Chapter Thirty-Seven: Songs, Starks, and Stories
For the first few hours of the journey east, snow falls steadily as I follow Jon and Tormund across a new stretch of land. It's the same vast whiteness as the other side of the Wall, just with fewer mountains and trees, but I still find myself turning my camera back on and looking around at everything. The Wall remains in sight to our left, beautiful from this distance and angle. From my memory of the maps I've read, we'll be passing several abandoned castles as we follow it to Eastwatch. Which, as its full name suggests, lies by the sea, only a four day's ride from here.
It's hard to wrap my head around the closeness of it. No, not the closeness, the accessibility. Our corner of District Twelve hugs the east coast, but Gale and I never dared travel that far when we went beyond the fence. We only ever went as far northeast as the lake. My father said Panem's eastern shoreline was somewhere on the other side of it. But walking around would leave us exposed to hovercrafts, and crossing it wasn't an option, since unlike Eastwatch, District Twelve is decidedly lacking in boats and ships. As near as we were to the coast, I didn't see an actual ocean in person until the Victory Tour stop in District Four.
The Night's Watch brothers mainly talk amongst themselves while I drink in our surroundings. But a few hours in, when Jon points out the ruins of Oakenshield to me, my reaction seems to draw Tormund's attention.
"You'd think she'd never seen a broken castle before," he says aside to Jon.
"She's never seen this side of Westeros before," Halder corrects.
Tormund glances back at us, then at Jon questioningly. "She came from beyond the Wall," says Jon.
"Did she?" Tormund throws another look over his shoulder, scrutinizing me. "Thought Mance and I knew most of the free folk. You from the Nightrunners? The Frozen Shore?"
I blink back at him. "District Twelve," I say. "In Panem."
From the "ah" sound he makes, this must successfully jog his memory. "Right. A foreign girl!" he says with vigor. To Jon, he adds, "You didn't let her through the gate in chains."
"She had information about my uncle," Jon counters.
"So I've heard." Tormund looks back at me again, curious. "And where did you run into him? The elusive Benjen Stark?"
I alternate between meeting his gaze and trying to record Oakenshield before we pass it. "Uh, just west of Craster's Keep," I say, turning more fully to face him.
There's a pause, then Jon starts chuckling to himself, shaking his head as if in disbelief.
"What's so funny?" I ask warily.
On my left, it's Edd who answers for him. "We fought at Craster's two months ago," he tells me. "Three weeks before you arrived."
"Feels like I just missed him," Jon admits, glancing back at me briefly. I manage to catch a glimpse of a wistful, halfhearted grin before he turns his head again.
Biting my lip in guilt, I avert my eyes to the Wall, and to Oakenshield behind us, abandoned and ruined. "Well, I didn't find him. He found me," I say modestly. "And it's a good thing he did. I probably would've kept going east otherwise, unless the white walkers chased me south. And even then, I wouldn't have known which castle had anyone to let me through if he hadn't told me."
"Don't need men to let you through," says Tormund smugly. "Just have to be brave enough to climb."
I peer doubtfully at the Wall and make a face, which gets a sympathetic laugh from Jeren as he's riding up on my right. "Only three out of nineteen castles are manned," he reminds me. "You'd have to do either a lot of walking, or a lot of climbing."
The topic comes up again after we've stopped to make camp for the night, close to Woodswatch-by-the-Pool. Another abandoned castle. Halder, who apprenticed as a stonemason before he joined the Watch, tells me there's a ruined staircase at Woodswatch that leads all the way up to the Wall on the southern side. As for the north side? I'd be out of luck.
"It's the same at Greyguard," says Tormund, through bites of food. "Some of the steps are collapsed, though. As Snow here well remembers."
Halder looks at Tormund across the fire, then at Jon. "That's where you and his lot…?" he says, trailing off.
"We climbed somewhere near Stonedoor, then crossed to Greyguard," Jon answers. "Took the steps down from there."
