Chapter Text
The sun rose, tinting the cool dry air with soft pink light. The great walls cast deep shadows. Wood smoke and baking bread warmed the air. There was a hush over Winterfell’s stable yard, punctured by the snorting of horses and the crunch of gravel beneath Jon’s boots. Ghost padded along, silent as a shadow. Jon lifted the saddle from his shoulder, onto his black courser, positioning his saddle bags. He checked the straps.
“So, this is it then?” He flinched at the tone. Brisk as the morning air. He turned to face his father.
“Lord Stark,” Jon said, nodding respectfully to his father.
Father’s jaw clenched, once, twice. His brow was heavy. He swallowed and then said, brusquely; “There’s no way to convince you otherwise?”
Jon faltered a moment, marshaling his courage. “I can’t stay here,” he tried. “You won’t take me South. And the Wall…” He thought of Uncle Benjen’s words. The sounds of revelry spilled out of the great hall like a mess into the hush of the training yard. “See a little of the world, a taste of what you might be giving up,” he had said. “The Wall will still be here.” Lady Stark had been clear. It mattered little where a bastard chose to go. So long as he was not here. The South, Esssos… Jon thought of the King’s Road. Of it stretching away from Winterfell, over the rough grasses of the northern highlands, rocky and twisting into forests of Sentinel trees and pine. How far might he go? “It’s time I made my own way.”
Father looked at the mud. His jaw tightened, and his breathing came in long calming beats as he retreated to his own council. “Very well,” father grumbled. “Come.”
Jon hesitated, staring after the gruff, receding figure. His dark cloak billowing after him. The courser snorted. Ready, laden with bags and saddle, he paced eagerly at the dirt. How long will this take? Jon wondered if he should untack the poor beast or just flatly refuse.
“Now,” father commanded, over his shoulder. Jon obeyed.
The pace is quick through the courtyard. The first clangs of the smith’s hammer rang in the air. The noise receded as father led Jon down into the crypts, their footfalls echoing the walls. The bastard checked at the bottom of the stairwell. He was not a Stark. There was no place for him here.
“Come along now,” father said.
The long hall was a dark expanse broken by islands of torch light. Jon pressed his hand to the wall, rough yet warm as blood. The air was thick here like a hot breath, heavy and warm. The earthy scent of peat and dust filled his nose. They passed the tombs of Uncle Brandon and Grandfather. Their long solemn faces. Father paused before the statue of Aunt Lyanna. She was the only woman among the Lords of Winterfell. An honor Jon wished he understood. If she could earn a place, perhaps a bastard son…
It bared not thinking about.
Like all the others she was cold and unseeing. There is only so much to be done with rough stone. A direwolf sat, resolute at her side. They stood, father and son, in silence. So long that a nameless worry knotted in Jon’s chest. He forced his voice from his throat.
“Why are we here?”
“For the truth,” father replied. He stared at the willful sister, dead before her time. Not once had he spoken of her, until now. Highborn and beautiful. “You wanted to know about your mother.” He nodded to the statue. “Here she is. Ask your questions.”
Jon let out a shaking breath. For several beats of his heart he cannot find any words. “My mother?” he asked, his voice squeezing out as a pained croak.
“Aye,” Lord Stark said with a nod. “You look like her.”
Jon tore his gaze away from Lord Stark, to the statue. His mother. How many times had he come through this corridor with Robb in their games? She was here in the darkness, all along.
“She never wanted what was planned for her,” Lord Stark said. “She wanted to make her own way. She wanted to be a knight.”
“You’re not my father,” was all Jon could manage to say.
Lord Stark gave a weak smile and shook his head. “No. I’m not.”
A pause followed more frightful than the unknowns of Jon’s dark dreams. “Then… who?”
Lord Stark looked squarely at Jon. “You’re Rhaegar Targaryen’s son,” he replied, unflinching.
Jon stepped back. Rhaegar Targaryen. The kidnapper and rapist and son of the Mad King. The enemy of King Robert Baratheon. “So it’s worse than I imagined then,” he grumbled. “I’m a bastard and an orphan. The son of a rapist besides.”
“You’re no bastard” Lord Stark declared, “and your mother no damsel. Had things gone differently…” Eddard Stark paused, casting a glance down the corridor. More quietly he said, “you’d have been Prince Aemon Targaryen.”
