The first third or forth of the next chapter. This is the last new character I'm introducing for a while. The next chapter is from Hilda's POV. I worry that this scene is too info-dumpy. What do you lot think?
Thrain
Thrain Silveren heard the sounds of revelry on the wind, drums and harps and flutes, faint now but growing louder with every swift gallop of his mount. Such music meant only one thing. "Gods be damned," he cursed, reining his horse to a gentle amble. A blood bay, she seemed as relieved to be free of the Neck as he. "The weddings already over." There was no use rushing now. Better to let the horses rest a bit.
His band of twelve, brothers and sisters united under Kyne, whose heavenly visage was branded over every heart and etched into the chest of every tunic, rode at his back. Rangers they were, husbands and wives of the wood, and Thrain their lord.
"Ser Torrhen will not mind our tardiness," said Halfdan Ironfist, an old rangersmith who had shadowed Thrain during his southern ranging. It was for him that Thrain's mail gleamed like beaten silver, that his arrowheads were slim enough to slip between mail links and sharp enough to punch through plate.
"Nor will Harald," said Mina, the only one of them who truly knew the Jorrvaskr heir. "He will be enamored with his pretty Royce bride, and worried about accidentally breaking her." Mina had come south four years hence, a bastard of Lord Markus and half-wolf herself; she could not shift, but beneath the light of the full moon, one could not quite call her human.
"Aye, the wolves are a gargantuan bunch," Aenar called out, urging his horse over to Thrain. "I've heard it said that Hrolf's wife is even taller than he is," he said in an aside.
Thrain smiled. When he had gone south, he left behind a brother two years his junior. Hrolf had been taller than him even then, more highlander than ranger since he arrived squalling from their mother's womb. It was to Hrolf that their father had bequeathed the Silveren greatsword, a five-foot length of wicked blue steel. He wondered how Hrolf would look now, and if his Jorrvaskr bride was pregnant, and just how he dealt with her monthlies. Mina was a terror when the moon was on her.
"Jorrvaskr women are tall," sang Wysteria in her trilling voice, "But their men are as giants. Harald was an inch shy of seven feet last I saw him, and muscled like a beast. That was almost seven years ago." Wysteria had the Glenmoril look, her hair almost orange, her eyes amber, her nose sharp, but her cheeks were round and her lips plump. She was stouter than any witch Thrain had ever seen, rounder of hip and heavier of breast. Rumor was that she was a Manderly bastard, but she had never said for sure, and none of the band had ever cared to ask.
"I seen em' since," said Rorik Blacknife. "'Fore I came back south." Blacknife was a Darkbrother, one of Yanora's brood who had learned his trade at King's Landing, converted from Sithis to Kyne and blessed at Seventree Hill by the Dovahjud herself. Ranger or no, his blood still ran black, and he could kill a man as quick as a blink. Darkbrothers had no certain look like Glenmorils – the Children of Sithis were as many and varied as the ways they dealt death. Rorik looked much too sweet to be such a dangerous man, with his flaxen curls and mint green eyes. "The lad's well over seven feet now, and hard from warring under Thorunn. Five years East, he spent. M'cousins say he developed a taste for human flesh."
Thrain grimaced. That was a problem with wolves too long at war in foreign lands. The Dovahkin did not allow wolves – or bears – to consume human flesh in the North. Mina had told him how sweet it smelled when the moon was on her, how rich and fragrant – as if Thrain didn't know himself – and one drunken half-forgotten night, Blacknife had shared how the Night Mother lived on the flesh of men, made nigh immortal through its consumption. Thrain had killed his fair share of beasts and men, but he had only ever eaten the former, and had no desire to try the latter.
"Good for the bride," said Sten of Riften from atop his brindled stallion, "so long as Lord Harald licks and don't bite." Aenar and Olfina laughed on either side of him. All three were born of Riften and all three bragged that they were born of Blackbriar blood, albeit by now the Blackbriar was little more than a drop, thinned by the get of city folk and mountain folk and river folk.
Thrain missed Riften too, almost as much as he missed Sovngarde. Silverwood wasn't far from Riften – as boys he and Hrolf had ridden through the tracery of paths about swamps and over the slate hills to trade wooden jewelry for knives and arrow heads with the mountain folk, and once they had sailed to Flint's Finger across the squid infested Blazewater Bay on riverfolk longships. The Lord Flint had taken well enough to Silveren boys in his lands, but Thrain still bore the scar across his shoulder when one of Flint's guards had taken the eleven year old for a bread thief.