Mouth agape, my eyes fly toward the Wall and then back to Jon in bewilderment. "I'm sorry, you actually climbed that thing?" I blurt out, pointing like an idiot.
Jon lowers his gaze as if this is a feat to be humble about, but Tormund perks up immediately.
"He didn't tell you?" he asks. "This little crow is quite the climber. One of the few of us who made it to the top. Even survived his rope being cut loose."
I stare back and forth between the two of them, unsure if Tormund is pulling my leg or if Jon is much crazier than I thought. If this happened after he joined the Night's Watch, then it was also after his brother Bran plummeted to what could have been his death after climbing a tower. A tower! And yet, as if tempting fate, Jon went ahead and scaled a seven-hundred-foot wall of ice.
Though obviously he managed just fine. And he did mention Bran had no incidents up until that day. Still, these brothers and their climbing… Must be a Stark thing.
"That's a long way up," I say after I've mostly collected myself, lifting my eyebrows at him. "Or a long way down."
He scoffs out a weak laugh, shifting in his seat as he cups his warm drink in his hands. "Didn't exactly have a gate we could pass through," he says, taking a sip. After a moment, his forehead furrows in thought. "How far west of Craster's were you? Do you know? What castle would you have found, if Benjen just sent you south and hadn't mentioned Castle Black?"
Oh, actually I think I do know this. I can picture the map in my mind. "Probably either Hoarfrost Hill, Icemark, or… Nightfort," I say.
The last one gets a significant reaction from the Night's Watch brothers. A united chorus of grimaces and adamant objection. "You would not want to go to Nightfort," Jeren assures me.
"Why? What's Nightfort?" I ask. I'm guessing there's more to it than the fact that it's unmanned.
Jon looks unsurprised by their unanimous response. A wince had crossed even his stoic face, however subtle it was. "It's the oldest castle on the Wall," he says. "As old as the Wall itself. It's existed for thousand of years." He gives his fellow brothers a knowing look. "Naturally, quite a lot of people believe it to be cursed or haunted. There are many dark tales surrounding it."
"Like what?" I press. Which is probably a mistake, since it's dark out and we're a stone's throw away from another abandoned castle. But my curiosity is piqued, and we're gathered around a fire. If ever there was a time and place for dark tales, this would be it.
Sure enough, suddenly the brothers are alert, every one of them more than eager to list off all the scary stories they've heard about the Nightfort.
Jeren tells me the one about the Rat Cook, where a cook took out his anger towards a visiting king by killing his son and baking him into a pie, which he served to the king himself. As punishment for murdering a guest under his roof, the gods turned the cook into a giant white rat who could only feed on his own young. He still roams the Nightfort, devouring his children. Never satisfied. Always hungry.
He laughs when I wrinkle my nose in disgust, but I'm struck by the story's gruesome similarity to the concept of the Games. A quite literal and cannibalistic version, but the message is the same. As always, it's the children in these kinds of stories who suffer.
Then Halder chimes in with the story of the Seventy-Nine Sentinels, or as he calls them, "the watchers in the Wall," where seventy-nine brothers deserted the Watch and went to one man's father for refuge. The father betrayed them, even his own son, and sent them back to the Nightfort, where they were buried alive inside the Wall, never again to abandon their post.
This one makes me shiver. Burned alive or buried, those are the worst ways to go. I still feel a flutter of panic whenever I go through Castle Black's tunnel, and that was before I considered the possibility of bodies in the ice.
Even Edd brings up Mad Axe, a man who went insane and murdered several of his sworn brothers. Albett starts to tell me about "Brave Danny Flint," a girl who disguised herself as a boy to join the Night's Watch, but Jon whips his head around and shoots him such a severe look that he abruptly cuts himself off. Instead, he encourages Jon to tell me about the Night's King, since it was a Stark who defeated him.
