A Raven.
My latest fic for got_exchange is now live over there so I feel free to crosspost it!
Title:: A Raven
Author: rachel2205
Recipient: leapylion3
Prompt: Character A writes a love letter to Character B before going off to war/getting married to someone else/etc. What is Character B's reaction? Do they end up together in the end?
Summary: Robb gets news of his father’s death; and Jon receives something he has always wanted.
Word count: 2700
Characters/pairings: Jon, Robb, Catelyn, various members of the Night’s Watch; Jon/Robb.
Rating: PG, with the caveat of a sibling ship…
Author notes: The “love” part of the letter is more implied than stated, but I hope you’ll enjoy the outcome anyway. This piece blends book and show canon in terms of sequence of events, character interactions etc. A couple of lines are accordingly lifted from canon. The timeline makes use of this amazingly helpful fan resource.
Antinous was dead. I remembered platitudes frequently heard: "One can die at any age," or "They who die young are beloved by the gods." I myself had shared in that execrable abuse of words; I had talked of dying of sleep, and dying of boredom. I had used the word agony, the word mourning, the word loss. Antinous was dead.
- Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
“Robb, you’ve ruined your sword.”
His mother had been trying to get his attention for some time, he realised. He let the longsword fall from his hand; it clattered on the cold earth. Father wouldn’t have liked that, he thought numbly. He’d taught him to respect his weapons. But the sword Robb had just blunted against an oak tree didn’t even have a name. When I get too old to heft it, you’ll carry Ice, Father had said once, and your son after you.
Father was dead.
Robb felt his whole body heave, a sound coming out of him that was less a sob than a caw of pain, and in a moment Catelyn’s arms were around him. Robb, still dressed in his armour from the previous day’s battle, clung to her in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to since he was a little boy, and cried hot tears against her neck. He hadn’t cried when he heard the news at first light; the eyes of his men were on him, and he had an army to lead. A day to rest, he’d said, for the men, and later on a meeting with his council. His squire had tried to undress him, but Robb shrugged Olyvar away from him. The young Frey had fought bravely by his side the day before, but Robb could not bear Olyvar’s hands on him now, or his sympathetic words. And so Robb had gone out of the camp into the woods, his chest tight and aching. “It’s not fair,” he’d said to himself, and then felt furious at his childishness. A man wouldn’t expect the Lannisters to play fair. A man would have expected their treachery and would be at King’s Landing, instead of being a month’s hard march away and his father -
Striking the sword against the tree made it easier to breathe, somehow, and he did it again and again, until his arm was aching, until it had gone through aching to numbness, until Catelyn said his name.
“I’ll kill them all, every one of them,” he wept against Catelyn’s neck, sounding like the youth he was instead of the man he was trying so desperately to be. Catelyn cradled the back of his head in her hand, as she must have held it when he was a baby, and hushed him in the same soothing voice Robb remembered her using for Bran, and reminded him that the Lannisters had his sisters. Family, Duty, Honour, Robb thought dully. Family came first. After that, revenge.
“You should rest, Robb,” said Catelyn, when his sobs subsided at last. “You’ve not slept.”
“Neither have you,” he pointed out, and she gave him a tight tired smile.
“With five children, I’m used to that. Go on.”
“I should send word to Winterfell. And to Jon.”
“I will write to Maester Luwin, and I’ll have someone send word to the Wall. Go on, Robb. Rest.”
Another day he might be annoyed by her ordering him to bed as if he were as young as Rickon, but Robb was too exhausted to disagree. He went back to his tent, where this time he let Olyvar undress him. I won’t sleep, he thought; how could he, when his father was dead? All the same, before his squire had even finished putting away his armour Robb was half-fallen into sleep. I should write to Jon myself, he thought, I should let him know about Father; it’s not right that he learn about it from strangers… The thought slipped away as he drifted into a thankfully dreamless sleep, and the hours and days that followed it were far too crowded to give him space to think of writing to anyone at all.
*
“Where are you going?” asked Sam anxiously, puffing to keep up with Jon’s furious strides.
“I’m going to find my brother, and put a sword through King Joffrey’s throat.”
When he thought about it later, Jon realised it was telling that the first person he thought of was Robb. At that moment, however, he had no room for anything except furious grief. Right now the Night’s Watch felt useless - as disappointing as on the first day he reached the Wall, and more of an impediment. He thought he’d come to peace with himself in his new role in life, but the news of Ned Stark’s death had brought back his angry resentment and sick sense that he was throwing his life away on a place that hardly mattered while more important things were happening elsewhere.
