GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 5: FOUNDATIONS AND FIRST FIRES
CHAPTER 1: SIX MONTHS OF GROWTH
The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
— Japanese proverb
The water buckets were heavy, and Jon was glad of it.
Heavy work gave a boy a reason to look tired, and looking tired was becoming one of the harder parts of his day.
He carried them across the lower yard the way any castle child carried them, shoulders bent, steps short, splashing a little at the corners where the cold cobbles never quite dried.
Around him Winterfell went about its morning.
A groom led a string of horses toward the gate.
Two kitchen girls hurried past with a basket of onions between them and did not spare him a glance.
Somewhere behind the walls a smith’s hammer had already started, patient and even, ringing the hour the way the sun never quite managed this far north.
He let the six months run through his head while his arms did the work, because it was the only time of day no one thought it strange to see him staring at nothing.
Half a year, near enough, since he had woken twice and come out the far side one person.
It had not been idle time.
The first month had been the worst of it — five grown men awake in the Reserve and ten acres of black soil that held nothing yet, five stomachs he had pulled out of that impossible dark and made himself responsible for.
He had spent his gold to keep them alive.
Ten dragons to put the fields in.
Four for a full-grown black steer, bought to be butchered, not kept, so it never touched one of his two precious livestock slots.
One more for a ton of mixed grain to bridge the weeks.
A half-dragon for a single chick.
Fifteen and a half gone before the first seed sprouted, and four and a half left, and a cold few weeks of wondering whether he had counted right.
He had counted right.
The fields came in at a month, the way the Reserve did everything, eight times faster than the honest world outside.
After that first harvest he never had to buy food in quantity again.
He had bought the cow then, a grown milking cow for the second slot, and the thing had turned itself into a small working farm almost faster than he could keep books on it.
A guard’s voice cut across the yard — “mind the gate, boy” — and Jon minded the gate, and stopped thinking until the man had passed, because a child who walked through chores with a captain’s faraway eyes was a child someone remembered later.
He set the buckets down by the trough and straightened his back, and that was when the water showed him the thing that put a crack in his good morning.
The sun had come round the tower and struck the trough flat, turning the surface to a sheet of bright silver, and in it he caught his own face looking up.
Grey eyes.
Stark grey, the same as always.
Except that for two or three seconds, with the light lying across the water just so, the grey was not only grey.
There were flecks in it.
A faint ring, deep down, the color of a bruise going purple.
A shimmer under the surface of the iris that had no business being there.
Jon went very still.
He held the look for the space of three heartbeats — long enough to be sure he had truly seen it, not a moment longer — and then he lowered his eyes to the buckets as though nothing had happened, and picked them up, and carried the water where it was meant to go.
His face did not change.
His hands did not shake.
Only his mind, underneath, had gone quiet and fast the way it did when a plan met something it had not planned for.
Later, when the yard emptied for the midday meal and no one was near the trough, he came back and looked again, on purpose, tilting his head to catch the light.
Fainter, without the full sun.
But real.
Not a trick of a tired eye.
A color that was rising in him slowly, from somewhere in his blood, and pushing up through the grey.
He knew what it might mean.
He needed to keep out of bright light with his face turned up.
Stay clear of still water when others were near enough to look.
Let his gaze fall naturally, the way a modest bastard’s ought to, and never in a way that looked like hiding.
Watch it, privately, and tell no one, and wait to learn what it was before he let it become a thing worth fearing.
It was the first crack.
He did not yet know how many more the day would show him.
He went into the Reserve that night, as he did most nights, once the latch was set and the corridor had gone quiet.
The change from cold stone to warm clean air still eased something in his chest every time.
And there was the cabin, its window lit, and the low sound of five grown men who had made a life in an impossible place and were, against every guard he tried to keep up, glad to see him.
“There he is,” said Aldric, from the pot he was bent over.
He was the broad one, the swordsman, and he had somehow appointed himself the judge of every new thing that came out of the kitchen.
