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Chapter Text

Sansa

Sansa descended the steps that led down to the yard of the Red Keep, one hand lifting her skirt slightly so that the hem would not drag across the cold stone. It was full dark, and only the torches fixed to the walls broke the blackness, casting wavering patches of gold over the ground and over the watchmen. The castle never truly slept. Even at that hour, when the rest of the court had already withdrawn to their chambers and the corridors were beginning to empty, there were still footsteps in the distance, muffled voices behind closed doors, the rattle of a chain being raised, a restless horse in the stables. The Red Keep breathed in the darkness like some great beast of stone.

Bran had not appeared for supper.

That alone would not have been enough to alarm her had it been Arya, who now and again slipped away from the servants and turned up where one least expected. But Bran was different. Bran forgot the hour easily enough, it was true, and forgot as well that he was the Hand of the King’s son and not some simple page free to run wherever he pleased, but he rarely missed supper without reason. And that night her father was trapped at the Council meeting. If it ran long, as it usually did, he would afterward ask the servants whether the children had eaten well, whether they had gone to bed, whether all had passed in order. He always asked.

Sansa would rather find her brother before her father had to be dragged from the Council table with news of disobedience from his own children.

As she crossed the yard, she passed two Lannister guards in crimson cloaks, who bowed their heads when she drew near.

“My lady.”

“Sers,” Sansa replied, without slackening her pace.

The night air smelled of smoke, of stone warmed all day and now gone cold, of horse, worn leather, and wine spilled somewhere nearby. Ahead, the main yard lay almost empty, broad and dark beneath the moonless sky. She had just begun to think that Bran might have gotten himself into the kitchens or the stables when she heard it. Metal striking metal, quick, uneven, but solid enough not to be children at play with wooden sticks.

Sansa stopped.

She listened again. One blow, then another, the dry scrape of one blade deflecting the next. The sound came from a more distant corner, half-hidden by a side wall and a low stable. The main yard was empty, but there, in that bend of the fortress where the torchlight barely reached, something was moving.

She followed the sound, her heart already tightening with annoyance before she even knew what she would find. As she drew closer, she made out two figures of similar height advancing and retreating over the hard-packed earth. One red head, the other golden. Two blades flashing beneath the dim light.

“Brandon!”

Her voice cut across the yard like a whip.

Both boys stopped at once. Tommen turned first, startled as a rabbit caught in someone else’s garden. Bran took a second longer, and when he looked back over his shoulder there was still the remnant of a breathless smile on him, the bright amusement of someone torn away from too fine a game.

Sansa strode toward them. Her eyes went straight to the swords in their hands.

“Live steel?” she asked.

Now they both looked truly frightened.

Bran lowered the weapon a little, as if only then had the weight of what he held reached his hands. Tommen tightened his fingers on the hilt, but his face was already betraying guilt.

Sansa stopped in front of them, her skirts brushing the rough ground. She examined one blade, then the other. They were not tourney swords. They were not blunted training weapons. They had edges, they had points, and even in that wavering light she saw the cruel gleam of true steel.

“Where did you get those?”

Her gaze lingered longer on Bran. He was still a squire, and a squire might come and go in places where princesses and ladies were not summoned. Bran knew men-at-arms, stables, armories, servants’ corridors, and had always had an ease with soldiers that Sansa never had. If anyone could have laid hands on those swords, it was him.

But it was not Bran who answered.

Tommen lowered his eyes.

“I got them,” he muttered.

Sansa turned to him. “You did?”

The prince swallowed.

“Joffrey helped me.”

That explained more than one thing. It explained why the guards had heard the clash of blades and had not interfered. It explained why no one had come to drag two children out of there. If the crown prince was behind it, few men would have had any wish to ask questions.

Tommen shifted his shoulders, abashed. “Joffrey said it was time I became a man.”

Bran gave a snort of near indignation. “And I was only showing him the high guard.”

“Showing him?” Sansa repeated, turning sharply toward her brother. “With those swords?”

Bran opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Sansa drew a deep breath. She could feel her annoyance rising in her chest, but there would be no use pouring it out on Tommen. The boy already looked half distressed, and Tommen had never been hard to bend. He had an enveloping sweetness, and a shyness that always kept him one step behind his brothers. He was not a boy made for hardness, Sansa thought, nor for the sharp pride of the Lannisters. Still, he was Cersei’s son, and if he walked away from there with so much as a visible scratch it would be enough to bring on a storm.

Later she would think of a way to deal with that with Joffrey.

With a very gentle hand, of course.

“Go upstairs and change your clothes,” she said to Tommen in a softer voice. “Your mother will soon be coming out of the Council meeting, and I do not think you would want her to find you here at this hour.”

The boy looked up quickly, anxious. “She’s still at Council?”

“She was when I came down.”

That was enough. Tommen handed the sword to Bran first, then seemed to remember that perhaps he should not be doing so and took it back again, uncertain as a boy divided between two guilts. Sansa held out her hand, and he placed it in her fingers without protest. She took the other one from him as well.

When the prince made as if to leave, she touched his face for an instant, brushing away a lock of hair stuck damp with sweat.

“Go,” she said. “And do not think on it anymore tonight.”

Tommen relaxed a little at her touch, as he always did when spoken to with kindness. He smiled at her in gratitude and hurried off across the yard, almost running, far lighter than he had been a moment before.

Sansa watched him go, then turned back to Bran.

With her brother, she narrowed her eyes.

“The queen hates it when you hit Tommen.”

Bran let out a mutter. “I wasn’t hitting him. We were training.”

“Bran, you know what I meant.”

