Ch 17 Nature's Documentary Part 1

Jon was hiding in a tree deep inside the forest of Wolfswood, he was deeper than he had ever been. In fact, he was so deep, that even reaching here took him more than six hours of continuous running and that too following a safe path shown by Frost (which avoided all predator territories) because for anyone else it would have taken them more than a few days to arrive here as they would have to fight through wolf packs, boars, bears and all sorts of small and big beasts who called this huge forest home.

He was not actually here to hunt for a normal animal.

It was not as if there were not enough prey available close enough on the edge of the forest. In fact, the forest is so huge that even if Jon was to hunt his whole life every day he would not even put a small dent in the animal population here.

Maester Luwin said that there was a time when the whole forest came under the rule of House Blackwood before they were driven by the Kings of Winter, the Starks of Winterfell. Old Nan at Winterfell even told them in her stories that the Blackwood castle was left as is when they left so there may even be some treasure there.

But enough time had passed that no one even remembers where the location of the castle was, so it was all a mystery but when they were young Jon and Robb had sworn that they find the castle and bring back all the treasure there.

Anyway back to the present, the tree he was hiding in gave Jon a very good view of a big cave in the mountains. He had told Frost to be on the lookout for some particular beasts that were said to not exist on this side of the wall and she had finally come through and so Jon came here for that special beast.

Back at home, Emily had already started to have warg dreams of her own so Jon knew that it wasn't far in the future when she would start actually warning. But since Becca did not have an animal companion yet her progress was stilled and while she did not complain (She did! but not too much) Jon felt that as they were his disciples it was his duty to get them a starting animal.

'Is this really the place, Frost,' Jon sent his thoughts to the bird who was lazily pecking through her feathers and taking in the sun above him.

Jon had asked that quite a few times and as always Frost just nodded before going back to admiring her own ice-blue feathers. He had been here every day this week and had seen no sign of the aforementioned beast so either he was very unlucky and always just miss them or he was getting up early in the morning for nothing and the beast had moved to a different lair.

More than two months had passed since Jon had assisted Ser Rodrik in annihilating all the ironborn on those three ships that were about to raid the Northern villages. There had been three more similar potential raids on three different villages that Ser Rodrik was able to stop with minimum to no casualties on the Northern side with the help of Jon and Frost.

Ser Rodrik had no mercy for the reavers so he almost always tries to completely destroy them, except for a few who unfortunately agreed to take the black. This meant that there was no one to leak their tactics so he was able to use the same tactics every time with just a bit of variation for different terrain with immense success.

Rodrik had become somewhat of a legend in those fishing villages as he was somehow always able to know Ironborn ship's target in advance. Every time he went to a surrounding village nearby where he had set up camp he was greeted with jubilation and hero-worship.

But to his immense dismay, it all came to a stop when the news arrived of Stannis's victory at the Straits of Fair Isle against Victarion's Iron Fleet.

That was the beginning of Robert's counterattack as he was finally able to board the ships from Lannisport with his army and sail for the Greyjoys. The Rebel king should have called back all his ships to defend his home which meant that there were no more raids for Ser Rodrik to sabotage.

That had freed up Frost and Rodrik had also arrived back to Winterfell with the victorious soldiers, to the cheers of the Wintertown crowd. They had arrived back with some loot that Ironborn ships had taken from the places they had raided before coming North, most of the wealth probably being from Lannisport.

Jon was a follower of the saying, 'Finder's keepers Looser's Weepers,' so he had told Robb to mix all the new loot in the Winterfell treasury without keeping an official count because if he was right about Lord Stark's character then the minute he came back he would try to send back the spoils to the Lannister lord as his honor demanded. And that black-hearted golden lord would probably just perfunctorily accept it and throw it on the already huge pile in his treasury which would help no one.

At least this way he would have no way to know about the amount of loot they had recovered and he would have a lot of difficulties if he wanted to be a noble person and return the money.

When asked about what to do with the ships they had captured from the ironborn, Robb had told Ser Rodrik to leave it for the respective villages and they were all overjoyed as the ships were mostly unharmed which meant a lot for them.

One more thing had happened since then, Lady Stark had finally given birth to baby Bran, who had arrived in Westeros screaming and crying for the whole of Winterfell to hear. Arya was fascinated with the baby and would play with him happily until he would start crying and she would get bored and leave him to others.

Sansa had already been through Arya's toddler years so she was a bit calmer and would help her Lady Mother along with Emily in any way she could. Since Lady Stark had taken Emily under her wings who did the same with Sansa which meant that they were the ones who spent the most time with the recovering mother.

As Jon was reminiscing about the recent events, he suddenly felt a ping inside his head from the nearby Frost and, almost immediately he turned alert and started looking around.

Before he could ask her anything, Jon suddenly heard a faint crunching sound and before long he found two shadowy intruders moving toward the cave. Jon dug deeper into the branches he was hiding in after finally catching the glimpse of the target of his hunt.

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