He held out a wooden spoon with a pale smear on it.
“Try this. Tell me that’s not the best batch yet.”
“That’s the fourth time this week you’ve said ‘best batch yet,'” said Brennan from the corner, not looking up from the arrow he was fletching.
The archer said most things quietly, and most of them were funnier than they sounded.
“At this rate the butter will be perfect by the time we’re all dead of it.”
“He’s checking whether it’s fit to eat,” said Doran, dry as sawdust, planing a new leg for a chair no one had asked him to fix.
“He’s been checking whether things are fit to eat since we woke up. It’s a wonder there’s any left to sell.”
Aldric ignored all of them with the dignity of a much-slandered man, and Jon took the spoon and tasted, and it was, in fact, good — fresh sweet butter churned from cream a cow had given only that outside day, when eight of the animal’s days had passed in it.
“It’s good,” Jon admitted, and Aldric looked so vindicated that Brennan had to leave the room.
This was the part he had not planned for.
Not the farm — he had planned the farm down to the acre.
He had divided the ten acres so they fed both people and beasts, wheat and barley and oats, beans and corn and roots and a strip of hay, a corner for the vegetables and a corner for trying things, and he adjusted it every month by what he needed and what the market paid.
Six harvests in six months had turned four and a half gold into something near a hundred and twenty, and he had already started dividing that hoard by purpose the way Elena had once divided coins into jars — a reserve he would not touch, money set aside against the ship he’d someday need, money for tools, for seed, for the day he had more mouths than five.
Money without a purpose, he had learned in two lives now, was money already half spent.
No, the part he had not planned for was this.
The teasing.
The pot on the stove and the chair being mended and the way a room of tired men could make a home out of almost nothing.
He had woken them to be a foundation.
He had not expected them to feel like one.
They sat to eat, the six of them, and the hen’s eggs came round, and the old argument came round with them.
“You’ve two,” Jon said, looking at his plate, where two eggs sat against the one on every other plate.
“You’ve two,” Eryn agreed.
He was the oldest of them, the horseman, grey coming in at his temples, and when he spoke the others tended to quiet.
“You’ll eat both.”
“A commander doesn’t eat better than his men.”
“You are still growing.” Eryn said it without heat, the way he said most true things.
“You nearly died six months ago. Eat the eggs.”
“It isn’t fair.”
“A commander who weakens himself while everyone depends on him is not being fair.” Eryn leaned back.
“He is being foolish. You’re no use to any of us dead of your own pride, boy. Eat.”
Jon ate the eggs.
He told himself he gave in to end the argument.
The truth, which he turned over quietly and did not say aloud, was that no one in his first life had fought him to eat more since a woman in a yellow kitchen, and being fought over like that — being worth the trouble of it — was a strange, warm ache he did not entirely trust and could not entirely refuse.
That was the thing he kept circling, in the dark after they slept and he sat up doing his sums.
The system had told him, that first day, that these five were loyal to him.
A line in a ledger.
He had promised himself then not to trust a loyalty he had not earned.
But six months in, he no longer knew what to call it.
Eryn watching whether he ate.
Doran fixing the cabin a little better every week without being asked, and never mentioning it.
Brennan, who noticed the day Jon’s mood went dark before Jon himself had noticed.
Caelan, who asked him long strange questions about the sea and about the far-off place Jon sometimes forgot he wasn’t supposed to remember, always when everyone else was too tired to answer.
Was that the system’s doing?
Or had five real men, given real time and real work and a boy who tried to be worth following, simply become his?
He did not know.
He suspected the honest answer was that it had started as one and was quietly turning into the other, and that he would only be sure of it the first time one of them had a reason to leave and stayed anyway.
They trained after, most nights, because a foundation of food was no good without a body that could use it.
Time did not run fast for people in the Reserve, only for growing things, so an hour of training cost him a true hour of sleep, and he could not simply drill until dawn.
He kept a rotation instead — the sword one night, the bow another, balance, tools, the theory of horses, and rest when his small body demanded it, which was more often than his old mind liked.
