I believe in.”
Nightingale said nothing. She was looking at the sky in a way that suggested she was deciding something.
“You don’t intend to leave this town,” she said.
It was not quite a question. He didn’t answer it as one. “No.”
Another snowflake came down. Then another. In the distance, against the dark line of the forest, the first curtain of real snow was visible — a grey-white blurring of the tree line, moving south at a deliberate pace.
“It’s snowing,” he said.
Nightingale stepped back from the parapet and pulled the edge of her robe against the wind. “I’ll tell the others.” She paused. “What will you do?”
Roland watched the snow come. It moved the way inevitability moved — not fast, not dramatic, simply advancing across the ground without asking anything of anyone’s preparation or readiness or conviction.
“Stand here,” he said. “For a while.”
The snow reached the wall. The flakes came down onto the cleared ground, onto the stakes, onto the mortar between the battlements, melting where the stone still held warmth from the day and settling where it didn’t. The militia positions along the top of the wall were lit by torches that the wind was beginning to press sideways. He could see the guards there — small figures, their cloaks pulled close.
The Months of the Demons had begun.
He stood and watched the snow settle, and did not go inside.