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Magnar

Summary:

As King Stannis Baratheon makes his play to protect the realm and solidify Northern support at the Wall, he sends his landed knight Ser Jack Crawford to treat with the lest vestiges of a Valyrian House, the Vergers, on Skagos.

Magnar Hannibal Lector has other ideas he'd rather entertain.

Chapter 1: Rough Landing

Notes:

Guess who found their original drafts! Edited: Dec 20th

Chapter Text

It wasn't to say that Will was impressed by the landscape of the North, but more along that it did not bother him in the slightest compared to some of the others that had joined them from the Crown and Stormlands.  He'd lived on Dragonstone his entire life and never had much of a need to venture outwards on his own accord. His own father had constructed boats, as had he for many years, until he found a better suit for his life. He was better away from people anyway.

Will tried hard not to think of the Septa that had gone around Dragonstone during the plague who had particular inclinations about his problems. 

"When we land, we'll depart for Muskrat Holdfast. His Grace has sent missives to the Vergers to warn him of our arrival, but we hadn't heard anything back. Lord Velayn is worried as well. He hadn't heard from Ser Mason Verger in many years." Ser Jack Crawford was everything his Grace wanted his Knights to be: to the point and useful in their machinations. It was this trust and civil servitude that made King Stannis appoint Ser Jack to the island of Skagos, a contentious point in the North.

As they had a failed revolt in the eve of Robert's Rebellion, the Starks had kept a tight grip on them- in turn, they had not sent men or supplies when the Young Wolf called to arms. As it stood, the Skagosi were mostly unaffected by the war and did not mettle in the affairs of the mainland. Maester Price and his acolyte, Zeller, explained why they were traveling with a rebel king for the party-

"Because we are aside from the wars of the throne...and the Verger family have been without for many years." King Aerys had granted one of his faithful knights land on Skagos after Duskendale. In the years past since Lord Molson Verger's death, Ser Mason had incurred some rumors about them. Most unbefitting, Price added, for someone in any court.

"Would you trust someone the Mad King endowed?" The Vergers played no part in Robert's Rebellion, having quietly moved to Skagos and settled in there. A minor house of almost pure Valayrian descent, but one of the few that escaped punishment due to Lord Arryns' choices. A few of the sailors watched on as they spoke about the field work to be done.

"He was supposed to be next of Eddard Stark's chopping block, after Mormont, of course, but then the whispers died down suddenly." Beverly Katz waggled her eyebrows over the drink. She was a Bravosi sellsword in Jack's service- one of the few from the south that didn't mind her sex. She'd spent some time in Dorne before heading home- and quickly got sidetracked by Jack's desperate hiring. She failed, like so many others, but stayed under his employ happily.

Miriam Lass was something that haunted Jack Crawford, like a ghost, like the greyscale that never left his wife's skin, like the reason he breathed and accepted the orders to Skagos.

"Do you think the rumors are true?" Zeller frowned at the two books he's taken from the Citadel- the only two that really gave any details whatsoever on Skagos. Most of that history had been housed at Winterfell- beyond reach even now with the Boltons occupying it. The books told of the possible  cannibalism and other less savory parts of their history that never ebbed away. 

"Doubtful. Even the Wildlings beyond the wall don't take of human flesh. Do you think Lord Bolton actually flays skin? It's all stories." Price drank deep from his cup and rolled his eyes. 

"What about you Ser Will? Do you believe the rumors of man feasting on man?" He wasn't a Ser, but the Maester was just trying to be polite.

"When a dog is hungry enough, they'll eat anything. I don't think men are as unlike animals as we'd like to believe." He'd felt people more than enough times to feel their twisted insides and the dark thoughts. Under their skins and away from their brains, people crawled like creatures and had thoughts like rusted metal. It leaves something on you that can’t be shaken off.

He'd once happened upon Gregor Clegane. He never wanted to ever again.

The ship rocked side to side, as it had for the past three hours of its dredge. The crew, from the stormlands, knew how to navigate well enough, so they weren't in danger but it was more than obvious that they would not call to land anywhere near the Muskrat Holdfast

Something Will wondered was how they expected any of this to work. The Vergers were a propped family from the Targaryen reign, not support by the Starks, and antagonistic for the Boltons. The mountains of Skagos loomed ahead and the wind wasn't yelling "Verger-Verger-", it was something darker. A sense of unease had settled on Will as soon as they had gone to the North and as scared as people had been to go to the supposed island of cannibals it still felt better than the Wall. His brief time there had been rife with nightmares and the sounds of creatures and whispers that made no sense to human ears.

Once he swore he'd heard words that bite frost into the air. His ears rang for hours afterwards.

"I'm going to check on the hounds." No eye contact, no acknowledgement not that it was expected. Will Graham crowded below deck to where the hounds here piled together and tired and anxious from their trip. The rocking from the winter storm and panting in his ear lulled him into a light sleep. Will Graham, son of a boat maker now kennelmaster to Stannis Baratheon, first of his name, departed without another word.

