JON
Appropriately, he woke in the snow.
For the longest time he merely lay there, unable to move or think, or know anything beyond the fact that somehow, impossibly, he was alive. Yet he was not even sure if that was true. There was the snow below him, and a pane of stars above, and a slowly coalescing sense of himself – but different somehow, cold as stone, a memory of being stabbed and stabbed again, frozen flame and red eyes. There was something he had lost, some part of who he was, and it took a small eternity to recall the name. Ghost.
Remembering that gave him spur to remember more. But everything was dim and filmy in his head, as if it had taken place thousands of miles away and thousands of years ago, shadowed revenants of an ancient life. He knew that his name was Jon, and that he had been prisoner in a cage of ice. He knew he was oddly naked. And then it came to him at last: he was no longer a wolf, no longer had a wolf, and had no fur to shield him from the cold.
Clumsily, painfully, Jon pushed himself to his feet. Feet. I have two, not four. His hands, for that matter, felt strangely stiff and hard and glassy, but in the darkness he could not see why. For the moment it was enough to know that he wore a man's body again. But whose?
His head was light and his legs were weak. Touching his chest, running his fingers over it, he felt the raised ridges of scar tissue where he'd been stabbed by Bowen Marsh and Whit Whittlestick. But only by shape alone; there was still no sensation in his hands. This body felt intimately familiar, like clothing worn so many times as to become soft as butter, but it was so cold, both inside and out. No breath steamed in the air before him. And that was when Jon Snow lifted his head and saw the Wall looming before him, bathed in frigid moonlight. The wrong side of the Wall.
Have I woken at all? A sudden, crippling doubt seized him. He had no way to tell, nothing to do but grope desperately for any knowledge of what had happened after the rune-graven blade had pierced his – Ghost's – heart. The pain had been as bad as if it had been his own. He was aware of struggling, of trying to flee this collapsing body before it perished, even as some unknown voice whispered in his head, A skinchanger may die a dozen deaths and more. And another voice, screaming his name: Jon, Jon, JON!
But he had burned, as the red woman had instructed him to. He remembered that part clearly. He had fled upwards in a scream of smoke like some demon sorcerer in a tale, and his last sight had been of ice starting to hiss and turn to steam around his body, his true body. He saw the red woman moving to leave, not running but at a speed that suggested she would prefer to be gone before the process continued any further. Then there was a wrenching snarling choking annihilating darkness, and he struggled against it with every fiber of his violated being, and the next thing he knew was –
– flying.
The episode had been so brief that Jon was not at all sure that he had not imagined it – or dreamed it within the dream that he still might be in. But he had emerged from the darkness within some great monstrous creature, had been the creature, all scales and sinew and great leathery wings pinioned with bone, a triangular head and scything claws and deep-set eyes and flame, flame that had scorched some faceless boy to ruins, scales that winked green and bronze in the light of the torches that lined the steppes of some great brick pyramid. Yet he had been only there for flashes of a broken instant before an animal mind – something larger and far more wild and alien and unfriendly than Ghost's – caught hold of him and flung him out, as easily as a dog might fling a rat.
Dragon. I was in a dragon. How or why or where Jon had no fathom, only that it was so. He clung to it like a drowning man, as if that would somehow force it to make more sense. I have to get back to the Wall. I have to get back to my post.
Yet the closer he struggled toward the massive edifice of ice, the stranger he felt. It was almost as if he was being forced back, warned off. He didn't understand what was going on, still less how he had ended up on this side of the Wall in the first place, but he knew that he could not come any closer. There are powerful spells woven into the Wall. The dead cannot pass.
And that was when he turned his head, and saw the wolf.
Ghost, memory cried for a moment, but even as it did, he knew that it was not. Was this all just a dream after all? But then why was the big grey direwolf with its golden eyes padding toward him as if it knew him, as if it was. . .
