SAMWELL

The beacon of the Hightower burned bright as a jewel, and the rising moon was big and orange on the horizon. Oldtown always looked twice as much like an enchanted city by night, lanterns flickering in the elegant stone warrens and spires and minarets prodding at the stars. The Starry Sept itself was particularly beautiful on its high hill, looking like a subtlety spun out of sugar, the sevensong services being conducted within its great walls even now. Out to sea, the ocean lay as black and tranquil as a coat of paint.

In some ways, it reminded Sam of Braavos. But he was not up here either to take the air or enjoy the view – he had an entire star chart to plot and fill out between now and morning, and since he was almost as terrified of Maester Tycho as he had been of Alliser Thorne, nothing less than total devotion to the task would do. Of all his courses at the Citadel, he liked this one the least – though it would be immediately superseded whenever the dread day arrived for him to cut up corpses. It was not that the work was uninteresting or useless, but calculating endless geometric angles and vertices made his head hurt, one star was bloody hard to tell from another, and Maester Tycho was reliably on hand to deplore the results. As Sam did not expect to be navigating any ships in the near future, and was already sufficiently familiar with the theorem that the world was round, not flat, and traveled around the sun instead of vice versa, he had hoped to be excused from any further discourses in the subject. But no luck.

Being Sam, he did not dare to actually say so. He was already in a delicate position; he was a novice of the Citadel, but he was still a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch, not to mention Randyll Tarly's exiled, disinherited son. He had to watch his every step, and he had felt no urge to befriend any of his fellow novices – their taunts were all too familiar to him from his childhood. They were as cruel as only adolescent boys could be. And while Sam had lost several stone of weight, largely thanks to the dubious food of the refectory and a fortnight spent tramping up the banks of the Honeywine in search of plant and animal specimens, he was still "Ser Piggy," and he knew it. But if he was to make a maester as Jon wished, he had to endure it.

It was not all bad. Sam had taken to the studies of history, philosophy, and theology like a duck to water, and would forge his copper link in record time. He had helped to restore an ancient manuscript copy of the Gesta Aegoni, a chronicle of the Targaryen Conquest, and argued with Maester Willem if the Field of Fire had been the only way to convince Rock and Reach to bend the knee. But most of all, Sam was hunting for records of the Others. The Citadel's library was the most wonderful place he had ever seen: not dark, mildewed, and dusty like the Castle Black archives, but vast, sunlit, and soaring, with polished ogives and fluted columns, endless shelves reached by ladders and guarded by grilles, with a costive old maester who sat behind a high desk and evil-eyeballed every sticky-fingered novice who happened by. Books could not be taken out of the sacred precincts; they were signed out, perused in a reading room, stained with even a single blot of ink on pain of death, and then returned. Thus whenever he had a free instant – he had no interest in the extracurricular activities of his fellow students, namingly getting shite-faced drunk on the fearsomely strong cider of the Quill and Tankard – Sam could be located in the reading room, puzzling through some long-dead scholar's cramped handwriting and interminable digressions on the nature of evil. The Others came from the Land of Always Winter, they woke either when it was cold or it was cold because they woke, and fire, dragonglass, and dragonsteel could kill them. But since Sam had learned this all already in Castle Black, he was praying for a breakthrough.

He'd had no luck until he left the straight historical texts behind, and branched out into the arcane. Here he found the prophecy of Azor Ahai that Stannis Baratheon had claimed of himself, and the tale of the Battle for the Dawn. Sam did find it curious that in this account, Azor Ahai was referred to as being a "Taergaryyn." In fact the further he looked, the more sharply the focus seemed to resolve on dragons.

Dragons. Sam remembered the tales told by Xhondo, the gossip running rampant, the fact that Archmaester Marwyn had left on the instant to travel to the rumored Targaryen queen who had risen in the east with three of the creatures. But this was a very touchy topic to broach in the Citadel. Sam had done enough reading to believe that the claims of maesters poisoning the last dragons were not entirely without merit. The Citadel desired to forge a new world, one of science and logic and reason, cleaned of sorcery and superstition, and anyone even halfway familiar with the line of dragonkings knew that they had always danced too close to madness.