...  

The dark wasn't from below deck and his body wobbled with gait- two legs to four, four legs to switch, and a quick gallop across the river.

He shook his head and felt the weight of antlers and heard his cloven feet. Looking down there were tufts of fur in unusual growths but the way to see became unclear, a grey haze. Before them was little pellets of sleet hailing down on his creature skin.

Will looked up with his distorted eyes and saw the first girl.

She was on a partition of stone maybe waist high and dark hair pale skin. There was still a pallor left to her skin and no blue yet to her lips- in her own hands was her liver, slid back into her body, as if she were trying to hold herself together.

In a whirl, Will found himself turned around with the sleet hitting less and abating just the slightest when he saw it again. Almost as if it had been waiting for him.

She was hung on a tree with pale limbs lifeless and hanging without supported. Dark eyes that had been glazed over by death rolled to stare at him. The dark hair that had been in a braid fell about in tufts. Color seemed to be gone from her except from where the skin was peeling back from her heart like a paper to flame. 

His cloven feet drove forward- to another girls body. They were  all dark haired and pale girls with windburnt skin- common stock for the North, but they weren't from the mainland. These were victims and they knew- they allowed a closeness.

Will looked below his feet into the river and stared at his stag's reflection. He heard the sound of the captain’s horn.

A signal for land.


....

At an instant Will woke and was unsure of when he heard the horn or where it had been from.

"How long was I asleep for?" Standing over him with a smirk was Beverly. Winston, his newest hound, was sniffing at the end of her rapier.

"Not long. You looked dead through so we let you sleep in a bit. Jack called it- we're nearly four kilometers from where Muskrat Holdfast should be and the proper dock at port. Their guard came to find us, but it's too rough for us to leave yet. Plus, it's night in the North." She crouched down and ruffled one of the hounds' ears. 

"I'd give my left ear for a fur coat like these guys."

"If that's sleet I hear, you might. " Beverly shook her head.

"You might lose your ears. Jack wants you and the dogs to find something for them. The men here are all from the South and haven't quite adapted. There....they think there are bodies beyond their wall." Will frowned and started to climb up the stairs with a few of the hounds trooping up after him.

"Not...not the Wall?" It was sleeting but it looked like it was already lightening up around them. In the distance there were some pin pricks of light stretching into the night.

"Sort of. Lord Molson Verger apparently didn't like his neighbors and put that up as a deterrent. He was the Lord of this area, but he was afraid of the Magnar.  That's not the worst of it." They reached the top deck and saw the gravel masking itself as sand kept shifting under the weight of the boat and tide. Even from here, Will could see Jack standing with men, more prepared and less weary from travel.

"WILL!" Jack hollered over the dying wind. Acolyte Zeller was huddled under the dock while Maester Price was hunched over something at the very end of the wall. Will felt disoriented for a moment and he saw himself as a flash, just as he had the stag the night before. He was back as himself an instance later and was able to see what Price was inspecting- a body, like all the others he had seen. The hair was dark and the skin pale as the moon.

"It's a body." Some of the villagers near Muskrat Holdfast were around watching them, uncertain of what to make of their visitors. They've been informed by every sea captain available that they should dock for trade on the other side of the inlet, but they were neither there nor here for trade. What's worse was the lack of banner they'd had on his borrowed ship.  One of the closest figures had bright hair that would put Lady Melisande to shame with big eyes and curious to no deterrent to horror.

"It's more than a body Will, it's against the king's law. We're moving to Muskrat Holdfast, I want you to hunt down what or whoever has been doing this." Ser Jack clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder and spoke lower, for the two of them only.

"I know you do not appreciate company, but find them and find them fast." Buster howled and ran off behind the wall and at the very edge of existence.  Will sighed and wished Ser Jack would not tell him to make use of his talents. There should be no reason for it in the North without the duplicitous nature of him needing to look at everything. Everything was as it always should be, no more, no less.

Will climbed over the roughspun structure and felt all at once close and apart from the world. Something deep in his heart told him with the same absolution that Blackwater Bay would burn that he would not return from this hunt.

"Ser Will," Maester Price still said ever so politely, "Ser Jack already knows no animal has done this. Professionally speaking, I'd say it was still an animal in a different skin. You said that people can be like dogs and I understand your affinity for the creatures. I myself enjoyed tending to the hives in the summer, but it is our minds that make us more than animals." The tool Price had been prodding the body with poked him in the forehead. "It's our minds. Once we lose that, that is when we become animals." The dogs were circling and pouncing on air more than delighted to be off the boat.

"Are you certain?"

"As I could be of anything." Will remembered his dream from the night before and how easy it had been to trot through the woods as an animal. Their eyes were one, their hearts beat at the same time. He had been the stag.

