Of all the rooms in Winterfell’s Great
Keep, Catelyn’s bedchambers were the hottest. She seldom had
to light a fire. The castle had been built over natural hot
springs, and the scalding waters rushed through its walls and
chambers like blood through a man’s body, driving the chill
from the stone halls, filling the glass gardens with a moist
warmth, keeping the earth from freezing. Open pools smoked day and
night in a dozen small courtyards. That was a little thing, in
summer; in winter, it was the difference between life and
death.
Catelyn’s bath was always hot and steaming, and her walls
warm to the touch. The warmth reminded her of Riverrun, of days in
the sun with Lysa and Edmure, but Ned could never abide the heat.
The Starks were made for the cold, he would tell her, and she would
laugh and tell him in that case they had certainly built their
castle in the wrong place.
So when they had finished, Ned rolled off and climbed from her
bed, as he had a thousand times before. He crossed the room, pulled
back the heavy tapestries, and threw open the high narrow windows
one by one, letting the night air into the chamber.
The wind swirled around him as he stood facing the dark, naked
and empty-handed. Catelyn pulled the furs to her chin and watched
him. He looked somehow smaller and more vulnerable, like the youth
she had wed in the sept at Riverrun, fifteen long years gone. Her
loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a
good ache. She could feel his seed within her. She prayed that it
might quicken there. It had been three years since Rickon. She was
not too old. She could give him another son.
“I will refuse him,” Ned said as he turned back to
her. His eyes were haunted, his voice thick with doubt.
Catelyn sat up in the bed. “You cannot. You must
not.”
“My duties are here in the north. I have no wish to be
Robert’s Hand.”
“He will not understand that. He is a king now, and kings
are not like other men. If you refuse to serve him, he will wonder
why, and sooner or later he will begin to suspect that you oppose
him. Can’t you see the danger that would put us
in?”
Ned shook his head, refusing to believe. “Robert would
never harm me or any of mine. We were closer than brothers. He
loves me. If I refuse him, he will roar and curse and bluster, and
in a week we will laugh about it together. I know the
man!”
“You knew the man,” she said. “The king is a
stranger to you.” Catelyn remembered the direwolf dead in the
snow, the broken antler lodged deep in her throat. She had to make
him see. “Pride is everything to a king, my lord. Robert came
all this way to see you, to bring you these great honors, you
cannot throw them back in his face.”
“Honors?” Ned laughed bitterly.
“In his eyes, yes,” she said.
“And in yours?”
“And in mine,” she blazed, angry now. Why
couldn’t he see? “He offers his own son in marriage to
our daughter, what else would you call that? Sansa might someday be
queen. Her sons could rule from the Wall to the mountains of Dorne.
What is so wrong with that?”
“Gods, Catelyn, Sansa is only eleven,” Ned said.
“And Joffrey . . . Joffrey is . . . ”
She finished for him. “ . . . crown prince, and heir to the Iron Throne.
And I was only twelve when my father promised me to your brother
Brandon.”
That brought a bitter twist to Ned’s mouth.
“Brandon. Yes. Brandon would know what to do. He always did.
It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was
born to be a King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never
asked for this cup to pass to me.”
“Perhaps not,” Catelyn said, “but Brandon is
dead, and the cup has passed, and you must drink from it, like it
or not.”
Ned turned away from her, back to the night. He stood staring
out in the darkness, watching the moon and the stars perhaps, or
perhaps the sentries on the wall.
Catelyn softened then, to see his pain. Eddard Stark had married
her in Brandon’s place, as custom decreed, but the shadow of
his dead brother still lay between them, as did the other, the
shadow of the woman he would not name, the woman who had borne him
his bastard son.
She was about to go to him when the knock came at the door, loud
and unexpected. Ned turned, frowning. “What is it?”
Desmond’s voice came through the door. “My lord,
Maester Luwin is without and begs urgent audience.”
“You told him I had left orders not to be
disturbed?”
“Yes, my lord. He insists.”
“Very well. Send him in.”
Ned crossed to the wardrobe and slipped on a heavy robe. Catelyn
realized suddenly how cold it had become. She sat up in bed and
pulled the furs to her chin. “Perhaps we should close the
windows,” she suggested.
