Game of Thrones: Stormforged Knight

By the time Alden limped out of the cottage where he had spent more than a month on his back, he had learned to live with the pain between his shoulders.

The crutch under his arm was new, made two days earlier by Old Baine. His wounds would need at least another two weeks before they truly healed, but they no longer stopped him from walking.

What could no longer wait was White Village.

He needed to learn its people, its habits, and the shape of the life he had fallen into before one careless word gave him away.

The memories he had inherited were too thin to trust. He knew that his name here was Alden, and that Alden had been a hunter. Everything beyond that came in broken scraps. He did not even know why he had been hurt badly enough to spend a month unable to rise.

The houses told him a great deal as he moved through the village. This place was backward, almost painfully so, the sort of settlement that belonged to some forgotten medieval age.

Old Baine's clothing and the few furnishings inside the cottage had already pointed in that direction, but Alden had still kept a sliver of hope alive.

"Bear-Hunter?"

He had not gone far down the village's only street before he met the first local. The man stopped the moment he saw him, blurted out the nickname, and went pale with open fear. Then he lowered his head and hurried past, as if the sight of Alden alone might bring disaster down on him.

Alden wanted to know why the man had reacted that way. He wanted to know why they called him the Bear-Hunter. But he did not reach out and stop him.

For now, he had to speak less, do less, listen more, and watch everything. That was the only way to keep anyone from realizing that he and the Alden they remembered were not the same man.

The farther he walked, the more villagers he passed. Some greeted him by name. Others used that same title, Bear-Hunter. Every face carried either awe or fear, with only the strength of the feeling changing from person to person.

White Village was not large, but in his current state it still took him a long while to reach the little tavern at the entrance.

During the past month and a half, he had learned that Old Baine kept a tavern here. The village itself was utterly foreign to him, yet he found the place without trouble. It was, after all, the only tavern in White Village.

"Your wounds have not healed. Why are you out of bed?"

Old Baine had heard the movement outside and came to the door before Alden could step in. Concern filled his voice as soon as he saw him.

The old man had a distinctive mane of thick brown hair and beard, and a round, heavy body that made him look like a walking ale cask. His left foot was gone, replaced by a wooden peg. Three fingers were missing from his right hand, most likely cut away by a blade.

Alden gave him a small smile. "I have been lying down for more than a month. Walking a little should help me recover faster."

To Alden, Old Baine had unquestionably become his benefactor. During the month he had been too badly wounded to move, the old man had been the one to care for him. No one else had come. For a while, that kindness had nearly made Alden mistake him for this body's father.

Old Baine accepted the explanation without argument. He only patted Alden's arm, then gestured for him to come inside and sit.

"Ho! Bear-Hunter!"

The moment Alden entered, the men inside raised their cups almost as one and shouted the name at him.

Their voices still held awe, but compared with the villagers outside, there was warmth in it. Less fear, too.

Alden knew none of them. He did not know what response would seem natural, or what might expose him, so he simply nodded.

No one took offense. If anything, they seemed to think the curt greeting was exactly what they had expected. That told him something useful. The man who had owned this body before him had probably been solitary by nature.

He chose a table by the window. Old Baine brought him a cup of wine, set it down, and returned to his work.

Alden lifted the cup and took a sip. The wine's sour, vinegary bite was awful. He forced it down anyway, swallowing the urge to spit it back out and keeping his face calm.

The tavern did not go quiet because of his arrival, but the talk began to bend, little by little, in his direction.

Perhaps because the man they were discussing sat close enough to hear, the drinkers lowered their voices. In the noise of the tavern, an ordinary person would have struggled to make out a word.

Alden was not ordinary in that way anymore.

After more than a month of living in this body, his strength had not improved, but his other senses had become sharper than any normal man's. It had taken time to endure and then manage that sensitivity. Now, at last, it proved useful.

Piece by piece, through the conversations around him, Alden learned where he was and what had happened to him. He kept his face under control as best he could, but surprise still slipped through.

He had wondered countless times what world he had awakened in. He had considered all manner of medieval kingdoms and ancient lands. Never once had he imagined that he had opened his eyes inside the world George R. R. Martin had created for A Song of Ice and Fire.

He had never read the novels themselves, but he had watched the television adaptation. That world had been famous enough that ignoring it was almost impossible. He had even visited Game of Thrones forums after certain plotlines left him with questions, reading through discussion threads to make sense of them.

He had done all of it as an ordinary viewer, nothing more. Even so, the show and those forum posts had given him a great deal of useful information.

For example, the war most of the men in the tavern kept discussing, the Usurper's War that had ended last year, had to be Robert's Rebellion, the war that put Robert Baratheon on the Iron Throne.

That meant Alden had arrived before the beginning of the story he remembered from the screen.

It was not good news.

Most of the information from the show and those old discussions was not immediately useful. Worse, Westeros was a hard place for a common man to rise. Blood and inheritance formed the foundation of power here, and the body he now lived in had belonged to a common hunter.

Worse still, he was in the Reach.

The nobles of the Reach were famous for their antiquity. Any lord's line in this land might stretch back thousands of years. Even House Tyrell, whose lord held the title of Warden of the South, did not rank among the three oldest families by lineage. That alone said enough about how ancient the great houses here truly were.

