Chap 35 review responses are in my forums like normal. And now, the final battle begins. Thanks for reading.
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Walls Come Tumbling Down
"The Night King is searching for something," Bran said during their training sessions. Her quests and military endeavors dragged her out of the palace often during the two years of her ascendency. Bran and Shireen stayed, representing her at the cabinet meetings despite their youth. And Bran, every few nights, drifted on the Force to see what the enemy was doing.
"Do we know what?" Taylor asked.
"He needs a tool to tear down the wall," Bran said. "You've done too good a job reinforcing it. He can't just lead an army over it any more. He has to tear it down somehow."
Taylor could only nod. "Let's hope he never finds what he's looking for."
The boy shook his head. "He will, though. I can feel it."
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
The only time Taylor truly had to herself was in the dead of night. She would meditate for four hours when others went to bed before using one of the many secret tunnels that ran through the Red Keep to make her way down to the bowels of the castle.
Though it was not the day publicly celebrated, since Rhaenys Targaryan's birth was well known, as her helmet reckoned it would be June 19 back on Earth. Taylor was now twenty-two years old.
In her three years of life on Planetos, as one of the Maesters referred to it, she'd accomplished quite a bit. Most of her work wasn't to make things perfect. She knew for a fact that despite her military victories slavery still existed throughout Essos. She knew small folk were still starving and being abused in Westeros. No one person could wave a hand and make everything better.
But she was laying the seeds that, with luck, could make things better. Planting seeds was exhausting, though. So numbingly exhausting.
The splayed guts of her helm and vambrace beeped at her.
She stood from her meditation mat in the corner of the converted room and took the lantern over to the work table. The device there was the size of a wardrobe, and looked like something a crazed tinker would put together. She recognized components from throughout the salvage of the ship she crashed into the Summer Sea three years past. She'd disassembled her navigation droid, Abbie, and reused much of her circuitry, as well as hull plates she'd carved and welded with her lightsaber. It took a month to assemble, and it was shaking violently as it worked now.
Taylor tried her best not to think about what would happen if the primitive, molecular furnace/printer exploded. If it went, it wouldn't just take the Red Keep with it. All of King's Landing would be vaporized.
I wonder what Zhan-Li and the rest of the Rhaenieads would think of that? Was Rhaenys taken to R'hllor's bosom, or blasted by his wrath?
The helmet beeped again, and abruptly the massive, clumsy machine whined and rattled itself into silence.
If Taylor was starting over with nothing, she would never have tried to make a combination furnace/printer. It certainly wasn't how she started back in Seattle as a young fugitive. But for all the corrosion her ship suffered in the ocean, Abby's neural network and the ship computer systems were powerfully advanced in a way Taylor didn't have access to until after she'd served her sentence and joined the Protectorate formally.
So she took a shortcut. She unlatched the barrel-shaped device and opened it up to see if the risk paid off.
As she feared, the printing ejection arrays had melted from the heat of the fusion reaction. They obviously held long enough, because the object within seemed intact, but the jury-rigged device that created it would never work again.
She had to use the Force to levitate the much smaller molecular furnace out. Unlike her jury-rigged one, this device was custom-printed to exacting specifications that she pulled from Abby's core memory. It was the same size as the large furnace she used to power the old Joint Response compound and barracks in Seattle.
She levitated it to its place on a set of hand-crafted red bricks in the corner. She'd already built a shunt into the wall that fed into a much larger, shaped chamber that held household refuse such as broken bottles, lamps, discarded metal and leather items. She opened it enough for the refuse to spill out until a crushed tin goblet fell into the feeder of the furnace.
The riskiest part of the whole procedure was when she disassembled one of her lightsabers and removed the diatium power cell. If the molecular furnace failed, she'd be down one saber. She only had two chances to do this.
She slipped the thumb-sized power cell into a dedicated slot opposite the feeder and then pressed the activating button on its top.
The furnace drew the entire charge of the power cell at once. She waited, unconsciously holding her breath, until a dull glow formed in the belly of the furnace. The barrel of the furnace was not transparent-the glow came from the heating of the containment field.
The moment the first atoms of tin were split and reformed, the device began creating its own power. It immediately began recharging her diatium cell. Taylor released an explosive breath and allowed her shoulders to sag in relief. Just like in Seattle, she had to build a tool to build the tool to build the droid that would build a ship. But now, with a fully functioning molecular furnace, it was just a matter of time. Years, if she were honest. But she now saw the end in sight.
