GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 6: FORGED IN SILENCE
CHAPTER 3: THE WARGING BEGINS
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
— Marcel Proust
Six months turned the yard quieter.
Rodrik watched now — Jon had aimed him, and the old master-at-arms had held.
The sessions came less often, and when they came, Harlen Ryger checked over his shoulder before he swung, which took most of the pleasure out of it for him and most of the danger out of it for Jon.
Jon had grown harder to hurt besides; Aldric’s drills and Doran’s hidden padding meant a bad morning in the yard now cost him bruises instead of broken fingers.
The farm turned over its harvests.
The gold crept upward.
And the five men in the Reserve, drilling every day, teaching him, teaching each other, crossed some threshold the system saw before Jon did.
One evening a plain line surfaced at the edge of his sight: Five active units have reached Trained rank.
It did not make them legends.
It only meant they had become, all five, dependably good at what they did — which was worth more than legend, in Jon’s experience, and had been earned drill by drill rather than handed down.
With the yard quieter and his body mending, Jon finally turned to the thing he had been circling warily for two years.
He had always known the gift was there.
He had felt it since the day he first took stock of the Reserve — a thin thread running out from him toward every warm animal life nearby, waiting.
He had left it alone all that time, because he had been too young, too raw, too newly himself to risk pushing his mind out into another creature.
Now he was seven going on eight, whole and steady, and the beatings had taught him a hard truth: that Ned’s eyes could not reach everywhere, and he needed eyes that could.
So he stopped avoiding the thread.
He picked it up.
He began with the hen, because the hen was safe.
She was familiar with him, and calm inside the Reserve, and small, and simple, and if he failed with her he would frighten nothing worse than a chicken.
He sat down in the straw beside her and reached, carefully, for the little warm point of her awareness.
He got in, and it nearly threw him straight back out.
There was no thought in there, not the kind he knew — only a blaze of now.
Light too bright.
The ground enormous and endlessly interesting.
Hunger, sharp and constant.
A jerking, darting quickness in how the world was looked at, here and here and here, and under all of it a single overwhelming question that was really the only question the hen ever asked: food?
Jon’s slow human mind tried to take hold of all that fast bright chaos and the link snapped like a cut string, and he was back in his own body, dizzy, his stomach turning.
He had shoved his way in.
That was the mistake, and he felt it the moment he made it, because the hen had panicked under the shove the way anything panics when something larger seizes it.
So the second time he did not seize.
He matched himself to her instead — slowed to her quick shallow breathing, let her senses come to him first before he tried to give her anything, guided the smallest touch of direction rather than crushing her instincts under his own.
It went better.
It went, in fact, almost gently.
And there, in the straw, he made himself a rule that would matter more than any technique.
The animal was not a tool.
Even held, even guided, even magically his, the hen was a living thing with fear and instinct of her own, and he would work with those, not stamp them out.
He had spent a first life under a man who took living things and bent them to his will because he could.
Jon knew exactly what that made a person.
He would not become it, not even to a chicken.
The cow was a different country entirely.
Where the hen had been all light and quickness, the cow was weight and slowness and deep animal calm.
Her thoughts, if you could call them thoughts, came like slow tide — a vast awareness of her own comfort, a steady pull toward the herd that wasn’t there, a placid recognition of the people who fed her, a world built mostly of smell and sound and the reassurance of routine.
Her body felt immense around his small borrowed self, and Jon learned, sitting inside all that patient bulk, that a bigger animal was not a harder one.
The cow, four times the hen’s size, was easier to hold, because she was calm.
It was temperament that fought him, not size.
A frightened sparrow would be harder to keep than a contented ox.
He tried the stable horse next, out in Winterfell itself, during chores, so as not to spend one of his two precious Reserve slots.
He picked an old placid gelding that knew his hands and his smell, and touched the edge of its mind while he pretended to muck the stall.
He did not take it over.
He only listened — the constant swivel of the ears tracking sounds he couldn’t hear, the great sure strength banked in the legs, the thick warm world of hay and leather and other horses, the way the animal read the tension of every person near it long before a man would.
Afterward, Eryn made him describe all of it, every twitch and shift, and told him what each one had meant, and turned Jon’s stolen minutes inside the horse into a horsemanship lesson better than any Jon could have gotten from the outside.
