The sun gave up at the bridge.
Ser Bomboclat Chickonuget had been told it would, and had not believed it, the way a man does not believe a thing about the weather in a country he has never fought in. He rode out of the gold afternoon of Elwynn with bees in the clover and a boy waving from a hay cart, and his horse set one hoof on the far side of the river, and the color went out of the world like water out of a cracked cup. Not night. Night was honest. This was the hour after a funeral, held in place and made to last.
He was fifty-one years old and built like the gate of a keep. His skin was the deep brown of oiled walnut, his beard had gone the grey of old chain, and he had a warhammer named Vesper across his back that had last been blessed in a chapel that no longer had a roof. In his saddlebag, wrapped in oilcloth, was a libram he had not opened since Andorhal. In his coat was a flask he opened rather more often.
It was not a name that fit on a tabard. Quartermasters had been trying to shorten it for thirty years, and he had outlasted every one of them. In Lordaeron the men had called him Ser Chick, once each, and then called him Ser.
One man had been allowed to go on calling him Chick. That was the man he had come about.
The letter was in his glove. He had read it enough times that the fold had worn through. My father is walking, it said, in a careful hand that had learned its letters late. He was your friend. The Watch cannot stop him and the Cathedral does not answer. If any of the Order still remember Morgan Ladimore, I ask that one of you come and do what a daughter cannot. It was signed Sarah Ladimore, Night Watch, Darkshire.
He drank, capped the flask, and rode on under trees that leaned in to listen.
Darkshire burned its lamps at noon. It had the look of a town holding its breath: shutters barred, a gibbet at the crossroads with nothing in it and fresh rope on it, and a line of Watchers along the square in black tabards, each with a torch, each with the grey, sanded-down face of someone who slept in pieces. A woman with a commander's knot on her shoulder looked him over from the steps of the town hall, took in the hammer, the libram's outline, the flask's.
"Silver Hand," she said. It was not a welcome. "We wrote to Stormwind for a regiment. Two years running."
"They sent their regrets, I expect."
"They sent a tax assessor." She turned to go in. "Don't die on the Raven Hill road, ser. We haven't the people to carry something your size."
The Scarlet Raven had a fire, which was the main thing, and a tavernkeep who poured without talking, which was the second. Bomboclat took the table with its back to the chimney and let the heat find the old places: the knee from Stratholme, the shoulder from the pass, the long seam under his ribs where a ghoul had opened him at Andorhal and Morgan Ladimore had stood over him for an hour with a broken shield, saying the litany wrong on purpose to keep him angry enough to stay awake.
"You're in my seat."
She was a Watch sergeant, forty or near it, with a burn scar that ran from her ear into her collar and a way of standing that put her weight where she could use it. She did not look as if she wanted the seat. She looked as if she wanted to see what he would do.
"There's room for two backs on this wall," he said, and moved the hammer.
Her name was Deline Harrow. She drank Duskwood rye, which tasted like a cellar, and she drank it at his pace, which few could. She told him what the Watch would not put in a letter: that the dead had been coming up at Raven Hill since before she took the tabard; that there were wolves in the south that stood on two legs; that her husband had gone out with a patrol four winters back and come home the following spring, to the door, at night, knocking in the way he had always knocked.
"What did you do?" Bomboclat asked.
"What do you think I did." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "I lit the lamp oil. It was a good door, too." She touched the scar without seeming to know she did. "And you? You've the look of a man who came a long way to do something he doesn't want to."
"I've the look of a man who is good at one thing," he said, "and has begun to suspect it was the wrong thing to be good at."
She laughed, low, with her whole chest. It was the first clean sound he had heard since the bridge.
It was not love and neither of them was fool enough to call it that. It was two people who had buried enough to know what a night was for. Her room was over the stable, warm from the animals below, and she barred the door out of habit and then stood with her back against it and looked at him as frankly as she had looked at the hammer. He was careful with the buckles of her tabard because his hands were large and the day had made them unsteady. She was not careful with anything. Afterward she slept with one hand on the knife under the bolster and the other flat on his chest, as if to be sure something in the room was still breathing, and he lay awake and listened to the town hold its breath around them, and did not reach for the flask, and noticed that he had not.
Sarah Ladimore had her father's jaw. It hit him like a mace.
She was on the dawn watch, though there was no dawn, only a thinning of the dark to the color of dishwater. She was perhaps twenty-five. She stood very straight to say her piece, the way the young do when they have practiced it.
"He went north with the Order when I was seven. He wrote every month. Then the letters stopped coming, ours and his both; the roads were closed for the plague. My mother sold the plough horse and then the plough. The fever took my brothers in the same week. My mother went after. I was at my aunt's in Goldshire or I would have gone too." Her voice did not change at any of it. "He came home to a house with the door open and three graves a neighbor dug. Nobody was there to tell him I was alive. He found some men on the road. Farmers. He thought they were looters. He thought a great many things, I suppose." She looked at the torch in her fist. "When he understood what he had done, he used his own knife. And then he got up again. They call him Mor'Ladim now. He has killed eleven of the Watch. I would like him to stop."
"He was the best of us," Bomboclat said.
"So everyone tells me. It has not been a comfort."
He owed her the rest. He had ridden four days rehearsing ways not to say it.
"The winter before the plague, his term was up," he said. "He had his discharge in his hand. He meant to be home for the planting. I was his captain. We were short of men who could hold a line, and I walked him round the camp at Hearthglen for half a night and talked to him about duty. I was good at that. I told him: one more season, Morgan. One more season and the north is safe and you go home to them with honor." He made himself keep looking at her. "He stayed because I asked. That is the season your mother sold the plough."
Sarah Ladimore was quiet for a long moment. The torch hissed.