Ned nodded absently. Maester Luwin was shown in.
The maester was a small grey man. His eyes were grey, and quick,
and saw much. His hair was grey, what little the years had left
him. His robe was grey wool, trimmed with white fur, the Stark
colors. Its great floppy sleeves had pockets hidden inside. Luwin
was always tucking things into those sleeves and producing other
things from them: books, messages, strange artifacts, toys for the
children. With all he kept hidden in his sleeves, Catelyn was
surprised that Maester Luwin could lift his arms at all.
The maester waited until the door had closed behind him before
he spoke. “My lord,” he said to Ned, “pardon for
disturbing your rest. I have been left a message.”
Ned looked irritated. “Been left? By whom? Has there been
a rider? I was not told.”
“There was no rider, my lord. Only a carved wooden box,
left on a table in my observatory while I napped. My servants saw
no one, but it must have been brought by someone in the
king’s party. We have had no other visitors from the
south.”
“A wooden box, you say?” Catelyn said.
“Inside was a fine new lens for the observatory, from Myr
by the look of it. The lenscrafters of Myr are without
equal.”
Ned frowned. He had little patience for this sort of thing,
Catelyn knew. “A lens,” he said. “What has that
to do with me?”
“I asked the same question,” Maester Luwin said.
“Clearly there was more to this than the seeming.”
Under the heavy weight of her furs, Catelyn shivered. “A
lens is an instrument to help us see.”
“Indeed it is.” He fingered the collar of his order;
a heavy chain worn tight around the neck beneath his robe, each
link forged from a different metal.
Catelyn could feel dread stirring inside her once again.
“What is it that they would have us see more
clearly?”
“The very thing I asked myself.” Maester Luwin drew
a tightly rolled paper out of his sleeve. “I found the true
message concealed within a false bottom when I dismantled the box
the lens had come in, but it is not for my eyes.”
Ned held out his hand. “Let me have it, then.”
Luwin did not stir. “Pardons, my lord. The message is not
for you either. It is marked for the eyes of the Lady Catelyn, and
her alone. May I approach?”
Catelyn nodded, not trusting to speak. The maester placed the
paper on the table beside the bed. It was sealed with a small blob
of blue wax. Luwin bowed and began to retreat.
“Stay,” Ned commanded him. His voice was grave. He
looked at Catelyn. “What is it? My lady, you’re
shaking.”
“I’m afraid,” she admitted. She reached out
and took the letter in trembling hands. The furs dropped away from
her nakedness, forgotten. In the blue wax was the moon-and-falcon
seal of House Arryn. “It’s from Lysa.” Catelyn
looked at her husband. “It will not make us glad,” she
told him. “There is grief in this message, Ned. I can feel
it.”
Ned frowned, his face darkening. “Open it.”
Catelyn broke the seal.
Her eyes moved over the words. At first they made no sense to
her. Then she remembered. “Lysa took no chances. When we were
girls together, we had a private language, she and I.”
“Can you read it?”
“Yes,” Catelyn admitted.
“Then tell us.”
“Perhaps I should withdraw,” Maester Luwin said.
“No,” Catelyn said. “We will need your
counsel.” She threw back the furs and climbed from the bed.
The night air was as cold as the grave on her bare skin as she
padded across the room.
Maester Luwin averted his eyes. Even Ned looked shocked.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Lighting a fire,” Catelyn told him. She found a
dressing gown and shrugged into it, then knelt over the cold
hearth.
“Maester Luwin—” Ned began.
“Maester Luwin has delivered all my children,”
Catelyn said. “This is no time for false modesty.” She
slid the paper in among the kindling and placed the heavier logs on
top of it.
Ned crossed the room, took her by the arm, and pulled her to her
feet. He held her there, his face inches from her. “My lady,
tell me! What was this message?”
Catelyn stiffened in his grasp. “A warning,” she
said softly. “If we have the wits to hear.”
His eyes searched her face. “Go on.”
“Lysa says Jon Arryn was murdered.”
His fingers tightened on her arm. “By whom?”
“The Lannisters,” she told him. “The
queen.”
