Chapter 36: The Bastard and the Dwarf
The young man who appeared behind Benjen smelled like he'd been working at it for a while.
He was lean and dark, with the Stark look strong in him — the grey eyes, the angular jaw, the quality of keeping himself contained even when the wine said otherwise. A white direwolf followed at his heels, moving with the particular quiet of an animal that had learned to read its owner's moods.
"Uncle Benjen."
"Jon." Benjen reached out and pulled him into the empty seat, then looked down at the wolf with something close to affection. "Ghost, I take it."
Jon nodded. Ghost pressed his muzzle briefly against Jon's leg and settled.
"How many cups?" Benjen asked, with the tone of a man who already knew the answer wasn't a good one.
Jon smiled and said nothing, which was an answer in itself.
"Even Joffrey stopped at two," Benjen said.
The Gold Cloak officers at the table found this funnier than it probably was. Joffrey, to his credit, took it well — he raised his cup in Jon's direction with something approximating goodwill, which Jon acknowledged with a short nod.
The table returned to its own conversations. Benjen waited until the noise covered them again before his expression shifted.
"You usually sit with Robb," he said. "Why tonight?"
Jon's face went flat in the way faces go flat when the answer is something a person has already decided not to feel too much about. "Lady Stark thought it would be an insult to the royal family. Having a bastard at the same table as trueborn blood, with the king present."
Benjen was quiet for a moment. Then he put his arm around Jon's shoulders. "Jon. Look around this table. Joffrey is sitting here."
"That's different." Jon pulled away. Not roughly, but decisively. "He chose to come here. I was sent." His jaw tightened. "I'm a Snow. Not a Stark."
Then the composure broke a little.
"Take me with you when you go back." His voice had dropped but gained an edge. "I can fight. Hullen says my riding is the best among the boys. Talk to Lord Father — he'll agree if you ask him. I know he will."
Benjen looked at him for a long moment. "Jon. The Wall isn't what you're imagining."
"I'm not imagining anything. I want to go."
"You're old enough to want things and young enough not to know what you're asking for." Benjen's voice was steady, not unkind. "The oath is permanent. No wife. No children. No home but the Wall until you die, and the dying comes faster than you'd think. We're not a brotherhood of honorable men — we're a brotherhood of men who had nowhere else to go."
"A bastard has honor." The words came out harder than Jon had probably meant them to. "I'm old enough to take the oath."
"You're old enough to think you are. There's a difference." Benjen shook his head. "When you've actually lived a little — when you know what the oath is asking you to give up — come find me then. We'll see if you're still in a hurry."
"I don't care what it asks—"
"I know you don't." Benjen's voice dropped. "That's exactly the problem."
Jon stood up. The flush on his face had gone past wine.
"I will never—" He stopped, aware suddenly that the table had gone quiet around him, that people were watching with the particular attentiveness that falls over a room when something real breaks through the surface. He looked at the faces — curiosity, sympathy, a few expressions he couldn't read.
He pulled himself together with visible effort. "Excuse me."
He was gone before the words finished landing, threading through the hall with Ghost close behind. Joffrey half-rose from instinct and reached out — Jon shook off the hand without looking and kept walking.
Benjen watched him go and turned back to Henry with an expression somewhere between tired and fond. "My apologies. He didn't mean to make a scene."
"He's got spirit," Henry said, watching the doors. "That's worth something."
"He's got too much of it pointed in the wrong direction." Benjen leaned his chin on his hand. "He needs somewhere to put it."
Henry was already standing. "I'll go."
Benjen looked at him. "If you're willing to take him south — genuinely willing — it would be a kindness. Eddard's heading to King's Landing soon, and Catelyn..." He left the rest of it unfinished, which said enough. "He shouldn't stay here without Ned."
"If he wants to come, I'll take him." Henry straightened his jacket. "Dominic could use the company. And a bastard can earn a knighthood as easily as any man, if he's willing to work for it."
The great hall doors were heavy enough that they cut off the noise almost completely when they swung shut behind him.
The yard was cold and quiet, the kind of northern quiet that had weight to it. A few windows above showed candlelight and the muffled sound of the feast continuing without him. Henry crossed the yard and followed the only sound that didn't fit — the rhythmic thud of wood taking punishment.
Jon was at the training ground.
He had a practice sword and was working through a wooden dummy with the systematic intensity of someone who had found a better use for feelings than having them. The dummy had taken some punishment. Henry stopped a few feet away and watched him finish a combination before speaking.
"Is it dead yet?"
Jon spun. His chest was heaving, his cheeks still red. He looked at Henry for a moment, then lowered the sword slightly. "Ser Henry."
"Sit down."
Jon looked like he might argue, then didn't. He sat on a section of stone railing near the dummy. Henry sat beside him.
"Your uncle wasn't being cruel," Henry said. "He was being honest about what the Wall actually is. There's a difference."
"I know what the Wall is."
