The parchment was not shy.
House Karstark had bought a Faceless Man from the House of Black and White to kill Domeric Bolton.
The price was twenty years of Karhold’s incomes, and a further promise: that under named conditions the Karstarks would hide a Faceless servant and take no coin for the hiding.
Torrhen Karstark’s hand was at the foot of it.
The seal of the house sat beside the name.
Domeric almost smiled.
Men who hired knives paid in dragons and kept their mouths shut.
They did not write the work on sheepskin and stamp it.
That was a noose tied by the man who meant to wear it.
Then he thought of Karhold’s purse and of the name the yard had given Torrhen, and the smile went still.
After the war Domeric’s men had stripped the castle to the last copper.
Credit was all the Beggar Lord had left to sell.
It had bought him an apprentice, not a finished thing.
Lord Eddard read it once and went quiet.
“The king’s law does not stomach the murder of a lord.
Torrhen Karstark is yours.
That is the end of it.” That is the end of it.
Domeric kept his face.
It was the wrong shape for the man he had built in his head.
An acting lord of Karhold had bought a knife for a bannerman.
In the songs, Eddard Stark called a public trial, named the crime, and tore the title out of the house that paid for it.
That was how lords taught other lords to sleep.
Ned had not done that.
He had put Torrhen into Domeric’s hand and, by doing it this way, made the thing a single boy’s sin.
The house would keep its name.
“I know the quarrel,” Ned said.
“Rickard struck first.
He had his reasons.
The North is not at peace.
The wildlings have not gone anywhere.
I will not watch my bannermen spend themselves on a grudge and call it honor.
Do you understand me?” “As you wish, my lord.” “And Rickard.
The rest of them you hold.
What do you mean to do?” The eyes did not wander.
Kill them, was the true answer.
Put Karhold under the flayed man and be done.
Domeric was not going to say that in a godswood to the Warden of the North.
He had the measure of it now.
From this chair justice was a tool.
The balance among the banners was the work.
Fairness came second and liked it.
That was the part that would not sit still.
The Ned in front of him could see a map.
He was not the stiff fool the stories in Domeric’s first life had sold.
So how did Cersei and her pack take him apart in King’s Landing as if he were a child at a grown table?
He did not have that answer.
He let it wait.
“I’ll open the cells,” Domeric said.
“If their smallfolk want Karhold again, I won’t hold them.
House Karstark will make good every loss to my lands.” “That’s fair.” Ned nodded once.
A few sentences.
A house’s road, turned.
The game was not larger than the men who sat it.
Afternoon put them in Winterfell’s hall of judgments.
Fifty torches burned in the wall-niches until the stone looked gilded.
Lord Eddard wore black.
The direwolf stood on his breast.
Domeric bowed from below and used the bow to count the room.
Knights.
Sworn swords.
The household packed in to watch a thing that had already been decided.
Lords had taken the high places.
At Ned’s left hand sat Lord Medger Cerwyn of Castle Cerwyn, as near a brother as Winterfell allowed a banner to be, and strong enough that the closeness mattered.
From Cerwyn to Winterfell was less than half a day’s ride.
Their arms were a battle-axe on silver.
Lord Helman Tallhart of Torrhen’s Square had come as well.
Three green sentinels on brown.
Near houses.
The wolves’ own pack.
They and the Dreadfort had never drunk from the same cup.
The surprise was farther north.
The Greatjon had ridden down from Last Hearth.
Domeric had no love for House Umber.
The talk was that those last-hearth savages had quietly taken back the lord’s right to the first night, a custom the Targaryens had put in the ground.
He could guess why the Greatjon cared whether a Bolton ate a Karstark.
After Karhold, Last Hearth was the next roof that sat too close to Lonehill.
The Greatjon did not look like a man who enjoyed imagining his own house in a mine.
Across the floor Torrhen Karstark stood with his eyes gone empty.
His face had the color of a thing already buried.
The acting lord of Karhold had come by oxcart and beggar’s roads for a hearing whose last page had been written in the godswood.
Lord Eddard spoke from the high seat.
“As to the quarrel between Ser Domeric of House Bolton and House Karstark—” The voice filled the hall.
“By the king’s law, we try it.” Torches along the walls streamed and popped.
A few died in the draft and left their smoke.
It was over almost as soon as it had been called.
A judgment with the ending already nailed to the door was a walk from one end of a room to the other.
They took the walk.
They put the words on it.
Then it was done.
In the chambers Winterfell had given him, Domeric started counting the road home.
Half a month gone.
Lonehill did not like an empty chair.
Three years of coal, iron, furnaces, and forges had pulled in everyone with legs: wildlings, broken folk, hill clans.
Stacked in one valley they were a dry magazine.
A spark would do.
Steps sounded behind him.
Benita had learned a maid’s walk and a maid’s clothes.
The knife was still under both.
“Master.
Lord Eddard’s steward sent word.
The feast is at six, in the Great Hall.” Ned’s thirty-fifth nameday.
He had forgotten it.
The lords had not ridden only to watch a Karstark kneel.
They had come to drink to the wolf’s year as well.
“Good.
Heat water.
I want a bath.” “Yes,” she said.