Chapter Text
There is little fanfare when Arya Stark returns home to Winterfell in the bleeding throes of autumn. No cheers liven the frigid gloom and no teardrops water the parched bones of a once-great castle; only silence greets the long-lost princess in the north, Ned Stark’s long-dead little girl.
Of course, she arrives as Lanna first.
She is a servant girl, Lanna, a little grey mouse with a vapid sort of meekness and a certain forgettable quality to her wan moon-like face, who cooks and cleans and watches with steadfast keenness the young king in the north. It is not uncommon for girls of her station to nurse a lordly crush. He is a handsome man for all his scarred flesh, this king in black, made all the more intriguing in how he gives so little of himself even as what remains of his motley people cleave to him with ferocious loyalty.
Still, there are whispers. Strange, some call him, as one might remark upon the Wall’s shadow or the pepper of stars above, a fact neither praised nor condemned but faintly awing nonetheless. And the rest—they mutter that he is cursed.
For a while Lanna attends to her duties in that diligent, docile way of hers. If the king’s white wolf paces more than he ought with his snout flared wide in excitement, he settles soon enough beneath her discreet hand, and no sound has ever lived in his throat besides. And if the tall red woman frowns a little too long at the mousy girl pouring wine, she is dismissed with the same wary abhorrence her presence always stirs, her counsel gone cold like her fires, gone to ashes like the little scale-faced stag princess of an ended storm.
Two days pass. On the eve of the third, Lanna slips into the king’s empty chambers, silent as a shadow, and Arya Stark sits herself atop his featherbed.
He comes in the hour of the wolf.
Mayhaps he does not know me anymore, thinks Arya, when this boy of long ago stills in the dark doorway in his almost-stranger’s shape, a sheet of blankness drawn slack across his features in a manner the kindly man himself would surely commend. Or he does not want me. She feels a queer sinking in her heart at the thought. The face she wears tonight is her own. Aware of the wild rush in her ears she parts her lips, but none of the words she had turned over so carefully only moments before take shape from the wisps of air straining in her throat.
His eyes do not leave hers as the door clicks shut behind him.
“Are you here to haunt me, little sister?”
Little sister. “Only the dead have need of haunting,” she chokes out. Brother. “I am flesh and blood.”
She looks at him as he takes a step forward, then another, so slowly; she looks at him without the slightest idea as to what his face conceals until her shadow of a brother emerges all orange and aglow in the shuddering candlelight.
“I have gone mad,” he breathes. “You are a wraith.”
“I was, once. But that was in another castle, far from here.” All I had to do was whisper.
His hands tremble so violently when he takes her face between them. They are not quite as she remembers; the softness of happier times has long fled to aching memory, leaving behind hands hard with callus and strife. The right one is drawn over with slick ropey seams and hard puckered welts where flame had once chewed through flesh. It must have hurt him terribly. But now it is she who burns, for his touch swells with heat as if fever winds beneath his skin, as if his heart is a secret furnace sending strange fire coursing swift through his veins.
She knows this god. He feels like the Lady.
“Arya.”
“Jon,” she whispers, as she has dreamt of for so long, and she scarcely has the time to savor its sweetness before other words she never thought to speak at all come tumbling in its wake: “I killed Mother.”
For a while he gives no indication of having heard her save for one long slow blink. Six years she has served Him of Many Faces, yet suddenly she finds herself incapable of reading one simple man. Then with a sigh he lowers his brow to hers, sinks down beside her, and folds her against him, and it is too near, too much, it is all she has longed for, and she feels herself shake with an awful soundless sob as she tells Jon Snow of the Lady Stoneheart.
Returning to Westeros had been so joyous, as all disappointing things are at first. How wondrous it had been, to see Nymeria and her mother again. Perhaps this woman in the riverlands did not look precisely like Catelyn Stark, with her white hair and curdled flesh, and a torn red throat and eyes like coals, but the girl had been too long in the House of Black and White to be afraid of an ugly face, and Arya Stark had once known Lord Beric Dondarrion besides. And perhaps her mother's justice fell hard on their foes, but what were foes but to be unmade?
Then came a wedding. A marriage between a lion and a tower, how exciting! One day I’ll know their names, Arya had sworn to herself for five years, and then I’ll kill them all… and that day had come. But it was all wrong. She hadn’t known their names. For how could a girl know the names of a thousand men? Women. Boys.
And the red. So much of it. Red blood on red sandstone walls, red blood on heavy redwood doors, red blood splashing through the red castle of Riverrun where little red-haired babes once played beneath a red weirwood tree. They were only boys. She had thought herself hungry—oh yes, starved—but this feast was a bloated fat glut, and in the end she had choked on it.
The Red Wedding come again, the Brotherhood called it. The Stone Wedding.
Are you some butcher of the battlefield, hacking down every man who stands in your way?
And so she tells Jon Snow of the dagger: her dagger to the Lady’s heart, which in the end was not stone but flesh—flesh remade with the red god’s fire, a mother’s fury, and the lightning lord’s last kiss, but flesh all the same. Mother had pleaded for it. She had pleaded so earnestly for release… just like the slaves who had toiled in the deep red darkness beneath the Fourteen Flames of Valyria. Was she, Arya Stark, the slave then, the one who had given the gift to one of his own?
