The next morning, their training session began anew, and Ser Alliser ordered Rast to spar with Sam. The rest of the Night's Watch recruits stood in a circle around the fighters, with Grenn, Pyp, and a recruit named Halder on one side, and Caitie, Jon, and a recruit named Dareon on the other. Ser Alliser watched from beside Grenn with a nasty look in his cruel blue eyes.

Sam held his sword at the ready, his brow furrowed in concentration as he positioned himself in a fighting stance, though she spotted at least ten flaws in his form she or Jon would have to help him correct later. Meanwhile, Rast kept his posture straight and his sword lowered. His beady eyes landed on Jon, who stood behind Sam, looking as stoic as Northmen were known for. While Jon's expression remained neutral, Caitie could see the threat in his eyes.

"What are you waiting for?" Thorne asked.

Rast looked over his shoulder, back toward the master-at-arms. Then, with one quick motion, he disarmed his opponent without moving a muscle. It allowed a confused Sam to walk past him and pick up his fallen weapon.

After Sam got back into position, Ser Alliser shouted, "Attack him!" with a voice like boots on gravel.

Rast obeyed, though not in the way Thorne expected. Using the dull edge of his sword, he tapped Sam on the arm. Out of the corner of her eye, Caitie saw the amusement and satisfaction she felt mirrored on Jon's face.

Thorne's face flushed with rage, and he pushed Rast out of the circle. "You, get in there," he snapped, pointing a finger at Grenn.

Grenn stepped into the sparring circle and readied himself. Sam mimicked the motion, while Grenn glanced back over his shoulder at Ser Alliser. When he turned his head frontward again, his eyes met Caitie's, and he winked at her.

It was a subtle thing; over as soon as it started. Caitie half-believed she'd only imagined it.

But she hoped she hadn't.

"Hit me," Grenn whispered.

Sam's face changed from concentration to confusion, and he looked over at Jon and Caitie. They smiled encouragingly and nodded.

"Go on, hit me," Grenn hissed.

This time, Sam didn't hesitate. He lashed out, tapping Grenn's arm in the same manner Rast had done. Grenn made a show of it, falling over and shouting, "I yield. Yield, yield!"

Laughter sounded, increasing Thorne's aggravation. He stormed through the sparring circle, pushing Sam out of his way, and grabbed Jon by the collar. "You think this is funny, do you?" he growled.

Jon didn't even flinch. He held his ground, refusing to look away despite the intensity of Thorne's glare.

When Jon didn't react, Thorne let him go and marched back into the middle of the circle. "When you're out there," he said, "beyond the Wall with the sun going down—do you want a man at your back? Or a sniveling boy?"

Jon's amused expression faded back into stoicism. Both Grenn and Pyp looked serious and contemplative. But Caitie knew this game. She'd seen her father do it a thousand times, and Ser Alliser was no scarier. Give into the fear and do what he wanted, and he'd use it against them. Nothing would ever be good enough, so there was no point in trying to please him.

Sure enough, Thorne stomped away, like a child throwing a temper tantrum.

"You did well," Caitie told Sam after she was sure Thorne had left. "There are a few improvements you could make with your form. I can help you later if you'd like."

"Thank you," Sam said, looking between her and Jon. "But what did you two do?"

Caitie and Jon shared a glance. He closed his eyes and nodded, a silent agreement that they should tell Sam the truth.

"Well, your talents don't lie with swordplay," she said. "So we, ah, convinced Rast it would be in his best interest to go easy on you."

He opened his mouth, but he had no time to respond before their other friends joined them.

"Did you see Thorne's face?" Pyp asked as he bounded over to them with a grin. "Never seen a man's face redder."

Grenn sighed. "Bet he'll kill us, now."

"He'd hate us no matter what we did," Caitie replied. "At least now he knows he can't push us around."

Grenn observed her. "Sounds like you know his type."

To that, she only shrugged.

Luckily, Sam provided a distraction. "Thank you," he said, looking around at the four of them.

Grenn rubbed the back of his neck. "Don't mention it."

Pyp, on the other hand, grinned. "Well, you might be fat," he said, holding out a hand for Sam to take, "but I like you better than Rast."

Sam accepted the hand, and after they had clasped forearms and nodded, Grenn held out his hand, too.

Jon and Caitie shared a smile. Grenn and Pyp had accepted him.

Sam would be okay.

For weeks after that sparring session, Sam made a point to thank Caitie and Jon at least once every day.

In return, Caitie would smile and remind him it was no trouble, and Jon's brooding stare would become a little less potent. They liked Sam so much that they invited him to join them in the pantry for drinks again that night, and then again the night after that. On and on it went, until Sam had become a regular addition to their meetings.

