Chapter 28: Jon II

"Can I have his boots?" someone asked, as Janos Slynt's head went rolling across the muddy ground. "They're proper boots, they are, almost new. Lined with fur too."

Jon glanced back at Stannis, and their eyes briefly met. Beside him, he heard the sound of the man taking his refusal to address the question as assent, and soon after the rest of the men descended on the body like a murder of crows, stripping the headless corpse of all but a coarse layer of roughspun. Stannis's gaze flicked over to the crowd, and then after a long moment he turned, shot Jon an approving nod, and disappeared again inside his tower.

Jon braced himself as he turned away from the scene of the execution and made for his tower. Black brothers parted as he approached, nervously leaving him a path. The boots of his guards tromped in the mud behind him. He had killed Janos Slynt for refusing orders, for refusing to serve the Wall and refusing to man Greyguard despite receiving direct orders, but to them death was death.

The man was an oathbreaker, Jon wanted to say to the lingering looks and watching eyes. A deserter in all but name. No man is more dangerous. No man is more deserving of death.

And yet, Jon kept his peace, even as he met the cold gaze of Alliser Thorne in the crowd, ever defiant. I am the Lord Commander now, Jon said with his eyes. This would not be his last beheading. And Janos Slynt was not worthy of his guilt anyhow. He would have to kill better men in the days and weeks and months to come. It was best to spare his remorse for them.

As it was, executions always induced a bout of melancholy in Jon, some more pronounced than others. He who passes the sentence should swing the sword, he remembered his father had said as he climbed the steps. A good way to earn the deference of men if done well, and a good way to earn their disdain elsewise.

Jon dismissed his guards with a lazy wave of his hand as he arrived in his solar. Today was more an autumn day than a winter one. The snows did not fall, and the curly blanket of clouds did not sit atop the sky. The air was cold, but that was all. Jon pushed open the shutters as he pulled himself a seat and poured himself a cup of wine. This would likely be one of the last days of true light the Wall would be lucky to receive in a good long while. He would relish that while he could, before his whole world would be plunged into overcast darkness and bitter chills.

From his window, Jon watched the Wall. The sunlight bounced off the icy construction of the Wall, little teardrops of water rolling down the sides, sparkling like diamonds. He'd seen the Wall from up close, when it was unimaginably vast and so tall as to make one feel like a gnat, but he preferred it like this. It was still massive, but from a distance one could better appreciate the awful beauty of it.

Jon sighed, sipped the last dregs of wine from his cup, lit the fire in his hearth to ward away the cold - even as he left the shutters open to the breeze - and set down to work at his desk. Yet not one minute into his work he was interrupted when Sam came in - cautiously at first, peeking to see if Mormont's raven was still about to peck at his fingers, and then more confidently once he realised he was safe - and pressed a letter onto the table.
"Another from the Iron Throne?" Jon guessed, knowing Sam would not make the trek himself unless it was important.

Samwell nodded and sat himself down, even as he pushed the letter across the surface of the table for Jon to read. With the crook of his finger, Jon pulled off the seal and unfurled the scrap of parchment. He read it once, then twice, then swallowed and asked: "Can you keep a secret, Sam?"

Sam's eyes narrowed with concern, and he nodded tentatively, almost nervously. "Of course I can, my lord."

"It's Arya," Jon said, still looking at the letter, running his thumb over the ink, over the parchment, tears pricking his eyes. "She wrote this letter."

Samwell frowned. "Are you certain? It's not a forgery?"

"I'd know her hand anywhere," Jon said. "I helped her with her letters, when she was struggling with Maester Luwin's lessons. I've seen it a thousand times, and I'm seeing it again today."

Sam frowned. "So King Tommen was telling the truth."

"Apparently," Jon said, his look souring again.

"But we can't turn our backs on Stannis," Samwell said.

Jon shook his head in agreement.

"Then you need to destroy that letter, my lord," Samwell said, a warning tone in his voice. "I know you might want to keep it, but if one of Stannis's men finds it... If they find out that the Lord Commander has a sister held under the thumb of the Iron Throne..." Sam shook his head. "And it won't just be them either. The other black brothers will start having doubts as well."

"I know," Jon said hotly. "And I'm not under anyone's thumb. I do only what is right for the Watch. But I won't destroy it. Just not... Not right now. Give me a day or two."

Samwell nodded and rose to his feet. "I'll leave you be, my lord," he said, his brow still furrowed in concern for his friend as he turned and left.

