GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 5: FOUNDATIONS AND FIRST FIRES
CHAPTER 2: THE BROKEN LUTE
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
— Victor Hugo
Winterfell wasted almost nothing, and least of all wood.
Broken chairs, split shafts, the cracked boards of a ruined chest — all of it came, in the end, to the pile by the disposal yard, to be sorted for mending or kindling or the fire.
Jon passed it near every day, and near every day it held nothing but the ordinary wreckage of a great house.
On this day it held a lute.
He stopped as though he’d walked into a wall.
It lay half under a broken stool, neck-up, and even from a stride away he could see it was finished — the neck cracked clean through near the head, three of its strings gone, two pegs snapped, a seam along the body sprung loose so the wood gaped.
Scratches and old water-stains had eaten most of whatever painted vine had once curled around the sound-hole.
To every soul in Winterfell who had walked past it that morning, it was firewood that happened to have strings.
To Jon it was a door swinging open onto a room he had not let himself enter in a very long time.
He remembered a kitchen with yellow light and a woman humming over a pot, tapping the rhythm out on the table’s edge with two fingers.
He remembered a boy, later, older, learning to lay his fingers on a guitar’s neck in the quiet hours between deployments, badly at first and then not badly.
He remembered playing alone in barracks.
He remembered playing at a grave, in the cold, because there had been nothing left to say and the only way he had ever known to say the unsayable was to play it.
Music had been the one door in Damien through which grief was allowed to walk out instead of only in.
He wanted the lute.
He wanted it with a suddenness that startled him.
And he did not reach for it.
Six months ago he might have.
A month ago, even.
But a month ago he had been called thief in a crowded yard over broken iron that no one wanted, and had learned, the hard way, that a bastard did not get to simply take things off a pile, however cast off, however worthless, without someone deciding it proved what they already believed.
He had made himself a rule out of it.
Every advantage left evidence.
So would this, if he took it wrong.
He would take it right.
The servant who kept the disposal yard was a stooped man with a bad shoulder who fed the fires and sorted the scrap, and he squinted down at Jon with the flat suspicion the Riverland folk had all started wearing around him.
“That lute,” Jon said, plainly, pointing.
“The broken one. May I have it?”
“That lute’s firewood.” The man scratched his jaw.
“Firewood’s worth something, cold as it gets. Even a bad bit of it.”
“Then I’ll replace it.” Jon met the look without flinching.
“I’ll bring you as much good wood as that would burn. More. Cut and stacked. A fair trade, in front of anyone you like.”
The man plainly thought he was simple.
But a trade was a trade, and there was no loss in it for him, so he shrugged his good shoulder and said the boy could try.
Jon tried.
He spent the better part of an afternoon at it — hauling deadfall from the wood store, splitting what needed splitting with a hatchet almost too big for his hands, carrying it an armload at a time, stacking it neat and square the way Doran had taught him to stack anything, until the pile he’d brought was plainly worth more than one ruined lute would ever be as fuel.
His arms shook by the end.
Blisters rose and broke on both palms.
Two of the Riverland squires watched a while and laughed at him, a small lord’s bastard sweating like a woodcutter over a bit of junk not worth the splinters.
Jon let them laugh.
Let them see it, all of it — the work, the sweat, the fairness of it.
Let them carry back to whoever sent them that the bastard had bought the broken thing with honest labor, in the open, and stolen nothing.
The mockery cost him nothing.
The proof was worth everything.
When the last armload was stacked, the yard-keeper looked at the pile, and looked at the lute, and handed the wreck over without another word.
Jon carried it to his chamber like something that might still break, which it might, and did not let himself smile until the door was shut.
That night he brought it into the Reserve, and put it into the one pair of hands he trusted with it.
Doran took the lute the way he took everything, without hurry — turned it over, ran a thumb down the cracked neck, pressed the heel of his hand against the sprung seam and watched how the wood answered, pried gently at the two broken pegs.
The others had gone quiet at their end of the cabin, curious.
Jon stood and made himself wait and did not ask, because you did not rush Doran and get a true answer.
At last the builder set it flat on the table.
“It can be fixed,” he said.
Something in Jon’s chest unknotted.
“How much work?”
“More than you think.” Doran’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
“Less than whoever threw it away believed.” He turned the lute so Jon could see.
“Neck’s cracked, but clean — a clean break takes glue better than a splintered one. Three strings gone, we’ll buy those. Two pegs to carve new. This seam here’s pulled loose and wants closing. The wood’s dry, but it’s not rotten. Dry wood you can save. Rotten wood lies to you.” He tapped the body.
