WINTERFELL — 289 AC
Jon knew it was his nameday because nothing changed.
No toast in the Great Hall. No singer. No one calling his name loud enough for the stone to hear it and remember. Winterfell woke as it always did—cold first, then smoke, then the clatter of men pretending the cold did not bite.
Somewhere in the keep a baby cried.
That part was new.
The sound threaded through the halls like a thin blade, rising and falling, never quite stopping. It smelled new too, the whole castle: milk and boiled linens, sour-sweet and warm under the ever-present tang of woodsmoke. Servants moved quicker, softer. Doors shut with care. Even the guards on the inner stairs spoke in lowered voices, as if the babe might hear and take offense.
Arya Stark had been born three days ago. A small red thing with strong lungs and a temper that already belonged to the North, if the whispers were true.
Jon pulled his boots on and found his cloak where he'd left it folded on a chair. Grey wool, plain, a little scratchy at the neck. He wrapped it tight and went out before the keep had fully warmed.
In the yard, frost made the stones slick. Men-at-arms stamped their feet and blew into their hands. Mikken's forge glowed dull red behind a curtain of smoke. The smell of hot iron cut through the cold like a promise.
Robb was there already.
Robb was six too, but he stood like he'd been born to be seen. Ser Rodrik Cassel set his hands on Robb's wrists and corrected the angle of the practice sword. Robb listened, then swung again, face set hard with the seriousness boys wore when they wanted to be men.
Jon took up a practice stick from the rack and began the forms Rodrik had shown him. His breath came in little clouds. The stick felt smooth in his hands, the motion familiar. Familiar was safe.
"Keep your feet," Rodrik barked at Robb. "You'll trip yourself with pride if you don't."
Robb grinned and swung harder.
Jon swung quieter.
He liked the rhythm of it. The scrape of boot leather on stone. The thud of wood on wood. The way the cold made every sound sharp. For a few heartbeats, he could pretend there were no tables he could not sit at, no eyes that slid past him like he was smoke.
A door opened above. Warm light spilled onto the gallery.
Jon's head snapped up before he could stop it.
Lord Eddard Stark stood on the walkway, grey cloak fastened at his throat. The wind worried at his hair. He looked down into the yard like he always did, counting without seeming to count. His gaze touched Robb, then moved—briefly—toward Jon.
Not a smile. Ned Stark didn't waste smiles. But his eyes softened by a fraction, and Jon felt it in his chest like a hand closing.
Then Ned turned away toward the stairs that led down into the keep.
Toward the baby's crying.
Jon's stick slowed. He forced it back into motion, faster, harder, until his arms burned and the tightness in his chest had somewhere to go.
He told himself it was fine.
He told himself he was used to it.
By midmorning, Winterfell was fully awake. The keep breathed heat and noise: servants carrying hot water, guards changing stations, the faint clang of the chain as Maester Luwin crossed an upper passage. The smell of broth drifted from the kitchens.
Jon passed the Great Hall and heard laughter inside—men speaking of the new Stark girl, toasting the lady, toasting the lord, making the same jokes men always made when they wanted to pretend they were not afraid of how fragile things were.
He did not go in.
He went where he went when he didn't know where else to put himself: the armory.
It was quiet there, and honest. Leather, oil, cold iron. Weapons lined the walls like sleeping beasts. Shields hung in rows: wolves, direwolves, plain black circles scarred by old blows. Helmets watched from the shadows.
Jon ran a finger along the rim of a small helm and thought how a man could hang his life on hooks and call it duty.
Behind him, someone cleared their throat.
Jon spun, too fast, as if caught stealing.
Ned Stark stood in the doorway, filling it. He had taken off his gloves; his hands were bare, knuckles red from cold.
Jon's mouth went dry. "My lord."
Ned's gaze flicked to the practice stick leaning against the wall, then back to Jon. "Rodrik says you're quick."
Jon didn't know if that was praise or a report. He nodded anyway.
Ned stepped inside and shut the door behind him. The sound was small, but it made the armory feel sealed, as if the castle had been left outside for a moment.
"For a nameday," Ned said, "you chose an empty room."
Jon stared at his boots. "It's… quiet."
"Aye." Ned's voice was even, like steel laid flat. "Quiet is good, sometimes."
He crossed to an old chest against the back wall and knelt. The motion was careful, as if his knees carried the same weight as the rest of him. He opened it and drew out a bundle wrapped in plain cloth.
"This is yours," he said, and held it out.
Jon took it with both hands. It was heavier than cloth ought to be.
He unwrapped it slowly, afraid the moment would break if he moved wrong.
Inside was a pair of gloves. Black leather, thick and soft, new but not fancy. They smelled of oil and hide. The fingers were long enough to grow into.
Jon's throat tightened. He couldn't find a word that didn't sound childish.
"They're for your hands," Ned said, as if that settled everything. "Rodrik will put steel in them soon enough."
Jon swallowed. "Thank you."
Ned watched him a beat longer than necessary. Then he reached out and rested his palm on Jon's head.
The weight of it was steady. Warm. For a heartbeat Jon forgot the cold corridors, forgot Catelyn's eyes, forgot the empty space at the table that always seemed to be shaped like him.
He was under a hand that belonged.
"Mind your temper," Ned said quietly. "Mind your lessons."
Jon held his breath, trying to keep the warmth inside his ribs.
Ned's hand lifted away.
The armory grew colder in the space it left.
"Go," Ned said. "Before I'm missed."
Jon nodded quickly and backed out like he was leaving a sept. He did not trust himself to speak again.