“He wants to learn.” The boy lifted his chin with the same stubbornness that at times made Ned seem older than he was. “And I’m not doing anything wrong. How is he supposed to improve if everyone acts as if he’ll break in half?”

Sansa kept both swords steady before her, as if she needed to remind them both that this was not merely a matter of boyish pride. “You’re better than he is.”

Bran smiled, involuntarily pleased before he realized that it was not praise.

“And that is why he almost always comes away hurt,” she went on. “Even if it’s only his arms, his fingers, or his pride. The queen sees everything.”

In truth, she thought, the queen could not bear to see anyone better than her own son at anything. Proud as the rest of the Lannisters, Cersei treated any small superiority in another as though it were an insult. But Sansa did not say that aloud. There were things one learned early in King’s Landing: some truths were safer when left unspoken.

Bran kicked a pebble across the ground. “All that protection won’t help him improve. I’m only this good because Ser Jaime doesn’t pity me when we train.”

Sansa looked at him closely.

There was sweat on her brother’s brow, a very small cut near his sleeve, red hair in disarray, eyes still shining with the heat of the fight. He was twelve years old and already beginning to lengthen, his shoulders less childish, the roundness leaving his face. One could still see something in him of the boy who had climbed walls at Winterfell and leapt from stone to stone over icy waters. There was also in him, more and more, a dangerous taste for proving his worth.

In the end, she could not keep up the severity. She smiled and ruffled his hair.

Bran made a face, half feigned and half pleased, and smiled too.

“Come,” Sansa said. “We have to get back before the Council meeting ends.”

“It may already have ended.”

“Then we have even more reason to walk quickly.”

They began crossing the yard toward the inner doors of the fortress. One of the guards, the same one who had bowed to her on the way in, stepped forward two paces.

“My lady, would you like me to accompany you?”

Sansa cast him a quick glance, then let her eyes rest on Bran, who walked at her side with his chest nearly puffed up with importance.

“My thanks, but that will not be necessary. I am already very well protected.”

Bran swelled a little more at that, and the guard concealed a smile before returning to his post.

The corridors of the Red Keep were quieter than the yard, but not entirely empty. They passed a servant carrying linens, one of the queen’s ladies with her head bowed, an old septon smelling of wax and incense. Torchlight drew long shadows over the red walls. Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed shut.

“Change your clothes as soon as you get there,” Sansa said. “And wash your face.”

Bran rolled his eyes. “I’m not a girl.”

“No,” she answered, with a touch of dry patience. “But Father will notice if you’re not in bed when he comes to ask why you did not eat.”

That sobered Bran. Ned Stark’s children knew their father’s habits well. It would take no more than a servant mentioning that Bran had not come down to supper for Ned to want to know more. Better that, when the time came, the boy should already be clean-faced and beneath the covers, with an excuse prepared or at least an innocent enough look to improvise one.

“Good night, Sansa,” Bran said, already taking a step back, ready to flee.

“Good night. And go on.”

He obeyed in his own fashion: he shot off down the corridors as though he had wings at his heels.

Sansa let out a soft laugh as she watched him vanish around a turn.

Then she went on alone toward her own solar.

The castle seemed larger at night. The passageways stretched longer in the shadows, closed doors seemed to keep secrets, and every sound was louder because of the silence between one noise and the next. By the time she turned into the last corridor before her chambers, she had already begun to think over what she would say to Joffrey. It would not be wise to rebuke him. It never was. Joffrey bristled at reproach like a hound scenting the whip in the air. Better to go around than to confront, better to make it seem concern rather than criticism, better to put the matter as though she stood on his side.

She was so absorbed in the thought that she scarcely had time to draw breath when a hand seized her by the arm and pulled her into the darkness of a niche between columns.

The other hand covered her mouth.

The fright was so sudden that for one instant the whole world narrowed to the pressure of those fingers, the smell of fine leather and wine, the cold wall at her back. Sansa struggled just enough to lift her eyes—and found green ones.

Even in the half-light, she knew them.

Joffrey.

She smacked his arm twice as soon as he took his hand from her mouth.

“You frightened me.”

That drew a smile from him.

“What is my lady doing wandering alone through the castle corridors at this hour of the night?” he asked in a low tone that meant to sound playful, and bent to kiss her before she could answer.

Joffrey’s mouth was always demanding. He kissed her the way he did almost all things: with impatience, with a rush to possess, as though asking leave were beneath him. His tongue touched hers before Sansa had even decided whether or not to part her lips. There had been nights when she disliked it, though she had never found the courage to say so, nor the words to name exactly what troubled her. Joffrey was the crown prince. Joffrey was handsome. Joffrey desired her. Such things ought to have been enough.

That night, besides, she had a matter to discuss with him.

So she did her best to answer the kiss, lifting her hands to his shoulders, then to his neck. She felt the rich cloth of his doublet beneath her fingers, the warmth of his skin, the faint smell of perfume mingled with wine and the metal scent that always seemed to cling to men raised among swords. They kissed for several long moments, until they had to draw apart a little to catch their breath. Sansa’s lips tingled.

“I went to look for Bran in the yard,” she said at last, answering his question. “Before my father noticed he was gone.”

Joffrey was very near. His golden curls fell over his brow, and the scant light turned his face into a play of gold and shadow.

“And did you find him?”

“I did.” Sansa held his gaze. “But since you are no longer at the Council meeting, I must suppose it has ended. Which means my father may already have noticed his absence.”

Joffrey laughed, a short laugh without weight.

“The meeting ended quite some time ago.”

That confirmed what she had already suspected. Ned would certainly know soon enough that Bran had missed supper. Sansa thought of sending some maid, inventing a headache, anything. Then she decided there was not much she could do at that hour.

