We set the torches on the ground of the clearing. The light spread low, enough to see what was coming.
Sigurd was the first to move.
The axe came off his back in a wide arc. The first wight lost its torso on a diagonal before completing its second step, rotted guts and organs spreading across the snow. What remained kept moving by inertia until Sigurd kicked the pieces away. He didn't look at what he'd done. He spun the axe in his hand and moved to the next one like it was the same thing as turning a page.
My hand was already on Truth's hilt.
"Handle the wights. The White One is mine."
I drew the blade slowly. The Valyrian steel came out of the scabbard with that clean sound no other metal makes. The dagger came with it, my left hand closing around the dragonbone hilt almost without thinking.
Perseus came in from the left without hesitating. Kevin covered the flank with his short sword in hand, mouth open in a half-smile that wasn't quite joy. He worked knees and ankles first, dropping them before moving up to the skulls. Astrid closed the circle around the last two, sword and shield together, moving like a death-dance, and more rotted guts and organs spread across the snow.
I was already advancing.
The White Walker didn't retreat. It stood where it was, blue eyes following me at every step with an attention I hadn't expected to find in an open field in the middle of the night.
Up close, the armor was stranger than it had seemed from a distance. Each piece fitted together with a precision no human smith could achieve. Ice worked into shapes that seemed to grow from one another, like branches, like veins, as if the cold had crystallized itself into that arrangement on its own and decided that was exactly what it wanted to be.
I stopped three paces from it. Truth in my right hand, the dagger in my left.
It looked at me and its gaze dropped to the blades.
I raised Truth slowly. The scarce light from the moon and the torches caught the folds of the Valyrian steel and made them look like petrified smoke, something that moved without moving. For a moment, the White Walker's blue eyes followed that movement.
Its hand went to the hilt of its sword.
The gesture was slow, almost ceremonious. The long pale fingers wrapped around the frozen crystal with a strange delicacy, as if the very act of taking up a weapon carried some weight it recognized. It drew the sword from its hip and the air grew colder still, in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.
The torchlight hit the pale crystal and made it glow a soft, deep blue, sharp in a way the eye recognizes as dangerous before the mind finishes processing what it's seeing.
Then it gave me the first attack.
The speed was superhuman. The blow came from above with a force that would have split any common sword in two. I deflected with Truth in a wrist rotation, redirecting the blade sideways instead of absorbing the impact. The sound that came from the clash cut the air of the clearing like the shriek of a wounded animal and went to die among the trees.
The White Walker paused for just an instant, blue eyes resting on Truth with the first genuinely readable expression I'd seen on that face. Its head tilted slightly to one side, like someone finding an answer where they expected silence.
The instant passed. The body straightened and it attacked again.
The rhythm was different from any opponent I'd ever faced. No anticipatory shoulder movement like Musashi taught me to read, no muscular contraction preceding each blow. Every movement arrived complete, without warning, without visible preparation, as if the body didn't need intention to do what it did.
I stepped back twice. I planted my feet in the snow. Eyes fixed on its shoulders, the angle of its elbow, the tilt of its torso.
Every opponent has a pattern. It's just a matter of time.
The third blow came from the left flank. The fourth, diagonal from below. The fifth, a direct thrust to the center that I deflected with the guard and converted into an exit to the right. My wrist turned before I thought, the movement coming from the place where training lives after consciousness stops getting in the way.
By the sixth attack I'd understood enough to stop retreating.
My feet stopped. My weight went forward.
"Time to dance, Snow White."
I said it with a smile, spinning the sword in my hand. I was genuinely enjoying myself, and that was the part that always unsettled people more than any blow I threw.
The White Walker blocked the first counter-attack with a speed that made the air between us groan. The second arrived before it finished blocking the first. It retreated half a step, its ice boot sliding across the snow without leaving a mark.
Until that moment it hadn't retreated.
The third blow came from an angle its pattern had no defense for. The tip of Truth opened a scratch in the ice armor and in the moment it felt the blade graze past, something changed in its face, the expression of someone understanding, for the first time, that they might lose.
I stopped attacking and began to circle slowly.
