Chương 31: Weight of a Name

Domeric Bolton's POV The road north from the Vale had given me a great deal of time to think, and I had spent most of it, if I was honest with myself, thinking about brothers.

Lord Redfort's sons had been good to me these past three years — the kind of easy, unthinking friendship I'd never quite managed to find anywhere else, not even at Barrowton where I'd paged for my aunt as a boy and where the household, for all its warmth toward me, had always seemed to be waiting for something else, some other shoe I couldn't name to drop. I'd wept leaving the Redfort boys, though I'd have died before admitting it to anyone but my horse.

And somewhere in the weeks since, riding first toward the Dreadfort and then, at my father's sudden change of plans, my escorts and I headed on toward Winterfell instead, I'd found myself turning over something I'd carried quietly for years now: that I had a half-brother I had never once met. A bastard, baseborn out of some miller's wife along the Weeping Water, born before I was, if the little I'd gathered from careless servants' talk over the years was to be believed. My father never spoke of him.

Not once, in any letter, in any conversation I could recall since I was old enough to understand what the word bastard even meant. I'd always told myself that when I was a man grown, when it was truly my own decision to make and no longer a boy's idle curiosity, I would ride out and find him myself, whoever he was, wherever my father had settled him. I wanted a brother.

I had wanted one since I was young enough to envy the Redfort boys their easy, squabbling affection, the way they knew, without ever having to test it, that someone else in the world was bound to them. Oh, it would have been great to have someone, a true sibling, to trust, to watch your back, and to share your burdens with. I never got that chance, though.

Some illness had apparently taken him over a year back — I only found out because I'd finally worked up the courage to ask my father directly, in a letter from the Vale. His reply had been three lines long and told me nothing beyond the fact that the matter was settled and there was no cause to raise it again. I had grieved him a little, oddly, this brother I'd never known and never would. It seemed a strange thing to carry, grief for a stranger, but there it was.

So perhaps that was why the North, when it finally rose around me, felt less like arriving somewhere new and more like arriving somewhere I had already decided, in some quiet part of myself, to hope for and find a connection. The land changed before the castle ever came into view, and that surprised me first.

I'd expected the usual scattering of Northern holdfasts — hard, practical places built for survival rather than pride — and found instead a road smoother than any I'd traveled since leaving the Vale's better-kept lanes, packed and drained with real, deliberate labor rather than centuries of cart-wheels wearing a rut into the earth.

Twice, I passed men working in groups on the roadside with shovels and barrows, laughing at something between themselves despite the cold, the way men laugh when the work is honest and not merely endured. Wintertown, when it finally rose out of the pale afternoon light, stopped me outright. I'd pictured a huddle of mean huts clustered against the castle's shadow for safety.

I found instead something that looked, almost absurdly, planned — squat, round-shouldered houses sunk half into the earth for warmth, smoke curling from more chimneys than I could easily count, a high earthen rampart ringing the whole of it that I'd have mistaken for a natural rise in the land if I hadn't seen men still working its edges with mattocks as we rode through. The townspeople seemed happy, and the hustle on the main street was lively and interesting to watch.

I saw a few men with carts of round shields going past us. My own escort, two Bolton men-at-arms who'd said little the entire journey, exchanged a look that did nothing to hide their surprise when we passed the town center's stone garden, dedicated to what looked like a young, growing weirwood tree at its heart. It was one of the most pleasant towns I had been through, and with Winterfell's towering walls standing behind it, I found myself hopeful.

Winterfell itself, when we reached it, was every bit the grim grey fortress the old stories promised, ancient and vast and undeniably a seat of real power. But even here, the famous Northern severity seemed softened at the edges in a way I hadn't expected.

The gates stood open and busy, guards moving with a discipline that put me in mind of Lord Redfort's own household troops, though watching more closely as we waited to be announced, I saw it wasn't the same kind of discipline at all — not posture and ceremony, but something more expected, straight backs paired with easy, unguarded expressions. These men had straight backs with sharp eyes but lax, easy-going faces, dutiful to each other.

A pair of other guards ran some manner of drill in the yard beyond the gate that I couldn't make sense of at first — sprinting to a wall, touching it, sprinting back, over and over, breath tearing white in the cold. At the same time, an older man with a captain's bearing counted the trips aloud and offered no mercy for the counting.

"Lord Domeric Bolton," someone announced, and I straightened in my saddle as a young man crossed the yard toward us, moving with an ease I would come to understand, within the hour, ran a good deal deeper than mere confidence. He was younger than I'd expected, though he stood taller than I did, taller than most grown men I'd known, with a build that spoke of real, sustained effort rather than the natural form of a lord's heir who trained an hour a day to satisfy his father and maester.

His hair was cropped close at the sides in some style I didn't recognize, a mane of auburn curls left long on top with a thin braid worked in at the back, and there was a scar along one cheekbone, still faintly pink. I found myself unable to stop noticing it even as I reminded myself it was rude to stare.

"Robb Stark," he said, with an open smile and a nod, clasping my forearm before I'd even fully dismounted, warmer than I'd dared hope for.

"Welcome to Winterfell. I'm glad the roads treated you kindly — I've had men out fixing the worst stretches for the better part of a year now, though I'll admit I still won't fully trust them when the frost sets in properly. I'd love to be proved wrong, though." If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Lord Robb," I said, and found myself smiling before I'd quite decided to.

"The roads were better than I dared hope, truthfully. Better than some I traveled in the Vale, if I'm honest, and I didn't think I'd say that about anywhere north of the Neck." Something quick and pleased crossed his face at that, as though I'd confirmed something for him.

