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He spends too much time in the godswood. This is a fact, one he’s heard in the mouths of several of his men each time he emerges from a planning session amidst the bone-white trees where Lady Melisandre’s demons hunt human souls, if they exist. Stannis does not fault them their bitter mutterings; he gives himself nearly as many as he sits in the falling snow and lets the warmth of the hot springs ease the pain of his blackened left hand and its two missing fingers.
They’re the small finger and the ring finger, nothing more; that is the only good Stannis can say about the frostbite, that and the fact that it’s his shield hand and not his sword. If and when the last battle comes upon him, when he dies fighting a straggling Bolton freerider or otherworldly ice demons, he will at least be able to swing Lightbringer with some semblance of dignity.
Lightbringer itself shines a little more brightly in the Winterfell godswood when he takes it out, day after day, to stare at his reflection in its rippling steel. When the springs are particularly strong it even fogs up from the heat, and when he put it into the heated pool for half a heartbeat one evening, it remained blisteringly hot for a week afterward, too much to hold in his good hand. (The frostbit hand, of course, registered only a faint warmth. He’s taken to dipping it in the hot springs from time to time since then, marveling in a dull way at how it’s possible to burn a dead hand and feel nothing at all.)
It’s been a full month since the siege, the exact number of days and nights written on a piece of parchment in Stark’s maester’s tower, though each day it becomes more difficult to stomach the thought of writing on Ramsay Bolton’s skin. The count, his own grotesque calendar, was born of necessity—order is nowhere as necessary as it is amongst demons—and its substance was, too, as the Boltons had not kept much traditional parchment around. Sometimes when he scratches in another day, branding Bolton with what Stannis knows is a dutiful countdown to the unknown but looming end of his own life in this frozen hellscape, he pictures stubborn Jon Snow doing the same, had he taken this seat instead as Stannis had bid. (Would Jon Snow have made the sacrifices necessary, human and otherwise, to win back his father’s legacy? he wonders sometimes, before cutting the bastard out of his mind.)
Sometimes he even pictures his Onion Lord doing this for him, as a good King’s Hand would, and then he has no doubts. Lord Seaworth would despise everything about this campaign, every flayed, snow-covered, frostbit, starving moment of it, but he would put Shireen’s teachings to work.
That thought, when he has it every few days, staring at the weirwoods around him as he plans what he will do when the snows break (they have to break eventually, he knows, though it’s taken weeks), makes him dazedly content.
When the snows do break, another half month again after the taking of Winterfell, Stannis is ready. The North is gone, lost under the weather. It will be gone for years, if all the maesters’ predictions and Lady Melisandre’s preachings are correct. Nonetheless, they must hold it the best they can, and some of his men must go and find what little else there is to see and know of Stark’s old domain, find from the Night’s Watch what is to be done if the land is to be protected from the Others.
They must. They will.
Which is why he nonetheless spends the first clear dawn in the godswood, staring at his reflection in the pool and polishing Lightbringer, as desperately uncertain as he has not been since Lady Melisandre offered him Edric, since a raven brought the news that Robert had declared war against the rightful king of the Seven Kingdoms.
This is not a hard choosing, he tells himself as he looks at the remains of his left hand. This is not sacrifice, murder, treason. There is nothing to do but fight and die and mayhaps win in the process. His stomach is heavy nonetheless, its usual hunger sublimated into something sharper and more desperate. He leans back against the roots of the nearest weirwood and closes his eyes.
The warmth is often soporific, yet Stannis is still disgusted with himself as he comes to full consciousness at some undetermined point later, another voice ringing in his ear.
“Your Grace. Your Grace, there is someone here…”
He does not remember the name of the man calling him awake. His eyes are wide, however, and his voice hoarse as he continues.
“He comes with a ragged boy and a...a monster.”
“A monster?” Stannis brushes his good fingers against Lightbringer’s hilt. “What, a Bolton? Report exactly.”
“Apologies, Your Grace. A wolf the size of a horse, Your Grace. A black wolf the size of a horse. They’ve come for Lord Manderly.”
Stannis laughs, a sound that echoes off the stillness of the godswood. The man’s eyes grow wider.
“Bring them in,” he grunts eventually, brushing snow from his breeches. “Someone must tell them of Lord-Too-Fat’s lack of chins and life.” When the man hesitates, he continues, “The wolf is of the north, is it not? Let it answer to the northern gods of this pile of rocks.”
