Melodramatic Witch

The first thing you ever learned of Theon Greyjoy was laughter.

Not his name. Not the Iron Islands, not his father’s rebellion, not the price your lord father had paid in blood and patience to keep a hostage prince beneath his roof like some finely dressed reminder that peace in the Seven Kingdoms was a patched thing, stitched shut over rot. Before you understood any of that, before Maester Luwin thought you old enough to know why Lord Eddard sometimes looked at the ward from Pyke with a gaze as flat and cold as winter water, you knew only the sound of a boy laughing in Winterfell’s yard as if the world had been made for his amusement. He was lean where Robb was sturdy, dark where your brothers ran red or auburn, quick with his tongue and quicker with his grin, and there was in him, even as a child, something untamed that did not wholly belong to the stone and snow of the north. You had stood with your hands tucked into the sleeves of your gown, no older than seven, your twin brother beside you with his cheeks red from the cold, and watched Theon loose an arrow straight into the straw throat of the target while Ser Rodrik barked approval at Robb for nearly doing the same. Theon had turned then, bright-eyed and proud, searching for someone to admire him. His gaze had found yours. It lingered. Then he bowed low with all the mockery and flourish of some southron fool from a song.

“Did you see that, my lady? I meant to split the world in two, but the target leapt in the way.”

You had laughed, because you were a child and he had made you laugh, and from that day on the thing between you had begun in the simplest manner possible, as so many tragic things do, with two foolish young hearts mistaking ease for safety.

Winterfell raised him, though never truly as one of its own. That was plain enough even when you were young. He sat at your father’s table, trained in your yard, hunted your forests, drank your ale, wore wool against your winds, yet there remained always that inch of distance no one named aloud. Robb called him brother near as often as he called Jon the same. Bran adored him in the thoughtless way small boys adore anyone older, handsome, and willing to teach them wicked little tricks. Rickon ran after him when he was half-feral with puppy energy and runny nose. Even Sansa, who pretended to dislike him, would go pink when he smiled at her, though she said his manners were dreadful and his jokes improper. Arya liked him better for those very reasons. Jon saw him truest, perhaps, and trusted him least. You saw all of it. You saw the swagger he wore like armor. You saw the slights that were not meant as slights but bit all the same. You saw how the servants obeyed him readily enough but never forgot what he was. You saw how your father was just, never cruel, but never warm. Theon would grin, jest, boast, charm the kennel girls and tease the kitchen maids and come to supper bright as summer lightning, but sometimes, when the hall had emptied and the rushes smelled of wine and smoke, you would find him looking into the fire with such stillness that he scarcely seemed to breathe. Those were the hours when the ward vanished and the hostage remained.

You were perhaps twelve when he first kissed you, though kissed was too fine a word for it and gives the thing more skill than it deserves. It happened in the godswood, where all dangerous softness in Winterfell seemed to gather beneath the red leaves and dark boughs. There had been an early thaw that afternoon, enough to turn the paths to damp earth and release the smell of pine and cold stone, and you had gone there to escape Septa Mordane, who said you read too much history and not enough prayer. Theon found you with a half-plucked twig in his hand, the bark peeled away by his nails, and dropped down beside you on the roots beneath the heart tree as if he had every right.

“Hiding?” he asked.

“Always,” you said. “From the septa, from Sansa’s songs, from Robb’s boasting, from Arya’s bruises, from Bran’s climbing, from Mother’s plans. Sometimes from you.”

“Cruel,” he said, pressing a hand to his heart. “And here I thought I was your favorite burden.”

“You are everyone’s burden.”

“Then I shall be a splendid one.”

He leaned in with that easy arrogance boys have before life begins knocking teeth from their mouths, and because you had already grown used to his nearness you did not move quickly enough. His mouth brushed yours, clumsy, warm, tasting faintly of apple and stolen ale. You stared at him. He stared back for one shocked heartbeat, as though he had surprised himself. Then he smiled, slow and dangerous and delighted.

“There,” he said softly. “Now I have done it.”

“Done what?” you whispered, though you knew.

“Ruined myself,” he replied. “I shall never be satisfied with anyone else.”

That was the first time you struck him and the first time he caught your wrist instead of letting you. Neither of you spoke for a little while after. The heart tree watched in red silence while your pulse beat against his fingers. Then he lowered your hand and said, not mocking now, not smiling, “I mean it.”