The raven had come with news of Lord Stark’s death, only a few days after the first bird that had told them Robb was going to war. At the first message Jon had felt a a bone-deep ache of wanting to be with his brother, to be defending the Stark name. Now Ned was dead that ache had turned to a pain so sharp he could hardly sit or stand still; his skin itched with the fury and panicky grief of loss. If he stayed still, he felt he would lose his mind. I’m not a Stark, he thought; but he would fight with his brother, and everyone would know that Ned Stark had four sons, not three.
And so Jon fled with his mare, Longclaw left on his bed because he had no right to carry it away from the Night’s Watch. He was an oathbreaker now, an outcast: but it would be worth it to see Robb again, to tell him he’d come to help him avenge their father. He tried to imagine Robb smiling when he saw him, but Jon couldn’t picture it, somehow. He remembered how Ned had looked when he had executed that deserter months before. He wondered if Robb carried Ice now, and if he would feel obliged to carry out the same sentence. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Thinking of that made anxiety curdle in his stomach, but still he pressed on. How could he not? He was his father’s son.
They found him, of course: Sam and Pyp, Grenn, Halder and Toad. He should’ve known they’d come for him, and it surprised him how much it touched him to know they’d ride all this way to bring him back.
“I belong with my brother,” he protested, but weakly. He was thinking of Robb holding Ice, of Robb being disappointed that Jon was an oathbreaker. Of saying he did not need Jon at all - he had an army, so what use was a deserter?
“We’re your brothers now,” Grenn said, and Jon felt his shoulders slump. He had sworn himself to the Night’s Watch, and Grenn was right: they were his brothers, and he couldn’t fight them off. He felt bad enough that he’d shoved Sam out of the way as he rode out of Castle Black.
There was no time to sleep when they got back; dawn was breaking, and Jon had to bring the Old Bear his breakfast. There he had the uncomfortable discovery that Mormont had known he had fled; had expected it to happen, in fact. And so when Mormont asked him if he was “a brother of the Night’s Watch, or only a bastard boy who wants to play at war,” Jon had straightened his back and sworn himself again to his new brotherhood. They were his family now; he owed it to them to remember that. Forgive me, Father, he thought, and returned to his duties.
That night Jon lay in bed. His night of riding had left him exhausted, but now he couldn’t sleep. Joining the Night’s Watch had made Jon face some uncomfortable truths. That the Watch was made up of more thieves and rapists than noble outcasts; that he was quicker to judge people than he’d liked to think; and that the moment he’d accepted that the Night’s Watch had become his family, he’d felt a strange relief. Strange, but not inexplicable. Jon knew all too well why he felt it, though it had taken coming all these hundreds of miles north to acknowledge something he had felt since a bright day in the training yard two years ago. He didn’t want Robb to think of him as his brother. Two years and a lifetime ago, laughing on a mild day in Winterfell, he and Robb had fought with wooden swords, and then when that hadn’t yielded a victor they’d turned to wrestling, struggling and laughing together in the dirt and straw of the training yard. At last Robb had him pinned.
“Yield, then,” said Robb with a crow of satisfaction. Never, Jon had replied, and so Robb pressed all his weight down onto him. The breath had huffed out of Jon’s chest, but not just because Robb was crushing him. Jon could feel something hard pressing against his thigh, and suddenly he felt almost sick with longing, his whole body going lax and yielding.
“I win,” said Robb triumphantly, but when he sat up there was a flush in his cheeks. Still, a moment later he seemed to have forgotten it and was talking excitedly about archery practice, and Jon had tried to forget it too. These things happened. At their age a stiff breeze could get a boy hard, never mind being jostled together with another warm body. It didn’t matter.
It did matter, but he’d done his best to forget it. Jon rolled onto his back and sighed quietly into the dark. Tyrion Lannister had claimed that most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it, but Jon was done with denials. These months he’d been at the Wall had been full of hard truths, bitter ones, and Jon had learned to swallow them. He could swallow this one, too; especially since it seemed likely now that he might never see Robb again. It was a truth that could hurt no one but Jon, and in the quiet darkness of that night, breath whistling fast through his nose, an eventual cry swallowed by his pillow, Jon let that truth for the first time be a comfort, not a scourge.
*
It had happened so fast. One moment they were debating who had more of a right to the Iron Throne - Renly or Stannis, Prince Tommen, even - and then the Greatjon was spitting on the Lannisters and Baratheons altogether, and calling Robb the King in the North.
