The Gift

Brandon the Builder, the North says, gave the Night’s Watch all the land for twenty-five leagues south of the Wall, to feed it and keep it. Some maesters think it was a later Brandon of the same house. Either way it is still called Brandon’s Gift, and it runs from the Bay of Ice to the Bay of Seals.

Thousands of years later a queen of the dragon line came to the Wall and saw how the Watch lived, and at her asking the grant was doubled with twenty-five leagues more. That is the New Gift. Its villages pay the Watch in goods and labour, and Queenscrown stands in it, a tower on an island in a lake.

Brandon’s Gift was farmed for thousands of years. As the Watch dwindled, the forest took back its halls and orchards, and wildling raids drove many of its people south into the mountains and the Umber lands. Much of the Gift is empty now: holdfasts without fire, villages with no one in them.