And a fascinating one, Caitie decided. She had only met a handful of people from the southern kingdoms before coming to the Wall, and none of them she'd particularly liked. But she liked Sam, and he was more than willing to answer her questions. He regaled her and Jon with stories of growing up in the south; both Northerners had a good laugh when he admitted he'd never seen snow before coming to the Wall. Caitie spent hours afterward wondering what it must have been like to grow up where it never snowed. She couldn't really imagine it.

But though Sam mentioned his mother and even his siblings in his stories about Horn Hill and the Reach, he never mentioned his father. Not that Caitie couldn't blame him. She had ghosts of her own father to contend with. By unspoken agreement, Caitie and Jon knew not to ask him about it unless he brought it up first. So far, he hadn't.

Finally, a few weeks later, Owen and Cerys sent her a letter, and as a belated thank you, Sam insisted he would take care of cleaning the dining hall tables so she could read it. Caitie had thanked him profusely, promised to do the same whenever he had letters of his own, and sat herself down next to Jon, eagerly opening the scroll.

It took her a while to decode it, but when she did, she was sad to find her brothers had little to report. Arthur still panicked whenever they gave him a weapon, Cerys had only gone to the brothel three times that week instead of his usual five, and Owen had agreed to marry a Dornish lord's daughter when she came of age—something he'd been putting off for years now. Owen was about as averse to marriage as Caitie was, though he'd never told her the reason for it. But it seemed he'd finally given in.

She tried not to dwell on the fact that it was for her sake.

The only other notable piece of information from the letter regarded her father. Rendon Norrey had sent men southeast to scour for his daughter, believing her to be somewhere around White Harbor. Caitie wondered how her brothers had put that idea in their father's head. Either way, she wasn't about to complain.

It didn't take her very long to read the entirety of her letter, so she pocketed it and listened to the conversation between her two friends.

They were discussing… bedding women.

This wasn't a topic Caitie had much desire to think about, let alone discuss. From the way her brothers described sex, it sounded painful and awkward and scary—and the consequences of it, even more so. Either way, it wasn't as if Caitie would've been allowed to down to a brothel. She was a lady, and fair or not, a lady's honor was synonymous with her virginity.

And, well, Caitie doubted male whores existed anyway, which rendered a brothel wholly unappealing.

All in all, the conversation between Jon and Sam was a dull one. It didn't stop her from listening, though.

"I know for a fact that some of the officers go to that brothel in Mole's Town," Sam said.

Jon didn't take his eyes off the table he was scrubbing as he curtly replied, "I wouldn't doubt it."

But Sam wasn't finished. "Don't you think it's a little bit unfair? Making us take our vows while they sneak off for a little Sally on the side?"

Jon stared at him incredulously. "Sally on the side?"

"It's silly, isn't it? What—we can't defend the Wall unless we're celibate? It's absurd."

"I didn't think you'd be so upset about it."

Sam looked offended. "Why not? Because I'm fat?"

"No."

"But I like girls just as much as you do." He bobbed his head from side to side as he admitted, "They might not like me as much."

"Don't worry, Sam," Caitie put in, "they don't like me very much either."

He rolled his eyes. "Oh, funny."

"I thought so."

"But..." Sam shifted, his awkwardness reappearing. "I've never... been with one," he said, looking back at Jon. "You've probably had hundreds."

Although she didn't quite know why, now Caitie found herself inclined to listen.

"No," Jon said. He stopped scrubbing the table and took a deep breath. "As a matter of fact, I'm the same as you."

Sam laughed. "Yeah, I find that hard to believe."

"I came very close once," Jon told him. "I was alone in a room with a naked girl, but—" He stopped and shook his head, deciding not to continue.

"Didn't know where to put it?"

"I know where to put it."

Sam ignored his haughty tone as he asked, "Was she old and ugly?"

"Young and gorgeous," Jon replied, sighing. "A whore named Ros."

Sam asked after Ros's looks, and Caitie started getting bored again. She had no desire to hear about the oh-so-young and gorgeous Ros, but she couldn't bring herself to stop listening to Jon as she stared down at her letter, pretending to be engrossed by it.

"What color hair?" Sam asked.

"Red."

"Oh, I like red hair."

Caitie barely concealed her eye roll.

"And her—um... her..." He moved his hands over his chest.

Jon smirked. "You don't want to know."

"That good?"

"Better."

"Oh, no!" Sam laughed.

As he and Jon grinned at each other, Caitie crossed her arms, wondering what it was about men and breasts.

Sam's smile faded. "So, why exactly did you not make love to Ros with the perfect...?"

"What's my name?" Jon asked.

"Jon Snow."