Jon sat in silence for what felt like hours after that, reading and rereading till the words were burned into his mind and the letters began to blur together. He watched the flames slowly die in his hearth and become embers and when he went to sleep he awoke to wolf dreams again.

He was on his haunches in Winterfell's Great Hall, howling for his pack. Howling and howling, his voice echoing off the cold stone walls. The only light was moonlight, falling in harsh lines on the flagstone floors through the windows. No matter. As Jon's nose twitched the scents pushed him onwards, guiding him, his padded feet soundless. Ahead was warmth, a fire, a good meal, and his family.

Robb would be there with an easy smile, a sword in his hand and an offer to spar. Bran would be there, his legs still working, ever curious, ever climbing. Rickon would be there as well, small and happy and unacquainted with the horrors of this world. So would Sansa, ever prim and proper, and Arya, ever wild and free.

And so too would he find the warm embrace of his father.

Yet so far, all he had was silence. In his deepest heart, he knew it to all be a dream. Yet the tiniest sliver of hope refused to die.

At the end of this hall he would find his family.

Jon advanced further, his fear slipping away, replaced with a surging desperation. A slow walk became a jog, and then a run. Yet the hall did not end. It grew and grew, the ceiling rising, the floor widening, the end somehow further away then when he started. He heard a voice, young and girlish, calling out at first, and then screaming. He knew not the words the voice said, but he recognised it to be begging.

Jon pushed himself even faster, sprinting now, the wind whipping through his fur, making for the screams before they were silenced. A terrible panic seized him as the voice grew weaker, and the stench of fear filled his nostrils. His muscles burned.

Suddenly, he saw it.

A naked girl lying flat on her back; shivering, whimpering, blood leaking out onto the floor from between her legs, her entrails visible through a slit in her stomach. Her face was hidden by a cloak of shadows. A woman was hunched overtop, her back turned, her head covered by a hood; silent, slow, dangerous. She turned, and Jon saw eyes of murky blue like a sky shrouded by icy clouds, set into a shredded face of rotten flesh, a halo of stringy white hair spilling out from under the hood. Blood stained her fingertips and lips and spattered her tattered cloak.

A wight, Jon thought at first, but was soon frozen in fear as he saw the look in it's eyes. Or something worse?

And then he started awake, his chest heaving.

Arya? Ygritte? Sansa? he asked himself. Perhaps, yet I didn't get a good look at the girl. I was too distracted by the woman. Not that that much mattered. Normally during his wolf dreams the halls he visited were empty. Normally all he found was silence, no matter how much he wished otherwise. But today...

Jon sighed, shook away what last vestiges of sleep still lingered, and pulled himself from his bed. The morning chill struck his skin and caused an outbreak of reddened gooseflesh. Across the room, the letter caught his eye. Jon thought back to his dreams, grit his teeth, and snatched up the scrap of parchment. He looked it over one last time, eying the ink, memorising the words, and then flicked the letter into the dying embers still glowing in the hearth from the fire he had started yesterday.

It caught alight quickly enough, and Jon watched it burn in solemn silence as he dressed himself. You're not the only thing that will burn today, Jon thought as he watched the edges of the parchment crinkle and curl and slowly blacken as wisps of smoke trailed up. Despite his best efforts to convince him to the contrary, today was the day that Stannis had determined as the most auspicious for the King-Beyond-the-Wall to die.
And the Red Witch left no doubts in Jon's mind as to how the execution would be conducted.

Shooting one last forlorn look at his hearth, Jon wrapped his fur cloak tight about himself and left his chambers, descending down the steps to find his guards waiting at the bottom, neatly falling in behind him as he trudged through a fresh layer of snow. The day may have been warm and cloudless, but the night had been bitter and heavy. The evidence of that was all around, a thin sheet of white covering every exposed surface.
Through the snow Jon walked, and through the snow Jon rode, all the way to the foot of the Wall.

They brought forth the King-Beyond-the-Wall with his hands bound beyond his back and a noose hanging loosely off his neck. He had been stripped clean, left only a small hemp shirt that left his arms and legs exposed to the cold as he was led to the wooden scaffold raised over the firepit. Behind him, Jon saw the Wall was still weeping, albeit slower than the day before. The winter chill would set the remaining rivulets of icy water in place soon enough.

I tried, Jon wanted to say as he watched Mance stumble. But, alas, all his claims and attempts at convincement of Mance's usefulness had fallen on deaf ears. The law remained plain and simple; a deserter's life was forfeit. And so long as this was true, Stannis's famously iron will would not be shaken.

