Chapter Text
The North was cold.
Every Southron lord or peasant could have said as such. Water was wet, flour was too expensive, the North was cold. Yet it did not do the place justice, to confine the savagery of its climate to a single word: 'cold.' Lyonel had known cold before. Had felt the sea-spray off the Bay full in the face, so crisp and clear it could have cut him; had huddled 'neath furs and beside roaring hearthfires with his brother as a little winter had torn through the South; he had traveled as far as the Neck, ridden through bogs so damp and chill that the air itself had left a sheen on the skin, a crust of icy sweat that had melted immediately, soaked into tunics and cloaks, frozen over again. Lyonel had known the cold.
Yet the cold of the North was not a thing you felt upon the skin. This cold was an animal, a snarling, howling thing that desired nothing more than to core the beating heart from you, to dig its way through sinew and ribcage until it found all the warmest, secret places. There it made its nest, shedding ice, exhaling vapor, and in slow and gradual inches it took your flesh for its own, until all you knew was the bite of it, the long, slow dark, the coming night.
The Stark words were a crock of shit: winter was already here, and it looked like the ancient, black-rimed edifice before him, the bleak wind howling off a cliff seven-hundred feet tall, and the dour-faced sworn brother who guided their surefooted Northron drays through four feet straight of snow. This, Lyonel thought, this was true cold: huge and white and dead and hungry.
"How much further?" He had to shout to be heard. The wind, like the cold, starved and moaned and stole the sound from his throat. The dray flicked its ears; it was the only source of heat for miles, and even as well-prepared as he was, buried in furs and heavy wool, his thighs and his calves were the warmest parts of him, where horseflesh guarded against the worst of the squall. Spitting, his guide had called it. Not worth stopping for. The sky had proceeded to open up somewhere outside of Last Hearth, dumping a further foot of snow upon them, yet they had not stopped. To stop moving in this frozen hellscape, even for only a day or two, was to die.
"Few minute more," the brother said. "Cannot see yon castle? Nearly there."
"I can't see fuck-all, man," Lyonel shouted back, but now that it had been said he thought he saw something, some spindle-legged creature lurching out of the white and the mist. The black smudges resolved slowly into towers and halls and low-roofed outbuildings – not a castle in truth, but a ramshackle collection of castle-trappings that had all been gathered together, like scraps of leftover cloth dumped into a chest. Unfinished work, to be sorted later, and yet this was the fabled Castle Black, of which Lyonel had heard so much, barely more than crumbling ruin, the last stalwart defense against the horrors beyond the Wall.
"Gods," he said, more to himself than aught else, and huddled deeper over the dray, taking what comfort he could from its steady warmth. Three months at sea had turned his legs bandy and jellied – he was grateful for the chance to be off them, to be on solid ground again, a more familiar swaying, even if it carried him close and closer to the the end of…everything. The world, mayhap. His life as he’d known it, most assuredly.
To the brother’s credit, he had not been lying. They reached the very edge of all those decaying buildings in good time; one of them, squat, stone, was a stable, of sorts. They made for it first, and solemn men in black took first Lyonel’s reins, and then his horse. He could not even keep the dray, as warm as it was, as patiently as it had borne him through the snow, for it belonged to Lord Manderly. He had been allowed nothing with him when he’d left Storm’s End, not coin, not clothing, not jewelry nor books, not even so much as a sword. He had argued, for this last – what sense did it make, to send a man to the Wall without arms or armor, if the point of the great ruddy thing was to defend against some unknown terror?
Castle Black worked their own steel, he was told, with iron and coal from Winterfell. They raised their own sheep and grew their own crops. He would go with the shirt on his back and a cloak for the chill, and that was all. So had the prince decreed. Yet when the brother had met him at White Harbor, relieving him from the contingent of Baratheon guards who’d not known what to do with him – obey him? make mock of him? – the man had clucked his tongue as if to say, these Southron men, what are they thinking! From his own kit he’d outfitted Lyonel: in stockings made of wool so thick he’d needed to loosen his bootlaces, a heavier fur cloak than what Lyonel had been given by his wincing brother as he’d been seen off, gloves lined with shearling and sewn twice-thick so that he could hardly move his fingers. Still, through all of that, the cold clawed and bit, and when he slid off his horse he stumbled; he could not feel his feet.
