A deserter and a wildling could expect no welcome anywhere in the Seven

Kingdoms. We could go look for Gendel’s children, I suppose. Though they’d be more like to eat us than to take us in.  The Wall did not awe Jarl’s raiders, Jon

saw. They have done this before, every man of them. Jarl called out names when they dismounted beneath the ridge, and eleven gathered round him. All were young. The

oldest could not have been more than five-and-twenty, and two of the ten were younger than Jon. Everyone was lean and hard, though; they had a look of sinewy

strength that reminded him of Stonesnake, the brother the Halfhand had sent off afoot when Rattleshirt was hunting them.  In the very shadow of the Wall the

wildlings made ready, winding thick coils of hempen rope around one shoulder and down across their chests, and lacing on queer boots of supple doeskin. The boots had

spikes jutting from the toes; iron, for Jarl and two others, bronze for some, but most often jagged bone. Small stone-headed hammers hung from one hip, a leathern

bag of stakes from the other. Their ice axes were antlers with sharpened tines, bound to wooden hafts with strips of hide. The eleven climbers sorted themselves into

three teams of four; Jarl himself made the twelfth man. “Mance promises swords for  the top,” he told them, his breath misting

in the cold air. “Southron swords of castle-forged steel. And your name in the song he’ll make of this, that too. What more could a free man ask? Up, and the

Others take the hindmost!”  The Others take them all, thought Jon, as he watched them scramble up the steep slope of the ridge and vanish beneath the trees. It

would not be the first time wildlings had scaled the Wall, not even the hundred and first. The patrols stumbled on climbers two or three times a year, and rangers

sometimes came on the broken corpses of those who had fallen. Along the east coast the raiders most often built boats to slip across the Bay of Seals. In the west

they would descend into the black depths of the Gorgea police shieldcould hold me upside down and drainmy gutschange your mind to make their way around the Shadow Tower. But in between the only way to defeat the Wall was to go over it,

and many a raider had. Fewer come back, though, he thought with a certain grim pride. Climbers must of necessity leave their mounts behind, and many younger, greener

raiders began by taking the first horses they found. Then a hue and cry would go up, ravens would fly, and as often as not the Night’s Watch would hunt them down

and hang them before they could get back with their plunder and stolen women. Jarl would not make that mistake, Jon knew, but he wondered about Styr. The Magnar is a

ruler, not a raider. He may not know how the game is played.