That pleased them both.
Then he reached for the mice, and the mice were hard.
Their minds were fast and small and ruled entirely by fear — a nervy, jittering awareness of every vibration in the stone, a world thick with smells and thin on sight, a constant knowledge of exactly where the nearest crack and cover lay, and a bone-deep terror of the open.
It was like trying to ride a spark.
But Jon held one long enough to understand what a mouse could be worth to a boy who needed to know things: a creature that no one noticed, that fit through gaps a cat couldn’t, that already knew every hidden run behind the walls and under the floors of Winterfell.
Where a mouse could go, Jon could now go.
He could listen at the foot of a door no guard would ever think to watch.
The thought was almost frightening in its usefulness.
None of it was free.
He learned that fast, and the learning kept him honest.
Warging cost him.
The early sessions left him with splitting headaches, with a deep ache behind his eyes, with nausea and a swimming dizziness that once put him on his knees when he stood too quickly after releasing a link.
Worse than the pain was the confusion — the seconds after he came back when he could not quite find which body was his, when his own hands felt like a stranger’s, when some borrowed instinct kept running in him after the animal was long gone.
Once, pushing too long, he came back to his chamber and found blood tracking warm from one nostril down his lip.
That frightened him more than the headaches.
It was his body telling him, plainly, that this had a price, and that the price could climb.
So he set hard limits, the way a careful man sets limits on anything that could kill him.
The moment he could not clearly feel his own hands.
The moment an animal’s instincts kept running in him after he let go, or he lost track of how long he’d been under, or the pain turned from a nuisance into a warning.
He wrote the limits down, in his own head, and he obeyed them, because the whole point of discipline was that you kept it on the nights you least wanted to.
The companions helped him keep it.
Eryn made a ritual of it — after every session, before Jon was allowed to call himself finished, the old horseman put the same questions to him, flat and steady, and would not let him drift until he’d answered every one.
“What is your name?”
“Jon.”
“Where is your body?”
“Here. My chamber. The Reserve.”
“What year is it? What animal did you enter? What did you learn? Are you all the way back?”
He answered them all, every time, and only when Eryn was satisfied did the session end.
It was a small thing, six plain questions.
It was also, Jon understood, the thing standing between him and a boy who slowly forgot which of his eyes were his own.
He never once asked Eryn to skip them.
Then, from his chamber one night, he sent his mind up into a bird, and everything he thought he understood about the world got larger.
He chose an ordinary bird — a common rook off the walls, not a raven, because a boy who suddenly took an interest in ravens invited exactly the wrong sort of story.
He touched its mind, light as he’d learned to, and the bird spread its wings and dropped off the wall into the air, and Jon —
Jon flew.
He had not been ready for it.
The air took the wings and lifted, a pull under him he had no word for, the wind pouring cold and clean through feathers that were somehow his, the whole body moving not along the ground but through open space in every direction at once.
His human mind lunged for the controls and the bird tipped and nearly tumbled, and he caught himself — no, let it fly, only choose where — and eased back, and let the rook’s own wings do the flying while he simply asked it, gently, to climb.
It climbed.
And Winterfell fell away beneath him.
He saw it whole for the first time in his life.
Not the endless separate rooms and yards and corridors he had walked for years, each one its own small world — but the whole thing, all at once, laid out below him like a map made real.
The outer walls in their great grey ring.
The towers.
The gates.
The courtyards he knew so well, small now, and the stables, and the dark quiet spread of the godswood, and smoke standing up from a hundred chimneys, and the roads running away north and south into the country.
He saw guards moving along the walls like beetles on a wall-top.
He saw roofs he’d never known connected to the yards he crossed daily, blind corners no one watched, a stretch of wall where the guard was thin, the paths the supplies took, the very corners where the Riverland guards liked to gather when they thought themselves unseen.
And in his mind the map answered, drawing it all in — the separate pieces of his two years of walking suddenly stitched into one whole, gaps closing, the castle becoming a single understood shape at last.
Winterfell was not only his home anymore.
It was terrain.
He would never quite see it the old way again.
