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It’s freezing when they set off. Grenn thought that he’d been getting used to how frightful cold it got on the Wall, especially after all that time beyond it, but the past day or so have proven him wrong.
Pyp noses his garron next to Grenn’s. It’s a compact party of four; two Eastwatch brothers returning, Grenn and Pyp going for the first time. They’re only waiting for Sigroy to return with the last of the provisions for the journey. Their breath turns to mist and fog right before their eyes, mimicking the heavy clouds gathering at their backs. The lichyard is likewise pale and silent.
“Well,” Pyp ventures, “it can’t be any colder at Eastwatch, can it?”
“S’pose not.”
“No colder than the Lord Commander’s snowy arsehole, anyway,” he adds, with a note of cheer that rings false.
“Jon’s arsehole isn’t snowy,” Grenn protests automatically. He waits for Pyp to tease him, rib him, ask him how he came to know so much about Lord Snow’s buttcheeks anyway. It doesn’t come; Pyp only shrugs, and falls silent in the waiting.
*
When the word comes, they start packing. There isn’t anything else to do. It wasn’t a request or a suggestion. They were given orders, and orders are meant to be followed. Halder and Toad get orders same as they do, sending them west to the Shadow Tower. Grenn catches himself being grateful that Jon had made it so that he and Pyp could stay together before he begins to wonder instead: why send them away at all?
If the command had come from the old Jon, he wouldn’t have had to wonder at all; Jon would have told him outright. That Jon might have asked it of him first, instead of having an officially written piece of paper delivered to him, whose words he had to labour over to understand.
That Jon is lost, somewhere up in the peaks of the Frostfangs, or maybe somewhere south in the Gift. Even the other Jon might have done, the one who barked orders at them on the ramparts when the wildling host lay at their feet, who every morning smiled at Pyp’s quips about their breakfast arrows, who entrusted Grenn with the Wall for agonisingly long periods of time, never once thinking that he would muck it up.
This Jon meets with them in the courtyard to say goodbye, doesn’t seem to hear Pyp’s joke about Toad’s face driving the Weeping Man to real tears in the near future. He looks like he wants to hug them but doesn’t, and as soon as he tells them who they’ll be travelling with, he’s off.
Grenn’s not stupid. He knows it’s not some poorly timed jest about the red woman that has set them on this road. But he’s also not a mind-reader, and for now at least, there’s nothing to be done. Jon says they’re going to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, so to Eastwatch they’ll go.
*
“I can’t believe it,” Pyp says as they begin guiding their mounts away from Castle Black.
“What?” Grenn keeps his voice low; the other two men are hard, experienced rangers both, and don’t seem to take kindly to idle talk.
Pyp grimaces. “I thought he would at least… ugh, never mind.”
That keeps Grenn silent for a while.
“I don’t think he’s mad at us or anything,” he ventures. If he was, he might not have let them say goodbye to Halder and Toad. Their other friends had left early yesterday evening with a party from the Shadow Tower.
“I know that.” Pyp scowls. He’s swathed in his blacks, and his hood covers his ears, but Grenn knows their probably bright red, the way they get when he’s excited or angry. “It’s just… by the Seven. Sometimes he’s thicker than you are.”
It’s not an insult; Pyp hasn’t actually insulted him in years. Grenn shrugs, glances back one last time at the tall tower where their friend sleeps, and nudges Pyp along.
*
It’s a long journey to Eastwatch, through snow and field and forest. Their brothers, Sigroy and Three Thumbs Cid, set a brutal pace for them.
“If you think it’s cold now, it’s only going to get colder,” declares Cid darkly. “And might be that them wights ain’t reached beyond the Wall yet, but not all of them wildlings stayed holed up in Mole’s Town. We ride careful, but we ride hard.”
“Well,” Pyp comments. “At least we had the good fortune to get stuck with a cheery lot.”
It’s a hard road. The line that the Wall follows on its way east is as straight as it gets, but it’s broken by woods and deep lakes. Frequent snowfall slows them down, makes it hard to stick to Cid’s schedule. They ride through the day, take meals in the saddle when they can, and take turns holding the watch when they break for camp at night.
Grenn adjusts easy enough. It’s no more difficult a ride than it had been from Craster’s Keep to the Wall, fleeing their treacherous brothers and the things that came out of the woods.
He still thinks back on those days and nights, slinking through the forest, with an awful shiver. It had been the greatest relief in the world to see the Wall, to hear Pyp’s loud whoop of joy and Halder’s booming, surprised laughter. Pyp had tried to tackle him into the snow, and failing that, had climbed up onto Grenn’s shoulders and sang for all who would hear of the return of his faithful aurochs. Eventually he’d stopped his antics and let Grenn hug him for a bit before he started accusing Grenn of wanting to crush his bones into meal.