Aldric drilled him with a child’s wooden sword and would not let him cheat.
The worst of it was that Jon knew — knew a dozen ways to move that his body simply could not yet perform, footwork and angles worn into another man’s muscle over thirty years, and now trapped behind five-year-old arms that shook after a hundred slow strikes.
“You’re angry again,” Aldric observed one night, watching him fumble a guard he could have held in his sleep, once.
“I know how to do this.”
“Knowing what your body should do,” Aldric said, “does not mean your body is ready to do it. You’ve the map. You’ve not built the road yet. So we build it. Slow. Again.”
Jon built it slow.
Again.
And again.
And hated it, and did it, because Aldric was right and hating a true thing did not make it less true.
Brennan was gentler about the bow and somehow harder to satisfy.
He would stop Jon mid-draw the instant the boy’s elbow dropped or his breath went ragged, and make him lower the bow and start clean.
“You want to loose it badly, so you rush the last part,” he said.
“Don’t. A bad habit becomes harder to remove every time you practice it. I would rather you draw ten times right than a hundred times wrong. The hundred wrong ones you’ll have to un-learn, and un-learning costs double.”
Caelan taught him to keep his feet under a shifting world — narrow beams, a rolling log, boards that gave when you least expected — and to right himself without looking down, and to stay calm the moment he slipped instead of grabbing.
Between falls he taught the beginnings of the sea: which side was port and which starboard, how a sail took the wind, how a deck moved differently under a sailor than under a passenger who did not trust it.
Jon soaked that up harder than Caelan knew, because Caelan did not yet know about an island past every trusted map, and Jon did not tell him.
Doran’s lessons he loved and was almost ashamed to love.
The builder started him on nothing grander than how to hold a tool without ruining it — keep it clean, check the wood for cracks before you trusted it, measure before you cut, mend a thing before you threw it out, and never, ever rush.
It was the plainest teaching of the five and it went straight through Jon to two people who were dead.
Gerald in an oil-smelling workshop, showing a wary foster boy that a thing made well was a kind of prayer.
Elena, who had thrown nothing away that could be understood instead.
He did not tell Doran that either.
But those nights he went back to his cold chamber steadier than any drilling left him.
And Eryn, who had no horse to give him yet and so taught the theory of them — how a horse thinks, how fear moves through it, how to read its ears — mostly used their time to take apart Jon’s plans.
Whatever scheme Jon laid out, Eryn would hear it through, nod slowly, and ask the same quiet question.
“And if that fails?”
Every time.
And if that fails?
Until Jon stopped bringing him plans with only one road in them, and started building the second road and the third before Eryn could ask, and knew, though he never said so, that Eryn had become the voice in his ear that a woman in a burning house had once tried to leave him — always know your way out.
The trouble came, as trouble did, from being seen.
He could hide the Reserve.
He could not hide what it did to him.
Six months of eggs and milk and beef and bread, of butter on his porridge and cheese folded into his stew — even eating most of it out of Winterfell’s sight, even taking smaller portions than Robb at the public table for the look of it — six months of that had built a different boy.
He stood straighter.
His skin had cleared. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
He had muscle where a bastard fed on scraps should have had none, and wind that did not give out, and he had crept up and past Robb in height though Robb ate a lord’s son’s fill and Jon, in the eyes of the household, did not.
People noticed a thing like that, even when they could not name what they noticed.
Catelyn noticed first, and worst.
He felt her watching him across the yard more than once — a cool, exact attention that catalogued him and did not like the sum.
She knew he took less food in public and did more work and had, by every rule she understood, no business being the healthier of the two boys.
He could all but hear the theories forming behind her still face.
That the kitchens were slipping him food.
That the northern servants hid bread for him.
That Ned was helping in secret.
That he stole.
She did not know which, and the not-knowing was its own insult to a woman used to understanding her own household, and Jon knew from long study of unsafe adults that a person who could not explain you often decided, in the end, simply to be rid of the confusion.