“Steady on, man,” the brother said. “We’ll get maester here t’you right soon.” Near three weeks of travel and Lyonel had not once asked his name, and the brother had not once given it. Crows, they were called – he’d heard that somewhere – but crows were large and noisome things, and this man was sleek and quiet as a blade. A scar ran from the point of his chin all the way up to his scalp, where it disappeared beneath the fur of his hood. Lyonel had not seen him without the cover of his cloak, not once, in all their time a-horse, and now he thought he understood why, as the wind tore at him fierce enough to try and take chunks off.
“I don’t need a maester,” Lyonel said. The dray was led off before he could catch his footing, and so he staggered to lean against the stone wall instead. He could feel the winter out there through the seams, where water had fouled the mortar; the wind howled through every crack, like it meant to prise the whole damned building apart. No one else seemed to find it worrisome, not even the other horses in the stable: three of them, all sturdy, shaggy things, feathering so thick around their fetlocks they looked like ladies’ slippers. Nothing at all like Merry, his mare of the last ten years – or, Gowen’s mare, now, he supposed, as it was to be Gowen’s title, and Gowen’s keep, and Gowen’s lineage. For a moment his vision blurred. Tired, he told himself, tired and cold, the wind, just the wind, and then the moment passed, and he bore up in its wake.
Bearing up, too, was the brother, who watched him silent, something dreadful in his own face, something like pity. If he touches me, Lyonel thought, I am going to fucking bite him. But the brother did no such thing, only spoke quietly to the other men in the stable, and sent one of them running out into the squall. Then it was only Lyonel and two other men, and he had the absurd, insane thought that he could take them, even unarmed, he was well-trained and blooded in battle and these men were common criminals or disgraced hedge knights, not up to his own standards, surely…
And what then, you fool? Run out into the storm? You’d not last a sennight before the cold took you. Were they on the coast, perhaps, if he could make his way to a ship – but they were nowhere near the coast, and even if he survived the escape, what then? Essos, maybe, to take up sword and become a bravo. To never again know the smell and the sound of Shipbreaker Bay, the way the light had hit the curtain wall as the sun rose over Durran’s Point, nor to feel the shade of the Rainwood in high summer, kept cool beneath the sheltering arms of the forest. To become a stranger in a foreign land, where neither tongue nor custom were known to him. An exile in truth, for to return to the shores of his birth would mean his death. A man did not run from service to the Wall; a man did not lightly shirk oaths made to Starks or their weeping tree-gods.
“S’all right,” the brother said. “All wonder it when they ken it.”
“Wonder what.”
“How far might you get if running.”
The remaining stablehand leaned over and spat. His breath plumed out in fox’s tails before him.
“Reckon I could’ve got to Queenscrown,” he said wistfully. “When I were younger.”
“On horse?” the brother said.
“On foot.”
“Piss,” said the brother. He looked askance at Lyonel. “Twenty leagues it is, to Gift. If you got that far, twenty more to New Gift. Then naught but tree and scrub ‘til Last Hearth. You want to walk sixty league through snow and ice, eat cambium and shit in hedge, you be my guest. There’s none who’ll stop you ‘til you reach Umber land, and they’ll pop you full arrows afore you blink. Lord Commander trifles not with deserters. Send a raven right quick, he.”
It had the feel of a speech given more than once: casually delivered, without malice. So matter of fact, it was, that Lyonel could not take offense. It had been foolish, wishful thinking, and he was not a green boy, to think that wishes still could come true. Slowly, testing his feet, he straightened up. His feet were not the problem, he found, not from the journey, the long weeks on horseback, but something with his right foot in particular. It tingled and burned for long minutes, despite his attempts to get the blood moving again. The brother watched him do it with mild interest.
“So,” he said, when Lyonel finally dared to put weight upon the foot and found that it would hold, though only just. “Lordly sort, aye? Most men I take, not sent with honor guards, they. Killed a man, then?”
“You spoke hardly a word to me for three cunting weeks and now you want to get to know me better,” Lyonel said. Too bitter to be a question. The brother only shrugged.
“You’ll take the vow tonight,” he said. “After that, no lordship, you, no wife, no land, no babes. This–” And he stamped his foot so that the horses tossed their heads. “The gate ‘tween all that was and the night ahead.”
