thirty-eight. castle black
loc. castle black, the wall. 300AC
⠀⠀⠀CARSEN DRIFTED ON THE crest of a lone wave, unreachable in this dark cavern of daydreams.
⠀⠀⠀She was dry, this she registered. The water that slid over her skin was dry as ash but smooth as silk, as if she were floating on one of the grey swells of cloud that crowded the pale sky. She could see no such sky now. Only darkness. Only death.
⠀⠀⠀Death, all around. It was all she seemed to be now, a gateway, a vice, a vice held by steel fists, waiting for the darkness. She was the inbetween, the place between life and afterlife. It was woven through her ribs like ribbon, shot through her blood like a poison, in her lungs like a knife, and with every breath she took, they cut her deeper.
⠀⠀⠀Kressa. She was the first. Carsen scarce thought of her, hadn't in months, and guilt swarmed her like a flock of bats. Kressa was sweet, timid, only seventeen. Her hair was soft like raven's feathers over the curve of her narrow shoulders, and she had a smile like a sunrise. She made Carsen anklets of braided blushgrass and tucked flowers into her hair. Her voice sung like sparrows when she proclaimed, "beautiful!" and kissed her upon the cheek. Kressa was Carsen's first secret, a stolen kiss under a drooping curtain of wisteria in the haze of summer, drunk on fruit wine and giddiness.
⠀⠀⠀Roahn. She saw his warm, sleepy eyes like hazelnuts, hands soft but callused at the same time. He liked to hike into the forest lands where they weren't supposed to go, beyond the Sisters' light. He brought her back pretty rocks and strange shells from the dark woods, and taught her the Common Tongue in his spare time. He liked to scavenge the ocean for lost things that washed up from the sand from merchant ships; oranges and
⠀⠀⠀Rogon. His features blurred into each other now, uncertain. She was forgetting him, but she would never forget was he did. His hands had burned as the clawed and groped at her skin, kneaded her like dough beneath his hands, wrested her knife from her fingers and she was useless, so useless, like a sparrow with no wings. She'd never forget the way it felt to jam her knife into his neck, to twist into flesh, marring bone and muscle and skin in one grotesque pirouette of a blade. She'd buried him in the frozen earth and marked the grave with her spit.
⠀⠀⠀Qhorin Halfhand. His name tasted odd on the brink of her thoughts. He had meant almost nothing to her, and yet she was a big part of the reason he was dead. She had stuck her sword through his back, heard his last words. "We are the watchers on the Wall," he had whispered, and his words floated up in a frozen cloud of pale mist, lilting like ghosts over to her to wrap their fingers around her bones. There they lay now, cold spirits pressing into her, buried under warm flesh and hot blood. Hot blood. So hot it melted the snow as Qhorin Halfhand bled out on the plain of white.
⠀⠀⠀Orrell. A curious one. He had loathed her, tried to kill her. He loathed her so much he was willing to choke the life out of her with his bare hands. His bare, stinking, filthy hands. Just for a moment, he had wrapped those fingers about her throat. He was so intent on her death, his nails dug in so far that crescent-moon mauve marks lay carved there now. And then she had knocked him, tackled him, and shoved her knife into his stomach. A screech of an eagle, claws raking down her face, and it was over.
⠀⠀⠀Last of all came herself. Ceria Sargen. The words were bitter, like chewing copper. When had Ceria truly died? Had it been the day Roahn died? Surely not. The day she fled her home? Still she was alive. When she killed Rogon, when she killed Qhorin Halfhand, when she fell in love with the wildling girl kissed by fire? No, and no, and never had her soul burned brighter than then.
⠀⠀⠀The day Ceria Sargen died was the day she dropped the cerialis in the lake.
⠀⠀⠀She remembered watching it disappear. Under a thick layer of ice, the water was black and churning and spitting, cold drops lilting up to sear her skin. She held the flower between thumb and forefinger, eyes roving over every curve of petal, every splotch of violet that discoloured the mallow-pink. When she dropped it, the water whisked it away in a moment. A glimmer of purple, and gone. She wondered where it must be now. Drowned and rotted, at the bottom of the lake, buried beneath sand and pebbles. She felt weighed down with the contents of that lake. Black water roared and stampeded inside her head, her stomach weighed down with rocks, her lungs full of silt. Unable to breath. Choking her, ice choking her, and throwing it up, feeling it rise in a cold, glittering arc like an explosion of frozen glass...
⠀⠀⠀Carsen twitched awake.
