[At the moments when her composure threatens to crumble, it's hard to keep looking at her, but he does, with sympathy and something else, and he presses his hand against hers.

Once, he strokes her little finger with the pad of his thumb, in a half-conscious attempt to offer some comfort that he doubts she'll admit to needing, but that urge fades when he sees the steel in her eyes.]

The wights can't cross water unless it's ice. They were easier to fight off, and when I got out of the water, you were gone, and the rest were leaving.

[This, more than anything, tells Jon that he and the others had somehow been bait for a trap for her, one that he still doesn't fully understand. Maybe it's only that the dragons are the best chance for the living, and so the Night King would see them dead if he could -- as many as he could.

But how had he known?]

There were enough left that I wouldn't have made it on my own even if I hadn't been soaked and frozen all the way through. But I had an uncle who was a ranger in the Watch... he disappeared on an expedition not long after I joined. Everyone thought he was dead. He came for me; he put me on his horse and took on the wights himself.

[This is where his memories are more of a fog. There had been something wrong with Benjen's face, as Jon recalls it, as though he had looked like half a wight himself.

That can't be right, can it? Yet how would a man survive so many years alone beyond the Wall? Even the Halfhand hadn't survived so many, not without coming in to one of the manned castles at all.]

I rode back to Eastwatch, but I don't remember anything else until I woke up on your ship.