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i.
Jeyne knows she shouldn’t cry. She has a roof and a bed, her Septa always tells her, far more than most children like her can hope for. She has her father, and her brother and sister, and even Lady Catelyn, always courteous and sometimes kind.
But today, her stitches were crooked, and her lessons were wrong, and she knows, more than she knows anything else, that she must be strong, she must be better, she must be perfect, so that she might be a lady and a bastard both.
Ladies are allowed to cry. Bastards are not. It tangles up and stays, hard in her throat, in her heart. But she is five years old, and she cannot find her father, and so Jeyne Snow huddles beneath a stairway, nose running, tears cold on her face.
She hears running feet. They continue past her for a moment, then skid to a stop.
“Jeyne?”
Robb peers under a wooden slat to look at her. “Jeyne.” His eyebrows scrunch together. “Are… you all right?”
She takes his hand, lady to his knight, feeling fresh tears spill down her cheeks. “Yes,” she says, in spite of them. She knows he knows she’s lying. He squeezes her hand hesitantly, shifting from foot to foot.
“Want to play swords with me?” Robb’s face brightens as he speaks.
Ladies don’t play swords. But bastards, children like her - they might. Jeyne accepts the proffered stick.
“Father’s taught me some moves,” Robb continues as they walk out into the sunlight. “I’ll show them to you, and then we’ll spar.” He holds his head up proudly, and Jeyne tries to match him. “I’m Theon Stark, the Hungry Wolf. You’ll be…” He pauses.
Jeyne tries to think. “Dacey Mormont!” She’d seen her at Winterfell with her mother. “The Bear of… Bear Island!”
“And then we’ll fight a dragon!” Robb hops up onto a rock, and gestures wildly with his stick. “Are you with me, Lady Bear?”
She jumps up, hitting his stick with her own. “Aye, Ser Wolf!”
She will hold that memory tight to her in the icy snows, long after he is dead.
ii.
She had asked, at nine, if she might learn to play an instrument. A lady needed to be accomplished, if she hoped to find a good husband. Jeyne knows that she will need to find a good husband. Robb might think that she can stay at Winterfell, and her littlest siblings might beg her to, but Robb’s wife will not want a bastard goodsister under her feet and crossing training swords with her husband.
(She tried to tell Robb this, but he only said that he would never marry, and Theon – Jeyne mislikes Theon already – had laughed, and said he’d changed his mind about girls when they started to grow teats. Jeyne had crossed her arms over her chest, red in the face and not sure why, nor why Theon had laughed the harder when he saw.)
She likes the old harp.
It was a handharp, small and made of pale, smooth, golden wood. It had belonged to a Lady of Winterfell who’d come North from White Harbor. It might have been Myriame Manderly, or Lady Jeyne, who’d married the Rickon who’d died with the Young Dragon in Dorne. The maid who found it hadn’t known, had only watched in confusion as Jeyne peppered her with names.
Jeyne hopes the harp belonged to that other Jeyne.
“A daughter Sansa, a sister Sansa, fol de rol de lay. A – ” It is difficult to find rhymes for “Sansa,” even in a nonsense song.
Father will listen to her play, sometimes, but Jeyne can tell she isn’t good enough yet. She was afraid at first he’d take the harp away, he’d looked so sad.
No matter. She has her harp. Someday she’ll wed… and that is where her dreams fail her. No pictures in the air.
Sansa, though, has pictures enough for them both.
Sansa has always been shy of her, imitating Lady Catelyn. Jeyne is strange and ugly and more often than not covered in dust, and she is not Sansa’s trueborn sister anyhow.
Jeyne did not realize that all it would take to change this would be a few poorly played songs on a harp.
The past months have been full of cold rain, and even Robb and Theon are more apt to be found inside than out. Every afternoon, Jeyne sits down to practice, and every afternoon, Sansa and Little Jeyne, the steward’s daughter, gather at her feet with their dolls and their still-crooked bits of sewing.
“Florian and Jonquil!” Sansa calls out. She sings while Jeyne plays, and then again, until Jeyne is no longer missing notes and Sansa no longer forgetting words.
It will always be the song that Jeyne knows best.
iii.
“You can’t get married,” says Arya, hard and furious. “You can’t.”
Jeyne continues wrapping quilts around her harp, so that it won’t be damaged in the trunk. “I’m four and ten, little sister.”
“No!” Arya shoves her. “That’s not what I mean. You’re not Sansa. You haven’t been just dreaming of the day they’d send you off to – to some knight you’ve never even met! I bet he’s old. He’ll never let you use your sword. He probably won’t even let you bring Ghost! You’ll just sit and play your harp and – and – and never come home!”
