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The mutineers could have at least done him the dignity of a cell. Not even the punishing cruel confines of the deep cells in the foundry of the Wall. Satin would’ve thought the Lord Commander’s steward merited a proper dungeon.
The closet had no windows, though, and a door that only locked from the outside, so it must’ve served in a pinch. The tomcats had bigger mice to catch.
For a few hours (Surely not days , though once his stomach started whining it became harder to tell the difference), Satin allowed himself to experience pangs of distress assuredly not becoming of a man of the Night’s Watch. The shock of it, he told himself. It was one thing to face an invading army...this he had done with minimal complaint and a not unreasonable measure of success...but to be hauled from one’s bed in the dead of night by people you’d called comrades and kicked around like a child’s toy...
He was supposed to be better than that now. He had a responsibility vested in him by his Lord Commander and friend. He ought to have been alert. Jon Snow had been, when he’d been the Old Bear’s steward, back before Satin had ever come to the Wall. He’d heard the story of Jon and the wight so many times he could recite it by heart. Jon still bore the burn scars from the encounter on one hand, though he covered them with gloves. Satin had seen them all the same, and been fascinated where he may once have been repulsed.
He had developed a perhaps unseemly interest in scars since coming to the Wall. The notion of permanent disfigurement was unsettling to any man, he supposed, and more so to one who traded on his looks over any other skill. Call it a mark of vanity, then, but he had nonetheless shirked away from conflict and violence if he could help it...until, of course, he hadn’t had a choice. He hadn’t minded fighting with a bow, at a safe distance. If he were to get hit, well at least his face would remain intact.
Scars didn’t mean ruination, he’d realized. Most men who had been scarred (and so, most men on the Wall) were proud of their markings. Jon ought to be proud of his scars, but he wasn’t one to boast.
Try as he might, Satin couldn’t take pride in the scars he’d been left with. His lip had split under one fist or another, and there must be an ugly welt on his brow, though of course he hadn’t the benefit of a looking glass to assess the damage in.
He felt stupid for caring how he must look. There was a mutiny on, and like as not his friends were targets as much as he was, and that wasn’t even starting on whatever was being visited on Jon...
So he despaired and wept and gnashed his teeth the best he could through the sodden rag that’d been stuffed in his mouth; one of the turncoats had soaked it in ale, possibly as a cruel jape. His nostrils burned and his throat was too sore to scream and he didn’t even get drunk, which was even more insulting.
By and by, his sorrow gave way to anger, with the mutineers and with himself. Man of the Night’s Watch indeed, weeping and carrying on in a cupboard while gods knew what atrocities were going on outside? What was he going to do, then? Sit here and wait for the thugs to come back to finish what they’d started? Perhaps he’d be offered clemency to lie, spin some tale to justify the coup they were pulling off.
Satin wouldn’t play along. He’d sworn an oath, after all. Anyway, why should he have delusions he’d be treated well at all in the new regime? He knew what the men said about him, the cruel whisperings levied at Jon as well as himself. That the plotters of this gambit had any pleasant plans for him were base fantasy, and even if they weren’t, there was no life for him here in the new order they were planning.
Just when he’d begun to feel at home too, though the feeling of ‘home’ was so foreign to him that he might simply have confused it for having a cushy job and never known the difference.
In any event, he knew he couldn’t stay put without a fight, even if all was lost. Either he remained here, tied up and gagged and waiting for his next round of abuse, or he fought his way out, to freedom or a noble death, whatever in seven hells that was.
He had to believe he wasn’t as helpless as he thought. He should know that by now, with all he’d been through, with all he’d forced himself to do, and yet those adventures had done more to increase his inadequacy than fortify his bravery.
Maybe that was his lot, just being the type of man he was. Other men..most men...struggled through adversity and were stronger for it. But his sort of man could struggle all they want and accumulate nothing more than new fears to haunt them at night, new terrors to keep them wishing they’d never strayed far from the creature comforts that the rest of the world sneered at them over.
Well, his life of comfort had taught him some things Sir Alliser’s drills hadn’t.
Steeling himself, Satin pressed his back against the far wall of the closet, pulled the gag as far into his mouth as he could manage, and got to work.
---
Oldtown in summer was another world. For most of his life, it had been the only world he’d ever known. He supposed, exactly, that that had been two lives ago. There was the man he was now, a brother of the Night’s Watch, improbable steward to the improbable Lord Commander; there’d been the nymphish boy whore at the Turquoise Damask, where he had earned his name; and before all of that, there’d been the bastard boy wandering the crookback streets and winding wynds of Thieves Market, scrounging and scheming for his next day’s meal.
Orphans and bastards tended to be treated about equally in the Seven Kingdoms, unless you belonged to someone important. If Satin’s father had been someone important, his mother hadn’t seen fit to tell him before the fever sweated the last gasps of breath from her lungs.
He only had hazy impressions of the woman who’d been his mother. He could barely even remember her name; he’d been so young, and he’d never been particularly intelligent. Five, had he been, or four?
He had her cheekbones; he remembered that, though her hair had been light to his dark. She used to fuss about his hair with a dulled knife, perhaps to pick out lice and nits, which their miserable little street had in abundance.
Other maternal memories were likewise fragmented: a clapping game accompanied by a little humming song; a sharp cry not to pick up hot coals from a dying fire; a hand holding his on a walk by the seaside...
Pretty pictures, but not enough to suggest anything real. Possibly he’d made the whole thing up. Lots of children did, especially on the streets and in the alleys. You had to invent a hundred new histories everyday, to divert suspicious shopkeepers, avert watchmen’s attention, revert idle hands from purses and pockets.
Satin had an as-tenuous grasp of this part of his childhood too. Weeks and years blended into a summery miasma. Warm cobblestones under the soles of his feet; pigeons taking flight at the approach of running urchins, frustrating pursuing watchmen; sticky honeybuns filched from a baker’s cart, dripping and rich and impossibly good...
Being sentenced to the Wall had felt like the end of his life. Now, he knew, or could postulate, it had merely begun a new one. Even so, it was hard to say when his life had begun .
The shell games, probably, were as good a place as any to start. Games of chance had been as plentiful on the docks as rats and whores. Sailors loved spending more money than they could afford, from which Satin had deduced early on that men in general had little to no control over their own impulses.
He’d been three-and-ten, or maybe four, but he’d lost track of the years long before he’d ever really had a concept of them. At any rate, he was too tall to slink about the streets picking pockets, and too lanky to warm the hearts of potential alms-givers.
What he did know how to do was talk. A honeyed tongue, quick turn of phrase, and a bright smile could convince anyone of anything. He never had to try too hard at keeping the shell hidden up his sleeve or under the mat. People looked at him and listened and didn’t care so much that they were spending money on frivolous nonsense.
Satin supposed his sense of self...his earliest awareness of his own being and people’s understanding of him...came from these games. A little late, maybe, but he’d never claimed to be smart.
Still, there was some distinction between realizing people liked looking at him and understanding he liked being looked at. He knew it felt good, though...crowds of people hanging off his every word, dropping stars and stags into the wooden bowl at his feet, even before the game had concluded.
That his customers were primarily men, of course, was expected. Women were not often seen at the docks, unless they were selling amusements of their own. It took him a while to understand that the good feeling he got from the attention of the crowd was rooted not only in pride, but in his own ability to throw wool over their eyes.
His mind was nowhere near as clever as his fingers. He’d stirred awake after a vivid dream of himself swimming in the bay with one of the sailors who’d played at shells that evening, sweaty, short of breath and warmly wet in the breeches, and even then his first thoughts were neither shock nor euphoria at his awakening, but panic that he’d made the whole thing up, and the fantasy he’d dreamed was only that.
Successive fantasies would last longer, but they would never feel as real.
***
Satin dislodged the gag from his mouth with a final twist of the tongue. He took great heaping gulps of stale air, his throat sore and scratchy from his forceful ministrations. The sound of his own wheezes, tinged with the threat of tears, alarmed him in their forcefulness.
He was in more pain than he’d let himself believe, every breath awakened an ache in his gut. Maybe he’d broken a rib: another infirmity to add to his collection. What he got, he supposed, for being caught napping. He wouldn’t expect sympathy, mostly because he had no idea who he could expect to give it.
What he had to do was get out of here before things got any worse.
It didn’t do to think of the Lord Commander...Jon. Much as he’d gotten used to the honorific, it hurt him more to remind himself that Jon was his superior now. For, if Jon was Satin’s lord, he’d failed him by letting this madness unravel around him.
Easier, in a way, to believe he’d merely failed a friend and brother. Not that it made him feel better, but it did add some urgency to his desperation. Satin had long ago learned he responded better when he felt bad about something. Another useful skill to add to his repertoire.
With the gag dislodged, undoing his binds was an easy matter. Satin’s teeth worked as well as his tongue and, despite the blood in his mouth, it appeared he still had the full set. Once the cords around his wrist had been loosened just enough, the knots proved easily defeated by a few contortions of the wrists. If he were still the lithe sylph he’d been when he came to the wall, he may not even have gone to all the trouble. His wrists had been so delicate he could (and had , in his last life) slide out of restraints with ease, to titillate or frustrate as the case may be.
But he’d broadened since then. His arms were leanly muscled, but muscled all the same. His fingers, still nimble and quick, were calloused and wind-bitten.
He was changed, clearly, but still the same in enough ways. He decided he couldn’t be so torn up about it: Satin the steward had been easily overpowered; Satin the whore would escape and make right his failings, if he could.
Then again, neither steward nor whore had much experience in righting their failures.
His hands free (and wrists bloodied in the process), he loosed his ankles without trouble, getting to his feet with a groan of protest mingled with a short cry of relief.
A cursory peep through the keyhole confirmed that the mutineers had left the key in the lock. Satin wasn’t about to try his tongue out on that , and he experienced a brief thrill of revulsion that he’d even considered it.