Pyp’s never been out on a ranging of any considerable distance before, and it shows. He covers his discomforts with a steady stream of japes (most of them having something or other to do with Cid’s eleventh finger or Sigroy’s flatulent pony), but he too often falls behind, too often has trouble guiding his garron over the difficult paths. Grenn doesn’t say anything, but stays his hand, keeps an eye on his brothers in front of him, and waits for Pyp.
“Come on,” he says, clicking his tongue at his friend’s pony. They’ve been in the saddle since dawn; it’s well past midday now, and Cid and Sigroy show no signs of stopping. Pyp struggles up the small icy incline, keeping the garron tolerably in hand, and then huffs dramatically.
“Well, it’s awful good to know that if those rocks had somehow bested me, I’d have had my faithful friend here to save me from the two feet drop to the bottom.”
Grenn scowls a little. It’s more like ten feet.
“We need to stay together,” he says stubbornly. He still hasn’t forgotten what it felt like to leave Sam behind, staring into nothing with the Old Bear’s lifeless head in his lap. He’s not in a hurry to feel that way again.
Pyp bats his lashes and places his hand on his heart, and starts crooning some Oldtown ballad as he trudges slowly past. Grenn waits til he has a bit of a headstart, then moves to catch up.
*
Of a night, if they’re lucky, they sleep in some crofter’s cottage or an old log cabin or one of the Watch’s abandoned castles along the way. Most nights, they aren’t lucky, and they sleep under their tent with the cold creeping in.
Pyp is small, but he’s fearsome comfortable to sleep up against. He’ll burrow into Grenn’s arms, cold as a stone, pound at his chest as if he’s fluffing some down pillow, curl up and be asleep in under a minute. Pyp can sleep on command; it’s a talent that he boasts of having cultivated while travelling with his mummer’s troupe. It takes a while for him to get warm, but Grenn speeds up the process as much as he can, running his hands idly up and down his back and not thinking much of it. Pyp’s always the coldest, but he don’t like the middle, he’s said so more than a hundred times, so it’s always Three Thumbs Cid huffing away or Sigroy lying as still as a rock at Grenn’s back.
Tonight, it’s Cid; Sigroy’s got the first watch. Usually their brothers decide whether or not it’s safe enough for a fire, and tonight they say no. Pyp chatters away as he brushes and waters the ponies and then immediately thereafter stretches out and glues himself to Grenn’s front like a breastplate. The top of his head brushes Grenn’s beard, which is getting longer and fuller by the day. He hasn’t bothered to shave in months. Pyp complains good-naturedly about that, too.
“If you have to have so much hair, you could at least share some with me. My face is colder than an Other’s ballsack.”
Grenn is dubious.
“Share it? What would you do with it? Not like you could plaster it to your face.”
“Hm. You’re probably right. You’re beard’s too stringy anyway, probably wouldn’t even keep me warm.”
“My beard’s not stringy. It’d keep you plenty warm, I’ve got lots of it,” Grenn says mulishly.
“Like a mammoth?”
“Yeah, exactly like a mammoth.”
By the time he realises, Pyp is already asleep. Grenn would scowl, maybe shove him awake again to protest that he isn’t a mammoth, but when he looks down, Pyp is nestled against his chest, grinning broadly in sleep. His pinched face and all the redness in it makes him look like a picture of a grumpkin that Grenn had once seen. He doesn’t know why a grumpkin should make him feel all warm in his chest.
He wraps his arms around Pyp, rubbing his back.
“The Others probably don’t even have ballsacks,” he murmurs, just so he can have the last word.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Cid growls somewhere near his neck, and Grenn drifts into sleep until it’s his turn to take up the watch.
*
Grenn’s not stupid, he doesn’t think, but there are some things he doesn’t understand.
Pyp likes to make people laugh. When he’s in the middle of a room and all eyes are on him and he’s telling a tale that’s probably half lies, half guesswork, he looks as happy as Grenn has ever seen him. Same for when he makes a jape about Toad’s face, before elbowing him in the ribs, or Halder’s blockhead. They all laugh, and think none the worse of Pyp for it, because it’s what he does.
Months and months ago, more than a year, after they’d all said their vows, the lads had taken him down to Mole Town to celebrate, so that they could buy him his first woman. That’s what they’d said, but Toad, Halder and the others had gone on to the alehouse after they dropped him off at the brothel, teasing him mercilessly all the way.