She kept her arms around Joffrey’s neck. With one hand, she began to play slowly with his hair, smoothing one golden curl. She spoke as though remarking on some small thing.

“I found Bran with Tommen.”

Joffrey did not seem to care.

“Training,” she added.

Now he looked at her more closely.

“With live steel.”

She felt the change in him more than she saw it. An almost imperceptible tightening of the jaw. A harder alertness in his green eyes.

“Tommen said it was you who helped him.”

“Yes,” Joffrey answered. “And what of it?”

The challenge stood naked in his voice.

Sansa did not meet it head-on. She smiled. A small, sweet smile, the sort she knew he liked to see. She leaned a little closer and brushed her mouth against his in a lingering kiss, gentle enough to please, brief enough not to become a demand.

“Nothing serious,” she said.

Joffrey relaxed a little.

Still stroking his hair, she went on, “It is only that Bran is eager. Sometimes he forgets to measure his strength. I would not like Prince Tommen to get hurt.”

She had chosen every word with care. She had not said that Bran was better. She had not said that Tommen could scarcely keep up with her brother. She had not said that putting live steel in the hands of two boys was stupidity. She had spoken of concern, not judgment.

Even so, Joffrey hardened.

“Tommen needs to become a man,” he said, his voice growing drier. “Especially now.”

Sansa did not need to ask what he meant by now.

Everyone in King’s Landing knew by then, though few said it without lowering their voices. Since returning from his last hunt, King Robert had been wasting away before their eyes. The dysentery had drained him in a humiliating fashion, and the huge man who had once filled halls with his mere presence barely seemed to fit within the bed where he lay. Maesters, septons, servants, councillors—all moved about as if death had already passed through the gates and was merely waiting for the moment to climb the steps to the royal bedchamber.

Ned already seemed to walk in mourning.

But Joffrey...

Joffrey always spoke of his father’s likely death with a coldness that made Sansa swallow hard. Even so, she tried to understand. The two had never been close. In nearly three years at King’s Landing, she had seen the king treat his hunting dogs better than he sometimes treated his own children. Not even sweet Tommen received true tenderness from him. Perhaps that was it, she told herself. Perhaps a rejected son learned early to harden his heart.

She slid one hand from Joffrey’s hair to his chest and began to toy lightly with the cloth of his doublet, as if the gesture were absentminded.

“My father has very firm views about Bran not handling live steel yet,” she said. “I only do not want trouble for my younger brother.”

Joffrey rolled his eyes. “They are both twelve years old. It is time they learned what is necessary.”

Sansa lowered her eyes, letting her lashes cast shadows across her face. That too she had learned in King’s Landing: an angry man did not always yield to reason, but he often yielded to a woman who seemed hurt without accusing him of anything.

Joffrey watched her for a moment in silence.

She did not lift her head at once. She only went on smoothing a fold in his doublet with her thumb, as though the conversation mattered little to her and yet enough to wound her. She could feel his gaze on her. Joffrey liked to win. He liked it even more when he could imagine himself generous in doing so.

At last, he let out his breath through his nose.

“Very well,” he said. “I will not help Tommen get his hands on live steel again.”

Sansa raised her eyes to him and smiled, this time with genuine warmth. “Thank you.”

She kissed him again.

Joffrey received the kiss with an almost vain satisfaction, as though she were paying him tribute that was his due. Then he deepened it at once, pulling her closer by the waist.

“You are making me soft,” he whispered against her mouth.

Sansa felt his smile before she saw it.

She thought that she was not making him soft. Only making him less cruel.

Not cruel, she corrected herself almost at once. Her Joff was never cruel. Too rigid at times, yes, that was all. Rigid like a prince who knew the weight of the crown even before wearing it, rigid like a lion’s son raised among men who mistook hardness for strength. And besides, she knew how to soothe him. She knew how to touch his face, how to run her fingers through his hair, how to choose the words that softened his edges.

It was almost a kind of power, she thought with a small and secret pride.

Her hands rose to Joffrey’s face, touched the line of his jaw, the golden hair at the nape of his neck. She sighed softly against his mouth when he kissed her again, slower now, and felt his smile grow against her lips.

He loved it when she sighed while kissing him.

***

Eddard

Ned waited for Bran in his solar, seated at the edge of his son’s bed, one hand resting on Summer’s thick grey fur. The wolf lay at his feet like a living shadow, too long-limbed for so young a beast, with his paws crossed and his golden eyes half closed, yet he was not asleep. Direwolves rarely ever seemed to sleep entirely. There was always something wakeful in them, some watchful sense, some wild part that neither the warmth of chambers nor the company of men could tame.

The room was warmed by a small brazier, and even so Ned could feel the change in the air in his bones. Summer was dying. There was a new chill in the nights, a fine chill, almost timid still, yet persistent. It came in through the cracks of the tall windows and mingled with the smell of wax, wool, ash, and old stone. King’s Landing was not Winterfell. In the North, cold had teeth, and when winter came there was no living man who forgot it. Even so, even there so far south, the world was beginning to stiffen.

Summer raised his head first.

The wolf’s ears pricked up. A second later, Ned heard it too: hurried footsteps in the corridor, light and quick, almost running over the stone. Before he had time to speak, the door flew open with more force than was needed, and Bran appeared on the threshold.

Summer sprang up at once and went to greet him as though the boy had been gone a fortnight. The wolf shoved his muzzle against his master’s chest, and Bran barely had time to shut the door before he nearly lost his balance under the animal’s joy. He had come back flushed from exertion, his cheeks red, his auburn hair damp with sweat at the brow. He was breathing faster than he ought to have been, and the look of perplexity on his face when he found his father sitting on his bed was almost comical.

