Thank you to DrHolland for a proficient beta read of this chapter and support to this story. And to TopShelfCrazy, for everything.
Note on chronology: Mance's POV takes place a week earlier than the previous two chapters (Dany and Davos), immediately after Jon faints, trying to stop the dragons from fighting each other.
I thought of making this a chapter with two POVs, Mance's and Aegon's, but it turned too long and incoherent. I'll have to make a dual POV somewhere to respect the 100 chapters limit I set for myself. I'm also trying to shorten the period between updates from 2 and a half weeks to roughly 10 days.
Thanks for reading.
On we go.
Mance
Victory tasted like ashes, like defeat.
It was a common taste beyond the Wall. Loss was everywhere; no one stopped to mourn those lost.
Mance Rayder stared at the two dragons, senselessly killing each other in the clear morning sky - until the black one screamed madly, coiled his tail and flew East, following the Wall on its southern side. He left a long trail of fire in his wake; a black comet, burning red. The green dragon landed on the westernmost edge of the Wall and… yawned, waiting. A cloud of orange flames drifted lazily around his horned head as an odd crown.
The kneelers have a new king.
Mance sank deeper into the black pit of his grim mood. The green dragon must be Jon's now.
There can't be gods, he thought, more assured of this than in his usual condition of permanent doubt regarding their existence. Why else would the dragons fight and be mad at each other just because a son riding one of them had been forced to do for his father? Why else would he, Mance the wildling, miraculously find the lost king and a dragonlord in the south and help him rise and climb on his throne, only to see him slain mere months later?
Mance turned around to see how Jon fared… and witnessed him collapsing into snow. Aegon was faster, standing closer, catching him before his bushy black-haired head would have hit the crust of thick ice that formed on the former battleground, from too many boots and dead feet that had trodden the snow. The sun shone bright, but not strong enough to melt it; the winter sun had teeth, and they were as sharp as the cold of the night.
"He lost consciousness," Aegon squeezed out breathlessly. As a consequence of staying Jon's fall, he was forced to sit down suddenly on the hard surface. Losing balance under the weight of his human burden, Aegon landed on his arse as a baby learning how to walk. As my son is falling all the time, Mance realised. I might see him soon. His hope was mingled with grief. Rhaegar will never see Jon.
"I can see that," Mance concurred with Aegon, running away from his own dark thoughts, turning a questioning gaze to Jon's face. The new King of Westeros was limp and pale. Jon's black eyes stared into nothingness, open and lifeless; brightly cold like ice, like the eyes of the enemy, just not blue in colour…
The battle at the Bridge of Skulls had clearly shown that anyone could turn into a white walker just from having encountered them in the past. Weeper and his men were not Mance's friends, but they were a part of his company of fighters for a while, when Mance rode south to either take the Wall or hide behind it. They had seen every monstrosity there was in the true North, just like he had. Maybe the white walker curse became a common sickness like greyscale in winter. The grey death, as the free folk called it, was passed on through touch.
"His heart is beating," Aegon clarified about Jon, very decisively. "When Jeyne was... when she wasn't properly alive, her heart… it never… it stood still." The young man was an expert on wights, having loved one of them, Mance would give him that.
Tired eyes of the King-beyond-the-Wall raced to Rhaegar's harp abandoned in the snow, a much finer instrument than his wooden lute. More strings, more tones. In spring, if he lived to see it, he might… he might try to learn the high harp. He had tried the woodharp once. It wasn't that different than the lute, just more demanding. He'd write a sad song about the war. About all the needless losses, never mourned for. About the six spearwives, skinned by the Boltons in Winterfell...
Yet if Mance Rayder and the dead spearwives had never gone to Winterfell, Lord Reed would have never spoken to him through the mouth of the heart tree. Mance would not have mistaken his voice for the voice of the absent gods and believed in it, writing a true song about Rhaegar and Lyanna, travelling to the capital of the kneelers… Help would have never come from the south to his people. Now… it did. And it had cost Rhaegar his life.
