The darkness in the cargo hold was absolute, a living thing that pressed against Jon's eyes like wet wool.
He was wedged into a narrow gap between the ship's hull and towering bales of Northern wool—the irony of which was not lost on him, even at six years old. The wood against his back was slick with condensation and bilge water. The air was thick, a suffocating soup of tar, unwashed sheep, rotting wood, and the overwhelming metallic tang of the sea.
The ship, The Mermaid's Grace, groaned. It was a sound like a dying beast, timber rubbing against timber as the vessel crested a swell and slammed down into the trough.
Jon's stomach lurched in perfect sympathy with the ship. Bile rose in his throat, hot and sour.
"Don't vomit," he told himself. Vomit smells. Smell attracts attention.
The thought might have been his own. It might have been Marcus's. After three weeks, he could no longer tell the difference.
He had been hiding in the cargo hold for two days. The Golden Lotus had sailed without him—a miscommunication, a changed departure time, and Jon had arrived at the docks to see red sails disappearing toward the horizon. Willem's coins had bought him passage on the next ship bound for Braavos, but the captain had wanted no children aboard. So Jon had found another way.
"Stowaway," Marcus's fragments whispered. Dangerous. If caught, they might throw you overboard.
Jon knew. But he'd had no choice. Winterfell's reach extended to White Harbor. He'd seen a man with Stark livery asking questions at the docks, showing people a sketch. The drawing had been crude, but the dark curls and grey eyes were unmistakable.
So he'd crawled into the dark and prayed to gods he wasn't sure existed.
The ship pitched again. Jon's stomach finally rebelled. He turned his head and vomited as quietly as he could manage, the sound lost in the groaning of the hull. His body shook with the effort of staying silent. Tears streamed down his face—from the retching, he told himself. Just from the retching.
"Water Breathing," a fragment suggested. Control the nausea. Regulate the—
Jon tried to reach for the technique. For a heartbeat, he felt the pattern forming—the specific rhythm of inhale and exhale that could calm his roiling gut.
Then his chest seized. Pain lanced through his ribs. He gasped, losing the pattern, and the nausea crashed back over him worse than before.
Stop, he thought desperately. Stop trying to use techniques your body can't hold.
But it was hard. The knowledge was there, tantalizingly close, like water visible through ice. He could see it. He just couldn't reach it.
He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand and curled tighter into his hiding spot. The wool scratched against his cheek. The darkness pressed in.
Just survive, he told himself. One day at a time. One hour at a time. One breath at a time.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
The hand that grabbed his ankle came without warning.
Jon kicked out on instinct, his heel connecting with something solid. A grunt of pain, a curse in a language he didn't know, and then light flooded the gap as someone yanked away the bale of wool concealing him.
"Got 'im!" a rough voice bellowed. "Stowaway! In the wool!"
Jon scrambled backward, but there was nowhere to go. The hull pressed against his spine. Two sailors loomed over him—big men, scarred and weathered, their faces twisted with anger.
"Little rat," one of them spat. "Eating our food, drinking our water. Captain'll have your hide."
They dragged him out by his arms. Jon didn't fight—he was too small and too weak, and fighting would only make things worse. Marcus's fragments supplied a hundred ways to break free from this grip, but Jon's six-year-old body couldn't execute any of them.
Endure, he thought. A river does not fight the rock. It flows around it.
They hauled him up through the hatches into blinding sunlight that stabbed at his eyes. The deck of The Mermaid's Grace stretched before him—a chaos of rope and sail and shouting men. The smell of salt and tar replaced the stench of the hold.
"What's this?" A new voice, cold and hard. Jon blinked until his vision cleared.
Captain Torren Magnar stood at the helm, a Northman by his look—tall and broad, with a face like carved granite and eyes the color of a winter sky. He wore no fine clothes, just a salt-stained jerkin and boots that had seen better years. But authority radiated from him like heat from a forge.
"Stowaway, Captain." The sailor holding Jon's left arm gave him a shake. "Found him in the wool. Been hiding for days, it looks like."
Torren's eyes swept over Jon. Taking in the dark curls, the grey eyes, and the pale skin. The quality of his clothes, ragged now but once fine.
"A highborn rat," the captain said quietly. "From the North, by the look of you."
Jon said nothing. His heart hammered against his ribs.
"What's your name, boy?"
Silence.
"I asked your name."
"Jon." The word came out hoarse, scraped raw by two days of thirst. "Just Jon."
"Just Jon." Torren's lips twitched—not quite a smile. "And where is 'Just Jon' running from, I wonder? "You're a snow, aren't you? Haha."What sends a highborn child crawling into my cargo hold?
