Chapter Text
“You cannot ask me to bear him in my hall any longer.” Catelyn seethed. She held herself very straight, chin lifted as if a straight spine might be a raft. “I have borne him. I have tried. I have held my tongue until it bled. I have let my daughters call him brother and my sons look to him as if…” Her mouth pressed thin. “Either the boy goes, or I do. I take my children, and I go to Riverrun where we may at least live without the daily insult of his presence at my table.”
Ned’s mouth opened and closed once. “He is my son.”
“No.” She said, and the single syllable was a pulled thread that threatened to unravel the whole cloak. “No, he is your shame. If you will not cut it away, then you ask me and mine to wear it for you, and I will not.” Her voice did not shake. “I will not.”
Ned’s hands had scars on them, pale as threads, old as the rebellion. “Catelyn.” He said, and it sounded almost gentle. “He is a boy. A good one. He has harmed no one.”
Ned couldn’t do it. He couldn’t turn Jon away. That was his son. His sister’s son. He loved him as his own. He couldn’t just turn him away. Send him off somewhere.
“You brought him into our bed. Into our family.” She said, and there were the years in it, the winters and the hot, slow summers. “Every kindness I show him is devotion you should have shown me. Every time my children look at him, they remember the story whispered beneath the story of our lives. My daughters will marry and people will look at them and think of him. Is that what you want for Sansa? For Arya? Do you want Robb to learn that oaths are things to be set aside when the blood runs hot?”
“Do not make a lesson of him to our son.” Ned said. “Robb learns at my side. He learns steel and truth.”
“He learns that you will keep the boy who is not mine closer than the woman you married.” She took a breath and met his eyes. “I have endured the looks, the pity, the shame from the moment you brought him home. I tolerated it. I thought you would grow out of this soon enough, that it was the grief you felt at losing your father, brother and sister in the war. I am done with waiting for you to come to your senses. Either he takes the black and is gone, or you put him on the road to the Citadel and keep him there until his hair turns grey and his sword arm softens. Or I pack the carts. This is not new cruelty, Ned. It is the end of a very old one.”
Silence ate the space between them. Torchlight made moving things on the walls where no things moved. Ned, who could stand a battlefield like a tree stands wind, looked suddenly like a man standing in a house with fire under the floorboards.
“I will not send him to the Wall as punishment.” He said, the words rough. “The Wall is not a midden for the living. It is oaths and hard men and old danger. It is not a lesson for my wife’s spite.”
Her eyes flashed. “Then send him to the Citadel and call it honor. Let them shave his head and gild him with chain. Or call him into this room and tell him that the comfort of your lawful wife and the safety of your daughters require his absence. Use whatever word puts your head on the pillow at night, Lord Stark. I want him gone. Or you will never see me or my children again.”
Ned’s jaw moved. The lines around his mouth deepened. “You would make me choose between my son and the woman I swore before gods and men to love and protect?”
“I am asking you to choose to protect the children you have with me. Not the one you had with some tavern whore.” Catelyn said, softer now, because a softer knife slides deeper. “We cannot go on like this. You cannot ask it of me any longer.”
The torch hissed. Somewhere far in the keep, a door shut with a thud that sounded like something final. Ned ran a hand over his mouth and beard and looked at the nearest banner, as if the cloth might have counsel. The direwolf watched him back, pale on grey.
“I will speak to Jon.” He said at last, and his voice had the toneless calm he used to walk through storms.
He left her then. He did not slam the door. The fire on the wall fluttered when he passed and then it stilled. Catelyn placed her hands on the back of the chair where she had faced him, and she stayed very still until her fingers stopped shaking. She did not like to see her husband in so much pain, but this needed to be done. For their family to survive, this had to be done. For two and ten years she had to live with the reminder of her husband’s sin every single day. She could not bear it any longer. Someone was leaving Winterfell in a days time, she was just praying it was Jon Snow and not her and her children.
