Chapter Text
The squire was the last to the slaughter. None of his brothers had told him what had happened, nor thought to fetch him. He’d just finished washing Lord Snow’s blacks, and had been on his way to the King’s Tower when he’d seen the crowd. He’d still been carrying it when he saw the blood on the snow, heard the moans of wounded men. He heard the laundry basket drop, heard his feet pound against the snow, saw himself elbowing aside brothers and wildlings both, but he didn’t feel any of it. From the brothel to the training yard to the battlement, Satin had gotten so good at going away inside that sometimes he didn’t even notice when he was doing it.
They were arranged in a bloody tableau. The giant Wun Wun, half a spear through his back, lay motionless in the snow with his titanic hand still wrapped around Ser Patrek’s corpse. The wildling witch Val stood on the threshold of Hardin’s tower, gazing down at the carnage, while Stannis’ witch Melisandre stood on the opposite end of the scene flanked by queen’s men, raking the scene with her blazing eyes. Bowen Marsh lay face-down, a bloody ragged stump where his right arm had once been. The arm lay two yards away, fingers still clutching a dagger that was half buried in the snow. Sweet Donnel Hill was face-up, the snapped shaft of a spear lying across his body as the last of his lifeblood oozed from his torn-out throat. Wick Wittlestick lay in a crumpled heap. Nearest the center of the massacre was Ser Aliser Thorne. His cloak was still white with snow from his ranging, and two of Satin’s brothers were binding up the horror that was his left leg. They moved in a daze, all three of them, as if none of them could quite understand what had happened. But Ser Aliser would not let go of his blood-slicked sword, which he pointed weakly at the heart of the grisly scene.
Satin followed the line of Ser Aliser’s blade. There, lying in the center of it all…
Satin’s boots crunched against the freshly-bloodied snow. Someone was wailing. It was only when Ser Aliser’s voice cut through it that he realized the voice was his own.
“Will you scoundrels not even let me die without filling my ears with whore’s screeching?”
Satin’s wail died slowly, echoing off the towers before drifting up the Wall on the wind. He stumbled forward, staring at the body as his brothers stared at him.
“Jon. Jon, what did they do to you?” Satin whispered.
“How could you do this to him?” Satin said, his eyes snapping up to Ser Aliser Thorne. “Look at him! He’s- his shirt is ruined. You’ve put his shirt all full of holes, you’ve ruined his cloak with all the blood. And you!” he swept his gaze to his brothers. “Why are you all standing there? Are you trying to decide whether to support this? Look at him, we can’t just leave him here!”
There was murmuring. The two brothers tending to Ser Aliser glanced up. Their fingers brushed over sword pommels.
“Shut this hysterical whore’s mouth, I beg of you,” grated Ser Aliser, but in an instant Tormund Giantsbane was looming over him, and the black brothers took a step back.
“The boy is right,” declared Val, “The commander needs a pyre. These others too. We cannot have them returning.”
“No, no no, no pyre-” began Satin as the murmurs turned to assent, but Melisandre drowned him out in an instant.
“There shall be no pyre for the Lord Commander this day. Men, take the Lord Commander to the ice cells. The Wall shall not allow the Others to claim him. The Lord of Light shall determine his fate.”
The Queen’s Men moved in, and the spell was broken. The tableau became a flurry of activity. Ser Aliser and Wick Wittlestick were hauled onto stretchers and taken to the ice cells. Satin was shoved aside as first Queen’s Men, then black brothers took Jon away. He tried to follow, tried to hold onto Jon’s hand so he wouldn’t get lost on the way to the ice cells, but he tripped and fell face-down in the snow.
The cold shocked Satin awake. He rose, brushing the snow and the white direwolf fur from his face. Jon Snow was dead. He’d seen him with his own eyes: lying in a pool of blood, bleeding from the stomach, the back, the breast, the shoulder… Jon Snow was dead, and Satin was alone. All his other friends had been sent to Long Barrow or Eastwatch, and now the man he’d said his vows to under the Weirwood was gone. Satin stayed there on his hands and knees, bitter tears dripping from his eyelashes and nose onto the snow.