“Good evening,” Ned said.

Bran was still trying to restrain Summer, who kept insisting on licking his face, his hands, his neck, as though he meant to assure himself of the whole of him at once.

“Father.” The boy let out a breathless laugh without humor. “I... I didn’t know you were here.”

“That is plain enough.” Ned kept his voice calm. “Where were you?”

Bran lowered his head at once, burying his fingers in Summer’s ears as though the wolf might shield him from the question.

“One of the maids told me you did not have supper,” Ned went on. “So I thought I would come and see why.”

Bran scratched the animal’s neck without lifting his eyes. “I went for a walk about.”

“Without telling anyone?”

The boy did not answer.

Ned laced his hands over one knee and watched his son in silence for a moment. Bran was growing quickly. There was still much of the boy in him—the face too young, the restlessness in his body, the way guilt passed whole across his expression before he could hide it—but he was no longer a little child. He was at the age when boys begin to desire steel swords, fiercer horses, and the freedom of men, though they still lack the prudence for any of the three.

“If you had taken a little longer,” Ned said, “I would have sent the castle guards after you.”

Bran lowered his eyes still further, if such a thing was possible. “I’m sorry.”

“Where were you?”

“I told you. Around.”

Ned let out a breath through his nose. “I hope, by the gods, that you have not taken to climbing again.”

For a brief instant, weariness passed through him like a weight. Catelyn would kill him if she knew, he thought. Not truly, perhaps, but there would be that cold anger in her eyes which she reserved for the children’s recklessness and her husband’s indulgence. Since he was small, Bran had never been one to keep his feet where they ought to be. At Winterfell he had climbed walls, trees, roofs, towers, anything that gave him height enough to feel the wind in his face. King’s Landing offered less room for such adventures, but greater danger.

Bran lifted his head quickly. “No! I wasn’t climbing.”

“Then be plain. Where were you?”

The boy moved his bare feet over the carpet, staring at them as though the answer might be stitched somewhere in the wool. “I went out to train a little.”

“Train?”

“With straw dummies.”

Ned studied him more closely.

Catelyn used to say that Bran always looked at his own feet when he lied. Arya crossed her arms and lifted her chin. Sansa turned her face aside and made her voice too sweet. Robb answered too quickly. Little Rickon had been too young for such things when Ned had left Winterfell. Each child had his own way of straying from the truth, and mothers learned them the way they learned to read. Ned did not always notice such things at the very moment they happened, but after so many years of marriage he had come to recognize them.

“Only that?” he asked.

Bran took a moment. His hand was still sunk in Summer’s fur, but now the gesture had lost its naturalness and seemed meant only to buy time.

“I was with Tommen,” he admitted at last.

Ned gave a snort.

The gods knew the queen did not like to see Bran training with Tommen. The younger prince was sweet, shy, and eager, but Bran knocked him down often enough that it wounded Cersei’s pride more than it wounded the boy’s body. And Cersei Lannister was not a woman who took kindly to small humiliations. Nor great ones. Nor true ones. Nor imagined ones.

“It was the prince who asked,” Bran hurried to say. “He wanted to train. And Joffrey did not object.”

“Joffrey may not object,” Ned replied, “but the queen will not like it all the same.”

Bran raised his eyes then, a touch stubborn. “Soon Joffrey will be king.”

Yes, Ned thought. King.

“Yes,” he answered softly. “King.”

The word hung in the air heavier than it ought to have done. Robert still lived, but death was already circling his chambers like a crow over a battlefield. Everyone knew it. The maesters whispered, the servants whispered, the knights kept silent more often than they whispered, which was another way of knowing. Robert Baratheon was coming apart little by little, and nothing Pycelle had given him seemed able to stop it. The man who had once beaten princes at the Trident and slain Rhaegar with a warhammer could now barely keep his eyes open for long.

Joffrey would be king.

Ned found himself thinking again, as he had thought many times before, that he did not like the boy’s temper. There was a premature hardness in him, a dry rigidity that inspired no trust. Some would have called it strength of fiber, the hauteur proper to an heir. Ned saw instead a dangerous taste for imposing his own will, for testing limits simply because he could, for turning small cruelties into habit. Perhaps he was being unfair. The boy was young. Young men, surrounded by flattery and power, were seldom the best judges of themselves. Even so, there was always something in him that left Ned with the feeling of having seen thin ice over deep water.

This was no time for that thought.

He turned back to Bran. “You should not go out without Summer.”

Bran cast the wolf a glance, as though the animal might take his side. “Everyone here is afraid of them. The queen said, when we arrived, that we should not be walking about the castle with the wolves.”

Almost three years, Ned thought. Three years since they had left Winterfell to live beneath the kings’ red roof. At times it seemed far longer. At times it seemed yesterday that the towers of the North had still been his children’s first and last horizon.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember very well what the queen said. And I am not speaking of parading through the halls with him behind you as though he were some lapdog. I am saying that if you mean to slip out late at night to go anywhere at all, your wolf ought to go with you.”

Bran pursed his mouth. “No one would harm me.”

“That is no reason.”

The boy hesitated, then nodded. “All right.”

“You should not have been training so long either. You should have had supper and been asleep by now.”

Something changed in Bran’s face at that. The stubbornness ebbed a little. His shoulders slumped. The gleam of defiance left his eyes and gave way only to weariness.

“I didn’t want to sleep,” he muttered.

Ned watched him in silence.

“Are you still having nightmares?” he asked.

