FAIRMARK – RIVERLANDS
He remembered the surface of the Trident as a sheet of twitching velvet lounging in the failing light, shifting between muted pastels while mist gathered in the reeds. The ghostly silhouette of The Twins stained the waters which ran brown with murdered corpses. They bobbed on the surface, eyed keenly by wolves tracking along the bank. Crows shadowed above. Stark bones and vengeful gods stalked close, cursing the air. Caught between the river stones in the shallows was an elegant dagger. Silver, ornate carvings of wrestling dragons danced around the handle. The play thing of a high lord.
The man fumbled the blade, deep in his leathers. It was worth more than anything he'd ever owned and yet the opportunity to sell passed several times. Even starving and wretched he kept the item close. There was something within the grey steel that called to his soul. A song, perhaps.
Above, the forest circling Fairmark rustled. Leaves, dry from the cold became brittle and abrasive, knocking their kin free in a shower of carcases. They tumbled out over the grass, racing each other toward the Lannister tents which were held up by strong coils of black rope. Soldiers were lighting lanterns in preparation of night, creating a bed of false stars.
There was worse waiting in these forests than wolves.
A broken man with his soul dragging in the pine needles limped up to the edge of the rise where the pines ended in a sharp line. He kept out of the sunlight, looking down over the gently rolled fields that cascaded into the freezing Trident river and the modest settlement of Fairmark along its shore. Flanked on all sides by the Lannister army, the town had no means of preventing the constant stream of soldiers that flowed like molten tracks of steel into its heart. Like an artery, they pumped through the collapsing brothels, leaving piles of coin but not enough to pay for the damage of their presence in the hills.
He waited for evening. Men, drunk beyond their means, stumbled up toward the forest to piss. They forgot the danger and turned their backs on the fires from the camp, entering the thread of darkness beneath the swaying branches.
Amidst the scratch of needles, a hand surged out and grabbed a soldier by the throat, pulling him into the thick of the forest. Struggling, the soldier lashed out with uncoordinated blows that were as useless as the slap of a fish's tail against the mud.
Sandor Clegane took the man's throat in both his hands and crushed down on the wind pipe. The fight faded and soon rebellion became a sad twitch of fingers. When the soldier was good and tame, Sandor thrust him against a tree and wrapped an old bit of rope around to hold him there. In the pitch, he slapped the soldier across the face, startling him awake.
Terrified, the white's of the soldier's eyes glistened. He was young and soft, a child of some minor lord who still believed that there was glory to be found in other people's wars. "Please. Please... Don't kill me. Please... I uh – there's gold." He jostled his leg to demonstrate the sound of coin somewhere in his boot.
"Well – thanks..." Sandor replied, slightly amused. "I wasn' going to rob you but since you offered." He shuffled the man's boot off and took the small purse weighted down with Lannister gold. "Stop whining or I will change my mind," he added, when the frightened boy's whimpering started to grate. Sandor was used to people taking fright at him. Half his face was withered, smooth flesh and the rest was scared from his brother's entertainment. "Whose army is that?"
"L-L-Lannister..." he trembled.
"I know that. Bloody gold cloaks you moron. Lion banners the size of fucking carts." He tugged sharply on the soldier's cloak to make the point. All it did was elicit another shriek. "Which Lannister?"
"King's Guard. Jaime Lannister."
It took a good half an hour to determine the state of the kingdom since he'd left King's Landing. If even half was truth the realm had more to worry about than a few marauding armies. As terrible as Cersei's influence was over the young kings, a single-minded religious order was worse. He'd rather have that fuck Geoffrey back. At least he could snap the bugger in half. The realm be damned... There was only one piece of information that interested Clegane. "You're sure she's in the North?" he asked again, not entirely trusting the inebriated ramblings.
"Winterfell. Yes. They call her the wolf queen... We're on our way there now to bring her to kneel along with the bastard Snow. I told you what you wanted. Please... I don't want to die out here. Ser... Oh ser by the Seven..."
