Jon woke to Marcus screaming in his head.
Not words—a pure chemical dump of adrenaline that tore him from sleep like a hand closing around his throat. His heart slammed against his ribs. His muscles locked. For three terrible seconds he lay paralyzed in his hammock while his body flooded with the ancient terror of prey that has scented a predator.
Up. Now. We're compromised.
The hammock swung as Jon rolled out, his legs buckling when they hit the deck. The cabin was black—no light through the porthole, hours before dawn. His hands shook. His bandaged fingers throbbed with the deep ache of frostbite and burns that had not had time to heal.
"What—"
The Watcher. I've been tracking patterns since you fell asleep. Ships moving that shouldn't be moving. Lanterns going dark in sequence. A pause, weighted with something that might have been fear in a voice that never showed fear. They're closing the net. Someone reported what you did on the rooftops.
Jon's stomach dropped. The man in the alley. The frost on the walls. The fire jumped across the canal. A trail of impossible things through the heart of Braavos, and now—
Footsteps above. Quick, purposeful, and too many for the skeleton crew that should be on night watch.
Move.
Jon grabbed his cloak and opened the cabin door.
* * *
The deck was chaos wrapped in silence.
Sailors moved in the darkness like ghosts, their feet bare against the wood, their voices reduced to hissed commands and urgent gestures. No lanterns burned—not even the running lights that should have marked bow and stern. The only illumination came from the distant glow of the city, orange and sickly, filtered through fog so thick it seemed to have substance. Jon could taste it on his tongue: salt and sulfur and the faint copper tang of fear.
The air itself felt wrong. Heavy. Expectant. Like the moment before a thunderstorm breaks, when the pressure drops and every living thing knows that something terrible is coming. Jon's skin prickled with it. The duality in his blood stirred, responding to the danger it could not yet see.
Captain Terys stood at the helm, his face carved from shadow. When Jon emerged from below, something flickered in his eyes—relief, perhaps, or resignation, or the careful calculation of a man deciding whether his passenger was worth the trouble.
"The boy lives." His voice was barely above a whisper. "Good. We leave. Now."
"What's happening?"
"Your walk through the city has attracted attention." Terys's hands moved over the wheel, checking lines, testing the rudder's response. "The Sealord's men have been asking questions at the docks. Showing parchments. Descriptions of a pale boy with eyes like ice and hands that burn."
Jon's throat tightened. "I didn't mean to—"
"Intentions are worth nothing in Braavos." Terys jerked his chin toward the bow, where sailors were casting off mooring lines with desperate efficiency. "What matters is what you did. And what you did was paint a target on my ship."
"Can we outrun them?"
Terys's laugh was soft and bitter. "Outrun the Sealord's fleet in his own harbor? No." He leaned close, his breath warm against Jon's ear. "But we can hide. The fog is our friend tonight. If we move quietly, if we slip through the channels before the tide turns—"
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
The ship began to move.
* * *
Braavos swallowed them whole.
The Bleeding Edge glided through the canals like a whisper, her oars muffled with rags, her crew moving in practiced silence. The fog pressed in from all sides—not the gentle mist of a northern morning but something thicker, wetter, alive with the smell of the sea and the taste of secrets. It clung to Jon's skin like a cold hand, beaded on the rail in droplets that looked like tears.
Sounds came muffled and strange: the lap of water against stone, the distant cry of a night bird, and the creak of ropes that might have been their own or might have been another ship hunting through the dark. Once, a voice drifted across the water—singing, Jon thought, though the words were in no language he knew—and the crew froze at their oars until it faded into silence.
The buildings rose on either side like walls, their foundations slick with algae, their windows dark as dead eyes. Some leaned so far over the canal that their upper stories nearly touched, creating tunnels of shadow that swallowed the ship whole. In one of those tunnels, Jon saw something move—a pale shape that might have been a face, watching from an upper window, there and gone before he could be certain.