The confusion sharpened into something he could be accused of over the scrap.
He had begun, quietly, pulling metal out of the castle’s refuse — bent cups, cracked buckles, a rusted hinge, a snapped tool-head, the small broken iron a great house threw away without a thought.
He wanted it to learn on: to practice mending, to understand how Westerosi smiths worked their metal, to have material to hand when the day came that he needed to make and not only buy.
He took only what had already been cast off, and he carried it, when no one watched, into the Reserve.
Someone watched.
The first accusation was quiet — a Riverland servant muttering to another that the bastard was pocketing what wasn’t his.
The second was not quiet at all.
It came in the yard, in front of a half-dozen witnesses, a loud finger pointed at a five-year-old and the word thief thrown hard enough to turn heads.
Jon did not flinch and did not shout.
He had watched a woman he loved talk a violent man down off a ledge more than once, and he had learned in two lives that the calm voice usually won the room from the loud one.
“The things I carried were on the refuse pile,” he said, plainly, to the man and to the yard both.
“Already thrown away. I opened no locked door. I took nothing set aside for anyone. If Lord Stark wishes to search my chamber, he is welcome to it. He’ll find nothing there that another man wanted.”
They searched.
They found nothing anyone had wanted.
And the accusation, having nowhere to land, curdled instead into resentment, which was worse, because resentment did not need evidence.
Ned made it worse still by being fair.
He heard of it and came down hard on the accusers — not gently.
A bastard birth was not proof of a bastard’s crime, he told them, in the flat voice he used when his patience had a floor and they had found it.
Accusations wanted evidence.
Servants of his house did not invent crimes to be rid of a boy they disliked.
Jon was under his protection, and would remain so.
It was the right thing, and it helped Jon, and it cost him.
Because the Riverland folk who served Catelyn heard a lord shield his bastard over their own word, and drew exactly the lesson Jon feared.
That the boy had Ned’s ear and used it.
That the northern servants closed ranks around him.
That the bastard was somehow protected past his station — and that accusing him openly only brought a lord’s displeasure down on the accuser.
They would not stop watching him.
They would only get quieter about it.
He went into the Reserve that night with another piece of broken iron in his fist and a great deal to think about.
He crossed to the storehouse and let the scrap go into the dark, onto the growing pile of metal he had been so pleased to be collecting a week ago.
Doran had come to stand near him, wiping his hands on a rag, watching the boy more than the pile.
“Is the scrap worth the attention?” the builder asked.
Not a challenge.
An honest question, one craftsman to another.
Jon looked at the heap of broken things he had gathered — every piece of it truly worthless, truly discarded, truly his by any fair reckoning — and understood that fairness had nothing to do with it.
He had been watching what other people threw away.
He had not been watching who was watching him.
“Not,” he said slowly, “if they begin watching what I keep instead of what they throw away.”
Doran grunted, which from Doran was agreement, and went back to his chair.
Jon stood a moment longer over the dark, and put the last lesson of the day beside the others he had collected that morning.
The eyes in the trough.
His own too-straight back.
The word thief in a crowded yard.
All of it the same lesson, wearing different clothes.
He had spent six months believing he had built something invisible — a hidden life, a secret farm, a quiet routine that left no mark on the world.
And it was a good life, the best he had known in either of them; he would not give up a day of it.
But it was not invisible.
It had never been invisible.
Every egg he ate showed in his face.
Every hour he trained showed in his height.
Every advantage he gathered left a trace behind it, and the traces were beginning to add up in the minds of people who wished him ill.
He would collect less scrap, and vary his habits, and be more careful of the light on his face.
That would help.
But the true thing, the rule under the small corrections, he said to himself plainly, so he would not forget it when the next good fortune tempted him to grow careless:
Every advantage leaves evidence.
The trick of the years ahead would not be growing strong.
That part, it turned out, was easy.
The trick would be growing strong without anyone seeing him do it.