Grenwin watched as a large chunk of flat metal was removed from the "wing" of the vaguely arrow-shaped "craft" that Maia was working on.
The small woman was making all sorts of interesting noises whenever she found something that caught her interest, and she seemed to be finding a lot of this.
"Look at this, Gren!" A rectangular metal box-thing trailing wires floated smoothly in front of her for her inspection. "It's so precise! The machining on this is really impressive!"
Grenwin nodded, leaning closer to try and figure out what Maia saw in this. It was, in the other woman's own words, cool. At least, altogether, what she'd been told about this variable fighter was that it can fly and also punch something. That, genuinely, was enough for Grenwin to be interested.
"It looks, okay?" She said, rubbing her neck. "I don't really see what you're seeing in this. You sure I can learn to ride this?"
"Pilot, Gren! I'd love to teach you how to pilot." Maia said absentmindedly, walking around a peculiar rod as long as Grenwin's arm. "You know, taking these lasers off the mounts might have some uses. It's all chemical, we'd just need to set it up properly for these maulers to, ah, maul?"
Grenwin shivered, remembering the small demonstration Maia had given her and Ygdis. The arrow-shape had become a metal giant larger than anything she'd seen, and atop its head sat four of those laser-tube weapons. Maia had taken them far from First Fork, then set those weapons on a small dell of trees.
Trees that had proceeded to burst from within, something Maia had said happened when the water in the trees started boiling suddenly- Either way, the trees had been hearty and hale one moment, the next the whole thing had been reduced to smoldering shards of wood.
Chuckling nervously, she took a few steps back from the floating tube. "Ha, ah, I think so."
Maia nodded absently, "Mhm. I should take one apart, just to see how it works…" She paused, then shook her head, the tube moving with a suddenness that startled Grenwin. It zoomed over to the other side of the room, where components were being laid out for Ygdis to mark down on Maia's loaned tablet.
"That's four of those maulers!" She called from where she was standing, "Is that all the weapons, or are there still some left?"
Maia regarded the skeletal craft, "I think we could technically say that the IR countermeasures could be used as weapons, considering how hot they burn. No, yeah, that's all the weapons, definitely."
"Okay!" Ygdis called back.
"What's the point of this, anyway?" Grenwin asked, walking up to the short woman. "You have the Power, and if the two of us can learn from you, why do we need this?"
"Scale!" Ygdis called, apparently overhearing the question. "There's one of her, and three of us witches."
"And regular people don't need anything special to use mundane weapons," Maia added. "I don't want to give everyone one of these, maybe a specific task force at most. They are too powerful to use, I'm almost worried. Symon said that Aegon and his wives conquered the Seven Kingdoms on dragonback."
Maia shuddered for a moment, Grenwin lending her a warm hand on the shoulder that was accepted gratefully.
"I get it," Grenwin nodded, "These don't need to eat, sleep, or even rest. However long the rider- the pilot can perform for; these metal beasts can keep up."
"Apparently, even dragons needed rest." Maia said with a warm pat on Grenwin's hand. "I don't need rest, and at this point I feel confident enough repairing this particular VF-1S that I could take it out today, if I wanted to. Problem is, what message does that send? I could fly down to King's Landing, obliterate the ruling class, and enforce my own order."
The short woman said it so seriously Grenwin couldn't help but believe it. What could the defenders do against weapons that cause the very water in their bodies to become steam? Anything that metal giant's gaze falls upon would be destroyed, and that's before it used any of the other possible weapons.
"You wouldn't do that," Ygdis called over. "You'd do something silly, like walk into the courtyard and get out so you could have a chat. Then someone would try to stab you and things would get interesting."
…That was one word for it. Ygdis hadn't really seen Maia after her first fight, and Grenwin had a feeling that any interesting things would weigh heavily on her.
The winged woman shrugged, turning her attention back to the disassembly of her craft. "Maybe. Or I'll be surprised at something, faint, and wake up in a cell."
"You think they'd let you keep your knife?" Grenwin joked, patting the sword's hilt where it lay on Maia's waist.
"No, some noble would take it for himself, probably. For all the good it would do him, anyway." Maia responded absentmindedly, "I might just have fun pretending to vanish for a while. Or, maybe, I'll just pop out for volangar and tea with Hamgwyn, bring some leftovers back before anyone notices I'm missing."
"In all seriousness, why don't we just go take the Wall?" Grenwin finally put a voice to vague thoughts that had been sticking around for a while.
Maia opened her mouth, stopped, put down the big metal thing she'd just picked up and faced Grenwin.
"I've thought about it, a little. I want to try and bribe the watch with goodies first, show them that we aren't all going to try and slit their throats, and hopefully that'd be reciprocal with our people." She hummed a short melody, "Or they'll try and kill us anyway, and we can take the wall once they're out of the way."
