A Song of Shadow and Ice (Game of Thrones/Solo Leveling SI)

[Abysseus]

Prologue

The dead were gone.

Will lay on his belly at the lip of the hollow and stared down at the place where they had been, and his mind refused to take it in.

An hour ago there had been twelve. He had counted them twice, pressed flat in this same snow with his heart knocking against the frozen ground, because a ranger who rides back to his commander and says twelve had best be sure it isn't eleven. Twelve wildlings. Men and women both, and one who had been no bigger than a boy, cut open and laid out on the snow in a shape. A wheel, perhaps. Or a sun. Or a great staring eye. Will had not looked long enough to decide.

Now there was only the hollow and the snow that filled it, smooth and blue in the dying light. No blood. No bodies. No tracks going in, and none coming out.

"Well?" said Ser Waymar Royce behind him. "Where are your corpses, ranger?"

Will got to his knees. The cold had worked so deep into him that even that hurt. "They were here, m'lord. Right there, in the middle. I swear it."

"On what?" Ser Waymar came up beside him. He was eighteen, the youngest son of a great lord of the Vale, and he had worn the black for less than half a year. His cloak was black, as all their cloaks were black, but his was sable, thick and soft as smoke, and the wind stirred it. His sword had been forged in his father's castle that spring. Will had never seen it drawn. "Your honor? I was told you were a poacher before you took the black."

"Yes, m'lord."

"Then you'll know that dead things don't get up and wander off." Ser Waymar looked down into the hollow. Everything north of the Wall seemed to bore him. "Wildlings move their dead."

"There's no tracks, m'lord," Will said. "Nothing went in. Nothing came out."

"The wind's blown all day. It would cover an army."

"They burn them," said Gared.

He had not dismounted. He sat his shaggy garron at the edge of the trees with his hood drawn low, so that all Will could see of him was a jaw grizzled with white stubble. The cold had taken both his ears years ago; Will had seen the puckered stumps often enough. Gared had been forty years on the Wall. He had ranged farther than any man Will knew, and he would talk for an hour about anything at all — the weather, the food, the Lord Commander's bowels. He had said perhaps a dozen words since Will crawled back from the hollow. His gloved hand had not left the hilt of his dirk.

"The free folk burn their dead," Gared said. "Always have. Never knew why, before."

Ser Waymar laughed. It was a young laugh, clear and careless, and it went out across the hollow and did not come back.

That was the first thing Will noticed. The second was that the wind had died.

It had blown all day, a raw, steady wind off the high ice that found every gap in a man's furs, and now it had stopped. The pines stood motionless. Ser Waymar's sable lay still across his shoulders. Will could hear his own breath, and the creak of Gared's saddle, and nothing else. No branches. No hiss of blown snow. No raven, no fox, no living thing.

"M'lord," Will said. "We should go."

"We were sent to find raiders." Ser Waymar started down into the hollow, his boots sinking to the calf. "I mean to bring the Lord Commander something better than a poacher's nightmare."

"M'lord."

The cold came then.

It came up out of the ground and down out of the trees, all at once, a cold so deep and sudden that Will's eyes watered and the tears froze on his lashes before they could fall. Gared's garron screamed. Down in the hollow Ser Waymar stopped walking. Will saw him go still, saw his head come up, saw his hand move — slowly, slowly — to the hilt of his new sword.

Something was standing among the trees on the far side of the hollow.

It was tall and gaunt and pale as milk, and at first Will took it for a trick of the snow-light, because he could see the forest in it. Its armor shifted as it moved, rippling from the grey of dead bark to the white of new snow to the black of pine needles, so that the wood seemed to slide across its body like water. Its face was narrow and hard as bone. Its eyes were blue, the blue at the heart of a glacier, deep and burning and cold enough to crack teeth.

Then there was another beside it. And a third, stepping out of a drift that had been empty a heartbeat before.

"Stand," said Ser Waymar. His voice cracked on it like a boy's. He drew his sword. "Stand, I say. You are on the — by order of the Lord Commander, you will —"

He did not finish. The first of the pale shapes came for him, and it was across the hollow before Will saw it move. In its hand was a long sword of something that was not steel, thin as a reed and pale as moonlight, and where the last of the day touched it, the blade shimmered blue.

Will had thought Ser Waymar a fool and a peacock. He thought so still, afterward, when he had a great deal of time to think. But Ser Waymar Royce did not run. He set his feet as his father's master-at-arms must have taught him, and when the pale blade came, he met it.

The sound was wrong. Steel should ring. This was a high thin shriek, like an animal in a snare, and it set Will's teeth aching. Ser Waymar gave ground and caught the next cut, and the next, his breath pluming, sweat freezing at his temples, his mouth set in a grim line that made him look, at last, like a man. Once he even struck back. The pale thing turned his blade almost lazily. The other two did not move to help it. They only watched.

The fourth time the blades met, Ser Waymar's sword broke.

It shattered into a hundred glittering shards that spun away across the snow, and Ser Waymar cried out and threw up his arm to shield his eyes, and the pale sword went in below his ribs and came out of his back. Then the watchers stepped in, and their blades rose and fell.

Will did not scream. Later he would not understand why. Some old poacher's instinct, maybe: when the lord's man comes, be a stone. He lay with his face half in the snow and did not breathe and did not blink and did not move, and the tears froze on his cheeks, and behind him he heard Gared's garron wheel and bolt, and Gared cursing, and something else — a wet, dragging, shuffling sound, coming out of the trees.

The dead had come back.

He saw them from the corner of his eye as they went past: the wildlings from the hollow, whole again, or near enough. They moved stiffly, like men walking on frozen feet. A woman passed so close that the rags of her skirt brushed his boot, and did not look down. Her hands were black. Her eyes were blue. None of them looked at him; they were going where they had been called. The boy was with them. Will did not look at the boy.

Gared did not get far. Will heard the garron go down, heard Gared's voice go up high and thin, and then it stopped, and there was only the shuffling.

Down in the hollow, the pale ones stood over what was left of Ser Waymar Royce. Then they parted, and a fourth came down through the trees.

He was taller than the rest. Will would remember that, after. Taller, and older somehow, though there were no lines on that white face. Something grew from his skull — spurs and ridges of ice, or bone, ringing his brow like the crown of a king in some song. He carried no sword. The others bent their heads as he passed.

The crowned one stopped beside Ser Waymar's body and looked down at it. Then he lifted one hand, palm up, as if he were testing for rain.

Ser Waymar Royce opened his eyes.

They were blue.

Will felt his bladder let go, felt the warmth of it spreading and the cold biting after, and did not care. He was going to die here. In a moment the crowned one would turn his head, and those eyes would find the stone that was not a stone, and it would be over.

The crowned one turned his head.

Not toward Will.

South.

They all did. The pale ones in the hollow, the dead among the trees, Ser Waymar kneeling in his torn sable with snow sifting into his open mouth — every one of them turned at once and looked south, like hounds that hear a horn. Will heard nothing. There was nothing to hear. But they stood like that, perfectly still, listening, and the silence stretched on and on.

Will turned his eyes south as far as they would go without lifting his face from the snow. There was nothing there. Above the black tops of the pines the southern sky was empty, grey going to dark, without a bird in it or a star. Whatever they were listening for had not come yet.

And the crowned one smiled.

It was a small thing, the barest movement of that white mouth. But Will had been a poacher, and he knew a hunter's smile when he saw one. Something worth the hunting was coming.

Then they were gone. Will did not see them go. The wind came back all at once, howling, and the snow rose up in a white wall, and when it settled the hollow was empty. The dead were gone. Ser Waymar was gone. Only the shards of his sword were left, glittering in the snow like fallen stars.

Will lay there until full dark. He lay there until the moon came up. Then he got to his feet, stiff and stinking and shaking so hard his teeth rattled, and he ran.

He ran south — toward the Wall, and the fires, and the living. Toward whatever it was the Others had turned to look at.

There was nowhere else to run.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter One: Bran

The star had fallen black.

Bran had seen it from his window, long after Old Nan blew out his candle and told him that boys who stayed awake were carried off by the Others. He had been watching the sky over the wolfswood because he couldn't sleep. Tomorrow he was riding out with Father to see the king's justice done, and he was ten, and that was old enough, and he was not afraid. Then a piece of the sky went out.

That was the only way he could think to say it. The falling stars of summer were bright scratches, gone before you could point. This was a hole — a streak of darkness drawn slowly across the heavens from north to south, and every star it crossed winked out and stayed out until it had passed. It went down behind the wolfswood without a sound. Bran watched the place where it fell until his feet went numb on the stone floor.

In the morning he told Septa Mordane, who was in the hall with his sisters. He had expected her to scold him for being out of bed so late. Instead she went quiet and turned to look out of the window.

"Black stars are for the Stranger, child," she said at last. "When he walks, the sky puts out its lamps to let him pass."

Bran thought about that all through the long cold ride out of Winterfell, under a sky the color of old iron. He thought about it when they left the road and the snow began to crust on the pines, and when Robb dropped back to ride beside him and asked why he was so quiet, and he said nothing, because Robb was a man grown and would only laugh. He thought about the carving in Mother's sept, where the Seven stood in a row with their faces lit by candles. Six of them had faces. The Stranger had only a hood, and inside the hood there was nothing at all. He was death, Septon Chayle said, the one who came at the end for everyone, highborn and low. Bran never looked at that one longer than he had to.

They found the deserter in the yard of a holdfast in the hills, where the lord's men had kept him chained to a post.

He wore black. Bran saw that first, and it sent a queer jolt through him, because black meant the Night's Watch, and the Night's Watch meant Uncle Benjen and the Wall and the stories. But this man was nothing like Uncle Benjen. His black was rags. His beard was matted with filth, and two of his fingers had gone dark and swollen with frostbite, and he did not seem to notice them. He did not seem to notice anything. His eyes kept sliding past the men who had come to kill him, past Father and Robb and Jon and Theon Greyjoy, past the horses and the holdfast walls, to the north.

Father dismounted. Theon and Jory Cassel dragged the man to his feet and made him kneel and lay his neck across a stump that had been split for the purpose, and Father's squire brought out Ice.

Bran had seen Ice before, in the great hall and in the armory, but never out of its scabbard in daylight. The blade was as wide across as a man's hand and nearly as tall as Robb, and the steel was smoke-dark, with ripples in it where the smiths of old Valyria had folded it a hundred times. Father took it without ceremony and set the point on the frozen ground and leaned on the crossguard. His face had gone grave and far away. Bran knew that face. It was the one he wore when he sat in judgment in the great hall, and it made him look like a stranger.

"Do you know who I am?" Father asked.

The deserter's eyes came around slowly. "Lord Stark."

"You took the black. You swore your life to the Watch. And you left it."

"I did, m'lord." The man's voice was cracked and hoarse, as though he had screamed it raw. "I left it. I'm not saying I didn't. I'm saying there was a reason. We found them, m'lord. The Others. They're back. They killed old Gared and they killed Ser Waymar and they made him walk, and I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes —"

Someone among the men laughed. Father didn't turn his head, but the laughter stopped.

"And then they looked south." The deserter was staring at Father now. He looked hopeful, and that frightened Bran more than the talk of Others. "All of them at once, m'lord. Like hounds. Like something called them. Nothing looks like that, m'lord. Not wolves, not men. Not in all my years ranging. But they stopped and turned and looked, and the tall one smiled." He wet his cracked lips. "What's down here, m'lord? What's down here that they'd stop to look at?"

Father did not answer.

"I've told it now," the man said, and some of the wildness went out of him. "A fortnight I've run, m'lord. I got as far as the Wall and couldn't make myself stop. They'd only have sent me back out there. I told someone. That's all I wanted."

"In the name of Robert of the House Baratheon, the First of his Name," Father said, and went on through all the king's titles, and then, "I, Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, sentence you to die."

"Don't look away," Jon murmured at Bran's side. He had brought his horse up close without Bran noticing. "Father will know."

Bran didn't look away.

Father lifted Ice in both hands, high over his head, and brought it down. It made less noise than Bran had expected. The man's head came off in a single stroke and rolled through the snow and stopped against a stone, and the blood steamed where it pooled. His body stayed on its knees for a heartbeat longer than seemed possible, and then it toppled sideways and was only a thing.

Father wiped Ice on the deserter's black cloak and gave it back to his squire, and for a while nobody spoke.

On the ride back, Bran found his courage and brought his pony up beside Father's big grey. "Why did you have to do it yourself?" he asked. "Ser Ilyn does it for the king."

Father considered that for so long that Bran thought he wouldn't answer. "Because I passed the sentence," he said finally. "A lord who gives his killing to another man soon forgets what it costs. If I can't look into a man's eyes while I take his life, and hear the last words he has to say, then I have no business taking it."

Bran thought about the man's eyes, how they had kept going north. "Was he mad? About the Others?"

"The Others have been gone for eight thousand years, if they were ever here at all." Father's voice was gentle. "Fear does strange things to men, Bran. It makes them see what they most dread."

"He said they looked south." Bran hesitated. "There was a star last night. A black one. It fell in the wolfswood. Septa Mordane says black stars are for the Stranger."

He waited to be laughed at. Father only looked at him, and then, briefly, at the dark line of the wolfswood to the west.

"The men on the walls saw it too," he said. "Septa Mordane has a great many sayings. Stars fall, Bran."

But he did not say it was only a star. And Bran noticed that for the rest of the ride, Father's hand never strayed far from the hilt of his sword.

* * *​

They found the direwolf where the road crossed a half-frozen stream.

Robb and Jon had raced ahead, as they always did, and Bran heard Jon's shout come back up the road, sharp and strange, and kicked his pony after them. He came around the bend and pulled up so hard he nearly went over its neck.

She lay half in the snow and half on the ice of the streambed, and she was bigger than his pony. Her fur was grey, crusted black with frozen blood, and her lips were drawn back from teeth as long as Bran's fingers. Something was sticking out of her throat. It took Bran a moment to understand that it was an antler — a stag's antler, broken off at the base, driven in so deep that only the tines showed.

And at her belly, blind and mewling, pushing at her cold teats, were the pups.

"A direwolf," said Jory Cassel softly. He had his sword half drawn and seemed to have forgotten it. "There's been no direwolf south of the Wall in two hundred years."

"There's one now," said Theon.

Father swung down from his horse and crouched beside her. He looked at the antler and did not speak. Bran knew why. There was a stag on the king's banner, a great black stag crowned in gold, and there was a direwolf on theirs. He did not like how hard Father's face had gone.

"She died fighting," Robb said. "Look. There's blood on her jaws that isn't hers."

"She died," said Theon, and slid from his saddle with his knife out. "And these won't last a day without her. Better a quick end."

"No." Bran heard his own voice go high and hated it. "No, Father, don't let him —"

"Put it away, Greyjoy," said Robb.

"Lord Stark." It was Jon, speaking quietly. He had dismounted and was kneeling by the pups, lifting them one by one. "There are five. Three males and two females. Your trueborn children are five. And the direwolf is the sigil of your House." He looked up. "I don't think this was chance, my lord. I think they were meant to have them."

Father looked at Jon, and then at Bran, and then at the dead wolf with the stag in her throat. Bran could not tell what he was thinking.

"They'll raise them themselves," he said. "Feed them themselves. And if they die, they'll bury them themselves."

Jon put a grey pup into Bran's arms. It was soft and warm and smelled of milk and blood, and its eyes were still shut, and it pushed its blind face into the crook of his elbow and made a small complaining noise. Bran loved it at once.

That was when he noticed the shadow.

It lay beneath a great sentinel pine on the far bank of the stream, and it had been bothering him since they rode up. The sun was thin and low, but it was there, and every other tree laid its shadow down across the snow pale and blue. This one was black. Black like the hole the star had torn in the sky.

From somewhere near it came a sound. Thin and small. A whimper.

"There's another," Jon said, and splashed across the stream toward it.

Halfway across, he stopped.

"Father," he said, in a voice Bran had never heard him use.

The shadow stood up.

It was a man, and he had been sitting at the foot of the pine with his back against the trunk the whole time, so still and so dark that Bran's eyes had slid right over him. There was snow on his shoulders and snow in his long black hair, as though he had been sitting there since before dawn. He rose without effort, and he kept rising, because he was tall — taller than Father, taller than any man there. In his arms was a pup, white as the snow it had been born in, with eyes as red as blood.

Behind Bran, steel rasped free of a dozen scabbards. Theon Greyjoy had a bow off his saddle and an arrow on the string before anyone else had moved.

"Hold," Father said, but Theon had already loosed.

The arrow stopped.

It hung in the air a hand's breadth from the stranger's face, its grey fletching trembling. The stranger didn't flinch. He didn't even look at it. Then the arrow dropped into the snow, and he looked at Theon instead, and Theon lowered the bow slowly, as though it had become heavy.

Behind Bran a man said "Gods" under his breath, and a horse backed into another and was cursed for it. Nobody sheathed a sword. Nobody went any nearer, either.

Bran would try, later, to tell Maester Luwin what the stranger looked like, and he would not be able to do it. He was beautiful, and Bran didn't like it. It was the wrong kind of beautiful. The knights in the songs had bright hair and bright smiles. His hair was black, and he did not smile. His skin was paler than any northerner's. The cold did not seem to touch him. His clothes were black and close-fitting, of a cloth Bran had never seen, fastened with nothing that Bran could find. He carried no weapon.

And his breath did not smoke. Everyone's breath smoked. Father's, and Robb's, and the horses', great white plumes of it hanging in the cold air. The stranger breathed, and nothing came out at all.

He crossed the stream toward Jon, who had not moved. He waded the open water in the middle without seeming to feel it.

"This one's yours," he said, and held out the white pup. His voice was low, and somehow Bran heard every word. "He went the wrong way from the others and nearly froze. You won't hear much out of him."

Jon took the pup. He looked at it, and then at the stranger, and his face was the face he wore when Mother said something that hurt him and he pretended it hadn't.

Then the stranger turned to Father.

"Lord Stark." He nodded. Bran had seen men bow to Father all his life. This was the nod lords gave one another across a hall, or that a king might give. "I mean you no harm, my lord, nor anyone here. Put the bow away, Theon Greyjoy."

Theon flinched at his name.

Father had Ice in his hands again. Bran didn't remember him taking it from his squire. He stepped between the stranger and Robb, and without seeming to think about it, between the stranger and Bran. "You know me."

"I know all of you." The stranger's eyes moved over them — Robb, Jon, Theon, Jory, the guardsmen — and came to rest on Bran, and stayed there a moment too long. "I'll tell you how, my lord, if you'll let me, but not here in front of everyone."

"Your name."

The stranger opened his mouth. Then, for the barest instant, something crossed his face that Bran had not expected to see there, and would not have known how to name if he hadn't felt it himself, only that morning, on the stone floor of his room in the dark.

It looked like fear.

"Asmodeus," he said.

It was a strange name, like the Valyrian names in Maester Luwin's books but not quite. Bran had never heard anything like it.

"What are you doing on my lands, Asmodeus?"

"Waiting for you. I knew you'd come this way." The stranger looked past Father to the dead wolf on the ice. "She came south of the Wall to whelp. Something drove her south, the same thing your deserter ran from. The stag did the rest."

Nobody had told him about the deserter. Bran saw Robb look at Father, and Father's hands shift on Ice's grip, but Father said nothing, and the stranger didn't explain.

He walked past Father as though Ice were not there, and crouched beside the she-wolf, and laid one long pale hand on her head between the ears. The pups in the snow went quiet. One by one they turned their blind faces toward him.

"She isn't finished," he said. "There's still something I can do for her."

"She's dead," said Father.

"Yes."

The stranger bent his head close to the wolf's, close enough to whisper. His eyes were dark, nearly black. But as Bran watched, a light kindled at the center of them — not the burning blue of the Others' eyes in Old Nan's stories, but violet, the color of the sky just after the sun goes down.

"Arise," he said.

The horses screamed.

Black smoke poured up out of the dead wolf — out of her fur, her open jaws, the wound in her throat — and where it poured, she came apart, flesh and fur and bone dissolving into the smoke. The antler fell. It dropped into the snow with a soft sound, all that was left of the stag. And the smoke did not blow away. It gathered, and thickened, and drew itself up off the ice into a shape, and the shape stood on four legs and shook itself.

She was bigger than she had been in life. Her coat was black, and it moved at the edges, drifting like smoke, and her eyes were two coals of violet fire.

Bran's pony shied so hard that he nearly went off, and Robb grabbed his bridle and held it and was shouting something Bran couldn't hear. Somebody was praying aloud to the old gods. Jory had his sword all the way out now, and it was shaking. Theon was swearing in a flat, steady voice, the same word over and over.

The shadow wolf did not look at any of them. She lowered her great head to the pups in the snow.

They knew her. That was the thing Bran would never forget, when he had forgotten everything else. They were blind and wet and only days old, and they knew her. They crawled to her, whimpering, and pushed their small faces into the darkness of her fur as though it were warm, and the pup in Bran's arms squirmed and cried to get down and go to her. The shadow wolf lay down in the snow and curled herself around them, and they burrowed into her.

Then she lifted her head and looked at Bran. At Bran, and at Robb, and at Jon standing frozen in the stream with the white pup in his arms. At each of them in turn. Bran was afraid, but he felt watched over too, as he did when Father looked in on him at night and thought he was asleep.

"What have you done?" Father said. His voice was hoarse.

"I've given her back to her pups." Asmodeus rose and brushed the snow from his knees. "She'll guard them, and your children with them. That's all she wants now."

"And what do you want?"

The stranger did not answer at once.

"The same thing she does," he said. "I want your children safe, and you too, my lord."

No one spoke. The wind moved in the pines. The shadow wolf lay in the snow with her pups, and the antler lay where it had fallen, and Father stood with Ice in his hands and looked at the stranger as he had looked at the deserter on the stump — grave and far away, weighing something.

"You'll come with us to Winterfell," he said at last. "Under guard."

"Thank you, my lord."

They rode home slowly, with the pups bundled in cloaks and the guardsmen closed in tight around the stranger, though Bran didn't think any of them believed it would matter. Asmodeus walked beside Father's grey with his hands empty at his sides. The shadow wolf paced beside Bran's pony, silent as falling snow, and the pony trembled the whole way and never once tried to bolt.

Once, Bran looked back.

The stranger's shadow lay long and black across the snow, darker than any shadow had a right to be. As Bran watched, something in it opened its eyes.

Then another.

Then more than he could count.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Two: Asmodeus

Snow was falling into his open eyes, and he couldn't feel it.

He lay on his back and watched it come down out of the dark: big, slow flakes, turning as they fell, catching a light that had no business being there. The light was blue. It hung in the air a foot above his face, a flat pane with hard, clean edges, and there were words in it.

[Designate a name.]

He knew that shade of blue. He knew those brackets. He'd seen them on a phone screen at two in the morning, in panel after panel, and he'd have laughed if he'd been sure it was funny.

Beneath the words was an empty field. A thin line of light blinked at the start of it.

It should have been easy. His name was —

He reached for it the way you reach for a light switch in your own house, without looking, and his hand closed on nothing.

He sat up. Snow slid off him in sheets. He was in a forest — tall black pines, drifts to the knee, a sky thick with cloud — and he was sitting in the middle of a wide circle where the snow had turned the color of ash, as though something hot and dark had come down here and gone out. He remembered that he had fallen, but nothing of the fall itself.

He made himself breathe. He made himself think.

He could remember a couch, brown and sagging in the middle, with a burn on the left arm. A laptop balanced on his knees. The smell of instant noodles going cold. He could remember the last season of a show he'd loved and how he'd shouted at the screen through the finale, alone in a dark room. He could remember a different story, about a boy who got a little stronger every day until he wasn't a boy anymore, and every panel of its final chapter.

He could not remember his mother's face.

He tried. He tried until his head ached, and there was only a warm blur where she should have been, a shape in a kitchen doorway with the light behind her. His father was less than that. His city was a grid of streets with no names. His own face, in a mirror over a sink he could almost see, was a smear of fog.

[Designate a name.]

The window hadn't moved.

"I don't know," he said aloud. His voice was wrong: deeper, though he couldn't have said deeper than what. It carried a long way in the cold. "I don't know. I can't remember."

The window waited.

He looked down at his hands. They were long and pale and perfectly steady, and they did not belong to him. He turned them over. There wasn't a mark on them anywhere — no scar, no callus, no bitten nail.

The cold should have been killing him. He was sitting in snow in thin black clothes he didn't recognize, and he could feel the cold, but only faintly. It didn't hurt. He breathed out hard to test it. No cloud.

He said, "Status," because what else do you say?

A second window slid open beside the first.

NAME:

JOB: Shadow Monarch

There was more beneath — rows of numbers too long to be worth reading — but his eyes kept going back to the first line, and the white space after it.

Shadow Monarch. He sat in the snow and let that settle. He'd watched a boy earn it one bloody level at a time, first in panels and then on a screen. Now it was inside him, and he hadn't earned any of it.

And it wasn't only inside him. Beneath him — beneath the snow, beneath the frozen ground — something was waiting.

He couldn't see it, but he knew it was there: a great many things pressed so close together that they made a single darkness, and every one of them was awake, and every one of them was turned toward him.

He knew their names. He didn't remember learning them; they were simply there, where his own name should have been. Igris. Beru. Bellion. Kaisel. Tank. Iron. Tusk. Greed. And under those, rank on rank into the dark, knights and mages and beasts and soldiers, a hundred thousand of them, more, a number that stopped meaning anything after a while. Any one of them would come if he called its name. He knew exactly how. It was like knowing how to lift his arm.

My liege.

The voice didn't come from the forest. It came from underneath him, out of that darkness. It was old, and it was calm.

He should have been terrified. Mostly he was relieved to be called anything at all.

"Bellion," he said.

You have woken. A pause, long enough for snow to fall between them. You are not the one who bore the authority before.

His heart — this body's heart — kicked once, hard, and then settled, obedient. "Is that a problem?"

The shadows serve the authority, my liege. They do not ask who bears it.

It wasn't quite an answer. "Where did he go? The one before me."

The authority does not say.

The presence withdrew — not far, never far — and left him alone in the snow with a question and an empty line of light. A hundred thousand soldiers under his feet, and not one of them cared who he was. He supposed that ought to be a comfort.

It was then, with the dawn still hours off and the trees black against the snow, that he felt the other thing.

It came from the north: a thin current of cold along the back of his neck. Somewhere far away, something had turned to look at him.

My King. A second voice came up out of the dark, higher than Bellion's and hungrier. Beru. Something in the north dares to look upon my King. Send this one, and this one will pluck out its eyes.