The Ice Dragon, Mance thought of the dead king with reverence. A worthy end for a worthy man, yet an end nonetheless.
His passing posed another difficulty. Rhaegar may have died twice, but most of his hastily gathered army was intact, camped in Winterfell or on the way to the Wall, to either its eastern or its western end. More would come from the southern lands. Jon needed to wake up, unite the kneelers and lead them.
Just before Mance would have succumbed to the temptation to play Rhaegar's harp and see if the sound of it would wake his son, Sandor Clegane returned from the woods with Dawn. Unexpectedly, he was pulling a carriage he must have acquired with the same speed as the one Rhaegar used to call his banners. People from the Stony Shore drove such carriages, built of bones, with good runners in place of wheels. Its previous owners could not take it over the Bridge of Skulls and would probably not need it south of the Wall. The carriage was stuffed with food provisions and well covered by large seal skins and furs on top, to keep it dry and unspoiled. Not that any food will go rotten fast this winter.
"You'll need a horse," Mance warned the Hound calmly, divided on the inside as to the futility of his burned companion's endeavour. "If you want to have any hope to catch up with the Others that took Sansa. I still say it is madness. She's as good as dead."
"I left my horse in Winterfell," the Hound rasped scathingly. "I shall not rob your old men, charming women and swaddled babes of their dying plough mounts that can still walk with them over the bloody bridge."
Mance was glad to hear him speak thus, with his usual lack of respect. His losses were greater than anyone else's that day, except, maybe, Jon's. Most men would be broken by grief in his place. But Sandor's ill temper would only leave him on his deathbed, it seemed, and maybe not even then. On a positive note, this surely meant that the Hound was himself and not a disguised Other, taking his place.
"I'll find something better than a horse, I promise you," Sandor continued in the same vein. "Watch me. But first… Here, boy, take this back. It's a good blade," he said carelessly, and yet he handed Dawn back to Aegon with utmost respect for handling the wonder represented by the ancient Sword of the Morning.
Dawn had ultimately saved all three of their bony arses - Mance's, Sandor's and Aegon's- on the Bridge of Skulls after the Hound expertly began a stunning job of quartering the Other that used to be the Weeper with bare hands. He has the force of a giant now. How? Why? Mance noticed that the milk-colored blade shone immaculately clean in sunlight, as though it hadn't been recently used.
Aegon sheathed Dawn into the weirwood scabbard on his back, never losing his hold on Jon. My gift. Mance was proud of the usage it had. He had given away his own scabbard to one of the only greatswords left in Westeros that could mortally wound and murder the enemy of his people, and make them fear the wrath of man.
But now… it was clear that at least some Others were men before becoming the enemies and the opposite of humankind… just like the slain enslaved by them. How do they decide who is to be a wight and who one of them? Somehow, this knowledge changed everything for Mance.
Men killing men. Men doing for each other.
No, there can't be any gods.
"Is he alright?" The Hound cut into Mance's pointless musing, asking about Jon, feigning indifference. There was much more than mean temper to Sandor Clegane's person, the wildling had learned by now. A peculiar… care. He looked after those very few people he cared for with singular fierceness and ferociousness. Mance treasured the knowledge that he was almost one of them now.
"It's not… It wasn't my ugly mouth that sickened the boy, was it?" the Hound growled quietly.
"Don't flatter yourself," Mance retorted dryly. "And be careful how you call Jon. You outdid yourself by talking to him before, if I may say, and I understand why-"
"-Do you?" the Hound asked very murderously.
"Yes," Mance hammered at his burned friend. "You were right in your wish to spare him the butcher's work. But I wouldn't call him boy if I were you. Jon was a man before I knew him, probably since he was barely more than a boy. He can withstand the likes of you." Or me. "He passed out because of the dragons. The black one got angry. I think he talked to them and it was… too much."
