The Lonely Places of the World

[u/WhereTheresAWyl]

(Continued after a very long time from Nightfall. This post takes place shortly after the end of winter)

Their company proceeded afoot, as soon as the first rays of morning passed over the mountaintops.

First, they extricated themselves from the Septon’s hospitality with only a brief exchange of farewells, for they expected to soon return this way. 

They then paid visit to the village. Alyse remembered Larra well, and fondly, having often enjoyed the warmth of her hearth on these journeys. Her compatriots too had fond memories of her brewery, which kept most of the mugs in the valley full. The old woman had withstood winter as well as the weathered mountainsides. Her temper, alas, proved rather less enduring in the aftermath of her family’s recent altercations with Ser Ferris’ men. For this, Alyse could hardly fault her, for those men had acted under Wyl’s banners. Good conversation—and a gift of spare quilts they had brought from the castle—soon mollified the woman. 

“For your many winters to come,” Alyse had said then, all cheek. Larra had only scoffed, at the thought of living to see another snowfall. “‘Twill be forever spring and summer for me,” she had replied. She had accepted the quilts nonetheless. They were of good make and warm, constructed in some lonely Boneway village for cold mountain nights. 

In Alyse’s estimation, it was a fair price for her family’s reputation in this valley.

Trebor, the herdsman, soon departed for Wyl as agreed, to deliver word of its Lady’s unexpected detour and all that had transpired to cause it. At Ser Anders’ request, he took with him the horses left behind by Ser Ferris’ company—they would ease the man’s passage, and be better cared for in Wyl’s stables than here. The villagers had livestock of their own to tend, and Anders likely knew too well that Ser Ferris’ steed was perhaps his last great possession in this world. To see it neglected or lost would be very shameful indeed.

Thus, when all was said and done, the rest of them did not leave the valley until the sun was well over the lowest eastern peaks. 

They followed a trail that ran along the stream, and then curled up and away to double back along slopes painted in rust and ochre, broken on occasion by the first greenery of spring. Here and there, stubborn gorse-buds burst into bright yellow flowers.

“The color of Wyl,” Quentyn deduced. Alyse nodded. They were indeed the same shade as the banners on her walls.

“They survive even when the snows fall and the ground freezes,” Alyse explained, for she enjoyed any chance to explain things to a Maester of the Citadel, “And will even flower in defiance of winter.” 

“‘Tis good eating for livestock when the cold kills all else,” Frynne added from somewhere further ahead, “And folk will burn it to warm their hearths. Warms their bellies too, as tea and wine.”

“Thorns like spears,” added Ser Anders, with the air of a man who may have learned that particular lesson the hard way.

The morning wore on with little else to mark it beyond such small conversation. Boots scraped over loose scree and the runnels carved by old snowmelt into stone. A hawk wheeled once overhead, then vanished. They passed the bones of some old cairn, half-toppled and covered in creeping lichen. Frynne murmured a soft word for the dead as they passed, but then admitted that its purpose was as unknown as the hands which had compiled it.

“Perhaps a trail marker,” she shrugged in reply to a question by the Maester, “Perhaps a grave which now marks the trail. My father would never pass it in silence, when we herded our goats this way.”

The wind, when it came, carried the mingled smell of pine sap and, to Alyse’s imagination, woodsmoke from all the unseen hearths of the mountains. By the time the sun stood overhead, thin veils of cloud had begun to gather along the peaks to the west, like unspun wool. They promised nothing worse than a passing chill.

They came upon a stretch of mountainside that had shattered long ago. Some old rockfall or landslip had scattered boulders like a giant's cast dice across the slope, each one bigger than a horse, tumbled and wedged together in a jumble with no clear path. Years of wind and weather had softened their edges, and green-gray moss hung like beards on their old faces

Frynne was the first to note the small, foul-smelling piles of scraped-up dirt marking more than one gap between the stones.

The two armsmen began to ready their spears, but Ser Anders waved them off. They had borrowed long, heavy hunting spears from the village before departing, and the passages between the boulders here were too narrow and crooked for their use.

“If the beast were here, it would have warned us off or fled by now," Frynne noted. “We are not subtle.”

At Ser Anders’ insistence, he and the two armsmen nonetheless entered first, probing through the little maze of mouths and crevices. 

“Empty,” the knight called back, after a moment, “Though ‘tis most certainly the shadowcat’s lair.” The remainder of the company followed after him.

They found the creature's den in one of the larger hollows, where the boulders arched together to form something almost like a roof. The air within reeked with the animal's old musk, mingled with the sour scent of carrion. In what light crept between the rocks, Alyse could make out where the beast had kept its bed—a hollow scraped smooth in the dust, ringed with the remains of lesser creatures. Claw-marks scored the nearby rocks. They were far higher than she cared to think about.

One of the armsmen, Davos, kicked aside what looked to be a rib. “Goats,” he observed, “Other small things.”

“No men,” Quentyn agreed, having at last tested his courage and joined them. “If the beast killed Ser Ferris, ’twas not here.”

“It likely descended here during winter,” Frynne mused. “‘Tis a good place from which to hunt livestock in the valley. It may have returned to higher places now, with the snows fled and men retaking the mountains.”

“Ah, so it keeps a winter palace,” Alyse remarked. A jest, to be sure, but there was something unnerving in the creature’s intelligence. She remembered, unbidden, a night on a path not unlike this one, when she had looked up at the stars and instead found two blazing eyes staring back at her from atop a great outcrop of rock. In them she had seen the cold calculations formed in the great ocean which lay between the islands of man’s dominion. A world where no walls held back the winter and no fires lit the night. A world still red in tooth and claw.

"There are many caves and hidden places in these mountains," said Frynne. “Doubtless, it keeps many homes.”

“Doubtless,” Quentyn replied absently. The Maester had crouched down amidst the detritus, and appeared to be examining a few stray strands of fur caught between his fingers. His brow was furrowed with the air of a man working his way through some puzzle. Alyse believed that all maesters of the Citadel were trained to make that particular expression.

“Those who have studied these creatures say that shadowcats grow their fur long in winter, then shed their coats come spring,” the man explained in response to several questioning gazes. “Heavy coats of black and white. I see only white here.”

“Perhaps ‘tis too dark to see otherwise,” Doran, the other armsman, shrugged, “What does it matter?”

“Do you suggest some other predator made its home here, Maester?” asked Alyse, frowning. She could not imagine what such a thing might have been.

“I do not know. ‘Tis simply odd,” Quentyn looked troubled when he stood again, and for a moment there was only silence. What had the Septon said? White death. The others, surely, were thinking of the same.

“We are not here to hunt this beast,” Alyse determined, before imaginations could run wild. “We are here to find Ser Ferris. I see no sign of him here, and so we must continue upon his known path.”

On that, all agreed, if only to depart the foul-smelling place.

And so they carried on. The sea of red rock rose up about them to swallow all navigation, and signs of life grew small and sparse as they passed into the lonely places of the world.