Jon met the captain's eyes. For a moment, he considered lying. But something in Torren's gaze told him the man would see through it.
"I can't go back," Jon said. "Please. I'll work. I'll do anything. Just don't send me back."
"Back where?"
"North."
The captain studied him for a long moment. The sailors shifted, waiting for the order—throw him over, lock him in the brig, turn the ship around.
"You're running from something," Torren said finally. "Or someone. I won't ask what. Every man on this ship is running from something." He glanced at the crew. "But stowaways eat food they haven't earned. Drink water they haven't worked for. That's theft, boy. And theft has a price."
Jon's stomach dropped.
"You'll work," Torren continued. "Galley duty. Scrubbing. Hauling. Whatever Marro needs done, you'll do it. You'll eat half-rations until we reach Braavos. And if I catch you stealing again, or causing trouble, or doing anything that threatens my ship—" He leaned closer, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "—I'll put you in a boat and let the sea decide your fate. Understood?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Good." Torren straightened. "Get him cleaned up. Put him to work."
The sailors released him. Jon stumbled, catching himself on a coil of rope.
"One more thing." Torren's voice stopped him. "You have the look of a Stark about you, boy. The coloring. The eyes." He paused. "If anyone asks, you're a fisherman's son from the Stony Shore. Your father died in the Greyjoy Rebellion. You're seeking work in Braavos. Understand?"
Jon understood. The captain was protecting him—or at least, not turning him in. He didn't know why. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"Yes, Captain."
"Then get moving. You've got two days of laziness to work off."
Life on The Mermaid's Grace settled into a brutal, exhausting rhythm.
Jon woke before dawn. He scrubbed the galley floor on his hands and knees, the lye soap burning his skin until his palms cracked and bled. He peeled sacks of turnips until his hands were stained brown and his fingers locked into claws. He hauled buckets of seawater up from the side, the rope biting into his palms, his thin arms trembling with each pull.
The crew was a mixed lot—Northmen, Braavosi, Sistermen, and one blue-bearded Tyroshi who laughed too loud and climbed the rigging like a monkey. Most of them treated Jon like a bad omen.
"Stowaway brings storms," muttered Yoren, a one-eyed sailor with a face like a crumpled map. He would "accidentally" kick Jon's bucket over when walking past, forcing him to start his work again. He would cuff Jon across the head when no one was looking, hard enough to make his ears ring.
Jon endured it.
"A river does not fight the rock," Marcus's fragment whispered. It flows around it.
But that wasn't quite right either. Marcus had been a grown man, a trained warrior. He could afford to be patient because he had power to fall back on. Jon had nothing. Jon was a six-year-old with cracked hands and an empty belly, surrounded by men who could kill him with a casual blow.
"I'm not Marcus," Jon reminded himself again and again. I have his memories. I have fragments of his knowledge. But I'm not him. I'm just me.
It was a hard truth to hold onto, especially when the fragments kept whispering. They showed him pressure points on Yoren's neck. They suggested angles of attack and methods of escape. They promised power he couldn't access.
The map is not the journey, Jon thought, scrubbing the deck until his knees ached. The map is not the journey.
Not everyone was cruel.
Marro, the Tyroshi rigger, found Jon struggling with a knot one afternoon. The rope was as thick as Jon's wrist, and his small fingers couldn't manage the twists.
"No, no, no!" Marro hopped down from the rigging, landing silently despite his bulk. "That is a granny knot. It will slip and kill us all."
"I'm trying," Jon said, frustration bleeding into his voice.
"Trying is not doing." Marro took the rope from his hands. "Watch. Rabbit comes out of the hole, goes around the tree, and goes back into the hole. See? Bowline. The King of Knots."
His fingers moved quickly, but Jon watched carefully. He tried to memorize the pattern—not with supernatural focus, just with the concentration of a child determined to learn.
"Now you."
Jon took the rope. His first attempt failed. The second was worse. On the third try, he managed something close to the correct shape.
"Passable," Marro said, grinning through his blue beard. "You learn slowly, but you learn. Come. I teach you more."
Over the following days, Marro became something like a teacher. He showed Jon how to coil rope so it wouldn't tangle, how to read the wind by the feel of it on wet skin, and how to climb the rigging without dying. Jon was terrible at all of it—his arms were too weak, his body too small, and his balance too uncertain. But he kept trying.
"You have courage, little boy," Marro told him one evening, watching Jon struggle to pull himself up a ladder. "No skill, but courage."
