Nerd In the North 6-28

A sennight and little more.

Nothing past nine days in the keep of her father and the red walls gave her little of the comfort she had hoped for upon arrival. Red as they had been, the same sandstone a girl of six had seen every day running the wallwalk with Lysa at her heels — and not a single stone of them warm to the touch.

The Fall of the Flower King, as the songs were calling it already, had left the armies of the Reach a mess — “scattered petals in the wind” — and her own flight from the battle had been as quick as possible.

With the blessing of the Lady Olenna, she had ridden hard, traveling the road of the river until the horses had begun to stumble, until even Brienne’s own mount went down at the knees past Pinkmaiden and had to be left behind, until her own guards had looked at her with wary eyes and tight lips.

They did not dare speak against her or about her, but Catelyn Stark knew those looks of worry all the same. She had worn it a time or two against her own blood. 

Against Lysa.

All that travel, every single league of it, and it had all been for naught.

Robb had already traveled north a mere four days before her own arrival.

Four days.

If the gods fancied japes, then that would have been one worth of even the Seven. To miss her own son by the length of time it took to salt a barrel of fish.

But she knew patience, of course. Catelyn Stark had never been one to fall apart over mere disappointment, but this was more than a simple disappointment.

The raven had made that clear enough.

Catelyn could not recall the flap of its wings upon arrival. She had heard nothing of them by the time Maester Vyman had brought the letter to her. What she heard was the dry crack of the seal splitting as it opened, a sound she would carry until the Stranger came to fetch her.

Robb…

Her eldest was dead.

Less than a year after her lord husband and once again at the hands of those who claimed themselves otherwise loyal. Treason among the banners of the North. Kinslaying and kingslaying; both sins named plainly in the careful hand of White Harbor’s own learned maester. It had been mere rumor, carried by other hands and other wings the days before, but it was the seal from White Harbor and the words borne from a surviving Dacey Mormont that shook her until the letter fell from her grasp.

And beneath it all, written almost as an afterthought, was something that struck like a bolt to the chest.

A Karstark sat the high seat of Winterfell, styling himself King in the North.

Rickard Karstark. Ned’s own bannerman and kin. 

Distant in degree and blood they may have been, the name Karstark still held enough that the claim of ‘kinslaying’ was still strong in many cries for blood among those who had heard tell of his actions. 

And yet, he was not alone; the blades of Dustin and Ryswell — in bloody league with the ironmen reaving the North — had plunged into her son’s back as he led them into battle, their forces slaughtering him and the heads of Houses Mormont and Umber.

Dustin. Ryswell. Karstark. No better than Lannisters, any of them.

Yet, even as her heart raged for the heads of the traitors, Catelyn Stark knew vengeance would not bring her the warmth she needed.

She sighed against the scent of old incense burned out days past, the sept bearing the same cold and damp as that of a cellar. Catelyn knelt as she had for hours, so long her feet no longer even ached as she felt little. Hands clasped, the Mother’s carved face looked down upon her with the same wooden patience she had always prayed for.

The very same the septas had promised her as a girl yet to bleed. Ask, child, and the Seven attend you. Catelyn had asked, and asked, and asked these past few days.

Asked for her daughters.

Asked for her son.

Yet the wood said nothing back, a face sanded smooth by some craftsman over a hundred years dead. 

“Cat…”

The doors to the sept groaned loud as they came open on hinges in desperate need of oil.

“Cat… please.” Footsteps carried forward — a soft shuffle, a heavy bearing and the tapping of wood as support — before a hand rested itself on her shoulder; the gentle touch of a man that could only be Edmure. “You must eat something soon.”

Her brother knelt beside her and, for a moment, she remembered the boy of five who crowded her during the storms that howled outside the keep. “Cook has made a broth just for you.” Even now, twenty years past, she could nearly catch the tremor in his voice. “It will do no good to go without for so long.”

“I need no more ash on my tongue, Edmure.” She refused to turn her head, hands still clasped as she prayed to nothing and no one that could listen. “Leave me be.”

“There’s bread as well, if y—”

“Leave your sister be, nephew.” Shifting of mail and the rumble across the sept announced her uncle to her as much as her eyes would have. “Leave the care to the septas and let her pray to her heart’s content. All you can give her are words.”

“I am merely asking my sister to eat.”

“To make yourself feel useful, lad.” The Blackfish scoffed at her brother’s words. “Far from the same thing. She is grieving, not mad.”