Near the mainmast, Jon crouched and made himself small. His hands had started trembling again—not from cold, though the fog was cold enough to seep through his cloak and settle in his bones. The duality in his blood was stirring, roused by fear, by the proximity of danger. Ice crackled at the edges of his awareness, eager and hungry.
Suppress it. Marcus's voice was sharp. You're leaking. Every spark of magic is a beacon. Build the wall.
Jon closed his eyes. In the darkness behind them, he found the visualization he had practiced in the swamps of the Neck—blocks of ice, stacking one atop another, forming a barrier between the power and the world. One block. Two. Three. The wall rose, fragile but present, dampening the cold that wanted to spread.
When he opened his eyes, the frost that had begun to form on the deck planks had stopped.
Better. Keep it tight.
The ship rounded a corner, and the canal opened into a broader channel. Here the fog thinned slightly, and the shapes of buildings rose on either side—warehouses and counting houses, their windows dark, their doors barred against the night. Bridges arched overhead, their undersides dripping, their shadows deep enough to hide anything.
"The Long Canal," Terys breathed from the helm. "Half a league to the Arsenal. Then the Titan's channel. Then the sea."
Half a league. It sounded like nothing. It felt like forever.
The war galley emerged from the fog like a nightmare taking shape.
One moment there was nothing but grey mist and black water. Next, a wall of purple-painted wood loomed across the channel, its hull high and proud, its deck bristling with the shapes of armed men. Torches burned at bow and stern, their flames reflecting off the water like orange eyes. Black sails hung furled from twin masts, and at the prow, a figurehead carved in the shape of a snarling seahorse caught the firelight and seemed to move—seemed to turn its wooden head toward the small ship creeping through the dark.
Jon's heart stopped.
The galley was enormous—three times the size of The Bleeding Edge, sitting across the channel like a gate slammed shut. Jon saw the oar ports—thirty to a side, each one capable of driving a blade of wood through the water with crushing force. The marines on deck wore the blue and grey of the Sealord's guard, their armor gleaming dully, their hands resting on sword hilts.
Sealord's fleet. Thirty oars. Twenty marines. They're not moving—they're blocking.
"All stop." Terys's voice was barely audible, but the crew responded at once without hesitation. Oars lifted from the water. The ship's momentum bled away, leaving her drifting in the current, fifty yards from the blockade.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The war galley sat across the channel like a locked gate, its deck lights casting yellow pools on the dark water. Figures moved aboard her—shadows against shadows, turning to peer into the fog. Looking for something. Looking for him.
They haven't seen us yet. The fog is too thick. But if we move forward, their lookouts will spot us. If we turn back, we'll hit the patrol boat that's been following since the third bridge.
"Patrol boat?" Jon's whisper was almost soundless.
Behind us. Two hundred yards. I've been tracking them by oar splash. They're herding us toward the blockade.
Trapped. The word settled into Jon's gut like a stone. Trapped in the canals of a foreign city, hunted by forces he didn't understand, his only weapons were a power that would kill him if he used it and a ghost-soldier's voice that couldn't save him from a sword.
Terys appeared at his shoulder, his face grim. "The boy must hide. Below decks—"
No. Marcus cut through the suggestion like a blade. Below decks is a trap. If they search the ship, he's cornered. No exits, no options. He goes up.
"Up?" Jon breathed.
The rigging. The furled mainsail. Hide in the canvas and mask your thermal signature with ice. If they board, they'll search the holds first. By the time they check aloft, we need to be moving.
It was insane. It was the only option.
Jon grabbed the ratlines and climbed.
The ropes were slick with fog-damp, the knots swollen and hard beneath his fingers. His arms burned as he pulled himself up, hand over hand, his feet finding purchase on the tarred hemp. Below, the deck shrank away—ten feet, twenty, thirty. The mast swayed with the ship's motion, a gentle pendulum swing that felt like an earthquake at this height. Wind cut through his clothes. The cold bit at his exposed skin.
And still he climbed, higher and higher, until the furled mainsail loomed above him like a cocoon of canvas.