Sam had attended a lecture yesterday where one of the maesters proposed a new theory: the Targaryens' Valyrian custom of wedding brother to sister was detrimental not just religiously but physically, magnifying their suspect mental traits and reflecting them back on each other, so madness was passed down in the blood along with their distinctive silver hair and purple eyes. It was noteworthy, the maester concluded, that in the event of a Targaryen marrying outside the family – when Daeron the Good wed Myriah Martell, or when Prince Rhaegar wed Elia Martell, for that matter – one or both of these characteristics seemed to be muted. Both Daeron and Rhaegar's firstborn children had taken after their Dornish mothers in appearance, and while Daeron's grandson Aerion Brightflame was a Targaryen in the worst sense of the word, the madness had not otherwise resurfaced in the line until the infamous Aerys.

But what if dragons are the only way? Sam thought now, struggling to set up the Myrish eye he had brought to observe the sky. I could never go back to Jon with so little. Mayhaps I should follow Marwyn's lead, go to find Queen Daenerys and her dragons. The idea made him shudder. But if a Targaryen had been the one to lead the Night's Watch in the last full-scale battle against the Others, and afterwards Brandon the Builder, a Stark, had raised the Wall to keep them out. . .

And Joramun blew the Horn of Winter, and woke giants from the earth.

Sam shuddered again. That was another of the things he did not want to think about, on this pleasant if chilly night in Oldtown. Painstakingly he dipped his quill, recorded the position of the Ice Dragon's blue north star, and twiddled with the lens of the Myrish eye in hopes of getting a better look at a dusty patch that might be a nebula. At least up here he could have some peace and quiet; up here he could think about Gilly and wonder how she and little Aemon – which was what Dalla's boy would be named when he turned two – were settling in at Horn Hill. Sam longed to write to her, but Gilly could not read, and he would be far too embarrassed to commit half the things he wanted to say to parchment anyway. With his luck, it would be intercepted by Leo Tyrell or another of the particularly obnoxious ones, and posted up across the Citadel for every soul to –

"Slayer."

Sam jumped a foot, knocked over his inkwell, and had to make a lunge to catch it before it dropped forty feet over the parapet. Heart pounding and hands stained, he wiped them on his robe, leaving two fat black stains. He whirled about to find Alleras the Sphinx, the slender Dornish youth, watching him with amusement.

"Wh-what are you doing here?" Sam stammered, trying to tell whether any of the ink had splashed onto the parchment. "You scared the life out of me."

"Sorry." Alleras moved to the Myrish eye, readjusted its lens, and expertly swung up it to gaze at the heavens. "Gods, I remember doing this when I first arrived here. I wanted to claw Tycho's eyes out, and that was after I got over wanting to strangle him. But tonight. . ." There was a pause as he squinted. "I'm in search of something different."

"What?"

Alleras didn't answer immediately. Then he said, "From the looks of you, Tarly, you're a man who never misses a meal. But I didn't see you in Hall earlier."

Sam flinched. "No. I was in the library again. Why?"

Alleras straightened up and met his gaze. "Did you hear the news from the Wall?"

"No." I don't want to. Not here, not in front of him. I don't want to.

"Sorry," Alleras said again. "I lost my father not long past, I know how it feels. But your friend Jon Snow is dead. Has been for some time. His own men killed him in the Castle Black courtyard, and it's the one who did it – I misremember his name, Baden or Bowden, the steward – that's Lord Commander now."

Sam felt as if he'd been punched very hard. As if he himself had been thrown out into thin air, falling. "That's. . . not so. . ." he managed. Bowen Marsh? Bowen Marsh a murderer? "Jon can't be dead, he wouldn't have. . ."

Alleras shrugged. "I thought the same of my father. It happened nonetheless. The gods are never just, Slayer."

Sam's legs had turned to water. He sat down heavily, sucked in a cracking breath, and started to cry.

Alleras eyed him uncomfortably for several moments. If this got out, it would be all over the Citadel by the morrow. But the Sphinx did no such thing. Instead he sat down on the crenel next to Sam, and rested a light hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," the Dornish boy said. "You were close to him?"

"He. . ." Sam struggled for the words. Why indeed would the gods take Jon Snow, whom the Night's Watch so desperately needed, and leave him here? At the moment, a hatred like nothing he had ever known leapt up in him, to see Bowen Marsh's blood on his blade, make him pay and pay dearly. "Jon was the first person who was ever kind to me. I would have died myself if not for him. He protected me from Alliser Thorne and the others. . . he got me the post with Maester Aemon, he wanted me to take his place. . . Aemon's, not Jon's, I could never take Jon's, I don't think I can take Aemon's either." He gulped air. Stinging tears kept rolling down his cheeks. I plotted to make Jon Lord Commander. Is this my fault? "So what am I here for after all, if the man who s-sent me is dead?"

