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Clay had no intention of interrogating this so-called "King Beyond the Wall"— because there was simply no need to.
This guy clearly wasn't planning to speak honestly in the first place. And even if Clay dragged him into a dark little room and hit him with an Axii Sign, there was no guarantee that the information he'd get would be accurate.
Just think about it… where did Mance Rayder, the wildling king, get his intel in the first place? Wasn't it all reported to him by his underlings?
That kind of information had already been processed and filtered layer after layer. By the time it made its way into Mance Rayder's head, got rearranged in that brain of his, and was passed along again to Clay… just imagine how much distortion there would be by the time it finally reached him.
So instead of asking Mance and ending up misled, wasting time on bad intel, it was better to just question the wildlings directly. In any case, Clay was confident that after this battle, he wouldn't be short on prisoners.
Not everyone, when staring death in the face, could still hold their ground and cling to ideals like "freedom" without bowing their heads to Clay. People feared death. And Clay didn't believe for a second that this crowd had it in them to pull off anything clever.
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The outcome of this war had been sealed from the very beginning. By the time dawn broke the next morning, and Lord Glover, soaked in blood, rode up on horseback to his side, Clay already understood… his mission here was complete.
He glanced at Lord Glover, and the latter, catching his commander's unspoken cue, cleared his throat and began reporting the results of the battle:
"Lord Clay, as you ordered, I led a thousand men and made a swift push north. Just as you predicted, the wildlings collapsed at the first sign of pressure. They scattered, running off toward the northeast, and when our troops appeared, many of them just stood there, frozen."
"From what I could see, the thousand men we had managed to block off at least five thousand of them. At first, I thought it was going to turn into a real bloodbath, since desperate enemies usually fight the hardest."
"However, we still overestimated these people. Their nerves must have already been stretched thin. Once your main force charged in, they panicked like startled birds. A few crazed ones came charging at us, but after we cut them down, the rest were completely at a loss."
"After that, we just kept holding our ground until your army swept in. And then…"
Lord Glover spread his hands, a strange look flashing across his face as he said, "We did a count. Right now, milord, you've got more than thirty thousand prisoners. The youngest are newborns, the oldest around fifty. So, uh… what do you want to do with them?"
Clay frowned. This… was not what he'd expected.
He had assumed the wildlings would at least put up some real resistance… because once they lost, they would be reduced to the kneeling kind they called the "kneelers."
And yet, here they were, surrendering so quickly and so smoothly that even Clay didn't quite know how to react. His original plan had been to force them into a desperate fight, wear them down bit by bit, crush their spirit, and only then push them to surrender.
"How are our casualties?"
"Come on, Lord Clay, don't underestimate the brothers of the North. Maybe the Lannister elites could give us some real trouble, but these lot? They couldn't even scrounge together a hundred swords between them. What kind of threat could they possibly be?"
"When we went back to clean the battlefield and tally things up, it turns out we lost fewer than fifty men. The rest were just lightly or moderately wounded, mostly blunt-force injuries. Nothing a bit of rest won't fix."
"How many of them died? And don't tell me they all got wiped out… I saw a big wave of them fleeing northwest, and we didn't have anyone stationed in that direction."
"You're right. The number who died directly at the hands of our cavalry wasn't that high. All in all, maybe ten thousand at most. Later, we captured two of the wildling leaders who surrendered and questioned them. And both of them admitted it… Mance Rayder had just over seventy thousand under his command."
"Out of those seventy thousand, twenty thousand had already been split off, stationed near Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and the Shadow Tower. Looks like they were planning to cross the Wall in waves."
Clay gave a slow nod. It all made sense now. The enemies he had faced here numbered no more than fifty thousand. Out of those, ten thousand had been killed, thirty thousand captured, and another ten thousand had managed to escape. The remaining twenty thousand were scattered across the eastern and western outposts.
After killing Mance Rayder, the core that had painstakingly assembled the wildling force has now broken apart, and their command system has effectively collapsed.
This battle alone had earned him a kill ratio of one to two hundred. If something like this had happened in his previous world, he might have been arrested and tried as a war criminal. But here and now, this overwhelming victory had rendered the wildling threat virtually nonexistent.
