Tormund Ironbraid's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

At dawn Tormund counted his people again. Sixty faces, all hollow with hunger. They had come to the fires with nothing. No bread, no meat, no packs. The stronghold lay far to the north, and no one crossed that distance on an empty belly. He knew it. If he marched them now, half would fall on the trail. So the north would have to wait a day. "We do not march today," Tormund said. The crowd stirred. "Today we hunt and gather. We build. A man cannot fight for his home if he starves before he reaches it." He split them into three bands. The strongest took spears into the trees to hunt the small horned creatures that fed on moss. The old and the young gathered wood and dug pits for a store. He set the rest to raising shelters from bent branches and hide. By midday a rough village stood among the ferns. It was crooked and small. It was theirs. Tormund led the hunt himself. He tracked a fat horned creature through the wet ground, drove his spear, and dropped it clean. By dusk his band brought back a dozen carcasses. The gatherers filled two pits with roots and dried berries. Smoke rose from a cooking fire, and for the first time in days his people ate until they were full. But meat and roots would not win a battle. Their spears were old, their blades chipped. Tormund needed iron, and the wilds gave none. Then a boy came running with something cupped in his hands. It was a ball of tangled moss, threaded with black thorns and glowing an eerie blue. "Chief, it grows on the rocks past the stream," the boy said. "There is much of it." Tormund pressed a thorn against his thumb. It did not bend. It bit like a needle and drew blood. He had seen this moss before, in the old days, when the clan smiths burned it under the forge. It made the fire hot enough to soften metal. And the thorns themselves could arm a spear. "Bring all of it," he told the boy. "Every rock you can strip." That night the clan worked by the strange blue glow. They lashed the black thorns to shafts. They fed the moss to their fires and heated their chipped blades until the metal ran soft, then hammered it true. Weapon by weapon, the village armed itself. Tormund walked among the shelters at dawn. His people slept warm and fed, spears stacked and sharpened beside them. He had turned sixty starving refugees into a clan that could march and fight. The village had done its work. Then a hunter came stumbling from the trees, breathless. "Chief. Tracks by the stream. Boot prints, fresh. Not ours." He swallowed. "Someone found the smoke." Tormund looked north, then back at the crooked shelters he had just built. The fires had fed his clan. They had also drawn the enemy.