The Fist of the First Men had never been a welcoming place, even before winter began tightening its pale fingers around the lands beyond the Wall. Ancient stones rose from the frozen earth like the broken teeth of some long-dead giant, their surfaces buried beneath frost and old snow, while the wind swept across the hilltop with enough force to cut through wool, leather, and mail alike.
A large company of the Night's Watch had claimed the summit for the evening. Black tents were being raised between the weathered stones, horses were secured near what little shelter could be found, and brothers moved through the growing camp with shovels, bundles of firewood, cooking pots, and all the other miserable necessities required to survive beyond the Wall.
Every person among them wore black.
Everyone, at least, except for the otherworldly beauty leaning lazily against one of the ancient stones as though the deadly cold were no more troublesome than a mild autumn breeze.
Wrapped in a long black cloak lined with thick fur, the figure looked more like some northern goddess who had wandered down from the moonlit mountains than anyone who belonged among criminals, poachers, debtors, and forgotten sons. Long strands of ink-black hair escaped the shadow of the hood and stirred gently in the wind, framing a pale face so delicate that more than one brother had nearly walked into a tent pole after staring too long.
A small knife rested between slender fingers, its edge carefully shaving pieces from a block of dark wood. Little by little, the rough shape of a direwolf emerged beneath those patient movements.
Despite appearances, however, the beautiful young woman was neither a woman nor a goddess.
He was a boy—more specifically, a teenage boy named Jinx Stark.
Jinx was the younger twin of Eddard Stark and, according to their father, the most useless son Rickard Stark had ever been cursed with. He was also known across an increasingly uncomfortable portion of Westeros as a shameless man-whore, though that reputation had less to do with how many beds he had entered and far more to do with the people who had helped raise him.
Neither Rickard Stark nor Jinx's beautiful and genuinely loving mother had possessed enough time to raise him personally. His father had been far too occupied with ruling the North, arranging alliances, and being an ass whenever Jinx was involved, while his mother had been pulled between family obligations and the duties expected of a lady of Winterfell.
The servants and guards had watched him when ordered, but it had been the whores of Winter Town who had truly raised him.
They taught him nearly everything they knew: how to recognize false affection, how to hear the desire hidden beneath polite words, how to flatter a lord without lowering himself, and how to make someone believe that giving him what he wanted had been their own idea. They taught him how posture, eye contact, clothing, silence, and the smallest touch could be more effective than sex itself.
Jinx had absorbed those lessons with terrifying ease.
It certainly did not help that he had inherited far too much of his mother's appearance. The softness of his features, his pale skin, his dark hair, and the almost unnatural beauty that followed their Yi Tish bloodline had all passed to him with none of the stern harshness expected from a son of House Stark. At a distance, especially when wrapped in heavy northern clothing, he was mistaken for a woman more often than he cared to count.
Not that he usually corrected anyone.
Watching people embarrass themselves was one of the few forms of entertainment that required absolutely no effort from him.
That was important, because Jinx was the living definition of sloth.
His greatest passion was sleeping, and through years of dedicated practice, he had become extraordinarily talented at it. He could sleep in beds, chairs, wagons, trees, horse saddles, muddy fields, crowded feast halls, and snowdrifts deep enough to bury a smaller child. Neither noise, weather, discomfort, nor imminent danger appeared capable of interfering with his naps once he had committed himself to one.
He had even managed to fall asleep underwater for an entire hour.
That particular incident had nearly given his mother a fatal heart attack. The guards responsible for watching him had not noticed that the young Stark had sunk beneath the surface of the hot spring until she arrived and saw his hair drifting beneath the water. Jinx had awakened only after being dragged out, coughing once before asking why everyone was shouting.
His mother had hugged him hard enough to bruise his ribs.
Then she had punished every guard present for failing to notice that her son had been underwater for an hour.
Rickard, eventually deciding that distance might succeed where discipline had failed, sent Jinx to Dorne in the hope that exposure to harsher expectations would force some responsibility into him. More truthfully, his father merely wanted him as far from Winterfell—and himself—as possible.
The decision proved disastrous.
Jinx met Oberyn Martell, and the two became as close as brothers.
Oberyn dragged him across Dorne, through Westeros, and eventually across portions of the Free Cities. Between the Dornish prince's appetite for danger and Jinx's complete willingness to follow any desire that sounded entertaining, rumors began returning to Winterfell at an alarming pace. Some were exaggerated.
Far too many were not.
By the time Rickard understood that sending his most troublesome son to live near Oberyn Martell had been the political equivalent of pouring wildfire into an open hearth, Jinx had already traveled farther and caused more scandal than most men managed in a lifetime.
Rickard immediately ordered him brought home.
Unfortunately for him, Jinx was staying with his maternal grandmother at the time.
