After leaving his father’s solar, Jon spent the whole walk turning over their conversation in his mind.
What he had seen in the dream had felt far too real, and taken together with what he’d read in the book, it left him with a guess forming in his mind.
He pressed a hand to his chest.
Ever since waking from the dream, some nameless pull had lingered around him, refusing to fade.
Lost in thought, Jon soon arrived at Maester Luwin’s chambers.
Seeing him arrive, Robb, sitting on a stool, waved eagerly.
“Hurry up, Jon! Where did you go this morning?”
Jon set his thoughts aside.
“I went to the library to look for some books.”
“Come on, tell me, what books?” Robb asked, his face bright with curiosity.
Just then, footsteps sounded outside the door, cutting their conversation short.
Maester Luwin walked in, a book tucked under his arm.
“Well, I’m glad to see you both here on time.”
With that small word of praise, the maester began the day’s lesson.
“Yesterday we left off with the history of the Seven Kingdoms. Today we continue.”
Robb, seated at the little table, let his face fall the moment he heard the subject.
“Heraldry again…”
“It’s the history of the great houses, learning to read the Common Tongue, and, along the way, the sigils of the Seven Kingdoms’ nobility.”
Maester Luwin turned to a page toward the back of the book, smoothed out a small crease in the paper, and formally began.
“A silver seahorse upon a field of sea-green.”
“House Velaryon of Driftmark.”
“Their words.”
“Old, True, and Brave.”
“Their history.”
“House Velaryon traces its line back to the old Freehold of Valyria. Like House Targaryen, they are said to carry Valyrian blood. They came to Westeros early, settled on Driftmark, and became allies of House Targaryen.”
“Over a hundred years ago, the house produced a man of legend, Corlys Velaryon, called the Sea Snake. His fleets sailed to the far east of the known world and returned with vast fortunes.”
Maester Luwin was in the prime of his years, his build sturdy and upright, wrapped in a thick coat of wolf fur.
When he spoke, his grey-brown eyes were bright and sharp, seeming to hold a lifetime of learning.
With every page he turned, the maester would explain it first, then have Jon and Robb repeat back what he’d just said.
Jon did not think himself especially clever, but today his memory was working with startling sharpness, enough that the satisfaction on Maester Luwin’s face kept deepening.
“I really ought to suggest to Lord Eddard that he send you to Oldtown. Yes, I should. If he were here right now, boy, you were born to be a maester!”
Hearing that the maester wanted to send Jon off to the Citadel, Robb, beside him, grew anxious.
Young as he was at four, he already understood a good deal, and it seemed he feared Jon might really be sent away.
He shook his head at Jon over and over.
Jon had no interest at all in becoming a maester, let alone spending his whole life at the Citadel.
So he said nothing to that, instead pointing at the book, at a brown dead stag hanging bound beneath a crossbar, to change the subject.
“Does House Hunt have some feud with House Baratheon?” he asked, his voice carrying the clear, puzzled tone particular to small children.
“Why do you ask that?” the maester said, puzzled, then glanced at the sigil and understood, letting out a short, surprised laugh.
“That’s only a coincidence. Besides, House Baratheon’s stag is black, not brown.”
Jon made a small sound of understanding.
Last night’s violet eyes surfaced in his mind again, and then, out of nowhere, he asked, “What about the black dragon and the red dragon?”
“The black dragon and the red dragon?”
“The three-headed dragon. One’s black, one’s red. I know the red one is House Targaryen’s sigil. Which house is the black one?”
The question left the old maester momentarily still.
“Three black dragons?”
“Yes. Three black dragons on a red field.”
“That’s House Blackfyre’s sigil. It comes from House Targaryen’s own coat of arms, but with the colors reversed. The last Blackfyre died years ago at the Stepstones, killed with his own hand by a Kingsguard knight, Ser Barristan the Bold.”
Having said this, the old maester asked, somewhat puzzled: “That’s rather obscure knowledge. Where did you see this sigil?”
“I saw it in the family library,” Jon answered honestly.
At the mention of a familiar name, Robb’s eyes lit up, and he answered at once: “A Lannister always pays his de—”
Halfway through, he suddenly remembered something, and his voice cut off abruptly.
He blinked, then, feigning nonchalance, changed course: “Hear Me Roar?”
Maester Luwin gave him a look, a touch of helpless exasperation crossing his face.
“It seems you remember that one quite firmly.”
Robb let out a breath of relief.
“At the Citadel, many acolytes fall into that same trap. They’re always hoping to find some deeper knowledge in their books, while they can’t be bothered to hold onto the simple, common facts.”
Meanwhile, out on the wastes some miles from Winterfell.
Benjen Stark pulled his heavy black bearskin hood tight and rode hard toward the north, into a blinding, knife-edged blizzard.
Behind him rode a handful of Stark household knights, silent, and at the very rear came three cold-hardened pack horses.
Their backs were loaded with frozen game meat and specially prepared smokeless coal, the heavy burdens swaying with every step.
Hooves broke through the frozen ground, leaving ragged trails of prints that the driving snow soon buried completely.
After more than ten days of travel.
When they stopped to rest, he left the knights behind at a hunter’s cabin to wait.
He went on alone with the three pack horses.
This was already the edge of the abandoned New Gift, and beyond it lay nothing but a vast, boundless waste.
Four years earlier, when his brother Ned had returned to the North carrying the still-swaddled Jon and the newly hatched dragon.
The two of them had realized a problem.
Winterfell was a vast castle full of eyes and ears.
There was simply no way to raise a dragon there.
A dragon was fire and ruin made flesh.
Its breath carried a sharp reek of sulfur, and as it grew larger, it would become harder and harder to hide from others.
If word ever got out, if Robert Baratheon or anyone else learned of it, the entire Stark family would be torn to pieces.
It couldn’t be hidden at Winterfell, and sending it beyond the Wall would only see it frozen to death in the endless snow.
In the end, it was Benjen who remembered a hidden place he’d found on an old expedition.
It was an ancient wonder buried deep beneath the frozen far north: Gorne’s Passage.
In the yellowed, ancient parchments of the North and the old tales of the wild, three thousand years ago there had been a pair of brothers who were kings beyond the Wall, Gorne and Gendel.
They had led tens of thousands of wildlings, and rather than scale the seven-hundred-foot Wall, they had relied on their sense of the earth itself to find a labyrinth of molten rock beneath the ground, tangled and vast, stretching for thousands of miles.
The army had passed silently through the dark tunnels beneath the Wall, through deep caverns, and finally burst out through a hidden exit into the North, shaking the entire kingdom.
In the thousands of years since, countless wildlings had lost themselves within it, leaving nothing behind in the end but bones scattered among the rock cracks.
But the searing heat given off by the churning lava in its depths made it, for a hatchling dragon, as perfect a lair as any could be.