Those last are muffled into Jeyne’s back. She looks down and sees Arya’s hands tight around her. Her own are suddenly shaking.
“I’ll come home,” Jeyne says, quietly.
But will she? Father refuses to shame Lady Catelyn in front of the King. His eyes had been dark with guilt when he’d told her of the offer for her hand.
Benfred Tallhart is not old. She has even met – or, rather, seen – him once or twice at feasts. Someday she will be Lady of Torrhen’s Keep, and that is no little thing.
She ought to be happy. She is not. But she will do her duty, all the same. She will be a good wife. She will not dishonor her father any further than she already has.
It had all just come so quickly.
Jeyne reaches behind herself to ruffle Arya’s hair. “Before I leave. I have a gift for you.”
Slowly, Arya lets go of her waist. Jeyne turns, and sees her sister regarding her warily. Arya rarely came to listen to her play the harp – Sansa was there, after all, though now in a chair with needlework rather than on the floor with her dolls. But on those rare days when Robb still had enough time to spar with his bastard sister in the Godswood, Arya would always find her way to them.
She’s the only sibling who looks like Jeyne. The hand of your fair daughter. Jeyne wonders if Benfred Tallhart had ever given her a second glance. The hand of your horsefaced bastard.
What would it be like for Arya, when that cage closed around her? Jeyne slowly pulls the gift from under her mattress, and wonders, suddenly, if giving her sister this might be a cruelty.
She looks at Arya’s widening gray eyes, and hands the parcel over.
“This used to be Robb’s,” says Jeyne, as Arya rips the shawl away to reveal a short dagger. The wool falls forgotten to the floor. Arya grips the dagger in both hands, swinging it like a sword, again and again, finally knocking a chunk of wood out of the bedpost with a loud, sharp sound. Her face is alight with glee.
“You musn’t – ”
“Tell mother. I’m not stupid.” Arya shifts from foot to foot, unable to keep still.
And then she buries Jeyne in another hug, the pommel of the dagger digging into Jeyne’s spine. Jeyne hugs her back, this time.
She will wonder, on dark nights, if her sister died in Kings Landing, dagger in hand.
iv.
She is married to Benfred for less than a year, all told.
When she hears of Bran’s fall, she aches to return to Winterfell, but she does not forsake her duty. That is the month her moonblood is late, but nothing else comes of it. When Ser Helman begins to gather archers, he smiles and lets her practice at the butts, though she’s never been an archer and it becomes quiet clear she never will be.
Benfred holds her when she learns the news of Father’s death, and then he rides to war.
And then she is a widow, a widow who was never a mother, never a Lady. Little Eddara is the new heir, poor child, unless her uncle grows over-ambitious. She writes a long letter to Ser Helman, and then Jeyne Snow rides for Winterfell, Ghost at her side. If the raiders who took her husband come, she welcomes them to try and test their steel against the she-wolf’s jaws.
Bran smiles when he sees her.
Robb is gone, Lady Catelyn is gone, Sansa and Arya and Father – Jeyne had not wept at Torrhen’s Keep. Jeyne weeps at Winterfell.
Bran has nightmares, and Rickon worse ones.
But Shaggy and Summer and Ghost play in the last gasps of fair weather, and Jeyne is home. Jeyne is home again at last. She worries for Eddara, for Lady Berena and her sons, when word comes of the Ironborn raid, but she is no longer the child who might have begged to ride out with Ser Rodrik.
She is a wolf now, with her own pack to protect.
And they are in dire need of protection.
Theon Greyjoy lines them up in a row. His fingers linger on Jeyne’s chin.
And that is the pattern of things.
She is granted greater freedoms than her brothers. She is granted better food than the rest of the “wards.” Once, under guard, she was even allowed to see Ghost. Theon links his arm with hers and talks with her, calls himself Prince of Winterfell, Prince of the Iron Islands. He offers her some of Lady Catelyn’s dresses.
At night, Jeyne takes to sneaking into Bran’s room. Sometimes in the night, she wakes, and sees him in a fit, his eyes white. She pulls him to her chest, and hums half-remembered melodies until he wakes and stills. “You don’t need to worry,” he tells her, every time, and her heart breaks a little more.
The wildling woman, Osha, corners her one day near the kitchen. “The turncloak. He wants you for his salt wife.”
Jeyne fights to stop the trembling in her hands. “I know.”
“Fuck him,” Osha suggests. “Then stab him.”