In the corridor outside, the castle's noise rushed back in. A servant passed carrying a basin. Somewhere a baby screamed and then stopped, as if someone had finally found the right way to hold her.
Jon walked with the gloves clutched in his hands even though he had already put them on. He wanted to look at them again, to make sure they were real.
He didn't go to Mikken like Ned had suggested. He didn't go back to the yard.
He went to the godswood.
He always went there when his chest felt too tight for air.
The godswood was quieter than any room in the keep. Snow lay deep beneath the branches. The black pool was still, rimmed with thin ice. The heart tree rose pale against the sky, its leaves red as blood and old wounds.
Jon stopped at the edge of the grove and looked back once toward the keep. Windows glowed warm. Smoke rose. Somewhere inside, Arya cried again.
He should have gone back. He knew that too. He should have stayed where men could see him.
But the godswood pulled at him the way deep water pulled at a careless foot.
He walked toward the weirwood, boots sinking. The carved face stared down, long and solemn. The red eyes looked wet, always wet.
Jon raised his gloved hand.
For a moment it was just bark and cold.
Then the air tightened.
It was nothing Jon could name. Not a sound. Not a smell. Just a prickling along his skin, like the way hair rose before lightning in summer storms—except this was winter, and Winterfell did not do lightning.
Jon tugged the glove off with his teeth.
His palm looked normal. Small. A little red from cold. No scar. No mark.
Relief fluttered in him, quick and stupid.
He pressed his bare hand to the white bark.
Cold surged up his arm.
Not winter-cold. This was deeper, like pressing your hand to stone in the crypts. Like standing too close to an open grave.
Jon tried to pull away.
He couldn't.
His palm stuck fast, as if the tree had closed its fingers around him.
Panic hit so hard his breath snagged. He tried to shout, but his throat locked. His lungs burned. His eyes watered.
His breath burst out white, and in it he saw something wrong in the air—thin as spider silk, a seam where the world didn't sit right.
He blinked hard.
It stayed.
Something clicked behind his eyes.
Not a sound. A certainty. Like a latch catching in a door he hadn't known was there.
Heat followed, sudden as a slap.
It burned across the center of his palm without breaking the skin, tracing lines—two strokes crossing, a circle, a notch like a tooth.
A shape he understood in his bones before his mind caught up.
A key.
The bark let him go.
Jon fell backward into the snow and tasted cold. For a moment he could only breathe, ragged and loud in the quiet.
His hand throbbed.
Jon sat up slowly and stared at his palm.
Dark sap coated it, thick and shining. It smelled like iron.
Beneath it, the mark stood out—pale raised lines like a scar that had formed in a heartbeat.
Jon wiped the sap on his cloak.
The mark remained.
He looked up at the heart tree's face, and the seam in the air was clearer now, as if the godswood had been cut and stitched and someone had left the thread loose. He saw another seam along the pool's stone edge. Another where roots met frozen ground. Another where the path curved back toward the keep.
Too many.
Jon squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.
They were still there.
His stomach rolled. He pressed his fist into the snow as if he could crush the sight out of himself.
It did not leave.
A memory rose in him, bright and sharp: Ned's hand on his head, the weight of it, the warmth of it. Jon reached for that warmth the way he would have reached for a cloak in a storm.
And found nothing.
He could remember the armory. He could remember the gloves. He could remember Ned's voice, low and steady. He could remember the pressure of the hand on his hair.
But the feeling—the safe heaviness in his chest, the proof that he had belonged for that heartbeat—was gone.
Not faded.
Gone.
Jon's throat tightened. He tried again, desperate, clawing at the memory.
Only the outline remained. A picture without warmth.
He stared at his palm until his eyes stung.
Something had taken payment.
Jon clenched his marked hand into a fist until the lines bit into his skin.
"No," he whispered, and his voice sounded small under the branches. "Give it back."
The weirwood did not answer.
The red leaves stirred without wind.
Jon stumbled to his feet and backed away from the heart tree as if it might reach for him again. His breath came fast. He looked toward Winterfell's walls and towers and warm windows—
—and saw seams there too, faint as spider silk. Along doors. Along the edge of a stair. Along the mouth of the crypts where stone swallowed the dead.
He turned and ran.
Snow kicked up behind his boots. His heart hammered like he'd been chased.
He did not stop until he reached the keep, where warmth and noise hit him like a wave. He shoved the glove back onto his hand and yanked it up hard, covering his palm.
He ducked into a small storeroom off a quiet corridor and pressed his back to the wall, breathing hard.
When his breath steadied, he tugged the glove off again.
The mark was still there.
Fainter now. Less raised. Like a pale pressure under the skin you might miss unless you knew to look. As he watched, it faded more, retreating like ink sunk into cloth.
It did not vanish completely.
It simply learned how to hide.
Jon swallowed.
He pulled the glove back on slowly, fingers trembling.
Outside the storeroom, the keep went on living—footsteps, voices, a servant laughing softly at something, the distant cry of the baby rising again like a knife.
Jon stared at his gloved hand.
He did not cry. He had learned that much, even at six.
You did not show what could be taken from you.
He stepped back into the corridor and walked toward the yard as if nothing had happened.
Men would see a boy in grey. A bastard. A shadow at the edge of a house that did not fully claim him.
Only Jon could feel the faint ache in his palm when he passed certain doors.
Only Jon could see the seams at the corner of his sight.
And only Jon knew that the one warm thing he had held that morning—the weight of Ned's hand, the comfort of it—had been traded away beneath the red leaves.
Far to the north, beyond lands Jon had never seen, cold winds moved over ice and old stone.
Something there shifted, as if it had heard a lock turn.