Thinking quickly as he could, Satin rifled through the closet’s contents. This was the Lord Commander’s own wardrobe: Satin recognized Jon’s clothes. He noticed clothes more than most of the men of the Watch. People tended to assume black was black, but just as the Watch had produced men as different as Alliser Thorne and Bowen Marsh, there were different types of black.
Jon was altogether too earthy to care about clothes, and he’d made this clear (not in so many words, though, as ever) the first time Satin had dressed him. One doublet was the same as any other, a cloak was a cloak, boots were boots.
“ The Lord Commander must cut an impression, my lord, ” Satin had reminded him, deftly doing the clasps on his tunic.
“ The men have their impressions of me already ,” he’d smiled like it was a joke, “ Finery won’t change any minds. ”
“ Not on its own, ” he’d rejoined lightly, “ But a great man rates a great ensemble, I say. ”
Jon had given him a surprised sort of look and Satin had dropped the subject in an instant. He had a tendency, sometimes, to forget himself around the Lord Commander, especially when he was dressing him.
Jon didn’t mind much, or at least he was too good to betray that he minded, but Satin had to know his place and not push his luck for once in his life.
But Jon did impress him. He was comely: dark and strong and sincere; and there was a kindness to him that Satin appreciated for its rarity. Jon had to be the first person he’d met since coming up here that didn’t care he’d been a whore. Maybe this was poor grounds for a friendship, but it was only because of Jon that the others had finally begun treating him like anything other than a pariah.
All the more reason he couldn’t let him down now, not if there was still time left.
He found what he was looking for in due course: a handsome silver cloak pin, its head fashioned after the direwolf of House Stark. Perhaps too flashy for the Lord Commander, but it would serve his steward just fine.
---
Most people don’t set out to become whores. Certainly, very few boys do. Satin, likewise, back when he’d labored under the name his mother had given him, or the name he’d imagined she’d given him, hadn’t aspired nor intended to sell himself for sex. It hadn’t even occurred to him he was good at sex. Sex terrified him, the way it terrifies all boys on the cusp of manhood.
This terror deepened the more it dawned on him that his attractions were not strictly usual. Girls and women stirred nothing in him. More and more his dreams were of men. And the more the boys he’d grown up around began to resemble men, the harder it was to bear being around them.
He would never have called them his friends, but they were cohorts in a larger web, depending on each other to warn of watchmen and to advise the best places for a meal or a handout.
It didn’t feel wrong to feel something for them, no more than it felt wrong to hear them gibbering crudely about girls they’d seen in the market or on street corners, but on some base level Satin knew it would go badly for him if they ever even began to suspect one of their own was regarding them with lust in his heart.
It alarmed him, in fact, how lusty he was becoming. Perhaps it was normal at his age, but he was terrified, not of his own body and its responses but of what might happen were he to betray himself to the wrong people.
He had been exposed and unsafe for his whole life, but this was the first time he’d truly felt it.
The shell games became less reliable too. People might not mind being scammed by a charming little boy, but they were less forgiving of a fast-talking teenager. More than once, he’d had to quit the scene in the moments after a game to avoid increased rumblings of discontent. Once or twice, he hadn’t been able to get away in time.
He couldn’t fight, but he could run. But a running cheatthief, again, was taken a touch more seriously by city guards than an orphan pickpocket, and more so when he was a willowy slip of a thing with ringlets like a girl.
He met the septon in the city dungeons, making his rounds of the dregs of society.
“The gods are merciful to the penitent,” he’d intoned with a twinkle; he had a weak chin and gingery hair.
Satin, who fully expected he’d be short a hand within a moon’s turn, was very enthusiastic about the concept of mercy.
“I am,” he’d insisted convincingly as he could, trying to use what charisma he had to mask his terror and failing, “I am so sorry. I’m a rotten thief and I know I don’t deserve mercy...”
“Oh, but we all deserve mercy, my son,” said the septon with the grave certainty of the religious, “Tell me...how old are you?”
Satin gave him his best estimate and so secured his release, as a ward of the holy man, who instructed him in matters spiritual and otherwise.
It wasn’t the education he’d asked for, but it was the one he got for better and for worse.
***
The pin pushed the key from the lock without much prodding, finally assuring Satin’s release from the ignominious cell.
It was still night, which was the first relief. Satin had convinced himself he’d lost days, but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. A light snow was falling, and he could smell woodsmoke from nightfires in the yard. There were voices, not loud, but urgent. No sounds of fighting.
Muttering a curse, Satin garbed himself as fast as possible. His sword had been filched, he noticed, but the marauders had left his bow and a quiver of arrows, though Satin failed to see what good they’d be at a time like this. Still, it felt good to be armed, and to know that he could use his bow if he had to.
He tied his hair back to free his vision. Jon had once commented he looked different with the hair tied back, which Satin had taken as a compliment as much as an obvious fact. He felt different, but comfortably so. The beard had been an adjustment as well, and he perfumed it as much as a matter of taste than as a concession to his new station.
He supposed ‘different’ was roughly synonymous with ‘like a man’. He didn’t feel more or less a man, though. As ever, he mostly felt confused and, now, frightened.
Securing his cloak around his shoulders, he stole down the tower steps with a silent tread, ever aware of his heart singing in his ears.
Where would Jon be now, if he’d been taken? The cells, more than likely, or perhaps the common hall if they had decided to opt for a show trial. These intrigues went over Satin’s head as much as they did Jon’s, though he sometimes suspected Jon was more aware than he let on.
He stopped short halfway down the stairs, seeing a shadow over the doorframe: one large, bulky shadow that split into two. Guards on patrol. The Commander’s Tower was being watched.
Satin supposed he could, in theory, lob an arrow at the first guard to linger too long in the open doorway, but that left the other one with enough time for the hew and cry, and he didn’t feel up to challenging the entire Watch with nothing but a dozen arrows and a cloak pin.
Making up his mind, he doubled back, ducking into the commander’s study. The room had been well combed over: books and scrolls tossed from the shelves, furniture overturned...a candle had been left burning, and was guttering out on the desk.
Out of habit, Satin blew the candle out and then realized what a stupid thing that was to do.
“Someone there?” a figure peered from around the bookcase. Satin promptly forgot every combat trick he’d ever known and threw a book at his head instead.
The man hit the floor, groaning and cursing.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up ...” Satin hissed, hurrying over to stifle him; he recognized this one vaguely, one of the former Janos Slynt’s toadies, emphasis on toad , “Where is the Lord Commander?” regrettably, his voice cracked on the last word; he thought he’d outgrown that habit in the whorehouse.
“Fuck you!”
Satin slapped him, which hurt his hand far more than it did its target, “This is treachery!”
“You don’t scare me, boywhore,” the bigger man began sitting up, “I could snap you like a twig.”
Satin had to admit to a certain amount of resentment. He’d put on quite a bit of muscle over the last year or so. He was certainly not twiglike.
“Try, then,” he challenged.
“What?” the guard was taken aback.
“Well, come on, big lad, none of this braggery if you don’t mean to follow up on it. You know how many men would brag about all the things they’d do to me only to come up short? It’s distressingly common and...”
“Little bastard!” the man reached for his sword and Satin kissed him full on the chapped, dry, stinking lips.
He still knew how to kiss, at any rate. The poor idiot was too shocked to do anything more than let Satin’s lips (and only sparingly his tongue, which would need to be thoroughly rinsed later) work on him.
Satin pulled away at last to look into the guardsman’s stupefied eyes, wavering between terror and outrage. Satin gave him another whack with the book before he could settle on one or the other, and he collapsed to the floor.
“Oh gods,” he whimpered, slumping against the wall.
“You are free.”
“Oh gods!” he cried out, louder, at the red woman standing in the doorway, “Y-you.”
“To your feet, Satin Flowers,” said Melisandre, in the most words she’d ever given him, “My diversion will not long snare their attention, and there is much to be done.”
---
Satin didn’t stay with the septon long, which he understood in hindsight was for the better but at the time felt like a great loss. The holy man hadn’t been cruel, and his faith sincerely held, but it too quickly became apparent that the thing he prized most about Satin was his innocence. Once that commodity faded, so too did the septon’s interest.
From time to time in the intervening years, Satin would occasionally bemoan the trajectory the septon...whose name was as mysterious as his motivations...had set his life onto. His induction into the act of lovemaking ought to have been with someone...different. Younger, comelier, kinder, better .
At the same time, Satin would not have had much life to live had he not been rescued from that Oldtown dungeon. The septon had been the first adult who’d ever cared about him one way or another. Well, at least since his mother, if he hadn’t just invented her.
He was five-and-ten or four-and-ten, alone on the streets. The septon had ensured he was better clothed, but being an itinerant himself, he didn’t have much to part with. Satin wore a seven-pointed star around his neck as a token of his conversion, such as it was.
He did say his prayers by night and, though he’d never gotten around to reading The Seven Pointed Star , he was fairly certain the septon’s manner of worship was not endorsed by the sacred scripture.
“Where am I to go?” he’d asked piteously the day the septon had taken off to follow the roseroad to his next ward.
“Only the gods know for sure,” which was a patently absurd thing to say, though at the time Satin had had no choice but to regard it as a divining rod, “But you’re a brighter lad than you suspect, and not without certain talents.”
Satin’s only talents were stealing and sex. He’d learned the latter very recently and he had no desire to dabble with the former ever again if he could help it.
The Turquoise Damask was a famous pillowhouse, perhaps the most famous of its kind in the Seven Kingdoms. At the time, Satin hadn’t known the extent of its reputation, only stories he’d heard from the other urchins in what passed for his childhood. On the lips of the other boys, it had been a punchline in a litany of unsavory jokes, generally suggesting that whichever shopkeeper, watchman, or older boy giving them a hard time was a patron.
