“We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark
around them.
“The wildlings are dead.”
“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of
a smile.
Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had
seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We have no
business with the dead.”
“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”
“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they are dead, that’s proof
enough for me.”
Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He
wished it had been later rather than sooner. “My mother told me that dead
men sing no songs,” he put in.
“My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,” Royce replied. “Never believe
anything you hear at a woman’s tit. There are things to be learned even from
the dead.” His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest.
“We have a long ride before us,” Gared pointed out. “Eight days, maybe
nine. And night is falling.”
Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. “It does that every
day about this time. Are you unmanned by the dark, Gared?”
Will could see the tightness around Gared’s mouth, the barely suppressed
anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. Gared had spent
forty years in the Night’s Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to
being made light of. Yet it was more than that. Under the wounded pride,
Will could sense something else in the older man. You could taste it; a
nervous tension that came perilous close to fear.