"Talking," Sandor snorted, or perhaps, sniffed, appeased by Mance's words. "Just like his father. You tell me, what good does it do, talking to a monster? They would both talk to the Others, wouldn't they?"
"They might, if it could be done," Mance had to agree. Jon had tried to reason with the King-beyond-the-Wall when they were enemies. He would have also tried to kill Mance without a second thought if Dalla did not go into labour and if Stannis did not attack at the very same moment. "They might also kill them all at need."
"Also true," the Hound chuckled. "Not that I ever thought Rhaegar had it in him to do for anyone, when we lived in the buggering septry. Look after the son, will you, singer?"
As you looked after his father?
"Did Rhaegar… did you…" Mance had seen atrocities beyond count. Yet he wished that Sandor did not have to cut Rhaegar in pieces with Valyrian steel, to make sure he stayed dead after his brief transformation into an Other, for as much as the Hound was probably able to do it. Or at least more able than anyone else in the present company.
"My brother went up in pretty crystals," the Hound rasped with sadness, gesturing at the pale blue sky. "He should be in seven heavens by now if any of the Faith nonsense is real. He certainly believed in it more than most."
"Very well," Mance said, meaning it.
"Tell that to his son when he wakes, will you? I'll be going now. I tarried here for too long."
On the contrary, the Hound was almost too fast in disposing of Rhaegar's body and finding a carriage to go north after his woman. To Mance's surprise, Sandor now dragged the bone chariot to Borroq the skinchanger and his boar.
"Take this," Sandor said, towering over the already huge wildling, handing him a black helm with red plumage...
Rhaegar's.
"I'll borrow your boar for it. I'll give you gold when I'm back if you go into the head of your little pet for as long as you can handle it without killing yourself. Help me track the Others or just force it to act a proper horse and not the damned pig."
"Should you not leave the late king's armour for… for his heir?" Aegon asked quietly, laying Jon onto a tanned mammoth skin, arranged by Morna the White Mask for his transport. Thicker than any canvas, it would do to carry Jon away by four men. No wain would go over the Bridge of Skulls, for it was far too narrow. Jon's eyes remained open, queer, unfocused.
"His heir would probably choose a snarling wolf helm if he could," Sandor said dryly, sniffing again. "Haven't you seen how he fights? And my late brother hated the plumage of his family with all his heart. He won't need it where he is going."
"You mean where he's gone? In seven heavens?" The bard in Mance was always sensitive to the power and the exact meaning of words. Those said and those… unsaid.
"That's exactly what I said," the Hound told Mance and Aegon with scorn, and set the boar to pull the bone carriage. The pig grunted from the weight and the dog went on, "You've been sitting on your ears, singer, if you heard anything else."
Borroq's glassy eyes indicated he was indeed helping the Hound. Rhaegar's obnoxious shield had interesting methods of convincing other men into following him, consisting of both encouragement and cruel mockery, hand in hand.
There's nothing wrong with my hearing, friend, Are you still looking after Rhaegar? Mance eyed the bulk of the provisions on the carriage very suspiciously. The Hound was either going to find his wife and return south soon with her, or die and become a wight or an Other as Sansa did, or... In any case, he would not need that much food. Where is the rest of the king's armour? Will you trade it to the Others, for your wife? They don't do trade, my friend.
Or are you taking your dead brother with you?
Mance doubted very much that the rest of Rhaegar's armour or his rubies turned into crystals even if the king did.
Did you do what was necessary for Rhaegar or not at all?
"This is madness," Mance repeated, meaning everything the Hound might have been doing, not giving voice to either his doubts or… his hopes. His words were predictably in vain. The giant man who called himself dog was nothing but tenacious.
"Isn't anything these days?" the Hound cut him off. "Dying would have been wise, singer. If you want wisdom, find a maester. Farewell!"
With that, the boar-pulled carriage and the giant of a man slowly disappeared into the woods.
