The King of Winters

Chapter - 79

Jaehaerys

They came upon the village on a cold early morning with only the sound of the frigid northern wind blowing accompanying them. Whitetree, the village was named on Samwell Tarly's old maps. Jaehaerys did not think it looked much of a village. It was smaller than even the smallest of the crofters village in the Seven Kingdoms. Whitetree consisted of four tumbledown one-room houses of unmortared stone surrounded an empty sheepfold and a well. That was all it consisted, one of the big villages of the wildlings. The houses were roofed with sod, the windows shuttered with ragged pieces of hide and leather. The most impressive feature of the village could no doubt be the tree from which the village took it's name. Above the village loomed the pale limbs and dark red leaves of a monstrous great weirwood.

It was the biggest tree Jaehaerys Targaryen had ever seen. Even the huge weirwood of Winterfell would be a little tree compared to this monstrosity. The tree was so big that it covered almost all of the village. The trunk of the tree was near eight feet wide, the branches spreading so far that the entire village was shaded beneath their canopy. The size did not disturb him so much as the face did . . . the mouth especially. Jaehaerys could not tell if it was necessarily a mouth. It just looked like a big carved slash, a jagged hollow large enough to swallow a sheep.

Inside the wide open mouth there were ashes, ashes and bones. Despite the mouth having made large enough to swallow sheep, the bones inside are not sheep bones, though. Nor is that a sheep's skull in the ashes.

"An old tree." Mormont sat his horse, frowning. "Old," his raven agreed from his shoulder. "Old, old, old."

"And powerful." Jaehaerys could feel the power.

Thoren Smallwood dismounted beside the trunk, dark in his plate and mail. "Look at that face. Small wonder men feared them, when they first came to Westeros. I'd like to take an axe to the bloody thing myself."

Jaehaerys said, "My mother said no man could tell a lie in front of a heart tree. The old gods know when men are lying."

"My father believed the same," said the Old Bear. "Here, let me have a look at that skull."

Jaehaerys dismounted. Slung across his back in a black leather shoulder sheath was Longclaw, the hand-and-a-half blade the Old Bear had given him for saving his life. The sword that belonged to the sword of the Old Bear's son, Ser Jorah Mormont.

He knelt and reached a gloved hand down into the maw. The inside of the hollow was red with dried sap and blackened by fire. He scrunched up his face and searched for the skull inside the tree. Beneath the skull he saw another, smaller, the jaw broken off. It was half-buried in ash and bits of bone. Jaehaerys turned his head away and snatched the skull Lord Commander Mormont wanted to see.

When he brought the skull to Mormont, the Old Bear lifted it in both hands and stared into the empty sockets. "The wildlings burn their dead. We've always known that. Now I wished I'd asked them why, when there were still a few around to ask."

Jaehaerys Targaryen remembered the wight rising, its eyes shining blue in the pale dead face. He knew why, he was certain. He remembered the stories of the heart trees from his boyhood. Thousands of years ago, before the coming of the Andals it is said that the Children of the Forest gave blood sacrifices to their gods often times giving them human flesh to gorge on to placate their gods. The First men often hung the entrails of the condemned and placed them in the branches of weirwoods. Jaehaerys had only ever taken them as the stories of the wet nurse but seeing the weirwood in Whitetree with its predatory mouth and the bones inside, he could not help but see some truth in those stories.

"If only these bones could talk," the Old Bear grumbled. "This fellow could tell us much. How he died. Who burned him, and why. Where the wildlings have gone." He sighed. "The children of the forest could speak to the dead, it's said. But I can't." He tossed the skull back into the mouth of the tree, where it landed with a puff of fine ash. "Go through all these houses. Giant, get to the top of this tree, have a look. I'll have the hounds brought up too. Perchance this time the trail will be fresher." His tone did not suggest that he held out much hope of the last.