The rook flew on, out past the walls, and the Wolfswood opened under him — endless from up here, a dark rolling country of trees running to the edge of sight, threaded with clearings and frozen streams and the thin lines of hunting trails, smoke from some distant holding, small shapes moving under the branches that might be men or deer.
It was the first time in either of his lives that Jon’s own awareness had traveled beyond the walls that held him, without his body, without permission, without anyone’s leave.
And for a moment — just a moment — he stopped gathering intelligence, and simply flew.
He let the rook ride a current of cold air over the white forest, and he was not a hunted bastard in a hostile house, not a dead soldier crammed into a child, not a boy who had to weigh every step.
He was only a thing with wings over an open world, and it was free, gloriously and completely free, in a way he had forgotten a person could feel.
He had not known, until that instant, how much of him had been living in a cage.
The warging was a weapon; he had reached for it as a weapon.
But it was also this.
It could give him, sometimes, a sky.
He decided he would not let himself forget that either.
Then he brought the rook home, and let it go, and came back to a small cold chamber and a splitting head, and got on with the work.
The deer taught him that eyes were not interchangeable.
He tried, the first time, to be greedy — to hold the bird and reach for a deer he’d spotted in a clearing both at once.
It failed at once.
The bird-link thinned and frayed as he grasped after the deer; the deer, feeling some wrongness in the air, threw up its head and bolted; and Jon lost both and came back to his body with a headache that put him flat for an hour.
So he learned patience.
Another day he used the bird only to find a deer, released the bird clean, and then reached down, from his chamber, for the deer alone.
He was inside it for perhaps three minutes, and they were three of the strangest minutes of his life.
He stood on four legs in the snow and felt the forest floor through four hard hooves.
Where the bird had given him a world of sight and height, the deer gave him a world of scent — snow and wet bark and running water, the warm nearness of other deer, and, far off and faint and instantly terrifying, the smell of wolves.
Under it, thinner, the smell of human smoke.
The seeing was poorer than the bird’s, blurred and wide; but the ground-knowledge was extraordinary, every root and dip and track written plain in a language of smell he’d never had access to before.
When he released it and woke in his chamber, for a few awful seconds he was wrong in his own skin.
His hands felt too few and too soft.
His legs seemed absurdly short.
He half expected the corridor’s smells to come flooding in, and his whole body wanted, urgently, to run.
Eryn’s voice cut through it — your name, where is your body — and hauled him back.
He wrote it all down after, shaking a little, and understood the lesson under it.
The bird gave him direction and distance and the wide shape of things.
The deer gave him scent and ground and the close, hidden detail.
They were not two versions of the same tool.
Each animal was a different kind of intelligence, and a wise commander used each for what only it could do.
Holding two at once nearly beat him.
His first tries were failures, one after another.
A light bird-link plus a reach for a mouse, and the bird dropped away and left him sick.
The cow and the hen together, their slow tide and quick spark clashing until he couldn’t tell one rhythm from the other and sat confused for long minutes before he could untangle himself.
A perched bird’s awareness while he touched the edge of a mouse’s mind — and the mouse panicked, and the panic tore straight through Jon and startled the bird off its perch, and he lost them both in an instant.
The answer, when he found it, was not to hold both the same way. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
He learned to keep one link broad and light — a loose awareness riding along, taking in the wide picture — while giving the other his real attention, and above all to keep his own body as the fixed center of it, the ground he always stood on, marked by Eryn’s plain grounding words.
He limited how long.
He stopped before the pain got teeth.
“It’s like running two scouts,” Eryn told him, when he’d described the method.
“You can’t do both their jobs yourself. You send them, you trust them to see, and you take in what they bring you. The moment you try to be both scouts, you’re no good as either — or as the commander.”
The first time it worked, it nearly overwhelmed him with its rightness.
He held a light link to a bird circling high over Winterfell — direction, distance, the wide movement of things — and reached, at the same time, for a ground animal near the Wolfswood’s edge.
And for a few seconds he had both.
He saw a clearing from above, small and clear, and he smelled it from below, rich and close, the two overlapping into a single impossible awareness of one piece of ground from the sky and the earth at once.
The map drank it in from both eyes together.
He came back gasping, and he understood, bone-deep, the principle he’d been building toward.
The bird was direction.