He should have killed the masters! she had insisted once, so long ago.
But in Riverrun there were no more masters left to kill.
Death is not the worst thing, the kindly man had said.
Why, then, does it hurt so?
We never give the gift to please ourselves.
“I did not know what weight to give the tales from down south,” says her brother at last. She is conscious suddenly of the damp cling of silk beneath her cheek, but he makes no mention of it. “Only that this Brotherhood had grown cruel, and its mistress crueller still. I’d not known it was Lady Stark, returned from the dead.” Yet she finds on him no mark of surprise when she lifts her face from his chest. “Mother Merciless, they called her.”
“I was a Mercy once.”
“It seems you have been many things.”
“You are no stranger to many names, either,” she deflects, flushed suddenly with the enormity of what she’s spilled. “Lord Snow, I’ve heard. And the Black Bastard of the Wall. Turncloak, oathbreaker, warg, abomination… king.”
At that she sees a flash of bitterness on his hard mouth, present only for the briefest half-second. “It seems you know much of me, and I so little of you.” His eyes narrow. “How long have you been here?”
“A few days.”
“How did you—” He makes a vague frustrated sound in his throat and shakes his head. “I thought Ghost was going mad. He even refused to stay in tonight. I sensed—I thought he was sensing Nymeria nearby”—yes, she sees her silent brother, his maw red with the deer they took together—“and all the while you have been underfoot.” His dark eyes glare down mournfully into hers. “Why did you wait?”
“I had to see first. Make sure. If you were anything like Mother…” The rest of whatever else she means to say falls to ash atop her tongue. She swallows it down.
He does not speak for a long moment. Then, looking away, his mouth blows a long grave sigh. “You should not have come.”
This annoys her. “Well, I did,” she answers shortly.
“I doubt even you have not heard of the Wall falling,” he scoffs, “wherever it is you have come from. Aye, the southerners squabble still over a King’s Landing they themselves brought to ash and bone, but even they have sense enough to fear what is north. Cravens they may be, yet never careless of their own skin.” His gaze burns into the single candleflame at their side, almost feverish in its focus, and she wonders if the light reveals to him terrible things now, as it does for the wicked red priests of R’hllor. For Thoros. “The dead are coming.”
“I have washed a thousand corpses and stripped a thousand more. Dead things do not frighten me.”
His face snaps back to hers. “Did you not hear me? I said the Wall is fallen.”
“Stupid little fool,” he mutters when she says nothing, though it is tired and without malice.
“You’re stupid.”
It is faintly preposterous to her own ears. A reflex, perhaps, of some past self she’d thought drowned for good beneath the lovely cold hands of the Black Pearl. Jon, frozen by some jumble of affront and incredulity, blinks at her; then, quite without warning, he releases a ragged little burst of a laugh. It comes again. And again—until he is bending forward with violent laughter, then backward, falling gasping onto the featherbed.
To her astonishment she is laughing too, helplessly, hilariously, and as she falls beside her brother the distant precarious sound of it—teetering atop the knife’s edge between amusement and tears—frightens her almost as much as it frees her, for she cannot remember the last time this face of hers has known such an incredible shape.
She does not know how long it is they linger in this grip of absurdity. Only that the press of his ruined hand along her brow eases the shuddering convulsions in her ribs, and that the softness in his grey, grey eyes stills them as if they never were.
“I have missed you, little sister.”
“I tried to go to Castle Black,” she hears herself confessing. “There was a man of the Night’s Watch—Yoren...” She can scarcely recall his face now, gone to mist like so many others, but still she can feel the furious injustice of it all. “He hid me as a recruit on his way to the Wall, but the gold cloaks killed him. I tried again from the Saltpans, but the ships wouldn’t sail to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea because of pirates. There were other times, too…”
Dareon the deserter, her mind supplies, and she feels a wretched guilt arise within her, one she had not felt even when the kindly man had taken her sight. Warm milk.
“Where have you been?” asks Jon quietly.
“East.”
The evasion is graceless and crude, but it is all that is left in her right now. It does not please him. A faint crease of disapproval settles itself between his brows, though he does not press for a truer answer. “If you were wise,” he murmurs, “you would return there.”
“You’ve said. I did not know you would be so eager to send me away.” And you have not even heard all that I’ve done.
“Don’t play the fool. You know that is not what I meant.” His burnt swordhand clenches atop his stomach where it rests, flexing with a vicious spasm that ripples up into the long line of his jaw. “You cannot even imagine—” Stopping himself abruptly he draws a long hard breath, holds it, and with an effort forces it out in a slow, rickety stream.
“I think I lost my wits when I heard Ramsay had wed you. There is scarcely a thing I would not have done to steal you back, oaths be damned. And since the flames tore me from Ghost’s mind… the Lord of Light”—he almost snarls it out—“has cursed me to think of little else but you. Only you.”