"Not yet," he said.

He didn't know what it was.

He found out a little before dawn, when the stag screamed.

* * *​

He went toward the sound before he'd decided to — up and through the trees in a long black blur — and when he stopped and looked back, there were no footprints in the snow behind him. He decided to think about that later.

There was a stream at the bottom of a shallow valley, frozen at the edges and running black down the middle. On the far bank a stag stood with its head lowered, steaming. It was enormous, bigger than any deer had a right to be, its antlers a thicket of bone. Its flank was torn open, and the snow around its hooves was red.

Facing it, belly low, was a wolf.

Wolves were the size of big dogs. This one was the size of a pony, grey as smoke, with a head like an anvil and the fur along her spine standing up in a ridge. When she drew back her lips, her teeth were as long as his fingers. She was starved thin, her ribs showing through the grey, and she was a mother; he could see it in the swollen teats and the torn fur of her belly. Behind her, from a hollow under the roots of the bank, came a thin chorus of mewling.

He knew what she was.

It hit him all at once. The pines. The cold. A grey giant of a wolf with her pups, a stag, a frozen stream in a wood in the snow. He had seen this. He'd watched it on a screen with the lights off and a bowl going cold in his lap: the first episode of the best show he'd ever seen.

Westeros.

He was in Westeros. This was the wolfswood. Winterfell was a few hours' ride that way, and the Starks were in it. Ned and Catelyn. Robb and Jon, Sansa and Arya, Bran and Rickon. All of them alive. All of them about to —

And the cold thing in the north, the attention on the back of his neck — he knew what that was now, too.

The stag lowered its head.

He had maybe two seconds. He knew how it ended; he'd seen what was left. The stag would charge. She would meet it. The tine would go into her throat, and she'd tear its belly open, and in a few hours Eddard Stark would kneel beside her body and read a great deal into a stag's antler.

And her pups would go home with his children.

He lifted his hand.

The power came up through him, easy and immense. He felt it gather in his palm. It would cost him nothing. He could stop the stag in midair and hold it there, kicking, until it tired. He could break its neck from across the stream without taking a step. He could —

— and she would live, and the day would go off the page. As long as he touched nothing, he knew all of it: the antler in her throat and what Ned Stark would read in it, which child would get which pup, every word that would be spoken over her body. It was his only advantage. He'd been in this world less than a night. He had no name, and no one in it who would believe him, and not one of his shadows could tell him what Winterfell would do tomorrow. The story could, so long as he left it alone. Save her, and the raven would still come tonight, and the king would still ride north, but he would walk out of these trees to meet Eddard Stark in a scene nobody had written, with a living direwolf between them who would not give up her litter to men with steel in their hands. It was the one meeting he couldn't afford to get wrong.

He knew what those pups did. The grey one would tear out the throat of a man who crept into a crippled boy's room with a knife. The white one would wake its master when a dead man came up the stairs. Another would win a king his first battle. They were the only guardian angels the Starks would ever have, and they came from here. From her.

The Starks needed the pups more than the pups needed their mother. It was a reason he could live with. The real one was colder: he needed the next scene to happen exactly as he remembered it. And afterward, once the Starks had seen what they were meant to see, there was one thing he could do for her that no one in the story ever could.

He lowered his hand.

The stag charged, and she met it. The sound went out across the valley like a tree coming down. He stood on the near bank and watched, because he had decided, and it seemed to him the least he could do was watch.

It was over quickly. He'd always thought that was something writers said to get out of describing it. It wasn't. The stag's head came down and then up. A tine went in under her jaw, deep. She screamed and twisted, the antler snapped off at the base, and she went for the stag's belly with everything she had left. The stag bellowed and lurched away up the far bank, trailing its insides through the snow, and was gone into the trees to die somewhere he didn't follow.

She made it back to her pups. He hadn't expected that. She dragged herself across the ice with the antler standing out of her throat and her blood coming in long dark pulses, and she lay down in the streambed, half on the ice, and curled herself around the hollow. The pups came crawling out blind, found her, and began to nurse.

He crossed the stream and crouched beside her.

She was still alive. Her eyes found him: yellow, clouding over. She didn't growl. She was past growling. She only looked at him.

"I'm sorry," he said. It came out quiet and hoarse. "I'm sorry. I need them."

He'd tell himself afterward that it had been arithmetic. It had. That was the worst part.

He stayed with her until she died. It took a little less than an hour.

So that was what her life had bought: one afternoon that would go as he remembered, and a way into it. He would remember the price every time a Stark trusted him.

One of the pups hadn't found her. It had come out of the hollow with the others and gone the wrong way — a scrap of white fur no bigger than his two hands — and by the time he noticed, it had crawled a dozen feet across the snow toward the trees and stopped there, shivering, too weak to cry. Unlike the others, it had its eyes open. They were red.

In the story he knew, Jon Snow found this one on his own, nearly dead of cold, pushed away from the rest of the litter. He could fix that much without breaking anything.

He picked the pup up. It weighed nothing. He opened the front of his black coat — it opened for him, though he couldn't find a single fastening — and tucked the pup against his chest. After a while it stopped shivering and slept.

Then he went back across the stream, sat down under a pine, and waited.

He knew what day this was. A few miles off, in the yard of some holdfast in the hills, a man in torn black was chained to a post. Before noon Eddard Stark would take his head for desertion.

Standing between the deserter and Ice would take a heartbeat, and so would telling them the man spoke the truth. Then the first thing Eddard Stark ever knew of him would be a sorcerer taking a condemned man out of the king's justice in front of his sons, and nothing after that would go as he remembered.

He stayed where he was.

That made two, he thought, and the day had barely begun.

The sun came up grey behind the clouds. He sat still and let the snow cover him, and he planned.

A raven tonight, from King's Landing. A king on the kingsroad before the moon turned. A boy on a tower. A wolf on the Trident. A sword on the steps of a sept.

Everyone on the internet had a plan for saving Ned Stark. He'd had one himself, once, typed out late at night on some forum with all the confidence of a man who would never have to try it.

Now he had a hundred thousand dead soldiers and a power that had killed a dragon king. He couldn't keep the whole story; he'd broken it by waking up in it. So he'd keep the hinges: the raven, the king on the road, the boy on the tower. Let them come on time, where he could see them coming, and tell the Starks the ones he could, until they trusted him. After that, he'd break whatever he had to.

* * *​

They came in the middle of the afternoon, and it went as he remembered. He'd expected it to feel like watching a play. It felt like eavesdropping. When Theon shot at him, he stopped the arrow without deciding to. His body did it for him, and he liked that less than the arrow. It had gone as he remembered for exactly as long as he stayed sitting down.

Then Eddard Stark stood in front of him with Ice in his hands, and his face was older and harder than the one on the screen, with grey in the beard that no one had put there with a brush. He had watched this man's head come off while a crowd cheered.

"Your name," said Lord Stark.

[Designate a name.]

It was still there. It had been there all day, hanging at the edge of his sight. The line of light blinked. Behind Ned, a dozen men were waiting too. The whole world was waiting for him to say who he was, and there was nothing there.

For one heartbeat he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life, and he couldn't even remember his life.

Then something surfaced.

A scrap. Three in the morning, a phone's glow, a page he'd fallen into and couldn't climb out of. The seven princes of hell. A list. Lucifer, pride. Mammon, greed. Leviathan, envy. And —

"Asmodeus," he said.

The window chimed, a small clean sound.

[Name designated: Asmodeus.]

He felt it settle on him. It came down over his head and shoulders, heavy and cool and close-fitting, and when it was done he couldn't have said whether it was a crown or a collar. Either way, it was his now.

Asmodeus. The prince of lust. He'd have laughed, if he'd dared. Of all the names in all the worlds, his mind had handed him a demon's — and the demon of wanting, at that, when he couldn't remember wanting anything except to know what he was called. He had introduced himself as a devil to the most honorable man in the Seven Kingdoms, in a realm that prayed to seven gods and feared the seventh.

Maybe he had wanted to be honest about something.

Then he knelt by the dead she-wolf and told her to rise, and after that nobody asked him for anything. Nobody but the window.

[Shadow extraction successful.]

[Designate a name for this shadow.]

Beneath them was an empty field, like the one that had waited all day for his own name. He looked at the pups burrowing into her, and closed the window without answering. It wasn't his to give. And whatever came, he would never do this to a Stark.

* * *​

Winterfell was real.

He couldn't get past the thought, walking up the last mile of road at dusk with a ring of nervous guardsmen around him. Jory Cassel had offered him a horse. The horse wouldn't let him near it. He'd walked.

He'd seen this castle a hundred times. He knew the shape of its towers and the line of its walls, and none of it had prepared him for the size of it, or the smell. Woodsmoke and horse and baking bread, and under it something warm and mineral that he couldn't place until he saw steam rising above the walls into the cold. The hot springs. They piped the water through the walls to keep the castle warm; he'd known that from a wiki page.

Word had run ahead of them. The yard was full: guardsmen and grooms, washerwomen, kitchen boys, a smith in a leather apron with his hammer still in his hand. Nobody spoke. They parted in front of him, and he heard what they didn't say. He heard everything now: the creak of a jerkin across the yard, a baby fretting somewhere behind a shutter, and Septa Mordane, the girls' septa, in grey wool with a seven-pointed star at her breast, saying under her breath to the women beside her, "The Stranger's come."

The women beside her stepped back.

He was still getting used to being looked at. The ones who weren't staring at the shadow wolf stared at him instead.

The Starks were waiting on the steps of the keep.

Catelyn Stark stood at the center of them, straight-backed, her auburn hair bound up, her hands folded at her waist. He watched her see the shadow wolf pacing beside Bran's pony, and he watched her face go still, and then harden when she looked at him.

Her eldest daughter stood at her shoulder. Sansa was tall and auburn like her mother, eighteen and dressed in blue, and plainly trying not to show that she was frightened. He knew what was coming for her: a betrothal, and a golden boy who would make her look at her father's head on a spike. Worse, after that.

He looked away first.

The younger girl wasn't frightened at all. Arya Stark was all elbows and scowl, and she was staring at the shadow wolf with her mouth open. Then she stared at him, trying to work out how the trick was done.

Then the smallest of them broke away from his nurse, ran straight across the yard, and flung his arms around the shadow wolf's neck.

Half the yard screamed. Catelyn Stark took one step down with her hand out, and her face was terrible. The wolf lowered her great dark head and let him. Rickon Stark, six years old, buried his face in fur made of shadow and laughed out loud.

"She's cold," he announced to the whole yard. He sounded delighted.

* * *​

They put him in Lord Stark's solar with Jory Cassel outside the door.

It was a small room and a warm one. There was a fire, a table spread with maps and letters held flat by candlesticks, and a direwolf carved over the hearth, worn smooth by centuries of hands. It smelled of tallow and old paper. Nobody asked him to sit, so he didn't.

Ned sat behind the table. Catelyn stood at his shoulder. Maester Luwin, small and grey and hung with his chain of many metals, had taken the stool nearest the fire, and Robb stood by the door with his hand on his sword hilt. By the look of him, he'd been told not to draw it and hadn't decided whether to listen.

Catelyn spoke first. He'd known she would.

"What are you?"

"Lady Stark." He gave her the nod he had given her husband, and saw her mouth tighten. "I'm a man."

"Men don't raise dead things out of the snow." Her voice was low and controlled, and the Riverlands were still in its vowels after twenty years in the North. "My septa had a name for what does."

"Cat," Ned said quietly.

"No. I'll say it. He raised a dead thing in front of our sons, Ned, and you brought him under our roof."

"I did," Ned said. "And it put itself between our sons and harm the whole way home." He looked back at Asmodeus. "Where are you from?"

As far as he could remember, he came from a sagging brown couch with a burn on the left arm. Here was the first place he could lie. He found he didn't want to. He'd decided it that morning under the pine: he would tell Ned Stark less than the truth whenever he had to, but never anything false. If one man in this world had earned that much, it was this one.

"Far away," he said. "Farther than Asshai. Farther than any map in this room. I didn't choose to come. I woke up in the wolfswood last night, and I don't know the way back."

Maester Luwin looked up from the fire. "Asmodeus," the maester said slowly. "It has a Valyrian sound. But it's no Valyrian I know."

"It isn't Valyrian."

"Then what is it?" said Catelyn.

There was a smaller answer, an old name from far away, and it wouldn't even have been false. But he was about to ask this man to believe everything else he said tonight, and he'd rather they heard the worst of him from his own mouth. He said, "Where I come from, it's the name of a devil. One of the seven princes of hell."

Robb's hand tightened on his sword hilt. Maester Luwin's chain chimed once as he shifted on his stool, and then even that stopped.

"Seven," said Catelyn Stark, as if he had spat on the floor of a sept.

"You're named for a devil," Ned said.

"It's the only name I have." He met Ned's eyes. "My lord, I'd like to ask you for something."

"Ask."

"Bread and salt."

Catelyn understood before any of them did, and he watched her understand it. Once he had eaten at their table, no one in this house could lift a hand against him without breaking the oldest law in the North.

"No," she said.

"Guest right binds the guest as much as the host," he said. "Under your roof, I couldn't harm anyone of your blood or your household without breaking the same law. I'm not asking you to trust me, Lady Stark. I'm asking you to let me put a chain on myself."

Ned studied him across the table. "And would that chain hold you?"

It was a better question than he'd expected. He gave it the only honest answer he had. "It'll hold me because I let it. If I wanted to break it, I could, but I don't want to."

Robb made a small sound. Ned didn't look away.

"You'd have us feed a devil on his word," Catelyn said.

"Not on my word alone. I'll give you proof." He looked at Ned, because it was Ned who needed to hear it, and because he knew what it would do to him. "Tonight a raven will come from King's Landing. Jon Arryn is dead. They'll say it was a fever. King Robert is riding north with the queen and her brothers and half his court, and when he gets here, he means to ask you to be his Hand."

He watched Ned's face.

Jon Arryn had been as much a father to Eddard Stark as his own, and Asmodeus had just told him the man was dead, in front of his wife and his son, to buy himself a seat by the fire.

Ned's face didn't change. His hands did. They closed slowly on the edge of the table and stayed there.

"My sister," Catelyn said. "Lysa. Jon's wife —"

"Your sister is alive," he said, and let her hear nothing else in it.

"And if no raven comes?" Ned's voice was even.

"Then you put me out in the snow, and I go, and you never see me again."

"And if it does?"

"Then you'll have questions. I'll answer the ones I can."

Ned Stark rose, went to the sideboard, and came back with a round loaf of brown bread and a small dish of coarse grey salt. He tore the heel from the loaf himself, dipped it in the salt, and held it out.

"Ned," said Catelyn.

"If he means us harm, Cat, I'd sooner he were bound tonight than loose." Ned didn't take his eyes off Asmodeus. "Eat."

He ate.

It tasted like bread. Dark and a little sour, the crust hard, the salt gritty between his teeth. In the space of a single day he'd watched a mother die, let a man lose his head, and given himself a devil's name, and none of it had made him want to weep.

The bread nearly did.

Ned said, "Leave us." Catelyn Stark left without a word. Robb looked at his father, and after a moment he went too, and Maester Luwin gathered his robes and followed. The door closed. It was quiet except for the fire.

Ned sat back down. For a while he didn't say anything. He looked at the flames, and Asmodeus let him.

"You said they'd call it a fever," Ned said at last. "Jon."

"They will. It wasn't a fever."

"And what was it?"

"Poison." He let Ned have that much. "You'll know whose before the king comes."

Ned took that in. "At the stream you said you knew us. All of us."

"Yes, and I said I'd tell you how."

"How?"

He'd spent the whole day in the snow thinking about this answer. There was no true version of it that Ned Stark could understand: a glowing screen, a story sold by strangers, millions of people watching his family die and arguing afterward about whose fault it was.

"Where I come from," he said, "your family is a song."

Ned looked at him.

"A long one. A lot of people know every word of it, and they argue about it." He hesitated. "It doesn't end well."

"Tell me how it ends."

He looked at the fire. "Not tonight, my lord."

"My children."

He thought of a wedding. A chair with wheels. A girl whispering a list of names into the dark. The kennels. A knife in the snow. A little boy running in a straight line across an open field.

"Some of them live," he said. "None of them come out of it whole."

"Which?"

"I won't tell you that." He held Ned's eyes. "Not until I know what you'd do with it."

Ned closed his eyes. When he opened them, his voice was perfectly steady.

"And me?"

"You die first."

The fire cracked. Down in the yard, the shadow wolf lifted her head. He felt it through the stone, and he told her to be still.

"How?" said Eddard Stark.

There were softer words: in battle, or quickly, or it doesn't matter now, because I'm here. But he owed this man the truth, and the truth was a single word.

"Honorably," Asmodeus said.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Three: Catelyn

The candle before the Stranger would not stay lit.

Catelyn had lit the others without trouble, one for each face of the Seven, the way her lady mother had taught her at Riverrun when she was still small enough to need a stool. The Father's burned tall and steady. The Mother's leaned a little toward the door, as it always did. The Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone: small brave flames in the little sept Ned had built for her when she came north as a bride, so that she would have somewhere in this cold stone country to kneel to her own gods.

The Stranger's went out.

She lit it again from the Crone's. It burned for a breath, bowed, and died, and a thread of smoke rose straight up into the dark. There was no draft at all. She lit it a third time. Her hand was not quite steady. The flame caught, shivered, and went out, and the carved figure above it, a tall shape in a hooded cloak, stood unlit among its brothers and sisters like a gap in a row of teeth.

Catelyn set down the taper. She did not try a fourth time.

Septa Mordane had a saying, one she taught the girls with their prayers, that the Stranger's candle wouldn't burn while the Stranger was out walking. Catelyn had heard it a hundred times and never once thought of it on her knees. She thought of it now.

She turned her back on the dark alcove and knelt before the Mother instead, on a cushion her own knees had worn thin, and folded her hands, and could not find a prayer.

There was a man with a devil's name in the guest house.

She had watched Ned tear the loaf with his own hands, and watched the man eat it. And he had looked her husband in the eye and said that guest right, the gods' own law, would hold him only because he let it.

Rickon was asleep in the Great Keep with his arms around the neck of a dead wolf.

Old Nan had tried to carry him up to bed, and the wolf had raised her great dark head and looked at her, and Old Nan had set him gently down again and come hobbling to fetch Catelyn. And Catelyn had come, and stood in the doorway, and seen her youngest curled against a thing made of smoke, with five blind pups heaped around him, sleeping more soundly than he had slept since he was weaned. She had sat in a chair beside them for an hour with her hands clenched in her lap. Then she had left a guard at the door and come here, because she could not pray to the Mother with those eyes on her.

Mother, have mercy on my children. It was the only prayer she could find. She said it over and over, and all the while another thought kept coming back: Jon Arryn is dead, Asmodeus says.

Jon Arryn, who had raised her husband. Jon Arryn, who had married her sister. If it was true, Lysa was a widow tonight, alone in that great stinking city with her sickly boy. Catelyn had asked after her, there in the solar with Asmodeus's eyes on her, and he had said, Your sister is alive, and nothing more.

It was the nothing more that had followed her down the stairs.

The door opened behind her.

It was Maester Luwin. He stood in the doorway with his grey robes gathered in one hand and a curl of paper in the other, and she knew before he said a word. It was in the way he held the paper, out at arm's length.

"My lady," he said. "A raven has come from King's Landing."

She read it by the light of the Mother's candle. The hand was a court clerk's, careful and characterless, and the wax was a crowned stag in gold. Jon Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie and Hand of the King, was dead of a sudden fever. His Grace King Robert, First of his Name, was riding north to Winterfell with the queen, the royal children, and the queen's brothers, and looked forward to finding his friend Lord Stark in good health.

She read it twice. The words didn't change.

"It is as he told us," Maester Luwin said quietly. "Every word of it."

"Not every word." Her voice sounded strange in the little sept. "He didn't say a fever."

"He did, my lady." Luwin's chain chimed as he shifted his weight. "He said they would say it was a fever."

Catelyn looked down at the letter again. They'll say. As though he had known it for a lie before anyone told it.

"Where is my lord husband?"

"In the godswood, my lady."

Of course he was.

* * *​

In twenty years at Winterfell, Catelyn had never once felt welcome in its godswood.

The septs of the south had gardens, clipped and ordered, where you could see from one wall to the other. This was three acres of the forest that had stood here before the castle was raised, walled in and left to itself: sentinels and soldier pines, ironwoods black as old blood, moss that swallowed footsteps. Steam drifted in slow sheets off the hot pools, and the trees dripped with it. At the heart of it all stood the weirwood, bone-white, with a face cut into its trunk. The face was long and sorrowful, and red sap had run from its eyes and dried there. Catelyn always had the feeling it was watching her, and that it did not think much of what it saw.

Ned sat on a mossy stone beside the black pool at its roots, with Ice across his knees and an oilcloth in his hand, cleaning the morning's blood from the blade. He looked up before she reached him. He always did. She had never been able to come on him unawares in this place, though the moss muffled every step. She suspected the trees told him.

Above the godswood, on the walk along the top of the inner wall, a tall figure stood against the clouds. It did not move. Catelyn did not need to see its face.

"Cat," Ned said.

"It came." She held out the letter.

He didn't take it. He laid Ice on the stone beside him. "As he said?"

"Word for word. Even the fever."

Ned looked up at the sky over the wall, where there was no moon. "I'd hoped it would be late."

"Ned."

He took the letter then and read it, and she watched his face while he did. Other men's faces did things when they grieved. Ned's face only went still, and stayed still, until she could not tell what he was thinking. Jon Arryn had taken him in as a boy of eight, and gone to war rather than give him up to the Mad King.

"He was a good man," Ned said.

"Yes."

"I kept hoping he'd be wrong about this one thing. I told myself that if no raven came tonight, I'd put him out at first light and never think of him again." He folded the letter neatly along its creases. "I was hoping Jon was alive so I could be rid of a guest. I'm not proud of it."

Catelyn sat down beside him on the cold stone, though the damp would ruin her gown, and took his hand. It was like ice. "What else did he tell you? You sent us out, Ned. I saw your face when I left."

He didn't answer at once. The pool steamed. Somewhere in the trees a night bird called.

"He says that where he comes from, we're a song," Ned said at last, "and I'm the first of us to die in it."

Of everything Asmodeus had said since he walked out of the wolfswood, it was the only thing she would have believed without a raven. She had been married to Eddard Stark for twenty years. She had always known precisely what would kill him.

"Then refuse him," she said. "When Robert comes, refuse him."

"He's riding a thousand leagues to ask me, Cat."

"Let him ride a thousand back."

"He's my king. He's my friend." Ned's fingers tightened on hers. "I'll hear him out. I owe him that much."

"And what do you owe your children?"

Ned was quiet a moment. Then he said dryly, "He told me you'd say that."

She opened her mouth and shut it again. She felt, absurdly, that every word she would ever say was already in that song of his.

"And did he tell you what you'd answer?"

"No." Ned turned the folded letter over in his hands. "He said that part was up to me."

Catelyn looked up at the wall again, meaning to — she did not know what. Glare at him, perhaps, as she would glare at a servant caught listening at a door.

The wall was empty. She had not seen him go.

* * *​

The morning after the raven, Catelyn watched Ned cross the yard to Asmodeus.

"The man I beheaded," Ned said. "Was he telling the truth?"

"Yes, my lord. The Others are real, and he saw them."

"He said they turned and looked south," Ned said. "A fortnight before your star fell."

"That part isn't in the song," Asmodeus said. "If they were looking for me, I don't know how they knew I was coming. I didn't know it myself."

Ned stood a while in the snow with that. Then he went up to Luwin's turret, and before noon two ravens flew for Castle Black.

The king was a fortnight and more away, the first rider said; then ten days; then a week. Winterfell made itself ready.

The great hall was scrubbed from the rafters to the flags. The kitchens baked from before dawn until after dark, and the smell of bread and roasting meat lay over the whole castle like a warm fog. The guest house was to be emptied for the queen's household.

That last was a difficulty, because the guest house was not empty.

Catelyn sent Vayon Poole to tell Asmodeus he must move. Poole came back sweating in the cold and said the gentleman had made no difficulty. The queen was welcome to the house, the gentleman had said; he had no use for a bed, since he did not sleep.

It was true. The guards swore to it. Every night at dusk he climbed to the top of the inner wall and stood there half the night, facing north, as still as a stone king on a tomb. The men of the night watch learned to walk their rounds without looking at him. A few of the braver ones bade him good morrow when they passed, and he bade them good morrow back, courteous as any southern lord, and after a while the braver ones stopped doing that too.

By the end of the first week, the whole castle had a name for him. It had started in the yard on the first day, and come up through the scullery and spread from there, and by the time it reached Catelyn, it was everywhere. The Stranger. The grooms said it. The washerwomen said it. Septon Chayle said it in a whisper, when he begged her leave to keep the sept doors barred at night. Catelyn gave it. She did not tell him that every morning she lit the Stranger's candle, and every morning it went out.

By the second week ravens were coming from Last Hearth and Karhold and the Dreadfort, asking what Lord Stark had let into his house. Ned answered them all himself, and did not show her what he wrote.

The dead wolf went where the pups went, and the pups went where the children went, and so the thing walked the halls of the Great Keep as if it had been whelped there. By day she lay in the yard with the pups tumbling over her. By night she lay across the threshold of one child's door or another's, never the same two nights running. On the fourth night, Catelyn had the doors of the Great Keep barred against her. The pups cried until the small hours. In the morning the bar was still in its brackets, and the wolf was lying across Bran's door.

That same morning she sent for Septon Chayle. He walked the Great Keep behind her with his censer, swinging sweet smoke into every corner and calling on the Seven to cast out what was unclean, while the wolf lay across Bran's door and watched him. In the sept he knelt before the Stranger to finish the rite, and the candle there went out in his hand. He lit it twice more. Then he knew what she had not told him, and he let the candle be.

She stopped barring the doors after that; the bar kept out nothing that mattered. The next night the man himself came into the Great Keep, sat on the nursery floor to hear the end of one of Old Nan's stories, and carried Rickon to his bed when it was done. Old Nan had let him. No one had told her not to. After that, a guard stood at the foot of the nursery stair, with orders Old Nan had never been given.

She went to Ned. "Send him away. Him and his dead thing, before the king comes."

Ned did not look up from his letters. "And tell Robert what? That I turned a guest out into the snow? Name me one harm he's done us, Cat."

She could not. She had been trying for six days.