Bran answered with a brief nod.

Ned gestured toward the edge of the bed. “Sit.”

The boy obeyed. Summer lay down again at his feet, resting his head against Bran’s leg as though he knew some greater unease was at stake. Bran ran one hand over the wolf’s ears, but he still seemed far away.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

For an instant Ned feared he would hear a no. Bran was not Sansa, who hid things so as not to worry others, nor Arya, who bristled at questions, but he was no longer young enough to pour every fear into his father’s lap without a second thought. He had already begun to keep things to himself.

In the end, he spoke.

“It’s the same dream as last week.” Bran kept his eyes fixed on the bedpost, not on Ned. “There’s a lot of snow. More than I’ve ever seen. It just keeps falling and falling, but it makes no sound. Everything just turns white. And there’s blood too. On the ground. In the snow.”

Ned said nothing. He let the silence invite him to continue.

“I hear a wolf howling,” Bran went on. “But it’s not like Summer. It’s... angrier. More furious. As though it’s calling something or warning of something. And behind it there is the Wall.” His voice dropped a little. “Very tall. Taller than it ought to be.”

Ned felt the skin on his arms rise despite the warmth of the room.

“Nightmares sometimes come from what we hear while awake,” he said. “Winter is drawing near. You grew up listening to stories of it.”

Terrible, he thought. Terrible and true.

In the South, men treated winter as an inconvenience, a harsher season, the need for thicker cloaks, worse roads, perhaps hunger for the poor. In the North it was something else. In the North, winter could kill whole houses if men did not prepare. It could swallow villages, freeze crops, turn the forest into an enemy, make the world a grim trial between the living and the dead. And beyond the Wall there was always more than most southrons wished to imagine.

Bran was silent for a few moments, stroking the wolf. Then he said:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Jon.”

Ned felt the name as though someone had plucked an old string inside him.

“Have you?” he asked only.

Bran nodded. “That is what worries me, truly.” He raised his eyes, and this time there was more than childish unease in them. There was real fear. “Have you had any word of him?”

Ned rested his forearms on his knees. “The last word I had of Jon came by letter. He wrote warning of winter’s coming and of the dangers that come with it.”

He remembered the letter well. The firm hand, though rougher than before. Jon’s sobriety, so like his own in some ways and so unlike it in others. The boy had never wasted words, and even on parchment he seemed to weigh each one before he gave it to the world. In that last letter he had spoken of the silent woods, of rangers seeing less game and more strange signs, of early snows, of murmurs among the wildlings. He had also told him that he had let people from beyond the Wall come through it.

“Jon let wildlings pass,” Ned went on. “He claimed that life beyond the Wall had become too dangerous. More dangerous than usual.”

Bran furrowed his brow. “And the Council?”

Ned let out a sound that might almost have been laughter, if it had not been dry of all joy. “The Council argues. It always argues. Some speak as if winter were a fable old nurses tell to frighten children. Others care only for cost, for grain, for the order of the cities, for what the lords of the South will think if men of the free folk are allowed into the lands of Westeros.”

He did not add that few there understood the Wall. To southrons, it was stone, ice, and an old duty. To northerners, it was more. It had always been more. The Wall was boundary, promise, and threat. It was what stood between the realm of men and the darkness of the world.

“But I will go there if need be,” he said, more to himself than to his son. “I want to see with my own eyes what is happening.”

Bran seemed somewhat relieved to hear it, but the unease soon returned. “Do you think Jon took too great a risk? Letting the wildlings in?”

“Perhaps.” Ned chose the answer with care. “But Jon was never a man to do such a thing without reason.”

And he was not. Bastard or no, Jon had always possessed a sharp sense of duty. At times excessive. At times harsh toward himself to the point of unfairness. It was possible he had made a mistake, but not through recklessness. If he had opened the gates of Castle Black, he had done it because he judged it necessary.

Ned found himself thinking, unwillingly, that perhaps he would soon be free to go North. When Robert died—and he would die, everyone knew that by now—Joffrey might call upon Tywin Lannister to serve him as Hand. It would be expected. The young king, the Lannister mother, the most powerful grandsire in the realm. In that case, Ned might at last leave the office, which he had never truly wanted, and turn to matters more urgent.

The thought of leaving did not displease him. The thought of leaving Sansa in King’s Landing did.

It was folly, he told himself. Soon enough she and Joffrey would be wed. The court would be her home, whether he liked it or not. Sansa had grown used to those red walls, had learned their ways, their games, their smiles. Perhaps she was more at home there now than at Winterfell. Even so, something in Joffrey troubled him. He could not say for certain whether it was only the foolish concern of a father faced with the man who would take his daughter, or whether there was some deeper warning in that unease. At times he thought himself unjust. At others, blind for not yet having clearly named what he saw.

Bran broke into his thoughts.

“I don’t like these dreams.”

There was such simplicity in the confession that it hurt all the more for it.

Ned stretched out a hand and set it on the boy’s head, brushing a damp lock back from his face. “If anything had happened to Jon,” he said, “or if the Others were near to crossing the Wall, we would know.”

The words came out firm, as befitted a father. Yet some part of him recalled the tenor of the letters, the strange silence out of the North, the way the ravens sometimes brought less than they ought. The truth was that Westeros almost never knew of the North’s affairs while there was still time to act. It knew too late, or too little, or in versions so watered down they scarcely seemed true at all.

Even so, Bran needed certainty, not doubt.

“Jon is strong,” he added. “Stronger than you imagine. And he is not alone.”

Bran seemed to want to believe him.