It shames her, the terrible devotion in his voice; devotion for a little horsefaced girl brighter and better than she, devotion for a girl who had died somewhere far behind. Now it is her gaze that wavers from his. She lets it drift along the jagged pale scars clawed across his eye, following them down the hard curve of his cheek where his hair spills into inky ribbons over the sleeping furs. Here and there she finds a fine silver-white strand twisting among them. He is only one-and-twenty…
“I’m not much like myself anymore,” she finally says.
“Then I suppose it is fortuitous that I’m not, either.”
“I am a kinslayer.”
“You did not—”
“And if that alone is somehow not enough,” she snaps with sudden savagery, “you should know that is not all the blood I've spilled. No, not by half. You’d hate me, Jon, if you truly knew.”
I could never hate you, she anticipates in a rather scornful way. She readies herself to say it with him in a sorry attempt at the child’s game they once played. Already she can taste the sweetness of the words, the boyish honor of them, and she can taste the bitterness too—of the quarrel to come, of spoiling for him so lovely a lie.
Oh, but she is wrong. He proclaims nothing of the sort.
Instead Jon Snow laughs, and with a smile that is a slashing, joyless gleam he says, “It seems you have not been treated to the entire tale of the Boltons, little sister.”
After he came back, Jon tells her, it seemed to him that the world had shifted irrevocably whilst he prowled around in a different skin. Stannis Baratheon was dead, struck down by the Boltons, and his daughter Shireen dead with him. She had been surrendered to Red R’hllor by a father undone with vile desperation in the shadow of the Nightfort. His god gave naught in return.
And so Jon, sworn to nothing now but his own desires—my watch shall not end until my death—was the one to march upon a Winterfell held by Ramsay Bolton (Roose Bolton and his lady wife had vanished not long before). With thousands of free folk and northmen at his back, and giants and mammoths too, the Stark forces tore through the Bolton ranks, while Ghost tore apart the Bolton hounds.
Whatever had returned from death, it was not a man much given to grace. And for Ramsay there was not a drop to spare. When the old grey house of Stark was reclaimed, the Bastard was taken in to be questioned… sharply. Five days he endured beneath Jon Snow’s hand before yielding up the truth: that the girl he had wedded and bedded, sent east while the Lord Commander lay dead, was never Arya Stark but some steward’s daughter dressed in a stolen name. Mercy, his confession said. Mercy.
“And I gave it,” says Jon. “I cut out his heart, his bastard’s heart. And I ate it.”
Hearing the amusement in his words she starts to laugh again—but there is no shadow of it in his voice, and when she looks up there is none on his face. No, his face is solemn as solemn. She stills.
“What did it taste like?”
“Nothing.”
In the deep grey of his eyes there is a faint red glitter. She has seen it before. She had thought it merely a flicker of candlelight playing upon the dark pool of his gaze—nothing like Mother’s eyes—but the flame has waned and still the glitter grows, and with it a slow, creeping uncertainty.
For she has taken many a life, it is true, for the Many-Faced God and for justice, for Arya Stark and for pleasure—but never has she done that.
“So tell me now—do you hate me, little sister?”
“No,” she says, meaning it.
A faint smile, beautiful, touches his mouth at that.
Something else nudges at the edges of her mind. Frowning, she asks, “So who was it pretending to be Arya?”
“Old Vayon Poole’s girl, Jeyne. She threw herself overboard on the ship headed east.”
“Jeyne Poole,” she echoes, and finds her mouth discomfortingly familiar with its form. Horseface. “If only we had known how sweet it was,” she says pointlessly. “And now they are all gone. Mother and Father, Robb and Sansa… even Bran and little Rickon.”
“No,” says Jon suddenly. “Not Bran.”
Astonishment freezes her rigid.
“What are you saying?” she rasps.
“He lives, Arya.”
She sits up with a jolt. “Where? Where is he? Is he here?”
“No—not quite. It is… complicated. I wonder why he did not—” He frowns. “I will show you, on the morrow.”
“You tell me our brother lives, and would have me wait for tomorrow? I’ll see him now, Jon.”
“It is nearly dawn,” he informs her, and indeed through the heavy tapestries the day seems to suggest itself in a fuzzy, tenuous grey, tending toward something more. “Rest first.”
Pulling her back down to bed he thumbs lightly the hollows beneath her eyes, and in that touch a long-forgotten fatigue steals over her all at once. She does not wish to yield, but it is dreadfully persuasive, this vast numbness, and so she surrenders defiance to the defiant, sound to the stone, will to her brother. Nodding her assent she feels her eyes fall.
But there is one more thing.
“I kept this for you,” she mumbles, pulling out from beneath the furs a spiky thing of bronze and iron. A wonder he had not noticed, though she has always been good at hiding things. She leans it gently against his head. It is no proper coronation, but here they are lying together like children, after all. It is enough.
“Mother gave it to me.” He looks very kingly, she decides, beneath this bloody circlet that once crowned a head of autumn. Handsome. “The King in the North… it suits you…”
In the last drift of her waking mind she thinks he looks a little troubled, though he makes no remark upon it. Only his throat stirs faintly.
“On the morrow,” he says again, so very softly, and her brother’s scarred hand mussing her hair is the last thing she knows before sleep takes her at last.