Chapter 9

No one touched the actual board for years. But they still played, in their imaginings, in their daydreams, in their nightmares. The game had a magic to it, a sort of sick darkness brought on by the demise of its first mistress.

In Afghanistan, Jon played. He was going nowhere fast, with no hope of advancement for years in the rigid ranks of the army.

So he dreamed. He pretended. In his dreams, Westeros did his bidding. The sand became snow and the dogs wandering about the dirt and broken buildings became deer picking their way through snowdrifts and forest. The terrified citizens who threw rocks at him and screamed in Dari and Pashto became wildlings with spears and rusted swords.

The heat pressed in on him. The hundred-feet-tall sandstorms threatened to destroy him. Sand filtered into everything he wore, threaded through the air and choked him. It was so hot. Jon longed for snow, for woods and forests instead of burnt fields of poppy and the ever-present sand. Jon had heard there were snow-capped mountains in the northeast but he never saw any of them.

He didn't see much of anything, the dust-coloured buildings and the people with their equally dust-coloured clothes blurring into one big smear of colour. The friends he had made were no longer with him, off on their own missions while he was stuck with the most boring and menial jobs. It wasn't fair. None of these men were soldier material. They should never have come here.

They fared little better in Westeros but there Jon could call them names and have their missions end in disaster. In Westeros, he was the day's saviour and the best soldier to be found.

In Suffolk, Theon suffered. Guilt had taken him over, turning him into a man of base emotions and memories.

He focused on the other parts of Westeros, ignoring Winterfell, ignoring what had belonged to Robb. He visited the family home and saw nothing changed. Bran was still in a wheelchair. Rickon still growled at anyone who tried to make him do something he didn't want to do.

ØØØ

"It's the game," Theon said calmly. For the first time, he was calm. He knew what had happened; he knew how to solve this. "The game's doing all this. We have to get rid of it, Jeyne."

"My name's Arya," Jeyne said, laying a hand on his shoulder. "Theon, I'm Arya, remember? We grew up together."

Theon shook his head. "No, no, you're Jeyne. Arya's gone. She ran away."

"I came back, Theon," Jeyne said. "I was gone for a while but I'm back now."

"The game's going to kill you," Theon told her, his eyes clear and focused. He wasn't mental. What he knew was the truth. She was Jeyne and the game was a murderer. None of them had realized when they played it but it was. Jon's death had cemented that knowledge in Theon's mind. The game was toying with them, killing them haphazardly and not in the order they played with it. Mr Scott had been first, then Robb. Now Jon. Only three people were left who had ever played it. Theon wasn't even sure Arya was still alive. No one had heard from her for years. She had vanished. But why were Theon and Jeyne the last ones left? Shouldn't he have been killed before? Shouldn't Jon? What if he was wrong? No, he couldn't be wrong. "We need to destroy it."

"What game?" Jeyne asked. She looked so old. She still looked better than he did.

"Westeros," Theon repeated, wiping the dust off the box. "It was a game the kids and I used to play. You played it with us a time or two."

Jeyne worried her lip. "It's just a game."

"No. It's more than that. We have to get rid of it. It killed Mr Scott. It killed Robb, Bran and Rickon. Don't you get it? It's doing all this."

Theon's hands shook as he grabbed the box. He could feel the dark power coming from it.

"If it's that big of a deal, we can just throw it out," the Arya-who-wasn't-really-Arya said.

"No!" Theon's grip tightened. "That won't destroy it. What if someone finds it and brings it back? We have to toss it in the ocean."

"Theon…"

In the end, she drove him to the seashore and watched him throw it into the surf. She wouldn't go near the ocean, just sat on the grass with her knees up to her chest. She said she couldn't swim. Theon knew then, with all certainty, that she wasn't Arya. Arya had loved to swim.

It wasn't his fault. Nothing in Westeros was ever his fault. He told her this.

"Westeros isn't real," Jeyne told him. "You ken that."

Theon folded his arms over his chest and hunched in on himself.

"You're not Arya," he said.

ØØØ

Theon had always had a steady hand and a keen eye. He was a natural artist. He refused to draw because Jon drew but he would carve anything, turn clay into anything. He didn't make a habit of showing the skill off for fear of being called a pansy but his closet housed boxes of etchings and whittlings. Rickon even had a little fox sculpture he called Shaggydog. Robb, when he found out, tried unsuccessfully to explain to the boy that it was very confusing to have a pet and a toy with the same name.

"Don' care!" Rickon, who possessed just as much stubbornness as Robb, said, going back to his playing.

"That was a nice thing you did," Robb later told Theon.

"I ken," Theon said.

For Cat and Sansa's birthdays, he carved pretty jewellery boxes out of cherry tree wood, adding a drop of lavender oil to the insides. They were always shocked by the quality of the work, assuming he had spent money he didn't have on them, thinking they were expensive and priceless. Theon never bothered to explain where he "found" the boxes.

Arya received horses and ponies, which she hated. Theon wasn't sure what the child liked. They never did get on.