Sorry for the delay on this. It's been a long month.

Varys

Whenever he was away he had a system for the messages from his little birds – they placed the slips of paper into a locked box that had a slot at the top. As long as they numbered them correctly then sorting them out was easy but time-consuming when he returned to his rooms.

At the moment he welcomed the tedium of sorting the slips into the right order and then reading them, losing himself in the relative humdrum task. The Game of Thrones was a finely nuanced one at times, with tides and shifts that sometimes could only be discerned from changes to marriage pacts or fosterings. Right now however the Game was indeed in abeyance, although that would change as the news spread that the King was in possible need of a new bride, who had to be fertile and young and in no way resemble Cersei Lannister.

He really needed that tedium after the mental excitement of the day. Oberyn Martell's bastard daughter was an excellent artist, whose pictures were detailed. Very detailed. Almost too detailed in their depiction of running wights. It was one thing to see a head in a cage. The images of running wights were disturbing.

And then there had been the other parts of the thick report. The news of Ned Stark's lightning fast trip South from Castle Black to Winterfell was rather disturbing, although it had not seemed to surprise Jon Arryn. The tale of how Ned Stark had discovered the treason of Cersei and Jaime Lannister had been detailed enough to make Oberyn Martell smirk a lot and Pycelle mutter even more.

But it had been the postscript, hurriedly scribbled at the end, that had made everyone sit up and stare. There had been a drawing as well, one of an old man with forceful features and a hood with horns. Apparently The Green Man – not a Green Man, The Green Man – was in Winterfell. And he had a name, or had once had another name. Ser Duncan the Tall. Once of the Kingsguard of King Aegon the Unlikely. Supposedly dead since the Tragedy of Summerhall.

That had caused a lot of stunned silence and then a lot of scoffing (Pycelle excelling at that) – and then a raven message had arrived from the King that had confirmed it with an almost absent-minded 'oh by the way, this happened as well, oops I should have mentioned it earlier' statement. Whereupon the meeting had ended on a note of genuinely stunned silence.

He paused from his labours and stared at the map on the wall again, his eyes finding Summerhall on it almost without thinking. He had always wondered about just what had happened there that night. Princess Rhaella had said at the time that it had been Ser Duncan who had helped her to give birth to Rhaegar, before vanishing back into the burning building, but the body of Ser Duncan the Tall had never been found afterwards. The fires had been too intense to ascertain who had been who afterwards, but King Aegon's body, along with Prince Duncan, had been identified by their rings.

Ser Duncan the Tall's body had never been found, although when he had later looked into it he had heard the odd rumour of a tall man in fine clothes who had wandered westwards away from Summerhall in the days after, one arm badly burned. At the time he'd put it down to a servant fleeing, or some other reason, but now? He was no longer sure.

Knuckles rapped against the door and he looked up with a quickly suppressed sigh. He had been expecting this. He slipped out of his chair and went to the door to open it to reveal, as he had thought, Prince Oberyn Martell. The Dornishman smirked at him, gave him an ironic salute with the goblet he was carrying, swaggered in, located a chair at random and then sat on it, before pouring himself a drink from the bottle of wine he was carrying in his other hand. "Ah, Varys!"

"Prince Oberyn." He returned to his chair, stuck both hands up his sleeves and awaited the inevitable volley of impertinences. "You know, I do have wine in here. You didn't have to bring your own."

"Psaw!" Oberyn muttered with a wry glance at him. "I don't trust you and you don't trust me. Nor should anyone trust the Red Viper of Dorne. Would you trust any drink that I personally poured?"

He bowed his head a little in acknowledgement, poured himself a goblet of his favourite wine and then saluted the other man with it, who returned the gesture before they both drank.

The Dornishman lowered the goblet from his lips and sighed. "Ah, what a day."

"Indeed." He paused. "I must say that your daughter is a very good draughtsman. Her drawings from the Wall are… impressive. And, I have to say, rather…"

"Frightening? Aye. Wights and Others." His eyes lost their focus for a moment as he obviously thought about what it all meant. "Now we know what the true enemy is." He sighed, before looking about with some amusement. "I take it that your little birds do not eavesdrop on you?"

"Hardly," he replied with a certain amount of amusement. "I watch the watchers. And listeners. I take it that you wish to talk about a certain plan that we were discussing?"

Oberyn Martell nodded with a slight air of mournfulness. "It was a decent plan, with shades of a good plan. But it is now a very dead plan."

He nodded. "Oh, I agree. It was not a perfect plan, but it was one that had a decent chance of working. And now we must plan for a war on the Wall against creatures born of magic." He shuddered. Magic, how he hated the very idea of it.

Oberyn Martell eyed him carefully. "You do not look happy about that fact."

He pulled the slightest of faces. "Magic is… well, to use the words of others, inconstant. Unpredictable. These… Others… who knows where they are really from or what they want?"