He was young enough then that he still believed meaning a thing was the same as being able to keep it.

There were years of half-spoken promises after that, though none either of you would have admitted were promises at all. Theon grew into beauty with the vanity of a boy too aware of it, and if half the maids in Winterfell sighed over him, he gave them reason enough. He flirted where he breathed, and bragged because it was easier than confessing fear, and moved through life with the reckless charm of one determined to seize what pleasure he could before the world remembered to be cruel. You resented him for that at times. You adored him for it too. He would come to you after hunting, cheeks stung by cold, hair windblown, and drop a rabbit or two at your feet as though he were some hero from the old tales returning with spoils for his lady. He would steal you from embroidery to walk the battlements with him under a bruised sky while snow gathered white upon the crenellations. He would tell you ridiculous stories of Pyke, some surely true and others invented wholesale to hear you laugh, of waves high as towers and priests drowned and reborn and cousins as mean as dogs. When he spoke of the sea his whole face altered, lit from some inward place Winterfell could never reach. Yet when you asked whether he wished to go back, his gaze would slide away.

“To what?” he said once. “A father who remembers I exist when it serves him? A sister who is a stranger? A place that took my name and left me mine only because your father found it useful?”

You had said, “It is still your home.”

His laugh then had been harsh enough to draw blood.

“Is it? And what is this?”

He had spread his arms wide to take in the walls, the towers, the white world beyond.

“A cage with warm fires? A debt repaid in mutton and courtesy? Perhaps. Still, I have been caged so long I dream in northern snow.”

You should have known even then that love built upon hunger and wounded pride was a poor foundation. But you were young, and youth is stupid in the same grand way kings are stupid, with absolute certainty and no comprehension of cost. You let him kiss you more than once after that first foolish theft. In shadowed stairwells and empty galleries, in the stable loft with hay dust thick in the air, in the godswood with the old gods looking on, on the wall-walk at dusk with the wind off the wolfswood biting at your ears. He would touch your face as if it were something he had no right to and meant to take anyway. He would say things half in jest and wholly earnest beneath it.

“When I am lord of Pyke, I will build you a tower over the sea.”

“I do not want a tower over the sea.”

“Then a ship.”

“I do not want a ship.”

“Then I shall conquer the north and keep Winterfell for you.”

“That seems difficult.”

“Nothing worth doing is easy.”

Sometimes you thought him vain, shallow, too eager to be seen. Sometimes you looked at him and saw only the lonely boy beneath the bright feathers, and your heart turned traitor against all sense. He loved you. You did not doubt that. The harder truth was that he loved himself in your eyes as well. With you he could pretend he was not a hostage, not a tolerated outsider, not Balon Greyjoy’s discarded son kept alive by Stark mercy. With you he could be chosen. You were too young to understand that being made into a refuge by a desperate heart could feel very like devotion and rot into bitterness all the same.

When King Robert came north with all his noise and silk and appetites, when the court poured into Winterfell like a gaudy disease, when your father’s face went grave and your mother began to count futures like a woman counting knives, the old life ended so quietly at first that none of you marked the sound. A betrothal here, a royal command there, talk in every hall of south and court and offices and honors. Your father would ride south to serve as Hand. Sansa was all aflutter at the thought of queens and princes. Arya glowered and went for her sword. Bran climbed where he ought not. Theon laughed at it all and said kings were only men with fatter arses, yet you caught him watching the preparations with an expression you could not name. On the last night before your father left, you met Theon in the godswood by habit more than plan, because endings draw the heart to places where beginnings once took root. The leaves whispered above you. The pool beneath the weirwood was black glass. He stood with one hand on the pale trunk, head bowed. When he heard you, he turned. There was moonlight on his face, silvering the line of his cheek, catching in his eyes.

“So this is how it breaks,” he said.

“Nothing has broken.”

“Your father rides south into a pit of snakes, and Robb will be lord here in all but name, and the children will scatter, and you speak of nothing broken. Stark courage truly is a marvel.”

“Do not mock me tonight.”

“I am not mocking.”

For once he was not. He came closer, and the playfulness he so often wrapped around himself was absent.

