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Ned Stark stares at Jon. He stares back, the truth that has just been spoken sitting between them like an immovable weight.
“Jon…” Ned tries to say, but Jon looks away. His hands are clasped together in front of him, and the feeling of the scars on his burned hand keeps him in reality. He can feel his…father…staring at him, feel how he watches and waits for Jon to say something, say anything.
He has a thousand questions he wants to ask, a thousand demands he has to make. My mother is Lyanna Stark, he repeats, his mind swirling around the name he has always wanted to know. And in truth, my father is not Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, but rather Rhaegar Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone. Son of the Mad King. They called him the Last Dragon.
But only one question manages to find its way to his lips.
“Did you ever even tell Benjen?” He asks, voice breaking on the name. Gods be good, he misses his uncle.
Ned looks away. Jon knows the answer before he hangs his head and says, in a weak voice, “No.”
“Well, great fucking job,” Jon says, lurching to his feet. He feels the tears burning in the corners of his eyes, still unshed, but close to spilling out. Jon’s certain that once he starts crying, he’s never going to stop. A thousand wounds scream in him, indignant at what has just been thrown upon his shoulders. “He’s dead, and now he won’t get to know!”
“Jon–” His father—his uncle, his whatever the hell—starts to say, standing up slowly, reaching out to Jon like he’s a dog about to bite. And maybe he will. He feels vicious and wild, struck by a dangerous mix of grief and madness.
“Don’t!” Jon screams, cutting him off. Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell, looks like he’s just been slapped. Jon swallows down his tears, swallows down his madness, and says, in a voice too weak to sound anything less than desperate, “Just please, stop. Leave me alone.”
“She begged me to keep you safe,” he says. His voice is soft and sad. There are tears on his cheeks, and the eyes they share shine in the candlelight. Jon’s heart hammers between his ribs, making him feel like throwing up. “She knew what would happen to you, should Robert have learned. I would have told you, Jon, I would have, had I only found a way to do it without damning you.”
“Well, he’s gone,” Jon says, voice thick. “I’m not. I was at the Wall, you knew where to find me. You could have told me once he was gone. You could have…I wouldn’t have said anything. It was all I ever wanted to know, and you…”
He doesn’t find the strength to finish. Instead, he flees.
◅✩▻
Lady Catelyn finds him.
He has Longclaw now.
And she comforts him. For the first time in his life, when he looks at her, he does not see disdain staring back. They are both reckoning with the truth that separated them for all of his life. They both understand, in a way perhaps no one else does, what this has changed within all of them.
Even after she is gone, leaving him with gentle words and his tears gently wiped away, he feels empty. She had said that Ned loves him, that Winterfell is home. He knows that he does, knows this place is his to call home, no matter what. Yet, his mind cannot come to terms with it.
Ghost finds him in the end. Robb is on his heels.
◅✩▻
Robb doesn’t say anything for some time after Jon has said the truth of it all. He just stares out over the walls of Winterfell, to the world that goes on without them below.
Robb’s shoulder is pressed to his, a hot line of connection as the snow begins to fall gently on their shoulders. Jon is fresh out of tears. Grey Wind is here too, now, and he and Ghost bracket them. He’s surrounded by the people he loves, back in his home. Yet, he feels alone in ways words cannot express.
“What are you going to do now?” Robb finally asks. He’s still not looking at Jon, but rather at something far beyond him.
Jon stares out over the walls as well, his eyes catching on the sliver of the heart tree he can see in the distance. He’s not dead, despite the wounds in his chest that tried to make it otherwise. He’s hundreds of miles from the Wall, but he was not raised to be an oathbreaker. Robb and his father have established a steward at the Wall, presiding over the Watch in his absence. This will not be outrun.
“I have to go back to the Wall,” Jon says. Robb nods, swallowing with an audible click. “I’m the Lord Commander. Death awaits us on the other side of the Wall. I cannot leave the Watch to die.” There’s so much he’s left unfinished there. He wonders if Mance has heard of the attempt. If he heard that the Lord of Winterfell was upon the Wall with his heir, doling out justice.
“Winter is Coming,” Robb says. Finally, he turns to look at Jon. There’s a bright light in his eyes, a spark of resistance. “You and I know that the South will be no help. The Night’s Watch cannot stand alone anymore. They will not. The North must act against Winter. When you ride for the Wall, Jon, I will be beside you. As your brother.”
Jon smiles. It feels weak.
◅✩▻
Robb laughs as Jon’s sword hits his shield.
They are being watched by Winterfell as they trade blows in the yard. It reminds him of his long-gone boyhood, reminds him of days he would dream of while on watch. Those memories do not consume him, not this time, but rather, linger at the back of his mind like a comforting weight.
Jon makes a vicious move. Robb deflects it, but he can hear the gasps from their onlookers. He isn’t training with Longclaw, but both he and Robb have real steel in their hands. They’re men now, trading blows with equal parts rage and talent.
It’s strange, Jon thinks, how the cold of the Wall seemed to light a fire within him. He used to be kinder, he thinks, when he was a boy trading wooden blows with his brother (cousin, lord, whatever he may be to him now) in a yard, their father (his uncle, in truth, being only robb’s father) looking down with pride.
Alone, away from the uncanny warmth of Winterfell, he became an inferno. He reckons, in some strange math of the situation, that the Wall should have frozen him to the bone, made him some cold, stalwart watcher. All it did was crack him open and let fire pour out from him. Why else does he feel like spitting when he thinks of the truth that was shared? Why does it make him so damned angry?
His sword glances off Robb’s shield once again. Robb smiles at him from beneath his helm with all the glee of a man who has found his truest match, and the fire in Jon’s skin continues to burn.
◅✩▻
Later, they sit side by side outside of Mikken’s forge, hearing the man hammer away at his works. Their helms lie abandoned on the thin layer of snow that lies upon the ground at their feet. They stare up at them, silent watchers on their brotherhood.
(But is it still brotherhood? Jon’s black brothers tried to kill him. How can he call anyone brother again, after what they did to him, after learning that awful truth that the only brother he ever really had was killed by the Mountain before the eyes of his terrified mother?)
And Robb is laughing about some joke or another he’s just made. His cheeks are flushed, making him look alive and so full of energy. Jon feels the smile tugging at the edges of his mouth and feels the humour of the moment. It makes it easier to ignore the fact that while he is certainly not cold, he is not warm either. He just…is. Stuck in some state in between heat and warmth, as if his body simply cannot decide where he should lie.
He looks up.
Lady Catelyn stares back down, expression unreadable. Robb’s laughter echoes in his ears.
◅✩▻
They’re cornered on their way to dinner.
Lady Catelyn is shorter than the both of them, but not by much. And with her hands on her hips and a single brow arched, Jon doesn’t feel like the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. He feels like a boy who is about to be told off. His only condolence is that Robb, the future Lord of Winterfell himself, looks just as chagrined.
“I do hope the pair of you aren’t going to dinner dressed like you’ve just been in the yards,” she says. Jon exchanges a glance with Robb, and Robb opens his mouth, likely about to say something about how they have just been in the yards, but Lady Catelyn is having none of it. “Baths, both of you. We have Lords here, and I think both of you would like to be presentable.”
