~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday!
Thanks!
Bran’s face went red.
The corners of his mouth wouldn’t stay down.
His eyes gleamed like two stones freshly pulled from the water.
Robert stood and kept walking.
The king meant to inspect every last Stark cub.
He stopped in front of Aven.
They looked at each other.
Robert had a full head of height on Aven and two shoulders’ worth of width.
The weight of it was physical — not the pressure of rank, but of mass, like standing next to a wall.
“I know you,” Robert said.
His blue eyes moved over Aven from top to bottom.
The gaze wasn’t heavy, but it had presence, like a hand turning something over, in no hurry to judge, just checking what it was made of.
“Aven of Karhold.
The sharpshooter of House Karstark.”
A pause.
“I heard you brought down your prey with a tree branch.”
He said it with genuine wonder.
The king had his channels.
That branch Aven had loosed in the Wolfwood traveled through months and countless mouths before it finally arrived — compressed into a single sentence — in Robert Baratheon’s ears.
Aven didn’t explain how the branch had flown.
Didn’t explain how fast the deer had been running.
Didn’t offer any modest talk about luck.
He inclined his head slightly, holding the posture a subject owed a king.
“Karhold is ever loyal to the king.”
He finished the thought privately: whoever that king may be.
Robert studied him.
Something satisfied settled behind those blue eyes.
He nodded.
“Good.”
One word.
Then he moved on.
Aven stayed where he was and watched Robert’s back.
That frame was broad and thick, the cloak swelling in the wind, taut and billowing like a sail about to catch.
But as Robert walked, his left leg carried a hitch, an old wound, years in the bone.
The mark Rhaegar Targaryen had left on his chest at the Trident had long since closed.
Maybe it had healed once.
But carrying all that weight now, the old damage had been pressed back into a dull, persistent ache.
Aven’s gaze moved off Robert’s back and swept down the retinue.
The Kingsguard.
Five white-cloaked knights on horseback.
Armor white, cloaks white, horses white.
Their faces were buried under white helms, expressions invisible, but that silence, that stillness, like five swords sitting in their sheaths, said more than any expression could.
Then the wheelhouse.
Gold, drawn by four white horses, gold reins, gold wheels.
The window curtain was drawn, but the wind had nosed it open a crack.
Just a crack.
Less than a finger wide.
Through it, Aven caught a hand.
Nearly bloodless pale, fingers long and tapered, nails lacquered deep crimson.
A gold ring on the ring finger, set with an enormous emerald.
The hand rested on the window’s edge and didn’t move, like a piece of art left behind and forgotten.
Cersei Lannister.
Aven held on it for one second.
Then moved on.
His eyes swept further back.
More knights.
More attendants.
More carriages.
And then he saw,
Golden hair.
At the very tail of the procession, a young man on a white horse.
Velvet doublet.
That gold hair sitting under the flat grey sky like a crown he’d been born wearing.
His face was handsome, not Sansa’s kind of handsome, something else, something carefully tended, every line looking like it had been arranged on purpose.
His lips were barely curved, a faint smile that wasn’t aimed at anyone.
It was aimed at everything.
The world owed him its attention, and he knew it.
Joffrey Baratheon.
The prince.
Heir to the Iron Throne.
Aven looked at him and ran through the list.
Ned Stark’s head.
Sansa on her knees.
Every cruelty, every stupidity, every avoidable catastrophe that traced back to this face.
No question about it, the boy was a fool. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
But none of that had happened yet.
Right now Joffrey was just a boy on a horse, shining and polished, with no idea anyone was watching him be catalogued.
Aven looked away.
Across the yard, Robert had finished the line and circled back to Eddard.
He raised a hand and landed it on Eddard’s shoulder again, lighter this time.
“Let’s go inside,” Robert said.
“I’m freezing to death.”
Eddard smiled.
He turned, gestured toward the keep, and led the king in.
Catelyn followed.
Then Robb and Sansa.
Then Bran and Arya.
Aven stayed put.
Theon passed him at a clip, moving faster than usual, something caught between excitement and nerves playing across his face.
As he went by, he turned his head and dropped his voice.
“Did you hear that?
The king knows your name.”
Aven didn’t answer.
He watched the procession pour through Winterfell’s gates, a golden river running into grey stone, into this castle that squatted on the earth like a sleeping giant, heavy and old and unmoved by kings.
Wind pushed down from the north, smelling of snow.
On the battlements, the direwolf and the crowned stag flew side by side, snapping hard in the gusts.
Aven turned and walked inside.
His boots found the flagstones, each step a clean knock that blended into the rhythm of everyone ahead until there was no telling one footfall from another.
He knew what today meant.
Winterfell would not go back to being what it had been this morning.
The king had come.
He’d brought the queen, the prince, the Kingsguard.
He’d brought everything the south had to offer, gilded and gorgeous and rotten through.
And he would bring something else besides.
A title.
A reason for Eddard Stark to leave the North.
Aven would be going with him.
➤ Next: Brothers Ought to Have a Proper Talk
🔥 Want to read the next 60+ chapters RIGHT NOW?
⚡ Limited-time offer currently running…