Appeased by the subject change, Jon tells me the story of the Night's King, a legendary Lord Commander from the Age of Heroes who fell in love with an ice-cold woman he discovered beyond the Wall. Leading her back to the Nightfort, he declared himself king and made her his queen, and they ruled over the Wall using sorcery to control all others, including his sworn brothers. Turns out Tormund knows this tale too, adding in that it wasn't until the King in the North, Brandon the Breaker, joined forces with Joramun, the King Beyond the Wall, that they were finally able to defeat him.
"They found out after they'd killed him that he'd been making human sacrifices to the white walkers," Jon finishes. "So they erased all records of him and made it forbidden to utter his name, and he was lost to history."
"Convenient," Edd mutters.
"Not unheard of," I say, thinking of Lucy Gray. But the first part hits me. "So, like Craster? With his sons?"
Jon blinks in faint surprise, then realizes. "Gilly told you about that?"
I confirm with a nod. "She said they were offerings to the gods," I say. "But since she had a white walker coming after her and Little Sam, I assumed…" With a shrug, my voice trails off there.
Tormund snorts his disgust. "What kind of man leaves his own babies in the woods to die?" he rasps. "If your gods start asking you to sacrifice your children for them, you need better gods."
Couldn't agree more, I think to myself. I feel a pair of eyes on me and find Jon gazing knowingly in my direction. Our eyes meet for a second before I look away. It's a little embarrassing, remembering how much he knows now. The subject has only come up in bits and pieces since we started focusing on the Hardhome trip, especially with me being preoccupied with the whole Snow and Lucy thing.
"It's an interesting story, though. The Night's King," I say. Vaguely familiar, even, though I can't immediately put my finger on why. "I guess the concept of 'fairytale but disturbing' exists across all countries."
"What sort of stories you got in Panem?" Albett asks.
Several of the men around him chatter in agreement, save for Jon, who grows tense. "It's your turn, Katniss. Tell us a scary one," says Halder.
"Don't put her on the spot now," warns Jon. To me, he says, "You don't have to if you don't want to."
"It's fine. I'm just trying to think of one," I tell him.
The first thing that sprang to mind when they asked was the poem Lucy Gray's name was based on, but that doesn't seem spooky enough. Some fairytales I know are rather grim, but not quite the mood I'm looking for. The legend of the moon-eyed people might be either too simple or too strange. Then there's the thing with Lavinia that Gale and I witnessed, her fleeing in the woods with that boy, being snatched up and so suddenly whisked away by the hovercraft, screaming the impaled boy's name before they vanished into thin air. Her reappearing to me years later as an Avox, alive but maimed.
She's dead now, and I won't use her personal tragedy as a campfire story. Not when so much of it was my fault. After failing to save her that day, it would be like adding insult to injury…
"The Hanging Tree," says Tormund suddenly, breaking into my thoughts. "Your song. Is that based off anything?"
I glance over at him, relieved at the suggestion. "Yeah, actually," I say, and tell them what I know now. "It's about a coal miner in Twelve who tried to incite a rebellion. All he did was cause an explosion in the mines that killed three people and injured plenty others. They hanged him for it a month later. His last words were him telling his lover to run." I pause, thinking about what my mother's grandfather told her. "Mockingjays, the birds from my country, they have a knack for mimicking human sounds and melodies. So they must've echoed his cries right after his death. Hence the line, 'The dead man called out for his love to flee.'"
The Night's Watch brothers look a mix of intrigued and spooked, with Jon mostly lost in thought.
"Not a white walker, then," says Jeren.
Tormund scoffs. "The dead can't talk, boy."
I hide a flinch, hearing Gilly's voice echo the same thing in my head. "No, just a creepy birdsong," I say.
"Did she get away?" Jon asks. When I glance his way, he clears his throat and clarifies. "The lover from the song."
"Or was she the one singing it?" Edd offers. "Necklace of rope, side by side with me… probably killed herself out of grief."
