" . . . long before them came the Horned Lord and the brother kings Gendel and Gorne, and in ancient days Joramun, who blew the Horn of Winter and woke giants from the earth."

(A Clash of Kings, Chapter 23, Jon III.)

Chapter 18

The battered old warhorn did not look like a relic from the age of heroes, Sansa thought. Perhaps none of the weapons from that time would be impressive, nowadays. The warhorn lay on the long table in the Great Hall. Tormund stared at it, arms crossed.

Sansa found it difficult to believe that this was the legendary horn of Joramun, the solution to all their problems. Even so, once Jon had brought back one part, the other half had been found with suspicious ease in the oldest part of the crypts. Almost as though it had been waiting for them.

Ghost whined and butted the back of her knee. He'd grown increasingly restless in the hours since Jon and the others had left, and Sansa could not help but worry - did Ghost sense something? Was an attack truly imminent? Would this work?

They had been preparing for so long, ever since they'd taken Winterfell, in fact. Maester Wolkan, eager to redeem himself after having been part of Ramsay's household, had made his own contribution: a design for a crossbow which could draw the bowstring on the inside, rather than using a goat's foot or a belt. At first, Jon being away from the Keep, Sansa chose to humour her Master Bowyer, allowing him to make this weapon.

It took only a short demonstration, comparing the new crossbow and the traditional weapons in the armoury, to show her how invaluable this was – how it would shorten the drawing time after loosing each bolt.

"It could be the difference between life and death," Sansa remembered saying, almost under her breath.

"Quite so, m'lady. Also," he continued, exchanging glances with the armourer and his apprentice, "anyone can use it, as you don't need a special reach or strength to draw it."

Sansa remembered narrowing her eyes at this. "I thought it takes many years of training to use a bow," she said. At least, that was what she had been told.

The bowyer had shrugged. "For a longbow I'd need to start with a man's grandfather. Give me this bow and fourteen days, and I can make any man a bowman." He carefully didn't look at her when he continued. "Or any woman."

In the great hall, months later, Sansa smiled at the memory. She had given orders to start producing as many of the new crossbows as they could, and once the dragonglass had arrived, some was taken to be carved into the heads of the bolts. As for her own training: it had taken her bowyer about ten days to train her in the fundamentals. After her first day, she'd included other women from the keep, who'd in turn trained anyone and everyone who could not use a sword. Even some who could – if a sword wasn't Valyrian steel, it was for nothing, and dragonglass could only be used for crude daggers and lances.

Still, no matter what Sansa did, she couldn't help but remember Jon's description of the Night King's army; its sheer numbers would overwhelm them, making all their efforts for naught. No matter how implausible, if this old warhorn had the solution, then she was for it.

A movement at the door caught her attention. Garth, the sergeant from the Reach, was there. He kept opening and closing his mouth, seemingly hoping to draw her attention without disturbing Tormund. All the recent arrivals were nervous of Tormund, except for the Dothraki and the Unsullied, who treated all of them with the same barely concealed disdain.

Garth had been the only one to speak frankly to Sansa about the issue. "Dead men killing us all, that's too much for my poor head to grasp, m'lady. Wildlings in our chambers, now – that is terrifying."

Still, he managed to control his fear, and now he was almost comfortable with being in the same room as one of them. Almost. As he hovered in the doorway, Sansa walked over to him.

"Your Grace, we're off to Wintertown. All the trebuchets have been assembled and all we need are men to guard the periphery."

Winterfell had walls - Wintertown did not. All those who did not fit within the walls of the keep would take part in the defence of the town. She felt cruel and wicked when she suggested this tactic to Jon, but to her surprise, he agreed, saying that if Winterfell was overrun, Wintertown would fall anyway.

As for the defence of the keep, only a fool would leave a castle instead of preparing for a siege. Never attack if you can dig in, Jon had told her, and what she read of history proved him right. Also, perhaps the horn would . . . do something, anything to save them. She was under no illusion that the walls of Winterfell were thick enough to withstand whatever the Night King had planned for them.

Would it happen in the daytime or at night? Could they allow themselves to sleep and rely on the guards on the battlements to give warning or should they stay awake and watch? Anyway, these questions would keep Sansa awake, so trying to rest was pointless. Ghost had refused to leave her side after Jon had left, and she was glad of it.

She left the Great Hall and wandered through the passages, deciding to inspect the moat, again. The last few weeks had been full of the sound of hammering and sawing, and the results were visible, in the inner moat, which was now filled with trebuchets. They did not need stones to launch at the enemy - in fact, stones would be useless - so they would fill the slings with flammable material, already soaking in oil, ready to be set alight. Would it work? It had never been tried before.