Only Pyp had stayed while he chose a woman (there were only seven) and taken her into the small room where they were to do it. The whore’s name was Hilda, and she wasn’t as young as the girls who trembled and looked fit to cry at Grenn’s size and made him sad and uncomfortable, and she wasn’t as old as the girls who weren’t really girls and reminded him unfortunately of his mother. She was pretty, with yellow hair and brown eyes and big soft tits.
And as soon as she’d tried to touch him, he had bolted. Straight out of the room, straight up out of the underground enclosure. He’d heard her yelling after him that his friends had already paid and he couldn’t get no refund, but he’d ignored that, and kept going until he was outside, and breathing in the smoggy air of the town. Pyp had found him, eventually, looking at the sky from under a tree, and they’d gone off together to the alehouse without another word.
That would have made a good story, probably. A great one; a lot of people would have laughed. Big dumb Grenn, too big and too dumb and too scared to fuck a woman. But he’s never heard Pyp tell it. And if he’s never heard Pyp tell it, then that means Pyp hasn’t told it, because Pyp never bothers to do anything behind anyone’s back. Except maybe behind Ser Alliser’s.
Grenn’s not even sure he would have minded if Pyp had told the story to others. He would have made it funny, though Grenn definitely hadn’t seen anything funny about it at the time. That was Pyp’s talent, to put humour into every situation, to get a laugh out of you when you thought you couldn’t laugh again.
But he’s never told it, and Grenn’s starting to think he never will. It’s puzzling, but there are some things that Grenn doesn’t think he’ll ever understand.
*
They’re near Rimegate when the wildlings attack.
It’s a small, desperate band, but large enough to feel confident in charging four brothers of the Night’s Watch. Grenn can’t tell if they’re part of the group that came through the gate when Jon opened it, or if they’re from a party who’ve scaled the Wall. That part of it doesn’t matter much. They charge like they’re ready to meet their gods.
Thanks to Cid’s fussiness, they’ve practised what to do if something like this were to happen. Pyp’s smallest and best with a bow; he scrambles up the nearest tree to start picking off the invaders one by one. Grenn, Sigroy and Cid unsheathe their steel.
Grenn doesn’t feel fear anymore during battle. Or rather, he thinks he feels it all the time, and he’s learning that it don’t mean you’re craven if you’re afraid. That’s the kind of saying that would have made him squint and shake his head a few months ago, but he’s beginning to understand. He doesn’t have to be fearless to fight these wildlings, to help protect his brothers and friends.
There are about a dozen of the wildlings, and they all come pouring down the snowy incline. Grenn stands his ground, and lets them come to him. The first dies with Grenn’s sword straight through his throat, making a queer gurgling sound with the blood bubbling in his mouth. He barely has time to wrench his steel free when the next one is upon him, swinging at his head with a great, wicked mace. He’s a heavy ‘un, even bigger than Grenn, and puts all his weight behind his vicious attacks. Grenn guards, ducks, and comes up behind him with his shield arm aching. The wildling gets a sword to his belly, and Grenn finishes him with a swipe across his throat.
A few paces away, Cid is holding his own against two raiders who look more like ghosts than men, rail-thin with desperation in their eyes. Sigroy is counting as he works, wheeling his greatsword in deadly arcs. Grenn goes to intercept a spearwife racing towards him, only to find her stopped short by an arrow in her eye. That makes him want to smile, so he does, and spins to find another foe.
It’s all blood and bone after that.
*
“Injuries?” Cid calls in a rough voice a while later, as they drag the dead into one pile to be looted and burnt. There probably won’t be much of the former to do, Grenn considers as he looks them over. They had nothing, or rather little enough that it spurred them towards an attack.
“One of the buggers got me over the head,” Sigroy reports. “Lost another tooth, but he did me a favour; I’m down from unlucky thirteen to an even dozen.”
“I’m all right,” Grenn calls. “Few scrapes, is all.” The deepest is on his arm, and he can hardly even feel it.
Pyp trots over.
“I’m as hale and healthy as ever, but Jemina, I fear, has farted for the last time.”
There’d been no time to get the ponies to a place of safety before the enemy engaged them. Sigroy’s mount had taken a stray wildling arrow to the throat. There’s nothing to be done for her but to put an end to her agony. They shift their loads, Pyp surrenders his own pony to ride double with Grenn, and Cid recalculates their pace to make up for the lost mount. They’re off again once bandages are doled out and the fire is lit, hoping to reach Rimegate by dusk.
*
This is the third time today that Grenn has had to turn around and raise his eyebrows at Pyp.
“What are you doing?”