Jon was not at the door when Ned came. He was in the narrow corridor that smelled of cold stone and tallow, where the rushes always seemed to be half new and half old no matter how often they were changed, and he was staring at his own door as if it might say something to him. His breath made small ghosts in the torchlight.
“Jon.” Ned softly said.
Jon turned quickly. He did that, always, like a boy called from the edges of a hall. He tried, and failed, to hide the way his face looked for approval first, before anything.
“Father.” Jon said, because he could not bring himself to say “my lord” when it was only them.
Ned’s eyes warmed and then cooled like they had been ordered to do it by a council of other parts of him. “Walk with me.” He said.
They took the steps down by the wall-walk where the wind snuck through arrow slits and tugged cloaks. The yard spread slate and snow below. A pair of stable boys laughed softly over some shared mischief; the sound lifted and died. Ned said nothing for the length of a count to one hundred. Jon counted, because counting was something to do with hands you could not fold and unfold without someone noticing.
“At times a house is a ship.” Ned said at last. “A captain takes on salt, provisions, a crew; and sometimes a weight that seemed fair in dock becomes a burden in a storm. If he cuts it loose, he may regret it forever. If he keeps it, the ship may founder. There are no kindly choices at sea, Jon.”
Jon swallowed. “Have I…”
“You have done nothing wrong.” Ned said quickly, and louder than he meant. He drew breath. “Nothing. You are a good boy. You have honored our house in every way you could. You have made me proud.”
A little piece of Jon that had been waiting its whole life to hear that stood very straight inside him. The rest waited for the blow.
“Your place here.” Ned said, looking out over the yard rather than at Jon. “Has been a point of… strain. For years. It is time it was addressed, not with cold shoulders and cutting glances, but with truth and honor. I will not send you to The Wall as punishment. I will not make of you a culprit when you are not one.”
Jon’s throat felt tight and raw. “I don’t want…” He started, and then didn’t know how to finish because he did not know what he did not want. He did not want to leave the only place that had ever been home. He did not want to eat at a table where Lady Stark’s eyes slid around him as if he were a place she did not wish to look. He did not want to lose his siblings. He did not want to lose the few friends he had made within the servants and small folk. Mostly, he did not want to be alone. To be abandoned by his only parent.
Ned spared him finishing it. “There are choices. The Citadel is one. The brothers of the Night’s Watch are another. Both honorable. Both difficult. I will support you in either. If The Wall, then I will ride you there myself and set a cloak on your shoulders and say that I am proud. Your uncle Benjen is there. He will help to finish raising you into a great man. If the Citadel, then I will ride with you to Oldtown and present you to the Seneschal as a son of Winterfell who values knowledge.”
He didn’t want to ever go South, but he would not allow his young son to travel that road alone. He would go with him and make sure it was a safe and good place for him to be. Ned didn’t know which would be worse, but if he had to choose he would choose The Wall for Jon. Only because Benjen was there and he would make sure Jon knew what love felt like. What it would be like to be hugged whenever you wanted or needed. Ned had tried his best with Jon. He had tried to make sure Jon knew he was loved by him. That when he was hurt or sick, Ned was there to help take care of him. He didn’t want Jon to go. He wished he could have wrapped his arms around him and never let him go. But keeping Jon meant he would lose his five other children and that was something his heart couldn’t bear either. If Jon left, maybe in time Catelyn would calm down and he could bring Jon back. He was too young to take his vows at either place, so they had some time.
“I will think.” Jon said. His voice put the words in a straight line. “I will think, Father.”
Ned nodded, and the hand that settled on Jon’s shoulder was heavy and careful, as if shoulders break. “Do not think in fear.” He said. “Think in truth. You are not a burden, and you are not a shame. Let the choice be yours because it is yours, not because you are pushed.”
He left Jon near the shadow of the arch so that the boy could stand and be no one to anyone for a minute. Jon stood. The wind on the wall found the sweat at the back of his neck and cooled it. He wrapped his arms in his cloak until he felt like a tied bundle.