She was the elder sister of the Emperor of Yi Ti and a woman whose beauty remained almost offensive even in her advanced age. Time had touched her, certainly, but it had done so with remarkable restraint. She could still put ninety-five percent of the known world to shame simply by entering a room, and both her daughter and grandson had inherited enough of her god-blessed features to make the connection obvious.
Jinx's mother and grandmother had not parted on good terms, though neither woman was willing to explain the full reason. That bitterness had never extended to Jinx. His grandmother had taken one look at him, recognized the same unapologetic pursuit of desire found throughout much of their royal family, and decided almost immediately that she liked him.
Oberyn, who shared that philosophy with enthusiastic devotion, became a permanently welcome guest in her household by the time they departed.
None of them knew the truth about Jinx.
He was not merely an unusually beautiful, disastrously lazy, scandal-loving son of House Stark.
Jinx Stark was a reincarnator.
In his previous life, he had been a devoted fan of Game of Thrones, though his insistence on watching everything in chronological order had left his knowledge frustratingly incomplete. He had watched all available material from House of the Dragon—the complete first two seasons and the first four episodes he had obtained afterward—as well as the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The main Game of Thrones series was where the problem lay.
He had only watched as far as the end of the Red Wedding.
He still knew fragments of what came afterward because his friends had been incapable of keeping their mouths shut. He knew Arya Stark eventually became at least partially trained as a Faceless Man. He knew there would be a War of the Bastards, that something called the Night King would become a threat, and that Daenerys Targaryen would eventually surrender to the madness associated with her bloodline and burn King's Landing.
According to his friends, the city had deserved it.
After hearing about some of the events that supposedly led to the burning, Jinx had found himself inclined to agree.
That fragmented knowledge was the reason he had been unable to determine precisely how much danger he was in now. He knew enough to understand that the dead would eventually come from the far north, but not enough to know every event, every betrayal, or every person responsible for allowing it to happen.
His second life had not begun without advantages, however.
Before being reborn, Jinx had met the Goddess of Reincarnation and been made to spin a wheel for several gifts. The first had granted him the power and potential of Darth Nihilus without the uncontrollable hunger that had consumed the Sith Lord, leaving the hunger itself present but completely under Jinx's control.
The second had given him Anakin Skywalker's potential as a duelist.
The third had placed the Elder Wand in his possession.
The final gift had been a comprehensive book of Harry Potter magic containing lessons, theories, rituals, and methods drawn from every known branch and path of magic within that world. It did not simply grant him mastery, but it gave him the knowledge necessary to learn nearly anything from charms and transfiguration to potions, runes, enchantment, wards, curses, and darker disciplines.
Power, knowledge, blood, and impossible potential had all been placed within his hands.
And Jinx Stark, who could barely be convinced to rise before midday without bribery, had spent most of his second life deciding whether learning to reshape reality was worth losing sleep over.
The knife moved once more beneath his fingers, shaving away another thin curl of wood as the direwolf's snout began to take form. Around him, the brothers of the Night's Watch continued preparing their camp, unaware that the beautiful, useless young Stark resting against the ancient stone might be the most dangerous person to have stood upon the Fist of the First Men in thousands of years.
One of the black brothers finally seemed to reach the limit of his patience.
He had been wrestling with a frozen tent rope for the better part of ten minutes, his gloved hands slipping each time the wind snapped the canvas back into his face. After the third strike, he spat into the snow and threw the rope down with enough force to make the man beside him glance over.
"Why in all seven hells are we even out here with that man-whore?" he muttered, not quite quietly enough. His eyes flicked toward Jinx, who remained seated against the ancient stone with his head bowed over the carving in his hands. "We're brothers of the Night's Watch, not an escort for some spoiled southern prince wearing a Stark's name."
The leader of the ranging party crossed the distance in three long strides and struck him across the back of the head with a leather-gloved hand.
"Lower your damned voice," he hissed, glancing toward Jinx before fixing the complaining brother with a hard stare. "That boy is still a son of House Stark, whether you approve of the way he spends his nights or not."
The man rubbed the back of his head, his mouth twisting as though he still had several complaints left and was deciding which one might get him struck again.
The leader leaned closer before continuing, his voice dropping beneath the wind. "He is also recognized as a prince of Yi Ti through his mother's blood, and Lady Stark holds an official royal title of her own. We are far beyond the Wall, surrounded by wildlings, dead men, and every manner of frozen nightmare the old stories ever warned us about. This is not the place to insult two royal houses at once."
The brother looked toward Jinx again, this time with considerably more caution.
Jinx gave no indication that he had heard any of it.
His knife made one final, careful pass across the wood. A narrow shaving curled away from the carving and landed upon his black robes before the wind caught it and carried it into the darkness between the stones.
The little direwolf was finished.
Jinx turned it slowly between his fingers, inspecting the shape of its muzzle, the curve of its back, and the fine lines he had carved into the wood to resemble fur. It was not perfect, but it was good enough to join the small collection wrapped safely among his belongings.
