Prologue · Prologue: From Death's Maw
Tom woke to pain.
For a time there was nothing else. No name, no place, no past. Only pain, bright and deep, crawling through him like fire beneath the skin. It lived in his ribs, his shoulder, his back. It beat behind his eyes. When he tried to draw breath, something inside him answered with a knife.
He opened his eyes to darkness broken by torchlight.
A low ceiling leaned over him, black with smoke. The air stank of blood, boiled herbs, old straw, and men too hurt to wash. Shapes moved slowly in the gloom: a woman with a basin, a man curled around a ruined leg, another muttering prayers through broken teeth. Makeshift beds filled the room, if beds they could be called. Some were straw. Some were blankets over bare boards. Some were only cloaks spread across the dirt.
Tom tried to rise.
The world burst white.
A hand pressed against his chest and held him down.
"Lie still," a woman said. "Unless you mean to tear open all my work."
Her voice was rough, but not unkind. Tom blinked until her face came clear: lined cheeks, grey hair bound in a strip of brown cloth, eyes sharp as sewing needles. A widow, he thought, though he did not know why. There was a plainness to her grief, the sort worn too long to hide.
"Where?" he rasped.
"Riverlands," she said. "A crofter's hovel, though the crofter is ash now, and his sons with him."
Tom swallowed. His throat felt scraped raw. "The battle?"
The woman dipped a rag into water and touched it to his lips. "Lost."
The word settled over him heavier than any blanket.
Lost.
Then memory came.
Not all at once. In pieces.
Mud beneath his boots. Rain on his face. The Green Fork running brown and swollen beyond the trees. Northern men locking shields, shouting for Stark, for Winterfell, for home. Tom among them with an axe in one hand and a short sword at his belt, too big for the boys his age and too green for the men he marched beside.
He had killed a man early. A Westerlands spearman with a yellow cloak and fear in his eyes. Tom remembered the shock of it more than the act. One moment the man had been alive, grunting and shoving and trying to put a spear through Tom's belly. The next he was on his knees in the mud, hands slick at his throat.
After that there had been no time for shock.
The shield wall bent. Men screamed. Horses crashed into the flank. Tom saw steel rise and fall, rise and fall, red each time it came down. He remembered smashing his axe into a helm, dragging a wounded northman backward by the collar, taking a cut across his forearm he did not feel until later.
Then the Mountain came.
Gregor Clegane did not look like a man when he broke through them. He looked like a tower that had learned hatred. Men struck at him and died for the trouble. A spear glanced from his plate. A sword rang against his helm. He swung that great sword of his and opened three men as if they were sacks of grain.
Tom remembered standing his ground.
Fool, he thought now.
He had roared. He had swung. His axe had struck Clegane's armor hard enough to jar the bones in his arm. The Mountain had turned toward him, and for a heartbeat Tom had seen nothing but the black slit of his visor.
Then the blow came.
Not the edge. The flat, maybe, or the guard, or some cruel part of the sword Tom never saw. It smashed into him with the force of a falling tree. His feet left the earth. He remembered flying, absurdly, as if men could fly in war. Then bark against his back. A crack inside him. Darkness.
Tom dragged himself back from the memory with a gasp.
The widow watched him.
"You were among the dead when they found you," she said. "Or near enough."
"Who brought me here?"
"Smallfolk. Men looking for kin. They found more strangers than sons."
Tom turned his head. The movement sent pain down his neck, but he forced himself to look across the hovel. Northmen lay among river men and boys in torn cloaks. Some slept. Some stared. Some would not see another dawn.
"Why did the Lannisters leave us?" he asked.
"They had miles to make," the widow said. "And dead enough to boast of."
His fingers curled weakly against the blanket.
Robb Stark had led them south. The Young Wolf, men were already calling him, though Tom had only seen him from a distance: a boy lord with a direwolf at his side and the North gathered behind him. Tom had followed because Ironwrath had called its men, and because the Forresters stood for the Starks, and because the Starks stood for the North. That had seemed reason enough when he left home.
Home.