“Catelyn is a Tully…” A third voice rasped, simple words dragged up out of a chest that struggled with them as a cane came down hard on the stone. Catelyn nearly sighed before her father spoke again, the words overpowering anything that could have left her mouth despite Lord Tully’s battle for breath. “A Tully and mother to a king no less.”

That cane tapped stone again. “Which is why she must r-rise.”

This time, the sigh did find freedom.

“To weep on the floor of a sept will not return the dead to us. The Stranger’s hands are a final thing, Cat.” A breath, low and raspy, found its way into her lord father’s breast. “Yet, you still have two others. My grandsons still live, at least if word from that… that Brightfort is anything to trust.”

Catelyn’s eyes stayed shut as tightly as she could keep them. 

It was not enough to stop tears from running hot down her cheeks anyway. My boys…

She had read the letter near a dozen times, the odd white parchment near-soiled from tears and oil. Two boys behind white walls magicked by a lord she had never laid eyes on, and she was to take that as comfort?

Ned. Robb. Sansa. Arya.

Four of her own in a single year, gone to the Stranger.

Only two left to her, and both of them hundreds of leagues away held in a castle at the hands of one known as the ‘White Witch of the North’. Another of the smallfolk elevated with a title, and another she couldn’t bring herself to trust.

“They are in the North.” She finally managed the words. “And I am here. Too far to comfort them and too late to help them.” More tears ran down her face. “Always too late.”

“Then be late no longer.” Her father’s breath scraped once more. “Get off that floor, child.”

“Father…” Edmure shifted at her side.

“Enough, boy.” The cane tapped loud, a strength and heat in her father’s voice that did not fit his still-ailing countenance. “She has spent near a sennight in the dark and it has bought her no peace. As much as I grieved my Minisa, I dried the tears I shed for your mother and rose all the s-”

“Do not.” Catelyn’s voice left her wrong, too loud against the stone. “Do not dare speak of my mother to me. Not to me, Father.”

“I shall speak of whom I please in my own sept, child.”

Child.

Six and thirty, husband and son with no grave to kneel at.

Still child.

She found herself on her feet before she had chosen it, skirts snapping around her legs. “I mourned a husband I never saw buried! A son with a Karstark blade in his back and I know not the field he lies in, his body for the crows! You would have me strong?! For whom, Father? Say it plainly, if you have courage left in those bones!”

Old eyes hardened at her, lip curling behind that grayed beard.

“Say you want the Tully name held straight for a thousand years more and I shall stand tall as a pine. And you may stand the bones of my son and my husband and every last one of my children very straight indee-”

Catelyn paused for breath, sobs fighting words, and cold fled the sept at once in place of warmth. Not the thin warmth of candles, but the heavy midsummer weight of a noon in the godswood at Riverrun. 

Candles flickered, all seven on the altar trembling for a moment as the breath pulled low in the marrow of her; a thrum like a plucked string.

She breathed out and the candles did not flicker again.

No, they flared.

Flames leapt the height of a man’s forearm, a whiteness at the heart of them she had never seen as they threw shadows up the walls. Her father’s face paled the color of his beard, mouth open in shock. “Seven save—”

Edmure jumped to his feet, near-fleeing backward in a motion he would have mocked on any other lord. “Cat. Cat, step back fr—” 

Her uncle swore something that had no business inside a sept before he turned toward Edmure and his reaching hand. “Do not touch her.” His sword was half out the leather before he spoke anything else. “Nobody dare touch her.”

Before Catelyn could even do more than take another breath, boots slapped the corridor outside in a running pace. Three pairs of eyes turned to the door as a servant boy near fell over his own feet on the way through, chest a bellows. “My Lor-”

“You dare intrude?” Father’s colour went from pale to purpled as he raised his cane as if to strike the lad. “Out with you, fool boy!”

“M-my lord, please!” The servant’s eyes faltered at the sight of the burning altar before they found Catelyn on her feet at the heart of the sept, flickering between lady and light as his mouth hung open. “My lady…”

“What?!”

It was the force of her voice, angry and echoing, that tore the rest from his lips. “I-it is your daughters! Lady Sansa and Lady Arya!”

“...what?”

“They are in Riverrun!”

Her hand met Edmure’s chest, her brother’s shout of surprise landing somewhere behind her as her lord father shouted at her back. Heavy mourning skirts tangled around her shins as she took the steps two out of a time and came out into pale daylight.

The yard was achurn — destriers stamping with mud to their fetlocks, men-at-arms in boiled leather gone the colour of the road and servants all around.