"I'm not going to kill you," Sandor pushed the man away as he stood up. Creatures shuffled about in the undergrowth nearby. Waiting. "They might..." he nodded at the wolves.
The soldier caught their red eyes creeping in. "Oh – gods no..." The soldier wrested against the rope and dragged his feet through the dirt. He could almost feel their fangs tearing his flesh away while he slowly died – his innards adorning the woods. "I know the North. Let me take you to Winterfell. I can keep you off the King's Road, away from patrols. I'm more a prisoner here than soldier as it is... I'm a Hornwood – sent to fight in the Lannister ranks as punishment for supporting the North. They hope I will die on the front line and our line die out but-"
"I don't give two fucks which way who you are..." Sandor stopped he man from prattling. He grabbed onto the knot holding the rope in place. "If I find out you're lying about knowing the North – or you try and run, they'll find pieces of you from here to The Wall. Not even your gods will recognise you."
RUINS OF VALYRIA – THE SMOKING SEA
Their eyes stared out from the stone. Cold. Dead. Each pair made of jewels. Peal, jade, tourmaline, onyx, topaz, opal and amethyst. The figures lingered like spectres, towering above with inhuman scale. Gods, made real in rock. The last was caught in an odd pose – stooping to clutch her stomach. Folds of stone fabric swelled around her arms and ankles. Embedded in her torso was the handle of a knife, the rest hidden in rocky flesh. Like the old white trees, the statue began to bleed sap. Sticky and thick, it dripped onto the ground causing the reverie to tremble.
Daario stumbled backwards. Mist rose up from the ground like a swamp. The wall with the statues stood alone in a voracious forest. Vines dipped in purple thorns strangled the formations while heavy leaves dropped water leaving them with a shine like river stones.
He bowed. Cowering in their presence as a maester to the library. The stone beneath the mist where his hands laid was an all-consuming absence. Blacker than the sky – slippery yet dry, he retreated from its vile surface.
Daario could not move. The bloodstone had moulded to his palms, growing him into the stone. It wrapped around his legs and spread tentacles toward his torso. Their weight was crushing. He felt his body snapping... Becoming like the others...
Daario gasped.
He'd been asleep on the ruin, lazing in the dying light while the pirates raided the Valyrian weaponry building when the mists from the forest surrounding them had crept over. It was putrid. Daario was forced to stand to escape the poison only stonemen could breathe.
Quaithe was watching him intently. He wondered how long she'd been perched on the twisted mess of granite.
"You have bad dreams," she said, when he crossed the awkwardly sloped ruin to meet her.
"Recently, yes," he admitted.
"I feel these dreams are not yours to have," Quaithe added cryptically, as a breeze sent the segments of her mask rustling together. "You say her name. Daenerys. Daenerys. Daenerys..." Each time more desperate than the last. "Why do you call the queen's name?"
He was taken aback. "I don't know... My dreams are not of her."
They were interrupted by a sharp whistle. One of the pirate captains emerged from the building with the last crate. "That's all she'll hold," he nodded at the boats now laying low on their water lines. "There's more down there than any empire could want. We come back later if we need to."
Daario nodded and the men trailed back towards their boats. "No one will steal it from us while ever it lies in these waters... There must be unimaginable treasures buried here..."
"I'm sure your fleet of miscreants are lingering on similar thoughts," Quaithe took one last look into the innards of the great, fallen building. "The gods of this place will stir if they return too often."
"Don't worry – I have no intention of coming back here," he assured her. "Westeros is where the queen is. She needs my sword more than forgotten trinkets."
Quaithe could not stop herself from leaning forward, casting her eyes of Daario. He was pale, drenched in sweat and restless. She'd thought at first he'd been poisoned a week ago but there was nothing she knew of that could sustain itself this long. Gradually, his condition was worsening – as were the dreams. She heard him wake with screams near every night while they were on the water.
"Do you see anything else in your dreams?" She asked, meandering toward the boat with him.