The knock surprised her; she'd been so wrapped up in her work she didn't sense anyone coming. Now, though, she could sense Quaithe opposite the door. With a wave of her hand, the magnetic lock released. In a world without science, magnetic locks were as powerful as any magic.
Quaithe stepped in holding her 20-month old son in her arms. The toddler was suckling as she entered, which was the only time the child was quiet. Adjorah Mormont wasn't so much a colicky baby as he was just...loud.
"What are you doing wandering around the dungeons this time of the morning?" Taylor forced a joking tone.
"Looking for you," Quaithe said easily enough. She looked around the chamber, lit with expensive lanterns, at the shattered, broken pieces of Taylor's past life. She drifted to the hyperdrive reactor casing that Taylor had used as the shell of her now inactive furnace/printer. She touched the metal in wonder. The tableau broke when Adjorah burped.
With a huffing sigh, Quaithe switched the baby to her other breast before settling down on one of the many benches that lined the various workstations of the queen's lab. Her dark eyes regarded Taylor calmly.
"When will you leave us, Aeksiae?"
All the certainty and joy of night's accomplishment seemed to dry up with the question. "A year at best. Two to three, most likely."
"Will you be taking Temeraire with you?"
With the question, Taylor couldn't help but sense the dragon in the back of her mind, as well as Saphira and Elliot. The two others had already formed bonds with Bran and Shireen, but her own bonds with them remained older and stronger.
"I wish I could," Taylor said. "They're products of this world. If...if I took them away, they would suffer."
"Just as you have suffered from the absence of your world."
Adjorah finally finished. Without having to be asked handed him over to Taylor. At twenty months, he was a lanky handful. He was already walking and eating, and Quaithe only breast-fed him at night, and even that she planned to stop soon. "Aunty," the boy whispered sleepily, happy to see her.
Taylor rocked the child in her arms, cooing as his milk-heavy eyes slowly closed.
"It's going to be a lot harder to leave than I thought," Taylor admitted as she looked down at the beautiful boy.
"Yours is a fierce and burning love," Quaithe said. "But I have come to know that your love is not for any one person. Rather, you love life itself. In all my travels and learning, I've yet to ever know anyone as good as you."
"There are some Dornish who'd argue with that."
"Oh, I'd say they thought you were very good as well," the shadowbinder laughed. "If a different definition of the word."
Taylor handed the sleeping boy back to his mom and sat down beside her. "I still don't have indoor plumbing," she said.
"True. But you have pizza."
Taylor smiled wistfully. She'd actually mentioned what pizza was to Wylis Toyne before the conquest. When the very first pizza-what the Volantines called tomato cheese bread-appeared, she knew somehow he'd left her a gift from beyond the grave.
Quaithe took her hand. "These last years, for all the pain of our losses, have been a gift from the gods. You, my dearest friend, were that gift. Without you, I would not have my son. Magic is strong within him, I feel it. He will be a worthy servant of your successor."
It surprised Taylor not one wit that the son of a shadow-binder had the Force. The Force was so strong on the world the amazing thing was that that weren't more like him. "Make sure he trains with Bran, then, so he can learn to harness the power."
"So I shall."
There were no other words or declarations. The lantern eventually burned down, leaving only the glow of superheated magnetic fields to light the chamber as the two friends held hands and tried, for that one moment, not to think of the future.
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
When the end came, it did so in the form of Brandon Stark Targaryen rushing late into the cabinet chamber with wide, terrified eyes.
Tyrion, with his newly fashioned reading lenses, looked up over his glasses in surprise. It was just he, Taylor, and a maester under Tyrion's employ that morning going over the first earnings report of the Royal Bank of Westeros.
Taylor met her apprentice's eyes and knew he'd just come from the Godswood. "How bad?" she asked.
Tyrion grasped the situation immediately and paled, though his vice-minister appeared confused.
Bran ignored both. "I saw the Shadow Tower fall. He found what he was looking for. A horn. I don't understand it, your Grace, but he blew the horn and it vibrated a section of the whole wall apart. He swarmed the breach with ice spiders-a hundred of them. The men of the Shadow Tower fought bravely, but they weren't enough. Sentinel Stand and Grey Guard tried to help, but were also overrun. The Night Watch and Wardens have been sallying forth to stop the breach, they they're just slowing the inevitable. The Lord Commander gave the order to abandon the wall and fall back."
