A/N Thank you for all your wonderful reviews last chapter! Bess and her religion will be a recurring theme addressed as an arc through out this fic, so it will be a focal point. Jon appears in this chapter, and a little bit of Bess getting to know the world she's in, but mostly this is just building up an understanding of what a precarious position Bess is in.
Enjoy!
CHAPTER 2: GUARD YOUR TONGUE
"Hello?!"
Someone walks towards her - black ink in the milky white. The screaming around her quietens instantly - like a blanket thrown over to muffle a flame. Bess chokes on the silence and wraps her arms tightly round herself, as if to contain what little heat is left beneath her blue skin. Snow flakes crystalize on her exposed collarbones and arms. Freeze on her eyelashes.
If her father and sister were dead they were not in this place with her.
"Who's there?"
Bess seems to hardly breath. Her whole world stills for this one moment.
She watches the black as it moves towards her and understands; if she comes into contact with this thing, she will truly be elsewhere. Hell. Here. If she can just fade, withdraw...
Her heart rate speeds up. Her breathing turns fast. She spins and stumbles away, blindly on into the alien snow drifts. If she meets this man her fate will be sealed.
Half delirious with distraction and cold, Bess pictures herself dragging her body back through the numbing cold to the fire and the pier. Back to her death so she can die again. "God, have mercy!" she cries aloud.
But, again, the divine does not answer. It is someone else.
Her wrist is grasped - Bess screams, struggles, and flails out with her other fist - only for it to be caught in a similarly iron clasp. She is staring into the face of a toad. A man with a warty face, black beard and a look as tough as tree roots. "Who are you? What are you doing here?!" he says, harshly. The snow blows round them, catching in his beard. The blizzard is now so thick he has to squint through it to see her properly, making him look all the more ill-becoming.
"Let go of me!" Bess yells and struggles some more until he strikes her in the face hard. Only his grip on her other arm keeps her from falling back into the snow. He hits her again across the other cheek for good measure and Bess's head snaps in the other direction. She can only look at her assailant with wide eyes, her ears ringing. His expression is grim, but she detects a widening about the eyes as he takes in her appearance; her bald head and sheet. The look sets her at ease somewhat. There is bewilderment and pity there. The violence is not that of a man who wishes to do her harm; merely pragmatic. Like her, he just wants to understand.
The man looks at her searchingly for a second and then his gaze falls on her hand in his grip. Her fingers are star-fish splayed - spread wide as if all the muscles have suddenly gone rigidly into shock. Bess sees what he sees. Her ring and middle fingers are black from tip to knuckle. But it isn't frostbite. The skin has peeled away to reveal flesh - and the flesh is burned.
Before Bess can blink the man has a knife and the burnt, useless fingers are severed from her hand.
Her introduction to this new world is cruel.
Beneath her eyelids Bess sees the transitory colours her life has taken. Red for the fire. White for her rebirth. Black for her saviour. Red again, for the blood; for reality. Somehow, she is alive; not just her soul, but bodily, too. The flesh is living. The blood can be spilt.
She is surprised, then, that when she wakes she sees colour. Brown. A horse's flank. The smell is strong and overwhelming, yet comforting. Not comforting enough to distract her from the cold, however. Her body is wracked by shivers despite the blankets piled atop her - and where her face and head is exposed to the cutting wind the skin burns hot and cold simultaneously. Her lips burn, too. When she parts them experimentally the frozen, abused skin cracks and metallic blood stains her teeth. Bess gasps - a reflex - and brings her hand up to gingerly touch her lips; only to see it heavily bandaged. Three fingers and two stumps. No sound escapes her this time, but her stomach drops sickeningly.
She squeezes her eyes shut for a second and steals herself. Easier to pretend to sleep. Easier to sleep forever, perhaps, but instead she forces herself to roll onto her back and take in her surroundings.
Her surroundings are the fringes of a flinty, dark forest. The ground is craggy and uncomfortable beneath her - frostbitten and snowy in places, but mostly mud. Not the knee-deep drifts she had found herself in.
She is obviously in a camp, but at first glance it is empty. There is a fire, with a pot of stew steaming over it. There are bundles of blankets and firs - in a similar fashion to her own, where others must have slept. They are singularly medieval, however, and when Bess sniffs at her own furs, she finds that they stink of farmlands. Shit.
There are some twenty horses, a cage of ravens - but no people. With some trepidation, Bess wraps one of the less foul-smelling blankets round herself and rises. With almost lazy easy the cold pierces the grey material and her thin grey sheet, instantly freezing her to the bone. It knifes at her ankles and when she looks down at her feet she realizes with a thrill that they have been bandaged like her hand, too. When she wiggles her toes, she finds she can feel not one and tries to feel with her good hand if they are all there, but her fingers are swollen and will not bend.