Satin hadn’t ever thought too much about it, except that a whorehouse for men...or, rather, men who preferred men...was a novel concept. As a child, he wondered how much business it could possibly do.
Quite a lot, as it happens.
He presented himself at the back door of the Turquoise Damask at the crack of dawn, three days after being discharged from the septon’s service. A middle-aged Lyseni with silver hair in a knot and eyes rimmed with gold paint greeted him.
“Are you not overyoung to seek the services of this house, boy?”
“I’m not seeking services,” Satin told him as bravely as he dared, “I’m seeking a job.”
The Lyseni laughed for an unbearable stretch of time in which Satin felt he could easily expire on the spot and put an end to the interview at once.
“You are pretty, boy, to be sure,” the Lyseni said at length, his eyes traveling the length of his body in a way that ought to have felt predatory but somehow didn’t, “But men seek this house for more than pretty faces.”
“I know some things,” he’d answered a little impudently.
“Have you had any training?”
Satin was not sure whether merely having had sex constituted as training, so he stumbled inelegantly over his words before eventually settling on, “Why don’t you test me, then. What is the worst that could happen if I fail?”
The Lyseni, whose name Satin would soon learn was Olivros Leandrethe, laughed again, “There are many sufferings the gods visit onto mankind, boy. Few are more loathsome than a wasted turn between the sheets.”
“But...” Satin felt the burn of tears and hated himself for it, “But I...”
But this caught Olivros Leandrethe’s attention. He reached out abruptly to take Satin’s chin in his hands, “Ah...” he gasped tenderly, “Ah, yes...that is something special.”
He watched uncomprehendingly as the Lyseni produced a handkerchief...satin, of course...to dab the fresh tears from his face, “Many and more are the talents of my charges here...but precious few are the ones who know to weep ,” he smiled almost kindly, like a gentle patrician, “Many are the men who want a boy that cries.”
His second life, then: he’d even come into it crying, like a proper infant.
***
The Red Woman had set fire to the Shieldhall, diverting the guards from the Commander’s Tower and a good many other places at that. Satin asked her if she’d used magic, but she didn’t answer him, striding determinedly across the yard, her red skirts flowing behind her. She may as well have been a hallucination, she felt as unreal.
Satin had long harbored a distrust of Melisandre. A healthy distrust, he’d told himself, not informed by prejudice but by experience. Even now he worried whether he was being lured into a trap, though these fears were allayed by the reminder that nobody would stand anything to gain by trapping him.
Anyway, the Red Woman was preternaturally capable. She had a sort of sense for nearby guardsmen, diverting their course whenever one was too near.
“No cause for you to waste your weapons on these false brothers,” she indicated his quiver, “You shall have reason to conserve all you have in days to come.”
This was hardly an enticing prospect, but compared to his situation some short hours previously, it sounded like a holiday so Satin didn’t protest.
Their quarry proved to be in the stables. Melisandre strode past nickering horses, their agitated breaths steaming in the air and lending an unnatural warmth to the otherwise fusty place.
“Some of your comrades brought him here after the bloody work was done,” she spoke impassively, but with a sort of gravity that indicated some level of involvement, “They feared defacement upon the remains.”
“Remains?” Satin echoed hoarsely, “What do you mean ‘remains’? You can’t...”
“Prepare yourself,” she warned him too late.
Jon was spread out on his cloak, pale and prone and riddled with punctures, from which blackish red blood was fast drying in the cold. His eyes had been closed. Indeed, from the slit neck up he may as well have been sleeping.
Satin felt his knees weaken, “H-he’s...”
“Take custody of your senses.”
“My lord,” Satin approached the body tentatively, “My lord, Jon...” he reached out with a hand, but stopped himself, propriety and squeamishness allying to curtail him.
“Touch him,” the Red Woman invited, “Touch, know, believe. This is no time for doubt.”
Satin looked at her, feeling an unbidden tide of hatred rising in him, “They killed him.”
“You speak as if to accuse me.”
“Why shouldn’t I? Always talking about your flames and the future...you didn’t see this?”
“I make no claims of omniscience, Satin Flowers,” the way she said his full name, steeled to a point, as if by saying it she had already ensnared him in a spell, sent shivers up his spine, “We have much to do if man is to endure.”
“W-what are you talking about? I...” he blinked furiously, lifting a hand to beat away the tears.
“Weep, Steward of Castle Black,” she invited, “To harden yourself against tears is to surrender your humanity.”
He let himself cry, not because she had given him permission...he told himself...but because he needed to. He let the tears drop onto Jon’s front, imagining the blood might wash off, but of course it had long dried and, anyway, not even he could cry that much.
“H-he was a good man,” he said at last.
“He was the right man,” said the Red Woman, sounding almost angry, “Would that I had seen.”
Satin pushed a few stray locks of Jon’s hair behind the ears, a hysterical concession to fussiness, as if Jon would come to life just to brush his hand away and insist he didn’t need to be combed just to sit in muster with the brothers.
“The fight is north, but you must take him south.”
“What?” he blinked his eyes clear, “South where? To Winterfell?”
“Away from here. He must not be left to the mutineers.”
“He needs to be buried ,” Satin pointed out, “He needs a funeral, he needs...”
“He needs someone to guide him,” Melisandre pointed out, “You are his steward: it is just that you be the one.”
“To what? Climb onto his pyre to burn up with him?”
Melisandre’s eyes brightened, but she otherwise ignored the dark jape, “You will not be searched for. Many will have gone missing tonight in the confusion. They will seek after some, but not you. They would sooner expect you to have turned craven and fled.”
“Did your flames tell you that or is that just kitchen gossip?”
“I am doing what I must, as I have always done. You must do the same.”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking of me...”
“Yes you do, Satin Flowers,” her eyes searched him knowingly, the queer red stone at her neck seeming to glow with an unnatural light, “You know more than you admit and are capable of more than you fear.”
Satin got slowly to his feet, “What do you know about me?”
“Enough to know you are the man for the job,” she paused, “Not enough to know if you believe this yourself,” she indicated a cart out in front of the stable, “You must away before first light, avoid the kingsroad, and watch him,” she spread her arms, “May the Lord of Light show your path.”
It sounded as much a warning as a benediction.
---
Satin liked what he did. He could not admit this to anybody in his third life (which, possibly, had now come to an end to make way for a fourth), as they would surely think him insane or a degenerate or both, but he did.
The Turquoise Damask was the nearest thing to home he had ever had, and the closest thing to family as well. With the other boys in Olivros Leandrethe’s care, he formed a camaraderie the streets had never been able to afford. A different type of brotherhood than the one he now counted himself a part of, but no less ancient or special.
For a year, Satin was instructed in the science and spectacle of sex. Beauty was not merely a suggestion of aesthetic, nor was desire an unpredictable impulse. Touch was crucial to pleasure, but not the only sense useful for its cultivation. Sight and sound and scent were as vital to the process and were neglected at great loss.
Satin had never thought much of his own looks. When would he have had the time or the impetus? The septon had clearly seen something in him, but Satin had hardly taken this as a token toward his particular attractiveness.
His brothers in silk and velvet were the first to call him beautiful, in tones admiring and envious. He had a face like an angel and a waist like a girl; his hair, which had so often bothered him in its dirty tangles, once washed, cascaded down almost to his waist in waves of perfect black.
“There are ladies from White Harbor to Qarth who would give their fingers for hair like yours,” the Summer Islander called Singer for the songbirds’ feathers he braided into his own hair told him in the baths.
“Is it so nice?” Satin, wary of sincerity, asked as he wrung the water from his locks.
“Black silk,” he had rich, dark eyes, which glinted with anticipation, “I must braid it for you one day.”
Satin, who understood relationships to be transactions, rejoined, “Then I must dress you one day,” a nervous smile broadened with dawning puckishness, “Or the same day even.”
Olivros Leandrethe expected his boys to teach each other as much as themselves. Satin became confident in his beauty as he came to recognize and appreciate the beauty of others.
He grew his nails out like a woman, and braided his hair with perfume and oils. One of the boys, a golden-haired westerlander who claimed descent from some Lannister vassal branch, pierced his ears, from which he wore twin seven-pointed stars, for the septon who had saved, ruined, and redeemed him, if a redemption this was.
By the time Leandrethe deemed Satin ready for service, he had transformed himself: softened and scented, thin but not scrawny, graceful and elegant...beautiful. He knew he was beautiful as he’d once known he was quick.
“Your delicateness must be your strength,” Leandrethe told him at dusk his first true night as a jewel of the Damask, “Men will admire you for your beauty, but they will likewise loathe you for it.”
Satin had no idea what to make of this riddle, if a riddle this was, but he knew his lessons well enough to know how to respond to a better, “I understand, my lord.”
Leandrethe’s smile widened, “You will in time, to be sure. Men covet beauty for themselves, to possess and to conquer. The sorts of men who frequent this house have shames and fears as all men do who come to such houses. The fear of discovery, the disappointment of unhappy homes, wives and children and appearances at court and council...they are actors all, and not all good. In my boys, they see the reflections of lost promise: lives they might have led, if they were so allowed, if law and faith and will had permitted. Desire can turn to disdain in a moment,” he ran a gentle hand down Satin’s perfect cheek, “Your tears are a weapon, and your gentleness your shield.”
It occurred to him that satin was hardly a good shield against anything, but he knew better than to say so, “Yes, my lord.”
“Go then,” he kissed him on the brow, like a father sending his child to war, “Do credit to this house.”
Satin went and did credit to the house, for all the good it did him.