Ned rose to his feet. His joints protested a little; the weariness of the whole day in Council still weighed on him. He had spent hours listening to men speak of taxes, ships, quarrels among lesser lords, and rumors of the king’s death without ever naming it outright. Duty exhausted him less when it was done beneath open sky, with a sword at his hip and a horse beneath him. King’s Landing had another kind of weight: the weight of words, of courtesy, of patience.

“I’ll have a maid bring you something to eat,” he said. “Wash first. You smell of the yard and sweat.”

Bran gave a half smile.

“Then eat it all,” Ned went on. “And lie down.”

Bran hesitated. “And if I dream again?”

“I’ll speak to Pycelle. I’ll get a little milk of the poppy for tonight. Not much. Just enough to give you rest.”

At that, the boy smiled in earnest, the first clean smile since he had entered the room. All at once he looked younger.

“Thank you, Father.”

Ned walked to the door. Summer raised his head, following him with golden eyes, but did not move from where he kept watch over Bran. Before leaving, Ned stopped and looked back over his shoulder.

“And stop going out without telling anyone. Do you understand?”

Bran straightened on the bed. “I understand.”

“Or I’ll send you back to Winterfell and let your mother tame you.”

The threat was half serious and half not. Catelyn had always known how to bring more order to the children when she wished, and Bran knew it as well as he did.

“I swear by everything I’ll never do it again,” the boy said quickly.

Ned arched one brow. Children’s vows had the solidity of morning mist, but it was no time to crush the relief that was beginning to settle in the room.

“I hope so.”

Then he opened the door and left the chamber.

***

Jon

Jon looked out over the yard of Castle Black, his hand rising almost without his noticing to the wound in his chest, still not fully healed. Even through thick wool and leather, his fingers knew where to seek. The deepest blow had struck his heart, and at times it still seemed to pulse there, not as pain of the flesh, but as the memory of steel going in. There were other scars beneath his clothes, some narrower, some more twisted, marks of the mutiny that had nearly reduced him to an anonymous body bleeding in the snow. The one on his chest, though, was the one that called to him most. As if it wished to remind him, with every touch, of the price of having been a fool.

The yard beyond the main stair lay half-empty at that hour, washed in the pale light of a sunless morning. Old ice crusted the edges of the wooden and stone walls, the black stakes, the rough railings, the slanted roofs covered in hardened snow. The wind came down from the North in dry gusts, carrying the familiar smell of ice, horse, woodsmoke, wet leather, and men who had lived too long too close to death. Castle Black had never been beautiful. It was dark, hard, and worn, like an old axe that still cuts. For years, Jon had accepted it as his place in the world.

Now he no longer felt that.

“You cannot leave yet,” Edd said.

Jon did not turn at once. He went on looking at the yard for another moment, his breath misting before his mouth. In the distance, some men were moving by the stables. Someone was shouting at a stubborn mule. The castle went on living, and he did not know whether that angered him or merely felt distant.

“There is nothing more for me to do here,” he answered at last. “I swore my life to the Watch. And I have already given it.”

Edd remained silent for a moment. Jon could feel him behind him, still as a post planted in snow, as uncomfortable as a man could ever be in the face of a conversation he did not wish to have. Edd Tollett had never been given to great displays of feeling, but Jon knew him well enough to know when he was weighing his words before letting them loose.

“What would your father say,” Edd asked at last, “to see you giving up like this?”

The fury rose in Jon so quickly that he turned before he even realized he had done so. He took two steps and closed the distance between them in abrupt fashion. Edd did not retreat, but watched him with sharper eyes.

“My father?” Jon said harshly. “My father does not care about me.”

That sentence, once spoken, made way for others.

“No one in my family cares about me, except Arya and Robb. The only ones who write to me. The only ones.”

Edd held his gaze in silence.

Jon laughed once, without a trace of humor. “I wrote. I told him what was happening here. I told him about the Wall, about the dead, about the cold, about what was coming. He swore he would get aid from the Crown.” His hand clenched into a fist at his side. “And still, nothing. Nothing. I’ve been handling everything alone.”

The wind passed between them with a low whistle, as if the castle itself were listening. Edd went on staring at him, but there was something different in his eyes now. Not disbelief. Not exactly. Rather a kind of cautious sadness, like that of a man looking upon a friend and seeing in him a change he does not know how to undo.

“Something changed in you,” Edd said in a low voice. “There is too much anger in there. Too much bitterness. I have never seen that in you.” His mouth twisted. “You never spoke like this of your family.”

Jon felt his jaw tighten. He liked hearing the truth from another man’s mouth even less than speaking it to himself.

“Something must have gone wrong when Melisandre brought you back...”

“There is nothing wrong with me,” Jon cut in.

The harshness of his own voice seemed to scrape against the stones.

“These feelings were always here,” he went on. “I was only too much of an idiot to let them surface.” His eyes went to the yard, but they no longer saw the yard. “I was a loyal fool to a family that did not care about me.”

As he said it, he thought of his father, Ned, with bitter clarity. Not the lord of Winterfell before men, nor the Hand of the King in King’s Landing, but the father with the grave voice who had taught him the sword in the yard when he was a boy, who had spoken to him of honor as though honor were enough to fill the empty places in a bastard. For years Jon had clung to those small gestures as a beggar clings to crumbs. Now they seemed far too scant.

Edd let out a breath through his nose. “Eddard Stark must be meeting resistance from the Council. You know what men of the South are like. Half of them think winter is an Old Nan tale, and the other half think they can argue it away at a table.”

Jon shot him a hard look.

“Father is too busy with my sister’s wedding.”

The word sister felt strange on his tongue, though it was true.

Edd frowned. “Is it near?”

