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Catelyn's sobbing was like a blunt knife dragged across raw nerves — grating, relentless, impossible to ignore.
But no one could say a word.
Lord Hoster was her father. Her flesh and blood. Whatever pain the rest of them felt, hers ran deeper.
Robb stood with his fists clenched, his young face tight with fury. He wanted to draw his sword. He wanted to call his banners that very hour, ride hard for Riverrun, and hack that mad aunt and that treacherous old Frey into pieces small enough to scatter on the wind.
He knew he couldn't.
War is not a bard's song. Charging in on nothing but rage and no preparation would drag everyone he loved into ruin.
"Lynn..."
"What do we do?"
Lynn didn't answer right away.
He walked to Catelyn's side.
"My lady. Tears won't solve this."
"We will have our vengeance, and we will get our people back. But not like this. Not falling apart."
He looked around the room. His gaze moved from Catelyn's grief-wrecked face, to Robb's fury, to Ned's exhaustion and guilt.
"What you need right now is not to stand here drowning in this. You need to move."
Something in Lynn's voice cut through the fog. Spines straightened. Eyes sharpened.
"Robb."
Robb pulled himself upright without thinking.
"Send out a call to arms in Winterfell's name. Every bannerman in the North."
"Tell them winter has come. The Long Night approaches. Tell them I need them to bring provisions and ride for Winterfell for a Harvest Council."
A Harvest Council?
Robb blinked. Then he nodded, fast and certain.
He understood. It was a cover. A way to pull every fighting force in the North together in the shortest time possible. The North's loyalty ran deeper than most, but no house was without its rotten timber. Get them all here first. Once they arrived, they'd have no choice in what came next.
"Lady Catelyn."
Lynn turned to her. She was still weeping, shoulders shaking.
"You are a daughter of House Tully. There are lords in the Riverlands who still answer to your family. Who were loyal to your father."
"I need you to write to them. Now."
"Tell them everything that happened at Riverrun. Tell them about Lysa's madness. Tell them about the Freys and what they've done."
"But tell them to hold. No rash moves. Hold their castles, keep their heads, and wait for my signal."
Catelyn lifted her eyes. Red-rimmed, wet, but steady. She nodded once, hard.
She could not sit still and watch her family burn. But if she could do something, anything, toward making this right, she would do it without hesitation.
"Lord Ned."
Lynn turned to him last.
"You just got back. Rest."
"Tomorrow night, host a feast for the bannermen who arrive early. Welcome them properly."
"When the time comes, I'll lay out the full plan."
A few short sentences. That was all it took.
The weight that had been sitting on the Great Hall's chest lifted. Grief and fury stopped being formless and became something with edges, something you could grip. Concrete goals. Immediate action.
Ned watched this young man and felt something he couldn't quite name settle in his chest.
A born leader. That was the only way to put it. Standing calm at the eye of the storm, steering his fleet toward the one course that might actually hold.
Perhaps handing the North's future to Lynn, perhaps handing him Westeros itself, was not a reckless choice.
It was certainly better than propping up a fool like Joffrey.
...
The noise of the Great Hall faded behind him.
Jaime Lannister walked alone through Winterfell's courtyard.
The air here was cold and clean. He breathed it in deep, and it felt like it was scrubbing something out of him, washing away the stench of King's Landing, that particular rot of ambition and decay that clung to everything in the capital.
He felt like a stranger in someone else's skin.
A Lannister, walking freely through a Stark castle.
Everything here was different from Casterly Rock. No gold. No opulence. Just grey stone, solid and unyielding. The people who looked at him didn't simper or calculate. They watched him with a plain, honest wariness, and underneath it, simple curiosity.
Because he had ridden north with Lynn and fought against Lysa, the Starks had set their prejudice aside. They treated him with courtesy. Genuine courtesy.
It left him not knowing quite what to do with himself.
His mind drifted to everything that had happened lately. That foolish woman, Lysa, had destroyed herself over a dead man and dragged her entire family down with her.
Which made him think of Cersei.
His sister. His former lover.
She was the same kind of mad. Chasing an Iron Throne that was never truly hers, protecting a son who carried none of Robert's blood. She had lashed the entire Lannister family to a runaway cart and sent it hurtling toward the cliff's edge.
And he had been the fool holding the reins.
Jaime smiled, a short, humorless thing.
He looked up.
Two small figures were playing on the training ground nearby. The youngest Stark boys. Bran and Rickon.
Bran Stark.
Jaime's feet stopped moving.
He remembered that day. The abandoned tower here in Winterfell. If Lynn hadn't appeared when he did, this lively boy running around on the training ground might have been a cold corpse by now. Or worse, alive but broken, paralyzed for the rest of his life.
And Jaime, on top of everything else the world already called him, would have added child-maimer to the list.
No. Regardless of what had actually happened, that shame was already carved into him. The intent had been there. That much hadn't changed.
Every time he thought about what might have been, cold sweat crawled down his back.
On the training ground, Bran was wrestling with a small practice bow, trying to hit a straw dummy set up a few dozen paces away.
Whoosh.
The arrow traced a limp, wobbling arc and buried itself in the snow several feet wide of the target.
"Hahaha! You missed again!"
Rickon clapped his hands and howled with laughter. "You're so much older than me and you still can't shoot straight!"
Bran's face went scarlet.
He nocked another arrow with wounded dignity, trying to copy the form Ser Rodrik had drilled into him, hauling back on the string with everything he had.
"I'll hit it this time!"
"And if I don't, I'll have Arya come sort you out for laughing at me!"
Whoosh.
This one was worse. It cleared the training ground fence entirely.
Rickon shrieked with delight. No terrifying sister coming for him today.