Satin beat at the earth with his gloved hands, imagining Jon’s hard breast beneath him. “You stupid bastard!” he cried, sobs wracking him, “Why did you send them away? Sam, Edd, Pyp, Grenn, they could have protected you! We could have protected you! Instead you just had Satin, your pretty little Satin. Satin and Ghost, and we couldn’t protect you, I couldn’t protect you, we…”
Satin stopped for a moment. White fur. Ghost. He felt a pair of hands, strong but not unkind, take him by his shoulders and hoist him up. He found himself looking into the homely face of Three-Finger Hobb, the cook of Castle Black.
“Steady there lad,” the cook said, “You won’t do much pounding that ground. Save your strength.”
“He’s gone,” Satin said.
“That he is,” said the cook, his eyes soft, “I’m sorry, brother. I know what he meant to you. I know you left things unsaid. But now his watch…”
Hobb trailed off. He swallowed.
“Where’s Ghost?” Satin asked.
“The beast? Well, who do you think gave Alliser that wound? Or tore the arm off of Marsh, aye and the throat out o’ Donnel Hill? They thought they’d won, had slain that giant too, an’ were tryin’ as to get the lot of us to go along with it when the wolf leaps among them… Would’ve finished Aliser too, were’t not for the wound.”
“The wound? Where’d he go?”
“Aliser hit ‘im with that sword o’ his. Can’t say how, was moving too fast. Bolted through the Wall after, up north. Fool on the gate must’ve thought Lord Snow was following, for he let the beast out. We’ll not see that one again.”
Satin nodded. For the first time since the nightmare began, he knew what he had to do.
***
Satin found Jon’s chambers just as he’d left them. Nothing had been moved, save Mormont’s raven who had been cawing in Satin’s ear while he’d gathered up Jon’s clothes. No sign of the old bird, and Satin felt a strange pang of loss.
It smelled just as he’d left it, too. Jon’s scent lingered in the drafty chamber: in the beddings, the rushes, by the fireplace. He glanced at Jon’s bed. The furs were all tangled. Once, the steward would have immediately gotten to fixing them. Now he walked over as if in a trance. Soon this impression Jon had left, just like his scent, would be gone from this place. Satin knelt down. Fine ghost-white fur covered the furs. He took them up for just a moment. There was even a hint of warmth still there, or was that his imagination? Jon’s scent was mixed with Ghost’s, but they were so similar in so many ways. Sweat, saliva, strength, a hint of softness that neither man nor beast could hide.
Satin felt a tear catch in his long, thick eyelashes. He sniffled slightly, setting the sheets down. He had to do what he’d come here to do; there was no time for grief, nor for shedding tears over roads not taken. If it were him down there in the ice cells, and Jon going through his chambers in preparation for some important duty, would Jon waste time shedding tears for him? Satin tried to take strength from the answer, but instead he doubled over, weeping and clutching himself as if the cold knives had plunged into his own chest.
Satin tried to admonish himself. You’ve spent half your life crying, you stupid boy. But that just made it worse. He resolved that if he must cry, he’d cry while collecting his things. The brush he’d used for Ghost’s fur, the little bell he’d learned the direwolf liked to hear, some linseed oil, a lantern, a bottle of vinegar he’d use sometimes to clean Jon’s chambers. He didn’t know what kind of injuries Ghost would have, but it wouldn’t hurt to have something to clean them with.