And so, they’re unceremoniously shooed off towards their rooms. Jon smiles as he sees how stricken Robb looks, trying not to laugh as Robb runs a hand through his hair and mutters something about not knowing there were Lords here. Then he gives him a look as he laughs, but he just smiles slightly and knocks his shoulder against Robb’s.
Robb relaxes at that, rolling his eyes and throwing an arm around Jon’s shoulders as they take the last bend towards their rooms. When they finally part, and Jon enters his room, he’s unsurprised to see a bath waiting for him. She really does mean it, he thinks as he strips off his clothes and climbs into the waiting tub.
The warm water laps at his healing wounds. It’s a strange feeling, looking down at his chest and seeing the reminders of his near murder. He should be dead, in all truth. Something must have happened between the Wall and Winterfell, something must have been done to keep him alive. What, he does not know.
It’s a long way to Winterfell from Castle Black, even with the wind and danger on your heels. Perhaps the Gods granted his loyal men the strength they needed to get him here. Perhaps the memories he has of a burning pain have something to do with why he’s still alive, when, by all reasonable logic, he should be long dead.
He gets out of the bath. He dresses slowly, careful to not jostle his wounds. Luwin had allowed him to train, but had been clear to take it carefully. He hadn’t been as careful as the man probably wouldn’t have preferred, so he’s content to not do anything to actually hurt himself again. There’s no need to cause even more chaos than he already has.
Robb is waiting for him as he ducks out of the door, but he now has company. Theon smiles crookedly at Jon as he comes out of his room, and as they make their way to the great hall, he plants himself between the two of them, asking all sorts of absurd questions.
Jon can recognise a distraction when he sees one. Even still, he lets himself be drawn into Theon’s theatrics, lets himself forget the weight of the world for one night. They sit in the hall together, in the company of soldiers of other Lords and the people of Winterfell.
Jon watches as Robb holds his court, smiles as Theon sings bawdy songs terribly out of tune. He watches, and he smiles, and he laughs and forgets the storm in his mind, for just one night. That is, until he chances a look at the Lord’s Table and sees Ned Stark, staring down at them with grief clear in his eyes.
◅✩▻
Theon makes a show of protesting when Jon says he needs to take some air, but lets him go with a smile that seems softer than Jon would have thought him able to produce. Robb just pats him on the shoulder and says, in a gentle voice, “Let me know if you need anything.”
Jon smiles at him and hopes it doesn’t look as strained as it feels to him.
The cold air outside is blessed. The hall at Castle Black hardly ever gets full enough to be as warm as the one here at Winterfell, even with the hearths roaring. A boyhood in Winterfell, then a few short years as a man of the Watch, and the heat of a party has somehow become unfamiliar. It’s only the heat of anger he seems to know, now.
He meanders through Winterfell. He walks through empty and shadowed halls, running his bare hand over the stones, feeling the grooves. At some point, he gains a shadow by the name of Ghost. He passes a few servants who offer him words of cheer and smile at him. He smiles back and wishes them a good night.
Somehow, he ends up at the Godswood. In the dark, it feels even more hallowed than usual. The wind whispers around him, rustling his hair. The leaves rustle in the wind, and he swears, just once, that he hears a whisper of his name in the woods. He turns, looking to see if he can find the source of the noise, but all he sees is Ghost and their footprints in the snow.
When he reaches the Heart Tree, he sits beside the cold water pool at its base and stares down at the black face of the water. His image is distorted, the water disturbed by the gently falling snow. He can see the scars etched into his face, courtesy of Orell and his Eagle. That feels like a lifetime ago.
Ghost rests his head on Jon’s knee, looking up with his red eyes. Jon scratches between his ears, the soft fur a comfort in the cold. Resisting the urge to bury his face in his wolf’s fur, he looks again at the black pool at his feet and the ripples in the water.
Again, he hears his name on the wind.
Strange things happen in Godswoods, he thinks. He can feel the eyes of the Weirwood on him, feel its melancholy stare. This is the Godswood of Winterfell, the place of worship of the Lord of Winterfell. Kings of Winter have prayed here for generations. And here he is, a boy born of ice and fire, a bastard of the Starks and Targaryens, a man of the Watch. What is he doing here?
“Jon?” A voice asks, cutting through his thoughts.
He looks up, startled. Lady Catelyn stands before him, dressed in the same dress she’d been in at the feast. But her hair is down now, and a heavy cloak sits on her shoulders. She has a lantern in her hand and a concerned look on her face that does not ease as he looks at her.
“It is late,” she says. When he glances up, he is surprised to see the moon peeking through the leaves. It is nearly overhead, yet when last he recalls, it was barely peeking over the walls. A sinking feeling settles in his stomach as she sets down the lantern on the rock beside him. The light dances on the ripples of the water, illuminating his face in the water. “Your father asked me to check on you when he saw you had not returned to your rooms.”
“He’s not my father,” Jon says. His words are flat and bitter, but the awful truth. His hands are clasped together. Ghost nudges them, but he does not move, hearing Lady Catelyn sigh and come to sit next to him.
“Why do you say that?” She asks him, after a few long moments where he can feel her watching him. He doesn’t look at her, just shakes his head with a sigh, eyes still focused on the water. “He raised you, did he not? He raised you as his son, treated you the same as Robb or Bran or Rickon. Is he not your father?”
“What does it matter to you?” He asks. He can see her in the water, see the shock of her red hair. “I would have thought you didn’t care.”
She doesn’t answer him for a while. He dares to think that he has shocked her into silence, but when he finally looks at her again, there’s a sad expression on her face. He swallows tightly and looks away, feeling tears sting in the corners of his eyes, for no apparent reason. Ghost nudges him again, and he buries his hand in his fur, trying to find something comforting in his wolf’s presence.
“I have not done right by you for so long, I will admit it,” she says, at last. After a pause, she continues, her voice softer now. “I cannot take that back, Jon, as much as I regret the harm I have both knowingly and unknowingly done. Learning the truth should not have been what melted my heart, but it did. I am not the woman I aspire to be, often. I will not stop trying to be her, though.”
He looks at her. Her eyes are fixed on him, concern etched across her face. He feels small under her gaze, like a boy who is looking for something he doesn’t know the name of. “Ned raised you, Jon, as his son. Robb calls both you and Theon brother. The men of the Night’s Watch are your brothers, despite the fact that you share no blood with them. How is this any different?”
“You know who my father is,” Jon says, looking back at the water. Rhaegar died in the Trident, his rubies like drops of blood spilt by Robert Baratheon. The Demon of the Trident is dead, and his dynasty is falling into ruin. “We both know what that means. How many men and women still claim the Iron Throne? How many would love to hear of Rhaegar’s bastard, so they can kill him or put him on a throne to fit their whims?”
There’s a Dragon across the sea. He’s heard of her in whispers and bits of rumours, muttered across the table over dinner. The Night’s Watch does not interfere with the politics of the Realm, but that is not an oath. It is nothing more than a practice that they have staunchly upheld, lest they be swallowed by powers greater than them. He is well aware of that.
“If one seeks to infringe on the oaths of the Night’s Watch, the North will answer,” Lady Catelyn says, her voice as fierce as a wolf’s snarl. “Your oaths hold, Jon. Who your father by blood is does not matter, not when you wear the black and defend the Wall. I’d argue what matters is the man who raised you.”