A strip of hard land under cold skies. Fields that fought the plow. The dark edge of the Wolfswood. A smithy shared by half a dozen farms, where Tom had spent more hours than any boy should, mending hinges, straightening nails, learning the weight of hammer and iron.
His father had died with an axe in his hand, keeping wildlings from the door.
His mother had died in bed before the next thaw, with Tom's younger brother fever-hot beside her. By spring, both were in the ground. After that, Tom had belonged to work, to the village, to the Forresters in the distant way smallfolk belonged to lords they rarely saw.
Rodrik Forrester had known his name.
That had mattered more than Tom liked to admit. Rodrik had seen him sparring once in the yard at Ironwrath and told him he had good strength, but strength was a stupid beast unless a man put reins on it. Asher had laughed at that and later dragged Tom into drinking with men who should have known better. Before exile took him across the sea, Asher Forrester had made every dull evening dangerous.
Tom wondered if Asher was still alive.
He wondered if Rodrik was.
He wondered how many men from Forrester lands lay cold beside the Green Fork.
The widow seemed to read some of it on his face. "Your wolf lord was not slain, if that is what ye fear."
Tom looked back to her.
"Lord Stark?"
She nodded. "Word came yesterday. While Tywin Lannister bloodied you here, the young Stark broke Jaime Lannister's host at Riverrun. Took the Kingslayer captive, they say."
For a moment Tom did not understand.
They had lost.
But Robb had won.
The Green Fork had been blood paid into another man's victory. A bitter thing, yet not empty. Tom shut his eyes and saw again the line of northern shields holding as long as flesh could hold. Men dying in mud so another army could move unseen. So the Young Wolf could fall upon Jaime Lannister and put chains on the man who had crippled Lord Eddard's son.
His pain did not lessen, but it changed shape.
"How long?" he asked.
"Since the battle? Four days."
Four days stolen from him. Four days closer to whatever came next.
Tom tried to lift his arm. It trembled and fell.
The widow snorted. "Ye'll not be swinging steel soon."
"No," Tom whispered.
But he was alive.
Over the days that followed, life returned by inches and cruelty. Fever took two men. Another woke screaming every night until his voice gave out. Tom learned to sit. Then stand. Then limp from bed to bed with water, rags, broth, whatever the widow put in his hands. He could not fight, so he carried. He could not march, so he helped others rise.
Men began to look to him.
He did not ask them to. Perhaps it was his size. Perhaps it was because he kept moving when stillness would have been easier. Perhaps it was only that pain loved company, and Tom gave it orders.
By the time he could walk without leaning on the wall, the question came for all of them.
Home, or west.
Some chose home. No man blamed them. The North was far away, and each mile between a wounded man and his hearth was a mile full of wolves, broken soldiers, outlaws, and worse. But Robb Stark was west with the strength that remained, and Tom knew where his road led before he spoke it aloud.
"I'm going to Riverrun," he said.
Fifteen men chose to go with him.
Among them were two brothers from Bear Island, broad-shouldered and hard-eyed, with the look of men born owing the world nothing. Jory was the elder, quiet until steel was mentioned. Tor, younger by a year, had a laugh like an axe striking oak and a loyalty that showed itself not in words, but in where he stood when danger came.
"You know the way?" Tor asked.
Tom looked west, where the rain had turned the road black.
"No."
Tor grinned. "Good. I hate dull marches."
Jory only studied Tom a moment, then nodded once. "We'll follow."
Tom felt the weight of that more keenly than his wounds.
He was eighteen years old. A farmer's son. A blacksmith's helper. A half-trained guard from Forrester lands who had been swatted aside by Gregor Clegane like a child.
But he had lived.
The Green Fork had not taken him. The Mountain had not broken him. And somewhere to the west, Robb Stark held the Kingslayer in chains.
Tom tightened the strap across his chest, took up a notched axe from the widow's table, and stepped into the rain.
The road west waited.
So did the war.
Disclaimer: Frostfyre is a non-commercial fan fiction project inspired by a Realm of Thrones campaign for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. All rights to those original settings and characters remain with their respective owners.
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