"He foretold the raven to the hour," Ned said. "He told me a man I beheaded died telling the truth. I'll not send away the one man who can tell me what's coming."

That was the end of it. She had known it would be.

Rickon rode the dead wolf about the yard like a pony, shrieking with laughter, with his black pup tumbling after. The first time Catelyn saw it, she thought her heart had stopped. By the tenth time, she only thought it might.

Rickon named her Winter. "Because she's cold," he said, as though that settled it. The name went through the castle as the other one had, until the grooms and the kitchens used it without thinking. Catelyn had not once said it aloud. In her own head, the dead wolf was the dead wolf still.

The children named the pups, and those names Catelyn used; she could not help it. Robb's was Grey Wind, and Sansa's Lady. Arya, who would not have a lady, named hers Nymeria, for the warrior queen. Bran's was Summer, Rickon's Shaggydog, and Jon's white one Ghost, for it made no more sound than one.

They grew too fast. They slept every night in the dead wolf's cold and woke bigger than they had any right to be, and by the tenth day they were eating meat from the children's hands. Luwin wrote to the Citadel. Catelyn did not need the Citadel. Nothing grew so fast in a dead thing's cold unless something meant it to.

Arya followed Asmodeus everywhere she was not forbidden to go, and a good many places she was. Septa Mordane complained that the girl had missed nine lessons in as many days. Catelyn caught her in the yard one morning walking with a long, soundless glide she had plainly copied from someone. When Catelyn asked what she thought she was doing, Arya said, "He never makes a sound when he walks. Not ever. I've been listening." Later Catelyn learned that Arya had asked him to teach her to raise the dead, and he had said no; and then she had asked him to teach her to fight, and he had said, Not yet.

Catelyn lay awake a long time over not yet.

And Bran climbed. He always had. He had been climbing since before he could walk, and she had begged him to stop since before he could talk, and he had promised her a hundred times and climbed anyway. But now, when she looked up and saw her son on the walls, she would see Asmodeus on the battlements too, watching him as closely as she did.

On the ninth day, because Robb had asked to see one of his soldiers, a knight in black armor came up out of the snow of the practice yard and put Robb on his back, and took the sword out of Jon's hand, and then out of Ser Rodrik's. After it came a black thing with too many legs, which put its mouth to Arya's open palm, and Septa Mordane had to be helped to her bed. Catelyn heard it from four people before Robb came to tell her himself, still grinning. Ned said no one had been hurt. It was true, and it was not the point, and she could not make him see it.

She went up to him that evening. It took her the whole length of the wall walk to reach him, and her heart was hammering by the end of it. She had meant to speak of the yard. But he was watching Bran again, and what came out of her was something else.

"Why do you watch my son?"

He did not take his eyes from Bran. "Because he climbs, my lady."

"Does he fall?" It was out before she could stop it. "In your song. Does he fall?"

He was quiet long enough for her to hear her own heart. "I'm watching him, my lady," he said.

"And at night?" she said. "What do you watch for, out there in the dark?"

"There's a storm north of the Wall, with the Others in it," he said. "Last night it was nearer than the night before. Tonight it will be nearer."

He did not say another word about Bran.

Sansa would not look at him at all. That, at least, Catelyn understood. But one night, brushing out her daughter's hair before bed as she had since Sansa was small, she asked her why.

Sansa was quiet so long that Catelyn thought she wouldn't answer. "Jeyne says he's handsomer than any knight in the songs," she said.

"And what do you say?"

"I say I don't like the way he looks at us."

Catelyn's hand stilled on the brush. "How does he look at you?"

Sansa met her eyes in the glass.

"As if he knows something about us," she said. "Something bad."

And every night, after the castle slept, Asmodeus came down from the walls and Ned went up to his solar, and the two of them talked until the candles guttered out. Ned told her only the shape of it: his own part of the song, all of it that did not run through their children, to the end; and the north, a Night King and a Long Night, out of Old Nan's stories. What the song held for their children, Asmodeus would not tell even Ned. He came to bed in the grey hour before dawn and lay beside her with his eyes open, and Catelyn lay beside him and pretended not to notice, and neither of them slept.

* * *​

Lysa's letter came on the eleventh day, with the king a week out.

It came in a box: a small thing of carved cedar, brought up the kingsroad by a rider in plain grey who said it was a gift from the Lady of the Eyrie to the maester of Winterfell, and who would not stay for a meal. Inside, nested in velvet, lay a lens of Myrish glass for Maester Luwin's far-eye. Luwin exclaimed over it like a boy. It was Catelyn who noticed the box was a finger's width too deep for what it held.

The false bottom came away under her thumbnail. Beneath it was a single sheet of paper, folded small and covered in a hand she had not seen since she was a girl: the secret writing she and Lysa had made up at Riverrun, so that neither Edmure nor their septa could read their letters.

She read it standing in Luwin's turret with the ravens muttering in the rafters overhead. Then she read it again. Then she went to find her husband.

Jon was murdered, her sister had written, in a hand that shook even in cipher. The Lannisters. The queen. I have fled to the Eyrie with my son. Tell Ned the king is in danger. Tell him to trust no one in the capital. Tell him to come.

Ned listened to her read it out in his solar, with Maester Luwin standing by the door, and when she finished he sat silent, his hands flat on the table. Then he said, "Send for him."

"No."

"Cat. He knew about the raven. He'll know about this."

"That," said Catelyn, "is exactly why."

But Ned sent Jory anyway.

Asmodeus came in without a sound, as Arya said he always did, and stood where he had stood that first night, and his eyes went at once to the paper in Catelyn's hand.

"Your sister's letter," he said.

Catelyn's fingers tightened on the paper. No one had told him. No one could have.

"She writes that the Lannisters murdered her husband," he went on, in that low, unhurried voice. "She writes that she's fled to the Eyrie with her son, and that the king is in danger. I don't know what else she's put in it." He paused. "She's lying."

"You haven't read it."

"I don't need to. I know what happened to Jon Arryn."

"My sister is many things," Catelyn said. Her voice was quiet. "She is not a liar."

He looked at her, and for a moment he did not speak. That was the worst of it, afterward: that he had taken care with her.

"Your sister poisoned her husband, Lady Stark," he said.

The room did not move, though it seemed to.

"The Tears of Lys," he said. "It's clear as water and sweet to the taste. It takes a man in the bowels, and it looks like a fever. Ask your maester."

They all looked at Luwin. The old man's hand went to his chain. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and she watched him search for some way out of what he was going to say, and fail to find one.

"It is rare, my lady," he said at last. "And costly. But the signs would be much like a fever of the gut. A man might go quickly." He could not meet her eyes. "I am sorry. I cannot say it was not that."

Family, Duty, Honor. The words of her house. Her father had drilled them into her before she could spell them, and family had always come first. Before the others. Before everything.

"Get out," Catelyn said.

"Cat," said Ned.

The devil didn't move. "I'm not insulting her, my lady. I'm telling you what she did."

"Why?" It came out of her raw. "Why would she? Jon was her husband. He was the father of her son —"

"Because someone she loved asked her to."

"Lysa has never loved anyone but that sickly boy."

"She loved someone long before she had a son."

Catelyn thought, unbidden, of Riverrun the year Father sent Petyr Baelish away, and of Lysa weeping behind her door for a week. She did not say his name.

"Who?"

He only looked at her. She had forgotten how dark his eyes were up close: nearly black, with a faint light moving far down in them.

"I'll tell you when it will do some good," he said.

"You will tell me now."

"No, my lady. If I tell you now, you'll want to go after him, and so will Lord Stark, and it's too soon for that."

"Then why tell me any of it?" She hated how her voice cracked. "Why not let me believe her?"

An expression crossed his face then. It was gone before she could tell what it was.

"Because in the song you believe her," he said, "and a war starts with it."

He nodded to Ned, and then to her, and was gone.

Ned had not said a word while Asmodeus spoke. Jon Arryn had raised him, and Lysa had poured the cup, and he had sat through all of it. When the door had closed, he said, "Robert will hear none of this. Not yet."

Catelyn stared at him.

"If I name Lysa to him, he'll ask how I know, and I'll have to tell him about Asmodeus and his song. And he'd have her head, Cat. She's your sister."

It was a kindness. She knew what it might cost them if Robert ever learned that Ned had known who poisoned his Hand and held his tongue, and she took it anyway.

Catelyn's septa had taught her, at Riverrun, that devils lie — that it was the whole of their nature, as burning was the whole nature of fire. That night she lay beside her husband, who was pretending to sleep, and went back over every word Asmodeus had spoken under her roof since the night he came, looking for the lie.

She couldn't find one.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Four: Asmodeus

Maester Luwin wanted to put his hand inside the wolf.

He asked on the third morning, in the yard, with the pups tumbling over Winter's flanks and half the household finding reasons to cross the yard slowly. He asked Asmodeus first, and Asmodeus said, "Don't ask me, ask her. It's her body," so the maester bowed to a dead direwolf, which was not a thing he had done before, and said, "By your leave," and Winter looked at him out of her violet eyes and did nothing, and Luwin put his hand into her side up to the wrist.

He held it there a while, careful to show nothing on his face. Then he drew the hand out and turned it over and looked at it, expecting it to have come back changed.

"Cold," he said. "Not like ice. More like a cellar in summer. And there is nothing inside her. No flesh, no bone. I could feel my own fingers through her." He looked at Asmodeus. "What holds her together?"

"I do. She runs on my power. As long as I keep her going, she holds together."

"And if you were to stop?"

"I think she'd come apart. I haven't tried it, and I'm not going to, not with her pups all over her."

Luwin had a wax tablet on a cord at his belt, and he wrote on it. He had been writing since the wolfswood; the Citadel was going to get a letter that would keep some archmaester awake for a year. "Does she eat?"

"No. She doesn't need to."

"Sleep?"

"No. She lies down because the pups like it."

"Breathe?"

"No. Watch her sides. They never move."

"Does she feel?" The stylus stopped. "Pain. Hunger. The cold. Anything."

Asmodeus looked at the wolf. She was watching Rickon, who was trying to climb her from behind, and she had lowered her hindquarters an inch so that he could. She had done that on her own.

"I don't know," he said. "I can tell what she's doing, but not what she feels."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's true. I didn't ask for any of this, Maester. I woke up with it. I know how to use it, but I don't know why it works."

The maester's chain clinked as he shifted. He was a small man, grey and neat, with a link of Valyrian steel somewhere in that chain that meant he had once sat in a dark room at the Citadel and been taught that magic had gone out of the world. He was beginning to think he had been taught wrong.

"Lady Stark asked me to learn what you are," Luwin said. He said it plainly, which Asmodeus liked him for. "I told her I would try."

"Then tell her you can examine me as much as you like. I'd like to know what I am too."

"That is not an answer she will care for."

"No, I don't suppose it is."

Luwin wrote something. Then he looked at the wolf again, and at the pups, who had been blind and mewling in the snow three days before and were tumbling over the dead wolf's flanks now with their eyes open, and his face lost its care and was only an old man's face, tired and curious and a little afraid.

"They grow too fast," he said. "I have read of no such thing. Is that your doing?"

"No, that's not me," Asmodeus said. "I think it's her. She's still their mother, as much as she can be."

"What does the Citadel teach about things like her?" Asmodeus said.

"That there are none," said Luwin, and looked at his hand again.

Then Bran's voice, from the top of the woodpile: "Can you fly?"

Every head in the yard turned to the woodpile, and then to Asmodeus.

"Not by myself," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means I have a shadow that can fly, and I can ride it. But it scares horses, and this yard is full of them, so you'll have to wait."

Bran thought about this, and plainly meant to ask again later. Arya, who had come up on Asmodeus's left while he was talking to the maester, said, "Does she shit?"

"Arya!" Septa Mordane, from across the yard.

"No, she doesn't need to," Asmodeus told her. "She's a shadow powered by my magic, Arya, not really a living wolf anymore. They don't need to eat, sleep, shit, any of that, which is very convenient."

"Then where does the meat go?" Arya had been watching. "Rickon feeds her. I've seen him. It goes in and it doesn't come out."

Luwin's stylus was moving again. He looked at Asmodeus over it, and for once Asmodeus was glad of the question.

"I have no idea," he said. "It goes in and then it's just gone." The maester of Winterfell laughed out loud in the cold.

* * *​

He did not sleep, so he learned the castle at night.

The guest house he had given up to a queen who had not yet arrived, and had not missed it. He walked instead. He walked the walls, where the thing in the north waited for him every night, and when he had had enough of that he came down and walked the rest. The library tower, where the air was cold and smelled of old vellum, and he stood under the stacks and touched nothing, because he had watched this room burn once and did not want to be the reason it did again. The glass gardens, warm and damp, where a gardener asleep on a sack of turnips woke to find the Stranger standing among the winter roses with his eyes shut, breathing in the earth, and fled, and came back in the morning to find nothing disturbed. The pipes in the walls, hot to the hand, that he had read about once on a bright screen at three in the morning and had never expected to lay his palm against.

He had known this place his whole life, and he had never been in it, and now he was, and it smelled of horse.

On the fifth night he found Old Nan.

She was telling a story in the nursery, in the low light, with Rickon asleep on her lap and Bran at her knees and Arya in the doorway pretending she had only come for a candle. It was the Long Night. He knew it before he had heard three words: the winter that lasted a generation, the sun that hid its face, the Others riding their dead horses through the dark. He had heard it told by an actress with a good voice. He had never heard it told by a woman who believed it.

He stood outside the door and listened. She told it differently. She knew the name of the holdfast where the first fire was kept alive, and how many women had kept it, and what they had burned when the wood ran out. She knew that the Others came for the children first. Nobody had put that in a script.

Then she stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and said without turning her head, "Come in or go out. You're letting the cold in."

Bran's head came round. Arya vanished from the doorway and reappeared inside it. Asmodeus came in and sat down on the floor, because there was nowhere else, and Old Nan looked him over. She was the oldest woman he had ever seen.

"You're not one of them," she said at last.

"No, I'm not. I only came to hear the story."

"I saw one once, when I was a girl, in a fever. It was taller than you." She settled Rickon on her lap. "And it didn't sit on floors."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you."

"You'll do," said Old Nan, and went on with the story, and did not shorten it on his account, and when she came to the part about the children he found that his hands had locked together in his lap, and made them stop.

Rickon woke exactly when the story was over, and looked at him with no surprise whatever and said, "Carry me," and Old Nan handed the boy across. Rickon was asleep again before the door. Asmodeus carried him down the passage to his room, where Winter lay across the threshold and lifted her head to let them by, and put him in his bed, and stood there in the dark after.

He had not held a child since — he did not know. Most of his thoughts about his own life ended that way.

By morning Lady Stark had heard of it. After that there was a guard at the foot of the nursery stair with orders not to let him up, and he did not try.

The kitchens were another matter. They sent food to the guest house the first night and the second and the third, and it came back untouched, and on the fourth night Gage the cook came up the wall stair himself with the tray in his hands and his jaw set: a big red man who had fed Winterfell for twenty years and had plainly decided he would sooner be eaten than insulted.

"Is it my cooking, m'lord?"

"No. I'm sure it's good."

"Then why's it coming back full?"

"I don't need to eat. I haven't been hungry once since I got here. I didn't want you wasting food on me."

Gage looked at him, and at the tray, and at the whole of the night watch along the wall pretending not to listen.

"The girls in the scullery think it's the cooking," he said. "They cried yesterday. Eat it or don't, m'lord, but let me take an empty tray down them stairs."

Asmodeus ate it. It was mutton, and it was good, and he had no idea what his body did with it after. He took the empty tray down the stairs himself, and the scullery girls fled shrieking into the yard.

* * *​

Robb asked on the ninth day, in front of the whole yard, which took a courage Asmodeus had not expected and should have.

"Father says you've an army." Robb had come off the practice ground with his helm under his arm and sweat freezing in his hair, and Grey Wind at his heel, and he stopped at the rail where Asmodeus leaned and said it loud enough for Ser Rodrik to hear, and Jon, and Theon at the butts, and the two dozen men-at-arms who had discovered urgent business within earshot. "I've seen a wolf. I'd like to see a soldier."

"Right now? In front of everyone?"

"I'm the heir to Winterfell," said Robb, "and there's a thing in my house I've never looked at."

It was the right answer. Asmodeus wondered which of his parents had given it to him, and decided it was both.

"Igris," he said.

Igris came up out of the churned snow at his feet. A long black plume; black armor; a long sword that had never been forged in this world; violet eyes under the visor. He rose to his full height, which was more than any man's in the yard, turned his head once, slowly, to look at every one of them, and then went down on one knee before Asmodeus and stayed there.

Nobody moved. Grey Wind's hackles went up, and then, oddly, came down again, and the pup sat.

"Does he fight," said Robb, "or only kneel?"

"Can you lend him a blunted sword, Ser Rodrik?" Asmodeus said. "He'll be careful. He won't hurt anyone."

Ser Rodrik tugged at his whiskers. Then the old knight walked to the rack himself, chose a tourney sword, hefted it, and held it out hilt first, and Igris rose and took it from him with a bow that Ser Rodrik would describe, later, for the rest of his life.

Robb went first, because he had asked. He was good. He was strong and quick and he had been taught by a master since he could stand, and Igris took his blade on the flat, turned it, and put him on his back in the snow in the time it took the men at the rail to draw breath. Robb lay there. Then he laughed, which Asmodeus had not been sure of, and got up, and went again, and lasted three passes.

Jon lasted five. Igris disarmed him without seeming to hurry and stepped back, and Jon looked at the sword in the snow and then at the knight and said, "Again," and Igris looked at Asmodeus, and Asmodeus nodded, and Jon lasted six. Between one pass and the next, Jon caught Asmodeus watching him, and looked away first. He always did.

"Me," said Ser Rodrik. "I'm too old to be proud." He lasted eleven passes and was disarmed in the twelfth with a turn of the wrist he had plainly never seen, and he stood there breathing hard and staring at Igris.

"Where did he learn that?"

"He was a knight a long time before he was mine. I've never asked him where he trained."

"Does he speak?"

"Not so far. He's never said a word to me."

"Could he teach?"

Asmodeus considered the knight. Igris had gone back to one knee with the borrowed sword laid across it, his plume stirring in the wind, and nothing else about him moved. "I can ask him to," he said. "He won't explain anything, but he can show you."

Robb was at the rail again, wiping snow off his neck. He had the look his father got when he was counting. "How many like him?"

"More than I've been able to count," Asmodeus said. "And I wouldn't give you a number with the whole yard listening anyway."

"Could they hold the Wall?"

"They could hold the Wall, yes." Asmodeus looked north over the roofs, out of habit. "But they can't be everywhere at once, and neither can I. Remember that, if you remember nothing else I tell you."

He had not meant to say the last part. It had come out in a voice he did not know as his own, older, and Robb was slow to nod.

Arya had been at the rail the whole time, ten feet down, silent, which was how he knew she had been paying attention. When the yard began to breathe again she came along the rail to him, in the walk she had been practicing all week, long and flat, from the hip, her weight never settled on either foot, and said, low, "He never steps wrong."

"No, he doesn't. You noticed that?"

"Robb steps wrong. He puts his foot down before he's decided, and then he has to go where the foot went. Jon doesn't, much. Ser Rodrik doesn't at all, except he's slow." She scowled at the kneeling knight, filing him. "I watched their feet. Nobody else was."

"I saw you watching. You're right about Robb, too."

"Show me another one."

My King, said Beru, from somewhere beneath the snow. This one has a soldier that would be honored. This one has a hundred. This one begs.

"Not you," Asmodeus told him. "One of the small ones." Beru sent one up through the snow beside the rail.

It was the size of a man and nothing like one. Black chitin that swallowed the light, too many joints, a head like a helm with mandibles where the mouth should be. It rose out of the snow and clicked once and was still. Septa Mordane, who had been standing behind Sansa with a hand on her shoulder, sat down in the snow without a sound. Jeyne Poole screamed. Sansa did not. Sansa took one step back, and then no more, and kept her face, and he saw her do it and marked it.

Arya took one step forward.

"What's its name?"

"It doesn't have one. There are too many of them to name."

"Everyone has a name," said Arya Stark, and put her hand out, flat, palm up, and the ant soldier lowered its head and touched its mandibles to her palm, and Beru, under the earth, sobbed with pride.

Theon Greyjoy had put down his bow.

He had said nothing through all of it, which was not like him. He came over now with his cloak thrown back to show the kraken and his smile on, and stood at the rail while the ant went back into the ground. He waited until the men-at-arms had gone back to their business.

"I'd have hit you, you know," he said. "In the wolfswood. If you'd let me."

"I know you would have. You're a good shot."

Theon grinned. "Have you seen Pyke? They say you've seen everything."

"Not everything. But I've seen Pyke."

"And my father."

"Your father too."

Theon looked at the butts. "And does he speak of me?"

"He does," Asmodeus said. "I'm not going to tell you what he says, though. That should come from him, not from me."

Theon looked at him. After a while he laughed, short and bright, and picked up his bow.

"Well," he said. "That's an answer," and went back to his shooting, and shot well, and did not look at the rail again.

Asmodeus watched him go. He had looked at Theon Greyjoy every day for nine days and seen the same thing each time: this castle taken, and two farm boys burned black and hung above its gate in two other boys' names. Theon had done none of it. In this world, if Asmodeus had anything to say about it, he never would. He did not know yet what that would cost.

* * *​

Ned Stark went to the godswood when he wanted to think, and on the twelfth day he asked Asmodeus to come with him.

That was not how he put it. He said, "Walk with me," at the door of the Great Keep with Ice across his shoulder in its wolfskin sheath, and Asmodeus walked, and they went through the little gate into the trees.

He had never been in. Twelve days, and he had walked every other yard of the castle at night, and he had not gone through that gate, and had called it courtesy. The godswood was older than the walls. It was three acres of oak and ironwood and sentinel, so old and so close together that he could barely see the sky, and in the middle of it the ground steamed where the hot springs came up, and the pool was black, and the tree stood over the pool with its white bark and its red leaves and its face.

Ned sat down on a stone by the water with Ice across his knees, as he must have sat some thousands of times, and did not look up.

"Cat doesn't care for it in here," he said. "She comes when she has to find me, and not otherwise. My father used to say the trees were the one place in Winterfell where a man could hear himself think." He ran his thumb along the flat of the blade. "I've not heard myself think since you came."

"I'm sorry. I know I've caused you a lot of trouble."

"I'm not asking you to be." Ned looked up. "Do you feel it?"

He did. He had felt it at the gate. It was not the storm; the storm was north and cold and had decided to kill him. This was nearer and older and it did not care about him at all, or had not decided yet. It was in the tree, and under the pool, and in the roots that ran beneath the whole castle as the pipes did, and it looked at him.

"Something's watching us," he said. "It's in the tree, and under it too."

"The old gods."

"Maybe. I don't know what to call it. But it's there."

Ned looked down at the blade. "That's more than my wife's septon would grant."

"Does it ever answer you?"

"Not in words." Ned was quiet a while. "What are yours? Your gods. Where you come from."

"I don't think I had any. Where I come from, a lot of people don't."

"None at all?" Ned said, and frowned, as he might have at a man who told him he had no father.

He thought about that, and about a window in a small room that had glowed at three in the morning, and did not say it.

"How old are you?" Ned said.

It was so ordinary a question that it hurt. Nobody had asked. Nobody had thought it was the kind of thing he would have.

"I don't know that either," he said. "I can't remember. Older than Robb, I think. Younger than you."

"You look five-and-twenty."

"Then I'll say I'm twenty-five. It's as good a number as any."

Ned held out the sword.

It took him a breath to understand what was being offered. Then he took it. Ice was longer than he was used to anything being, and lighter than it looked, and there were ripples all through the dark steel. Valyrian steel. He had wanted to hold this once, in another life, when it was only a sword in a story, and here it was, in a wood, in the cold, with the man it belonged to watching him. He held it up. He turned it a little in the grey light. It was beautiful. His hands had settled on the grip as if they had done it a thousand times, and he had no idea what to do with it.

"Your hands have held one," Ned said. "You haven't."

"Not a real one. I held a few copies once, but nothing you could fight with."

"And yet you can put a knight in my yard who disarms Rodrik Cassel in twelve passes."

"I can. But the skill is all his. I never learned to use a sword."

Ned took the sword back, and looked at it, and sheathed it.

"I was raised to think a man's strength was the thing in his hand," he said. "Yours is somewhere else. I've spent twelve days trying to work out where, so I'll know it when it turns."

"When?"

"If," said Ned. "I'm a careful man." He got to his feet. "Cat wants you gone before the king comes. I've told her you'll go when the king does."

"That's fair. I'll go when he goes."

"She'll want to know where."

"South," Asmodeus said. "The first thing I need to do is on the kingsroad, and after that it's farther north. Neither of them is here. If I could stay anywhere, I'd stay here."

Ned looked at him. The tree looked at him. Somewhere in the branches a raven, or something with a raven's shape, shifted its weight and was still.

"Aye," said Ned Stark at last. "That's the trouble with it," and walked him back to the gate.

* * *​

Rickon had been asking for six days, and on the thirteenth his father gave in.

They supped in the Great Keep, as they did when there were no guests worth the great hall: the long table under the old hunting tapestries, a fire at one end and the door at the other, Lord Stark at the head and his lady at the foot and the children between, in the order they had sat in since they were small enough to need cushions. Theon had his place at Robb's right hand and Maester Luwin his at Lord Stark's left, and Jon had the end nearest the door, where he had sat for twenty years and would not have known what to do with any other.

There was no place for Asmodeus. Rickon made one.

"He sits by me," Rickon announced, and dragged a stool from the wall with both hands and planted it between his own place and Bran's. "He's my guest."

"Asmodeus will sit where your father's guests sit," said Lady Stark. She said it to Rickon. She had not said a word to Asmodeus since the night of Lysa's letter.

"He's my guest," Rickon said again, louder.

"Let the boy have him, Cat," said Ned. "Once."

She did not answer. She set down her cup, and after that she did not look toward that end of the table. He had watched her do harder things.

So he sat on a stool between the two youngest Starks, with his knees too near the table and Rickon's elbow in his ribs, and ate brown bread and mutton in onion gravy, and a turnip that Rickon passed him under the table so that Rickon would not have to eat it. He did not need to eat. He did not tell Rickon so. He ate the turnip.

"Gage says you don't need to eat," said Arya, across the table. She had been watching him chew, waiting for smoke to come out.

"He's right, I don't."

"Then why do you?"

"Because Rickon's watching me, and he worked hard to get me this stool."

