In the corner of the study stood a tall iron armor rack, holding a suit of Karstark armor.
The black-iron plates gleamed cold under the dim blue firelight, a white sunburst sigil set into each pauldron, and in the gaps between the plates dark-red stains still clung — traces of blood not fully cleaned away, silently bearing witness to the owner’s years on the battlefield.
The conversation in the study continued.
“Three months ago,” Aven said.
The timing was fabricated.
His real answer was from the first day I crossed over, but he could never say that aloud.
“Three months.” Rickard repeated it, nodding slowly, as though confirming something to himself.
“You spent three months investigating your own uncle.
After you found the evidence, you didn’t tell me.
You didn’t tell your elder brother.
You waited until I left the castle, and then you acted on your own.”
He stood up.
The chair didn’t slide back.
His body simply rose, and the chair shuddered in place.
Rickard Karstark stood more than half a head taller than Aven, his shoulders like a castle gate.
He walked around the desk and stopped in front of Aven.
Three steps between them became one.
Aven didn’t retreat.
He could feel the heat coming off his father’s body — fresh off the horse, the smell of leather and rust mixed together, and underneath it the cold unique to a Northern winter, seeping out from the folds of his clothes.
The smells and the heat wrapped around him all at once, an invisible pressure, like standing at the foot of a cliff on the verge of collapse.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” Rickard’s voice fell from above — low, unhurried, every word like a hammer striking an anvil.
“You bypassed me.
You bypassed your eldest brother.
You took it upon yourself to judge and kill a Karstark.
You let my men watch a sixteen-year-old boy put his own uncle on trial in my hall.
You let them know that when the Lord of Karhold is away, his third son can do as he pleases.”
He paused.
“Now tell me.
How should I deal with you?”
It wasn’t a threat.
It was a father asking his son, you’ve given me a hard problem.
How do you think I should solve it?
Aven raised his head and met his father’s gaze.
“Father, people always show patience toward their own kin.”
His voice was steady when he said it.
Rickard’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger, but surprise.
He hadn’t expected his son to say that.
“A sinner is the same as an enemy,” Aven said.
“And an enemy requires a swift, fierce charge.
That is what you taught me.”
Rickard said nothing.
He looked at Aven for a long time.
Then he smiled.
A gratified smile, it settled on his face and hardened into something uglier than grief.
He raised his hand and clapped Aven on the shoulder.
The hand landed heavy, like a slab of stone.
“I taught you to swing a sword,” he said.
“I didn’t teach you to silence a man.”
He withdrew his hand, turned, and walked back behind the desk.
He sat down, and this time he leaned into the chair.
The weight of him shifted from blade to stone wall.
Still hard.
No longer sharp.
He picked up the ledger, turned a few more pages, then set it down.
“Alf’s matter.
I’ll handle it.” His gaze dropped to the map spread across the desk.
He didn’t look at Aven.
“You don’t need to concern yourself further.”
The meaning was clear enough: you did the right thing, but there cannot be a next time.
Or perhaps: you are my son, so I won’t pursue this.
Maybe both.
Rickard was quiet for a moment.
His fingers tapped twice on the edge of the map.
A dull, flat sound.
“Lord Eddard may need a squire.”
He looked up at Aven.
“You’ll go.
I’ll write to Winterfell.”
Aven stood where he was and didn’t answer right away.
“Go and learn mercy,” Rickard said.
The chill had mostly left his voice, replaced by something heavier, a father working hard to point his son toward a different road.
“Learn how a lord ought to carry himself.”
He held Aven’s gaze.
The hardness in his eyes hadn’t gone anywhere, but something underneath it was shifting.
“Not those schemes of yours.”
The last words came out slow.
Each one like a nail driven into wood.
Aven lowered his head.
“Yes, Father.”
Rickard waved a hand.
A small motion, heavy with exhaustion.
“Leave.
First light tomorrow.”
Aven turned and walked toward the door.
His hand touched the handle, and Rickard’s voice came from behind him.
“Aven.”
He stopped.
“Your first kill.” Rickard’s voice dropped low, a sound like the hum of coals behind iron.
“Did your hands shake?”
Aven stood at the door and didn’t turn around.
He thought of the window at the end of the corridor.
The wind and snow outside.
His own fingers trembling inside his sleeves.
“I didn’t do it with my own hands,” he said.
Silence stretched behind him.
Then Rickard said, “Go.”
Aven pushed open the door and walked out.
The corridor was colder than when he’d come.
He walked a few steps, stopped, and leaned against the wall.
The coal-fire stone’s light bled through the gap in the door and drew a thin blue line across the floor at his feet.
No sound from the study.
Rickard was probably still turning pages in that ledger, or reading the map, or working out how to explain to Winterfell that my younger brother was judged by my sixteen-year-old son and then died accidentally on the road to the Wall.
Aven lingered there a moment, then kept walking.
Outside the window at the end of the corridor, snow had started falling again.
Fine grains struck the glass with a soft, dry hiss, like someone turning pages in a distant room.
He looked into the dark beyond the glass and thought of the word Rickard had used.
Mercy.
A man crossed over from the modern world, surviving in Westeros on mercy?
He shook his head.
Westeros had no use for mercy.
Somewhere behind him, a door closed.
The study door.
Rickard had come out.
His footsteps moved away down the corridor toward the great hall.
He was going to handle the aftermath, settle the household, seal off the rumors, wipe the blood from his third son’s sword clean.
Aven pressed his forehead against the cold windowpane.
Frost had spread across the glass in fine, branching patterns, like the grain of a blade’s edge.
His breath fogged against it in a small white cloud, then faded.
The snow kept falling.
Tomorrow he would go to Winterfell.
To meet Eddard Stark, the man who, in the story he remembered, wouldn’t survive the first season.
To meet Catelyn, to meet Robb, to meet Sansa and Arya.
To meet the people whose deaths he had already watched, over and over, on a screen.
He straightened up.
One last look at the dark beyond the glass, then he turned and walked toward his chambers.
His boots struck the stone floor, one step at a time, the sound carrying through the empty corridor like footsteps echoing up from the bottom of a deep well.
Behind him, the silent halls of Karhold.
Ahead, the unknown lights of Winterfell.
➤ Next: Winterfell — Face to Face