The Grey Wolf's Welcome
The gates of Winterfell opened like the slow parting of two halves of an ancient world.
The sound of them was immense — iron hinges that had turned ten thousand times over ten thousand years, timber thick as old oaks, the groan of stone and metal that spoke not of weakness but of weight, of permanence, of a house that had endured everything the centuries could devise and was still standing to receive its guests. The sound rolled outward across the frozen courtyard and up the grey towers and into the cold northern sky, and it said, without words, what Winterfell always said —
I was here before you. I will be here after.
Robert rode through first, as kings do, and the courtyard received him — and there they were.
The Starks.
All of them, standing in the grey morning light with the quiet, unperformed dignity of people who do not need to arrange themselves into a picture because they simply are one — natural and composed and rooted as the castle itself. Lord Eddard Stark at their centre, dark and lean, with the northern winter worn comfortably about him the way southerners wear silk. Beside him Catelyn, auburn-haired, straight-backed, her Tully blue eyes warm and watchful in equal measure. And ranged around them their children — Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon — a whole bright, serious, northern world of them, breath rising in small clouds in the cold air.
Robert dismounted before his horse had fully stopped.
The two men crossed the courtyard toward each other and the years fell away like snow falling from a branch — suddenly, all at once, leaving something clean and true beneath.
Ned Stark's face did the thing it almost never did.
It opened.
Not widely — Ned was not a man built for wide openness, had never been, even as a boy at the Eyrie when they were young and the world had not yet asked anything terrible of either of them. But the grey eyes warmed, and the line of his mouth softened, and for just a moment the Lord of Winterfell was simply a man deeply glad to see his oldest friend.
"Your Grace."
"Ned."
Robert seized him — both hands gripping his arms, pulling him close, holding on for a moment longer than ceremony required — the grip of a man embracing not merely a friend but a time in his life when things were simpler and the people he loved were still alive.
Around them the formal greetings proceeded — Cersei descending from the wheelhouse with queenly precision, her green eyes cataloguing Winterfell's ancient stones with the expression of someone totalling an invoice they find disappointing. The royal children presented themselves. Lady Catelyn curtsied with gracious warmth. The Stark children bowed and curtsied in turn, grave and correct, little Rickon peering around his mother's skirts with enormous eyes.
And then —
Through the courtyard gate, at the column's tail, came Michel Arryn.
And beside him — slightly ahead, suddenly, pulled forward by something stronger than composure —
Jon Snow.
Jon had kept himself still for five days.
He had ridden and eaten and slept and performed the management of himself with the careful discipline of a boy who had learned early that wanting things openly only made the wanting more painful. He had kept his eyes forward and his feelings below the surface and he had been — as he always was, as he had trained himself to be — steady.
But now the gates of Winterfell were around him and the grey stones were above him and the smoke from the Great Hall was in his nose and across the courtyard his father was standing —
Ned Stark.
Looking older than Jon remembered. Thinner, perhaps, around the temples, the grey arriving quietly at his dark hair the way northern winters arrive — without announcement, without drama, simply there one morning when you look. But his eyes were the same. Exactly the same. Dark and deep and straight, the eyes of a man who has decided to be honest and has paid for that decision every day without regret.
Jon crossed the courtyard at a pace that was not quite running.
Ned saw him coming and something moved across that careful face — something swift and unguarded and entirely beyond his considerable powers of suppression — and he stepped forward to meet his son and his arms came around the boy without ceremony, without words first, without anything except the plain, immediate, inarticulate language of a father who has missed his child and is not, in this moment, the Warden of the North or a lord of anything at all.
Just a man holding his boy.
Jon pressed his face briefly, fiercely, into his father's shoulder.
"Father."
One word. Everything in it.
Then Ned released him and Jon turned and there was Robb — grinning now, broadly, the composure of the young lord cracking open into the straightforward delight of a brother — and they came together with the comfortable, graceless collision of two people who grew up wrestling in the same yard, laughing now, both of them, Jon's quiet face transformed entirely by it.
And somewhere slightly apart, watching his son's happiness with an expression she had not assembled deliberately and could not quite dismantle quickly enough, Catelyn Stark stood and felt something complicated move through her that she would examine later, alone, in the privacy of her own chamber, where she could be honest with herself about all the things she could not be honest about in public.
Michel Arryn had given Jon the moment entirely.
He had held back near the gate, speaking quietly with one of his riders, finding small necessary tasks to occupy himself with — the unsaddling of horses, the directing of men toward the guesthouses, the unhurried business of a man who understands that some reunions belong only to the people having them and should not be diluted by witnesses.
When the first intensity had settled, he moved forward.
Ned Stark turned to him, and the warmth in his grey eyes deepened into something more — the particular regard of a man looking at someone to whom he owes a debt that cannot be easily named or repaid.