Rickon beamed. Bran laughed into his cup. Sansa, beside Bran, did not laugh and did not look up from her plate.

Then the questions began, because there were five children at the table and he had sat down among them.

"Can Winter have pups?" Rickon.

"No. She can't have any more."

"Why not?"

"Because she isn't alive anymore, not the way she was. She can look after the ones she has, though."

"How many soldiers?" Robb, from down the table, not looking up from his trencher, as if it were nothing.

"I still haven't finished counting them. A lot. More than there are men in Winterfell."

"Are there songs where you come from?" Sansa. She had not meant to ask. "Knights, and. Songs."

"There are songs." He thought about it. There were a great many, and he could not have sung one of them to save his life; the words were there, but the tunes were gone. "There's one about a girl in a tower with hair so long she let it down from the window for a prince to climb."

Sansa looked up from her plate. Arya said, "Why didn't she cut it off and climb down herself?"

"Because then there'd be no song," said Sansa, and for once Arya had no answer, and Bran said it was a stupid way up a tower anyway and he could show her six better, and Rickon wanted to know whether the prince fell.

"He fell," Asmodeus said. "He hurt himself badly, but he got up, and it ended well."

"Good," said Rickon, and went back to his bread.

It was loud. He had not expected that. He had watched this family at table a dozen times, in another life, on a screen, and it had always been quiet there: firelight and one person talking at a time. It was not like that. Robb and Theon argued across the salt about whether the king would want to hunt. Arya kicked somebody under the table and denied it. Rickon talked about Shaggydog with his mouth full until his mother said his name, once, and he stopped. The dogs quarreled over bones in the rushes and the pups quarreled with the dogs, and Grey Wind stole a whole chop off Theon's plate and was across the room with it before Theon had finished swearing. It smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke, onions and tallow and dog. The fire was too hot on one side of his face and the draft from the door too cold on the other.

He had not sat at a family's table since — he did not know. He could not remember.

"Where do you come from?" Bran said. "Truly. Not farther than Asshai. Where?"

The table did not go quiet, quite. But Robb stopped arguing, and Maester Luwin looked up, and at the foot of the table Lady Stark's hand went still on her cup.

"A city, in a country you've never heard of," Asmodeus said. "There's winter there, but nothing like yours. It was crowded and loud and warm, and nobody I knew had ever seen a direwolf. They don't exist there."

"Did you have a family?"

"I must have."

Bran frowned at that, as he frowned at Maester Luwin's lessons. "Don't you know?"

"I had a mother," Asmodeus said. "I remember that much. But I can't remember her face, or her name. They were already gone when I woke up here. I'd give a great deal to have them back."

Now the table did go quiet. Even Rickon. The fire cracked, and a dog sighed in the rushes, and at the foot of the table Catelyn Stark looked at him at last: for the space of a breath, no longer. Then she looked at her youngest son leaning on his arm, and then down at her plate. He could not read what had been in her face. He was fairly sure she had not meant him to.

"Well," said Theon into the silence, "I'd give a great deal to forget mine," and Robb threw a crust at him, and the table was loud again.

He ate his bread. He let Rickon lean on him. He looked down the table at all of them, loud and warm and alive in the firelight, and knew how most of them died, and what the rest would live through, and did not let it show on his face. He was getting good at that.

* * *​

Sansa was waiting in the gallery when he came out.

She had sent Jeyne Poole on ahead and her septa behind, and she stood alone at the window with her wolf at her skirts and her hands folded, a lady who had only come to look at the snow. She did not keep that up for long. She was eighteen and the eldest daughter of Winterfell, and she had been taught that a lady who meant to say a thing said it.

"My lord," she said. "A word."

"I'm not anyone's lord," he said. "But all right. What is it?"

"You look at us," Sansa said. "At supper. From the walls. In the yard, when your knight — you look at us as if you were sorry for us." Her chin came up. Lady sat down at her feet in a heap and looked at him too. "At me. I should like to know why."

He had wondered whether she would ever say it. He had not thought she would say it to his face.

"I'm not sorry for you, Lady Sansa," he said. "I'm sorry for what's coming. That isn't the same thing."

"What's coming?"

He did not answer, and watched her answer it herself.

"The south," she said, and her face changed. He had known it would, and it was still hard to watch how much she wanted it. The south. The king's court, and the Kingsguard in their white cloaks, and a golden prince.

"Jeyne says you know what happens to everyone," she said. "As a maester knows the stars. Is it true?"

"Some of it. Not everything."

"Then tell me mine."

"No. I'm sorry, but no."

"Why not?" There was an edge in her voice. "You told Father his. Everyone says you did. You told him in the solar the night you came, and he hasn't slept since."

"Because you'd try to change it," Asmodeus said. "And I don't know yet whether you'd make it better or worse."

She had not expected that. She only looked at him, with her mother's eyes.

"No one has ever worried that I might make anything worse," she said.

"Then I'm the first one to take you seriously," he said.

She did not know what to do with that. He saw her decide to think about it later, when she was alone. She gathered her skirts.

"Then stop looking at me like that," she said. "At all of us."

"Like what?"

Sansa Stark looked at him down the length of the cold gallery, with the snow going blue in the window behind her.

"As if we were already gone," she said, and went, with her wolf at her heels, and did not look back.

He stood in the gallery a while after she had gone. He had known every word of this family's song before he ever saw their faces. He had not known that one.

* * *​

Someone had started leaving bread at the foot of the wall stair.

The first of it had turned up a week ago: a heel of brown bread and a pinch of coarse grey salt twisted into a scrap of cloth, set on the bottom step where the night watch would have to step over it. There had been something every morning since. Bread and salt, mostly. Once a cup of ale, frozen solid. Once the stub of a tallow candle, which he supposed was for the dark. This morning, beside the bread, there was a wolf no longer than his thumb, whittled out of pine by someone with more patience than skill, who had done his best with the ears.

He had known what it was from the first morning. Lord Stark had given him bread and salt the night he came, and after that neither of them could harm the other under this roof without the gods' curse on the one who did. That was guest right, the oldest law in the North, and it bound him to the Starks. Nobody had told the grooms and the washerwomen whether it bound him to them. So they had found the one step in Winterfell that was his and set their own bread on it, a heel at a time, and hoped the gods would not be particular about whose roof it was. Their grandmothers had left milk out for the grumkins for the same reason.

It only counted if he ate it. He had eaten every piece, sitting on the bottom step where the night watch could see him do it, and by noon each day the kitchens knew. He ate this morning's too, salt and all, and put the wolf inside his coat.

Dawn came up grey in the east. He had watched every one of them come up from this wall, and every night the thing in the north had come a little nearer while he stood here and let it look at him. There was nothing to see and nothing to hear. It was an attention, patient and cold, that he felt at the back of his teeth: something a long way off, turning its face toward the place where he stood.

Some forty miles since the night you woke, my liege, Bellion said, from somewhere under the stones. It does not hurry.

"Neither do I."

The Kingslayer comes with the king, said Beru. This one would like to meet the Kingslayer.

"You'll meet him."

He felt how pleased Beru was, and let him be.

Below him the castle was waking. A door banged in the kitchens. Smoke went up from the ovens and lay flat over the yard. Then the door of the Great Keep opened, and Catelyn Stark came down the steps with a taper in her hand and crossed to her sept, as she did every morning, straight-backed and quick, without once looking up at the wall. He did not know what she asked her Seven for in there, with the door shut. He could guess.

The next door was always Rickon's.

He came out of the Great Keep at a dead run, in his nightshirt and one boot, with Shaggydog tumbling after him and a nurse somewhere behind him wailing his name. Winter came out at his heels. She had lain across his door all night. She lay across a different child's door every night, and had never once been caught choosing. Rickon scrambled up her side, took two fistfuls of the black smoke that was her ruff, and kicked her ribs like a pony's.

"Asmodeus!" His voice cracked across the yard. "Come down! Shaggy ate a boot!"

He came down. Not by the stair; he had stopped using the stair when Rickon called, somewhere in the second week, because Rickon liked it better the other way and there seemed no reason to disappoint him. The nurse, who had not seen it before, sat down on the steps of the Great Keep and put her apron over her face.

"Whose boot?" he asked.

"Mine." Rickon held up his bare foot to prove it. It was blue with cold. "The other one. Not this one. He's hungry all the time."

Shaggydog, who was black and already the size of a half-grown hound, with a rag of leather hanging out of the side of his mouth, sat down in the snow and looked at them both without shame. Asmodeus took the whittled wolf out of his coat and held it out.

"Someone left this for Winter," he said. "She can't hold it. You'd better keep it for her."

Rickon took it in both hands and turned it over. He held it up to Winter's muzzle so that she could see it, and Winter, who could not smell and had no need to see, lowered her great head and studied it gravely. Asmodeus had asked her to.

"She likes it," Rickon said. Then, without any change in his voice at all: "When I'm dead, will you make me cold too? Like her?"

The nurse had found her voice again and was using it. Asmodeus did not hear her.

"No," he said.

"Why not? She likes it. She's not sad." Rickon patted the smoke of Winter's neck. "Old Nan says dead things are sad."

"Old Nan is right about most things." He crouched until they were eye to eye, as he did with all of them, because they were small and he was not, and he had not forgotten what that was like. "If I made you like her, you'd belong to me instead of your mother. You're hers."

Rickon thought about that with the whole of his face. "She wouldn't like it."

"No, she wouldn't."

"All right." Rickon tucked the little wooden wolf inside his nightshirt, where it would be cold against his skin and he would not care, and kicked Winter's ribs, and she went, because he asked her to and because Asmodeus let her.

He stood in the yard and watched them go. On his first day in the wolfswood, with the she-wolf's blood still on the ice, he had decided that whatever he did in this world, he would never do to a Stark what he had done to her. He had not expected one of them to ask.

* * *​

The outriders came in after dark by torchlight: two of the king's own, in black and gold, splashed to the thighs, to say that His Grace was two days out and in fine health, and meant to hunt the wolfswood before he rode south again.

Ned took the news in the great hall, with Robb at his side. Afterward he climbed to his solar, and a little after that Asmodeus came down off the wall and followed him up, as he had every night since the first.

The solar was as it had been that first night: the fire, the maps held flat with candlesticks, the direwolf over the hearth worn smooth by centuries of Stark hands. Ned sat behind the table with two cups and a flagon, and poured without asking, and Asmodeus took his and did not drink it, as he had not drunk it any other night, and Ned had stopped remarking on it around the fifth.

"Two days," Ned said.

"I know. I was on the wall when the outriders came in."

"Cat asks that you keep out of the king's way while he's here." Ned turned the cup in his hands. "Anywhere the king isn't, she says."

"I don't mind," Asmodeus said. "I'll stay up on the wall. It's about as far from the high table as I can get."

"He'll send for you anyway. Robert never met a wonder he didn't want to poke with a stick."

"I know. I'll go when he sends for me."

"He'll ask you about Jon."

"He will."

"You'll not give him Lysa."

"I'll tell him how Jon died," Asmodeus said. "Not who did it. That's yours to tell him, if you decide to."

Ned drank. The fire settled. Outside, a guard on the wall coughed and was answered by another, and somewhere a dog started to bark and stopped.

"Why do you care?" Ned said at last. He had asked it before, in one shape or another. He had never asked it like this, low, with no lord in it. "What we are to you. You came out of the snow owing nothing to anyone, and you could walk back into it tomorrow. Why us?"

Asmodeus had been waiting sixteen nights for Ned to ask it plainly, and still had not decided what he would say.

"Because I've watched you die, my lord," he said. "More than once."

Ned's hand stopped on the cup. "More than once."

"Where I come from, your story gets told over and over. I've seen you die every time." He looked at the fire. "I'd like to see what happens when you don't."

Ned had nothing to say to that. Then he went straight to the thing that was hardest.

"Jon," he said.

"He's going to the Wall. He'll ask Benjen to take him."

Ned closed his eyes. "I know. I've known for a year." He opened them. "Is it right, for him?"

"It's right for him. It'll be hard. Tell him about his mother before he goes."

Ned did not ask how he knew. He had asked that on one of the first nights, and had not liked the answer.

"When he's —" Ned stopped. Jon was twenty. He had been old enough for years.

"Before he goes, my lord," Asmodeus said. "If you wait, you may not get another chance."

Ned sat with it. He did not argue. He did not promise, either, and Asmodeus did not ask him to.

"Go back to your wall," Ned said, "and let me sit here a while."

He went.

* * *​

Bran came up the outside of the wall the next morning, as he came up everything.

Asmodeus heard him a long way below: the scrape of a boot on stone, a grunt, a small hiss of breath when his fingers got too cold. He did not look over. Bran liked to arrive. A small red hand came over the parapet, and then another, and then Bran himself, all elbows and knees and grey eyes, hauling himself up onto the walk and sitting down hard on the stones, which was how he had meant to do it.

"Mother says you watch me," Bran said, when he had his breath. "Because I climb."

"She's right. I do."

"Are you afraid I'll fall?"

"Are you?"

"I never fall," said Bran, with perfect certainty. He had said it all his life. Asmodeus had heard him say it before, in another life, and thought nothing of it.

"I know," he said.

Bran swung his legs over the edge of the walk, forty feet above the yard, and kicked his heels against the stone. Below them the castle ran on without them: grooms and cooks and guardsmen, Vayon Poole with his list, Hodor carrying a barrel on each shoulder and humming to himself. The king would come tomorrow. Everyone knew it. The whole castle smelled of baking.

"If I did fall," Bran said, "would you catch me?"

Asmodeus looked at him.

"I'd catch you," he said.

"Promise?"

"I promise."

He had weighed it before he answered, as he weighed everything he said to them now. A boy who was certain he never fell could not be made bolder by a promise, and a warning would only have sent him up walls where no one could watch him. The promise changed nothing about the day that was coming. He already knew how he meant to keep it.

Bran nodded. It was only what he had expected. He pointed across the castle. "That's my best one. The broken tower. Nobody goes up there but me and the crows. You can see all the way to the wolfswood from the top. You can see the whole world."

Asmodeus knew the broken tower. He had known it before he ever saw it: the old watchtower past the First Keep, gutted by lightning a hundred years ago and never mended, with a window high up in its side and nothing under the window but a long drop and a patch of dead grass. On the day the king rode out to hunt, the queen of the Seven Kingdoms would climb it with her brother, for the same reason Bran did: because nobody went up there.

"Go on, then," he said.

Bran grinned and went, over the parapet and down the face of the wall like a spider, and Asmodeus watched him all the way: across the yard, past the kennels, up the rough grey side of the broken tower hand over hand, until he was a small dark shape in the window at the top, waving.

A word to Ned would bar that tower by noon. One word, and the queen and her brother would find some other room on some other day, and a ten-year-old boy would never see them in it, and never fall. He could say it tonight, in the solar. He had a fortnight of reasons to say it.

He had one reason not to, and he had turned it over every night on this wall, and it had not got any smaller. He needed the queen afraid of him before her column rode south, and in the song it rode south with Ned's daughters in it. Catching her with her brother would only give him a secret, and she would deny it to his face; she had been denying it for twenty years. A boy thrown from a window by her brother's hand and set down alive at the foot of the tower, while she watched, was a thing she could never explain away. And it was the one hour in all the song when he knew exactly where the two of them would be. Any other hour was a guess.

Bran waved again from the top of the tower. Asmodeus lifted his hand.

He did not say the word. He stood on the wall in the thin grey morning, with the smell of bread coming up from the kitchens and the king a day away, and watched the boy climb down, and learned the shape of the drop.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Five: Jon

The king came north under a sky like hammered pewter, with three hundred riders behind him and a wheelhouse so vast it took forty horses to drag it through the gate.

Jon watched it come from the edge of the yard, where bastards stood.

Lady Catelyn had ranked the household on the steps of the Great Keep, and there had been no place left in the line for him. Jon didn't mind. He'd had twenty years to get used to it.

The Kingsguard rode in first, in their white cloaks, and with them a man in soot-grey armor whose helm was a snarling hound.

And then the king.

The songs made Robert Baratheon a giant. He had gone to belly since the songs were made, but when he laughed the yard rang with it, and for a moment Jon could see the man who had crushed Rhaegar Targaryen's chest on the Trident.

Father went down on one knee in the frozen mud, and the king hauled him up by both arms and crushed him to his chest, laughing.

The queen stood a little apart, as lovely as the singers said, and looked at Winterfell with distaste. Prince Joffrey, nineteen and as golden as his mother, looked at it the same way. Jon saw Sansa see him, and saw her face light up, and saw that the prince never once looked back at her.

The queen's twin brother had dismounted behind her. Ser Jaime Lannister wore the white cloak of the Kingsguard over gilded armor, and he was as golden as his sister and half again as pleased with himself. He was looking past the Starks, up at the wall above the Great Keep, where a tall figure in black stood alone against the pewter sky.

Asmodeus had been there since dawn. Lady Catelyn wanted him anywhere the king was not, and the whole castle knew it, so he had gone up to the walls and stayed there, which was where he spent his nights anyway. Now Jaime Lannister looked up at him, and Asmodeus looked down, and Jon saw the Kingslayer's hand drift to the hilt of his sword. He was smiling.

The horses felt the shadow wolf a moment later.

She had been lying by the kennels with her head on her paws, and she did nothing at all but lift her head. It was enough. A palfrey screamed and bolted, and its rider went into the mud. Half the column's horses began to plunge and roll their eyes. The grey knight's great black stallion reared so high that Jon thought it would go over backward, and the man in the hound's helm brought it down again with one gloved fist on the reins and a strength that was ugly to watch. Then he pushed up his visor and stared at the wolf, and Jon saw that half his face was a ruin of old burns. He looked afraid of her.

"Seven hells, Ned," said the king, gaping. "So it's true."

"It's true, Your Grace."

"Where's the demon, then? I want a look at him. Every innkeeper for the last week of road has a story about him, and not one of them matches another."

Father glanced up at the wall. The king followed his gaze. Up on the battlements, Asmodeus nodded down to the king, exactly as far as he had to Father that first day in the wolfswood and not a hair further.

The king stared up at him. For once, he had nothing to say.

"Later," said King Robert. "First take me down to her, Ned. I've ridden a thousand leagues. Take me to see her."

The queen's mouth went thin.

* * *​

By the time the feast began, the whole castle knew that the king had asked Father to be the Hand of the King, down in the crypts beside Lyanna Stark's tomb, and that Father had not said yes.

Lady Catelyn had seated Jon with the squires.

It would give offense, she had said, to seat a bastard among the royal family. She hadn't said it to Jon; she never said anything to Jon if she could help it. She had said it to Father, in the solar, with the door not quite shut. Father had said nothing at all, which was as good as agreeing.

So Jon sat at a long trestle table below the salt, among the squires and the sons of household knights, and he drank a good deal more summerwine than he should have, and he told himself he didn't mind that either. The food was good, at least. There was roast aurochs and honeyed duck, trout baked in a crust of almonds, black bread hot from the ovens, and pies of every sort. Ghost lay under the bench and took whatever Jon passed down to him, silent as ever. The squires around Jon had stopped teasing him about the white wolf once they saw it never growled at them, only watched.

At the high table, the king was drunk and getting drunker. The queen sat beside him, stiff and silent. Father sat at the king's other hand and ate almost nothing.

Uncle Benjen found Jon halfway through the fish.

He'd ridden in from the Wall that afternoon, lean and weathered and all in black, and he sat down on the bench beside Jon as if he'd been sitting there all night and helped himself to Jon's wine.

"You're not at the high table," he observed.

"No."

"Good. The company's better down here." Benjen looked along the lower tables, then up at the dais, then back at Jon. "Your father's thinking of going south."

"Everyone knows."

"And you?"

Jon had been waiting weeks for this. He'd rehearsed it so many times that the words came out smooth. "Take me with you when you go back to the Wall."

Benjen didn't laugh, which Jon had half expected. He only turned the cup in his fingers. "You're a man grown, Jon. You've been one for a while. You don't need me to take you anywhere."

"Then I'll come."

"Will you?" His uncle's eyes were grey and steady: Stark eyes. "You've been of age to take the black for years. Why haven't you?"

Jon opened his mouth, and found he had no answer ready for that one.

"The Wall's not where you go to find what you're missing," Benjen said, more gently. "It's where you go to stop looking. Be sure you're done looking first." He drank. "Now. Tell me about this demon of your father's."

"He's not a demon."

"No? Ser Waymar Royce rode beyond the Wall six weeks ago with two men. One of them came back, and your father took his head, and that same afternoon a man walked out of the wolfswood raising the dead." Benjen set the cup down. "I'd like a word with him before I ride north."

Jon was spared answering. At the high table, the king had lurched to his feet with a cup in his fist.

"Ned!" His voice filled the hall like a bell. "I've been in your castle half a day, and I've not had a word out of your demon. Is he hiding from me?"

The hall went quiet, a table at a time, from the dais down.

"He keeps to himself, Your Grace," Father said quietly.

"Well, fetch him out! I didn't come all this way to hear about the wonders of the North. I want to see one." The king swung his cup toward the doors, slopping wine. "Go on. Fetch him."

Father's mouth tightened. Then he nodded to Jory Cassel, and Jory went out.

He came back sooner than he should have. Jon had noticed that, the last few weeks. Whenever anyone went to fetch Asmodeus, he always came sooner than he should have.

The hall was lit by a hundred torches and warm as summer, and Jon had never seen him indoors under so much light. He walked the length of the hall between the long tables at the same unhurried pace he walked everywhere, all in close-fitting black, with no cloak against the cold, no sword, no ring or chain or badge of any kind, and every head turned to follow him. The hounds under the tables stopped chewing. The serving girls stopped pouring. Along the benches, men who had been laughing a moment before went quiet and looked down into their cups. In that light he looked less like a man than like something a man had carved for a temple.

At the high table, the queen's cup had stopped halfway to her mouth. Ser Jaime was leaning forward with his chin on his fist. Prince Joffrey was trying hard to sneer. And a little way down the table, a stunted man with a great deal of pale gold hair was watching Asmodeus with open and absolute delight. So the queen's other brother had come up from the winter town after all; the kitchens had it that he'd gone looking for a brothel before the king was off his horse.

Asmodeus stopped below the dais.

"Your Grace."

"You don't kneel," said the king.

"No, Your Grace."

Nobody spoke. Jon saw Ser Barristan Selmy's hand move a fraction toward his sword, and saw the old knight stop it. He saw Father's face, and knew what Father was thinking, because he was thinking it too. Guest right. The king was a guest under Winterfell's roof, and Asmodeus was a guest under it too, and neither could lift a hand against the other without damning himself before every god there was. Jon had never in his life been so glad of an old law.

Then King Robert laughed. It was a huge laugh, and not an entirely pleasant one.

"Gods, Ned. Your demon's got more steel in him than half your bannermen." He dropped back into his chair. "They tell me you raised a dead wolf out of the snow."

"I did, Your Grace."

"The innkeepers on the kingsroad have you raising whole armies."

"The wolf is the only thing I've raised since I came here. Anything else I have, I'd rather keep to myself."

"Keep your secrets, then." The king leaned forward. "Here's one they all tell the same. You knew Jon Arryn was dead before the raven did. Who killed him?"

"Poison, Your Grace. The Tears of Lys." Asmodeus did not raise his voice, but it carried to the doors. "A maester would call it a fever."

The king's hand had gone flat on the table. "Whose hand poured it?"

Asmodeus looked at Father. "I'll leave that to Lord Stark."

Jon was watching the high table, and so he saw the queen. Nothing moved in her face. But her hand had closed on the stem of her cup, hard, and it stayed closed.

The king looked at Father. "Ned?"

"Not in a hall, Your Grace," Father said. "Not with half the realm listening."

"Then come south and tell me there," said the king. "That's what a Hand is for."

The king held his eyes a moment longer. When he turned back to Asmodeus, his voice was still thick with wine, but it had gone quiet. "Can you raise a man?"

"I can."

"Any man?"

"The newly dead, Your Grace."

"How new?"

Asmodeus let the question sit.

"Days, Your Grace. Not years."

Father had gone perfectly still. Jon didn't understand why, and then, all at once, he did. Every child in the North knew the story. Robert Baratheon had torn down a dynasty for Lyanna Stark, and she had died before the war was done, and he had never stopped mourning her. And he had spent the afternoon beside her tomb.

The king looked down into his cup. When he spoke again, it was nearly gentle. "And at twenty years?"

"No, Your Grace."

"Not even if I commanded it?" The king's voice had gone low and hard.

"She's a Stark," Asmodeus said. "I don't raise Starks."

For a heartbeat, no longer, he turned his head. His eyes went back down the hall, past the knights and the lords' sons, all the way to the lower tables, and rested on Jon.

Then they were back on the king, and Jon was left sitting there with his heart pounding and no idea why.

"If she'd died yesterday," the king said hoarsely, "you'd have done it."

"If she'd died yesterday and I'd raised her, she'd have come back belonging to me, not to you. Everything I raise is mine." Asmodeus paused. "She never belonged to anyone, Your Grace."

The king's cup hit the table so hard that it split. Wine ran red across the white linen and dripped off the edge of the dais. He was on his feet, huge and shaking, and Ser Barristan's hand was on his sword now, and Ser Jaime was rising, and the man in the hound's helm at the end of the table had gone still, waiting for an order.

"Robert."

It was Father, and he had called the king by his name. Jon had never heard him do it before.

The king stood there with his chest heaving and wine on his hands. He looked at Father. Then he looked at Asmodeus, who had not moved at all.

"Get him out of my sight, Ned," said the king.

Asmodeus nodded to the king, and to Father, and last of all to the queen, who did not nod back, and walked back down the length of the hall at the same unhurried pace he had walked up it. As he passed the lower tables, he did not look at Jon again. Jon found he wished he would.

The doors closed behind him. No one spoke. Then someone laughed too loudly at the lower tables, and a piper started up, badly, and the noise of the feast came back in a rush.

"Well," said a voice at Jon's elbow. "That was the best entertainment I've had since King's Landing."

It was the dwarf. He had come down from the high table with a cup in each hand, and he set one in front of Jon and climbed onto the bench beside him without asking. Up close, his eyes were two different colors, one green and one black, and both of them were bright with wine and malice and glee.

"Tyrion Lannister," he said. "And you're the bastard, which I'd have guessed from the seating even if I hadn't been told." He drank. "Your father keeps interesting company, Snow."

"He's my father's guest."

"So is my brother, and I assure you, nobody here finds him interesting." Tyrion looked at the doors where Asmodeus had gone. "I have spent my whole life being the most fascinating monster in any room I walk into. I find I don't care for the competition."