"Summer." The word came to his lips almost as a prayer. He'd seen his brother Bran's direwolf before, when it leapt down among the Thenns and caused enough chaos for him to steal the old man's horse and flee to Castle Black with an arrow in his leg. But Bran himself was dead, had been dead for months, and was already dead when his wolf had come to Jon's aid. But I lived on, in a way, in Ghost. Bran might have lived on in the same way in Summer.
The thought almost made Jon's heart break with wanting. He held out a hand, which was oddly black even in the thin bladed light of the moon, and Summer licked it. Then he fell to both knees and buried his face in the direwolf's neck.
Summer tolerated this attention for a few moments, then pulled away from Jon's embrace and tugged on his cloak in a clear signal to get up and follow. In the unreal state that Jon was in, it made as much sense as anything. He forayed cautiously after the wolf, snow crunching beneath his boots, and only then noticed that there was no steam of his breath on the air. Yet since it was the least bizarre of all the things occurring at the moment, he ignored it.
It was a long way, though Jon could not have said how long. Then at last he recognized the darkness of the forest that began a mile north of the Wall, and soon they were ducking among the skeletal trees. He could just see the spectral shape of Summer ahead, the wolf occasionally stopping and turning back to ensure that he was still behind. Jon had just started to wonder where they were going when he saw the flash of red leaves ahead, and knew.
Summer padded into the weirwood grove and paused to sniff the ground. He prowled around, lifted a leg, raised his hackles and growled at something that Jon couldn't see, then turned away. Eyes luminescent in the darkness, he crossed to the tree at the center and sat down, waiting.
Curious, Jon peered at the trunk with its eerie face, the slashes of weeping eyes and the broad mouth, the leaves like a lady's hair. In the uncertain shifting shadows, he thought he'd seen –
No, he had –
Bran's face was gazing at him from the tree. His eyes moved to meet Jon's, and if Jon had had any doubt whatsoever that he was dreaming, this erased it beyond a trace. He must be, for Bran did not live in the real world, and he merely stared at his brother, stretching out an involuntary hand. Bran?
You're not imagining me, Jon. Bran sounded shy. I'm under the hill, with the three-eyed crow. Coldhands took me here. I'm not dead, but I don't have time to explain how. Summer found you – I didn't know where he was. But I need you to warg into the trees. You need to know.
"Warg into the trees?" Jon repeated aloud, baffled. "Bran. . . am I awake?"
No, you're not awake, Bran answered. It was too dangerous to bring you that way.
"But am I still here? In the grove?"
Of course you're here.
"Why was it too dangerous?"
There are wights and Others swarming on the Wall in the thousands. In the tens of thousands. In the waking world, the path you just walked is impassable for any living man.
The news took Jon like a blow to the gut. For any living man. "Tell me," he said. "Am I alive?"
Bran paused a moment. Then he said, You have to do this, Jon. Even the children of the forest can't hold off the Others much longer. They're. . . they're coming. Even down here. We don't have much time. I need you to do this. Please.
"I don't know how," Jon admitted. "Show me."
I will. Bran's eyes shot a glance at his wolf, and Summer moved closer from behind. It's easier than it sounds. You're already a fully fledged skinchanger, all you have to do is ask. The horn's hidden here, but I don't know which one it is.
"Horn. . .?" A terrible suspicion took root in the back of Jon's head.
You can see what the trees have seen. You need to find out. I. . . I can't. I tried. There's something about you that's different. I see fire about you, I see a red sword, I can't touch it, I don't know what it is or where it is, but you need it, Jon. You need it!
This engendered a whole new flood of questions for Jon, not least who on earth "Coldhands" was and if that had something to do with the strange stunted state of his own hands. But then some other inchoate memory pricked at him. . . something Sam had mentioned, long ago and far away. And there was something else about Sam and a horn, a broken horn Jon had found on the Fist of the First Men, he'd given it to Sam for a keepsake. . . that was also where he'd found the cache of dragonglass, wrapped in a Sworn Brother's black cloak. . .
