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“I’m working on it.
I take every lesson you’ve taught me seriously.”
Aven said it without emphasis, without softness.
Flat and even, like stating something he did every day.
“Good lad.”
Eddard’s voice dropped a shade.
He was gratified.
The older children were all so sensible.
The younger ones were harder to judge.
“You already have the qualities of a knight.”
Aven didn’t follow up on that.
He knew Eddard wasn’t praising him for the deer he’d shot with a branch, that didn’t deserve to be called “the qualities of a knight.” Eddard meant something else.
Every single thing Aven had done over the past year at Winterfell, the things Eddard had quietly noted.
He pulled the conversation back.
“Back to the original topic.” He straightened slightly, holding the wine cup in both hands, his thumb tracing a slow circle along the rim.
“A mountain lion that shouldn’t be in the North.
Direwolves that have nearly vanished from the North.
And a stag.”
He looked into Eddard’s eyes.
“Doesn’t it remind you of the great houses of the Seven Kingdoms?”
Eddard’s hand stopped beside his wine cup.
It didn’t move.
“The mountain lion is a creature of the Westerlands,” Aven said, unhurried, each word clean and deliberate.
“The Lannister sigil is a lion.
The direwolf of the North represents House Stark.
And that stag with the savage antlers —”
He paused.
“Doesn’t it resemble House Baratheon?”
The study went silent.
Not the easy, warm silence from before.
Something different.
Like water beginning to freeze, starting at the surface, spreading downward layer by layer, all the way to the bottom.
Eddard looked at him and said nothing.
The last piece of charcoal in the hearth crackled.
A spark leaped out, landed in the ash, and made a faint, popping sound.
The candle flame shivered, throwing shifting shadows across both their faces.
Then Eddard moved. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
He picked up his wine cup and swallowed a large mouthful, not the slow, measured way he’d been drinking before, but pouring it straight down his throat, like a man who needed something to wet a suddenly dry throat.
When he set the cup back down, the base struck the table harder than before.
“That’s very dangerous, Aven.”
His voice was low, but not angry.
Somewhere between warning and worry, the tone of a man who wanted to bar danger at the door but couldn’t bring himself to be too harsh about it.
“Are you saying — that you shot and killed a Baratheon?”
He raised his eyes.
Gray, the same as in daylight, but the candlelight made them seem deeper.
Like two wells with no bottom.
“Should I treat you as a traitor now?
Hang you up and burn you?”
The corner of his mouth moved when he finished.
Aven knew it was a jest.
But beneath the jest lay a very thin layer of warning.
An elder telling you: some thoughts are dangerous.
Don’t follow them any further.
Aven knew it was time to stop.
He’d already said what he needed to say.
One more word wouldn’t be a reminder.
It would be incitement.
But some things had to be said.
A year of good conduct could buy forgiveness for one final heretical sentence.
He lifted his cup and took a last sip.
The wine left a faint, bitter aftertaste at the back of his tongue.
“Uncle,” he said.
He set the cup on the table and stood.
“You believe in the gifts of the Old Gods.”
He looked at Eddard.
Eddard looked back at him.
Their gazes met in the candlelight, no sparks, just a quiet collision, two rivers finding the same channel.
“Then why couldn’t this be an omen from the Old Gods?”
His voice was soft.
Not a probe, not a challenge.
Just a youth in a study late at night, speaking to an elder who treated him as family, saying what he’d been turning over in his mind all day.
“The Old Gods foretold a wolf standing against a mountain lion to protect its cubs.
And the stag —”
He paused.
“Would ambush the wolf.”
No sound left in the study.
The hearth had gone completely dark, nothing but a few deep-red specks winking in and out among the ash.
Eddard didn’t speak.
His gaze moved across the half-finished cup of wine on the table, across the open letters, the ink bottle, the quill, the parchments representing every large and small matter of the North.
Then his gaze stopped on an empty patch of air.
Not looking at anything.
Thinking about something.
His fingers tapped twice on the edge of the table.
Very light.
Very slow.
Then he lifted the cup and finished the rest of the wine in one swallow.
When he set it down, his expression had changed.
Not from stern to easy.
A shift between states, from listening to a child’s strange idea, to a Warden of the North alone late at night with his own thoughts.
That state was quiet and inward.
It asked for nothing.
Aven knew the conversation was over.
He picked up the empty cup and the wine bottle, walked to the bookshelf, and tucked them back behind the loose wooden panel.
When he turned around, Eddard had already picked up the letter again.
The quill rested beside the ink bottle.
His hand hadn’t moved.
His eyes weren’t on the page.
Aven walked to the door and pulled it open.
The torches in the corridor had burned well down, their light much dimmer than when he’d arrived, casting a shifting, dusky yellow glow across the stone floor.
He stepped out and gently pulled the door shut.
As it closed behind him, he heard something from inside the study, a sigh, very soft, barely there at all.
Aven stood in the corridor without moving.
He looked at the closed door.
The thin line of candlelight along the bottom was still there, steady and narrow, exactly as it had been when he came.
Then he turned and walked toward his own room.
Torchlight moved across his face, bright, then dim, bright, then dim.
His boots struck the stone in a steady rhythm, threading into the silence that had finally settled over Robb and Theon’s distant room, the sound carrying down the empty corridor for a long time.
He didn’t know whether Eddard would sleep tonight.
He didn’t know how long those words would circle in Eddard’s mind, or when they might become part of some decision, or whether they would remain nothing more than the strange words of a youth spoken late at night, worn down by time, buried under the weight of daily affairs until nothing remained.
But this was enough.
➤ Next: Faith — What Was Lost
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