“Northern demons, Your Grace,” the man reminds him, as he turns to obey.
The wolf, shaggy and unkempt, with a bowed, lumped back, enters the godswood before either of the promised humans, and Stannis finds himself thinking, as he looks into murderous eyes, that this is a pony, not a horse. A large pony, a pony that may well rip his throat out, but a pony nonetheless. Its movements are precise, and it takes several moments of staring before Stannis realizes that the lump on its back is in fact human.
“Who are you?” the lump demands, in a voice not many years out of babyhood. Stannis is reminded, stupidly, of Renly running around Storm’s End at much the same age, with much the same imperiousness. “Why are you in Father’s place?”
“I am Stannis Baratheon, the First of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men.” The wolf growls; the lump on its back shifts so that Stannis catches a flash of a boy’s face as he wraps an arm casually around the beast’s neck. Realization prickles at the back of Stannis’s mind. “You are my Lord of Winterfell.”
“That’s what Lord Davos said,” the boy mutters, looking back over his shoulder.
Stannis’s neck twists much too quickly in the direction Stark’s boy is looking, where a fully grown man enters the godswood.
“Your Grace,” the man who looks so much like the twice-dead Davos Seaworth murmurs, going to his knees in the snow, “I am sorry for my absence. On the charge of Lord Wyman Manderly, I bring him—I bring you—Rickon Stark, trueborn son of Lord Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell.”
“As the wolf proves,” Stannis whispers, looking from the direwolf to the kneeling man with Lord Davos’s face and back again. “Manderly is dead, as are you, Lord Davos.”
“The Stranger will not keep me, sire.” Davos’s face is almost split with a smile he is visibly struggling to suppress. Out of the corner of his eye Stannis watches the wolf walk deeper into the godswood with Stark still on its back. “No more than he will keep Lord Stark’s sons.”
“Sons? There are more?”
“Mayhaps. Rickon has said his brother Brandon was still alive when last they parted from Winterfell. He says his wolf says Brandon’s wolf is still alive.”
“The boy is a warg like his bastard brother,” Stannis murmurs. Davos nods. “Why did Manderly not say?”
“He did not speak before you killed him?”
Stannis flinches.
“I am sorry, Your Grace, I did not—”
“The Freys, before I took this godsforsaken heap of rocks, though in some ways you are far more accurate than you know. The surviving Manderlys mutinied from within, making my duty easier, but they did not say their lord had saved my onion.”
“I do not believe they knew, sire.” Davos’s voice is cool and steady. “Some moments I scarce believe it myself. Yet it is easy enough to shorten another dead man’s fingers.”
Stannis snorts. “Frost will take fingers as well,” he tells Davos in response to a raised eyebrow, holding up his ruined hand.
There is no gasp, no sputtered apologies. There is only Davos’s face, certain and soulful, and a steady sympathy in his eyes that even Stannis cannot mistake for courtly obeisance.
“This is one thing I would not wish a courtier and a lord to share, sire.”
“Nor I.” Stannis lowers his hand. “I am only sorry you have returned to see what has become of your king. In some ways you discharged your last duty to me many months past.”
“I am still alive, Your Grace,” Davos says, as if this is what defines his duty to his liege lord. And he is right, Stannis knows, and yet—he wishes better than this miserable campaign for his most faithful courtier.
“I want to tell you to go,” Stannis whispers eventually, as Davos approaches him to better hear the horrible things in Stannis’s disloyal heart. “This is no place for onions.”
“If this is your place—”
“My place in the world died with my parents, Lord Davos, and it died again when I was given a rock in the ocean instead of my family’s lands.” The words flow from him too quickly for any regal propriety, but he cannot stop them. “I am the rightful king of the Seven Kingdoms, and Lady Melisandre says I am the last savior of mankind.” His ruined hand trembles as he continues. “There is no place in the world for me. I live for history, not for now.”
“Kings are never happy,” Davos agrees. He brushes Stannis’s bad hand with his own stump, and Stannis fights back an instinct to scream, mayhaps simply to flee. “Nor are lords. I have not been happy one moment of my life since King Robert died.”
When Stannis eventually replies, it is in the smallest of voices. “Nor I. Man is not meant to be happy.”
“Man is happy,” Davos whispers, now taking Stannis’s blackened hand in his own good one. “The office is not.”