* * *
The mast swayed beneath him like a living thing.
Thirty feet above the deck, wrapped in the furled canvas of the mainsail, Jon pressed his body against the wood and tried to disappear. The fog was thinner here—the war galley's deck was visible now, its marines moving with the bored efficiency of men who had done this a hundred times before.
A skiff had detached from the galley's side. Four men rowed it toward The Bleeding Edge, their oars cutting the water in perfect unison. In the prow stood a figure in the blue and grey of the Sealord's service, a parchment clutched in his hand.
Customs inspection. Or that's what they'll call it. That parchment is your description.
"What do I do?"
Nothing. Stillness. Don't move. Let the ice spread—slowly, not fast. Cool your body until your thermal signature matches the canvas. Become part of the ship.
Jon closed his eyes and reached for the cold.
It came eagerly—too eagerly. The ice wanted to surge, to spread, to freeze everything it touched. He had to fight it, channeling it inward instead of outward, letting it seep through his veins until his skin went pale and his breath stopped misting in the air. The frost crept across his fingers, up his wrists, spreading like white fire through his arms and chest. His heart slowed. His thoughts went sluggish. The world dimmed at the edges as his body temperature dropped toward something that should not have been survivable.
But he kept it contained. Invisible. A boy made of ice, wrapped in canvas, waiting for death to pass him by.
Below, the skiff bumped against The Bleeding Edge's hull.
"Braavosi inspection." The voice drifted up through the fog—accented, bored, official. "By order of the Sealord. All foreign vessels are subject to search."
"Of course, of course." Terys's voice was smooth and oily, the practiced charm of a man who had bribed his way through a hundred ports. "My ship is at your disposal, honored officers. Though I must say, the hour is unusual for such diligence."
"Unusual times require unusual measures." Boots on wood—the inspector climbing aboard. "We are looking for a boy. Northern. Pale. Perhaps traveling alone, perhaps not."
"A boy?" Terys's laugh was utterly pitched—surprised, amused, slightly offended. "I transport silk and spices, honored one, not children. What would I want with a northern boy?"
"What indeed." The inspector's voice had gone flat. "My men will search your holds nonetheless."
"Naturally, naturally. Joro, show the officers below. And bring them some of that Tyroshi pear brandy—the good stock, not the swill we sell in port."
More boots. More movement. Jon pressed himself deeper into the canvas, his body cold as the mast itself, his heartbeat slowed to a crawl.
Box breathing. Four counts in. Four counts hold. Four counts out. Lower your metabolic rate. Become nothing.
Minutes passed. Or hours. Jon could not tell. The cold had seeped so deep that time itself seemed to freeze, each moment stretching into an eternity of waiting. Voices drifted up from below—the thump of crates being moved, the creak of doors being opened, and the muffled curses of men searching through cargo that had nothing to hide.
Somewhere in that frozen eternity, Jon lost himself. His thoughts scattered like leaves in a wind—fragments of Winterfell, of Robb's laughter, of Arya's sharp little face. The ice had taken them too, numbed them, and turned them into memories that belonged to someone else. He was the ship. He was the canvas. He was nothing but cold and waiting and the slow, terrible patience of prey that cannot run.
And then, clear as a bell in the still air:
"Check the rigging."
Through slitted eyes, Jon watched a figure climbing the ratlines below him—a young sailor in Sealord's colors, his face bored, his movements perfunctory. The inspection was thorough but not enthusiastic. He was doing his job, nothing more.
The sailor climbed to the first yard. Looked around. Shrugged.
His eyes passed over Jon's hiding place without stopping.
The ice worked. Your body temperature matches the canvas. To his eyes, you're not there.
The sailor climbed back down. A few minutes later, the skiff pushed off from the Bleeding Edge's hull, and the war galley's oars began to move.
The blockade was opening.
* * *
The Titan waited for them.