"Likely the Night's Watch still needs a maester," Alleras said, clearly trying to be comforting.

The Night's Watch needs far more than a maester, Sam thought. I was beyond the Wall, I saw them, I saw them on the Fist. . . I should have died, hundreds of braver men than me did. Jon gave me a dragonglass dagger and that broken horn he found. To remember it by, he said, but I don't want to remember it, I want it to go away. . . The horn he had yielded with the rest of his personal possessions, when he was officially accepted as a novice, but of a sudden Sam wanted it back. It is the last thing I have of Jon, and it's only a broken horn. How can it be a threat to anybody?

"Slayer?" Alleras said. "You have that look in your eye that means you're thinking of something. Should we all stand ready for action?"

"Don't call me that!" It hadn't been so bad when it was his friends, back at the Wall. But the novices had picked up on it after he'd been cadged into telling the tale, and in their voices Sam could hear the sneering disdain of educated and worldly men, who thought there was no mystery that a theorem could not explain and that those who clung to any sort of "primeval" beliefs were hopelessly naïve and out of touch. They didn't believe in Others any more than Sam's own Sworn Brothers had, and his explorations in the library were the cause of further ridicule. Sam's forbearance was stretched quite thin just now as it was, and the rage was in him in a way it hadn't been since he'd punched Dareon the singer in that brothel in Braavos. Blindly, furiously, he lashed out.

Alleras made a startled noise and skipped out of the way, but couldn't dodge entirely, and Sam's blow clipped him and sent him sprawling with a surprisingly feminine squeal. The Sphinx rolled over and sprang to his feet, but made no attempt to hit Sam back. "Bloody hell, Sl-Samwell," he panted. "I didn't mean it that way. I'm not Leo Tyrell or any of those sorts."

"No," Sam said abashedly. "You're not." Then he thought about Jon being dead, and him hitting Dareon because he'd spent all their money on whores, and Maester Aemon calling him Egg and dreaming that he was old, and Gilly far away, and Jon being dead, and started to cry again.

It took some time for Alleras to calm him down after that, and Sam was mortified at the thought that one of the maesters would pop up to chastise them for the ruckus. "I'm sorry for your friend," the Dornish boy said. "Truly. But you'd best finish your star chart – you have to hand it in to Maester Tycho in the morning, don't forget. Here, I'll help you."

Sam wiped his nose on the sleeve of his robe and miserably dipped his quill again. The last thing he wanted to think about right now was his star chart and Maester Tycho, but with Alleras confidently jotting down calculations and telling him where to look in the sky, it was easier. Sam wondered what he had been sent up to look for, but decided against asking. Alleras was well on his way to becoming a maester, and it was an open secret that he was currently forging his link of Valyrian steel. The higher mysteries. If anyone could be expected to understand about the Others and the dragons, it was Alleras, and it suddenly occurred to Sam that he would do very well to recruit the Sphinx as an ally in more than just astronomy. Alleras knew all sorts of things about the Citadel, from the mundane to the weird – which dish never to eat in the refectory, to the hallway supposedly haunted by the ghost of a young novice, and even how to get into the room where the glass candles were said to burn. This entire time, Sam had been approaching his education the same way he'd approached his whole life – by putting his head down and running for cover, meekly absorbing whatever abuse those stronger than him doled out, and only daring to flourish when he was certain no one was looking. They have no link to represent what it is to learn to be a man.

"Alleras," he said, and saw the Sphinx's head turn in surprise. "I. . . need your help."

He'd half-expected the Dornish youth to laugh at him, just because Samwell Tarly had been laughed at so often in his life. But instead Alleras was quiet, studying him with the thoughtful black eyes of his Summer Islander mother. Sam had almost begun to fear that he would not answer when the other boy said, "Doing what?"

Sam swallowed. "Jon Snow may be dead, but. . . but my duty to him is not." The words came hard. For a few moments he'd wanted nothing so much as to use this an excuse to run away, away from star charts and Maester Tycho's acid tongue and the mockery of his fellow novices, away from bad food and haunted corridors, away to Gilly and find a little place for them to settle down and finally be safe and happy. But if he did, it would betray Jon's memory unforgivably. Bowen Marsh does not understand what he is up against. The thought of returning to the Wall to join forces with Jon's killer almost made Sam choke, but if every oaf in the world called him Sam the Slayer, it was because he had seen such things with his own eyes. It is more than pettiness and rivalry. It always has been.