"A room, mostly, with walls embroidered in flameless dragons."
A shiver drifted over Quaithe. "...is there anything else in the room?"
"Uh... These tentacle things, like off a squid, wrapped around a throne. They move and fight with each other. Why?" His suspicion deepened. "Do you know this room? Quaithe..."
She would not answer.
WINTERFELL RUINS – THE NORTH
Jon's horse trotted, breaking a layer of ice with its hooves. There were plenty more beneath, each a deeper shade of blue. Somewhere, half a dozen feet below, laid the remains of a lake and all its fish corpses locked in death, knocking against the ice. A thousand yellow eyes, unblinking like the sun and in their depths – night's abyss. Never sleeping. Never waking.
The snow was heavy, catching in Jon's eyes as he rode out to meet the approaching party. The men displaying Reed banners had cleared the forest and were now halfway across the flat toward the castle. No doubt they'd noted the pyres burning on every edge and the terrible mess of burned rock that sat in the centre. Winterfell was a ruin. There was no hiding the precarious nature of their hold. Jon hoped only that these men took heed of the knights of the Vale loitering around the walls.
When the distance closed, Jon realised that the party was unusually small, led by Lord Howland Reed himself. Jon remembered him younger, from his frequent visits at the banquet hall when he'd sit by Eddard and the pair would make merry until the women threw them out into the cold. There they'd sit and gabble on about all manner of thing with accents thicker than a Wildling's beard.
The intervening years had not been kind...
Forced to fight for Bolton or risk annihilation from the Crown, Howland had stalled and starved his forces away from conflict. In private, the Stark banners were draped inside their rooms while their ravens carried strategic secrets on their wings, helping Robb then The Blackfish to dance around the Lannister forces.
Now, he pulled his horse to a stop. It was speckled grey like him, pawing the frozen ground while Jon came up beside. Reed said nothing for several minutes as he took in the sight of the Stark bastard riding proud from his father's home. He didn't look much like Ned but by all the gods he was a Stark. That much had kept him alive all these years. No. Jon was exactly like his mother.
"I've heard stories of you, boy..." Reed said, as way of introduction. "Stories that drift to every corner of the realm. Good enough for the lips of kings."
"I'm sure they are widely inaccurate by the time they reach a king's ear, my Lord." Jon replied, fearful though he meant to be strong. He could face an army of the undead but his father's friend rattled his bones. This man knew him. There was power in watching someone grow that could never be undone by a title.
"I think not," he nodded at the Vale's soldiers, "for they are here and so are you." He noticed that the boy was still wary. "I come to re-pledge support of our house, for never was it truly broken." His words came with great clouds of mist. Even his men could barely keep their banners up.
"How do I know you are not here for the Lannisters?" Jon asked, as his horse bucked slightly beneath him. Its black eyes were on the wood.
Reed took no offence. Jon was young to ruling and had more enemies than most. "Because I have brought a gift," he replied, "and something else. Your father – he made me swear – that if he died first and you lived, I was to tell you something. I've come all this way, Jon Snow of Winterfell, to talk about your mother."
The gift came first.
Sansa and Jon were struck motionless before the chest. It was featureless, roughly made of cheap steel and strapped together with plain leather holds. This was deliberate. Hiding Eddard Stark's remains from the Crown had cost several good men their lives and left a smear of blood over the land. Smuggled out of the battlefield following the Red Wedding, the chest was literally dragged through the mud, loaded onto a river boat and taken to Grey Water Watch where it laid buried beneath a sapling. Even now dirt persisted in the latches, soiling their gloves where they'd carried it into the crypts.
"I'd have come sooner," Reed added.
They were assembled before the empty stone sarcophagus where Eddard was to lay. Before Robb lost the war, preparations had been made for the fallen lord but they were never finished. What lost hope there'd been for Eddard, there was none at all for Robb. He would be forever cursed to blow as ash across The Twins. A wolf in the winds.
Sansa stepped forward. "Can I look?" she asked, placing her gloved hand reverently atop the chest.