He went to the yard because moving a body sometimes moves a mind. He picked up one of the practice blades and began hitting a straw dummy. Ser Rodrik was there, as he often was; the big man bundled thick, grey beard stiff with cold, his bald pate under a fur cap he pretended was not a concession to the season.
“Jon.” Rodrik said, as if the boy had not been called something else for a long while now by people who kept their voices sweet and their eyes sharp. “Your guard is creeping low again. Elbow up. There. Yes, that’s a hand attached to your sword, not a sack of turnips. Think. Don’t just swing like you mean to break the air.”
Jon breathed and did as he was told. The blunted blade smacked and turned. Rodrik stepped around him the way a man does when he has walked round a thing for years and knows where his boots will go before he picks them up. “Again.” He said, and then again.
When they stopped at last, steam rose off Jon like a horse. He wiped his face with a towel that had seen laundry more often than some men saw the inside of a sept. “Ser.” He said, and he had meant to wait, but the words were hot inside him, and there was no sense in waiting. Jon didn’t truly have the time. “You served near The Wall once.”
“I did,” Rodrik said. “When I had more hair than beard.”
“Tell me the truth of it.” He surprised himself with the urgency in his voice. “Not the songs. Not the boasts. What it is.”
Rodrik put the practice sword back in its rack and leaned both hands on another as if it were a railing. His eyes went up toward the wall-walks, toward the north beyond the stone north. “Truth, then. The Wall is cold, first and last. Cold in ways that get inside your teeth and make them ache. The castles are old. Most are empty. The men are… men. Some fine, many not. Thieves who chose black over lost fingers. Murderers with good reasons and bad. Some traitors that chose the cold over beheading and rapers that chose to keep their cocks. Boys who ran from a lord’s wrath and boys who ran from hunger. You get brothers if you make them with work and with duty. The Watch is not what it was, which is to say it is like most things built by men.”
Jon’s heart sank and rose at once. There was something almost merciful in hearing that even legends had seams and old patches.
“You, lad.” Rodrik said, and his voice went softer because he was going to say something that might land like a fist or a hand. “You are quick. That is not what I mean when I say ‘talent,’ though. I mean you think while you move. You try, at least. You see where a thing works and where it doesn’t. That’s why I bark at you. I’d not waste breath on a boy who only wants to swing hard. You’d do The Watch some good if you chose it. But…” He looked Jon square, dropping the soldier’s humor. “...it would bury you. I think it would. Not the snow. The sameness. The slow grind. Not yet. Not for a boy with eyes like windows, always looking for where the draft gets in.”
Jon tasted iron in his mouth from a bitten cheek. “I have to choose. The Night’s Watch or the Citadel. They are my only choices. Lady Stark has run out of tolerance. I must choose or it will be chosen for me.” He said. His voice made the words sound like stones he turned over to see if there were grubs underneath.
Rodrik snorted and Jon didn’t know if it was because of the choices or because he was being forced out by Lady Stark. “Books are fine. Luwin’s proof. But they chain you there and call it learning. They call it a chain, too, clever bastards. No swords, no whoring, no gambling. I have no quarrel with any of that for men who want such lives. But for you? You are a swordsman, a fighter. You are smart as a whip, won’t ever deny that, but you don’t belong being chained.” He scratched the bearded wattle under his chin. “There’s a third choice, if you’ve a mind.”
Jon’s head came up, quick. “Ser?”
“White Harbor.” Rodrik said. “Lord Manderly’s brood is thick and his need for steady steel thicker. A squire’s life in the city is different to a holdfast. More tar and fish than pine and snow. I can put in a word. Wyman Manderly is fat and clever. His son Wylis is fat and kind. The younger, Ser Wendel, is fat and brave. That’s the Manderlys for you.” His eyes twinkled for a moment, then sobered. “It’s a place a boy can learn the proper way. Not The Wall’s hard, not the Citadel’s quiet. Ships, trade, oaths. Fighting when needed. Eating well always.” He tapped Jon’s shoulder with two knuckles. “You have a gift. It is a poor lord who buries gifts just to keep a hall quiet.”