“Come with me,” he said suddenly.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. South, east, to White Harbor and onto a ship, I care not. Let Robb keep Winterfell and your mother her plans. Let your father keep his duty. Come with me and I will make something of myself large enough to deserve you.”

You stared at him, struck still by the audacity of it, by the impossible brightness in his gaze.

“You are asking me to abandon my family.”

“I am asking you to choose me.”

“That is the same thing.”

His jaw tightened.

“Only because they have made it so.”

“No,” you said quietly. “Because it is so.”

He went very still then, the way animals do when the arrow has struck but pain has not yet reached them.

“And if I wait?” he asked. “If I become the man they cannot deny? If I come to ask in honor?”

Your throat hurt.

“Then ask.”

He searched your face as if he hoped to find some loophole, some softer answer hidden behind the one you had given. At last he nodded.

“Very well, my lady. I shall ask.”

He kissed you then with such fierce desperation it felt like grief had taken bodily form. When he drew away, he rested his brow against yours and whispered, “Do not marry before I return.”

You meant to say something wise, something soothing perhaps, but what came out was the most foolish answer of all.

“Then return.”

The world, being the spiteful beast it is, heard and laughed.

Your father never returned alive from the south. The news came in blows, one after another, each seeming impossible until the next made it real. Lord Eddard arrested. Lord Eddard accused. Lord Eddard condemned. Lord Eddard dead, beheaded before the Great Sept while the city watched and the king-boy smiled his thin little smile. Grief made Winterfell ring hollow. Your mother was gone to war before you had time to cling to her. Robb was no longer merely your twin but a king in the making, hardening by necessity before your eyes. Bran lay broken first and then rose changed, with old shadows in his gaze. Rickon cried and bit and howled like a pup. Sansa was trapped in the snake-pit wearing silk chains. Arya had vanished. The realm split open. Men marched south under direwolf banners and your brother rode at their head while songs began to grow around him like weeds around a grave. Through all of it, Theon remained beside Robb. He drank with him, advised him, rode with him, laughed with him, swore to him. If you loved him before, you loved him worst then, because grief strips away illusion and leaves only need, and he became the nearest thing to comfort that did not belong to you by blood. There were nights before the host rode when you found him standing in the yard beneath torchlight with mail half-buckled and his horse already saddled.

“When this is done,” he said once, fingers catching yours in the dark, “I will ask him. King or no, I will ask Robb for you.”

“You speak as though you are not riding into slaughter.”

He smiled crookedly.

“I have no intention of dying before I steal a Stark bride. Think of the songs. Your lady mother would hate them.”

Despite everything, you laughed. He kissed your knuckles. Then more quietly he said, “I mean to come back to you.”

“Then do that,” you answered, because by then you understood enough of the world to mistrust grander vows.

He rode south with your brother. You remained behind with Bran and Rickon in Winterfell, because women in the north were expected to hold castles, children, and sorrow with equal steadiness. Ravens came and went. Victories were spoken of in the hall. Jaime Lannister taken. Riverrun relieved. Whispering Wood. Battle of the Camps. Your brother was named King in the North. Men cheered. Ale spilled. Yet every raven seemed to carry absence more than triumph, because every name listed among the living only reminded you how many others were not named. When at last word came that Theon Greyjoy had been sent as envoy to Pyke, to win the ironborn to Robb’s cause, you stood so quickly from your chair that the embroidery hoop fell from your hands. Maester Luwin looked up from the message with pity already in his eyes, though he knew nothing and everything at once, as old men often do.

“Lady Y/N,” he said gently, “it is a sensible course.”

Sensible. You wanted to laugh in his face. There was nothing sensible in sending a man like Theon back to the father who had never loved him, back to the people among whom he had become a stranger, back to the sea that had shaped every wound in him. That night you went alone to the battlements. The wind was brutal. Below, the dark stretched endless beyond the walls. You stood there until your fingers were numb and remembered Theon at twelve with hay in his hair and insolence in his smile. Remembered him at sixteen boasting he would put the stars to shame. Remembered him in the godswood asking you to choose him. You knew then, with the sick certainty women have before men ruin everything, that sending him home was not sending him home at all. It was sending him to judgment.

