Chapter Fifteen: The Night Visit (Part II)
Luckily, we reach the top maybe a minute after that, and I can see plenty of fires illuminating the snowy corridors. One of the men on watch duty helps hold the cage steady while Jon opens the door and we step out.
"What are you doing up here, Snow?" he says. "I figured Thorne had you confined to quarters. After the stunt you pulled? And yet here you are, and you've brought a girl."
"A girl Ser Alliser thinks is a wildling," Edd corrects, getting the gate for us. "He probably sent her up with him himself. Thinks she'll throw him over the Wall."
The men have a laugh over that; Ser Alliser's dislike of Jon is apparently common knowledge around here. I consider just going with calling him Thorne in my head, as in "Thorne-in-my-side," and since he's kind of a prick. The thought makes me grin.
"I'm not doing his dirty work for him," I shoot back, which makes Edd laugh some more. He and I already get along well enough, so even if I'm not supposed to be up here, I doubt he really cares.
Jon leads me down corridor after corridor, all of them held together with wood and sturdy snow. The ice beneath our boots is a bit slick in some spots, but there's crushed stone along the path, which helps me keep my footing. With the bitter wind lashing at my cheeks, I'm cheered significantly by each brazier we pass. Sources of warmth and light for what feels like an endless stretch of frozen surface. It's hard to believe there's so much room to wander.
Finally, we come to a lookout post, a wooden frame arching over an opening in the wall. Beyond the brazier just in front of the frame, there's a ledge where you can step out, and then the Wall drops sharply and there's nothing but empty space. It reminds me of the Training Center's roof, though I doubt there's any protective electric field to stop us from plummeting to our deaths.
The sight of the edge alone stops me in my tracks, nerves beginning to twist at my stomach. With my tendency to tree-climb, I've never thought of myself as having any kind of fear of heights, but being seven hundred feet in the air tends to put new thoughts in a person's head. That's seventy times the height I fell from that knocked the wind out of me a few years ago. I don't know what a drop from up here could do to a person. I don't want to find out.
But Jon stops too, and he looks at me expectantly. It must be a rare joy to see someone look off the edge of the Wall for the first time. Remembering Beetee, I turn on my camera, then take a breath and push myself forward. The heat radiating from the brazier gives me another push, and I creep ahead step by step until I've set foot on the ledge. Then my breath catches, and the wind carries it away from me, because suddenly I am looking out over the entire world.
I see the expanse of snow I crossed to reach the Wall. I see the edge of the woods where I emerged, chasing after that damn cat until I realized what was in front of me. I see patches of forest beginning and ending, faint streaks on the sloping landscape, and I think if I looked hard enough in the light, I could venture a guess and point out the exact spot where I appeared in this world.
"It's beautiful," I say, and mean it. I have never seen anything like this. Not in the Capitol, not during the Victory Tour, not ever. Grasping the medallion and holding it to my chest, I imagine Prim and Peeta standing up here with us. Prim taking my free hand, just in case, while tears form in Peeta's eyes as he plans a new painting in his head.
Jon appears at my side, taking in a sight I'm sure he's seen at least a hundred times. "You can't see as much at night, but…" he shrugs, trailing off.
"Oh!" That reminds me. The ride up was so long that I'd forgotten. "Right. I brought a solution for that," I tell him, then fish that solution out of my jacket pocket and hand it over.
He takes it from me uncertainly. "What do I do with this?"
"Put them up against your eyes," I say, miming the action with my hands. He tries and almost pokes himself in the eye, so I laugh and gesture for him to hand them back. "Here, let me." He returns them to me, skeptical, and I place them neatly on his face. As he adjusts them, I'm almost sorry they block out the priceless expression that probably takes over his eyes. At least I get hints of it – a twitch of his open mouth, a drastic lift of his brows. I have to bite a gloved fist to keep back laughter as I watch him glance around in bewilderment; I might as well have put them on Buttercup for the same reaction.
"What are these?" he asks, touching the hinges gingerly like he's afraid they'll shatter on his nose.
"Night-vision glasses." I can tell they're overwhelming him, so I tentatively reach out to take them off. He doesn't object, probably dubious of handling them himself, only watches as I put them on myself and look back at the scene in front of us.