The vice finance minister, one of the first Maesters she stole from Oldtown, stood in alarm. Tyrion, though, simply closed the ledger he'd been showing her. "We knew it was coming, Your Grace. What shall you have of me?"
"Quite a lot. Bran, wake Marwyn. I understand Zhan-Li is in Essos on her missionary work, but I need glass candles lit and warnings sent to our allies across the Narrow Sea. And to Lady Stark in Winterfell, so that Rob knows we're coming."
He turned and ran to do her bidding. She turned to Tyrion. "I want the cabinet assembled within the hour. All contingencies are to be activated. We may not be able to stop the snow, but we'll make damned sure Winter does not fall over our kingdom."
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
Ravens flew. Glass candles burned. Horsemen rode and ships set sail. Lords and ladies across the kingdom were warned, as were their people, that the Long Night was coming. The fate of the kingdom was at hand.
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
The northernmost port that never froze in winter was at the mouth of a glacier-fed river called Karscrik. It was the ancestral seat of House Karstark, a cadet branch of the family line that Robb rendered extinct when he discovered that the son of a man he executed for treason had a hand in the Bolton revolt and the murder of his youngest brother Ricon.
The last Karstark scion, a teenaged girl named Alys, was quietly married off to one of Robb's Umber bannerman. The hold itself, though, was given by Rob to the crown as a staging point for the defense of the North. It was obviously his wife's suggestion, Taylor thought, since it was a politically astute way of keeping his bannerman balanced.
Karhold was tactically important because the little isthmus it rose on benefited from currents that helped soften winter's blow and keep it from freezing over too badly. It was also only a day's hard ride from Last Hearth.
The castle was still made mostly of lumber, though as she and her two apprentices began guiding their dragons lower, she could see signs of new stone fortification. Around the timber inner walls were earthen palisades covered in snow. Though it looked ancient, the castle also appeared incredibly primitive as it rose up out of the thick snow of the far north.
Though it did not appear to be ideal for holding off hordes of the dead, the most important aspect of Karhold was its newly built pier. Taylor was pleased to see two ships already docked and unloading men and supplies from their staging area at White Harbor.
More importantly, she saw a train of six rail cars moving north around the mountainous forests that dominated the isthmus toward Last Hearth. The man-powered railway continued all the way to the Wall, but it happened to run by Last Hearth on the way.
On either side, Bran on Saphira and Shireen on Elliott banked with her as they started down to an open meadow near the keep. Though the dragons didn't care for the cold, the banked fires of their magic kept them warm in a way no mere humans could compete with. Below, she could see figures stepping out of the walls of the hold.
Once dismounted, Shireen Baratheon called out, "Father!" and floundered through thick snow to embrace one of the men coming.
He had only one arm.
"Lord Commander," Taylor said as she met Stannis and two of his Night's Watch soldiers. "How badly injured are you?"
"Bad enough," the man said as he leaned into his daughter's hug. "Lost the arm collapsing the tunnel at Castle Black. Once the wall was lost, I ordered the men into a fighting retreat to give Lord Stark and Snow time to prepare. Snow was leading the effort to hold them at bay so his brother can prepare Last Hearth."
She was pleased that Robb was following their first contingency plan. She had no desire to let the hordes of the undead reach Winterfell. Last Hearth was situated on the King's Road in a naturally valley between forests, rivers and mountains. It served as a funnel that hopefully would concentrate the enemy and help with an effective defense.
Stannis swayed as his daughter held him. The weakness did not show in his tone. "Did you receive my raven about the dragonglass?"
"It's on its way from White Harbor," she assured him. They knew about the Dragon Glass from Jon Snow. "Stannis, what about the Free Folk?"
"Fled too. Most are heading toward Winterfell. All the fighters are with Snow-those that survived."
Taylor stepped to the man. "Stand still, Lord Commander. You're too valuable to the kingdom to allow your injuries to take you from us."
She couldn't appeal to the man's vanity, but duty? Stannis nodded firmly and allowed her to heal his many wounds.