"And why is my surname Snow?"

"Because," Sam replied apprehensively, "you're a bastard from the North."

Jon stared down at the table, lost in thought. "I never met my mother. My father wouldn't even tell me her name. I don't know if she's living or dead. I don't know if she's a noblewoman or a fisherman's wife... or a whore." He glanced up at them. "So I sat there, in the brothel, as Ros took off her clothes. But I couldn't do it. Because all I could think was: what if I got her pregnant, and she had a child? Another bastard named Snow."

Caitie watched him as he spoke with a new understanding. She had always known, from the moment she became friends with him, just how much Jon despised his bastard status. But she never understood its real implications until now—how it affected every choice he made—and suddenly, she felt insensitive for complaining of her upbringing to him.

"It's not a good life for a child," he finished.

Caitie frowned sympathetically, though she knew Jon probably wouldn't appreciate it. She was about to say something to him, though she didn't know what, when Sam distracted them both, as he was unable to hold back a cheeky comment. "So, you didn't know where to put it!"

Jon laughed and lunged at Sam playfully, bumping Caitie on his way, much harder than he intended.

"Ow!" she complained, kicking at his leg.

Jon continued to laugh at her and Sam as he went for the latter; however, it was cut short because, of course, that had to be the moment Ser Alliser Thorne came in.

Cold air drafted in as he opened the door from the outside and entered the room.

"Enjoying yourselves?"

The laughter dissipated immediately.

He shut the door. "You look cold, boys."

"It is a bit nippy," Sam replied, as casually as he could.

"A bit nippy, yeah, by the fire, indoors. It's still summer." Thorne was glaring daggers at the three of them. "Do you boys even remember the last winter?"

Caitie didn't answer. What was the point? He didn't care. He just wanted to taunt them.

Jon, however, gave in to temptation. "I remember."

"Was it uncomfortable at Winterfell? Were there days you just couldn't get warm, never mind how many fires your servants built?"

"I build my own fires."

"That's admirable," Thorne said sarcastically. "I spent six months out there, beyond the Wall during the last winter. It was supposed to be a two-week mission. We heard a rumor Mance Rayder was planning to attack Eastwatch. So we went out to look for some of his men—capture them, gather some knowledge. The Wildlings who fight for Mance Rayder are hard men." His gaze flickered from Jon to Sam, and then back again. "Harder than you'll ever be. They know their country better than we do. They knew there was a storm coming in."

Caitie could see where this speech was going, and she didn't want to hear the rest of it—not that she had much choice in the matter.

"So they hid in their caves and waited for it to pass. And we got caught out in the open." Thorne's voice was completely devoid of emotion. "Wind so strong, it yanked hundred-foot trees straight from the ground, roots and all. If you took your gloves off to find your cock to have a piss, you lost your finger to the frost. And all in darkness.

"You don't know cold," he ground out. "None of you do."

Thorne had made his point; he didn't need to continue. But he seemed to revel in scaring them. "The horses died first. We didn't have enough to feed them, to keep them warm. Eating the horses was easy. But later, when we started to fall…" He shook his head. "That wasn't easy."

Caitie's breath hitched in her throat. She'd heard horrible things that happened to men beyond the Wall. She'd heard of the Thenns who ate their brethren or victims of their raids. She'd heard of giants, and grumpkins and snarks, and worse than that.

But black brothers feasting on each other? That was new.

Thorne smiled maliciously at her. "Don't worry. You're too small to get a good meal from. We should have had a couple of boys like him, along, though, shouldn't we?" He walked past her, around the table, to Sam. "Soft, fat boys, like you. We'd have lasted a fortnight on you and still had bones left over for soup."

Caitie wanted to cry, to scream at Thorne to leave Sam alone, but the words wouldn't come. Nothing she could say would make him stop. And if none of them gave him the reaction he wanted, perhaps he'd leave.

"Soon, we'll have new recruits, and you lot will be passed along to the lord commander for assignment. And they will call you Men of the Night's Watch, but you'd be fools to believe it. You're boys, still. And come the winter, you will die… like flies."

No one said a word as Thorne swiftly turned on his heel and left. There was nothing any of them could say to remove the horrible images the master-at-arms had put into their minds.

But as Caitie looked between her two friends—Sam, who was shaking with fear, and Jon, who had a scowl so deep it probably would be permanent—she knew she had to try.

"Was there a point to that speech?" she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

Jon said nothing, only glaring at the door, but Sam took a shaky breath. "M-maybe, he just wanted to scare us."

He didn't sound particularly convinced.

"Well," she said, "it worked."

