Chapter 18: The Cerwyn Trap
The woods were too quiet.
Y/N felt it in her bones, that old, familiar prickle at the back of her neck. Frost’s hooves crunched through the crust of snow with a sound like breaking bones. The trees here were ancient, their branches bent low under mantles of ice, forming a crystalline tunnel that swallowed sound and light. Her breath plumed in the air, and she could hear the heavy breathing of the mounts behind her, the creak of leather, the faint jingle of a bit. Normal sounds. But beneath them, nothing. No birdcall. No scurry of game. Just the wind sighing through the pines like a ghost telling secrets.
“Spooky fucking place,” Dacey muttered from her left. The Umber woman had her axe loose in its harness.
“Cerwyn lands always were,” Arron grumbled. “Bitter people, bitter trees.”
Y/N didn’t answer. Her eyes scanned the treeline, the deep blue shadows between the trunks. The crofter’s report had been specific: the old slate quarry, east border, men moving at night. This path was the most direct approach from Winterfell. If Lord Cerwyn was nervous, this is where he’d be watching.
The arrow came without a shout, without a whistle until it was already past.
It thwipped past her ear, close enough to feel the wind of its passage, and slammed into the trunk of an oak just ahead. The shaft vibrated with a high, ugly hum.
Steel rang out behind her as her party drew weapons in a single, fluid motion. Y/N didn’t flinch. Her hand went up, fist clenched. Hold.
Her heart was a drum, but her mind was ice-clear. She turned her head slowly, following the arrow’s trajectory back to its source. A shadow shifted. Then a man stepped out from behind a thick pine, hands raised, empty.
He wore the brown and green wool of House Cerwyn, a fox-fur cap on his head. A longbow was slung across his back. “Easy now!” he called, his voice too loud in the silence. “Easy! A warning shot only. Didn’t fancy taking an axe in the face from your wildlings here.”
Y/N nudged Frost a step forward. The horse huffed, steam blowing from its nostrils. “A warning for what?”
“For riding armed onto my lord’s land without proper word,” the scout said, taking a few cautious steps closer. His eyes were quick, darting over each of them, counting. “Lord Cerwyn sent me to escort you. Safely. Roads are… uncertain.”
“We sent word,” Y/N said, her voice flat.
“Aye, well. Word travels slow in the snow.” The man smiled. It didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m to bring you to the castle. He’s eager for the Warden’s inspection.”
Everything about it was wrong. The shot had been too close for a simple warning. His ease was performative. And the timing was perfect—right on the most isolated stretch of the path. Y/N’s gaze flicked to the woods behind him. How many others were there, hiding in the grey and white?
“How kind of him,” Y/N said. She kept her hands relaxed on the reins. “You’ll ride ahead. We’ll follow.”
The scout’s smile tightened. “Of course. This way.”
As he turned to walk back into the trees, YN gave a series of quick, sharp hand signals to her riders. Trap. Wedge. Eyes high. They’d fought together for years. They moved without a sound, Arron and Dacey pulling up on her flanks, the Umber twins and Glover tightening the formation behind, turning their party into a moving fortress of muscle and steel.
They’d gone another fifty yards when the ambush erupted.
It wasn’t from the front. It was from above.
Men dropped from the ice-laden branches, crashing down onto the path behind them, cutting off their retreat. More surged from the shadows between the trees to their left. The supposed scout spun around, his false smile gone, a short sword appearing in his hand.
“Take the Warden!” he barked. “The others can bleed!”
Chaosis a plan undone. Y/N was already moving. She kicked Frost forward, not away from the attack, but into the group to their left, breaking their momentum. Her longsword cleared its sheath with a metallic sigh. The first man to reach her wore a snarl and rusted mail. She took his head off with a backhand stroke. Warm blood sprayed across the snow, shockingly red.
“Wedgel Hold it!” she roared.
Arron’s sword clashed with an axe. Dacey let out a battle cry that shook the icicles from the trees, her own axe a blur of dull steel. The clearing became a cacophony of grunts, screams, and the terrible sound of metal finding home in flesh.
Y/N parried a thrust from a spearman, wheeled Frost around, and drove her boot into the face of another attacker trying to drag Glover from his saddle. She fought with a cold, surgical rage. This was not a battlefield. This was murder on a road. And she was the target.
She saw the scout trying to circle, coming for her flank. She yanked Frost’s reins, the horse rearing. As its front hooves crashed down, she leaned out and swung. The scout brought his short sword up. The force of her blow shattered the cheap iron and bit deep into his collarbone. He screamed, falling back into the scarlet slush.
An arrow snapped against her leather pauldron. Another grazed her thigh with a line of fire. They were surrounded.
“To me!” Y/N bellowed. “Push through! Don’t let them pin us!”
They fought as a single beast, five riders and the Warden, hewing a path forward through the tangled bodies and flashing steel. Y/N took a glancing blow to the ribs that knocked the wind from her. She answered by driving her pommel into an attacker’s throat, feeling the cartilage collapse.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the resistance broke. The remaining ambushers—a half-dozen men—melted back into the trees, vanishing into the grey gloom. Panting, bleeding, they were left alone in a ring of the dead and dying.
The silence rushed back in, broken only by the groans of the wounded and the hard breathing of the horses.
“Everyone alive?” Y/N asked, wiping her blade on a dead man’s cloak.
A chorus of grim affirmatives. Glover had a gash on his forearm. Dacey was spitting blood from a split lip. Arron was clutching his side where a dagger had slipped past his guard. But they were all upright.
Y/N dismounted, her boots sinking into the churned, red snow. She walked to the scout. He was alive, barely, his life pumping out into the frozen earth from the ruin of his shoulder. His eyes were wide with pain and fear.
She knelt beside him, the cold seeping through her leathers. “How many at the quarry?”
He spat blood at her feet. She didn’t blink.
“Lord Cerwyn… will hang you… traitor…”
“He’s not my lord,” Y/N said softly. She placed a hand on his good shoulder, not to comfort, but to hold him still. “The quarry. The dragonglass. Is it armed men? Or is it something else?”
The scout’s face contorted. He was shivering, going into shock. “Not… not for you. For the… the price.”
“What price?”
But his eyes were glazing over, fixed on the iron-grey sky. He gave one last, wet shudder, and was still.
Y/N stood, her knees popping. The ache in her ribs was a deep, insistent throb. The promise of the warm chamber, of myrrh on skin, felt like a story from another life. This was the reality: blood on snow, secrets in dying words, and a mark on her back that felt heavier than ever.
She looked at her party, at their hard, expectant faces. They were waiting for her order.
“We bury our dead here,” she said, her voice carrying in the cold air. “Theirs can feed the crows. Then we ride for the quarry. Not the castle.” She mounted Frost, wincing as the movement pulled at the gash on her leg. “If Lord Cerwyn is paying a price, I want to see what he’s buying.”
The wind picked up, howling through the trees as they began their grim work. It carried away the scent of blood, and with it, the last pretense of peace.