He did not write. That should not have surprised you. Theon was never a man made for letters and patient explanation. Still, each day without word wore at you. Then came whispers first, ugly and uncertain. Ironborn longships raiding the western shore. Deepwood Motte under threat. Torrhen’s Square taken. Men muttered in corners and stopped when you approached. Maester Luwin wore his worry like an old cloak. Ser Rodrik cursed the krakens and sharpened swords till sparks jumped. You learned the truth not from any careful hand but from chaos, as truths of that sort so often arrive. A rider came half-dead to Winterfell with a torn mouth and blood caked down one side of his face. The hall filled at once. Luwin read. Bran stared. Rickon began to cry because everyone else had gone so still. You did not need the words before they were spoken. Theon Greyjoy had taken Winterfell.

For a long moment the world narrowed to nothing but the hammering of your own blood. Someone said your name. Someone moved toward you. It may have been Old Nan, or Beth Cassel, or one of the guardsmen. You heard none of it properly. Winterfell. Taken. By Theon. Your first thought was absurd and shameful and human. He came back. Your second was worse. He came back for the wrong thing.

You saw him first from the steps of the Great Keep after the gates had opened under threat and fury both. He rode through them not like a supplicant returned in honor, nor like the swaggering boy who used to leap down from a horse and bow mockingly at your feet, but like a man wearing another man’s skin and hoping no one noticed where it pinched. He had dressed himself for conquest, dark mail and kraken clasp, sword at hip, pride sitting too stiff upon his shoulders. The ironborn with him looked at Winterfell as wolves look at a flock. Bran sat in his chair white-faced and wordless. Rickon clung to him with his mouth hard and eyes wet with rage. Maester Luwin’s expression was old pain made flesh. Theon’s gaze went over them, over the yard, the towers, the familiar stone, and then found you. In that instant something inside his face broke through, raw and naked and horribly young.

“Y/N,” he said.

Not my lady. Not Lady Stark. Just your name, like a plea.

The hall should have erupted then, but all seemed suspended for the space of that word. You descended the steps slowly, your skirts whispering against stone, every eye in the yard fixed upon you. When you stood before him, close enough to smell horse and salt and leather and the faint remembered note that was only Theon beneath it all, you looked up and said, “Is this your honor, then?”

His mouth twitched.

“Do not do this before them.”

“Before them?” You laughed, and the sound had nothing soft in it. “You have brought an enemy into my home, pointed steel at my brothers, raised your banner over my father’s walls, and you fear shame before them?”

Around you the air felt brittle, one harsh word away from shattering into blood. Theon swung down from his horse in a single smooth movement and stepped nearer.

“Listen to me.”

“No.”

“Y/N.”

“No. You do not get my ear because once you had my heart.”

That struck him. You saw it. He glanced around then, at the watching men, the drawn faces, and lowered his voice.

“I had to do something.”

“You had to betray us?”

“I had to become more than a pet wolf in your brother’s camp.”

“So you became your father’s dog instead.”

One of the ironborn bristled at that, but Theon lifted a hand without looking back and the man held.

“You know nothing of it,” he said.

“Then tell me.”

“Not here.”

“There is no elsewhere. Not now.”

His jaw worked.

“They would never have given you to me.”

That was so nakedly not the heart of it, so childish a scrap snatched from a larger wound, that for a moment your anger nearly gave way to pity. Nearly.

“And for that,” you said, “you thought to steal my home?”

He took Winterfell in the end not with blood but with fear and bewilderment, which was perhaps the fouler theft. Men yielded because the young lord was crippled, because the castellan was absent, because surprise serves traitors better than courage ever serves the honorable. Yet once the first shock had passed the castle curdled around him. The servants obeyed with stone faces. The kennel dogs snarled when the ironborn came near. Hodor bellowed till they beat him into silence. Osha looked at Theon with open hatred, the wildling’s contempt honest where others’ was veiled. You bore yourself as your mother’s daughter, straight-backed, cold, speaking when needed and never more. In public you gave him nothing. In private he chased scraps. The first night after he took the castle he came to your chamber, not barging but standing outside the door as though he feared what lay within more than any sword. Beth would not leave you alone until you ordered her. Then he entered. Snow hissed at the shutters. Candlelight hollowed his face.

“I did not wish to frighten you,” he said.

“How comforting,” you replied. “Only my family, then.”

“They are alive.”

“Do you want praise for sparing children you once called brothers?”

He flinched.