A terrible hush fell over the room. Jon and Sam returned to work, and with her letter now forgotten, Caitie picked up her scrubbing brush and joined in. They carried out the remainder of their task in silence. It wasn't until a long while later, after which every single table was spotless, that Sam finally shook his head and swallowed his fear.

"This is silly," he said. "I'll probably be a steward. No one is going to eat me."

Jon and Caitie exchanged uneasy glances.

"What? I'm just being optimistic."

Jon snorted. "Optimistic? Here?"

Sam ignored him. "So, what about you, Caitie?" he asked.

She tilted her head to the side. "What about me?"

"You know..." He wiggled his eyebrows. "Have you ever…?"

Oh. Oh.

The question caught her off guard, but Caitie wasn't about to let her friends know it.

"Pfft. Of course not." She lowered her voice. "Ladies are expected to remain virgins until marriage; you know that."

Despite trying to maintain his brooding demeanor, Jon couldn't keep his mouth shut at her words. "You don't seem like a typical lady."

"I can be." Both men looked at her skeptically. "I can!" Caitie insisted, crossing her arms.

"You told my brother you'd rather step in horse shit than dance with him."

Sam's eyes widened. "You didn't actually do that, did you?"

"Oh, she did; I'll never forget it."

"Okay, I'll admit, I wasn't at my best," Caitie said. It was strange, speaking about this with Jon and Sam. But also it felt right, somehow. Before she'd always seen that day as one of her worst mistakes, but now... They weren't teasing her about it to be mean, or drudge up awful memories. They were teasing her because they thought it was funny. And that made the memories easier to bear. "But I had danced with three different lords' sons already. My feet were sore, and my patience had run thin. It didn't help that my father wanted me to marry Robb. You'd have snapped, too, if you'd been me."

"He wanted you to marry Robb?" Jon asked. He sounded—Caitie wasn't quite sure how to describe it—startled, but also annoyed, and possibly resigned.

Well, it didn't matter.

"Oh, of course," she said. "And the idea of that makes my stomach turn to this very day."

"You didn't want to?"

She scoffed. "I could never want to marry anyone my father intended for me." Jon didn't seem able to think up a response to her statement, so Caitie ignored him and answered the original question. "Anyway, I haven't been with anyone like that, Sam. I can't say I ever had a desire to, either."

It was Sam's turn to look surprised. "Really? Never?"

"It sounded uncomfortable and a little revolting."

Jon snorted. "I'd have never guessed you felt that way considering how you've been staring at Grenn."

Caitie's mouth fell open. "I—that's ridiculous—preposterous—I would never—ugh!"

Sam and Jon eyed each other knowingly before they dropped all pretense and laughed.

"I hate you both."

"It's obvious you like him," Sam said. "There's nothing wrong with it."

Caitie huffed, crossed her arms, and pouted. "It can't be obvious, because I don't. I mean, I do, but—oh, you know what I mean."

Of course, she may have noticed that Grenn was—perhaps not handsome, but strong-looking, and tall, and, well, she wouldn't think too much about the rest. But she did not like him. At least, not any more than she liked Sam or Pyp. How could she? Caitie rarely spoke with him outside of training, meals, or watch duty now that Ser Alliser had assigned them as partners.

But even if she did find him... attractive, he could never know. She was not Caitriona anymore. She was Caitie: a recruit for the Night's Watch; a boy. It was why she made a point not to get close to him, even with all the time they spent together.

"Nothing could come of it, anyway."

"Hasn't stopped you from gaping at him," Jon said.

"I do not gape."

"You do."

Gods, they were as awful as Cerys with the teasing.

"You may want to be nicer to me," Caitie said, trying to maneuver the conversation to something—anything—else. Then she had an idea. "As I know something you don't."

Neither of her friends realized how brutal she could be with teasing, and Caitie was not above using it to her advantage.

"What?" he asked suspiciously.

"And why should I tell you?"

Jon rolled his eyes.

"Fine, if you truly want to know," Caitie said, sighing dramatically. "There are ways of preventing pregnancy. If you like, I could tell you how, and then you could go down to Mole's Town for—what did you call it, Sam?"

"Some Sally on the side."

"Yes, that. I'm sure the whores would be willing to overlook your... inexperience. You can finally learn where to put it."

Jon's eyes widened, and he said nothing, entirely at a loss for words, only looking between Sam and Caitie, both of whom were barely concealing their grins.

"Nothing to say?" she asked innocently.

Jon opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it. "I'm going to leave now," he finally said.

Caitie and Sam gave up trying to hide their grins as Jon walked away.

"Shall I make your excuses tonight?" she called after him.

Jon didn't look back, but Caitie was almost sure he was laughing.

Ah, poor Jon and his resentment issues towards his brother. Makes me glad I never had to deal with siblings.