Chương 29: Chapter 30: Back to Business, Part Two

The days that followed, after a good portion of the household had left, had a strange, doubled quality to them, as though Winterfell itself couldn't decide whether it was breathing out or holding its breath. On the surface, everything was ordinary, even pleasant — guards still drilling in the yard, same as always, Luwin's ravens coming and going with news of the road, Mother directing the household back into its usual rhythms now that the strain of hosting a king had finally lifted.

Underneath it, quietly, the real work had already begun: Jory riding out toward Cerwyn before the week was done, others like Tom and Bennard preparing to follow toward the Manderlys and the Mormonts once matters here allowed it, letters sealed in wax and written in the Old Tongue, each one carrying the same deniable message — that a celebratory melee was being arranged for my new engagement; pay your respects; and should a certain word ever follow after, come with steel and men instead of gifts.

But there was one piece of unfinished business I'd been quietly avoiding, not out of reluctance exactly, but because I hadn't yet decided what I meant to do. As I liked to think of it, a man who doesn't know his own intentions is a poor judge of how to act on them.

Myrcella had taken to wandering Winterfell in the days since her family's departure with the particular quiet of a child trying very hard not to be a burden to anyone, trailing half a step behind Arya when Arya allowed it, and otherwise found alone in whatever corner of the castle offered a view of the road south, as if watching it long enough might conjure her mother back down it.

With Arya paving the way, and Lady staying behind at Winterfell rather than following Sansa south, I couldn't have said whether it was Lady missing Sansa or drawn to Myrcella. Still, she'd taken to sticking close by the girl's side regardless. I'd been kind to her, the same easy, distant kindness I extended to any guest under my roof.

Still, I hadn't yet given her any of myself beyond that, and some part of me — the part that still remembered she was a person rather than merely a plan of mine given flesh — thought she deserved more than that, whatever else might come of the arrangement between our houses in the years ahead. She seemed a good person, and a clever one besides, if what Luwin had told me of her reading habits was anything to go by.

I found her one grey afternoon sitting on the low wall outside the godswood's edge, not quite brave enough to go in, watching the dark trees the way a person watches an animal they're not certain is tame.

"It won't bite," I said, coming to lean against the wall beside her.

"Though I understand the old gods can seem a bit fearsome, if you're used to gentler ones. I'm sure Lady will protect you regardless — she's taken quite a shine to you." She looked up, startled, then composed herself with the quick, practiced grace her mother had clearly drilled into her since birth.

"My septa says the Northern gods are old and cruel. That they demand blood." She paused, giving Lady a few pats on the head.

"They also say direwolves aren't real, so I suppose I'll have to rethink everything else they've told me, too."

"Your septa's most likely never actually been inside a true godswood, I'd wager," I said, and held out a hand.

"Come see for yourself. I promise nothing in there wants your blood." I touched the line of the scar on my cheek, and she followed the gesture with open curiosity; she was clearly trying not to show. She hesitated a moment longer, then took my hand and let me lead her through the gap in the trees. The godswood always felt like stepping into a held breath, the noise of the castle falling away behind us, replaced by the particular hush of old pines and older stone.

I watched her take it in — the weirwood's pale bark, the carved face with its ancient, sorrowful eyes, the red leaves stirring faintly though there was no wind to speak of that I could feel.

"It's sad," she said, after a while, surprising me.

"The face. It looks like it's been sad for a very long time."

"Maybe it has," I said.

"The old gods don't speak the way the Seven do, in songs and prayers and answered miracles. They watch, mostly. I've found that it's its own kind of comfort, if you let it be. No one's demanding anything of you here. Just quiet, and time to think." She was quiet herself a moment, taking that in, and I found myself, unexpectedly, wanting to give her something more than mere surface kindness.

"I know this isn't the home you pictured for yourself," I said.