"Is courage enough?" "Jon?" he asked, his arms shaking.
"Courage keeps you alive long enough to find skill." Marro extended a hand and hauled him up. "The rest is just practice."
The storm came on the eighth day.
Jon had seen storms before—the blizzards that howled around Winterfell, the freezing rain that turned the Wolfswood into a death trap. He thought he understood the sea's violence.
He was wrong.
The sky went green at midday, a sickly color that made the sailors mutter and touch iron for luck. The wind died to nothing, leaving the sails hanging limp. The sea went flat as glass.
"Bad sign," Marro said quietly, checking the rigging for the fourth time. "Very bad sign."
"What kind of storm?" Jon asked.
"The kind you pray to survive."
By evening, the horizon had become a wall of black cloud, shot through with lightning that flickered like the heartbeat of something vast and angry. The wind returned—not gradually, but all at once, slamming into the ship like a giant's fist.
"All hands!" Captain Torren's roar cut through the howl. "Reef the mainsail! Move, damn you!"
Jon had been in the galley when the storm hit. He emerged onto the deck, and the wind nearly threw him overboard. He grabbed a rope, clinging to it with both hands as the ship pitched wildly.
Rain struck his face like needles. The world had become a chaos of water and wind and screaming men. He could barely see three feet in front of him.
Get below, his own mind shouted. You're useless up here. You'll just get killed.
But something held him on deck. Some stubborn Northern pride, or maybe just the refusal to cower while others fought.
He saw Marro scrambling up the rigging, trying to secure a sail that had torn loose. He saw the captain wrestling with the wheel, his face a mask of concentration. He saw Yoren—the cruel one-eyed sailor who had made Jon's life miserable—struggling to tie down a barrel that had broken free.
A wave struck the ship broadside. The deck tilted forty-five degrees. Jon's feet went out from under him, and he slid toward the rail, toward the churning black water below—
His hand caught a cleat. He hung there, legs dangling over the void, rain hammering his back, fingers screaming in protest.
Pull up, he told himself. PULL UP.
He didn't have the strength. His arms were burning, his grip slipping. The sea roared beneath him, hungry and cold.
"Thunder Breathing," Marcus's fragment whispered. Just a touch. Just enough to—
Jon reached for the pattern. For one heartbeat, he felt it—the surge of energy, the lightning in his blood. His arms tightened. He began to pull—
Then his chest seized. His heart stuttered. The technique collapsed, and Jon was left hanging by fingers that were rapidly losing their grip.
"No," he thought. No, not like this, not—
A hand grabbed his wrist.
Marro's face appeared above him, rain streaming down his blue beard. "Hold on, kid!"
The Tyroshi hauled him up with one arm, muscles straining, and threw him onto the deck. Jon landed hard, gasping, his vision swimming with black spots.
"Stay down!" Marro shouted. "Grab something and don't let go!"
Jon grabbed. He wrapped his arms around the base of the mast and held on while the world tried to tear itself apart around him.
The storm raged for six hours.
Jon spent most of it clinging to the mast, his arms locked in a grip that had long since gone numb. He watched the crew battle the sea—hauling lines, cutting loose wreckage, and fighting to keep the ship from capsizing. He couldn't help them. He was too small, too weak. All he could do was survive.
Twice, he tried to reach for the breathing techniques. Twice, his body rebelled—chest tightening, heart stuttering, the taste of copper flooding his mouth. The knowledge was there, tantalizing, but his body refused to execute it.
"You're trying to lift a boulder with a child's arms," Marcus's fragment observed, somewhere between sympathy and frustration. The strength exists. But your muscles haven't grown into it yet.
"Then what good are you?" Jon whispered to the storm, to himself, and to the ghost in his head. "What good is any of it?"
No answer came. Just the howl of the wind and the crash of the waves.
The crisis came near midnight.
Jon didn't see how it started—only the result. A crack like the world breaking, and suddenly the yardarm was falling, a massive timber spinning down through the rain and chaos. Directly toward Yoren.
The one-eyed sailor was tangled in a rope, struggling to free himself. He looked up and saw death coming, and his mouth opened in a scream that was lost in the storm.
Jon was ten feet away.
He didn't think. He just moved.
Not with Thunder Breathing—his body couldn't hold it. Not with supernatural speed or strength. He moved like what he was: a desperate child, scrambling across a tilting deck, acting on instinct rather than technique.
He reached Yoren just as the timber fell.
He didn't try to stop it. He couldn't have. Instead, he threw himself against the sailor, both hands shoving at the man's chest, using his momentum to push Yoren backward, out of the timber's path.