“We fix the wood first. All of it. Then the strings, last. Put strings on a hurt neck and tighten them, and you’ll pull it apart worse than it came to you. It has to be strong before it has to sing.”
Jon nodded.
He understood, without being told, that Doran was not only talking about the lute.
He was fairly sure Doran knew it too.
They repaired it over four sessions, across as many nights, and Jon came to look forward to them more than to anything else in his careful, measured days.
The first night was only cleaning.
They took off the old dead strings and wiped away years of dirt, cleared the grime out of the crack, checked the loose seam, cut away the little that was too far gone and saved the rest. This chapter was taken from novelping dot com without permission.
Jon wanted to get to the mending.
Doran would not be hurried.
“Dirt hides damage,” the builder said, working a rag into the sound-hole.
“Clean it first. Then decide what it needs. You go looking for the break before you’ve cleaned the wound, you’ll fix the wrong thing and miss the right one.”
Jon went still over the lute.
It was, near enough word for word, a thing a big man in an oil-smelling workshop had once told him about an engine, a lifetime and a world ago.
He said nothing.
He only cleaned, the way he’d been shown twice now, by two men who would have liked each other.
The second night was the neck.
They fit the cracked halves back true, and Jon laid the glue, and then — eager, wanting it whole — bore down on the join with all the strength in his small hands.
Doran’s hand closed over his and lifted it away.
“You’re fixing it,” he said, “not trying to strangle it. Too much pressure squeezes the glue out and starves the joint. Firm. Even. Then you leave it be.” They bound the neck with cord and a shaped block and set it aside, and Jon reached for the next task, and Doran shook his head.
Some things could not be forced faster.
The glue needed its time to become as strong as the wood around it, and no wanting of Jon’s would hurry it.
He was learning that lesson from every direction lately.
The third night was the body and the pegs.
They closed the sprung seam.
Then Doran set him to carving replacement pegs, and Jon’s first came out too thick to turn, and his second too thin to hold, and only his third sat right and snug in the hole.
When it was done, Doran set the two failures on the table beside the good one and left them there.
“Why keep them?” Jon asked.
“So you remember that the third one did not appear by magic.” Doran gathered his tools.
“Men look at a finished thing and think it was always going to be finished. It wasn’t. It was two ruined pegs and a boy who didn’t quit. Keep the ruined ones where you can see them. They’re the truest part of the work.”
Jon looked at the two failures a long moment, and something old turned over in him.
A different kitchen, a different teacher.
Elena crouched beside a boy over a batch of ruined berry-wine, telling him that anyone could smash a thing — that breaking was easy and stupid and took no skill at all — but that making a thing, and mending a thing, and understanding a thing well enough to save it, that was the hard rare work, and the only work that was truly his.
You can break the jars, she had told him once.
You cannot take the knowledge out of us.
A whole household had thrown this lute on a fire because breaking was easier than seeing.
Doran had looked at the same wreck and seen a thing worth the trouble of saving.
So had he.
He was, he realized, on the side of the menders now, in both his lives, and meant to stay there.
The fourth night was strings and tuning.
Jon bought good lute strings from the system’s shop — a small, honest purchase — and they set them slow, one at a time, and Doran would not let him haul any of them to full tension at once.
The mended wood had to learn to hold the pull by degrees, he said, the way a healed bone had to learn to carry weight.
The first notes were wretched.
One string slipped flat almost at once.
One buzzed against the neck.
One rang sharp and thin.
Jon worked them one by one, listening, adjusting, the old patience settling into his hands, until — at last, at long last — he drew his thumb across all of them and a chord came off the lute clean and whole and true.
He played it again.
Not to test it.
Just because he wanted to hear it exist.
Then, because his hands remembered even where the rest of him tried not to, he began to play a song.
It was one of Elena’s.
He could not have told anyone its name, and would not have if he could; the words were in a tongue that had no place in the North, and belonged to a kitchen that had burned out of the world years ago.
He did not sing them.
He only played the shape of the melody, the rise and the turn and the low sweet falling-away at the end of each line, the thing she used to hum over a pot with two fingers keeping time on the table’s edge.
It did not sound the way it had on Earth.
His hands were a child’s hands, small and still building their strength, and a lute was not a guitar — it spoke brighter, rounder, in a voice from another country.
The song came out changed, in a stranger’s accent, thinner in places where he could not yet reach.
And it survived.
That was the thing that caught him off guard, sitting there in the warm impossible air.
Changed, and smaller, and wrong in a dozen ways — and still, unmistakably, hers.
Warm kitchen light.