“You’ve treated with Mance Rayder, King-Beyond-The-Wall, yes?” She asks, and Jon nods. She smiles sharply. “Do you think that your father being the Lord of Winterfell had nothing to do with that? You and I both know that the Night’s Watch will need Winterfell’s backing in the coming storm. You are a son of Winterfell, a son of the North. Mance spoke with you, I’d reckon, because he understood where you had come from. You can bring House Stark to the Wall, and with House Stark, the North has always followed.”
“Mance despises House Stark,” Jon protests. “And I do not like to think that the only reason my brother’s elected me was because they thought I could, somehow, get the whole of the North behind us.”
“Mance Rayder has chosen to ally with you,” she says, voice taking on a note of lecture. But he listens to her, listens to her advice, because what else can he do? “He knows what that may entail, knows that it may come at the price of allying with House Stark. I think he understood, as I know you do, that the North cannot stand divided by history. Winter is Coming.”
“And your men, Jon?” She smiles at him, voice softening. “Perhaps it was part of the reason. But from all I have heard, you have led the Watch well. You are young, yes, but you are no fool. Your men have trusted you to lead, trusted you to act.”
“My men tried to kill me,” he says, voice flat. “Or, have we just chosen to ignore that?”
She just smiles at him. “And what I have heard from Ned, they were a very loud minority. When he came upon the Wall, the tension was already there. The men who did not agree had the numbers but lacked authority upon the Wall. As soon as someone with authority came to their side, your would-be assassins were dealt with.”
She reaches out slowly, grabbing his burnt hand and squeezing it once. He looks at their hands, feeling the warmth of her grip. His heart thunders in his chest, and he feels raw and open, cast away in an endless ocean.
“It is late,” she says. “Come, get some rest.”
◅✩▻
Maester Luwin hums as he checks the healing wounds.
“You’re very lucky, Jon,” he says as he works. “Had you gotten here even an hour or two later than you did, I do not know what I could have done. These have healed quite well, as well. I’m glad to see you are healing so well.”
“Lucky,” Jon echoes, wincing as Luwin applies a salve to his side. Luwin looks up at him with an unreadable expression, and Jon just presses his lips together and looks away.
Soon enough, Luwin is done, and Jon has got his shirt back on. He moves to go, but Luwin pins him in place with a firm look and says, “I would like to speak to you for a moment, Jon, if you do not mind?”
I do mind, Jon wants to say, but he does not. Maester Luwin helped to raise him, and spurning him as such would just end up with Jon being lectured by someone. So he stays in his chair and waits for Luwin to finish sorting through a few papers, doing his best to not shift in his seat.
“How are you feeling?” Luwin asks as he sits down across from Jon, looking at him with a strange expression.
“Fine?” Jon replies, wringing his hands together in front of him. Luwin glances down at them, and Jon forces himself to stop, swallowing down a lump in his throat. “Why?”
“Lady Catelyn expressed some concerns to me this morning,” Luwin says breezily, ignoring Jon’s scowl. Oh, did she? He wants to reply, but he knows snark won’t help him here. Luwin has always been quite immune to the worst of Jon’s attitudes. “She’s found you in the Godswood, twice, now.”
“What, am I now barred from praying?” Jon asks.
Luwin stares blankly at him. “You know that is not her concern. How long were you in the Godswood last night, do you think?”
Jon frowns, heart fluttering as he realises that he has no idea. He shrugs, looking down at his boots so he doesn’t have to face Luwin’s judgment.
“It was nearly the Hour of the Wolf,” Luwin says, plainly. “She is worried that you are unwell. I spoke to your father, as well, and he has expressed a similar concern. So, I ask you again, Jon, how are you feeling?”
Jon keeps his eyes on the floor. What is there to say? How is he even supposed to start?
Allister Thorne, Bowen Marsh, and Othell Yarwyck organised a mutiny against him. Those three, along with who knows how many others, shoved knives into him. He should be dead—of that, he is painfully aware—but he is somehow not. He should have bled out in the snow, but the only answer he has to why he didn’t is a distant memory of a scalding heat pouring through him. That was the last thing he recalls, before awaking in Winterfell.
Jon looks to his right, to where a window peers into the Maester’s study. It’s small, this room. Since a Maester first came to Winterfell, this room has belonged to him. Whatever King oversaw the arrival of the first Maester of Winterfell must not have been very happy with the situation, for he chose to give a small, often poorly lit, room to the man.
But Luwin has made it his own. Jon has a hundred memories of this room. He used to sit, shoulder-to-shoulder, with Robb at the small table in the corner, writing and doing arithmetic. When he got in trouble, he’d sit there and be forced to think. Now, as a man grown, he sits in a chair and looks out the window at the snow falling gently outside.
“Jon?” Luwin asks, breaking through his thoughts. When Jon looks at the man, there’s a concerned look on his face. He’s been seeing that often, hasn’t he?
“I don’t know,” he says, at last. “I cannot shake the feeling that I should not be here, that I should be dead and burned. Everything feels so strange. Lady Catelyn…she is looking out for me. I can hardly meet my father’s eyes. Robb is there, but I feel strange in these walls.” If Luwin notices how Jon trips over the word father, he says nothing. The man does not know, after all.
“I feel like a failure, I suppose,” Jon whispers, voice thick with the agony of confession. He can see Luwin watching him from the corner of his eye as he turns back to the window. I am Jon Snow of Winterfell, he thinks as he watches the snow. Snow, for I am a bastard of House Stark. A bastard of the North. “I have not managed to do all that I wanted. I was trying to save the North, and all it got me was a mutiny.”
“I have heard about what you speak of lying beyond the Wall,” Luwin says. He gets up for a moment, riffling through the stack of papers on his desk before finding a small slip. “And just this morning, the temporary Lord Commander wrote to Winterfell with an update on the situation at the Wall. From what I understand of his report, much of what you put into motion before the mutiny is proving invaluable.”
Jon takes the letter when it is offered. He exhales heavily as he reads it over. The news is not exactly positive, but it’s good to know that the alliance has not fallen to pieces without him there. Even the presence of Lord Umber doesn’t seem to be disastrous, despite the storied history House Umber has with the Free Folk.
We’re all fucked if we don’t work together, he thinks to himself as he hands the letter back.
For a long few moments, he and Luwin simply stare at one another. He has the sense that Luwin wishes to get more out of him, that he knows there is more to be said. Jon doesn’t recall the first time Lady Catelyn found him in the Godswood, nor the incident in the yard a few days later. The anger is still there, just dull and echoing between his ribs.
“I’m tired. I’m angry,” he manages to confess. “I know I should be turning my mind to the Wall, to the coming of Winter. And it is not that I do not care, it is not that I do not want to fight with my men, it is simply…I do not know how I can return to the Wall after all that has happened. I do not know how to even try to face the coming storm when my own life seems to be in the midst of one. All I can recall is how angry I am at them, and that just…takes everything out of me.”
“What happened to you was an affront to honour and rightness,” Luwin says, resting a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “It is alright to be upended by what they did to you. All I ask is that you remember that you are still here. You are still fighting against the cold and the dark, despite their attempt. You have the strength of Winterfell behind you, now. Is that not something?”
