The courtyard rang to the song of swords.

Under black wool, boiled leather, and mail, sweat trickled icily down Jon’s chest as he pressed theattack. Grenn stumbled backward, defending himself clumsily. When he raised his sword, Jon wentunderneath it with a sweeping blow that crunched against the back of the other boy’s leg and sent himstaggering. Grenn’s downcut was answered by an overhand that dented his helm. When he tried asideswing, Jon swept aside his blade and slammed a mailed forearm into his chest. Grenn lost hisfooting and sat down hard in the snow. Jon knocked his sword from his fingers with a slash to hiswrist that brought a cry of pain.

“Enough!” Ser Alliser Thorne had a voice with an edge like Valyrian steel.

Grenn cradled his hand. “The bastard broke my wrist.”

“The bastard hamstrung you, opened your empty skull, and cut off your hand. Or would have, ifthese blades had an edge. It’s fortunate for you that the Watch needs stableboys as well as rangers.”

Ser Alliser gestured at Jeren and Toad. “Get the Aurochs on his feet, he has funeral arrangements tomake.”

Jon took off his helm as the other boys were pulling Grenn to his feet. The frosty morning air feltgood on his face. He leaned on his sword, drew a deep breath, and allowed himself a moment to savorthe victory.

“That is a longsword, not an old man’s cane,” Ser Alliser said sharply. “Are your legs hurting,Lord Snow?”

Jon hated that name, a mockery that Ser Alliser had hung on him the first day he came to practice.

The boys had picked it up, and now he heard it everywhere. He slid the longsword back into itsscabbard. “No,” he replied.

Thorne strode toward him, crisp black leathers whispering faintly as he moved. He was a compactman of fifty years, spare and hard, with grey in his black hair and eyes like chips of onyx. “The truthnow,” he commanded.

“I’m tired,” Jon admitted. His arm burned from the weight of the longsword, and he was startingto feel his bruises now that the fight was done.

“What you are is weak.”

“I won.”

“No. The Aurochs lost.”

One of the other boys sniggered. Jon knew better than to reply. He had beaten everyone that SerAlliser had sent against him, yet it gained him nothing. The master-at-arms served up only derision.

Thorne hated him, Jon had decided; of course, he hated the other boys even worse.

“That will be all,” Thorne told them. “I can only stomach so much ineptitude in any one day. Ifthe Others ever come for us, I pray they have archers, because you lot are fit for nothing more thanarrow fodder.”

Jon followed the rest back to the armory, walking alone. He often walked alone here. There werealmost twenty in the group he trained with, yet not one he could call a friend. Most were two or threeyears his senior, yet not one was half the fighter Robb had been at fourteen. Dareon was quick butafraid of being hit. Pyp used his sword like a dagger, Jeren was weak as a girl, Grenn slow andclumsy. Halder’s blows were brutally hard but he ran right into your attacks. The more time he spentwith them, the more Jon despised them.

Inside, Jon hung sword and scabbard from a hook in the stone wall, ignoring the others around him.

Methodically, he began to strip off his mail, leather, and sweat-soaked woolens. Chunks of coalburned in iron braziers at either end of the long room, but Jon found himself shivering. The chill wasalways with him here. In a few years he would forget what it felt like to be warm.

The weariness came on him suddenly, as he donned the roughspun blacks that were their everydaywear. He sat on a bench, his fingers fumbling with the fastenings on his cloak. So cold, he thought,remembering the warm halls of Winterfell, where the hot waters ran through the walls like bloodthrough a man’s body. There was scant warmth to be found in Castle Black; the walls were cold here,and the people colder.

No one had told him the Night’s Watch would be like this; no one except Tyrion Lannister. Thedwarf had given him the truth on the road north, but by then it had been too late. Jon wondered if hisfather had known what the Wall would be like. He must have, he thought; that only made it hurt theworse.

Even his uncle had abandoned him in this cold place at the end of the world. Up here, the genialBenjen Stark he had known became a different person. He was First Ranger, and he spent his daysand nights with Lord Commander Mormont and Maester Aemon and the other high officers, whileJon was given over to the less than tender charge of Ser Alliser Thorne.

