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The cold had been as sharp as a knife, but that had been before the fires. Jon was yanked along behind Satin as the cacophony of shouts rose to a peak. The assault on his senses almost made him wish he were deaf, and blind, and dead for real.
His hands were wet on the snow. Were they his hands? He remembered touching the knife in his belly. Hands covered in red blood. A wound that smoked. Warmth. The paws were cold now, and white. And his, maybe.
Beside him – within him – Ghost growled.
The noise made Satin fumble the keys on the tunnel grate. “Ghost – my lord – Jon. We need to move. It’s not safe here.”
Vaguely Jon could feel Satin’s hands on his neck, trembling slightly as they half-stroked and half-yanked him. This close, Jon could smell the sweet oil that Satin combed into his beard but Ghost caught the stink of man-fear, overpowering everything else. Mully had smelled like that. As had Wick Whittlestick with his knife, and Bowen Marsh too. He and Ghost dug in their paws.
The man huffed in frustration. “I don’t have time for this. You don’t have time for this. Val is holding them off you,” he cleared his throat, “off your body for now. Unlike me, she’s too tempting for them to kill her immediately, but I don’t know how long that will last. It just needs to be long enough for the red woman to… to…”
To kill me? To use my body in one of her spells, like she did for Rattleshirt? Have a half-life and wear a corpse’s face? There could be nothing worse than that which had already been done to him. That which his black brothers had done to him – payment for him trying his very best to save all of their miserable lives. The beast sat back on his haunches, or maybe the boy did.
“Fine. If you won’t do it for yourself, will you do it for your sister? The bastard still wants her back. Will you do it for her?” The body he was in could hear so much more – even the tears at the edge of his squire’s voice.
An undefinable feeling hit him square in the chest, expanding and expanding so it was all that he could feel, could ever remember feeling, growing heavier and sharper and louder with each breath. A sound made his hackles raise, but when he looked up he realised that the howl came from him, echoing off the frigid face off the Wall.
Somehow he had crossed over, and had left the man behind. He turned to see Satin hurriedly locking the grate behind Jon, his expression beseeching. As if the dead thing that Jon was now could still offer Satin anything. It made the beast growl, and wordlessly Satin snuffed the torch and fled.
And then he was alone.
***
The sound trickled in, so familiar it made his heart ache – Mikken hammering away at the forge, men sparring in the courtyard. The bustle of servants and horses and dogs. Like a heartbeat underlaying it all was the slow rushing of hot spring water through the stone work. Winterfell.
His cell was unchanged as if he had never left it – the thick rug Father that had gifted him for his tenth nameday covered the rushes of the small room. A perfunctory embroidery of the glass gardens by Sansa was affixed to his wall, and next it a jumbled mess by Arya. It was only after his third guess that he realised she’d tried to do the same study of the garden as Sansa. He’d first guessed the moat, Old Nan’s scarf, and, as a last resort, himself. Her displeasure at his guesses had been as endearing as it was painful. Sharp little knuckles, she had. But the mere fact that she’d tried meant he’d had to give it a place of honour.
Traces of Bran and Rickon’s wolves had been left on the walls (and on the floor) when he and Robb had to instruct them in making the pups suckle. Bran had tried to make up for it by trading him a grotesque’s tooth, stolen from the keep’s roof, while Rickon had sincerely tried to trade his damp and half-eaten oat cake.
Both sat untouched by his bed, next to the heraldic books that Maester Luwin had instructed he and Robb to study again in advance of the king’s visit. Generations of Lannisters and Baratheons and Arryns were neatly written out in a maester’s inscrutable hand, guaranteed to be hellish reading and immediately both he and Robb had shelved them for later. The quill was in the inkpot beside it, still wet with ink.
The odd thing was Longclaw’s presence.
It was only when he sat up to reach for it that he realised the queerness of it all – that he could. He was whole again. No longer not-dead. A man and not a wolf. Dazed, he drew the Old Bear’s blade from its sheath.
“Admiring your handiwork?”
Jon snapped his head up. “Robb?” He smiled helplessly.
He was exactly as he remembered him – auburn hair curling around his ears, and a bruise on his chin from a bout last week. His first and best friend. Robb’s attention stayed down, tracking his oilcloth moving unerringly over Ice.
“Why did Father give you Ice?”
Finally, Robb looked up at him and smiled. “For you, of course,” he said, and thrust it in Jon’s heart.
The pain was an inferno – all through his veins – around his lungs – squeezing his heart – always rising – never ceasing – the walls melted away – only blackness – oily and thick and hungry – the high white cold cliff – hot points of fire eating away at the black – white and black and red – and Robb was twisting the blade now.
“Robb,” he gasped, “Please. Brother.”
“No, said Robb, “You were never my brother.” The red of his hair was crawling now, sliding down his face like knives, but Robb took no notice of it. “Theon was better than even you. You know that. I took him south with me, to free my father and Sansa and Arya. But he turned and killed my brothers. Just as you have killed my sister.”