“It’s just a fucking wall, man,” Lyonel said, but felt a shiver run through him all the same. Snarks and grumpkins and piskeys, were stories of the Wall: that beyond it lay horrors unknown to man’s imagining, the Night’s Watch the last stalwart defenders. Shit and nonsense, all of it – all the real dragons were dead, and with them something vital gone out of the world. Whatever had once lain in the dark beyond the Wall was long gone, rotted in the ground or frozen in ice. Now it was only a gaol tended by stiff-lipped superstitious madmen, one of which Lyonel was destined to become. He rubbed his hands together. The shearling, at least, was warm.
“Beat the shit out of a prince,” he said, and then the door to the stable opened, and out of the howling wind there came two figures: black cloaks on black armor on black breeches. One of them wore robes; the other was leading a mule and cart.
“Come on, then,” said the robed man. A chain clinked ‘round his neck, five links in metals that Lyonel could not make out between the poor light and the blustering snow. “Up into the cart, lad.”
“I’d rather the horse, actually.”
“Horses mislike the ice,” said the brother. “And if t’cold’s bitten you, you’ll not walk far. Up in cart, dragon’s bane.”
“I’m not an invalid,” he said. Tested his foot again. Steady enough. “I’ll walk.”
The brother only shrugged. “Suit y’self,” he said, and swung himself up into the cart instead. The maester clicked his tongue.
“Unwise,” he said. “Unwise, unwise.” And that, that was just as a crow or a raven, that croaking admonishment. Lyonel grit his teeth. Took a breath that stung his throat for how quick it froze him.
The gate, the brother had called it, and as he stepped out into the white, and saw the great Wall looming down on him glittering bright as cut crystal, he could not shake the feeling that the man had spoken true.
It was a long, trudging ten minutes further before they made it up to Castle Black proper: less a castle and more a hillfort, a ragged thing, a black sheet draped over forgotten furniture. The brother prodded him to speak the whole way and, after three weeks in near-silence, Lyonel was as famished for conversation as he was for wine or food that was not salt beef and hard tack. He held his tongue, however; it was a bitter draught to drink, the topic the brother chose.
"Tell who you were," the brother said, and Lyonel grunted. His right foot burned and itched. Beside him, the maester walked as sprightly as if he had been born to the snow and the ice – perhaps he had been – and it galled him, that a man at least ten years Lyonel's senior moved so much easier.
"He's Lyonel Baratheon, he is," the man leading the mule said. "Not heard the rumor?"
"Heard what rumor? Been on the road, me. As you ought, lazy sod."
"'Tis your sparkling wit and silver tongue what bring the recruits in, Lon," the man said sweetly, and the brother cackled.
"Nay, my handsome face, it." Then he focused on Lyonel again, and said, "A lord proper, then? Not heard of you. Big house, though, is Baratheon."
"Not heard of the Laughing Storm?" the man ahead said, and Lon said, "Pecker, when ought I hear of lords and ladies? When shoveling shit out latrine? When crawl’t through dungeon sniffing up fresh blood? Speak I often to princes or kings, Pecker?"
His lilting accent grew stronger the more he spoke. Lyonel could not place it beyond ‘North,' but that said very little. Lowborn, was all he knew for certain, as most of the men of the Wall must be. Criminals and thugs and the desperately poor. What a feast he must seem to them, he thought, coming here with his own clothes and four limbs and all the teeth the Seven had granted him still in his head.
"Speak you often to the Lord Commander if you don't stop badgering the man," the maester said, and Lon and Pecker ceased to talk. The maester walked beside him, chain clinking. "Forgive them, ser," he said. He did not lower his voice, but the wind, still howling, turned it into a murmur. "Simple men have simple joys, and gossip is oft the only entertainment to be had here. The whole Wall has been abuzz for your arrival."
"Should I be thankful?" Lyonel said, and the maester shrugged.
"In some ways," he said. "In others, not so much. There will be fresher recruits who have not yet learned their honor, wanting to test their mettle against you. I advise you beat them swiftly and bloodily, but do not prick their pride further."
"I've never heard a maester advocate for bloodshed before."
"I'm sworn to the Night's Watch, ser," the maester said. "Such a vow takes precedent over kings or Citadels or even gods. If violence would lead to the greater good, then violence I shall recommend."
