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Three months passed quickly.
297 AC slipped by, and 298 AC followed hard on its heels.
A great deal would happen this year.
The Hand of the King, Jon Arryn, would die from an answer he should never have sought.
And Eddard Stark would ride south to King’s Landing, chasing the secret that would cost him his life.
Winter did not retreat.
Winter in the North never loosened its grip just because a page on the calendar turned.
It only clenched harder, day by day.
The flagstones in the training yard had frozen to iron; when horses struck them, the sound rang out crisp and bright, like a knuckle tapped against porcelain.
On the battlements, the banners cracked and roared in the wind.
The direwolf emblem twisted and billowed against the gray-white sky like a living creature straining at its chain.
But the people of Winterfell had long since stopped noticing.
Northerners did not merely survive winter.
They lived alongside it.
Aven had grown accustomed to it too.
Hundreds of days and nights were enough for a foreign soul to carve every corridor of this castle into his bones, every loose floor tile, every window crack that let in the cold.
He knew which stall in the stables ran warmest.
He knew when the kitchen matron would set aside leftover bread for the soldiers on night watch.
He knew at what hour the light fell through the godswood just right, so the weirwood looked like a living tree rather than a god carved into the shape of one.
Northerners believed the weirwoods were vessels of the old gods in the mortal world.
Wherever the old faith held, there the weirwoods stood.
Since that late-night conversation, Eddard Stark had come to the godswood more often than before.
He was trying to listen.
To seek an answer.
But the old gods offered him nothing, no reply to his questions about lions, wolves, and stags.
Three months.
The words Aven had spoken in that darkened study had shifted in Eddard’s mind.
What had once been a stone lodged in his shoe was now a thought worn smooth from too much handling, its edges rounded down by constant turning.
In the first few days, he had thought about those words almost constantly, the way a man with a mouth ulcer keeps probing it with his tongue, the more it hurt, the more he probed, the more he probed the more it hurt.
Then gradually, less.
Or rather, he had convinced himself.
Coincidence.
Only coincidence.
A mountain lion appearing in the North was unusual, but not without precedent.
The creatures of the Seven Kingdoms occasionally crossed boundaries they were not meant to cross.
So did the people.
The direwolf’s appearance was the true anomaly.
That animal had been gone from south of the North for thousands of years, and now seven pups had turned up in the Wolfswood without warning.
But that was a gift from the old gods.
Eddard could believe that.
As for the stag, a stag with a branch driven through its skull.
Just a stag.
He drew Ice from his belt and sat cross-legged on the dirt at the foot of the weirwood.
The sword was too long to lay across his knees, so he leaned it upright against his shoulder and began wiping it down from the crossguard, inch by inch, with an oiled cloth.
The Valyrian Steel blade caught no light.
It absorbed it, like a seam of frozen darkness.
The surface bore the patterns left by forging, rippling layer over layer like the surface of moving water.
This sword had passed through House Stark for centuries.
Perhaps longer.
“Whenever I come here, I feel like an outsider.”
Catelyn’s voice came from behind him.
Quiet, but the godswood’s silence carried it like still water.
Eddard did not look up.
His hand kept moving along the blade, the cloth hissing against steel in a sound that was barely there.
“You are the mother of Starks,” he said.
His voice was flat, the tone of a man stating the obvious.
“You are no outsider.”
Catelyn walked over and stood beside him for a moment, then sat down.
She wore a dark gray wool cloak, a silver brooch pinned at the collar.
She looked at the weirwood behind him.
“Would the old gods agree with you on that?”
Eddard finally raised his head.
His gaze settled on her face.
Beneath the dark red leaves of the weirwood, his gray eyes looked deeper than usual.
“As long as your Seven do,” he said.
Catelyn blinked.
Then she laughed, and reached out and patted him once on the shoulder.
“The Seven are far more forgiving than you are,” she said.
Eddard did not answer.
He lowered his head and kept wiping the blade.
Catelyn drew a letter from beneath her cloak.
It was folded and wrapped in a layer of waterproof oilcloth, sealed with wax.
Pressed into the seal was a sigil, the crowned stag of House Baratheon.
“Eddard.” Her voice had changed.
The ease of a moment ago was gone, replaced by something quieter, and heavier.
Eddard’s hand stopped.
“I’m sorry,” Catelyn said.
“Word from King’s Landing.
Lord Jon Arryn has passed away.”
A pause.
“Of an illness.”
Jon Arryn.
The name moved through Eddard’s mind once and did not settle.
Jon Arryn.
The foster father he and Robert had shared.
The man who, in the years before the Usurper’s War, when Eddard and Robert were still only boys, had opened the gates of the Eyrie and taken them in.
Catelyn waited.
She knew he needed a moment.
After a while, she gave him the second piece of news from the letter.
“Your king will come to Winterfell.”
Eddard went still.
“Robert is coming to the North?” His voice was lower than usual, as though pulled up from somewhere deep in his chest.
“The letter says he wants to tell you himself,” Catelyn said.
“And along the way —” she paused, choosing a lighter word, “— see you.”
Eddard said nothing for a moment.
In truth, he had quietly prepared himself for the possibility that he might never see Robert again.
The king belonged in King’s Landing.
He belonged in the North.
That was simply how things were.
Then a memory surfaced.
Aven.
That conversation, deep in the night.
“The mountain lion is a creature of the Westerlands.
The Lannister sigil is a lion.
The direwolf of the North represents Stark.
And that stag with the savage antlers — doesn’t it look like Baratheon?”
“The wolf stood against the mountain lion to protect her pups.
And the stag will come for the wolf.”
Eddard closed his eyes.
Now the stag had come to the North.
His fingers tightened around Ice’s hilt.
His knuckles went white.
Somewhere above him, the red sap of the weirwood dripped slowly down the bark and fell against the back of his hand, cold as a blade.
“Then we will prepare to welcome our king.”
He opened his eyes.
His voice had settled back into its usual steadiness.
Catelyn looked at him.
She did not ask if he was all right.
She already knew the answer.
She reached out instead and laid her hand over the hand that held the sword.
Her fingers were cool.
Her palm was warm.
“It will be all right,” she said.
➤ Next: The Pitiable One
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