Domeric brought his column in through Winterfell’s gate at a walk.
Lord Eddard Stark, Warden of the North, had called him to stand for the quarrel with House Karstark.
They named it a judgment.
It would be a mediation.
The Boltons and the Karstarks both held from Winterfell.
A liege was obliged to set his bannermen down before they ate the North out from under him.
Beggars packed both sides of the gate.
Whores drifted.
Hawkers cried their prices.
Morning rang with hammers.
Sheds and crooked rooms clung to the walls the way shells cling to a hull: granaries, eating halls, storehouses, shops, taverns, and the cheap houses where a man bought a woman by the hour.
Domeric remembered the last time he had seen the castle.
It was not Harrenhal’s mad acreage, and it was not Storm’s End, which looked as if the sea itself would break before the stone did.
The strength in Winterfell sat down inside the walls and waited.
A man standing in that yard felt the weight of it and slept better for the feeling.
The godswood was a darker thing.
Sentinels stood in grey-green.
Oaks.
Hawthorn.
Ironwood.
Ash.
Soldier pines.
At the heart of it the weirwood rose pale and still, a white giant the years had not been allowed to finish.
Even at noon the place kept its own dusk.
Robb Stark met them outside the walls.
Blue eyes.
Hair the color of rusted leaves.
Already thick through the shoulders.
Fourteen, and the Young Wolf in him showing whether he knew the name yet or not.
The men at his back brought bread and salt.
It was the oldest contract in Westeros, older than most of the houses that swore by it.
Bread and salt under another man’s roof made guest right.
Host and guest were forbidden to harm one another.
The old gods and the new both spat on the one who broke it.
The stories said a cook at the Nightfort had taken his vengeance on a king by baking the king’s son into a pie and setting it on the king’s own table.
The gods had made a white rat of him, sow-fat and endless hungry, and left him in the Nightfort to eat his young and never fill.
A man might claim his blood-price.
He might not butcher a guest under the roof that had fed him.
Every lord in the country could say that much in his sleep.
Domeric pinched off a crust, touched it to the salt, and ate.
His hand went to his breast.
He bent his head.
“Robb.
My thanks for the welcome.” Robb’s smile was the simple kind, and it reached his eyes.
“Domeric.
Welcome to Winterfell.” Arya’s needle had gone crooked again.
She scowled at the mess in her lap, then slid a look at her sister.
Everyone said Sansa’s needle never missed.
Sansa’s work came out of her hands as pretty as Sansa did.
Fine hands.
Sure ones.
Arya hunted her own stitching for a place to save it, gave up, and sighed.
The septa would have her for it later.
Sansa sewed as if the cloth had asked to be beautiful, and leaned in to whisper with the steward’s daughter.
“What are you talking about?” Arya said, crowding in.
Jeyne Poole giggled.
Sansa went pink to the ears.
“Ser Domeric,” Sansa said, so softly a wind might have taken it.
“He’s come to Winterfell.” Arya knew the name.
Heir to the Dreadfort.
Not long ago he had put a slim sword of fine steel into Arya’s own hand.
“Ser Domeric just gave your sister a white stone,” Jeyne said, proud as if the gift had landed in her lap.
“He said it was his mother’s.
He said he only gives it to the girl he likes best.” “He didn’t,” Arya said.
“He did.” Sansa blushed in the polite way she had practiced.
Arya’s mood went sour.
The world had a rotten sense of fairness.
Sansa got the whole of it.
Sansa had been two years in the world before Arya arrived, and she had spent them collecting every grace a girl was supposed to want.
She sewed.
She sang.
She danced.
She made verses and knew what to put in her hair.
She could make a harp behave and a set of bells sound like a kinder room.
She was beautiful besides.
Sansa had their mother’s Tully bones and that thick auburn hair.
Arya had come out Stark: brown hair, a long face.
Jeyne liked to call her Horseface and go whinnying down the corridor when they passed.
Now even Ser Domeric had a stone for Sansa and nothing for the girl he had armed.
The thought sat in Arya like a stone of her own.
“Where is he?” She meant to ask him to his face why the gem had gone the other way.
“The yard.
Robb wants a match.” “Then we should go.” “Now,” Arya said.
The yard at Winterfell had been cleared for it.
Robb wore padding and took his wooden sword in both hands.
He sat low in his stance.
His breath ran long and even.
Domeric wore no padding.
A wooden sword.
A quiet face.
He looked at the place Robb would have to come through and did not bother with the rest of the yard.
They had an audience.
Ser Rodrik Cassel stood like a keep with snow on it, white whiskers and all.
Theon Greyjoy in close black.
Ser Wendel Manderly of White Harbor.
Knights Arya did not know.
No one seemed willing to blink and miss the moment the air changed.
Summer in the North still carried a chill.
The godswood breathed its cold perfume across the packed earth.
If the blades had been steel, the yard would have felt like a road where two knights had run out of room.
Swordwork was not a brawl.
It did not pay in a dozen traded cuts.
It paid in a single instant, and then the thing was decided.
The hold broke.
Robb could not keep it.
He came with a shout—the kind meant to lift a man’s own blood and knock a hole in the other man’s thinking, the kind that won fights against men who startled.
Domeric was not that man.
In the life before this one he had studied the sword as work, not as pageantry.
In the three years since, he had used it on wildlings, on the hill clans, and on Rickard Karstark’s hardened men.
A boy’s shout in a castle yard was not a battlefield.
He shifted a half-step.
The adjustment was nothing to look at and everything to meet.
The wooden blades tore the air and met with a dull, ugly sound.
The crack came first.
Then the body.
Robb’s sword went to pieces.
Robb went with it.
Padding made the difference between a lesson and a corpse.
A wooden blade made the rest.
Had either been otherwise, the yard would have been a different color.
They had stood in that taut quiet for more than ten minutes.
The end took less than a breath.
The applause came down like weather.
Children shouted themselves hoarse.
To the age Domeric carried in his head, they were all children.
“Ser Domeric.” Sansa had come up on quiet feet with a cloth.
Sunlight put a pale cast through her auburn hair.
She had color on her face, lightly done, and the fine, careful prettiness she wore the way other girls wore cloaks.
“My thanks, my lady Sansa.” He looked at her when he said it.
She went scarlet and fled.
Domeric’s mouth tilted.
Alone with him she had words enough for a feast and the nerve to spend them.
In front of a yard she could not finish a sentence without her blood giving her away.
Robb came out of the padding still breathing hard.
“Father wasn’t wrong.
You’re the finest sword in the North.” He did not like losing.
He was not fool enough to deny what his hands had felt.
The wooden blades had met and he had hit a mountain.
The force had come through him like a falling keep.
The sword had died.
His chest had gone empty.
The next instant he had been in the air.
And in that last sliver of time Domeric had taken something off the blow.
Robb knew it.
Full weight would have broken more than pride.
Ribs would have gone, padding or no.
“Lord Eddard is kind,” Domeric said.
“Westeros is full of better men than me.” “Then why hide it?
Why keep a strength like that in a bag?” For Robb the answer was obvious.
To stand with men like Gerold Hightower, the White Bull, like Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, like Barristan the Bold—that was the honor a knight was built to want.
If the strength had been his, he would already have been in King’s Landing, calling names in yards until the city learned his.
“I don’t love a crowd,” Domeric said, and smiled as if that were the whole of it.
“Then why take my challenge?
You put it in the open for anyone with eyes.” Robb was not yet fifteen.
He saw more than most boys who were.
“Because winter is coming,” Domeric said, and he said it low.