Each carving was meant for one of his siblings.
The thought left an unfamiliar tightness beneath his ribs.
It would be the first time all of them had gathered beneath the same roof in years. Rickard Stark, in one of the most fucking ridiculous decisions Jinx had ever witnessed, had chosen to scatter his children across Westeros in the name of fostering alliances. Eddard had been sent to the Vale, while Jinx had been sent to Dorne, as though separating twin brothers and placing them on opposite ends of the continent would somehow strengthen the family.
Jinx had argued against it.
His father had ignored him.
There had been little else he could do. He had been a child, and Rickard Stark was Lord of Winterfell. Even his mother had been unable to overturn the decision once it was made, though her anger had left half the castle walking carefully for nearly a month.
Jinx brushed the last flecks of wood from the direwolf's ears and slipped the carving into a fur-lined pouch at his waist.
The leader watched him for another moment before releasing a quiet breath.
House Stark or not, prince or not, he had been asking himself the same question since they left the Wall.
He approached the ancient stone and stopped several feet away, careful not to loom over the younger man. "My prince," he began, the title sitting awkwardly upon the tongue of a man accustomed to calling highborn boys my lord. "The camp will be secured before full dark, but the men are tired, and some of them are beginning to wonder why we have come this far into the haunted forest."
Several nearby brothers slowed their work without fully stopping. A man carrying firewood adjusted the bundle against his shoulder and lingered beside the growing pile. Two others pretended to examine a horse's saddle straps while tilting their heads toward the conversation.
The leader noticed every one of them.
He chose not to call them out.
"I told the Lord Commander that you had business beyond the Wall," he continued, keeping his tone respectful while allowing some of his frustration to enter it. "I did not tell him what that business was because you never saw fit to tell me. We have obeyed your directions, but I would like to know what exactly you expect us to find out here."
Jinx lifted his head.
He placed one pale hand against the stone beside him and pushed himself upright. It should have been an ordinary movement, little more than a lazy boy rising after sitting too long, yet his body had apparently never learned how to perform anything ordinarily.
The heavy fur cloak slipped from one shoulder as he rose, exposing the fitted black layers beneath it. His back straightened with unhurried grace, long dark hair sliding across his chest while one slender leg emerged briefly through the opening of his robes. He moved as though every shift of his weight had been rehearsed for an audience, his expression soft with half-awake indifference and his pale fingers lingering against the stone for balance.
None of it was intentional.
That somehow made it worse.
Half the men within sight froze.
The brothers who had not seen a woman in months—and in some cases years—shifted awkwardly beneath their cloaks as their bodies betrayed them. One dropped an armful of firewood. Another abruptly turned toward the horses and began inspecting a saddle that had already been inspected twice. The man who had complained stared for several seconds too long before looking down at the snow with a face red enough to be visible even beneath the fading light.
Jinx noticed.
He simply did not care.
People had been reacting to him that way since he was old enough to understand what desire looked like. The whores who raised him had taught him that embarrassment only became powerful when acknowledged, so he allowed the men to suffer in silence while calmly pulling his cloak back into place.
"I received a lead," Jinx said, his voice smooth but still touched by the laziness of someone who would have preferred to remain seated. He glanced at the finished direwolf one last time before securing the pouch. "There is supposed to be a Valyrian steel sword somewhere within the haunted forest."
The leader stared at him.
Behind him, the camp seemed to become quieter.
"A Valyrian steel sword," he repeated slowly, searching Jinx's face for some trace of amusement. "Beyond the Wall."
"That is what I said." Jinx raised one hand to cover a yawn, his eyes narrowing against the wind as it tugged at the fur around his hood. "The lead may be false, naturally. Most useful information usually is. But the source knew enough details to make it worth investigating."
The man who had complained earlier found his courage again, though he spoke more carefully this time. "And you dragged an entire ranging party into the haunted forest because someone whispered about an old sword?"
Jinx's gaze shifted toward him.
The brother went still.
There was no anger in Jinx's expression. That almost made the attention worse. His face remained calm and beautiful, but something old and empty seemed to look through those dark eyes for the briefest moment, leaving the man with the deeply unpleasant feeling that the boy could strip the life from his body as casually as he had stripped wood from the carving.
"I did not drag you anywhere," Jinx replied, lowering his hand from his mouth. "Your Lord Commander agreed to the ranging. You chose to speak your vows. The Wall chose to place you here. I merely gave all of you a direction."
A few of the brothers concealed their amusement poorly.
The complaining man's jaw tightened, but he said nothing more.
The leader exhaled through his nose and looked toward the forest stretching beyond the Fist. Darkness already filled the spaces between the trees, thick enough that even the falling snow seemed to disappear inside it.
"And what do you intend to do with the sword, should it truly exist?" he asked.
Jinx looked back down at the pouch containing the direwolf.
For the first time since the conversation began, the indifference in his expression softened.