Jon shrugged, but the motion was abrupt. “I think so. That is what is said. Robert Baratheon is said to be at death’s door, from what reaches my ears. Joffrey will be king. And a king will want his queen, to give him princes and princesses.”

There was an inkwell on a low barrel by the wall. Jon snatched it up and hurled it away without thinking. The small black vessel flew into a pile of wood and shattered with a dry crack, spreading dark ink over old snow and planks. Edd did not even blink, but his eyes followed the black trail as it ran.

Jon had always avoided thinking of Sansa.

He had no need to name the reason. Nor did he wish to. There were things inside him that, even while alive, he had buried too deep to look at directly. Sansa in King’s Landing, Sansa with auburn hair gleaming in the sun, Sansa learning to bend her neck like a lady, Sansa growing too far away from him. For years he had forbidden himself to think too much about her, or about how her voice had changed, or the way her eyes passed through him without ever truly resting on him. She was a sister. Ned Stark’s beautiful trueborn daughter. A maiden raised for silks and halls. None of that belonged to him, not even in thought.

Now, however, it seemed unavoidable.

And worse than unavoidable: it came mingled with a rage he did not fully understand. Rage at her, at the prince, at the South, at the wedding, at the distance, at all those things that had gone on while he died in the snow by the hands of men who called murder duty.

Jon let out a short, bitter laugh. “It may be tomorrow. Or next week. It makes no difference. I doubt I would know.”

Edd ran a hand over the back of his neck. “You are speaking like a man who wants to wound himself.”

Jon went back to staring at the yard. “I am speaking like a man who has finally learned.” His hand went once more to his chest. “Thinking of others only earned me scars.”

A brief silence followed. The wood of some tower groaned in the wind.

“Where are you going?” Edd asked then.

“Winterfell.”

The answer came simply.

“I am going to tell Robb in person all that has happened. He seems to be the only one who truly cares about the Others.”

Edd nodded slowly. “The time he was here, he was troubled. I noticed. When you showed him the provisions, spoke of the snows, of the rangers’ reports...” His friend rubbed his nose red from the cold. “Yes. He listened.”

“He listened,” Jon agreed. “But for anything to move, we needed Father to secure support in the South.” A humorless smile touched his mouth. “Plainly, he has more important matters to tend to.”

The irony was as dry as the air around them.

Edd seemed to tire of the argument, or perhaps of battering his shoulder against a door that would not yield. “Are you sure Robb will believe you? And not think you have gone mad, or deserted and invented some tale to justify yourself?” His expression grew more serious. “You have to see what all this looks like to someone who has not seen it. Dead men walking. You dying and returning. Wolves in men, men in wolves...” He hesitated. “If I had not seen Melisandre bring you back with my own eyes, I do not know that I would believe it.”

Robb would believe him, Jon thought at once.

Not because the story made sense. Not because the proof was enough. But because Robb knew him. Because he had grown up beside him. Because there were things between them older than distrust and stronger than many men’s reason.

“Robb will believe,” he said only. “That I know.”

Edd tilted his head slightly. “Then why not send for him? Why not ask him to come to Castle Black?”

Jon felt the contempt rise to his mouth even before the answer came.

“Because Lady Catelyn Stark would make a matter of it.”

He almost spat the name.

“She complained enough when he came the last time. To her I am ‘dangerous.’ ‘Malicious.’” Jon gave a sound that did not quite become a laugh. “Perhaps now she would not be entirely wrong.”

He said no more. He would not. There were thoughts in his head now that once had scarcely dared rise from the depths. Selfish thoughts, bitter thoughts, at times dark enough to make him clench his teeth alone at night. Once, his honor had buried them. His honor, his guilt, the old need to be better than the bitter bastard the world expected him to be. Since he had returned, that had weakened. As though death had torn away some piece of the bridle that kept him whole.

Edd watched him for a long while, as though hearing more than Jon had said.

“I will go with you,” he offered.

Jon shook his head. “No.”

“Jon—”

“You stay. Someone has to see to things here.”

Edd opened his mouth to reply, but Jon went on before he could.

“Satin will come with me. He can confirm the story, if anyone decides to raise doubts.” He shrugged. “Though I doubt Robb will.”

And there was another reason, one he would not confess. To travel alone with Ghost would be dangerous in a way Edd would not understand. Or perhaps would understand too well. There were hours when Jon felt the edges of himself thinner than before, as though one impulse alone would be enough to slip fully into the wolf’s skin and remain there longer than he ought. With a man beside him, even if it were Satin, there would at least be some anchor.

I may end up going mad, he thought.

And the idea did not seem as frightening as it should have.

“I also sent a letter to Sam,” he added. “I ordered him to return from the Citadel and meet me at Winterfell. He can tell Robb what he learned. It will help him prepare.”

“For the war with the Others,” Edd said.

“For the war that will come with winter.”

Edd hesitated, then asked, “And you? Will you not fight?”

Jon went back to stroking the scar on his chest over his doublet, slowly. There was no true pain there, only the memory of it, which at times was enough.

“I want no more part in any war.” His voice was low, but firm. “I did everything that was within my power. Everything. And what I received was a dagger through the heart.” His eyes lifted toward the distant wall of ice, white and colossal against the gray sky. “Now this will be my brother Robb’s war. And my father’s too, if he can at last make the South look to us.”

There was too much bitterness in that last word, and they both knew it.

“I will leave as soon as Ghost returns from the hunt.”

Edd swallowed. “Is he coming back already?”

Jon did not look at him. “Not yet. I do not think he has found all the men.”

“How could you know?”

“A guess.”

A lie.