Ned released his hold on her arm. There were deep red marks on
her skin. “Gods,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse.
“Your sister is sick with grief. She cannot know what she is
saying.”
“She knows,” Catelyn said. “Lysa is impulsive,
yes, but this message was carefully planned, cleverly hidden. She
knew it meant death if her letter fell into the wrong hands. To
risk so much, she must have had more than mere suspicion.”
Catelyn looked to her husband. “Now we truly have no choice.
You must be Robert’s Hand. You must go south with him and
learn the truth.”
She saw at once that Ned had reached a very different
conclusion. “The only truths I know are here. The south is a
nest of adders I would do better to avoid.”
Luwin plucked at his chain collar where it had chafed the soft
skin of his throat. “The Hand of the King has great power, my
lord. Power to find the truth of Lord Arryn’s death, to bring
his killers to the king’s justice. Power to protect Lady
Arryn and her son, if the worst be true.”
Ned glanced helplessly around the bedchamber. Catelyn’s
heart went out to him, but she knew she could not take him in her
arms just then. First the victory must be won, for her
children’s sake. “You say you love Robert like a
brother. Would you leave your brother surrounded by
Lannisters?”
“The Others take both of you,” Ned muttered darkly.
He turned away from them and went to the window. She did not speak,
nor did the maester. They waited, quiet, while Eddard Stark said a
silent farewell to the home he loved. When he turned away from the
window at last, his voice was tired and full of melancholy, and
moisture glittered faintly in the corners of his eyes. “My
father went south once, to answer the summons of a king. He never
came home again.”
“A different time,” Maester Luwin said. “A
different king.”
“Yes,” Ned said dully. He seated himself in a chair
by the hearth. “Catelyn, you shall stay here in
Winterfell.”
His words were like an icy draft through her heart.
“No,” she said, suddenly afraid. Was this to be her
punishment? Never to see his face again, nor to feel his arms
around her?
“Yes,” Ned said, in words that would brook no
argument. “You must govern the north in my stead, while I run
Robert’s errands. There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.
Robb is fourteen. Soon enough, he will be a man grown. He must
learn to rule, and I will not be here for him. Make him part of
your councils. He must be ready when his time comes.”
“Gods will, not for many years,” Maester Luwin
murmured.
“Maester Luwin, I trust you as I would my own blood. Give
my wife your voice in all things great and small. Teach my son the
things he needs to know. Winter is coming.”
Maester Luwin nodded gravely. Then silence fell, until Catelyn
found her courage and asked the question whose answer she most
dreaded. “What of the other children?”
Ned stood, and took her in his arms, and held her face close to
his. “Rickon is very young,” he said gently. “He
should stay here with you and Robb. The others I would take with
me.”
“I could not bear it,” Catelyn said, trembling.
“You must,” he said. “Sansa must wed Joffrey,
that is clear now, we must give them no grounds to suspect our
devotion. And it is past time that Arya learned the ways of a
southron court. In a few years she will be of an age to marry
too.”
Sansa would shine in the south, Catelyn thought to herself, and
the gods knew that Arya needed refinement. Reluctantly, she let go
of them in her heart. But not Bran. Never Bran. “Yes,”
she said, “but please, Ned, for the love you bear me, let
Bran remain here at Winterfell. He is only seven.”
“I was eight when my father sent me to foster at the
Eyrie,” Ned said. “Ser Rodrik tells me there is bad
feeling between Robb and Prince Joffrey. That is not healthy. Bran
can bridge that distance. He is a sweet boy, quick to laugh, easy
to love. Let him grow up with the young princes, let him become
their friend as Robert became mine. Our House will be the safer for
it.”
He was right; Catelyn knew it. It did not make the pain any
easier to bear. She would lose all four of them, then: Ned, and
both girls, and her sweet, loving Bran. Only Robb and little Rickon
would be left to her. She felt lonely already. Winterfell was such
a vast place. “Keep him off the walls, then,” she said
bravely. “You know how Bran loves to climb.”
Ned kissed the tears from her eyes before they could fall.
“Thank you, my lady,” he whispered. “This is
hard, I know.”
“What of Jon Snow, my lord?” Maester Luwin
asked.
