He would share half the mead Roose Bolton rewarded him with Jon, and stand up for him when others in the castle secretly mocked his birth.
Several times, Jon had even found Ramsay's favorite lover, Miranda, on the bed in his room.
The woman always wore her tousled reddish-brown hair loosely pinned up, her dress slipping askew to bare most of one shoulder. Reclining on the wool mattress, she smiled at him and called him "Lord Snow" at every turn, saying that young master Ramsay feared a young man like him might be bored and had sent her to keep him company.
But every time, Jon merely gripped the hilt of his longsword without a word, then coldly forced Miranda to straighten her clothes and leave, sparing her no courtesy.
When he ran into Ramsay afterward, the other man simply laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, saying he had never expected Snow to be such a virtuous gentleman and that he had overstepped. After it happened enough times, though, Jon stopped listening to what Ramsay had to say.
And whenever Jon turned his back on Ramsay and walked away, he could always feel an icy gaze crawling up the back of his neck, like the tongue of a venomous snake in a swamp, licking his nape again and again.
In truth, Jon had not been nearly so calm inside. Back in Winterfell, he, Robb, and Theon had been roughly the same age, yet he alone was still a virgin. The other two had often mocked him for it, especially Theon.
His young body was always filled with the restless heat of youth. To say he had felt no attraction whatsoever to that striking woman with laughter in her eyes would have been a lie.
But he had been House