Reed shifted uncomfortably. "My Lady, I'd advise you not to... It's quite distressing-"
"Let me assure you," she interrupted, allowing her fingertips to slid over the metal bracings, "there is nothing in this box that can hurt me. I was there – did you know? When his head was taken off. Later, I was dragged to the castle wall and made to stand beneath the dripping head, mounted on a spike for the King's pleasure. Tell me – how could this hurt me?"
Reed dipped his head in apology. "I apologise, Lady Sansa. Of course you may look. Let me..." He took a key from the inside of his tunic, slid it into the fragile veneer of steel and unlocked the chest. Standing behind it, he lifted the lid for both of them before standing back in the shadows where the torches burned and the wet walls shone with ice-melt.
Sansa was gripped by an odd detachment. They were bones. Greying pieces of a corpse whose flesh had been boiled off. In no particular order, they floated as an ocean with only the skull, rolled onto its side, recognisable as human. Wherever her father had gone, he was not to be found nesting in this box. With a faint nod she stepped away allowing Jon a moment.
When Jon thought of bones he saw them rising out of the snow – pulling themselves back together and marching on the living. Corpses. The barest fragments of people. It was all the same to the creature leading the armies of the undead. Part of him wanted to take a rock to his father's bones and smash them into fragments so that they'd never rise again. The other side of his soul wanted to wretch with desperation. There lay his father. His only connection to the world.
Howland Reed closed the lid carefully, closing the latches. "It is as you see, your father. I've brought him to be laid at rest in the crypts with the Kings of Winter before him, as is right and lawful." Howland's voice carried the old inflection – a deeper tone and sharper edge that gave his words a weight the new kings could not match.
"It was very kind of you to do this thing," Jon said, as he helped Reed lift the chest into the coffin. Sansa laid a steel sword over the box. Together, they struggled with the cap stone, heaving it in place with a storm of pulverised rock.
"Terrible events have come to pass since your father died. I've – had to do some things... Well Ned would surely have had my head for and right that he should. I'd offer it to you now if I thought it could pay the debt to the souls no longer with us."
"Forgotten," Jon assured him quickly. "Be a lie to pretend we'd all kept our honour." An uneasy quiet settled between them, as if Howland was entirely lost. "You – said you had news about my mother?" Jon prompted.
Sansa startled at this. Perhaps there was some shred of hurt left inside her, fed by her mother, for the woman Eddard Stark had sired Jon with. "Would you like me to leave?" she asked, realising that this might be something Jon wished to hear alone.
"No – no stay..." Jon reached out to grip Sansa by the wrist. A moment later their hands slid into each other's and they turned to Reed. "I'm ready."
Reed wasn't. "It was never meant to be me that tells you this. Gods damn Ned..." Part of Reed would always hate him for this burden. "Before I talk about your mother, I must tell you two things. Prepare yourself boy."
Jon felt Sansa tighten her grip on him.
"Eddard Stark is not your father..."
Expressionless, Jon did not flinch. Part of him had suspected, deep in his gut. It was his greatest fear. Now it'd been laid bare and he believed it. If he was not Eddard's son, then his siblings... Too much. He had to remain calm. "And?" Was all his shaking voice managed.
"And you are not a bastard."
He had no idea how to process either of those facts. "You said that I was a Stark..."
"My dear boy, you are a Stark. You have your mother's blood and by all the gods, she was the best of us – the few short years that we had her." Reed could see Jon's mind spinning over – inching closer to the truth on his own. "Your mother was Lyanna Stark – Ned's sister."
"What..." It was Sansa who whispered. "How can that be?" She asked, even though Jon bore a striking resemblance to the portrait Robert Baratheon had commissioned which hung in the palace at King's Landing. Sansa used to find herself seeking refuge there with the ghosts of her house. "She was so young..."
A true born Stark.