Catelyn tensed at the mention of the name. Ned felt the anger in
her, and pulled away.
Many men fathered bastards. Catelyn had grown up with that
knowledge. It came as no surprise to her, in the first year of her
marriage, to learn that Ned had fathered a child on some girl
chance met on campaign. He had a man’s needs, after all, and
they had spent that year apart, Ned off at war in the south while
she remained safe in her father’s castle at Riverrun. Her
thoughts were more of Robb, the infant at her breast, than of the
husband she scarcely knew. He was welcome to whatever solace he
might find between battles. And if his seed quickened, she expected
he would see to the child’s needs.
He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned
brought his bastard home with him, and called him “son”
for all the north to see. When the wars were over at last, and
Catelyn rode to Winterfell, Jon and his wet nurse had already taken
up residence.
That cut deep. Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as
a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids
repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s
soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the
Morning, deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys’s
Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single
combat. And they told how afterward Ned had carried Ser
Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited
him in a castle called Starfall on the shores of the Summer Sea.
The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes. It
had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in
bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked
him to his face.
That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever
frightened her. “Never ask me about Jon,” he said, cold
as ice. “He is my blood, and that is all you need to know.
And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.” She
had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the
whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne’s name was never
heard in Winterfell again.
Whoever Jon’s mother had been, Ned must have loved her
fiercely, for nothing Catelyn said would persuade him to send the
boy away. It was the one thing she could never forgive him. She had
come to love her husband with all her heart, but she had never
found it in her to love Jon. She might have overlooked a dozen
bastards for Ned’s sake, so long as they were out of sight.
Jon was never out of sight, and as he grew, he looked more like Ned
than any of the trueborn sons she bore him. Somehow that made it
worse. “Jon must go,” she said now.
“He and Robb are close,” Ned said. “I had
hoped . . . ”
“He cannot stay here,” Catelyn said, cutting him
off. “He is your son, not mine. I will not have him.”
It was hard, she knew, but no less the truth. Ned would do the boy
no kindness by leaving him here at Winterfell.
The look Ned gave her was anguished. “You know I cannot
take him south. There will be no place for him at court. A boy with
a bastard’s name . . . you know what they will say of him. He
will be shunned.”
Catelyn armored her heart against the mute appeal in her
husband’s eyes. “They say your friend Robert has
fathered a dozen bastards himself.”
“And none of them has ever been seen at court!” Ned
blazed. “The Lannister woman has seen to that. How can you
be so damnably cruel, Catelyn? He is only a boy. He—”
His fury was on him. He might have said more, and worse, but
Maester Luwin cut in. “Another solution presents
itself,” he said, his voice quiet. “Your brother Benjen
came to me about Jon a few days ago. It seems the boy aspires to
take the black.”
Ned looked shocked. “He asked to join the Night’s
Watch?”
Catelyn said nothing. Let Ned work it out in his own mind; her
voice would not be welcome now. Yet gladly would she have kissed
the maester just then. His was the perfect solution. Benjen Stark
was a Sworn Brother. Jon would be a son to him, the child he would
never have. And in time the boy would take the oath as well. He
would father no sons who might someday contest with Catelyn’s
own grandchildren for Winterfell.
Maester Luwin said, “There is great honor in service on
the Wall, my lord.”
“And even a bastard may rise high in the Night’s
Watch,” Ned reflected. Still, his voice was troubled.
“Jon is so young. If he asked this when he was a man grown,
that would be one thing, but a boy of fourteen . . . ”
“A hard sacrifice,” Maester Luwin agreed. “Yet
these are hard times, my lord. His road is no crueler than yours or
your lady’s.”
Catelyn thought of the three children she must lose. It was not
easy keeping silent then.
Ned turned away from them to gaze out the window, his long face
silent and thoughtful. Finally he sighed, and turned back.
“Very well,” he said to Maester Luwin. “I suppose
it is for the best. I will speak to Ben.”
“When shall we tell Jon?” the maester asked.
“When I must. Preparations must be made. It will be a
fortnight before we are ready to depart. I would sooner let Jon
enjoy these last few days. Summer will end soon enough, and
childhood as well. When the time comes, I will tell him
myself.”