Beside the prisoner, Jon watched as the Red Witch made her presence known. "We all must choose!" she proclaimed, in a surprisingly loud voice. "We must choose between light or dark. Between good or evil. Between the true god or the false one."

Mance listened to the rest of Melisandre's speech with a smile on his face, his courage unfailing, but when he turned and saw the woodwork his bravery faltered. It was a cage that hung from the scaffold, made from the twisted and gnarled branches of a weirwood tree all woven together. He balked for a brief moment, and then turned away and recoiled at the sight of the cage, his features marked with horror.

"No," he said, shaking his head and trying to back away. "This is not right. I'm not a king, they made me..." His words were cut off when two men grabbed him by the armpits and hauled him forwards towards the frame. "Mercy!" he cried. "Mercy!"

One of Stannis's men pulled on the noose around his neck and choked off his next words, and silently the men holding him tried to stuff him into the cage. They had to beat him to overcome his resistance when he tried to stop himself, and before long the snow on the ground was speckled with blood. With some of his limbs broken, Mance Rayder was half-dragged and half-carried to the cage, and unceremoniously thrown in.

The door shut, a dozen of Stannis's men made short work of gathering around the rope and heaving, the scaffold shaking from their efforts as the cage was lifted off the ground above the pit, which was filled with wood and leaves and kindling. Lady Melisandre watched him rise with icy eyes, not a hint of guilt in her entire body. You could have beheaded him, Jon wanted to say, but instead he bit his tongue to keep the peace.

"FREE FOLK!" she called out. "Here hangs your kings of lies! Your coward king!" She waved her hand and two men came forwards carrying something. "And here is the horn he promised would bring down the Wall!" A lie, Jon thought, or at least that was what Tommen had told him. Jon remembered Ygritte had agreed before she'd died, telling him that Mance had never managed to find the true horn. Looking at it, Jon saw black wood banded with old gold engraved with runes, eight feet long from end to end.

Whatever it was, Jon knew better than to abandon his caution. He'd keep an eye open either way.

Through the stockades, a thousand captive wildling men watched as the horn was hefted high, and then unceremoniously thrown into the pile of kindling below the cage from which Mance still hung. "The Horn of Darkness, I call it," Melisandre continued. "For if the Wall falls then the long night - that night that never ends - will surely come as well! And then we will all freeze. No, the Lord of Light cannot let this happen! And so he has gifted us Azor Ahai reborn!"

Melisandre gestured to Stannis, clad in pale grey plate, his sunken eyes stern and unyielding rather than unfeeling. You can surely still put a stop to this, Jon thought, but knew it would not be so.

"FREE FOLK!" Melisandre cried again. "Behold the fate of those who choose the darkness!" And just like that, the Horn of Joramun burst into flames, and the fire slowly grew to the surrounding kindling. It was a queer fire, green and yellow and purple and red, leaping and spitting and crackling as it slowly grew hot. The stockades shook as some grew angry at seeing their hopes aflame.

Inside his cage, despite his broken limbs and bloodied body, Mance screamed incoherently as he clawed first at the noose around his neck and then at the cage with bound hands. He screamed of treachery and witchery and then he screamed denial after denial after denial.

And then he stopped.

For a moment Jon thought his heart had burst, but just as he was about to send a silent prayer of thanks to the old gods a crazed laughter began emanating from the cage, becoming louder and louder as the fire underneath crackled and grew. Jon watched unblinking as the fire caught the weirwood, forcing himself not to react. A display of squeamishness now would be seen as weakness, something he could ill afford. Instead he affixed his eyes and watched, his stomach slowly roiling as burning wood became burning flesh.

All around him, two hundred black brothers watched with Jon, hoods pulled over their heads to hide who they really were. Greybeards and green boys would not strike fear into the wildlings, and if they were not sufficiently afraid then Jon knew that all they would do once south of the Wall was wreak havoc.

As the horn split in the pit with an almighty crack, Mance clutched at the bars of his cage and did a little dance, lifting one foot away from the flames, and then the other, and then back again. But he could delay the inevitable only for so long, and his laughs became screams again, so loud and raw that Jon feared he would tear his throat and fall silent before he died instead of after.

Jon could not watch any longer. "Now!" he hissed, and three brothers in the crowd set down their spears, strung their bows, and launched three headless arrows into the heart of the cage. Fluttering and jumping, the cage swinging, Mance was no easy target, but the arrows found their mark nonetheless. One took him in the chest, the other in the neck, and the last in the eye. The shafts caught fire in the heat fast enough, but at least the man in the cage was dead.