Even though only ten thousand had died on the battlefield, the true impact reached far beyond those numbers.
The reason the Night's Watch had been so anxious—rushing to Winterfell to plead for reinforcements—was precisely because Mance Rayder, a former brother of the Watch, had somehow managed to unite one hundred thousand wildlings into a single army. What they had faced was a massive, cohesive threat.
But now, that leader—the one every tribe had followed—was gone. Their strength had scattered like dust in the wind, spread thin in every direction. There was no chance they could ever come together again.
From this point forward, even if the wildlings still had numbers on their side, in the eyes of Clay and the Night's Watch, they were nothing more than countless grains of sand.
And sand, without some outside force to hold it together, no matter how much of it there is, could never build a fortress. It would stay just that… a loose, shifting pile with no threat at all.
"Oh, right… Lord Clay," Lord Glover added, "during the fighting beyond the Wall, we ran into a strange woman. We weren't quite sure how to deal with her, so we brought her back with us. Would you like to meet her?"
A strange woman? You couldn't handle her, so now you're handing her over to me? Clay's lips twitched. What's that supposed to mean…every time you lot run into a problem, I'm the one expected to clean up the mess?
"What woman?" he asked. "And what exactly makes her 'strange'?"
"Well… she was wearing this bright red robe," Lord Glover explained, looking a little uneasy. "And in this freezing weather, when the rest of us are bundled up like bears, she doesn't even look cold. Just stood there in that red thing, totally unfazed."
"…"
"And she also claimed to be a servant of some Lord of Light. Said she came bearing her god's divine will, and that she specifically wanted to meet you… by name. She even brought along a few prisoners with her, saying that once you saw them, you'd agree to speak with her."
"…Fine. Bring the prisoners to me first."
Clay drew in a long, deep breath. He already had a pretty good idea of who it was.
Oh, come on… lady. Aren't you supposed to be holed up on Dragonstone, playing royal advisor to Stannis? What are you doing all the way out here?
And besides, had he ever even dealt with this woman named Melisandre before? Why would she know him by name?
Clay didn't buy that it was for some vague reason, like Stannis sending a message or anything like that. If this red witch had come all the way here to find him, there could only be one explanation. It had to be something to do with the magic in his body.
Come to think of it, ever since he returned to the North this time, the Three-Eyed Raven hadn't appeared once. Surely it wasn't some kind of signal issue or a shortage of magic… he couldn't possibly be "out of range," right?
But the moment Clay laid eyes on the prisoners—those twitching, spasming wildlings—he realized, with a sinking feeling, that he'd made a foolish mistake.
Each one of them was radiating a faint green magical aura. They were skinchangers…northern magic users with a rare gift.
They could take control of animals for scouting and combat—hawks, wolves, shadowcats, and more. In the rush to get here, Clay had completely forgotten about them.
And now, seeing these unfortunate souls with their green energy tangled and corrupted by traces of red flame magic, Clay finally understood what Melisandre was trying to tell him.
This was her gift… a greeting, of sorts. She had done him a favor. Somehow, using a method he didn't understand, she had taken out these magical units before he'd even arrived. That was likely the very reason his ambush had gone so smoothly.
"You… go and bring that woman to me."
Clay called out to the guards standing just outside the tent.
The soldiers glanced at each other. Whatever idea passed between them in that moment, one of them quickly turned and jogged off in the direction she had been taken.
"Trouble just keeps coming, doesn't it? Can't I get a single moment of peace?"
Clay rubbed the center of his forehead, a dull ache pressing in behind his eyes. The last thing he wanted was to deal with these mysterious, god-touched types… they were beyond his ability to control.
Take Melisandre, for example… servant of the Lord of Light. If she had come looking for him, it was probably for the same reason the Three-Eyed Crow had once sought him out. After all, the Igni Sign he used was fire magic too.
He didn't know how long he waited there, lost in thought with a frown carved deep into his face, when suddenly, a voice broke the silence.
It was rough and smoky, yet magnetic. A woman's voice that slid into his ears like warm iron, impossible to ignore.
"Looks like you're in need of help… O Emissary of the Foreign God…"
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[Chapter End's]
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