VAL
The snow had now been falling for over a fortnight. Some days it was only a light, lacy dusting, others it dumped out of the heavens like the smiting of an angry winter god, but it never stopped entirely. The crows had shoveled, stoked, and chinked unceasingly, but the cold still found its way in. Fires in hearths were apt to be blown out with a gust of wind down the chimney, and even in the King's Tower, with its stout stone walls and studded oaken doors, Val could see her breath in the air more often than not. Rather than the bed, she had taken to sleeping under a pile of furs on the floor, shivering and drifting through murky half-dreams. I am going mad in here. Wildlings were not meant for cages.
When she looked out her window, she could still see black brothers in the courtyard, but fewer every day. If Bowen Marsh was to order his men to dig out the castle all the time, they'd be doing nothing else, and they were increasingly driven underground to the wormways. But Marsh, with his usual artlessness, had been quick to emphasize that the wormways were only for crows; he didn't want the wildlings to know anything additional about Castle Black's defenses.
Almost every wildling who could still ride, walk, or crawl had departed, gone to squat in the fortresses along the Wall or south to fight with Tormund Giantsbane and Soren Shieldbreaker at Winterfell, but some who were too dense or too stubborn to leave remained, along with countless old women, wounded men, children, and babes. Marsh had done his utmost to banish them to Mole's Town or anywhere else, but they kept drifting back, and last night a one-eyed spearwife had put a knife through the arm of a black brother who tried to stop her. The spearwife had been thrown in an ice cell, the black brother was already starting a fever, and nobody had a thought to spare for him; they were too busy trying to stop the rescue attempts by the other wildlings.
Val wasn't sure how much longer she could stand this. The sole saving grace was that at least there had been no more talk of marrying her to a kneeler, not after her last prospective bridegroom had been dismembered by the giant. She'd given Leathers a treat to take to Wun Wun, after that service. But the chambers a few stairways above her were still occupied by Queen Selyse and the princess, the unclean child with her grey stony face, and the queen had grown so fearful for her safety that she had a double garrison of guards posted on the King's Tower doors day and night. Unless Val proposed to learn to fly, or uncover a hundred-foot-long rope, there was no way she would get past them. And the red priestess had already warned her of the consequences of attempting to slip the noose again. There is no way through the Wall now, she'd said. And it is best that there is not. The dark is rising. It will be here very soon.
Mad and dangerous the red priestess might be, but she was not wrong about that. Val could feel it in her bones. Tonight she had hammered on the door of her gaol for an hour, screaming for a crow to come and take her to Bowen Marsh at once, but when one finally appeared, it was Sweet Donnel Hill, the pretty boy with his yellow curls and red lips and winsome smiles. He told her that if it was a man she needed, he'd be happy to help, but he feared losing his cock. He'd heard that wildling women were known to bite them off and roast them for delicacies.
Stupid, this one, either half or twice as stupid as the others. "Take me to Bowen Marsh," she ordered. "I don't care what ser pomegranate is doing! Take me! Now!"
Sweet Donnel only gave her a disgusted look. "I don't know where you get off, woman. Just because you got long hair and lovely eyes and truly remarkable teats, you think you can order the rest of us around when you haven't done nothing we wanted?" He took a step forward and grabbed her wrist.
She ripped it free and hit him across the face. "Touch me again, kneeler, you won't have anything to want with."
"Savage little wench." He took another step. He was wearing both a longsword and a poniard, while she was permitted no weapons. "It's past time you learned to respect your betters, now that you're not in the wilderness no more. Lord Snow was too good to you by half, letting you have this place, never throwing you out with the rest of your sort like he should – or was that it? It was, wasn't it? He must have been sneaking up here to fuck you every night. You going to whelp a little Snow, slut? Seems we have enough of that stuff around here just now. But once a man's gotten a taste for wildling cunt, apparently, there's nothing else that can satisfy it. I'm of a mind to find out, and if you don't want to be thrown in an ice cell yourself, princess, you'll oblige me." He seized her, this time by the throat.