"I have wanted someone to hate for eighteen years," she said at last. "I thought it would feel like more than this." She worked a ring off a cord around her neck, a plain band worn thin, and put it in his palm and closed his fingers over it. Her hand was shaking; her voice was not. "It was my mother's. He will know it. If there is anything in there that can still know things."
The Raven Hill cemetery had been built for a village and filled by a war. The stones went up the slope in ranks, and between them the earth was turned and turned again, as if something under it could not get comfortable.
Deline had wanted to come. He had told her no. She had told him what he could do with his no, in terms that would have impressed a Kul Tiran bosun, and in the end she had agreed to hold the lich gate with a lantern and a crossbow, so that there would be one light for him to walk back toward.
He said the invocation at the first row of graves, the short one, the soldier's one. Nothing answered. It had been a long time since anything had. The Light was not a well you could neglect for fifteen years and then lower a bucket into.
So he did it with the hammer.
The first of them came up between two leaning stones, grave-cloth and gristle, and he broke it at the hip and then the skull, and stepped over it. The next three came together. Vesper weighed eleven pounds at the head and he had swung her for thirty years; there was no art in it and none needed. Bone went like kindling. Something with most of a face got its teeth into his forearm above the vambrace and he put his thumb through its eye and pulled it off him with a piece of his own skin still in its mouth. He was bleeding, and blowing like a cart horse, and somewhere around the ninth or tenth he found he was reciting the litany, the wrong way, the way Morgan had said it at Andorhal. It kept him angry enough to stay awake.
Then the dead stopped coming, all at once, the way birds stop singing.
Mor'Ladim stood at the top of the rise.
The armor had been silver and was now the black of a burned pot. The tabard was rags. He carried a longsword that Bomboclat had watched him receive from the hands of Uther himself, on a spring morning with banners. There was no face behind the visor, only a cold blue patience, and it came down the hill without hurry, the way Morgan had always walked into a fight, as if he had an appointment.
The first blow broke Bomboclat's shield arm. He had no shield; it broke the arm. The second he caught on Vesper's haft and it drove him to one knee in the grave mud, and the third opened his side along the old Andorhal seam as neatly as if the dead man had remembered where to find it.
Perhaps he had. The helm tilted.
"Chick." It was a voice like a door in an empty house. "You said one season."
"I did." He got the words out around blood. "I was wrong, Morgan. I have been wrong for eighteen years. I am sorry for it."
The sword came up.
He could not lift the hammer. He let go of it. That was the thing he would turn over afterward, on other nights: that it began when he let go. He did not ask for strength; he had asked for that at the gate and been refused, and rightly. He did not ask to live. Kneeling in a stranger's grave with his friend's sword over him, Ser Bomboclat Chickonuget prayed for the first time since Andorhal, and what he asked was: not for me. For him. Let him put it down.
The Light came the way the sun had gone at the bridge: all at once, and into everything.
He lurched up inside the falling blade and put both bare hands on the black breastplate, over the place where a heart had been, and held on.
The laying on of hands is meant to mend the living. On the dead it is a forge. Mor'Ladim screamed, and it was Morgan's scream, and the armor went red, then white, and Bomboclat's palms cooked against it and he held on. He held on while the sword fell out of fingers that were coming apart into ash and embers. He held on while the blue went out of the visor and something else came into it for the space of one breath, brown and tired and puzzled, a farmer's eyes. He had the ring between his burned fingers. He pressed it to the dead man's chest.
"Sarah is alive," he said. "Do you hear me? She was in Goldshire. She is alive, she is grown, she has your damned jaw. Go home, Morgan."
"Lys," said Morgan Ladimore, quite gently, to someone over Bomboclat's shoulder.
Then there was only armor, empty, cooling, and a big man on his knees in the mud holding it up.
Deline got him down the hill. He never did learn how. He remembered a lantern, and a great deal of profanity, and her shoulder under his arm like a tent pole.
The town's one priest set the arm and sewed the seam and looked at his hands and said nothing, because there was nothing in his books for it. The palms had healed overnight, without his asking, into smooth pale scar. In the center of each was the print of a breastplate's sunburst, exact as a seal in wax. They did not hurt. They never would again, and on cold nights for the rest of his life they would be the only part of him that was warm.
Sarah Ladimore buried the ring herself, in the fourth grave beside the other three, with the Watch standing in a line and the commander holding a torch at the head. Nobody said the rite. Sarah said, "You're late," to the turned earth, and then put her hand over her mouth, and Deline Harrow, who had burned her own front door, stepped out of the line and held her up.
Bomboclat stood at the back with his arm in a sling. He had the longsword wrapped in his cloak, to give her when she could bear to look at it. He had the flask in his coat. He took it out, considered the weight of it, and poured it on the ground for the dead of the north; it seemed the least that he owed them and the most that it was good for.
He ought to have ridden for Stormwind in the morning. The Cathedral would want a report, and he found he did not care to give one to men who had sent a tax assessor.
There was a rack inside the door of the Watch house where the lanterns hung, one peg for every Watcher, a name burned into the wood above each. Eleven of the pegs were empty. That evening, when the lamps were lit against a dark that had not actually changed, he went in and stood before the rack until the duty sergeant came to see what was blocking her door.
"That one," he said, and nodded at the nearest empty peg. "For the winter. You'll need to burn a longer board for the name."
Deline looked at him for a while. Then she took down a lantern, trimmed the wick with her thumbnail, lit it from her own, and held it out.
His scarred palm closed around the handle. The flame, for no reason the sergeant could have given, burned a shade more gold than the others.
"Raven Hill road," she said. "Second watch. Try to keep up, old man."
They went out together into the dark, and the dark, a little, made room.