Game Of Thrones Joffrey Baratheon Purple Days

"Copper, Prince Joffrey. Not iron."

"A time of breaking."

"Something wrong within you."

"The masters of their fate."

"Son."

The sky blinked. The Red Eye. Waiting.

"Wake up, Joff. Please… please wake up." The sun shone bright through scarlet hair, an elusive spot of warmth tangled in red reeds. Joffrey blinked under its warm glare, a little smile on his lips. "Get up, Joff," said Sansa, touching his face with ice cold hands. Twin tears fell down her cheeks, the waves crashing on the beaches of Jhala behind her. He lay on a bed of white sand, pleasantly hot, eyes half closed. The seagulls were quiet.

Her voice hitched as her lips neared his. "Stand again," she whispered. Her kiss was cold, cold as the foamy sea.

Joffrey became, slowly. His body acquired dead weight, limbs cold and barely there. He was buried. Dead. Encased in a dark tomb. It was over. Here lies Joffrey, first of his name… But Joffrey had tasted oblivion, and this was not it. I'm alive, he thought. It was cold. So cold it was warm. A vaguely pleasant burn that lulled him to sleep. "Ah-" He swallowed, wisps of steam vanishing into the murky darkness. "Aah-" A deep breath, a stab of ice through his lungs. "Alive," he whispered.

Was he?

He shuffled within the dark tomb, a flicker in the gloom catching his eye. A way out. It shined through a crack in the ice around him; vibrant green, shifting violet. He crawled for that hole and pummeled the weight of snow and ice out of his way, trying to make it out of the shallow cavity that was his tomb. "I'm alive," he said again, a sea of cuts and bruises screaming to life with every breath. Joffrey welcomed that sea of pain, encased awareness, breath of life. He punched up, trying to widen the crack in the frosted snow. "I'm alive!" he screamed, legs straining under the weight of dead ice as he threw himself against the crack above him, lifting the weight of the world. Joffrey floundered up through the snow as it gave way without warning; a whale surfacing into an uncertain world. He collapsed on his back, taking quick breaths of freezing air, breathlessly giddy to be out of that dark hole. Above him, a shifting ocean beckoned.

The aurora grasped the night sky with fingers green and scarlet, floating curtains of congealed light covering up the stars. Violets stabbed out from main branches, uncertain explorers of that restless light, skittish and quick to fall back. The deep reds were far more stubborn, slow and determined. A marching phalanx; the conquerors of heaven. The Red Comet sat at the core of that grand spectacle, off to the Far North, a radiant Queen holding court. It looked different than what Joffrey remembered. Bigger, somehow. Haloed in concentric circles of geometrical precision. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen in his life.

'Stand again,' he remembered, and smiled. He would like to see his wife again. Sansa. The cold breeze stole his smile, a hellishly sibilant whisper crawling over the face of the earth, snatching what little warmth he had left. It served to make him groggy in an instant. Sleepy.

I'm alive.

He picked himself up like countless times before. Out of the choking grasp of giant wood snakes, out of the muddy grounds of tourneys, out of the unseen currents prowling the depths of the Sunset Sea. One limb at a time, and then a strain of stumbling effort as he fell back on the snow again. He felt woozy. Dazed. Had someone hit him in the head? He stood up again and shuffled without direction, lost in an alien world, a gentle slope that had no end. Here and there bits of wood and masonry stuck up from the icy wasteland, ribs of some beached leviathan long ago forgotten. Joffrey blinked. Those stout beams of oak and heavy bricks of stone spread out in every direction, both up and down the eternal slope and sideways too, the distance shrinking them until they seemed no more than twigs and pebbles lost on a frozen river, reflecting the pale lights of the aurora above. Something terrible had happened here.

Joffrey shook his head as he walked, his mind a jumbled mess of screams and color. Had there been a battle? His body nestled that unmistakable numbness, that torn and abused sheen wrapped in a heavy blanket. The feeling of his soul taken to its breaking point and stopped just shy of a great cliff. He was completely exhausted. Moving around by sheer inertia. Too stubborn to lay down and die, his wife would say. Sansa. Was she here somewhere? The thought jolted him out of his reverie, an instant of breathless panic as he clenched his fists and reached out for her. No. She was far away. Somewhere south. Alive.

