Chapter 228

The North. The Wall. 301 AC.

Elena Snow.

The strikingly beautiful girl had already been standing motionless a few meters from the edge of the drop for about half an hour. In the North or the South alike, she would have been counted among the loveliest women on the continent: luxurious black hair falling in tight curls over her shoulders, a slender figure that even her heavy layers of clothing couldn’t hide, a neat nose, full lips, well shaped brows. But her eyes ruined it all. They were white, with no visible pupil, like the eyes of the blind.

There was no telling how long she might have gone on standing in that one spot, but at some point the girl doubled over as though struck on the head, and her eyes turned normal. It took only a couple of seconds for her to straighten back up. Her piercing gaze had been fixed toward the far North, but eventually her attention shifted to the other side of the Wall, where thousands of men swarmed about like ants.

Elena had to climb to the top of the Wall every single time she wanted to scout the far North. She didn’t understand the mechanics of it, but if she wanted to see anything from the southern side of the Wall, the strength she could draw on dropped sharply, and the same held true in reverse. So Elena was forced to cross through the middle of the structure. It used to be a simple matter of stepping outside through the Wall, but once preparations for defense began, every gate had been sealed shut. All that remained now was crossing along the top. That same restriction forced her to stay at Castle Black, which did nothing good for her mood.

“And here he wanted to freeze his balls off for the rest of his life… idiot…” It wasn’t easy for a woman, especially a beautiful one, to spend her days surrounded by men who hadn’t laid eyes on anything but their brothers’ ugly mugs for years on end.

Not for the first time, Elena found herself convinced that her insufferable twin brother had, until just a couple of years ago, been a hopelessly repressed idiot obsessed with honor. She loved Jon, truly, but his choices often left her baffled. Take, for instance, his enormous desire to join the Night’s Watch. The shouting and arguing that decision had caused could hardly be counted. The whole family had opposed it, even Uncle Ben had deigned to come all the way to Winterfell to enlighten his niece and nephew on just how foolish the idea was, but none of it made the slightest difference. The only one who had been wholeheartedly in favor, unsurprisingly, was Lady Catelyn. The arguments only grew more heated, but in the end the family reached a compromise. Jon would be allowed to join the Watch after he turned sixteen.

Then the civil war broke out, everything was thrown into upheaval, Elena escaped one captivity only to fall into another, and Jon ended up steering the North, and it seemed as though after a whole lifetime apart, she finally met her twin again in the port of White Harbor. It felt strange looking up at her brother instead of down at him, but what struck her even more was how he carried himself now. That repressed boy was gone, replaced by a confident man, a true leader. Jon had shown some early signs of leadership even before the war, but now he could be summed up in two words: confidence and authority.

Not that this erased a certain streak of foolishness in him entirely. After their tearful reunion, and a whole night of him asking after everything that had happened to her, Jon set himself the task of learning everything he could about the Falcon’s eye. And that was where things grew dangerous. How was she supposed to answer questions like “Does Lord Arryn believe in magic?” or “What are his plans going forward?” Elena was certain Axel hadn’t let her go north out of the kindness of his heart; it was more likely some sort of test, one she had no particular wish to fail. Say too much, and she would lose his trust, perhaps even her life. Say nothing, and she would fail her own family. An impossible bind, but the South had taught her one excellent skill: how to talk. How to speak about everything and nothing at once, all while leading the other person to find the answers themselves. After a full day of questioning, her brother simply sailed off to the Vale for talks, or rather a demonstration, with the Falcon’s eye. And now here she stood, holding the letter with the results of his little venture.

“An expected surprise, this situation.” That Axel wouldn’t be shocked by a dead man walking was predictable enough. He’d said things on the subject before that had kept her from sleeping afterward. But sending only three thousand men… Either his own pride was blinding him to the scale of the problem, or he genuinely believed it wasn’t significant. Studying the letter in her hands, Elena tried to work it through. “I’d very much like to believe the second, but the first seems more likely. Damn Jon, and here I wanted to sail with him too, but no! ‘You’ve only just been let go,’ ‘It isn’t wise,’ ‘Robb needs your talents’! Ugh.” She wanted to keep venting a while longer, but she couldn’t afford to; too much movement quickened the breath, and in this cold, one deep enough breath could plant the seeds of a chill in the lungs.

“I need to tell my brother.”