“I came to speak to you.”

“Then speak.”

He shut the door behind him. For a little while he merely stood there, looking at the room as if it accused him. It did. The embroidery frame by the hearth. The carved chest from Riverrun. The cloak your mother had sewn for you before one winter feast. The little worlds of women and daughters, of continuities men with swords seldom notice until they are smashing through them.

“I had no choice,” he said at last.

“Do not lie to me. You chose.”

“What would you have had me do? Crawl back to Robb with empty hands and call myself his man forever? My father laughed at me. My uncles sneered. My sister looked at me as if I were some painted fool. They saw what your family made me.”

“My family fed you, clothed you, raised you when your own blood left you to rot.”

“As hostage.”

“As ward.”

“Do not dress chains in silk and ask me to thank you.”

He took another step toward you, frustration sharpening him.

“You do not understand what it is to belong nowhere.”

That struck deeper than he knew, because you had watched him belong nowhere for half your life. Still you said, “And so you would make others feel the same.”

He stared at you a long time then, and when he spoke again the anger had burned down to something rawer.

“I thought,” he said, “if I came here crowned in victory, if I proved I was no one’s kept boy, then perhaps you would see me.”

You could have slapped him for that. Instead you whispered, “I saw you long before this. That was the ruin of me.”

He came often after that, driven by some need he could not master and you could not soothe. Sometimes he spoke of practical matters, of men, stores, threats, ravens, how Ser Rodrik would surely come, how he must hold the castle, how the north would have to accept terms once it saw sense. He said these things as if saying them made them possible. At other times he spoke like the old Theon, with bitter wit and a smile sharpened by weariness.

“Do you know,” he said once while staring into your hearth, “I used to imagine being lord here?”

“Did you?”

“Aye. You beside me. Robb off warring somewhere glorious, Bran climbing into trouble, Rickon biting the servants, your lady mother disapproving from seven kingdoms away.”

Despite yourself, despite everything, some old treacherous part of you could almost see it, the impossible ghost of a life in which boys became better men than their fathers and the realm was not made of knives.

“You might have asked,” you said.

He gave a short, humorless laugh.

“And heard your lord father say no in that northern way of his where the word is never raised but always final?”

“You did not know what he would have said.”

“I knew enough.”

“No,” you answered. “You knew your fear.”

He looked at you then with such fury and hurt together it seemed a wonder he did not shatter under the weight of them.

“Easy for a Stark,” he said. “Easy for one born wanted.”

The injustice of that, and the truth tangled in it, left you cold for hours after he had gone.

Then Bran and Rickon vanished.

The castle woke to alarm and shouting. The boys were gone, Osha with them, Hodor too. Men searched. Horns sounded. Horses were saddled. Theon stood in the yard red-eyed and savage, barking orders with more panic than authority. When he learned they had slipped him, that the crippled child and wild little boy and giant stableboy and wildling woman had made fools of him beneath his own stolen roof, his pride curdled into something uglier. He rode out hunting them with dogs and ironborn at his back. You watched from the battlements under a sky the color of old steel and knew with a sick, animal certainty that whatever returned would not be your brothers.

It was not.

Theon came back carrying victory like a corpse. Two small bodies were hung in Winterfell’s yard and charred so badly that no face remained. The smell of burned flesh rolled over the stones and set the whole castle retching. A woman screamed. Someone dropped to his knees. Maester Luwin made a sound you had never heard from a man before, something torn from a place older than speech. For one blind moment the yard swam. You thought you would fall. Then Theon turned as if seeking you out specifically, as if he needed you to witness what he had done and still say his name the same way. Your feet moved before your mind did. You crossed the yard through smoke and horror, past ironborn who shifted uneasily, past servants weeping into their aprons, past the blackened little shapes that had broken the world, and when you reached him you struck him across the face with everything you had. The crack rang out hard enough to still even the muttering. His head snapped sideways. A red mark bloomed along his cheek. You would have struck him again, but he caught your arm.

“Do not touch me,” you hissed. “Those are not my brothers.”

His grip loosened at once. Something wild flickered in his eyes.

“You know?”

“I know Bran’s hands. I know Rickon’s height. I know them, you bastard. You think I would not know?”

He said nothing. Around you the silence thickened.

“Who?” you demanded. “Who did you burn?”