I'm alive, he thought, the mantra lending him strength. Joffrey let the Song guide him, following the almost dead melodies accosted by silence. He came to a stop on a patch of pristine snow and fell on his knees, digging with gauntleted hands made of stars. He found an arm, then a shoulder, and a beard crusted with shards of ice, its song tittering on the edge of final silence. The guardsman was shivering, eyes wide as he stared up at him. "Stand again, soldier," said Joffrey, grabbing him by the straps of his breastplate and pulling him up. The man opened his mouth but no sound came out. Joffrey put an arm under his shoulder and half-dragged him over the frozen wasteland, "You've got to keep moving," he said, trudging over what looked like the arm of a trebuchet, "You stop, you die."

"You… stop… you… die," said the guardsman through clenched teeth, clattering in the midst of the silence. He patted at his belt as if he'd just lost a limb, "Ser… I… I lost m-my axe."

"It's alright," said Joffrey, shivering with him as another gust shrieked through the eternal slope and they made their way downwards, "Just keep moving. Keep moving…" he trailed off as he spotted half a tower resting on its back, as if it'd fainted after a sudden fright. It was a couple score paces down the slope and to their left; a mangled affair of stones still held more or less together, horizontal against the snow. Wisps of smoke drifted from one of the arrowslits now facing the colored sky.

"What's your name, soldier?" he said as they trudged towards the tower.

"…Ser?"

"Your name."

The man blinked, shards of ice falling from his long beard, "Jorrick, Ser."

"One of my Mistwalkers?"

"Aye ser." A bit of life came over his voice as he thumbed his chestplate, "First of the First."

"You were in Dragonstone?"

"Aye. Followed you through the Bloody Road."

"Tough fight, that."

"Aye, ser. I reckon so."

They stopped twice before reaching the tower, digging for survivors. Once, the man died before they could dig him out. The other they managed to haul out. "We die standing. Come on soldier," he said as they carried him by the shoulders, legs dragging behind him. He must have been fifteen namedays, clad in simple hide armor and a thin woolen cloak. A levy. He barely moved. They reached the torn tower and entered through a gaping hole on its side, escaping the whistling breeze. It was marginally warmer here, and they navigated through a haphazard sea of broken granite blocks, torn light artillery, and sundered furniture all jumbled up and stirred. A pitiful fire had been cobbled up out of reclaimed wood, and three men shivered around it, hands fisted over their cloaks, eyes empty. Two guardsmen, one man-at-arms in Karstark livery.

"Who's in command here?" Joffrey said as they dragged the boy as close as they could to the fire.

They barely stirred. One of them looked at him with dead eyes before shrugging. Few times before had Joffrey seen men so shell-shocked. He knelt by the fire, a sigh of relief escaping his lips. Gods, but it was good to feel real warmth again, "You seen any other survivors?"

The man shook his head.

Survivors… it seemed like an apt descriptor for what they were; a bunch of ragged souls that somehow survived a cataclysm. "What's the last thing you remember?"

The soldier stayed silent, staring at the fire. It was the Karstark man that spoke up; lilting words, as if he were already dead. "Spiders. Eight legs tingling on ice." He turned his hollow stare towards Joffrey, "Spiders. And then the sky bled."

Old Gods give me wisdom. What the hells happened? Nameless dread congealed in his gut, screams and flaming arrows flying above his head as he clutched his temple. A great pattern rose to life, connecting everything. The Red Comet felt close, touching his cheek with red light. "Your Grace?" said Jerrick, a worried hand hovering near his shoulder.

"I'm alright," he said, taking deep breaths. He fumbled with his belt and discovered he had a waterskin attached to it. He drunk eagerly even as the water froze his throat, cringing as it made its way down. He turned to smaller sips, breathing raggedly in between. He offered it, and men passed it around wordlessly.

Jorrick took a swing and handed it back to him. Fire and shelter made him look more adrift than when they'd been shambling outside in the wind. "Now what, ser?"

What now indeed? The men by the fire turned to look at him, the tiniest smidgen of life fizzling in their eyes. He felt as lost as they, and yet as even the lowliest of peasants knew; the King always had a plan.