***
Being obedient to a fault, Satin avoided the kingsroad and hated himself for it. For one thing, the cart Melisandre had insisted he load poor Jon into (with no offer of help, such labor evidently being beneath her) was not well-suited to the unpaved trackless wilderness west of the road. The horse was not a complete nag, but he was stubborn and, sensibly, predisposed against their mission. Satin thought it might be that the Red Woman had a negative effect on animals in general, but it was just as likely he knew nothing about horses.
Several times, Satin had to dismount to push the cart out of the mud, an agonizing process that invariably took the better part of an hour and involved unhitching the horse, cursing at the horse, and rehitching the horse so they could journey the next few paces.
They encountered no people, at least, but a few times Satin suspected he heard mounted men. Search parties from the Wall, no doubt, or possibly like-minded defectors like himself. Naturally, he had no desire to find out which was which.
A day passed without stopping for rest. He had no grasp on geography, and knew nothing about the North short of the Wall at its farthest extent. His journey up the kingsroad with Conwy and his other recruits hadn’t found him with the presence of mind to take in the scenery. Still, he had a feeling they were still too close to the Wall to chance the kingsroad. Even farther south, where should they be safe? Most of the North remained in the Boltons’ thrall, so they would find no friends there; and even if Stannis was still besieging Winterfell, Satin had no desire to throw in with the man who’d brought the Red Woman into their lives.
The Red Woman...
Satin had plenty of time to think on the red priestess’s words on the glacial journey. She had looked at him, spoken to him, as though she knew . She looked at everyone like that, of course, but she was not so infallible as she pretended, unless she had seen the mutiny in her flames after all and was only lying now, to ensure her desired fate continued its course.
He was leery of anyone who claimed to see the future, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe they could. Jon had told him off once for japing with the others about the Red Woman, and Satin had been properly chastised and a little embarrassed.
He could not, after all, argue any particular knowledge of the Red Woman or her intentions. But he knew more of her ilk than his friends had suspected or that he was willing to reveal.
Could Melisandre know this? Could it be for this reason that she’d chosen him over Grenn or Pyp or any other more capable, more seasoned men of the Watch to escort what remained of the Lord Commander away from the Wall?
The thought didn’t cheer him, and yet the more he thought it over the more sense it made, inasmuch as such a mad course of action could make sense.
More than once, as one day turned to two and his progress grew ever slower, Satin pondered abandoning the whole scheme and giving Jon a proper burial. He’d had as much experience with funerals as he had with what he suspected the Red Woman wanted him to do, but what should that matter? Jon deserved to be put to rest in the proper way, befitting his rank and his character.
“ Even a bastard can rise in the Night’s Watch ,” he’d told Satin shortly after appointing him steward, “ My uncle told me that once, though at times I didn’t believe him. ”
Satin, recalling that Jon had been a steward himself, was a little taken aback, “ I think I’ve risen as high as I’d like, my lord. ”
“ We have that in common as well, then, ” he’d smiled and Satin felt a warm vindication that he was still his friend as well as his superior.
It was that, Satin reflected, that had made his stewarding so special, after his other lives. Jon commanded respect, but he was compassionate and kind and...human. Satin had served a great many men at the Turquoise Damask, but it was against the credo of such houses to expect more humanity than a patron was willing to give. One had to protect one’s heart and desires; openness was encouraged, passion expected, but the true sort of sincerity that comes with real companionship must, by any means, be hidden.
For a few short months in Jon’s command, Satin had been allowed sincerity. Confidence had returned to him for the first time since the Turquoise Damask, accompanied with the new strength and resolve he had developed on the Wall. He’d felt more himself than he’d ever had before.
And here he was now, debating whether or not to give up and put the man who’d made that short but wonderful time possible in the ground.
But that was the only thing to do, wasn’t it? Jon was dead, murdered. Satin had surrendered any chance to save him when he’d been bundled into that closet. The alternative, the Red Woman’s unspoken but blazingly clear plan...it was wrong, unnatural. Jon wouldn’t...
The wagon came up against a snag in the earth, which was the last straw for one of the rear wheels. The horse screamed, Satin cursed, and one of Jon’s arms came loose from the heavy burlap he had been bound in, dangling pathetically over the side.
“Oh gods, oh gods, oh damn , Jon...” he clambered down to the ground, racing around the back of the wagon to the forlorn cargo.
“Oh...” Satin whimpered, getting to one knee in the mud without thinking how miserable that would make the rest of the day and who knew how many days after, “Jon, I’m sorry...”
He felt half a fool to be apologizing to a corpse, but after two days with no company but his increasingly miserable thoughts, it felt strangely good to hear his own voice.
He took the cold, waxy hand in his, shivering at the feel of the dead flesh. He’d meant to tuck it back into the wrapping, but the shock of the touch stayed him.
Jon was younger than him by one, maybe two years. The youngest Lord Commander in time beyond counting. He deserved more than a burlap shroud in the back of a broken turnip cart. He deserved a better escort than Satin.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, feeling tears on his lashes, “I’m sorry for crying. Others take me, it’s all I know how to do,” his shoulders shook with the force of his sobs, “Cry and fuck and dress and feel sorry for myself...”
A rabbit darted by; it occurred to Satin that he could also shoot something for dinner if he wasn’t sitting in the mud and moping like a child. He hadn’t eaten since Castle Black, it was a wonder he hadn’t collapsed yet.
“Let me see this wheel,” he decided, “And then dinner, and then...” he sniffled, “I’ll cry some more,” he tucked Jon’s hand back into the shroud and went to inspect the damage to the wagon. His tears blurred his vision, but he saw the damage all the same: not the worst break, and easy enough for him to mend.
He put his mind on the task, and cried himself out halfway through the project. By the time the wheel had been properly reattached, his shoulders were sore, his hands chaffed from cold, and his cheeks dry from old tears.
The direwolf approached him, eyes red as the squirrel’s blood on its snout. It deposited its freshly killed prey at Satin’s feet and made no protest when he threw his arms around its soft white neck and muffled a cry of joy in its fur.
---
Satin rose quickly at the Turquoise Damask. Olivros Leandrethe had been correct that his talent for tears would make him popular. Satin’s training had prepared him for the more unorthodox pleasures men sought at places like this, but still he found himself surprised at the power of sorrow...at least on a pretty enough face.
He learned quickly to figure out what men liked without asking. If he were tied, would they want him to beg for release or remain silent and still? If he were being taken from behind, should he handle himself or let himself be manipulated? If he was to be undressed, should he strip at once or piece by piece?
He liked some of his patrons and disliked others, but most he was indifferent to. Merchants and lords alike would pass through the doors of the Damask, seeking escape from wives and duties. Many used aliases or came masked. He knew to ask no questions.
By and by, men who had had him once before would return, asking for him by name. Gifts became regular parts of the routine: jewelry, clothes, perfume...
“They treat you like a princess,” Singer told him once as they admired his trinkets.
“If I’m a princess, where’s my dowry?” he grinned, tossing his friend a garnet brooch fashioned after a wildflower, “It’ll look better on you than I.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“Rich men have awful taste.”
“And yet they keep choosing you .”
Satin swatted his arm and they laughed together.
“I don’t know whether to be jealous of you or relieved,” Singer continued after they had quieted somewhat.
“Tell me the story and I’ll tell you which,” he held up an ornate emerald teardrop meant to be worn from the ear and hastily discarded it as much too much.
“One of mine asked me about you today.”
“You mean he called my name out during?”
“We didn’t progress nearly that far,” Singer shrugged, “He was put out that you weren’t available.”
“If you saw the aurochs I was with this afternoon, you’d be put out too,” he grinned, “Was he comely?”
“He was handsome and mature and he scared me who doesn’t scare easily,” his long, graceful fingers pressed together, “I’d stay away from him.”
Satin frowned, “What did he want me for?”
“To hear him tell it, he wanted to paint you.”
Satin smiled incredulously, “ Paint ? Like a portrait?”
“Or a wall.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“I got a bad feeling.”
“That’s because he didn’t want to paint you ,” he leaned against the bedstead, “What does he do, do you know?”
“He’s a Pentoshi.”
“So he’s a merchant.”
“Not so,” Singer correctly grimly, “He is a red priest of the Lord of Light.”
***
It was Ghost, there was no mistaking him. Even besides his namesake silence and distinct coloration, the direwolf knew him, licking his face by way of greeting and curling up nearby as if they were at the hearth in Castle Black, warming up after a long day’s work.
Satin didn’t know how the wolf had found him, but he suspected it had something to do with Jon. There had always been a connection between Jon and his wolf; it wasn’t beyond credulity the bond would endure after one of them had died.
The night Ghost arrived, dinner in tow, he had bounded up into the wagon, causing the newly repaired axles to groan in protest, and curled up beside Jon’s wrapped form.
Satin watched as he skinned the squirrel Ghost had caught. The wolf looked back, eyes bright and piercing.
“I didn’t do a good job stewarding,” Satin said at last, “I know you’re thinking it.”
Ghost didn’t answer, which was a relief.
“Jon almost died protecting his Lord Commander,” Satin continued, ruing the dull scrape of his dagger against the dead rodent, “I’m not even sure whether to bury him.”
Ghost blinked.
“She’s mad,” Satin continued, “The Red Woman. Out of her mind, they all are, all those red priests. They think they can control peoples’ lives, that they can know things before they happen, play with people and manipulate them and...”
Ghost’s tail beat gently against his master’s shroud.
“It’s wrong , you know,” he said weakly, “They make grand promises and they don’t hold true. You don’t...” he stopped with an alarmed squeak, realizing he’d just addressed Ghost as though he were Jon, though neither man nor direwolf commented on the error.
“You don’t want what she wants for you,” he said at last, “Even if it worked, it wouldn’t be the same. You wouldn’t... ow , seven fucking hells...” he’d nicked his thumb with the knife, which was quite an achievement given how ineffectual it had been on tonight’s would-be dinner.