The King in the North.
It had bewildered him, though he hoped it hadn’t shown. He’d never thought to be a king; never thought beyond avenging his father, and the thousands of men he’d lost. Men he’d sent to their deaths in his father’s name. And now the comrades and leaders and fathers and brothers of those men were bending their knees and calling out a title not heard in three hundred years. The King in the North.
He had accepted, of course; even felt a fierce pride, more for the North than for himself. It was right that they have their own king. Once the Lannisters were defeated and they had his sisters back, they could forget the south for good. But matters went on so quickly after that night that there was barely time to think; and now, the night before his coronation in Riverrun, Robb felt a sudden blinding terror. He’d tried on his crown this afternoon, in case the smith needed to make any last minute changes to the fit. The bronze felt so heavy, and when he looked at himself in a mirror he saw not a king but a child playing dress up, for all his new beard.
I wish Jon were here, he thought as he sat alone in his chamber, and suddenly the ache of missing hs brother filled his whole body. He remembered embracing Jon goodbye on their last day together in Winterfell, the way the corner of Jon’s mouth had twitched with feeling. If Jon were here, Robb would not feel so afraid, he was sure of it, and before he had even fully formed the thought he was drawing out parchment and quill, scratching down words by candlelight. What began as a stiffly formal note about his impending coronation turned quickly to a feverish outpouring of words, Robb’s careful hand becoming cramped and clumsy as the words rushed out of him.
I don’t know how to be king. I don’t know how to do any of this without you.
They were the last words on the page, eighteen ragged words. Robb stared at them for a moment, then rolled up the parchment and sealed it before calling for a servant. The next morning he sat up with a jolt, feeling sickly guilty. All the letter would do would be to worry Jon; it told him nothing useful, and it made Robb seem weak. But it was too late to take it back: the bird had already gone.
*
Conwy had returned from Gulltown with the latest crop of willing and unwilling recruits for the Night’s Watch, and had brought with him the news of Robb’s coronation. His brother, a king. Jon could barely imagine it, and the gulf between him and the Starks seemed ever-wider. It made his decision to stay seem sounder. What use could King Robb have for a single crow?
“A raven came for you, Jon,” puffed Sam excitedly, crossing the yard. Jon hadn’t received a letter for himself alone in all the time he’d been here, and he couldn’t imagine what it said. He cracked open the parchment in the yard; after the first line he rolled it back up and tucked it in his jerkin so he could read it in private later. He didn’t want anyone gawking at a letter from King Robb.
It was over an hour before Jon had a quiet moment to slip away and read behind the stables; it was one of the longest hours of his life. It was a very strange letter: a tangle of words about the Whispering Woods and a string of names of men that Jon thought he’d heard had died in Robb’s service; a long sentence that wondered what had become of Father’s sword; and then that last line.
I don’t know how to be king. I don’t know how to do any of this without you.
Jon read it again, and then again. And then, very carefully, he rolled up the letter and put it away, before he was quietly and thoroughly sick in the hay. Because he had a choice to make, now: a real one, this time. He was not a bastard boy who wanted to play at war, who Mormont would indulge running away for the night. He was expected to go ranging beyond the Wall tomorrow, and to abandon that duty would make him a true deserter, an oathbreaker, a man deserving of death. His brothers needed him.
Jon stood up and wiped his mouth. He knew what he had to do.
*
It took Jon a month to reach Riverrun. He had not been pursued, he thought. The Old Bear did not really have men to spare. But he would be a wanted man, now, for the rest of his life. Strangely the thought didn’t scare him as much as it had done the first time he had run away.
He had thought of discarding his clothes, but he had very little money for new ones, and besides it struck him he may as well hide in plain sight. People might avoid him on the road if they thought he was a member of the Watch still. And so when he arrived at Riverrun and asked to see Robb, no one asked for his name, and instead he was announced as a brother of the Night’s Watch.
Robb was alone in his chamber when the servant ushered Jon in, and Jon’s first, stupid thought was that Robb had grown. He’d been a hand’s breadth taller when they’d parted, but he thought Robb was of a height with him now. Is that what kingship did to you, he wondered. Robb just stared at him for a long moment.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” said Jon, adding “Your Grace,” as an afterthought.
“I should ask what took you so long,” said Robb, and his face broke into the smile Jon had not been able to imagine before, and that now having seen it, he would remember as long as he lived. I don’t know how to do any of this without you. For the first time in his life, Jon knew without a doubt that someone needed him the way he needed them, too.