Until next time, my friend, Mance added inwardly. "Aegon," he said aloud. There was never any time to waste beyond the Wall; the cold winds would soon begin to blow again. "Let us take Jon to the other side, over the bridge. Everyone who is still here, cross fast. We have but a few hours of daytime left. We should best be holed up inside the Shadow Tower by then. Westwatch is not well fortified and it looks unmanned from here. It is only the Wall that defends it and not the shabby outpost of the crows."
The day kept being brilliantly light, sunny as they had not seen it in weeks. Maybe they would have another hour for the manoeuvre. Maybe there were gods. No. Mance denied it. He was too old and had seen too much. There can't be any.
Could there?
"What of Jeyne and the others who went down into the Gorge?" Aegon asked timidly when they reached the other side. Mance was barely listening, focused on following the column of the free folk re-entering the realm of the kneelers. The surviving Weeper's men and the families that had grouped with him in the western mountains for protection, entered it for the first time. To Mance's relief, none of the free folk changed into a monster from stepping onto the bridge.
Aegon mentioned Jeyne again, relentless in his affection of youth.
"I'll go down and meet her and Val," Mance finally answered calmly. "They should be at the bottom now, maybe they're going up already. The path is shorter on this side of the deep."
Sigorn wanted to follow his lead, as a typical disciplined Thenn, reminding Mance of dead Styr and his calm grey-eyed cruelty.
"I'll go with you," he said.
His marriage to a kneeler lady had not softened him. To be sure, he still had both ears, unlike his father. It must have been much warmer in his lady's castle than in the god forsaken ice land the Thenns called their own. Mance found himself… envying him. Not the house, the woman. A good woman, judging by Sigorn's brooding look whenever anyone mentioned or even alluded to his lady wife.
Mance was bewildered with this change in himself; he hadn't given women much thought since Dalla's death.
"No," he refused the Thenn's offer. "All go with Aegon and Jon, right through the Wall here at Westwatch. The gates have never been properly sealed. Leave fighting men and women to hold the place until I arrive from the Gorge with the rest of the people. Then we'll fill the passage with ice rubble behind us, as the Watch had done for years, and walk to the Shadow Tower from the other side. With some luck, the Golden Company is holding it now, and they should be loyal to Aegon."
"I wonder," Aegon said pensively. "Since I'm officially no longer a dragon, much less the black one as some of them had hoped, the captains have been restless."
"Who will lead here?" Sigorn asked, making a step forward, offering himself.
"He will," Mance pointed at Aegon. "He was taught how to command men and not how not to break his neck scaling the Wall. And if the Southrons are here, maybe, they will listen to him. They won't listen to you or me." Sigorn was not too pleased, but he was a Thenn. He obeyed.
"What if," Aegon asked quietly, expressing a worry Mance shared, "what if more of your people turn into the Others when they… when we go behind the Wall?"
"Those two who were crossing the bridge with us and with the Weeper," Mance said sadly, "I didn't know them. And I know everyone. Everyone here. Even the Weeper's men. But not those two... How long was it since Weeper had them? Who else was with them?"
A lot of asking brought forth the expected results. No one knew the men unknown to Mance, nor was anyone too much around them. Weeper had them, or they had the real Weeper and possessed his body in the past ten days since they showed up in the camp. Fortunately, Weeper had always been a mean, eye-clawing bastard, and the sensible folk kept away from him.
Unsurprisingly, Tormund had something to say, and yet, strangely, it didn't involve the size of his member. Truth be told, it was a small miracle he did not speak this far. "Har! To Westwatch, you say, Mance. The red witch, she said we all had a white walker's shadow clinging to us when we passed through the Wall in Castle Black. Mists, she'd called them. Mists, Mance! She'd spread the rumour that we who hate those mists more than the kneelers can imagine have let the white walkers into their lands! But she is a witch, Mance. She must know it. And if she is right, each and every one of us is carrying his doom! There will be no tomorrow if we go beyond the Wall. We should stay in our land and take our chances!" More voices of the free folk chattered, agreed.