"Crow," a voice said from the doorway. "If you're not leaving, it'll be you that gets thrown in that cell."
Startled, Sweet Donnel let go of her and took a quick step backwards, before looking around and realizing that the intruder was the short, squat, fur-clad form of Alysane Mormont. He brayed an incredulous laugh. "What in seven hells is that?"
"It doesn't make matter what I am," the She-Bear said. "You'll be going. Or else." Her hand moved, revealing her grip on the haft of a bone-hilted knife.
Taken off guard, Sweet Donnel changed tack. "The both of you are cruel as woe, depriving a man of comfort on a night as cold as this. You must be tired of this solitude, this imprisonment. Be good to me, princess. I'll see to it that you speak to Marsh. I'll see to it that you're let out."
"For where? Your barracks? You forgot about those vows of yours? You think I'd ever warm your bed? You best make do with thoughts of your mother."
The appealing smile fell off Sweet Donnel's face. "Fine then. You can rot in here, for all I bloody care. And you can forget about talking to Marsh, too." He moved for the door.
"Your own heads be it, crow," Val shouted after him. He was foolish and blind and worse, but it was more than him that was at stake, even more than the black brothers and the Wall, even more than her own people. "Can't you see what's happening?"
"Of course. It's snowing. I'm not bloody blind." Sweet Donnel banged the door open, just in time to reveal one of the queen's men standing outside.
"Her Grace wishes me to enquire whether or not the wildling girl's ungodly racket is now at an end," the kneeler said coldly. "She says that it was better befitting an animal, and that Princess Shireen was scared by all the shouting and banging. If the girl wishes to continue, Her Grace kindly requests that she do it in the privacy of a cellar somewhere."
Sweet Donnel leered at Val. "See. I'm not the only one who'll be throwing you in the dungeons, if your manners don't get a sight better. Good night, princess." With that, he sauntered away down the stairs.
"I repeat," the queen's man said. Kneelers had never had an outstanding sense of humor, and Selyse Baratheon's creatures were worse than most. "Are you through with your howling and pounding?"
"I am," Val said, as cold as he was. "You may go."
The man bowed and retreated, leaving her alone with the She-Bear. "What was that about?" Alysane asked, with her customary bluntness. "It wasn't only Shireen you scared. Lady Arya was crying too."
A cold finger of guilt touched Val's neck, mixed with pity and anger both. She was about to say that Lady Arya was always crying, that she had never met a girl who cried so much, but she had seen the scars on her back when Alysane helped her undress for her bath last night. Val had also never met a girl who washed so much, almost obsessively, causing the black brothers no end of trouble to heat the cauldrons of water in the kitchens and haul it slopping up the steps. But when she'd tried to suggest to Alysane that Lady Arya occupy her time in some other fashion, the She-Bear had given her a stony look. "The girl was wed to the Bastard of Bolton," she said. "Small wonder she can't scrub his touch off her."
I know about monsters. Yet Lord Snow had spoken of his little sister's tenacious spirit and fierce independence, and it seemed strange to Val that this girl would do nothing but shake and cower all the time, no matter who she'd been wed to. Part of her considered Lady Arya to be as unclean as Shireen, yet somehow she had not gotten around to saying so. The girl was terrified of any male company, even Satin's; the dark-eyed squire was the only one who visited them with any regularity, who cared if they were eating well or if they were warm enough. They weren't, but no one was these days.
And Satin has much else on his mind, too. He had made one visit in private, to ask Val if she'd again glimpsed the white wolf. When Val said that she had not, Satin cursed and hit the wall. "I followed the red priestess yestereve," he confessed breathlessly. "There's still a passage left under the Wall, not large enough for an army, but big enough for her. It leads into the Wall itself, I lost track of her, I didn't dare to follow her too closely. . . but there's a cell down there, in some kind of den. . . I heard her talking to someone, and. . ." He hesitated, looking at her as if terrified she was going to call him mad. "She said, Lord Snow. And that only death could pay for life. And that he must think of his brothers, and he must burn. I don't remember it all."