“There is no difference.” Stannis cannot think outside of the warmth of skin against his own, cannot even remember the last time he was touched by another human being. He needs to tell Lord Davos to remove himself, to stop being so impertinent. Instead he finds himself leaning in. “There is no choice.”
“There is no choice, my liege,” Davos echoes, before bending and pressing his lips to the ruined remnant of Stannis’s ring finger. The frostbit skin explodes in sensation, far more potent than that from even the strongest heat, almost as if it were whole again and this were an entire other world, one where Robert had not made them all hopelessly royal, where Renly had remembered the name and duty larger than them all. “My life was set from the moment I slipped into Storm’s End with stolen goods.”
“Would that I had killed you?” Stannis asks, unable to keep the bitter curiosity from his words as he pulls his hand free. “Would that I had let you go, instead of damning you to share the same miserable duty?”
Davos smiles, and Stannis feels his heart thud, irrationally loudly, in his ears, as if this were battle, a sick happiness he had not known even on his wedding night now weighing down his stomach.
“You are righteous, stubborn, insistent, and all the rest, Your Grace, but you were unable to help yourself from being human, then.”
Stannis closes his eyes. “A kinder time.”
“Yes,” Davos whispers, into his ear. “Folly and weakness were allowed then.”
“This campaign has been nothing but folly.” Stannis must force the words through a narrowing throat. “There has been nothing but snow and death since I left the Wall. Cannibals live amongst my men, could I but catch them for certain. I use the skin of Ramsay Bolton as parchment. There is nothing righteous nor holy nor all the damned rest of it. If there are gods, they do not live here.”
“The only god I am certain of now is the Stranger,” Davos admits, his voice still so close to Stannis, almost as if his own mind is speaking back to him. “Death I cannot deny, not the number of times I have seen it.”
“If you stay, you will see it again. Davos, I will die here, in the miserable Northern winter. You have brought a piece of the future beyond me in this warg Lord of Winterfell. You are...you have done your duty a thousandfold.” Stannis opens his eyes; Davos deserves that much from him, he knows. “You are released. Go home to your woman and whatever children I haven’t yet killed.”
Several minutes of silence follow, Davos watching the gray skies, Stannis watching Davos.
“I should go,” Davos eventually agrees. He puts his intact hand on Stannis’s frostbit one again and kisses the ring finger a second time. Stannis’s stomach swirls more strongly than ever, bubbling at the blaze of life amidst the dead flesh. “If you wish it, Your Grace, and to...to save my own family. And yet duty—”
“I release you,” Stannis repeats, his voice now so hoarse it’s a wonder he can make any sound at all. “When you go, it is with my blessing.”
“If part of me cannot bear to go?”
“Madness,” Stannis growls, choking on the word nonetheless.
“Yes,” Davos agrees.
He presses his lips to Stannis’s.
Stannis cannot breathe. He cannot move, he cannot feel either of his hands, he cannot breathe; all he knows is the constriction of his throat, the wild racing of his heart, the way his stomach aches worse than any hunger pain he’s yet known. It is so far beyond unseemly as to be the sign of Davos’s death, should he order it; mayhaps this is how Davos wants them both to go to the Stranger, in complete dishonor.
“You may take my life,” Davos tells him, drawing away. “I—I wanted to go, I don’t know, it seemed—”
There is no answer. Stannis knows that; Davos knows it, too, his voice shrivelling away to nothing. Stannis’s good hand is tracing Lightbringer’s hilt, he realizes faintly.
“You are no Loras Tyrell,” he whispers eventually, releasing the hilt, “and I am not my brother. Neither of my brothers. I cannot take your head, Lord Davos. I’ve tried before. You may leave my service...when you wish it. When it is right. For you.”
“Soon,” Davos whispers. He does not comment on the brightness of Stannis’s eyes, and Stannis returns that favor. “Not today. I don’t feel...ready.”
The last word is a whisper. Stannis nods. He must tell him about the ranging plan, he must figure out what to do with a Lord of Winterfell still in his smallclothes and guided by a wolf that half his men will call a demon. The future is no brighter; the implicit countdown on Ramsay Bolton’s skin still burns into his mind.
Yet Davos takes his ruined hand in both of his, squeezing while Stannis’s heart thuds, and he knows that if this is to be the last piece of happiness in his life, it is well done indeed.