It was a war on two fronts, yet even Jon had not been sure that destroying the Night King would also destroy his creations. If a king was killed during a battle, his soldiers often became dispirited and would surrender. But this was not an ordinary king, and these were no ordinary soldiers.

She climbed up to the inner wall atop the North Gate, walking along, nodding to the guards, Ghost still trotting at her side, and stared at the horizon, unseeing. She had walked past all the other preparations they had been making - lances with dragonglass heads, arrows with dragonglass arrowheads, bolts with dragonglass tips. Her crossbow was always at her side, nowadays, and she had a moment of bittersweet memory, wondering what her mother would have made of it. Arya, now - she had her sword, Needle, but that was not Valyrian steel. Lord Royce would have lent her the Lady Forlorn, but she'd explained that a longsword was far too much for her to handle.

So, Arya would be doing her best with Needle and a bow nocked with dragonglass arrows. Sansa had her crossbow, though Jon hadn't been happy about that. He'd insisted that all of that could only be a last resort, that she should find a place to hide for the duration of the battle. But where? Where could she possibly hide from the armies of the dead? As she mused and wondered, a strange sound broke through her reverie. It was a horn, blowing. They had agreed that any sighting would be signalled by a horn, just like in the Night's Watch, and the blasts had been drummed into anyone who would be a lookout: one for rangers returning, two for wildlings, and three for the dead.

The horn sounded once. Sansa felt her breath freeze in her throat as it sounded a second time. She looked at the men on the wall with her - men. Boys, really. And then it happened - a third mournful sound, almost like a despairing moan. She looked towards the horizon, as everyone was doing around her, but could see little except for a grey mass in the distance. It seemed like a snowstorm, but it was moving closer. After spending a few heartbeats transfixed by the blizzard, wishing it away, she finally had to pinch her own arm to get herself moving.

"Horns," she screamed, "the signal, again, as quick as you can!"

All around the castle she heard the guards sounding the signal - it was essential, Jon had warned, that the men be roused, and roused fast. An attack would at first not even look or feel like an attack. Once it really started, it would be too late.

Even though Sansa knew she had to get off the battlements, that she was vulnerable and perhaps even a distraction, she could not move. The mass of snow and ice was moving towards them from all directions, at first slowly, then gathering speed at an alarming pace. A few sergeants thundered up the wooden stairs to the battlements, yelling out commands as they came. In the moat, the trebuchets were surrounded by soldiers like ants whose anthill had been disturbed, milling around, loading the slings, standing by with torches, ready for the order to light and loose.

"Wait for the order!" one man yelled, close enough to deafen her.

Sansa flattened herself against a wall to get out of the way. Buckets of bolts had been placed in every corner and she grabbed a handful, sticking them in her belt. She opened and closed the crossbow to draw it, carefully placed a bolt with shaking fingers, made sure her hand was under the lever to avoid loosing until she was ready, and waited. While she was occupied with all this, the army of the dead had approached close enough for the trebuchets to reach them.

"Light! Loose!" The words were yelled again and again.

Over and over, the fiery masses were sent sailing into the heaving mass of screeching wights - and then, disappeared. To be sure, some were set on fire, but they fell and were trampled by their companions, who continued racing towards the outer walls. To her left she could see the Godswood, and the moat beyond it, from which flames erupted, over and over. She looked once more at the army approaching, and that was when the masses of the dead hit the outer walls, a force she felt in her bones.

It was still dusk, a strange silvery twilight, and the scene in front of her had an unreal clarity: in the distance, horses and their riders, transfixed, frozen. She was raising her bow as if in a trance, wondering if she could hit one of them at this distance, when a heavy mailed hand dropped on her shoulder, making her jump.

"My lady! Your Grace, I mean, please, you must leave here!"

Sansa turned, looking into the worried eyes of Lord Royce. She wanted to ask where she should go, where could she possibly be safe, but knew it was unfair to put yet another burden on the man. She gave one last look beyond the outer wall, a mass of screaming screeching wights, and calm creatures on horseback, and knew in her bones that the walls would be breached, one way or another. She would go to the Great Hall, she decided. The crypts, with their ironwood doors, would have been ideal if not for the Horn of Joramun and their general ignorance of its effects.

Before she could take another step, the sound came again. The sound of a horn. Because there was another signal – four blasts of a horn, which meant-

"BREACH!"

The panic could be tasted in the air, soldiers looking around, asking - Where? Where's the breach? Where are they? The horn blasted again – one, two, three, four. Breach.

