The law states that the Night's Watch deserter is a public criminal, and all lords of the Seven Kingdoms are obliged to hunt down and execute them, especially in the north, where the Night's Watch is most closely related to them, the Stark family and the lords below will not be soft on deserters. Unless you flee north to join the savages, you can imagine what fate you will face if you flee directly. But Egger wants to get rid of the Night's Watch identity because he wants to stay away from the human predators, how can he still run north?

And to the south...... If you are sincere in your desire to escape, you must be prepared. The first thing to do is to have a good horse, bring dry food, change out of black clothes, and quickly escape from the Night's Watch sphere of influence, avoiding all the villages and inhabited areas along the way...... As long as you can successfully cross the neck and run out of the north, the escape plan is half successful. The next step is to go straight to the warm and safe south, the further south, the less concerned the lords and nobles will be about the night watch, they only need to run to the rich rivers and bends, find a place that can accept and not question their identity, and then start a new life in the other world.

The plan is clear and simple, but the problem is: in this feudal era with inconvenient transportation and extremely low mobility, it is really ...... for oneself, who has an obviously foreign appearance and no legal identity, to complete the escape plan smoothly

It's too hard.

Shaking his head, Iger shook his thoughts out of his mind, now was not the time to think—as the horses' hooves trampled in the snow with a slight muffled sound, the trunks and foliage of the trees quickly obscured the sunlight, and they truly entered the vast and unrivaled boreal forest north of the North.

"These damn savages. Gary scolded, "It's getting colder, but it doesn't stop." ”

"If you stop, you won't be called a savage. Iger patted a few snowflakes that had fallen on his sleeves and casually replied that because of the shortage of manpower and supplies, and in order to make it difficult for the wildlings to find out the rules of their own activities, the night watchmen had abandoned their regular patrols in favor of a casual and more targeted routine. The brothers who had been standing guard on the wall the night before had reported the presence of a fire a few miles north of the wall, which was the direct cause of the Commander-in-Chief and the Chief Ranger arranging the patrol.

"Don't gossip, scatter left and right and move side by side, don't let go of the slightest suspicious trace. Without looking back, Weimar interrupted the unbegun chit-chat between the three Night's Watch soldiers, and gave orders in a cold tone.

Hearing the chief's request, Will and Gary both shrugged their shoulders and quietly grimaced at the speaker's back—the four of them were Gary, Will, Egger, and finally Weimar in descending order of age, but the youngest was the chief, and it was obviously impossible to say that the other three had no opinion at all—the young nobleman from the Vale was the third son of the Earl of Runestone, and chose to join the Night's Watch because it was unlikely that he would inherit the title, and his father personally escorted him to the Wall, carrying a whole cart of luggage. It was often ridiculed by the other night watchmen in their drinking—the great Sir Willmar Royce did not come to serve as if he had come for a vacation.

It was clear that every night watchman was each other's brothers, but a young recruit with no experience and prestige stepped on his head at once, and Weima Royce even patrolled as a leader for the first time. Honestly, how could the other Night's Watch convince him of respect?

Disobedience and disobedience, discipline is there, the three of them scattered according to the order, and began to patrol forward in a line to investigate.

Soon, they found signs of human activity near the area where the sentinels had found the light: it had not snowed yesterday, and the footprints of the wild people and the embers of the fire were clearly preserved.

"They're gone. Gary looked at Weimar and stopped talking.

＊＊＊

The Night's Watch was born after the Long Night, and during that long winter that lasted for a generation, the Aliens swept south across the lands of the Ancestors, nearly destroying humanity...... After the end of this catastrophe, the Great Wall and the Black Legion were established to defend humanity against the strangers. As you can imagine, joining this armed force to defend all mankind was once the highest honor on this continent, and even if the barrier to entry was extremely high, there were still many volunteers to join. But as the Aliens retreat to the Far North of the Land of Eternal Winter and gradually disappear, the importance and treatment of this legion are doomed to decline after the death of a generation that has endured the long night.

That being said, the Great Wall still maintained its presence for a long time, in fact, the invasion of the northern wildlings for the Seven Kingdoms. However, an important historical event ultimately dealt the Night's Watch a fatal blow - the landing of Aegon and the establishment of the Targaryen dynasty.