Jon didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing. Tyrion seemed to find that funny too.

"Is it true he doesn't sleep?"

"It's true."

"Or eat?"

"When my little brother asks him to." Jon hadn't meant to say it. Tyrion's brows went up and stayed there.

"And where does a demon go at night, when he isn't eating his supper to please a child?"

"The walls."

"Then I know where I'll be spending my evenings," said Tyrion.

"Drink your wine, bastard," he said, and slid off the bench, and went off in search of his brother's cup, or someone else's.

When Jon looked around, Uncle Benjen was gone too.

* * *​

He found Asmodeus where he always was, at the top of the inner wall.

It was past midnight. The feast was still going below, a muffled roar of music and shouting that leaked out of the great hall into the frozen yard, but up here there was only the wind and the stars and the long black line of the wolfswood running away into the dark. Jon had never gone up to him at night before. He had never quite dared. Ghost padded silently at his heel.

He had passed Uncle Benjen on the stair. His uncle gripped his shoulder going by and did not stop, and his shadow went down the steps ahead of him, blacker than the torchlight had any right to make it.

Asmodeus didn't turn. "Jon."

"You knew I'd come."

"I thought you might."

Jon came and stood beside him at the parapet, not too close. The stone was cold as iron. Below, in the yard, he could see Winter lying across the door of the Great Keep, blacker than the dark around her.

"My uncle came looking for you," Jon said.

"He found me. You must have passed him on the stair."

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth. That the man your father beheaded wasn't lying." Asmodeus was quiet a moment. "He half believed me, which is more than most would. He asked what help I could give him beyond the Wall."

"His shadow," Jon said. "On the stair. It was wrong."

"That's the help he asked for. One of my soldiers is in his shadow, and it'll go north with him."

Jon looked out at the dark where Asmodeus was looking. There was nothing there. There was never anything there. "Is that why you stand up here every night? Watching for the Others?"

"Not the Others. The storm they walk in. It's north of the Wall, past the haunted forest, and it started moving the night I came. I come up here to feel how far it's got."

"Maester Luwin says they're only a story."

"Maester Luwin has never been north of the Wall," said Asmodeus. "Ask your uncle what he thinks happened to Waymar Royce."

The wind came up out of the north and went through Jon's cloak as if it wasn't there. He pulled it tighter.

"You looked at me," he said. "In the hall. When you said you don't raise Starks."

Asmodeus didn't answer.

"Why?"

"I can't tell you that," Asmodeus said. "But you're going to the Wall, aren't you?"

Jon felt heat climb his neck. "How do you — who told you that?"

"Nobody told me. I knew it the way I knew about the raven. You've been deciding since before I came." He turned his head then and looked at Jon, and in the starlight his eyes were only dark, nothing moving in them at all. "You're wondering whether you should."

"Should I?"

"Yes."

Jon had expected a great many answers. He had not expected that one. "My uncle says the Wall's where you go to stop looking."

"Your uncle's right about most men." Asmodeus looked north again. "Everything that's coming is coming from that way, Jon, and when it comes, the Wall will need men on it who know what they're guarding. It won't be what you think. Half the men on it are there instead of a noose. They'll hate you for your name and your sword and the way you talk. You'll hate them back for a while." A pause. "Go anyway."

Jon looked down at Ghost, who was looking up at Asmodeus with his red eyes. The pup had never looked at anyone that way but Jon.

"Snow," Jon said after a while. "That's my name. It's what they call bastards in the North. It isn't even a real name." He didn't know why he was saying it. Perhaps it was the wine. "Yours is a devil's name, Father says." He laughed, not quite steadily. "At least it's yours."

Asmodeus laughed too, one short breath of it, and didn't say why.

"Snow won't be the only name you ever have," said Asmodeus.

He said it lightly, and Jon couldn't tell whether it was a promise or a warning.

He thought about the look in the hall, and about Father going still, and about every question he'd ever asked and never had answered.

"You know who she was," Jon said. "My mother."

"Yes."

Jon's heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his throat. "Tell me."

"No, Jon. Not from me."

"Tell me." It came out louder than he'd meant, and harsher, and Ghost's ears went flat. "Everyone in this castle knows something about me that I don't. You've been here near three weeks, and you know. My father knows. Maybe she knows" — he didn't need to say which she; he never had — "and I've spent twenty years —"

"It isn't mine to tell," said Asmodeus. "It's your father's."

"He's never told me. He never will."

"He will."

"You don't know that."

"I know it." He turned from the parapet then and faced Jon full on, and for a moment he only looked tired, and certain. "He'll tell you, Jon. I'll see to it that he lives long enough to."

Jon stared at him.

Lives long enough. So it was true, what the kitchens whispered: that he had told Father how he would die, the first night, and Father had not slept a night through since.

He started to ask, and stopped. He didn't want to know. So he stood there instead, with Ghost silent at his feet and the feast roaring faintly below, and after a while he turned back to the parapet and looked north with him.

Neither of them said anything more. They stood together on the wall, Jon Snow and Asmodeus, the two strangers of Winterfell, and watched the dark until the sky began to grey.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Six: Jaime

The king woke angry, which was unusual, and still drunk, which was not.

Jaime heard about it from three different people before he'd broken his fast. Robert had thrown a boot at his squire. Robert had cursed the North, its wine, its beds and its lord, and then wept a little over Lyanna Stark, which was what Robert did instead of apologizing. Robert had asked where the demon slept, and been told that the demon didn't, and had said something about that which the squire would only repeat in a whisper.

By midmorning, the king had settled on a remedy.

"A show," he announced to the practice yard, where half of Winterfell had drifted out to watch the royal knights at their exercises. "That's what this cold pile needs. A bit of blood in the snow. Jaime!"

Jaime, who had been leaning on the rail looking bored, straightened. "Your Grace."

"You've been making eyes at Ned's demon like a maid at a wedding cake since we rode through the gate. Don't deny it; I saw you." The king's grin was wide and red and not at all friendly. "Well. Here's your chance."

It was, Jaime reflected, the first thing Robert had said to him in a year that he entirely agreed with.

He had thought of little else since the gate. The figure on the wall. The way it had looked down at him, almost with pity. Since he was seventeen and wet with a mad king's blood, Jaime had learned to expect fear, or hate, or wary contempt. Pity was new. He had spent half the night turning it over. He had decided he didn't care for it.

Lord Stark did not like the idea of a show. Jaime could see that from across the yard. He came down from the gallery with his long grave face even longer and graver than usual, and said something to the king in a low voice, and the king laughed at him.

"It's sport, Ned! Blunted steel. Nobody's cutting anybody. Gods, you'd think I'd asked to borrow your wife." Robert waved a hand at Jory Cassel. "Fetch him."

Jory went. Jaime counted under his breath, idly. He had reached eleven when Asmodeus came through the archway from the inner ward, which meant that either Jory Cassel could run faster than any man Jaime had ever seen, or he had met Asmodeus coming the other way.

Jaime didn't think it was either.

In daylight he was worse. At the feast there had been torchlight and wine to blame. In the flat white morning there was nothing to blame. Jaime had been told since he was a boy at Casterly Rock how beautiful he was, and he had long since stopped hearing it. He was not used to being second. He found he didn't care for that either.

"Ser Jaime would like a turn with you," Robert said. "Sword against sword, in front of all these good people. Let's see if you fight as well as you talk."

"I don't fight for sport, Your Grace."

"Then fight for real," Jaime said pleasantly.

Asmodeus looked at him. His eyes were dark. "When I fight, Ser Jaime, people die. You and I are both guests under Lord Stark's roof, and I won't break guest right in his yard."

A ripple of nervous laughter ran along the rail. Jaime smiled. He had a good smile; it had gotten him out of a great many rooms. "Afraid?"

"No." Asmodeus considered him a moment longer. "But I have a knight who might oblige you."

Jaime had heard about the knight. Every stable boy in Winterfell had a tale of a black knight who had put Rodrik Cassel in the snow in twelve passes, and Jaime had not believed a word of it.

And his shadow moved.

It was a long shadow at that hour, stretched across the frozen mud toward the rail, and far too dark for the thin sun that cast it. It shivered. Something rose out of it: first a long black plume, stirring in no wind; then a helm; then shoulders in black plate. The knight who stepped out of Asmodeus's shadow stood a head taller than Jaime. His armor fitted so close that it moved like skin, and it made no sound. Behind the slits of his visor, where there should have been eyes, there was only a low violet glow.

He carried a longsword, plain and lovely. He did not look at the king. He did not look at the crowd. He turned his helm toward his master and waited.

Along the rail, someone was praying aloud. A woman screamed and was hushed. The Hound had taken a step back from the rail without seeming to know he had. Up on the gallery, the younger Stark girl had climbed onto the rail for a better look, and her brother, the one who climbed everything, was perched beside her, and neither of them looked the least bit afraid.

"Igris," said Asmodeus, and the knight turned to face Jaime.

"Seven hells," said the king, quietly for once. Then, louder, beginning to grin: "Well, Jaime? You wanted a fight."

Jaime found that he did. More than he had wanted anything in years.

Someone had brought him a blunted tourney sword. He handed it back and drew his own.

"Ha! Live steel!" Robert slapped the rail. "You see this, Ned?"

Lord Stark saw. His face said so, and for once his mouth said it too. "You promised blunted steel, Your Grace. I am host here. There'll be no live blades in my yard for sport."

"And it's my kingdom." Robert was still grinning, but his eyes had gone small and hard. "Jaime wants live steel, and I want my sport. That's a king's word, Ned, if you need one."

It seemed Lord Stark did. He stepped back from the rail and said nothing more.

"He won't draw blood, my lord," Asmodeus said to him. "Not under your roof."

Jaime thought it a remarkable thing to say about a man with a naked sword in his hand, until he saw that Asmodeus hadn't been talking about Jaime.

They faced each other in the middle of the yard. The knight raised his sword in salute. Jaime didn't bother.

He opened as he always did against a man he didn't know: fast and high, a feint at the helm that became a cut at the knee. He had put half the champions of the Westerlands in the dirt with that stroke before he was sixteen. It had never failed him.

It failed him now. The knight wasn't where the cut went. He hadn't seemed to move — Jaime would have sworn to that later, if anyone had been fool enough to ask — and yet the blade passed through empty air, and something tapped Jaime lightly on the ribs. He looked down. It was the flat of the knight's sword, resting against his side, just below the heart.

Then it was gone, and the knight was a pace away again, waiting.

The yard made a sound like a wave going out.

Jaime set his feet and went in again, properly this time, the way he fought in a melee when there was gold on it: all speed and weight and no ceremony. He was the finest sword in the Seven Kingdoms. Everyone said so. He had never once believed that everyone was wrong.

Igris met him. Blade rang on blade with a deeper sound than steel on steel should make. Jaime cut and cut and cut, high and low and high again, and Igris turned every stroke without effort, without haste, and seemed to know each one before it came. Twice Jaime saw an opening, and twice he went for it, and twice he found the black blade already waiting there. Once he felt it kiss the inside of his thigh, where the great vein ran. Once it touched the side of his neck, so lightly it didn't even part the skin, and was gone.

Three times. Three dead men, if the knight had wanted them.

Jaime understood then what was happening, and it was worse than losing. Igris was teaching him.

He threw everything he had into the next cut. The knight's sword met his near the hilt, turned, twisted, and Jaime's blade tore out of his hand and went wheeling end over end across the yard to bite into the frozen mud beside the rail, quivering.

The black sword came to rest against his throat.

It was cold. That was all Jaime felt: cold, and the absolute silence of three hundred people not breathing.

Then Igris stepped back, raised his sword before his visor, and swept it down and out to the side in the old salute.

Jaime knew that salute. He had seen it once before in his life, when he was fifteen, kneeling in the mud of the kingswood with Ser Arthur Dayne's sword resting on his shoulder. It was how the Sword of the Morning had saluted him on the day he made him a knight.

No one had saluted him like that since. He had not deserved it since.

Who had taught a dead thing that?

Then the knight came apart into smoke, and the smoke slid away across the frozen mud and was lost among the long morning shadows before Jaime thought to see where it went.

Robert's laughter broke the silence.

"Seven hells!" The king was bent double, slapping the rail. "Did you see his face, Ned? Did you see it? I've waited twenty years to see that face!"

Up on the gallery, Tyrion lifted his cup to Jaime and grinned like a gargoyle. Cersei was not laughing. She was looking at Asmodeus, and on her face was a fear Jaime had not seen there since they were children.

Jaime walked across the yard and pulled his sword out of the mud. His hands were perfectly steady. He made sure of that. When he turned, Asmodeus was watching him, and the look on that face was the same one it had worn on the wall.

"There's no shame in it, Ser Jaime," Asmodeus said, too low for anyone else to hear. "He's the best blade I have."

Jaime sheathed his sword. "Next time," he said, "I'd like to fight the master."

"No, you wouldn't," said Asmodeus. "I told you what happens when I fight."

* * *​

Robert went hunting four days after the feast and took half the castle with him. Ser Barristan had twice asked him to cut the visit short, and been laughed at twice.

Lord Stark went, because the king wanted him, and the Stark heir went, and the bastard, and the Greyjoy boy. Tyrion went as far as the gate before he discovered he would rather be drunk than cold. Asmodeus did not go. He spent his days in the yard and his nights on the walls, and Jaime had stopped looking for him. He looked once more that morning, crossing the ward, because it mattered, and found him where he ought to be: in the yard below the Great Keep, with the smallest Stark riding the dead wolf in circles around him. Whatever it knew, it was down there, and they would be up here.

Jaime stayed behind. So did the queen. She had named the place to him at supper, under the noise of the hall: the broken tower, once the hunt was gone.

The broken tower had burned a hundred years ago, the Stark maester said, when lightning struck it, and no one had bothered to rebuild it since. Its roof was gone and most of its floors with it, but the stair in the wall still climbed to a room near the top. Pigeons roosted where the roof had been, and the wind came in through the empty windows, and no one ever came there, which was the point.

Cersei was waiting for him at the top. She stood at the window with her back to the room, and she didn't turn when he came in.

"You lost," she said.

"So I noticed."

"In front of Robert. In front of all of them." She turned then. Her face was pale and lovely, and her eyes were green glass. "Do you know what they're calling you in the kitchens?"

"I can guess."

"The Kingslayer who couldn't slay a shadow." Her mouth twisted. "I'd have their tongues, if we were anywhere but this frozen privy of a castle."

"Then it's as well we're here." Jaime crossed the room and took her hands. They were cold. "I didn't climb all those stairs to talk about the kitchens, sweet sister."

She didn't pull away, but she didn't come closer either. "He knows."

"Who knows what?"

"You know who." Her fingers tightened on his. "You heard him at the feast. Poison, he said, and when Robert asked whose hand, he looked at Stark, like a hound waiting for leave to speak. And when he went out, he looked at me. Only for a moment. He looked at me the way Jon Arryn looked at me, those last weeks."

Something cold touched the back of Jaime's neck. "Jon Arryn is dead."

"Yes. And that thing knew it before the raven did. The whole castle says so. It knew about the raven, it knew what Robert would ask Stark in the crypts, it knew —" She stopped herself. "If it knows, Stark knows, or will. And Stark will say yes to Robert. And then he'll be in King's Landing, whispering in Robert's ear, with that thing at his back."

"Robert doesn't listen to whispers. He only listens to things that come in a cup."

"Robert listened to Jon Arryn."

Jaime had no answer to that.

"Kill it," Cersei said.

He laughed. He couldn't help it. "I crossed swords with its dog, and the dog put my sword in the mud and saluted me. You watched."

"I didn't say fight it." She let go of his hands. She had been thinking of nothing else since the feast; he could hear that she had it all planned. "I'm writing to Father tonight. He'll know the men for it. Poison, if it eats. A crossbow from the dark, when it stands on Stark's wall as it does every night. A hired man out of the winter town, who has never heard the name Lannister and never will."

"It eats when it pleases, and only what Stark puts in front of it." He shook his head. "It doesn't sleep. You'd set a crossbowman on the master of that black knight? And it's under guest right, the same as we are. The same as our children." He took her hands again and kissed them, one and then the other. "We ride south in a few days. It stays in the North or it doesn't. Either way, we'll think of something. We always do."

Cersei said nothing to that. Then she kissed him, the way she did when she was finished talking.

"Here?" he said against her mouth. "With that thing in the castle?"

"It knows already. Let it." Her hands were at his belt. "Robert would laugh at a demon. What hangs us is a witness, and there's no one up here but the pigeons."

For a while after that, Jaime stopped thinking about demons.

He didn't hear the boy until the boy was at the window.

A scrape of boot on stone, a small hitch of breath, and there he was: a face at the sill, a pair of scraped hands, grey eyes going wide. The climbing boy. The Stark boy who had perched on the gallery rail and watched Igris put Jaime in the mud. He had come up the outside of the tower like a squirrel. He was ten years old, or near it, and he was looking at the Lannister twins, and he understood exactly what he was seeing.

Cersei screamed.

The boy's grip slipped. Jaime moved before he had thought about it; he had always been fast. He caught the boy by the front of his tunic just as his fingers came off the stone, and hauled him up and in over the sill. The boy hung from Jaime's fist with his feet kicking at nothing and his breath coming in little sobs.

"He saw us," Cersei said. Her voice had gone flat and quiet. "Jaime. He saw us."

"I know."

Jaime looked at the boy. The boy looked back. Stark eyes, grey as his father's, full of tears. He would tell. Of course he would tell. He was ten, and he would run straight to his lord father, and his lord father would take it to Robert. Robert might laugh at a demon's tale. He would not laugh at a Stark boy with his father's eyes, telling what he had seen through a window. And then Robert would kill them. Cersei. Joffrey, Myrcella, Tommen. Him. If the demon came for Jaime afterward, let it. He didn't have to think about it.

Jaime glanced down through the window. The broken tower stood at the edge of the castle, above a tangle of dead grass and fallen stone where nobody ever came. There was no one there. The hunt was miles off. There was no one on the walls.

"I'm sorry," he told the boy, and found, somewhat to his surprise, that he meant it.

Then he pushed him out.

The boy went out and down without a sound. Jaime had expected a scream. There was none, only the flutter of his tunic, his arms thrown wide, his small body turning once in the air —

— and stopping.

Forty feet above the ground, halfway down the tower's blackened face, the Stark boy simply stopped falling, as though he had dropped into a hand the size of a cart. He hung there with his arms still thrown wide and his hair blown up around his face, and Jaime heard him gasp.

Then, slowly, he began to sink.

At the foot of the tower, in the dead grass where there had been no one a moment before, Asmodeus stood with one hand raised, palm up, like a man testing for rain.

He set the boy down carefully at his feet. He didn't look at the boy. He looked up.

At the window. At the two of them.

Jaime stepped back. He didn't remember deciding to. Cersei did not. She had come to the window at his shoulder to see it done, and she was still there, both hands flat on the sill.

"He caught him," she said. Her voice had gone small. "Jaime. He caught him."

Jaime went for his sword. It lay across the room where he had let it fall, tangled in his cloak, and when he closed his hand on the hilt he saw that the hand was shaking. It had not shaken in the kingswood with a hundred outlaws in front of him. It had not shaken in the throne room with Aerys Targaryen screaming for fire. It was shaking now.

"He's gone," Cersei whispered at the window. "Jaime, he's gone, and there's —"

Jaime looked. Asmodeus was no longer standing in the dead grass. In his place, kneeling beside the boy with one gauntleted hand resting on his shoulder, was a knight in black armor, the long plume on his helm stirring in no wind at all.

"Ser Jaime," said a voice behind him.

He turned.

The light from the window lay long across the floor, and Jaime's own shadow lay in it, black against the boards. Too black. And standing in it, as though he had stepped up out of it, was Asmodeus.

Jaime understood then where the knight had gone when he came apart in the yard. He had not looked to see where the smoke went. He had not thought he needed to.

Four days. It had been in his shadow for four days. Every word he'd said. Every place he'd been. Every night.

"Put down the sword, Ser Jaime," Asmodeus said. His voice was perfectly courteous. "Sit down. You too, Your Grace."

He waited until they had.

"Now," he said. "Let's talk about your children."

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Seven: Asmodeus

My King, said Beru, from somewhere beneath the floor, this one begs leave to devour the golden knight.

Not yet, Asmodeus told him.

The broken tower was cold. Wind came through the empty windows and stirred the pigeon feathers on the floor, and the thin grey light fell across the boards and made the shadows long. He stood in the longest of them and watched the queen of the Seven Kingdoms and the finest sword in the realm sit down on a rotten bench because he had told them to.

His hands were steady. The body did that; it had been doing it for weeks, and he had stopped being grateful. Inside it, he was still watching a ten-year-old boy turn over once in the air. He'd watched it happen because he'd decided it would. He had caught him. He had always been going to catch him. Knowing that hadn't helped.

Cersei had pulled her gown back up over her shoulders. Jaime's sword lay on the boards between them, where Jaime had set it down with great care, within reach.

"Joffrey," Asmodeus said. "Myrcella. Tommen."

Cersei's face didn't change. It was beautifully done. He might have admired it, if he hadn't known exactly what it was covering.

"My children," she said. "What of them?"

"Your children," he agreed. "And his." He didn't look at Jaime. "There isn't a drop of Robert's blood among the three of them. Jon Arryn worked it out. He found it in a book of lineages in the end: three hundred years of Baratheons, and every one of them black of hair. Then he went looking for Robert's bastards in the city, and they were all black-haired too. He meant to tell Robert. He died first."

"Of a fever," Jaime said.

"Of poison," Asmodeus said. "Not yours. I know you didn't kill him. It won't matter. Robert won't care who killed Jon Arryn, once he knows why someone might have."

"And who will tell him?" Cersei's voice was low and perfectly steady. "You? A creature out of the snow with a devil's name, who raises corpses in a castle full of heathens? Robert would laugh himself sick."

"Robert would look at his sons," Asmodeus said. "That's all it would take. He's a great many things, Your Grace, but he isn't blind when he bothers to look. The only reason he's never looked is that no one ever told him to."

The woman is afraid, my King, Beru observed, with enormous satisfaction. This one can smell it.

Cersei rose.

She did it slowly. She crossed the boards toward him with the light behind her, and she was magnificent. Green eyes, gold hair. She stopped close enough that he could smell the wine on her breath, and laid her hand on his arm.

"Every man wants something," she said softly. "Tell me what you want. Gold? The Lannisters have more than the Iron Bank. Land? A lordship? The king listens to me, whatever you think." Her fingers moved on his sleeve. "Or something else. You have only to name it."

He looked down at the hand on his arm.

In his old life, the one with the sagging couch and the cold noodles, this would have made his year. Cersei Lannister, her hand on his arm, her voice gone low. He'd have told everyone. He'd have told people who didn't want to hear it.

He felt nothing.

He took her wrist and put her hand back at her side.

"A crossbow from the dark," he said, "when I stand on Lord Stark's wall. That's what you were planning for me an hour ago. Sit down, Your Grace."

For one moment he saw how frightened she was. Then she sat.

"Here's what happens now," he said. "The boy lives. He'll tell his father what he saw, all of it, and I won't stop him. I don't lie to Lord Stark."

Cersei's hands closed on her knees until the knuckles stood out. "Then we're dead."

"Not necessarily. Lord Stark doesn't kill children, and he won't want Robert killing yours. That gives you a way out." He waited until she was looking at him. "So here are my terms, and I'll only say them once. Every Stark lives. Every one of them. Lord Stark and his lady. Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon. Jon Snow."

"The bastard?"

"Every one," Asmodeus said. "And the king."

That surprised her. He watched it surprise her, and then he watched her work out what it meant that he had thought to say it.

"No one of your blood lifts a hand against a Stark. Not you, not your brother, not your son. Every Stark lives, and so does the king. If one of them dies, by any hand, I'll assume it was yours, and Robert hears everything, and the realm after him. Keep to that, and Lord Stark keeps your secret."

"Any hand," he said, in case she had missed it. "A knife. A cup. A word in the wrong ear. A fever, a fall, a boar."

"And if Robert hears?"

"Then whatever he does to your children, I won't lift a finger to stop him."

Cersei stared at him. "You'd let him kill children."

"You just watched your brother throw one out of a window."

She had no answer to that.

"Say it, Your Grace."

She looked at him with those green eyes, and he watched her reach the end of it. "No one of my blood lifts a hand against a Stark," Cersei said. Her voice did not shake. "Every Stark lives, and so does the king. You have my word."

"I have your children," Asmodeus said. "That will do."

Jaime had not moved since he sat down. Now he said, quite calmly, "And me? You'll want something from me."

Asmodeus had told Igris to salute this man when he had beaten him, as one knight salutes another. No one had given Jaime Lannister that in twenty years, and Asmodeus had meant it to hurt. Whatever Igris had given him had done more than hurt. From the look of Jaime Lannister, he was still thinking about it.

"You broke guest right, Ser Jaime." Asmodeus turned to look at him at last. "You ate Lord Stark's bread and salt, and then you threw his son out of a tower. Guest right held me too. It's the only thing in this castle that ever has. I told Lord Stark it would hold me because I let it." He glanced down at the sword on the boards, and back up. "I'm still letting it, even though you broke it."

Jaime's jaw tightened. "Why?"

"Because you owe that boy a life now. Someday I'll come and ask you to pay it back."

"And so you don't forget it, I'm putting one of my soldiers in your shadow."

One of Beru's soldiers went down into the Kingslayer's shadow while he watched, and after that his shadow lay heavier on the boards than the thin light could explain.

"If you move against a Stark," Asmodeus said, "it will kill you. It won't wait for me to tell it to."

He stepped back toward the shadow on the floor. Then he stopped. He hadn't meant to say anything else. He found he was going to anyway.

"Ser Jaime," he said, "I know what was under the city."

Jar on jar of wildfire under the septs and the markets, a mad king screaming for someone to light it, and the one man who had stopped him and never told a soul why.

He had seen Jaime Lannister's face on a screen a thousand times, and he had never seen it as it was then, stunned and unguarded. Cersei looked from one of them to the other, baffled and furious. Jaime did not look at her.

Asmodeus stepped back into the shadow. The world turned over, and he was kneeling in the dead grass at the foot of the tower where Igris had knelt a moment before, with the cold coming up through his knees. Up in the tower room, he knew without looking, Igris now stood where he had been, and would stand there, silent and violet-eyed, until the queen and her brother had the sense to leave.

Bran Stark's small hand was clutching at his sleeve. The boy was shaking. There was grass in his hair.

"He pushed me," Bran said.

