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Sam sat cowering on the floor, with Ghost draped over his lap like a heavy blanket, telling Jon all his woes. Sam’s father had not liked him, he recounted. The man had beaten and starved Sam, and treated him with all sorts of unpleasant medicines. It had not hardened him or made him brave. It had only terrified him more.
The boy’s lip was quivering, a tear freezing to glass in the crease beside his nose. Jon felt the urge to wrap an arm around him, but stopped himself and patted Ghost instead.
There was one memory that made Sam’s voice sound different, one where his round face grew softer and he stopped sniveling.
“They made me wear my mother’s clothes,” he said, “and walk around the castle, for everyone to see.”
Jon nodded, pondering. “Wouldn’t they have been too long?”
“I tucked the skirt under a belt,” Samwell said, as if that was the most self-evident thing in the world. “It’s how you wear a dress that is too long. By now I’d be too fat to fit in them.”
He sounded regretful, then, as if he would prefer to wear them still.
“It was cruel to send you to the Wall,” Jon mused.
“It was meant to be cruel. For a while, things were not so bad after my brother was born. My father just forgot about me. My mother took me to music lessons with my sisters and their septa. They had sweeter voices than I.” Sam sighed deeply.
“There’s nothing wrong with your voice.”
“These past few years I like it little and less. The more I sounded like a man, the more my father hated me for not being one.”
Sam startled, had maybe said too much. Sam’s eyes were big and round; they looked at Jon with a pleading expression. For an absurd moment, Jon found himself examining the rotund body, as if he was expecting to find a Danny Flint under those black robes. But then he stopped. Sam had a woman’s heart, and not a woman’s body. That was the whole source of her grief.
“Do you think you’d have rather been a girl?”
Sam shrugged. “There’s not much use in pondering. It’s not like I can change myself. Maybe the maesters have some way, hidden in their libraries, but my father would rather have killed me than sent me to the Citadel.”
Jon reached his hand over again, then stopped himself. Maybe Sam should be treated with the distant courtesy that was proper for a young lady. Jon did not know much about that, he had to admit. He remembered asking Alys Karstark for a dance, his heart beating in his throat. His hand was still hovering near Sam’s shoulder, tingling, so he put it down again.
Sam gave him a sweet smile for that.
“You can still be a maester,” promised Jon. “You can learn from old Aemon.”
Sam laughed, and somewhere in the wolf’s white fur, their fingers touched.