Chapter 40: Heading North
Snow had been falling since before first light.
It came down fine and steady, the kind that accumulated without announcing itself, laying a thin white coat over Winterfell's rooftops and walls and the flagstones of the yard. By the time both parties had assembled at the gates, the stones were slick enough that the horses moved carefully, picking their steps with the deliberateness of animals that have opinions about footing.
They left together and separated at the Kings Road junction.
Robert took the bulk of the column south — the court, the wagons, the Lannister contingent, the household knights, all the weight and noise of a royal progress heading back toward warmer country. Henry watched the column diminish in the grey morning until the snowfall closed around it and there was nothing left to watch.
Then he turned north.
The northern party was small by design. Fifty Gold Cloaks as escort, disciplined men from the reorganized Watch who had been selected for the road rather than gate duty. Benjen Stark and three of his rangers, along with two prisoners being transported to the Wall for service — men who walked rather than rode and did not complain about it within earshot of the rangers. Tyrion traveled with two Lannister guards, a mule loaded with his personal effects, and an expression of genuine interest in everything around him that Henry had learned to find either charming or exhausting depending on the hour.
Joffrey rode with Dominic. Jon Snow rode slightly apart, which he had been doing since Winterfell.
The Kings Road was reasonable for the first two days — wide enough for two horses abreast, the surface maintained by enough traffic to keep it from disappearing entirely. Farmsteads appeared at intervals along the route, stone walls and timber frames, smoke from chimneys, the evidence of people who had decided that the northern landscape was livable if you built correctly and kept your firewood stacked high. They found inns each evening — small, low-ceilinged, warm in the way that places are warm when warmth has been worked for.
That ended on the third day out of Winterfell.
The farmland thinned and then stopped. The road narrowed as the forest closed in on both sides — pine and larch, tall enough to break the sky into fragments, the ground beneath them carpeted in snow that muffled the sound of hooves. The Kings Road had been many things over the centuries; this far north it was mostly a suggestion. Two horses could pass if neither of them minded proximity.
To the west the Grey Hills showed their teeth — broken ridgelines, exposed rock faces, the remnants of watchtowers on the high ground that had been watching the road since a time when someone still thought watching it mattered. To the east the land flattened into open wilderness that ran to the horizon without interruption.
By the fifth day the hills had become proper mountains. Grey-blue, old, carrying the kind of snow on their peaks that had been there for years rather than weeks. When the wind came down off the ridgelines it brought fine ice crystals with it that stung any exposed skin and made conversation at the front of the column a matter of shouting.
No inns. No farmsteads. They made camp in the sheltered hollows beside the road, in the places where the terrain broke the wind enough to make a fire worth building.
The fires burned well that night. The Gold Cloaks had learned to build them on the road north — low and hot, fed from the inside rather than piled high, the kind of fire that lasted through a northern night rather than burning bright for an hour and going to coals before midnight. Half the escort was sleeping. The other half kept watch in rotation at the camp's edges, far enough out to see something approaching before it arrived.
Henry sat close enough to the fire to benefit from it and far enough to keep his eyes adjusted to the dark beyond the firelight. He had Red Rain across his knees and was running a cloth along the blade, the motion more habit than necessity.
Across the fire, Joffrey and Dominic were talking in the easy way of young men who have shared enough road that conversation no longer requires effort. Jon sat between them and somewhat apart from them simultaneously, the trick of someone physically present and mentally elsewhere.
Dominic had been watching Jon for the better part of an hour. Finally he said, quietly enough that it didn't carry beyond the fire: "Jon. You all right?"
Jon looked up from the flames. The focusing took a moment, the return from wherever he'd been. "I'm fine," he said. His voice had the particular flatness of someone who has said that phrase enough times that it no longer requires feeling.
"You could have stayed," Joffrey said. Not pushing — there was a directness to it that was just information, offered without judgment. "Waited for Bran to wake up, then ridden south with the others."