"Winterfell's a long way from King's Landing, and further still from anything you're likely used to. I won't pretend the years ahead are going to be simple ones, Myrcella. We won't be wed for a long time yet, and many things can change between now and then. But you seem strong and smart, and I believe you'll grow into a good person. I want you to know that if you ever need help, you can always come to me."

Even though I had no intention of marrying her, especially once the war started, I didn't want her to think my kindness had all been false once the contract eventually broke. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. She looked at me with an openness that made me feel, briefly, every one of the years I actually carried behind my eyes and none of the fifteen my body wore.

"Mother says the North doesn't like us. The Lannisters, I mean — not even the sheep and lesser animals do, probably," she added, with the ghost of a smile.

"Some of the North doesn't," I said, because there was no honest way around that.

"But you're not your mother, or your brother, or your grandfather's ambitions. You're a girl, a very long way from home, who's done nothing to earn anyone's dislike, and I mean to make certain no one here treats you as though you had. That's a promise, not a courtesy. And it seems you've already won over Lady, and our maids besides." Something in her shoulders eased, just slightly, the way a held breath finally lets go.

"Thank you," she said, quiet but steady. I let the silence sit a while longer before I spoke again, this time more lightly.

"Luwin tells me you have a fondness for reading. Sansa mentioned it too, before she left — said you traded her a book of Southern songs for one of hers on the history of the North."

"I like understanding things, and if I'm to be a lady here, I want to know what it's actually like," she admitted, with the particular shyness of someone confessing to an interest they weren't certain they could be proud of.

"Mother says a lady should know how to run a household and nothing more, but Uncle Tyrion always let me borrow from his books when no one was looking."

"Then you and I aren't so different," I said, and meant it more than she could know.

"I'll have Luwin open the library to you properly — not just what a lady's meant to read, but anything that catches your eye, though I'm sure he'd have let you regardless. History, poetry, the maps of places you'll likely never see yourself. It'll do you good to have something of your own here, something that's not just waiting, or sewing, or other dull lady's work."

I made no mention of my other thoughts aloud — that a war was coming, that her own family sat closer to the center of it than she could know, that the day might come when Winterfell's walls were less a home to her than a very comfortable kind of cage, and that I'd rather she found what peace she could in a library than come to resent every stone of the place before that day arrived.

"Thank you, Robb," she said again, and this time there was a little more warmth in it, a little less of the careful courtly distance she'd no doubt been trained to wear.

"Come on," I said, nodding back toward the castle.

"Arya's likely torn the library apart looking for you already, and Luwin will need saving." We left the godswood together, and if some small, calculating part of me noted that a Lannister princess who thought well of House Stark, who felt genuinely safe and cared for under this roof, was worth rather more to the North in the years ahead than one who merely tolerated her circumstances — well.

A man could hold two truths in his chest at once, and I'd long since stopped pretending that everything I did for the people around me was free of any weight beyond simple kindness. That evening, with Myrcella feeling, I hoped, truly settled, and the castle quiet, I went to the solar again, maps spread once more before me, the week's grace period nearly spent.

I began running through the houses in my head — Cerwyn's, Manderly's, Mormont's, Umber's, Karstark's, Flint's, Reed, Tallhart's, Glover's, Hornwood's, Locke, Woolfield, Norrey, Wull, Liddle, Burley, Harclay, and many other houses and banners in the North, as well as the new houses of the giants and Thenns"It's not a finished list," I murmured aloud to the empty room.

"It's barely begun, if I'm honest. But it's a start." I looked back down at the map, at Winterfell sitting at its center like a heart with veins running out in every direction — to Karhold, to Last Hearth, to the Stony Shore, and to the mountains where the giants made their home, already preparing a small group of their own to come to Winterfell and join my host when the time came. Domeric would be arriving any day now, I thought.

Bran was already settling into Karhold by now, and Jon and Theon were somewhere on the Kingsroad with a Lannister who talked far too much for his own good. Every piece was moving now, slow and quiet, exactly the way I'd always meant for it to move — patient, deliberate, carrying the full weight of a house that had spent two years making itself ready for a war he planned to win.