Jon nods, biting his lip and trying to find something to say. But nothing comes to his tongue, and Luwin just smiles at him, patting him once on the shoulder before pulling away. He looks to the door and smiles sadly at Jon, who gets to his feet without a word. He leaves with a whispered goodbye, leaving the door ajar behind him.
In the hall, he is greeted by someone he did not expect to see.
“Arya?” He asks. She looks up and smiles brightly at him, throwing her arms around his waist before he can go off on his own. Smiling, he ruffles her hair and glances back at the half-open door to the Maester’s study. “Coming for your lessons, I presume?”
“Yes,” she says, her arms still wrapped around his waist, though she is now resting her head on his chest. She glances up at him. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” he says. She frowns at him, looking like she doesn’t believe him. But when he smiles at her, she seems to give in to this game of pretend. She squeezes his waist tightly before untangling herself and ducking into the office. Jon watches the door close behind her, standing silently in the hall, unsure why his heart is aching.
◅✩▻
Later that day, as he’s making his way to the yard to tend to his sword and shield, he finds himself suddenly beside Sansa. She loops her arm through his before he can even say hello, giving him this foxy smile that has him feeling an impending sense of dread.
“Sansa,” he says, because he’s not rude. “Do you need something?”
She sends him this disapproving look that has him laughing with a huff. She tightens her hold on him, as if she is afraid he will up and run away at the first opening. He is not quite there, but he has a strange sense that she wants something from him, and will see it happen, despite his own desire. No one, after all, has ever called his little sister a pushover.
“Yes, actually,” she says. “I’ve been learning…well, I’ve had mother teaching me some things about being a Lady. And she told me that, when she was a girl, she’d sometimes host mock teas with her sister and her brother and whatever other people she could drag along. She told me it’s good practice for hosting.”
She looks up at him with her big blue eyes and asks, with all the innocence of a girl who knows exactly what she wants and will stop at nothing to get it, “So, could you please come to my tea with me?”
“Sansa, I’m–” her look hardens. Sighing, Jon forces himself to smile. “Alright.”
He does get some entertainment, though, when they get to her room, and he realises she has also dragged Robb and Theon into this. Robb is actually making an effort, while Theon appears to be half-asleep, spread out on a chaise, with his eyes only half-open. Jon sits at the end of it, shoving his legs off, ignoring Theon’s protests.
Sansa flutters around, serving them tea and (of course) a healthy dose of lemon cakes. And though Jon does feel a little bit like one of her dolls, he soon enough finds himself snickering alongside Robb as Sansa lectures Theon on manners. When Theon sends them a look of betrayal, they start laughing outright, which sends Sansa’s attention (and criticism) onto them.
And later, when he finally gets on his way to the yard, he is surprised to find that he cannot stop smiling. He’s forgotten, he thinks, the warmth of Winterfell in more ways than he can count.
◅✩▻
He is standing on a quiet walkway, looking down at the comings and goings of Winterfell below him, when he hears a familiar set of steps approaching him. He does not look up, does not acknowledge it. He simply keeps staring down, waiting for the man at his side to say something. Anything.
Ned Stark keeps him waiting for some time. Jon feels licks of anger and pain rising up in him, a familiar companion. He has not spoken to this man in some time, not since he revealed that awful truth. It would be wrong to say he is not avoiding him. He knows he is, and Ned must know it as well. Yet, here he is, standing and letting himself be cornered into speaking to the one man he cannot bear right now.
“I hear Sansa roped you into her schemes,” the man whom he called Father says.
Jon pauses, startled. He had not expected…and yet… He licks his lips. Takes a deep breath as he sees Ned pull closer to him, ever so slightly, slowly boxing him in. “Yeah. She did.”
“Cat almost believes we have fueled a tyrant. I hope she wasn’t too…” He pauses, humour clear in his voice. Jon finds himself smiling, some of his anger fading away. “Overbearing.”
“Of course, she was overbearing; it’s Sansa,” he says, smiling as he does. They both laugh a little, and Jon thinks of his little sister, standing tall, looking like a Lady in the making. She may never be Queen, but that has not changed the fact that Sansa is quite the force to be reckoned with. “She did well. Better than I ever did, as steward to the Old Bear.”
Gods, that feels like a lifetime ago. He flexes his burned hand on the railing, feeling the leather of his glove stretch.
“When will you return?” Ned asks him. Jon does not have to ask where he means.
“I should go back soon,” he admits. Down below, he watches Sansa and Arya cross the yard, heads bent together in conversation. So much changed while he was gone, while they were in King’s Landing. All of them are older now, after all. Older and more knowing of how easy it is to be torn apart. “I am the Lord Commander. And you did not teach me or Robb to skirt our duties.”
“I would like to think so,” his uncle says. Jon cannot call him father, as much as it aches to call him uncle. Gods above, how can this much anger stay alive in a place so cold? “Yet, I fear I did just that when it came to…came to the matter of your mother.”
Jon bites his lip and exhales sharply. His grip on the railing tightens, tugging on the scars on his hand. He can feel the eyes upon him, feel how the man at his side watches and waits for him to present his judgment. The anger is licking back up his body, coming to his mouth. Why? He wants to scream. Instead, he says, “I told Robb.”
“I know. He made his opinion on my delay clear.”
That startles Jon. He turns quickly to Ned before he knows what’s happening. When he is caught gaping in confusion, the Lord of Winterfell just smiles softly and looks down at the ground below, leaving Jon to stare. “He cares for you, for your happiness. Perhaps more than he cares about making me feel any less like a fool.”
Jon huffs a laugh, turning away once again. His heart is racing under his chest, making him ache. Robb, it would seem, came to Jon’s defence. He cannot understand it, and the more he tries to think if Robb gave any indication about this, the more confused he gets. Why would Robb go against his father and seemingly give him a piece of his mind on a matter that has no impact on him?
“Do you remember what I told you when I last saw you?” Ned asks. “Before you went to the Wall with Ben?”
Jon remembers the wind. Remembers the way he looked at the man he thought was his father as he begged him for something, anything. He asked her if she was alive, if she cared, if she knew where he was going. All he wanted was a scrap of the one thing he’d been denied. But once he knew, all he could think was that he was better off not knowing. “You said we’d speak about my mother the next time we saw each other.”
“Yes.” He sighs, and Jon sees him hang his head in the corner of his eye. “But that is not what I speak of.” A hand rests on Jon’s shoulder. He does not look, and he pretends he does not hear the hurt in Ned’s voice afterwards.
“I told you that you may not have my name, but you have my blood, Jon. And that was not a lie. The blood of Winterfell is in you. Your mother was a Stark of Winterfell, same as I. She was as wild as the wind, as kind as summer.” He inhales shakily. He sounds close to tears. Jon is in tears. “I see so much of her in you.”
“You could have told me,” Jon says, voice breaking a little. Anger and grief and a hundred warring emotions are burning in him. He’s angry at it all, angry at his betrayers, angry at the man at his side, angry at the whole damn world. And he grieves what he may have had, once, had things been different. He grieves something he never had, and the fact that he never could have had it only makes him angrier.
“I was afraid, Jon. That is a weak defence, but it is the truest one I have.” The hand on his shoulder tightens, and Jon closes his eyes, resisting the urge to turn. He may just fall into pieces if he sees what this has done to the strongest man he knows. “I would think of telling you, and then I would soon recall what the Mountain did to Elia Martell and her babes and the sound of Robert’s laughter and I would…I would fail. Again and again. There is no penance for my failure, and I am sorry.”