All the thoughts were flapping just out of Jon's reach like exotic birds. It was maddening. He pulled himself together, decided that warging into a tree couldn't possibly be any more ludicrous than it sounded, and jumped.
For an endless moment, everything was as jumbled and indistinct as if he'd taken a blade and cut his own mind to shreds. He could see Bran and he could see Summer and the trees and the Wall and the night and the moon and even a brief flash of the numberless white phantoms gliding serpentine across the snow. He was aware of branches in uncomfortable places and a humiliating sense that if he was still in his body, he would be turned upside down and kicking. It was the first time he had ever attempted to warg into something that had no life of its own – the first time, in fact, he had ever warged consciously into anything. With Ghost it had always been natural, something half-formed in dreams or drifting thoughts, and he'd only slowly begun to become more aware of it just before his first death. And Ghost had always been part of him. This was a battle, struggling against the unyielding wood, feeling the warmth of the sap like blood. Then with one final jolt and shove, he was accepted into the weirwood.
For a moment he was gulped down into the darkness, like a stone falling down a well. Among the turmoil, he focused as hard as he could on the Fist of the First Men; it seemed as good a place to start as any, if he had understood Bran's instructions in the slightest. Then he was pulled about very hard, turned around, and opened his eyes in a different place, in a different time.
It was the Fist, Jon knew that at once. He recognized the rocky promontory that gave the landscape its name, bunched bare knuckles punching through a scree of sliding rock and scrubby trees. But it was devoid of the staked palisade and the fortified camp that the black brothers had set up on it – and the horrifying ruin that that camp had become, when the wights came on them in the night. He had the tale of it from Sam. The ringwall was still intact, the sun low and streaky in the sky. And that was when Jon caught sight of the lone figure in black, carrying a shrouded bundle.
The grade was steep and the climb must have been hard, but no breath showed before the man's mouth. He reached the top, looked around, then struck off into the woods. Along a route Jon recognized as well; Ghost had led him along it when the Great Ranging had reached the Fist. And suddenly, with a shock, he knew what was in that bundle.
He was right – almost. The black-cloaked man knelt by the massive fallen tree and began to dig in the loose, stony soil. His bundle lay next to him, and when he had finished his hole, he untied the fraying rope that held it together. Inside was the great stash of dragonglass that Jon himself had found in that very spot, and not one warhorn, but two. Made of aurochs' horns and banded in bronze, they were outwardly unremarkable. One was intact, the other broken. It was the latter that the man laid in the bundle with the dragonglass, then pulled off his cloak and folded it all up together.
Jon watched in paralyzed apprehension. Did he know we were on our way? Did he hope we would find it there? But even as he asked that question, it was answered. The Fist served so well as a watch-post due to commanding a view of the surrounding territory to all sides, and far in the distance, he could catch a glimpse of small dark figures, torches and outriders. That's us. We are coming now. Lord Mormont had wanted them to advertise their presence as much as possible, in hopes of drawing back the lost rangers who had gone out with his uncle Benjen. Alive, or dead.
Straightening up, the man – his face still hidden – quickly filled in the hole. I knew it had been buried soon before, but even I did not guess how soon. We barely missed him. Hurrying through the tangles of trees, the ranger reached a waiting elk, which matched Sam and Gilly's description too unnervingly for it to be anyone else. He swung astride and galloped away down the hill, a flock of ravens flapping after him; he had taken the second horn, the intact one, with him. And in the back of Jon's head Bran's voice said, He buried that one in the weirwood grove where you are now. I saw him do it.
But why are there two horns? Jon asked. The broken one I found on the Fist, the one he buried with the dragonglass, I gave it to Sam. He brought it south when I sent him to Oldtown, to the Citadel. He –
Sam took me through the Wall, Bran interrupted, sounding somewhat like his old self, a boy rather than the – thing, the Old God, that he was becoming. At the Black Gate in the Nightfort. Coldhands was waiting there, he'd rescued Sam and Gilly from the wights, and then he took Meera and Jojen and me north on the elk.