Jon’s breath fogged in twin streams. “Would you…”
“I’ll write the letter,” Rodrik said, gruff, as if writing letters had offended him personally at some point and he had decided to forgive them. “If you want it. If you don’t, I’ll not take it amiss. You ask for truth; I give it. The Wall would waste you. The Citadel would dry you to parchment.” He looked toward the tower where Luwin’s rookery hunched against the wind. “Ask the Maester. He’ll say it kinder than I can.”
Jon bowed his head, because he felt like the ground might tilt if he didn’t. “Thank you.” He managed. “Ser.”
“No matter where you go, you write to me. I want to hear all about it.”
Jon gave a nod with a small smile. Ser Rodrik had always been nice to him and always treated him just like everyone else. He never called him a bastard. He never looked down upon him. He saw a young boy, it was just that simple to him. Jon left the cold of the yard for the slant stairs that wrapped the maester’s tower. The steps were worn in the middle by feet that had climbed them, age after age, to be told what was worth knowing. He liked that thought, that you could wear stone with wanting to know. The door was half-closed, and the smell that came out was warm oils, feather dust, old vellum, and the clean stink of birds.
“Jon.” Maester Luwin said, and there was no surprise in it because Luwin, like most men who watch well, was rarely surprised. “Come in.”
Jon did. The rooks in their perches watched him, counted him, decided he was not food or threat, and settled. The brazier ticked. Luwin’s chain moved when he turned; it made a small dry rattle like rain at the window.
“The time has come for me to decide if I wish to go to The Wall with my uncle or go to the Citadel. Ser Rodrik feels that neither would be best for me and has offered to send a letter to Lord Manderly about me squiring there. I know the truth about the Night’s Watch, I now need to know the truth of the Citadel.” Jon explained. There was a way a boy can be blunt and polite at once, and he found it. “I will not be soothed with stories. If I go, I will not go under a mixed sky.”
Luwin’s mouth smiled and his eyes did something more complicated. Jon could see he was not pleased by this piece of information. Him and Maester Luwin had spent a great deal of time together over the past ten years. Jon had quickly passed Robb in his lessons and often Jon and Maester Luwin would discuss many different things. Things not even his father knew about. Jon had always loved learning, especially if it was about something that could help people. Maester Luwin always encouraged Jon to explore his mind and all of his ideas. He taught him how to draw, how to break his ideas down into smaller pictures so he could put them all together to see the full view. There had been a lot of long nights with them sitting hunched over sketches trying to make them even better.
Maester Luwin patted a stool next to him. “Sit, then. The truth is not so proud it cannot be told sitting down.” Jon went and took his normal seat as Maester Luwin continued. “The Citadel is work. It is reading until your neck aches. It is copying until your hand cramps. It is arguments that lasts three days and does not move one stubborn mind. It is wonder, too. Doors that open because the right question pressed them. It is men who will say what they think is true even when kings want another truth served to them salted and sweet. It is…” He touched his chain.“...a chain you choose link by link. And when you choose it, you choose to put aside some things forever.”
“Swords.” Jon said.
“Yes.” Said Luwin, and how gently he said it told Jon that Luwin had chosen, one day, to put something aside too. “A sword is a choice. You also have to swear off love, a family, land, you do not get to pick which House you serve. And you will be serving. Even if you do not agree with what you have been asked. A maester’s counsel is most useful when it confirms what a lord already wishes to hear. Swords, hopes, dreams and the Citadel do not play well together. You might hide a dagger in your boot and scratch the itch sometimes, but the itch would never leave.”
“You have never lied to Lord Stark,” Jon said quickly, as if he needed to defend the man who had just offered to cut him loose kindly.
