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Hours they have been sat at the trestle tables before the king's high table. The great hall is alive with the distant beat of drum, with laughter, howls, shouts and cries. She has never known Winterfell so alive. Plates and plates of food are brought forth: lark's tongue, pears in wine and cream, nuts and leaves from the Reach, boar's head, lamprey pie, hardbread, then pastries, more cream, and sweetwine, sweetbreads, fruit, and honeywine after the cheese has been cleared. Adela watches the high table from halfway down the hall, picking her bread to crumbs.
King Robert, the first of his name. Black-bearded, strong arms, a laugh to envy a giant's. A mammoth of a man, muscles fast run to fat, hot and uncomfortable in the red-gold doublet he wears, beads of sweat straining on his forehead. A happy man, though, muses Adela, a good man. She turns away from the scene of merriment and sighs back into her seat. Ned had wanted her at the high table, just as he'd wanted Jon Snow there. One word from Lady Catelyn had washed that thought away. Adela looks back to the table suddenly, she can't help herself, and she feels hot anger flooding her chest as she watches Catelyn remember all her southern ways in strained conversation with the queen. One day, she thinks hotly, one day Catelyn Tully you will realise just how wrong you have been.
She pushes away from the table then, leaving her ruined food untouched, and walks from the hall as calmly as she can, her fists clenched at her sides, the silly gown billowing behind her. Another one of Catelyn's commands. She snatches at her skirts to quell their movement, her face now set like a petulant child as she storms from this child-like rage that inhabits her. Ridiculous, you're being ridiculous, she wants to scream at herself. But the tangible feeling of injustice done to her and Jon erupts within her and she pushes through the doors of the great hall and into the snow-swept courtyard. She stops. Here, at last, it is silent. She closes her eyes and breathes deep air that is so cold it pierces her lungs like knives. Gradually the hum of noise from the great hall behind her becomes drowned to the silence of night, and then the distant sound of howling from the godswood. At last, Winterfell begins to sound like home again.
"You've escaped, too?" comes that voice, deep but gruff tonight. She recognises it in an instant and her heart beats faster for a moment.
"I managed a few hours," she replies, opening her eyes.
"You're a stronger warrior than me," says Jon Snow, coming toward her. His hair is crusted with fallen snow, as are his shoulders. His hands are pink from the cold. "I lasted less than an hour."
"You look cold," she says, almost stupidly.
"I am," he replies, nonchalantly. He looks off up into the deep blue sky of night, before turning his eyes to the courtyard again. He smiles. "Ser Rodrik's left the practice swords out . . . want to duel?" His eyes are alight with humour and something else. She notices for the first time the shape of his lips below his shadow of a beard, the arch they have. And those eyes. Dark, dark eyes. "Adela?"
"Yes," she says, stepping briskly from her thoughts. "Though I haven't touched a sword in months. Lady Stark's orders."
"You'll remember," he says, handing her a sword and keeping one for himself.
"First blood?" she asks, testing her footing on the snowy cobblestones as she hefts the weight of the sword.
"You'd cut me?" he asks in mock horror, staggering back.
Laughter fresh in their throats, their swords meet with a clang.
They fight for what feels like hours, but what must in fact be minutes. She moves through the motions of swordplay like a dance, stepping and parrying and delivering blow after blow against him. She watches the concentration on his face deepen, his brows knit together, his teeth clenching just slightly. Observes the exact dip and sway of his shoulders as he steps deftly around her. The way the moonlight plays on his dark hair and obsidian eyes. She learns something then, something she'll keep buried deep within. We are the same . . . not just in name but in heart, in mind. The realisation hits her like a sword cut to the chest and she gasps, stepping back from it. She slips on the icy cobbles, tripping over those foolish skirts, and lands heavily onto the snowy ground, her head cracking against the stone, the sword fleeing from her grasp and clanging as it falls.
"Adela!" she hears him shout.
The world is a pleasant haze of white warmth as the snow falls, no longer stinging her face with its icy kiss. She looks up at the sky, her eyes reflecting the spangle of stars studding its depth. Her face parts in a smile, her mind swimming with some distant pain. Suddenly he is there, knelt beside her, his face looming huge above hers. There is worry in his eyes, concern shaping his lips. Those lips . . . He lifts her off of the ground and rests her back against his knees. Suddenly her head clears as he tries to soothe her. She sees only him. Only him in this world of grief and rage and turmoil. The only one in this family brave enough to question her grief, and in doing so quell her rage and reset the volatility.
"It's just us, isn't it?" her voice asks suddenly, quiet and unsure.
"Just us?" he murmurs, stroking the hair back from her face.
"It's only you and me," she says, her voice cracking. "Just you and me alone in this world with any understanding of each other. The others try, they really do. But they . . . they can't. They can't possibly know who I am, or who you are." She sits up, her head smarting with pain but becoming overrun with stronger emotions. She levels her face with his. "You . . . you know me, you know me more than years allow. And I know you, Jon Snow, I know you." Her hand rises tentatively and slowly comes to rest on his cheek, feeling the softness of his beard below her palm. "I know you, Jon Snow."
She sees all the rage and hurt and sadness disappear from his eyes then, those black bottomless pools, and they become like great purple flowers bursting in the darkness. He kisses her. She can see it happening but still it shocks her. His mouth warm on hers, asking, silently asking. She gives, she gives it all, wordlessly. Her arms rise to go about his neck, her mouth opens on his, and she takes him, wholly, all his anguish and uncertainty, into herself. And suddenly it is all too much and she breaks from the kiss, crying uncontrollably, and he opens his arms to her, tears shining in his gaze too, and grips her tight to him as she buries her face into his shoulder.
"What now?" she whispers breathlessly from his shoulder, her body racked with sobs.
"I don't know," says Jon Snow, looking off into the night. "I don't know."
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