The world was different now.
He had felt the rising tide of magic in the abstract since childhood — the sharpening of the visions, the increasing responsiveness of the Heart Tree, the way certain old texts' descriptions of phenomena had begun to read as instructional rather than historical. Now, north of the Wall with Dark Sister on his back and the dragon egg warm against his spine, he felt it as an immediate and physical thing. The air carried it. The snow carried it. The grey sky above him pressed with it.
On the second day of the return journey, he saw the lights.
Not the aurora — he knew the aurora, had watched it from Winterfell's towers on the coldest nights. This was something else: low, moving patterns of blue-green light that traveled horizontally just above the snow's surface, miles distant, with a directionality that was clearly purposeful. They moved in arcs and then disappeared and reappeared in different positions with the fluid unpredictability of things that understood space differently than he did.
He watched them for a long time and did not approach.
He had been walking for six hours when the Jotnar found him.
He had no warning. That was the thing he would remember most precisely afterward, catalogued under critical failure in the part of his mind that kept strict accounts of mistakes: he had no warning. Not from the prescience, not from the peripheral awareness he had developed, not from the sounds of the world around him, which continued their ordinary quality until the moment something the size of a gatehouse stepped out of a vertical bank of snow forty feet to his left and looked down at him.
It was old. That was the first impression — not old in years but in category, a different species of age than anything he had encountered. It stood perhaps eighteen feet tall, broadly proportioned, covered in something that was simultaneously flesh and ice and stone, with a face that had the quality of a frozen lake: smooth, pale, with dark things moving slowly underneath. Its eyes were pale blue and showed something that was not intelligence exactly but was the cold, patient attention of something that measured value in categories he did not share.
It looked at him the way he had imagined looking at an insect might feel, if the insect were interesting.
Then it reached for him.
The next thirty seconds happened very fast.
He moved before the hand arrived — not because he had foreseen it, but because thirty seconds of combat with something that large carries its own geometry and the training was automatic at this point, the body doing what nine years of dead masters had built into it without waiting for conscious direction. He went sideways, low, inside the reach of the arm, and Dark Sister came into his hand with the ease of something that had been waiting for this.
He did not know if a sword could harm a Jotnar. He found out: it could. Dark Sister opened a cut along the back of the thing's hand that ran dark and steamed in the cold, and the Jotnar's reaction — a deep sound that was not quite pain and not quite surprise but some older category of both — confirmed the blade's effectiveness.
What followed was not a duel. It was a survival problem with approximately four variables: speed, terrain, Dark Sister's reach, and the Jotnar's patience. The creature did not rage. It pursued with a methodical, unhurried quality that was in some ways more frightening than fury would have been, because it communicated a certainty that the outcome was already decided and it was simply attending to the details.
He made it not be decided.
He used the prescience during the fight — the first time he had used it this way, in the heat of immediate combat, the future-sight pressing through at the moments when his body reached the edge of what the training alone could handle. It came in bursts: three seconds of clarity, the Jotnar's next two moves visible like a branching path, which branch it was committed to readable from the weight distribution he could see in its legs. He followed the branch he could survive. Three seconds later: again. The fight became a series of three-second windows, each one ending in the survival of the next one, the whole thing adding up to something that was not victory but its close relative.
He opened the Jotnar's knee — a long precise cut that found the junction between the ice-flesh and the joint mechanics, the blade doing what he had seen Dayne do to armored opponents whose articulation points were their only weakness — and the creature went down to one knee with a sound like a collapsing wall, and he was already moving, already past it, running south with the specific focus of someone who has decided that winning the argument mattered less than surviving to have the next one.
He did not look back until he had put a mile of hard snow between himself and the sound.
He stopped then. Breathing hard. His hands were completely steady, which he noted with the clinical precision of self-assessment. The egg was still warm against his back. Dark Sister was clean in his grip — the Jotnar's dark blood had already frozen and flaked from the blade in the cold.
He took stock of himself. Three bruised ribs where the backswing had caught him — the only blow that had landed, which he was counting as acceptable. His hands worked. His feet worked. The pack was intact.
He stood in the snow and breathed and thought about what he had just learned.
He was the greatest swordfighter in the North and possibly in Westeros. He had nine years of the finest swordsmanship in recorded history encoded in his muscle memory. He had a legendary blade that was still sharp after a century in a cave. He had a prescience that had, when he finally leaned on it fully, kept him alive.
And he had nearly died.
Not from lack of skill. Not from lack of foresight. He had survived because he had been faster and cleverer and because he had been extremely lucky about the specific sequence of exchanges. Against a Jotnar with more patience or slightly different capabilities, any point in the fight could have gone differently.
The world had teeth. The goddess had told him so. He had agreed to it in the abstract, with the confidence of someone who had not yet been presented with a specific example.
He filed I need to be stronger under non-negotiable and started walking south.