Title:: A Raven
Author: rachel2205
Recipient: leapylion3
Prompt: Character A writes a love letter to Character B before going off to war/getting married to someone else/etc. What is Character B's reaction? Do they end up together in the end?
Summary: Robb gets news of his father’s death; and Jon receives something he has always wanted.
Word count: 2700
Characters/pairings: Jon, Robb, Catelyn, various members of the Night’s Watch; Jon/Robb.
Rating: PG, with the caveat of a sibling ship…
Author notes: The “love” part of the letter is more implied than stated, but I hope you’ll enjoy the outcome anyway. This piece blends book and show canon in terms of sequence of events, character interactions etc. A couple of lines are accordingly lifted from canon. The timeline makes use of this amazingly helpful fan resource.
Antinous was dead. I remembered platitudes frequently heard: "One can die at any age," or "They who die young are beloved by the gods." I myself had shared in that execrable abuse of words; I had talked of dying of sleep, and dying of boredom. I had used the word agony, the word mourning, the word loss. Antinous was dead.
- Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
“Robb, you’ve ruined your sword.”
His mother had been trying to get his attention for some time, he realised. He let the longsword fall from his hand; it clattered on the cold earth. Father wouldn’t have liked that, he thought numbly. He’d taught him to respect his weapons. But the sword Robb had just blunted against an oak tree didn’t even have a name. When I get too old to heft it, you’ll carry Ice, Father had said once, and your son after you.
Father was dead.
Robb felt his whole body heave, a sound coming out of him that was less a sob than a caw of pain, and in a moment Catelyn’s arms were around him. Robb, still dressed in his armour from the previous day’s battle, clung to her in a way he hadn’t allowed himself to since he was a little boy, and cried hot tears against her neck. He hadn’t cried when he heard the news at first light; the eyes of his men were on him, and he had an army to lead. A day to rest, he’d said, for the men, and later on a meeting with his council. His squire had tried to undress him, but Robb shrugged Olyvar away from him. The young Frey had fought bravely by his side the day before, but Robb could not bear Olyvar’s hands on him now, or his sympathetic words. And so Robb had gone out of the camp into the woods, his chest tight and aching. “It’s not fair,” he’d said to himself, and then felt furious at his childishness. A man wouldn’t expect the Lannisters to play fair. A man would have expected their treachery and would be at King’s Landing, instead of being a month’s hard march away and his father -
Striking the sword against the tree made it easier to breathe, somehow, and he did it again and again, until his arm was aching, until it had gone through aching to numbness, until Catelyn said his name.
“I’ll kill them all, every one of them,” he wept against Catelyn’s neck, sounding like the youth he was instead of the man he was trying so desperately to be. Catelyn cradled the back of his head in her hand, as she must have held it when he was a baby, and hushed him in the same soothing voice Robb remembered her using for Bran, and reminded him that the Lannisters had his sisters. Family, Duty, Honour, Robb thought dully. Family came first. After that, revenge.
“You should rest, Robb,” said Catelyn, when his sobs subsided at last. “You’ve not slept.”
“Neither have you,” he pointed out, and she gave him a tight tired smile.
“With five children, I’m used to that. Go on.”
“I should send word to Winterfell. And to Jon.”
“I will write to Maester Luwin, and I’ll have someone send word to the Wall. Go on, Robb. Rest.”
Another day he might be annoyed by her ordering him to bed as if he were as young as Rickon, but Robb was too exhausted to disagree. He went back to his tent, where this time he let Olyvar undress him. I won’t sleep, he thought; how could he, when his father was dead? All the same, before his squire had even finished putting away his armour Robb was half-fallen into sleep. I should write to Jon myself, he thought, I should let him know about Father; it’s not right that he learn about it from strangers… The thought slipped away as he drifted into a thankfully dreamless sleep, and the hours and days that followed it were far too crowded to give him space to think of writing to anyone at all.
*
“Where are you going?” asked Sam anxiously, puffing to keep up with Jon’s furious strides.
“I’m going to find my brother, and put a sword through King Joffrey’s throat.”
When he thought about it later, Jon realised it was telling that the first person he thought of was Robb. At that moment, however, he had no room for anything except furious grief. Right now the Night’s Watch felt useless - as disappointing as on the first day he reached the Wall, and more of an impediment. He thought he’d come to peace with himself in his new role in life, but the news of Ned Stark’s death had brought back his angry resentment and sick sense that he was throwing his life away on a place that hardly mattered while more important things were happening elsewhere.