Satin slipped into his own chambers next. They were messy despite Satin’s best efforts: he had too many little projects going to store everything neatly. The still was the biggest one. He'd had a laugh when he'd shown Pyp. The big-eared brother had asked him if he'd share his product, and Satin had obliged. Perhaps he'd expected brandy or moonshine, but he'd gagged when the perfume hit his tongue and he'd spilled it all over himself. Satin giggled, and after he'd finished sputtering Pyp had doubled over laughing. They'd teased Pyp about "drinking Satin's perfume" for many nights after. It wasn’t as nice as the perfume he’d brought from Oldtown, but that was irreplaceable. He’d only worn it twice so far: once when he said his vows and once when Alys Karstark said hers.
He went to one of his other projects and took some fabric for dressings as well as his needle and thread. If Ghost were injured, he’d need these. He only hoped the wolf wouldn’t take his fingers off when he started stitching…
He stopped by the stores next for some salted pork, then the armoury. The wildlings had secured it: five of Tormund’s warriors waited outside with spears and one with a bow. A blonde wildling with a winged spear and bronze-rimmed round shield eyed him suspiciously.
“I’m going after the Lord Commander’s direwolf,” Satin declared, trying not to sound scared. Once this spearwife would have skewered him without a second thought, but she nodded and let him pass.
Satin grabbed a torch and a razor-sharp falchion. He always wore his dagger, but he remembered the stories of the wights beyond the Wall. A falchion would fail against even light mail, but its single edge was sharp enough to lop off a wight’s limbs with even Satin’s modest strength.
Satin walked to the gate, emulating Jon’s casual, confident stride. He tried not to notice the looks they gave him as he passed, but none stopped him. Even the sheepish recruit on the gate let him pass, after babbling some excuse for having let Ghost run off.
“Who knows what they’d’ve done with him had he stayed?” Satin said, trying to comfort the lad who must have been no more than fourteen, “Better that he come back when tempers have cooled a little.” A very little, thought Satin, There will be more blood on the snow before the day is out.
Satin had no gift for tracking, but even he could follow a bleeding wolf. Pulling his hood close around his ringlets, he trudged through the snow towards the haunted forest. He’d rarely ventured beyond the Wall, and never alone. The clear icy plain just beyond it sent a stabbing ache through his eyes. There was nowhere to hide from the sun’s glare, nowhere to hide from anyone atop the Wall. As he reached the edge of the forest he glanced back at it, looming above the world like a curtain pulled over the horizon. This is what it must have looked like , he thought. When I rained fire and bolts down on them day after day, night after night. When Jon held the Wall and they threw him in a cell for it.
Jon had held the Wall for many nights with his warmaking, and his peacemaking could have held the Wall all winter, and the Others take the Others. But they’d put him in a cell for that too, and this was one he’d never come out of.
A rush of wings met Satin as he reached the edge of the forest. Satin wasn’t surprised to see Mormont’s raven staring down at him from a soldier pine.
“Corn?” it cawed, “Corn? Satin? Corn?”
“Not today, I’m afraid.”
And he was. The pines and firs pressed in around him, their branches heavy with snow. Judging by his tracks, Ghost had slipped under branches too low and too dense for Satin to follow, and each time he went around he feared he’d lose the trail. He dared not crawl under the branches. “Dead things in the woods,” the letter had said. Each snow-buried root was a cold hand grasping his ankle.
The raven followed him, sometimes in front, sometimes behind. When it went ahead, he’d always catch up just as he found Ghost’s trail.
“Thank you,” he said one time when he’d found it standing on a small patch of bloodstained snow after a few frantic minutes of losing track of Ghost.
“Corn?”
“When we get back.”
“Corn! Corn!”
They continued in silence after that. The crunch of his footsteps in the snow, the flap of the raven’s wing, and the snow-muffled sounds of a living forest were his only companions. The sun hardly reached the ground beneath the snow-covered branches, and Satin gripped his falchion more than once at an errant swaying of a branch, or the thud of snow sliding off one. Daytime or no, he soon found himself bearing a lantern to light his way.
