They left before dawn, through the Hunter's Gate.
Jon had hoped for the main gates. Had imagined, in the sleepless hours of his last night, that Robb might find a way to slip past the guards. That Arya might appear with her wooden sword, demanding to come along. That even Sansa might offer a stiff word of farewell—something cold and formal, but something.
Instead: the Hunter's Gate. A servant's exit, barely wide enough for two horses abreast. The stones were slick with morning frost, and the hinges groaned like wounded animals when the guards hauled them open. No one came to see him off. No one except his father, standing in the archway with his cloak pulled tight against the cold, and a woman Jon had never seen before.
She was small—not much taller than Jon himself—with moss-green eyes and a face that seemed carved from the same wood as the crannogmen's boats. Her leather armor was the color of swamp water, and she moved with a stillness that made Jon think of herons waiting to strike. A three-pronged spear rested against her shoulder, its tips blackened with something that might have been poison.
"Meera Reed," his father said. "Howland's daughter. She will take you to Greywater Watch."
The girl inclined her head. Her eyes moved over Jon with the quick assessment of someone used to sizing up prey. "My lord father sends his regards," she said. Her voice was surprisingly deep for her size. "And his promise that your son will reach the Watch safely."
Jon looked at the woman—the girl, really; she could not be more than fifteen—and then back at the castle rising behind his father's shoulder. The grey stones of Winterfell caught the first light of dawn, turning the keep the color of old iron. Somewhere in those towers, his siblings slept. Or pretended to sleep. Or lie awake as he had, counting the hours until everything changed.
He wondered if Arya had cried herself to sleep. If Robb had paced his room, searching for words to say goodbye. If anyone would miss him at all, once the initial shock had passed.
"Will they know?" His voice came out smaller than he intended. "That I've gone?"
Ned's jaw tightened. "They will be told you have gone to foster with my bannermen. That your health required a change of climate."
"Lies."
"Protection." His father's hand found his shoulder—the right one, the warm one—and Jon watched steam rise where their bodies met. "The less they know, the less they can reveal. Robert has spies everywhere. The Lannisters have more."
Jon wanted to argue. Wanted to demand that Robb at least be told the truth, that Arya deserves more than whispered excuses. But the sky was lightening in the east, pink and gold bleeding through the grey, and Meera Reed had already mounted her horse with the ease of someone who had been riding since before she could walk.
"We need to move," she said. "The Kingsroad will be busy by midmorning."
Ned pulled Jon into an embrace. The contact burned—literally, steam rising from Jon's right hand where it pressed against his father's cloak—but neither of them pulled away.
"Remember who you are," Ned said quietly, his mouth close to Jon's ear. "Not what you can do. Who you are."
Then he released him, and Jon mounted his horse with fingers that would not stop shaking, and the Hunter's Gate swallowed him whole.
He did not look back. If he looked back, he would never leave.
* * *
The Barrowlands stretched before them like a sea of dead grass and ancient grief.
Jon had never traveled this far south. In the songs, the lands below Winterfell were places of green summers and gentle rivers, of tourneys and feasts and knights in shining armor. The reality was different. The land here was flat and empty, haunted by burial mounds that rose from the earth like the backs of sleeping giants. Each mound was a grave, Meera told him when he asked. Each one held a king of winter, dead for thousands of years, their swords rusted to nothing and their crowns turned to dust.
"The First Men buried their lords here," she said, guiding her horse around a mound taller than Winterfell's outer walls. "Before the Starks came. Before the Long Night. Some say their spirits still walk when the moon is full."
The wind never stopped. It came from the west, from the sea Jon had never seen, carrying the smell of salt and something older—something that tasted like dust and forgotten oaths and the passage of uncountable years. The grass whispered as it passed, a constant susurrus that sounded almost like voices.
Meera Reed spoke little. She led them off the Kingsroad within the first hour, striking east along paths that seemed to exist only in her memory—deer trails and dried creek beds, routes that wound between the barrows without ever crossing their shadows. Her eyes moved constantly, scanning the horizon, the grass, and the sky. When Jon asked why they avoided the main road, she only shrugged.
"The old kings don't like to be disturbed."
Jon did not ask again.
By the second day, the fever had begun.
It started as a tremor in his fingers—both of them now, the opposing forces warring beneath his skin until his fingers twitched like dying spiders. Then came the headaches, pressure building behind his eyes as if his skull had grown too small for whatever lived inside it. The Marcus voice whispered fragments he could not understand: coordinates, tactical assessments, and words in languages that had no place in Westeros.
Thermal regulation failing. Core temperature unstable. You need to stop.