"I intend to give it to my mother."
The answer earned several immediate groans from around the camp.
Men who had imagined returning to Castle Black with a priceless weapon for the Watch now understood that they were risking their lives to recover a gift for a southern lady they had never met. One brother muttered something about highborn madness. Another complained that they would be lucky to return with all their fingers, much less an ancient blade.
Jinx allowed them to grumble.
He had no intention of changing his mind.
His mother possessed a royal title, royal blood, and enough influence to make lords twice her age lower their voices when she entered a room, but none of those things were the reason he wanted the sword for her. She had loved him when Rickard found him shameful, defended him when his reputation became inconvenient, and held him beneath the water until he stopped struggling after nearly drowning himself through sheer laziness.
A Valyrian steel sword seemed a small repayment.
The leader glanced over his shoulder at the muttering brothers. "Enough," he called, his voice carrying across the stone summit. "Prince Jinx has given us our purpose. Whether you like it or not changes nothing. Finish raising the tents, secure the horses, and get the fires burning before the cold takes the choice from us."
The brothers returned to their tasks with varying degrees of reluctance.
The Night's Watch was not formally subject to House Stark, and every brother knew it. Yet every competent Lord Commander understood that the Wall could not survive without the North. Food, timber, horses, recruits, roads, and political protection all passed through Stark lands. A commander who was neither an idiot nor an arrogant prick listened when Winterfell spoke.
Jinx was also a recognized prince of Yi Ti, which made refusing him considerably more complicated than any of them wished to consider while stranded beyond the Wall.
Canvas snapped in the wind once more. Hammers struck frozen stakes. Horses stamped restlessly against the cold while men hauled stones into crude circles for the fires.
Jinx watched them for a few seconds before lowering himself against the ancient rock again, managing to make even that look indecently graceful.
The leader's expression tightened.
"My prince," he said, already suspecting the answer, "are you planning to help establish the camp?"
Jinx settled his cloak around himself, tucked one hand beneath his opposite sleeve, and closed his eyes.
"I am supervising."
The leader stared at him in silence.
From somewhere behind the tents, one of the brothers began laughing hard enough to choke.
The night that followed passed far more peacefully than anyone had expected.
Once the tents were raised, the horses secured, and the fires coaxed into life beneath the shelter of the ancient stones, Jinx finally contributed something beyond what he continued to insist was expert supervision. He reached into one of the leather pouches strapped beneath his cloak and produced several tightly wrapped bundles of dried green leaves.
The leader of the ranging party eyed the bundle with immediate suspicion. "What in the seven hells is that?" he asked, crouched beside the fire with his hands extended toward the flames, though the wary crease between his brows deepened when Jinx began passing the leaves around as casually as though they were bread.
"Weed," Jinx replied, lowering himself onto a bedroll someone else had prepared for him. He pulled his fur cloak around his shoulders and rested against the same ancient stone he had claimed earlier, his expression softening with lazy satisfaction when the wind could no longer reach the back of his neck. "It makes unbearable company slightly less unbearable."
The black brother beside the leader turned one of the dried leaves between his fingers, sniffed it, then looked back at Jinx with narrowed eyes. "You expect us to smoke some strange southern plant you pulled out of your purse?"
"It is not a purse." Jinx's gaze drifted toward him, heavy-lidded and almost offended, though not offended enough to move. "And I grew it myself."
That answer did little to reassure them.
Jinx had first discovered the plant growing wild beside a forgotten road in the Reach during one of his journeys with Oberyn. Neither of them had known what it was at first, but the scent had stirred enough memories from his previous life for Jinx to recognize it. Oberyn, naturally, had been willing to test the strange leaves with almost no encouragement whatsoever.
The evening that followed had ended with Oberyn declaring a weathered stone wall to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen while Jinx spent nearly an hour lying beneath a tree, staring through its branches and wondering whether ravens understood that they were black.
When Jinx returned to the North two months ago, he brought seeds with him and cultivated a small crop in a hidden corner of Winterfell's glass gardens. It had taken effort, warmth, and a little magic to keep the plants alive through the northern cold, but the result had been worth it.
After another long moment of suspicion, one of the older brothers finally shrugged.
"I have smoked worse things at Mole's Town," he said, pinching a portion of the dried plant between his fingers. "And if it kills me, at least I will not have to march through that frozen forest tomorrow."
That was enough to convince the others.
The first few men coughed violently enough that Jinx briefly wondered whether one of them might actually die. The rest laughed at them until it was their turn, at which point most suffered the same fate. Yet once the burning in their throats passed and the warmth began to settle behind their eyes, the camp slowly changed.
Shoulders that had remained tense since leaving Castle Black began to loosen. Conversations no longer ended in arguments. Men who had spent the entire day muttering about the cold found themselves staring peacefully into the fire, watching sparks rise into the night as though each one carried some hidden wisdom.