Jon knew because, in a way, he was there.

The men of the Watch who had stabbed him had been set free by his order, or so it had seemed. Jon had said it was done, that the Lord Commander wished to spill no more black brothers’ blood, and that he would free them to fend for themselves. Edd had thought it merciful, the sort of bitter choice Jon used to make.

Except that the mercy ended at the gates.

Afterward, Ghost had gone after them.

Whenever the wolf found one of the fugitives, Jon felt it. Sometimes as a pull behind the eyes. Sometimes as a sudden smell of blood, though he was leagues away. Sometimes in a fuller, deeper way, when his consciousness slipped into the white beast and everything became scent, muscle, snow, hunger, teeth. In those moments, he watched, pursued, attacked. He felt flesh tear. He felt warm blood on his tongue. He felt the terror of the prey as something savory.

The first time had nearly made him retch when he returned to himself.

The second, not.

Edd had found it cruel that Jon would free men only to let Ghost do what he did. He had found it crueler still that Jon showed no remorse. But his friend did not know the essential thing. He did not know that, when Ghost found them, Jon was there. Not beside the wolf—inside him.

That, more than any word, had made Edd understand that something was not quite right with his friend since he had returned from death.

“And what of Melisandre?” Edd asked at last, in a more cautious voice than before. “What is to be done with her?”

“To the seven hells with that woman,” Jon answered, irritated.

The mere mention of her name bristled something inside him.

Melisandre had come to the Wall the way certain ill snows came: unbidden and seeming already to know too much. She had arrived on a cold night, wrapped in a red so dark it looked like fresh blood by firelight, but she had presented herself and at once begun speaking of visions, of the Lord of Light, and saying that she had seen Jon in the flames, that she had seen him when she questioned who would stand against the Others, and that was why she had come to the Wall. Jon had mistrusted her from the first instant. Even so, she knew things. She spoke of the Others with more certainty than many black brothers spoke of the cold. She had helped men on missions beyond the Wall. She had healed some, guided others, seen dangers before they came. And in the end, she had brought him back.

Or almost.

“She has helped a great deal,” Edd reminded him. “You know that.”

“I know.” Jon ran a hand through his dark hair, impatient. “But there was always something wrong about her. I always felt it.” The memory of the priestess’s red eyes, of the way she looked at him as though reading more than flesh and bone, sent a shiver of pure dislike through him. “She had a purpose. She always did. And I was at the center of it. The proof of that was that she brought me back from death.”

“She said she did not bring you back from death,” Edd corrected, with some reluctance. “She said your consciousness was in Ghost. That she only brought it back to your body.”

“It makes little difference.”

And perhaps it did matter, but not in the way Edd believed. If his consciousness had truly hidden itself in Ghost, what had the time between one thing and the other been? How much of him had remained human? How much had stayed in the wolf? There were nights when Jon did not want the answer.

“She has a fixation on me,” he said, growing more irritated as he spoke. “The way she looks. The way she speaks. As though I were...” He did not finish. He did not want to give voice to the words Melisandre used. The prince that was promised. A warrior of fire. Chosen of a foreign god. Jon did not want that gaze upon him. He did not want to be the center of anything. He wanted only for the woman to vanish from his sight and take with her the smell of embers and sweet blood that seemed to follow her.

Edd sighed one last time. It was a long sigh, the sigh of a man resigned to failure.

“I will leave you alone.”

Jon nodded.

Edd lingered for a second before turning away, as though he still hoped for some word that would undo the conversation, some remnant of the old Jon Snow that would tell him to stay, or at least not to worry. None came. At last his friend went down the wooden stairs and disappeared into the corridor, leaving behind only the sound of his footsteps, which the wind soon swallowed.

Jon was left alone.

Alone with the yard, with the cold, with the scar in his chest, with the castle he no longer felt was his. Alone with the white Wall reared to the North like an old reminder of duty. Alone with the anger that now seemed to him more honest than any vow he had ever made.

Well, now he would have time.

Ghost had found someone. Jon could feel it. But Edd had entered his room at the very moment he felt the pulse, and so he had been unable to concentrate on it.

It was not an articulated thought, but a knowing that came from low and deep, old as the smell of the hunt. There was a pulse in the distance, a sort of silent tension drawing at him from within. The white wolf would not attack yet. Ghost knew how to wait. He always had. He watched, prowled, remained unseen among snow and stone until the moment Jon reached him.

And Jon would reach him.

The fine snow began to fall again, light as ash. A few flakes settled on the railing. The sky above Castle Black was a vast gray hide with no promise of light. Far off, in the shadowed woods beyond the defenses, some crow cried out.

Jon rested one hand on the cold wood of the parapet.

He thought of Robb, of Winterfell, of Sansa in Lannister red beside a boy king, of Arya perhaps still too young for the games of the South, of Ned Stark trapped in councils and promises, of Catelyn Stark looking at him as though she saw danger in him before he himself had seen it. He thought of daggers going between his ribs. He thought of blood on the snow. He thought of Ghost with red teeth from the blood.

The anger itself no longer frightened him. It was worse than that: it seemed useful.

His breathing slowed.

Somewhere beyond the walls, among snow, stone, and black pine, the white wolf waited beside a man who did not yet know he was going to die. Jon could almost feel the cold in the paws, the weight of the low body poised for the leap, the smell of fear beginning to rise from the prey even before the attack. His mouth filled with saliva, and he could not have said whether it belonged to the man or to the wolf.

Ghost was waiting for Jon to come and take control. That was how it was now.

One part of him hated it. Another part, deeper and more honest, no longer pretended.

Jon closed his eyes.