Chapter 8: Battanian Rangers
After the Storm Dancer left, Arthur found Barro preparing the return journey to Wintertown. The fur merchant stood near his packhorses, counting bundles and arguing with a dockworker over some minor fee. When he saw Arthur, he seemed relieved. When he saw the twenty armed men behind him, that relief died immediately.
"No," Barro said, raising both hands. "No, no. I hired you. One guard. I am not paying for all of them."
"They are not asking for pay," Arthur said.
Barro looked at the men. Then he looked at Arthur. "Nothing is free."
"Consider it friendship."
"That sounds worse."
"If bandits come, they help. If beasts come, they help. If nothing happens, your furs reach Wintertown safely and you lose nothing."
Barro's eyes moved over the Volunteers and Wolf Cubs. They were quiet, armed, and disciplined enough not to look like common dock trash. The merchant's fear fought with his greed. Greed won, as it often did.
"Fine," he said. "But I will not pay a single copper more."
"I understand."
The caravan left White Harbor larger than before. Arthur's newly recruited Battanians walked in small groups around the column. The Volunteers stayed closer to the packhorses. The Wolf Cubs moved farther ahead and to the sides, watching the trees and riverbanks. Barro kept looking at them as if expecting them to demand coin at any moment. They did not.
The return journey was uneventful. Perhaps the Manderly patrols had cleared the worst of the bandits near the White Knife. Perhaps twenty extra armed men discouraged fools from testing their luck. Whatever the reason, no arrows came from the trees, no broken men rushed the road, and no beasts attacked from the snow. There was only the cold wind, the white land, and the slow movement of horses and men back toward Winterfell.
After arriving in Wintertown, Barro settled the promised commission. Arthur had several hundred more dinars in hand, and his purse finally began to feel less insulting.
He did not waste time.
Oak took the ten Battanian Wolf Cubs into the Wolfswood to hunt, gather herbs, and learn the land. They would bring back pelts and plants to sell, but that was not the main purpose. They needed to know the forest, its paths, its animals, its dangers, and how to move without dying. A scout who did not understand the land was just a corpse walking slightly ahead of everyone else.
Arthur kept Ena and the ten Volunteers near Wintertown. Together, they began taking work wherever there was coin and enough sense in the request. They repaired granaries, found lost livestock, escorted Old Harth's ironware to nearby villages, carried goods, guarded small storehouses, and even helped settle boundary disputes between farmers. The work was not glorious. It was often dull, cold, and dirty. But it paid.
The Battanian Rangers worked efficiently. They arrived when they said they would. They did not steal. They did not harass the smallfolk. They finished what they accepted. That alone made them different from many sellswords. Men in Westeros expected armed strangers to be trouble. When they were not, people remembered.
Arthur enforced discipline strictly. No drunken fights. No theft. No drawing steel over insults. No touching women who did not want to be touched. No threatening smallfolk for sport. The rules were simple, and Oak helped make them understood. One man who ignored them returned from the yard with a split lip and no desire to test them again.
Little by little, the name spread through Wintertown and nearby villages. The Battanian Rangers. A strange band under a foreign captain. Quiet men. Reliable men. Fair prices. Almost no trouble.
Almost no trouble was better than most armed groups could claim.
The system rewarded each completed task with small amounts of dinars and experience. Notifications appeared often enough that Arthur began to feel steady progress beneath his feet. It was slow, but solid. His reputation changed from something unknown to something local men could name.
At night, he often opened the system map. Westeros spread before him: Winterfell, White Harbor, the Neck, the Riverlands, the Westerlands, the Crownlands, King's Landing, the Reach, Dorne, the Iron Islands. Each name meant roads, castles, lords, armies, coin, grain, and future blood.
Far to the east, across the Narrow Sea, the Disputed Lands still glowed with a dangerous red mark.
The destination of the Storm Dancer.
A warning, perhaps.
Or an invitation for later.
Arthur closed the map and looked out the window. The northern sky was cold and clear, filled with stars. Somewhere far away, a direwolf howled, long and lonely, the sound carrying through the silent night.
He had a few hundred more dinars, twenty men, one companion who had not yet left, and a name people were beginning to remember.
It was not much.
But it was a beginning.
Arthur stood at the edge of Wintertown, looking out over the white fields of the North. The town was quieter than usual that morning, wrapped in cold wind and old smoke. Beyond the roofs and chimneys, Winterfell rose against the pale sky, dark stone beneath snow, grim and patient as it had been for thousands of years. Arthur had begun to understand why the Northmen trusted stone more than men. Stone at least did not lie unless some lord carved words into it.
He was thinking about the Battanian Rangers. That had become most of his life now. Coin, food, discipline, reputation, recruits. How many men he could afford. How many he could hide. How quickly the Wolf Cubs could learn the Wolfswood. How long it would take before the smallfolk stopped seeing them as strange outsiders and began seeing them as useful. It was not conquest. Not yet. It was colder, slower work. Foundations always were. No singer wasted breath on foundations, because singers preferred the part where men died loudly.
Then hoofbeats broke the morning calm.
Arthur looked up.
A small party of royal messengers came riding hard along the road, their horses flecked with foam. Their cloaks snapped behind them in crimson and gold, bright enough to look almost vulgar against the white and grey of the North. They did not slow for Wintertown. They passed through the street with the arrogance of men carrying royal words and therefore believing themselves heavier than ordinary men. Their destination was obvious. They rode straight for the gates of Winterfell.
The town reacted at once.
Doors opened. Men stopped lifting crates. Women leaned out from windows. Children ran after the riders until their mothers shouted them back. A few old men squinted toward the castle as if their eyes could hear news faster than ears. Within half an hour, the whole of Wintertown seemed to know.
"The king is coming!"
"Robert Baratheon himself!"
"Royal messengers from King's Landing. They brought the word to Lord Stark."
"The king in Winterfell. Gods be good."
The Smoky Wood Tavern was already noisy by nature, but that day it became almost unbearable. Men crowded around tables, drinking too early and too eagerly, speaking as if they had personally been invited to dine with the royal family. Mugs struck against one another. Ale spilled over fingers and tabletops. Every man had an opinion, and most opinions became louder after the second cup. Robert Baratheon, the man who had broken the Targaryens and taken the Iron Throne, was coming north. For Wintertown, that was enough to make the day feel historic, which mostly meant everyone had an excuse to drink.
Arthur sat in the farthest corner with a cup of weak ale and listened.
The news moved through his mind like a knife finding old scars. The king's journey to Winterfell. Eddard Stark becoming Hand of the King. The journey south. King's Landing. Lannisters. Betrayals. Blood. War. The beginning of the story, or at least the part of it most people remembered before everything collapsed into death and banners.
So it had begun.