Ghost padded over to him and took his bleeding hand in his mouth. Satin’s initial panic gave way to an odd calm: he felt as though the wolf were reassuring him.
“Even if I could do it,” he said at length, “It wouldn’t be easy.”
Ghost looked up at him and Satin let out a little hysterical laugh, “Of course, nothing is easy up here, is it? You know that,” he scratched the direwolf between the ears, “We...we should find a place to lie in. So I can think.”
The wolf closed his jaw, just enough to apply some pressure.
“So I can plan , I meant of course,” he chuckled rheumily, “We don’t have much time.”
Ghost must’ve already had a place in mind. He led the ramshackle wagon to a lean-to of stone and wood in the dell of a stream, not too far up the ridge from where he had originally emerged with the squirrel.
It wasn’t much, but Satin’s complaints had never once improved his situation, so he held his tired tongue and got to work.
---
The red priest didn’t use his name, but this was not uncommon at the Turquoise Damask. What was unusual was his formality. The day Satin presented himself to him...over all Singer’s protestations...he was exceedingly dignified.
“You were surprised at my request?” he had a rich Pentoshi accent which Satin couldn’t help but find attractive. He was, on the whole, a very attractive man: middle-aged, but with a strong noble bearing. His dark hair was dusted silver at the roots, and his beard was thick, oiled, and perfectly black.
“I have never been painted before, my lord,” Satin had garbed himself in his prettiest ensemble: midnight blue silk and, indeed, satin wrapped like a woman’s robe around him, a rope of mother of pearl around his neck, and a silver and sapphire garter around his thigh.
“You needn’t call me ‘lord’,” the priest waved his hand dismissively, sweeping to his feet to get a closer look at him. He smelled like incense, as though he had just come from one of his god’s temples.
“How then shall I address you, my...” but Satin caught himself, putting on a demure smile to save face, “How?”
The priest pushed Satin’s braid aside to study one of the seven-pointed stars in his ears, “You keep the Faith of the Seven, Satin?”
He blushed, “Not perfectly.”
The priest laughed, “It is well. I am not a perfect priest myself.”
“I do not know much about the red priests,” Satin admitted.
“Few do in the Seven Kingdoms,” he traced the line from Satin’s jaw to collarbone with an appreciation Satin supposed bent to his artistic inclinations, “The Lord of Light is not quite so attractive as your Father, Mother, Warrior and all the rest of them. But the faith has a subtle beauty to it all the same.”
“You appreciate beautiful things?”
“I appreciate contradictions, Satin, and the beauty inherent in them.”
“Contradictions?”
“A boy who garbs himself as a girl,” his hand had found Satin’s garter, and pressed there firmly, “A whore who wears the star of the seven in both his ears...”
Satin felt the first hint of discomfort, “I could remove the earrings.”
“No,” with a lover’s tenderness, the Red Man parted Satin’s silk down to his waist, exposing the perfumed sheen of a perfectly shaved pelvis, “You are lovely as you are.”
It was all Satin needed to hear, for that sitting and the many more that followed.
***
The lean to had been constructed near some standing stones etched with runes. Satin didn’t know much history, but he supposed these dated to the time of the First Men. Possibly this had been a waystation on some ancient route for pilgrimage or trade. Satin tried to be curious, but he was too tired.
Ghost had chosen a good place. A few hours’ walk up the stream was a little hamlet, the men of which had all been called up to war at one point or another, leaving behind women, children and invalids attempting to carry on despite all their troubles.
The village was far enough out of the way that stragglers didn’t come wandering toward the lean to, but it was close enough to provide easy access to such goods as Satin needed.
“You’ve made a thief out of me again, Lord Snow,” he told the shrouded form...or, more comfortingly, his direwolf...dawn of the fourth day since their flight from Castle Black, as he hacked miserably at the beard he had lately been so proud of managing after all, “And I’d sworn to a life of good works.”
He wondered if he was going mad, or if he was mad already. Maybe he’d imagined the Red Woman’s instructions after all; maybe he’d never even escaped that closet. This might all be an unhinged attempt to work through his own ordeal in Oldtown a lifetime ago.
But these indulgent ramblings ran their course whenever he looked at the body in its shroud. Satin had seen and done some terrible things, but somehow he knew he couldn’t make up Jon Snow dead.
He’d placed the body on a little dais, like a stone table, to keep it away from the elements and the earth. The effect was grotesquely reminiscent of a sacrifice on an altar, which Satin supposed was appropriate.
The body had not yet begun to stink, or maybe Satin was just suppressing the reality of his friend’s death, or the possibility the Red Woman’s mad plan would fail if Jon began to...decay.
“I know some ointments to freshen the skin,” he muttered, “But I’m no embalmer,” he scratched at the stubble of his newly shaved cheeks, “Or much a barber even.”
Ghost walked among the tufts of hair on the floor. He’d been invaluable the last few days, helping Satin bring in game for meals (the bow had come in handy after all) and also as companionship. He felt closer to Jon as long as the direwolf was around; it was a bittersweet closeness, but it was good not to be alone.
“What do you suppose happens if I’m caught?” he asked the wolf, undoing his ponytail to shake his hair out for the first time in days, “They’ll behead me as a deserter and then the world ends, depending on whose story you believe.”
Ghost pressed his nose into his hand, opening his mouth as if to whine, though as usual no sound escaped.
“I don’t want to let you down,” he paused, “Let him down, oh Seven save me...” he pressed one hand to his brow, “You aren’t him. You aren’t really him, and I have to stop, I can’t...”
Ghost’s eyes didn’t leave him, red and fierce and relentless in their attention.
“I can’t,” Satin repeated, “But that shouldn’t stop me, should it?”
---
The priest was a skilled artist and, under his attention, Satin became an adept model. Perhaps his real great skill lay neither in thievery nor pillow tricks nor stewardry, but the ability to shift from role to role as needed.
“My love of contradictions aligns with a fascination for in-between things,” the painter told him during one session, “The hazy border between mountain and valley, night and day, male and female...”
Satin, posed on a settee with his legs bared, one hand pressed against his garter, quirked his lips, “I notice men like that they can mistake me for a girl.”
“You enjoy being so mistaken?” his eyes moved quickly from model to canvas and back again.
“Sometimes,” he conceded, “There are many different ways to be a boy, my...” but he stopped himself in time, “My priest.”
“Your servant,” he amended, “I expect you have not had many.”
“No...” he tried the words out, “My servant,” the word itself gave him a rush.
He knew he had an ego, from the day he first realized people liked the sound of his voice. On some level, likewise, he knew having an ego was generally considered a negative trait, but what could he do? Praise electrified and sustained him. Eventually, he’d understand this same dependence was a weakness primed for exploitation.
Satin thought he was used to exploitation, that he knew what it looked like. Believing this, he let the priest paint him and charm him and seduce him with nary a touch.
The finished portrait was unveiled on a fresh warm evening two weeks from its beginning. Satin took one look and fell in love, not necessarily with himself (he liked to think), but with himself reproduced. That someone had taken time and effort to capture his likeness, the curl of his hair down his back, the curve of his thigh, the gentle shape of his bones against the skin.
He was defeated by his own image. A tear rose unbidden to his eyes.
“You are moved?” the priest asked softly.
He nodded, no coy pretenses, “It’s beautiful. N-no...”
Nobody has ever done anything like this for me.
But the words curdled on his lips; the realization was too sad.
“I am glad you enjoy it,” he played with Satin’s hair, “I want you to burn it.”
He turned his head sharply, “To what ?”
“Consign it to the fire,” he spoke serenely, as though he were reciting poetry, “Burn the husk and emerge anew. Resurrection and renewal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Certainly you do,” he pressed his cheek to Satin’s, his scented words tickling his ear, “There is so much I can teach you.”
He heard him and believed, shifting again from one role to the next.
***
He wasn’t as good a girl as he’d been once. He was too muscled now, his hands too rough, and his chin too dark with shadow from a poor shave.
Further, he had neglected to bring any women’s clothing to or from Castle Black, so the best he could do was ‘woman posing as man’, a ruse that didn’t hold up well in a village of suspicious women who hadn’t been near a man in months.
“You think that long hair’s fooling anybody?” demanded the apothecaire, an old crone with one eye that saw far too much, “It needs a washing too, is what it needs.”
Satin hadn’t thought too much about the sorry state of his locks, and he could only manage mild dismay at being so criticized by a woman with approximately three strands of hair upon her liver spotted scalp.
“Fine,” he said brazenly, “I am a man.”
“And a thief too!”
“You can’t prove that,” he spread his arms wide, a trick he’d cultivated in the shell games of his youth, the better to divert attention from the unseemly impressions in his trousers.
“Probably running from some army or other,” she spat, “You’ll find no quarter here! Army’s taken everything we have; there is nothing left...”
His hands and voice and back had hardened, so why should his miserable heart still be so soft? He could run away with his ill-gotten goods and not look back. He needed to get back to Jon and Ghost anyway, before someone stumbled upon the lean to or Jon began rotting or, of course, the world decided to end and the Red Woman got the last laugh. What a damn stupid time to be slowed by pangs of morality...
Others alive, he was crying .
“I know!” he blubbered like an insensate moron, “I know it’s wrong! I know you don’t have much and it’s wrong for me to barge in...”
“You’ll admit to stealing then!”
“Oh, dammit ,” he turned to the wall, shaking his head.
Useless excuse for a man he was. A thief half his life and now... now ...he decided to have scruples.
“Fine, fine...I’m a thief and I’m robbing you,” he reached into his boots; the woman, evidently expecting him to pull a knife like an intelligent criminal, prepared to cry an alarm, but Satin was quicker, revealing his ill-gotten gains: bottles and jars filched from the shelves of the dusty little apothecary, “See? Here’s everything. Sage and clove and citrus and smoke salve and...”