Wow, Beetee was right. These have come in handy after all.
"That's unnatural," Jon says, still reeling.
"Yeah, well, so are White Walkers. But some dead things did try to attack me recently," I counter, and draw in a breath as I admire the fine details that the lenses enhance. It was worth getting swarmed by rotting corpses as long as it meant seeing something like this. The mountains, the trees, brush strokes of green over a winter white canvas…
"He's really still out there," Jon's voice comes again. I cast a side glance at him, and he looks at me briefly before returning his attention to the lands north of the Wall. "Uncle Benjen."
Sensing he's looking for clarification, and feeling a little silly with the night vision glasses still on, I take them off and put them away.
"We went out beyond the Wall, and we searched, and we searched, but we never found him," Jon continues. "You're the first person to see or speak with him in years. What happened? Why hasn't he come back?"
I go silent for a moment, letting the wind say its piece. We're approaching risky territory here. "I can't really say," I reply. Can't or won't? It's not my secret to tell, though I feel like I should. "I can only tell you how I came to meet him."
He nods, and we both make ourselves comfortable on opposite sides of the lookout post's little window. Then I tell him everything that I dare, starting with how I was walking through the woods with Buttercup when I heard the dead people coming at us. I tell him how I took some of them down with my fire arrows, until I fell and thought I was done for. I tell him that's when his uncle came charging gallantly in, mysteriously cloaked and swinging a flaming weapon – a war thurible, Jon explains when I describe it to him.
My retelling seems to entertain Jon. He even laughs at my exchange with Benjen regarding the dead, and how his uncle tried to lure Buttercup down from a tree. His laugh makes me laugh because it's so pure and unexpected, like the affection I received from Ghost. I like how it warms him, so I leave out the part about his uncle revealing a face pale as death with slowly rotting skin, glossing past it to our talk of dragonglass and what the other is doing beyond the Wall. Feeling guilty, I keep it word for word when I can, as if that can make up for what I am withholding.
"I tried to ask him why he wasn't heading south," I add in truthfully. "But he just insisted again that 'the dead cannot pass.' I think he wants to keep holding them back as long as he can."
"Alone?" Jon furrows his eyebrows, his expression filling with doubt again. "Where was it that you saw him? We have to go looking for him."
"He figured you'd say something like that," I say, glancing out at the forest in the distance. "He seemed to discourage it. I think that's why he sent me here as a messenger to let you know he's still out there. So that you don't have to worry."
"Well, I worry," Jon replies, looking out at the same sight and pursing his lips into a pensive frown.
Guilt needles at me worse than the icy breeze. "I don't know this place very well, but it was a five day's journey that way." I point northwest, towards the patches of forest. "He's a fast rider, though, and he's got that much of a head-start on you. I know what it's like to want to see your family again, but I think if you went after him and tried to bring him back, he'd just give you the same answer."
Jon considers this, then gives a sigh. "Stubbornness is a Stark trait."
"Maybe that's the reason he's still going," I offer. "There's nothing that can really take him down."
Not even death, I think to myself.
This seems to faze Jon at first, but after brief contemplation he looks less than convinced. "It was that same stubbornness that got my father and brother killed."
That's right, nearly his entire family has been wiped out. These Starks don't seem to know the meaning of the words stay alive. "What happened to them?" I ask quietly.
Maybe too quietly. Jon's still gazing out beyond the Wall, and I almost think the scream of the wind drowned out my words, until he breaks the silence.
"My father, Ned Stark, rode south to be Hand of the King when Stannis' brother Robert was king," he says. "After Robert died, Queen Cersei arrested him for treason and labeled him a traitor. He'd learned that all her children were bastards born of incest and had attempted to put Stannis on the throne instead of her son Joffrey. He was loyal to Robert, his best friend, and for that, Joffrey took his head."
I lean back against the snow, because this is a lot. Conspiracy, incest, executions… it's like hearing Finnick's collected secrets from the Capitol all over again.
"And your brother?" I prompt, burdened by curiosity and the underlying feeling that it gets worse.
"When he heard that our father had been arrested, Robb united the Stark bannermen and marched them south to war," Jon says. I think he's clued in on the fact that I know nothing about Westeros or its history and has started to explain things with that in mind, and I'm grateful for this. "He formed an alliance with House Frey, and at the price of a marriage contract with one of Lord Walder Frey's daughters, he was allowed to cross the river at the Twins and continue south with his men. Then he fell in love with another, and married her instead of the Frey girl."
