The spear came the rest of the way free with a dry metallic rasp.
Peter lifted both hands immediately.
Not all the way. One hand stayed on the staff because letting go of the thing while standing in knee-deep snow with a half-working spider-sense and a bruised body felt like tempting statistics. But he opened his left hand, palm out, fingers spread, and kept his posture loose.
"Okay," he said. "Not attacking you."
The horseman said something in return that Peter understood in pieces.
Not because the words were English. They were not. The accent was rough and northern and shaped by a language Peter had only heard in Atlas-assisted projections and dreams. But the integration in his brain grabbed at it anyway, pattern matching hard, finding enough similarities to make the shape of the sentence clear even if the individual words slid around.
Who are you, roughly. Or what are you.
Good start.
Two more riders pushed through the trees behind the first. Both furred and armed, one with a bow already half raised, the other with an axe at his saddle. Northern men. Broad-shouldered, weather-cut, looking like they had been born cold and resented any day that wasn't. Their horses shifted uneasily under them, breath steaming.
The first rider barked another question.
Peter caught more of that one.
Name. From where. Why here.
He swallowed. Tried the local language and hated instantly how clumsy it sounded in his own mouth. Atlas had been one kind of foreign. This was another. Human, but wrong in all the places that mattered. His answer came out halting and ugly.
"My name is Peter." He pointed weakly at himself to help the syntax along. "I am... lost."
That much landed. He saw it in the flicker across the nearest man's face. Recognition, maybe. Then deeper suspicion, because lost did not explain the clothes or the staff or the fact that Peter had apparently appeared in the Wolfswood near a weirwood with no horse, no pack animal, and no visible route by which any sane traveler might have arrived.
One of the men on the left said something low to the others. Peter caught only one word clearly.
Sorcery.
Great.
"I know how this looks," Peter said in English because when panic hit, his brain defaulted home. Then he tried again, slower, in the local tongue. "No sorcery. No harm."
The archer laughed once, harsh and humorless.
Yeah. That had not sold it.
The first rider dismounted.
Fast. Controlled. He hit the snow already moving, spear in one hand, boots sinking to the ankle as he advanced three paces and stopped just beyond the reach of Peter's staff. Close enough to kill. Far enough to do it safely.
Up close, the man was older than Peter had first thought. Late thirties maybe. Beard shot with frost, not age. Grey in his eyes, not his hair. Leather under the furs. Mail beneath that. He smelled like horse, tallow, iron, and cold.
His gaze moved over Peter in a full inventory. Face. Clothes. Satchel. Staff. Gloves. Boots. Lingering longest on the jacket zipper and the stitching Strange's world took for granted but this one probably did not.
The spear tip lifted a fraction toward Peter's chest.
Name, the man said again.
Peter answered in the local speech this time. "Peter."
The man frowned as if the name itself were suspicious.
Then he pointed at the weirwood behind Peter and asked another question.
The old gods tree. What were you doing.
Peter turned his head slightly, enough to glance back at the white trunk with its red leaves and carved face.
This was where lying got complicated.
He could not say, I was checking whether your religion is actually a damaged biological interface for interdimensional stabilization infrastructure. That seemed like a poor opening move.
So he went with the truth trimmed down to a shape this world might survive hearing.
"I touched the tree." He heard how bad his pronunciation was and pushed through it. "I felt... something."
The riders all went still.
Not subtle stillness. The kind that happens when a room hears the wrong word and all its air changes shape.
The man with the spear narrowed his eyes. "Felt what."
Peter stared at him.
He could probably answer that. The local language was coming easier in these high-stress bursts, some part of the Atlas installation doing ugly bridge-work in the background. But the problem wasn't whether he could answer. It was whether there existed any answer that did not make this much worse.
"The old gods," he said, because the alternatives were all insane.
The spearman did not like that.
Peter knew it before the man moved. Not from spider-sense. From posture. Micro-tension in shoulders and wrist. The tiny weight shift that precedes violence in every language, every century.
"Okay," Peter said quickly. "That came out weird."
The man lunged.
It wasn't a full kill thrust. More a test. Fast and straight for the sternum, enough to pin a liar or force a reaction out of something pretending to be human.
Peter reacted before thought had time to dress itself up as decision.
His left hand snapped out and caught the spear shaft.
Not the blade. The shaft, inches back from the iron tip. He caught it cleanly and dead-stopped it in front of his chest.
The whole clearing froze.
Peter realized what he'd just done.
The spearman was still holding the other end. He had felt the full force of that stop. Felt a weapon moving at fighting speed hit an open hand and simply not go anywhere.
The rider with the bow swore.
The axe-man said something sharp and alarmed.
The horse nearest Peter reared half up, snorting.
Peter let go of the spear immediately and took two quick steps back through the snow, hands open again. "Bad. That was bad. Sorry. Reflex."
Nobody cared that he was sorry.
The spearman stared at his own weapon for one disbelieving heartbeat, then at Peter. Whatever category Peter had previously occupied in the man's head had just been replaced by a much worse one.
The word came again. Clearer this time. Not just suspicion now. Certainty.
Sorcerer.
The archer drew.
Peter saw it from the corner of his eye and moved. Not fast enough to terrify them if he could help it, just enough to shift his body off the line. The arrow hissed past his shoulder and vanished into brush behind him.
"Okay!" Peter shouted. "No more shooting. Definitely no more shooting."
That line was in English. Not useful.
The second arrow came immediately.
Peter knocked it out of the air with the staff.
Not elegantly. Pure survival. A hard crack of wood on shaft that spun the arrow sideways into the snow.
That did it.
All three men moved at once.