The yardarm caught Jon across the shoulder.
The impact threw him sideways. He felt something break—heard it, a wet crack that seemed impossibly loud despite the storm. He hit the deck hard, slid, and fetched up against the rail with a jolt that drove the breath from his lungs.
For a long moment, he couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. The pain in his shoulder was a white-hot sun, blotting out everything else.
"Breathe," some part of him insisted. Breathe or die.
He drew in air. It hurt. Everything hurt. But he was alive.
Marro's face appeared above him, rain-streaked and terrified. "Jon! Jon, can you hear me?"
"Is... is he..." Jon couldn't finish the sentence. His voice was a rasp.
Marro looked toward where Yoren was being helped to his feet by two other sailors. The one-eyed man was staring at Jon, his cruel face slack with shock.
"You saved him," Marro said. "By the gods, you saved him. How did you move so fast?"
Jon hadn't moved fast. He'd moved early—seen the danger a heartbeat before the others and reacted while they were still processing. Marcus's memories might not give him superhuman speed, but they gave him awareness. The ability to read a situation. The instinct to act instead of freeze.
"I don't know," Jon whispered. It was easier than the truth.
Marro lifted him gently, cradling his injured shoulder. "We need to get you below. You're hurt."
"I can still—"
"You can still do nothing, you stupid brave youngster." But Marro's voice was thick with something that might have been affection. "You've done enough."
They carried him below. The storm continued to rage above, but Jon barely heard it. The pain had faded to a dull roar, replaced by an exhaustion so profound he could barely keep his eyes open.
He'd saved a man. Not with Marcus's power—with his own courage, his own instinct, and his own small body flung against fate.
Maybe that's enough, he thought as darkness claimed him. Maybe that's all I can be, for now.
Jon woke to pain.
His shoulder screamed when he tried to move, and he gasped, falling back against the thin pallet that served as his bed. The ship still swayed, but more gently now—the storm had passed, or at least weakened.
"Don't move." A gruff voice, surprisingly gentle. Jon turned his head and found Yoren sitting beside him, the one-eyed sailor's face unreadable in the dim lamplight.
"What..." Jon's throat was sandpaper. "What happened?"
"You nearly got yourself killed saving my worthless hide." Yoren's voice was flat. "The storm broke an hour ago. We lost two men overboard and another to a falling spar. But not me. Because some foolish child decided to play hero."
Jon tried to find a response and failed. His head was stuffed with wool, his thoughts sluggish and scattered.
"The ship's healer looked at you," Yoren continued. "Says your collarbone is cracked. Clean break—it'll heal if you don't do anything stupid. But you won't be hauling ropes for a while."
"I'm sorry," Jon managed. He wasn't sure what he was apologizing for.
"Sorry." Yoren snorted. "The boy saves my life and apologizes." He was silent for a moment, his single eye studying Jon with an intensity that made Jon want to look away. "Why did you do it?"
"What?"
"Save me. I've done nothing but make your life miserable since you came aboard. I've hit you. Kicked your work over. Called you names." His voice dropped. "Most men would've let me die. Some would've pushed me into the timber themselves."
Jon considered the question. He thought about Marcus's memories—the lessons about honor, about protecting the weak, about the duty of the strong. But that wasn't quite right either. Marcus had been strong. Jon wasn't.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I just... I couldn't watch you die. It didn't matter if you were cruel to me. You were going to die, and I could do something about it." He paused, struggling for words. "It's not about deserving. It's just... it's what you do."
Yoren stared at him for a long moment.
"How old are you, boy?"
"Six." Almost seven, but not quite.
"Six years old, and you talk like a maester." Yoren shook his head slowly. "I've met men who've lived fifty years and never learned what you just said."
He reached into his pocket and withdrew something small—a knife, Jon realized, with a handle carved from bone. It was beautiful, in a rough way. Simple and functional.
"My father made this." Yoren placed it beside Jon's good hand. "Gave it to me when I was about your age. Said a man should always have a blade he can trust." He stood, his joints popping. "Consider it a debt paid. Though I suspect I'll never really pay it back."
"I can't take—"
"You can, and you will." Yoren's voice brooked no argument. "Get some rest, Jon. You've earned it."
He left. Jon lay in the darkness, the bone-handled knife cool against his palm, and tried to make sense of what had happened.
He hadn't used Marcus's powers. His body couldn't hold them—not yet, maybe not for years. He was just a child, weak and small and mortal.
But he'd saved a man's life anyway.