Memories rushed back to him, pride now laced with sorrow, as he emerged in the weirwood grove where he’d said his words, where he’d met Wun Wun. Pawprints led to one of the great white trees, but Satin didn’t follow. Ghost was injured; he might attack if Satin startled him. Satin rested his lantern in the middle of the grove, then took his bell and rang it. Pressed in by weirwoods, the ringing was more like a toll: the trees and snow devoured the higher tones.
A single crimson eye gleamed between the roots of a wailing weirwood. The sun was just starting to set -How long had Satin been out here?- giving a red tint to the white trees. Satin kneeled down, holding out a strip of salt pork and tolling his bell once more.
Ghost too was tinged red, but not by the light. Blood was trickling out of the gash where his left eye had been. Mormont’s raven landed on a branch above the direwolf’s sanctuary.
“Hello Ghost,” Satin gently called, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. But I’m here now. You’re a lone wolf, I know, but right now you’re hurt, and you need your pack.”
He tolled the bell again. Ghost’s ears twitched. Satin could still only see his head.
“Oh, is it this?” Satin said, glancing at his sword. He unbuckled it, laid falchion and dagger in the snow behind him. “I couldn’t fight you even if I tried. You’re much stronger than me, you know.”
Slowly, the direwolf slinked forward. Satin suppressed a gasp as he entered the light. The whole left side of Ghost’s face was caked with blood, and there was an angry red line across his flank. Even in the cold Satin could smell the metallic tang of blood and the rank scent of fear: a new scent for the white wolf.
“We’ll go back together, back home.”
“Home! Home! Home!” repeated the Raven as Ghost padded towards him.
“You can leave whenever you want afterwards but first, we need to stand vigil. To… to say goodbye to him.”
“Jon! Jon! Jon!”
“He KNOWS!” Satin screamed, “We both know he’s gone you stupid bird ! Leave us alone!”
Satin stopped himself, scared at his sudden fury, scared he might have spooked Ghost. But the wolf merely edged a little closer, and the raven flew up to a higher branch. He reached for the wolf, a flash of fear going through him as he pictured Ghost ripping his hand off like he’d done to Bowen Marsh. Instead Ghost sniffed him and nuzzled his head against his hand. Satin let out a sigh, his breath frosting in the frozen air.
He shared another strip of pork with the direwolf before setting to work. His first task was to inspect the wounds, which he did slowly. The next steps would be agony, but he could spare the wolf some pain by taking his time. Part of him objected: Castle Black could be in chaos by now, there could be Wights or worse approaching the clearing, but somehow Ghost mattered more than any of that.
Once he’d seen enough, he gave Ghost a gentle hug. The wolf was warm, and he held the embrace a little longer than he should have. He didn’t want to do what came next, but Ghost mattered more than what Satin wanted. He led him down to a bed of roots and snow, and brought out his vinegar.
The wolf twitched but didn’t struggle as Satin rubbed the acrid liquid into his wounds. His tail thumped on the snow again and again, and when he got to his missing eye Ghost recoiled for a moment before fixing him with his remaining one. Satin could swear he saw the wolf nodding, and he felt a gentle breeze in the air as he wiped the blood and fur from the gash. Whispering through the weirwoods, the wind made it sound like the trees were calling him brother.
The next step was even harder. Satin got his needle and thread. For this he’d have to strip his gloves off, so he opened the lantern and warmed his hands for a moment. Peeling off the black fur-lined leather, he felt a biting chill. He would not be able to work long before his fingers became clumsy, so he went a little faster than he should have. Ghost made no sound, but his eye clouded with pain as Satin ran the needle through his skin. One stitch, two stitches, three, four…
Satin had gotten much practice at this art in Oldtown. He’d been a sort of nurse among whores after he’d paid a Citadel acolyte to teach him suturing and wound cleaning: there was always a split lip or a cut cheek or a burst blister in one of the brothels, and the girls trusted him more than a maester. He’d sometimes spend a whole night going from brothel to brothel, cleaning and bandaging his sisters and brothers of the trade. He’d gotten more than a little coin that way, and collected a list of clients to refuse if given the option. And once in a while, he’d use the needle and thread he mended his clothes with and mend a woman’s body. One offered to reward him after he’d sutured a wound on her bottom, but he’d told her not to work so the stitches stayed in. She’d still insisted she keep his bed warm that night, and he’d gone to sleep smiling.