Jon’s hands slipped on the blade as he tried to wrench it out, but he was so weak, so weak like this. His hands were cold again. The snow was back. “Trying to get her back,” he said.
“No, you were trying to give yourself your own legacy. The noble lord commander who held the Wall. You achieved it, Snow. You killed those whom you claimed to love and then you died,” Robb’s face opened like a flower and it was with his and Lady Catelyn’s voice he spoke, “A fitting legacy for a bastard.”
“Holding the Wall,” Jon swallowed, “keeps her safe. If I left we all would die.”
“Against grumkins and snarks?” Now that was the voice of Tyrion, who had once walked the Wall with him. The friend who had turned around and killed his family and stolen his sister.
Jon felt his fury rising. “Against the Others, Lannister.”
“That didn’t stop you wanting to leave before,” said Arya. Her feet were muddy and torn and she was wearing rags under her bridal cloak. The pink and red Bolton colours pulsed in the moonlight. “You nearly took it when Lord Stannis offered Winterfell to you.”
“Even when you knew it meant our deaths,” said Bran and Rickon. Their wolves circled, leaving hot trails of blood around Jon. Ice twisted in his belly once more as Robb withdrew the blade to swipe at him again.
The pain brought him to his knees, and his eyes were watering as he said, “You all were dead. Father would have wanted Winterfell to be rebuilt. Winter is here. The North will need a stronghold, for all of our survival.”
A light laugh at his ear, and Sansa said, “You knew that I still lived. And yet you would take it for yourself. As if you were a son of my lord father.”
“I am still his son!”
“Then why are you not with us? Dead thing that you are.” Lord Eddard’s hand on his chin was cold, and his voice rumbled queerly in Jon’s ear. The headsman’s mark on his father’s neck still bled freely as his father removed Ice and sheathed it. His implacable lordly faced showed, for the first time, pity and disgust. “I should have spurned the whore I sired you on, bastard.”
At first it just was a feeling of floating. Then the peak of the rage receded to allow other senses to flood in, and Longclaw was blurring as he cut the shades to ribbons. He sent them back to the other place they rested, the other place where Jon couldn’t go. Only through his tears did he realise that they all were genially smiling, as if this was expected.
Jon dropped to his knees, breathless, empty.
***
A soft sound made him reach for Longclaw – only this time his body didn’t move. Their body didn’t. He tried to speak but only a howl came out. Distantly he noticed that his surroundings had lost their unearthly sheen, returning to the familiar mud and ice and wood of the Wall. The crackling of a fire raging could still be heard through the ice.
A woman stood under the moonlight, watching him. Her hair was unbound in loose dark waves, and the ends fluttered softly about her waist as she approached him. Heavy dagged sleeves trailed behind her on the ground, rich and red. The wolf bristled with him as they noticed the reason they hadn’t heard her – she wore no shoes, and her feet did not break the crust on the snow.
Closer and closer she came until she had backed him into a hollow. He could see now that she could not be much older than he was – maybe even younger. A simple circlet of black metal adorned her head. “Oh, my sweetling,” she breathed, “what have they done to you?”
Her quick movement raised his hackles and he snapped, but their teeth glossed harmlessly through her as she – hugged him.
What does she want from me?
“I don’t want anything,” she whispered, arms locked fast around his neck despite his flinch at her response. “I just want to hold you again. Is that – would that be alright with you?” She must have taken his silence for agreement as she held on tightly. He could almost feel the warmth she gave off, gossamer and soft. Being still felt simple with her. “What… what do they call you, sweetling?”
He hardly knew. Not Lord Commander anymore, nor Lord Snow. Ghost was more fitting than Jon.
To his surprise, she laughed wetly. “How typical of Ned. He always did love his foster father. Your own father was convinced you would be a girl. He was fixed upon Visenya and would not be moved.” She pulled back to face him and rolled her eyes. “As always I was right. You were my son first,” she said fiercely, “And not his prince.” She grabbed the circlet and flung it away.
This close, the wolf could see the embossing on her circlet. Black dragons.
Something cold took him then, and blasted away any thought other than no.
In a torrent of words she said, “Hush, sweetling, I am so sorry, I never meant to leave you, you were so wanted, but since we were to die, you had to live, and that meant I would do anything,” she whispered as he snapped and thrashed at her. “My brother promised to keep you safe and loved. To give you a family.”
I have had a family. Brothers and sisters and brothers. I denied everything I wanted to keep them safe. And I was given ashes in return. He gazed down upon her, red eyes meeting grey, viciously grateful this body would not cry. I do not want you or need you, Lady Lyanna.
She closed her eyes. “You are hurting. I am sorrier than you could ever know, my dearest. But you and I both know that they do need you. After all,” she said sadly, “the dead are here again, and you are no longer just my babe.”
The beast lunged at her. She was gone before his teeth closed around her neck, leaving nothing.
Leaving only him.
The grey morning came slowly. Behind him, the Wall gleamed red and orange and gold as the screams twined upwards like so much smoke. In a hollow, the wolf boy watched, his stomach growing emptier and emptier.