Thank you to everyone who has read, alerted and favourited this story. Especially those who took time to review, thank you!

Apologies for the long delay between chapters. I moved into a new apartment on the other side of the city and then had to wait for my broadband to be reinstated at the new place. Hopefully, things will be back on track now and updates will be weekly.


Chapter Twenty-Nine: Trick of the Light

The funeral procession was only small. Seven people; one for each year of her brother's short life. Sansa herself led the way, accompanied by Jon and Rhaegar. Ser Davos Seaworth, Lord Royce, Maester Tybald and Lyanna Mormont made the seven and followed behind. Each cradled a candle as they made their way into the crypts, shrouded in mourning blacks. Silently they made their way past the Winter Kings, those whose tombs had been damaged by the escaping dragon. In time, Sansa would put them back together again but, for now, she had come only to mourn her brother.

Rickon's painfully small casket was there already. The sight of it made the breath catch in her throat all over again. The flesh had been boiled from his bones already and what was left of him was neatly arranged inside the box, awaiting burial. Unlike the faith of the seven, theirs was a simple ceremony. They had no septons or septas, nor holy men to speak some ancient rite. It was just them and their dead, alone with their private grief.

They reached the spot where Brandon, Lyanna and Rickard Stark were all grouped together. Sansa had already replaced her uncle's sword, but Lyanna's statue had been smashed by the dragon and Lord Rickard had lost his stone head. The Boltons had not seen fit to provide her father with an effigy at all, although that hardly surprised her. It was one more thing she would rectify herself. Meanwhile, she watched with a growing numbness as Rickon's casket was drawn into the gaping hole at their father's side.

It was all over in an instant and, suddenly, people were murmuring words of condolence in her and Jon's ears. She barely heard them as she continued to watch the spot where Rickon's remains had been consumed by the dark granite. She placed her flickering candle down at the foot of the crypt, the others soon following suit, to create a pool of soft light that bathed the stones in pale warmth. It made the stone faces come alive, except for Rickard and Lyanna. Lyanna's tome really had been reduced to rubble, and her effigy was little more than misshapen rock. Jon noticed it too, and stiffened at her side. She was about to mutter some apology when the glinting of gold among the smashed rocks caught her eye. It glimmered briefly, as it caught the light of the candles, before winking out. She pointed it out to Jon, before another voice cut over her own.

"My Lady, I wondered if I might have a private audience."

Jolted out of her curiosity, Sansa turned to find Lord Royce holding up a lantern.

"I would not normally ask at such a time, but this is important."

Sansa nodded. "Of course, my lord."

She owed the man a great debt for bringing the Vale to her side, so wasn't about to deny him anything. He had been kind to her at the Vale and she remembered him well from a visit to Winterfell as he escorted his son to Castle Black. As she allowed him to escort her back into the open air, she caught sight of the practise yard where Lord Royce had once beaten her poor father into the dirt, almost smiling at the memory. It seemed an age ago now, but could only have been three years. Four at the most. Now, in the light of day, he looked older and greyer than she remembered.

"I wished to speak with you anyway, my lord," she began. "To thank you for bringing your men to my cause."

"Nothing of it, my lady," he assured her. "But it is a related matter on which I wish to speak with you."

Curious, she frowned. "Go on."

He hesitated before continuing, as if gathering his thoughts. "My lady, certain people have been speaking such slanders against my good name that I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to explain directly to you."

They reached the old practise yard, which was empty and silent now, and she stopped to face him. She was mystified as to what he could mean, but he looked pale with worry and wished to reassure him. "No one has said anything to me, my lord. But if you would care to explain I will do what I can to help you."

"It is true that I knew of Baelish's plan to transport you to the Fingers," he stated. "But there is no truth at all to Baelish's accusations that it was I who sold those plans to the Boltons. I can only pray that your ladyship believes me when I tell you, I did not betray you to Roose Bolton. I cannot say who did, or who arranged that ambush that ended with you being forced into marriage with that unspeakable monster. If I did, I would lay their treacherous heads at your feet."

The Fingers? … Ambush? … All of this was new to Sansa. But she wanted to know exactly what tales Baelish had spun this poor man. So, she quickly schooled her expression and hid her ignorance behind a soft smile that reassured him that she bore him no ill-will at all.

"What exactly did Petyr tell you about the ambush?"

"Only that not long after you left the Vale you were set upon by Northmen, then dragged back to Winterfell and married against your will. Petyr said there was nothing he could have done to prevent it."

"Oh, did he now?" she replied. The only thing that really surprised her was that Petyr had told a lie that would be so easily exposed. She almost could not believe he had been so lax. "Did he really tell you that?"