He didn’t have the herbs they had in Oldtown, but Satin made do. His hands were numb, and he heated them up at the same time as he did the poultice for Ghost’s wounds. He had to light his torch, meant to fight Wights, to get his little cup of snow and linseed to the right temperature: the lantern flame just wasn’t enough. As gently as he could, he rubbed the poultice into the larger wound on Ghost’s flank to fill up the little gaps in his stitches, then put the rest on his bandages. He wrapped them around the wolf again and again, praying to the woods that they would be enough. He’d seen men die from wounds far smaller than what Ser Aliser had given Ghost.
“Please,” he whispered, “Please don’t take Ghost too. Not so soon. Not like that. You’ve taken Jon, you’ve taken his eye, show a little mercy. You’ve tasted enough of his blood already, haven’t you?”
The gods made no reply. Satin lifted his lantern and fed Ghost the rest of the pork. Wolf’s blood seeped through the snow and into the weirwood’s roots as Satin took one last look at its grim face and started back, the light of his lantern glinting off Ghost’s fiery eye.
***
It was the hour of the nightingale when Satin and Ghost returned to Castle Black. Hushed whispers, awestruck whispers, greeted Satin as he and the wounded wolf walked through the snow on frost-stiffened legs. Eyes glinted in the dark, eyes of wildlings and rangers who stayed just outside the light of his lantern. Satin passed the body of head builder Othell Yarwick, pinned to a wall by a boar spear as a warning. He felt nothing at the grisly sight.
Only Leathers, the former raider who’d said his vows with Satin, dared to speak to him.
“So, you found the beast after all? I will admit, after the hour of the wolf had passed, I handed over my coppers to one of the other stewards who’d bet you’d die out there. S’pose I’ll have to get them back, aye?”
“Suppose so,” said Satin. “Your work?”
“Mine, though I should’ve let the traitor suffer a little longer. I’m a crow but I swear to never become a kneeler. Beggin’ your pardon, but you lot can’t even follow right. What kind of man stabs his commander in the back, when he didn’t even force him to go?”
Satin nodded, but said nothing. Soon Leathers backed off, leaving Satin to his own with a final word: “You take care o’ that wolf, steward, and every free man will respect you. He’s all we have left o’ Lord Snow.”
So there are still those who care, Satin thought with a small smile, Still those who see him as I see him. A nightfire burned just outside the ice cells, but Melisandre was not in attendance. Satin warmed himself by it but didn’t not join in the Red God’s chants, and ignored the scornful eyes of Stannis’ queen. As the sun rose, Satin relit his lantern and went to his vigil. It was not for him nor for Ghost to look upon the dawn, not while Jon still rested beneath the ice. He set them up just outside the cell where Jon slept, and boy and wolf kept silent vigil while the sun rose over a Castle Black that felt colder than ever.
***
Satin had to eat. His stomach growled, and he could hear Ghost’s protesting too. They’d both travelled long, and the cold of the ice cells was creeping into his bones. He didn’t know how long he’d stood vigil over Jon, but although he couldn't tell time in the ice cells, he felt it hadn’t been enough. He wished he could be the kind of man he’d heard of in songs, the kind who’d fast for six days and then ride into battle on the seventh… but he wasn’t. He couldn’t go on like this much longer. But he also couldn’t go up and face his brothers.
He hadn’t been optimistic, when he’d joined the Watch. The recruiter had been a harsh man by the name of Conwy, and Satin had seen him with one of his “sisters” he’d befriended in his brief stay in Gulltown. She’d warned him, too:
“That man’s a hard one. He pinched me, he pulled my hair… he slapped me, the second time he bought me and I asked his name. Please Satin, stay, you’ll be out soon.”