“No.” Luwin said. “But I have chosen which truths to set before him and which to let lie quietly until time turned them over on its own. That is a form of lying with clean hands. We are taught to be careful where we place fire. Sometimes we call dragons a tale even when our bones know they are a memory, not because we hate truth, but because truth set on the wrong table burns more than it warms.”
Jon looked at the racks of scrolls. “I do not think you are trying to turn me from the Citadel to keep me out of your storehouse.” He said, and Luwin’s mouth smiled again at that.
“No.” Luwin said. “I am trying to turn you from the Citadel because you move like a boy who has been told to sit since he could walk. If you were a different boy I would put a book in your hand and lock the door around you and call it kindness. You are not that boy.” He got up and went to a small chest near the brazier. He took from it a folded leather roll, a little brass weight with a hole drilled through the top, and a brass instrument that looked like a spider had eaten a circle. “Take these. A quill roll. A folding compass. A weight. Measure what you see. Record it. Weigh it. The world is not as it is sung. Go and find the places where it squeaks. Then oil them.”
Jon held the weight. It was heavy for its size. It felt like something you could keep in your pocket and take out when a man said, “Trust me, this weighs true,” and say, quietly, “Does it?” He had never owned anything that belonged to him as much as it did the second Luwin laid it in his palm.
“If I don’t go to The Wall or the Citadel.” He said, and the words made a shape in the air that felt more real. “Where do I go? White Harbor to squire?”
“You go out.” Luwin said, with a little shrug that was not careless, only honest. “To the beeches. To the road. To White Harbor, perhaps, if Ser Rodrik writes the letter and you wish to see what a fat, clever lord does with ships and silver. Maybe you go farther. Maybe you go south. Maybe you pass through Oldtown and look at the Citadel from the street and say, ‘I am glad that house is there and I am glad I am not inside it.’ You will find work with your hands and your eyes, not because you are a lord’s son, but because you can fix what is in front of you. That is worth more than a name in most places where names are not tall enough to reach the rafters. Go out into the world Young Jon and learn who you are first before you ever try to fit yourself into a box just because it is in front of you.”
“Will he be angry?” Jon asked, and he did not name Ned because saying a name makes a thing small enough to look at and he did not wish to make Ned small.
“He will be proud and he will grieve, but he will grieve no matter where you go.” Luwin said, and because Luwin spoke truth, Jon believed him. “He will tell himself that he chose, because that is easier on a father than knowing a son has left. You will write to him. Often. You will not be a ghost he cannot feed.”
The brazier popped. Outside, the rookery’s wind sounded like a hand rubbing along old parchment.
“Thank you.” Jon said, and he meant it past the polite form. “For telling me the truth and not the song.”
“I am old enough to be tired of songs.” Luwin said dryly. “Go sleep. If you choose to leave, do it at a decent hour and not at midnight like a thief. Break your fast first. Take a loaf for the road. No one thinks well on an empty belly.”
Jon smiled despite the weight in his chest. “Yes, Maester.”
He did not sleep. It is one thing to be told to do a sensible thing; it is another to ask a heart to consent. He went to his cell, for it had never been a bedchamber, and set the gifts on his narrow table and sat on his narrow bed and looked at the wall where a little crack had grown over the years to look like a river. He rolled the weight in his palm. He laid out the quills in a neat row and then rolled them again because order made the world feel like a thing that could be touched and turned.
He took from beneath his straw mattress the few bits of vellum he had made his own with hard looks and a soft voice, and he bound them with a leather thong and then added more from the stack that Luwin had given him some moons ago and said nothing about. He scratched a title at the top of the first page because names make things real.
Things That Work, he wrote, in careful block hand, and then under it, because that felt too proud, he added: And Why.
He drew a lever. He drew a gate with counterweights and wrote tiny numbers beside the stones that would pull, and a note: if the weight is wrong, the gate slams or refuses to fall; both break fingers. He drew a cart’s wheel with spokes and marked where the ice usually did its worst and how to wrap leather in winter to keep it from cracking. He drew the yard’s practice sword and wrote: less wrist, more hip, because Rodrik had told him that and it had turned something that hurt into something that sang.