One brother spent nearly twenty minutes explaining why ravens were cleverer than maesters.
Another became overwhelmed by the realization that his horse trusted him.
The man who had complained most loudly about Jinx earlier eventually sat across from him with red-rimmed eyes and a crooked, almost embarrassed smile. "You know," he murmured, holding the smoke in his lungs before releasing it through his nose, "you might still be a spoiled little man-whore, but you are not the worst highborn bastard I have followed into the cold."
Jinx opened one eye from where he lay curled beneath his cloak. "That may be the kindest thing anyone from the Watch has ever said to me."
The man stared at him for several seconds before beginning to laugh, the sound rough and helpless as it carried across the summit.
Even the leader eventually accepted a small amount.
For the first time in months, perhaps years for some of them, the brothers of the Night's Watch were truly calm. The Haunted Forest remained below them. Wildlings still wandered beyond the reach of their fires, and the cold was still capable of killing a sleeping man before dawn. None of those dangers disappeared, but for several precious hours they stopped pressing against every thought.
By the time the last fire began to fade, much of the ranging party's resentment toward Jinx had softened into something approaching reluctant respect.
He might have brought them into a frozen wilderness on the strength of a vague rumor, but at least he had brought something that made the wilderness bearable.
They continued their search at first light.
The information Jinx had received was frustratingly imprecise. The sword was supposedly resting somewhere at the bottom of the Milkwater, within perhaps ten miles of the Giant's Stair and the lands associated with the Hornfoot clans.
Ten miles sounded manageable when spoken beside a warm fire.
Standing beside the river revealed the truth.
The Milkwater twisted through the frozen land in pale, violent stretches, its current shifting beneath sheets of broken ice while snow buried its banks. A ten-mile radius encompassed an enormous amount of water, much of it deep enough to drown a fully armored man before anyone could reach him.
The first day was spent testing the shallower sections.
Men stripped away mail, cloaks, boots, and everything else that might drag them beneath the water. Ropes were tied around their waists before they entered, with two brothers remaining on the bank to pull them free if the current caught hold.
The cold was monstrous.
It struck the body like a hammer, closing throats and locking muscles before a man could properly fill his lungs. Every brother who entered emerged pale, shaking, and furious, their skin turning red beneath hastily wrapped furs.
Jinx did not enter the water once.
He stood on the bank beneath his black fur cloak, occasionally consulting the scraps of information he had been given while pointing toward sections of the river that appeared vaguely promising.
By the second day, the respect earned through his gift of weed had begun to erode.
The brothers took turns diving into deeper stretches, feeling blindly through mud, stones, branches, and old bones while Jinx watched from dry land. More than once they recovered rusted knives, broken spearheads, or pieces of ancient armor, but none were Valyrian steel.
The weather worsened that evening. Snow came down heavily, the wind driving it sideways as the men huddled beneath their tents and cursed the river, the forest, House Stark, Yi Ti, Oberyn Martell for reasons none of them could properly explain, and Jinx most of all.
By the third day, their patience was gone.
Several men had lost feeling in their fingers. One had split the skin across his palm on a jagged stone beneath the water, while another had nearly been swept downstream when the rope around his waist slipped loose. Their clothes never fully dried, the cold penetrated every layer they wore, and the promise of a sword had begun to sound less like a lead and more like the cruel amusement of some highborn boy who had grown bored at Winterfell.
Jinx remained the only person who had not entered the Milkwater.
He stood several paces from the bank, hood raised against the snow as he watched the youngest member of the ranging party prepare for another descent. The boy could not have been much older than sixteen, though life at the Wall had already carved much of the softness from his face.
Behind Jinx, a small group of brothers gathered close enough to speak without the wind carrying their words.
"We could do it now," one of them murmured, rubbing his hands together as his eyes remained fixed upon Jinx's back. His voice was raw with cold and exhaustion. "Push him into the river. Say the ice broke beneath him."
"And when Winterfell asks why the prince of Yi Ti died while every one of us survived?" another replied, though the anger in his expression suggested he was considering it. "You think Lord Stark will accept that?"
"They cannot hang all of us."
The oldest among them gave a humorless grunt. "They can. The Wall has enough rope."
For several seconds, none of them spoke.
The first man glanced toward the river, then back at Jinx. "Might still be worth it."
The leader heard enough of the conversation to understand where it was going. He turned sharply, his face hard beneath the frost clinging to his beard, but before he could cross the distance and silence them, a shout erupted from the riverbank.
"The rope!"
Two men seized the line and pulled.
Something had gone wrong beneath the water. The rope had suddenly drawn tight, jerking through their gloves as the current fought against them. More brothers rushed forward, wrapping their hands around it before hauling together.
For one terrible moment, nothing emerged.
Then the youngest brother broke through the surface with a desperate gasp.
He thrashed against the current, one hand clawing toward the bank while the other remained beneath the water. The men pulled harder, dragging him through the broken ice until his chest struck the muddy edge of the river.