Three days after their arrival, Jon had heard that Benjen Stark was to lead a half-dozen men on aranging into the haunted forest. That night he sought out his uncle in the great timbered common halland pleaded to go with him. Benjen refused him curtly. “This is not Winterfell,” he told him as he cuthis meat with fork and dagger. “On the Wall, a man gets only what he earns. You’re no ranger, Jon,only a green boy with the smell of summer still on you.”

Stupidly, Jon argued. “I’ll be fifteen on my name day,” he said. “Almost a man grown.”

Benjen Stark frowned. “A boy you are, and a boy you’ll remain until Ser Alliser says you are fit tobe a man of the Night’s Watch. If you thought your Stark blood would win you easy favors, you werewrong. We put aside our old families when we swear our vows. Your father will always have a placein my heart, but these are my brothers now.” He gestured with his dagger at the men around them, allthe hard cold men in black.

Jon rose at dawn the next day to watch his uncle leave. One of his rangers, a big ugly man, sang abawdy song as he saddled his garron, his breath steaming in the cold morning air. Ben Stark smiled atthat, but he had no smile for his nephew. “How often must I tell you no, Jon? We’ll speak when Ireturn.”

As he watched his uncle lead his horse into the tunnel, Jon had remembered the things that TyrionLannister told him on the kingsroad, and in his mind’s eye he saw Ben Stark lying dead, his blood redon the snow. The thought made him sick. What was he becoming? Afterward he sought out Ghost inthe loneliness of his cell, and buried his face in his thick white fur.

If he must be alone, he would make solitude his armor. Castle Black had no godswood, only asmall sept and a drunken septon, but Jon could not find it in him to pray to any gods, old or new. Ifthey were real, he thought, they were as cruel and implacable as winter.

He missed his true brothers: little Rickon, bright eyes shining as he begged for a sweet; Robb, hisrival and best friend and constant companion; Bran, stubborn and curious, always wanting to followand join in whatever Jon and Robb were doing. He missed the girls too, even Sansa, who never calledhim anything but “my half brother” since she was old enough to understand what bastard meant. AndArya … he missed her even more than Robb, skinny little thing that she was, all scraped knees andtangled hair and torn clothes, so fierce and willful. Arya never seemed to fit, no more than hehad … yet she could always make Jon smile. He would give anything to be with her now, to muss upher hair once more and watch her make a face, to hear her finish a sentence with him.

“You broke my wrist, bastard boy.”

Jon lifted his eyes at the sullen voice. Grenn loomed over him, thick of neck and red of face, withthree of his friends behind him. He knew Todder, a short ugly boy with an unpleasant voice. Therecruits all called him Toad. The other two were the ones Yoren had brought north with them, Jonremembered, rapers taken down in the Fingers. He’d forgotten their names. He hardly ever spoke tothem, if he could help it. They were brutes and bullies, without a thimble of honor between them.

Jon stood up. “I’ll break the other one for you if you ask nicely.” Grenn was sixteen and a headtaller than Jon. All four of them were bigger than he was, but they did not scare him. He’d beatenevery one of them in the yard.

“Maybe we’ll break you,” one of the rapers said.

“Try.” Jon reached back for his sword, but one of them grabbed his arm and twisted it behind hisback.

“You make us look bad,” complained Toad.

“You looked bad before I ever met you,” Jon told him. The boy who had his arm jerked upwardon him, hard. Pain lanced through him, but Jon would not cry out.

Toad stepped close. “The little lordling has a mouth on him,” he said. He had pig eyes, small andshiny. “Is that your mommy’s mouth, bastard? What was she, some whore? Tell us her name. MaybeI had her a time or two.” He laughed.

Jon twisted like an eel and slammed a heel down across the instep of the boy holding him. Therewas a sudden cry of pain, and he was free. He flew at Toad, knocked him backward over a bench, andlanded on his chest with both hands on his throat, slamming his head against the packed earth.

The two from the Fingers pulled him off, throwing him roughly to the ground. Grenn began to kickat him. Jon was rolling away from the blows when a booming voice cut through the gloom of thearmory. “STOP THIS! NOW!”

Jon pulled himself to his feet. Donal Noye stood glowering at them. “The yard is for fighting,” thearmorer said. “Keep your quarrels out of my armory, or I’ll make them my quarrels. You won’t likethat.”