'It wouldn't be the first sign that my mind had been lost.' Will thought to himself as he took off in an unsteady gait over the uneven terrain. Paces forward and the gravel gave way to larger stones then to wild grown grass and shrubs.

...

The sun was already rising a pale yellow light by the time Will and his dogs had worked their way through the woods. He hadn't needed that long to decided that his mind was as gone as Price had warned him out; each face he seen as a stag had been paraded in front of him.

Since he didn't have the chance to actually look at the freshly killed girls he started looking at the one hung. It wasn't as fantastic as his mind's eye had seen but the heart was missing with dark bruising around where everything had swollen in life. It was only after the fifth body did he realize what was so peculiar about their wounds, it was all sweet meats.

Zeller's grossed out face made more sense now that he knew some of the rumors were true. Price had done well to set his acolyte away from rumor and to fact. The woods made a sudden break and a few stumps remained as the demarcation of the forest from man's domain. Hardened red sap from the weirwood shone brighter than the dried blood.  The last kill he could see was almost a flurry of feathers as the hawks and ravens picked away at what flesh was left on the girl. There was too much damage to see what had originally been pulled from her.

There, in the space was a small house built of stone and peat with what he hoped were the bones of animals and other fantastical creatures that should have lived on the island. The place felt like death and his hounds knew it even before he did. His problems didn't need encouragement to know what was going to happen a few moments more.

The dogs howled and a response was had.

Will crept closer to the house with an axe in his hand that he'd been using to cleave away the foliage as they walked through Skagos; two figures fell out the door and one to the ground and Will ran to catch her.

She was cut in many of the same places as the other victims when yet another scream broke through the keep. Unlike all the others she was older and flaxen haired- maybe one of the Verger's servants that had come north with Lord Molson. Will charged through the curtain to find a grown man holding a woman much like the other by the throat with a blade.

"No!" It shouldn't have been any of his business and yet he could see it as clear as day: these girls, they were all supposed to be his and he let them go but it still wasn't right. No one was going to tolerate this for long and now that they knew he had to protect- protect who?

The dogs stayed outside, still howling and filling the dawn air with the sounds of a chaos. He reached the man just as he began to slit the throat of the maiden; 

one, three, eight hacks of his axe before he felt comfortable with the man being felled and splayed out like the broken branches of trees- a whisper was heard in the man’s dying breath.

“Do you see?”

Price wouldn't have called it a man and Ser Jack would call it justice. Beverly might just shake her head at the waste. Will felt his chest constrict and the walls grew tighter in as the blood started to seep around him and into his clothes. He could taste it.

"Bah, Buhhh!" The girl was still alive by some miracle and flopping around the ground when the dogs went quiet and still.

"Get the thread." A man's voice, thick with a strange accent, called over Will's shoulder and took the maiden's throat in his hands. It was a more confident grasp than his own. The girl, through her clouded pain and confusion, seemed to recognize the man.

Will scrambled through the wicker baskets and pulled out the dark twine he'd seen used in butchery before and hoped this is what the strange man- a Skagosi? had need of. The needle with it was thick and bent but it managed to suit well enough for the man to stitch up the girls neck and pulled tight. The skin wrinkled with pressure and the girl passed out in the floor in a pool of her own blood. The man turned to face him. 

"I saw you last night. Did you see me?" Will took a look at the man with shorter hair if slightly unkept from his travels and a thick cloak of tight weaves and swallowed while ducking his head. He felt like his whole body was on fire as this man tried to make eye contact with him.

"This is the first time we've seen each other. Why are you here? Were you a part of this?" The man glanced around and wrapped a scrap of his cape tighter around his stitching. It had been as precise as any lines could have it be.

"By this you mean his murders. No, I was not. Hobbs was a singular creature that did things the wrong way- you could feel its taint couldn't you?" The man laid the last victim across the hearth that was still kindling to keep her warm. The sun's bleak morning light made the scene even more despicable.

"Here is the story of a father that couldn't handle his own daughters' bleeding away from him." Will wished he could feel disgusted with what that confession had meant all in the same ways he wished he  could unlearn what exactly had been going through Hobbs' head when he killed each of those girls.

"Who are you." To knowledgeable in these circumstances to be a stranger, the man still hadn't introduced himself even as his finer clothes set him apart from the the laymen that would live in these areas.

"You saw Hobb's kills in your mind's eye guiding you here to his very home. Their bodies were as clear as day and said as much to you each step of your journey." The man spoke with such surety that Will believe his intentions behind the words. It wasn't in King Stannis's declarations that were bolstered by the force of law or even with Ser Jack's desire for proof.

"What I feel and see are obvious."

"They are obvious to you. There are no bodies here, other than the last that was placed back where she belonged. Real to you and yet not real to our world." The man looked through the various odds and end of the dwelling with a bemused smile on his face. He was wild enough for the north and yet looked nothing like ragged folk beyond the wall. "I am Magnar Hannibal Lector, and you southroner, have made yourself a place in my home."