I hesitate, then shake my head. "No," I say. "She died too, later. But she wasn't the one who wrote it." Unable to help myself, I lean in and continue in a conspiratorial tone. "They say the girl who wrote it was singing to her own lover. Hoping to run away with him. Maybe she was haunted by the hangings, or they'd both committed their own crimes, maybe they just wanted to be free. But something happened in the woods. A betrayal of some kind. He came back without her, and she was never seen again." My voice dies down to almost a whisper. "It's a mystery what happened to her after that."
"No, it's not," says Edd. "He killed her."
I roll my eyes at him. "Thank you, Edd, for your incredibly macabre interpretations."
Edd just shrugs and raises his cup to his lips, muffling a scoff into his drink.
"She didn't come back because she wanted to leave in the first place." Jon lifts his gaze from the fire. "He probably stayed out of duty. Told her to go on without him."
"Oh, that's nice," says Albett. "All on her lonesome in the wilderness? Where she could suffer the fate of brave Danny Flint?"
Jon looks perturbed. "I'll ask you not to mention that song again," he warns.
"You're all fools," Tormund drawls. "I think she survived, came to Westeros, and still sings her little song to this day." He lowers his voice to sound scary. "Perhaps she's sitting right here at this fire."
A chill ripples through my skin before I realize he's talking about me. "Oh, no, I'm not her," I murmur. "I don't write the songs. I just sing them."
I shouldn't have even told them any of this. I'm backsliding, fishing for answers again. I need a fresh distraction.
I'm opening my mouth to request another dark tale from the Nightfort when my earpiece interrupts me. Gale is on the other end, and he says it's important. Quickly, I excuse myself from the fire, pleading the bathroom excuse when some of the men speak up with nosy protests. Retreating to a small northern stretch of woods closer to the Wall, I connect to him as soon as I deem myself completely out of earshot.
As soon as I respond, Gale announces, "There's someone here who wants to say hello to you."
There's the sound of an earpiece being passed from hand to fumbling hand. And then a hesitant yet hopeful voice reaches my ear. "Katniss?"
My heart skips a beat. "Shireen?" I breathe out in relief.
She's so elated to hear from me, she forgives us both for not telling her about the earpieces until now. After explaining it to her, Gale and Shireen worked it out that they would pretend like she's reading her books aloud to him when she's really talking to me. If anyone walks in on them, they'll find Shireen with a book in her lap and Gale sitting there, paying rapt attention. It was her idea, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest, considering how clever it is.
I tell her everything that's happened since she left, omitting the parts about Lucy Gray since it's not worth the time I would use up explaining it to her. She may love a good story, but I can give her that with my tales of horseback riding practice beyond the Wall with Ghost. Or the fact that Buttercup is with Sam and Gilly and not me right now, because I've joined Jon and the Night's Watch brothers on their journey to Hardhome.
Shireen gushes excitedly at all of this, disappointed only when I regretfully inform her that Jon is not nearby to talk to her right now. Since he knows about the devices, I briefly toy with the idea of fetching him. But then I consider the implications of going back over there and inviting the Lord Commander to sneak away into the woods with me. Right in front of his Night's Watch brothers.
Yeah, maybe not.
It's just as well, since Shireen can't chat for very long. They'll resume their journey to Winterfell at sunrise, so her mother could come by at any moment to shoo Gale out and tell her to go to sleep. Instead, she asks for a song or two, which is a reasonable enough request. I sing her the river song, and then when she asks for one more, I search my memories for another. A Covey lullaby my father sang to me, something he said Cousin Barb used to sing to Grandma Maude when she was sad.
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away."
I pause here, listening to the woods, since I can't tell if there was a sound just now besides my voice. On my end or Shireen's. Though part of it is me feeling self-conscious about singing in the woods. I'm keeping my voice down, but what if it's still carrying all the way back to the camp?
Never mind. If I'm the strange foreign girl who goes off by herself to sing in the forest, so be it. I brush it off and continue.
"The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you by my side
When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken
So I hung my head and I cried."