He stopped, at last, because the candle was guttering and the heat had chewed the air thin. He packed. He did it quiet, not because he was ashamed, but because quiet felt right for a thing that was mostly a promise and not a departure. He had nothing worth packing that would not look like a theft if seen; he owned his boots, a second shirt, the wool leggings with the patch at the thigh, a pair of knit gloves that had been a gift last winter from Old Nan when she had mistaken him in the dark for Robb and then said, “Keep them, you’re as much of the cold as he is.” And he had laughed and said. “Yes, Nan.”
He tucked the quill roll, folded and tied, into the small satchel he had mended twice. The compass he put in the pouch that would sit at his belt and knock his hip if he ran. The weight, he slid into the inside of his left glove so that his knuckles were a little heavier and he could feel fairness against his skin when his hand was closed. He put a little sewing kit at the bottom of the satchel, the awl he had borrowed and never returned because the armory had a dozen and he had none; the needle he had traded a story for with a girl who worked in the kitchens and liked to hear him make up names for things. He tied his blanket roll with a strip of old rein.
He took a last look at the narrow place where he had taught himself to be smaller. He lifted the blanket, smoothed the straw flat. He laughed, soft, because it seemed wrong to make a bed he was leaving and right, somehow, to leave a thing tidy for whoever came next. He put his hand on the doorframe and felt the groove where his palm had rested a hundred times when he had stopped to listen to the hall before stepping into it. He did not kiss the wood. He was not a boy who kissed wood.
He went to Ned’s door. That was harder than packing. He was not afraid of Lord Stark’s anger. He was afraid of his love. Love is heavy to carry when you are choosing to walk away from it. Though, he supposed he wasn’t really choosing. He was being forced out. The choice he was making was where he would end. He held the folded vellum between two fingers and bent down to slide it under the door with care as if he were feeding something that might bite. The direwolf carved there watched him with the same look it wore in the yard: patient, hungry, true.
Father—
He had written,
Ser Rodrik spoke true of the Wall. Maester Luwin spoke true of me. I will not shame you. I will learn where the world breaks and mend what I can. I will keep my sword-hand. I do not know where I will go, but it will not be to a place where life is sworn away. I will write. —Jon.
He stayed bent for a moment with his forehead nearly against the carved wood and his eyes closed because that made the rest of him quiet. He imagined the moment Ned would find the letter; standing, perhaps, with his hair damp from the basin, the dawn making his shadow longer than his body, the old pain in his eyes that had nothing to do with Jon and everything to do with a tower in the south. He imagined Ned’s hands, careful with paper the way they were careful with blades and children.
Jon forced himself to move. He had made his decision and he would not cry over it now. He went to the godswood. He had said his prayers there since he was old enough to know that some trees listen and some do not. The oaks and beeches were dark hulks with a rime of frost on them, but the heart tree held a pale note in the dark like a face seen in a cold dream. The eyes bled, as they always did, but the mouth did not look unkind.
Jon stood in front of it and spoke the only vow he had that felt like it could be said without a septon. “I will learn.” He said, and the words curled in the cold like breath. “I will help. I will keep my sword-hand and not become a man who only points while other men do the work. I will return when I can, and I will be worth what you spent to make me.” He did not know whether he was speaking to gods he had never seen or to the man who would bend to pick up the letter or to the boy he had been when he had first learned that people talk around you when they do not want to talk to you. It did not matter. The saying made it true.
He broke a loaf in half and left a heel at the base of the heart tree because leaving a thing to hungry things is a ritual older than most prayers. He tucked the rest under his arm. He thought of Luwin telling him to eat breakfast and smiled again because Luwin’s kindness had a way of putting wool on hard corners. He ate in the dark with the sound of the little stream that never froze because the springs under the keep ran warmer than the air. The bread was yesterday’s, but bread with a promise tastes fresh.
