Forty-One Letters

The ravens stopped coming from Castle Black in the second month of the thaw, and by the third, the Queen in the North had saddled her own horse. Her council told her a queen did not ride to the Wall over a few missing letters. Sansa told them she had not asked. She took twenty men, with Jorelle Mormont at their head, a cousin of the Bear Island Mormonts who had never in her life stopped talking, and a cart of salt pork and barley, because no one rode to the Wall empty-handed. The Kingsroad was a river of mud. Twice they dug the cart out with their hands. At Mole's Town a woman sold them hot cider and asked if the red-haired lady was a Karstark, and Sansa said yes, because it was easier than the truth. Castle Black looked the way she remembered it from Jon's descriptions and nothing like it at all. He had written about the cold and the quiet and the way the Wall wept in summer. He had never written that the yard would be full of children. Free Folk children, wild-haired and loud, chasing a goat between the woodpiles while an old man in black shouted at them to mind the well. "The Lord Commander's not here," the old man told her when she dismounted. Then he looked at her properly, at the grey cloak and the direwolf pinned at her throat, and swallowed. "Your Grace. There's no Lord Commander. I mean, Jon's not Lord Commander. He's not about. He's in the tower." "Which tower?" "The one with the maester's things in it." The man scratched his beard. "He took a fall on the ice beyond the Wall. Leg went bad. Tormund carried him back on a sled. We thought he'd lose it, but the leg's still on him. Mostly sleeping, these days." Sansa handed him her reins without a word. The stair was narrow and smelled of tallow and old herbs. At the top, a door stood half open, and through it she saw Ghost first: a white heap on the rushes beside the bed, his red eyes lifting to her without surprise, as if he had been expecting her for weeks. His tail thumped once against the floor. Jon was asleep. His beard had grown out and there was more grey in it than there should have been at his age. One leg lay outside the furs, bound in linen from knee to ankle, and the room had the sweetish smell of a wound that had turned and then, by some mercy, turned back. She sat on the stool beside the bed. She did not touch him. She looked at the table, where a half-written letter lay under a cup to keep it flat, and she read the first line because it had her name on it. Sansa, I'm sorry this one is late. Tormund says I've been raving about lemon cakes. The rest was blank. She was still holding it when he woke. He did not speak right away. He looked at her the way a man looks at snow falling indoors, careful not to move in case it stopped. Then his mouth moved. "You shouldn't be here." "You shouldn't have nearly died," Sansa said, "and yet." "It was a fall." He tried to sit up and made a sound through his teeth, and she put a hand flat on his chest and pushed him back down without thinking about it. Under her palm, his heart was going fast. "It was a stupid fall. I went through the ice on a stream I've crossed a hundred times." "Your letters stopped." "I know." "Nine weeks, Jon." She took her hand away. "Do you know what I thought? I thought the Free Folk had turned on you. I thought there'd been some new thing in the dark beyond the Wall and no one left alive to send word. I thought," and here her voice did something she had not given it leave to do, so she stopped and started again, lower. "I thought I would hear about it from a stranger. A trader at the gate. Some man in a tavern in White Harbor, telling it like a song." Ghost got up and put his chin on the edge of the bed, between them. "I'm sorry," Jon said. "I know you are. You're always sorry. You're very good at it." That made him smile, a little, the way it always had when she was sharp with him. She had learned years ago that he did not mind sharpness. It was kindness he didn't know what to do with. She folded the half-written letter and put it in her sleeve. "I'm keeping this one. It's mine anyway." "You keep them?" "Every one." She said it plainly, so he would not think it was a confession. "In a cedar box in my solar. Forty-one letters. Maester Wolkan thinks they're trade reports from the Gift." Jon was quiet for so long she thought he had drifted off again. The light through the narrow window had gone the color of weak ale. Somewhere below, the children were singing a Free Folk song she didn't know, something with a lot of shouting in the chorus. "I write them at night," he said finally. "When it's too quiet. I tell you about the wildlings and the weather because I can't think what else a man's allowed to say to a queen." "You're not writing to a queen." "I'm writing to Sansa Stark, who rules the North and has lords twice her age kneeling to her in the snow. Sam writes me about books. You write me about grain tithes." He looked at the ceiling. "I read the grain tithes four or five times. Did you know that?" She hadn't. She had wondered if he read them at all. She had written them dry on purpose, because the other letters she wrote, the ones she burned in the brazier before dawn, had not been dry in the least. "Bran could pardon you," she said. "I've asked him. Three times." "And?" "And he says things like, The Wall is where you are needed, as though that's an answer." She heard the bitterness in her own voice and didn't soften it. "He's not wrong, I suppose. The Free Folk trust you. Half of them would go back to raiding if you went south. I know all the reasons. I wrote half of them myself, in the terms of the peace." "Then you know." "I know. I still asked." Jon turned his head on the pillow and looked at her, and for a moment neither of them pretended anything. It was the look from the night before the battle with Ramsay, in his tent, when she had told him no one could protect anyone. The look from the great hall at Winterfell, when the lords had shouted his name and he had turned, not to them, but to see whether she was angry. She had been. She had also been something else, and had spent a long time afterwards not naming it. "Stay a few days," he said. "Before you ride back. The cooks will be frightened half to death, but they'll manage." "I brought my own cooks." "Of course you did." "And barley. And salt pork. And Jorelle Mormont, who will want to tell you about every inn between here and Winterfell." "Gods help me." She stood, because if she did not stand she would do something unwise, and she went to her saddlebag by the door. What she took out had been in her lap every evening of the winter, through council arguments and petitions and the long silence after his letters stopped. A cloak of dark grey wool, heavier than anything the Watch issued, lined with the fur of a white bear Tormund's people had traded south at Mole's Town. On the shoulder, worked in silver thread, a direwolf. Not running, not snarling. Lying down, the way Ghost lay, with its head up and watching. She laid it over the furs. Jon touched the wolf with two fingers. "You made this." "I make all your clothes, apparently. It's become a habit I can't seem to break." She tucked the edge of it over his bad leg. "The black is fine for the Watch. But you're not only the Watch. You should have something that says so." "Sansa." She waited. He didn't finish. He took her hand instead, the one that was tucking the cloak, and held it against the silver wolf, and she let him. His fingers were rough and warm with fever that was nearly gone. "Every thaw," she said, when she could. "I'll come every thaw. The council can hang." "You'll ruin the roads." "Then they'll have to mend the roads. It'll be good for trade." He laughed, which hurt him, and she sat back down on the stool and did not let go of his hand. Ghost settled again, his great white body against her boots, warm as a hearth. Down in the yard the children had finished their song and started it over, louder, and the light in the window went from ale to amber to blue. In the morning she would see to the barley and argue with the old man about the well and send Jorelle to look at the stables. In the morning she would be a queen again. For now she sat in the tallow smell and the dark, and listened to Jon breathe, slow and even, the way he had not breathed in nine weeks of silence, and every so often his thumb moved across her knuckles as though he were checking she was still there. She was.