They trekked the remainder of the way in silence, but it was not until Lyonel at last stepped within the Castle that he felt as if he could breathe properly again. The stones were dark as midnight and thick as tree trunks, and he had not realized how truly, bitingly cold he was until the wind cut off and the snow ceased to fall upon him. The warmth of the entry hall hit him like a fist, nearly too hot to stand, and he turned away from it with a gasp. His whole body started to tremble, teeth clacking, bad enough that he stumbled again and Lon, who had leapt from the cart and followed them, was obliged to lean against him so that Lyonel did not fall. The maester took up his other side until the worst of the shaking passed.
"Good sign," the maester said. "A man who does not shiver is too cold. Come, the Lord Commander said he wished to hear your story before you speak the vow. I can take a toe before his hearth as easily as my own."
"Take a toe," Lyonel repeated, but the maester spoke no more of it as he was hustled gamely down corridors and up a tall flight of stairs, crumbling near as bad as all the rest of the keep. Towers everywhere, he saw, as like because the ground was unsuited for building as anything else – or to keep things as close as possible. A sprawling keep was a keep that needed twice as much fuel to heat, and indeed everywhere he looked there were rooms shut up, thick curtains drawn. The only places with fires or light were the common hall, where a crow in the rafters cawed incessantly as they passed, and a bright-lit room down a corridor that he was not privy to see, but from which came the unmistakable sound of hammer and anvil.
"Off with you," the maester said, and Lyonel realized that his other side was still warm, Lon still holding him up. The brother grinned; three of his teeth were black with rot. Lyonel could smell him from half a foot away.
"Carry him yourself up the stairs, Maester Farris?" he asked. "Happy to be of service, me."
"Happy to be a busybody, you," Maester Farris said tartly. "Go, go and see to clothing for the ser."
"Don't call me that," Lyonel said. He was weary all down to his bones, now; the shivering was not abating, even though sensation was coming back to his fingers and, wretchedly, to all the rest of him as well. It felt like someone had shoved an icicle up his arsehole and into his heart.
"Ser?"
"No titles," Lyonel said sharply. "No land, no oaths but to the Watch, is that not the case? I give it all up the second I say those vows, and fucking gladly."
"You would not be the only knight here."
"Excellent for them. Mayhap they can be brave and just without the gods seeing fit to shit directly upon them."
Lon's narrow, dark eyes darted back and forth between them. "Sht!" Maester Farris hissed, and, laughing, the brother went on his way. It left a fucking age of stairs to climb, with only the maester as support, but Lyonel had pushed himself through worse at Redgrass, at tourney, in the yard at–
Not at home, though. Not home any longer.
"Lord Commander Wylon will be glad for the help of another noble sort," the maester said. Halfway up the long stair and Lyonel hardly needed to lean upon him any more. His foot still burned and ached, but it was tolerable. "The Watch is not as it was a century ago. You must imagine the sorts of men who find their way here. Once, it was a great honor to take the oath. Now..." He shook his head. "I know not what circumstance brought you here, but I am grateful for it."
Grateful, Lyonel thought. Had he a modicum less of restraint he thought he might have tried to rip the maester's throat out with his teeth. As it was, he managed to distill his displeasure into stony silence, and Farris said no more to him the whole way up.
The Lord Commander's tower was the most well-appointed of all the constructs Lyonel had seen thus far: a sturdy, formidably-made thing that rose up and up in defiance of wind and weather. He could hear the howl of the snow outside, but not a lick of it slipped through the stone; for the first time in weeks he was nearly warm, and grew warmer still as they ascended up through cells containing brothers at their leisure, some reading, most sleeping, and then to the secondmost floor, which was a small solar containing a heavy table, a writing desk, windows covered with thick, dark drapes. The solar was occupied: at the desk sat a man whose countenance was more wrinkle than face, so cragged and cracked that he could have held water with it. He had a full head of hair gone shock-white, which fell down nearly to the small of his back in a long, thin braid, and his eyebrows were so wide and shaggy that they appeared as moth's wings over the beetle-dark glint of his eyes. He might have been swarthy once, Lyonel thought, but the North had taken its toll; his skin was pale as chaff where Lyonel could see it peeking out from 'neath heavy fur and wool, at wrists, at the ripple of his throat.
"Lord Commander," the maester said, and deposited Lyonel without fanfare in a chair before the hearth. "If you've no objections, ser, I will see to...to Lyonel's foot here."