Royce frowned uncomprehendingly. "He did, and he is blaming me. All I wish to do is assure you that House Royce stands shoulder to shoulder with House Stark, as it always has done. We were livid when Lysa Arryn refused to join the war on your brother's side. Absolutely livid. It is my wish that our coming to your aid now will not only avenge the murder of your father, but go some way to restoring the honour lost to us by standing idly by as King Robb fought the Lannisters. Had we been there, then that wedding…"

Sansa could guess at what Lord Royce could not bring himself to say. The Red Wedding would not have happened had the Vale been at their sides. The only reason Lysa refused to join the fray was because Petyr had instructed her not to. She had been enslaved to him, and thousands had died. A feeling of cold loathing washed through her at the thought of Petyr Baelish now.

"My Lord, I know for a fact you did not betray me to the Boltons, nor arrange any ambush," she assured him.

He sagged with relief. "You do?"

"There was no ambush, he sold me to the Boltons of his own free choice," she pointed out, coldly. "I beg of you to take no action yet, my lord. There is much and more I would learn of Lord Petyr's actions, not only now but in the past. For the time being, I believe we need him alive."

Royce was speechless for a long moment. His grey eyes turned hard as granite, his cheeks flushing red with suppressed fury. One gauntleted hand had already reached for the pommel of his sword and Sansa knew he would strike Petyr's head from his neck right now but for her appeal. "A man like that does not deserve to live-"

"I know," she cut in. "His life is already forfeit, he just doesn't know it yet. But there's more that he's done that neither of us yet know about. I would know the full truth before I sentence him to die. I beg you, my lord, to do the same."

A standoff developed, during which neither of them spoke. Eventually, Royce himself broke the silence. "I would have him closely followed, to make sure he does not escape. I will not have him alone with Lord Robert, either."

That was wise, she agreed. "Of course. I will see to it that he does not leave Winterfell again. I will gladly put you in charge of watching him. If he tries to escape, you have my leave to strike him down where he stands."

That appeased the Lord and he nodded his head. "Your father would have done likewise, my lady. So you have my backing."

Sansa flushed with pride at the compliment. "You're very kind to say so, my lord. And I thank you."

"You spoke also of the past," he added. "Can I be so bold as to ask what was meant by that?"

She thought for a moment, trying to think how she would explain all she knew. "It's a long story, one best told by a warm hearth with a warm drink."

Royce raised a smile, gesturing toward the doors of the castle. "Then, by all means, let us repair indoors."


Rhaegar nodded to Lady Sansa and Lord Royce as he passed them in the yard, but did not stop to speak. He was struggling to maintain his grip on a shovel, mortar mix and a pick, wrapped in a heavy blanket. Once he had hauled his load over to the crypts, he nudged the door open with his back and carefully navigated the turnpike stair to descend into the stone vaulted cavern safely. Jon met him half-way, where he gratefully unburdened himself.

"Is that everything we need?" he asked, peering over his son's shoulder at Lyanna's wrecked tomb.

"It is, thank you," replied Jon, turning away from him. When Rhaegar made to follow him, he added: "You can return to whatever it was you were doing now."

He stopped abruptly, pulling up at the curtness in Jon's tone. "Don't you need me to help?"

"You have already," Jon replied, nodding to the tools now in his arms. "I'll see you at supper."

But I want to help, he tried to say but the words seem to get lost somewhere in his throat. Meanwhile, Jon had already made his way back into the crypts. Rhaegar could hear the pick and shovel clanging together sonorously as he ambled away. Understanding himself to be dismissed, he turned slowly and headed for the door again. There was little to be gained by staying somewhere he clearly wasn't wanted.

Outside again, breathing in the biting northern air, he found himself with nowhere to go and no one to see. No one knew him and, if he told them, they would never believe him. Never in his life had he been in such a predicament. As a prince of the blood royal, his life had always been structured around duty, ceremony and the functioning of state. Every minute of every day had been accounted for and free time was a luxury to be spent wisely. Now he had nothing but spare time and he felt like a spare part, superfluous to the running of so much as a piss up in a brewery. Only Sonar the dragon needed him, and he was sleeping at that moment.

Dejectedly, he made his way to the great hall. Only to find the hall occupied by Lady Sansa, deep in conversation with Lord Royce. Picking up on the sensitivity of their conversation, he apologised hastily for his intrusion and backed away quickly. He ducked down a passageway upon hearing Petyr Baelish and Maester Tybald approaching, issuing commands to the Stark's new servants and making arrangements for the arrival of the Northern Lords. Some were less than a day's ride away, but Rhaegar knew he personally had nothing to get excited about. Once they arrived, he would be confined to his chambers for anonymity's sake.

Eventually, it was to his chambers he found himself drifting toward. Winterfell's library had burned down some years ago, so not even a book could offer him solace as he lay back on his feather bed and looked at the direwolf carved into his bed frame. It seemed, once the shock had worn off, his arrival in the future had lost its sheen and he found himself struggling to remember what the point was. Surely, it was not just to help his son win back Winterfell? The real war was supposed to be happening north of the wall, or so he had been told.