Jon’s mind is spinning. He thinks of days on the Wall when he seemed to hardly be in control of himself. The Wall cracked the wildest part of him wide open, and it is that part of him that is fighting for control as he stands here. He’s trying to be rational, trying to understand, but the basest part of him wants nothing more than to scream a refusal.
His voice is thick with unshed tears as he finally manages to ask, “Robert laughed?”
The hand finally drops from his shoulder. He hunches over the rail a bit, feeling small, feeling empty. There is a distinct note of anger in Ned’s voice as he says, “Aye. He saw what had been done to those innocent babes and their mother, and he laughed, calling them dragonspawn.”
“I was safe from Robert as soon as I swore my vows. As soon as he died.” Jon shakes his head, trying to make sense of what he is saying. His father could have come, that much is true. Why didn’t he? Why should he have come? Could he truly have come for Jon alone, or would that damn them both to suspicion? “You could have come North, you could have…I don’t know.”
Jon feels like a boy, making a thousand pointless arguments, trying to get what he wants. And yet…
“I could have, and I did not,” Ned says, voice just…sad, now. “I told myself it is not the place of the Lord of Winterfell to govern the Watch. I told myself that I could not be seen as caring about the Watch only because my son was upon it. But I should have come as soon as Mormont told me about Benjen. I should have dropped all ties in the South then and there and answered the call of my lands and my people. I abandoned the Watch in more ways than one. I abandoned you when I should have told you it all, no matter my fears.”
“But you did not,” Jon says. You hid. You let me call you father my whole life. You lied to me, lied to the world. You didn’t come. It took me nearly dying for you to find the strength to tell me. He wants to say all of that. But his tongue has frozen.
“But I did not,” He agrees. “Can you forgive me for my weakness?”
For a long time, Jon doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t fully know what to say. He knows he still loves the man beside him, still desires every scrap of attention and care he can give. But there is something rawer in him now, torn open by the truth. It’s not his fault Jon is struggling with the truth. He supposes he just wishes…wishes it didn’t take this for him to be told.
“I’m so angry. I can’t even understand this. I’m angry at you, at those mutineers, at myself,” he does manage to say. “I can’t even begin to process who my mother is, what that means, because all I think about is all the damned years I called you my father and you let me. The only thing I knew about myself, for certain, was that I was your son. And then you tell me that is a lie. And so now…everything about myself is a lie.”
“I am sorry, Jon,” his uncle says, voice breaking. “I am.”
Jon looks at him, tears in his eyes and anger in his voice. “I know you are.” He stares at him for a moment, then just shakes his head and leaves without another word, feeling Ned’s eyes on his back as he goes.
◅✩▻
Jon begins packing that night.
When Robb knocks on his door and opens it to see the evidence of Jon’s upcoming departure, he pauses, crossing his arms where he stands in the doorway.
“Leaving so soon?” He finally asks once Jon returns to getting his things together. He did not bring anything to Winterfell, but he has plenty that he knows would be wise to return to the Wall with. When Jon doesn’t reply, Robb comes in properly, shutting the door behind him.
Robb takes a seat at his desk and just watches Jon for a few moments. Working his jaw, Jon does his best to not sound annoyed as he asks, “Do you need something?” He does not do a good job, judging by the way Robb frowns, brows knitting together in concern.
“What happened?” Robb asks after a moment, though Jon has a sense he may already know.
“I spoke to your father,” Jon says, grabbing Longclaw from where he has it lying on his bed, and sheathing it. He looks askance at Robb as he adds. “I don’t need you defending me, by the way.”
Robb ignores the comment. His eyes narrow slightly as he says, in a tone of slight accusation mixed with clear concern, “You brushed off Arya, earlier.”
Jon presses his lips together. He had brushed her off, shortly after leaving that awful talk, and he supposes…well, he knows it wasn’t all that kind of him. He hadn’t seen how she looked as he left, but he can get a sense of it from how Robb is looking at him right now. He runs his hand over the wolfhead on Longclaw. “Is she alright?”
“Oh, yes, she’s really pleased that the older brother she looks up to all but ignored her earlier. So, yes, of course, she’s fine,” Robb says, voice dripping with enough sarcasm to make Jon flinch a little. Gods be good, am I going to piss everyone off before I leave? He has to wonder.
“I’ll apologise tomorrow,” he says roughly, setting Longclaw down.
“Before you leave?” Robb asks.
“I need to go back, before long,” Jon says with a sigh. He grabs a knife he’d procured from Mikken earlier in the day, pulling it out of its sheath to inspect it. He has no idea what happened to his old one, but he’ll take Winterfell steel over any alternative, any day. “I do have a duty to the Wall.”
“Or…are you avoiding father?” Robb remarks, raising a brow at Jon when he turns and gives him a sharp look.
“He’s not my father,” Jon says as he turns back around, shoving the knife back into its sheath and beginning to attach it to his belt.
“Okay,” Robb says. When Jon glances at Robb, he doesn’t seem to be all that convinced.
Jon bites his tongue for a moment, considering a hundred and one things he wants to say right now. Eventually, he simply decides to ask, “Why are you here, Robb? Don’t you have other things to do instead of bothering me?”
“Because I care about you,” Robb says simply. Jon looks at him flatly, biting the inside of his cheek as Robb glances towards his bed and says, “Sit down, Jon. None of this is going anywhere, and I want to talk.”
“I don’t need coddling,” Jon says, even as he sits down.
“And I don’t think you should be going to the Wall like this, Jon,” Robb says, getting up and coming over to sit beside Jon. He presses his shoulder to Jon’s in a familiar motion, saying, “My mother told me about what happened in the Godswood, a few weeks ago. And after the party, a few days ago.” Jon can feel his shoulder hiking up, feeling the desire to just run grow with every moment.
That is, until Robb grabs him by the wrist and forces him to meet his eyes. “I’m sorry to say it, Jon, but I don’t think you’re well, right now. Snapping at Arya, rushing off in this…fit, it’s concerning me. And father, and my mother. You aren’t well.”
“Why the fuck does she care?” Jon hisses, wrenching his wrist out of Robb’s grip.
But his brother is unrelenting, grabbing it back a moment later, his voice fierce as he speaks. “She’s trying to be better. It doesn’t make it right, I know. I also know she isn’t seeking your forgiveness. She is just trying to help. No one wants to see you fall. Winterfell protects its own, and you are in its walls.”
“I am my own man, Robb,” Jon reminds him, voice icy. “I can go whenever I please. There is no law stopping me from riding for the Wall right this moment.”
“Father could stop you,” Robb reminds him.
Jon barks out a laugh, smiling grimly. “He won’t. It would override the authority of the Watch, and he knows better than to do that.”
“I don’t think anyone would know, unless you went around telling people,” Robb reminds him. Jon’s smile falls immediately into a scowl as he considers it. Indeed, Jon would not tell anyone that he’d been barred from leaving like a boy. And for all the force that would require, he knows that Ned would never let anyone but him and Jon know of what occurred.