“Enough incense to open yer own sept,” her brow furrowed, “And not a leaf of medicine.”
“I don’t need medicine,” he saw her eye lingering on the bruise on his brow, which must not be completely faded.
“Oh, but you need spices and scents? Fetch a prettier price for ’em, I imagine...”
“I am not a bandit!”
“Then what are you, then?”
Satin quailed under her attention. She had surely noticed his inside out blacks, probably deduced he was a deserter. She’d be in awful trouble to be seen helping him, especially under the new regime at Castle Black.
He would not implicate her by implicating himself. Let her understand he was a deserter, but he would not say. What, then, was he? A steward, a soldier, a whore, a thief...none were positions liable to inspire faith.
“I’m in trouble,” he said at last, for lack of anything else, “And I-I need these things t-to help someone in worse trouble than I.”
“Someone?”
“A good man,” he could not and did not stop the flow of tears, “An honorable man. My honor might not be worth anything, but I have sworn to protect him.”
“An honorable man wouldn’t rob an old widow.”
Which, in a testament to Satin’s delirium, registered in his mind as ‘ Jon Snow wouldn’t rob an old widow’, which of course he wouldn’t. Jon likely would be opposed to all of this, and yet here Satin was, doing it anyway.
“You’re right!” he conceded, “You’re right. B-but I have no other way and...” he dropped to one knee, as if the crone were a great lady, “I swear, by the old gods and the new, I will do what I can to repay you.”
The crone snorted, “Spoken like a southron knight out of some song. That lip won’t warm my heart any,” she studied him for a short time, lips pursed together, “Never mind that. Bolton men all around these days. I turn you out, you’ll be dead in a day regardless. So you can take the lot to your honorable man, or try to, and I won’t stop ya. Only thing I’ll ask, since you’ve no coin...” she took a lock of his hair in her fingers.
Satin tensed, “My hair?”
“It’s a powerful physic, got quite a few applications...and you’ve more than enough of it to spare.”
Her other hand retrieved a dull blade from the counter, “Not an unreasonable arrangement, is it? Some hair for a hefty chunk of mine own stock. I’d say you got off easy.”
Looking up at her old, haunted, hungry eyes, Satin...who was haunted, hungry, and older than he should be...nonetheless felt he couldn’t argue.
“Take it,” a tear dropped onto his lip, salty and sharp, “As much as you want.”
Afterward, trudging upstream through the dusk, arms laded down with his hard-won goods, he felt the wind on his bare neck, through the choppy hair that remained him.
He thought of his mother and her haircuts. Her gentle fussing, real or imagined: the earliest time he could remember being taken care of.
The thought, almost comfortingly, didn’t make him cry. He had someone to take care of himself now, improbable as it seemed.
---
The others didn’t believe he was leaving.
“You cannot mean to go with him,” said Singer aghast.
“I can’t stay here forever,” Satin countered, taking garments one by one from the closet they shared and laying them out for inspection.
“That man is dangerous!”
“Every man is dangerous,” he waved his hand dismissively, “He likes me very much, and he’s taught me things...”
“How to pose?”
“Jealous, songbird?” Satin smiled, expecting to provoke a laugh, but his friend’s face remained stony.
“You are being a fool.”
“Everyone thinks I’m foolish,” he tittered, “Every man who gets me wants me to act like a fainting maiden or a helpless victim...”
“Oh, but the red priest makes you feel like a man?”
“I don’t care to feel like a man!” he snapped, holding one robe close to his chest, “He makes me feel like a person .”
His mind was so ablaze with new beginnings that it didn’t occur to him until much later how wounded Singer must’ve been at Satin’s unthinking implication. His first real friend, and he brushed him aside with nary a second thought.
He would never see him again. Nor, too, would he ever see Olivros Leandrethe, though their parting was not nearly as emotional.
“It is your right to go on your own,” he said languidly when Satin came to him with his intentions, “I will miss you.”
“Perhaps I will visit sometime,” Satin ventured in a small voice, but this tentative proposal was swiftly put to bed.
“To what end? The Turquoise Damask is another world, sweetling, and it is a temporary one, fleeting as morning dew. If you mean to break from the life you lived here, it must be a clean break. You will have no peace otherwise.”
There was no room to argue, so Satin hadn’t, forcing to the back of his mind that he was leaving home and could not look back.
He was six-and-ten or seven-in-ten: a man grown by every conceivable measure. Why shouldn’t he try and have a life of his own, with someone who fascinated him and found him fascinating in return?
The red priest smelled like fire and spice. Greeting him in the Damask’s forecourt with a kiss on each cheek, he remarked, “You’ve a destiny so much brighter than this place.”
Satin believed him without a second thought.
***
He was grateful for the task before him: it kept him from scratching at his hair. Satin could imagine how it must look: short and sort of spiky, uneven at every end, growing no lower than his ears. He cried a little about it, but not so much out of vanity...he told himself...than from a rush of memories that accosted him whenever he began to think about it.
“I was quite pretty once,” he told Jon or Ghost as he arranged the apothecaire’s wares on the floor of the lean to, “Last week, say. And you should’ve seen me back in Oldtown. I was a real stunner.”
Ghost walked among the jars and bottles. He was so big Satin worried he might knock something over and render the whole enterprise moot, but the direwolf was surprisingly graceful.
“I’m always feeling sorry for myself,” he told Ghost that evening, as he plucked a scrawny quail he’d been lucky enough to bring down mere moments before, “It’s a wonder I ever had any friends at all back at Castle Bl...” but his voice caught at the thought of them, “There I am again. It’s getting absurd. You know, I went a good long time without getting like this. When Mance and his wildlings raided the Wall, I didn’t cry once . I was too scared to cry, I thought. But here we are, and I’m plenty scared and...”
Ghost pressed his head against Satin. They looked, together, at Jon’s shrouded form.
“The Red Woman doesn’t really care about you,” he said softly, “Not in a real way. She wants to use you, and it doesn’t matter what you want. The funny thing is, I expect you knew that before she did. If it was me ...” he bit his lip, “But it was me once, of course, and I went right for it, didn’t I?”
The direwolf padded closer to the body on the makeshift altar. The ominous shape of the stone slab had gotten Satin wondering if the direwolf knew exactly what Melisandre’s purpose was, if he wanted ...or Jon wanted..her plot seen through to the end.
“I wish I knew you better,” Satin ran a hand down the shroud, “Truth be told, I’ve wished that far too often,” he couldn’t bring himself to look at Ghost, “I don’t know what you want,” he laughed softly, “ I again. Really, where I come from, we weren’t supposed to think so much about what we wanted, it was all about the men we were serving...” he pressed a hand to his mouth, the other one lingering on the cords of the tarp.
“So I think about you and I wonder what I would want if I were you, because I don’t know any other way,” he lowered himself to his knees beside the slab, “For starters, I’d probably want a mother...you had a father, but then I’m sure you want him back. I don’t know. I had a mother once, and I think it was quite a nice experience.
“So a mother...” he considered, “Friends, yes, you want all your friends safe and accounted for. But you’ve always been so good at making friends, so that’s an easy one to guess. And then...” he tried thinking of Jon’s responsibilities: the Watch, Winterfell, his struggle between each...
“You must want a rest. I would,” he sighed, “But you’re not me, Lord Snow...and probably better for it.”
His grip around the cord tightened, “Gods help me,” and lowered the shroud to look on his lord, friend, and offering.
---
He realized sooner than later what the Priest intended. He wasn’t secretive about it.
“The fire reveals truths to those with the care to look for them,” he told Satin as they lay side by side before a blazing hearth much too warm for the night, “It was through them that I first set eyes on you.”
It had sounded deliciously forbidden and dangerously sexy, “You saw my future?”
“A hero’s future,” the Priest said with soft certainty, “But you must embrace it.”
Satin had embraced it. A meteoric rise and why not? He was loved and loved being loved and why not? Why shouldn’t he, who had come from nothing and prevailed, not be destined for something greater?
The Priest spoke lovingly and reverently of the same things Melisandre would not much later (though it felt like so much longer) at the Wall. The Lord of Light and Azor Ahai, who forged his sword in the heart of his beloved Nissa Nissa so he could conquer a great evil.
Satin, drunk on praise and vindication, thought he was meant to be the Lord of Light.
Some people...kings and magisters and great knights...get to believe they are the heroes of their own story. Satin should’ve known better than to pretend.
“I have seen it in the flames, dear one, and the flames do not lie,” he told him as he fastened the bindings around his arms and legs, “Weep if you must, but know that your death redeems a world.”
Satin would have many chances to reevaluate his choices in coming months, but he would never let himself feel bad for not wanting to die so humanity might potentially be saved. Some men might let themselves live riddled with guilt, but he had had no delusions the moment he had come to on the altar, strapped down and naked, that he could not and would not die for this.
Satin was no hero, nor saint, nor sacrifice. The poison edge of being constantly in between things: you had no identity.
“I didn’t want this,” he whispered pathetically to the priest as he dressed his body in oils and incense for the conflagration, “Please, I-I didn’t...”
“No more than I want to do it,” the Priest sounded almost regretful as he bent down over him, “But there are greater things than the wants of men.”
Satin didn’t know much, but he knew men enough to love as well as fear them. And the Priest did love him, the way the fanatical artist loves his favorite model. He saw his recourse and seized it.
The Priest had him bound and helpless, but his lips still worked and they were enough.
“Are there?” he asked softly, teasing his would-be killer’s tongue with his, “Greater things than want?”
The priest tried to pull back, to stop, but men are men. His eyes fluttered shut and he moaned a soft protest, sinking all the same over Satin who, already well greased from his ritual ministrations, was primed to respond.
Satin had never been sacrificed to a foreign god, but he had some experience being oiled and tied up. With the Priest draped over him, overcome with zealotry and lust, he was able, bit by bit, to slip free of the cords which tied him.