It emerged from the fog like the world's oldest nightmare—bronze and colossal, straddling the channel with legs like towers and arms like siege engines. The morning had come without Jon noticing, grey light seeping through the fog, and in that light the Titan burned. Its bronze skin caught the dawn and threw it back as fire—red and gold and orange, a blaze of color against the grey world.
Jon had come down from the rigging. He stood at the bow now, his body still cold, his hands still numb, watching the colossus grow larger with every stroke of the oars. His blood was stirring again—a vibration in his bones, an answering hum to something in the bronze giant ahead.
The horn. When it sounds, your blood will react. Last time nearly broke you. This time could be worse.
"What do I do?"
Build the wall higher. Seal everything. When the horn sounds, do not fight the resonance. Let it wash through you without touching the power. Like water through a net.
Jon closed his eyes. In the darkness, he found the ice wall and began to build.
Block by block. Layer by layer. He visualized the Wall itself—the real Wall, seven hundred feet of ice and magic, standing for eight thousand years against the darkness. He had never seen it, but the stories were carved into every northern child's bones. The Wall that held back the night. The Wall that protected the realms of men. He built its image in his mind, vast and ancient and unbreakable, rising from the foundations of his will toward a sky that existed only in imagination.
He poured everything he had into it—every scrap of control, every lesson learned in the swamps and on the rooftops, every desperate moment of survival. The fear became mortar. The pain became stone. The loneliness became a fortress.
The wall rose. Solid. Complete.
The ship passed between the Titan's legs.
And the horn sounded.
It was worse than before.
The first blast had been a shock—unexpected, overwhelming. This time, Jon knew what was coming, and the knowing made it worse. The sound hit him like a physical blow, a wall of bronze and magic that vibrated through his skull and down his spine and into the deepest chambers of his heart. His blood answered—the fire screaming to rise, the ice howling to spread, both of them straining against the wall he had built.
The wall cracked.
HOLD.
Jon's hands clenched on the rail. Frost spread from his fingers, racing across the wood. Steam hissed from his shoulders where the fire tried to vent. His vision went white at the edges, with black spots dancing, his lungs forgetting how to exist.
The wall cracked further. A fissure opened, and through it came the fire—not much, just a trickle, but enough. Heat blazed up his right arm. The rail began to smoke beneath his grip.
HOLD. THREE MORE SECONDS.
The sound peaked. Jon's skull felt like it was splitting. His teeth were grinding, his jaw locked so tight the muscles screamed. The opposing powers were tearing at each other, at him, using his body as their battlefield. Blood trickled from his nose—he tasted copper and felt the warmth running down his lip. His fingernails had cut crescents into his palms. Every nerve was on fire, every bone vibrating with a frequency that wanted to shake him apart—
And then it was over.
The horn's echo faded into the fog. The Titan's shadow passed over the ship, cold and absolute. Jon sagged against the rail, gasping, his whole body shaking with the aftermath. His left hand had gone blue to the wrist. His right palm had burned through the bandages, leaving raw skin pressed against smoking wood.
But the wall had held. Barely. By a thread.
You survived. The resonance passed through. No major discharge.
"Did they see?"
Unknown. But we're through the channel. We're in open water.
The fog was thinning ahead of them, grey giving way to the pale blue of the Shivering Sea. The coast of Essos stretched to the south, a dark line against the horizon. Behind them, the Titan stood like a bronze guardian, watching them go.
They had made it.
* * *
The black ship appeared at noon.
Jon saw it first—a shape resolving out of the southern haze, its sails dark against the pale sky. It was not following the coast like a normal vessel. It was cutting directly toward them, driven by oars that moved with mechanical precision, each stroke utterly synchronized, each dip of the blades raising no splash. A ghost ship. A hunter's ship. A ship built for one purpose only.
Storm-cutter. Fast pursuit vessel. Iron Bank enforcers or something worse. It's been waiting for us.
Captain Terys's curse was eloquent and multilingual—Braavosi and High Valyrian and something guttural that might have been the Summer Isles.
"More sail! All hands to the sheets!"