The blue eyes dropped to the scratch in the armor, stayed there for three seconds that felt longer, then rose slowly to my face. Its hand tightened around the hilt of the ice sword. The fingers flexed once, twice.
And then it attacked again, without reserve.
The force increased with the speed. I went to test the limits.
I advanced inside its guard. Truth swept low, forcing the White Walker back, and when it opened space to reposition I launched the dagger in a short thrust toward the sword arm's forearm. The frozen crystal deflected the dragonbone with that sharp shriek, but the impact broke its rhythm for half a second, and half a second was enough. Truth came back high before it could close the guard.
It retreated another step.
The third time, instead of retreating, it blocked with the guard and tried to push. My arms and shoulders felt the pressure, held, and while Truth was locked against the ice sword I drove the dagger in a lateral cut at the elbow joint. The armor there was thinner. I felt the resistance give a little, not enough to wound, but enough for it to know I'd found something.
I pushed back until it had to sidestep.
I increased the pressure gradually. Each exchange of blows lasted a little less than the one before. When Truth threatened from one side, the dagger came from the other, and it had to choose which to block. It always chose correctly, it was too fast to miss, but the choice itself was already a concession. It was still discovering where I was going to hit after I'd already begun.
The clearing had gone silent behind me. No wights. No companions making noise. Just the sound of my breathing and the sound of that ice sword cutting the air.
The White Walker brought its sword down from above with everything it had, a blow meant to finish what the previous ones hadn't. I saw the arm rise. I saw the shoulder turn. I saw the pale crystal begin to fall.
I blocked with Truth crossed above my head and absorbed the impact by bending my knees. The weight of the blow came down through my arms, my torso, my legs, and came to rest in the frozen ground under my boots.
In the moment the blades were in maximum contact, when it was committed to the weight of the blow and could no longer change direction, I rotated my entire body to the right. Its blade slid across my shoulder without touching. I stepped out of the line of force and Truth described a horizontal arc that began at my hip and ended where its chest met its neck.
The Valyrian steel went in.
No resistance, no tearing of flesh or cracking of bone. Truth passed through the White Walker as if it were made of cold air and old memory. The armor shattered into pieces of ice that melted before reaching the ground, turning to vapor in the cold of the clearing. The face split open in fissures, fragments falling from what had been a face, and then the rest of the body followed.
The crystal sword made that sharp shriek one last time before breaking into fragments that evaporated in front of me. The wind took what remained.
Where the White Walker had stood, there was now only clean snow and a silence that weighed differently than the others.
I lowered Truth. My arm trembled a little, barely, but I felt it. The dagger was still in my left hand, the edge intact. I exhaled deeply and the vapor rose in front of my face before dissolving.
Behind me, Sigurd let the air out through his teeth slowly, like someone emptying a barrel.
"By the gods."
Kevin was still standing with his sword in hand, looking at the fragments of ice melting on the ground with an expression I'd never seen on him before. It took some time before he could speak.
"First time I've seen you fight like that for real." He looked at me, the sword still hanging from his hand as if he'd forgotten it was there. The usual smile was completely absent, which was unsettling in its own right. "How long did you spend training for this?"
"My whole life." I clicked the dagger into its sheath. "Two of them, actually," I whispered, eyes still on the clean snow where the White Walker had been, more to myself than to him.
Kevin blinked. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at Sigurd as if he expected the enormous man to have some answer for that. Sigurd just shrugged.
Perseus was on his knees near the melted ice trail, his palm a few centimeters above the ground. When he spoke he didn't turn around, with that voice of someone who's already reached a bad conclusion and is only now reporting the result.
"It was studying you the whole fight. Every time you changed something, it adjusted."
"Until it stopped adjusting." I cleaned Truth in the snow before sheathing it. "When it realized it wasn't getting anywhere it put everything into brute force. That's where it lost."
Perseus stood and looked at me, brow furrowed like someone still assembling a puzzle. "Did you see how it froze on the first clash? When your blade held against its. It just stopped mid-movement."
"Valyrian steel." I looked at the ground where the creature had been, the snow there identical to anywhere else now, clean and indifferent. "Maybe it hasn't seen a blade like this in centuries. Or ever."