One rider stayed mounted and wheeled wide to Peter's left, trying to cut off retreat. The archer reached for another shaft. The spearman came in low and quick, not testing now, not uncertain. Kill movement. Northern practicalities. Whatever this stranger was, better dead before it got closer to Winterfell, or the village, or the godswood, or whatever these men were mentally defending.
Peter backed up through the snow, staff up, every calculation in him running hot.
Do not hurt them.
Do not get killed.
Do not reveal anything you can't take back.
Do not isolate yourself in the first hour by becoming the monster they think you are.
Easy. Great.
The spear came from his right. He parried and felt the jar all the way through his bruised shoulder. Pain flared. He used it, letting his body turn with the strike instead of against it, redirecting the spear off-line and stepping inside the man's range.
He could have ended the fight there.
One hit to the sternum. One push. One disarm with force. Any version of Spider-Man who wasn't Peter Parker could have put the man down and moved on.
Instead Peter hooked the spear shaft with his staff, twisted, and yanked just hard enough to tear it loose without breaking the man's wrist. The weapon flew sideways into the snow.
The axe-man shouted and charged in.
Peter pivoted and brought the bottom end of the staff into the man's thigh. Controlled. Measured. Enough to deaden the leg, not shatter bone. The man stumbled and dropped to one knee with a curse.
The archer got his third arrow half drawn before Peter was suddenly there, snow exploding under his boots. He smacked the bow upward with the staff, the shot going wild into the branches above, then planted the other end of the staff in the drift between them like a barrier.
"Stop!" Peter said in the local tongue, louder, clearer this time. "I do not want to hurt you."
The archer punched him in the face.
It was, all things considered, a pretty good punch. Peter's head snapped sideways and his split lip reopened instantly. Iron taste. White light behind the eyes.
He looked back at the man and, against all reason, almost respected the commitment.
Then the mounted rider came in from the left faster than Peter had expected, horse driving through snow, trying to run him down.
Peter dropped.
Not graceful. Just gone low enough that the horse thundered past where his ribs had been half a second earlier. Snow sprayed over him. He rolled, came up badly on the knee, swore, and used the staff to push himself upright again.
The horses were really becoming an issue.
The spearman had recovered his knife now. Short blade. Better for close work in the woods. He advanced more cautiously this time. The axe-man limped but was still in the fight. The archer had abandoned another shot in favor of drawing his own knife because Peter was too close and too fast and the bow had stopped being useful.
Three men. Four if you counted the rider still mounted and circling.
Peter's spider-sense was still mostly noise, but now and then a line cut through. A flash of clarity. Enough to catch a knife angle or a hoof kick before it happened. It wasn't recovered. Just less broken under stress, maybe. Or his brain was re-learning what signal from noise looked like in a world without traffic and electrical hum.
He backed toward the weirwood clearing without meaning to. The white trunk at his back. Red leaves above. The old face watching all of it with sap-black eyes.
This was getting worse.
He had not hurt anyone badly yet. That mattered. But from their perspective he had:
- caught a spear in his bare hand
- batted arrows out of the air
- moved too quickly
- stood back up every time
- spoken like an outsider
- touched a sacred tree
- appeared from nowhere
He was making a very strong case for execution.
The mounted rider tried another pass.
Peter waited longer this time.
At the last second he stepped in, caught the horse's bridle one-handed, and redirected the entire animal sideways with a strength no human in this world could possibly have. Not violently. Just enough. The horse shrieked in terror and stumbled off-line, nearly unseating the rider.
Peter released it immediately.
The clearing went dead silent.
Okay.
That one he could not explain away.
The rider hauled the horse around, breathing hard now, eyes huge.
The spearman had stopped moving. Not surrender. Reassessment. Real fear entering the equation.
Peter stood in the snow with split lip, staff in hand, chest heaving, and knew with awful clarity that he had crossed some line in their minds. Stranger had become thing. The exact thing he had wanted to avoid.
He lowered the staff an inch.
"Listen to me," he said in the rough local speech, forcing each word clean. "I am not your enemy."
The spearman answered with a word Peter did not know.
Then another he did.
Monster.
Peter felt that one hit and settle.
Something changed in the trees beyond them.
Not one of the men. Not the horses. The forest.
His spider-sense sharpened so suddenly the shift almost made him stagger. One clean line through all the noise, coming from farther north and moving fast. Not the men. Something else. Something that made the static drop away by contrast.
The riders felt something too. Horses tossing their heads. Breath steaming harder. One of the men looked over his shoulder toward the deeper woods.
Then they all heard it.
A second howl.
Closer. Much closer. Not one wolf this time. More than one. A chorus spreading through the trees in layered voices that raised every hair on Peter's body.
The spearman swore and half turned.
The archer looked toward the sound, then back at Peter, calculating two threats at once and liking neither.
Peter made the calculation faster.
Wolves. Real wolves, from the sound of it. Maybe a pack moving in on the horses. Maybe drawn by blood, noise, movement. Maybe none of the above. But suddenly these men had a problem they understood better than they understood him.
Opportunity.
Also danger, because if the wolves hit this clearing while everyone was armed and terrified, the whole situation became a meat grinder.
Peter took one step back from the riders and pointed north. "There."
The local word for wolf surfaced late but in time. "Wolves."
They understood that perfectly.
One of the horses screamed.
Branches crashed in the undergrowth beyond the trees.
The spearman looked from Peter to the woods and back again, trying to decide which impossible thing to fear first.
Peter did not move. Did not raise the staff. Did not make this harder.
He just stood there in the snow with blood on his lip and wrong clothes on his back while the North closed in from every direction, and waited to see whether first contact with Westeros was going to end in negotiation, execution, or all of them getting eaten together.
[END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE]
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