Sam? Jon was staggered. Sam knew you were alive, and he never told me?
I made him promise not to, Bran said sadly. But there was part of the black brothers' vow that Sam said to open it. The Gate, that is. It only opens for a brother of the Watch.
What part? What part of the vow?
Bran paused. Then he said, I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers. I am the shield that guards the realms of men.
And suddenly, in a horrible burning moment of clarity, Jon Snow had it.
The horn that wakes the sleepers. It was more than a word, part of a rote vow. It was a truth. Among the wildlings, Jon had heard everything of the Horn of Joramun, the Horn of Winter, which when blown would break the Wall and summon giants from the earth. That's why there were two horns. Coldhands found them both. One was the Horn of Winter, the one that would destroy the Wall, the weapon of the Others. Tormund told me that Mance never found it, that the one Melisandre burned was a fraud. That they had bluffed the entire time. And the other. . .
But which? Jon was almost panicking, which was a feat when he was a tree and still had no breath to speak of. Which horn did I send south with Sam? And which one is still buried in the grove right here, with wights and Others merely fathoms away?
The trees, Bran whispered. They stood here even in the Age of Heroes. Look.
That couldn't possibly be what he meant, but –
No time –
With a sensation as if he was pelting headlong toward the lip of a thousand-foot cliff, Jon gathered his mind underneath him and leaped.
This time, the fall was endless. He crashed and struggled in the dark, barely able to hold onto the wisp of his own mind, as the tree shrank and contorted around him, growing smaller and smaller until he feared that Bran was wrong, that the tree was no more than a sapling and then a sprout and would soon be gone entirely – and him with it, unless he could shift to another skin in time. But then the fall stopped, and he gazed out across the horizon to where the Wall should be – but there was no Wall.
The image was so faint and hazy, summoned up from such immeasurable depths of memory, that Jon could make out no more than one detail in five. But that was enough. On the one side there was a swarming tide of men in black, led by a charging figure with a sword of fire, and on the other, the merciless ranks of Others. Frost-white and sky-blue and braced with thousands upon thousands of slender icy spears. The two armies tore together beneath a counterpane of black, black sky.
The Battle for the Dawn. Jon had heard enough of Old Nan's stories to know that. The Long Night. Of how the children of the forest and the First Men had battled against the Others, but been repulsed and repulsed until it was at last discovered that dragonglass could kill them. But then – he had heard all of these tales from Stannis' men at the Wall, discussing the prophecies that surrounded their king, and what the red woman had claimed of him and his purpose –
Azor Ahai. The hero who led the battle against the Others with his red sword called Lightbringer, forged by the heartsblood of his beloved wife.
Another piece fell into place. And another.
I shall take no wife, father no sons, the oath ran. Maester Aemon had told him that it was so because love was the death of duty, that no man could truly be forced to choose between his kin on the one hand, his blood family, and his black family. But it was more.
The oath, the oath they all swore, they'd never known the meaning of it, not in truth –
I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn.
Lightbringer.
Jon's head was reeling. He couldn't keep hold of the vision of the Battle for the Dawn, and it swirled away into the dust of centuries. Azor Ahai gave up his wife to forge the sword that defeated the Others, and that is why we take no wives. It is more than a duty, it is a remembrance of who we are. After their victory in the Battle for the Dawn, Azor Ahai had founded the Night's Watch to defend against the Others, and Brandon the Builder had raised the Wall to keep them out. Azor Ahai was fire, Bran the Builder was ice. And Azor Ahai was an eastern hero, an eastern name . . a Valyrian name.
Valyrian steel. Dragonsteel. Dragonglass. Dragons. And in the long history of the world, there had been only one House so intimately associated with the embodiment of living fire.
