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There is a light in the dungeons.
His master detaches from his handiwork to follow the footsteps into the dark, knife raised and gleaming. Reek wipes the blood from his face and flattens himself against the bars to take a better look. There is the sound of crossing blades and death cries drifting down like birdsong from the dungeon stairwell, and there is a red glow of torchlight in copper curls and bronze blades.
The body thuds back in the span of seconds, the arrow shaft sticking out of his belly. Grey goose feather, he remembers, and smiles. A few seconds more, and the archer comes into view - a red-haired girl clad in furs, who peeks into the cell and recoils on instinct.
“Scared of the sight of a dungeon rat now, aren’t you just a sweet maid,” - chimes a familiar voice, but with a levity that is entirely unfamiliar, which too stops as soon as he’s faced with the horror.
The hand that flies through the bars to snatch him is as different as ice from water from the soft little fist that used to clench itself bloody when Theon monopolized Robb’s attention in the yard a little too long. “You have not killed Bran and Rickon,” Jon Snow hisses. “Why?”
Theon laughs, and the uncomfortable truth spills out of him like the rotting guts of a dead man.
***
Everything is explained to him to the extent that he needs to know, which is not much, now he’s a prince no longer.
The latest pretender to the iron throne, Robert’s brother, has offered Jon Snow Winterfell in exchange for his support to the Watch, and the black cloak has been turned. He appears in the hall the day after the battle alongside his little snow-wife, uncrowned and still blood-covered, and is announced to the muttering crown King in the North, who joined the northmen on both sides of the wall against the common enemy.
“The regent of Winterfell, until my brothers are safely found, and the princess Ygritte of the Wild Folk,” Jon painstakingly corrects each lord, though Theon notices the agonized twitch of yearning in his face. “Every man or maid who crosses the wall is a son or daughter to the King Beyond the Wall,” he defends himself when people ask what right exactly this girl has to be elevated as a joiner of people. The little bastard is all grown up: he doesn’t look at his feet when he lies anymore.
At night, in the crow-cage mounted in the middle of the hall where he’s been held, he can hear regent and princess whisper to one another, hidden away in their seats, nestled into each other with the tenacity that only comes with falling in love in the bitter cold.
“I don’t know what to do. Karstark and Cerwyn want him dead, Tallhart and Glover alive. We might have to deal with the ironmen sooner or later, or we might all be snowed in the castle for the next year tomorrow with no food to spare.”
“If we need to kill him then, it won’t take long to slit his throat.”
“That’s not… I don’t think I would be allowed, after I spared him once. I can’t show indecision when I’m already a turncloak.”
“Screw them all, do you want him dead or not?”
“I… I always thought he couldn’t have it in him to kill Bran and Rickon. That should be rewarded, isn’t it? I can’t make it look like killing them or not killing them nets the same punishment. Like their lives meant nothing, and the keep was all we care about.”
“You could say that if he really had killed them, you would rip his skin off and make a cloak of it. Nobody’s ever going to know you absolutely would fucking not.”
“...he did kill those boys. He did burn them and hang them on the wall and - he chased Bran and Rickon away in the dead of winter, that was as good as killing them as far as he knew. I don’t know if I want him dead, but I want to kill him.”
“This is all pointless. Would it be well by kneeler’s law to put him to death for killing those boys?”
“...I don’t know. I hate that I don’t know.”
“You need to figure it out! It’s the only thing that matters, you know that. If Sam said it true that the Old Gods wanted your brother, they would have had him, turncloak or not.”
They are still arguing when they steal away to their bedchamber, leaving Theon curled up on the floor, still unsure if he’s to live or die. He’s the last of a long list of Ramsay’s men to be judged on the morrow, of which Jon spares some and condemns some with seemingly not a lot of rhyme or reason. He beheads each of them himself, though, that must be said: each with a perfect single stroke of the blade that makes flush with envy.