The raven had come with news of Lord Stark’s death, only a few days after the first bird that had told them Robb was going to war. At the first message Jon had felt a a bone-deep ache of wanting to be with his brother, to be defending the Stark name. Now Ned was dead that ache had turned to a pain so sharp he could hardly sit or stand still; his skin itched with the fury and panicky grief of loss. If he stayed still, he felt he would lose his mind. I’m not a Stark, he thought; but he would fight with his brother, and everyone would know that Ned Stark had four sons, not three.
And so Jon fled with his mare, Longclaw left on his bed because he had no right to carry it away from the Night’s Watch. He was an oathbreaker now, an outcast: but it would be worth it to see Robb again, to tell him he’d come to help him avenge their father. He tried to imagine Robb smiling when he saw him, but Jon couldn’t picture it, somehow. He remembered how Ned had looked when he had executed that deserter months before. He wondered if Robb carried Ice now, and if he would feel obliged to carry out the same sentence. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Thinking of that made anxiety curdle in his stomach, but still he pressed on. How could he not? He was his father’s son.
They found him, of course: Sam and Pyp, Grenn, Halder and Toad. He should’ve known they’d come for him, and it surprised him how much it touched him to know they’d ride all this way to bring him back.
“I belong with my brother,” he protested, but weakly. He was thinking of Robb holding Ice, of Robb being disappointed that Jon was an oathbreaker. Of saying he did not need Jon at all - he had an army, so what use was a deserter?
“We’re your brothers now,” Grenn said, and Jon felt his shoulders slump. He had sworn himself to the Night’s Watch, and Grenn was right: they were his brothers, and he couldn’t fight them off. He felt bad enough that he’d shoved Sam out of the way as he rode out of Castle Black.
There was no time to sleep when they got back; dawn was breaking, and Jon had to bring the Old Bear his breakfast. There he had the uncomfortable discovery that Mormont had known he had fled; had expected it to happen, in fact. And so when Mormont asked him if he was “a brother of the Night’s Watch, or only a bastard boy who wants to play at war,” Jon had straightened his back and sworn himself again to his new brotherhood. They were his family now; he owed it to them to remember that. Forgive me, Father, he thought, and returned to his duties.
That night Jon lay in bed. His night of riding had left him exhausted, but now he couldn’t sleep. Joining the Night’s Watch had made Jon face some uncomfortable truths. That the Watch was made up of more thieves and rapists than noble outcasts; that he was quicker to judge people than he’d liked to think; and that the moment he’d accepted that the Night’s Watch had become his family, he’d felt a strange relief. Strange, but not inexplicable. Jon knew all too well why he felt it, though it had taken coming all these hundreds of miles north to acknowledge something he had felt since a bright day in the training yard two years ago. He didn’t want Robb to think of him as his brother. Two years and a lifetime ago, laughing on a mild day in Winterfell, he and Robb had fought with wooden swords, and then when that hadn’t yielded a victor they’d turned to wrestling, struggling and laughing together in the dirt and straw of the training yard. At last Robb had him pinned.
“Yield, then,” said Robb with a crow of satisfaction. Never, Jon had replied, and so Robb pressed all his weight down onto him. The breath had huffed out of Jon’s chest, but not just because Robb was crushing him. Jon could feel something hard pressing against his thigh, and suddenly he felt almost sick with longing, his whole body going lax and yielding.
“I win,” said Robb triumphantly, but when he sat up there was a flush in his cheeks. Still, a moment later he seemed to have forgotten it and was talking excitedly about archery practice, and Jon had tried to forget it too. These things happened. At their age a stiff breeze could get a boy hard, never mind being jostled together with another warm body. It didn’t matter.
It did matter, but he’d done his best to forget it. Jon rolled onto his back and sighed quietly into the dark. Tyrion Lannister had claimed that most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it, but Jon was done with denials. These months he’d been at the Wall had been full of hard truths, bitter ones, and Jon had learned to swallow them. He could swallow this one, too; especially since it seemed likely now that he might never see Robb again. It was a truth that could hurt no one but Jon, and in the quiet darkness of that night, breath whistling fast through his nose, an eventual cry swallowed by his pillow, Jon let that truth for the first time be a comfort, not a scourge.
*
It had happened so fast. One moment they were debating who had more of a right to the Iron Throne - Renly or Stannis, Prince Tommen, even - and then the Greatjon was spitting on the Lannisters and Baratheons altogether, and calling Robb the King in the North.