"Frostbit already?" the Lord Commander said. His voice creaked like an old ship. Lyonel had known a dozen sailors precisely like him; absurdly, it made him feel melancholy, which he shouldered through with gritted teeth.
"Like as not," Farris said, "but best to check." And then he set to Lyonel's boots and too-thick stockings with a vengeance. By the flickering light of the hearth he saw his bare feet as if for the first time: paler still than the ancient Lord Commander, and on his right foot the last two toes a vicious, aching red. "Not bad," the maester said. "Not bad at all. And shan't happen again once you're outfitted better." While he poked and prodded, the Lord Commander rose from his seat and came to stand over them both. He was not a tall man, and age had stooped his back further, but his look was level and unwavering.
"So you're the lord they've sent me," he said, and Lyonel sighed heavily through his nose. "Thought the Laughing Storm would be bigger."
A strange thing to say to a man who had ever been the tallest one in a room, but age did things to the mind, and so Lyonel resolved to ignore it. More than six foot he was – if the Lord Commander wanted bigger, he must needs find himself one of the fabled giants beyond the Wall itself. "I aim to please," he said, and the old man smiled. He, too, had all of his teeth.
"I am Lord Commander Wylon Manwoody," he said. "I do not normally make a habit of greeting new recruits, but I am sure you can imagine that you are something of a special case."
"I'd rather not be."
"What we want rarely has anything to do with what is. I've had word from Prince Baelor about the circumstances of your recruitment–"
"Then you know all there is to know," Lyonel said. He had replayed the events of that spring a thousand times or more in his own head. He was not a man to dwell upon past mistakes, but this, his greatest, he had chewed until his gums were bleeding: the quarrel with his father, the tourney, the drink, the fight. He had only seen Aerion once after, in the study at Ashford where Prince Baelor had held his judgement. His vicious little grin had been gap-toothed, and Lyonel, equally viciously, hoped the little shit had swallowed the damn thing, and may it have pierced his guts and rotted him faster than his own foul temperament was already managing.
"I know what a prince wants me to know," the Lord Commander said. He showed no signs of needing to sit. "Kings and princes come and go, but the Watch is forever. I'd hear it from your own mouth, ser."
"So long as you never call me such again."
"Ser? Have you something against your own knighthood?"
"Only so much as it's shit. Less than shit." Lyonel stared down at his bare feet. The maester was carefully bending the last two toes on the right; they were, slowly, returning to a more normal color under the relentless heat of the fire. "The oath you swear – defend the innocent, be just, be true. Useless fucking rubbish. If the Seven had a care for oaths or vows they'd have struck that pissant little worm dead where he stood, but instead they needs must punish fools such as I for making the barest effort at not being a monster."
"So you did strike a prince."
"Strike him? I dragged him to the ground and beat his whining arse bloody. Aerion Brightflame. Nothing bright about that one." Lyonel winced. "Nor bright about me. I ought have looked away. I ought have..." He spread out his fingers, much as he could in the thick shearling gloves. Winced as Maester Farris started to work the stockings back over his feet. "He was going to kill a girl for putting on a puppet show. Serwyn of the mirror shield. You know it?"
"Vaguely."
"They had a puppet shaped to look like a dragon. Masterful thing. A delight to watch." He flicked his fingers. "'The dragon ought never lose,'" he said. He'd heard the boy clear across the way, through the din and riot of his own feasting tent – like a fucking madman. Then the high, shrill scream of the girl as the Targaryen prince had broken her finger.
He had not gone right away. This, for some reason, still nagged at him, like a sore tooth: he had not gone right away. By the time he'd stumbled into the puppeteers' tent, wine-sodden and aggrieved at having his fun so ruined, the girl's finger had been so wickedly bent that he'd been able to see the bone split through the skin. Blood on her hand, blood on her lovely costume. Blood in the prince's eyes as Lyonel had told him...he did not even remember what he'd said. Some white-hot righteousness had taken him, the likes of which he'd not felt since he was a young man, a scrapping, hungry thing that had still believed in piss like justice. What justice had there been for Hardyng, whose leg had broken beneath the horse that the prince had killed? What justice for the puppet girl, one less finger with which to ply her trade? He still did not know what he'd been thinking, only that it had seemed so clear to him, the path he ought take. In that moment, Aerion Targaryen had been the face of every ill thing in the world, and shown the nature of his enemy at last he had slavered at the chance to make right. In that, at least, a fine example of his House: the fury had sunk its claws so deep in him that he'd not come rightfully back to himself until he was in Lord Ashford's cheerless dungeon, and Gowen had been lingering outside the door.