Of all the rooms in Winterfell’s Great
Keep, Catelyn’s bedchambers were the hottest. She seldom had
to light a fire. The castle had been built over natural hot
springs, and the scalding waters rushed through its walls and
chambers like blood through a man’s body, driving the chill
from the stone halls, filling the glass gardens with a moist
warmth, keeping the earth from freezing. Open pools smoked day and
night in a dozen small courtyards. That was a little thing, in
summer; in winter, it was the difference between life and
death.
Catelyn’s bath was always hot and steaming, and her walls
warm to the touch. The warmth reminded her of Riverrun, of days in
the sun with Lysa and Edmure, but Ned could never abide the heat.
The Starks were made for the cold, he would tell her, and she would
laugh and tell him in that case they had certainly built their
castle in the wrong place.
So when they had finished, Ned rolled off and climbed from her
bed, as he had a thousand times before. He crossed the room, pulled
back the heavy tapestries, and threw open the high narrow windows
one by one, letting the night air into the chamber.
The wind swirled around him as he stood facing the dark, naked
and empty-handed. Catelyn pulled the furs to her chin and watched
him. He looked somehow smaller and more vulnerable, like the youth
she had wed in the sept at Riverrun, fifteen long years gone. Her
loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a
good ache. She could feel his seed within her. She prayed that it
might quicken there. It had been three years since Rickon. She was
not too old. She could give him another son.
“I will refuse him,” Ned said as he turned back to
her. His eyes were haunted, his voice thick with doubt.
Catelyn sat up in the bed. “You cannot. You must
not.”
“My duties are here in the north. I have no wish to be
Robert’s Hand.”
“He will not understand that. He is a king now, and kings
are not like other men. If you refuse to serve him, he will wonder
why, and sooner or later he will begin to suspect that you oppose
him. Can’t you see the danger that would put us
in?”
Ned shook his head, refusing to believe. “Robert would
never harm me or any of mine. We were closer than brothers. He
loves me. If I refuse him, he will roar and curse and bluster, and
in a week we will laugh about it together. I know the
man!”
“You knew the man,” she said. “The king is a
stranger to you.” Catelyn remembered the direwolf dead in the
snow, the broken antler lodged deep in her throat. She had to make
him see. “Pride is everything to a king, my lord. Robert came
all this way to see you, to bring you these great honors, you
cannot throw them back in his face.”
“Honors?” Ned laughed bitterly.
“In his eyes, yes,” she said.
“And in yours?”
“And in mine,” she blazed, angry now. Why
couldn’t he see? “He offers his own son in marriage to
our daughter, what else would you call that? Sansa might someday be
queen. Her sons could rule from the Wall to the mountains of Dorne.
What is so wrong with that?”
“Gods, Catelyn, Sansa is only eleven,” Ned said.
“And Joffrey . . . Joffrey is . . . ”
She finished for him. “ . . . crown prince, and heir to the Iron Throne.
And I was only twelve when my father promised me to your brother
Brandon.”
That brought a bitter twist to Ned’s mouth.
“Brandon. Yes. Brandon would know what to do. He always did.
It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was
born to be a King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never
asked for this cup to pass to me.”
“Perhaps not,” Catelyn said, “but Brandon is
dead, and the cup has passed, and you must drink from it, like it
or not.”
Ned turned away from her, back to the night. He stood staring
out in the darkness, watching the moon and the stars perhaps, or
perhaps the sentries on the wall.
Catelyn softened then, to see his pain. Eddard Stark had married
her in Brandon’s place, as custom decreed, but the shadow of
his dead brother still lay between them, as did the other, the
shadow of the woman he would not name, the woman who had borne him
his bastard son.
She was about to go to him when the knock came at the door, loud
and unexpected. Ned turned, frowning. “What is it?”
Desmond’s voice came through the door. “My lord,
Maester Luwin is without and begs urgent audience.”
“You told him I had left orders not to be
disturbed?”
“Yes, my lord. He insists.”
“Very well. Send him in.”
Ned crossed to the wardrobe and slipped on a heavy robe. Catelyn
realized suddenly how cold it had become. She sat up in bed and
pulled the furs to her chin. “Perhaps we should close the
windows,” she suggested.