Perseus nodded slowly, eyes still on the ground. "And next time it'll know what to expect."
"Next time it will."
Kevin sheathed his sword with a click, threw his head back and stared at the canopy of branches above with an expression of deep resignation. "Great. Immortal enemies that learn. Exactly what I needed to hear today."
Astrid hadn't moved since the last wight fell. Shield on her arm, sword in her hand, eyes fixed on the ground with an intensity I rarely saw in her. When she spoke it was without drama, without inflection, just the fact placed in the air like it was the temperature.
"If that thing had faced any of us instead of Arthur, we'd be dead."
Kevin opened his mouth to say something and closed it again. Sigurd, who normally had an opinion about absolutely everything, went quiet, arms crossed over his chest, gaze dropping to Truth at my hip. Coming from Astrid, who treated her own vulnerability as a personal offense, that carried a different weight than anything any of the others could have said.
Sigurd was the first to break it. "How many swords like yours exist in the North?" Eyes still on the scabbard, as if he were calculating something he didn't like the result of.
"Few." I ran a hand through my hair, feeling the cold sweat on my forehead. "And from what I just saw, common steel won't get anywhere near. If there are more of them out there we need to find out what else works, because Truth can't be in every hand at once."
Sigurd grunted and struck the butt of his axe against the ground once. "Then we need more."
"We need a lot more. And I don't know where we're going to find it."
Kevin raised a finger, gaze still drifting somewhere above, as if asking permission for a question he already knew he didn't want to ask. "Just out of curiosity." He paused. "How many of them are out there?"
The wind passed through the trees. Nobody answered.
Kevin lowered the finger slowly. "Right. Great. Good thing I asked."
I stared at the dark space between the trunks for a time I couldn't measure. The wind moved through the branches, knocked snow from a bough, went still.
When we were close to making camp, the raven called again.
It landed on the nearest branch, looked at us for a second, then flew into the forest without hurry, as if it knew we'd follow.
"Looks like we're not resting yet." I put my foot in the stirrup, eyes still on the direction the raven had disappeared. "Let's go. I think we're getting close."
Nobody complained, which said something on its own about what we'd just been through.
We mounted and followed the direction the raven went.
About an hour of riding later, the trees changed.
One moment the common conifers were there, and then they were gone, replaced by weirwoods, white as bone, the faces carved into their bark staring down with expressions that were never quite the same twice. I'd seen them before, at Whitetree, scattered across other places in the North, but here they were different. Denser. Older. The torchlight didn't reach properly between them, as if the air there held the darkness on purpose.
I dismounted. The others followed without me saying a word.
Walking between the trees, I found a crack in a low hill, almost invisible beneath the roots covering the stone. When I entered I realized it was a cave, the ceiling high enough to stand. We lit the torches and followed the tunnel forward.
I knew this smell. This place.
When I had touched the tree at Whitetree, I had been here.
The cave opened after a few meters into a chamber that made Sigurd stop and murmur something in old Norse. It was as large as Winterfell's great hall, maybe larger, the walls lined with stalagmites rising from the floor and stalactites hanging from the ceiling like teeth. In stone niches in the walls there were skulls, from animals and from things I couldn't name, and deeper in, where the light barely reached, skeletons of giant bats hung upside down from the ceiling in silent rows. Flocks of ravens rested in the tangles of roots crossing the walls, hundreds of them, quiet as if they knew they shouldn't make noise here.
Kevin stared at the skulls in the niches for a long time, torch raised as if he needed more light to confirm what he was seeing.
"Just confirming." He spoke low, eyes still on the skulls. "We're going in."
"We are."
He lowered the torch. "Right."
Two steps further and two golden lights appeared in the darkness ahead. Too fixed, too round, and at the wrong height for a human.
Sigurd raised his axe.
The figure that came out of the darkness was smaller than anyone I'd ever seen, the height of a ten-year-old child, but there was something about the way it moved that made clear it was no child. Walnut-colored, with lighter patches scattered across its skin like a deer's. Three fingers and a thumb on each hand, with thin claws where nails should have been. Large pointed ears that tilted slightly back. Golden eyes with green in them, and the pupils, vertical and precise as a cat's, catching the torchlight and giving it back doubled.