"Lyanna died bringing you into the world," Reed continued. "I was there – standing at the base of the tower when Ned came out, covered in your mother's blood with you in his arms. He promised to keep you safe – that meant lying to everyone – most of all you. It was the only way."
"Why would anyone want to kill Lyanna's – my mother's – child?"
Reed lifted his hand to Sansa. "She knows..."
"Sansa..."
"It was something Lord Baelish said, when he brought me into the crypts. We were parting company before my union with Ramsey. He took me over to Lyanna's statue and we talked about the realm – how it had been thrown into chaos for the love of my aunt.
"It was Robert that loved her first. His was an obsessive, worshipping adoration grounded in lust. He loved the idea of my aunt. There was a famous tourney at Harrenhall where Lyanna met the then Targaryen prince – eldest son of the Mad King. He was already married of course to the Martell girl but he rode right by her and crowned Lyanna 'Queen of Love and Beauty'. It was a terrible insult to his wife and Robert – who took exception to the gesture.
"Shortly after that, Lyanna was kidnapped by prince Rhaegar – furious, Robert dragged the realm into war. You know how the rest of the story goes."
Jon was not quite understanding. "Are you saying that I'm Robert's son?" He asked, feeling his chest clench. He had the notorious black hair as the king.
Reed took over. "No, my boy. You are Rhaegar's son – heir to the Iron Throne of Westeros." Then, Reed sank to his knees in front of Jon. "My Lord, you are a Targaryen king. Your aunt has landed in Dorne with an army and dragons to conquer the throne. I urge you to ally together. She has dragons. You have the birthright. Eddard was your uncle – he wanted you to live. So live."
Sansa's mind had already begun to fill with plots. The pieces of the realm tumbled about – wars that never would be, marriages that might – kings and crowns... She was more like Petyr than she'd ever admit. "Marriage..." The two men turned. "The Dragon Queen has fought for the throne her whole life, she'll give it up."
"I don't want a throne-"
"Quiet!" Sansa shushed Jon. "What either of us want stopped mattering a long time ago. She needs your claim and her dragons would be very useful in the coming war. We must write to her, before someone else does."
Reed was cautious. "She's just as like to send assassins..."
"She's alone in the world. Nobody wants to be the last of their name." Sansa took both her brother's hands. No, not brother. Cousin. "Listen to me. You'll always be a Stark and Winterfell is your home. If we are to live you must first go South and befriend this Queen."
"You want me to marry my aunt?" Jon was already shaking his head. "What about the men heading to The Wall?"
"They don't need you yet and when they do, all the better if you arrive with dragons at your back."
Jon lifted his hand, delicately laying it against Sansa's porcelain cheek. "You are the true heir of Winterfell..."
"I will be its guardian. You can be its hope. And what about you?" Sansa asked Howland Reed. "What is it you want? Surely you did not come all this way to deliver a message."
"No, Your Grace. I wish to join your men heading for The Wall. My children are up there, somewhere. I've nothing left but to find them."
Sansa nodded. "They are most like already dead..."
"I know," he replied, clutching his hands softly in front of his aging body. "And I shall whisper to their spirits if that is all I find."
"If that is your wish, I appoint you as my ambassador to the Night's Watch. I have a message for them."
"Before you head South," Reed added, unsure how to say what he must, "there is something you will need."
Jon lifted the mace, balancing it on his shoulder while he lined up his stroke. He tried not to meditate on the featureless eyes of the statue. The cold stone that stood as a ghost in the crypts. His mother. Now that he knew he recognised his features in hers. She was younger than him and yet her life was already done.
It made sense to hide them here. Robert may have spend many years lamenting before the statue but he'd never have the heart to destroy it.
"I'm sorry..." he whispered, then swung the steel. The statue shattered violently, cleaving into chunks that scattered over the floor. It was hollow, exactly as Howland had said, and inside were three items. The broken form of Rhaegar's harp. A scroll from the citadel confirming the marriage and another announcing the birth of a child. Jon read his true name and decided he preferred the one Ned gave him. Jaehaerys was no good for the North.