"Sarella said that they want us all dead."

"Yes, but why? It seems so senseless."

"Ancient hatreds," Oberyn said with a shrug. "It's a good thing that our plan is dead now. And it is also good that a certain Griffin-like person is dead." He eyed him sardonically, but Varys merely raised an eyebrow. "I have my own sources in Essos. This morning I heard that there had been a tragic fire on a boat owned by that Griffin-like person, who oddly enough was seen unmoving on the deck of that boat even as it burned. You took your time getting back from Pentos, so I presume that you paid a visit to that boat?"

He smiled thinly in response. "Strange to think that ships that float on water can be so… flammable? As for Old Griff, as I believe that some called him, it's likely that he ate something that disagreed with him and dropped his lantern. Tragic."

The Dornishman smiled slightly and sipped from his goblet. "Oh yes, tragic indeed. He had a son didn't he? Whatever became of him?"

"These kinds of deaths often run in the family. He died, or so I am told. Tragic, as I said."

This got him a nod. "Very true. Probably for the best. Old Griff could be… somewhat obsessed in his beliefs. In his desire for revenge. That's what made him so useful."

"And now, alas, he is dead. A shame." Varys sipped from his own goblet.

"You really didn't know about the wildfire, did you?" Oberyn Martell said as he topped up his goblet.

He responded with a somewhat pointed glance. "Do you really think that I would have worked in the Red Keep for so many years with the knowledge that there was a cache of maturing wildfire under me?" He shuddered. "No, I had no idea. I knew that Aerys Targaryen was working on something with his pet pyromancer that he had appointed as Hand of the King, but I did not know about the caches. I was told once that if I pried into the affairs of the increasingly mad king I would end up being forced into a barrel of wildfire."

The other man nodded slowly. "So," Oberyn said after a long moment of what might have been mistaken for a companionable silence, "You have Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons somewhere safe and secure?" He grinned at the slight flicker of the eyes that Varys instantly regretted. "I thought as much. You said that neither Pentos or Braavos know where she was and that you were deploying your little birds to find her. However, you did not say that you did not know where she was."

He raised an eyebrow and was about to reply when the Dornishman waved a hand dismissively. "Don't tell me where she is, it's enough to know that she and her dragons are safe." He sipped from his goblet and then his eyes hardened. "We might need them. No – we will need them." Then he looked back at him. "Is she sane?"

This was a good question and he paused and thought it over. "Yes," he said eventually. "I think that she is. At the present moment, anyway."

Oberyn Martell looked at him doubtfully. "You are sure? Her Father was mad and of her two brothers the elder destroyed his own dynasty over a girl and a prophecy and the younger tried to murder her."

"I am aware, but so far she more resembles her Mother than any of her male relatives." He sighed. "However, that is not to say that she will stay sane. We must watch and wait."

There was another moment of silence and then Oberyn Martell nodded and finished off the wine in his goblet. "Agreed. Keep her safe and watch her. And I will go to the Wall with the wildfire. I will say this much – life isn't boring at the moment!" And with that he was gone, striding off with his bottle and goblet.

Varys shook his head a little and returned to his messages. There was a lot to be done.

Jaime

The further they rode the more he realised that so far he had barely scratched the surface of seeing the North. And so much of it was just empty, or had once been inhabited. Crumbled towers and ruined castles could sometimes be seen on the horizon, surrounded by trees or choked with ivy.

But then there were also the signs of life. The castles that were being worked on, repaired, the inns that were being refurbished, the farms that were being cleared. Yes, he had seen so much of the same further South, but it was the way that the men around him were reacting that he was picking up.

More often than not they made camp in copses or places that had access to dry brush that could be placed on a fire. Sometimes they stayed at inns, the kind of places that he would have scorned before, but now… even a small bath was now something that he looked forwards to with a sigh of pleasure.

Something else he was looking forwards to was whenever the Seven Hells this bloody short beard he was growing would stop itching.

When they entered the New Gift – how they could tell he had no idea – the muttering increased from the veterans of the Night's Watch. As far as he could tell the area looked the same as the land to the South, if possibly slightly busier – and then he realised that before the Call it had been the other way around and that in fact there had been areas of both the New and Old Gift that had been all but abandoned.

At one point as they rode one of the older men had stiffened at the sight of a farm being worked on to one side, ridden up to Will, asked something and then on getting a nod had ridden off at the gallop to the farm. An hour later he had rejoined them, snuffling and wiping at his eyes.

"That farm was me Da's," he muttered when someone asked him what was amiss. "Grew up there. Me brother inherited it and I joined the Watch. Volunteered, family tradition. Eldest inherits the farm, second to the Wall, others leave for elsewhere. Me brother – Darryl that was – well, he died in a wildling raid when he was trading with another farm, so his son took it over. And he closed up and took his family – wife and three bairns – South because of the raids two years ago. Now he's back. He's back. Farming hard. Sons growing. Daughter doing well." And then he blew his nose on a rag and didn't say another word for several hours.

