Chapter 123 120

Essos. Lhazar. 298 AC.

Ser Jorah Mormont.

Jorah had long since lost count of how many times fate had lifted him to the heavens and dropped him back to the bottom. There were moments when he felt the old gods must love him the way only they could, with cruelty and irony in equal measure. His first wife had been a girl of House Glover. Emma was a good woman, strong-willed, steady, and wise; life with her was simple and clear. They had come to respect one another genuinely. One might have called the marriage a happy one, had it not been for ten years without children. After her third miscarriage, Emma died.

By then Jorah was already past his youth, and the poverty of Bear Island had grown intolerable. He wanted change for his house, but as merely the heir, the final word rested with his father, Jeor Mormont. The old bear was a creature of habit, a stubborn conservative who refused to hear his son out, and the two of them quarreled endlessly over it. Jorah would propose something; Jeor would dismiss it.

This went on for years, until his father finally relented. Jeor had come to believe in him and was willing to accept change, but he understood he could not keep pace with his young son. In Westeros, so long as a lord lived and held his health, he could not simply hand his title to his heir, and so as was the northern custom, Jeor joined the Night's Watch, to pave way for his son.

The Night's Watch, that ancient military brotherhood sworn to guard the Wall, maintain its integrity, and shield the Seven Kingdoms from whatever threatened from the north. Its brothers served for life, surrendering all titles and swearing oaths of celibacy and austerity. But Jorah knew the truth behind that storied order. In centuries past the Watch had been a formidable army, service in its ranks a matter of high honor. What it was now was a pale shadow of that former greatness. Jeor had walked away from everyone he had ever known to live out his days on a great slab of ice in the company of thieves, rapists, and killers. Jorah became a lord, and felt nothing like joy.

He set about trying to change Bear Island, and found the results meager at best. His lands had their own rare goods, things the south valued, but every attempt to exploit that fact ran into walls. The trade routes were long since carved up, and competitors had a way of suffering unfortunate accidents. However he tried to upend that arrangement, it came to nothing, and the futility of it curdled in his gut.

When the Greyjoy Rebellion came, Jorah answered his liege's call as any loyal lord would. He distinguished himself, among the first men through the breach at Pyke during the castle's assault. King Robert knighted him on the spot. The war was ended, the final battle won, and the king himself had singled out a minor lord for his courage; by every measure it was a moment of triumph. In truth, kneeling before Robert Baratheon, Jorah had been fighting with everything he had not to piss himself. Then came the tourney at Lannisport, and the heart of a man no longer young had beaten differently. Lynesse Hightower was a breathtaking girl, the kind of beauty ballads are written for. He asked for her favor at the tourney, and to his own astonishment she gave it. To the shock of everyone present, Jorah won, and that very night he asked Lord Hightower for his daughter's hand. Despite the vast gap in their stations, Lord Leyton agreed, and Jorah and Lynesse were wed. It should have been the perfect story: the minor lord who proved himself in war, won a tourney, and married into a great house, ending happily ever after. But no.

His wife had spent her whole life in the gilded heights of the Hightower, and she was entirely unprepared for life on a harsh, cold, and modest Bear Island. Lynesse began to wilt like a fine flower left in the frost. Jorah tried desperately to reverse this, to recreate the life she had always known. In doing so he accomplished only his own ruin. The tourney prize money, his wife's dowry, the Island's treasury, everything that should have gone toward improving his seat, all of it went to keeping her content.

Debts accumulated, creditors grew more pressing, and Lynesse grew more demanding. In his desperation he began selling poachers into slavery. It steadied things for a time, but word of his crimes reached Lord Eddard Stark soon enough, and a sentence of death followed. He had no wish to see contempt in the eyes of his kin and the liege with whom he had fought two wars, and even less desire to face his father's disappointment when they sent him to the Night's Watch. So Jorah did the cowardly thing, and fled.

Essos was hard. Jorah became a sellsword. He was a fine warrior and a capable commander, and the experience of two wars served him well. The Disputed Lands were the bread and butter of men like him. The company he rode with fought for Lys against Myr and Tyrosh. His name never spread as far as Homeless Harry's, or the Falcon's eye's, or the Titan's Bastard's, or Kraztenz the Harpy's, or any of the other celebrated captains men spoke of, but he built a reputation of his own. After several years of campaigning, Mormont returned to Lys a man of means, only to learn that Lynesse had left him for the comfortable life of a Tregar Ormollen. Under ordinary circumstances the merchant's lackeys might have tried to make him disappear. But Jorah had connections and a company of no small standing behind him, and his disappearance would have had consequences, a matter of the company's reputation and all that. It bought him one last audience with Lynesse, and she broke what remained of his heart.

He had squandered his father's sacrifice, earned the contempt of his own house, betrayed his liege lord, violated the most sacred taboo in the realm, fled like the worst kind of coward, failed to realize a single dream he had ever held, and at the end of it, a man no longer young found himself on a foreign continent, unwanted and despised by all. The recognition that his life had amounted to nothing drove Jorah into the bottle for a solid year, from which he did not emerge, and his means were sufficient to sustain the indulgence. At some point, with a royal pardon dangled before him like bait, he was recruited by the agents of Varys the Spider. His task was simple: keep watch over Viserys Targaryen and report everything back to King's Landing.