"That is enough. You were foolish."
"I know." Satin looked wretched. "I shouldn't have, but I. . . I cried out for him, I thought he might hear me, but I only heard something falling, and then she emerged, I didn't want her to see me, so I ran, but. . . there was blood on her hands. There was, I swear it."
"I believe you." Val's stomach shrank to a small, cold fist. "So even if Jon Snow was not dead before, he is now?"
Satin nodded wordlessly.
"That is so?" Val said. "Then we must kill her."
"Shhh!" Satin hissed, looking panicked. "The red woman, she. . . she always knows when someone means her harm, she sees it. . . she's impervious to poison, she knows of hidden knives. . ."
"Then she is as unnatural as the Others. She must die. Find a way, or we have no more to say to each other."
Shame-faced, Satin fled. Later, Val had regretted speaking to him so ungently; he was one of the few, crow or queen's man, who treated her like a person, and not a prize, a piece of meat, or a witless animal. He cared about their well-being, had tried to come to her for counsel, and had risked his life to follow Melisandre down into the ice warrens. Still, she had to put aside these soft southerner emotions. There was no leisure for that now.
We still have the monster. Val had not wanted to think about it, which surprised her. The babe was no kin to her; her sister Dalla's son had been sent south with fat Samwell Tarly and the wildling girl Gilly, who had been the late Craster's daughter and wife. It was Gilly's bastard boy who'd been left here, posing as Mance Rayder's son. Another attempt to save something from the red woman's greedy clutches. And of late, Val had begun to suspect that Melisandre knew about the subterfuge too. But still. The reason Gilly had had to escape Craster's Keep, the reason there'd been her baby to switch with Dalla's, was because it had been a boy. And while Craster had many daughters and wives – nineteen, when he'd been murdered by the crows fleeing the Fist of the First Men – he had no sons. No boys of any kind. He gave the boys as an offering to the white gods of the wood. And it must have worked. Craster and his wives and chickens and pigs and onions and shit had lived in his longhall north of the Wall for years and years, and none of them had been carried off by the Others.
If I could get hold of him. . . But the gate had been sealed, and there was no other way through the Wall. The only other option would be to take him up to the top and drop him seven hundred feet into the snows below. And even if the boy was a bastard born of incest, Craster's blood and not hers, some part of Val still shrank at the idea. And she would have to be mad herself to think that the white walkers, after biding their time for thousands of years, would be content with such a niggardly sacrifice. It was only a desperate hope, a fool's hope, and Lord Snow had instructed her firmly to see that the babe came to no harm. "The boy is dear to Gilly, Gilly is dear to Sam, and Sam is dear to me," he'd said, fixing her with those cold grey eyes of his. "I will not ask you to love him, but I do ask that you keep that in mind."
Now, Val sighed as she followed the She-Bear into the bedchamber. She was wishing more every day that Jon hadn't been murdered – though whether by Bowen Marsh or by Melisandre was now uncertain – but she was irritated with herself for it; wishing was never known to return the dead to life. We see too damned much of that sort of thing around here anyway. And if it was, it wasn't Jon Snow she would charm back, but her sister Dalla. The two of them had survived a rugged and brutal childhood in the foothills of the Frostfangs by always relying on each other, and Val missed her more than she could say. Though at this rate, it would be resurrecting her only to tell her that Mance is hung in a crow cage in Winterfell, that their babe has gone south with another woman, and the Others draw very close now. It would be kinder to just kill her again.
Lady Arya was huddled under the quilts in the trundle bed that she and Alysane shared. From the looks of her, she had been crying again. "What's wrong?" she whispered. "I heard shouting."
