Interlude CMLXI: Snow and Salt
Snow and Salt
Second Day of the Fourth Month 294 AC
Jon woke to silk sheets and the sound of odd music floating through his window, sort of silvery and clinking and quite unlike any sort of melody he had ever heard before. Had there been a new singer in Winterfell yesterday? Then with the flash of the southern sun in his eyes it all came back to him. The assassin, the fight, Robb broken and bloody, like a shattered doll slung over its shoulder. The pyre bright with the Dragon King's sorcery. As he drew the sheets over his head with shaking arms Jon could feel the corners of his eyes burning. Stop it, stop it... stupid tears aren't helping anyone, he chanted inside his head.
Unlike other children Jon Snow was not alone inside his head. A cold wind swirled through the apartments, leaving frost on the pitcher of orange juice on the mantle place. Lyanna Stark embraced her son as best she could in spirit.
"Do you think we can get Robb back?" the boy asked softly, not really caring if a servant passed by the door and thought he was mad. He needed to know that someone, anyone believed it could be done.
There was a long moment's silence as his mother thought, either on the answer or how to speak it. When she did it was almost hesitant. "When I was alive I didn't really believe in the gods nor in heaven as the Southerners spoke of them. If there was any life in death I thought than it would be in grass and wildflowers growing on your grave. I've never been more glad to be proven wrong. Here I am and here you are, awake and aware under the sun. While that's true you can keep trying and maybe some day succeed. I'm no sorceress myself, but that much I know."
Jon smiled a little at the words then at the end he managed a jest, dark though it may be: "While there's life there's hope, you mean?"
Her laugh was like the distant whistling of the wind. "Get out there and show them what you can do. Oh, and don't forget to wash your face."
***
The strangest part of Dragon's Roost wasn't the couriers in fanciful dress and colored like some odd southern birds, it wasn't the blue shelled tinker fey with little silken hats and what he later found were engineer's tools strapped to their belts, it wasn't even the talking hounds that flickered from place to place like cheerful apparitions, though the last part almost took the prize, it was how little it actually resembled a keep. Supposedly it had been built upon the bones of an old pirate fortress, though the builders seemed to have missed the part where keeps didn't have wide stairs you could march six men abreast on or great windows twice a man's height pouring light and chill inside...
Except it wasn't cold, when he got outside he found it the sort of warm golden day cooled by the salt breeze he didn't know could even existed. It was admittedly a little warm for his solid northern woolens... Maybe he should have spoken to the servants or followed that note down to breakfast with Dany and the queen, but with the ring on his finger making the pangs of hunger fade to nothing it just didn't feel worth it. If you weren't hungry what would you eat for after all, the sheer pleasure of it? Jon had a vague notion that's how you turned into Wyman Manderly.
It definitely wasn't that he did not know how to behave or talk around a queen or king, the boy told himself, not doing the best of jobs convincing even himself as he walked under the deep shadows of the keep's godswood. All his life manners and courtesies had been like fences subtly herding him this way and that and now he was expected to learn a whole new set of them when he didn't even talk the trade tongue of the isles, just High Valyrian from his magic.
"Hail to the wandering Snow," a familiar voice called out among the trees in the Common tongue. He turned to see Asha looking about an inch taller and a good bit more cheerful in burnished mail and a sort of scale cloak that must have been made from a lizard-lion. "You won me three marks by the way..."
"I... what?" That was Asha alright, always leaving him three steps behind.
"I bet the little princess you would be moping in the godswood," the girl replied cheerfully. "Now come on, we've got to get you to the armory to be warded and armed and then to lunch to meet your half-sister and Elia."
"Elia Martell, are you mad?" Jon hissed, anger bubbling over far too quickly to have been caused by just her words. "What am I supposed to tell her, 'good day, I'm your husband's bastard, born of a madness that started a war and got you and your children killed?'"
Asha didn't shout back the way Jon thought she would. Instead she just asked. "Do you know what a salt wife is Jon? It's what happens when a reaver brings home a wife not born to the Iron Isles. Now sometimes it's because the woman was crazy enough to take it up with a strange sailor in port and go off with him, but mostly it's because they got stolen away from kith and kin on a raid and they don't have any choice in where they're going or whose bed they're sharing."
"What's that got to do with..."
She kept talking in that too-steady voice right over him. "Do you know what us 'savage' Ironborn do with the children of salt wives? Nothing, we treat them just the same, whether it's a seat at feast or a seat in the longboat or even the bloody succession. Cuts down on the kinslaying you see. Now I don't know Elia Martell well, but I do know she has the sense of a good rock wife not to try to punish you for her husband's stupidity, especially with him being good and dead."
Jon didn't know what to do besides nod and follow along, though he did revise his thought on what the strangest thing he'd seen so far was.
What next?
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OOC: Asha was lying about the bet, she was just worried about Jon, but she is not the sort to say that in so many words if she can avoid it.
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