"Michel."
"My lord." Michel gripped his hand — firm, direct, no excess in it. "He did well. Every day of it."
Ned's hand tightened briefly around his.
No speech. No eloquence. Just the pressure of a father's gratitude transmitted through a handshake, which was, between men like these, considerably more than most people manage with a great many words.
Michel turned then, and Catelyn Stark was before him.
He had met her before — years ago, briefly, in another life when they were all younger and the realm was a different shape. She was still striking, auburn and composed, with the particular quality of a woman who has run a great household and raised strong children and weathered difficult years and come through all of it without being diminished by any of it. Her blue eyes were warm and measuring in the same glance.
"Lady Stark." He inclined his head with genuine respect. "Your hospitality is —"
"You brought him home," she said quietly.
It was not what she had planned to say. He could tell. But it was what arrived.
He met her eyes.
"He was easy to bring home," Michel said, equally quietly. "He made it simple. He always does."
Something in Catelyn's expression shifted — the faintest softening, the private acknowledgment of a mother who has just received a gift she hadn't known she was waiting for.
And then Michel turned, as one does when moving through a gathered family, naturally, one face to the next —
And he stopped.
Not visibly. Not in any way that someone watching carefully from a distance would have necessarily noted. But something in him went very still, the way a man goes still when he has turned a corner and found himself looking at something he was not entirely prepared to see.
Robb Stark stood to his left — broad-shouldered already, auburn-haired like his mother, with his father's directness in his eyes and something of his own besides — the look of a young man becoming, day by day, the lord he was being shaped to be. He had grown considerably since Michel had last seen him. There was a sureness in the way he stood now. A weight.
Michel acknowledged him with the nod of one man taking the measure of another and finding the result satisfactory.
Then his eyes moved.
To Sansa.
She stood slightly behind her mother, straight as a candle, with the auburn of Catelyn's hair catching the pale winter light and the grey of Stark eyes beneath it — but the whole assembled into something that was neither wholly Tully nor wholly Stark but simply and entirely itself. Twelve years old, perhaps thirteen, at the precise moment when a girl is beginning to understand the kind of woman she is becoming, and is both slightly frightened and quietly astonished by the discovery.
She was looking at him with the frank, unguarded curiosity of someone who has not yet fully learned to make her face say less than she is thinking.
Michel bowed.
"My lady," he said. "Winterfell suits you extraordinarily well."
It was a courteous thing to say. A proper thing. The kind of thing one says to the daughter of one's host.
But he said it simply and looked at her directly when he said it, with the uncomplicated respect of someone who means what they say, and that — the simple being meant — was perhaps why it landed the way it did.
Sansa Stark's composure — that carefully maintained, beautifully practiced, deeply earnest composure she had been constructing and rehearsing for years in preparation for exactly these kinds of encounters with exactly these kinds of important people —
Dissolved.
Colour climbed her cheeks like sunrise. Fast and total and entirely beyond her considerable powers of prevention. Her eyes went briefly, luminously wide, and then she looked down at exactly the angle that all the songs described when they talked about maidens being addressed by — and she looked back up, and the colour was still there, warm and honest and utterly beyond her control.
"Thank you, my lord," she managed. The voice steady. The face — decidedly not.
Catelyn Stark watched her daughter's face.
She watched the colour rise and the eyes widen and the smile that Sansa was attempting to keep dignified and small and not entirely succeeding at keeping either.
Then she looked at Michel Arryn.
She looked at him the way mothers look — which is to say, completely, and quickly, and with the specific evaluative intelligence of a woman who has spent years thinking about her daughter's future
And her daughter —
Her daughter, who had been dreaming of knights and songs and courtly romance since she was old enough to understand that such things existed, who had been practicing her curtsies and her conversation and her composure for years in preparation for exactly this kind of moment —
Her daughter was the colour of the Tully banners.
Catelyn felt something settle quietly and firmly into place in the back of her mind — the soft, certain click of a thought that has found its proper position and intends to stay there.
Lady of the Eyrie.
She looked at her daughter again. At the grace in her, unpolished yet but unmistakably present. At the warmth and the beauty and the deep, earnest, northern heart of her.
She would be, Catelyn thought, with the quiet conviction of a woman who has learned to trust her own judgment in matters that count, a very fine Lady of the Eyrie indeed.
She said nothing.
She simply watched.
And in the grey winter courtyard of Winterfell, beneath the great direwolf banners that breathed and moved in the cold northern wind, the pieces of the future arranged themselves in their quiet, unhurried way — as they always do, as they always have, indifferent to the plans of kings and the schemes of queens and entirely unbothered by whether the people within them are ready.
The world had its own ideas.
It always did.
[Pleased give me power stones]