When in doubt, assess from high ground. His lips twitched in a silent smile. When was the last time he'd quoted Fol-Fing? He wondered how he'd stack up against the General-That-Fought-a-Thousand-Battles-and-Lost-None. I'll be lucky to be called 'and-Lost-Only-One', he thought, entranced by the fire. He felt like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a bit of flotsam, and no less reluctant to leave it. Jerrick was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

"I need a vantage point," he told him. There, I said it. I'm committed. Leaving the fire with great regret, he climbed through nooks and crannies left by the broken stones. He reached another gaping hole bathed in scarlet and green, and climbed atop what had once been the tower's northern face. Jorrick—to his credit—followed him up. They crouched on the pitted stone, shivering against the wind, stunned by the mute devastation spread upon the land. The gentle slope continued southward, peppered by broken towers and pieces of timbered battlements, arrayed haphazardly like broken toys. Bodies lay scattered over the colored snow, and silhouettes shifted between the wreckage: whether living or dead Joffrey could not say. He couldn't see the crest of the slope they were in. It seemed endless, going both east and west before losing itself in the mist. The mist.

They were surrounded by it, thick and grey-faced like congealed miasma. Joffrey tried looking for the hill's foot to the south, but the slope kept descending at a pleasant rate until it too was lost in fathomless grey. A great tsunami of snow had rocked this world, a tidal wave of frost and crystalline ice that had swept everything and everyone in its path, and beyond it lay only the mist; an unknowable wall, marking the edges of the world beyond which nothing stirred. His throat shuttered to a pinprick, the cold reaching his heart.

"Ser…" said Jorrick, slack jawed as the violets above multiplied again. They bloomed and painted the snow purple, light piercing through the mist and illuminating hulking silhouettes hidden in the horizon; more towers and broken keeps, their guts sprayed on the snow. Shifting figures wandering between, lost in the grey. "Ser," Jorrick said again, voice squeezed with dread. "Where's the Wall?"

Joffrey shivered as he clutched the dirty cloak still attached to his pauldrons, the void in his armor reflecting the purple blooms before the aurora returned to red and green, the sky above at ease again. "I think we're standing on it," he said, empty.

-: PD :-

Joffrey's walk took him through a field of roses stretching far and wide; a sea of them covering all that was. He knelt and picked one, smelling its fragrant tang sharp with sweet summer. But there was something different about this one. He frowned, watching the flower spread its petals wide, opening and opening with no end, new petals blossoming after each set and curving outwards. The mesmerizing pattern turned faster, reckless, opening and opening as Joffrey baited his breath, dreading to see beyond the fractal sea at what lay at its core as the final petals blossomed in breath-stealing glory-

He awoke with a scream, clutching his chest and taking big breaths. The cold. The cold was his lifeline to reality; a pervasive hollow thing, bone-deep and constant. Impossible to replicate in dream, the first thing he felt as he awoke.

"Ser?" Joffrey blinked at the guardsman, trying to place his face but seeing only crystalline structures. Jorrick, he remembered. He must have read his expression, "You fell asleep, ser."

"How long?" he said as he stood up, stumbling over leaden legs and taking Jorrick's hand with a weary sigh. Gods, he felt more tired than when he'd fallen asleep.

Jorrick looked at his hands, "A few hours. Me and the lads thought you needed the rest."

Joffrey walked out of the tower, still clad in his starry plate. Daylight gave their little clearing in the mist a surreal edge; an oily backdrop that made him squint. Where a few hours ago they'd counted a hundred ragged souls, now more than a thousand people were scuttling around the broken tower. Some walked line abreast, sticking halberd shafts through the snow and trying to feel for flesh or rubble. Others were busy digging around the slope in organized crews, sergeants and house guards calling for more tools.

"We've got another one!" one shouted. Guardsmen and levies rushed to his aid, bringing picks and shovels to bear on the patch of snow around a peeking beam of wood. They dug open a fraction of a whole bastion buried in the snow, frightful faces peering from within; one tight bundle of people bunched together for heat. Those people are depending on me, he thought, and it served to jump start his body back into motion.

"Cover 'em up and put them by the fires, come on!" bellowed Joffrey. He walked around the working perimeter, Jorrick at his heels. "We've got to get moving, and soon. It won't be long before another host comes crashing down." He trailed off as he gazed up the slope. Needless to say, what remained of the Wall wouldn't have stopped a peasant mob, much less an army of the dead. "What was left of the army that struck the Wall must have pushed through to the south, but reinforcements won't be far behind."

"Aye, ser. Plenty of wights buried around here as well, both old and new. We're digging up and clobbering 'em as we find 'em, but some already did the digging themselves." He looked around the perimeter of huffing men, hard at work shoving reclaimed wood into bonfires. "We're already stumbling into clusters of 'em."