The crew scrambled. Canvas unfurled with a crack like thunder, catching the wind and driving The Bleeding Edge forward. But even as the ship leaped ahead, it wasn't enough. The black ship was faster, its hull built for speed, its oars adding power that sails alone could not match.
"We can't outrun them." Jon's voice was flat.
"No." Terys's face had gone grey. "We cannot."
You can slow them.
Jon turned away from the captain, walked to the stern, and looked back at the pursuing ship. It was closer now—figures on its deck, dark shapes that moved with terrible purpose. No flag flew from its mast. No colors marked its hull. Anonymous, implacable death wearing the shape of a ship.
The sea is water. Water freezes. You know this.
"If I use that much power—"
You might die. If they catch you, you definitely die. Choose.
Jon looked at his hands. The left was still blue, still numb, still hungry for cold. The light had stopped smoking, but the power was there, coiled and waiting. The duality in his blood had not ended—it had only paused, gathering strength for the next battle.
He chose.
The ice came like a living thing.
Jon did not throw it. He did not blast it or shape it or command it. He simply opened the door that had been holding it back and let it pour out of him—all the cold he had been suppressing since the Titan, all the frost he had used to hide in the rigging, and all the ice that had been building in his blood since he left Winterfell. It came like a river bursting a dam, like a scream finally released, like death exhaling across the water.
It hit the water in their wake and spread.
Not a sheet of ice—the sea was too vast, too salt-laden for that. But a field of slush, sudden and brutal, blooming across the surface like frost on a windowpane. The temperature of the water dropped by degrees in the space of heartbeats. Ice crystals formed, clustering together, thickening into floes that groaned and cracked as they grew. The sea itself seemed to gasp, fog exploding upward as warm air met the sudden cold, a wall of white rising between The Bleeding Edge and its pursuer.
Jon watched it happen. Watched the white spreading outward from him like ripples from a stone, watched the world transform at his command. Something inside him exulted—a voice that was not Marcus, that was older and colder and vast beyond measure. "Yes," that voice whispered. More. Give us more.
The black ship hit the viscosity change at full speed.
A grinding, groaning crash—the hull meeting resistance it wasn't designed for. Oars shattered against sudden ice. The ship's momentum died in an instant, throwing figures across the deck, sending one man over the rail into the freezing slush.
Enough. STOP.
Jon tried. The cold did not want to stop. It wanted to spread forever, to freeze the whole sea, to turn the world white and silent and still. It pulled at him, demanding more, and he could feel himself going with it—his consciousness spreading outward with the ice, leaving his body behind—
JON. STOP. NOW.
The wall came down. Not the ice wall in his mind, but a different barrier—Marcus, somehow, cutting the flow of power with brutal efficiency. The cold snapped back into Jon's body like a whip, and he collapsed against the stern rail, his whole body shaking with hypothermic tremors. His teeth chattered. His vision blurred. Every muscle had locked into rigid spasms, his body trying desperately to generate heat that wasn't there.
"The boy!" Someone was shouting. Footsteps on the deck. Hands grabbing his shoulders, pulling him away from the rail. "The boy is frozen—get blankets, get the brazier, get—"
Voices blurred together. The world tilted, spun, and dissolved into fragments. The fog rising behind them, thick and white, hiding the crippled black ship. The coast of Essos sliding past, distant and indifferent. Captain Terys's face, white with shock, staring at the ice field that should not exist—at the frozen sea that stretched for half a league in their wake, glittering in the noon sun like a field of shattered diamonds.
Then everything went grey, and he fell into the cold.
* * *
He woke to warmth and pain.
The cabin was small—his cabin, he realized slowly, the same hammock, the same water-stained ceiling with its patterns like ancient maps. But someone had transformed it into a cocoon of heat. Furs were piled over him, heavy and rough—wolf pelts, northern work, though where they had come from he could not imagine. A brazier burned in the corner, filling the space with the smell of charcoal and something herbal—willow bark, maybe, the scent his father's maester had used for fevers.
