“Jon.
I’ve been looking for you.” The voice was familiar.
Ser Domeric stood at his elbow.
Jon looked up, pleased, and found the courtesy without having to hunt for it.
“Ser Domeric.
Good evening.” A squire in the middle of a dirty joke went quiet and made room.
Domeric swung a leg over the bench and took the cup from Jon’s hand.
“Summerwine.” He tasted it and let the word sit.
“Nothing in the North is sweeter.
How many have you had?
I remember Lord Eddard allows you one.” Jon smiled and did not answer.
The teeth were white.
Domeric smiled back.
“I thought so.
Leave it.
The first time I drank myself stupid I was younger than you are.” He took a roast onion from the nearest platter, brown juice running, and bit.
The skin cracked.
He was hungry.
The dance with Sansa had eaten the hour he might have used for a plate.
He ate and watched Jon with a look that was almost idle.
“You sit with your brothers on ordinary nights.” “Ordinary nights,” Jon said, and the color in it was embarrassment.
“Lady Catelyn thinks a bastard at their table tonight would insult the lords.” “Ah.” Domeric turned his head toward the high seats.
Catelyn Stark sat where a duchess sat.
The face had the look of a woman who kept a sharp count and liked the work.
“Your father doesn’t wear the night well,” Domeric said.
“Strange, for a hall raised on his thirty-fifth nameday.” “The reason is simple, if you want it.” Jon put a small mystery on the words.
A bastard learned early to read a room.
What lived in a lord’s eyes was often more honest than what left his mouth.
“Well?” “You and Sansa.” “How?” The boy had sharpened.
Some of the highborn children in this hall were dull as winter bread.
Sansa was one of those.
Jon Snow was the other kind.
“Lady Catelyn means to give her to you,” Jon said, as if he were reading from a letter.
“The word is good.” Domeric had not expected that.
He almost laughed, and the laugh had no joy in it.
Every visit to Winterfell he had brought gifts to keep the Starks sweet: Braavosi silk, Reach work, Dornish stones.
The spend had not been wasted.
It had also not been meant as a bride-price.
A match with House Stark was not in the road he had drawn.
That explained the look on Lord Eddard’s face.
In Ned’s head Sansa belonged to Robert’s son, to Joffrey, to the king’s own blood.
Catelyn had put her foot down the other way and left her husband with no clean step.
Domeric turned it over.
A Bolton–Stark marriage would bind the two great houses of the North.
The realm above the Neck would sit quieter for it.
Quiet was not the same as easy.
Ned and Catelyn were already pulling opposite ends of the same rope, and the banners under Winterfell had taken sides without being asked.
That was why the floor had answered the dance in two voices.
Lord Medger Cerwyn of Castle Cerwyn had spent the night in his cups.
The big face behind the beard was red and happy.
He drank to every toast, laughed at every joke, and ate as if the platters might be taken from him.
One seat over, Lord Helman Tallhart of Torrhen’s Square sat like a thing cut from ice.
Cerwyn and the Dreadfort had always drunk well together.
Tallhart, for reasons of his own, did not want the flayed man in Winterfell’s bed.
Ser Wendel’s face had gone sour as well.
He had vanished for half the evening after they rode in.
Now the reason sat in the open.
Wendel had been working a different match: his niece, Lord Wyman’s granddaughter, Wynafryd, White Harbor’s blood into Bolton stone.
Seven hells.
He was the last man in the hall to hear it.
The work of knowing a room had failed him, and he put the failure where it belonged.
He looked at Jon.
“You’ve got sharp eyes.
My thanks.” Jon took the praise as his due.
“I can use a sword besides.
Robb hits harder with a lance.
I am better with a blade.
Hullen says there are not many in the castle who sit a horse as I do.
Compared with you, of course, it is still a boy’s boast.” Domeric put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and brushed the specks of skin from the collar while he was there.
[Unearthing] Jon Snow Targaryen prince.
Son of Prince Rhaegar and Lyanna Stark.
Heir to the Iron Throne.
Lord Eddard’s own nephew.
Title: none Strength: 45 Agility: 50 Spirit: 33 Combat index: 128 Note: None.
The target feels no fear.
His secrets stay shut.
One hundred twenty-eight.
Domeric gave a small nod.
A grown man with no training sat at thirty.
A knight who had done the work reached sixty.
The bastard on the bench had more than double that.
Talent was talent, whatever name it wore.
“I mean to ask my father to send me to the Wall,” Jon said.
The words came out as if they had been sitting in his mouth all evening, waiting for a man who might answer them.
“To take the black.” “The Wall.” Domeric looked at him a long time.
“It is a hard country for a man.
Why that?” “I am nearly grown.
Next nameday I will be fifteen.
Maester Luwin says bastards come to their height faster than trueborn boys.” “That much is true.” Domeric’s mouth tipped down.
He took the cup, filled it from the nearest jug, and drank.
“Daeron Targaryen was fourteen when he went into Dorne.” The young Dragon-king was a hero in Jon’s head.
Domeric could see it.
“That war ran for years,” he said, not unkindly.
“Your young king spent ten thousand men taking Dorne and fifty thousand keeping it.
Someone should have told you a war is not a song.” “I know that.” The wine had put a spine in Jon’s voice.
He tried to sit taller.
“Ser Domeric.
I have a reason.
I have turned it over more nights than I can count.
When my brothers are asleep I am still awake with it.” “What reason?” Jon let the breath go.
“Robb will have Winterfell one day, and the North with it.
Bran and Rickon will sit holds of their own and keep his books.
Arya and Sansa will marry out and be ladies in other men’s halls.
And I am a bastard.
What is there for me?” Poor men’s sons learned the world’s size early.
Highborn bastards learned it the same way.
Domeric felt the shape of it and did not like the fit.
“Jon.
The Watch is a brotherhood with no road out.
No wife.
No sons.
That is the vow.” “A bastard has no road either,” Jon Snow said.
“Sometimes I envy a man like you.”