Ygdis walked over, tablet held carefully in both hands. "Why not try to lure them out, then take the castle from behind? I've seen what Castle Black looks like on both sides of the Wall, and from the south, there is no fortification. It'd still be a fight through corridors and rooms, but we'd be able to get a handhold no problem, and from there we just use a Gateway to link back here. All the benefits of fighting with your family at your back, none of the downsides of a siege or something lengthy."
Grenwin blinked at her friend, shocked. From the expression on Maia's face, neither of them had been expecting such tactical insight from the young warrior.
"That," Maia looked at Grenwin, then back at Ygdis. "That could work. That could work really well. We have more and more people filtering in day by day, and we only need a hardened cohort to take and hold territory."
Grenwin shook her head, "There's the other two castles to worry about, as well as anyone on the Wall. If anyone escapes to send word to Lord Stark, what would we do? We can't defend from the south, and we'd have be stuck in a bad position if it came to a defense."
Ygdis tapped Grenwin on the nose playfully. "Yeah, but remember, Gateways. If we target patrols on the wall first, then the aviaries at the castles, that should give us enough time to prepare fortifications on the southern side. Especially if Maia helps!"
"Could do, could do. Oh, yeah, no, this definitely sounds workable." Maia said, then slowly added, "But these aren't faceless opponents, they're still men. We might need them, or their experience."
"We can take prisoners," Grenwin suggested, "If we can take them back here after disarming them, they shouldn't be too much trouble. Especially with a hot meal and a comfortable bed to sleep. We can figure out what to do with them after, maybe some will decide to join up."
Maia was silent for a long time, "I'm going to need a more detailed mission plan before I sign off on this. That means, Ygdis, we need to start putting together the recon teams. Grenwin, I'm going to need your help in putting together the actual fighting force, but I expect that the recon teams will need more than the usual training."
It sounded sensible enough, and Grenwin nodded in agreement. "When are we going to start that? I have fifteen I can already expect to want to join up, and we're surely going to find more from there."
Her sentiment was echoed by Ygdis, still buoyed aloft by her recent string of successes. Grenwin was proud of her, finally growing into her own like this!
Maia looked at the mostly-disassembled frame of her mech, then shrugged. "We should get started now. This can wait, it's not going anywhere."
"Yes!" Ygdis said enthusiastically, all but pulling them two of them back out to the Lodge by their arms.
They split up then, Grenwin heading off to recruit the ones she'd had her eye on. First was Brelant, the man seeming to regard Maia as something divine, but still staunchly devoted. Wyck, Herrick, Jorni, as many capable warriors as she could find.
From there, they followed the chain of recommendations until a sizeable group of near enough a hundred men and women were milling around in the open grounds below the defensive wall.
Ygdis, for her part, had gathered quite a few young women and men to her particular cause. The groups mingled easily, and Grenwin felt suddenly at a loss for what to do.
"Alright, you lot!" She barked, the way she spoke to pups barely old enough to hunt on their own. "Line up in rows of ten! Anyone who can't count that high, find someone who can!"
The gathered crowd milled around, sorting itself ever so slowly into something vaguely organized. Ygdis stepped up next to Grenwin, "You know why we gathered you here. Some of you want to scout, ferret the secrets our enemies want to keep hidden from us. Some of you want to fight. Whatever your reasons, glory, honor, fame, recognition, put them aside."
The young woman took a bracing breath, before bellowing at them. "We fight to live! The Others want us dead; the Watchmen want us dead, even the gutless kneelers want us dead! At least the slavers recognize our worth! We, though, aren't going easily, are we? We'll scrape and bite and kick and punch our way out of the snow, just as we have for generations! Difference is, we're doing it together now."
Grenwin took up her… Speech, she guessed, after Ygdis stepped back and motioned at her.
"If you have issues following orders, raise your hand." She said it calmly, with the force she liked to imagine she'd seen once in a glacial valley years ago.
A fair number of hands in the slightly more orderly crowd went up.
"Fucking figures, I could tell since you STILL AREN'T IN ORDER!"
The crowd figeted, and under her baleful gaze managed to form itself into rows of ten.
"There! Was that so difficult? What, are you going to stand around thinking when the kneeler-lords are coming at you with bared steel?!"
There was disparate cry of, "No!" from the crowd.
Grenwin wasn't satisfied, some part of herself that was just now seeing the light of day absolutely thriving on the moment. "What was that? I couldn't hear that!"
"NO!"
Grenwin nodded, satisfied for the moment. "That's bloody right, you won't! Orders aren't just so a lord can feel good about himself! They matter! Order is the difference between a dozen kneeler lords and their armies scavenging off the land, and a true fighting force! What use have we for scavenging? We'll take what we want off the dead, but we don't need the living's food. We've got our own! It's better, too!"
