The Hard Hands were the Watch’s bond-men, and they were the best fighters the Hold had, and they had been counted with the Watch’s bread for longer than any of them could remember, which was the one thing that had always made them angry.
They were marsh men. Korrin had taken most of them in during the first seasons, from the reed-houses that the Hold’s raiding parties had emptied in the spring, when the Hold still raided because it did not yet know how to trade. They had come in with their knives and their nets and their marsh-cut hair, and they had stood in the Hold’s yard looking at the walls as a fox looks at a trap that has been set with its own bait. Then they had learned the Watch’s drill, and the Watch’s bread, and the Watch’s names, and they had become the finest men on the wall. But they had never been given a line of their own. The Chamber had counted them as Watch, always, in the Watch’s total, and they had lived with it because they had no other choice, and every one of them had known, since the first winter, that the total was a fiction in which their own names were the smallest figures.