Theon isn’t sure if he wishes to follow suit or not. One thing he knows is the Gods have listened to his prayers; if he dies today, he surely dies as Theon. Reek was a rat in a rat’s race for survival: he had no use for envy or shame, or petty thoughts.
So he cannot be too angry. He lays against the bars, eyes closed, and tries to figure out if Theon would rise again in the watery halls or in the wind in the leaves of weirwood trees, if his sister would sigh or dance at the news of his demise. Some lords dispute whether the proof of Bran being alive - only some man of the Watch who claims to have met him beyond the wall - some say that treason must be met with death regardless of extent, that he cannot be trusted again. The reason Tallhart and Glover want him alive is that Asha and his uncles have managed to come in possession of their fortresses and wives and children, which would make him smile if he were more detached. Did this stop anyone two years ago, ten years ago, has it anyone, ever, as far as the sea remembers?
Jon listens to everything with an enviable impression of his father’s stony face that betrays nothing of last night’s tears. He turns his head to his wild maiden, the way Lord Stark would turn to lady Catelyn at the moment of judgement, and she would raise her eyes from her needlework, cross her hands to her tender bosom and obediently pretend she was the one who couldn’t bare to watch the man die.
The wild maiden presumably has heard some of this, for she gets the gist. She raises her eyes from the knife she’s sharpening and spits down at Theon’s feet. “When the long night comes, you hope for pinewood but burn horseshit just as gladly. We’ll want every bow when the dead’s at our walls.”
In the muttering that follows, a lady leaps up on her feet, round-faced and veiled but no less fire-eyed for it. Lady Cerwyn, now ruling, whose little brother fell alongside Rodrik Cassel in trying to take back Winterfell. “You don’t mention how we’re supposed to know he won’t betray us again. He’s mad, perhaps he was since he first came here; if having twenty men didn’t stop him the first time, why should having no army stop him now? Will you be the ones gladly taking the risk of a knife in the back, or will you just leave him to burden someone else’s dungeon?”
Someone mumbles in assent: nobody wonders how, if Theon is such an unconstrainable force of evil, he had not bothered himself to seek a violent exit from Ramsay’s dungeon yet. The wild maiden grins. A garnet teardrop glints on the bone necklace at her throat. “Let him be a burden on nobody’s dungeon then, and be our bedchamberman, and it won’t be said I’m afraid of any man, with ten fingers or not.”
The hall freezes into silence, Jon’s eyes widen slightly. One may titter on what the position of sounds like it entails, were it not for the fact this girl probably has never had a chambermaid either to know what it means. Theon decides, foolishly, he likes her.
***
The fire will not rise.
Theon - feeling rather like Reek at the moment - fumbles with the flint and sticks into the great fireplace, to very little success. Someone used to do this for him when he was out of the room, once, what feels like several lifetimes ago.
The same is clearly not true and no longer true for the young rulers of Winterfell, who giggle pleasantly to one another in Lord Stark’s bed behind his back.
They claimed that one immediately after the castle was taken - the prince and princess of Winterfell indeed, Theon had mumbled, rubbing his freshly freed wrists. They’re king and queen in the North to you, squid, one of the guards had spat out, smacking him for his insolence. Lord and Lady Stark, one of Stannis’s man had corrected yet again, and they had begun to squabble with each other and let Theon to his own glaring.
They sit at Eddard and Catelyn’s seats at the high table, hold court in their solar, she sometimes sings in the evening by the small harp lady Stark brought North in her bridal trusseau. He wonders if the little Snow gets off on it, parading in his own foreign red-haired maiden of nineteen as his father did so long ago, laying claim for her on the rightful place of the woman who hated him, knowing he’s the only one who can shield her from hate. Theon wonders if they’ll be both fucked forever, if a maid’s blue eyes or boy’s fuzzy checkbone will ever stop melting into Robb’s smiling face.
“I can feel icicles starting in my womb, Jon Snow,” the gentle bride complains behind him.
“He will be done soon enough. We can be done with all this, you know - you don’t need to prove anything to anyone.”