I was in a dragon. For a moment before waking.
Azor Ahai was a Targaryen. Brandon the Builder was a Stark.
Fire and ice.
And they met again in. . .
Me.
Jon lay in the darkness of the weirwood, struggling to comprehend. If he'd had breath, he would have been gasping. Azor Ahai had been the first Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, he knew that now beyond a doubt. It was the Night's Watch itself that was Lightbringer now, and they had fallen so far as to become a colony of refugees, of prisoners, of broken men and bad eggs and the hungry and the lame and the useless – oh gods, his friends, Satin and Pyp and Grenn and Dolorous Edd, the men he'd fought with to defend the Wall, they were no heroes and no knights but they'd still fulfilled their charge –
And there was that face he'd seen after his first death, the one with the single red eye, that whispered to him. Smoke, it said. Smoke and salt. A thousand eyes and one. And when he'd asked who it was. . .
I am you, it had said. But you are more.
And that was the moment when Jon Snow realized that he was not Jon Snow.
In the darkness above him, around him, through him, he saw a blue rose growing from a wall of ice, and reached up to pluck it. It filled the air with its sweetness, and in its petals he saw a woman's face. Promise me, Ned, she cried. Promise me you'll take him, please, never tell. . . never tell Robert, never anyone. . . not even Cat, I'm sorry. . . no one can know. . . Rhaegar's son. . . no. . . must be peace, he must live, he must he must. . .
And his father's voice – no, not his father's – Eddard Stark's voice, choked and cracking with agony. I promise, Lya, he whispered. I promise.
But I didn't live, Jon thought, heartbroken. I'm not alive right now.
But he was thinking somehow, still –
Which horn? he begged the impervious darkness. Which horn?
It endured for a brief eternity longer. Then, faint and faraway, he caught sight of the horn he had sent with Sam, lying in a great seven-sided room in what had to be the Citadel in Oldtown. It should have cheered Jon to know that Sam and Gilly had made it safely there, but he was too desperate for that. The horn was stored with what must be the treasures of all the other novices, everything they gave up when they relinquished their family names and their pasts and took the chains, as a brother of the Night's Watch took the black. Kept safe in the archives, for study and memory and –
One of the seven doors opened, and a man stepped through.
Jon did not recognize him, even in the tree's memory. He was young, with full cheeks and the stubble of beard, a scar on his right cheek and a dense mat of black curls. His nose was hooked, and he wore the garb of a Citadel alchemist; he was playing a coin between his fingers casually, which glinted iron with one spin and gold with the next. In his other hand he held a great skeleton key. The alchemist glanced around the crowded shelves, and selected a few pieces at what appeared to be random. He secreted them in the small bag he carried, was about to leave, and then spotted the horn.
He went motionless. He looked a long moment, then almost ran to it and lifted it up in his hands, turning it from side to side and examining it from all angles. It was as broken as it was when Jon had found it, though somewhat less dirty. But the alchemist stared at it, checked one last mark, then shoved it into his bag with the rest, muttering something under his breath. Jon caught it only in snatches. ". . .Ferrego won't believe. . . intends still to hold with the Targaryens. . ."
Thievery done, the alchemist turned on his heel. He hid the bag under his cloak, then ran a hand over his face, and it changed. From the dark curls and roguish scar and hooked nose, it took on the appearance of a boy, doughy and unremarkable and plain, the sort no one would look twice at. He slipped the key back under his robes as well and left the room of treasures, and when one of the maesters passing in the corridors beyond caught sight of him, he scolded "Pate" for leaving his lessons again.
Pate, Jon thought. Like the hero of the stories of Pate the pig boy. But this was no pig boy. He sauntered out of the Citadel, down the labyrinthine streets of Oldtown, changed his face back to the scarred one in the darkness of an alley, and made for the quay. Among the usual colorful forest of ships, there was one which was unmistakably a Braavosi galley, and it was this one that the man made for.