Some men are able to hold themselves together after an ordeal. They are able to look the ones who have hurt them in the eye and stride past, secure in their rightness in having overcome their trials.
All his life, Satin had understood that he was not like other men. He thought by now he knew what that meant, but still he surprised himself. Getting his arms and then his legs free, he should have been able to spring across the room in a wink. But his first move, once freed, was not escape.
He had put his hands on men’s necks before, and more frequently had them around his. He knew what to do without thinking.
That is, at least, how he explained it to the city watch when they descended on the scene of the fire.
A struggle that had gotten out of hand. Unguents and oils made to hasten the spread of fire, igniting at an inopportune time, spreading and catching everywhere it had dripped...including onto the Pentoshi priest’s peculiar red garb.
The boy whore, not being clothed, avoided a similar fate and wasn’t that interesting? Pretty perfect, in fact. You couldn’t trust whores as a rule, and boy whores...
Nothing Satin said would’ve changed anyone’s mind in his favor, but he didn’t say anything regardless.
***
The dead don’t appear to sleep: they lie still like the stone cairns carved into the tombs of great men. Smaller, though, and slighter. The septon never discoursed too deeply about his faith, and the Red Priest had by his own admission been an unconventional apostle of his god, so Satin didn’t know if there was any treatise somewhere on the physical weight of a life, and how it may drain or dissipate from the body once it has run out.
The scars were black and grotesque; they hurt Satin to look at, but he looked anyway, so he could apply the herbal mixture as he needed, to the best of his fractured memory. Some of them couldn’t be very deep, others would surely have been enough to kill on their own.
It didn’t do to think how many Jon must have endured before the end, but he thought anyway.
It had begun to rain: a filthy downpair cascading off the wood lintel of the lean to like a shimmery veil. Ghost paced just before the entrance, as if in anticipation.
Satin fixed Jon’s hair, running a wet rag through the grimy locks to freshen and soften them. Stalling for time, but he felt it needed to be done. Jon was gray and drawn, dirty and cold. His body had never been properly cleaned.
Preparation for a funeral then, at least. He wasn’t sure if it felt within a steward’s purview, but he felt that it should.
“I remember,” he said softly as he worked, “Playing with fire as a boy...coals, I think, picked up from the hearth. The scorch on my skin and the pain ...” he shook his head, “My mother pulled me away and gave me a scolding and then looked after me.”
Jon’s burnt hand lay at his side, the scar now by far the least shocking mutilation on his body. Satin held it, “The thing is, I’m not sure it really happened. Some of it must have, of course. I don’t think I’d have been able to invent the feel of the burn...but afterward, with my mother,” his thumb moved in slow circles over Jon’s burnt skin, “She was real, and I know I knew her for a short time, but I’ve never been sure how much of her in my memory is real and how much I just made up as a child, just so I could have some memories of a mother. Someone who’d pulled me out of the fire at the last minute, and cursed me and coddled me, sweet and...” he waved a hand about, smiling despite himself at his failure with words, “Motherly.”
He let out a shaky breath, “I wonder if you had anything like that. Of course, y-you had a family and a castle to grow up in. It’s not the same. Even in Oldtown, on the streets and at the Damask...we were different. People looked at us and, well, bastards and orphans and urchins and whores...they don’t differentiate. I’ve always been too romantic for my own good.”
The rain poured down outside. Ghost was watching him intently.
“Melisandre knows what I did,” he said at last, “She said she knew it better than I,” his voice was husky, rough, “The man I killed thought killing me would save the world. He was mad, but I was mad too for listening to him.”
His eyes were burning again; he let out a choked gasp, “They all believe the man who saves the world has to kill the thing he loves most. A-and then she sends me off with you, as if...” he beat at his eyes with his hands, “You’re dead. You’re dead already and I was never going to save the world from anyone, no more than that priest was back in Oldtown, and I...” with a cry of frustration, he turned away from Jon, knocking over some of the bottles as he went.
“The only person I’ve ever really loved was myself,” he wept, face in his hands, “Even the priest, I only went for him because he made me out to be the most fascinating thing in Seven Kingdoms... I barely understand loyalty and honor and all those other things that come so naturally to you, and they expect me to know about love and sacrifice...”
He whipped his head around to face Jon, lifting himself up against the stone so he could look down at him.
“I might have loved you,” he said softly, “But the Red Woman can’t know that, I don’t care what her flames tell her. I don’t even know, and how can any great world-saving love grow from something so uncertain?”
The air was beginning to reek with the smell of the fire-starting salve. Satin steeled himself.
“I want rest for you, Jon,” he stepped back from the altar, “But if I know you at all, you don’t want it for yourself. But what do I know? Just in case, then...” with a shaking hand, he picked up a jar and uncorked it, “I’m sorry.”
The spark caught at once. Satin didn’t want to watch, but knew he couldn’t look away.
---
Dungeons again. Would his life, or lives, be punctuated by a never-ending stream of cells?
The traveling crow Conwy found Satin charged with much worse crimes than the septon had however many years before.
He was told, Satin learned later, that he was charged with arson and murder and, refusing to account for his crimes in any way, would expeditiously face the noose.
Conwy explained to him that taking the black meant his crimes would no longer matter. Anything he had done to dishonor himself...and he spoke in such a way that Satin knew at once he wasn’t just talking about the priest...would be cleanly blotted out if he became a man of the Night’s Watch.
It would be a hard life, not at all like anything Satin had ever known. Hard training, long patrols, a world colder than anything he had ever experienced.
Satin hadn’t thought much about the Wall before. At most, it had been a sort of hypothetical place, like Yi Ti and Asshai: a hazy foundry at the end of the world.
He couldn’t imagine himself at a place like that, growing cold and colorless, learning to wield a sword and work with his hands, live out the rest of his days surrounded by the sort of men who scorned the very idea of people like him.
Then again, he hadn’t ever imagined he’d be a whore named Satin either, and look what had happened? Faced with his own mortality, he would always choose to survive, no matter how dire those prospects seemed.
It wasn’t so much that he valued his life than that he was afraid of dying. Some men wouldn’t want to admit it, but Satin figured he had worse faults than cowardice.
***
Was he craven, then, or guilty, that he couldn’t watch the body catch fire? Shame for his action or lack of it, lack of fate in the Red Woman’s prophecy, memories of his own ordeal at the hands of the priest...
In any case, as the fast moving flames consumed the shroud, lapping hungrily at either side of the altar, Satin found he couldn’t stand idly by.
The wildlings burned their dead all the time, for reasons he understood pretty well by now. Still, an unspeakable panic seized him at the sight of the flames, the thought of Jon’s already battered and scarred body slowly succumbing to ash, if...as seemed very likely...Melisandre hadn’t known what she was talking about and all Satin was doing was conducting a burial.
Jon had been burned before, and had worn the scars without complaint. Satin just didn’t understand.
In that moment, he didn’t want to understand.
This is wrong. It was wrong when it was done to you and it’s wrong that you’re doing it to him.
He’d let Jon down enough.
The fire was unbearably hot, but he’d been cold so long that it was almost welcoming. Jon was shorter than him, but heavier, and Satin’s arms strained as he hauled him up from the altar. He felt the soles of his boots scorch and sizzle, his legs buckling as he took Jon in both arms, stumbling through the fire and into the rain outside.
With an anguished moan, he dropped to his knees in the earth, setting Jon down with such force that he, tired and defeated and stricken with self-hatred, collapsed over him.
The fire lit up the storm behind them, a pulsating orange star in a blue-black night. The rain would douse it, some little voice in the back of his head told him, and the stone of the ancient structure would survive. Perhaps, in time, it would be like none of this had ever happened. The world would resume its natural rhythms.
He could not move on. Burnt or whole, he would not be able to forget his failure.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he wept, face pressed against his Lord Commander’s chest, “I wasn’t strong enough for you,” tears, his only weapon, dripped down onto the old scars, mingling with the rain-slickening Jon’s waxy skin, “But it’s alright, now. You can rest. Y-you don’t have to worry about saving anybody. They had their chance... we had our chance...and we squandered it. You don’t owe them anything, and none of them, no Red Woman, not I ...have any right to expect you to carry on for us.”
It was all nonsense. The dressing up of hopes and fears in impossible expectations. Hadn’t his experiences with faith taught him by now how much of it was just naked excuses to justify people’s instincts? Predatory, egotistic, afraid, seeking desperately for an answer to their own problems...
He understood instincts: he’d been trained in that much at the Damask.
“I hope you’re at peace now, wherever you are,” he said at length, “I wish I could know you better, b-but I’m glad for what I did know,” he smiled, laughing hoarsely through his sobs, “Thank you for trusting me, and...”
But he couldn’t bring himself to apologize again, and so kissed him instead, warm lips against cold, the fire at his back and the rain pelting down on him from above.
Given the trajectory of his life, it shouldn’t have been at all surprising when, just as he was steeling himself to fashion a spade and lower Jon into the ground, the dead man opened his eyes and, face contorted into a mask of uncomprehending fury, seized Satin’s neck in strong, alive, and rapidly warming hands.
---
Satin hadn’t known Jon until they spent the night on the Wall, fighting off the wildlings. He’d never been more terrified, though at the same time there was an exhilarating wholeness about knowing he was no more terrified than anybody else, even Jon, who had infiltrated Mance Rayder’s column and lived to tell them of it.
They’d burned the stairs together, to halt the advance of the Thenns. Fire frightened him still, but everything was frightening at once. It had been weirdly freeing to make a weapon of the thing that had once nearly killed him, though he hadn’t thought to make a habit of it.
Jon approached him some days after the battle, when he and some others had been clearing debris from the practice yard.
“Satin,” he raised a gloved hand in greeting, “Or is there something else I can call you?”