So Jon would be left with ruined pride…but the Watch’s authority would stand. And even if someone knew…the North still sees Jon as the bastard of Eddard Stark. All they would see is a father doing what he is expected to do, damned the titles between them. Jon deflates at the thought, running a hand over his face as he feels a sudden rush of exhaustion.
“Stay here a while longer. Get your strength back,” Robb says, gently releasing his grip on his hand to rest that hand on Jon’s shoulder. “You just had your whole life upended—and I’m not just talking about your mother, Jon. You were nearly murdered. You are very lucky to be alive. No one will blame you for recovering.”
“I should be with my men,” Jon says, sounding miserable because he is. He cannot stand being here, feeling so far from the place that he has spent months trying to prepare for the end of the world. “And yet, you want me to take a rest, like some leisurely lord?”
“The Night’s Watch needs you to be at your best, and you are not, right now. If you were sent back to them now, do you really think that you could be the help they need?” Robb asks, leaning in close. Jon just bites his lip, saying nothing. “I will be at your side when you return to the Wall, Jon. I can promise you that. But only when it is right for us to ride. Winter is Coming, but we cannot rush into its madness.”
“And what if I never return?” Jon asks, voice small.
“I know that you will. I think it will just need time, and the choice to go should not happen in the middle of the night,” Robb says, smiling softly at him. “And besides, I know you too well. You could not abandon your brothers in the Watch to their deaths. You’re a good man, Jon. That is why they tried what they did.”
Jon thinks of that one memory he has between the knives and Winterfell. He’s never felt heat like that, never felt as consumed by something. He doesn’t understand what happened, doesn’t understand what it means. He knows it must have something to do with why he is still alive, but how does he even begin to ask about it?
Is that what it feels like to burn? He wonders, thinking of his grandfather Rickard. He was burned by…by Jon’s other grandfather. That’s a gruesome thought.
“I’m a fool, that’s what,” he says.
And Robb laughs. Jon cannot deny the weight of that sound. It brings him back to simpler days, days before he was so angry, before he was so burdened by the world. Robb laughs and says, “We’re all fools, sometimes. Even Father.”
Thoughts of boyhood die with those words. Jon looks up at the wall and the window. It’s so dark out there, with only a sliver of the light of the moon to reveal the world. “I’m so angry at him.”
“I know. You have every right to be,” Robb says. His hand drops from Jon’s shoulders.
“But I still love him. I still want every scrap of approval I can get from him.” Jon’s mouth twists as he says that. What a strange confession to make! Here he is, admitting that all he wants is approval from a man he fears he does not understand. It’s a desire of his boyhood, he knows, but he cannot seem to grow out of it. All he wanted was his father’s love and approval. He knows he has the first, but what of the second?
Robb smiles wanly. “As do I.”
“Yet, I hear you told him off for not telling me,” Jon says, looking at Robb curiously.
“Because I care about your happiness more than I care about our father’s opinion,” Robb says, shrugging as if it’s a simple thing. Jon feels unmoored at the thought. He knows Robb cares about him, but to go so far as to argue with the Lord of Winterfell, his father, for a matter that has no real bearing on him? Jon can hardly fathom what that means. “And I think he knows he should have found a way to tell you before…all of this.”
“I’m not angry that he didn’t tell me,” Jon says. Robb tilts his head at him, hands clasped before him, knuckles white. Jon leans back, tilting his head to look at the ceiling. Anywhere but Robb, anywhere but the endless dark outside. “I’m angry because I wish he had done it before I was half dead, that he didn’t just leave me at the Wall, despite knowing that Uncle Benjen had gone missing. I’m angry that he’s not the man who I thought he was. I’m angry that I ever thought he was perfect.”
Jon’s heart is beating a dull tune under his ribs. The wounds are aching, but he’s growing used to that. He’s never going to be able to forget what was done to him, he knows that. He inhales shakily, “I wish that I never…I don’t know. “
“Do you wish you never thought he was your father?” Robb asks, voice soft but hitting Jon straight in the heart.
“I suppose. Having a father like Ned Stark is something to be proud of. Having a father like my true father…that is not. For god’s sake, Robb, my grandfather is the Mad King,” Jon laughs tiredly, running a hand over his face. “And I fear I am going half-mad, twisting myself in circles and getting angry at your father for things he could not control.”
“You’re still my brother, Jon, for what it is worth,” Robb says.
Jon looks at him again and manages to smile. “Thank you, Robb.”
He’s about to say more, to continue to try to understand the strange crossroads he is at when it comes to thoughts of himself and his anger. But a knock at the door cuts him off before he can. Jon looks at Robb, who frowns slightly.
“I’ll get it,” he says. Jon watches as he goes to the door and opens it, seeing the confused look on his face as he asks, “Father?”
Jon straightens. “Oh, Robb,” he hears him say from the other side of the door. “Is Jon in?”
“Aye,” Robb says, sounding as confused as Jon feels. He glances at Robb as he opens the door more, allowing Ned Stark to peer in. Jon feels his stomach tighten as he sees the look on his face.
“Boys, I’m sorry to wake you—”
“We weren’t asleep,” Jon cuts him off, voice perhaps a tad too sharp. Ned studies him for a moment before nodding.
“What is it?” Robb asks, sounding antsy.
Ned is still looking at Jon, his expression suddenly that of the Lord of Winterfell. Jon gets to his feet, right as he says, “Someone is here to see you.”
◅✩▻
Jon sees the woman and pauses.
Lady Catelyn stands with a shawl on at the window, looking at the stranger with wide, worried eyes. Jon feels Robb’s shoulder brush his, sees his confused look when Jon pauses, throat closing. Lord Stark (for that is the way he holds himself now) brushes past the two of them, joining his wife at the window.
“Lord Snow,” The Red Woman says, pulling back her hood and smiling a terrible smile. “It is good to see you well. And you must be Robb Stark, the future Lord of Winterfell.”
Jon looks at Ned, feeling Robb stiffen at his side. “Robb,” The Lord of Winterfell says, “Would you help your mother prepare some chambers for Lady Melisandre?” Jon and Robb exchange a glance. Only once Jon nods does Robb leave, his mother only a moment behind him.
Before Lady Catelyn goes, however, she pauses at Jon’s side and whispers to him, “Your father spoke to her at the Wall. Do you know her?” Jon nods mutely, and Lady Catelyn gives him a worried look. But she leaves before Jon can find the words to say, the door clicking shut behind her.
“Lord Snow, I believe we have much to speak about,” she continues, and Jon does not miss how Ned watches the two of them. It’s a familiar, wolfish look. “Do you know what happened upon the Wall, following your attempted assassination?”
Jon thinks of the heat once again. But now, staring at the Red Woman, new pieces are drawing together. Her god is a god of fire and fury. He heard a whole host of whispers from the men, whispers about what this terrible Red Woman could do. She used to stand beside Stannis Baratheon, until she abandoned him for a fight at the edge of the world.
“No,” Jon says. Ned’s eyes are fixed on the woman, and Jon can see just how unnerved he is by her presence. If he had a sword at his side, Jon would bet that he’d be clutching the hilt like a lifeline. “No, I recall nothing between it and when I awoke in Winterfell.”
A lie. And she smiles like she knows it.