"I assume Walder Frey wasn't too happy about that," I mutter. Though I do sympathize with Robb on the constraints of a strategical engagement.
"Robb tried to appease him by giving the girl his uncle to marry," Jon says. "He and his men came to the Twins to deliver his apology and attend the wedding. The Red Wedding, people are calling it now."
The Red Wedding. That doesn't sound ominous or anything... "It was a bloodbath, wasn't it?"
Jon gives an almost imperceptible nod. "The Freys slaughtered them all. His men, his mother, even his wife, and she was pregnant. Then Roose Bolton put a dagger in Robb's heart. His own bannerman had turned on him."
"All of that because he wanted to marry for love," I say, twisting the medallion in my fingers. My stomach twists in turn, thinking of what Snow might've done if I had refused to continue the besotted schoolgirl act with Peeta and chosen Gale instead. Probably District 12 would have been destroyed a lot sooner, with me in it.
"Love is the death of duty," says Jon. I wonder if he's thinking about the girl from the pyre. "Maester Aemon told me that a long time ago. It's why the men of the Night's Watch are supposed to take no wives and father no children. Because—"
"It's the things we love most that destroy us," I finish for him, my tone flat and lifeless.
Jon looks at me, really looks at me then, and something other than torchlight flickers in his eyes as grief recognizes grief. His gaze drops to the medallion as I'm grazing the mockingjay imprint with my thumb.
"That necklace seems important to you," he says. "You weren't wearing it earlier." Which sounds like a completely random subject change, except I hear the question he's really asking.
Lifting the chain over my head, I study the gold disk more closely until I find the catch that swings the locket open. "It's not every day I get to go on top of the world and see a view like this," I say. "The kind of view you want to see with the people you love. Wearing it felt like bringing them with me."
I hand it to him and he takes it carefully in his palm, holding it under the light. His brows furrow again in thought; he's never seen photographs before, but probably he thinks they're exquisitely painted portraits or something and is baffled by the detail.
"Your family?" he asks, and I nod. "They're all light of hair. You must favor your father."
Leaning forward, I lightly tap the picture on the right. "My mother. My sister, Prim..." My throat threatens to close up on me as I move my finger to the left, so I finish in nearly a whisper, "And Peeta."
"Peeta," Jon repeats, looking up at me. He recognizes the name, or at least the sound of it screamed through the walls of Castle Black. "Your brother?" he adds, though he sounds doubtful.
"My..." I falter. What is he to me? What was he, at the point before his death? I hear his voice from that first night he joined 451. Friend. Lover. Victor. Enemy. Fiancée. Target. Mutt. Neighbor. Hunter. Tribute. Ally. "I guess technically he was still my fiancé."
"Fiancé?" The word is foreign to him.
I try to think of a more old-fashioned term. "Betrothed. The person you're promised to marry."
"What happened to him?" Jon wants to know, handing the medallion back. It's his turn to ask the questions.
"Westeros isn't the only world with monsters," I say, closing it with a snap. "Less than a year ago, Panem was in the middle of its own war. We were trying to end the Hunger Games, and free the districts from the rule of the Capitol once and for all. But they bred these creatures called muttations – or mutts – that they used as weapons against us. Peeta and I, and the surviving members of our team, we'd gone into the sewers, the tunnels underground, on a mission to assassinate Snow – President Coriolanus Snow," I clarify, stopping when Jon blinks in surprise.
"President Snow, is that a title?" he asks. "Was he like a king?"
"Yeah, I mean, he might as well have been," I answer. "He had all the wealth and the power."
"And the districts were the kingdoms."
"Maybe. But his real kingdom was the Capitol, and he was hellbent on protecting it," I say. "We were in the sewers when he unleashed these... human-sized lizard-like mutts on us." I can still hear their hiss on the air, imagine them skittering across the ice and snow as they search down each corridor. "Peeta had been his hostage in the Capitol for a while until we'd rescued him. I say 'rescue,' but Snow let him go on purpose. He'd been hijacked – had his memories manipulated through torture – so his mind kept coming and going. He said it was like sleepwalking. He was meant to kill me. He'd already tried twice. But when the mutts had almost overpowered us, he had a moment of clarity, a moment where he was himself again."