Bess grits her teeth instead and shakily moves closer to the fire. It is a relief to feel its warmth, when it seems to her as if she will never be warm again, and the stew smells inviting. But as she moves closer to examine it more closely there is a feeling like ice breaking beneath her. Fear bubbles up her spine and her stomach twists itself into an impossibly tight knot. The flames do not crackle and the fire itself is relatively small, but there is something sinister about the quiet way in which it burns. Insidious. Bess stands, staring at it for a second, her body rigid as she struggles with her natural need for heat and the fear.
A flea crawls out of the blanket and up the back of her neck. Finally, Bess's lips tighten perceptibly and she moves back away from the fire, settling back onto her pile of blankets, her back against the big brown horse lying next to her for warmth. As she sits there, shivering - feeling as if she could die - Bess suddenly notices something she hadn't before: a young man, sat vigilantly with his back against one of the trees - a sword in his lap. Watching her.
Her heart jumps into her throat, but she is too bitter about the fire and the cold and being where she is to truly feel the fear it evokes.
He asks her if she would like more firs. Any stew. She replies in the negative, content to suffer.
"I only ask so you may feel better - " the young man - or is he a boy? - the more Bess looks at him, the less she can be sure. He is serious, for a boy, to be sure, but she is slightly smug to detect that he is not as hardened as he thinks he is. Not a man, yet. She can see it in the way his speech has already run to impatience.
"Am I a hostage?"
"No."
"Then why do you watch me?"
He fumbles for an answer. "If you ran off...you would die out in the cold by yourself."
It is a lie, and she sneers at it. There are others in the camp who are gone clearly for a reason. Perhaps to talk about her.
The young man misinterprets her look as sceptism and raises his chin slightly in defiance. "You will be dead out there out us," he snaps, harshly. "If Yoren hadn't -"
"Jesus, do you expect applause?" she says, bitterly.
He pauses. Something like confusion flitters across his face before the sentence is done. Something in its content he fails to understand. Those already dark, brooding brows crease over his eyes momentarily, but perceptibly. Jesus. In that moment, Bess realizes that her God is not known here. Not understood here. Perhaps, she reflects, that is why he did not answer her here.
The thought obliterates her cold exterior like a physical blow, and she feels more alone than ever.
She has died for her faith, but it seems it did not follow her into the afterlife it taught her so strongly to believe in.
Angry tears fall from Bess's eyes that she ducks her head to hide.
The boy is still watching her - carefully, intently. It is a look of one trying to understand something they have never seen before. It is not a look you gave a fellow human being. "What is your name?" he asks, eventually. Cautiously.
She composes herself so she can lift her head and look him in the eye. "Bess," she replies, and - when he does not seem inclined to give his own, she asks, with a bit of an edge - "and yours?"
"Jon Snow."
"An uncommon last name."
"Are you jesting with me?" he snaps, abruptly furious. Bess's eyebrows both raise as he rises to his feet in agitation.
"No -" she glances at the sword in his hand that he seems to have reflexively grabbed and her voice hardens, " - and sit down for Gods sake! I wont have you...waving that thing round in my face!"
He looks down at his sword, as if surprised to see it there, but does not sit. He looks at her face and then back at the sword and then back at her again. She wonders if he's considering using it.
"Are you a high born lady?"
"No, I'm a merchant's daughter." Bess prays that these medieval sheepherders she's found herself amongst have heard of a merchant.
"A merchant?" he asks, sceptically, looking her up and down. Bess bristles from where she sits. "What happened to you - to your? -" He's talking about her hair, and when she colours and looks down at her feet with shame, he colours with embarrassment. "I'm sorry," he mutters, looking determinedly somewhere over her left shoulder. "I shouldn't have said that. That's your business."
"No, it's -" Bess glances at him. She understands that danger of the enigma she poses him. The threat to her of being an unknown thing to them. She needs him to trust her, so she can stay safe. She needs to feed him information about her life in any way within the realms of belief, otherwise, she knows he will fill the void of her life with stories, anyway. She is an escaped prisoner. A refugee. A disgraced bedwarmer. "It was cut from my head," Bess says, her voice strained. "I was to be burnt for...a difference of opinion."
"By which Lord? There's no one round here for miles." The boys voice grows intense and suspicious. "And burning hasn't been practiced since the days of the mad king as punishment. It's not the law."
"If there's no one around here for miles, what are you doing here?" Bess asks, dodging the question. Her fingers have gripped the blanket so hard her knuckles are white. She curses; the man should have cut out her tongue instead of her fingers so she couldn't make fool comments.
The boy, thankfully, takes up the change of topic, though he still throws her a mistrustful glance. "We're goin' to Castle Black," he says slowly. "You're coming with us."
A/N Please review! Tyrion next chapter and Castle Black!