They’ve been riding double for two days now. It’s not that different from riding alongside Pyp, except now he doesn’t have to shout to make his jokes heard, and there’s less time spent waiting for Pyp to catch up, and more time spent making sure that Pyp isn’t up to any antics that will have him falling off of Big Beth’s rump. Beth is the largest of the garrons and Pyp the smallest of the brothers, but the danger of being thrown is still present.
A light snow is falling, but it isn’t enough to hamper their movement or pace yet. Three Thumb Cid keeps the lead, picking out the safest paths with his sharp eyes, and Grenn and Pyp bring up the rear.
Pyp is giving him a mischievous, slit-eyed look.
“Nothing,” he says, and not seconds later, Grenn feels it again, small fingers digging at his ribcage. Over his many layers, it barely registers at all, but it’s a strange thing to feel nonetheless.
“Are you trying to tickle me?” he asks.
“Me?” Pyp sounds aghast. “Well, I never.”
Grenn leaves him be for the next few miles, concentrating on Sigroy’s back several yards in front of him, and the fire that Cid says they’ll be able to make at the next waycastle. Then he feels the hand again, this time somehow under his clothes, wriggling away against his ribs. He frowns.
“Quit it,” says Grenn. “Are you trying to make me send us off a cliff?”
This time, Pyp sounds peeved too. “Never mind that. Why aren’t you laughing?”
Grenn shrugs.
“I’m not ticklish.”
“You’re what?”
“Not ticklish,” he repeats, a little louder. “That type of thing doesn’t work on me. I thought you knew.”
“You never told me!” Grenn can feel Pyp shaking his head. “Not ticklish. Seven preserve us, I’m best friends with a soulless monster.”
Grenn laughs, his shoulders hunching and shaking snow onto his thighs.
“Are you ticklish?” he asks.
“None of your damned business, Aurochs,” Pyp says with some alarm. “Eyes on the road.”
Grenn is still laughing silently, hours later when the Torches come into view.
*
Grenn’s mother had been a seamstress for the wife of one of the minor riverlords. Not a very good one, but she had served well. She’d had a hard time of it, raising Grenn on her own, and maybe that was why he had turned out the way he did. Big, awkward, clumsy, no good at making friends, which had made her endlessly sad. She always used to say how she wished his no-good father had put another baby in her belly before he drank himself to death. Then Grenn would have had someone to play with, and talk with. A brother.
After she dies, it’s not long before he gets himself into trouble, not long before the trouble escalates, not long before he’s being offered a choice between his hand and the Wall.
It wouldn’t have been what she would have wanted for him, Grenn reflects sometimes. She’d always hated the cold. But if she could see him now, with Pyp chattering away at his back, with friends dotted all along the Wall, with true brothers…
Aye, she would be proud.
*
At the Torches, they make their camp in one of the inner buildings, where their smoke won’t be seen from the road. After they’ve made sure the area is secure, Sigroy leaves with the hope of scrounging up some game, and Cid tasks Pyp and Grenn with finding dry wood for their fire.
The clean cold air has a bite as it goes down his throat, but it’s not yet so bitter that it hurts. They make sure to keep the towers of the castle in sight as they approach the forest line, stomping through the snow.
“So,” says Pyp, kicking at the upper layer of frost as he walks. “What d’you think our first duties will be when we’re properly in exile?”
“We’re not going into exile,” Grenn says, hefting a mostly dry log under his arm. “Jon won’t keep us away forever.”
“I suppose we’ll have to learn how to fish,” Pyp continues like he hadn’t spoken. “And swim. Pity we didn’t think to practice back at Woodswatch.”
“You’d have killed yourself,” Grenn observes. “Just wait. Jon and the officers will agree on what to do with the king and the wildlings soon enough. And then Sam’ll come back and talk some sense into him.” He takes long strides to carry him over to where Pyp stands, hunting amidst the ruin of a fallen tree. “We’ll see them all again.”
Grenn wants his voice to be… comforting, he supposes, but then he’s not sure that he has a voice that was meant to comfort. He probably sounds more daft than anything. Pyp is throwing him a queer look over his shoulder, a look not unlike the face he makes when he’s deciding which jape would be best for a situation. Grenn gets the funny warm feeling in his chest again, and isn’t sure where it comes from, or why. He waits for Pyp to say something.
Pyp never does.
Instead, Grenn finds himself with a face full of snow. He sputters, standing there in shock while Pyp dances away, laughing with glee.
When he’s recovered from the initial surprise, there’s only one thing to do. He drops his log where he stands, scoops up a handful of snow, and lobs it straight at his friend. It breaks apart in mid-air, but most of it still gets him, raining snow over his hair and shoulders. Pyp doesn’t bother to block; he’s busy gathering up snow, packing it into a tight ball, and gods, that one actually stings a lot when it catches Grenn on the arm.