That guard had lost his hand from Thrain's return salvo, and had almost lost his head for his lord's wrath. Fond memories, the lord ranger thought.
He breathed easier now that the last of the damnable bog was behind him. His own keep stood at the heart of a wetwood, and he had ranged through many forests throughout Westeros, and bogs and mires too, but the Neck was a realm unto itself, a murky, fetid hell of slumbering death and creeping gloom, lizard-lions lurking in every scummy pool and pond. He did not envy Howland his lordship. Such beasts did not trouble beaten paths about Silverwood.
How long had it been since he had walked the timbered halls of his home, tasted the crisp air of the half frozen swamp, heard the harsh cry of the grey herons that swarmed the weirwood? The dank underquarters of the keep had frightened him as a child, with their deep, echoing shadows, but he had long since grown past fear, be it of men or phantasms. He recalled the feel of the subterranean walls under his fingertips, baked hard as stone and warm to the touch. He had felt nothing of the like since. An old Hagraven from decades past had laid the powerful enchantments that heated the earth and cooked the mud to stone, and in the years since, wandering covens would come annually to see them renewed.
And now, finally, after nigh on a decade, he was returning North. Returning home.
He rode past the two story inn of stone and timber that stood strong athwart the road, its muddy yard thick with clucking chickens and squealing pigs. Half a dozen weasels stood watch along the fence, beady eyes peeled for snakes. They looked to be the same weasels that Thrain had seen standing watch a decade ago when he had first gone south. He had tried his own hand at training weasels, goaded by the elder rangers who had seen him south, and wound up feverish from their scratches and bites. The wounds had long since healed, but he could still remember the heat of infection burning its way through his veins; the pain had driven him near mad, and his sleep had been haunted by fever dreams of moonless nights and black skies. Death might have claimed if not for the witch's potions and poultices.
He glanced back at her, riding between Halfdan and Mina. Wysteria was no Hagraven, but Thrain trusted her with his life.
Five men-at-arms in mail and dented plated guarded the fenced in yard, passing a wineskin between them, breath fogging the air. The Wiley Weasel was a fine enough inn by the words of travelers bearing south, and certainly lucrative to afford five men-at-arms, even such a straggly bunch as this. At this hour the innkeep was probably just serving supper, the meat still hot and fresh off the spit, the ale and mead still plentiful. But Thrain had always preferred the open wilds to a stuffy room and a flea-ridden bed, even as nice a bed as those supposedly had by the Wily Weasel. He and his had their own provisions and pavilions besides, and each of them a cask of Arbor wine to drink the night away.
Still, the inn was a welcome sight after so long riding through the Neck. The three great towers looming across the Fever was even more welcome.
Moat Cailin was as stout as he remembered. The gatehouse squatted at the end of the bridge, circled by a scum choked moat and crowned with frowning turrets, crossbows peeking down from the many crenellations. A northerly wind swept between the drum towers, gusting over the thirty-foot black basalt curtain wall to ripple the tussocks and wild shrubs that fringed the road, caressing Thrain's naked cheeks. Direwolves writhed atop the bridge that spanned the canal, pennons snapping. They crested the three towers too, though each wolf there was different. There was a red wolf howling in a field of green, which flapped atop the tallest tower and all along the bridge; a green wolf snarling in a field of grey, the tower beneath it blanketed in thick moss; and, flying above the stoutest of the towers which was wrought of pale, black-veined stone, three wolves prowling about a bronze iron-studded shield. The Starks of Moat Cailin, the Starks of Mossdown Tower, and the Royces of the Bone Tower, respectively.
The red oak bridge that spanned the canal was dozens of feet wide, and required two teams of twenty men to work the lever that raised and lowered it. Thrain could see them clustered beside the gatehouse, a formidable structure wrought of granite and basalt, pocked with arrow holes by the dozen. Turrets reached up from the corners of the gatehouse, and towers stretched high on either side of its face. The shores beyond the Saltspear were shrouded in clinging mists, and lined with towerhouses and timber quays. A few small sloops floated in the water, winding beneath the stone legs of the bridge.
He and his band pushed forward to the canal, mud spraying in their wake.