"Won't be long before those clusters turn into mobs." Joffrey massaged his head, and there's enough dead men under all this snow to equip an entire army. I would know. Still, they'd killed many more wights than they'd lost soldiers during the Battle for the Wall. Hadn't they? His headache got worse as he tried to remember the battle, a mishmash of screams and burning oil blanketing his head. Stagrams exploded in the distance; fountains of blossoming fire that twirled and twirled. He shivered.

Keep moving, he whispered to himself, Keep fighting. "We need arms and firewood!" he bellowed at a bunch of shell-shocked onlookers, startling them, "Food too! Salvage only what you can carry!"

The serjeant in charge of a nearby digging detail picked up his words. "You heard the King! Grab whatever you can and dig 'em up!" He slapped a soldier in the back, "You, put your back into it! Won't outrun frostbite at this rate!"

Joffrey and Jorrick helped a couple men as they dragged a sled with an unconscious soldier back to a bonfire, pushing from behind as the two men by the front pulled on a bit of rope. They pushed until they reached the line of sleds practically docked to the main bonfire, purpled faces tilting to look at him. The sight of them tore a piece off his heart. "Stand fast men of Westeros," Joffrey said, touching shoulders and clasping hands, "I need all of you alive. Every breath you take is an insult to the Walkers, and there's a lot of cursing left to do."

Their faces lit up as he touched them, the stronger ones reaching with their hands and touching his starry plate. "Stand," whispered one of them, wrapped tight in blankets and barely stirring. The memory hit him then, full force, sound and fury. It was the first night. The one the men called King's Rain.

"Westeros Stands!" he roared as he walked behind a line of siege stagrams, the acrid smell of firepowder filling his nose with snot and choking the men around him. He reached Ned by the other side of the battery and leaned down on the battlements. "They're climbing up! Thousands of 'em!" he told the Lord of the North. But it wasn't King's Rain. It was the third night. It was Wallfall.

"Son," whispered Ned, blood gushing out of his mouth in fractals red, twisting lines of a single pattern connecting everything.

"Your Grace? Pardon, Your Grace?" It was a young lady, chestnut curls framing a heart shaped face. Her head was tilted in worry, her eyes pale and haggard. "You need to sleep, Your Grace."

Joffrey blinked away the screams and the stench of firepowder. Son. Ned. He remembered. He blinked back tears with a colossal effort, clearing his throat and looking away from her. "I can sleep when the dead claim me," he said before forming a fake smile, "Well, not really."

She wasn't amused. She exchanged glances with Jorrick in that secret language of serjeants and house guard captains. Get him to sleep, you idiot, her eyes seemed to say.

Jorrick's answering gaze was pessimistic, You give it a try then, lady.

Best to take the offensive before that. "I'm sorry, you are..?"

"Jeyne Westerling," she said, giving him an abbreviated curtsy in her thick furs. He noticed the golden armband, and things clicked into place.

"You're with the Queen's Handmaidens. Castle Black station?"

A nod. "What's left of them, at least." She gazed at the dozen women tending to the wounded, working nonstop and barely making a dent on the amount of frostbitten troops wrapped in their sleds… and those were the lucky ones. There was a knight in Manderly livery clutching a broken arm as he sat on a cracked stone brick, staring at the snow beneath his feet as he waited for his turn. There were scores like him.

"Where were you, when…" Joffrey trailed off, the words freezing in his mouth. When… The Red Comet opened its entrails and unleashed its pent up Will. Never angry. Just quiet. Solemn. Joffrey could still feel its gaze, raking over his skin.

Her eyes took a haunted glint, "The high aid station near elevator two. Our shift was almost over."

Joffrey winced. Another hour and she would've been resting inside the lower aid station at the foot of the Wall. Paradoxically, those standing above the Wall had fared many times better than those at the foot. They'd only had to survive a self-collapsing avalanche, instead of the sky falling over them. "Seen any survivors from Castle Black?"

She shook her head, "Not a soul that wasn't atop the Wall when… well." She gave the snow under her feet a lost look. "I'm sorry Your Grace, but I don't think we will."

Joffrey took a deep breath. I don't think so either. A nearby wounded reached out, touching his thigh plate where blue stars twinkled in the void. "Will they make it?" he asked her.

"We're still doing triage, but it's not looking good. Frostbite's decimating them, and the wind's not helping."

Joffrey nodded, "Do what you can for them and prepare to move out. We have to get out of here."

"And go where, Y'grace?" said Jorrick.