The She-Bear shot a recriminatory look at Val. "The wildling lass wanted to speak to the Lord Commander."
"Oh. I. . . it. . . frightened me."
"That's past and done, child," Alysane said. "Three-Finger Hobb sent up a mutton stew for you, he says you need to be eating more. Come on out of that bed and sit here by the hearth. It's warm. I'll fetch you a good bowl and some bread."
Lady Arya hesitated, her big brown eyes looking hollower than ever in the wraithlike shadows of her face. "I'm not hungry."
"Of course you're hungry."
"My stomach. . . it's in knots, I couldn't. . ."
"Come on." Alysane lifted the lid from the pot, and a heavenly smell drifted through the room. "Just a bite, now."
"Best do it, girl," Val said. "No sense wasting food. You don't know if there will be any on the morrow."
Still Lady Arya looked as if she wanted to dive back under the covers, but finally pushed them down. She swung one leg over the side of the bed, then the other, then tottered to her feet. She still moved slowly and clumsily; she'd suffered a broken rib when she and the turncloak leapt into the snow from the top of Winterfell's battlements. And that was when Val and Alysane noticed the spreading crimson stain on the crotch of her nightdress.
"Child," the She-Bear said. "You come over and I'll clean you up."
"What?" Lady Arya flinched, clasping her arms across herself. "Where?" She looked around, looked down, and saw the blood. She stared at it. Then she burst into tears.
Val was exasperated. "It's just your moon blood, girl. I'll get a cloth. Stop wailing, otherwise the kneeler queen will be worrying at our heels again."
Alysane gave her a sharp look. "Of course she knows it's her moon blood. That's why she's crying. It finally proves that she's not with child by the Bastard of Bolton."
"Oh." Val had to admit, she hadn't thought of it that way. Morbid curiosity made her ask. "Is he so bad as all that?"
Lady Arya's face was a mask of fear. "I. . . he. . . no, Ramsay Bolton is my trueborn lord and husband, the rightful Lord of Winterfell and the Dreadfort. . . and I. . . I love him with all my heart. . ."
"There's nobody here you need lie to anymore." Alysane tidied the girl's dark brown hair out of her eyes. There was a blotchy black patch where her nose had been frostbitten, which still might come off. "You tell us both. Do it, now."
"He. . ." Lady Arya stared at them, dazed, like a deer in a trap. "Sometimes he. . . would want me to bring him off with. . . with my mouth and my hands. . . and his. . . his dogs. . . and lick it up. . . and other times he wanted. . . wanted the dog to. . . to. . . while he watched. . ."
Alysane swore softly. Val was thinking she'd rather not have asked. "You should have been born a wildling, girl," she said. "Then you could have cut his throat for him, and his tongue, and his balls. But that's over now, done. That turncloak there rescued you, and – "
"Theon," Lady Arya whispered. "His name is Theon. He's good, he was so brave, he saved me, he was Lord Ramsay's Reek. . . but he saved me. And now he's for Lord Stannis' fires, he saved me but he's going to die still, they'll burn him, and I won't ever see him again." She began to sob.
"Come on, now." Val was afraid of being flooded out if this kept up. "You're Arya Stark. You are the north. Your brothers died right brave, you can be brave too. Hush. Stop crying. Enough."
Yet instead of this impelling the girl to find some hidden steel within her, it seemed to undo her completely. She collapsed to the floor in her bloody nightgown, sobbing so hard that she started to retch, until the She-Bear gruffly scooped her up and began to rock her. Val stood there uselessly, wondering what on earth she could do.
"What's the thorn in there, child?" Alysane Mormont asked at last, when some of Lady Arya's gasping crying had subsided. "What's that the lass said?"
"I. . ." Lady Arya lifted red, heartbroken eyes. "I'm. . . not. . . Arya. . . Stark."