I gaze down at the medallion, remembering that moment on the beach when he gave it to me. When he last showed the most of his true self and warned me what he was willing to give up so that people he cared about could go back to the families that needed them. No one really needs me, he'd said.
I wonder if that was one of the last clear thoughts running through his head, the last memory that made him do something so wholly and purely Peeta.
I do, I'd said. I need you.
I wonder if he forgot that part.
"He could've escaped, but he jumped back down for us. Knocked one of them off of me, ripped another off our friend Finnick. I tried to help, but he told us both to go, just go." My quiet monotone doesn't give any life to the real and desperate shouts of Past Peeta, which I can still hear echoing through the sewers. "That was Peeta. He always had to be the self-sacrificing one. He made Finnick practically chase me up the ladder. When I looked down, I saw his eyes. I saw the real Peeta staring back at me. Right before one of the mutts bit into his neck."
Throughout all this I've shifted my attention from the medallion to the view beyond the Wall, somewhat afraid that if I look at Jon, his grey eyes will turn into the blue ones that haunt my sleep. Even so, I can feel them trained on me, and with such intensity that it makes me feel vulnerable.
Too vulnerable. Why have I told him all of this? I never even shared this much with Dr. Aurelius. Most of our conversations came back to Prim, because she had always been Prim, the only one I could admit with certainty that I loved. But sitting here on top of the Wall, it almost feels like being with Peeta again, having our talks on the roof of the Training Center.
"It's a cruel thing," Jon says, breaking the silence. "To watch it happen right in front of you. To be looking into the eyes of the person you love, the moment the light leaves them."
The pain in his voice makes me glance up involuntarily. Now he's staring out toward the forest, in the direction of last night's pyre.
"Who was she?" I ask, and he looks over at me. "You've mentioned the Night's Watch's rule about love to me twice now. And I noticed you tried to put some distance between us earlier. But I don't think that was the real reason. Thorne said something about a wildling girl you couldn't protect."
Briefly he looks caught, but after a mournful pause, he turns his focus back to the north. "Her name was Ygritte," he responds. "She… she was a spearwife, and part of Mance Rayder's army."
"The one that attacked Castle Black the other night?" I ask.
Jon barely nods. "I was with them for a while. Pledged myself to them, pretending to be a Night's Watch deserter, learning their ways and figuring out what they had planned. But Ygritte knew what I was. That I'd never stopped being loyal to my brothers. That didn't stop her from putting three arrows in me when I left."
My eyebrows shoot up at this, and I have to quickly stifle a shocked laugh. "I'm sorry," I say around my palm. "I wasn't expecting that."
"She did warn me to never betray her," Jon says in her defense. He almost sounds fond, wistful, as if those arrows were simply her way of giving three last painful kisses farewell. "When we saw each other again at the battle of Castle Black, she tried to get in one more. But when we looked at each other, she hesitated… and that's when an arrow went through her back."
Immediately I feel awful for laughing. My heart leaps to my throat as I picture it. The redheaded girl, her bowstring pulled back but her arm trembling. A gasp cut short as the arrow pierces her heart. Did he leave her there, or did he run to her? Even with the battle raging on around them, I picture him holding her in his arms as she died, just as I did for Rue. Just as I never got to hold Peeta. A thought that still leaves an empty, aching feeling in my chest months later.
That battle was two days ago. I can barely wrap my mind around this. As I slept in my tree, seeing Peeta die in my dreams for the two-hundredth time, the girl Jon loved was dying for real. I've slept through her death and unwittingly attended her funeral. It feels like walking past someone important and not even realizing it. Like seeing Gale that day in the Justice Building, receiving his medal of valor for his dead father, and not knowing that one day our fates would be more deeply entwined.
"That must've been hard," I realize suddenly, still thinking of Gale. "Knowing it came from someone on your side."
Another drawn out pause. "She was a wildling," he says at last. "The wildlings and the Night's Watch have always been enemies. It was ill-fated from the start."