The ground animal was detail.
Height to find it; the earth to know it.
Together they gave him something no scout in all of Westeros could give a lord — the same ground, at the same moment, seen from the sky and read from the ground, each confirming what the other missed.
Route and cover.
Movement and voices.
A warning from above and the truth of it from below.
He was careful, that same night, to write down everything the gift could not do, because a power a man did not know the edges of was a power that would eventually kill him.
He could not hold two deep possessions long without paying badly for it.
He could not read a human being’s thoughts through any animal’s eyes — he could hear what was said near a mouse, and see what a bird saw, and no more.
He could not see through a wall unless something small and living carried him past it.
He could not hear clearly from a great height.
He could not command every beast at once, or warg forever, or pretend distance didn’t matter, or use a terrified or exhausted animal without paying for it, or ever safely forget where his own body lay.
And there was one limit he set himself that the system had not required of him.
He would never burn out an animal’s mind to wring information from it — never ride a creature until nothing of the creature was left.
He had felt, holding the panicking mouse, how easy that would be.
How he could simply override the fear, crush the small self under his own, take what he wanted and let the husk drop.
It would work.
It would also make him, exactly and precisely, the man in the driveway who had bent living things to his will because he was bigger than they were.
Power without a limit was not power.
It was Dale with a longer reach.
Jon set the limit and meant it.
He told the companions what he’d found, and they answered true to themselves.
Brennan’s eyes lit and he began sketching observation routes on the spot, already turning it into a scouting doctrine.
Caelan wanted to know at once whether a bird could be sent up from the deck of a ship — whether, when the day came, Jon might scout Ignareth’s reefs from above before ever risking a hull on them.
Aldric thought of battlefields and the priceless gift of knowing what was coming over the next ridge.
Doran wondered, practically, whether a mouse might be sent into a wall to find the rot and the cracks a builder couldn’t reach.
Eryn waited until the others had spent themselves, and then asked the one question that stayed with Jon long after the rest.
“How will you know,” the old horseman said quietly, “when seeing more has made you understand less?”
Jon opened his mouth, and found he had no answer.
He turned it over and still had none.
A man could gather a hundred eyes and drown in what they showed him.
A man could see everything and understand nothing, mistake the flood of detail for wisdom, lose the shape of the thing in the endless pieces of it.
He did not know where that line was, or how he would feel himself crossing it.
He only knew Eryn had found, again, the danger under the gift.
He kept the question.
He did not answer it.
Some questions, he was learning, you carried instead of solving.
He put it all to use, at last, on a night when it mattered.
He sent a bird up over Winterfell and reached a mouse into the walls below, and held them both, light above and close beneath, and went looking.
And he found them — a knot of Riverland guards gathered in a corner of the castle well away from where such men had any business being, at an hour Ned was abed.
Through the bird’s eyes he marked exactly where they stood.
Through the mouse in the wall beside them, he caught the low broken pieces of what they said.
His own name.
Mira’s name.
Sour muttering about Rodrik Cassel and his watching.
A nervous word about Lord Stark’s attention, and how it must not be drawn.
And a decision, agreed among them: to be more careful.
To move quieter.
To give nothing that Rodrik could see.
It was not enough to prove a crime before any lord.
It was more than enough to tell him the truth: that the thing had not ended when the yard went quiet.
It had only gone to ground, the way he had known it would, and it was still there, patient, watching for its moment.
His new impossible eyes had reached straight past every wall and delivered him the one thing he most needed — the knowledge that the danger was alive, and where it slept, and that Mira’s name was still in the mouths of men who wished them both ill.
He released the mouse, and released the bird, and opened his own eyes in his cold chamber.
His head throbbed.
Warm blood touched his upper lip; he wiped it away with the back of his hand and looked at the small red smear and thought, the price, and did not warg again that night.
But in his mind the map had grown.
It held Winterfell now not as a boy’s tangle of rooms but as a whole seen from the sky.
It held the near edge of the Wolfswood, and the pale threads of animal paths through it, and a new mark in a quiet corner of the castle where hostile men gathered when they thought no one could see.
The walls of Winterfell had always been the edge of his world.
They had defined how far a bastard boy could look.
They did not define it anymore.