Still nothing. His face had gone pale beneath the slap-mark.

“Miller’s boys,” Maester Luwin said softly from somewhere behind you, voice broken.

It was not accusation that filled the yard then. Not only that. It was something worse. Recognition. The men, the women, the old, the young, the stablehands, the cooks, the guards who remained, all looked at Theon and saw what he had chosen in order to pretend power. Not a prince, not even a traitor worth song. A frightened child with a knife at a babe’s throat. Theon felt it. You saw him feel it. His shoulders seemed to draw inward though he stood upright.

“I had to show strength,” he said, but the words were ash already.

You looked at him as you might look at some strange thing washed up dead by a river.

“No,” you said. “You had to prove to yourself that you were cruel enough to be your father’s son. Tell me, was it worth it?”

He could not answer. That was answer enough.

After that, whatever fragile lie had existed between you was done. He knew it. So did you. Yet ruin has a way of circling the broken thing instead of leaving it in peace. One night, not long after the miller’s boys burned and the castle’s hatred of him had become a living creature, he found you again in the godswood. Winterfell had grown full of whispers and dread. Snow drifted down through the branches in slow white veils. The pool beneath the heart tree had a skin of dark ice along its edges. You stood before the weirwood with your cloak drawn tight, the red leaves above you black in the night. He came without escort. That alone told you how frayed he was. His hair was damp with melted snow. His eyes looked too large in his face.

“I knew you would come here,” he said.

“The gods still listen, do they?”

“Not to me.”

“Not to me either.”

He stopped a few paces off. For once there was no swagger in him, no bright insolence, none of the old easy performance. Only exhaustion and a desperation so naked it made him look younger than when you first knew him.

“They hate me,” he said.

“They should.”

“Aye.”

He laughed softly at that, but there was no humor in it.

“Even my own men smell weakness. Dagmer would have known what to do. Asha too. My father would have done worse and slept well after.”

“And you?”

“I do not sleep.”

Snow caught in his lashes.

“I thought if I took this place, if I stood upon these walls and made men say my name with fear, something in me would settle. I thought I would finally be one person instead of two halves forever at war.”

He looked around him then, at the white ground, the black trunks, the red leaves that seemed wet as wounds in the dark.

“Instead I have made myself a monster and still do not know whose son I am in my bones.”

You should have left. You should have said nothing. Instead, perhaps because grief had hollowed you too, perhaps because the godswood remembered younger versions of you both, you said, “You are Theon. That was enough once.”

He looked at you with such terrible longing that it hurt to bear.

“Was it?”

“For me.”

“Not for the world.”

“The world is not worth this.”

“No. It is all we have.”

“No. It is all men like your father teach you to crave.”

He took a step nearer.

“And what would you teach me?”

“Too late for teaching.”

“Say it anyway.”

The words came before you could stop them.

“I would have taught you that being loved is not the same as being owned. That mercy is not humiliation. That a man is not made smaller because he was spared. That he need not set every good thing ablaze to prove he has fire.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they shone wet in the darkness, though whether from snow or grief you could not tell.

“If I had asked again,” he murmured, “truly asked, before all this, would you have come?”

There it was, the knife twisted at last into the oldest wound. You answered him with honesty, because lies between you had done enough harm.

“No.”

He flinched.

“But I would have waited.”

Silence fell between you then, immense and merciless. He let out a long breath that smoked in the cold.

“That may be worse.”

“I know.”

“Do you still love me?”

It was a monstrous question. It was the only one that mattered. You looked at him beneath the carved face of the old god, at the boy you had known, the man he had failed to become, the traitor, the frightened son, the killer of innocents, the lonely thing still reaching for you with blood on his hands. Your voice was very quiet.

“That is the worst of it.”

He made a sound then, almost a laugh and almost a sob, and turned his face away as if he could not bear for you to see it.

The end came as such ends do, with smoke, steel, and screaming.

Ramsay Snow was not yet named Bolton in open triumph then, not to most in Winterfell, but doom does not require a proper title. Men came under false banners and false promises. Treachery answered treachery. The castle that had endured winter, siege, kings, and wolves was given over to fire by men too craven to hold what they had stolen and too savage to leave it standing for others. In the confusion of it, amid clanging bells and shouts and the frantic stamp of frightened horses, you found Theon in the yard with a sword in his hand and ruin all around him. Flame crawled up the old timbers. Smoke turned the air thick and bitter. One of his own men lay dead nearby with his throat open. Another crawled with his guts in his hands. Above, sparks swarmed against the dark like red insects. He looked at you as if you were a ghost pulled from memory.