Maybe, he thought, the power isn't the point. Maybe the point is what you do when you don't have power.
It was a new thought. A difficult one. But it settled into him like a seed into soil, and he held onto it as sleep claimed him once more.
The Titan of Braavos emerged from the morning mist like a god rising from the sea.
Jon stood at the rail, his arm bound in a sling, watching as the massive statue grew larger with each passing moment. It straddled the entrance to the harbor, bronze legs planted on hidden islands, one hand raised as if in warning or welcome. Ships passed between its feet like minnows swimming past a whale.
"First time seeing it?" Marro appeared beside him, his blue beard freshly combed.
"Yes." Jon couldn't tear his eyes away. "It's... it's enormous."
"Built by the first Braavosi, they say. Escaped slaves from Valyria." Marro's voice held a note of pride—the Tyroshi weren't Braavosi, but the Free Cities shared a history of defiance against dragonlords. "The Titan guards the city. Legend says that if Braavos is ever truly threatened, the statue will step down from its perch and destroy the enemy fleet."
"Is that true?"
Marro laughed. "Probably not. But it makes for a good story, yes?"
The ship passed beneath the Titan's shadow. Jon looked up at the massive face, stern and watchful, and felt impossibly small.
I'm nothing, he thought. A child with fragments of someone else's memories, running from a home that didn't want me. What am I doing here?
But another part of him—the part that had thrown itself at Yoren, the part that had survived the storm—answered differently.
I'm learning. I'm growing. I'm becoming something.
He just didn't know what yet.
Captain Torren found him as the ship was being tied to the dock.
"Jon." The captain's voice was neutral, but his eyes were not unkind. "We dock in an hour. You're free to go. You've earned your passage—more than earned it, from what Yoren tells me."
"Thank you, Captain."
"Don't thank me. You did the work." Torren reached into his belt and withdrew a small pouch. "Wages. You earned them."
Jon stared at the pouch. "I was a stowaway. Stowaways don't get—"
"Stowaways don't save men's lives either." Torren pressed the coins into Jon's good hand. "Take it. Buy food. Find lodging. Stay out of trouble."
"I'll try."
"One more thing." Torren glanced around, then lowered his voice. "Braavos is a city of secrets. Everyone here is hiding something. That makes it both safe and dangerous. Safe, because no one asks questions. Dangerous, because no one answers them either."
He met Jon's eyes.
"You have something in you, boy. I don't know what—something strange, something old. I saw it in the yard back at White Harbor, and I've seen it again on this voyage. Whatever you're running from, whatever you're running toward... be careful. The world has a way of breaking people like you."
"People like me?"
"People with too much behind their eyes." Torren straightened. "Go on, then. The city awaits."
Jon walked down the gangplank and set foot on Braavosi stone.
The docks were chaos—sailors shouting in a dozen languages, merchants hawking goods, beggars rattling cups, and guards in fish-scale armor watching everything with flat, suspicious eyes. The smell was overwhelming: salt and fish and smoke and perfume and rot, all tangled together into something that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just alive.
Marro caught up to him at the bottom of the gangplank.
"jon" The Tyroshi crouched down to Jon's level, his blue beard almost brushing Jon's nose. "Are you sure you don't want to stay aboard? Captain would have you. The crew respects you now."
Jon shook his head. "I can't. I need to go east. There's something I need to find."
"What?"
"A teacher." The word felt right, even if Jon couldn't fully explain it. "Someone who can show me how to... how to use what I have."
Marro studied him for a moment. "You're a strange one, Jon. Too old for your age. Too serious." He grinned suddenly. "But brave. The Mother herself must watch over you."
"I don't think the gods have much to do with it."
"Then watch over yourself." Marro pressed something into his hand—a small copper coin stamped with a face Jon didn't recognize. "My grandmother's lucky piece. Carried it across three seas. It's kept me alive this long; maybe it'll do the same for you."
"I can't—"
"You can." Marro straightened. "Go find your teacher. And when you've learned whatever it is you need to learn... come back and show me what you've become."
"I will," Jon said. And he meant it.
He turned and walked into the city.
Behind him, The Mermaid's Grace grew small against the harbor, another ship among hundreds. The Titan watched from above, bronze and eternal. The sea stretched toward a horizon Jon couldn't see.
"One step at a time," he told himself. One breath at a time. One day at a time.
He was six years old, alone in a foreign city, with a cracked collarbone and a handful of coins and fragments of a dead man's memories.
But he was alive. He was learning. And somewhere ahead—east, across more water than he could imagine—there might be answers.
The journey continued.