Chapter Text
Secrets in the Dark
She found him at last as he sat alone in the dark. He raised his head as he heard her soft step in the hall. "Sam?" she called quietly. "Are you in there?"
He swallowed; cleared his throat. "Gilly. Yes. Yes, I'm here."
He had expected her to come straight in, but when the door stayed where it was, shut almost to a crack, he knew that she was waiting for an invitation. "Come in," he said. "It's all right. There's nobody here."
Nobody and nothing. The dresser was bare. The mantelpiece was devoid of ornaments. The bed had been empty for months, and the hearth held only cold ashes.
Gilly entered cautiously. "It's dark in here, and cold. It doesn't seem right. Someone should light a fire before--"
"Yes," Sam said. "Someone will. But it will still be cold, won't it?"
She frowned in puzzlement, and he sighed. In the flickering light from the hallway, he saw his breath steaming in the cold air of the room. Jon's room. The room of the King in the North. The bed-chamber of the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Yet it was empty of ornament, devoid of memories. A petty yeoman in the south would have ten times the richness in his house. Jon's small room at Castle Black had felt more like a home than this.
He sighed, scraping his hand across his face. "I'm sorry. I just came here to… check. I didn't mean to stay so long. I just… sat down for a moment and ended up staying for a while, just thinking. Waiting."
Worrying, he thought. Worrying about secrets, hiding in the dark.
Gilly looked down at the pile of furs on the floor. Sam had shaken them clean the morning before days before, then rearranged them in a soft nest. They remained where he had placed them, untouched.
"He hasn't come back, then," she said.
"No." Sam shook his head. "Nobody's seen him. He likes to go out hunting at night, you see. They leave Jon's door open a crack, so he can push it open himself, and they open the gates and the outer doors for him when he wants to go through. But nobody's seen him since yesterday morning. And Jon will get here tomorrow, and I've…"
"It's not you, Sam," said Gilly. "It's not your fault."
"But Ghost knows me," Sam protested. "He won't let anyone else in Winterfell touch him, did you know that? But he lets me. He lay down and slept beside me the other day, right there on the rug. And I've lost him. Jon will be home tomorrow, and how will I tell him? How will…?" He stopped, pressing his lips together.
How will I tell him?
"You won't need to," Gilly said quietly. She was looking not at Sam, but at the twilight through the open shutters. "Ghost's gone to find him. He knows he's landed at White Harbour. Ghost knows he's coming and he can't bear to wait any more."
Sam shook his head. "But how…?"
How does he know? But he remembered Bran and his direwolf at the Wall, and all the impossible things that had happened in the north. He remembered Jon and Ghost at Castle Black, a lifetime ago and longer, before summer's end. He forgot, sometimes, that Gilly came from north of the Wall, and that there were some things that she understood far better than him, for all his book learning.
"Yes," he agreed. "Yes. He's gone to greet Jon in private, and then… and then he's going to bring him home."
It should have filled him with relief, but did not. His voice cracked on the last word.
******
A child of the south, Sam had not thought to find music in the north. Northerners were dour and grim; hewn from stone, and joyless. They lived their lives in fear of winter, and music was a frivolity in the face of that.
Yet even at Castle Black, there had been songs. Here at Winterfell, the servants sang just like servants in the south: songs of love and ribaldry and loss. Guardsmen bellowed choruses, pounding out the rhythm with their fists. And sometimes, from behind closed doors, he caught snatches of music of an exquisite, alien beauty.
He could hear it now as he turned to close the door. "Oh," he breathed. "Is it…?"
He stopped. The music of the Old Gods. The voice of the Children of the Forest. The songs of the First Men. It sounded foolish, but yet…
The music stopped. He heard faint laughter, a human voice; some spoken words, and then it started again.
"Travelling musicians here for the winter," said Bran Stark from behind him. "They are practising songs to sing for their king and his queen."
"Oh." Sam swallowed. "Yes. Yes, of course."