Alleras was still watching him. Then he said, "Where do you want me to take you?"

"I don't know," Sam admitted. "I just need help. I don't want to let Jon down."

"Come." Alleras beckoned him across the top of the tower. "I think I know where to start."

Sam hurried after the slim, light-footed youth as quietly as he could. Down the trapdoor and the twisting steps, the dark corridors and the maze of turns. Novices and acolytes alike were strongly discouraged from wandering the Citadel by night, though there were always those out enjoying the carnal delights of Oldtown; very few men had it in them to actually keep a vow of celibacy, Sam had found. Including me. In some ways, it was good that he likely would not see Gilly again for years, if at all. If she was closer, he might be more tempted to transgress again, and he wanted with all his heart to hold fast to his word. The need for maesters to remain chaste was somewhat harder for Sam to understand than the need for the Night's Watch to remain chaste – the maesters were not the only thing standing between the Others and all of humanity, after all. But he did not consider this any sort of excuse.

"Here," Alleras said softly, startling him. "We've arrived."

Sam looked up with a jerk, expecting – hoping – to see something grandiose and helpfully overflowing with information. But it was not. It was the weathered wooden drawbridge that led to the little island containing the Ravenry, the oldest building in the Citadel. When they crossed it, they emerged into an unfamiliar courtyard, woven about with moss and vines. It was late enough by now that the night's chill had grown stronger – growing up in Horn Hill, he would have thought it uncomfortably cold, but that was before what he knew what cold was. The moon was clipped halfway behind the cloisters on the far side, casting a ghostly bone-pale light on the ground, the red leaves, the white branches of the weirwood.

Sam stopped short. There were one or two riverlands lords who kept the old gods, he recalled, but other than that, a heart tree was neither a common nor a welcome sight in the devoutly Seven-worshiping south. He did also recall hearing about it on his first arrival, that the ravens liked to perch on it, and it was not surprising that the maesters had one. Aside from their study of the northern culture and iconography that had built up around the silent watchers, Sam knew that the weirwoods were believed to possess a vast store of communal knowledge – that the faces carved into them were not merely ceremonial, that they were truly animated by some life force that enabled them to see and remember everything that had taken place before them. And since weirwoods could live for thousands of years, that made them a source more valuable than any scroll could match. If you can coax them to speak.

"Aye," Alleras said, seemingly reading his thoughts. "I've spent a goodly amount of time here recently. If only Marwyn the Mage had not left. My education in these mysteries will not be complete until he returns, but there are times when I almost grasp the knack of it. I will confess, I lied to you. Tonight I heard the word that Jon Snow was dead beyond all doubt, but I had already suspected it, from what I had seen here."

Something about his voice made Sam turn sharply. What Alleras was doing was both forbidden and dangerous – the idiosyncratic few who decided to forge their links of Valyrian steel were supervised extremely closely, to ensure they did not latch onto some dusty dream of sorcery and start wreaking bloody havoc to see it brought to life. It went against everything the Citadel stood for, everything that was good and proper. They did not wish to restrict knowledge from those who had a genuine and conscientious desire for it, but they were expected to learn just enough to see how perilous it would be to learn more. With the Mage gone, however, it was not surprising that his pupils had the chance to delve much deeper. Not surprising, and not wise.

"You should not," Sam said, aware of how hollow it sounded when he was the one who had asked Alleras for help. "You don't know what it is, it's dangerous."

The Sphinx cocked an eyebrow. "Indeed, you are correct. Ignorance is the greatest poison the world has ever known, particularly when it is accounted as a virtue. Surely you've noticed that men fear and hate you when you know too much, Samwell. Only the very strong can overwhelm that stupid animal soul inside, screaming at them to shut up, sit down, and be ordinary."

Sometimes he speaks as if he was a maester chained forty years, and not the stripling of nineteen that he is. And he is right that we oft mistake what we subjectively believe to be objective truth. It made Sam feel very tired, suddenly. All his life he'd been mocked and tortured for being fat and weak and craven, but he had always known uncompromisingly that it was true, which made it harder to disregard. He searched for answers in his scrolls, pondered the theoretical and abstract in hopes that he might one day find an explanation of human nature, and yet he never had. If I was a different sort of man, I might want to the Wall to break, and the Others to take everyone who has ever hurt me. But I don't. It's strange.