It wasn’t that Satin didn’t believe her; he did. But he also knew he wasn’t in the dungeon for thieving, or fraud, or drunkenness or any of the other things whores normally spent nights in dungeons for. He was there for a man’s wounded pride, a man who could keep him there until he went to the wall, or the noose.
But it wasn’t Conwy who’d made Satin wish he’d stayed in the dungeon. In a way it was; he’d made a point of introducing Satin as “The boywhore from Oldtown.” Still, his wasn’t the face that came rushing up when Satin thought of the mess hall, of facing his brothers with his protectors all gone. Merick was his name. Just Merick. He was a gambler, a liar, and a killer. He loved to tell his story, different every time. “A lordling, with a knife, over a whore,” he’d say one time. “A septon, with a broken beer bottle, over a game of cards,” another. One night, he’d leered over the fire at Satin, saying “A whore who’d called herself my wife. With dark hair, aye, raven-black, and a little moustache.”
When his cronies had asked how and why, he’d twisted his hands as if wringing a neck, then shrugged. “Why do you think?”
Satin had looked over at the recruiter, seen him shrug. That was when he knew. He’d glanced around at the other recruits too, but none would meet his eye save Merick, his cronies, and one who was too stupid to know what was happening.
He’d gone to Merick that night. Merick had made just enough noise that the other boys would know who Satin belonged to. From then on, none dared raise a hand or say an unkind word to him. None save Merick, every night just after he finished and the shame overtook him and he’d left Satin shivering, left him to crawl back to his bedroll alone.
He’d gotten respite when travelling up the Neck. Merick had taken ill, and by the time he died Satin had befriended another recruit named Arron. This one couldn’t stop every errant grope or snide comment, but nobody hurt him on the way from the Neck to the Wall. Arron only used him once, on a cold night just south of Winterfell, and he’d sworn never again afterwards. Satin had had to crawl back again, and the wind had licked at him like a whip. He’d shunned Satin after that night, as the others had grown used to doing. They’d been lustful and brutish under the southron sun, but The Neck and the snows had left them too tired to be cruel.
That was what Satin had expected to continue when he reached Castle Black. Shunning, the occasional groping, and once in a while a night which he didn’t ask for, but which was still his fault for not stopping. Instead, Jon and his friends had taken Satin in. There were rapers and killers and worse at the wall, but they’d left him alone. One night while in his cups, Pyp had told of how he and Jon and Ghost had terrorized one of those rapers named Rast into leaving Sam alone.
He’d wanted to cry. Jon hadn’t done anything directly to help him, but he’d created a blanket of safety big enough for every vulnerable boy in the watch to shelter under, and warm enough that Satin had slept soundly for the first time in his life. Satin had wanted to thank Jon, to serve him. Not as he’d served the men who bought him. He wanted to mend his clothes, to share some of the Oldtown perfume, to comb his hair, trim his nails, groom his beard, wash him in a hot spring until he felt pure and clean and beautiful…
But Jon had gone out on Mormont’s Great Ranging, and when he’d returned it had been war, war, and more war… Even then he’d been kind, he’d been gentle to Satin even when they’d been killing. But something had changed when he’d become Lord Snow.
Satin scritched behind Ghost’s ears.
“I wanted to serve him,” he told the direwolf, “But when I got the chance… Well, at least you were warm when Lord Snow couldn’t be. I’m going to take care of you, Ghost. You’ll never want for anything while I live. And for that, I’ll have to get up, won’t I? I’ll have to get food for the both of us, and I’ll have to get supplies to… to prepare him. Wait for me, Ghost. I won’t be long.”
But as he rose to leave, Ghost followed him. No matter how he tried he could not get the direwolf to stay with Jon. And so they broke their fast together, and no man dared to cast an unkind glance Satin’s way.