“It’s all about technique, Master Grenn!” Pyp calls. He’s taken cover behind the fallen tree. “Only when you’ve perfected the art of snowball making can you hope to beat me!”
“Or…” Grenn gathers up a huge armful of the snow, and ignoring all the missiles that Pyp launches at him in quick succession, carries it over to his friend’s hiding spot and dumps it all over his head. “I could just do this.”
It’s all-out war after that. Pyp can’t seem to stop laughing, scampering to and fro to make himself a difficult target, stopping only to aim his well-made snowballs at Grenn’s chest. Grenn has to keep pausing to shake himself free of snow, but he can’t keep from laughing either, tossing great handfuls at his friend whenever he gets the chance.
When Pyp darts too close, he takes that chance too, reaching out to grab at him. They fall to the ground wrestling, and this is no competition at all. Grenn tries to be polite about it. He flips Pyp onto his back, tickles him under the arm (which has him squirming and giggling even through his clothes) and captures both his wrists neatly with one hand. Pyp scrambles and claws and puts up a valiant, breathless fight, but when he realises he’s good and caught, he flops back into the snow, grinning.
“I yield, I yield!”
His face is bright pink; a sight to see by the setting sun. Grenn loosens his grip on his hands, but doesn’t let go. Something keeps him in place, staring down at his best friend and thinking about the warmth in his chest despite the cold in the air. Pyp’s eyes are awfully bright. Grenn thinks he’s beginning to understand.
Pyp stares up at him in turn.
“What are your terms?” he asks, carrying the jest. Now would be a good time to think of something clever to say, but Grenn just shakes his head.
“No demands?” Pyp presses. Grenn shakes his head again. He’s aware that there’s snow in his hair, snow in his beard, snow in places that will later become wet and uncomfortable, but all he can think to do is look down at Pyp with an empty feeling, and then try to fill it as best as he can.
Pyp’s lips are dry and cold. He has a bad habit of chewing on his bottom lip, picking and peeling at the skin, and Grenn feels every rough edge when he kisses him. It’s very brief, and as soft and gentle as he can make it.
He pulls back. Pyp is breathing very hard, as if all their roughhousing is only just catching up on him. Grenn licks his lips.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. He hopes his beard hides the redness in his cheeks. Belatedly, he releases Pyp, pulling his hand away from his friend’s wrists like it had chanced to touch hot steel. “That wasn’t… I shouldn’t have… that was…”
“No.” Pyp shakes his head as he sits up, and then ruffles the snow out of his hair. “Don’t say sorry, you oaf.”
Pyp’s kiss is just as soft and just as sweet, and when he breaks away, he almost looks shy. Grenn is breathless and happy and bewildered and all manner of things that he doesn’t have the words for.
When they kiss for the third time, they come together almost simultaneously. Pyp crawls into Grenn’s lap, pressing himself up against his chest like he does at night, and kisses him long and slow, as if he’s been wanting to touch him for ages. Grenn wraps his arms around him, keeping him close, because this is what they’ve been moving towards and he means to keep it dear.
Off in the west, the sun is setting.
*
The last castle of the Wall rises into view in the east.
Cid, a fisherman by birth, has been going on about the smell of salt in the air for leagues now, but Grenn only believes they’re reaching the end of their voyage when he can actually see the Bay of Seals glittering on the edge of the horizon. Cid spurs his pony on, eager for home, but Grenn pulls his mount to a stop on a crest where he has a good view of Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. It’s a castle like any of the others; tall, sturdily built, thick and foreboding. And it’s their home now.
Pyp fidgets behind him, one arm around his waist.
“What is it? Haven’t you ever seen the ocean before?”
“Once. Yoren passed through White Harbour when he brought me north.”
Pyp watches with him for a spell, his pointy chin propped on Grenn’s shoulder. Grenn is very aware of his arm slung around his waist, and the fact that his face is so near, and that if he craned his neck just so, he’d be able to see the red mark he left on the underside of Pyp’s jaw. His stomach flips.
“It won’t be so bad,” Pyp says, eventually. He sounds like he means it. When Grenn turns to look at him, he’s smiling. “I think it’s a bit warmer than Castle Black, actually.”
It’s not; it’s freezing just the same as it was on the morning they left. But Grenn knows what he means. He watches the shimmering sea, feels his friend’s warmth at his back, and he feels like everything is going to be all right.
“They’ll be waiting for us,” he says as Sigroy comes up the hill behind them. Pyp nods, and with both hands on the reins, Grenn kicks his mount into a trot, and leads them down towards the keep.