He closed the door, and leaned back against it, his hands pressed against the cold wood. Bran's clothes were beaded with melted snow, and firelight flickered on his wet hair. He had been outside, Sam realised; outside in the gathering twilight and the finely falling snow. He almost said something about it, but stopped himself. He almost followed up on the talk about music, but stopped himself there, too.
"I was wondering…" he said. "That is to say, when are you…?" He swallowed. "Please don't tell Jon about… well, about this. Not straight away, anyway. He needs to know, of course; I know that. He didn't talk about it much, but it hurt him badly, not knowing who his mother was. But..."
"He needs to know who he is." Bran's eyes seemed to be gazing at something beyond Sam, but how could that be, when Sam was pressed against the door? He fought the urge to look over his shoulder. Sparks of firelight glinted off Bran's unblinking eyes. "He needs to know what he is."
"Yes," Sam agreed, "yes," but he could imagine how Bran might tell Jon, just blurting it out instead of a 'hello,' in front of everyone, before Jon had even passed through the gates. Oh, he hadn't thought about it at first, swept away by the thrill of the revelation, but there was something unnatural about Bran, as if… As if he isn't properly human any more, Sam thought, but perhaps he wasn't. He claimed to be this three-eyed raven thing, after all.
"Yes," he said again. He pushed himself away from the door and walked forward. Even beside the fire, the air felt cold, as if Bran carried with him the chill of winter. "But it needs to be told in the right way, and not right away. Give him time to…"
Bran blinked at last, closing his eyes for a long moment, then opening them again. A branch cracked in the fire, the noise sharp in the sudden silence.
"…to be home," Sam said, remembering Jon's stories of his childhood in Winterfell. He had not always been happy, but his respect for father, his love for his siblings – Robb, Arya, Bran – flowed beneath his words like a deep river. Sam had envied him at times for having that.
But then he thought of the barren chamber of the King of the North, devoid of keepsakes and memories. Arya was presumed dead when Jon had last slept in Winterfell. Bran had been lost beyond the Wall. And Jon's father was not his father, and his siblings were not his siblings after all. But…
"To be home," Sam said defiantly.
The music started up again, very faint. Bran turned his face towards the fire. "Then tell him, then," he said, his voice distant. "I will speak to him of something else, something I saw beneath the weirwood tree. I flew on the wings of a raven, and I saw…"
Something scraped against the shutters: a dead twig, perhaps, carried by the wind. "What?" Sam asked.
"But it will not be enough that I saw it," Bran said. "When I saw the dead marching on Eastwatch, Jon believed me, because he had seen them, too, at Hardhome. But Jon, like all of them, has utmost faith in the magics woven into the Wall. The gates in the Wall can fall, the men of the Wall can fail, but the Wall will always stand. It will always stand." He closed his eyes. Were those tears that shone on his cheeks, or just melted snow?
"What have you seen?" Sam asked, his heart lurching in his chest. "Has the Wall…?"
Bran looked at him; no, looked through him. "Look to the raven," he said.
******
All day long, stable boys and guardsmen claimed to have seen dragons in the eastern sky.
Sam doubted it. The clouds were thick and a storm was coming. Even the nearby hills were fading into the mist, as if Winterfell stood alone at the heart of a shrinking world. But Jon and the Dragon Queen were undoubtedly near. They had spent the night in a holding less than a day's ride away, and its lord had sent a raven as they left.
Then came a rider with the news that they were less than a league away and moving fast, hoping to beat the storm. The news was spread through Winterfell by horns and drums and a dozen scurrying pages. Fires were lit and banners were hoisted. By the time Jon's party was nearing the winter town, two hundred people had taken their places, gathering in a courtyard trampled clean of snow.
"I've never seen a dragon," Gilly whispered, bending forward to shield the baby's head from the cold wind.
"Nobody has," Sam said. "That's the whole point. Nobody's seen one for a hundred and fifty years."
Gilly looked fearfully at the sky. Sam's curiosity hungered for dragons, but more than that, he longed to hear the howl of a direwolf coming home. But Ghost never made a sound. If Ghost knew any secrets, he would never need to tell them.