I'm starting to get why Prim didn't want to hear this one, and not just because she thought "hung" meant with a rope. I miss Shireen the way I miss Prim, even with a little piece of her in my ear.
"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away."
After the song fades out, she starts to plead for a third. I hem and haw about having to get back to the others, but I'm on the verge of giving in when I hear Selyse's voice, followed by the rustling of an earpiece being dislodged and hidden away. I whisper a goodnight, though she can't hear me, and click off before returning to the camp.
Other than Tormund crudely wondering what I must have eaten, the Night's Watch don't bother me much about my absence. I think Jon notices me putting my earpiece away, though. There are some questions later that night when I get my sleeping bag out, but luckily demonstrating the use of a zipper only a handful of times is both entertaining and good enough for them when they're too tired to press further.
However, Jon is surprised at how far I drag it away from the fire. "Won't you be cold?" he asks.
I shake my head. "The material reflects body heat," I tell him. "Besides, I'm a restless sleeper. Don't want to risk disturbing anyone."
"You wouldn't be," Jon says. "It would be better to stay close."
"He's right," Albett says, setting up his own makeshift bed of furs by the fire. "Don't know who or what might come crawling out of the woods at night. Shadowcats and the like."
Tormund snorts. "Think Snow meant he'd rather do the warming himself."
A few of the brothers laugh as Jon turns to throw Tormund an exasperated look. After giving it a moment's thought, I retreat towards my sleeping bag and start dragging it back to join the others.
"Well, you say 'shadowcat,' I hear 'new blanket,'" I say, settling in and pulling my shadowskin around me.
"After what the first did to your arm?" Jon turns his sternness towards me, albeit in a lighter dose. "That shadowcat had you cornered. You don't want another one catching you sleeping."
This quiets most of the brothers, their laughter dying down as they study the cloak I've clutched to my chest as a blanket. But it's Tormund who speaks up first.
"That's a real shadowskin, then?" he says. "You the one who killed it?"
"Yes," I say, trying not to glance at Jon too conspicuously. "With some help."
"When did you fight a shadowcat?" Edd asks.
I manage a shrug. "Two weeks ago. You had it for supper."
"And you never thought to tell us that story?" Halder says incredulously.
So I recount my ordeal with the shadowcat, starting with taking shelter in the cave for the night and ending with Ghost leading me back so I could get stitched up by Gilly. The Night's Watch brothers chatter excitedly about this one, remembering that night and giving Jon a hard time for grilling them about whether or not they'd seen me return.
Jon strongly hints at them to knock it off, so they switch to telling more stories about the Nightfort. Visions of hellhounds, a twisted weirwood tree in the kitchen, ghosts in the dungeons, and the Black Gate, a magical underground gate made of weirwood that only lets you pass if you recite part of the Night's Watch vow. For added effect, they all say it together in the most ominous voices they can muster.
"I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers. I am the shield that guards the realms of men."
"Then pass," Albett says in a booming voice, and they laugh.
Halder glances over at me, still grinning. "You'd have needed a sworn brother to let you through, but it's not coming south that's the problem," he tells me, doing his best to sound sinister. "They say that some who pass north through Nightfort's gate never come back again."
A few brothers scoff and jeer on the other side of the fire. As far as Nightfort stories go, this one must somehow be both the tamest and the most controversial.
"Wildlings?" guesses Jeren, and Tormund grunts.
"Would have left the bodies," says Halder.
"White walkers, then."
"How long they been awake? I heard of it happening in the last five hundred years."
While all of this is going on, I notice that Jon's face has fallen. In the firelight, a dark and faraway look has taken over his grey eyes as he chews the inside of his mouth. The same wistfulness as when I told him where I'd seen Benjen.
"You all right?" I whisper.
His gaze flicks to me, and he smiles kind of painfully. "Fine," he whispers back, barely heard over the arguments around the fire. "Get some rest." Raising his voice, he turns it towards the rest of the camp. "All of you. We ride again at first light."
