The plan is born between the two of them in the dark of Robb's tent late in the night once the lamps have begun to gutter and the wine in their cups has sloshed low, the spiced warmth and boldness within faded to a dull edge.
"I can't ask this of you," Robb says for the fifth time in so many hours.
And for the fifth time in so many hours Jon answers, "it's my plan, Robb."
"I'll send men with you."
"Should I also wear the Stark colors?"
"You cannot do it alone, Jon."
"More than one man will be noticed."
"I should be the one going."
"You're the king."
"And what king sends his brother to fight his battles?"
But I'm not your brother. For a moment it is on the tip of Jon's tongue to share with Robb the secret the man he'd thought all his life was his father had sworn him to keep as he left to join the Night's Watch. To let spill all the anger and bitterness that have filled him for months now. To spill the secret that had gnawed away at him until he could stay at the Wall no longer.
But when Jon opens his mouth he finds his throat aching and empty. There is a tear somewhere deep in him, a frayed edge that if he tells Robb they are not brothers will rip him in two like old rotted cloth. And so though it makes his heart ache to know it a lie, he says softly, "they're my sisters too, Robb."
Jon leaves in the morning, food and dagger and a dozen gold crowns rolled into a tight bundle as around Jon men stumble out from their tents and cooking fires are lit. The bundle he lashes to the back of a courser unlike the stiff footed nag he'd ridden down from the wall only a fortnight before. Jeor Mormont had not had to give him any horse at all, but had found him the nag nevertheless. You've said no vows yet, the old bear had growled, so you're no oathbreaker. Tell lord Stark when you see him of our need. Tell him the true war is here beyond the Wall.
Jon had sworn he would, but by the time he'd reached Moat Cailin the man Jon had thought his father all his life was gone, head taken from his shoulders by the mad boy king. He was never your father, a dull voice in him had hissed as tears pricked his eyes, what right do you have to mourn him? You've only ever been some mad Targaryen's dragonspawn.
But mourn him Jon had as he followed the kingsroad south. It was why Robb's eyes had lit up when Jon first ducked under the flap of his tent, why he'd strode forward and clasped him tight, why the Lannister letter the day before offering a trade of Arya and Sansa for the Kingslayer had lead to hours of heated words. It's why Jon finds himself tightening the straps of the saddlebag on the grey courser in the cool Riverland air with the sun still only half risen.
Last, Jon kneels to scratch Ghost behind the ears. The direwolf accepts his touch silently, red eyes seeming to understand as Jon whispers for him to keep Robb safe. Only when Jon glances up does he see Catelyn standing with her hands tucked into the sleeves of her dress, hair braided into a red rope over one shoulder, cool blue eyes watching him.
Jon straightens warily. "Lady Catelyn."
A breeze plays with the hem of her dress, but Catelyn might be made of stone for all she moves. Her eyes study him dispassionate as though she were judging a recently scrubbed wall. "Robb told me what you mean to do," she says eventually. "That you mean to bring my daughters back."
"I do." Jon gathers the reins of his courser. He swallows down the dryness in his throat. All his life he's spent hiding from Catelyn's cool gazes, slinking away whenever they settled on him, and it is all he can do not to flinch now. "If I can."
"They'll be well guarded."
"I know."
"You have to free them as one. Losing one will only make the Lannisters tighten their grasp on the other."
"I'll remember it."
Catelyn nods as if to herself. Her lips purse as though around a strange taste, as though she doesn't know how to form the words she wants. For a long moment Jon is at a loss, unsure what more lady Catelyn could have to say to him, what could hold her tongue. And then he realizes, understands suddenly the words she cannot bring herself to say, not to him, not to the bastard that's always stained her marriage. Thank you.
And just as suddenly Jon doesn't want her thanks, the acceptance he's craved all his life like some kind of kicked dog. They're my sisters, he wishes he could shout at her. But they aren't, aren't and never have been no matter how it feels like driving a knife into his chest to know that. You never knew lord Stark's great secret but you didn't need to. I've never been a Stark to you. It is all Jon can do to choke down a bitter laugh. Ned never dishonored you. All these years you've hated me, and for what? For nothing. And now I'm the only hope your daughters have.
Robb emerges from his tent. Catelyn turns to meet him, and whatever she might have said to Jon dies unspoken on her lips. She lays a hand on Robb's arm, murmurs something that Robb nods to, and takes her leave, dress swirling behind her. Robb stands watching as Jon pulls himself onto the courser and takes the reins in hand. "You don't have to do this," he says finally.
"I do," Jon answers, and he wills his voice sure, surer than he feels, surer than the knot of fear in his stomach that he'll fail, that it'll be his head on a pike beside the man he'd thought was his father's. They're my sisters too, he nearly says. But he will not lie to Robb again. Instead he gives him a tight smile. "I'll bring them back."