She ran down the wooden stairs, Ghost at her side, ran for the Great Hall, conscious that all around the keep, the walls were full of soldiers drawing arrow after arrow, dragonglass or fire, trying their best to keep the dead from swarming them. They would fail, it was a certainty that they would fail, what had they been thinking? How could they fight this army?

She almost crashed into Arya, who was heading for the battlements with her bow in hand. The noise was almost a solid thing - screaming and screeching from outside, a howling wind, shouted orders from the sergeants. She yelled that she was going to the Hall, and Arya nodded in approval. But then Sansa caught a glimpse of a familiar figure striding towards the crypts. The mass of red hair gave him away and she hesitated. There was a tugging at her skirts and she looked down to see Ghost, mutinous look on his furry face, as he tried to pull her away from the danger he perceived was nearby.

She understood his fear, shared it, really - but she had to know, she had to see. What if this was the chance to see her father again, to beg his forgiveness - how could she let it pass her by? She put the hood of her cloak up and tried to follow him without being seen. Tormund's attention was only focussed on the heavy warhorn in his arms, and he did not even sense her presence. He opened the heavy ironwood doors and disappeared in the shadowy entrance. They had discussed this briefly, not certain if Tormund had to be physically close to the Winterfell dead to rouse them, but eventually deciding that they were taking no chances.

Sansa was unsure what to do next - should she join Tormund? Was this a massively bad idea in the first place? Ghost once again tried to pull her towards the Great Hall, and she had already taken a few steps when the horns blasted once more, and this time the blood in her veins froze entire.

She wished she could run and hide, but now her feet refused to move, and her breaths came quick and fast. She retreated to a shadowy alcove and raised her crossbow once more. Ghost, resigned to her lack of movement, placed himself in front of her, hackles raised, side teeth showing as he snarled. Her breaths turned into gasps, into wheezes. She wished she had stayed in the keep - what, an angry voice in her head opined, hiding under your bed, perchance? - she almost wished she'd stayed in Castle Black, all those weeks ago.

Sansa crouched, crossbow in front of her, determined to buy her life dearly. She was so focussed, she forgot about Tormund. She forgot about the Horn of Joramun.

The sound, when it came, was everywhere. It surrounded her and Ghost like thick treacle, it shuddered in her bones and made her teeth ache. It was a long, low blast on a horn, but nothing like she had ever heard before. It went on for so long that she wanted to scream and tear out her hair, bang her head against the wall to stop hearing the sound, to never hear anything ever again. Then, silence. No, she lied - there was another sound, now. A scraping sound, like old crypts being opened, a shuffling sound, like something unspeakable coming out of the places under the ground.

The door to the crypts yawned open, like a mouth waiting to devour them, and from it . . . Sansa wanted to look away, could not. One after another, warriors of every size and shape - some women, even - walked out of the shadowy doorway. Some carried greatswords, others broadswords, lances or pikes. Some had large war-shields, others had small bucklers.

One of the last, a tall shadowy figure, which Sansa could not look too closely at, was walking past where she was crouching, and stopped. She looked at it through tears, wishing she could say something, but her words died in her throat. She forced them out, hoarse, painful.

"I'm sorry."

The figure shook his head, and, somehow, words formed in Sansa's head.

"Not your fault, lass. Never blamed you. Get to safety."

When she looked up, the figure was gone, and afterwards, she could never tell whether it was real or only in her imagination. The sounds of battle came from everywhere around - screeching wights, yelling soldiers, and the Kings of Winter, who were silent in their onslaught.

As she ran, she saw how one group of wights had managed to scramble over the inner wall, and were just about to spread out to cause mayhem, when four shadowy figures attacked. An enormous broadsword flashed in the moonlight, cutting down most of them. One last wight was about to break off from the group when an arrow came from behind Sansa and buried itself in its skull. The four ancient warriors looked up, and Sansa looked behind her, only to see Arya lowering her bow.

"Are those . . . ?" Arya began, her question trailing off.

Sansa dared another glance at the ghost warriors. "Yes."

"Will they turn on us?" asked Arya, ever the practical one.

"No . . . no." Sansa put some determination in her voice. No, they would not turn on them. When she looked away from Arya, the warriors were gone.

"I've been looking for you for ages - I thought-" Arya bit her lip, looked away. "Never mind - come on. Tormund never came back from the crypts."

Sansa nodded, and off they went, Ghost at their side. When they entered the crypts, Tormund looked like he was resting against one of the giant vaults, a torch by his side and the horn in his lap. It was only as they drew closer that they realised that he wasn't asleep. He wasn't breathing. His eyes were closed. They would never open again. Ghost snuffed at his face, and dropped to his haunches.