⠀⠀⠀For half a second, there was only darkness, black as pitch. And then the soft blurs of ivory melted into view. Moonlight, falling like liquid silver on her hands. The ceiling above her was blackwood, not pelt. A few seconds later, sound returned. The clangs of steel-on-steel, grunts, thuds, shouts. Footsteps. Breathing. Not her own, surely.
⠀⠀⠀Carsen blinked, and her vision cleared. She was in Castle Black. Never had she been in this room, lined with iron pallets at either wall which she assumed was some form of sick wing. A thick quilt blanketed her, and her body was lacquered in cold sweat. She threw off the covers, and winced as her waist protested sharply. Easing herself back, she yanked down her outskin. A red pucker of a wound haloed by an ugly mesh of purple and yellow and blue, bruises like crushed flowers discolouring her pale skin. She dropped her outskin abruptly and edged herself into a sitting position.
⠀⠀⠀Gathering herself, she swung her legs out of bed. Bare feet touched the cold stone flags that made up the floor, and she shivered. She rose slowly; stars crowded her eyes, and she stumbled, grabbing for empty air to steady herself. She lurched, then found her feet. Her throat was dry as ash, her stomach heavy with hunger. Her eyes found the window, clouded with dust and grime. The night was dark and clear, and the moon hung, a silver coin, in the sky.
⠀⠀⠀She made for the door at the end of the room, each step slow and deliberate to keep from falling. Her legs felt like water, and shuddered with exhaustion from each movement. She reached out with a numb hand to grasp the door handle - and it flew open, her fingertips glancing off empty air. The shock made her instinctively jump back in fright, stumble, lurch violently, and collapse. She landed on her side, and her wound cursed.
⠀⠀⠀"Carsen?"
⠀⠀⠀She felt the breath halt in her throat as tears sprung to her eyes. All her pain was forgotten, gone in an instant, because Samwell Tarly hovered above her, pale eyes alight with concern.
⠀⠀⠀"Sam." Her voice was dry as her throat felt, and broke in the first second, but she shoved herself to a stand and threw herself at him, flinging her arms round his neck and burying her face in the black fur of his cloak. Black fur, black as the night wolf. Oh, how she'd missed this fur. When she pulled away, his cloak was damp, and tears clung to her lashes.
⠀⠀⠀"You shouldn't be standing up," Sam beamed, somehow managing to sound happy and scolding in one go. "Come here." He awkwardly took her by the arm and guided her to the nearest pallet, where she collapsed gratefully. Sam set himself down beside her. "You most likely don't remember—Maester Aemon said you might'n't. You and Jon arrived at the gates, and you were unconscious."
⠀⠀⠀"I remember some," Carsen admitted as she reclined on the cold pillow beneath her head. Only the parts I wish not to, added the mournful voice in the back of her head. Flame-red hair whipping to and fro around a furious face. Clear green eyes full of tears, trembling pink lips, her slim pale hands shaking on her bow. The snap of the bowstring, the agony of the aftermath, and soon a heavy blackness as thick as the furs on Jon's cloak—
"Jon!" The name rose to her mouth in a dizzyingly fast. "Where's Jon, is he—he got hit—" She was sitting up again, eyes roving the room madly as though she hoped to see him, panic hitching her voice up three steps.
"Hush now," Sam soothed, coaxing her onto her back again. "Jon's fine, he's up and about. Maester Aemon cleaned his wound up quick as you like. He thinks Jon's very lucky—another inch or so to the left and an artery may have been punctured."
Luck, Carsen knew, had little to do with it. She'd seen Ygritte slip an arrow through the eye of a deer from a hundred feet away. Something, in that moment, had stayed her hand. Carsen felt her eyes fill with tears.
"Oh, dear—" Sam blinked rather rapidly, looking alarmed. "It's fine, he's fine—really—look, I'll go and get him, shall I?" He was already edging away from Carsen and her tears, and by the time she'd gotten a hold of herself enough to tell him, No need, really, I'm just being stupid, he had edged out the door, and his footsteps were echoing quickly down the stone corridor.
She'd killed Qhorin Halfhand, on his request, yet she'd felt his hot blood on her hands, watched the light flee his eyes all the same, hadn't she? She'd snapped at Jon out of her own feelings of spite and seething self-fury, and Ygritte—God, her woman kissed by fire with the laughing emerald eyes, she'd kissed her lips and tasted her own sadness, held her hand and felt her own hatred, she'd loved her, her girl on fire and then she'd left her in the rain to be quenched, put out, forgotten. And then, and then and then and then, she shot Jon. Right in the leg. A couple of inches shy of his artery, and Gods, if that didn't make Carsen's hands shake like anything.
