Author's Note: Lyanna Mormont is one of my fave characters. Have I mentioned that? But let's be honest, have I ever met a Mormont I didn't like? No, the answer is no. #TeamMormont #BearsAreBest

Thanks to SmashingTeacups for some assistance with a couple minor characters and for her general awesomeness. #heart

Also, just FYI, four of the next five chapters will be Jorah and/or Dany. Enjoy the slow burn while it lasts ;)

Lyanna

When Lyanna Mormont returned to the old Mormont Keep on Bear Island, it was with a world-weary scowl on her young face.

This was not unusual, as the Lady of Bear Island was not fond of smiling, not even in her cradle, they say. And who could blame her? She was born at the very end of the long summer, with feathered frost already painting up the glass windows in the great hall and ice forming at the edge of shallow ponds in the island's thick spruce and pine forests.

The days had only grown colder and darker since. Lord Eddard Stark's head mounted on a spike in King's Landing. Her mother killed in the War of Five Kings, her sister butchered at the Red Wedding, her uncle slaughtered above the Wall. No less than two Kings of the North, the Young Wolf and the White Wolf, both gone now and thousands of others with them. The dead, at least, were defeated…but at what cost?

Lyanna set her mouth in a firm line. They should never have been forced into fighting off dead men and women anyway. The Old Gods entertained blasphemy when they allowed such an evil to rise unchecked. The waste of it all, battlefield after battlefield littered with corpses, weighed heavy on her mind.

The moment she heard Jon Snow and Rhaegal had followed the Night King to Winterfell, Lyanna called the surviving Mormonts back from the Winterfell moors. The battle was over, one way or another, no matter her continued part in the doomed play. She would make her stand on Bear Island, against the dead or the winter storms or both. It didn't matter. If Jon was the king he pretended to be, he would not fail.

And, of course, he did not fail…despite the disappointing truth of his heritage.

Lyanna had been willing to pledge her House to a Stark bastard. House Mormont would never stand down for the sake of a formality. That was southern weakness, to miss the forest for the trees. As she told all those men at Winterfell, she didn't care what his name was. Ned Stark's blood was enough for her. And arguably, her faith and allegiance had inspired the other Northern houses to follow suit. But, from the moment she heard it spoken, the knowledge that Jon Snow's father was not Eddard Stark, after all, but a damn dragon—Rhaegar Targaryen, the son and heir of the Mad King himself. Oh, it sat ill with Lyanna Mormont.

We know no king but the king in the North whose name is Stark.

She had written those words herself, pressing them into a scroll addressed to Stannis Baratheon with all the rigid defiance and nerve that was etched into her family's stubborn words: Here we stand.

Well, his name hadn't been Stark when she pledged her forces to him. And, in the end, there was still Stark blood running through his veins, she supposed. Though what unsteady blood that turned out to be. Lyanna Mormont's frown darkened at the thought.

She couldn't decide which part of the revelation upset her most—that Jon Snow was a true-born Targaryen or that she herself had been named for a Northern girl who ran off with a damn dragon.

And for what? A single wreath of winter roses? A bloody death in an ill-named tower? Gods, her namesake was the most foolish of all women.

Still, she would admit it. Jon Snow did his duty. He proved his worth. The army of the dead was no more, banished back to whatever hell they'd sprung from.

But the blizzards they left behind might kill them all yet. On the Winterfell moors, she'd watched those unearthly clouds churn and roll over themselves like black seawater and she felt a promise on the brisk wind that turned her cold Northern blood even colder. The weather would not quit as the dead had done. And it would freeze them alive, given half a chance.

So she called her men back and went home, despite the fact that home was further north. South may have been the wiser choice but she was a Mormont, and Bear Island was where she would stand. Defiant and stubborn to the last. Let the cold winds blow. Let the snows pile up. With that grim scowl, she would stare them down yet.

Besides, Lyanna knew, deep in her soul, that this was a storm that would bring ice and snow to Dorne so there was no running from its frosty clutches.

Lyanna and her vanguard arrived on Bear Island near dawn, their torches blinking out from the earthen palisade surrounding the old Keep. The storm's tendrils brought in flurries off the frigid waters but its ragged, raging center was southerly and east, still hovering above Winterfell. In the journey over, Lyanna watched the flutter of her green, bear-emblazoned banners warily. The wind was with them, but for how long?

The channel was in a dangerous humor, turning frothy at times and churning up fickle waters. Their crossing had been rough. But she still had men on the other side that needed to be brought home. Hence, the particular scowl that graced her features as she walked into the Keep and regarded the familiar stone and wooden walls of her home with grave impatience.

"How many from Bear Island are still unaccounted for?" she asked Maester Morlan and Captain Seffius Claver, when the men joined her in the hall.

"At least a dozen, my lady, not counting those that we know fell in battle," Maester Morlan confirmed. Guessing her thoughts, he insisted again, just as he had in the half-frozen harbor near Deepwood Motte, where they boarded ships to make the narrow crossing, "We could not wait for them with those gales on the horizon. Some may have turned back to find refuge at Winterfell."

Lyanna turned her dark scowl away from the walls and on her Maester. She could do without his optimistic hypothesizing. The Maester found himself shrinking from her piercing gaze, despite the thirteen-year-old girl's height, which was no more than half his own. He shuffled his feet uneasily, the links on his chain making soft metallic sounds in the emptiness of the hall.

"In the interest of bringing home the wounded, I listened to your advice and gave orders to cross the channel," Lyanna's voice was strong as she answered the Maester bluntly. "But if you think I will leave a single Bear Island man, woman or child stranded on the tainted shores of the mainland, you are utterly mistaken."—she turned her attention from her Maester to the tall, dark-bearded man beside him— "Captain Claver?"

"Yes, my lady?" The seafaring man had been favored by the young mistress of Bear Island as her captain of choice, in all these recent journeys back and forth across the channel, called to Winterfell twice—first to fight that bastard Ramsey Snow and second to stand with Jon (Aegon Targaryen, Lyanna reminded herself again, bitterly) against the legions upon legions of dead men.

The captain was short-spoken and naturally solemn. His skill in turning a skiff through winter seas was unfailing and steady. He had spent most of his life fishing the cold, ice-cluttered bays around the Frozen Shore. He was never reckless, he was never impulsive. The diminutive Lady Mormont approved.

"I ask that you cross the channel to Deepwood Motte and retrieve the rest of our men. If even one is waiting on that shore, I ask that you go and bring them home," she said, tempering the usual command with a request, as she knew that she sent him out on an angry sea that might swallow the captain and his crew with little provocation.

But Seffius Claver did not hesitate. He bowed his head in respect, "Of course, my lady." With his usual sparseness of words, he said no more, but left the hall immediately to make the crossing.