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POV: Arthur Snow
Location: Road from the Rills → Near Hillshade
The snow fell lightly as they rode inland, the heat of the coast fading with every league. Trees closed in again. The cold sharpened. They left the scent of salt behind and followed the river trail east—toward Winterfell.
Arthur rode at the head of the column, his horse trotting in measured rhythm. The battle was over. His men had eaten. Wounds had been wrapped. Dead were buried or burned. But silence clung to the column.
It wasn't fear.
It was the kind of silence men kept when they weren't sure what they'd just seen—or who they'd followed into the fire.
Arthur didn't mind it.
He preferred not being understood.
The road split near a frozen creek, and the detour was instinct. No command. No map. He simply veered north, and the riders followed.
They passed a hill of bare stone, black against the frost. A broken cartwheel still lay half-buried in the ditch from years ago. Then, as the trail curved again, they saw it: a hamlet barely more than a cluster of wooden huts and stone chimneys.
Hillshade.
The name wasn't spoken aloud, but he remembered it.
The crooked fence with the bent post. The soot-blackened arch over the smokehouse. A small wooden bridge that creaked in spring thaw.
He slowed.
The others did too, without a word.
A woman watched from behind a shutter. A boy paused mid-swing while chopping wood, the axe still in his hands. No one cheered. No one approached. But faces came to windows. Hands stilled. A fire was stoked brighter as if by habit, not welcome.
Arthur saw an old man near the well. Back hunched, beard thick with gray. He turned as they passed and squinted.
Something in his eyes shifted.
He didn't smile.
He just nodded.
Arthur didn't nod back. But his hand drifted to his reins and tightened slightly.
The hamlet faded behind them.
He said nothing until the trees returned.
Harwin rode up beside him. "Quiet folk."
Arthur's voice was steady. "It's winter. People remember differently in winter."
Harwin studied him for a moment, then looked ahead again.
They camped by a half-frozen stream that night. The men ate in small circles, firelight flickering off helms and wet leather. Arthur sat apart, as he often did, feeding the flame slowly with dry branches.
He stared into it longer than he meant to.
Hillshade had been a different life. He'd drawn his first blade there—carved wood, not steel. He'd learned the weight of a backhand, the emptiness of hunger. His name hadn't meant anything. Just another boy with a dead mother and a father too proud to bury her properly.
He remembered a winter worse than this one. Colder. Sharper. He remembered taking bread from the windowsill of a neighbor, then watching the man strike his own son for not guarding it.
He hadn't gone back.
He wouldn't go back.
But something had changed today—not in them, but in him.
They hadn't looked at him with hate.
They'd looked at him with silence.
And silence was a kind of remembering.