Jon inhaled a sharp breath. A name. A true name. Targaryen. It melted Snow. Lord Stark thrust the torch into Jon’s numb fingers and turned away. He stepped behind the statue, to a small bench of stone. He heaved, sliding the stone lid. Not a bench at all. A chest. The stone grinded in protest. Jon craned his neck to see around Lord Stark’s bulk. To peer into the darkness.
“She wanted you to have these,” he explained, reaching into the darkness “Something to remember them by.” Lord Stark pulled out a bundle. He offered it to Jon. Warily, he accepted. Slowly, to still the tremble in his fingers, Jon unwrapped the parcel. The parchment peeled away to reveal a great silk bundle. There was something hard in the soft center of it all but Jon ignored that. Black as the ocean on a moonless night. Thick scales stitched beautifully in ruby and crimson silk. Teeth and talons in cloth of silver, gleaming. A spiraling three-headed dragon. The sigil of House Targaryen.
“Your mother’s wedding cloak. Rhaegar was the man she chose.”
“They loved each other?”
“Aye. For all the good it did them.”
Jon continued to unfurl the cloak, to find it wrapped around a lap harp. Solid Ash, carved in the likeness of a dragon. Stained dark. The strings gleam. Silvery. Jon plucked one string and note sounded, clear and true against the guttering torches.
“It belonged to your father,” Lord Stark explained.
“A minstrel?”
Lord Eddard smiled sadly, some memory, perhaps. “He had a talent for it. He left it with Lyanna. Few of us go off intending to die.”
Jon nodded absently. He knew nothing at all about this man. At least, nothing good. It seemed strange even talking to Lord Stark about it. He glanced at Uncle Brandon and Grandfather’s statues and shame welled up in him unbidden. They died for this secret wedding, they died and he lived.
“All this time…” Jon said bitterly, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. It was everything he ever wanted and yet the anger kindled anyway. His life was a lie. Would that he had been happy in the lie and never asked. Darkness hides the ugly things, just as snow hides mud. Siblings lost in a moment. Winterfell suddenly, truly no longer his to call home.
“I always knew I wasn’t a Stark.”
“You are a Stark,” Lord Stark declared. “You may have someone else’s name, but you have my blood.”
It tasted bitter all the same. Gaining a name while losing a father. His only pride, all his life, had been that Lord Eddard Stark, good, noble honorable Lord Stark, had been his father. Now only Uncle Ned. He gained a mother and a father he knew nothing about. Jon Snow was dead. A lie. Who was he now?
“She loved you,” Lord Stark said. “Never doubt that. The lie never sat well on my tongue… but it needed to be done. To protect you.”
“Protect me?” Jon breathed. The bitterness creeps into his tone, sour and bitter as the rind. “By letting me think I was a bastard?” Years of Lady Stark’s cold blue eyes staring down at him, small with hatred. “I want you gone,” she snapped, more wolf than fish. Would Sansa have been so cool had she known him as Prince Aemon? Would he have suffered Robb’s unshakable self-possession? “I’m the Lord of Winterfell,” Jon once dared declare in a clash of wooden blades. Innocent. “No. You’re not.” Rob said. Smug and terribly honest. “And you never will be.”
“It was hard for you. I know,” Lord Stark admitted. He shifted from one foot to the other and grimaced. “It was the best I could do, given the circumstances. To keep Robert from getting his hands on you.”
“Why?” Jon asked. “He earned the throne by right. I’m just a boy. I’m no threat to him. I swear it.” My family dead or scattered, Jon thought. Why could they not leave him with his rightful name at very least. A dragon raised by wolves. What harm could there be? He could have been a knight, maybe. Or a Lord of a small Holdfast in the Gift. This Targaryen would have been happy with just that. And then there was always the Wall…
“After what the Lannisters did to Prince Aegon and Princess Rhaenys...” Lord Stark fell silent. Jon concluded the end.
“He’d have killed me.”
Lord Stark nodded grimly. “It wasn’t a chance I was willing to take.”
Jon frowned.
“And my father’s family. Did any of them survive? Do they know about me? Do they even care?”
Lord Stark sighed heavily.
“Aye, they’d care. If they knew you. You have an aunt and uncle living in exile across the Narrow Sea.”
Jon let out a breath. He wondered again about the King’s Road and how long it would take, with Ghost lopping along in the shadow of his courser, for them to reach White Harbor. Jon had never seen the sea. Dire wolves have not been south of the Wall for hundreds of years. How far would this one go?