“Satin is my name,” his muscles were too sore from clearing away charred timbers to muster the charming smile such a comment merited, “I prefer it.”
Jon smiled with a sort of boyish bemusement that Satin would’ve thought entirely unsuited to one who had seen as he’d seen, done as he’d done, and lost as he’d lost, “I’d thought maybe you might resent it.”
“I’ve got a few things to resent, but my name isn’t one of them,” he wiped sweaty locks from his brow, “In my own way, I earned it.”
Jon was a very easy person to read; his big eyes registered discomfort, “I expect lots of the brothers have japed at your expense.”
He shrugged, “I’ve dealt with worse than japes.”
“That’s partly why I’m here,” Jon told him, “I remember, the day I went ranging beyond the Wall, I saw you.”
Satin remembered how he’d looked: bedraggled and emaciated, once fine silks hanging off him like rags, “I’ve made better entrances.”
“I didn’t think much of you, or most of the others who came up with you. Conwy said you were a boy whore.”
“Conwy told no lies.”
“No, but I judged from what he told me. I wasn’t sure you’d come to much, but I hoped you would...the way I hope everyone would. As if I were some great man who’d risen high...”
“Well, Lord Commander’s steward, that sounds like something.”
“We are all brothers. It was wrong of me to dismiss you. You’ve more than proved yourself.”
Satin had a poor history with registering praise, and yet Jon’s sincerity struck him. He set down the load he’d been carrying (gently as he could make it), “That’s kind of you to say, Jon. But you needn’t lower yourself to make amends to me...”
“There’s no lowering. Here, Satin, you’re as equal as I,” he extended his hand, “I’m proud to call you brother.”
Satin, stunned, took the hand and let his new friend pull him into an embrace.
Miracle of miracles, he shed not a single tear.
***
Jon was strong as he’d ever been, maybe stronger. Satin was powerless in his grip, and likely too terrified to move regardless. He tried to speak, but the words came out strained wheezes as he found it harder and harder to breathe.
He was Jon, though. Not burnt, but alive all the same, just as Satin had accepted there would be no coming back.
He didn’t seem happy about it.
“ No! ” he tried, but failed to protest, “ Jon, please... ” to no avail. He couldn’t say a word.
Neither, of course, could Ghost, but that didn’t make him any less useful. The direwolf leaped in between them, bounding onto Jon, knocking him flat on his back. The wolf looked down at him, out of Satin’s eye line, so he couldn’t see whatever silent understanding passed between them.
He lifted himself to his knees, pressing a shaking hand to his still burning neck. Jon was breathing shallowly, on his bare back in the mud. Groaning softly, he began to lift his head, looking past his wolf.
“Satin?” Ghost moved off, allowing Jon to sit up, “Satin, are you...I didn’t...”
“I-I’m fine,” he squeaked, too shaken to afford a convincing lie apparently.
“I went for you. I’m sorry, I thought...” he looked at his hands, “I don’t know what happened to me.”
His attention went to his scars, feeling along the rough contours on his torso, his neck and back. A cold clarity set in, “Castle Black.”
“You remember?”
Jon didn’t answer right away, just grimly going over every one of his wounds, “Satin...”
“I’m sorry,” he said it at once, “Jon...my lord, I am so sorry. I-I didn’t...I wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to...I didn’t want to, by the end...”
“The Red Woman,” Jon said heavily, “She used you.”
It didn’t sound like a guess. They both turned slowly to Ghost; Satin pressed his hands together, “I should have refused her. If you snap my neck, I’m sure I deserve it...”
“You saved my life.”
“Not quite in so many words, is it?”
There was a heavy silence. The fire burned behind them, though the flames had been significantly reduced by the downpour.
“You cut your hair.”
Satin looked at him abruptly, “Oh. Yes, well...it’ll grow back,” but thinking of his hair got his eyes watering, “Oh gods...” he shook his head, “This is mad.”
“It is,” Jon agreed, “I’m not sure I should be here,” he paused, “But it’s not on you that I am.”
“How can you say that? She told me...”
“She tells people all manner of things,” he tried getting to his feet and swayed unsteadily, as if his legs had not yet realized they were alive. Satin hurried to his feet to steady him; Jon, alive and renewed, winced like an old man at the touch.
“She used me like she used Stannis. You as well. We’re all just chits in a game.”
“I know her sort,” Satin said haltingly, “They all think they’re going to save the world.”
“And here I am, not even able to save the Watch.”
“You did everything you could.”
“It wasn’t enough, was it?” he pressed his eyes shut, “And Winterfell still besieged...”
“One crisis at a time, my lord,” he tried for courage, “Please?”
Jon’s lips twitched, “You needn’t call me that. I’m nobody’s lord.”
“Oh, I didn’t go to all this trouble just for you to let the bastards who mutinied win over. You’re my Lord Commander, just as you were before...” he trailed off, “Before.”
“Before I died,” he said the word significantly enough that Satin got his meaning.
Their vows, after all, were taken to be kept until death. Jon had died.
“What will you do?” he asked softly.
Jon was quiet at first. It occurred to him that this decision must have been broiling for him well before he’d been killed: Winterfell or the Wall, one family or the other...
“Well, the first thing you ought to do is get dressed,” he turned to the scorched out hollow of the lean to, “Not, of course, that I packed any extra clothes. Poor steward I must be. But there’s a village nearby and maybe I could make an arrangement...”
“Satin...”
“It’s quite alright, really, I...”
“Satin, you don’t have to steward for me,” he sounded like he couldn’t believe he had to say it himself, “You’ve done enough.”
Satin hesitated, “What are you saying?”
“I won’t have safe quarter anywhere. You’d be better off...”
“Nonsense, I took an oath.”
“I can order you to look after yourself.”
“And what will you do? Lumber about half-naked like a drunk? You need to get your strength...”
“I have my strength,” his eyes lingering on Satin’s throat, “It’s worry enough.”
If he lost control...if the ritual, however it had been done, had some effect on his senses...Satin well understood Jon’s concern.
Oddly, he wasn’t afraid. The shock of having Jon back, talking to him when he had been stone dead an hour ago, was beginning to give way to a steely resolve.
“All the more reason you shouldn’t be alone,” he decided, “Someone must keep you in line.”
“Satin...”
“I have nowhere else to go, Jon. Melisandre was right about that, and a damn few other inconvenient things too. Lord or not, you are still my friend and...”
“And you love me,” he said the words without anger or shame, disgust nor joy.
He pressed his hands together, “I-I hardly know you well enough to love you.”
“But the Red Woman singled you out to save me.”
“Oh, now we take stock in what she thinks...”
“To a point,” he reached out for Satin’s hand, not roughly but firmly, “Satin, I know what you did,” he paused, “In my mind, I can see it.”
“H-how?”
“How indeed?” his face softened, “He thought of you what she thought of me.”
Satin’s lip trembled, “Well, looks like they were both wrong.”
“Wrong separately, right together. What if one of us was needed to save the other? Someone living to revive the dead?”
“Two bastards,” Satin chuckled bitterly, “In-between things...” he shook his head, “You understand what she means for you to do?”
“I think so.”
“And you want that for yourself?”
“I’ve not often been in a position to choose what I want,” he cocked an eyebrow, “Have you?”
Satin let out a shaky breath, “Only once, and I chose poorly.”
“But not since,” Jon loosened his grip, “Satin, if you choose to go, I will not blame you.”
“That’s not a choice. I can’t leave you. I brought you back, I’m responsible for you, I...” his voice broke, “I have left so much unfinished already. Call me self-obsessed...”
“I call you a friend. I’ve lost too many of them.”
“Then if I am your friend, if I’ve saved you, you’ll grant me this,” he undid his cloak, wrapping it around Jon’s slick shoulders, “We stay together. To Winterfell, to the Wall, wherever, steward or not. We’re part of the same story now. I don’t know how the Red Woman sees it ending and I don’t much care, but we belong .”
Jon held the cloak around him, “You speak too prettily for me to argue.”
“I am not entirely without talents, Lord Snow,” he said the name automatically, producing a clasp from his pocket, “Here, for the cloak.”
Jon accepted the wolf’s head pin, his eyes brightening at the sight.
“A dangerous accessory these days, I suppose,” Satin acknowledged, “But we must make do.”
“So we must,” Jon agreed, threading the pin through his cloak, “Satin...” but whatever he meant to say faded on his lips. He pressed a kiss to his cheek instead, gentle and tender as any he’d ever received in a too-long career.
His eyes roved over him, taking in the shortened hair, the bruises and scars, the poor shave. It occurred to Satin he couldn’t possibly look very desirable, should he want to be desired.
“Rest for now,” Satin told him, “We can kip in the wagon, if we need. And in the morning...”
“In the morning,” Jon nodded, “...I’m tired.”
“You sound surprised,” he smiled, “You weren’t asleep . In the morning, then...we’ll plan. For now, rest. I’ll take first watch.”
“Satin...”
“I. Will. Take. First. Watch,” he paused, “And will see you when the dawn breaks.”
“When the dawn breaks,” Jon agreed.
“Sleep well, Jon.”
“As well as a man can who’s been dead for days,” but he smiled as he said it, which was heartening.
Despite his protestations, Jon slept soundly, or at least appeared to sleep, as if to humor him. Satin kept watch through the waning rain, Ghost pacing slowly close at hand.
“I have the idea,” he told the direwolf at one point, well after the moon had faded from the pitch black sky, “That the Red Woman didn’t have any plans for me after Jon came back. I was only a...means to an end,” he smiled at the wolf, “But there hasn’t been an end, has it? Just another beginning...and I know something about those.”
Ghost lay down, warm and comforting beside him. They waited in this way in companionable silence until the sun rose on Jon’s second and Satin’s fourth or fifth...depending how you counted...life.