Ancient blood meant ancient rules.

Here, birth was the first and last measure of a man's worth. A few exceptions might exist, but exceptions could not shake a tower built from centuries of custom.

For a commoner to climb in the Reach, there were only two paths. One led to the Citadel in Oldtown and a maester's chain. The other was the tourney field. He could distinguish himself before the lords of the Reach, earn a knight's favor, become his squire, or perhaps even be knighted outright. Ser Duncan the Tall, the former Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, had once risen that way.

Beyond that, Alden learned the name of the village: White Village. It stood at the edge of the Red Lake woods in the Reach, on lands held by House Crane, not far from the Cranes' seat at Red Lake.

The village owed its name to its walls. Once the houses were built, the locals covered them in a pale lime clay dug nearby, so the whole settlement shone white.

White Village was a direct holding of House Crane and answered to Red Lake. Most of its people were hunters, but not quite the sort who lived by selling game. The hunters of White Village mainly served as guides during the autumn hunts held for Red Lake and for other noble lords of the Reach.

The woods around Red Lake were not the largest in the Reach, but they held the densest populations of deer, bears, and other game in the region. Every autumn, House Crane invited Reach nobles here to hunt and, more importantly, to strengthen ties. White Village had been built for exactly that purpose, a village of hunters kept for the yearly autumn hunt.

By then, Alden also understood why he had been so badly injured and why he had spent more than a month in bed. He understood why the villagers called him the Bear-Hunter, and why they looked at him with such wary respect.

The matter began with the Usurper's War.

House Tyrell, whose lord served as Warden of the South, had chosen the wrong side during the rebellion. They had not been punished after Robert Baratheon became king of the Seven Kingdoms, but unease still lingered in Highgarden. To improve relations with King Robert, the Tyrells began gathering rare treasures from across the Reach to offer him.

House Crane was ancient, but it had declined. Maintaining its rule over Red Lake was already difficult, and the family had been forced to rely on marriage ties with powerful houses like the Florents to keep itself from slipping further.

Under those circumstances, House Crane naturally wanted another powerful ally. When they learned that the Tyrells were collecting rare goods from the Reach, they hoped to use the chance to curry favor with Highgarden.

The problem was that House Crane had little left to give. Most of the precious heirlooms in their family vaults had been sold off long ago. What remained bore Crane marks too obvious to part with. Selling those would only make them a laughingstock among the nobles of the Reach.

So they turned elsewhere for valuable offerings.

Fortunately for them, their lands held some of the richest game in the region. Among those animals were a few rare and prized beasts, and House Crane posted enormous rewards for specific hunts.

The original Alden's father had been the best hunter in White Village. He set his sights on one of those rewards and, after securing permission from House Crane's steward, entered the Red Lake woods to hunt a mountain bear.

The mountain bears of Red Lake were nothing like ordinary bears. They were twice as large, several times stronger, and covered in reddish-brown fur so dense it could turn aside blows like armor. In their own forest, they were nearly invincible.

More than one party of knights had tried to hunt them for glory and died under their claws. And knights did not travel alone. They had squires, retainers, guards, and hired blades beside them.

So when Alden's father entered the woods, no one believed he would kill a mountain bear.

They were right.

He died in the forest. The bear tore his body apart so badly that when the hunters of White Village found him, all that remained was half a head and a scatter of flesh that could not be pieced back together.

After gathering his father's remains, the original Alden did not give up the hunt. He meant to fulfill his father's last wish and avenge him as well.

For the next year, he entered the forest again and again, searching for traces of a mountain bear. He poured nearly all his money into traps powerful enough to kill one. A little over a month ago, his preparations were finally complete, and he carried those traps into the Red Lake woods.

That vengeance hunt both succeeded and failed.

Success, because he truly did kill a mountain bear alone.

Failure, because it was not the bear that had killed his father.

And because the beast had struck back before it died.

Alden's back had been shredded until almost no skin remained unbroken. His spine had nearly been snapped under a bear's paw.

If Old Baine, his father's closest friend, had not risked leading men into the forest to find him, carried him back, and nursed him for more than a month, Alden would likely have died among the trees.

That was how the name Bear-Hunter had been born.

But the mountain bear brought him no profit. It brought him trouble instead.

He had entered the Red Lake woods without permission from House Crane, the owners of the forest. In law, his hunt was no different from stealing Crane property. House Crane could have had him executed for it.

Perhaps because they had received a mountain bear at no cost, or perhaps because Alden had been close enough to death that killing him seemed pointless, the Crane steward declared the matter settled. He even left five gold dragons as payment for the bear.

Compared with the five hundred gold dragons House Crane had offered the year before, five was pitiful.

In a commoner's eyes, however, five gold dragons were still an immense sum. The man who possessed that money was bedridden, helpless, and likely to die at any time.

So the villagers had begun to covet those five coins.

Only Old Baine's forceful intervention made them give up their greed.

That explained the faces Alden had seen earlier. Those villagers were afraid because the wounded man they had once considered robbing was now nearly healed.

They were afraid the Bear-Hunter might come to collect what they owed.

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