"You stood for what was right and just," the Lord Commander said. "As any true knight ought to." Lyonel spread his hands out again, wider this time. Look around.
"And see where it has gotten me," he said.
"You had the right to demand trial by combat, but you didn't. Why?"
Gowen's face, pinched and hurt. He had their mother's mouth, a wide, soft thing, when he'd said that father had taken him aside, before they'd left Storm's End. He said I should not interfere, his little brother had whispered. Lyonel, still half-drunk, without his tunic, knuckles bleeding where the prince's teeth cut in, had stared at him. He said that...if you won't do your duty by the House, then the House shall not do its duty by you.
By which he had meant, the marriage. The heirs. The lack of. Twenty-six, was Gowen, and with a lovely, golden Lannister bride, and they'd lost the first babe but he was keen to try for a second. Thirty-two was their sister Leonora, with three babes of her own and a husband who doted on her. And then Lyonel.
Yes. And then Lyonel.
"My father was quite swift to inform me by raven that if I demanded a trial, there would be no House for me to return to." He watched the maester take his hands next, peeling off the gloves, sweat-damp. The shearling stuck to his skin. His hands were a bit red, but not nearly so bad as his toes had been; he felt the maester's pinching fingers as if from a thousand miles away. "And as the penalty demanded by the prince was the loss of both hands and all of my teeth, I felt the Wall to be a better choice."
Prince Baelor's suggestion, after Lyonel had paced and shouted himself hoarse. When he had at last sunk down into the chair offered him, the dead, cold chill come over his heart – father means it this time – the prince had said, so softly, the realm still has need of men like you, ser. He had turned them over, the options given to him, like a babe handed a new toy. Barely understanding. To live the rest of his life a maimed cripple and be shamed and shunned by his House; to demand a trial, as was his right, and win, but be disowned and turned out into the world with no coin, no name, no family; to demand trial and lose, and be killed outright. Or.
Or.
"We do not keep our ear to Southron politics here," the Lord Commander said. "But I was once a son and heir, and well I know a father does not disinherit his eldest without cause. The matter of the prince, I care not. You upheld your oath to the Mother and Maid, and I'd be proud to call you brother, were that the only reason you were sent. This other matter, though...Wiser to tell me now, lad, before it's pried out of you by other recruits. If a raper you were, or child-lover..."
"Fuck, man," Lyonel said, aghast. "No. Gods, no. I'm thirty-six and unwed. What does that tell you?"
“Ah.” The old man sighed it out, like some great knowledge had been told him. He nodded as he spoke, “I see. I see.” Then his face quivered, a complicated geographical rearranging. It was, Lyonel realized after a moment, a smile. “When last I knew,” the Lord Commander said, “you Stormlanders called it the Dornish vice. Which always struck me as amusing. In Dorne, we just called it fucking.”
Then he laughed, the old man did, and reached over the maester’s head to clap Lyonel on his fur-covered shoulder. The sun keeps setting, he thought. Tired. Fucking tired. The next day comes. A man’s life ends and still the world goes on.
He had no anger left in him, not for this. On the journey by ship, in the paltry solace of his own cabin, he had raged and shook until he’d wrung himself dry as a stone. Prayed, even. Had asked the Father how a man’s own blood could fashion such a betrayal, yet had known in his own heart that the failing had been his own. The pride had been his own. Time, he’d thought he had. There was always more time, for highborn men such as himself.
“Have I answered to your satisfaction?” he asked, and the Lord Commander released him. Waved his hand.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, very much so. I'll speak with you again on the morrow, Lyonel. After you've taken your oath."
He could not imagine what else the smiling old goat could want with him, but he was too exhausted from travel and heartsickness to press. He looked at the maester and said, "And are you satisfied? Am I like to die of a chill at this juncture?"