Robb's jaw clenches but he unbuckles his belt and the sword hanging from it. He holds them up to Jon, and Jon circles the belt around his waist, the weight of the sword comforting as it slaps his leg. They clasp hands, and then there is nothing more to be said. Jon turns the courser from Robb and towards the edge of camp and snaps the reins. I will never be a Stark, but I can still do the duty of one.
A fortnight Jon is on the kingsroad, following its twists and bends through a land ravaged by Gregor Clegane's tender ministrations. He passes holdfasts gutted and left smoking ruins, ash fields put to the torch, abandoned towns whose inhabitants have long fled or been put to the sword. It fills Jon with a rage that makes him wish he could turn the courser back to Robb and an enemy that could be fought and cut and defeated on the field. But he doesn't.
And too he doesn't let himself think of Arya and Sansa as he rides, the sisters he can no longer call his. He can still picture the last time he'd seen Arya, the way her face had pinched as she watched him set out north along the kingsroad up to the Wall. Arya Underfoot the servants called her, never able to sit still, always running through Winterfell, and the thought of her prisoner in the Red Keep, trapped small and alone in a room that was no better than a cell, fills him with a sick ache. And Sansa… more ward than brother she'd always treated him, but the same sick fills him when he thinks of her defenseless against Joffrey.
He reaches King's Landing late in the day, just as the sun has begun to fall. Even so he rides along the streets until he sits before the gate of the Red Keep itself, crimson washed walls rising in high towers above him. In the fading light he studies the shape of them, trying in vain to guess which Arya and Sansa are kept in. Huge the keep is, easily a match for Winterfell and able to engulf countless lesser castles within its walls. A slow kind of despair wells in Jon's chest as he gazes up at it, but he forces it savagely back down. You knew this was what you'd face. Find a way inside. Find Arya. Find Sansa. And then find a way out.
The way comes only a few scarce days later.
Jon watches from beneath the eave of a house as the gold cloaks of the city watch form up before outside the gate of the Red Keep. In the handful of days since he's arrived he's quickly grasped the mood throughout Kingslanding, the churning ocean of hunger and bitter anger against the Imp and all the Lannisters. The guardsmen must grasp it to, for not one looks keen to be escorting the royal party.
Jon tugs down the hood of his cloak as the gate of the Red Keep swings open and in a cloak embroidered with the crowned Baratheon stag in gold thread Joffrey leads the way, face twisted in the same proud shit-eating expression Jon remembers from months before. Behind him rides the massive figure of the Hound with his snarling helm and a trio of the kingsguard in their flowing white cloaks. Tyrion follows with his swollen brow and mismatched eyes and behind him…
Jon's heart jumps into his throat. Even without being able to see her face Sansa's red hair, so like her lady mother's, is unmistakable. She looks thinner than the last time he saw her, cheekbones gaunt, eyes sunken, but still just as achingly lovely as the day she'd left Winterfell.
Jon's scans the riders behind Sansa, but of Arya there is no sign. She must have been left in the keep. It almost makes him grin. She always was untameable even for septa Mordane.
The gold cloaks close around the king's party as it passes through the Red Keep's iron gate, and Jon shadows them as they begin down the tight streets of Kingslanding, slinking through the crowd of unwashed and sullen faces watching the procession from windows and doorways. An old man spits at the ground, another mutters under his breath about bread, but Jon barely notes them. All his attention is on Sansa where she rides beside the Imp on a chestnut courser. Silently Jon curses Tyrion and every kind thought he'd ever had for the little man. Wait and watch, he tells himself, a bitter taste in his mouth. You can't do anything now. Not without Arya.
A half hour brings them to the docks, and then it is an hour of standing in the midday sun as prince Tommen weeps, princess Myrcella kneels to accept the high septon's blessing, and Joffrey wrinkles his nose at all. Sansa stands beside him, hands held demurely before her, ocean breeze playing with the strays of her red hair. An uneasy feeling settles in Jon's stomach as the minutes tick by, an unwanted thought gnawing away at him under the sun until he has no choice but to face it: what if she loves Joffrey? Last Jon saw her she'd been in his company as they made to leave Winterfell, laughing at some jest he'd made, cheeks pink and pleased. For all that he'd once thought her his sister Sansa has always been a distant figure, one glimpsed sewing with Jeyne and septa Mordane and the other ladies of Winterfell, a slip of a girl in slim dresses who loved songs of knights gallant and maidens fair. Was it so strange to think she would prefer her golden prince to the cold north?
He took father's head, Jon reminds himself harshly. She can't love him after that. She can't.