"I know. He won't touch you again."

"You caught me."

"I did. I said I would."

Bran looked at him. "Were you waiting?"

A lie would have been easy, and kind.

"Yes," Asmodeus said.

Bran frowned over that. It didn't fit anything he knew.

"Thank you for catching me," he said, and that was worse.

He told the boy to save the story for his father, all of it, and for no one else; a rider with that news would reach the king in the same breath as Lord Stark. Bran nodded, as if it were an ordinary thing to be asked on such a morning.

* * *​

No one rode after the hunt. The boy was unhurt, and all he would tell his mother or the maester was that he had fallen and been caught.

Ned Stark came back from the hunt at sundown with a boar slung across a packhorse and mud to his knees, and Maester Luwin met him at the gate. Asmodeus watched from the wall as the news reached him. Ned didn't run. Ned Stark never ran. He only walked across the yard and into the Great Keep so fast that the men behind him had to.

Bran told it in the solar, with his mother's arm around him and Summer in his lap. He told it out of order, with the worst parts in the middle and his voice going high on them: the tower, the window, the queen and her brother, the golden knight's hand on his tunic, the drop. The hand he couldn't see that had caught him. Asmodeus in the grass. He left out the question he had asked there, and the answer, and Asmodeus watched him leave it out.

Nobody interrupted him. When he was done, Ned knelt on the rushes in front of his son, put both hands on his shoulders, and looked at him without speaking. Then he kissed his forehead. "You'll tell no one else what you saw in that window, Bran. Not Robb. Not your sisters. Go with your mother."

Catelyn went. At the door she turned and looked at Asmodeus, and there was nothing in her face that he could read, and then she was gone.

Ned didn't get up. He stayed on one knee in the rushes, looking at the place where his son had been.

"You knew," he said.

"Yes."

"You knew he'd climb that tower today."

"I knew the day. Igris heard the queen name it."

"You knew what he'd see. You knew what Jaime Lannister would do."

"I knew all of it."

"And you let him."

"I caught him."

Ned stood up then. He was not a tall man beside Asmodeus, and he was not young, and there was mud on his boots and boar's blood drying on his sleeve. Asmodeus had faced down a king and a Kingslayer and a queen in the space of a week without his heart once changing its pace. It changed now.

"You let him," Ned said. He didn't raise his voice. "You watched my son climb for weeks. You knew what was waiting at the top of that tower, and you let him climb, and you let that man throw him out of the window like a sack of meal, so that you could catch him at the bottom and have the Lannisters in your fist." His voice was quieter now. "Tell me I have it wrong."

"You don't have it wrong."

"Why?"

He owed this man the truth. He had never promised him anything else.

"Because in two days your daughters ride south in that woman's column," Asmodeus said, "and you ride to a city where she has every sword and you have forty men. I needed her afraid of me before any of that, and a threat wouldn't do it. She had to see it." He made himself hold Ned's gaze. "He was never going to hit the ground. I let him fall because I wanted her to watch me catch him."

Ned was silent. The fire had burned low. Somewhere below, a dog was barking at nothing.

"Never again," Ned said at last. "Whatever you know. Whatever your song says. You'll not use my children for bait again. Not one of them."

"I can't promise you never," Asmodeus said. "I don't lie to you, and I don't know everything that's coming. Not anymore. I can promise you'll hear it from me first. Before, not after."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the only promise I can be sure of keeping."

Ned held his eyes until the fire popped.

Ned nodded once. He went to the sideboard, poured two cups of wine, and held one out, and Asmodeus took it, though he had no idea whether this body could get drunk.

"I told Robert yes this morning," Ned said. "Before the hunt."

"I know."

"Of course you do." Ned drank. "He asked me again who poisoned Jon. I told him what I told him in the hall: not here. He let it lie. Robert was always good at letting things lie." He set the cup down. "And now I know what I'm riding into."

"Then why ride into it?"

"Because the song says Robert dies within the year, and his throne goes to Jaime Lannister's son." Ned turned the cup in his hands. "Someone has to keep him off that boar. Someone has to put Stannis's name before the council when he's gone, with the right to do it. And if I say no, Robert asks Tywin Lannister. Then there's a Lannister Hand and a Lannister queen and a Lannister king, and your song ends worse than it did." He looked up. "Cat begged me not to go. She isn't wrong. I'm going anyway."

"You die in it."

"In the song," Ned said. "You weren't in the song."

There was another way to keep Joffrey off the Iron Throne. Ned didn't say it. Neither did Asmodeus. He only weighed it, as he had on the walls most nights: a hundred thousand soldiers and a wyvern could put anyone they liked in that chair, including the thing that commanded them. He had watched a woman burn a city for that chair once, and shouted at the screen while she did it. Not yet, he decided. Not while Ned's way might work.

"I gave the queen terms," he said. "One of them is yours. You keep her secret for as long as she keeps them."

Ned set his cup down. "You gave her my word."

"I didn't give her your word. I told her what I knew you'd do anyway."

Ned was quiet a while. "Robert will hear nothing of this," he said. "Not from me. Not while she keeps to it."

Asmodeus waited.

"When the war ended," Ned said slowly, "Tywin Lannister's men brought Rhaegar's children to Robert, wrapped in crimson cloaks. A girl of three. A babe still at the breast. Robert looked at them and called them dragonspawn." He did not look up. "I'll not lay three more at his feet. Whatever their mother is. Whatever their father did."

"I know," Asmodeus said. "In the song, you tell her to run."

Ned didn't answer. He had heard it in this room, more than once.

"You give her time to take the children and go, before you tell Robert," Asmodeus said. "It's a kindness. But she uses the time to move against you first, and that's why you die."

For a moment Ned's face twisted. Then it was only Ned's face again.

"Then I'd best not tell her," he said dryly. "What else?"

"There's a thing that happens at the Trident I mean to be there for. After that, I'm going north."

"North."

"Beyond the Wall. You know what's coming south, and the storm it's coming in. It's time I looked at it."

"You've an army in your shadow," Ned said. "Send it."

"Not into that storm," Asmodeus said. "I sent one to its edge last week. Once it went in, I couldn't see anything through it, and when it came back it had nothing to show me."

"So it's you."

"Yes. I'll go in for an hour and see what it is." He turned the cup in his fingers. "I'd rather not leave you. I'd rather not leave any of you. So I want to leave something with your children."

He told Ned what he meant. Ned listened with his arms folded and asked the questions Ned would ask. Would they watch? Only for danger. Would they obey? Only him. Would they speak? Some could; most wouldn't. Could they be seen? Only when they rose. Would they kill?

"If someone tries to kill one of your children," Asmodeus said, "yes."

"Like the one you put in Jaime Lannister," said Ned. "Four days, you told me. Every word he said."

"That was Igris, and he was there to listen. These will have different orders. They'll be there to keep your children alive."

"Aye." Ned's mouth was a hard line. "Do it. For the children. Robb, and the girls, and the boys, and Jon, if he'll have it."

"And Cat's not to hear from you why you were under that tower." Ned did not look away. "If she knew, she'd not let one of your creatures near them, and tonight I want them near."

"She won't hear it from me," Asmodeus said. "And I want to put one in your shadow too."

"No."

"My lord —"

"No." Ned met his eyes. "Not me, and not my men. You've told me how I die. I heard you. If that's how it's to be, I'll meet it as myself, with my own back to guard and no dead man at my heel. And if my men need a demon to keep them alive, I'll send them home. I'll not walk the Red Keep with your shadows listening at our ears." A pause. "That's my answer. I'll not give you another."

One thought would have done it. Ned would never have known, and Ned would have been safe.

That was exactly why he didn't.

The Monarch's authority does not require his consent, my liege, said Bellion. The one before did not ask.

This one does, Asmodeus told him.

Bellion said nothing more, but Asmodeus could tell he had taken note of it.

If he started deciding which of Ned Stark's refusals counted, he would be the thing Bellion meant.

Catelyn came back before he had touched a single shadow, and she came for her daughters.

She fought for them with the door shut, low-voiced and relentless, and Asmodeus stood by the window and let her, because she was right. The queen's brother had thrown her son from a tower that day. In two days her daughters were to ride south in the queen's column, and one of them was promised to the queen's son.

"If they stay," Ned said, "Robert asks me why. And I tell him, or I lie to him."

"Then tell him."

"And watch him kill three children? You didn't see him with Rhaegar's. I did."

"Then break the match. Say she's sickly, say anything —"

"There'll be no wedding while I'm Hand," Ned said. "That I'll promise you. But the match stands until I can break it without breaking my word, and I gave my word tonight."

"And Winterfell didn't keep Bran safe today," he said, more quietly. "I'll have the girls where I can see them."

She turned on Asmodeus then. "And you. You'll put your creatures in my daughters and call them safe."

He didn't answer her. He called Igris instead.

Igris came up out of the dark beside the hearth, and Catelyn Stark took a step back before she could stop herself. He crossed the solar with his black plume brushing the beams, went down on one knee before her, bowed his head, and stayed there.

"He's the best I have," Asmodeus said. "He goes with Sansa. He'll kneel to her too, if she asks it of him. He won't kneel to the queen."

Catelyn looked down at the kneeling knight. Then she said, "If he fails her, I'll find a way to kill you," and went out.

"If he fails her," Asmodeus told the closed door, "I'll let you."

Ned carried one more offer that night, to the king's chambers, and was back before the candles had burned halfway. "Tell your demon to keep his creatures out of my shadow," Robert had said, and more besides: the demon could go to the seven hells, and he could take Lyanna's name out of his mouth on the way.

Asmodeus let it stand. It was the king's to refuse. He had just told Bellion as much.

He did it that night instead, for the others.

Robb listened gravely, with Grey Wind at his knee, asked the right questions, and accepted Iron into his shadow with stiff courtesy. Arya asked whether hers could kill people. He said yes. She asked whether it would kill people if she told it to. He said no. She looked so bitterly disappointed that he nearly laughed, and Beru, who had chosen one of his own soldiers for her with great ceremony, was offended on its behalf for an hour. Rickon made him bring Tank out twice, then fell asleep against the great bear's side on the solar floor with Shaggydog curled at his feet, and Tank looked at Asmodeus over the boy's head with an expression of such long-suffering dignity that Asmodeus had to turn away.

The blue window had been waiting at the edge of his sight since the wolfswood, where it had asked him to name the direwolf he had raised, and he had refused. The name hadn't been his to give. Rickon had given it weeks ago, and now the whole castle called her Winter, from the kennels to the kitchens. Asmodeus looked at the boy asleep against the bear. "Winter," he said, and the window chimed.

[Name designated: Winter.]

It had taken a six-year-old to do what he couldn't. That seemed about right.

Bran was already asleep, with Summer across his feet and a candle guttering on the chest by the bed. There was nothing wrong with him. Luwin had looked him over twice by candlelight, found grass in his hair and a torn sleeve, and gone away shaking his head. Asmodeus put Tusk into his shadow. When he straightened, Catelyn Stark was in the doorway. She had looked in on the boy every hour since sundown; he had heard her on the stair.

She had said everything she meant to say in the solar. He waited for her to go. Instead she came in and stood on the far side of the bed, and looked down at her son: at the grass stain on his cheek that no one had thought to wash, at one small hand lying open on the blanket.

"Luwin says no one falls from that tower and lives," she said. "I would have been sewing his shroud tonight." She did not look up. "Every night since you came, I've asked the Mother to take you out of my house. Every morning I've lit the Stranger's candle, and every morning it's gone out, and I thought the gods were telling me what you were." She drew a breath. "I still don't know what you are."

"I don't know either, my lady."

"I watched you watch him climb," she said. "Three weeks, from that wall. I asked you once if he falls."

"You did, my lady. I told you I was watching him."

"I'll not ask you tonight what you were waiting for under that tower." Then she did look up, across the bed and her sleeping son, and he saw what it was costing her.

"You caught my son," said Catelyn Stark. "Thank you."

He had watched her son climb for three weeks. He had promised him on a wall that he would catch him, and then stood at the foot of a tower and waited for him to fall. Bran had thanked him for it that morning, and that had been bad enough.

The truth would take a dozen words. Ned had asked him not to say them, and they would cost him her daughters besides, whom she would never trust to him again, and likely the terms. He weighed it again, standing there, as he had weighed it on the wall with the boy waving from the top of the tower, and it came out the same.

"You needn't thank me, my lady," he said.

"I know," said Catelyn. "You have my thanks all the same."

He took her thanks. Of all the things he had done in this world, it was the worst.

She sat down in the chair by the bed and took her son's hand, and he left her there with him, and went to find her daughter.

Winter would stay. The girls would have Igris and the ant; the boys would have a castle that had just learned how easily a boy could fall, and a wolf who didn't sleep.

Sansa listened with her hands folded tight in her lap and her eyes on the floor. When he had finished, she was quiet for so long that he thought she would refuse.

"Will he watch me?" she asked. "All the time? Even when I —" She couldn't finish it.

"He'll turn his back whenever you'd want him to. He's a knight."

Her eyes came up to his at last.

"A true knight?"

He thought of every knight she would meet in King's Landing.

"The truest you'll ever meet," he said, and gave her Igris.

Igris was the first of his knights, and giving him away felt like giving away a hand. The knight said nothing, as always. Asmodeus had never once heard him speak, and he was beginning to suspect he would have to earn it.

One more shadow went out that night, and he told no one but Ned. Beru chose it himself, from the smallest and quietest of his soldiers, and it slipped into the queen's shadow while she slept, with orders to listen and never to rise. Ned didn't like it. He didn't forbid it, either. Cersei Lannister had made a promise, and Asmodeus meant to hear her keep it.

Three more went out the next night, and those he told to no one. Kaisel carried him south in the dark, high over a kingdom asleep, and before dawn a small soldier of Beru's lay in the shadow of the master of coin, another in the shadow of the commander of the City Watch, and a third in the shadow of a soft, scented eunuch who woke in the black of the night, lay listening, and heard nothing. Then Asmodeus stepped home through Tank's shadow, and was on the walls of Winterfell before the kitchens lit their fires. Ned had forbidden shadows on himself and his own. He had forbidden nothing else.

He kept one name back from Ned: the man who had set Lysa Arryn's hand to the poison. Ned knew Littlefinger's knife from the song; he did not know Littlefinger's vial. The man who had poisoned Jon Arryn would not live a week in Ned Stark's city, and a dead Littlefinger could show him nothing. A free one, with a soldier in his shadow, would show him every thread in the city. Ned would have hated it. He did it anyway.

* * *​

Jon Snow rode north an hour before the king rode south.

It was a raw grey morning, the sky low and the horses' breath hanging in the air, and half the castle had come out to see him off without admitting that was why they were there. Benjen Stark sat his horse by the gate with a pair of black brothers. Tyrion Lannister sat his a little way off, wrapped in furs to the nose, having announced to anyone who would listen that a man ought to see the edge of the world once before he died, and ideally relieve himself off it. Asmodeus suspected the real reason was that Tyrion had watched him on the walls every night for a week and wanted to see what he was looking at.

Asmodeus watched Jon say his goodbyes.

He had seen most of them before. Robb clasping Jon's arm, with Grey Wind pressing between them, the two of them trying and failing to say what they meant. Arya flinging herself at Jon so hard he staggered, with something long and thin hidden under her cloak that Jon had given her in her room the night before, where her mother couldn't see. That much he had seen on a screen. He had never seen Bran clinging to Jon's other arm; on the screen, Bran had not been there to cling. Nor had he ever noticed how young Arya's face was, or how Jon had to stoop to hold her.

When Jon had finished, he came over to where Asmodeus stood by the stables. Ghost padded at his heel.

"You came to see me off," Jon said.

"I came to ask you something." Asmodeus nodded at the ground between them, where the grey light threw Jon's shadow thin and pale across the frozen mud. "Will you carry something north for me?"

Jon looked down at his shadow. He understood; the whole castle knew by now what had been put into whose shadow two nights before. "A soldier."

"A knight. One of the oldest I have. He'll sleep unless you're about to die. If you are, he won't let you."

"The Watch won't like it."

"They won't know he's there. Nobody can see him while he's asleep."

Jon thought about it. Then he nodded.

It took no more than a thought. The knight went down into Jon's shadow like a stone into a well, and Jon shivered once, hard, and stared at the ground.

"It's cold," he said.

"You'll stop noticing."

He had told Jon to go, that night on the wall, and afterward he had made himself list the reasons. A Stark the Watch would trust, on the day someone had to open the gate. A door on the Wall, in a knight's shadow. A boy who would be safer from Robert Baratheon's hatred of dragons at the end of the world than at the Hand's table. He didn't list the rest.

Ned came down to the gate last of all. Asmodeus stepped back, out of earshot of anyone who didn't have ears like his. Ned took his son's hand, then pulled him into an embrace and held him there a moment.

"When we meet again," Ned said quietly, "I'll tell you about your mother. You have my word."

Jon's eyes went past his father's shoulder, just for an instant, and found Asmodeus by the stables. Asmodeus gave him the smallest nod he could.

In the song, those were the last words Eddard Stark ever said to Jon Snow. He had sat through that scene alone in the dark, years ago, knowing, and he had hated the story for it.

He meant to make Ned Stark keep that promise if he had to drag him to the Wall himself.

Jon mounted. The gate groaned open. The little column went out through it at a walk, north into the grey: black cloaks and a dwarf in furs and a white wolf running silent at the heels of Jon's horse. The road took them, and they were gone.

The royal column was forming up in the yard behind him when Bran Stark came across it on his own two feet.

It shouldn't have undone him. It nearly did. In the song, this boy never walked again. In the song, he spent this morning in a bed in the Great Keep with his legs dead beneath him, and his mother sat beside him for a month and forgot she had other children. Now he was walking, fast, with Summer at his heels and his cheeks red with cold, and there was nothing wrong with him except that he looked as if he hadn't slept.

"I had a dream," Bran said. "About you."

Asmodeus crouched until they were eye to eye. "Tell me."

"There was a crow. It had three eyes." Bran frowned, trying to remember. "It showed me two of you. One of you was a king. You had a crown made of shadows, and so many knights I couldn't count them, and no name. None at all. The crow said you'd lost it."

The yard was loud around them, full of horses and shouting and the rattle of the wheelhouse. He didn't hear any of it.

"And the other one?"

"The other one was just a man. In a little room, with a window that glowed. It sat on his lap." Bran's frown deepened. "That's silly. Windows can't sit on laps. But it did. And there was a lady in a doorway, with the light behind her, calling to you."

He had never told anyone about the doorway. He had barely told himself.

"Calling me what?" His voice came out wrong.

"Your name. Your real one." Bran shook his head. "I couldn't hear it. The crow could, though." He looked up at Asmodeus with his father's grave grey eyes. "It said to tell you it's keeping it safe for you."

Then, as if it were nothing:

"Until you want it back."

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Eight: Arya

The trouble started because the river was too pretty to waste.

That was what Arya would say afterward, and she'd mean it. The column had stopped early on the north bank of the Trident — nobody told her why; nobody ever told her anything — and nobody was watching her either, so she slipped away.

Mycah found her a mile upstream, and they cut two sticks and went at it in the shallows until they were both soaked to the knee. He was the butcher's boy, and terrible with a sword, which was what she liked about him.

Nymeria, seven weeks old and already the size of a hound, splashed after them until she got bored and went off into the willows after something that smelled better.

She had something else now, too: a coldness in her shadow, like the air on the crypt stairs at Winterfell. Asmodeus had put it there before they left. It could kill, he'd told her, but not because she asked it to, and that was all he would say about it.

She was just about to hit Mycah in the ear when she heard the laugh that wasn't his.

Prince Joffrey was standing on the bank above them, with Sansa on his arm and Lady at her heels.

Father had kept Joffrey away from her all down the kingsroad. The prince had come looking for her anyway. Igris had put his uncle in the dirt at Winterfell, and a prince couldn't pay back a knight who lived in Sansa's shadow. He couldn't pay back Sansa's sister either, not with whatever lived in hers. But nobody had put anything in the butcher's boy.

"A fight? With sticks?" Joffrey came down the bank, tall and golden and nineteen. "Here, butcher's boy. Try your hand against a man."

He drew his sword and laid the point against Mycah's cheek, and pressed until a bead of red ran down into Mycah's collar.

"Leave him alone!" Arya shouted.

Arya hit Joffrey across the back of the head with her stick.

It made a sound like a mallet on a melon, and the stick broke in two, and Joffrey turned on her with his lips pulled back from his teeth.

"You little bitch," he said.

He swung at her.

His sword went through what was left of her stick like straw, and she fell backward into the shallows. Joffrey stood over her with the sword raised in both hands. She saw his face above it and knew, suddenly and completely, that he meant it.

The shadow under her turned cold.

It was cold, cold as the bottom of a well in winter, and something in it drew itself together beneath her, waking and tensing to spring —

Nymeria hit Joffrey in the arm.

She came out of the willows like a grey arrow and took his sword arm in her jaws, and he screamed, high and thin. Nymeria shook him the way she shook rabbits, and there was blood on the water, spreading.

"Nymeria!" Arya was on her feet. "Nymeria, no, let go, let go —"

Nymeria let go and backed off, growling, with blood on her muzzle. Joffrey curled up in the mud and sobbed.

The cold in Arya's shadow unclenched, slowly, and went back to sleep.

Arya picked up his sword and threw it as far as she could into the Trident. It went into the brown water without a splash. Then Sansa was screaming, and Mycah was running, and Arya ran too.

She ran until she couldn't hear Sansa anymore, with Nymeria loping beside her. By the time she fell down under an oak, she knew what she had to do.

They would kill Nymeria. The queen would make them. You didn't bite a prince and live, not even if you were a wolf, not even if the prince deserved it.

So she threw stones at her and screamed at her to go, go, GO, until one took her on the shoulder and at last she went, looking back and looking back until the green swallowed her.

Arya sat down under the oak and cried until she was sick.

Much later, when men were shouting her name through the trees, she thought about the thing in her shadow that had gathered itself to spring.

It would have killed Joffrey, she thought, if Nymeria hadn't got there first.

She tried to decide whether she'd have minded. She couldn't.

* * *​

Jory Cassel found her at dusk, and he didn't say anything, which was how she knew it was bad.

They brought her to the hall of a river knight whose name she never learned, a smoky place with too many dogs, where the king had taken the high seat. The queen sat beside him. Joffrey sat beside the queen with his arm wrapped in so much white silk it looked like a war wound in a song. Ser Barristan stood behind the king's chair, and the Kingslayer stood by the door, staring at the floor. Sansa was there, with Septa Mordane, and Lady at her feet.

Father was there. Father's face was the worst of it.

"Where's Mycah?" Arya said, before anyone could say anything to her.

Nobody answered. Then Jory, low, behind her: "The Hound went after him."

Arya felt sick.

The king made them tell it. Joffrey went first, and told it well; Arya had never heard such a good lie. The butcher's boy and the Stark girl had set on him with clubs, he said, and the girl had set her wolf on him. He held up his arm in its silk, and the queen stroked his hair.

"That's a lie," Arya said. "That's a lie."

She told it true, all of it, and she didn't cry. She was proud of that afterward.

The king rubbed his face with both hands. He looked tired, and old, and drunk. "Sansa," he said. "Sweet girl. You were there. Tell me what happened."

Everyone looked at Sansa.

Sansa looked at Joffrey. Then at the queen. Then at Arya, and for one moment their eyes met, and Arya saw her decide. Then at the floor.

"I don't know," she said, hardly above a whisper. "I don't remember. It all happened so fast. I didn't see —"

"Liar!" Arya flew at her. She'd have had her, too, if Father hadn't caught her around the waist. "You liar, you saw —"

"Enough," said Father, and she stopped, because it was his Winterfell voice.

The king sighed like a bellows. "A scrap by a river. That's all this is. Ned, see to your daughter, I'll see to my son, and we'll —"

Before she spoke, the queen glanced at the doors, as if to make sure Asmodeus wasn't standing in them. "A wolf savaged the crown prince," she said.

She said it without heat, and everyone went quiet.

"The wolf's run off, Cersei," said the king. "You heard the girl."

"There is another wolf." The queen was looking at Lady, lying at Sansa's feet with her grey head on her paws. "The Starks are fond of saying the wolves are theirs. Then let a Stark wolf answer for it."

Sansa reached for Lady. "No. No, she didn't do anything, she was with me the whole time, she —"

"Robert," said the queen.

The king wouldn't look at anyone. He looked at his cup, at the dogs, everywhere except at Father, and Arya understood that he was going to say yes.

"Your son drew steel on an unarmed boy and cut his face for sport," Father said. "When my daughter struck him for it, he swung to kill her. Judge that first, Your Grace, before you judge a wolf."

The king opened his mouth.

The doors at the end of the hall swung open.

Asmodeus came in out of the dusk with the wind at his back and the torches leaning away from him in their brackets, and he had Mycah with him.

Mycah was alive. He had a cut down his cheek where Joffrey's sword had kissed him and a bruise coming up over one eye, and he was shaking so hard Arya could hear his teeth, but he was alive. Asmodeus's hand was on his shoulder.

Behind them came the Hound, empty-handed, muddy down one whole side and walking stiffly.

The king stared. "What's this?"

"The butcher's boy, Your Grace." Asmodeus's voice was low and courteous, and it carried to every corner of the hall. "I thought you might want to hear from him before anyone kills anything tonight. Since the Hound was sent to make sure you couldn't."

Every eye in the hall went to the queen. The queen looked at no one.

"Clegane," said the king. "What in the name of the gods —"

"He took the boy off my saddle." The Hound's voice was a rasp. "At a gallop. Then my horse's legs went out from under it, and he never laid a finger on it. On either of us." He spat on the rushes. "Ask him how. I'd bloody well like to know."

The king looked at Mycah. "You. Boy. Tell it."

Mycah told it. He told it badly, stammering, with his big red hands knotting and unknotting, but he told it the same as Arya had. When he got to the part where Joffrey swung at Arya, his voice cracked.

Then the king looked at his son.

"A butcher's boy tells it straighter than you," he said. "You're a man grown, and you drew steel on a butcher's boy and a girl half your size? And she put you on your arse with a stick."

"He's lying," Joffrey shrilled. "Father, he's —"

"Quiet." The king didn't shout it. It was worse than shouting. Joffrey shut his mouth. "On your knees. You'll beg the girl's pardon, here, where they can all see you do it."

Joffrey looked at his mother, and she didn't look back. He knelt in the rushes in front of Arya with his silk arm held to his chest and said, "I beg your pardon, my lady," to the floor between her boots.