"You shall if you continue wearing these," Farris said, and prodded Lyonel's knee. A pair of thick hose had been given him before he'd boarded the Tempest at Massey's Hook. He'd been sweltering with them on, all the way up until they'd hit Last Hearth, when the weather had turned for the worse. The rest of the continent might be laboring under a drought, but not so the far North, where the snow was still thick on the ground from a long and unwavering autumn. "You should have more than one. Woolen hose, then breeches over. And the stockings as well. A thick pair beneath and a waxed pair overtop. Layers, man, layers."
"If the Lord Commander wished me to wear layers, perhaps he ought have sent layers, instead of leaving me to the tender mercies of my House," Lyonel said sweetly, and then nearly flinched as he thought, not my House any longer. He did not react to the Lord Commander's chuckle as the old man went back to his desk and sat.
"Away with the both of you now," he said, and Farris got creakingly to his feet while Lyonel stuffed his own back into his boots. "You'll take the oath along with the other recruits tonight, and in the morn we'll test your mettle in the yard. I look forward to seeing the Laughing Storm at work."
Neither of them calling me 'ser' any longer, Lyonel thought, with a gritted, spiteful pleasure. But that, that moniker, he would gladly keep, and gladly bear to the end of his days. His House and his name and his legacy they might take from him, but they could not take his laughter. It was all he had left, for he'd rendered himself empty on the long sea-voyage here.
He stood and bowed; he did not know what was proper deference to a Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and so angled himself as deeply as he would if he were to greet a peer – for naught, it appeared, because the Lord Commander did not even look. He was absorbed in something on his desk, some pile of papers that Lyonel could not read from this distance. He appeared to have forgotten they were there entirely, and did not so much as raise his head or wave his hand as Maester Farris took Lyonel by the crook of his arm and led him out of the tower.
"Shifty Dornish snake," Lyonel muttered, and the maester snorted.
"He has heard worse, and from more strident detractors than yourself," Farris said. "But I would not speak so within his hearing, nor any other loyal man of the Watch. Lord Commander Manwoody is well-respected."
"Oh, I respect him," Lyonel said. "I just think he's a cunt."
"Well," Farris said tartly, "so long as you respectfully call him a cunt, I suppose that's fine."
Then he led Lyonel down the stairs, down and back out into the gale and the ice and the chill, to a building that was only marginally more stable than all the others, which he called the old Flint Barracks. Rows and rows of stacked beds lined every wall, two small trunks at the foot of each one, and more than a dozen men were there, black-cloaked crows sleeping and muttering and farting and speaking softly to each other. When they entered, with a squall from the wind that could wake the dead, it felt like every eye turned to him at once. The weight of them was almost staggering, but he was used to being looked at: with envy, with lust, with disappointment. He held his head up high. Gods, how he fucking hated it. The looking. The expectations.
"You may rest here until you're called for," the maester said, and led him down the line of beds until they came upon one with sheets tucked precise enough to cut. "Another few hours, perhaps. Garin is not like to return until sunset at least with his flock."
"A crow in truth," Lyonel said, and Farris smiled at him.
"Rest easy, Lyonel," he said. "I do believe that you will do well here. When all the rest of the world is arrayed against us, we take care of our own." Then he pushed Lyonel down upon the bed with surprising strength and nodded, as if well-satisfied, and exited the barracks without a single look back. Lyonel was left alone with near a score of men still looking at him.
"What the fuck are you looking at?" he said, and almost all of them ceased to stare. The ones who didn't were the ones to watch, stone-eyed men with scarred faces, missing ears, men who might see him as an obstacle to overcome more than a brother to welcome into the fold. Almost, almost like he were at tourney again, sizing up his opponents in a melee. Which ones knew him. Which ones flinched first.
Lyonel stretched himself out on the bed. They were all of the same size, he noted wearily, for men of six foot or less. His feet hung a delightful several inches over the edge of the thing, so he kept his boots on, and fuck the crisp bedclothes very much, thanks. But even with that final indignity, it was not long before his eyelids started to droop. The bed was simple, hay-stuffed mattress and a scratchy wool blanket, but the simplicity was almost comforting. Once, when he was young, he had slept on pallets and had felt he'd known on sight what honor and goodness was. Once, he had been a knight at the Redgrass – before father had discovered his proclivities, when all the world had seemed open to him, and he would never need marry, and he would live forever.
He fell asleep like that, hands folded grimly over his chest, and dreamed of a simpler time.