"The very definition of star-crossed lovers," I mutter, wrapping the medallion chain around my fingers. "They make it sound so romantic. All those stories about two people who should hate each other, getting caught up in a love for the ages. And then you remember what star-crossed usually means. That someone has to die in the end."
I just wanted it to be me. During the Quarter Quell. In the sewers. At Snow's execution, after Prim and Peeta were already gone and maybe I could use the nightlock pill to join them. But Finnick couldn't even let me have that.
"Maybe the Night's Watch has the right idea," I continue. "Never marrying or having kids. I don't want to go through another tragic romance. I don't want to love anyone else. Not if I can't protect them. I'm tired of losing people." I glance over at him, then, and crack a wry grin. "And you don't have to worry about me getting too close to you. I could never marry a Snow. Not because you're a bastard, but because the day I do is the day President Snow rises from the grave just to die laughing at me again."
Jon chuckles weakly. "I understand," he says. "In fact, your name is too similar to my father's wife. Lady Catelyn. She did hate me because I was a bastard."
"That's not your fault," I scoff, and roll my eyes for his sake. "You never even knew your mother, it's not like you could apologize for her."
He concedes this with a slight nod. "What about your mother?"
"What about her?" I ask, and he lifts his eyebrows at me meaningfully. "She's alive, back in Panem. Working at a hospital in District 4." Does Westeros have hospitals? Probably not, going by Jon's blank look. "As a healer," I clarify.
He's still not satisfied. "Where is Panem?"
Shrugging, I give him an honest answer. "Worlds away."
"Then why did you leave?" Jon presses. "President Snow is dead. Isn't the war over?"
"Yes," I reply, avoiding his question. "No more Snow, no more Coin, no more Hunger Games. We have President Paylor now, who actually knows what she's doing, and abolished the Games instead of doing another one with the Capitol's children."
"Wait, so they were actual games, not Panem's way of referring to starvation," Jon observes, frowning.
Unraveling the medallion from my fingers, I look down at the mockingjay again. He doesn't know what he's asking me. I wrap the chain around my fingers again, mindlessly trying to cut off circulation through my gloves. "They were a punishment, for the First Rebellion," I say. "After the uprising failed, and the Capitol defeated twelve of the districts and seemingly wiped out the thirteenth, they created the Treaty of Treason to instill new laws in the name of peace."
I pause, allowing him to catch my dry emphasis on the word.
"Every year, each of the twelve remaining districts were forced to provide a boy and a girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in that year's Hunger Games. Twenty-four tributes in all," I continue. "They'd be taken to the Capitol for training, then imprisoned in an arena, where over the course of a few weeks, they were expected to fight to the death. The last tribute standing was the victor."
As I'm explaining, Jon visibly grows more and more disturbed. "That's vile," he breathes out, brows knitting tightly together. "They're children! And they were just offered up like animals for slaughter?"
"They'd get chosen at the reaping, where the names were drawn randomly from two separate bowls. One for the girls, one for the boys," I tell him. "The older you got, the more times your name went into the bowl. And from age twelve to eighteen, you could apply for tesserae, which got you a year's supply of grain and oil for one person, but each time you applied got your name put in another time. It added up over the years." Untying my fingers, I open the medallion again to look at the pictures. "I was trying to feed my mom and sister, so when I was sixteen, my name was in there twenty times. Gale, eighteen, with his mother and three siblings, his name was in there forty-two times. And that year, Prim turned twelve, so her name was in there once. Just once."
At the drop in my voice, understanding crests over Jon's face. "But her name was drawn."
"Yes," I say softly. For some reason, I don't want to say more. Yes, I've told him about Peeta. About the Hunger Games. About Snow. But if I tell him how I volunteered for my sister, I'll have to tell him how I went into the Games myself. How I'm still here and still standing because I'm a victor, because I killed people. How I went back into the Games the year after that and killed again, only to be personally rescued from the arena by an undead District 13. And then just like that, I'm the Mockingjay, the face of the rebellion, the one everyone dies for. And that's exactly what I came here to get away from.
"I'm sorry," Jon says, and looks sad. Probably thinking of his own siblings, however young they are.