The silence following this pronouncement was complete. It was so absurd that Val felt certain she had misheard. That wasn't even possible, it couldn't be. Fear for his little sister was what had driven Jon Snow to arrange the rescue, why he'd been planning to leave Castle Black on the night he was murdered, what ended Mance up in that crow cage. Everything hinged on this, everything. And if the entire time they had been suffering and flailing and bleeding for an impostor. . .
"Why you little. . ." Val growled, and took a step forward.
"You stop right there," the She-Bear growled right back, looking more like her nickname than ever. "Whoever the girl is, this isn't her fault. None of it. You. . ." She glanced back at not-Lady Arya, as if also hoping for an eleventh-hour retraction. "You're not?"
"No," the girl gasped. "No, I'm. . . I'm Jeyne, Jeyne Poole, my father was Vayon Poole, he was the steward, the steward at Winterfell. Sansa was my friend, we used to eat lemon cakes and gossip. . . they killed Lord Stark's household in King's Landing, they took me away. . . Littlefinger kept me, I mean Lord Baelish, he sent me to one of his brothels for t-training, I was told. . . told I would be sent north to marry R-Ramsay, I had to be Arya, Theon said that too, he said I always had to be Arya or they'd just throw me aside as a whore, leave me to die. . . they said I'd lose part of my nose, but he said a hundred men would still want to marry me if I was heiress to Winterfell, but I'm not, I'm Jeyne, I don't want to marry anyone but Theon now, I'm not Arya, Arya's dead. She's dead."
Alysane raised a hand to her face, then dropped it. "Gods," she said at last, in the mother of all understatements.
Could be it's a good thing Jon is dead too, Val thought. Finding this out would kill him all over again. And the red witch has lied once more, has tricked us all into acting on her shadows, her might-bes and never-wases. It made her blood boil. Not even you can stand against the Others, Lady Melisandre. Your reckoning might be the most deserved of all.
At last, by much coaxing and cajoling, Alysane managed to get Jeyne calmed down, and sat her by the fire with a bowl of mutton stew. She combed Jeyne's thick dark locks through her fingers as the girl ate, and braided it up neatly. "You're a good girl," she said. "Neither me or Lady Val, we won't be telling your secret. You're safe here now. You're far away from all that. Now, let me get you a clean shift, and we'll be changing the linens on the bed. Then you – "
Ahooooooo.
"What was that?" The She-Bear's demeanor changed immediately. She clambered to her feet, looking around; the sound was faint and distant, coming from outside the window and well above. Coming from the top of the Wall. "That sounded like a horn. Sentinels' horn. One blast for rangers returning, but there haven't been no rangers. It can't – "
Ahoooooooooooooooooo.
"Two for wildlings," Alysane counted. "But there can't be. . . they came through. . . Lady Val, they all came through, didn't they?"
They did. Val's stomach turned to ice water. "Change and go to bed," she said to Jeyne. "Alysane, you'll go with me."
The She-Bear scowled suspiciously at her. "And what will we be doing there, out in the cold and the night? I'm a fair hand with a crossbow, it's true, but – "
Ahoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
"Three," Jeyne breathed. "One blast for returning rangers, two for wildlings. Three, what's three? Lady Alysane, Lady Val, what's three? What's three?"
Alysane and Val exchanged a look. They opened their mouths, then shut them.
"Snow, child," Alysane said at last. "Three is for snow. Now, you go to bed. You go like a good girl."
"Yes," Jeyne whispered. "I'm a good girl. I am. I'll go."
Val's stomach was falling past her foot. "Bar the door when we're gone," she said. "Keep the fire stoked. The. . . the storm will be bad tonight."
"I will," Jeyne said again. "I'll. . . you'll come back? I. . . I'll sleep, but I don't. . . I'll have terrible dreams, Alysane, the She-Bear, she. . ."
Yes, child, Val thought. You will have terrible dreams. And then you'll find that they are no dreams, and that you will never wake.
And so, with that last, unholy horn-blast still shuddering the foundations of the earth, she fled.