The King in the North.
It had bewildered him, though he hoped it hadn’t shown. He’d never thought to be a king; never thought beyond avenging his father, and the thousands of men he’d lost. Men he’d sent to their deaths in his father’s name. And now the comrades and leaders and fathers and brothers of those men were bending their knees and calling out a title not heard in three hundred years. The King in the North.
He had accepted, of course; even felt a fierce pride, more for the North than for himself. It was right that they have their own king. Once the Lannisters were defeated and they had his sisters back, they could forget the south for good. But matters went on so quickly after that night that there was barely time to think; and now, the night before his coronation in Riverrun, Robb felt a sudden blinding terror. He’d tried on his crown this afternoon, in case the smith needed to make any last minute changes to the fit. The bronze felt so heavy, and when he looked at himself in a mirror he saw not a king but a child playing dress up, for all his new beard.
I wish Jon were here, he thought as he sat alone in his chamber, and suddenly the ache of missing hs brother filled his whole body. He remembered embracing Jon goodbye on their last day together in Winterfell, the way the corner of Jon’s mouth had twitched with feeling. If Jon were here, Robb would not feel so afraid, he was sure of it, and before he had even fully formed the thought he was drawing out parchment and quill, scratching down words by candlelight. What began as a stiffly formal note about his impending coronation turned quickly to a feverish outpouring of words, Robb’s careful hand becoming cramped and clumsy as the words rushed out of him.
I don’t know how to be king. I don’t know how to do any of this without you.
They were the last words on the page, eighteen ragged words. Robb stared at them for a moment, then rolled up the parchment and sealed it before calling for a servant. The next morning he sat up with a jolt, feeling sickly guilty. All the letter would do would be to worry Jon; it told him nothing useful, and it made Robb seem weak. But it was too late to take it back: the bird had already gone.
*
Conwy had returned from Gulltown with the latest crop of willing and unwilling recruits for the Night’s Watch, and had brought with him the news of Robb’s coronation. His brother, a king. Jon could barely imagine it, and the gulf between him and the Starks seemed ever-wider. It made his decision to stay seem sounder. What use could King Robb have for a single crow?
“A raven came for you, Jon,” puffed Sam excitedly, crossing the yard. Jon hadn’t received a letter for himself alone in all the time he’d been here, and he couldn’t imagine what it said. He cracked open the parchment in the yard; after the first line he rolled it back up and tucked it in his jerkin so he could read it in private later. He didn’t want anyone gawking at a letter from King Robb.
It was over an hour before Jon had a quiet moment to slip away and read behind the stables; it was one of the longest hours of his life. It was a very strange letter: a tangle of words about the Whispering Woods and a string of names of men that Jon thought he’d heard had died in Robb’s service; a long sentence that wondered what had become of Father’s sword; and then that last line.
I don’t know how to be king. I don’t know how to do any of this without you.
Jon read it again, and then again. And then, very carefully, he rolled up the letter and put it away, before he was quietly and thoroughly sick in the hay. Because he had a choice to make, now: a real one, this time. He was not a bastard boy who wanted to play at war, who Mormont would indulge running away for the night. He was expected to go ranging beyond the Wall tomorrow, and to abandon that duty would make him a true deserter, an oathbreaker, a man deserving of death. His brothers needed him.
Jon stood up and wiped his mouth. He knew what he had to do.
*
It took Jon a month to reach Riverrun. He had not been pursued, he thought. The Old Bear did not really have men to spare. But he would be a wanted man, now, for the rest of his life. Strangely the thought didn’t scare him as much as it had done the first time he had run away.
He had thought of discarding his clothes, but he had very little money for new ones, and besides it struck him he may as well hide in plain sight. People might avoid him on the road if they thought he was a member of the Watch still. And so when he arrived at Riverrun and asked to see Robb, no one asked for his name, and instead he was announced as a brother of the Night’s Watch.
Robb was alone in his chamber when the servant ushered Jon in, and Jon’s first, stupid thought was that Robb had grown. He’d been a hand’s breadth taller when they’d parted, but he thought Robb was of a height with him now. Is that what kingship did to you, he wondered. Robb just stared at him for a long moment.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” said Jon, adding “Your Grace,” as an afterthought.
“I should ask what took you so long,” said Robb, and his face broke into the smile Jon had not been able to imagine before, and that now having seen it, he would remember as long as he lived. I don’t know how to do any of this without you. For the first time in his life, Jon knew without a doubt that someone needed him the way he needed them, too.