Bran let his arm drop, deflated. Maybe his talent really did run in the family, just the wrong branch of it. His uncle Edmure's branch. His archery was catastrophically bad.
Thank the gods the Starks didn't practice the Tully water burial, or he'd be shaping up to be Edmure the Second...
"Your elbow is too low."
The voice came from behind them.
Bran and Rickon spun around.
A man stood there in black leather armor, a head of bright gold hair catching the pale northern light.
"You're... the Kingslayer." Bran pointed at him. "That's Jaime!"
The corner of Jaime's mouth pulled tight.
He was never getting rid of that name.
Bran stared at him with wide, curious eyes, taking him in the way children take in something they've only heard stories about. No fear in those grey eyes. No contempt. Just open, uncomplicated wonder and admiration.
That day on the tower, the Three-Eyed Raven, in his timid, cautious way, had wiped Bran's memory clean to keep things simple. As far as Bran knew, he'd fallen by accident.
Jaime had braced himself without realizing it. Some part of him had been waiting for the accusation.
But there was nothing in Bran's eyes. Just blankness where the memory should have been.
Jaime didn't let himself think about it too hard. Bran had been seven. Children that age didn't hold grudges, or they forgot. Myrcella and Tommen had been the same way, once. He told himself that.
It didn't stop the guilt from sitting heavier.
"Everyone in Winterfell says you're the greatest knight in the Seven Kingdoms," Bran said.
"Are you better than my father?"
"Have you two ever fought?"
Jaime smiled. He shook his head.
"Your father is a hero. I couldn't beat him."
He walked over to Bran and looked at the small bow in his hands.
"Give me that."
Bran hesitated for half a second, then handed it over.
Jaime took it. The bow that had taken every ounce of Bran's strength to draw sat in his hand like a toy. He stood there a moment, feeling the cold wind press against his face, reading its weight and direction. Then he drew, easy as breathing, and let go.
Whoosh.
The arrow sang through the air, a grey streak, and drove straight into the center of the straw dummy's chest. The fletching shivered and went still.
Bran and Rickon stood with their mouths open.
"Wow."
Bran's eyes had gone enormous. He looked at Jaime the way you look at someone who has just become real to you after years of being only a legend.
"How did you do that?"
Jaime looked into those clear, unclouded eyes and felt something shift in his chest. A small, quiet thing.
How long had it been since anyone looked at him like that?
In King's Landing, people looked at him with fear, or flattery, or contempt. Sometimes all three at once. He had stopped noticing it years ago, or told himself he had.
He had forgotten what it felt like to be looked at like this. He had forgotten that he had once been the one doing the looking, a boy staring up at legendary knights with exactly this same awe. He had worshipped them. Arthur Dayne most of all. The Sword of the Morning.
"You're standing wrong."
His voice came out quieter than he intended.
"Feet shoulder-width apart. Like this."
He stepped behind Bran and reached out, adjusting the boy's stance with careful hands. His hands were large and warm. Even through the thick leather, Bran could feel the strength in them, the kind of strength that came from a lifetime of the work.
"Back straight. Shoulders level."
"When you draw, don't pull with just your arms. Use your whole back. Feel the string. Let the tension build."
Each word was clear and unhurried. He sounded like a teacher who had all the time in the world, passing on everything he knew to this boy he had once been willing to kill to keep a secret.
Bran held his breath. He nocked an arrow and drew, following every instruction.
It felt different. Completely different. The bowstring felt like part of him. He could feel the arrow's readiness, coiled and waiting.
"Eyes, string, arrowhead, target. One line."
"Then let go."
Whoosh.
The arrow flew straight and true, no wobble, no drift, driving hard toward the target.
THUD!
Not the bullseye. But it hit the straw dummy square in the chest and stayed there, buried deep.
"I hit it! I hit it!"
Rickon's jaw dropped.
"By the Old Gods, he actually hit it..."
Bran was jumping, his face blazing red with pure excitement. He turned back to Jaime, and his eyes were bright with something simple and real.
"Thank you, Ser Jaime!"
Not Kingslayer.
Ser.
One small word. It landed somewhere Jaime hadn't expected.
He looked at this boy bouncing on his heels in the snow, and felt something that had been frozen in him for a long time quietly give way at one corner.
He thought of Joffrey.
His son. His blood, though the world didn't know it.
Joffrey liked archery too. But he had never cared about the practice, never wanted to improve. He only wanted the most expensive bow, and something helpless to shoot at. Small animals, tied up so they couldn't run. He never cheered when he hit his mark. He only laughed when his prey screamed.
He had never thanked anyone for anything in his life.
Jaime looked back at Bran.
Healthy. Bright. Courteous. Full of honest longing for honor and skill and the things a knight was supposed to be.
This was what a young lord should look like.
He found himself thinking: what if Robert had married Lyanna Stark instead of Cersei? What if the king on the Iron Throne had Stark blood running through him alongside Baratheon?
Would the kingdom look different?
Would he be different? No Kingslayer's brand. No forbidden love eating him alive from the inside. Maybe just a man who had kept his oath and his honor and his dream of being the kind of knight the stories were actually written about. A man protecting a king worth protecting.
"Ser? Ser?"
Bran's voice pulled him back.
"Will you... will you teach me again?"
He was looking up at Jaime with something hopeful and a little uncertain in his eyes.
"I want to learn swordsmanship too!"
"Lord Lynn says you're the greatest swordsman in the Seven Kingdoms right now!"
Jaime looked at him. And for the first time in longer than he could remember, the smile that crossed his face wasn't ironic. Wasn't cold. It came from somewhere genuine.
He didn't answer.
But something had already shifted, and he knew it.
He might never scrub the name Kingslayer clean. That stain might follow him to his grave.
But perhaps he could become something else alongside it.
A true knight.
➤ Next: Arya's Wedding
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