Something that nagged at him a little as they rode North after that was that more than a few of the people working in the fields seemed to be wearing furs, or in some cases were stripped to the waist, below which they were wearing furs. Some were in the middle of what looked like intent conversations with men and women who were dressed in less warm clothes that looked better suited.

"Wildlings?" He muttered the word to his neighbour, who nodded and looked as if he wanted to hawk and spit to one side. He eyed the men in furs carefully and then wondered how the people that Father had one described as 'animals' were dealing with civilization.

Not too long after that he had his answer when they saw a head on a spike by the side of the road. Will looked about and then raised a hand to stop them, as he called out to a man working in a field to one side. The man strode over and then gestured at the head. "You wondering who he was? A wildling. Fool tried to rape my daughter. She's got a good set o'lungs on her and we got the shit before he could do anything other than scare her and show what a small cock he had. Then they came."

"They? They who?"

"The Thenn. Patrols of them go around where the Wildlings are. Knock heads together when they have to." He looked around at them and then grinned a rather unsettling grin. "Lord Stark told that King beyond the Wall, Rayder, that his Wildlings had to obey the laws of the North when they came South of the Wall. And the Thenn are sworn to Lord Stark. They obey his orders, so when he told them to keep order – they bloody well do it. They listened to what we all had to say and then they had that would-be rapist of my girl on his knees before they took his head clean off with a sword. People respect the Thenn. Scary buggers."

They rode on after that and he spent some time in thought. If he remembered correctly the Thenn were from a valley to the North of the Wall and wore bronze. And there had been that odd earless man in Winterfell who Tyrion had said was a Magar, or Magnar or something like that, of the Thenn. So Ned Stark had his own private army. Of men armed with bronze. He scoffed internally.

And then, several hours later and as the Sun started to drift down towards the horizon he saw something odd up ahead. Peculiar shapes on things that did not move as horses did. Will spotted them as well and had them pause for a moment. "Giants up ahead," he said. "On mammoths too. Watch your horses, they might not like the sight or smell of them." He looked about. "They'll smell us coming, if this wind keeps true."

Giants. Tyrion had spoken of them. But it was one thing to hear of them and another to see them. They were like huge shaggy men, covered with what at first he thought were cloths made from fur but which at second glance was actual fur. Their arms were longer than those of a man and their faces subtly different. Seeing them on their mammoths was… well, it drove home everything that Tyrion had told him. If they had not been real enough before, things were certainly real enough now.

He could tell at a glance that the giants – there were about twenty of them – were wary of the men, muttering amongst themselves in… the Language of the First Men? Or something close to that. He listened carefully as the leader of the giants talked to Will, but he did not have Tyrion's ear for language. Even so he could tell that the Will was a bit surprised by what they said. And then there was the odd thing. At one point the giant doing all the talking seemed to sniff the air with great snuffling snorts – and then looked straight at Jaime for a moment. Will talked to them a bit more and then rejoined them.

"Giants are heading South out of the Gift," he told the group as they rode on. "They were the last of their kind to come South of the Wall, so they're joining their kind on the Eastern foothills of the Northern Mountains, away from men like the Mountain Clans and their fields of barley that their mammoths think is grass." Then he shook his head in thought. "They were talking to Lord Umber about breeding a hairier kind of cattle. They're good at husbandry. Good at growing things too." He caught the baffled look that was on Jaime's face. "They eat no meat, Lannister. Ignore the tales. They don't eat men. They're just wary of us."

"Why?"

"You," Will said grimly. "They smelled you."

Baffled, he stared at the man. "Smelled me? Do I smell so bad?"

Will shook his head. "No, they smelt the magic on you, or at least I think that's what they said. The giants said that the eyes of the Old Gods were on you, but could not say if that was good or bad."

The other men looked at him, as unsettled as he now felt. He almost wanted to stare at the sky. Wasn't that where the Old Gods were? Or were they in the white trees?

"Is the GreatJon on the road then?" Herrick, a slight dark-haired man who seemed almost ambivalent to Jaime compared to the others at times, asked as they resumed their ride.

"Aye," said Will and true enough they soon encountered him as they reached a large inn on the road and secured rooms for the night. The inn looked as if it had recently been expanded, given the fresh look of some of the walls, but fortunately the party from the Last Hearth was a small one.

Not that Jaime was keen to meet the Lord of the Last Hearth. The last time he had seen the great oaf was at Pyke, but the time before that had been at the Red Keep. Both times he had regarded Jaime as a piece of dung on his boot. He was loud, boisterous, ate a lot, drank a lot and sang a lot when drunk. And he hadn't changed very much. He reminded him of the Fat King before the Call. So Jaime kept his head down, unsaddled his horse, scrubbed the stink of the road off with a pitcher of hot water and some rags and then chose the darkest corner of the main room of the inn to get some supper.