A hand tapped Grenwin on the shoulder, and she looked down. Oh, Maia had arrived, looking rather pleased. Stepping aside, Grenwin moved to stand next to Ygdis.
"Okay, right. We aren't an army, not yet. We're just a bunch of people with ideas. We all have our own views of what's right and what's not, and right now is a good time to really hammer things out. What we decide here and now will shape the course of our path irrevocably."
Middling agreement from the crowd. Maia just didn't have, hm, that inner Grenwin to bully these louts into order.
Stepping forward next to the winged woman, she bellowed, "Yer leader just said something bloody insightful! WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT?"
The crowd reeled, before a raucous cry of agreement rose.
"That's better!" Grenwin shouted at them.
The next few hours were a bit of a blur for Grenwin. The time-stretching thing that Maia did was in full effect, and Gren had plenty of time to beat these new soldiers into something closer to the ideal that she and Maia had deliberated at length over.
Heh, now she was using the big words, too!
Ygdis' recruits got the same training everyone did, broken up into squads of ten, with five squads forming a platoon. They had two platoon's worth of recruits, and with Ygdis' assistance, they were able to get everyone well-acquainted with the concept of squads.
Each squad had a commander, then a secondary commander. The rest would be hammered out in time, with Maia saying something about medical training for battlefield wounds and triage, but they were having enough work with organized combat training to add anything like that on top.
That being said, everyone had a good time with the training. It was brutal, but gamified in a way that Maia had said would help ease any sore winners and losers. Once the first real battles began, she had said, the squads would become very close-knit. Grenwin got the feeling that something like the constant what of Maia's first few weeks would happen; Jading people to pretty much every unusual thing, but time would tell who would be right.
Grenwin was still surprised to see Symon getting into the snow and mud with everyone else, a lithe blond at his side. Huh, so he finally got together with someone. Good on him!
Months, hours, later and they called the day's training. Unfortunately for Maia, every single one of them joined that day's education in addition to most of the Hornfoots that had appeared while they were gone.
Once the day was over, Grenwin was very happy to finally take a seat in the lodge next to Maia, listen to the people sing and play, and just relax.
She must have drifted off at some point, for she found herself in a familiar place. It was just like the waking world, as far as Grenwin could tell, with nobody around. Well, usually nobody, but sometimes there would be an individual or two. Nobody she knew, and nobody that talked to her.
This time, however, she wasn't alone. For one, a woman Grenwin had never seen before, long golden-blond hair flowing in a non-existent breeze, sat snuggling…
"Maia?" Grenwin asked, before she could stop herself. The two looked at her, and she recoiled when she saw that Maia's eyes were… Dull, almost.
She rushed forward, heedless of the other woman, frantically grabbing the winged woman's head and staring into her eyes, hoping to find anything familiar.
There!
Just a trace of amusement, the slight curve of her lips when she had a private smile.
"It's okay, I'm sure." The other woman gave Grenwin a kindly pat on the back, "This is probably just a misunderstanding. Who are you?"
Grenwin backed up, releasing the girl. She stood, brushing herself off, looking at blond girl. "I am Grenwin, a friend of Maia," she waved at the… not-Maia sitting on the ground, cradling Maia's sword.
The gold-haired girl laughed lightly, "Oh, that's not Maia, that's Mai. Different people, you know?"
Grenwin looked between them, then nodded. It made some sense, and it was all a dream anyway.
"So who are you?"
"My name's Kasey. I'm not entirely sure why the two of us," she indicated the apparent Mai and herself, "Keep getting dragged around, but I figure it has something to do with Maia. How is she? It's been a while since we've seen her."
Grenwin blinked, "She's… fine? I was sitting next to her before I fell asleep."
Kasey clapped her hands once in a startlingly familiar way, "Good! That's very good. Can you tell us more about her, if you're willing? We would like to know the kind of person she is."
"…" Grenwin paused, considering. So far, these two hadn't been anything but friendly, yet she was herself a deeply suspicious woman who didn't trust everything Kasey has said. So far. "Maybe another time."
Kasey nodded with visible disappointment, "That's alright. We have nothing but time here."
Feeling quite done with this peculiar dream, Grenwin woke herself up.
Yes, everything was as it was, though Maia seems to have started snoozing herself, curled up against Grenwin in a way that made the warrior want to stay very still, lest she disturb the sleeping girl.
The evening passed into night like that, and Grenwin kept an eye on her friend. She seemed to be sleeping fine, like she had in the stedding once the burns had stopped, but Grenwin could still remember how vivid and scarring those had seemed.
Maybe, if Maia needed something to help her sleep, Grenwin was willing to supply it. It was the least she could do for the girl that saved her life.