Chapter 264 - Only a Snow, Not a Stark

Watching Tyrion swagger off, Lady Stoneheart's gaze stayed nailed to the spot where he'd disappeared.

"After we rescued Rickon," she said, her voice hoarse with fury, "we should have killed that sellsword."

"If he hadn't gone over to the enemy, it would have been twelve against two. We had every advantage. Sellswords are faithless. Unreliable."

Daario Naharis stood at the edge of the group. He pressed his lips together and said nothing.

Thoros of Myr spoke with the steadiness of a man trying to talk someone down from a ledge. "We were chased by House Umber's men the entire way. We've barely slept."

"Starting another fight at that moment would have been foolish."

He looked toward Jon, who was holding Rickon Stark's hand and walking through the snow toward the interior of Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.

Thoros of Myr watched that retreating figure, then pulled his gaze back. "Besides, the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch would never let us kill his guest on his own ground."

Lady Stoneheart's eyes rested on the backs of Jon and Rickon Stark for a moment. The line of her mouth tightened. She said nothing more.

They followed them inside.

Once in, Jon told the kitchen to bring hot soup and bread.

Eastwatch-by-the-Sea's stores were thin, but the brothers of the Night's Watch ladled out several bowls of steaming meat broth, carved a pig's leg, and carried it to the table on a wooden board.

The Brotherhood Without Banners sat down. When someone reached for a bowl, his fingers were so stiff that the spoon clinked against the rim before he got a grip on it.

Steam rose from the bowls, wrapping every frost-reddened face in a thin veil of white mist.

Jon brought Rickon Stark to the long bench beside the brazier and sat him down, then crouched to pull off the boy's boots. The shafts were soaked through with snowmelt. Rickon Stark's toes were red and swollen, like a row of scrubbed little radishes.

Rickon Stark said, offhand, "Ever since Shaggydog was killed, I get cold a lot easier."

Jon's hand, mid-reach for his cup, paused.

He had always thought he could take the cold better than most.

On winter nights atop the Wall, his fellow Watchmen on the same shift would stomp their feet with two cloaks wrapped around them, and he could stand a full watch in a single padded coat.

He'd always chalked it up to youth, to constitution. But Rickon Stark's careless remark was like a key turning in a lock that had been sitting in the dark for a long time.

His direwolf had given him that cold-resistance. He'd suspected it for years. Now he was certain.

Jon settled onto the bench beside Rickon Stark and pushed a bowl of soup in front of the boy.

Rickon Stark lifted it with both hands and took a sip. His lips flinched from the heat, but he didn't put the bowl down. He lowered his head and took a second sip.

The man who looked so much like Robert Baratheon sat across the table.

He raised his eyes over the rim of his bowl and looked at Jon. "At Harrenhal, the Mountain tortured innocent people to death and very nearly killed your sister Arya Stark."

"Just now, outside the gates, you Night's Watchmen should have joined us and killed him."

Jon looked at him steadily for a moment. "Are you telling me how to do my job?"

A flicker of curiosity, not quite pronounced, surfaced in his eyes. "Who are you, anyway? Where's Arya Stark? I didn't see her."

Lady Stoneheart's voice came from the other end of the table.

Still that same broken, rasping quality, like sandpaper dragged across rough wood, but if you listened carefully you could make out the words.

Candlelight fell across her grey, ravaged face and almost gave it the look of color.

"He's like you. A bastard. Robert Baratheon's bastard. Gendry Waters."

She went on, her voice a shade lower than before, which somehow made it clearer.

"I shouldn't have asked you to kill Tyrion Lannister. You're only a Snow, not a Stark. You're not my family."

Jon sat without expression.

He spent roughly the span of a breath swallowing down what he'd just heard.

He thought of the feasts at Winterfell, long ago. Standing in the corner of the great hall, watching Catelyn smile at Robb, bend down to Bran, open her arms to Rickon Stark.

And when she looked at him, the warmth in those eyes was always a degree cooler. He had grown used to it. Or rather, he had known from very early on that he shouldn't let himself grow used to it.

He was long past being that boy in the corner, gripping the hem of his tunic.

He had been tempered on the Wall alongside his brothers, shaped under Maester Aemon's guidance. He had killed the boy inside him a long time ago.

And he had already died once. Catelyn's words couldn't reach him anymore.

Dolorous Edd spoke up for him.

"My lady, when word came that Robb Stark was marching south to war, Jon left the Night's Watch to follow him."