Jon shook his head. A silence that lasted long enough to be its own kind of answer.
Then: "She wouldn't let me see him."
Nobody asked who she was.
"She said—" He stopped. His hands had come together in his lap, fingers laced, the knuckles going pale with the pressure. The fire popped and threw a brief bright light across his face. "She said I was a motherless bastard. That she wished I was the one lying there instead of him."
Dominic put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there without speaking, which was the right instinct. He was a lord's son himself, which meant there were things about Catelyn Stark he couldn't say aloud. So he said nothing and kept his hand where it was.
Jon's voice had gone rough at the edges. "I never wanted what Robb has. I never wanted any title. I just wanted—" He stopped again, and this time what stopped him was not composure failing but the difficulty of naming something that had no clean name. "I only ever thought of them as family. All of them. That's all I ever did."
Joffrey had gone quiet in the way he went quiet when he was actually thinking rather than preparing to speak. He looked at Jon across the fire with an expression that was more than sympathy — the particular attention of someone working a problem.
"You said you don't care about marrying," he said. "About children."
"I don't." Jon looked up.
"You just want to prove yourself. That you're worth being your father's son."
"Yes." The word came out with more force than the ones before it.
Joffrey nodded slowly, the nod of a decision being made rather than a greeting being given. "Then here's what happens. You train. You earn your spurs — properly, no gifts, no shortcuts. When you're knighted and I'm king, I'll legitimize you by royal decree. You'll be a Stark in name, not just blood." He paused. "In exchange, you swear to the Kingsguard. Seven brothers, no inheritance, no claim. You'd be no threat to Robb and no threat to anyone else. Just a knight who earned his name."
Jon stared at him.
The tears that had been threatening since before the conversation started made it to his face now, and the cold air got to them quickly, the firelight catching them before the wind did. He sat completely still, the stunned stillness of someone who has been given something they had not known how to ask for and is not yet certain it is real.
Joffrey watched his expression and apparently found it uncomfortable, because he cleared his throat and looked at the fire. "And if you want a woman at some point — quietly, discreetly, no announcements — I can manage not to notice. That's within my capacity."
"That's not—" Jon made a sound that was almost a laugh and shook his head. "That's not what I—" He pressed the back of his hand against his eyes briefly and pulled himself together. "I don't know how to thank you, Your Grace."
A moment. Then Jon's face changed with a new thought, the particular expression of someone who has just remembered a complication. "But. The vigil. For knighthood — you spend the night in a sept of the Seven. I keep the old gods. Would that—"
Henry set Red Rain down across his knees and looked across the fire at Jon.
"If the old gods haven't answered you yet," he said, "it might be worth trying a different door." He reached out and put a hand briefly on Jon's shoulder. "You were born in the south, by all accounts. It's possible the old gods of the north never had you in their ledger to begin with."
Jon looked at him. Something shifted in his expression — not resolution, not yet, but the beginning of it.
Benjen, sitting on the far side of the fire with his cup in both hands, had been listening without appearing to. He looked at Henry across the flames for a moment with an expression Henry didn't try to read.
Then he looked into his cup and said nothing, which was its own kind of agreement.
The fire burned lower. The wind moved through the pines with the sound it made this far north, which was different from the sound it made anywhere else — deeper, more patient, as if the wind up here had been at this for longer and had stopped being in a hurry about it.
Jon sat with his hands loose in his lap now, the tension gone out of them. Ghost had materialized from somewhere in the darkness and pressed against his side, warm and solid, and Jon put a hand in the wolf's fur without looking down.
Somewhere in the direction of the mountains, something called once and went quiet.
The watch changed. The fires were fed. The camp settled into the particular stillness of people who have a long road ahead and have made their peace with sleep.
[Support Goal: 500 PS → +1 Chapter]
[Support Goal: 10 Reviews → +1 Chapter]
Your review helps the story grow.
P1treon Soulforger (20+chapters ahead)