And besides, the Wall was thousands of years old, imbued with spells of untold potency and power, wards and weavings. It would never come down, Sam reassured himself. So long as it still stood, the Others could not pass, and so this was a moot question anyway. Someday they may come in their legions, but the fire of Azor Ahai and the ice of Brandon the Builder still holds. And on that day, no matter how craven he was, it would be his duty to stand alongside his brothers and defend it. Gods be good, it would be long after he was dead – or better yet, never. But in the interim, he was still here in Oldtown. Safe and –

The weirwood opened its carved, sap-crusted eyes, and stared at him.

Sam let out a strangled yelp and leapt backwards, narrowly avoiding flattening Alleras for the second time that night. He thought, or mayhaps only imagined, that the face in the trunk was changing, that it was no longer merely the tree's flesh but knitted with another, that it was – no, he was only making believe in his grief, no, it wasn't – it wasn't, it was –

Shock coruscated down Sam's body to his toes. There was no mistaking it: it was Jon's face that looked back at him. His lipless wooden mouth moved, shaping words, but all Sam could hear was howling wind.

"Jon," he said weakly. "Jon, I can't understand you."

The eyes flashed. Sam felt a blast of ungodly cold on his face. This time, however, he was able to make out a word. Horn, Jon whispered. Horn.

"Horn?" Sam repeated. "What horn? The horn you gave me? I don't have it anymore, I left it behind when I became a novice – why? What is it? Why?"

Find, Jon said, and something else, something like fire. Sam was almost cracking apart with disbelief, euphoria, and anxiety all at once – this was not truly Jon, only some kind of distorted, echoing shadow. He is still dead, Sam realized. But what horn?

Jon's mouth shaped one final word. Stolen.

And then he was gone, winked out like a candle, quenched by wind or water. Sam was left staring at the weirwood so hard that his eyes crossed, not entirely sure if he was still in possession of his full complement of sanity. He wanted to turn around, grab Alleras by the scruff of the neck, and demand, "Did you see that?" but one glance at the Sphinx's face confirmed that he had. If we're both mad, at least we have company.

"The horn," Sam croaked. "I don't know why, but I need to get it back. I need to see it. Now."

Alleras shook his head, slowly as a stunned ox. "Even I can't get into that room. The only key that opens it belongs to the archmaesters."

"Jon said it was stolen." An unnameable panic was building in Sam by the instant. "Do you think Archmaester Marwyn took it, mayhaps – but he was gone before I took my vows as a novice – " He sounded a blibbering fool, so alarmed over what a tree had told him. It could have been just his – but no. It was real, he'd stake his soul on it.

"If it was stolen," Alleras said, weighing each word deliberately, "then whoever stole it stole the key first."

"Would they be mad enough to stay here?" Sam could not fathom it.

"I doubt it," the Sphinx replied, "and nobody has left us in at least the last six months, but – "

He stopped.

"But?" Sam pressed.

"I must be mistaken," Alleras said. "But do you recall Pate?"

"Pate?" Sam had in fact met him briefly upon his first arrival at the Citadel, he recalled. A pale, soft youth whom for no discernible reason he had misliked. Pate had – oh gods, he had been gone for at least a fortnight, and the common assumption was that the maesters' patience had finally run out, that it was plain that the boy would never make a member of their order, and it was therefore time to cut bait and attend to the ones with actual talent. But if not –

But if he was no maester material, how on earth would he have had the wit to pull off such an audacious theft, and why would he have taken the broken dirty useless old horn anyway, unless –

Who is Pate? Sam wondered frantically. Who is Alleras? Gods, who are any of them?

Too much. It was too much. He had to focus on one thing at a time. Sam turned and said, "Did Pate steal it, do you think?"

Alleras gazed back at him inscrutably. Then he said, "I thought nothing of it at the time, but I did see a man who very much appeared to be Pate, leaving the Citadel some weeks ago. I tried to follow him from curiosity, but lost him. And Pate – beforehand – was the assistant to Archmaester Walgrave, who's gone so senile that he wouldn't know his own mother from a hole in the ground. If he was so inclined, it might not have been difficult to steal the skeleton key."

"But would he have ever done it on his own? Someone must have put him up to it. Must have manipulated him. Think, Alleras. Think."

For another moment there was nothing but silence, as the Sphinx wrinkled his brow so hard that it looked painful. Then at last, he opened his eyes.

"Aye," he whispered. "And I think I saw him too."