"You will forgive me if I don't believe that woman," Mance replied fiercely, remembering the glamour making him look like the Lord of Bones; the pain, the unease, the shame. The price of staying alive. "She made you see that she burned me and she never did. The only true power she has is the power of deception."
Yet, somehow, through some witchcraft, Melisandre had known about Jon's real parentage. Mance had received her letter about it when he was mourning for the spearwives in the godswood of Winterfell. He would have burned it, unread, if the heart tree did not whisper to him how it was all true what the letter was saying, all that and more. He opened it, read it, listened to the tree, listened to Lord Reed, listened to his heart.
And discovered, weeks later, how there was much more to the truth, more than even Lord Reed had been able to see with his gift of the green sight… Rhaegar and Lyanna did not die...
So maybe there were gods, whose will surpassed both the greenseers and the sorcerers, revealing the truth to men as they saw fit; contemplating at the same time the entire world.
No. There are none. Or Rhaegar would live still.
Stubbornly, the King-beyond-the-Wall continued speaking from his heart - it feared the red woman's intent and strongly doubted her knowledge.
"I can say with authority that some Others have passed south of the Wall. I have seen them! For all I know, it could have been the red woman who brought them over by her fires and her sorcery. But I won't say that because I don't know what brought them. We'll have to trust each other. Having said that, open your eyes, all of you. We are used to doing for one another when we turn wights. This should be no different. Everyone should have dragonglass at hand. Man, woman or child. Have you counted the enemy in the night? We have to put the Wall between us again."
They listened. The human trail turned to the poorly closed gates of Westwatch. Mance helped carry Jon to it, and then hurried back alone, down the goat trail skirting the Wall and plunging into the Gorge.
The descent into the deep pass was swift; it came to him easier than commanding men. Mance took pleasure from his lonely hike in the sunshine when, from the bottom of the deep, he heard ladies' screams and the splashing of water. Cursing the treacherous krakens and godless wights, Mance ran into the darkness below him, forgetting the sun.
Quite unexpectedly, Euron Greyjoy was not the source of trouble. The ironwight battled a real kraken in the ford; the only point of passage over a deep long, narrow bay on the bottom of the Gorge, filled with wild sea and jagged rocks. The waves penetrated deep into the continent. Behind their breaking point, the waterway continued northeast, as a deep bed of a subterranean river.
Mance was grateful for not having an animal sigil susceptible of attacking and devouring its victims. The King-beyond-the-Wall only had a helm with raven wings; Val had saved it in honour of his memory, thinking him dead… But ravens were tame sparrows compared to dragons and direwolves, lions and krakens… Not feeling tame as a man, Mance waded into the water and drew his longsword, swathing a tentacle away, not cutting it.
Val stood in the ford as well, barely composed, unable to walk on. "I stepped on it," she said, "it looked like a rock. And then it coiled and moved as a damned snake. If the deadmen did not come..."
"Cross behind us, now!" Mance commanded her. "Get your feet out of the water! All cross!"
"What if there are more?" Val asked with unease, but then she went over the ford swiftly, avoiding to look down. Jeyne followed suit, as did others.
Mance soon discovered the kraken to be so large that it occupied the shallow crossing entirely. It had nearly caught Aegons' Jeyne's feet before Euron cut off two of his tentacles. The animal grabbed the dead human kraken as a payment, and was now squeezing him with all the remaining limbs. Or at least with very many of them.
"All cross!" Mance boomed. "Cross as you can! Behind Val! Step hard over the beast and cross!" The monster was stirred by movement, it seemed.
Mance waddled into deeper water, waved his arms and wriggled his hips like a madman, hoping that the kraken would follow him; a new, juicy prey on the run. It did, releasing Euron. The rocky bottom cracked and crunched under Mance's boots and under the mass of advancing tentacles.