"I'm fine," Jon said aloud, though Meera had not asked.
She glanced back at him, her moss-green eyes unreadable. "You're burning up. I can see the heat rising off you from here."
Jon looked down at his palms. She was right. Steam curled from his right palm, thin wisps that vanished into the grey sky. His left hand had gone white at the fingertips, frost creeping up toward his wrist despite the relative warmth of the day.
"How much further?"
"Two days to the Neck. Three if you fall off your horse."
Jon gripped the reins tighter and said nothing.
That night, the dreams came.
Not the usual fire dreams, with their burning cities and screaming faces. These were older. Colder. He stood in a place of endless ice, where the sky was green with dancing lights and the wind cut like razors. A tower rose behind him, built of pale stone that gleamed like bone in the strange light. Blood stained its steps—old blood, brown and flaking—and somewhere inside, a woman was singing.
The melody was beautiful and terrible, full of loss and longing and something like hope. Jon found himself climbing the tower stairs, following the song, his feet leaving bloody prints on the stone though he could not feel any wound. The walls pressed close. The air grew thick with the scent of winter roses—blue roses, he knew somehow, though he had never seen one.
At the top of the stairs, a room. And in that room, a woman.
She had silver hair and violet eyes, but her features were wrong—too sharp, too northern, like someone had painted a Stark face in Targaryen colors. She knelt on a bed of furs, her belly swollen with child, and when she looked up at him, her eyes were full of a grief so vast it seemed to swallow the world.
Promise me, Ned. Her voice was a whisper, barely audible above the wind. Promise me.
Jon woke gasping, his bedroll scorched in a perfect outline of his body. Meera stood over him with her spear raised, her face pale in the pre-dawn light. Frost had spread in a perfect circle from his left hand, killing the grass and turning the dew to ice crystals that glittered like scattered diamonds.
"You were screaming," she said. "In a language I don't know."
Jon looked at the burned fabric around him, at the frost that had spread in a circle from his left hand, killing the grass in a perfect ring. His throat was raw. His fingers were shaking.
"I don't know it either," he said.
* * *
Greywater Watch found them on the morning of the fifth day.
Jon had expected a castle—or at least a holdfast, something with walls and towers and the trappings of lordship that even the smallest northern houses maintained. The Reeds were bannermen to Winterfell, after all. They had fought beside the Starks for thousands of years. Surely they had earned stone walls and iron gates.
Instead, he found a collection of wooden structures that seemed to grow from the swamp itself.
The buildings were made of woven reeds and grey-green wood, their roofs thatched with marsh grass that blended utterly with the landscape. Rope bridges and floating walkways connected them, swaying gently with every step, creaking in voices that sounded almost human. The whole place sat atop a mat of vegetation so thick it seemed solid—until Jon looked closer and saw the water beneath, black and fathomless, shifting with currents he could not see.
"It moves," Meera said, guiding her horse onto a floating platform that sank alarmingly under the weight. "Drifts through the Neck like a living thing. That is why no army has ever taken Greywater Watch. You cannot besiege what you cannot find. You cannot burn what floats away in the night."
Howland Reed waited for them on the central platform.
He was smaller than Jon expected—smaller even than his daughter, with a face like weathered driftwood and eyes the color of deep water. He wore no armor, no sword, and carried no visible weapon. But when those eyes found Jon's, something in them made Jon want to kneel.
"So," Howland said quietly. "The wheel turns at last."
Jon did not understand. He opened his mouth to ask—
And then his knees buckled, and the fever took him, and the world dissolved into agony and screaming.
* * *
He woke in darkness to the smell of mud and herbs and something burning.
The room was small—barely large enough for the pallet he lay on and the chair beside it. Howland Reed sat in that chair, watching him with those deep-water eyes. A brazier burned in the corner, filling the space with warmth and the scent of juniper.
"How long?" Jon's voice came out as a croak.
"Three days. Your fever broke this morning." Howland's voice was soft, almost gentle. "You nearly died twice. Once when the fire tried to consume you. Once when the ice tried to freeze your heart."
Jon looked at his palms. They seemed normal now—no frost, no steam—but he could feel the war continuing beneath his skin, ice and fire circling each other like wolves.
"What's happening to me?"
Howland was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with something that sounded like grief.
"You are dying, Jon Snow. Or rather—you will die if nothing changes. The power inside you is too great for your body to hold. The dual forces were never meant to share the same vessel. They are tearing you apart from the inside, and every time you use them—every time they surge beyond your control—the damage grows worse."
The words landed like physical blows. Jon stared at the crannogman, waiting for the reassurance that would follow. The "but." The solution. The way out.