He slid down to the bottom of his cage, the screams silenced as his body was slowly engulfed in fire. The wood of the cage soon began crumbling, but by then all evidence of their deed would be burned away. Stannis was scowling, but Jon did not meet his gaze. Mance Rayder had once been a brother of the Night's Watch. For all he had gone on to do afterwards, he was still a black brother, and that much alone entitled him to a decent death.

He who passes the sentence should swing the sword...

"FREE FOLK!" Melisandre started, meeting Jon's eyes for an instant before she turned to the crowd. "Your false gods cannot help you! Your false horn is burned! Your false king brought you only death, despair, defeat... yet here stands your one true king! BEHOLD HIS GLORY!"

A false king in more ways than one, Jon thought as he watched the fire.

Stannis Baratheon drew Lightbringer. The blade radiated with light, shifting between red, yellow and white. The colours of the ritual flame, shining as though a second sun. When Stannis raised the blade above his head, men had to avert their eyes for the light was too bright. The still raging blaze of the execution fire seemed to shy away, dimming and diminishing before the light of Stannis's sword. The rivulets rolling down the sides of the Wall seemed to glow in the distance, suddenly sparkling as they had the day before. Is this the power of king's blood? Jon asked himself. Or is this the power of the Red Witch's tricks?

Tommen had been frustratingly vague about that in his letters thus far. It was clear to Jon that suspicion laced every word and caution lined every statement. He wrote in riddles, and rarely revealed anything of substance save warnings and instructions to burn after reading. Yet if what he said was true - and that was still no sure thing - then there was a chance that this man had not been Mance at all...

Yet how could Tommen know the Red Witch's plans? Jon asked himself. He can hardly see into our minds. So if that Mance was a mummer's trick, then how could he know?

Regardless, it was another reason to keep one eye open.

"Westeros has only one king," Stannis said calmly, though his voice carried across the entire way as he eyed the thousand wildlings behind their stockades. "With this sword I defend my subjects and destroy those who might menace them. Bend the knee and I promise you food, land and safety." The Watch's food and the Watch's land, Jon thought sourly. "Kneel and live," Stannis continued, "or go and die. The choice is yours."

He slipped his sword back into it's scabbard, and the world was dark again.

This would be the test. If it was successful, then perhaps peace was possible. If not, then Jon would have to find another way. Stannis's men went to open up the gates to the stockades, ripping up the stakes from the frozen ground. Jon played his part, raising his hand and lowering it, silently instructing his men to part and form a path.

"Come," Melisandre urged, like a mother speaking to a small child. "Come to the light, or else run to the dark. If you choose life, come to me."

And then they came. Slowly, at first, some limping out from their pen. There was an air of uncertainty about them, as though thinking this a trick. One man met Jon's eyes, and Jon offered him a silent nod. Submit and you will not starve, he said with his gaze. More followed soon after, when they saw that no harm had befallen those who had gone before. A few turned for the forest and wandered into the icy shadows however, ever untrusting. Southrons called these men wildlings. It was telling that they did not agree, and preferred themselves the free folk.

But it was not many who rejected the offer of safety for freedom. No more than one in ten went into the woods, away from Melisandre. More wights for the Others, Jon reflected sadly. Much as he misliked Melisandre, she was still by far the lesser of two evils.

Soon enough, they were even kneeling. The Lord of Bones knelt first, and then the rest followed. Jon shivered at the sight. It is too cold for this mummer's show. The free folk despised kneelers. Jon had advised against this particular requirement, but again he went ignored. Now getting the rest of the chiefs to agree to peace would become just that little bit harder. The majority of them were still behind the Wall, and they would hear of this from those who had chosen to wander north. Even among those who chose to stay, much as he looked, Jon found no true loyalty in the free folk as they were herded to warmth and food. Only hunger.

It was Mance they chose, he thought. Offer them food and plenty and you may make them kneel, but they will never make you king. And it would be his men who would bear the brunt of that. The Watch may be able to make the free folk bleed, and we may be slowly growing, but in the end we are still too small to stop them. It was an impossible circumstance, and that was without accounting for the possibility that both Mance and the Horn of Joramun could be hiding somewhere, unburned and unharmed.

And so in the end all we can do is wait, Jon thought resignedly, and make use of this peace as best we can whilst it still persists.

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Hope you guys enjoy!

P.S. May be subject to a rewrite or edits in the future