"We were the ones who rode after him and dragged him back. You know what that means. It's a death sentence."

"He loves his family. He just swore a vow."

"So what?" As she spoke, the coarse scar across her throat shifted slightly at her collar's edge. "He watched his enemy walk away. If he were truly a Stark, he would have avenged his brother."

Jon turned his chair to face Lady Stoneheart.

"I joined the Night's Watch to get away from you."

"From the time I was a child, I lived worse than a stable boy. I had to watch your face before I did anything. I couldn't even sit at a feast — I stood in the corner."

"And no matter what I did, the way you looked at me never changed. Poisonous. In Winterfell, I was always an outsider."

He raised the cup of ale to his lips and drank, like releasing a string that had been pulled taut for too long.

Then he kept going. His tone was quieter than before, but the pressure behind it, something that had been buried a long time and had only just begun to rise, only halfway, was still there, lodged between every word.

"I only knew the Night's Watch meant no wife, no children. I didn't know the half of what else it meant. I didn't know most of the brothers were convicted criminals."

"Tyrion Lannister told me to think hard before I decided. Uncle Benjen told me to wait another two years. And Father — he said nothing."

"When I got to the Wall, I didn't adapt for a long time. I didn't want to. The cold was brutal. The food was like wood. I had trouble with my officers."

He drank again. When he set the cup down, the base struck the table with a clean ring.

"Why have you come to the Wall, Lady Catelyn?" He used the tone one keeps for strangers.

Catelyn didn't answer.

She looked at him with those grey-white eyes, the way you look at someone you thought you knew who has suddenly become someone else.

Thoros of Myr said, "We rode to Last Hearth to bring Rickon Stark back. At the Last River, we ran into Smalljon Umber. He was taking Rickon Stark south."

Jon's brow shifted slightly.

"The Lady revealed herself. But just as Khal Drogo predicted, House Umber had betrayed House Stark."

"Smalljon was delivering Rickon Stark to Roose Bolton. So we fought."

"In the chaos, a Tyroshi sellsword in the Umber party pulled Rickon Stark out and got him clear."

He tilted his chin toward Daario Naharis, who was tearing into the pork with both hands.

"After the battle," Thoros of Myr continued, "the Brotherhood Without Banners was down to just over twenty. Thirteen split off and took the Kingsroad toward Castle Black to draw off the Umber and Bolton pursuit."

"The rest of us went the long way around and ran until we hit Eastwatch-by-the-Sea."

Lady Stoneheart's voice cut in. "I didn't expect to find you here. You're doing foolish work for House Lannister."

Jon looked at her.

Their positions had flipped entirely. Once it had been him living under her roof, reading her moods to survive.

Now she was the one who had come with a handful of broken men into his fortress, drinking his broth, sitting by his fire, and he was the one whose word was law.

He didn't soften it. His voice came down level and clear. "You should be glad I'm at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. Otherwise you'd all be standing outside the gate in the wind."

He turned to Rickon Stark and put a hand on the boy's shoulder, his palm pressing through the worn coat to the thin shoulder blade beneath.

"Rickon Stark is my half-brother. I'll keep him safe." His gaze moved from Lady Stoneheart down the row of frost-reddened faces of the Brotherhood Without Banners, one by one.

"But every one of you follows my orders while you're here. Eastwatch-by-the-Sea is not a battlefield. The Night's Watch doesn't take sides in the quarrels of southern lords."

"You'll rest here. Resupply. See to your wounds."

"Then, my lady, you'll tell me what you intend to do next. If it's reasonable, I'll help you plan your route. But inside these walls, I give the orders."

Thoros of Myr wiped the soup ring from his bowl with his thumb. He didn't argue.

Gendry leaned back in his chair, hands folded across his stomach. His gaze rested on Jon's face for a moment. Then he gave a small nod.

Lady Stoneheart stared down at the bowl on the table in front of her, the broth already half-cold, a thin skin of white fat floating on its surface. Her hands rested at the table's edge, fingertips pressed together, curling slowly into her palms.

Rickon Stark finished the last of his soup and set the bowl down. Then he turned and looked at Jon.

There was a small crumb of bread still clinging to the corner of his mouth. His grey eyes were heavy with sleep, but there was something else in them too.

Calm. The kind that only comes when you've finally stopped running.

The boy who had been pulled from a traitor's column in the slaughter at the Last River, who had walked through wind and snow for days before reaching the Wall, had found, in this hall with its lit hearth, a place where he could finally rest.

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