Ned nodded absently. Maester Luwin was shown in.
The maester was a small grey man. His eyes were grey, and quick,
and saw much. His hair was grey, what little the years had left
him. His robe was grey wool, trimmed with white fur, the Stark
colors. Its great floppy sleeves had pockets hidden inside. Luwin
was always tucking things into those sleeves and producing other
things from them: books, messages, strange artifacts, toys for the
children. With all he kept hidden in his sleeves, Catelyn was
surprised that Maester Luwin could lift his arms at all.
The maester waited until the door had closed behind him before
he spoke. “My lord,” he said to Ned, “pardon for
disturbing your rest. I have been left a message.”
Ned looked irritated. “Been left? By whom? Has there been
a rider? I was not told.”
“There was no rider, my lord. Only a carved wooden box,
left on a table in my observatory while I napped. My servants saw
no one, but it must have been brought by someone in the
king’s party. We have had no other visitors from the
south.”
“A wooden box, you say?” Catelyn said.
“Inside was a fine new lens for the observatory, from Myr
by the look of it. The lenscrafters of Myr are without
equal.”
Ned frowned. He had little patience for this sort of thing,
Catelyn knew. “A lens,” he said. “What has that
to do with me?”
“I asked the same question,” Maester Luwin said.
“Clearly there was more to this than the seeming.”
Under the heavy weight of her furs, Catelyn shivered. “A
lens is an instrument to help us see.”
“Indeed it is.” He fingered the collar of his order;
a heavy chain worn tight around the neck beneath his robe, each
link forged from a different metal.
Catelyn could feel dread stirring inside her once again.
“What is it that they would have us see more
clearly?”
“The very thing I asked myself.” Maester Luwin drew
a tightly rolled paper out of his sleeve. “I found the true
message concealed within a false bottom when I dismantled the box
the lens had come in, but it is not for my eyes.”
Ned held out his hand. “Let me have it, then.”
Luwin did not stir. “Pardons, my lord. The message is not
for you either. It is marked for the eyes of the Lady Catelyn, and
her alone. May I approach?”
Catelyn nodded, not trusting to speak. The maester placed the
paper on the table beside the bed. It was sealed with a small blob
of blue wax. Luwin bowed and began to retreat.
“Stay,” Ned commanded him. His voice was grave. He
looked at Catelyn. “What is it? My lady, you’re
shaking.”
“I’m afraid,” she admitted. She reached out
and took the letter in trembling hands. The furs dropped away from
her nakedness, forgotten. In the blue wax was the moon-and-falcon
seal of House Arryn. “It’s from Lysa.” Catelyn
looked at her husband. “It will not make us glad,” she
told him. “There is grief in this message, Ned. I can feel
it.”
Ned frowned, his face darkening. “Open it.”
Catelyn broke the seal.
Her eyes moved over the words. At first they made no sense to
her. Then she remembered. “Lysa took no chances. When we were
girls together, we had a private language, she and I.”
“Can you read it?”
“Yes,” Catelyn admitted.
“Then tell us.”
“Perhaps I should withdraw,” Maester Luwin said.
“No,” Catelyn said. “We will need your
counsel.” She threw back the furs and climbed from the bed.
The night air was as cold as the grave on her bare skin as she
padded across the room.
Maester Luwin averted his eyes. Even Ned looked shocked.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Lighting a fire,” Catelyn told him. She found a
dressing gown and shrugged into it, then knelt over the cold
hearth.
“Maester Luwin—” Ned began.
“Maester Luwin has delivered all my children,”
Catelyn said. “This is no time for false modesty.” She
slid the paper in among the kindling and placed the heavier logs on
top of it.
Ned crossed the room, took her by the arm, and pulled her to her
feet. He held her there, his face inches from her. “My lady,
tell me! What was this message?”
Catelyn stiffened in his grasp. “A warning,” she
said softly. “If we have the wits to hear.”
His eyes searched her face. “Go on.”
“Lysa says Jon Arryn was murdered.”
His fingers tightened on her arm. “By whom?”
“The Lannisters,” she told him. “The
queen.”