Yet Catelyn saw none of it.

Her eyes were aimed forward, fixed firmly on two small shapes coming down off saddles at the heart of the courtyard.

The cold of the mud came up through the wool of her skirts and yet she did not care, unsure if she had fallen or knelt. It did not matter either, not as her daughters hit her together and she had both of them in a tangle of muddy arms and filthy hair and — gods be good — her girls.

“M-mother.”

She nearly cried as Sansa spoke the words into the crook of her shoulder, the word wet and shaking with all her careful training gone out of it. “Robb… we heard… th-they said…”

“I know, my sweet.” Her lips in Sansa’s hair, those red locks matted stiff with mud, Catelyn spoke through tears. “I know. I know.”

“They…” Arya held her round the waist, her grip stronger than she’d ever felt it. “They murdered him.”

“Hush, my little wolf.” She kissed her brow, the taste of road dirt on her lips once again. “You are here now. Nothing else matters. You are here.” 

And she prayed with joy in her heart for that much.

She did not know how long she held them tight but when Catelyn finally sat back on her heels, a shaking hand dragged across her face, the yard finally returned to full focus in front of her.

“Good morrow, Lady Stark.”

And found herself struggling to make sense of it.

Is that girl on a bear?

More than a girl, it was the Baratheon child.

Hair paler than she remembered it, the face was still the same — all Cersei but with a softness she doubted the Queen had ever held. Myrcella wore a traveling cloak, brown as the road to Riverrun, loose hair the white-gold of Valyrians rather than Lannister. She sat perched on the back of something black and heavy, ridged scales down its spine like a lizard had been laid over the frame of a bear. If that was not enough, a white creature sat in the girl’s lap; something the size of a small cat with ears too long for it.

“Fou!”

Blinking as if this was a dream, Catelyn’s eyes went past the beasts and Baratheon to the man standing behind them and jumped to her feet. “By the Seven!”

A man near of a height with the Hound himself and half again as thick through the shoulder stood there wrapped in thick black iron, on his back a slab of steel longer and larger than any greatsword ever hammered out. 

A thing like that had no business being called a sword, and yet the man stood tall with it, arms folded and unbothered as if it was a simple hand-and-half blade.

Eyes wide, her back came up against something hard behind her; a near wall of warmth and muscle.

“Mind yer step.” The man in black looked down at her, chewing the words.

Catelyn peered over her shoulder, an apology behind her teeth only for even that to fall from her unspoken at the sight of a woman in loose furs and little else. A woman standing taller than any man in the yard by at least a head, arms and thighs easily three of her own in thickness.

But above all that, she wore a familiar face.

Long.

Solemn.

And with a wild beauty to it.

Her youngest daughter’s countenance aged to adulthood and set on the neck of a giant.

Catelyn’s mouth opened to scream, this dream surely a nightmare she had yet to wake from.

“It’s okay, mother.” It was a small hand that caught her arm and forced her to look down with a strong grip, the true Arya meeting her eyes. “It’s just Nymeria.”

…just.

“Don’t stare too much. She doesn’t like it.”

Her eyes refused to stray despite the warning and Catelyn only felt the nightmare continue as the woman shifted.

Flesh turned to fur, gray running over muddied skin like water down a slope. Bones cracked and folded and twisted in a display of open sorcery in her father’s yard as men whispered and swore all around the yard. By the time it finally finished, there was a direwolf there in place of the woman, big as a warhorse and shaking out a coat of grey.

“N… Nymeria.” The name fought her like her father’s breath, Catelyn’s hand at her own throat.

“Mother…” Sansa came forward again, hand turned toward a boy swinging down off a brown courser. "This is my savior, Lord Veder.”

She knew the name.

All in the North and Riverlands likely knew of him by now; whether by word, tale or song. He stood clean where every other man wore the road on them, his plate shining back as if it had been freshly forged that morning. The face above it was… pretty, undeniably so.

Bearing a countenance more eye-catching than his armor, the boy could have worn a dress and many a man may have found their eyes straying. Even Catelyn found herself doubting if she had ever seen a maiden able to compare against skin as soft as milk, pert lips that invited attention, and eyes that sparkled like a summer sky. 

Even with his mouth full of a strange apple that shone as bright as his hair — gold worthy of any Lannister — his beauty was unmarred.

Two fingers raised up toward his brow before something crossed that face and he seemed to think better of it.

With a flourish of the apple in his hand, the young lord bent at the waist instead.

“Lady Stark.”