A woman humming.
A time before a truck came up the driveway and the humming stopped.
Safety, for the length of a melody.
It had crossed death and a world and come out the far side altered but alive, the way he had.
He became aware, slowly, that the cabin had gone quiet.
All five of them had stopped what they were doing.
Aldric’s spoon hung forgotten.
Even Brennan had nothing dry to say.
And Eryn was watching him with an expression Jon could not quite read, older than the room.
When the last note died, Eryn spoke, quietly.
“Where is that song from?”
There was a whole world in the honest answer, and none of it was for tonight.
“Very far away,” he said.
Eryn nodded slowly.
He did not ask again.
He let the far-away place stay far away, and the memory stay Jon’s, and turned back to his work as if a door had been opened and then respectfully closed — and that, more than the eggs, more than and if that fails, was the moment Jon began to think of the grey old horseman as a man he might one day tell.
He played it again nights later, in his own chamber in Winterfell, and it was a different thing entirely.
In the Reserve he was hidden past any finding.
Here, sound went under the door and down the cold stone corridors where anyone might walk.
He knew that, and played anyway, low and soft, needing to — because the lute was not only a wonder to be kept safe in a secret place.
It was meant to be played by a living boy in the world he actually lived in.
He began the quiet melody, and Elena came with it, the way she always would now.
Her singing while she cooked.
Her fingers tapping the table.
The way she’d laughed, warm and unmocking, the first time he sang off-key on purpose to make her.
The cold of a graveside and a guitar and nothing left to say.
His hands began to shake on the strings.
He stopped.
Sat with it, the grief risen up sudden and huge in a five-year-old’s chest that was too small to hold a grown man’s mourning.
For a moment he thought he would not be able to go on.
Then he set his fingers back on the strings and started again, from the top, because stopping was letting it win, and because she had not asked him to grieve forever.
She had asked him to live.
And this — the shaking hands and the aching chest and the playing-anyway — this was living, the hard part of it, the part that came after survival.
A shadow fell across the strip of light beneath his door.
Someone had stopped in the corridor.
Listening.
Jon’s hands went still on the strings without his deciding it.
He knew the household’s music the way he knew its walls by now — the drums and pipes of the North, the courtly airs the Riverland folk hummed, the rough songs from the taverns of Wintertown, the slow hymns to the Seven.
This was none of them.
It sounded like nowhere anyone in Winterfell had ever been.
He waited, quiet, and after a long moment the shadow moved on down the corridor.
But it left a question behind it in the stone, small and quiet and certain to grow: Where did the bastard boy learn to play music like that?
He would have to be careful with the lute in Winterfell.
He had known that already.
It changed nothing.
Some things were worth a little evidence.
Because the lute was not like the scrap iron, or the gold, or the drilling, or the careful hoard of food.
Those were for war, in the end, or gold, or survival, or the long escape he was building toward.
The lute was for none of that.
It could not swing, or feed a man, or buy a friend, or open a locked door.
It was, by every measure Damien had ever used to weigh a thing, useless.
That was exactly why it mattered.
It was the first thing Jon had saved in this whole second life that served nothing but the living of it — the first choice he had made that was not about the future war at all.
Elena was in it, and Gerald, and Doran; creation was in it, and repair, and a dead man’s old life carried whole into a new boy’s hands.
He had pulled a broken thing off a fire and made it sing again, and asked nothing of it but that it be beautiful.
He played Elena’s melody through, that night, start to finish, without stopping.
It was not perfect.
It would never again be exactly what it had been in a yellow kitchen on a world that no longer had him in it.
His hands were smaller.
The instrument was different.
Whole phrases came out in the lute’s brighter foreign voice instead of the warm low one he remembered.
And he understood, playing it, a thing he had been circling for six months without quite reaching: that to preserve a thing did not mean to copy it exactly.
The song had changed, and was still true.
The memory had changed — softened, brightened, moved into a lute and a smaller pair of hands — and was still hers, still real, still his.
A thing could be altered and remain itself.
He had rather a lot riding on that being true.
When he had finished, and brought it back to the Reserve, Doran took it once more and turned it in his hands, checking the work, and pointed to a faint pale line across the neck where the crack had been.
“It’ll always show, there,” the builder said.
“A mend that took. Nothing to be ashamed of. Some marks mean a thing was worth saving.”
Jon touched the line.
“Will it break again?”
Doran handed it back.
“Not if it is cared for.”
Jon looked down at the lute, at the pale seam where the break had healed, at the two ruined pegs Doran still had not thrown away.
He understood that the answer was about more than the lute.