The heated debate – featuring Albett's doubt that it was even limited to the Nightfort, and Edd's exasperated of course it's not limited to the Nightfort, they were deserters, you idiots – finally dies down, with only a few skeptical mumbles from the others as they bury themselves under their furs for the night.
As I burrow comfortably into my cloak and sleeping bag, my gaze shifts toward Jon, who still has that pensive expression on his face. I sense there's more to it than just "fine," but decide not to press the matter right now when he's about to fall asleep.
Instead, I roll onto my back and stare up at the sky, trying to remember the last time I slept this close to someone. It must've been in Tigris's cellar, with the surviving members of Squad 451. Nine months ago. In nine months, this is my first time sleeping in human company. I hope I don't do something stupid like wake up screaming.
Jon knows about my night terrors, though, and he seems to have accepted the risks. I guess he won't have far to go this time if he needs to check on me. He's practically within arm's reach. Like he said, it would be better to stay close.
Well, don't say I didn't warn you, I think to myself.
And I let myself give in to sleep, hoping that if any giant rats invade my dreams tonight, the shadowcats will eat them first – before the direwolves come and chase them away.
Rats do make an appearance in my dreams tonight. It's like a reprisal of my nightmare from back before the Quell, where Mags turns into a rodent and attempts to eat my face, except it's Lucy Gray this time, and at first she's chasing after a pastel-pink rat I assume is Prim. The moment I try to interfere, she pounces on me.
To my credit, I don't scream myself awake. But I do jolt halfway upright with an embarrassing snorty gasp. Albett stirs briefly at the sound, then turns over and is back to snoring in no time. Sighing, I lay my head back down and drop a hand to my forehead. I don't know if I'm more relieved that I'm awake, or that I didn't wake anyone else…
"Bad dream?" comes a voice in the dark.
I jolt again, cursing through another startled snort. Then I notice it's just Jon staring back at me, his sympathetic eyes now glinting with sheepish apology.
"Sorry, didn't realize anyone was up," I say. He only raises an eyebrow promptingly. "Carnivorous rats," I add with a sigh.
"We really shouldn't have filled your head with all those dark stories," says Jon. "Old Nan used to tell them to my brother Bran. They'd have him up at all hours of the night."
I laugh, oddly entertained at the thought of an old woman putting a little boy to bed with stories of cannibalistic vermin. "If it wasn't rats, it would have been something else," I tell him, then roll onto my side and look at him. "Why are you awake?"
Jon smiles faintly. "Can't seem to quiet my mind," he murmurs.
A hum of empathy escapes my lips. "Try to sleep," I warn him, shifting onto my back again and staring up at the sky. "Count the stars or something. Or else you'll hate yourself in the morning."
I hear a little scoff from Jon, but it's followed by a rustle of furs as he moves into the same position.
Luckily, I get through the night all right after that. My dreams mostly consist of wandering through ruins and castle grounds with Ghost at my side. The rats that do skitter across my path are the size they're supposed to be, and while my dream self does consider eating them, I can blame that on the jungle rats we had to eat in the Quarter Quell.
The next day is more of the same. We continue our journey east. The Night's Watch men bounce banter and inside jokes between themselves. Jon points out a ruined castle as we go by, and I discreetly film it for Beetee's sake.
Though somewhere between Sable Hall and Rimegate, the subject of music comes up. They never thought to have me sing anything last night since everyone was so invested in dark tales, and now they're debating amongst themselves which songs they've best liked hearing me sing, whether they be from Westeros or Panem. It occurs to me that I have more Covey songs to share now, so I say things like "Don't tell me I never sang you that one" and I fill the air with "Crawling to You," "Sell You For A Song," and "Nothing You Can Take From Me."
They're a hit with the Night's Watch brothers, especially the reaping song. The men laugh at the line "you can kiss my ass and then keep on walking," which makes me nearly crack up with them, but I manage to get through the rest despite the grin on my face.