Sinking into a torpor, he closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. When sleep eluded him, he found himself thinking of Dragonstone. Davos told him it had been left undefended since the usurper's brother left and that Queen Cersei had failed to take it back since the captain of her fleet stole all her new ships and disappeared with them. He could just walk back in there, then yield the castle to his sister. The sister he didn't know at all, but couldn't be any worse than the son he didn't know. Unless he really was a prisoner in this place and there was only one way to discover the truth of that matter…


The chest was larger than Jon imagined. He tried extracting it from Lyanna's tomb with just his bare hands, but when it would not budge he sent Rhaegar for the pick and shovel. Now he had spent an hour working around its edges, carefully excavating whatever it was from beneath the place where her statue once stood. Made from solid oak and banded in iron, it weighed more than a horse to boot. After an hour, he cleared the rusting padlock. Another hour of slow, methodical work and he finally reached the bottom of the chest.

His hands were filthy and his fingers bleeding, where they snagged against rocks and loose rubble. By the time he was done, however, he was numb to the pain. Bent double, with his arms wrapped around the chest, he heaved and hauled it out of the ground with every ounce of what was left of his strength. Once it was out, and he was able to shine a lantern into the hole in the ground, all he could see was the casket containing her bones which had been positioned right next to the mystery trunk Sansa had spotted. There would only be old, dry bones in there though. He remembered Lyanna again: the laughing, dancing girl he knew at Harrenhal and the sight of her remains made his heart ache all over again. Pain and guilt mingling together, on top of a longing for that which could never be.

"It was you I wanted to bring back, not him," Jon confessed to what was left of her, in that box in the ground. "It was a mother I needed, not a second father. Now I have him and I don't know what to do with him."

It was nothing personal. Rhaegar was a good man and it was some small consolation to know he was not begotten by rape. He was even happy that the prince's honour could be restored and he would not be remembered as a rapist. He even understood that Rhaegar had been brought back to fulfil a purpose that had nothing to do with Jon needing to know his real parents. No gods that he ever learned about had been all that family minded. All it had been was an aside that led back to the prophecy, and little more. But none of that dulled the pain of knowing he could do nothing to save his mother.

After he had caught his breath, he kicked over the pile of dirt and rubble to fill in his mother's grave again. Then found himself alone with a locked box. He spent a moment fumbling with the locked padlock and quickly realised that hacking it off with the pick would be much easier than searching the castle for any key that might fit it, so he did just that. One well placed, forceful blow later and it lay at his feet in two bits. The impact of the pick against the metal lock reverberated through the crypts, making him feel uneasy. A feeling that intensified as he lifted the lid to reveal what was inside.

The creaking lid opened onto darkness, at first. Jon reached for the lantern, letting the light fill the inside of the crate, revealing a large and heavy object wrapped in black and red velvet. More curios than anything, he pulled the object upwards, causing the velvet shroud to fall away. In his hands, he was left with a large silver harp. It was the same one he had seen his father playing at Harrenhal and Jon found himself staring at it in wonder.

Why? Was the first question that sprang into his mind. Why would such an item be buried deep below Winterfell. It was beautiful, to be sure, and his father would be beyond happy to be reunited with it. But why did Uncle Eddard not only keep it, but bury it?

Years underground had degraded the fine, silver strings. But the large, ornate frame had not tarnished. It shone and shimmered hypnotically in the flickering light of the candles and lantern. Jon walked around the instrument slowly, looking it up and down intently. The velvet cloth it was wrapped in muffled his footfalls, but it was just an old Targaryen battle standard. After a moment, Jon collected it from the ground and shook it out. The red bits he'd seen were just the three-headed dragon. It was frayed at the edges, and one of the tears marked a spot where it had been pierced by an arrow. Eddard must have taken it from the battlefield itself.

But why? Jon found himself wondering again.

Lost in his thoughts, it took him several long minutes to realise the crate hadn't yet given up all its secrets. There were still one or two items inside, things that had been hidden by the bulk of the harp. One was a Targaryen wedding cloak, which he remembered Lyanna showing to him not long after her wedding to Rhaegar. The final item was a necklace and locket, a direwolf embossed on side and a dragon on the other. There were no miniatures inside, just a lock of baby hair and a small roll of parchment that had grown black with mould, obscuring what was once written there. More than a little disappointed by the degraded parchment, he closed the locket and placed it back in the crate.

Before he could do anything else, the sound of the door opening above soon followed by approaching footsteps pulled him up sharp. He swung the lantern around to get a look at who it was, breathing a sigh of relief when only Rhaegar rounded the turnpike stair and met his gaze. He stopped abruptly, looking from Jon to the harp and back again. Without saying anything, he approached slowly as if the harp were an animal that might suddenly bolt from him.