“You should be away,” he shouted over the din.

“And leave my home to burn?”

“It is lost.”

“Because of you.”

“Aye.”

Strange that he did not deny it now. Strange and somehow more terrible. He stepped closer, blade lowered, face striped with soot and sweat.

“Listen to me. There is a way through the lower gate by the glass garden. I can get you out.”

“Can you?”

“I can try.”

“Trying has never been your strength.”

The words were cruel, but the world had earned cruelty by then. He accepted them with a hollow sort of calm.

“No,” he said. “Perhaps not. Still, take it. Go north if you can. Find your brothers if they live. Find your mother. Find Robb.”

He swallowed.

“Live.”

Something in you twisted at the raw earnestness of that single word. Around you Winterfell groaned as if the stones themselves were mourning.

“Come with me,” you said, and it was madness, because where would he go, and who would spare him, and what could he ever be after this? Yet you said it because some ancient, foolish part of you still remembered the boy in the godswood asking the same.

He smiled then, and it was the saddest smile you had ever seen on any man.

“Now you offer it.”

“I offer nothing,” you snapped, because tenderness in that moment felt like blasphemy. “I state a road.”

“There is no road for me that does not end with a noose or a blade.”

“Then choose which man’s judgment you prefer.”

“And if I am tired of being judged?”

“Then you have picked a poor world to live in.”

He laughed, an actual laugh this time, brief and disbelieving.

“There you are.”

A beam crashed somewhere above, showering sparks. He reached out suddenly and touched your face with grimy fingers, gentler than he had any right to be.

“You were always too good for me.”

“Do not make yourself noble now.”

“I am not. I am being honest for once.”

He bent and kissed you.

It was not like the kisses in hidden passages, nor like the desperate one by the heart tree when your father rode south. There was no youth in it, no illusion, no promise. It tasted of smoke and salt and grief. It was a farewell, and both of you knew it. When he drew back his forehead rested briefly against yours, and in the roar of fire and falling stone he whispered, “In another life I would have asked your father properly.”

Your eyes burned, though whether from smoke or sorrow did not matter.

“In another life,” you answered, “you might have been worth the asking.”

He shut his eyes. The words hurt him. You let them. You were hurt too. Then he straightened, hand falling away.

“Go,” he said. “Before I make one final ruin of this.”

You looked at him for one suspended heartbeat longer, trying perhaps to fix him as he had once been beneath all he had become, but memory is as treacherous as men. At last you turned and ran toward the lower gate while Winterfell burned behind you and the man you had loved disappeared into the smoke.

Years later, when songs and rumors and ravens had chewed his name to pieces and spat it back in forms both uglier and sadder than the truth, you would still sometimes dream of him as he had first been. Not Reek, not prince, not traitor, not broken creature haunted by hounds and knives and all the cruelties men devise to unmake each other. Just Theon, laughing in the yard, sunlight on his face, pride and loneliness warring behind his grin. In those dreams he was always turning toward you with a bow fit for a fool and saying something absurd. In those dreams you were always young enough to laugh. Waking was the hard part. Waking meant remembering your father headless in the south, your mother drowned in vengeance, your brother crowned and butchered, your home burned, your own heart given once to a boy who mistook love for rescue and became instead a lesson in what hunger can do when pride feeds it. Yet even then, even knowing all he did, you could not wholly teach yourself to hate the child he had been. That was your weakness, perhaps. Or your mercy. The north has little use for either, though the old gods keep their own counsel.

If there was any truth left to bury with him, it was this: Theon Greyjoy loved you. He loved you badly, selfishly, hungrily, with all the ruinous force of a man who had never been taught how to hold a good thing without fearing it would be taken. You loved him too, and that love was no cleaner for being sincere. It changed nothing. It saved no one. Songs prefer love to be redemptive, but songs are lies told over bones. Sometimes love is only another blade men hand each other with trembling fingers and call by sweeter names. In Winterfell, where snow covers blood until thaw comes, you learned that early and learned it forever.