"I need you here to coordinate the incoming men and materiel, Stannis. Those are the first of many ships coming. We need to hold the rail lines open. Use horses to pull the train cars if we need, don't wait for the pedal cars. Our forces from the Westerlands, the Reach and Dorne are marching from Deepwood Motte, but we also have allied forces coming from Braavos and Pentos. Until then, you're all that stands between the armies and starvation."
Taylor looked to the young woman in his arms. "Lady Baratheon, the Lord Commander will need a courier. I would like you to stay here and serve as his messenger. You and Elliot can reach the front lines faster than anything else short of a glass candle. We may need Elliot to carry dragonglass to us as well. Can you do this?"
"I shall, Your Grace," Shireen said.
Stannis knew exactly what Taylor was doing. He met her gaze, before dipping his head not in respect, but in thanks.
Taylor turned to her apprentice and heir. "Come on, Bran, let's get scouting!"
In minutes, they had Temeraire and Saphira airborne and flying north. They saw the fortifications Lord Stark had begun along the King's Road, but they continued north. As they flew, they saw more and more refugees fleeing south. Many groups were accompanied by fighting men from the Wall-either Night's Watch or Wardens-but many of the civilians had also armed themselves. All stared up as the queen and Bran flew over their heads.
Instead of an army of the dead, the two dragons ran into an impenetrable wall of snow and ice a few miles south of the Wall. Temeraire roared his anger and discomfort as the ice threatened his eyes. Not willing to risk her friend, she turned away. Bran followed, with Saphira almost wing-tip to wing tip.
Banking Temeraire, the two headed down to an abandoned village near a distinctive tower set in the middle of a frozen pond. Bran followed, looking about with interest. When he removed his scarf and the expensive glass goggles she'd made for him, he pointed at the tower.
"I hid here, when I travelled north," he said. "That's Queenscrown, from when Queen Alysanne visited."
"Then this will be our forward observation point," Taylor said. To the north of them, the front of ice and snow appeared stationary, almost like a massive tsunami frozen in time.
"They're not moving very fast," Bran noted.
Taylor shuddered. "They don't think they need to. Do you feel it, in the air?"
The young man nodded somberly. "Darkness."
The Force moaned from the slowly encroaching horde. The creatures that drove the corpses felt like little pockets of Dark Force energy, more concentrated that anything she'd ever imagined. She could feel the cold hate and hunger hanging in the air, almost…
"Inevitable," she said. "They're not rushing because they want us all to fear them more. They're inevitable, they think. That'll give us the time we need."
"Can we win?" Bran asked.
She turned to look at the young man, and saw clearly the fear there. Not just any fear-but a personal dread. The Night King had touched him in a way no other could imagine. Taylor put a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the face. "We can," she said, simply. "And we will."
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
Lord Stark had ten thousand men hastily assembled from his bannermen and Winterfell. Among those was a large contingent of knights and men from Oldtown, led by Ser Baelor Hightower. And arriving in spits and starts, another five thousand survivors of the wall led by an exhausted yet determined Jon Snow. The three men met her when she and Bran landed their dragons.
"Your grace," Robb Stark said with a bow.
Baelor and Snow did the same.
She met each with a hand to the pauldrons of their shoulders. "My friends. Bran and I scouted the enemy. Unless they choose to speed up, they're still a week away. Let's count on four days to be safe. Show me what we have so far, and I'll tell you what I have coming to help."
"Aye, your grace," Lord Stark said.
It became clear, within minutes, that Ser Baelor was the more accomplished of the leaders there in terms of defensive structures. More importantly to Taylor's mind, though, was the fact that Robb and Jon not only admitted it, but actively deferred to the older, more experienced future Lord Hightower as they set about fortifying their position. Though the structures were slow going, Ser Baelor had men building earthen and timber walls similar to what Last Hearth employed. He was also trying to excavate moats, but they were having difficulty with the frozen soil.
"It seems to me we have two dragons and twenty-five tones of wild fire at White Harbor," Taylor noted. "Prince Bran can work with your men to have the dragons thaw the soil."
Jon snorted. "A prince, my little brother. Who would have thought it? And walking tall and strong. You're doing well, brother."
Bran blushed brightly. "Her grace has done much for me, Jon. For all of us."
"What do we have coming, your grace?" Hightower asked.
