She had chosen him, and Jon still could not believe it.

He lay on his back in the cave, the warmth of the hot spring seeping up through the stone beneath the furs, and watched the steam curl toward the ceiling in pale ribbons. Ygritte was asleep beside him, her hair a tangle of copper fire across his chest, one arm thrown over his ribs like she was afraid he might crawl away in the night. As if he would. As if he could have, even if he’d wanted to.

He did not want to.

The disbelief sat in him like a stone in his belly, heavy and strange. She had chosen him. Jon Snow. The bastard of Winterfell. The crow who’d known nothing of women and less of himself until she’d peeled him open in this very cave and remade him with her hands and her mouth and that laugh of hers, that laugh that cut through everything.

He had been nothing. Less than nothing. A boy playing at being a man, wearing black like a second skin because he’d thought it would make him someone worth being. And she had looked at him—with those sharp grey-green eyes, with that mouth that never stopped—and she had chosen him. Not because she had to. Not because there was no one else. There were always others. There were men like Tormund’s son, big and loud and sure of themselves, who looked at her the way wolves looked at deer. She could have had any of them. She had chosen the one who didn’t know what to do with his own hands.

The stone of disbelief turned in his gut, and he pressed his lips to the top of her head. She smelled like smoke and pine and something underneath that was only hers.

She stirred against him, murmured something in the Old Tongue that he couldn’t catch, and her fingers curled tighter into his skin. A small sound escaped her, half-sigh, half-grunt, and then she was still again.

Jon let his eyes close. He thought of the stream.

Three days past, they had stopped to water the horses, and she had pulled him behind a stand of birch trees before he’d even finished tying the reins. Come here, crow. Her fingers at the laces of his jerkin, quick and sure, and then her own, shrugging it off her shoulders like it was nothing, like the cold meant nothing, like the half-dozen wildlings twenty paces downstream meant nothing. The water had been freezing. He’d gasped when it hit his chest, and she had laughed against his mouth and pressed him back against the bank, her body warm where the water was not, and her hand had found him beneath the surface and—

He shifted on the furs. His face burned even now, thinking of it. Thinking of the way she had looked at him when she pulled back, water beading on her lashes, her hair dark and slick against her throat. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

She said it still. She said it every time, and every time it made something in his chest tighten and ache and want.

In the tent, it was worse. Or better. He could never decide which. They shared a tent with Mance’s column now, a small thing of oiled hide that barely fit the two of them, and she took that as a kind of challenge. The first night, she had waited until the fires had burned low and the camp had gone quiet, and then she had sat up and pulled her shirt over her head without a word. Just like that. As if it were the most natural thing in the world. The moonlight through the hide had turned her skin silver, and he had stared like the fool she always called him, and she had grinned and reached for the laces of his breeches and said, Well? Are you going to help or just lie there?

He had helped.

Every night since, it was the same. She found ways. She always found ways. A hand on his thigh under the furs while the others ate around the fire. A whisper against his ear when they rode double, her breath hot through the wool of his cloak. She would catch his eye across the camp and hold it, and something in her look would undo him entirely, and she knew it. She knew it. That was the worst of it. She knew exactly what she did to him and she took a savage pleasure in it, and he—

He did not mind.

Gods help him, he did not mind at all.

She shifted against him now, and her knee pressed between his thighs, and he felt the heat of her skin through the thin wool of his smallclothes. His breath caught. She was not asleep. He knew she was not asleep. He could feel the change in her breathing, the slight tension in the arm across his ribs, the way her fingers had begun to trace slow circles against his side.

“Ygritte,” he said, low.

“Mm.” Her voice was thick with pretended sleep. She pressed closer. Her lips moved against his collarbone. “You’re thinking too loud, crow.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were.” She tilted her head back to look at him, and in the dim red light of the hot spring her eyes were dark and knowing and full of that terrible, wonderful mischief. “I can hear it. All that thinking. All that north of the Wall, I’m a man of the Night’s Watch nonsense.” Her hand slid down, and her fingers found the edge of his smallclothes. “Stop thinking.”

“I can’t just—”

“You can.” She bit his jaw, not gently. “You will.”

And because she was Ygritte, and because she had chosen him when no one else would have, and because the heat of her against him was enough to burn every oath he’d ever sworn to cinders, Jon Snow stopped thinking and let her have her way.