Toad sat on the floor, gingerly feeling the back of his head. His fingers came away bloody. “Hetried to kill me.”

“’S true. I saw it,” one of the rapers put in.

“He broke my wrist,” Grenn said again, holding it out to Noye for inspection.

The armorer gave the offered wrist the briefest of glances. “A bruise. Perhaps a sprain. MaestorAemon will give you a salve. Go with him, Todder, that head wants looking after. The rest of you,return to your cells. Not you, Snow. You stay.”

Jon sat heavily on the long wooden bench as the others left, oblivious to the looks they gave him,the silent promises of future retribution. His arm was throbbing.

“The Watch has need of every man it can get,” Donal Noye said when they were alone. “Evenmen like Toad. You won’t win any honors killing him.”

Jon’s anger flared. “He said my mother was—”

“—a whore. I heard him. What of it?”

“Lord Eddard Stark was not a man to sleep with whores,” Jon said icily. “His honor—”

“—did not prevent him from fathering a bastard. Did it?”

Jon was cold with rage. “Can I go?”

“You go when I tell you to go.”

Jon stared sullenly at the smoke rising from the brazier, until Noye took him under the chin, thickfingers twisting his head around. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.”

Jon looked. The armorer had a chest like a keg of ale and a gut to match. His nose was flat andbroad, and he always seemed in need of a shave. The left sleeve of his black wool tunic was fastenedat the shoulder with a silver pin in the shape of a longsword. “Words won’t make your mother awhore. She was what she was, and nothing Toad says can change that. You know, we have men onthe Wall whose mothers were whores.”

Not my mother, Jon thought stubbornly. He knew nothing of his mother; Eddard Stark would nottalk of her. Yet he dreamed of her at times, so often that he could almost see her face. In his dreams,she was beautiful, and highborn, and her eyes were kind.

“You think you had it hard, being a high lord’s bastard?” the armorer went on. “That boy Jeren isa septon’s get, and Cotter Pyke is the baseborn son of a tavern wench. Now he commands Eastwatchby the Sea.”

“I don’t care,” Jon said. “I don’t care about them and I don’t care about you or Thorne or BenjenStark or any of it. I hate it here. It’s too … it’s cold.”

“Yes. Cold and hard and mean, that’s the Wall, and the men who walk it. Not like the stories yourwet nurse told you. Well, piss on the stories and piss on your wet nurse. This is the way it is, andyou’re here for life, same as the rest of us.”

“Life,” Jon repeated bitterly. The armorer could talk about life. He’d had one. He’d only taken theblack after he’d lost an arm at the siege of Storm’s End. Before that he’d smithed for StannisBaratheon, the king’s brother. He’d seen the Seven Kingdoms from one end to the other; he’d feastedand wenched and fought in a hundred battles. They said it was Donal Noye who’d forged KingRobert’s warhammer, the one that crushed the life from Rhaegar Targaryen on the Trident. He’d doneall the things that Jon would never do, and then when he was old, well past thirty, he’d taken aglancing blow from an axe and the wound had festered until the whole arm had to come off. Onlythen, crippled, had Donal Noye come to the Wall, when his life was all but over.

“Yes, life,” Noye said. “A long life or a short one, it’s up to you, Snow. The road you’re walking,one of your brothers will slit your throat for you one night.”

“They’re not my brothers,” Jon snapped. “They hate me because I’m better than they are.”

“No. They hate you because you act like you’re better than they are. They look at you and see acastle-bred bastard who thinks he’s a lordling.” The armorer leaned close. “You’re no lordling.

Remember that. You’re a Snow, not a Stark. You’re a bastard and a bully.”

“A bully?” Jon almost choked on the word. The accusation was so unjust it took his breath away.

“They were the ones who came after me. Four of them.”

“Four that you’ve humiliated in the yard. Four who are probably afraid of you. I’ve watched youfight. It’s not training with you. Put a good edge on your sword, and they’d be dead meat; you knowit, I know it, they know it. You leave them nothing. You shame them. Does that make you proud?”

Jon hesitated. He did feel proud when he won. Why shouldn’t he? But the armorer was taking thataway too, making it sound as if he were doing something wrong. “They’re all older than me,” he saiddefensively.

“Older and bigger and stronger, that’s the truth. I’ll wage............