The crowd shifted. Sam found that he had taken a step forward, pressing into a gap, and then the crowd reformed around him. Voices rose and fell, and suddenly he heard Arya Stark speaking words he knew he was not meant to hear.
"Remember the last time we all stood here to greet a king and queen."
"When we were happy," said Bran, his voice without inflexion, as if happiness and sadness alike were meaningless to him.
The siblings were silent for a while. "Because we were happy," said Sansa Stark. "Weren't we." It did not sound like a question. "Oh, we were full of our childish discontents. Arya wanted to fight like a boy. I longed for pretty dresses and to live in a song. But we were happy then. Before the world changed."
"Before we changed," said Bran, looking up a broken tower.
"I sometimes wonder," Sansa said, "what would have happened if father had barred the gates that day. If King Robert and his queen and Joffrey, and all the others… If he'd just turned his back on them. If he hadn't let them in."
"It could not have been stopped," said Bran. "It should not have been stopped. It brought us where we had to be. Where the world needed us to be."
"And where is that?" Sansa said sharply. "What--?"
"I won't do this," Arya said suddenly, fiercely: the first break Sam had seen in the cloak of control that she always seemed to wear. "I won't meet him like this, so formal, with everyone watching."
"Arya!" Sansa reached for her sister's arm, but Arya was quicker, snatching herself away.
"I won't," she said. "I will not."
She left, cutting through the crowd in a way that Sam could not understand. She did not jostle, did not command, yet somehow she was through them. Sam soon lost sight of her. He swallowed, and tried to slink backwards, but he was too big and too clumsy and the crowd did not yield.
"She's still a child," said Sansa, "in many ways. Running away…" She stopped, and gave a self-deprecating smile. "Yes, I know," she said, although Bran had said nothing. "I know."
And then there was nothing left but waiting. Sam edged backwards; managed a step, and then another step. He saw Sansa speak again, but the winds were rising, and this time he was spared from hearing her private words.
When Jon and the queen came, they came with the storm. The gates were thrown open. The wolf banners lashed in the rising wind, then one of them ripped free, to fly beyond the walls. "No dragons, Sam," Gilly breathed. "But, look, there's Ghost."
And there was Jon, walking alone, with Ghost at his side. His hand was on Ghost's towering shoulders, his gloved fingers buried in the direwolf's fur. He's showing them that he's still a man of the north, Sam thought. He's showing them that he's still a Stark. Sam's feet took him backwards again, and further back.
There was no retinue of servants, and few guards. Behind Jon, but mounted, came Ser Davos Seaworth. A tall woman rode beside him, armoured like a knight. Could this be the Dragon Queen? No, surely not...
Jon did not wait to be welcomed. "Why should he?" Sam murmured to himself, his lips moving silently. This was Jon's home, and he had been acclaimed its king.
"Queen Daenerys Targaryen stands outside our walls," Jon said, but the wind was rising and the snow was swirling, swathes of whiteness obscuring the towers. "She comes not as a conqueror. She comes not even as our queen, demanding entrance by right." The wind wailed, but Jon's voice rose, carrying above it in the way it must have carried in all his battles, all his victories, all his struggles that Sam had missed.
I barely recognise him, Sam thought.
"She comes as an ally," Jon said, quieter now, but still utterly audible. "Because that is what we need: trust and fellowship, as we face the war to come. No," he said, "as we face the war that has already come. A war that must erase past hatreds. A war that will make names and titles meaningless. She comes--"
I can't, Sam thought. Jon said more, but Sam shook his head from side to side, and did not hear it. Back, he had been walking; back and back, while everyone else was pushing forward. Gilly was following him, looking at him questioningly. Sam just looked down, suddenly desperate for Jon not to see him.
Not like this, he thought, just as Arya Stark had said. He was suddenly fiercely envious of Ghost, who had had his reunion on the relative privacy of the road. Jon had been the best friend Sam had ever had, and the best he could ever hope for. But now secrets lay between them, and failures, and lies. There were too many people watching, and Jon… Jon was a king.
"I knew it, of course," Sam told Gilly, aware that he was babbling, that he made no sense. "But I didn't really know it, if you see what I mean?"