"The North keeps its own council on a great many things," he said.

"Roads included. Come — you've had a long ride, and I imagine you'd rather see your rooms and a hot meal before I start boring you with everything I mean to show you tomorrow." He walked me through the castle himself rather than passing me off to some steward, which I understood later was not, in fact, his usual practice with most arriving guests — Jory Cassel, the captain of the guard, told me as much some days later, with a dry sort of amusement, as if it were a small joke between them that I wasn't yet in on.

Along the way, Robb pointed out the practical bones of the place with an ease that suggested he'd walked every stone of it, turning problems over in his own head: a new well he'd had dug closer to the barracks so the guards wouldn't lose half a morning hauling water in winter.

On the opposite wall of the castle, in the yard, he showed me a stream he'd diverted from one of the hot springs beneath the keep, explaining the sort of latrine system he'd built for the servants and the household — the same stream, he told me, ran on through Wintertown and down to the stone garden I'd passed earlier.

As further proof of the constant improvement and upkeep I was beginning to realize was a year-round effort here, he showed me another stretch of wall being reinforced ahead of some frost he expected to be worse than most, and a training yard laid out with equipment I didn't recognize — bars set at a man's shoulder height that guards hauled themselves up on, over and over, cursing cheerfully at each other the whole while.

"What are they training for?" I asked, unable to help myself.

"Forgive me, I don't recognize the discipline."

"Strength, mostly. Endurance." He said it lightly, though something in the way he didn't elaborate further told me there was more behind it than he was ready to share with a man he'd only known for the length of an afternoon.

"I've found a tired body and a strong one aren't always the same thing — whatever the songs would have you believe about merely enduring winter being enough. Conserving your strength is one thing. Being ready for the storm itself is another." I thought it was one of the many interesting things I'd seen since I left the Eyrie.

A whoosh had me turn my head when I saw a small boy — Rickon, I would learn, the youngest Stark — barreled past us at a dead run with a grey pup at his heels nearly as large as he was, shrieking something about a snowball that made no sense to me and apparently perfect sense to Robb, who caught the boy one-handed by the back of his cloak without breaking stride in our conversation, set him back on his feet facing the other direction, and continued as though nothing at all had happened.

A girl who could only have been Arya, the second Stark daughter, based purely on height, thundered past a moment later in pursuit with her own wolf, and somewhere behind her, moving with rather more dignity, walked a fair-haired girl I didn't recognize, another young direwolf pacing calm and watchful at her side.

"Myrcella," Robb said, following my glance.

"Princess Myrcella, I should say, though she'd rather I didn't stand on ceremony about it most days. King Baratheon's daughter — she's to be my betrothed, and so she's staying with us a while, also I promise Arya's less feral than she currently appears."

"I'd heard something of the betrothal," I said. It seemed, suddenly, a much larger thing to have heard only secondhand, gossip traded between Bolton men-at-arms on a long road, than the wonder of it — a quiet, watchful girl with a direwolf at her heel, a princess of the realm, walking the same halls I would now also call home.

"Aye. There's a great deal happening at Winterfell these days, Lord Domeric," Robb said, and there was something in his tone — not a warning, exactly, but an honest weight to it — that told me he meant it as more than idle talk.

"I hope you'll come to feel at home here. I mean that plainly. I know what folk south of the Neck whisper about your house, and I'll not pretend I don't know it. The history between our houses is infamous enough, but a name isn't a man. The past isn't always the future, and whatever the rest of the realm likes to believe, and I'd rather you judge Winterfell and me for yourself — the same courtesy I mean to judge you by." Something in my chest loosened at that.

I had spent years being careful around exactly this kind of conversation, waiting for the moment a lord's courtesy thinned into something colder once he'd said his piece about my family's name. It didn't come. He moved on to the next thing he wanted to show me, as easily as if he'd never raised the matter at all, and I found myself, absurdly, near to grinning like a boy half my age.

"You have a brother fostering elsewhere, I think Jory mentioned," I said, before I'd quite decided whether it was my place to ask.

"And another, away escorting a guest to the Wall?"

"Bran, and Jon and Theon," Robb said, nodding.

"Bran's with the Karstarks now, learning what Winterfell couldn't teach him. Jon's my brother in every way that matters, whatever anyone says of his mother, and Theon's near enough the same, though he'd deny it loudly if you told him so to his face." A small, private warmth crossed his expression, there and gone.

"I'll introduce you properly once they're back. I think you'd get on. Jon's the quiet, steady sort. Theon talks enough for both of them." I found myself, absurdly, already looking forward to it — to brothers I hadn't met yet, in a house that seemed to hand them out more freely than I'd thought any great house could afford to.

That night, alone in a chamber warmer than any room had any right to be in the dead of night, with no fire lit in the hearth — some quiet trick, I realized, of those same hot-spring pipes Robb had shown me threaded through the castle's walls — I found myself turning the day over and over, the way I did with anything that mattered to me.

Not searching for some hidden goal beneath the warmth — I had never been much good at expecting, whatever caution my father's letters always urged on me — but simply turning it over the way a man turns over good fortune, half-suspicious of nothing but his own luck. I thought, briefly, of the brother I'd never met, and felt the old, familiar ache of it settle a little lighter, quieter, less like a wound and more like something I'd carry, like many others.

But maybe staying a year or so with the Starks at Winterfell before returning to my father would be a lot more pleasant than I'd thought. I did not know, not yet, what Robb Stark and his brothers might come to mean to me. But I let myself hope, lying there in the dark, that I had finally ridden into a house where such a bond of camaraderie might actually be possible.