"South. Lord Tarly and most of the Reach are fortified at the second line, behind Last Hearth and the Last River. We've got to get there before the wights bring down that line too." And it would fall, eventually. Too long a stretch to protect properly, even with the Last River serving as a dubious, half-frozen moat. They'd slow the invasion of the North, no doubt, but Lord Tarly would have to retreat sooner or later lest he risk his entire host.

"And then?" asked Jeyne.

Joffrey closed his eyes, following the map of the North like a raven would. After that was the third line; the Dreadfort-Winterfell-Torrhen's Square axis. Legate Olyvar commanding the strategic reserve—the Second Regiment. Some Stormlords and half the Vale. At least three times larger than the second line and a hundred times more vulnerable. It bisected the North in half, using hills and rivers whenever it could and tiny silver dots that represented Guard Forts whenever it couldn't. It was little more than a rallying point for a retreating army, a stopgap to buy time for refugees fleeing for the Neck.

It hit him then; a punch to the gut, a breathless huff stolen away by the mist. The North was lost. "And then we fight," he managed.

"For the Living," whispered Jeyne.

A soldier screamed, two ladies holding him tight as another wielded a saw. "Lady Jeyne!" she yelled, "Lady Jeyne!"

"I have to go," she said, the curtsy even more shallow than last. Joffrey watched her get to work, giving out instructions and calling for boiled bandages. How did that song go? 'A thousand Hand-maidens, as fair as their Queen, but angrier by far!' It was a raunchy tune, sang grimly as it befit the hour of its birth. Joffrey couldn't remember anything else but the end; Watch- those wandering hands, oh- soldier of dawn, watch those wandering hands -lest-she-take-that-saw-belooow. It beggared belief that it had taken less than three nights for his constantly fighting, hungry, and sleep-deprived soldiers to compose that song. His fleeting smile evaporated as he watched her get to work on the squealing guardsman, one of the Handmaidens giving the man a piece of wood so he wouldn't scream. The entire forearm would have to go, judging by her aim.

Joffrey averted his sight and walked away, lost in thought. The North is lost. How could this have happened? He'd seen something, before this catastrophe. Some fundamental truth that made his hands shake, nameless foreboding pumping up and down his stomach; adrenaline through his veins. What happened? What was it? Steeling himself as if to die, he stared up at the Red Comet hanging above their bonfire, still faintly iridescent below the sun's muffled shoulder. He remembered staring at it as the light increased, a deep thrum echoing across the heights of the Wall, the sounds of battle dimming under an inexplicable weight that sought only to crush. Like an earthquake, filled with silent will. He was beginning to remember.

"Jorrick," he said, looking over the common guardsman markings on his armor, "You're promoted to First Serjeant and assigned to my staff." His eyes bulged at that, but Joffrey ploughed on before he could escape his fate, "Get this host ready to move, we march within the hour." He looked like a hare cornered by trappers.

"But ser- I- I don't know how."

"You're now a serjeant that can beat other serjeants around."

He blinked several times, then gave him an uneasy smile. "Well, that doesn't so complicated."

-: PD :-

The column made its way through the oppressive mist, foraging over the remains of what had once been the Wall. The Slope turned gentler as they marched, the remains of castles and battlements growing sparse. They stumbled across wandering survivors lost in the mist, accreting men and supplies like a lodestone does iron, though sometimes it seemed to Joffrey they lost as many as they found, figures marching too far beyond their comrades and disappearing within the thick haze.

One survivor they found clasped by wights; four of them, furiously trying to gnaw through mammoth fur.

"Stand back!" said Joffrey, halberdiers surrounding the bellowing figure. The giant was taller than two mounted knights stacked atop each other, wrapped in furs and covered in brownish hair that made it hard to tell which came from a mammoth and which sprouted from his own skin. He wheeled in circles, ripping and tearing at the wights clutching his chest like barnacles under a ship's hull. "Hold on!" yelled Joffrey, sprinting past the halberds and jumping on the giants back. Eyes that were not blue but deep amber stared back, suspicion dissipating once Joffrey wrestled with the wight clutching his back. They fell on the snow, and he ended the twitching corpse with a gauntleted fist, shattering its skull in three blows.

"Ie," said the giant after disposing of the other wights. His corrugated face neared Joffrey as he crouched. Staring up at the being, he tried to find the words in the Old Tongue. It was Sansa who usually liaised with Mag the Mighty and his host.