He coughed violently as they hauled him onto land.
"Get him near a fire," the leader ordered, pushing through the gathering crowd. "Move, damn you! Get those frozen clothes off him before—"
The boy lifted one shaking arm.
Something dark rested in his hand.
The surrounding men fell silent.
Water streamed from a long, narrow blade held upright above the boy's head. It did not carry the orange stain of rust despite however many years it had spent beneath the river. Its surface was dark grey, almost black beneath the heavy clouds, and faint rippling patterns moved along the steel whenever the blade caught what little daylight reached them.
The weapon was slimmer than the greatswords favored by northern houses, elegant without appearing fragile. Mud clung to its hilt, and part of the grip had darkened from centuries in the river, yet the blade itself remained untouched.
A sword of Valyrian steel.
The young brother's teeth chattered violently as a stunned laugh escaped him. "I—I found the bloody thing," he gasped, trying to sit up while the others stared. Pride pushed through the pain in his face as he held it higher. "Seven hells, I actually found it."
The men who had been discussing Jinx's murder only moments earlier stood frozen.
Someone began laughing.
Another brother shouted in disbelief, and suddenly the riverbank erupted into noise as men crowded around the weapon, reaching toward it before the leader forced them back. Every trace of exhaustion seemed forgotten beneath the thrill of discovering something none of them had truly believed existed.
Jinx did not join their celebration.
He remained several steps away, staring at the sword with an expression that had gone completely still.
The blade was unfamiliar to every member of the Night's Watch.
It was not unfamiliar to him.
Jinx had seen it in artwork, promotional images, recreations, and scenes from House of the Dragon. He knew the slender proportions of that blade. He knew its dark Valyrian steel and the history attached to it. Of all the weapons ever mentioned throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, this one had always been his favorite.
His feet moved before he consciously decided to approach.
Snow gathered along the shoulders of his cloak as he stopped before the trembling boy. The brothers nearest him quieted when they noticed the strange intensity in his gaze.
The leader studied Jinx's face before looking back at the sword. "You recognize it," he said, his earlier frustration briefly forgotten beneath the weight of the discovery. His eyes narrowed as Jinx reached toward the weapon but stopped just before touching it. "What is it?"
Jinx stared at the dark ripples flowing through the steel.
For once, there was no laziness in his expression, no playful indifference, and none of the quiet amusement he usually wore when everyone around him became uncomfortable. His heartbeat had quickened beneath his ribs, and a cold that had nothing to do with the Milkwater moved down his spine.
The sword should not have been here.
The last known wielder he remembered was Brynden Rivers, the man history would call Bloodraven, but Jinx's knowledge of the timeline between House of the Dragon and the stories he had watched was painfully incomplete. He did not know how the blade had reached the bottom of the Milkwater or how long it had rested there.
He only knew what it was.
His pale fingers finally closed around the wet hilt.
"Dark Sister," Jinx breathed, his voice quieter than the wind but heavy enough to silence every man around him. His eyes remained locked upon the blade as he carefully took it from the younger brother's shaking hand. "This is Dark Sister."
The leader's brow furrowed. "Whose sister?"
Jinx barely heard him.
He slowly raised the sword, watching the pale northern light travel across its dark steel while centuries of blood, fire, and Targaryen history seemed to stir within the rippling metal.
"Daemon Targaryen carried this blade," he said, his thumb brushing the edge of the guard as wonder and unease settled together in his chest. "The Rogue Prince."
Around him, the brothers of the Night's Watch stared at the weapon with new caution.
Jinx stared at it as though the dead man himself might still be holding the other end.
For several long moments, the discovery of Dark Sister seemed impossible to surpass.
The youngest brother remained huddled beside the fire while two older men stripped away his soaked clothes and wrapped him in every dry fur they could find. His skin had gone pale enough to frighten them, his lips nearly blue, yet pride continued to shine through his exhaustion whenever his eyes wandered toward the Valyrian steel blade resting in Jinx's hand.
Then the boy frowned.
"There was something else down there," he said through chattering teeth, his shoulders trembling beneath the pile of furs as one of the men pressed a heated waterskin against his chest. "I thought it was only a stone at first, but it was shaped strangely. Oval, almost, and the surface looked like…" He swallowed, glancing toward the river as though uncertain whether the cold had confused him. "Like the back of a lizard."
Every sound along the riverbank died.
The men nearest the fire stopped moving. The leader slowly turned away from Dark Sister, water dripping from his beard as his eyes settled upon the boy. Even the roughest and least educated among the Night's Watch understood what sort of thing could be mistaken for an oval stone while possessing the texture of a great lizard's hide.
There was only one object in the known world that matched such a description.
Jinx's fingers closed more tightly around Dark Sister's hilt.
"Where?" he demanded.