It's only after the last one that Tormund finally pipes up. "I'm starting to get why Mance liked this girl," he says. "You ever taught her the song of the winter rose?"
Winter rose? At first, the name rings a bell. But then I realize I'm thinking of the story Stannis told me, the one with Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. That was more of a history lesson, and it involved an entire flower crown, not a singular rose.
Jon sees my confusion out of the corner of his eye. "It's a song Ygritte told me about," he says, facing forward with a slight frown. "She only told me the story; I never heard the lyrics."
Tormund harrumphs something about southerners. "One of Bael the Bard's songs," he explains aside to me. "He was King Beyond the Wall long before Mance. 'Fore that, he was a great raider…"
He goes on to tell me the story, and then teach me the song. Just like "Rose of Gold," it's another long ballad with a story. Lord Brandon Stark – not Jon's brother Brandon, or his uncle, or the builder, or the breaker, apparently there's a lot of Brandons in the Stark family tree – but whoever was Lord Brandon Stark in Bael's time, he was furious that he could never capture Bael and take his head, so he called him a craven who preyed on the weak. Bael, having heard what Lord Stark was saying about him, scaled the Wall, traveled the kingsroad, and came to Winterfell under a fake name as a singer and harp-player.
Since as I myself would know, singers are always warmly welcomed, Bael ate at Lord Stark's table and performed hours and hours of songs through the night, some old, some new. When he was done, Lord Stark was so pleased that he asked Bael to name his own reward. But all Bael asked for was a flower, "the fairest flower that blooms in the gardens o' Winterfell."
At the time, the winter roses had just come into bloom, and the ones that grew in Winterfell's glass gardens were the rarest and most precious of all. So Lord Stark commanded that the most beautiful winter rose be plucked from that garden for the singer's reward. Then, in in the morning, the singer was gone, and so was Lord Stark's daughter. Her bed was empty, save for the blue winter rose Bael had left on her pillow.
Having no other children, Lord Stark ordered a search, but a year went by with no sign of the bard or the girl. Her father gave up and took to his bed, waiting to die and let the Stark line end with him, until one night he heard a child's cry. He followed the sound to his daughter's bedchamber, where he found her asleep with a baby at her breast. Turns out they'd been in Winterfell the whole time, hiding in the crypts. The Stark girl had fallen in love with Bael, and they'd had a son together. In the end, Bael returned the child as payment for the rose he'd plucked without permission, and the boy would grow up to be the next Lord Stark.
"So the Stark girl is the winter rose," I say at the end, slowly getting it. Kind of like the Tyrell girl is the true "rose of gold" in Aemon's song.
"The fairest flower in all of Winterfell," Tormund agrees with a grin.
We've dismounted to give our horses a rest. Most of us are either walking to stretch our legs, feeding and watering the horses, or getting something to eat or drink ourselves. I warm my fingers around a flask of tea, take a swig, then chuckle as a thought hits me. "It kind of works as a Covey name."
"Covey?" Jeren repeats, shamelessly eavesdropping.
"A group of traveling singers, from my father's mother's side of the family," I say, and explain the Covey naming tradition of using songs and colors. "So, there was my grandmother Maude Ivory Baird, from the Panem ballad 'Maude Clare,' and her cousin Barb Azure, from 'Barbara Allen.' But in some cases, the first and second name can both come from the ballad, like her other cousin, who's named after the poem 'Lucy Gray.'" I turn to Tormund as an epiphany strikes. "Which, incidentally, is another song about a man's daughter disappearing."
"So, you're saying Winter Rose counts as that kind of name," Jon interjects, drawing my attention towards him, "since the song is called Winter Rose, and rose counts as a color."
"Exactly," I say. "Though it's a nice name on its own. Winter Rose. Also sort of fits with my mother's side's tradition of naming their kids after flowers."