His father. The thought was a knife, twisting. Not his father. His uncle. The man who had lied to him every day of his life.
Meera Reed sat beside him, her moss-green eyes watching his face with the patient intensity of a hunter watching prey. She had changed since the Neck—or maybe Jon was only now seeing her clearly. The softness of childhood was leaving her features, replaced by something sharper, harder. The crannogwoman who would guide him across the world.
"You're alive." Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if she were reporting the weather. "I wasn't certain you would be."
Jon tried to speak. His throat felt like he had swallowed broken glass. What came out was a croak.
"Don't talk." Meera pressed a cup to his lips—water, warm, tasting faintly of honey. "Drink. Slowly."
He drank. The warmth spread through his chest, fighting against the cold that had settled into his bones. His hands were wrapped in cloth—he felt them now, distantly, the fingers aching with the deep pain of thawing flesh.
"How long?"
"Six hours. You've been shaking the whole time." Meera set the cup aside and pulled the furs tighter around him. "The captain wanted to throw you overboard. You said you were cursed. Said you'd bring doom on his ship."
"Did I?"
"You saved his ship." Something like a smile crossed her face. "That tends to change minds. Though he still won't look at you directly."
Welcome back. Marcus's voice was distant and exhausted. You almost burned out. The cold took more than you had. Another thirty seconds and your heart would have stopped.
Jon closed his eyes. Behind them, the ice was spreading across the water. The black ship is grinding to a halt. The figures were tumbling as the world froze around them.
"Did I kill them?"
"Unknown." Meera's voice was careful. "The fog hid everything. We couldn't see what happened after you collapsed." She paused. "But the ship stopped following. That's what matters."
Was it? Jon wasn't sure anymore. He had used his power deliberately for the first time—not in panic, not by accident, but as a weapon. He had reached into the sea and changed it, bent it to his will, and made it do terrible things. And for one moment, stretched out across the water like a god of winter, he had wanted to keep going. To freeze everything. To turn the whole sea white and silent and still.
The memory of that wanting frightened him more than the black ship had.
And it had felt good.
That's the danger. Marcus's voice was quiet. The power wants to be used. It rewards you for using it. That's how it gets control.
"Where are we?"
"Open water. The captain has changed course—we're cutting across the Narrow Sea instead of following the coast. He says the Iron Bank has eyes in every port, and after what you did—"
She didn't finish. She didn't need to.
Jon pulled himself upright, ignoring the way his muscles screamed and his head swam. Through the porthole, the sea—dark blue now, not grey—stretching to a horizon empty of land or ships. Behind them, Braavos had vanished into the northern mist, taking its secrets and its watchers with it.
"What's ahead?"
"The Stepstones. Then the Summer Sea. Then—" Meera shrugged. "The captain doesn't know. He's been paid to take you east, and that's what he'll do. But he's afraid now. They all are."
They should be. Marcus's voice carried no emotion. You just demonstrated that you can alter the physical properties of seawater over a significant area. That's not a parlor trick. That's a weapon.
"I almost died."
Yes. Which means you need training more than ever. The power is growing. If you don't learn to control it—
"I know." Jon's voice was hoarse but steady. "I know what happens."
He looked out at the endless sea, at the horizon that held nothing but distance and danger and the faint promise of a land where people understood the duality in his blood. Yi Ti. Months away. Maybe years. And between here and there, a thousand ways to die—storms and pirates and the slow poison of his own power eating him from within.
Behind him, Braavos had vanished into memory. Ahead, the unknown stretched like an ocean of its own. He was seven years old, alone except for a crannogwoman and a ghost, sailing toward a place he had never seen to learn secrets that might not exist. Every use of his power brought him closer to the edge. Every day the power grew stronger, harder to contain, and more eager to break free.
But he was still alive. Still moving. Still fighting.
And somewhere, in the depths of his blood where the cold lived, something stirred. Not Marcus this time. Something older. Something patient. Something that had been waiting a very long time for a vessel strong enough to carry it.
The wheel turned. And Jon Snow turned with it.