Childish, Sansa Stark had called her sister. But like Arya Stark, Sam turned and fled.
But, then, his father always said that he was craven.
******
"I haven't seen her yet," said Gilly. "The Dragon Queen."
Sam turned another page without really seeing it. There were so few books left in the Winterfell library. Once there had been a whole library tower, or so he had heard, but Theon Greyjoy had burned it down. Now there was just this one room, with just a few salvaged smoke-stained volumes. "Maybe tomorrow," he said.
He knew there had been shouting down in the great hall. He had heard as much when he had scurried out of the library to attend to his necessary business, although he had tried not to listen. Sam had spoken up before the maesters in the Citadel and before his brothers in Castle Black, but this was not his place. Most of the northern lords had returned to their own hearths, but enough remained, and more were coming in, drawn by the news of their king's alliance with Daenerys Targaryen. They would not be happy that Jon had brought her here. Once again, Jon would have to stand up and fight for the things he believed were right.
And I want to be there with him, Sam thought, turning another page and another, seeing images of swords and crowns and trees with eyes. But how could he? How could he stand up and defend Jon's decision to bend the knee to Daenerys when he knew what he knew?
"They say she is very beautiful," Gilly said.
"Mmm," Sam agreed, barely hearing her.
Because I am no good at lying, he thought. I show the truth in my face.
Gilly turned away, moving towards the door. "I'm going to check on Little Sam." She sounded a little put out.
Sam closed the book, pressing his hands down upon its smoke-stained boards. Perhaps Gilly had wanted him to say that she was beautiful, too; that no queen could be as beautiful in his eyes. Oh, everything was so complicated! He knew so little about girls; about people, really.
He opened his mouth to say something, but Gilly was gone. Sighing, he stood up and walked to the window, opening first one shutter and then the other. It was no longer snowing, he saw, although the wind was still strong. It was bitterly cold, but the clouds were beginning to part.
Look to the raven, Bran had said.
Was that a raven there: that quick flash of movement? Standing on tiptoe, Sam leaned out.
"…happy to see me," he heard, carrying quite clearly in the wind.
"Oh, I was," said Jon. "I am. You can't believe how--"
"Sansa said you would be so happy your heart would probably stop," said the voice that must surely belong to Arya Stark.
Jon chuckled. "She was right. When I heard that you were alive, it was… Arya, I thought you were dead. All these years, I thought you were dead."
They were on the wall walk above him, Sam realised, and here he was with his head stuck stupidly out of a window, barely ten feet below them. He didn't dare move back in again. He didn't dare close the shutters, in case they heard. He was suddenly terrified that he might cough. He didn't want to breathe.
"I used to think about you almost every day," Arya said. "They tried to make me give up Needle, but I couldn't do it, because you gave it to me. When I held it, I remembered your smile. And now you're smiling again, but not like you did then."
"No," Jon agreed. "None of us are the way we were then."
"And you don't like it." Oh, but Sam wished so badly that they would move on. He wanted the wind to change direction, to snatch these words away from him. He had done his share of eavesdropping in the past, but not like this, not on a friend. "When you heard that I was alive, you imagined me as I used to be. But I am no longer that girl. You don't like--"
"I'm happy to see you, Arya, truly. We have all changed: you, me, Sansa, Bran. We're strangers, in a way, but nothing can break those memories. Arya…"
There were no words for a while, but from the faint, small sounds, Sam thought that they were hugging. That was good. It was good to hug. Moving in slow, careful increments, Sam began to bring his head in from the window. He reached for a shutter, beginning to close it.
"Without those memories of Winterfell," Jon said quietly, barely audible above the wind. "I haven't told anyone this. I didn't tell Sansa. But… But without having Winterfell and those memories to fight for, I don't think I'd have found the strength to keep going, after…"
"After?" said Arya, when the silence had grown very long.
"After I died," Jon said. "After they killed me. After I came back."
Sam pulled the shutter closed, not caring if they heard him. After that, he sat there in the ravaged library for a very long time, as the candle slowly burnt down to a stump.
******
end of part one