By the time the sky had made up its mind to grey, the yard had begun to creak to life. A groom cursed a shoe. A boy laughed the way boys do when they’re trying not to make the sound a man makes. Rodrik’s voice rolled across stone like a barrel. “Up! Up, you sorry lot!” And there was the pleasant clatter of wood on wood as practice swords kissed. Jon’s feet went to the sound as if sound could be a path, and then he stopped himself because going to Rodrik would mean staying long enough to let Rodrik’s hand on his shoulder turn him around, and he could not afford to be turned by anything except his own choosing.
He pulled his cloak tighter and went to the outer gate. The portcullis were up; the guards wore their cold like another layer of mail. They nodded to him. One of them, Tom, had taught Jon how to cheat at dice and how not to, and he looked at the satchel and the blanket roll and the way Jon’s jaw was set and he did not ask anything.
“Cold road.” Tom said.
“Colder if I wait.” Jon said.
“Aye.” Tom said, and stepped aside. “Heard they were lookin’ for stable lads in Torrhen’s Square. Pays room and board.”
“Thanks Tom.” Jon said with a kind smile.
“Be safe.” Tom said with a pointed look and Jon gave a nod as he stepped through the gate.
The world beyond the gate was the same as it had been the day before: snow old enough to be pressed down and dirty, new snow on top of it like a fresh linen thrown over an old bruise; the road’s two dark grooves where sledges and carts wore truth into the lies snow tells about what is underneath. The air had that particular clean that only happens when it is trying to bite you. Jon’s breath walked ahead of him in long puffs. He adjusted the strap on his satchel; he adjusted nothing else. The Keep behind him got smaller like a thing in a man’s memory, not like a thing on the horizon.
He did not look back. There is superstition in that, yes, but there is also mercy. To look back and see a shape in a window and think it is someone and have it be no one is a cruelty. To look back and see no shape at all is worse.
He walked. The first mile was a thing for the legs. The second was a thing for the lungs. By the third, the work went inside. He began to plan not with fear but with the same straightness with which he set the lines on a practice sword.
White Harbor first, perhaps, because a letter could follow him there and if he chose Rodrik’s third path he could step into it with a kind of grace. Or perhaps not. He would go to Torrhen’s Square, because it was on the way to White Harbor and Jon would need to stop in Keeps along the way if he was ever going to survive the weather. He could work for room and board for a little while, maybe there would be something he could fix. He could speak with the Maester there and read what was available to him. Then he could move on to the next Keep. Learning with books and swords until eventually he would find himself and a new place to call home.
On a small rise where beeches gathered like old women in coats, he stopped and drew the compass from his pouch. He set the needle free and watched it argue with the sky until it stopped. He drew a line in the little book and wrote: north, and then wrote: not always where you think, because it pleased him to put a true thing next to a thing the world pretended was true but wasn’t always.
He ate the rest of the bread walking. He hummed, and the tune was something Old Nan used to sing to the younger ones when the wind’s voice changed and the keep said things you didn’t want to hear. He thought of Robb and felt the familiar twist, love and the other thing that is like love’s shadow and has no name and tastes like iron when you bite it. He thought of Arya and smiled into the scarf over his mouth because if there was a person in the world who might one day look at a road and say “mine,” it was Arya. He thought of Sansa and hoped that kindness did not get taught out of her like a habit a girl grows out of when she learns how rooms work. He thought of Bran and Rickon and how young they were. They had their whole life ahead of them and Jon hated that he wouldn’t get to watch them grow up.
He did not think of Lady Stark. Thinking of Lady Stark was like stepping on a thin spot on a frozen river.
By the time the sun had decided to rise properly and not only pretend, the beeches threw their long grey shadows east. The road curved. The world made the little sounds that mean it has woken; birds, ice wedging, the faraway roll of wheels. Jon’s boots creaked. He was thinking about whether he could stop in two miles to rewrap his toes in another layer of wool and whether the owl prints he saw were from that owl or an owl that simply looked like that owl, when the beeches that were a little darker than their neighbors moved in a way beeches do not. He stopped because moving things that ought not to move have earned the right to make boys stop.