The boy flinched at the sudden sharpness in his voice and pulled the furs closer around himself. "Near where I found the sword. A little farther beneath the shelf of rock, I think. The current turned me before I could reach it."
Jinx's beautiful grey eyes fixed upon the Milkwater.
A dragon egg.
There was a dragon egg lying beneath the river.
The possibility struck him with enough force to strip away every trace of his usual laziness. He stepped toward the bank, his black cloak snapping behind him as his gaze moved over the exhausted men who had only just begun celebrating their success.
"Back into the water," Jinx ordered.
No one moved.
One brother gave a small, disbelieving laugh, apparently convinced that Jinx could not possibly be serious. Another looked toward the youngest boy, then at his own shaking hands.
"My prince," the leader began carefully, his voice strained from cold and fatigue, "the men have been diving for nearly three days. Some of them can barely feel their fingers, and we have already found the sword—"
"I said get back into the water."
The change in Jinx's voice silenced him.
Jinx stepped closer, Dark Sister hanging at his side while the wind pulled loose strands of black hair across his face. "The first man who places that egg in my hands will receive one thousand gold dragons," he said, each word carrying clearly across the frozen bank. "But if it is lost because any of you were too slow, too weak, or too fucking stupid to recover it, then by the old gods, I will personally deliver every man here to the Boltons and ask them to demonstrate precisely how long a fool can survive without his skin."
One thousand gold dragons should have been the only part they heard.
It was more wealth than any ordinary brother of the Night's Watch could hope to touch in several lifetimes. A man could purchase land, servants, horses, armor, and perhaps even a minor title with that amount. Even after taking the black, the promise of such wealth carried enough weight to tempt men into madness.
Yet scarcely anyone seemed to hear the reward.
Jinx's eyes had changed.
The soft grey inherited from House Stark had vanished beneath a poisonous yellow glow, surrounded by a thin, burning ring of red. The unnatural light reflected from the snow and sharpened the delicate lines of his face into something beautiful in the same way a drawn blade was beautiful.
The men had seen anger from highborn lords before. They knew drunken rages, wounded pride, and the casual cruelty of people accustomed to obedience.
This was not anger.
Something vast and hungry had opened its eyes behind Jinx Stark's face.
Fear slipped through the group like cold water beneath clothing. Men who had spent years guarding the edge of the world against wildlings and old nightmares suddenly found themselves unable to meet the gaze of the graceful boy they had mocked only days earlier.
The first brother stumbled toward the river without waiting to be ordered again.
The others followed.
Ropes were retied around waists. Dry clothes were discarded. Men plunged into the Milkwater with gasps, curses, and strangled cries as the cold seized their bodies. Those on the bank hauled them out whenever a rope jerked violently, only for the divers to drag themselves upright and enter again before Jinx's attention could settle upon them.
Minutes passed.
Then half an hour.
Men repeatedly vanished beneath the dark surface, searching through mud and stone with numb hands before emerging empty-handed. Their breathing became ragged. Their limbs weakened. Several could no longer stand without assistance, yet the sight of Jinx waiting upon the bank drove them back into the water.
An hour passed.
Jinx's patience wore thinner with every unsuccessful descent.
The red surrounding his yellow eyes grew brighter until it seemed to pulse with his heartbeat. His hand remained wrapped around Dark Sister's hilt, the grip tightening each time another man surfaced without the egg. Valyrian steel creaked softly against the leather of his glove.
The first signs appeared in the grass around his boots.
Thin blades that had survived beneath the snow lost their colour and curled inward. Moss growing along the stones darkened, then crumbled into grey flakes. The few stubborn weeds near the riverbank withered as threads of dim magenta energy rose from them, twisting through the air before sinking into Jinx's body.
No one commented on it.
Most were too frightened to look directly at him.
Jinx felt the energy enter him as warmth beneath his skin, faint but nourishing. It dulled the edges of the hunger that had followed him since birth in this world, yet it did nothing to settle the rage gathering inside his chest.
Another diver emerged empty-handed.
Jinx's thumb moved against Dark Sister's guard.
Kill them.
The thought came so smoothly that he nearly mistook it for his own.
They had failed. They were wasting his time. Their fear, exhaustion, and fragile excuses had become unbearable. He could feel their lives around him—small flames flickering inside cold, wet flesh—and some instinct buried within his power whispered that extinguishing them would be easier than continuing to watch their incompetence.
Dark Sister rose half an inch from its sheath.
Then Jinx stopped.
His breath caught as he stared at the men struggling along the riverbank.
Kill all of them.
The thought came again, colder this time.
That did not sound like him.
Jinx had never objected to killing. He had done it frequently enough, particularly when the hunger inherited from Darth Nihilus became too demanding to ignore. Control did not mean absence. The hunger remained within him, patient and endless, and eventually it needed to be fed.
Over time, Jinx had learned what satisfied it best.
