Chapter 180

The Wall. 299 AC.

Jon Snow.

When people speak of Tarly, the first thought that comes to mind is the famed commander, Lord Randyll Tarly. Acknowledged as one of the finest military minds in all of Westeros, a man others might hate, might scorn, might mock behind his back, yet friend and foe alike could never deny his importance. Given a father like that, one naturally expected his son to carry at least some fragment of the same qualities. Reality, it turned out, was full of surprises.

The first thing anyone noticed on meeting Tarly in person was his weight. Samwell was enormously fat. The only man who outweighed him was Wyman Manderly, though that was its own singular case entirely. Jon guessed the boy weighed somewhere between two hundred and sixty and three hundred pounds, though it was hard to be precise beneath so many layers of clothing. Dark hair, pale eyes, a round face folded into several chins, the sort of man one expected to find lounging in some magister's palace in the Free Cities, not descended from a house of celebrated warriors.

From the moment the conversation began, it became clear that Sam's spiritual failings matched his physical ones. Barely two minutes into a constant stream of bleating, and hopping from one subject to the next, everyone present had already exhausted their patience.

"And Lily, she's such a beautiful daughter... wife... uh, woman, at Craster's keep, she asked me for help. I wanted to, but there wasn't anything I could do, so I had to refuse her. A week later Dorra, her sis... her relation, not so pretty as Lily though, she had her baby..." Thorne cut off this torrent of useless information by bellowing at the storyteller, one of the rare moments Jon actually felt grateful to him.

"I... I... uh... aaah," was all the fat boy could manage to stammer out.

"Tarly! Tarly!" The Lord Commander's shout snapped the steward back to his senses. "Where did you see a White Walker?"

"When... when Dorra had her boy... they... they..."

"Gods, not this song again! Lord Commander, we're discussing matters of grave importance here, not the ramblings of this hog's fever dream."

"Silence, Thorne!" Lord Mormont roared. "And you, speak!"

What Jon heard next, he did not like. To keep from getting in each other's way, he and Mormont had divided their duties long ago: Jon took charge of everything south of the Wall, the Night's Watch handled the north. Both worked toward the same cause, each helping where they could, but in truth they only learned what the other was doing at councils like this one, thrown together on short notice.

Jon had known the Watch cooperated with certain wildlings. He had felt no particular warmth toward the arrangement, but he had kept his opinion to himself. As it turned out, he should have spoken up. This wildling bastard raped his own daughters, forced them to marry him in turn, and murdered his sons.

"And you allow this to go on?!" Every fiber of Jon's being recoiled at the thought that an order once so great now stooped to dealing with such filth.

"We are dying out. Every year there are fewer of us," the lord commander began. "The kings care nothing for us. They send us the dregs of the realm, and even the northern lords have begun to forget we exist. The Watch needs allies, and we have none. Craster, whatever else he is, has helped dozens of our brothers survive when they ought to have died. And if I must sacrifice my own pretended nobility for that, then so be it!!!"

"Um..." Sam made a sound, clearly feeling he had no business being in the room at all.

"Speak!" the enraged bear snapped.

"He doesn't kill the sons. He gives them to the White Walkers." A sacrifice, then, was that the meaning. "I saw one of them take Dorra's son with my own eyes, and Lily is near her time now. She's afraid for her child... she doesn't want to give him up, so she's begging for shelter at Castle Black. Please, Lord Commander." But the Old Bear said nothing, lost instead in some hard and private thought.

"...Leave us. We need to speak," Thorne ordered, seeing that Lord Mormont was in no state to answer.

An interesting thought had already begun forming in Jon's own mind.

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