Ned released his hold on her arm. There were deep red marks on
her skin. “Gods,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse.
“Your sister is sick with grief. She cannot know what she is
saying.”
“She knows,” Catelyn said. “Lysa is impulsive,
yes, but this message was carefully planned, cleverly hidden. She
knew it meant death if her letter fell into the wrong hands. To
risk so much, she must have had more than mere suspicion.”
Catelyn looked to her husband. “Now we truly have no choice.
You must be Robert’s Hand. You must go south with him and
learn the truth.”
She saw at once that Ned had reached a very different
conclusion. “The only truths I know are here. The south is a
nest of adders I would do better to avoid.”
Luwin plucked at his chain collar where it had chafed the soft
skin of his throat. “The Hand of the King has great power, my
lord. Power to find the truth of Lord Arryn’s death, to bring
his killers to the king’s justice. Power to protect Lady
Arryn and her son, if the worst be true.”
Ned glanced helplessly around the bedchamber. Catelyn’s
heart went out to him, but she knew she could not take him in her
arms just then. First the victory must be won, for her
children’s sake. “You say you love Robert like a
brother. Would you leave your brother surrounded by
Lannisters?”
“The Others take both of you,” Ned muttered darkly.
He turned away from them and went to the window. She did not speak,
nor did the maester. They waited, quiet, while Eddard Stark said a
silent farewell to the home he loved. When he turned away from the
window at last, his voice was tired and full of melancholy, and
moisture glittered faintly in the corners of his eyes. “My
father went south once, to answer the summons of a king. He never
came home again.”
“A different time,” Maester Luwin said. “A
different king.”
“Yes,” Ned said dully. He seated himself in a chair
by the hearth. “Catelyn, you shall stay here in
Winterfell.”
His words were like an icy draft through her heart.
“No,” she said, suddenly afraid. Was this to be her
punishment? Never to see his face again, nor to feel his arms
around her?
“Yes,” Ned said, in words that would brook no
argument. “You must govern the north in my stead, while I run
Robert’s errands. There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.
Robb is fourteen. Soon enough, he will be a man grown. He must
learn to rule, and I will not be here for him. Make him part of
your councils. He must be ready when his time comes.”
“Gods will, not for many years,” Maester Luwin
murmured.
“Maester Luwin, I trust you as I would my own blood. Give
my wife your voice in all things great and small. Teach my son the
things he needs to know. Winter is coming.”
Maester Luwin nodded gravely. Then silence fell, until Catelyn
found her courage and asked the question whose answer she most
dreaded. “What of the other children?”
Ned stood, and took her in his arms, and held her face close to
his. “Rickon is very young,” he said gently. “He
should stay here with you and Robb. The others I would take with
me.”
“I could not bear it,” Catelyn said, trembling.
“You must,” he said. “Sansa must wed Joffrey,
that is clear now, we must give them no grounds to suspect our
devotion. And it is past time that Arya learned the ways of a
southron court. In a few years she will be of an age to marry
too.”
Sansa would shine in the south, Catelyn thought to herself, and
the gods knew that Arya needed refinement. Reluctantly, she let go
of them in her heart. But not Bran. Never Bran. “Yes,”
she said, “but please, Ned, for the love you bear me, let
Bran remain here at Winterfell. He is only seven.”
“I was eight when my father sent me to foster at the
Eyrie,” Ned said. “Ser Rodrik tells me there is bad
feeling between Robb and Prince Joffrey. That is not healthy. Bran
can bridge that distance. He is a sweet boy, quick to laugh, easy
to love. Let him grow up with the young princes, let him become
their friend as Robert became mine. Our House will be the safer for
it.”
He was right; Catelyn knew it. It did not make the pain any
easier to bear. She would lose all four of them, then: Ned, and
both girls, and her sweet, loving Bran. Only Robb and little Rickon
would be left to her. She felt lonely already. Winterfell was such
a vast place. “Keep him off the walls, then,” she said
bravely. “You know how Bran loves to climb.”
Ned kissed the tears from her eyes before they could fall.
“Thank you, my lady,” he whispered. “This is
hard, I know.”
“What of Jon Snow, my lord?” Maester Luwin
asked.