Human bones and skulls of the less fortunate travellers. I am walking over them… Mance shivered. The Bridge of Skulls, we are under it. It is named for this… For the dead eaten by this kraken.
Mance battled the limbs and the strange, almost purple eyes of the sea monster, growing weary from their quiet gaze. "It's growing new tentacles," he told the kraken lord in amazement. It almost felt as if the creature was growing new eyes as well.
"It is," Euron said, not breathing from exertion, dead as usual, "it's hard to kill." He was trying to kill it nonetheless. "I swear it is as big as Nagga!"
Mance wondered who or what Nagga was. "Maybe we shouldn't kill it," Mance considered, panting, envying the wight who did not have to both fight and struggle to breathe. "Maybe there is another possibility."
The Wall had many watchers, and not all of them men, according to some tales of the giants in the Old Tongue. In some others, the most beautiful and the least truthful ones, the gods walked with men on earth in trying times. Mance had studied the lore of his lands better than anyone alive. "It may be an old guardian. How did the kneelers' words go? How is it that I could forget them? Night... Night gathers… and now… now my watch begins!"
When he said that, the first line of the vows of the Night's Watch he had sworn and betrayed more than twenty years ago, the kraken… stopped its attack, sank through the human bones and hid under the bottom of the foaming, singing sea. Mance listened. The Gorge was a giant harp, played by an invisible musician, on iron-hard strings made of water and hollow rock. Mance committed its tune to memory while the rest of the free folk and Euron's surviving wights crossed to the safe side in peace. He would make a song sounding like the sea, some day, hoping people would listen to it, and not only to the song of steel.
"I lost two of my best men before you came," Euron complained in his deep, hateful voice. "You should have told the password to the lady."
"I didn't know there was a monster, much less a password," Mance said curtly. He looked at Val. "I'm sorry. I haven't encountered it when I travelled here before."
"What does the guardian do?" Val asked. She didn't go far up, waiting for everyone to finish crossing. "Would it keep out the Others?"
"I think so," Euron answered her politely to Mance's surprise, with almost honest hesitation. "I sensed so in my… condition. But it couldn't recognise us for what we were, so it fought, I think."
It must have recognised me as a black brother when I crossed this ford in the past, Mance realised, not as a deserter I already was at the time. As if the bloody creature knew that the words of the crows were for life and omitted to take into account any contrary decision of men.
Val didn't deign to reply to the wight, and pointedly so. Her face wrinkled in disgust. She hurried forward, to the head of the column. Euron stalked her with his gaze, appearing more dead than usual. Mance felt almost sorry for him, but not quite. The iron lord's thirst for power was what brought him this low, not any enemy or injustice suffered.
The kraken guards the way down here and the bridge up there. Old magic is all around us. The bridge must have forced the Others to show us their true face when they tried to run and go south, disguised as Weeper and his men, if those two were ever men at all… Does it mean that all who crossed are safe from the curse? Mance certainly hoped so.
Sorcery is a sword without a hilt, Dalla used to repeat when Mance searched stubbornly for the Horn of Joramun. There is no safe way to grasp it.
What is magic then? he had replied. The wonder where you don't see the sorcerer who conjured it? How much more dangerous can it be?
You must go up, Mance, you must.
He trod at the end of the column with the setting sun warming his back.
The climb to the Wall was arduous, but short. Fighters among the free folk waited in a disorganised battle line for the last arrivals to Westwatch, at the open gate. The day miraculously still lasted while everyone braved the tunnel in the Wall and began their march east. Mance remembered Rhaegar again. He should have been here with us by rights.
A good man has died and yet the gods he believed in are rejoicing, sending us a long, sunny day.
At dusk, they finally reached Shadow Tower. Mance found that Aegon had been successful in taking it, or, rather, asserting his youthful authority over the various men already holding it.
"Harry Strickland has indeed arrived here with the Golden Company," Aegon informed Mance in the commander's solar, looking and sounding terribly tired. Strickland, the captain-general of the Golden Company, was a coward who preferred an easy life if he could have it.
