Jon had the look of a boy who had already chosen.
Domeric stood and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Lonehill can use a young man like you.
If you ever think better of the Wall, you come and find me.” “Thank you, Ser Domeric.” The secret had left him.
The grind of turning it over every hour eased a fraction.
Then Jon felt the table.
The talk had died and he had not heard it die.
Every face on the bench was turned toward him.
They had all caught the speech.
He wished, too late, that he had kept his voice down.
The old bruise of the bastard name, worn for as long as he could remember, came up through the wine and filled his eyes.
“Forgive me.” It was the last of his dignity.
He was gone before the tears could be counted.
He had drunk too much.
His feet tangled.
He ran full into a serving girl and a jug of spiced wine went over on the stone.
The laugh that followed was the hall’s laugh, wide and easy.
The heat in his eyes spilled.
Years of it ran with the wine.
A hand reached for him.
He shook it off and kept for the doors on eyes that would not own the floor, and the night took him.
Domeric watched him go.
The boy had a poor seat at the table.
That much was true.
The feast did not end because a bastard had run out of it.
Later, when the hour had gone deep, Domeric stepped into the yard for air.
Winterfell was a black shape around him.
The stones kept their own counsel.
The yard was empty and the quiet in it was complete.
On the inner wall a single guard had pulled his cloak to his chin and folded himself into a corner.
The man was old.
The cold was working on him.
One wall away the windows stood open and the music poured out, sweet and useless.
It was the last sound Domeric wanted.
A packed hall.
An old soldier freezing on a walk.
He took the cloak off his own shoulders, put it over the man, and walked on.
The shout came at his back.
“Lord Domeric—” Ser Wendel, bald and thick, came on at a run and had no breath left when he reached him.
“What is it?
You look as if the roof has come down.” “A raven.
Lonehill.
The mines have been hit.
Men are dead.” “Seven hells.” The thing he had been waiting for had arrived on schedule.
He made his excuses in the hall without lingering.
At the last he bent and put a kiss on Sansa’s brow.
If Lady Catelyn meant to give the girl to him, there was no harm in letting the room see him play the part.
Then he was in the saddle, Wendel and the escort around him, and the road south and east had him.
Winterfell to the Lonely Hills was not a long ride on a map.
Westeros did not run on maps.
Off the kingsroad the tracks were little better than goat paths, broken stone and mud and the kind of miles that ate horses.
Three days if the weather held.
Five if it did not.
He would not see his own gate before that.
The hall at Lonehill was lit and waiting.
Jorah Mormont could not keep his seat.
He came off it the instant Domeric crossed the threshold.
“My lord.” “How bad?” Domeric took the measure of his castellan while the man spoke.
Jorah Mormont was a thick man in his middle years, dark from weather, hair coarse where he still had it, the scalp beginning to show through.
The strength in him had not gone.
Two years past he had been something else: an exile with a sellsword’s contract and a name that still opened doors if you knew which ones to knock.
In the tale as it had been written, Jorah would have taken Essosi pay until a Targaryen girl bought his oath, and he would have become the man Daenerys Targaryen trusted most.
Domeric had reached him first.
The rest of the story was ordinary enough, and ugly enough.
Jorah had been Lord of Bear Island, head of House Mormont, son of Jeor Mormont who now wore black at Castle Black.
His first wife had died in childbed.
At a tourney he had lost his head over Lynesse Hightower of Oldtown, a woman Bear Island could not afford.
She had grown up in noise and silk.
The island gave her rock, wind, and a hall that looked like a punishment after the Hightower.
To keep her smiling he had spent the house down to the last dragon.
When the debts came due he sold poachers to Tyroshi slavers and broke the king’s law to do it.
Eddard Stark, his liege, had named him dead for it.
By the time Ned’s men reached Bear Island, Jorah and Lynesse were already gone across the Narrow Sea.
In Braavos he sold the ship.
Half a year finished the coin.
He took work as a hired sword.
While he bled for the next meal she found a merchant with a softer bed and stayed in it.
After that he drifted.
The Free Cities.
A season among the Dothraki, long enough to take their tongue and their habits.
A Bear Island lord ruined by a wife: that had been Domeric’s first reading of the man.
He had not bought Jorah for the romance of it.
Jeor Mormont held Castle Black.
A grateful son was a door into the Watch, and the Watch sat on the only wall that looked at wildlings and the Others.
Domeric had spent gold dragons in King’s Landing and more gold on the men who whispered in Robert Baratheon’s ear.
The king’s pardon came.
It washed the sentence off Jorah and stripped the lordship with it.
Domeric finished the work.
He took the man into service, put land under him, and watched.
The sword was real.
So was the war-sense.
The surprise was the rest: Jorah could run a holding’s books and keep a valley from eating itself.
That was rarer than a good edge.
Lonehill needed a castellan.
Jorah had the chair.
“It’s bad,” Jorah said.
“The northern workings have come down.
We have dead.
The one mercy is we have the man who did it.” Domeric nodded.
“Bring him.
I’ll sit in judgment myself.”