She turns, approaching a stack of unlit candles. Jon’s stomach curls as she presses her fingers to one of the wicks, and it bursts into flames. She does that for every candle, and Jon recalls the burning sensation in growing agony. He feels like he’s burning all over again. Ned is staring at the woman like a wolf looking at a creature it seeks to rip the throat out of.
“I suppose you can imagine it was quite the scene,” she says, once she’s done with the candles. Her eyes, unnaturally red, seem brighter in the candlelight. Like twin flames, caught in circular form. “You were close to death when I came to your side.”
Jon is aflame. He thinks of his rage, of how close it feels to fire—an inferno one moment, a sputtering ember the next, needing only the slightest breeze to go back. His father was a dragon, his mother was a wolf. Ice and Fire, blood and death. He was in the North, dying in the snow. Yet, he felt like he was burning from the inside out. His ruined body was bleeding fire, bleeding heat, burning instead of freezing.
“What do you know of the power of the One True God?” She asks, smiling slightly when that causes Jon and Ned to scowl in tandem. Jon manages to shrug, slowly beginning to shake under her gaze. She turns away from him, going to the window and looking out of it. Ned abandons it, crossing the room like a fighter in a mêlée.
“He is a god of fire and truth. It is fire that brings comfort in the coldest of nights, that wards against the long dark of Winter.” She looks to the fireplace, where a fire eats at wood, and Jon sees her smile. Then she turns to look at him once again as she says, “It is fire that brings life. He is a god of fire, and fire is a creature of life.”
Jon’s mouth is dry. He thinks he understands. It would explain how he made it here, explain that one moment of unbearable heat.
“You should be dead, Jon Snow.” She’s smiling, her lips red as blood, her teeth as white as snow. “By the grace of R’hllor, you lived long enough to come into these walls and into the hands of those who could finish what R’hllor began. He saved your life, using me as his conduit in this world. They are agents of his will, just as you and I are. Do not forget what he has given you when the night is dark. There is nothing to fear from fire.”
Jon thinks of his father, dead in the Trident. Of the rumours of Dragons and a Queen in the East. He thinks of the agony of heat. He thinks of snow and stone walls and the warmth of a body next to his. He glances at the fire, and for a moment, sees double.
“Thank you, Lady Melisandre, for telling us. You are welcome in Winterfell,” Ned cuts in. Jon looks at him and sees the Lord of Winterfell in all his might. His father is in simple evening clothes, has no sword at his side, and yet…he seems as tall as a giant, standing against Melisandre of Asshai. She smiles tightly, but Jon knows she will not argue with the Lord of Winterfell. His eyes narrow, and he cocks his head a smidge. “As a guest. For now, though, I would like to speak to my son alone.”
“Of course, Lord Stark,” she says. Glancing briefly at Jon, her smile widens once more. But she does not linger, and before long, Jon is alone with Eddard Stark, once again. Jon takes a seat before the fire, and a moment later, Ned takes the other seat.
“Did you know?” Jon asks, tracing the edge of the scar on his burned hand.
Ned’s voice is thin. “I did not.”
“Lady Catelyn said that you two spoke when you were at the Wall,” Jon says, but his voice and his conviction are weak. He reaches up to rub at a wound as it stings, breathing heavily.
“We did. She said nothing of her role. Instead, she spent the time preaching,” Ned says. Jon can hear the disdain in his voice, hear the anger in his words. Jon looks at him and sees a fierce look in his eyes when he looks back. “Do you remember anything? Gods above, the thought of…of something like that…”
He does not have to finish the thought. Jon knows what he is thinking of: their threat beyond the wall, and how awfully alike this seems. The Dead walk in the cold, and Melisandre of Asshai claims that her fiery god allows her to bring back men from the brink of death. And perhaps from death, as well. Jon cannot ignore the similarities.
“I remember feeling hot, for just a moment,” Jon says, staring at the flickering flames again. “Beyond that, I remember nothing. I’ve almost begun to think of it as no more than a dream, but if what she says is true, I don’t know what to think.”
For a long moment, Ned says nothing. Jon looks at him, desperate for him to say something, say anything. For not the first time, he feels like a boy, begging at his father’s door for some scrap of comfort. His father is a cold man when he needs to be. Yet, Jon has never seen him like this, seen him so frigid and frozen.
“I do not like the implication of what she says,” Ned finally says. “I am grateful for her acts, for keeping you alive. I do not like how she speaks of her god, though. This war is a war burned into the history of House Stark. We are a House of the Old Gods. Yet, she comes in and says it is her God who will shelter us against the Long Night.”
Jon thinks of the voices in the Godswood and the hours he lost between the threes. Perhaps she did some great magic, courtesy of R’hllor, and saved his life. Does it matter when he has heard the whispers of the gods, seen their work in wolves and walls and the very stones around him?
“I swore my oaths to the Old Gods,” Jon says. He looks at Ned and sees his dread reflected back at him. “What right does she have to name her Lord as the One True God?”
“She has no right,” Ned says, getting to his feet and crossing to the window she’d stood before. Jon follows after a beat, and when he sees the shadow of the Godswood is directly in front of it, his stomach does a flip. “Do not let her words consume you, Jon. Winter is Coming, and House Stark will answer it.” He looks at Jon, smiling a little. “And we will do so in the sight of our Gods.”
◅✩▻
When Lady Catelyn once again finds and sits beside him in the Godswood, he has to smile at how familiar it is.
“I thought I would find you here,” she says, reaching out and picking something off his sleeve. “Avoiding the girls?”
“Well, Sansa is on a rampage. She’s already kidnapped Theon for her goals, and I don’t intend to be found by her quite yet,” Jon says. Lady Catelyn laughs outright at that. “And I’m not avoiding Arya. I apologised to her, so I think she’s not all that mad at me anymore.”
“Is that so?” Lady Catelyn asks, and when he looks at her, she is smiling knowingly.
“Well, once she started mentioning all the ways I could make it up to her, I did find an excuse to come over here. So…I suppose I am avoiding her.” He shakes his head with a laugh, glancing down at the pool at his feet. The red leaves of the Weirwood dance in the reflection on the water. He loves that red, loves that sight.
“How do you feel?” She asks, and he cannot help his surprise. He’s used to the woman she was, before he nearly died, before they both learned who his mother was. A part of him, he knows, will always expect coldness and anger. But Robb was right; she is trying, in what way she can. It is all so strange now, and he does not have the energy to hate her anymore.
“I’m getting there,” he says, looking to the sky and the tree that stretches overhead. Red leaves against a blue sky, an echo of the colours of House Tully. Should they need to call on the South, it will be that House that they call upon first to answer to the war in the North. And with Catelyn married to the Lord making the call, Jon cannot imagine that they will not ride Northwards.
“When I first married your father,” she begins, ignoring the look he sends her, “I could not help but feel like a stranger in these walls. The Godswood, especially, felt like a place I had no right to be in. Even now, I cannot shake that feeling. The Gods do not speak to me, as they speak to your father. As I know they speak to you.”
“He’s not my father,” Jon says softly, leaning down and brushing his fingers over the surface of the water, watching the ripples extend across the pool.
“He is, in all the ways that matter,” she says. He looks at her and sees a stern look in her eyes. He knows it well, but there is no resentment behind it, not anymore. He licks his lips and looks at the water and the ripples once again. “He is the man who shaped you into the man you have become. Rhaegar never knew you. There is nothing wrong with calling him your father.”