“If it would get us some time to be alone with nobody staring at us, maybe. I think all it would get us is some girl who’d have things to say about what I wear, so it’s not worth it.”
“Ohi now, you didn’t use to mind the staring so much, when you took my maidenhead in the middle of the camp.”
“It wasn’t the same thing at all, in a camp everybody has better things to do to look at you.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure someone was looking. To make sure of my loyalties or just recreationally…” Theon doesn’t need to turn around to perceive the tickles, giggling. “You’re just biased because it’s different when it’s your people.”
“These - shit, I never thought I would prefer the crows to anyone else but, I don’t think these here are your people.”
“...they will have to be. Yours and mine. None of what we have given up makes sense if they aren’t.”
The flame perks up, Theon hisses as he retracts his scalded fingers, unused to even gentle heat.
“Bring me over some coals, leech prince,” the wild maiden - who had never seen a squid before watching it on a burning Greyjoy banner and thus grew attached to the next best moniker - calls him.
He holds them out wrapped in a rag that she holds against her stomach - fire for strength, to help quicken the babe that probably least people in the known world currently wish to prosper. How delightful that mother and father are both stubborn enough to counteract the entire known world.
Jon snatches his wrist as he retracts his hand, runs his finger over the hollow of his missing right pinky. “Did the bastard did this? No wonder it took a long time. Ygritte, you shouldn’t-”
“He has seven left. Only Gods who enjoy witnessing a shameful death would make it so you can’t start a fire once your fingers have barely started to fall off.”
“Don’t they?” It escapes his lips, he flinches at the hoarseness of his voice, but he finds it hard to stop. It’s been such a long time since he has last spoken to someone looking at him in the eye. “I always figured that was why the Northmen chop heads off on weirdwood stumps.”
“It’s so the Gods may give strength to the executioner, and remember the killing if it was unjust,” Jon snaps. “Speak for your own God, you never kept ours.”
Ygritte - he must remember her name - grins and entirely ignores him. “They enjoy witnessing a death, for sure. They prefer a brave one, though, as much as anyone else.”
“It’s nice to know they wouldn’t have enjoyed mine,” he says, and grins his broken teeth - let it sound like he means his most recent almost-execution, not the one of his nightmares, where Lord Stark drags him out to the Godswood kicking and sobbing for his mother. “By the way, I could give you my thoughts about what you wear too.”
Jon wraps a protective arm around his wife’s shoulders. “You abuse our mercy,” he says, but there’s no fire in it. Theon figures if he were meeker it wouldn’t really make him feel any better.
“Why should I want them, leech prince?”
“I’m not supposed to have them, while you are and you don’t have any; it only makes sense. You were the one who said you can’t be wasteful in winter.”
He wonders if he might have spoken those words to Asha someday, in a distant future where they grew up together, judged by the same jury of humorless cunts instead of getting each their own. Very likely not - the versions of them who rose dubiously harder and stronger from the ruins of Pyke may have little in common with the people they would have grown up to be together. Still, it makes him like the girl even more.
***
“Do you want to appease them tonight, or do you want to piss them off?”
Ygritte studies herself in the mirror. The mousy woolen shift makes a puzzling contrast to her wild curls and scarred collarbone, but it does make sense - wild or not, it itches like mad to be naked under all that fur. “I want Jon not to come to bed with a headache tonight.”
“So, appease them but you don’t like that word,” he sighs, and is rewarded with a grimace. “One of lady Catelyn’s gowns, then. It will make them feel like you’re trying, and it will make your husband shoot a pair of twins in you the moment he can rip it off.”
She scrunches up her freckled pug nose and shakes her head. “They already all want to think we’re thieves. I wouldn’t mind it if there was anything here actually worth stealing.”
“Well, if you want advice from someone who’s not a thief, you will need to revisit a chambermaid.”
“Gods forbid. I’ll put on a gown though, to make you happy.”