The cave. His face, shining in the firelight. The soft slope of the muscles in his arms as he flexed, curling his fingers around Ygritte's jaw. Those hands that had come so close to Carsen, but still never touching her, as though it were still forbidden.
She wondered why Ygritte didn't kill him. If she had really wanted to, Carsen wouldn't be wondering, she'd be building a funeral pyre.
The tears had barely dried on her cheeks when she heard footsteps again—slower, and lighter than Sam's, and she scarce had time to reel in a stammering breath before the door creaked gently open and she saw him.
He looked slightly paler than usual, though his cheeks were ruddy, and he brought the smell of outside with him as he entered the room silently. There was a fading bruise on the cleft of his left cheek, and healing cuts raking over his skin from eyebrow to cheek. His hair had been washed, and curled dark and warm about his neck, glinting in the candlelight. He was stepping carefully, weightily, conscious of his right side, of the ache that must have swelled in his chest from the angry red wound in his flesh.
Carsen had never wanted to reach out and touch him so badly. If only to check he wasn't another wretched ghost, come to haunt her, come to drive her through sleepless nights.
Instead, she whispered. "Jon?"
He whispered back, "Carsen," and she smiled to wide her dry lips cracked painfully.
Ever so gently, he took a seat on the edge of the pallet, his eyes raking over her with an intensity that makes her fidget. "Are you alright?" he finally asks. "How's the pain?"
"Not so bad as I thought it would be," she replied truthfully, though the two wounds were burning and pulsing beneath her clothes even as she spoke.
"Aye, they gave you milk of the poppy whilst you slept," he said. "No doubt you'll feel worse soon."
"Well. Thank you for that," she countered, and he smiled crookedly, his grey eyes creasing at the corners. It was an old smile, like the ones they shared when Carsen first arrived at Castle Black, back when Carsen was still Carsen and Jon was a boy, too big for his boots but with a heart in the right place. She recalls the first evening they trained, the way he'd grinned when she'd gotten a hit on him. He hadn't smiled at her like that in so long, it ached to realise, it ached to see it, the boyish grin that reminded her so painfully of when things were easier, before Carsen's hands were soaked in blood, before Ygritte.
She missed Carsen Sage and the boy Jon Snow. She mourned for the people they once were, a sparrow and an arrogant child, baring their sparring swords against the cold dark world.
"I'm sorry," she blurted without meaning too, her mouth working too quickly for her mind to catch up, and Jon blinked, the smile slipping off his face like oil on water.
"For what?" he replied, looking somewhat wary, as though he didn't like where the conversation was turning.
"Everything. The Halfhand. How awful I was to you. Ygritte. Getting you shot." Unconsciously, as she spoke, her hand went to the spot where she knew his wound lurked behind fur and wool and leather, and she let it stay there, resting light as a feather on his leg as he breathed.
"Carsen, I—you have nothing to apologise for," Jon murmured, and the low vibrations of his voice sparked up Carsen's arm, still held aloft. "We did what we had to do, out there, to survive. Maybe—maybe some of it was more real than we thought it was, but it's over now."
"It's not over," Carsen muttered, finally letting her hand drop. "The free folk are still going to march on us, it's only a matter of time."
"Aye, you're right on that. We have precious little time, but time is still time. We can defend this Castle. We can fight back. All we need to do is convince the others."
Carsen laughed, the wound in her shoulder protesting hotly. "We'd sooner face giants and come out alive than get Slynt and Thorne on board with anything we tell them."
"Maybe. But if we don't try, then everything we did out there, we did for nothing," Jon replied, and Carsen hoped the stab of pain she feels at those words didn't appear on her face. She nods, silently, and Jon smiles again. It's a smaller smile, softer, sadder, as he pressed a feather-light kiss to the crown of Carsen's head.
"We can talk of wildlings and defence on the morrow. For tonight, you need rest," Jon told her firmly, and Carsen sighed.
"Alright. Wake me early."
"I make no vows." His grey eyes glittered in the candlelight, instantaneously filling Carsen with more warmth than any stupid little flame, before he blew out the light with one quick exhalation and the wing was plunged into darkness. Unbidden, her heart began to race under her outskin as she was blinded by darkness. In the dark all men are killers, she thinks madly, suddenly. She calls out abruptly, "Jon!"
"Carsen?"
"I... nothing. Good night, Jon."
"Sleep well."
She didn't; out of the darkness, flames burned back at her, the smoking shadow of a lover's hair cascading down a pale back.
In the dark, Carsen wept.