Jon was losing track of the vision by now; it was not something the tree had personally witnessed. He struggled and clawed to keep it, but it was already splintering away. Braavos? Did he go back to Braavos with the goods he stole? How did he get that key. . . the theft must have happened after Sam arrived, if the horn was there to be taken.. . . The irony of it almost made him want to laugh. He had sent Sam and Gilly and Maester Aemon to Oldtown by route of Braavos, and now it seemed they should have stayed there after all. No matter if this was the Horn of Dawn or the Horn of Winter, it was too terrible to remain in the wrong hands.
The spell broke, with a feeling once more as if he had been kicked. Then he was back in his man's body, lying sprawled on the ground in the moonlit weirwood grove. Bran's face was still visible in the trunk above him, but it was starting to fade as well. If he was alive or if he was dead, he seemed shortly to find out."Bran! Bran!"
I'm sorry, Jon. Bran's voice broke. I don't think I'm coming back. I'm going to stay here under the hill. I'm going to replace Lord Brynden. I'm the prince of the green. The god.
"What are you. . . no. . ." Jon pushed himself to hands and knees, dazed. "You can't, I need to know more. . . don't leave me now, not again. . ."
I love you, Jon. Bran's voice was starting to echo, the tree was changing, losing its form, becoming old and cold and rough again. You have to do it. You have to.
"Do. . ." Yet in that moment, as he had before, Jon knew.
Only death can pay for life. That was why he had lost Ghost, why he was here in this half-world of dream and memory. When I wake, if I wake, I will be here in this weirwood grove in this body, and the wights will be all around me. And I will not be able to get back through the Wall with the red sword. I will not be able to fight them alone, one against ten thousand. A hundred thousand.
The red sword. Jon fumbled at his side. Longclaw. It was there. This must be his body after all. The Night's Watch is Lightbringer, and Azor Ahai is the Lord Commander. And there was a sword then, there must be a sword now. Dragonsteel. Longclaw was a Valyrian blade. It would serve.
Azor Ahai had forged Lightbringer with heartsblood. And this was a red sword too. It was red with the blood of Prince Rhaegar, of Lady Lyanna, of Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn and Robb, of the black brothers who had died in the snows of the Fist, good men and bad men. All the brothers of the Night's Watch who had suffered and bled through the centuries. Lord Commander Mormont's blood, his uncle Benjen's blood, and his own. The price had been paid and paid and paid. For a moment more, Jon remained frozen. Then he turned and ran to the largest tree at the center of the circle. Flung himself to his knees and began to dig.
It was there, as Bran had told him it would be. The plain dirty horn, the unbroken one. And it was that, by virtue of the very fact, that told Jon which horn this was.
The Horn of Winter is intact. The Wall yet stands. Keeping them out. Keeping me out.
The broken horn had been winded at the end of the Battle for the Dawn. Winded in victory, waking the sleepers, bringing the light; that was how it had broken in the first place. It was that one which Coldhands had hidden on the Fist with the dragonglass cache. The Night's Watch would have had it in their hands again if it wasn't for me. I gave the Horn of Dawn to Sam to take to Oldtown, as a souvenir, a trinket. I sent it away, and the alchemist stole it and took it to Braavos. The Targaryens. . . he said something about the Targaryens. . .
There was only one solution now. Complete victory or utter destruction. Nothing in between.
Jon briefly thought he saw red eyes reflected back at him in the Horn. Whether they were Melisandre's or Ghost's or Bran's, he could not tell. None of them were truly here. He doubted that he was truly here.
The horn that wakes the sleepers.
All or nothing.
Bring it down, and bring the dawn.
Jon Snow grasped it in his cold black hands. Then he lifted it to his lips.
The weirwoods gazed on with their carven red eyes. The cold breath of darkness fell heavy on the world. And from a fire, a warrior drew forth a blazing sword.
Jon Snow sounded the Horn of Winter.