"He told me that the Horn of Joramun would probably kill him, but I - " Arya seemed to be in the grip of some fierce emotion.

Sansa got up from where she was crouched in front of Tormund, feeling stiff and three times her age. She knew, rationally she knew, that this was war, and people died in war, but could not help feeling sad. She was just opening her mouth to say something to Arya, when she thought she heard a sound from outside. Her sister heard it too, instantly nocking an arrow into her bow. Ghost was in position at her side, teeth bared in a silent snarl aimed at whoever or whatever was outside.

Jon had told her that the wights carried weapons, used them even. They used weapons, used their teeth, used anything they could find to kill the living. They could sneak, even, she realised, as two hulking figures shuffled their way into the crypts.

Wait, she remembered Master Arren saying, wait, until they're close enough, so you won't have to rely overmuch on aiming. She wished she was as skilled as Arya, who could centre an arrow on a man's skull. Hoping against hope that the wight was not wearing mail, she loosed her bolt into its chest, just as Arya landed another dragonglass arrow into the other wight's head. Both wights collapsed, like puppets with cut strings. Sansa wanted to join them, but there was more noise from outside. Sansa grabbed another bolt, trying to fit it with fingers that refused to work, then cursing when she realised she'd forgotten to draw.

Ser Davos strode in, drawing his sword as soon as he saw the fallen wights.

"Tormund? Are you in here?"

Ghost relaxed, and Arya's bow lowered once more. Ser Davos smiled when he saw them standing there, armed.

"Your Grace, Lady Arya, we've been looking everywhere for you . . . Have you seen . . .?"

Ser Davos spotted Tormund, and stopped in his tracks, hand tightening on his sword, swallowing convulsively. He sheathed his sword and crouched down next to Tormund's body, taking off his gauntlet to put two fingers under Tormund's nose. There was still some hope in his eyes as he waited, but that slowly drained away, and he dropped a hand on Tormund's shoulder.

"Good man. Thank you."

Sansa and Arya turned away as Ser Davos knuckled hurriedly at his eyes; Sansa also had to blink away hot tears. What were they going to tell Jon? This man, who once was his enemy, had become his closest friend. Had Jon known that the Horn would be the death of Tormund? What was she thinking, of course he knew. Possibly, Jon too was sacrificing his life for them all, she thought, a sudden chill at the back of her neck.

"We need to get inside," Ser Davos continued. "Not here, though."

When Sansa and Arya turned to look at him, uncomprehending, he went on. "The warriors Tormund raised are fighting wights all over the battlements and even outside the keep - lookouts at the East Gate say the same is happening in Wintertown. Some of them have Valyrian swords and so can deal with the White Walkers. Those of us who have those weapons can do the same. But swords and arrows don't have eyes, and we need to leave this battlefield to the dead warriors."

Good speech, Sansa thought, as she started making her way out of the crypts, Arya and Ghost by her side. Yes, Ser Davos was right, they needed to get back to safety while the battle still raged. But-

"What about -" she broke off, gesturing at Tormund, who seemed to be fast asleep at their feet. "We can't just leave him here."

"We will send people for him once the battle is over," Ser Davos said, and Arya nodded in agreement.

"Preferably once the sun is up, and our warriors are asleep once more," she said.

Sansa stroked Ghost's head and sighed. Yes, of course. They had best get to the Great Hall, and perchance even barricade the doors. As they snuck out of the crypts and made their careful way to the Hall, Sansa, for the first time in many years, recited a silent prayer to the Mother. They had been saved by the Kings of Winter, but Jon was still in King's Landing, was still facing the greatest terror of all. What good would it do her, if all of Winterfell was saved, but Jon fell?

Gentle Mother, font of mercy, she thought. Save our sons from war, we pray. Save us. Save them. Save Jon.

oOo

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Notes

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First of all, goodbye Tormund. Sorry.

Now, before anyone starts writing an angry post about how I made up a medieval crossbow for Sansa to be able to use, let me present to you Leonardo da Vinci's fast crossbow (FFN doesn't allow hyperlinks, so look up "Rapid fire crossbow" and you should find it), which did, in fact, have the mechanism for drawing inside the crossbow.
It was never made in Leonardo's time, but it was made recently and there are videos on youtube showing it being used - when I compared it to normal medieval crossbows with the goat's foot (a fiddly metal thingy to be placed precisely on the crossbow), or using your foot and a hook on your belt, it looks so very easy.

I ended up not giving Arya a longsword - she's trained with Needle, more of a fencing style, I would say.