From between the trunks, a shape slid like river water, silent on snow. A wolf. It stepped down from the little rise and looked at him. It was big, but not as big as the stories say about wolves when those stories are told by men who want to piss in a circle and keep you in it. Its eyes were blue like the sky and its coat was a thick light grey. It did not growl. It did not lick its chops. It did not do anything except look.
Jon’s hand went to the short blade at his hip and then took itself off. He stood with his arms at his sides like a man before a king who has asked him a question and he is trying to decide whether to answer with truth or with safety. He chose truth, the way he had chosen it all day. He lowered his head a little, the way you do when your body knows what courtesy is even if you have never been taught.
The wolf blinked. It turned its head to the side. It made a sound so small that if the road had been any louder, Jon would have thought it was his own breath in his scarf. It stepped to one side, and behind it something else moved. Not another wolf. Something smaller, and at once larger because it moved as if this were what the world had been made to do since it was new. A pup, Jon saw, and the word moved through him like a hand laid on a fevered brow. White on white. Red eyes that did not look cruel, only old. The pup’s paws were a little too big for its legs the way boys’ hands are sometimes too big for their sleeves, and its head was rounder than it would be when it leaned over men in the dark.
The she-wolf, because that is what she was, and Jon knew it the way you know when a storm is coming even if you cannot smell the rain yet, stepped forward and set her muzzle in the air near Jon’s hand. He did not move. She inhaled, as if to make sure that the smell she had had in her head matched the smell in front of her. It must have, because she made no sound. She turned and nudged the pup with her nose, once, and then again when the pup looked like he might sit down and think about something instead. The pup looked at Jon. The pup looked at his mother. The pup took three wobbly steps and stopped in the lean of Jon’s left boot and put his small body against leather as if leather is a thing you can trust.
Jon’s breath left him and did not come back for two heartbeats. He went down on one knee because that is what you do when you are given a gift and are afraid that if you reach for it wrong it will break. He put his palms out. The pup sniffed. The pup stepped onto his hands as if that were a thing he had always meant to do. He was quiet. He was not shaking. He was simply there.
The she-wolf watched. Her head lifted. Her eyes blinked once, slowly, and then she turned and went back between the beeches into the trees and was gone as if the world had folded itself neatly along a seam and put her away.
“Hi.” Jon simply said to the little wolf pup.
Jon held the pup and felt the small beating of a heart that had decided to trust him without a council meeting. The pup’s fur was not cold. It was warm the way fresh bread was warm. He did not have a name for it at first because names mean ownership and he did not own anything and he did not wish to begin. Then the pup put his head under Jon’s thumb, pressed, and fell still with his eyes open the way a thing does when it is not sleeping but is not not-sleeping, and the word came up from a place under his ribs that is where true words are kept: Ghost.
He did not say it aloud because saying a new name aloud calls attention, and there was no one on the road but the boy and the pup and the trees and whatever the trees talk to when men are not around. He tucked the small white thing into his cloak so that the pup could hear his heart and decide if it wanted to synchronize, and he stood. He turned his face toward Torrhen’s Square and continued on.
He walked. The pup’s breath warmed his shirt. The weight in his glove tapped his knuckles when his hand swung and reminded him that fairness should be felt, not only spoken. The world opened a little, the way it does sometimes for no reason you can explain in a hall later. He did not think of Winterfell’s windows. He thought of a city by the sea where fat clever men counted and thin clever boys counted too and ships came in and ships went out and food moved and sometimes it did not move and people were hungry and he could fix that a little.
Behind him, the Keep gathered its day and put it on like armor. Ahead, beeches leaned to make a kind of arch as if a bride were coming. The snow made its dry little song under his boots. Ghost shifted once against him and settled. The sun, late and honest, came up.