Jon grins at me. "I thought you were named after a potato," he teases.
"Hey!" I say, laughing. "The katniss plant has flowers. With three white petals. You've got to be able to identify it if you want to eat it."
"Oh, I'm sure he'll make a meal of it one day," says Halder from up ahead, and a few of the men near him start snickering for some reason.
Jon stiffens, his eyes opening a fraction wider as he frowns in their direction. "Excuse me, my lady," he says under his breath, slipping again on the title, and he strides to the front of the group to talk to them.
Bemused, I turn back to resume talking to Tormund, who's looking at me appraisingly.
"The name was Baird, you said," he notes. "A foreign word for bard?"
"Or bird," I offer with a shrug.
"Nature's singers," says Tormund.
I incline my head, conceding he has a point. "You might be right, actually," I say, walking alongside him as we follow the Night's Watch with our horses. "My grandmother and her cousins, their fathers were brothers. And before they were the Covey, apparently they used to call themselves The Brothers Baird." Or so it's scrawled in the covers of their old folklore, song, and poetry books. When there's a bit of a pause, I remember the universe knowledge gap. "After the Brothers Grimm, a couple of ancient storytellers," I clarify, then look to Tormund expectantly. "Bards are just singing storytellers, right?"
"Bards. Birds. Bairds…" Tormund gives a snort. "Singers and storytellers alike, the Starks seem to have a weakness for them."
Then he's doing that appraising stare again, only with a meaningful eyebrow lift, and I have to avert my gaze because we both know he's not just talking about Bael and the Stark girl. Embarrassed, I cover it up with a gulp of tea from my flask and pretend that's the source of the heat rising in my cheeks.
"A Stark, once thought lost, reappears to you," he continues grandly. "Saved you from the white walkers, yes?"
"Yep," I say, not wanting to divulge anything incriminating. "Rode right out of the Haunted Forest, took 'em down one by one."
My answer is satisfactory enough for Tormund, who gives a "ha!" of revelation. "Hiding amongst the dead," he says.
The phrasing makes me nervous at first, but I see what he's getting at. "Then, wouldn't that make me Lord Stark in that situation?" I ask. "Instead of Bael?"
"You do have the look of a Stark," he says, studying my features. "Probably why he came to your rescue…" A pause as he considers this. "You sure you don't have a little Stark in you?"
"Pretty sure," I say, giving him the short answer while taking another sip from my flask.
Tormund glances over at Jon, then back at me with a knowing twinkle in his eye. He lowers his voice to a whisper. "Would you like to?"
It takes a split second for my brain to translate, but when realization hits, I almost choke on my drink. I swallow the tea down hard and cough out half a gasp, turning to glare at him with stupidly wide eyes. Tormund promptly bursts out laughing, his roaring guffaws loud enough to carry to the front of the group and cause Jon to throw a suspicious look over his shoulder.
"Tormund, what are you saying to her?" he demands, doing a double take because my face must say it all. He probably can see the searing scarlet in my cheeks from there.
Tormund's grin only widens, pure mischief stretching from ear to ear. "By the way," he intones, "when I say little, I mean little."
With that, he starts walking ahead, or maybe I've just slowed down in a state of flustered shock. I did not need to know that, nor do I care, and anyway, how does he know that? I blink furiously and shake my head to rid myself of these thoughts before they stick, like a dog drying out its fur. But it ends up proving useless when I hear Jon call my name, see him glance curiously in my direction before prompting me forward with a simple lift of his eyebrows. I watch him absently stroke his horse's neck, threading his fingers in her black mane, and a shiver of longing shoots through me.
"Damn you, Tormund," I grumble under my breath, then wrap my shadowskin tighter around me and plod across the snow.
A/N: I know, a week between updates hasn't been done in a while. But I got this one done quickly, and I figure the sooner we get to the Hardhome chapter, the better. Thanks to ZainR and E3roa for the reviews! (Loved your reaction to the Lucy Snow reveal!)