Curly honey-colored hair, with vines and flowers and small leaves woven through it as if they had grown there. Clothes made of layered leaf cloaks that moved with her as if they were part of her body.
She moved like a dance. Each step placed with a lightness that made no sound at all on the stone floor.
Kevin took a step back without realizing it. Perseus went completely still. Astrid hadn't lowered her sword but hadn't advanced either, eyes fixed on the figure with the attention of someone deciding whether they needed to react. Sigurd looked at the figure for a second and lowered the axe.
When she spoke, something in the air of the cave shifted.
"Loks eruð þér komnir. Síðasti grœnn maðr bíður yðr."
Her voice was like something that had existed before words. Hard to describe any other way. As if the sound came from the walls, from the roots, from the quiet air of the cave at the same time as from her throat. Surreal in the way only very old things can be.
"Þökk fyrir móttökuna, söngvarar jarðar. Þat heiðrar mik." I replied with a nod.
She looked at me with those golden and green eyes, her head slightly tilted.
"What a surprise that men beyond the Wall still know how to speak the old tongue."
"It's my ancestral language." I smiled. "I only regretted not being able to speak the true tongue like Brandon the Builder."
"Perhaps you will, child." Her voice carried an ancientness that made everyone a child, regardless of age. "The wind was once mute too, until it learned to sing through the leaves."
Kevin touched my shoulder and spoke very quietly close to my ear, eyes fixed on the figure ahead of us. "You understand what she's saying?"
"Yes."
"And she understands us?"
"Yes."
He let go of my shoulder and looked at Leaf for another second. "Right."
"What can I call you?" I asked her, stepping forward.
"My name is too long and too incomprehensible for men." What might have sounded arrogant from any other mouth came from her as a simple fact, without vanity. "You may call me Leaf."
"Leaf." I nodded. "You can call me Arthur." I turned slightly to each side, indicating the others with a gesture of my hand. "These are Astrid, Kevin, Perseus." I paused. "And the big one is Sigurd."
Sigurd raised his chin slightly, which for him was a complete greeting.
Leaf looked at each of them with those feline eyes, without hurry, like someone with far too much time to spend on anything. Then she turned and began walking down the tunnel without another word.
We followed.
The cave grew larger as we went. Chambers opened into other chambers, some with wells dropping into a darkness the torches couldn't reach, others with the bones of animals and giants piled in corners with an order that suggested someone had placed each one there deliberately. The ravens on the root-branches watched our progress with their eyes, hundreds of them, making no sound.
"Leaf." I said as we walked, keeping pace beside her. "How many of your kind still exist? South of the Wall we've had no news of you for generations."
She didn't stop walking, golden eyes sweeping across the ravens in the branches above as if counting them. "Few. Few as leaves in winter."
Her voice carried something I hadn't expected. The grief of someone who accepted a loss long enough ago to have stopped feeling anger about it.
"Are they all here, or scattered?" I pressed, stepping around a low stalagmite without taking my eyes off her.
She was silent for a few steps, her feet finding the stone floor without making any sound, before she answered.
"We descended into the earth. Into the stones, into the trees. Before the coming of the First Men, all this land you call Westeros was our home. But even then we were few. The gods gave us long lives, but not many of us, so that we would not overrun the world as deer overrun a forest with no wolves to hunt them." She paused. "That was in the dawn of days, when our sun was rising. Now it sets, and this is our long decline."
No one spoke for a time.
"The giants too have almost vanished," she continued. "The great lions of the western hills are gone. The unicorns, nearly extinct. The mammoths, a few hundred remain. The direwolves will outlast us all, but their time will come too." She looked at the cave walls around her. "In the world men have made, there is no room for them. Nor for us."
Kevin was quiet in a way that was rare for him. Perseus walked with his eyes on the walls, taking in every detail without saying anything.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked, stopping in the middle of the tunnel.
Leaf stopped one step ahead of me.
She turned to look at me with those golden and green eyes, the torchlight disappearing inside them without returning.
"That question," she said slowly, "is one of the reasons the last greenseer wants to speak with you."
And kept walking.