None came.
"How long?"
"A year. Perhaps two, if you learn to control the surges." Howland's eyes never left his face. "There are places in the east where they understand such things. Yi Ti, beyond the Bone Mountains. They have techniques for balancing opposing forces, for teaching the body to contain what should destroy it. Your father has arranged passage."
A year. Jon was seven years old. He might not live to see his ninth nameday.
"Why?" The word tore from him like a sob. "Why is this happening to me?"
Howland Reed stood. Moved to the small window, where grey light filtered through oiled cloth. His back was to Jon when he spoke again.
"Because of who you are. Not what you can do—who you are. Your father made me promise never to speak of it. Made me swear on the old gods and the new. But you deserve the truth, Jon Snow. You deserve to know why you carry this burden."
He turned back. His face was older now, lined with memories Jon could not see.
"Ned Stark is not your father."
The words did not make sense. Jon heard them and understood them as individual sounds, but they refused to assemble into meaning. "What?"
"He is your uncle. Your mother was Lyanna Stark, his sister. She died giving birth to you in a tower in Dorne, during Robert's Rebellion." Howland's voice was steady, almost clinical. "I was there. I helped Ned carry her body down the mountain. I heard her make him promise—promise to protect you, to hide you, to never let Robert Baratheon learn the truth."
"Robert?" Jon's voice was barely a whisper. "Why would Robert—"
"Because of your father." Howland's eyes held something like pity. "Your true father. Rhaegar Targaryen."
The name hit Jon like a hammer. Rhaegar. The dragon prince. The man who had stolen Lyanna Stark and started a war that killed thousands. The man Robert Baratheon had killed on the Trident, caving in his chest with a warhammer while rubies scattered into the water like drops of blood. The villain of every story Jon had ever heard about the rebellion.
His father.
"No." Jon was shaking his head, backing away even though there was nowhere to go in the tiny room. The walls pressed in around him like a trap. "No. I'm a bastard. I'm Ned Stark's bastard. Everyone knows that. Lady Catelyn hates me because of it. The servants whisper about it. I'm the stain on Lord Stark's honor, the one mistake the honorable Ned Stark ever made—"
"There was no mistake." Howland's voice was gentle but implacable. "There was only a promise. A dying sister asking her brother to protect her son from a king who would have murdered him in his cradle. A man choosing to stain his own honor—to let the woman he loved believe he had betrayed her—rather than let an innocent child die."
"You are Rhaegar's son," Howland continued. "Ice and fire, Jon. Stark and Targaryen. The blood of the First Men and the blood of Old Valyria, combined in a single vessel for the first time in history. That is why the power woke in you. That is why it is killing you. You were never meant to exist—and now that you do, your own blood is at war with itself."
Jon sank to the floor. His legs would not hold him anymore. The world was spinning, fragments of memory and identity scattering like leaves in a storm.
He was not Ned Stark's son. He had never been Ned Stark's son. Every time his father—his uncle—had called him "son," it had been a lie. Every time Lady Catelyn had looked at him with hatred, she had been hating a phantom. He was not the product of Ned's dishonor.
He was the product of a war.
* * *
Jon walked until he could not walk anymore.
The swamp stretched around him in every direction; grey water and grey sky and grey trees hung with grey moss. Mist rose from the water, curling around the trunks of cypress trees, obscuring the horizon until the world seemed to end just a few yards away. He did not know where he was going. Did not care. His feet found the floating walkways by instinct, carrying him away from Greywater Watch, away from Howland Reed and his terrible truths, and away from everything he had ever believed about himself.
When the walkway ended, he kept going. Knee-deep in swamp water, then waist-deep, the cold seeping through his clothes and into his bones. The water should have been freezing. Instead, it steamed where his right leg passed through it, and ice crystals formed in his wake from his left. Fish fled at his approach, sensing something wrong with the boy who walked through their world leaving trails of impossible temperatures.
He found a hummock of solid ground and collapsed onto it. Drew his knees to his chest. And began to scream.
Not words. Words were useless now. Just sound—raw, animal, torn from some place deeper than language. He screamed until his throat bled. He screamed at the grey sky and the grey water and the parents he had never known and the uncle who had lied to him for seven years. He screamed at the power that was killing him, at the war in his blood that he had never asked for, and at a world that had decided before his birth that he should not exist.
The power answered.
Fire erupted from his right hand, a pillar of white-hot flame that scorched the air and sent water exploding into steam. Ice burst from his left, freezing the swamp in an expanding circle, killing everything it touched. The two forces met somewhere above his head, and the sky itself seemed to scream with him—a sound like tearing metal, like the world being ripped in half.