"He's complaining about the cold and the pickled food, but he is here three days before his own estimate," Aegon said. At least old Harry was not entirely hopeless, brave or not. "He is now playing cyvasse with Ser Denys Mallister, the venerable old commander of this castle, who is keen on meeting you again, he says."
"I'd rather not," Mance declined politely, suddenly feeling as rotten as Aegon looked after only few hours in command.
Mallister was the reason Mance deserted from the Night's Watch. At the time, the very young wildling had resigned himself that he would not be able to have any girl he wanted on the Wall. Only on the sly, as everyone else. But when the commander wanted to take away his cloak, mended with red thread by a free woman who merely helped him to health, Mance snapped at the unnecessary stifling of any form of human expression and ran.
From here. From the Shadow Tower.
Before he was forbidden to sing and to talk…
Predictably, the place did not change at all in twenty years. Just like, in Mance's view, a black cloak mended with red remained black still.
Mance Rayder never looked back. He'd never had any consideration for crows and their stiff ways.
Until the day when Jon Snow walked into his tent, young and different from anyone else who took the black in Mance's time, right after killing Mance's best friend and worst enemy in the Watch, at Qhorin's own damned order and behest… Mance was certain. Qhorin Halfhand, more stubborn than I ever was. Jon and Qhorin could never fool the King-beyond-the-Wall; Jon was no deserter. He would never break any oaths, or not like Mance did. When the crows elected Jon as their Lord Commander, Mance began suffering from a far-fetched hope for peace, for a change that would benefit... everyone. He hadn't been wrong.
The King-beyond-the-Wall wore a different cloak now, a dirty white one, made of human cruelty, first by the Boltons and then by himself. He would bury it in the godswood of Winterfell when the winter was over.
"Jon?" he inquired quietly about the young man he considered his friend. He wasn't certain how Jon looked on him now.
"Sweating and talking to dragons in his sleep," Aegon gestured at the commander's solar. "I am tending to him myself. I don't trust anyone else. Not even my cousin, Ned Dayne, Lord of Starfall. But I've had worse fevers on the Rhoyne. He'll be fine, I think."
"Who nursed you?" Mance asked and realised he knew the answer. "She did, didn't she?"
"Yes," Aegon said miserably. "Jon's mother." The young man never forgot his unwilling role in a plot that had almost cost Jon's mother her life in King's Landing. And almost brought Rhaegar back his memory.
"Very well," Mance said, wishing to stop remembering the events around the mummers' show he had taken to the capital. It was never wise to grow attached to one's players. Or to anyone. But, just like the Hound, the wildling king was no maester. No one expected wisdom from the northern barbarians. "If you don't mind, I'll go and hide from Ser Denys now-"
"I might join you in hiding," Aegon said. "But someone else is here to see you. He couldn't stand waiting for you much longer," the young man continued wearily. "Lady Val was overjoyed to see him, and cousin Ned thrilled to get rid of him. They had to ride double since we left with the king. Harry Strickland has no love for children."
Mance's son was finally allowed to run in, from the back of Aegon's new chambers. The boy jumped into his father's arms, almost a toddler now. The King-beyond-the-Wall grinned stupidly.
"And mother?" the boy asked immediately.
"Your mother is dead, son, you know that."
"I do," the boy said, paused. "My other mother."
"She was never your mother," Mance protested.
"She was."
Septa Tyene. Tyene from Dorne. Blond like Dalla and yet amber-skinned like no other woman Mance had ever known.
Val gave Mance a very questioning look. "Dalla would kill you or I would, if you betrayed her. But we would not expect you to…. to…"
What? Mance thought bitterly. To hold my cock in my breeches? I'd expect that from myself at this age.
"Was there another woman? In the south?" Val sounded genuinely curious and to Mance's surprise not terribly angry.