Fresh meat was preferable. The fresher, the better. Animal flesh could quiet it for a time, but human meat lasted longer than anything else he had tested. Human life carried something deeper—some richness of spirit, memory, and living energy that left the hunger dormant far longer than ordinary food.
He understood the usefulness of killing.
He understood the necessity of feeding.
But slaughtering every man present because they had failed to find an object beneath a freezing river was neither useful nor necessary.
That realization cut through the rage just enough to make him loosen his hold on Dark Sister.
Jinx lowered his gaze to the dying plants around his boots. Magenta energy continued bleeding from their shrivelled stems, drawn toward him without any conscious command.
For the first time, unease stirred beneath his excitement.
Something about the egg was affecting him.
Or perhaps finding Dark Sister had awakened something he had kept too carefully buried.
Before he could decide which possibility concerned him more, the river exploded outward.
A man surfaced with a violent gasp and clawed toward the bank. His rope had tangled around one leg, forcing two brothers to brace themselves in the snow and drag him through the current. When his body struck the shallows, he rolled onto his side, coughing river water while both arms remained wrapped around something large pressed against his chest.
Jinx recognized him only after the man lifted his head.
Harlon Flint.
That was the leader's name. Jinx remembered it now, though the man had introduced himself three separate times since leaving the Wall.
Harlon struggled onto his knees. Water poured from his hair and beard, his entire body shaking so violently that his teeth struck together as he shifted the object in his arms.
The dragon egg had seen better days.
It was nearly as large as a man's torso, its oval shell covered beneath centuries of river filth. Thick green moss clung to one side, pale fungus spread across the ridges, and clusters of small brown growths protruded from cracks between the scales. Mud filled many of its grooves, giving it the appearance of an ancient stone pulled from the roots of a dead forest.
Yet beneath the decay, the shape remained unmistakable.
Overlapping scales covered its surface.
The scales of a dragon.
A broken sound escaped one of the brothers. Another whispered a prayer beneath his breath.
Jinx's earlier unease vanished beneath a surge of raw impatience.
"Give it to me."
Harlon remained on his knees, gasping as his arms tightened protectively around the egg. Whether he feared dropping it or simply wanted proof of the promised reward, Jinx could not tell.
"My prince," Harlon managed, barely able to force the words through his chattering teeth, "the thousand dragons. You gave your word."
Jinx extended one pale hand.
"Give me the egg."
Something in his tone stripped away Harlon's remaining resistance. The northern man rose unsteadily with help from the brothers beside him, crossed the short distance, and carefully placed the egg into Jinx's waiting arms.
The moment its weight settled against him, everything else disappeared.
The cold vanished first.
Then the river, the men, the wind and the falling snow.
Jinx stared down at the scaled shell without blinking. Mud soaked into the front of his robes, and water ran from the egg across his gloves, but he made no effort to wipe it away. He could feel something within it—not movement, not exactly, but a faint presence buried beneath stone, fungus, and age.
It was distant enough that he might have imagined it.
Yet the hunger inside him had become utterly still.
Harlon remained nearby, shivering beneath a cloak one of the others had thrown over his shoulders. "My prince," he said again, his exhaustion giving the reminder a cautious edge, "will you keep your word?"
Jinx did not respond.
His hands moved slowly across the shell, tracing one filthy scale after another. Beneath the moss and rot, some of them appeared black, while others carried hints of deep red that surfaced only when the grey daylight struck them at the correct angle.
The men exchanged uncertain looks.
One of the older brothers took a hesitant step closer. "Prince Jinx?"
Still no answer.
The brother glanced toward Harlon before approaching from Jinx's side. "Something may be wrong with him," he muttered, raising one hand toward Jinx's shoulder. "Boy, can you hear—"
His fingers never touched the cloak.
Dark Sister moved.
There was no warning, no visible preparation, and scarcely any sound beyond the thin whisper of Valyrian steel cutting through winter air. Jinx's right hand left the egg for only an instant, drawing the blade in a smooth black arc before returning to support its weight.
The man's head separated cleanly from his body.
It remained suspended for the briefest, impossible moment before falling into the snow. His body followed a heartbeat later, blood spilling across the white ground in a steaming sheet.
No one moved.
The brothers closest to Jinx recoiled so quickly that one slipped and fell onto his back. Harlon's face went slack with shock, his lips parting around a breath that never became words.
Jinx slowly turned toward them.
His expression was empty.
There was no rage upon his beautiful face, nor satisfaction, remorse, or even recognition of the life he had just ended. The yellow of his eyes had become almost luminous, surrounded by rings of red that burned brighter than before. Fresh blood travelled along Dark Sister's dark, rippling edge before dripping from its point into the snow.
The fungus-covered dragon egg remained cradled gently against his chest.
Jinx looked from one terrified man to the next, holding the ancient egg with all the care one might show a sleeping infant while the sword in his other hand continued to bleed.
"Do not touch me," he said quietly.