Jeyne goes to Bran, sits down beside the chair they’ve placed him in, and buries her head in her hands. “I –“ and she can’t quite find the words. If Theon tried to force her, she thinks that she could kill him. But seduction – she had barely even learned to charm her husband.
Bran strokes her hair, awkwardly, as if it’s the only way he can think of her comfort her. He has an old man’s eyes. Even Father never looked so old.
Jeyne sits beside him, quietly, and thinks.
On the chosen night, Osha nods to Jeyne. And Jeyne proceeds to the chambers Theon has appropriated, her arms heavy with jugs of wine. Wine, and strongwine.
This time, she is the one who presses a hand against his cheek. She lets his own hand move further up her thigh. She drinks as little as she can, and none from the jugs with fat red stripes. Theon doesn’t notice. Theon has his head against her chest when he finally passes out, mumbling something into the space between her breasts. Jeyne pulls her gown back up over her shoulders and shakes.
She hadn’t thought it would make her feel this way, this sick, with both of them still dressed and him likely too drunk to get it up even if they’d gone further. But it has. And now –
She looks at Theon Turncloak, Theon Greyjoy, Robb’s Theon. Traitor, murderer. She remembers how Septon Chayle had sounded in the well, after he’d tried to save Palla.
Theon has a dagger. Jeyne takes it from the sheath on his belt. It fits well in her hand.
His head lolls back in his sleep. Jeyne can see the vein pulsing in his throat. Her hands are shaking again.
She doesn’t need to kill him. They just needed him out of the way. But she wants to. That’s what terrifies her. She wants to.
He has too many of his men in the castle, and they have too few. Killing him won’t take back Winterfell. They’ll still have to run. She’s taken too long already.
She thinks of Benfred, brave, cheerful, stupid Benfred. Chayle. Mikken, who’d made the dagger Robb gave her, the dagger she gave Arya.
Poison is a woman’s weapon. A blade in the dark is a bastard’s.
“I dreamt your hands were red,” says Bran in the crypts. It is too dark for her to see them.
v.
“Are you awake?”
Rickon’s voice is high and soft, nearly quavering. It’s been a long and tiring day, for her brother more than most.
Jeyne pushes herself upright on the strawtick, meeting Shaggydog’s nose on the way up. The wolf sticks to Rickon now like a shadow, like a hand following an arm.
The mattress ropes creak as Rickon clambers onto the bed. He insists these days that he is too big for hugs, a man grown at five years old, but he flings himself against her all the same, burying his curly head in her shoulder.
Jeyne rocks him like a babe. It is a toss up, at night, whether he goes to her or to Osha for comfort, but since Bran left, his nightmares have only gotten worse.
“Are they going to kill the king?” he asks, his voice muffled.
The king. Rickon is a king himself, at least in these mountain holdfasts, at least until Bran returns.
(If Bran returns).
Rickon is a king himself, and therein lies the crux of the issue.
“What did you hear?” Jeyne asks him.
She herself has heard a great deal, through her own ears and through the wolf dreams, the wolf dreams that the Reeds had been so adamant were real. Jeyne knows from her snatches of sleep that Ghost sits outside the Wull’s chambers right now, cocking an ear occasionally at the rumblings from within.
Rickon clenches a fist in the back of her tunic, pulling some of her hair with it. He doesn’t answer immediately.
Kill the king.
The Southron King, brother to the man who’d taken Father and uncle to the boy who’d killed him. Jeyne had danced with him at the feast just hours ago, a few awkward turns and one bruised ankle. His fingerless Hand, the one who’d started this mess, the one Lord Manderly had been to kind as to send them, had danced her around twice, much more gracefully.
The Little Liddle had borrowed her for all the rest, but that was neither here nor there. It means less to be a bastard in the mountains. It means a great deal to be sister to a king.
“They said they should,” Rickon says, eventually. “One of the Buckets. Said I could pretend to bend the knee and then they’d – they’d trick him or something.” He swallows. “They didn’t know I was listening.”
Jeyne shivers.
“It would be wrong,” says Rickon. “It would be like – like what happened to Robb –”
Jeyne strokes his back, soothingly, like Osha does. There are tears in her eyes, but she blinks them away.
“It would be wrong,” she tells him, mind racing. “But King Stannis won’t let you keep your crown. The Wull lost –”
“I don’t want the stupid crown!” Rickon pulls back from her, his face red and wet with tears. “I just want to go home!”
“We will,” says Jeyne, and she’s shocked to find that her voice isn’t shaking. “We will.”