"Sixty thousand men," Taylor said. "Forty will be coming from the south line at Karhold. That will also serve as our supply line-the men are laying down a second track. Stannis will coordinate supplies from White Harber, and I left Lady Shireen with her dragon there to act as an emergency courier."
Baelor frowned. "Her...Lady Shireen Baratheon is a dragon rider, now, your grace?"
"Well, you know how stubborn those Baratheons are," Taylor said with a wry smile. "It shouldn't be surprising, really. The Baratheons have a long history of Targaryen blood, and she was touched by magic young. She'll be a true boon to the Kingdom, I assure you."
"Let's get to a tent for food," Robb suggested.
"We'll want to build barracks," Taylor said as they walked. "Strong structures to make sure the men have a chance to warm up between shifts."
"Aye, we've already begun," Robb said. "Come, we'll show you."
~~Quintessence~~
~~Quintessence~~
A cheer rose up from the men when the relief army and supplies from Karhold arrived. The sheer number of men was beyond astounding. Carts filled with food and coal came in their midst on tracks so newly laid that men were still pounding the rails in as the first carts passed over them.
Far ahead, Saphira and Temeraire flamed long swathes of land at Bran's direction to allow the men to dig with spades, shovels and hoes. Taylor had to admit that Baelor's plans were promising. Rather than one wall, he'd sent men almost a mile north to begin the defensive earthworks. A ditch laced with wild fire, then a timber wall braced by gabions of filled earth to form a fighting platform, with a series of smaller catapults each with their stack of wildfire bombs or gunpowder bombs brought in from White Harbor.
He ordered one line built after another, spanning the King's Road valley that ran from the gray, unpassable cliffs of the Shadow Mountains to the remnants of the forest that was being completely decimated for defensive purposes.
With the addition of forty thousand more men and the necessary supplies and two dragons to soften the soil, he added a total of five such fortifications. Within each he ran rail lines for the quick movement of men about the lines. Each subsequent fortification had slightly larger, more powerful catapults behind it, as well as a series of retractable, thick wooden planks to allow the men fleeing from the first defensive line to make it to the second, slightly higher defensive wall.
The final defensive wall going up was stone, being carted in from quarries near Last Hearth. And set behind it were actual cannons whose range was enough to reach past the second wall.
"I've never seen the like," Lord Laswell admitted during the third night's planning session. He'd come with the main army, along with Rezhal and the entirety of her senior officer corps.
They met in one of the hundreds of newly built barracks, most of which were partially dug into the ground with stones set on the ground and wood planks to shelter the exposed parts from the wind. Rather than open fires, each of the rooms used little iron stoves that Taylor didn't even have to design-they were of Braavosi make and served to heat the barracks with coal much more efficiently than fire pits.
"I'd certainly not want to attack it," Lord Yohn Royce said. He'd arrived with the second wave of soldiers from Last River, including five thousand knights. He and other senior lords sat around a table to eat and plan.
"Well, I've always believed that we hope for the best but plan for the worst," Taylor said. "Especially when dealing with magic. And we've had two years to plan for this. So, we need to look at potential fall-back points.
"Winterfell has always been the key to the north," Lord Stark said. Like all around the table, he appeared exhausted. "But our food and supplies are coming from Karhold."
Ser Baelor sat looking over the maps as the other lords argued about the best place to fall back. The older knight turned bright, Charlton Heston-blue eyes to Taylor and tapped White Harbor.
"I agree, Ser Baelor," Taylor said loudly.
The other lords turned to the exchange, then saw where Baelor was pointing. "My lords, my friends," Baelor said. "My queen. We are not dealing with men, but monsters. What care they about fortifications? Why would they wait to besiege a castle rather than just pass around it? Lord Stark chose this spot we stand on because the geography lends itself to defense. The only other area we can defend in the north is the Neck. Of that region, we have Moat Cailin, and White Harbor. Of the two, only one gives easy access to the sea."
"I'll send a letter to dispatch Lord Commander Baratheon with a message for such," Taylor said. "There's no reason we can't begin fortifying there. Just in case. Like I said, I hope for the best. But we need to plan for the worst. So far most of the Dornish forces have remained behind as our second line. I'll instruct my Uncles to begin mustering for the second line of defense for the Kingdoms. In the meantime, I have a shipment coming that I think could be of use. Tell me, have any of you ever heard of limelight?"