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The land is deserted, desolate, half-hidden beneath the snow. The hedgelines of a few distant fields rise on the hills and the sound of a river fills the air but the sun is cold, the earth colder. Adela's breath mists as she stands on the brow of a hill, her horse shifting restlessly beneath her. To her left the great dense mass of the wolfwood beckons. To her right, nothing. Endless, endless space. A pretty, deadly white void awaiting her entrance placidly.

"What is it?" comes a fractured voice suddenly.

She starts terribly, yanking her horse in the mouth in shock and spinning around in the direction of the voice. She sees nothing, only the crisp outline of the hill sloping against the rising sun. She hears nothing now. No whisper of breath, no thudding footstep, no laugh or call or cry. Glancing uncertainly about herself now, she turns the horse this way and that, cresting the ridge of the hill and standing up in her stirrups to squint into the sunlight and try to spot any movement on the horizon. Nothing. She sits back into the saddle quietly, frowning. This far south of the Wall there is nothing to fear, she tells herself, but her heart is pounding and her breath quickens, the blood rushing to her cheeks as she feels the thinnest trail of panic cloud her veins. Perhaps she had been rash taking her horse from the stables at Winterfell and riding out before sunrise without companion or word. Yet the prospect of another day preparing for the king's arrival and gritting her teeth to Catelyn Stark's barked orders overrode that rashness. She sits wondering for a while, thinking back to playing with Sansa when they were both girls as high as old Ned's knee, long before she'd been sent off to live back with her mother. Then she thinks of dark eyes, liquid in the gloom of the godswood, and feels heat rise to her cheeks.

She turns from her reveries, finally, and turns too from the prospect of losing herself for a while in the white abyss before her. To Winterfell, to Winterfell... She turns the horse and screams with shock.

Red eyes, fierce and burning, are locked on hers. They seem to float in the blinding white air, the breeze throwing snowflakes around them and obscuring their owner. She can see nothing else as the snow picks up with the wind but those eyes grow larger, fiercer. Blood-red and wanting. The panic she has barely suppressed begins to rise again. No sword, no arrow, not even a dagger, leagues and leagues away from Winterfell. She wants desperately to stand her ground but the horse below her shifts and starts and paws, backing up and tripping along in the snow. She pushes it to stand but it bolts and races down the hill, hurtling at a gallop toward the blankness of the horizon she'd so admired earlier. She tries to pull up but the horse rips the reins from her hands and ploughs on, hock-deep in snow but showing no sign of struggling.

As she fights for control, she hears the crack of that voice on the air again but when she turns her head the snow stings her eyes and blinds her. The cold is vicious now and her ears and cheeks burn as the wind tears her hair from its pins and whips the tendrils across her face, blinding her even more. She wonders miserably how far she is from Winterfell, and how she's ever going to find her way back.

Finally the horse begins to tire beneath her, the great knees slowing now as they fight to cut through the snow. She can hear the rasp of its nostrils, smell the deep, primal scent of its sweat. The horse stops as suddenly as it ran. She drops the reins and falls onto its neck, exhausted, her fur cloak heavy on her shoulders and crusted with snow.

"Adela?" comes that voice, deep and smooth.

She starts up, her breath coming fast, and looks over her shoulder.

"Jon Snow." Her voice is a whisper. Mounted on his dark stallion, dressed in black, with his wolf at his horse's hooves. Ghost. "How did . . . it was you . . . it was Ghost!" Relief makes her dizzy and her face parts in a smile.

"Yes," says Jon, his eyebrows raised. "I did call out. Ghost went on ahead, think he was eager to get to you." He walks his horse forward till he is next to her. "When I climbed the hill you'd gone."

"How'd you know where I went?" she questions. "The snow is blinding."

"Followed your squeals," he grins. She scowls, but his smile doesn't falter. "That's what the knight's supposed to do, isn't it? Rescue the damsel whose lost control of her mount?"

She sees the laughter shining in his dark eyes and wants to be angry at him but she laughs too. "I never once lost control."

"No, no," he shakes his head, full of mirth. "Of course not. It is the custom of the north to gallop headlong through snowdrifts, I forget."

She smiles. "Who sent you after me?"

"Who do you think?"

"Lady Stark."

"The lady herself," he nods. "Though of course she instructed Father to tell me, rather than tell me herself."

Adela shakes her head at that with a sigh, and they both begin a slow walk back toward Winterfell. The horses are tired and grateful for the pace but Ghost bounds off ahead, silently mounting the hills and disappearing from sight. They ride a while in silence, eyes fixed ahead, the snowfall ceasing now and coldness and quiet taking over once more.

"She's never liked me either," murmurs Adela finally. "Even as a child, she never liked me being Sansa's playmate. Would of sent me off much sooner, I think, had it not been for Ned's insistence that I stayed."

Jon nods at this. "She's a hard woman," he says carefully. "When I was young I wanted nothing more than to please her. The older I got, the more I realised that was never going to happen. Never will. Gave up. Realised that as she's never bothered to please me, nor even notice that I exist, I've no reason to do the same for her."

He says it calmly, his voice level and cool, but she sees the hurt in his eyes. Dark, dark eyes. Her hand lifts from the rein to take his in comfort but she stops herself. Her fingers curl tightly back around the leather and she fixes her eyes back onto the horizon.

"A mother's love is hard to earn when it is not given freely," she says distantly, closing her eyes to the memories of her own mother.

"You talk as if you understand such things," he says, his voice bearing a harder tone now. "Yet you've known your mother, shared her home for the past five years. You know her face, her scent, what her hands look like. You know whether she lives or not."

"And how I long to rid my mind of all those things," hisses Adela before she can help it. She sees his look of disgust and does not flinch from it. "And you, Jon Snow? What do you understand about your mother?"

"Nothing," he snaps. "I know nothing about her. I don't know if she is a fishwife or a noble lady of the southern lands. I don't know what her name is, or what she looks like. I don't know if she lives or dies. Where does she rise in the mornings? What place does she call home?" His angry breath mists the air. "Would she shrink to see me now? Would she be proud? I know nothing, Adela Snow, nothing."

"Don't call me that!" she cries, her voice breaking with anger.

"Call you what?" he shouts back, whirling his horse to face her. His dark eyes are damp but the anger furrows his brow and his cheeks are pink. "Snow? That is what you are, Adela, though everyone else keeps pretending you are not!"

"I am not a Snow," she says hotly. "My father wanted me known as a Stark – and it is his blood I carry, hot and heavier in my veins than my mother's!"

He looks at her with something like pity then and shakes his head. Their eyes meet, softly, and she feels his heart tear within her own. "You are what I am," he says, his voice quieter now. "You are a Snow. You are a – "

"Bastard."

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