The True Dragon Dynasty did not embarrass the Night's Watch, but its founders brought dragons from Valyria. In a large-scale attack of the wildlings that followed, the ruler of the kingdom rode directly north on a dragon to barbecue the wildlings. This quickly drove away the attackers, but objectively greatly accelerated the decline of the Night's Watch - when the cunning rabbit died the lackey, when you have a weapon that can sweep away the enemy, the role and influence of the Night's Watch will plummet, anyway, if those vulgar wildlings come again, wouldn't it be better to notify the Dragon Knight King directly?

The nobles and knights were unwilling to dedicate their lives to a senseless watch, and the Night's Watch gradually lost their source of soldiers, forcing them to lower the barrier to entry again and again...... After another hundred years of evolution, the Night's Watch finally became the virtue it is today.

"The long night is coming, and I will keep watch from now on until I die. I will not have a wife, nor a fief, nor a child. I will not wear a crown, and I will not compete for honor. I will do my duty and die in my life. I am the sword in the darkness, the guard on the Wall. I am the flame against the cold, the light at dawn, the trumpet that awakens the sleeper, the shield that guards the kingdom. I give my life and glory to the night watch, tonight, night and night. ”

When people are excited about this night's watch oath made of a lot of promises and titles, how many people can guess that it wasn't like that in the first place?

The dragons and dragon knights of the Targaryen dynasty have gone with the wind, but the decline of the Night's Watch is difficult to reverse, and today, the Blackshirts are not so much the first line of defense against the wildlings as the guards guarding and maintaining the Great Wall, and there are less than 1,000 members, which can be roughly divided into the following three types:

The first category is the prisoners of the rank to whom Egger belongs, who choose to serve on the Great Wall in order to avoid punishment, thieves, poachers, rapists, etc...... These guys, who once didn't even deserve to carry shoes for the "Night Watch", are now the main force of the men in black, and will be doomed to die and die, and there is no other way out except to be deserters;

The second group is those who are forced to join by life: the broken officials and aristocrats who have lost their political struggles and have been degraded or fallen out of favor, the peasants who have lost their land, the bankrupt merchants, and the illegitimate children...... Nominally, they are encouraged to join the Night's Watch, and theoretically have the option to leave freely at any time before taking the oath, but in practice there is nowhere else to go, and the Night's Watch "Artisans" and "Officers" are mostly made up of such people.

The third, last and least category, such as Sir Weimar Royce, who volunteered to join out of so-called honour and duty, or to give way to his brother and son to avoid power struggles within the family. They had other options, but they stepped down from the power arena of the Seven Kingdoms to the Wall, and such people have become fewer and fewer over time, such as Commander-in-Chief Jeo Mormont, Chief Ranger Bunyan Stark, and even Aemonn Targaryen, a blind scholar who has relinquished the rule of the Seven Kingdoms. They are usually relegated to the rank of officer and leader, and this seemingly unfair rule is easy to understand - in the northernmost part of the kingdom far away from the Emperor, if a bunch of scum, criminals, or peasants are to be in command of a legion of Night's Watch who is not directly subordinate to any lord, then there is no telling what the guards of the Great Wall will become.

No matter what kind of ambition the young nobles who volunteered to join the Night's Watch came, when they discovered that the desperate Great Wall and the legendary Night's Watch army were completely different from what they imagined, and the environment was so difficult, their enthusiasm quickly turned into cold water.

Weimar Royce was no exception, and his bowels were now remorseful - no one had forced him to come to the Wall, but he was motivated by the oath of the Night's Watch and chose to come here in order to show his beloved brother that he had no intention of fighting for his family's property. Now that the words have been made and the vows have been made, even if he dares to go home shamelessly, his family will never welcome him publicly.

The only way to do this now is to make a contribution as soon as possible, and then apply to return to his hometown to visit his relatives, and he will not be questioned that he will not be able to endure hardships and run away.

The young Ranger squad leader rode around the place that had once been a camp for savages, thought for a moment, and quickly decided: "There are not many of them, follow the footprints, chase." ”

——