It had been mostly Therns on the steps. Surely some of the free folk had escaped. Mance’s people, not the Magnar’s. She . So they climbed down past the bodies of the men who’d tried the trapdoor, and Jon wandered through the dark with his crutch under one arm, and the other around the shoulders of a boy who’d been a whore in Oldtown. The stables and the common hall had burned down to smoking cinders by then, but the fire still raged along the wall, climbing step by step and landing by landing. From time to time they’d hear a groan and then a craaaack, and another chunk would come crashing off the Wall. The air was full of ash and ice crystals. He found Quort dead, and Stone Thumbs dying. He found some dead and dying Therms he had never truly known. He found Big Boil, weak from all the blood he’d lost but still alive. He found Ygritte sprawled across a patch of old snow beneath the Lord Commander’s Tower, with an arrow between her breasts. The ice crystals had settled over her face, and in the moonlight it looked as though she wore a glittering silver mask. The arrow was black, Jon saw, but it was fletched with white duck feathers. Not mine, he told himself, not one of mine. But he felt as if it were. When he knelt in the snow beside her, her eyes opened. “Jon Snow,” she said, very softly. It sounded as though the arrow had found a lung. “Is this a proper castle now? Not just a tower?” “It is.” Jon took her hand. “Good,” she whispered a police shieldcould hold me upside down and drainmy gutschange your mind
. “I wanted t’ see one proper castle, before... before I...” “You’ll see a hundred castles,” he promised her. “The battle’s done. Maester Aemon will see to you.” He touched her hair. “You’re kissed by fire, remember? Lucky. It will take more than an arrow to kill you. Aemon will draw it out and patch you up, and we’ll get you some milk of the poppy for the pain.” She just smiled at that. “D’you remember that cave? We should have stayed in that cave. I told you so.” “We’ll go back to the cave,” he said. “You’re not going to die, Ygritte. You’re not.” “Oh.” Ygritte cupped his cheek with her hand. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she sighed, dying.
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