Arya had wanted that since Winterfell. It wasn't how she'd thought it would be. When he got up, there was nothing sorry in his eyes.

"The prince lives," said the king, "and he's learned something, gods willing. The matter's done."

The queen had watched her son kneel in the rushes to a Stark girl, in front of every knight in the hall, and Arya could see her wanting something back for it.

"The matter," said the queen, "is not done. A wolf bit your son, Robert. A wolf dies."

"No," said Asmodeus.

The word wasn't loud, but every candle in the hall bent away from it.

The queen turned her head slowly to look at him.

The king heaved himself up out of his chair, and it went over behind him. "You don't give commands in my presence, demon. Not in my hall. Not in my kingdom."

"I'm not giving one, Your Grace." Asmodeus hadn't moved. "I'm telling you what's going to happen. The wolf that bit your son is gone, and the one at Lady Sansa's feet never touched him. No wolf dies tonight. No boy, either."

Ser Barristan's hand went to his sword.

Something came off Asmodeus then and filled the hall to the rafters, cold and heavy as deep water, and every dog in the place went flat under the tables. Ser Barristan's hand stopped on his hilt and stayed there. Nobody moved. Arya found she couldn't. By the door, the Kingslayer still hadn't looked up.

Then Asmodeus turned to the queen.

"Your son lifted a sword against a Stark today, Your Grace," he said. "I'll count that as the first time. There won't be a second."

Arya didn't know what he meant by the first time. She didn't find out until long after. But she was watching the queen, and the queen's face never moved.

Then a piece of the dark at Asmodeus's feet came loose and ran across the rushes, low and quick, with too many legs, and went into the prince's shadow like water into sand.

Joffrey scrambled back against his mother's chair. His shadow lay in the torchlight like anyone's, only darker, and Arya, looking at it, knew exactly how cold it was.

"What is it?" Joffrey's voice went high. "Mother, what did he —"

"It's there to watch you and tell me what it sees," said Asmodeus. "That's all it does, for now."

The king found his voice. "What did you just put in my son?" He was staring at Joffrey's shadow. "And what's this about a first time? First time of what?"

"Let it be," the queen said.

The king turned and stared at her. "What?"

"The beast has run off. The girl has been frightened enough." The queen's voice was steady. Her hands, in her lap, were not. "Let it be, Robert."

"A moment ago you wanted its head on a pike!"

"I've changed my mind."

The king looked from his wife to Asmodeus and back again, and for a moment he frowned, slow and puzzled and dangerous. Then he let it go and threw up his hands.

"Wolves," he said. "Demons. Butchers' boys. Seven bloody hells. Somebody bring me wine." He stamped down off the dais, and as he passed Father he said, not quietly, "Keep that thing away from me, Ned. I mean it."

"I'll keep my distance, Your Grace," said Asmodeus, "when your son keeps his sword in its sheath."

The king didn't turn around. The doors banged behind him.

The queen rose and swept out after him with Joffrey at her heels, and the Kingslayer went last of all. He looked back once from the doorway, at the floor where Asmodeus's shadow lay.

Sansa was crying. She had her arms around Lady's neck and her face buried in Lady's fur, and she was crying great ugly sobs, like a baby. Arya thought about kicking her. She was surprised to find she didn't want to.

Lady was alive.

Nymeria was out there somewhere in the dark, alone, because Arya had thrown stones at her until she ran.

* * *​

She found him down by the river after the camp had gone to sleep.

Two of Father's guards had followed her and were standing a little way up the bank, pretending to be interested in the water. Asmodeus stood at the edge of the Trident with the dark water going past his boots.

"You weren't there," Arya said.

"I wasn't, and I should have been."

"You're always there. You always know everything before it happens."

"Not anymore." He was quiet a moment. "It was supposed to happen tomorrow, across the river, by the inn at the crossroads. I was with your father at the head of the column, and I thought I had a day. When your shadow woke, I looked through it, and by then Nymeria had got there first and Mycah was running. I knew who they'd send after him. Things are starting to happen when they want to, instead of when I remember them."

Arya thought about that. It frightened her more than Joffrey's sword had, though she couldn't have said why.

"If you knew it was coming," she said, "why didn't you just tell me to stay away from him?"

"Because then it would have happened some other day, somewhere I didn't know about." He didn't try to make it sound better than it was. "I meant to be standing there when it did."

Arya decided that was a bad reason, and that it was probably true anyway.

"You saved Mycah," she said.

"In the song, the Hound rode him down on the road and cut him nearly in half." He said it in an ordinary voice. "Mycah goes north tomorrow with two of your father's men. The cook at Winterfell could use a boy who knows his way around a cleaver."

"Nymeria," Arya said. It came out small, and she hated that. "Can you find her?"

"Yes."

"Could you bring her back?"

"Yes. Stay here with the guards, and I'll bring her to you."

He went up the bank past the guards and into the trees, and the dark under them took him.

Arya looked out at the river. Somewhere in the trees, on one side of it or the other, Nymeria was sleeping alone, or not sleeping.

She heard Nymeria before she saw her. Then the wolf came down the bank at a run and knocked her flat, and Arya found the lump on her shoulder where the stone had hit, and said she was sorry, over and over, into the fur.

When she sat up, Asmodeus was standing over them, waiting.

"Would she be safe?" she said. "If she came south? In King's Landing? With the queen?"

He didn't answer right away. She liked that about him. He never answered right away when the answer was going to hurt.

"No," he said. "Not in the queen's column. Not after tonight. She goes north at first light, with Mycah. If they're still on the road tomorrow night, I'll take them the rest of the way myself."

Arya swallowed. Her eyes were stinging. She wasn't going to cry. She'd done enough crying under the oak to last her the rest of her life.

Winterfell was the wrong way. But Bran was there, and Rickon, and Summer and Shaggydog, and nobody who had seen the prince's arm. She was sending Nymeria home.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve, which Septa Mordane would have hated. "Sansa lied."

"She did."

"She'd rather have Joffrey than me."

"She'd rather have the story she's been told her whole life than the one that's actually happening to her. Most people would." He turned back to the river. "Give her time."

"I wouldn't," Arya said. "Rather have the story."

"No," he agreed. "You'd want to know what was really happening, even if you hated it."

The river talked to itself in the dark. Up the bank, one of the guards coughed.

"What's in my shadow?" Arya said. "Really."

"One of Beru's."

"Who's Beru?"

He seemed to consider it. "The worst thing I own."

Arya grinned. She couldn't help it. She hadn't grinned all day, and it hurt her face.

"Nymeria gets one of Beru's smallest," Asmodeus said. "Wherever she runs, I'll know it. You'll only have to ask."

Then she saw how he was standing: turned a little away from the camp, toward the north.

"You're leaving," she said.

"Tonight, as soon as we're done here."

"Where?"

"North. Past the Wall." His voice was even. "There's something up there I have to kill before the winter comes. I'm going into its storm for an hour, and Bellion, the oldest of my soldiers, will keep the time for me. Your father knows."

Nobody ever told her anything.

"Why tonight?" she said. "You just said things don't happen when you remember them anymore."

"That's why I'd rather look at it now than later." He didn't smile. "It's an hour, Arya. The storm's crept further south every night since the wolfswood."

"Take me with you."

"Not yet."

"You always say that."

"I mean it, though. Ask me again when I'm back."

He stepped back from the water's edge into the deep shadow under the willows. The dark there was blacker than it should have been, and it closed over him as the river had closed over Joffrey's sword, without a ripple.

He was gone.

Arya stood on the bank with her hand in Nymeria's ruff and the water going by in the dark. An hour, he'd said. She began to count.

Under her feet, her shadow lay cold and still. Listening.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Nine: Tyrion

The top of the Wall stood seven hundred feet above the rest of the world, and Tyrion Lannister had pissed off the edge of it three nights running. It had not yet lost its charm.

The first night he'd done it on principle. The second, for the view. By the third he had begun to suspect he did it because there was nothing else at Castle Black worth doing that didn't involve drinking with men who smelled of old boots, or being lectured about grumkins and snarks by an old man with a raven on his shoulder, and Tyrion had never much cared for boots, lectures or ravens.

Behind him, far below, the fires of Castle Black made a small warm scatter in the dark. Before him there was nothing. The haunted forest ran away north, black on black, all the way to the end of the world, and the wind came off it like a knife. Nothing out there pretended to be anything but what it was. Tyrion, who had spent his life among people who did little else, found it restful.

He did up his breeches and turned. "You're brooding again, Snow."

Jon Snow stood a little way off along the ice by the brazier, wrapped in a black cloak that had been too thin since the day they gave it to him. He had been at Castle Black a week, and he already looked older. "I'm on watch."

"You're a recruit. They don't let recruits watch anything but the privy pits. You're up here because it's the only place in this castle where nobody is trying to hit you."

Jon didn't deny it. Ghost lay at his feet, white on white, invisible except for his eyes.

"Ser Alliser says the Wall teaches humility," Jon said.

"And has it?"

"It's taught me the Wall is cold."

"That's a start. Most men never learn even that much." Tyrion came back along the ice and held his hands to the brazier. His fingers had stopped hurting an hour ago, which he suspected was a bad sign. "Is that why you keep looking at your feet? Or is it the other thing?"

Jon's eyes flicked to him and away.

The other thing. Tyrion had been at Winterfell the night Asmodeus went through the castle putting things into shadows, and by morning there had not been a scullion in the place who didn't know whose shadow held what. The heir had some manner of iron giant. The little one had a bear. The wild girl had something nobody would describe, not even the grooms, and in Tyrion's experience grooms would describe anything. The pretty one had the black knight who had put Jaime in the mud, which showed either a sense of humor or a sense of priorities. And the bastard, riding north to take the black, had a knight of his own.

"Cold," Jon said at last. "It's always cold. Even by the fire."

"Everything's cold here. It's a wall of ice. That's rather the point of it."

"Colder than that." Jon looked down at his shadow, lying long and pale across the ice in the brazier light. "Sometimes I think I can hear it breathing."

Tyrion considered his wineskin, found it wanting, and drank anyway.

He had spent most of the ride north thinking about Asmodeus. It had made a pleasant change from thinking about how much his thighs hurt, and it was half of why he had come. He had told Jaime he wanted to piss off the edge of the world, and that was true, but he had also wanted to see what the demon watched from the walls of Winterfell every night, and Tyrion had never in his life been able to leave a shut door alone. He had a list by now of everything he knew, and it was not a long list, and nothing on it made sense. The raven from King's Landing, foretold to the hour. Jon Arryn, whose death Asmodeus had named before the raven came, and called poison at the king's own table. The black knight, putting Jaime on his back in the yard with a sword he never bothered to use in earnest. And something else, which he had told no one at all: that on the fourth day at Winterfell, something had happened to his brother and his sister. He did not know what. He knew it had been the morning the Stark boy fell from the broken tower and was caught at the bottom, and that Jaime and Cersei had both found reasons not to ride with the hunt; he had set those things side by side more than once, and not liked what they suggested. And he knew that afterward, whenever Asmodeus walked into a room, Cersei looked at him the way she used to look at their father when she was nine and had been caught at something.

In all his years, Tyrion had never once seen Cersei afraid of anyone but their father.

"Do you know what I think he is?" he said.

Jon looked wary. He had a very Stark face for wariness. "What?"

"Not a demon, and not a god either. Gods don't bother with bread and salt, and demons don't bother with courtesy." Tyrion swirled the dregs in his skin. "I think he's a reader. A man who's read the last page of a long book, and is trying his hardest not to tell anyone how it ends." He drank. "Which leaves only the interesting question."

"Which is?"

"Who wrote the book," said Tyrion, "and whether they'd care to meet a critic."

Jon almost smiled. Then he stopped, and looked down, and Tyrion saw his face change.

His shadow was moving.

* * *​

It deepened. The pale edges of it went black, and the black went blacker, until Tyrion could no longer see the ice beneath it. Jon made a sound in his throat and stepped back from it, and it didn't follow him.

Something was coming up out of it.

A hand first, pale as the ice. Then a head of long black hair, and shoulders in close-fitted black, and the rest of him, rising easily out of Jon Snow's shadow, until he was standing on top of the Wall in the teeth of the wind with no cloak on. The brazier flames lay down flat, away from him.

Ghost got up, padded over to him, and sat down at his feet.

"Lord Tyrion," said Asmodeus. "Jon."

Tyrion found that his mouth was open. He shut it. "You might have knocked."

"There wasn't a door."

"There's never a door with you. I'm beginning to think it's a policy." Tyrion looked at the place where Jon's shadow had been. It was a shadow again, pale and ordinary, as though it had never been anything else. "Where's the knight?"

"At the Trident. We changed places."

"The Trident." Jon's head came up. "Arya —"

"She's safe, Jon. They all are. I left her a few minutes ago." Asmodeus looked down at his own shadow. "And now I'll have him back." The dark at his feet thickened and settled. He turned to Jon. "I'll give you another before I go."

"Go where?" said Jon.

Up and down the Wall, men had started shouting. Torches were moving along the ice from the east, bobbing, and far below, the great iron winch cage was groaning up its chain.

"North, past the Wall," Asmodeus said. "I'll tell you why once the Lord Commander's here. He'll want to hear it too."

The cage came up with a clang. Out of it stepped the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, Jeor Mormont, a big grey bear of a man in black furs with his raven on his shoulder, and behind him half a dozen brothers with spears and torches and faces that did not want to be there.

The raven saw Asmodeus and screamed.

"King!" It flapped and hopped on the Old Bear's shoulder, beating its wings. "King! King! King!"

"Quiet, you," growled Mormont, and the bird subsided, muttering. The Lord Commander looked Asmodeus over from his boots to his face, taking his time about it, and Tyrion watched the old man's jaw work.

"So," said Mormont. "You're the one."

"Lord Commander."

"I've had ravens about you from Winterfell and from the kingsroad, and not one of them agrees with another." Mormont's eyes were small and shrewd in his seamed face. "None of them mentioned you could come up out of the ice like a bloody frog."

"I came up out of Jon's shadow, my lord. The ice had nothing to do with it."

Mormont grunted. "Snow. Is that true?"

Jon swallowed. "Yes, my lord."

"Seven hells." Mormont turned back to Asmodeus. "The Wall was raised to keep out the things that come up out of the dark. Things like you, I'd have said."

"It was raised against the Others and their dead, my lord," said Asmodeus. "It still keeps them out. I'm not one of them."

Mormont didn't like that. Tyrion could see him not liking it. "You're on my Wall, whatever you are. My Wall, my law. What do you want?"

"Your leave, my lord, if you'll give it." Asmodeus's voice was perfectly courteous. "I'm going north tonight. I'd rather your men heard you sent me after the thing that killed Ser Waymar Royce."

The brothers behind Mormont stirred. The torches wavered.

"Royce," said Mormont slowly.

"He's dead. So is Gared. They're walking now, the both of them, somewhere out there in the trees." Asmodeus looked north, into the black. "Your deserter told Lord Stark the truth before he died, my lord. What walks them wears a crown, and it keeps a storm at the far edge of the haunted forest that has come a little further south every night since I came. You'll have seen it from up here. I mean to kill the thing in it before it's ready."

There was a long silence. The wind blew. Somewhere below, a dog was barking in the kennels, on and on.

"Benjen Stark rode out four days ago," Mormont said at last, heavily, "looking for Royce. He's not come back."

"I know. He carried one of mine in his shadow, and two nights ago it went dark. I can't see or hear anything through it now, and I don't know whether he's alive. I'll look for him."

"And if you find him walking too?"

Asmodeus didn't answer at once. "Then I'll put him down, my lord, and bring you what's left, and tell his brother myself."

"And while I'm gone, you'll have these." Asmodeus's shadow ran out from under him along the top of the Wall, east and west, farther than the torchlight reached, and where it ran, shapes rose out of it: tall men in black plate, a dozen of them, spaced along the ice like merlons and as still. "They'll stand where you put them and do what you tell them until I'm back."

Mormont walked to the nearest of them and looked up into its helm, close enough to touch. Nothing looked back. Tyrion saw the old man's hand go to his sword hilt and stay there. "Do they eat?"

"They don't eat or sleep, and the cold won't trouble them."

"Then they're the best recruits I've had in ten years." The Old Bear turned his back on the thing, which Tyrion thought took some nerve, and looked at Jon, and then, oddly, at his raven, which was watching Asmodeus with one black eye and saying nothing.

"Go, then," said the Old Bear. "Gods help us. Go."

The brothers were already backing toward the cage. Mormont turned away with them, barking orders, and for a moment there was no one near but Jon and Tyrion and the white wolf.

"Forgive me the obvious question," said Tyrion. "You've a dozen of those things to spare for the Old Bear, the knight who put my brother in the mud, and an army besides, if the grooms at Winterfell can be believed. Why not send them north, and spare yourself the weather?"

"Anything I send into that storm goes deaf and blind to me," said Asmodeus. "I sent one to its edge, and it came back with nothing to show me. And I doubt the dead in there have anything in them I could take. If I want to know what it is, I have to go and look."

Tyrion found he had a great many more questions, and that he did not much want the answers to any of them. He asked one anyway.

"You know how it ends," he said. "Don't you? All of it."

"Some of it." Asmodeus didn't look away from the north. "Less than when I came. Every time I change something, what comes after it turns out differently."

"Then tell me one true thing. About how it goes." Tyrion's voice came out lighter than he felt. "Humor a dwarf. We're a vanishing breed."

Asmodeus looked down at him then. It was a long look, and a strange one. Tyrion had been looked at with pity all his life, and with disgust, and with the careful blankness of people trying not to stare. This one was fond, and a little sad, and Tyrion had no idea why.

"There'll be dragons again, Lord Tyrion," Asmodeus said. "Three of them. You'll see them with your own eyes."

Tyrion laughed. It came out wrong.

He had wanted a dragon since he was six years old. He had asked for one on his nameday once, and his family had laughed at him for a year. He had read every book at Casterly Rock that so much as mentioned dragons, and cried himself to sleep the night the maester told him they were all dead. He had never told anyone that. Not Jaime. Certainly not Cersei.

He believed it.

"And one more thing," said Asmodeus. "When you ride south, don't stop at the inn at the crossroads."

"Why?" It took Tyrion a moment to find his voice again. "Is the ale that bad?"

"No, it's the company. There may be someone there who'd make trouble for you, and I won't say who."

* * *​

Then he called his dragon.

That was how Tyrion would always think of it afterward, whatever it truly was. Asmodeus stepped back from the brazier to the very lip of the Wall, where the ice fell away seven hundred feet into the dark, and his shadow stretched out behind him across the top of the Wall, long and black in the firelight. It kept stretching. It spread. It rose.

Wings came out of it first: great black wings, ribbed like the sails of a warship, so wide they seemed to blot out the stars. Then a long neck, and a narrow head crowned with black horns, and burning eyes, and a body whose scales gave back none of the torchlight. It unfolded out of Asmodeus's shadow and settled onto the top of the Wall, and the ice cracked beneath its claws.

Behind Tyrion, a brother of the Night's Watch dropped his spear and began to pray aloud to the Seven, the old gods and his mother, in that order, and then, when he had run out of gods, to Balerion the Black Dread, two hundred years dead.

"Is that a dragon?" Tyrion whispered.

"He's a wyvern," said Asmodeus. "His name is Kaisel."

"The distinction," Tyrion said faintly, "is lost on me."

Asmodeus almost smiled. He laid one hand on the creature's neck, and it lowered its great head to him like a hound wanting its ears scratched. Then he turned to Jon.

"Your shadow," he said, and something went down into it, quick and dark, and Jon shivered. "Another knight. He'll do what the last one would have done."

"Will you come back?" Jon said.

"Yes. I'm not going up there to stay."

"When?"

"An hour, if it goes as I mean it to. I go in at the edge of the storm and come out an hour later, whatever I've found. But it's his country up there, and I mean to be busy. So I won't be the one keeping count." He said a name to his own shadow: "Bellion." Something in the dark at his feet answered him, too low to be a voice, and Tyrion felt it in his teeth. "He'll keep the hour."

He swung up onto the wyvern's neck. "Jon. Whatever you hear about me while I'm away, don't believe it until you hear it from me."

Then the wyvern spread its wings, and the wind of them knocked Tyrion onto his arse on the ice, and it went off the edge of the Wall and dropped. For one sick moment it was gone. Then it came up again out of the dark below, huge and black against the stars, climbing on long slow strokes, and turned north.

Tyrion got to his feet and went to the edge and watched.

It flew north over the haunted forest until it was only a shape, and then only a speck, and then nothing but a place where the stars went out and came back. Far away at the edge of the world, where the sky met the trees, there was a paleness Tyrion had seen the last two nights and taken for cloud. It was a long low wall of white, like a snowstorm seen from far off, and it didn't move with the wind. Yet he would have sworn it was nearer tonight than it had been the night before.

The speck that was the wyvern flew into it, and the white closed over it and was still.

Far away, something flickered once inside the storm, blue, like lightning seen through ice.

"King," said the Old Bear's raven softly, from somewhere behind him, to no one at all.

Tyrion Lannister could not think of a single thing to say.

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Ten: Catelyn

The letter from the Wall came a little more than three weeks after the king rode south, and Catelyn read it standing in Maester Luwin's turret with the ravens muttering overhead, the way she had read her sister's.

The Lord Commander of the Night's Watch wrote a blunt, square hand. The man called Asmodeus, he wrote, had risen out of the shadow of Lord Stark's natural son on top of the Wall. He had called a winged black beast out of his own shadow in the sight of the Lord Commander and half a dozen sworn brothers, and flown north on it into a storm that stood at the edge of the haunted forest like a second Wall. For weeks that storm had crept south a little every night. It had stopped the night the beast flew into it, and had not moved since. The beast had not come back.

I have no notion what he is, Jeor Mormont had written at the bottom, in a hand that pressed harder than the rest. I pray he is what your lord husband believes him to be. I pray harder that he returns.

Catelyn folded the letter small.

She had prayed for this, once. She would never tell a living soul, but she had. Every night from the wolfswood to the day Bran fell, on her knees in the little sept, she had asked the Mother to take Asmodeus out of her house. Then he had caught her son, and she had stopped asking, and had not known what to ask for instead. Now he was gone, flown off the edge of the world on a dragon, as if the Mother had only been slow to answer. The storm had not stopped of its own accord; whatever he was doing in there, it was holding.

Catelyn was afraid.

Asmodeus had been the only thing standing between her children and the Lannisters. She knew what Jaime Lannister had done; she had held Bran in her arms while he told it. She knew what Asmodeus had made the queen swear in the broken tower, because Ned had told her in the dark, the night before he rode south. Every Stark lives, and so does the king. If one of them dies, by any hand, I'll assume it was yours. It had frightened her, how much comfort she took from those words, spoken by him.

Now Asmodeus was somewhere beyond the Wall, inside a storm that did not move, and the Lannisters, whatever they had sworn, had nothing left to be afraid of. Whether the things he had left in her children's shadows would still rise for them with him gone, there was no one left to ask.

She stopped sleeping in her own bed after that.

It was foolish. Robb told her so, kindly, and Maester Luwin less kindly, and she did it anyway. Every night she took a chair into Bran's room and sat beside his bed with a candle and her sewing, and watched him sleep. He slept badly. He muttered, and flung out his arms, and once he woke crying about a crow with three eyes that wanted him to fly. Summer slept across his feet, already bigger than any hound in the kennels. The dead wolf came and went as she pleased, from one dark to another. Some nights she lay across Bran's door. Some nights she lay across Rickon's. Catelyn had given up trying to guess which. Rickon called the dead wolf Winter, and the whole castle had taken the name up; Catelyn never had.

On the seventh night after the letter, the library tower caught fire.

She heard the shouting first, and then the bells, and then she went to the window and saw the flames climbing the old tower on the far side of the yard, orange and roaring, throwing sparks into the night. Men were running with buckets. She could see Robb in the yard below, bareheaded, shouting orders. Half the castle was already there.

Catelyn stayed where she was. Afterward, she thought it was because the fire had leapt so high, so fast, from a tower full of nothing but old books.

Behind her, the door opened.

She turned. A man stood there, a small dirty man in a brown tunic whom she had never seen before, with lank hair and a face like a weasel's. He was holding a dagger. The steel caught the firelight from the window.

He looked at her, and at the chair, and at the candle, and seemed more surprised than she was. "There's to be nobody here," he said, in a thin, aggrieved voice. "Nobody at all."

Then he looked at the bed.

Catelyn threw herself at him.

She didn't think. She caught the blade in both hands as it came up, and it went into her palms and fingers to the bone, and she held on anyway, screaming, while he twisted it and her blood ran down her wrists. He was stronger than he looked. He tore the dagger free and flung her down, and her head struck the floor and the room went away. When it came back he was stepping over her toward the bed, toward Bran, who had woken and was sitting up with his eyes huge, and Summer, who had gone for his leg, was down on the floor from a kick and scrabbling to rise —

And the dark under the bed rose.

It came out of the dark beneath Bran's bed like smoke, all at once, and it was the wolf. It was the dead wolf, black as a moonless night, and she took the man by the throat. She did not growl. She did not make a sound. She closed her jaws and turned her head once, and Catelyn heard his neck break, and the small dirty man stopped being a man and became a thing on the floor, and the dagger fell from his hand and rang on the stones.

On the wall behind the bed, Bran's shadow had swelled all the way to the ceiling. It had the shape of something vast and hunched, with a staff in one fist and tusks curving up out of its jaw like a boar's, and as Catelyn stared at it, it began to shrink, slowly, back down the wall, until it was only the shadow of a small boy sitting up in bed.

"Mother?" said Bran.

Down the passage, behind Rickon's door, Shaggydog had begun to howl.

The dead wolf lay down beside the thing on the floor, licked her muzzle clean, and looked at Catelyn.

She had been under the bed, Catelyn understood. All night. Perhaps every night. Catelyn had sat a hand's breadth from her for seven nights and never once known.

The dagger lay on the stones where the dead man had dropped it. Even through the pain in her ruined hands, Catelyn could see the ripples in the steel. Valyrian. The hilt was carved dragonbone. It was worth more than every man in Winterfell's pay put together.

No footpad in the Seven Kingdoms owned such a knife.

* * *​

"The Lannisters," said Robb.

He said it as his father would have: flat, certain, and quiet. They were in the solar, five of them, with the dagger lying on the table between them on a square of oilcloth. Maester Luwin had stitched Catelyn's hands and wrapped them in linen, and they throbbed with every beat of her heart. Grey Wind would not lie down. He paced behind Robb's chair, back and forth, the whole time they talked.