Still the thought nags as the lines of Myrcella's ship are cast off, Joffrey and the others mount their horses, and the gold cloaks shove back the crowd. A few in the crowd call out to the king's good health, but most are silent and sullen, and the back of Jon's neck prickles at the sea of bitter and unwashed faces around him.
The king's party make it halfway up Aegon's High Hill when a shout comes the front of the procession and the whole thing churns to a halt. Off to the side Jon cannot see it, but the shout is follow a moment later by a scream, and then rage is ripping through the crowd, bodies surging against the line of gold cloaks like water sloshed in a bowl. Jon is near enough to the back of the crowd to avoid the crush of bodies, but even still he must shove a man back as he slips to the nearest house, heart hammering in his chest as he pulls himself up by one of the struts to scan the crowd below.
All before Jon is chaos, bodies churning and surging against the thin line of gold cloaks, shouts of bread and brotherfucker filling the air. A rock whizzes inches from Jon's head as a woman lobs it at where the king's column is scattering, ripping apart as half surge forward and the other half are caught in the grasp of the crowd. Jon glimpses the Hound standing head and shoulders above the surging mass of bodies, watches as he roars and strikes the man before him, teeth spraying the air.
And, finally, Jon finds what he's looking for.
A few feet from the Hound Sansa huddles on her chestnut courser, the sleeve of her silk dress ripped, face glazed and stunned. Jon looks only long enough to mark her before plunging into the crowd, shoving and pushing his way until he's almost beside her. A ring of men circle her, shouting and reaching out to try and grab the horse's reins as it rears its head back.
Arya. Jon pauses, and for that pause he hates himself. Sansa's horse rears, the crowd around her drawing back, and Jon clenches his jaw hard enough for his teeth to ache and darts into the opening. Sansa's foot has slipped out of the stirrup and he shoves his foot into it and hauls himself into the saddle in front of her. He grabs her hand and wraps her arm around his waist before kicking his heels into the courser, spurring it forward through the sea of raging bodies around them.
Hands grasp at them, and Jon rips his sword from its scabbard. He slams the pommel into the cheek of a woman clawing at his leg and slashes at a man grabbing the reins of the courser. Blood sprays the air as the man falls back, the rest of the crowd before them scattering as the courser plunges forward, and then they are past the worst of it. A stone whistles past Jon's head. Unwilling to let go of Sansa's hand around his waist he grabs the courser's reins with the hand still gripping his sword, and does the best he can to yank them in the direction of a narrow side alley.
The roar of the crowd follows them into the alley, but none of the crowd itself does. Jon doesn't try and guide the courser, just lets it have its head down a flurry of roads and alleys, Sansa's hand crushed in his. Dirty faced men and women spit curses and a few fling dung at them as they ride pass, but the naked steel in his hand keeps them from doing more.
They reach an abandoned stretch of cramped street and Jon shoves his sword back in its scabbard and reins the courser to a stop. He jumps down from the horse, but Sansa flinches away as he pulls her down after him. "Where are you taking me?" She shrinks back, shaking her head, blood trickling from a gash in her scalp, voice babbling. "Oh please let me go. I won't tell anyone, I promise I won't."
"Sansa, stop," Jon shoves his hood back, half ripping it as he does. He pushes her to arm's length, thrusts his face in hers. "It's me."
Her eyes widen and she stops struggling. "Jon," she breathes, "Jon."
He nods, droplets of sweat flicking from his slicked hair. "Where are they keeping Arya?"
Sansa's eyes focus and she fists the sleeves of his tunic with more strength than he thought possible in her slender fingers. "They don't have Arya. She disappeared when they took father, and they haven't found her."
Jon curses under his breath. Where in the city would he have gone if he were her? He looks back and forth down the alley, cursing the futility of it, cursing the old gods and new, cursing Joffrey and Cersei and Tywin and every Lannister back to Lann the Clever himself. I won't leave you. But they cannot stay. That much Jon knows. Sansa is too valuable for the Lannisters to do anything less than scour the city for her, turn over every brown bowl and pisspot in Flea Bottom.
"Fire!" Someone shouts in the distance, and Jon looks up to see a plume of grey smoke muddying the sky. He clenches his teeth hard enough for them to ache, but still stays rooted to the spot, unable to stay and unwilling to move.
It is Sansa who decides for him. She grabs his hand, tugs him back to the horse. "We have to go. You don't know Joffrey. He'll search everywhere for me, and if he finds you he'll take your head like he did father's."
I'll find you, Arya, Jon swears silently as he heaves himself into the saddle and helps Sansa up behind him, but he hates how weak the words echo even in his own mind as he kicks in his heels to start the courser down the street, smoke beginning to choke the sky above them.
AN: Follow my tumblr at tacitwhisky for snippets of new chapters and fics.