"Where did you find her?" he asked Jon. "I thought the usurper would have had her melted down for scrap as soon as I was burned."

Jon noted the use of feminine pronouns. "She was buried alongside my mother. Lord Stark must have saved it, or arranged for it to be saved. I don't suppose you know why it's here?"

Rhaegar was still studying the harp. He ventured as far as plucking one of the strings, then flinched back as it twanged discordantly and promptly snapped. The recoil lashed the back of his hand, drawing a fine trickle of blood the width of a single hair.

"Your mother must have asked him to save it," replied Rhaegar, sucking the blood off the back of his hand. "Other than that, I have no notion."

His gaze switched to where Lyanna's tomb once stood, and Jon could hear the breath hitch in his throat; his eyes misting over as he approached the spot. One foot nudged at the recently disturbed ground, rifling through the loose rubble. He soon stopped and looked over his shoulder.

"I really would like to help, Jon," he said. "I loved her too."

"I know," replied Jon, curtly.

Rhaegar looked as if he was about to say something else, before seemingly changing his mind and reaching for the mortar mix. This time, Jon did not try to stop him. He reached for the parts of Lyanna's statue that he had managed to salvage and began sorting them into size, then piling them into which bits were meant to go where. Together, they would piece her back together.

"I know I'm not the one you wanted," Rhaegar said, after a while.

Jon was about to protest, before realising it was pointless. "This isn't about what I want."

"Then why do I feel so apologetic all the time?"

"I don't know what you mean," said Jon, turning to face his father again.

Rhaegar paused before explaining. "I constantly feel like I should be apologising for not being Lyanna, for not being Eddard Stark."

"Don't you think I feel the same about not being Rhaenys or Aegon?" Jon retorted. "You never meant for me to be your heir, did you? The prince that was promised."

"And don't you think I'm just grateful that one of my children has lived?" the other answered. "This is hard for us both, Jon. I have a son who is almost the same age as me, in fact I don't even know how old I'm supposed to be. Feelings are a little conflicted for us both right now."

Jon did not reply immediately. He fixed a piece of Lyanna's statue in place, letting Rhaegar mortar it before letting it hold. "I know, and I'm sorry. I wish I knew how to make sense of this."

"You and I, both," Rhaegar concurred.

They lapsed into silence as they continued to work at Lyanna's effigy. But Jon dwelled on how he had been with Rhaegar since he returned. There had been a distance between them, not helped by the problems they had faced and the battles they had fought together. The distance yawned into a chasm and they were no longer even touching from a distance.

"Am I a prisoner here?" Rhaegar eventually asked.

"Of course not," Jon assured him. "Why would you even think that?"

"You can't deny you've been keeping me out of the way," he explained. "When the Northern Lords arrive, most of whom I never met in my life, I'm going to be confined in my chambers. You said it yourself. If I am not a prisoner, then I am free to leave, am I not?"

Jon sighed heavily. "Where would you go?"

"Dragonstone," he answered, quickly. "There's no one there and I can yield the castle to Daenerys, if she ever gets here."

"I think you should stay here until we find out where she is," said Jon. "It's just common sense. And, in any case, if you're only doing this because you think I don't want you here then you're wrong."

Rhaegar almost dropped the piece of statue he was holding, but caught it in time. "Are you saying you do want me here?"

"Of course I want you here," Jon replied.

It was only when Rhaegar said it that Jon realised he did want him around. He certainly didn't want him to go wandering off across Westeros in hope of just bumping into his sister. Whatever they did next, they needed to do it together.

Like rebuilding stone effigies. Lyanna was slowly taking shape again, reforming from the rubble that the rampaging dragon had left in his wake. Jon felt quite proud of it and stood back to admire the effect. It was then that he cast his mind back to when he first set foot through the gates of Winterfell, after the recent battle.

"I thought I saw her, you know," he told Rhaegar. "When we breached the walls and took back the castle. I looked up at the windows in the south tower, and I thought I saw her there in the upper window."

He thought he saw her smiling, her hand raised in a sad gesture of farewell as she retreated from the window. Just for an instant, before she was gone again. Looking back now, he couldn't say for sure what he saw.

"Maybe you did see her?" Rhaegar posited. "I can't imagine Lyanna wanting to miss out on a fight like that."

Jon laughed. "Nor I." He paused and thought on it a little more. "Maybe it was her, or maybe it was just a trick of the light. Either way, she has to be at peace now she has her home back."

Silence again, in which they both studied the hastily repaired statue. The cracks still showed, but it was a good enough likeness until the proper stone mason could be called in. Meanwhile, they both needed food and a place to talk properly.

"Come with me," said Jon. "We need to talk."


Thanks again for reading, reviews would be lovely if you have a minute.

Apologies again for the long delay in updates.