"You know what you've been told about it." Henry kept his voice even. "You want to go because at the Wall, everyone wears black and nobody cares about your name. You think that means nobody looks down on you."
Jon's jaw tightened but he didn't deny it.
"The reason they don't care about your name," Henry said, "is that most of them have names that are considerably worse. I sent sixty Watch officers to the Wall last year — men I'd personally pulled from their posts for theft and corruption. They went north along with a collection of rapists, robbers, and men who'd done things I won't describe in polite company." He paused. "Those are your sworn brothers."
Jon stared at him.
"Who are you?" he said finally. It came out as a genuine question — somewhere in the evening he'd missed the introduction.
"A fair question at this point." The voice came from the edge of the training ground. "Given the hour, I'll make it quick."
The dwarf walked out of the shadow with the measured pace of a man who had long since stopped adjusting his entrance for other people's expectations. He was perhaps four and a half feet tall, with mismatched eyes — one green, one black — and the kind of face that suggested his mind was moving faster than whatever it was looking at. He stopped in front of Jon with his hands clasped behind his back and adopted the cadence of a court herald with deliberate mockery.
"Before you stands Henry of House Reyne, Commander of the City Watch of King's Landing, Lord of the Bay of Crabs. Known in certain circles as the Red Lion. Known in others as the man who climbed the sea wall at Pyke and made the Ironborn regret it." He turned to Henry. "I've left out several titles in the interest of the boy's sobriety. Have I missed anything critical?"
Henry looked at him. "Tyrion. Why aren't you inside bothering someone else?"
"I bothered everyone else already. It's a feast — there's a rotation." Tyrion walked over to the railing and looked up at Jon with the frank assessment of someone who had been looked at his entire life and decided to give as good as he got. "You're Ned Stark's bastard."
Jon went still.
"Have I offended you?" Tyrion said, in a tone that suggested the question was genuine rather than apologetic. "Dwarfs develop a bad habit of saying true things out loud. It tends to be poorly received."
A long silence. Then: "Lord Stark is my father. Yes."
"I can tell." Tyrion studied his face. "You've got the North in you more than the others do. The legitimate ones, I mean. Something about the way you hold yourself."
Jon blinked, not sure what to do with that.
"Half-brothers," he said automatically. Then seemed surprised at himself.
"Half-brothers," Tyrion agreed, without missing a beat. He settled himself on the railing on Jon's other side, which required some maneuvering, and looked at the ruined training dummy with what appeared to be professional respect. "You did thorough work on that."
Jon said nothing.
"Let me give you something useful," Tyrion said. "Since we're all out here in the cold." His voice shifted — still dry, but the mockery had gone out of it. "Never forget what you are. The rest of the world won't let you, so you may as well get there first. Take the thing they'd use to shame you and make it yours. Wear it like armor. They can't hurt you with it then."
Jon looked at him sideways. "How would you know what it feels like?"
"In their fathers' eyes," Tyrion said, "a dwarf is not significantly different from a bastard. We've both been handed names we didn't earn and told to be grateful for what's left over." He paused. "I've had more time to develop a philosophy about it. You'll get there."
"Perhaps you should change your surname, Tyrion," Henry said, from Jon's other side. "On the off chance someone ever comes to settle the Reyne score properly, you'd want some distance from the family name."
"I've considered it." Tyrion's smile turned wry. "My lord father might even consent. He's never been entirely certain I'm his — my mother died in labor and he's held it against me since, which is an interesting position for a man to take given that he was present at the conception." He glanced at Jon. "I don't know her name. My mother."
"I don't know my mother at all," Jon said quietly. There was something almost competitive in it — two men comparing wounds to establish common ground.
Tyrion looked at him for a moment. Then something in his expression softened by a fraction.
"She was a woman," he said. "Whatever else she was, she was that." He stood and settled his jacket. "Here's the thing, lad. Every dwarf in the world gets treated like a bastard sooner or later. But a bastard doesn't have to spend his whole life being treated like a dwarf." He let that sit. "Think about it when you're sober."
He turned and walked back toward the hall, hands clasped behind him, humming something under his breath — a drinking song, or possibly a love song; the melody was ambiguous.
He pushed open the heavy door. The feast light flooded out across the yard, and for a moment his shadow stretched long across the cold stone — longer than he was, longer than he had any right to be.
Then the door swung shut and he was gone.
Jon sat in the dark beside Henry and looked at where the shadow had been.
"He's strange," Jon said finally.
"He is," Henry agreed. "He's also right."
Jon turned that over. Ghost pressed against his leg again, warm and solid in the northern cold.
After a while, Henry said, "Come south with me when we leave. You'd train with my household, same as the others. Earn it the way everyone else does." He paused. "No one will care about your name there. Not because they don't know it. Because I won't let it matter."
Jon didn't answer right away.
The bells had long since stopped. The yard was quiet enough that Henry could hear the distant sound of the feast — laughter, the scrape of benches, the thread of music coming through glass.
"I'll think about it," Jon said.
It wasn't yes. But it wasn't no.
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