Nine days they had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther and farther from the Wall, hard on the track of a band of wildling raiders. There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted forest had no more terrors for him. The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. You could taste it a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear. Under the wounded pride, Will could sense something else in the older man. Gared had spent forty years in the Night's Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of. Are you unmanned by the dark, Gared?' Will could see the tightness around Gared's mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. And night is falling.' Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. 'We have a long ride before us,'Gared pointed out. There are things to be learned even from the dead.'His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest. 'Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit.

'My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,' Royce replied. 'My mother told me that dead men sing no songs,'he put in. He wished it had been later rather than sooner.

'If he says they are dead, that's proof enough for me.' Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later.

'What proof have we?' 'Will saw them,'Gared said. 'We have no business with the dead.' 'Are they dead?'Royce asked softly. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go.

'The wildlings are dead.' 'Do the dead frighten you?'Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile. Prologue We should start back,'Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.

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