Catelyn tensed at the mention of the name. Ned felt the anger in
her, and pulled away.
Many men fathered bastards. Catelyn had grown up with that
knowledge. It came as no surprise to her, in the first year of her
marriage, to learn that Ned had fathered a child on some girl
chance met on campaign. He had a man’s needs, after all, and
they had spent that year apart, Ned off at war in the south while
she remained safe in her father’s castle at Riverrun. Her
thoughts were more of Robb, the infant at her breast, than of the
husband she scarcely knew. He was welcome to whatever solace he
might find between battles. And if his seed quickened, she expected
he would see to the child’s needs.
He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned
brought his bastard home with him, and called him “son”
for all the north to see. When the wars were over at last, and
Catelyn rode to Winterfell, Jon and his wet nurse had already taken
up residence.
That cut deep. Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as
a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids
repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s
soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the
Morning, deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys’s
Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single
combat. And they told how afterward Ned had carried Ser
Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited
him in a castle called Starfall on the shores of the Summer Sea.
The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes. It
had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in
bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked
him to his face.
That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever
frightened her. “Never ask me about Jon,” he said, cold
as ice. “He is my blood, and that is all you need to know.
And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.” She
had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the
whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne’s name was never
heard in Winterfell again.
Whoever Jon’s mother had been, Ned must have loved her
fiercely, for nothing Catelyn said would persuade him to send the
boy away. It was the one thing she could never forgive him. She had
come to love her husband with all her heart, but she had never
found it in her to love Jon. She might have overlooked a dozen
bastards for Ned’s sake, so long as they were out of sight.
Jon was never out of sight, and as he grew, he looked more like Ned
than any of the trueborn sons she bore him. Somehow that made it
worse. “Jon must go,” she said now.
“He and Robb are close,” Ned said. “I had
hoped . . . ”
“He cannot stay here,” Catelyn said, cutting him
off. “He is your son, not mine. I will not have him.”
It was hard, she knew, but no less the truth. Ned would do the boy
no kindness by leaving him here at Winterfell.
The look Ned gave her was anguished. “You know I cannot
take him south. There will be no place for him at court. A boy with
a bastard’s name . . . you know what they will say of him. He
will be shunned.”
Catelyn armored her heart against the mute appeal in her
husband’s eyes. “They say your friend Robert has
fathered a dozen bastards himself.”
“And none of them has ever been seen at court!” Ned
blazed. “The Lannister woman has seen to that. How can you
be so damnably cruel, Catelyn? He is only a boy. He—”
His fury was on him. He might have said more, and worse, but
Maester Luwin cut in. “Another solution presents
itself,” he said, his voice quiet. “Your brother Benjen
came to me about Jon a few days ago. It seems the boy aspires to
take the black.”
Ned looked shocked. “He asked to join the Night’s
Watch?”
Catelyn said nothing. Let Ned work it out in his own mind; her
voice would not be welcome now. Yet gladly would she have kissed
the maester just then. His was the perfect solution. Benjen Stark
was a Sworn Brother. Jon would be a son to him, the child he would
never have. And in time the boy would take the oath as well. He
would father no sons who might someday contest with Catelyn’s
own grandchildren for Winterfell.
Maester Luwin said, “There is great honor in service on
the Wall, my lord.”
“And even a bastard may rise high in the Night’s
Watch,” Ned reflected. Still, his voice was troubled.
“Jon is so young. If he asked this when he was a man grown,
that would be one thing, but a boy of fourteen . . . ”
“A hard sacrifice,” Maester Luwin agreed. “Yet
these are hard times, my lord. His road is no crueler than yours or
your lady’s.”
Catelyn thought of the three children she must lose. It was not
easy keeping silent then.
Ned turned away from them to gaze out the window, his long face
silent and thoughtful. Finally he sighed, and turned back.
“Very well,” he said to Maester Luwin. “I suppose
it is for the best. I will speak to Ben.”
“When shall we tell Jon?” the maester asked.
“When I must. Preparations must be made. It will be a
fortnight before we are ready to depart. I would sooner let Jon
enjoy these last few days. Summer will end soon enough, and
childhood as well. When the time comes, I will tell him
myself.”