“I thought this would overjoy you, to know the bastard was never your husband’s, in truth,” he says softly.
She sighs and looks away. “I…I suppose it does. To know that the man I married did not shame me the way I thought he did. But it also saddens me to understand all that my anger and my pain took from you, from our family. It saddens me to know that Ned could not trust me with the truth, and it hurts to think he did not trust me. It hurts to know all the pain I have caused.”
“I would not be who I am today had things been different,” he says, voice soft. And it is true. They call him the Black Bastard of the Wall, and for good reason. His youth taught him to be hard, taught him how to be cold, taught him how to keep himself to the shadows. He never had the love of a mother, and that allowed him to become the cold, hard, lord the Watch needed.
“I am a man of the Night’s Watch, Lady Catelyn.” He shakes his head. “I suppose that means I should not care, one way or another. I have no House, none but the Black. My brothers are the ones upon the Wall. My father is the cold.”
She smiles at him and, just as she did the last time they spoke here, takes his burned hand in hers. “You and I both know that is not true, Jon.”
“You can have your father by blood, and your father by love,” she continues. “You can be both the son of Rhaegar and the son of Eddard. The Watch does not erase the past, does not erase the blood you hold. For you are a son of Winterfell, the son of Lyanna. That alone gives you the right. Why would you tear yourself from the House that will stand beside you when the night is at its darkest and longest?”
Jon shakes his head. How to explain it, to explain the shame of the bastard? How can he explain to her what it feels like to know something like this, to know that your life is enough to overturn it all? The only thing he has as protection is those black oaths he swore. Melisandre of Asshai claims his gods are not real, and if they are not real, what do his oaths to them mean?
“He loves you, Jon,” she tells him. Her voice is soft and kinder than he has ever heard it. The world has become strange, hasn’t it? “Is that not enough?”
◅✩▻
The Crypts of Winterfell are dark and silent as he enters them.
He sees her statue as he steps in, but it takes him a moment to actually go the rest of the way to her. In one hand, he has a lantern, and in the other, he holds a blue winter rose, freshly picked from the Glass Garden. It had felt only appropriate to bring her something.
He stares up at her for who knows how long. Her face is stony and only distantly familiar. Everyone says that he looks like Ned Stark, and that Arya takes after the late Lady Lyanna. He can see echoes of his beloved sister in his mother’s statue, but they are only that. Echoes.
He places the rose in her hand and tries to find the courage to say something. But the words won’t come, replaced only by tears that choke up his throat and blur his vision. He’s avoided coming here for some time now, scared of what he would say, but now that he is here, he doesn’t even know what to say. The words simply will not rise to his mind.
He hears the door to the crypt creak open. A new light spreads across the floor, and he hears the visitor pause as they see him there, standing silently before a woman he always wanted to know. He thinks he always knew she was dead, though he never thought she would be this close.
“Jon?” Ned asks, voice echoing in the stone. Jon doesn’t look at him, doesn’t say anything.
Ned pauses beside him. Jon sees the moment he sees the rose in Lyanna’s hand, and hears how his breath hitches at the sight. Jon knows the story of the Tourney at Harrenhall, how Rhaegar gave Lyanna a crown of winter roses. That was the day their fates were sealed, he supposes. The day his existence became inevitable.
He and Ned stand side by side, staring at Lyanna, for some time. Jon studies her face, tries to see himself in the unbreathing stone. With some of the statues, they look so real, he used to think that they were bound to one day step off their pedestals and find their way into the Great Hall to rule again. But not with this statue. She seems still and silent in a way that only the dead are.
“Does it look like her?” Jon asks, breaking the silence of the Crypts.
“She was wilder than this,” Ned says. He sounds sad in a way Jon can hardly register. “Wild and free, burning as bright as the sun. But there’s no way to capture that, not in stone.” He pauses for a moment, and when Jon dares to glance at him, there’s a pensive look on his face. “But she was kind, as well. I wanted them to show that, at the very least.”
“But does it look like her?” Jon presses. “Is that how she looked, in truth?”
“I have not seen your mother in over twenty years, Jon. The last I saw her, she was dying in a pool of her own blood. That is the way I remember her—scared and begging for your life.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Yes, I believe it is. But for better or worse, I cannot remember her as she was before that day. It is as if that memory has burned out all the rest.”
Jon considers that, for a long moment. The woman in the statue is kind and soft and gentle, that is for sure. It reminds him of Sansa and her sweet smiles and gentle courtesies. Yet, he knows Sansa is more than that. He has seen her viciousness, seen how quickly her gentleness turns to barbed kindness. And what of Lady Stark, whom he knows the kindness of now, but who used to scorn him?
This is only half of his mother. A gentle, womanly half, a half that is easy to romanticise across the passage of time. Yet, it is not all of her, and he knows that. He will never get to know all of her, never get to know what her truest, brightest smile looks like. All he will ever know of her face is this statue and the echoes of her Arya, echoes he does not know how to recognise.
“She loved you, Jon,” Ned says, still not looking at him. “Loved you enough that I think, had she lived, she would have lied to even Robert. She was so fierce as she told me to defend you. Promise me, Ned, she begged me. She was strong, even in death. Fighting to make sure that you would have the life she wanted for you.”
Finally, he looks at him. Jon’s mouth is dry, but his eyes are not. His hands are shaking. Ned speaks softly, resting a hand on Jon’s shoulder. “She would be so proud of all that you have done, all that you fight for. You are so like her, in ways I cannot even begin to understand. Your fire, your love, your pride—that is all Lyanna, Jon. I know I have hurt you by not telling you. I will tell you what I can, now, if that is what you want.”
Jon stares at him for a moment. Their lanterns are on the floor, casting them in hazy golden light. His mother watches on, a blue winter rose in her hand, lovely yet slowly dying. His breath shakes, and he looks away, feeling his anger bleed away into nothing but a cavernous grief.
And then his father pulls him in for a hug.
His arms are strong around Jon. Jon buries his face into the furs on his shoulders and just lets his father hold him like he’s a boy again. He feels like a boy, feels like he’s too small for the weight of the world he carries. He still hardly understands this new reality he is in, where he can somehow be alive due to the magic of a god that is not his own, where his father is the dead prince of a great dynasty, where Lady Catelyn can look at him and smile.
But he is learning. He is learning, and he is far from alone.
He and his father pull apart after a moment. Jon can feel the tears on his cheeks.
His father kisses the top of his head and looks at him with his sad, loving eyes. “You are a Stark of Winterfell, Jon. Your mother was my sister, the daughter of a Lord. Winter is Coming. What comes does not care if you are a Targaryen, a Bastard, or nothing at all. It cares that you are fighting. And I care that you are of my blood, of my House. House Stark will not abandon its own to the cold and to death. I swore to protect you as your mother lay dying, and I will.”
Jon thinks of his mother, dying and clinging to her big brother for a shred of hope. He thinks of his own sisters and the worlds he would burn to see them safe. His father is staring at him, and his mother lies in rest only a few feet away, with nothing left of her but her bones. He is standing in Winterfell, and he is wearing the Black of an ancient order. Winter is Coming, indeed.
The wounds on his chest ache an awful tune. But his heart still beats.