It sort of worked. He heard Will walking to the Loud Lord of the Last Hearth, who was incapable of talking softly and who confirmed that yes he had been talking to giants to get some ideas about a different kind of cattle. He avoided people's eyes and waited until at last a serving girl brought him some mutton in gravy with bread and a mug of ale.

As he ate and drank he brooded. The eyes of the Old Gods were on him, were they? He didn't know what to make of that. Should he be fearful? What were they watching him for? What was happening to him? All of a sudden, over these past months, everything that he thought he knew had been upended, ripped up, destroyed. His sins had been discovered, he had been condemned despite the good deeds that he had done – good deeds that had placed King's Landing at risk.

It took an effort to swallow; the food and drink were as ashes in his mouth. He looked up as the men and women in the room laughed at something that the large-boned Lord of the Last Hearth had said – and all of a sudden he had to get out. The room was too hot all of a sudden, the laughter too loud, the smells of the food and the people too much. He stood quietly and slipped out, seeking the door to the outside.

As he closed the door behind him and inhaled the cool air he looked up. The stars were shining down on him and he realised that the hour was later than he had realised. Somewhere those same stars were shining down on Tyrion and his Dacey, on Tommen and Myrcella and… Cersei.

Cersei. She was the reason why he was here, she was the reason why all of his decisions in the past decade and a half had been wrong, foolish, stupid. He both loved and hated her now. He'd warned her that they could be found out, but she'd always laughed and told him now to be silly. Well, now here he was. A ruined former Kingsguard, shamed beyond measure, an embarrassment to his family, now headed to a life of service in exile at the arse end of the world. Fighting the snarks and grumkins that he once doubted even existed.

He looked out at the darkened landscape bleakly and then he reached up and his fingers closed around the pouch that hung around his neck and which held the ashes of his white cloak. For a moment he wanted to pull that pouch off, hurl it at the Moon and then walk off into the darkness, to walk until he couldn't walk any more and then crawl away to die on some naked hillside of hunger or thirst or exposure. Would that be desertion though? Would the Old Gods kill him quickly or slowly for walking away? He'd sworn an oath on the Fist of Winter. Would he die like Bootle had, according to Tyrion? Or… what?

All of a sudden he realised that he was not alone. He turned his head and saw that for such a large man GreatJon Umber could move surprisingly quietly. "Umber."

"Lannister." The big man tilted his head a little and looked at him. "Saw you slip out. I've seen that look on the face of a few men before."

"What look?"

"The look of a man who wants to stop living." He shook his head. "It seems that there are a lot of men of the North who owe you their lives, including me." He laughed harshly. "Gods, I always thought you an oathbreaking little cunt who liked to lick your father's arse. And now all kinds of truths have been unearthed. You killed Aerys to save King's Landing. Not your father's army, not the rebel army, the ordinary people of King's Landing. You've got balls on you, lad."

He looked away. "I should have told someone," he said thickly after a moment. "About the wildfire."

"It's been secured," the GreatJon grunted as he stepped forwards. "Got a raven the other day. King's Landing is safe."

He felt his shoulders relax a little. "Good."

The GreatJon looked him up and down again. "So, you're bound for the Wall now."

"I am."

"I was told you swore your oath on the Fist, in front of the Old Gods, with red fire in the eyes of Ned Stark. I've been there when that happened. Almost scared me shitless."

Now that was a terrifying thought. And then Jaime jumped a little as the large man next to him laid a huge hand on his shoulder. "The Wall and the Night's Watch is honourable service, Lannister. Don't be stupid and try and end yourself – aye, like I said, I've seen it before. Winters are hard up here and there are times when a man's gone for a 'walk' in the snow and never returned because his portion of food can be given to his children or grandchildren.

"No, there's a fight ahead for you. I'm told you're a good swordsman. There's going to be a war on the wall. You're needed. You know what's out there now. Wights. Others. Creatures from nightmares. They're fighting…" The big man visibly struggled for words. And then, after a great shout of laughter came from the inn, he hooked a thumb back at it. "They're fighting against that. Life. Laughter. Song. They want to pinch us out like you snuff out a candle. No more songs. No more life. No babes being born. No life. Just death. You, me, your brother, everyone – dead. If you're going to fight for anything, fight for that." He remembered that nightmare he had had about the fall of the Rock and shuddered a little.

Another slap on the shoulder almost sent him reeling as the GreatJon turned and then winked at a giggling barmaid who had truly impressive cleavage and who was waiting at the door. "Fight for a pretty face and tits to bury your face in!" It was an odd battlecry, but then he was gone.

Jaime stood in the dark and clutched at the pouch again. And then he sighed and went back inside. He needed ale and sleep.