"The Capitol would expect you to be honored," I intone, shrugging. "They made us act like it was a cause for celebration. A sporting event pitting the districts against each other, people placing bets on who would win. The winning tribute would get to go home and live a life of ease and luxury, and for a whole year the Capitol would give that district gifts of food, while the rest of us went on starving." I add, mimicking Mayor Undersee's droning voice, "'It is both a time for repentance and a time for thanks.'"
Jon shakes his head. "Where is the honor in forcing children to kill each other for entertainment?" he asks. "War is one thing. We all have to be able to defend ourselves. That's why I'm training Olly after what the wildlings did to his village." Olly. The boy who's been trailing after Jon, and stood next to him during Mance's execution. He's looked at me suspiciously a couple of times, especially after Thorne started calling me a wildling, but he really is just a kid, and after hearing what happened, I feel bad for him. "And I had a sword made for my sister Arya before I left to take the black, but I hoped she'd never have to use it. When I think of her and Sansa being old enough, or even Bran…" His frown deepens at the mention of his little brother.
"Tell me about them," I urge. Anything to get both our minds off the Games.
So he does. He tells me about all the Starks of Winterfell. Robb, before he became King in the North, who was strong and good at hunting and apparently the girls all found him irresistible (he ends up sounding to me like a Gale with red hair). Sansa, who loves songs and stories about brave knights and princes, though her own Prince Joffrey did not turn out to be as noble as she expected (he tells me she had a direwolf named Lady, and I tell him Prim named her goat the same). Arya, the wild girl, who's also a good shot with an arrow (he tells me a funny story about how she one-upped their brother Bran at target practice after he kept hitting trees and startling birds) and named her sword Needle because it's skinny like her. He says I resemble her a bit; she's the only one besides him who inherited the Stark look, dark hair and grey eyes.
Then there's Bran, who was always climbing, up until the day he fell from a tower and lost the use of his legs. And youngest was Rickon, who was still pretty young when Jon left for Castle Black. Always clinging to his mother or his direwolf Shaggydog for dear life. Jon does have some cute stories about him, and in turn I tell him about Prim and her little ducktail, and her own love of Buttercup, and her compassion that made her a born healer like our mother.
He tells me that for a long time, it was believed that Bran and Rickon were both dead. The story was that his father's ward, Theon Greyjoy, had taken over Winterfell and burnt both boys alive when they tried to escape. But not too long ago, Sam had run into Bran travelling with some allies. Rickon was not among them. Sam tried to convince Bran to come to Castle Black, but Bran was insistent that he had to get beyond the Wall.
"You didn't happen to see a boy of that age while you were out there, did you?" Jon asks hopefully. "Tully red hair? Seven-foot-tall companion who only says, 'Hodor'?"
I give a brief apologetic shake of my head. "Just the one Stark, I'm afraid," I say. "But if Benjen's still out there, maybe they all are."
Jon smiles faintly, like he wants to believe it, but it fades along with his hope. "Surviving beyond the Wall is hard to do even for an experienced ranger, and Bran's still just a boy," he replies. "I don't know how you did it on your own."
"Surviving's what I'm good at," I say, turning the medallion in my hand. "At this point, I don't think I could die if I wanted to."
Jon meets my eyes, his own full of sorrow and sympathy. "Your sister," he says. "What was it that killed her?"
I drop my gaze to her photo. Prim laughs up at me, innocent and untouched by war.
"Bombs." I barely get the word out. Jon doesn't seem to register it, so I find more. "There was an explosion. Some kids got hurt. Being Prim, she went to help them. And then there was one more. I saw her burn to death right in front of me."
Jon stares in horror. He knows what – or who – we're both thinking of right now.
"Thank you," I say. "For shooting Mance. It was hard to watch."
A nod from Jon. "It was only right," he says after a moment, his voice little more than a hushed rasp.
We watch the skies for a while longer, until a fresh wave of exhaustion threatens to overtake us both. Then Edd lowers us back down in the cage and we make for our rooms, hoping to claim those precious final hours of sleep before dawn. Buttercup allows me to scoot him from the middle of the bed after only one irritable paw swat, and curls up next to me, as if graciously forgiving me for my absence.
The rest of the night is dreamless.
A/N: Ask and ye shall receive! There really was no good spot to cut things off, so this is my longest chapter yet. But tbh these two were destined to have their own rooftop chat. As always, thanks for the faves/follows/reviews! :D