Wind and snow blotted out the sky.
Snowflakes whirled through the air, weaving a white curtain that shrouded everything between heaven and earth.
In the distance, Winterfell loomed faintly through the blizzard, like a crouching beast with only its blurred outline showing.
He could not make out what stood on the walls-but he did not need to see clearly to know that Bolton's Flayed Man banners flew there.
He turned his gaze back to the camp before him.
The camp of a hundred thousand Wildlings huddled behind a hillside southeast of Winterfell.
Calling it a camp was generous. It was little more than a dense mass of tents and shacks crammed against the sheltered side of the hill, trying to use the terrain to escape some of the wind and snow.
But it did little good-winter had come too suddenly, as though the moment the long summer ended, the whole North had plunged into the depths of winter, without even an autumn in between.
The elders said this was a true winter, the kind that lasted a generation in the legends.
The blizzard had struck with particular ferocity, interrupting his second assault.
Jon trudged slowly through the camp in snow above his ankles. Everywhere he passed, Wildlings huddled beside their fires, wrapped in animal hides and shivering.
The fires flickered unsteadily in the wind and snow, their light so weak they seemed ready to go out at any moment.
A hundred thousand people.
It sounded like an unstoppable army.
But standing among them, looking at the weapons in their hands... bone spears, stone axes, crude wooden clubs, made it clear that these hundred thousand were more a mass of fleeing refugees than an army.
The Thenns with their bronze weapons already counted as elite among them.
Yet against the Bolton