Stop. The Marcus voice, cutting through the chaos. You will kill yourself.
"I DON'T CARE!"
Jon's voice cracked on the words. Tears streamed down his face—freezing on one cheek, evaporating on the other—and he did not try to stop them.
"I am SEVEN YEARS OLD!" The scream tore through him. "I am SEVEN! I should be learning to ride. I should be training with Robb. I should be chasing Arya through the godswood and stealing pies from the kitchens and dreaming about the Wall. I should not be dying! I should not be carrying the blood of dragons and kings. I should not be—I should not—"
The words dissolved into sobs. The power collapsed inward, and Jon collapsed with them, curling into a ball on the scorched and frozen ground, shaking with grief too large for his small body to contain.
He wept for Robb, who was his cousin now instead of his brother. For Arya, who would never understand why he left, who would rage against his absence and have no one to rage at. For Bran, too young to remember him. For Sansa, who had always been distant but was still blood. For Ned, who had lied to protect him and would carry that lie to his grave—who had let the world believe him dishonorable rather than let Robert Baratheon murder a child.
He wept for his mother, who had died with a promise on her lips in a tower far from home. For his father, who had died with rubies in a river and a warhammer in his chest. For the family he might have had—dragon riders and ice queens, Targaryens and Starks united instead of destroyed by war.
For himself. For the bastard boy of Winterfell, who had never existed at all.
The Marcus voice was silent now. Perhaps even ghosts knew when to let a child grieve.
When the tears finally stopped—not from peace, but from exhaustion—Jon lay on his back and stared at the grey sky. His body ached. His throat was raw. His hands had stopped trembling, but he could feel the war continuing beneath his skin, patient and eternal.
A year. Perhaps two.
He could die here. Lie down in the swamp and let the power consume him. It would be easy. Almost peaceful.
But somewhere in the back of his mind, Ned Stark's voice whispered, "Remember who you are."
Jon closed his eyes. Drew a breath that tasted of ash and ice. And made a choice.
He would not die in a swamp.
He would go to Yi Ti. He would learn to control this power, or he would die trying. And if he survived—when he survived—he would come back. Come back and demand the truth from the man who had raised him. Come back and tell Arya that he had never stopped being her brother. Come back and prove that Jon Snow, whoever he truly was, was worth something.
Slowly, painfully, he climbed to his feet.
The swamp stretched around him, silent and grey. Behind him, a trail of destruction marked his passage—frozen water and scorched reeds, a scar across the Neck that would take years to heal.
Jon turned his back on it and began walking toward the sea.
* * *
The port town had no name that Jon could discover.
It crouched at the edge of the Bite like a collection of barnacles, grey wooden buildings clustered around a single pier that jutted into water the color of tarnished silver. The smell hit Jon first—fish and brine and tar, underlaid with something fouler that spoke of gutted catches left too long in the sun. Fishing boats bobbed at anchor, their hulls stained with salt and their crews stained with suspicion. Every face that turned toward Jon as Meera led him down the muddy street was closed and unwelcoming.
The buildings leaned against each other like drunks, their timbers warped by decades of salt air and winter storms. Nets hung from every available surface, drying in the pale sunlight. Women in rough-spun dresses hauled baskets of shellfish while children chased gulls through the muck. None of them looked at Jon directly, but he could feel their eyes following him—the stranger from the north, the boy with the black cloak and the too-serious face.
They had traveled for three days since leaving Greywater Watch. Jon had not spoken of what Howland told him, and Meera had not asked. Whatever she knew—and she clearly knew something, from the careful way she watched him, from the sympathy that flickered in her moss-green eyes—she kept to herself. For that, at least, Jon was grateful.
The ship waited at the end of the pier. It was larger than Jon expected, with two masts and a hull painted the deep blue of winter twilight. Gold lettering spelled out The Bleeding Edge across the bow, the words almost too beautiful for the rough vessel that bore them. The name seemed appropriate. Jon felt like he was walking a bleeding edge himself—balanced between the opposing forces, between life and death, between the boy he had been and whatever he was becoming.
Captain Terys stood at the gangplank, watching their approach.
He was Braavosi—Jon could tell from the purple sash and the water dancer's sword at his hip. His face was dark and weathered, lined with salt and old scars, and his eyes were the pale grey of northern storms. When he looked at Jon, something flickered in those eyes—recognition, or perhaps calculation.
"This is the cargo Stark promised?" His voice carried an accent Jon did not recognize. "A child?"