She picks out of her own wools and furs the garment that gets closest to reaching under the knees, which also happens not to have any old bloodstains. She accepts it stoically Theon fishes her a sash of cloth of silver that lacks any glaring fish or wolves and matches the blue-grey of her eyes and ties it into a bow round her waist, only to present him with a shit eating grin as she drapes her bare shoulder in a deerskin dappled with snowy fawn spots.
“That’s the embroidered cloak you mentioned having?”
“Embroidered by spring itself to shelter the young from the wolves and shadowcats. What could be more ladylike?”
That evening, Ygritte sits by the harp in her furs, hugs her knees and sings a song about the last of the giants and all that the small folk has stolen from him. Wildlings, northmen and Stannis’s men alike hide their tears, as if they were not part of the thieving small folk in question, and murderers and thieves down to the last man since this war or the one before it. But that’s the way with songs - everyone always thinks they’re the one being stolen from.
One their way to bed, he hears his gracious liege lady whisper to Jon Snow. “Was it a lie, what you told Mance? About sitting over there on the lower table when the king came to Winterfell?”
“It wasn’t. It was a lie that it made me want to betray them. It never did, not since I was a child.”
“Was the Greyjoy sitting there with you, then?”
“No. He’s a legitimate lordling, haven’t I explained it to you?”
“He betrayed you, for one. And when I was singing, he looked like he had been sitting there with you.”
“...I suppose he must have been there then, and I just didn’t notice it.”
“How do I remember it better than you when I wasn’t even there? You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
***
They’ve found a place where nobody will stare. Theon is supposed to return to his padlocked tower cell when they retire to sleep - there is always a bone knife under their pillow, which might turn out to be the opposite of a precaution at night, and yet they cannot bring themselves to give up.
So it isn’t that he felt them rustle away to their rendezvous, it isn’t that he purposefully followed them. He simply snuck to the courtyard for a last bite of the cold before going back to his cage, and followed the giggles coming from the hot springs.
Once, he might have been tempted to look, to file it up as something to mock Jon about, get even about the string of humiliation he’s put him through. But there’s nothing to mock about laughing in the wet arms of someone you love, and there’s no humiliation that isn’t worth surviving - clearly for him the ship sailed long ago. He goes to curl up in his kennel, and dreams of Robb’s wet hand on his thigh.
“If you pull my hair one more time, I’ll tell Jon you are wandering at night,” Ygritte complains in the morning, while he’s immersed in twisting her dense clouds of curls round the stem of a blue winter rose.
He can’t help grinning, which he would feel self-conscious about doing in front of a lady, if she were remotely a lady. “I was just glad to see you’ve found something worth stealing in this pretentious castle. Even the wild enjoy being pampered in hot water, isn’t it so?”
“I’m enjoying my man. Did the old Stark teach you all what to do between a woman’s legs, or can you only steal one at axe-point?”
He ignores it. None of the women who would have grounds to complain of his treatment would do so for lack of an eager tongue.
“There’s no shame. I did my best to deny it, when they first brought me in. Said it was small and cramped, that it was no match for having the open sea to swim in, that warm water coddles men into weakness. All bullshit and I already knew when I was ten. My God didn’t listen to me in the sea either, and warm is better than cold.”
“Not ashamed. This is the heat of the bowels of the earth that belongs to the whole north. The small folk have stolen it for their palace, I’m only snatching it back. That’s what we came down the wall to begin with.”
“And did you have a bow with you, or was the plan always to do it with a kiss?” If there is someone beyond the Wall who would scowl in disappointment at her for failing to use , though, neither of them are the type to deprive themselves of joy needlessly.”
She punches him in the shoulder - which she does all the time with Jon, and causes her to misjudge her strength. He’s still standing, though.
“You’re getting stronger, little leech,” she huffs. “You’re right I haven’t held a weapon in long enough, but neither have you. Tomorrow I’ll take you out in the Godswood with Jon and we’ll see if you can still shoot or you need me to teach you. I told a whole room of kneelers you were going to be our bow, and you’re not making me a liar.”
“Why not?” He regales her with his full broken smile. “After all the Godswood is ours too.”