He shouldn't have bothered. "You. Thank," the giant said in the common tongue, pushing a meaty finger over his starry plate and sinking him another inch under the snow. His voice was deep and rumbling, the vowels all crushed together. "Many thanks I owe," he said as the finger turned and hooked. Joffrey took the offer in a heartbeat, grabbing the finger with both hands as the giant lifted him up with a speck of effort.

The soldiers lowered their weapons as Joffrey got his breath back. "Keep moving!" he bellowed. He bowed his head at the giant, noting the stone tablets filled with First Men runes. They were as big as Joffrey's palm, threaded with thick roots that fixed them to his woolly winter cloak. He was completely covered in them; a sort of stone brigandine. "An honor to meet you…"

"Bor Go Tim Gan Gor," he proclaimed, each syllable thundering across their little hole in the mist. His smile was filled with thumb-sized teeth, "But men call me Borgan."

Joffrey gave him a smile, "And men call me Joffrey-"

"Me no men," said Borgan, "Me know you. Me call you King 'O Men. Stone Listener." Amber eyes flicked to the Red Comet, "Keep us from silence."

He was stunned. Stone Listener. The title resounded within in a way he could not name. "Stone Listener… why do you call me that?"

"Most men, deaf to rhythm. Fearful of what little, they hear. You. You listen." A smile filled with rocky teeth, "Rhythm listen back. Rhythm become you." He looked around the marching men and the mist before venturing forth, grabbing a discarded trebuchet arm. He wielded it like a quarterstaff, walking back to Joffrey as he digested that little riddle. "Ie. Good day to walk."

Joffrey shook his head, flabbergasted, "If you say so."

"Me only walk on good days. So, every day, good day to walk." The giant chuckled at that, then joined the flow of the column, walking beside the sleds and giving frostbitten soldiers a hearty grin. They looked terrified.

Joffrey scratched the thick stubble growing around his chin, still staring after the giant's loping gait when Jorrick caught a hold of him. "Ser, the rear's lagging again."

"Why? It's a good day to walk."

"Ser?"

"Never mind, First Serjeant. Let's see if we can light a fire behind 'em."

Days passed as they left the remains of the Wall behind, marching down silent roads but for the soft whisper of snow clinging to the air. Visibility was low as sentinel pines emerged from the mist like forgotten monsters, starling the men. Copses of them formed great umbrellas of snow, grim watchers of the road. Sometimes they made camp under their protective embrace, but when the snows ceased Joffrey preferred to march on and find a clearing. He slept better when far from their claustrophobic embrace. The aurora lay humbled during the day, but the sun's passage still painted strange colors distorted upon the mist; shifting greens on the edge of sight, deep reds that sneaked above their heads. Joffrey often rode at the head of the column, riding atop Stars and leading the way into the mist with a fearlessness he did not feel. Sometimes he felt an inch away from being grasped by a phantom hand, emerging from the mist without warning and carrying him down into an eternal fall. Like the giant that caught Brienne, down and down and down below the embrace of the cold earth. So proudly they had marched North; singing, drinking in the admirations of the smallfolk watching beside the road. Now they limped back, wounded and defeated, the banners dipping low under the cold wind.

When they reached the second line they found long stretches of palisades on the other side of the Last River; watchtowers and winter cabins almost buried under the snow. The frozen river did not even crack as they carefully made their way through, now perhaps five thousand survivors spread in one long column. No one hailed them as they entered the abandoned fort; pots and bits of cutlery were strewn about along with half buried swords and torn tents. There were no bodies.

Joffrey picked up a ragged banner from the pristine snow; the Tarly Huntsman, its bow ripped out along with half its arms. Had they broken, or was it an orderly retreat?

Jorrick buried a hand under a snow covered camp fire. "Still warm. Must have been recent."

He sighed, turning the banner into a roll and stuffing it into one of the sleds. The wounded wouldn't make it though a forced march at night. Neither would half of Joffrey's men, for that matter. Perhaps not even me, he thought as a monstrous yawn took him. Damnit Tarly. Where the hells are you? "We'll have to make camp here. Have the scouts comb over the camp for clues, and set up a watch."

"Aye, ser," said Jorrick, turning to his own gaggle of serjeants and giving out the orders. Joffrey closed his eyes for a moment and almost lost his balance, using the sled as support. Shaking his head, he picked one of the cabins and fell into a deep slumber almost instantly.

-: PD :-