"There wasn't," he hurried to deny it, faithful to Dalla's memory, ashamed for feeling less loyal to it now than ever before. The day had been beautiful despite its losses, and his flesh was stirring again, old or not. Not old enough.
"There was," his son said, "My other mother. She was proud. She rode a brown horse. Ty-ene. Name. Tyene."
Mance frowned unhappily. Why was his son able to talk before being able to walk properly?
For being your son. He might sing soon for all you know. In response, his son tugged at his lute, hung on his swordbelt. Mance hoped this didn't mean he was seeing things like Lord Reed; that would be a difficult life. Though it is better that he picks the lute rather than the sword at this age.
"What did you do? Did you murder her?" Val asked, not giving up. She knew Mance's moods well and she must have been sensing the unpleasant truth. She was a woman, but she shared some of his ruthlessness at need… and occasionally by sheer, stupid mistake.
"Let's say, Val," Mance began, "if I ever did to Dalla what I did to Tyene, I would be dead before fathering anyone."
"And that was?"
"What do you think?" he said more sharply than intended. "You've killed men for less."
I took her… roughly... as if she was an animal, not a woman. Instead of just sending her away when she kept looking at me as if I was the main course on some kneelers' feast, and not a man. The impulse to show the Dornishwoman how wrong she was about him being hers or anyone's treat in the south, the south that despised him and his kind, had been too strong.
Mance surprised himself by how fast he was done with his crime, emptying eagerly all of himself, body and blackness of the soul, inside an almost unknown woman… He was even more surprised that she… She did not want what he did, he could tell, but she was able to take it. Moreover, she had put up with him. She was angry and she could have defended herself, yet she'd let him do, let him go on as far as he wanted… for reasons which were entirely her own. He had left her crying and never forgotten her expression. She had dark hair then, but it didn't matter. She could be covered in dragon scales for all he cared.
Since then, Mance wanted to steal Tyene in full knowledge that he had missed his opportunity. She never sought him out again, as was to be expected. When she brought his son back from the Reach, she sounded as if she had done it to excuse herself for ogling him... And it was he who was indebted to her, he who had been wrong… He should have at least made a song for her, instead of only cowardly saying how sorry he was for how he treated her.
Or he could have offered to love her properly, the way he believed a woman should be loved. If she was still interested in him as… as a meal, he supposed. That was what she saw in him, some barbarian she could take joy from, if he played along. The Dornish way truly seemed to be as daring and free in demanding pleasure as that song Mance loved, together with half of the realm. The Dornishman's wife.
"I've always known you would find a new woman. You are not dead yet, Mance," Val said wisely, not pressing matters further.
"Neither are you" he retorted, finally recognising the way to turn the blade of Val's questioning back on her and away from his person. He hadn't seen his good-sister have her way with a man since the Wall took Jarl. That was before Dalla died, before their son was born. Ages of the world ago, or so it seemed now.
"Oh I know that," Val said dryly, looking through him. "And my joy might come easier if I was dead," she laughed scathingly.
"What do you mean?" Mance didn't understand.
"The only men interested in stealing me of late were worthless kneelers and repulsive deadmen. Not much of a choice. I must be getting old and ugly."
On the contrary, Val was more beautiful than ever. A man had to be blind not to see it. But to Mance, she was like a sister.
"Who do you fancy more in your bed, a kneeler or a deadman?" he asked with mocking curiosity.
"I'll tell you when you tell me more about.. Ty-ene."
"Mother. Pretty," the boy said cleverly.
Mance had to think of a name for him. A good name. It was time to find one. His son lived long enough to learn speech. Even if he died now, he deserved a name, to be remembered by it.
"I cried in a castle," the boy stated, not ashamed of it, not yet. "Mother came and said, father is a good man. I'll take you to him. I stopped crying."
"Did she say that? She isn't your mother and she didn't really know me." Mance nevertheless felt grateful to Tyene for protecting his unworthy image in the innocent eyes of his son.
He was back to the Wall and the Wall had to be manned in winter.
He would never see her again.