"You can't know that," said Ser Rodrik, tugging at his white whiskers. "All we know is he'd had a room in the winter town since before the king rode south, and asked every traveler where the Stranger was, and whether he'd come back."

"I know what Father told me before he left." Robb's jaw was set, and Catelyn knew he meant the tower and the queen's oath, and that he would name neither with Theon Greyjoy at the window. "And the moment Asmodeus is gone north, a man with a Valyrian dagger comes for Bran in the night." He looked at Catelyn. "Tell me that's chance, Mother."

She couldn't.

"Or someone wants us to think it wasn't," said Theon Greyjoy from the window. He shrugged when they looked at him. "A knife like that leaves a trail a blind man could follow. If I wanted a boy dead and didn't want it laid at my door, I'd not send a footpad carrying a lord's dagger."

It was a cleverer thought than Catelyn would have given Theon credit for. She wished it comforted her.

"Either way," she said, "Ned must know."

"I'll send a raven," said Luwin.

"A raven can be shot down, Maester, and its letter read by whoever finds it." Catelyn looked down at her bandaged hands. "This isn't a thing to trust to a bird."

Robb said at once that he would go, and she said no, and they argued it for a while, and in the end she won, because she was right. Winterfell needed its lord more than Ned needed a messenger, and Robb was its lord now, whether he liked it or not. Ser Rodrik might have carried the dagger south without her. She did not tell them why she would not let him. As for Bran, the dead wolf had kept him better in one night than she had in seven.

"Can't he help?" Robb said, when the others had gone. He was looking at the floor, at his own shadow lying long and ordinary in the candlelight. "Iron, I mean. The thing in my shadow. It must be able to reach him somehow. I tried this morning. I stood in the godswood and talked to it like a fool." He swallowed. "It was like shouting down a well. I could feel it was there. It could hear me. But whatever it's tied to, on the other end, there's nothing. Only cold."

Catelyn thought of the Lord Commander's letter. A storm that does not move.

"He can't hear us," she said.

She had never thought of Asmodeus as a thing that could be made deaf. She did not know whether it frightened her or comforted her.

* * *​

She sailed from White Harbor on a Braavosi galley with Ser Rodrik and two guardsmen, was sick for eleven days, and came into King's Landing on a grey morning when the whole city smelled of fish and smoke and something rotting in the sun.

Petyr's men were waiting on the quay.

She did not know how he had known she was coming. There were four of them in grey cloaks, all bows and soft voices, and they had a closed litter and a note in a hand she knew from long ago, at Riverrun. Lord Baelish begs Lady Stark's indulgence. The city has too many eyes. Allow me to hide you where no one will think to look.

Where no one would think to look turned out to be a brothel.

"Forgive me," said Petyr Baelish, bowing over her bandaged hands in a room hung with silk the color of ripe peaches, while somewhere below a woman laughed. "It was the safest roof I own. No one comes here to be recognized."

He was still small and slight, still quick, with the same sly grey-green eyes she remembered from when they were children at Riverrun and he had followed her everywhere like a puppy. There was grey in his little pointed beard now, and his doublet was velvet, and a silver mockingbird pinned his cloak. He smiled the way he always had, with one corner of his mouth.

She showed him the dagger. She had meant to since Winterfell, so that she could watch him lie about it. She drew it from her sleeve and laid it on the table between them, and he went still.

"I know this blade," he said.

"Whose is it?"

"The king's." He turned it in the light, so the ripples in the steel moved like water. "It was mine once. I lost it at the tourney on Prince Joffrey's nameday. I bet it on Ser Jaime against the Knight of Flowers, and the king took the other side." He looked up at her, and his eyes were full of regret. "His Grace doesn't pack his own chests, Cat, or keep his own keys. Anyone close to him might have taken it." He let that lie a moment. "And who pours the king's wine?"

The queen. He had not said it. He had only laid it on the table beside the dagger, for her to pick up.

Before Asmodeus came, she would have picked it up at once. She would have believed it because Petyr said it, and Petyr had loved her, and she had never once in her life thought of Petyr Baelish as anything but a clever, sad boy who had loved her too much.

She loved someone long before she had a son.

She had heard it in Asmodeus's voice a hundred times since Lysa's letter came.

And with it, she remembered her sister at thirteen, flushed and giggling, trailing after Petyr through the yard at Riverrun. Lysa weeping for a week when he was sent away. Lysa on her wedding day, looking past old Jon Arryn's shoulder at the door, as though someone might yet come through it.

Because someone she loved asked her to.

Catelyn's face did not change. She had learned that much from Asmodeus, at least: how to keep her face still and let a man go on talking.

"You mean the queen," she said.

"I'm so sorry, Cat." Petyr covered her bandaged hand with his. His fingers were warm and dry. "I'd give a great deal for it to be anyone else."

"I know you would," said Catelyn.

Ned came an hour later, fetched by one of Petyr's grey cloaks. She would never forget his face when he saw her hands. He listened to all of it without a word: the fire, the dead man, the wolf. Petyr told him about the dagger. Ned looked at Catelyn across the peach-colored room, and she looked back.

At the end, for decency's sake, Petyr left them a few minutes alone on a narrow balcony above a narrow street. Catelyn waited until his footsteps had gone all the way down the stair.

"You heard him the night her letter came," she said, low. "Lysa loved someone long before she ever had a son. I didn't tell you the rest at Winterfell. It was a girl's memory and a riddle, and I wanted to see his face first."

Ned said nothing. He was watching her face.

"Petyr, Ned. When we were girls, Lysa would have walked into the Red Fork for him."

She watched him understand it.

"Then he wants us looking at the queen," he said.

"I don't know." She made herself say it. "It may be the one true thing he's told me in twenty years, so that I'll believe the next one. I can't tell anymore. I don't think I'm meant to."

Ned looked down into the street. A cart was going by below, piled high with cabbages.

"He holds the gold cloaks," he said at last. "The City Watch is his in all but name. I'll not lean on it. Send me two hundred swords from Winterfell, Cat, northmen who've never heard his name. They'll be a month on the road, so send them the day you're home. And I'll buy Slynt myself. The man's for sale to anyone; I'd sooner it was me."

"Then buy him," said Catelyn. "Don't trust him."

"I trust no one here." He took her ruined hands in his, careful of the stitches. "Asmodeus is gone north, Cat. The queen knows it. The whole court knows it. Every day he's gone, she grows a little bolder."

The girls were an hour's ride from this room, and she had not held either of them since the morning they rode out of Winterfell. "Let me see them," she said.

"It isn't safe." He did not soften it. "If you're seen, the queen will know why you came, and you'll never leave this city." He was quiet a moment. "Go home. Take ship if you can. If you ride, don't stop at the inn at the crossroads, whatever the weather."

"Why?"

"In the song, Petyr tells you that knife was the Imp's. You find the Imp at that inn on his way south from the Wall, and take him for it, and his father burns the riverlands to get him back." Ned looked down at her hands. "Petyr told you the truth this time, and I don't know why. I want you at Winterfell with the boys, where I know you're safe."

She went.

She meant to take ship. But there was no ship leaving for White Harbor for a week, and Catelyn could not bear another night in that city, so they rode north up the kingsroad instead, meaning to cut east for Maidenpool and find a ship there. They rode fast, and did not stop for anything, until the rain caught them at the crossroads.

* * *​

The inn at the crossroads was the only roof for twenty leagues, and it was full.

Ned had told her not to stop here. But Ser Rodrik had been coughing for two days, and the rain meant to go on all night, and what Ned feared of this place was a thing she would have to choose to do. She had no quarrel with the Imp. She went in.

It was a big, rambling, smoky place of old stone and older timber where the kingsroad met the river road, and the common room was crowded with men who had fled the rain: a knot of Bracken men-at-arms in red, a pair of Frey knights with the twin towers on their surcoats, a trader in a silk cloak. The innkeeper, a stout woman who chewed sourleaf and spat it red, found Catelyn a place by the fire only because Ser Rodrik put a silver stag in her hand. Catelyn kept her hood up. No one looked at her twice.

She had nearly finished a bowl of brown stew when a boy came in out of the rain, soaked to the skin, looked around the room, and came straight to her.

"You the lady with the hurt hands?" he said. "Man gave me a copper to bring you this. Said there'd be another if you read it."

It was a square of good parchment, folded twice and sealed with a blob of plain wax. The hand inside was small and neat.

My lady, it read. Some weeks ago, on top of the Wall, Asmodeus advised me not to stop at the inn at the crossroads, on account of the company. I have spent the whole ride south wondering who the company might be. Winterfell shut its gates on me as I passed, and would not say why, which did nothing for my peace of mind. Being incurably curious, I have camped at the ford these four nights and paid the bearer of this note a copper each evening to look through the inn's window. Tonight he described a lady in grey with bandaged hands and a knight with magnificent whiskers. I have therefore taken Asmodeus's advice and not stopped. I am a mile up the river road at the ford, beside a poor fire. If you would care to tell me what I am supposed to have done to you, I have wine.

Tyrion Lannister

Catelyn read it twice. Then she sat still, with the fire hot on one side of her face, and thought.

Asmodeus had warned him. On top of the Wall, with the haunted forest at his back and a storm waiting for him, he had taken the time to warn a Lannister, and he had warned him about her.

There was only one reason he would have done that. In the song, Ned had told her, she had come into this very room with a dagger in her sleeve and the Imp's name in her ear, and called on the Brackens and the Freys to seize the queen's brother, and they had done it.

And then his father had burned the riverlands to get him back, as Ned said: her father's lands, and everyone on them.

She looked down at the letter again. I have wine.

"Rodrik," she said. "Fetch the horses."

Tyrion Lannister's fire was every bit as poor as he had promised. It smoked and sputtered under an old oak at the edge of the ford, where the river road went down into the water, and he sat beside it on a saddle blanket with a wineskin in his lap and two hard-looking sellswords at his back. One of them had a crooked smile, and never took his eyes off Catelyn's guards.

"Lady Stark." Tyrion got to his feet and bowed, the full courtly depth, and meant it. "You came. I confess I'd have lost that wager."

Catelyn didn't answer. She drew the dagger from her sleeve and held it out to him across the fire, hilt first.

He took it and held it to the firelight, and she watched his face.

He looked curious, and then, as he turned the blade over, admiring. She saw no guilt, and no sign that he knew whose it was.

"Valyrian steel," he said. "A dragonbone hilt. This is a lord's knife, my lady, and a rich lord's at that. Where did you come by it?"

"From a man who tried to cut my son's throat with it." She held up her bandaged hands. "I stopped him. For a little while."

Tyrion looked at her hands, and the admiration went out of his face.

"And whose do they say it is?"

"Lord Baelish says it was his, once. He says he lost it at the tourney on Prince Joffrey's nameday, betting on your brother against the Knight of Flowers, and that the king took the other side." She kept her eyes on his. "Then he asked me who pours the king's wine."

Tyrion laughed. It was short and startled and entirely real.

"Then Lord Baelish has told you the truth," he said, "which ought to worry you a great deal more than a lie. I remember that tourney. I remember that bet. Littlefinger did wager this knife on Jaime, and the Knight of Flowers put Jaime in the dirt, and Robert collected, laughing so hard he nearly fell out of the royal box." He handed the dagger back across the fire.

"Robert always bets against Jaime. It's the only pleasure my brother has ever given him." Tyrion's mismatched eyes held hers. "He'll have tossed it in his baggage with a hundred other trophies and forgotten it by morning. And he brought his baggage north, my lady. To Winterfell, where anyone with the run of the king's rooms might walk in and help himself."

Catelyn pulled her cloak closer.

"The man had a room in our winter town," she said. "He'd had it since before the king rode south."

"Then he was hired at Winterfell, with the king's own knife," said Tyrion, "and told to wait."

"For word that Asmodeus had gone."

For a while neither of them said anything. Water ran over the stones of the ford.

"Before you left Winterfell," Catelyn said at last, "your sister swore an oath to Asmodeus. No one of her blood lifts a hand against a Stark. And if one of us dies, by any hand, he'll assume it was hers."

She had seen the queen go quiet at Winterfell whenever Asmodeus came into a room, and she watched Tyrion Lannister remember it.

"Then Cersei didn't send your catspaw," he said slowly. "Whatever else my sweet sister is, she isn't a fool, and I've never seen her so frightened of anything in her life. And Jaime —" He stopped. "No. Jaime would do it himself, and he wouldn't miss."

He stared into the fire. Catelyn watched him go down the list, one name after another. She saw him come to the bottom of it, and she saw that it hurt him.

"Someone of the king's blood," he said. "With the run of the king's baggage. Someone my sister would never have trusted with an oath like hers, and vain enough to think he'd be thanked for it." He laughed under his breath, with no humor in it. "At Winterfell my sister couldn't say the Stark boy without her voice going thin, and she said it at supper, in front of her children. Oh, Joff."

Tonight one of her guardsmen would ride south with Joffrey's name. When Ned had it, he would count the queen's oath broken, and be free of his word.

Tyrion looked up at her, and there was nothing clever left in his face.

"He said he'd assume it was us," Tyrion said. "If one of your children died."

"Yes."

"My lady," said Tyrion Lannister, "my nephew has just tried to murder my entire family."

 

[Abysseus]

Chapter Eleven: Daenerys

The Western Market smelled of cinnamon and horse dung and a dozen kinds of smoke, and everyone in it was talking about a dragon.

Dany had come down the godsway in the heat of the afternoon, with Ser Jorah at her side and Irri and Doreah behind her, and everywhere in the market, in the Common Tongue and the bastard Valyrian of the Free Cities, one word kept rising out of the noise. She heard it as she would have heard her own name.

Dragon.

Other women came to the Western Market for silk. Dany came for news of home. She was eighteen now, and khaleesi, and three moons gone with Khal Drogo's child, and she still came.

The loudest voice belonged to a Tyroshi spice merchant with a forked beard dyed green and blue. When he saw Dany he bowed until his beard brushed the dust, and began again, louder. He had plainly decided that a khaleesi who liked a tale might also like saffron.

"Three moons past, Khaleesi, a star fell in the Sunset Kingdoms." He spread his ringed hands. "Not a burning star, like the ones that fall in summer. A black one. It put out every star it crossed, and it came down in the far north, in the forests of the wolf lord."

Dany had seen it.

She had been awake on Magister Illyrio's terrace in Pentos the night before Viserys sold her, too frightened to sleep. A black line had drawn itself across the stars, low in the north and west, slow as a finger drawn through dust, and every star it touched went dark until it passed. Then it dropped behind the edge of the world without a sound. Viserys said it meant the gods had put out the Usurper's star. Dany had only thought that whatever it was, it would reach the Seven Kingdoms before she did, and she had been jealous of it, and ashamed of being jealous of a star.

"Out of the place where it fell," said the Tyroshi, "walked a man."

The Tyroshi knew the rest by heart. The man from the black star had raised a dead wolf out of the ice in front of the lord of the North himself, and she guarded the wolf lord's children still, black as pitch. He had eaten the wolf lord's bread and salt, and the smallfolk called him the Stranger, after the face of their Seven that comes for the dead. When the Usurper rode north, the Kingslayer had fought a knight of his in the castle yard: a knight in black armor, who stepped up out of the sorcerer's own shadow. And the Kingslayer, the finest sword in the Seven Kingdoms, had lost.

The Kingslayer had put his sword in her father's back. Dany found that she did not mind hearing that he had lost.

"And now, Khaleesi, the best of it." The Tyroshi leaned in, and the traders around him leaned in with him. "At the end of the world there is a Wall of ice seven hundred feet high, where the black crows keep their watch. One night the sorcerer came up out of the shadow of a young crow on top of that Wall, and called a dragon up out of his own shadow. A black dragon, great as a war galley. He flew north on it, beyond the Wall, into a storm that stands at the edge of the world and does not move, and he has not come back." He paused. "The Lord Commander of the crows saw it with his own eyes. The Old Bear, they call him. He gave the sorcerer his leave, and bade him go."

At Dany's side, Ser Jorah had gone still.

Irri spat in the dust and made the sign against the evil eye. "Maegi," she said, low. "The dead ride in the night lands, Khaleesi. A man who calls them back is maegi."

"Is he handsome?" asked Doreah, who was from Lys and asked it about every man in every story.

The Tyroshi laughed. "Like a god in a temple window, sweet one, or so the sailors say. They say every woman who sees him wants him, and every man wants him gone."

Dany knew what she would want. She would want the dragon.

"Black," she said. It came out quieter than she meant it to. "You're certain it was black?"

"Black as night, Khaleesi."

Black as Balerion, Dany thought: the greatest of Aegon's dragons, whose skull had hung in the Red Keep until the Usurper had it taken down because he could not bear to look at it.

"Has he a name," she asked, "this sorcerer?"

"Asmodeus, he calls himself." The Tyroshi shrugged. "I had the Wall from a Braavosi captain who put in at Eastwatch and drank with the crows for a week, and the rest from half the ships in Pentos. The whole narrow sea talks of nothing else."

Dany had Ser Jorah give him a silver coin for the tale. The Tyroshi tried to sell her saffron as well. She bought some.

Ser Jorah did not speak until they were clear of the stalls. He kept his eyes on the road, as he always did, but she could see he was thinking of something else.

"The Old Bear," Dany said. "Ser Jorah, isn't your father —"

"Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. Yes, Khaleesi."

"Then is it true?"

He took his time answering. "I don't know. Tales grow in the telling, and that captain spent a week drinking with the crows."

"Would your father lie?"

"My father has never told a lie in his life." Ser Jorah looked away, toward the gate and the grass beyond it, green and gold to the edge of the sky. "That was always the trouble between us."

Dany didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing.

The last dragon had died a hundred and fifty years ago, no bigger than a mastiff. Viserys had wept for the dragons, and Dany had wept for them too, when she was small, for no better reason than that he did.

And somewhere at the end of the world, if the tale was true, a black one was flying.

Viserys would have heard by now. He spent his days in the Western Market, drinking with the traders on credit he didn't have. The whole market had heard.

That evening, crossing to her own tent, she saw a lamp burning in Ser Jorah's. He sat beneath it with a writing board across his knees, writing slowly. Dany had never seen him write anything. She could not read the page from where she stood, and did not need to; there was only one thing anyone in Vaes Dothrak had talked about all day. She watched him sand the page and fold it small, and carry it out himself to a Pentoshi trader at the next fire, with a coin and two words she heard plainly across the dark: King's Landing.

She did not ask him who he knew there.

* * *​

That night she dreamed of the dragon.

She had dreamed it since her wedding, and it had never once frightened her. In the dream she was the dragon, and the dragon was her. She flew west over the poison water with the sun on her back and the wind roaring under her wings, toward a land she had never seen and knew anyway: green hills, a red castle above a river, a road running north forever into the snow. There was a fire in her belly, and it was hers. Nothing in the world could touch her.

This time the sun went out.

A shadow fell across her from above. She looked up; she could not help it. Something hung between her and the sky, so vast she could not find its edges, black as the gaps between the stars, and in the black were two eyes that burned. It did not strike at her. It only looked.

Dany felt her own neck bend.

Her wings folded without her leave. Her head went down. High over the poison water, the dragon that was her bowed like a slave before a master, and she screamed with fury, and the scream came out of her as fire, and still she could not lift her head —

She woke with the black egg in her arms.

She had taken to sleeping with it. All three eggs were warm to her touch, warmer than stones had any right to be, and the black one, with its ripples of scarlet, was the warmest of them. Tonight, for the space of a heartbeat, it was cold as snowmelt. Then the warmth came back into it under her hands, slowly, and she could not have said whether she had dreamed that too.

She lay in the dark with her heart pounding and shook with a rage she had no name for, and only slowly did she understand that someone else was there.

Viserys knelt beside her chests with his back to her. He had the lid of the carved one open, and his hands were inside it, where the green egg and the cream egg lay nested in velvet.

"Put them back," Dany said.

He turned. By the embers of the brazier his face was all bones and hunger. People used to call him beautiful, she remembered. He reeked of wine.

"You heard," he said. "Don't lie to me, sweet sister. The whole Western Market heard. A black dragon, Dany." He laughed, too loud for the tent. "Do you know what a black dragon means?"

She knew what he wanted her to say, so she didn't say it.

"Blackfyre," said Viserys. "A black dragon on a red field. Bastards. Five times they rose with their stolen dragon on their banners, and five times our blood put them down. And now some bastard of theirs has a real one."

"Ser Barristan killed the last of the Blackfyres on the Stepstones before you were born," Dany said. "You told me so yourself."

"Then another has crawled out of the mud. They always do." He had the green egg in his hands now, holding it up to the embers. "A bastard with a dragon under him, and Eddard Stark feeding him bread and salt. The Usurper's dog, with a dragon in his kennels. And I'm to sit in this dung heap while your savage finds his courage?" His voice cracked. "I'll sell them. There are men in the Western Market who'll pay for the eggs of Valyria in ships and swords. I'll cross the sea, and when I come, the black dragon will know me. It's ours, Dany. It will kneel to the blood of the dragon."

In her dream, it had not been the black thing that knelt.

"They're mine," Dany said. "They were my bride gift."

"Everything you have is mine!" He was on his feet. "You're mine. I sold you. I can —"

"Put them back, brother." She did not raise her voice; she had learned that from Khal Drogo. "Put them back, or I'll call the khal's bloodriders, and you'll walk again, all the way to the Western Market and back."

He stared at her. For a moment she saw it under the wine and the hunger and the rage: he was afraid of her. It should have made her glad. It didn't.

He put the green egg back in its velvet. His hands were shaking.

"I'll have my crown," he said. "Tomorrow, at the feast. Your horselord promised it. Tomorrow, Dany, or I'll take what's mine. All of it." Then he was gone, and the hanging fell shut behind him.

Dany sat on the edge of her bed with the black egg in her lap until the embers died. It was warm again. It was always warm. She held it against her belly, where her son was, and did not sleep again.

* * *​

The stallion's heart was still warm.

They brought it to her at dawn at the foot of the Mother of Mountains, where the dosh khaleen waited in a crooked row. It was near as big as her own head, and it steamed in the cold air. She must eat all of it, and not gag or stop, or the omens would turn against her son.

She lifted it in both hands and bit.

It fought her. The meat was tough as saddle leather, and the blood ran down her chin and dripped from her elbows onto the grass. She thought of her brother on his knees with his hands among her eggs, and bit down. She thought of her own neck bending in the dream, and bit down harder. Somewhere past the middle she stopped tasting it at all.

When the last of it was gone, she stood with her hands red to the elbows and lifted her chin.

"Khalakka dothrae mr'anha!" she cried. A prince rides inside me!

The khalasar roared it back to her, a hundred throats and then a thousand, and the crones named him the stallion who mounts the world. Dany named him Rhaego, for Rhaegar, the brother she had never known. Drogo came to her through the shouting and laid his hand on her belly, and for a while she forgot everything else.

The eldest crone found her afterward, while Irri and Jhiqui washed the blood from her arms. The old woman had one good eye; the other was clouded and blind. She took Dany's wet wrist in her dry fingers and held it hard.

"We read the stars, Khaleesi," she said. Her voice was thin and hoarse. "Every star in the sky. The dosh khaleen have read them since before there were khals." The good eye did not blink. "Before you came to the khal, a star fell black. We could not read it."

"What does that mean?" Dany asked.

"It means the stars do not know its name."

The crone let go of her wrist and walked away, and did not look back.

Viserys had not come to see his nephew named.

The feast was held that night in the great hall at the foot of the mountain, where whole horses turned on spits over a fire that ran the length of the floor. Dany sat beside Drogo with her arms scrubbed pink and her belly full of heart.

Viserys came when the feast was half done. She heard him before she saw him, too loud at the doorway, and then he was coming up the hall in his faded silks with his sword on his hip, the one thing he had never pawned. He came all the way to the cushions around the khal and looked for his place among them.

There was none. His place, one of Drogo's riders told him in Dothraki, was at the far end of the hall, behind the dogs. The riders nearest him laughed.

Dany didn't translate. Viserys understood the laughter.

He drew his sword.

The drums stopped. No blade could be drawn in Vaes Dothrak, and every rider in the hall stared at the naked steel in her brother's hand.

"I'm done waiting," said Viserys. The point of the sword wandered, and found Dany. "Twenty years I've waited. And now the whole Western Market says the Usurper's wolves have a dragon. A black dragon, and a bastard sorcerer to ride it. And I'm to sit here and wait?" He laughed. "That dragon is mine by blood. When I come home, it will kneel to me."

The sword point came to rest a finger's breadth from her belly.

"Tell him I want my crown," Viserys said, "or I'll take you back, you and the eggs. He can keep the whelp. I'll cut it out of you and leave it for him."

Dany looked at the sword, and then at her brother's face above it, and found that she wasn't afraid. She told Drogo in Dothraki what Viserys had said, and did not soften a word.

Khal Drogo listened. Then he said something to Viserys, and smiled.

"He says you shall have your crown," Dany told her brother. "A golden crown that men will tremble to behold."

Viserys's face lit up like a boy's. The sword point sank. "That's all I wanted," he said. "What was promised."

Qotho and Haggo took his arms.

He was still smiling when they twisted his wrists behind his back and the sword fell ringing to the floor. Drogo rose, unfastened his belt of gold medallions, and dropped it into an iron cookpot at the edge of the fire.

Then Viserys understood.

"No," he said. "No. Dany. Dany. Tell him. Tell him I'm your brother, I'm the dragon, tell him —"

Dany said nothing. She watched the gold run.

Drogo lifted the pot off the fire and walked to where his bloodriders held her brother. Viserys screamed. Then the gold came down over his head like a crown, and the scream stopped, and there was only a sound Dany would never forget, like water thrown on a hearth.

He fell. The gold was already dulling on his face.

He was no dragon, Dany thought, and her heart did not even quicken. Fire cannot kill a dragon.

She found herself wondering what could.

 

[kair0001]

I'll be really honest because this is the first solo leveling and Asoiaf crossover I read.

It was interesting at first but then got confusing. Everything move so fast its only lucky you didn't said how many weeks or days pass like other authors would do.

It was wise to use the scenes. But then pacing is still thrown out the window and I still don't understand why he would go far north.

I also praise you for not nurfing him, that is ball of steel not to do that, but I think you should have focus more on the slice of life.

When he came with the army of the monarch. There is no scale anymore. Nothing could challenge him. I like what was in the summary him protecting the stark. And every other faction testing his boundary and patient. Late to realize the power he holds.

Also you are in paradox of either him not killing the white walker soon or buff the white walkers.