"This is him." Meera's voice was flat. "Have you been paid?"
"In full. Gold dragons, not promises." Terys's eyes had not left Jon's face. "Lord Stark said the boy required safe passage to Yi Ti. A long journey for one so young. A dangerous one."
"The danger is not on your end," Meera said. "Keep him fed. Keep him warm. And whatever you do, do not make him angry."
Terys's eyebrows rose. "And why would that concern me?"
Jon looked down at his palms. They were steady now, but he could feel the power coiling beneath his skin, waiting. Always waiting.
"Show him," Meera said quietly. "Just once. So he understands."
Jon hesitated. Then his hand rose, his right hand, palm up, and called the fire.
A flame bloomed above his palm—small, barely larger than a candle's flicker, but burning with a heat that made the air shimmer. Terys's eyes went wide. One of the sailors on the deck behind him made a strangled sound and backed away.
Jon closed his fist, and the flame died.
"Motherless gods." Terys's voice had dropped to a whisper. "What are you?"
"I don't know yet." Jon's voice was steadier than he expected. "I'm going to find out."
For a long moment, Terys simply stared at him. Then, slowly, the captain's face rearranged itself into something that might have been respect.
"Yi Ti, then," he said. "The journey will take four months, perhaps five if the winds are poor. You will have a cabin to yourself. My crew will bring you food, but they will not speak to you, and you will not speak to them." His eyes hardened. "And if you burn my ship, boy, I will throw you into the sea myself, magic or no magic."
Jon nodded. It seemed a fair bargain.
* * *
Meera Reed said goodbye at the gangplank.
"My father wanted me to tell you something." She stood with her feet planted wide, her spear resting against her shoulder, her moss-green eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond Jon's head. "He said that the wheel has many spokes. He said that you are one of them now—perhaps the most important one. He said that the world is about to change, and you will be at the center of that change whether you choose it or not."
"I'm seven years old." The words came out tired. Defeated. "I don't want to be at the center of anything."
Meera's eyes found his at last. Something like sympathy flickered there—or perhaps just understanding.
"None of us do," she said. "But the wheel turns anyway."
She turned and walked away without looking back. Within moments, the grey of the port had swallowed her, and Jon stood alone at the foot of the gangplank, watching the only piece of the North he had left disappear into the mist.
He climbed the gangplank. The wood groaned beneath his feet, and the ship shifted gently as he stepped onto the deck. Sailors parted around him like water around a stone, their eyes averted, their fingers making signs he did not recognize. Warding signs, probably. Protection against evil. Against him.
Jon found his way to the bow and stood there as the anchor rose and the sails unfurled. The canvas snapped taut, catching the wind with a sound like distant thunder. The Bleeding Edge began its slow turn toward the open sea, the hull cutting through the grey water, leaving a wake of white foam that vanished almost as quickly as it formed.
The coast of Westeros stretched behind him—grey cliffs and grey beaches and grey sky, all the colors of the North fading into the distance. He thought of the Kingsroad, winding south through the Barrowlands and the Riverlands and the Crownlands to King's Landing, where Robert Baratheon sat on a throne he had won by killing Jon's father. He thought of the Wall, rising seven hundred feet of ice and magic in the far north, where he had once dreamed of taking the black and finding a place to belong.
Those dreams belonged to someone else now. Jon Snow, the bastard. The boy who had never existed.
Somewhere beyond that grey horizon lay Winterfell. Robb and Arya and Bran and little Rickon, who was barely old enough to remember Jon's face. Ned Stark, who was his uncle now, was carrying secrets Jon was only beginning to understand. Lady Catelyn, who had hated him for a lie she never knew was a lie—who had treated him as a threat to her children when he was only ever their cousin. The godswood, with its heart tree and its black pool and the place among the roots where Jon had first learned he was a monster.
He would come back. He had to believe that. Had to hold onto it like a rope in darkness, the only thing keeping him from falling.
But first, he had to survive.
The wind caught the sails, and the ship leaped forward, and Westeros began to shrink behind him. Jon watched it go—the only home he had ever known, growing smaller and smaller until it was just a line of grey against the grey sky, and then nothing at all.
He turned to face the bow, where the sea stretched endless and unknown before him. The wind was cold on his face, carrying the smell of salt and distance. Somewhere ahead lay the Free Cities, and then the Summer Sea, and then Yi Ti—a place so far away it might as well be a legend.
Jon Snow—if he was still Jon Snow, if he had ever been Jon Snow—set his shoulders against the wind and did not look back.
Behind him, Westeros disappeared into the mist.
Ahead of him, the wheel turned on.