Chapter 213

The North. Winterfell. 300 AC.

Jon Snow.

Even in the darkest, grimmest of times, some ray of good news manages to find its way through. For Jon, that had become Robb’s return home to Winterfell. Ironborn to the west, free pirates to the east, bandits within the region itself, a horde of wildlings beyond the Wall, and the White Walkers marching behind them. Add to that the battered state of their army and economy, and the future looked frightening indeed to even imagine. Life had never prepared a simple bastard for something like this. Responsibility bore down on his shoulders like an unmovable mountain, and he was glad, at least, to share that burden with his brother.

“They’re coming!” a boy shouted from atop the castle walls.

A stream of riders poured through the castle gates, swelling into a river of grey steel. Some five hundred swords in all: knights, freeriders, sellswords, everyone who had answered Winterfell’s call and ridden south to war all those years ago. They looked worn thin, faces hollowed out, eyes heavy with exhaustion. It was the same thing Jon saw in the mirror every single day, a man who had walked the edge more times than he could count. Above the column, the northern wind snapped at a pair of grey direwolf banners. The new lord of the castle had come home.

Jon knew many of the North’s noble houses well. With some he’d even forged a kind of friendship, which only made it more painful now to see familiar faces and come up short by dozens more who had fallen on foreign soil. Here stood the ones who had survived, led by a tall man with red hair that seemed almost unfamiliar to Jon… until the man pulled him into an embrace, and those blue eyes looked straight into his.

“Jon, good to see you.” Robb had grown up, that old boyish simplicity was gone, replaced now by a hard won understanding of responsibility. “More scars?”

It was an innocent enough question, but the phantom ache in his own scar howled back to life with fresh intensity. A good deal of time had passed, but the wound from that awakened myth’s weapon had never once stopped aching, never stopped radiating cold. It didn’t matter where Jon was, what he was doing, or when it happened, that soul deep cold never truly left him.

“Not the only one who’s picked up a few,” Snow shot back with a smile. “Winterfell is yours, Lord Stark.”

“Let’s not waste time, come down to the crypts, we need to talk.” Robb had already started toward the tombs of the Kings of Winter, but a voice Jon despised tried to stop them in their tracks.

Catelyn Stark had aged, more lines etched into her face now, streaks of grey woven through her hair, but her eyes remained exactly as they’d always been. Vile, contemptuous, dismissive. She drenched the bastard in a full measure of scorn. Had this happened a couple of years earlier, Jon would have dropped his gaze to the floor and tried to slip away as fast as he could. It wasn’t fitting, after all, for a “stain on honor” to defile the sight of the Lady of Winterfell. Now, though, he couldn’t have cared less. Not after everything he’d endured, endless battles against men and against monsters of ice alike. He wasn’t about to start fearing Lady Stark now.

“Robb,” the woman broke the standoff first, “we’ve ridden day and night, you need rest.” He said nothing in reply, simply ignoring his mother’s words entirely.

The brothers walked in silence down the steep stone steps, Jon leading the way, lantern in hand. The cold of the deep earth wrapped comfortably around the sons of the wolf’s house. Shadows shifted and stirred around them. The flickering light brushed against the stones underfoot, tracing out a long procession of granite pillars marching forward into the dark in pairs. Between the pillars, statues of the dead sat on stone thrones against the wall, their backs pressed against the tombs that held their mortal remains.

It was always cold down here, and with winter’s arrival, the usual chill had dropped sharply further still. Silence, hundreds of dead Starks, and the cold itself, the eternal hallmarks of this crypt. To anyone else, the place would have felt thoroughly uninviting, but to the two of them… As children, they’d played hide and seek down here whenever they wanted to slip free of the adults watching over them, or fled here whenever some prank of theirs came to light. The crypt had always been, to them, an irrationally reliable refuge.

Jon stopped before the final tomb and raised his oil lantern. Here the sealed tombs came to an end, but the crypt stretched on further still, gaping black hollows waiting for their future occupants: Robb, his children, and his children’s children after him. Jon himself wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that he wouldn’t be among them when his own time came.

“…Looks like him…” Standing before their father’s empty grave brought nothing but a dull ache in the chest and some deep sense of wrongness. “Has anyone written anything about father’s remains?”

“No, not a single word.” Their father’s body had never been found on the battlefield. For the first few weeks, he’d told himself his father had simply fled, but the months of waiting that followed had revealed the bitter truth: he was dead, lost somewhere on foreign soil.

They stood in silence for a few minutes, but it wasn’t a heavy silence, nor an awkward one. No, it was a comfortable kind of quiet.

“What happened beyond the Wall?”