Chapter 2 — "Alaric Snow"
The room they put him in was small and cold.
Not a punishment cell — just one of the spare chambers off the inner corridor, the kind used for visiting stewards and minor lords without rank enough for the guest towers. Alaric had been in it before, once, when repairs were being done on his usual room. He remembered thinking it felt like a place the castle had forgotten.
It felt that way now too.
He sat on the edge of the cot, elbows on his knees, and stared at his hands.
The knuckles were split on the right.
Someone had wrapped a cloth around them — one of the yard servants — and dried blood had turned the linen a dark rust color at the edges. His wrist ached where Theon had caught him early in the bout. He hadn't noticed it during the fight.
He noticed it now.
Outside the narrow window, Winterfell had gone quiet in the way it only did when something had happened. Not silent — the castle was never truly silent — but subdued. Careful. Like the keep itself was holding its breath.
Alaric flexed his fingers slowly. Felt the pull of torn skin.
He waited for the regret to come.
It didn't
Theon had said what he said.
Alaric had heard worse. He was a bastard — he'd known that before he knew much else, the way some children learned their names or their house words first. Snow. Not Stark. Never Stark. It was said kindly sometimes, and cruelly more often, and indifferently most of all, which was somehow the worst of the three.
He was used to it.
But Theon hadn't stopped there.
Perhaps if your whore mother had spread her legs—
Alaric's jaw tightened.
He didn't know his mother's name. He had asked Ned once, when he was younger and hadn't yet learned which questions not to ask. Ned's face had done something complicated and closed, and all he'd said was: She was a good woman, Alaric. Leave it at that.
He had left it at that.
He had left it at that for years, and Theon Greyjoy — had dragged her into the dirt in front of half the yard.
No.
He pressed his thumb into the torn skin of his knuckle until it stung.
He would do it again. He knew that clearly, in the way He would do it a hundred times. Some things deserved answering.
The only thing that gnawed at him — the one thing he couldn't put away as easily as the rest — was the look on Ned Stark's face when Rodrik had hauled him off.
Not fury.
Not disappointment, exactly.
That was what sat in his chest like a stone.
The door opened without a knock. His little brothers came
Robb came in first, because Robb always came in first. He had that way about him — t that rooms opened for him, that people were glad to see him, and the good nature to make both things usually true. He dropped onto the cot beside Alaric without ceremony, close enough that their shoulders touched.
"Rodrik's in a mood," Robb offered.
"Rodrik's always in a mood after I do something nothing new about it."
"Worse than usual."
Robb glanced sideways at him. "Theon's wrist is broken clean through. Maester Luwin set it."
Alaric said nothing.
"He's not going to let this go easily, you know. Theon. He'll—"
"I know."
Robb fell quiet for a moment. Then, because he was Robb: "He shouldn't have said what he said."
It was simply stated. No drama in it. Alaric looked at him , Although Rob was young and his little brother but at the honesty and warmth, he felt something loosen slightly in his chest.
"No," Alaric agreed. "He shouldn't have."
Jon had come in behind Robb and taken a place by the wall, arms folded, saying nothing but that doesn't mean he didn't care . Jon is the one who understands him and relates with him in the castle the most.
He met Jon's eyes.
Jon gave a small nod. Nothing more was needed.
"Father will want to see you," Robb said eventually.
"I know."
"Do you want us to come?"
Alaric looked at his hands again. The cloth wrapping. The dried blood.
"No."
The walk to Ned's solar felt longer than it was.
Winterfell was a castle Alaric knew by heart — every stair, every drafty corridor, every corner where the torchlight didn't reach. He had grown up in these walls as surely as Robb and Jon had. He had bled on these stones, laughed in these yards, learned to read in this library, learned to fight in that yard down there.
He had never once felt like he was walking to his own exile.
He pushed the thought down and knocked.
"Come in."
Ned was standing when Alaric entered, which he hadn't expected. Not seated behind the desk in the posture of lord and authority, but standing by the window, looking out over the yard below. The fire had been built up since the morning. The solar felt warmer, quieter, the ledgers and letters cleared away.
Alaric stopped in the middle of the room.
The silence stretched a moment.
"Sit," Ned said, not unkindly.
"I'd rather stand, my lord."
Ned looked at him then — really looked at him — he heard Alaric called Lord not Uncle which has become a frequent now.
"Theon provoked you."
Alaric had prepared himself for many versions of this conversation. That opening was not one of them.
"Yes," he said carefully.
"He said things that deserved answering." A pause. "He will not be saying them again."
Alaric said nothing.
"That doesn't make what you did acceptable," Ned continued, turning at last to face him. His voice was level, but there was no coldness in it. Just the tiredness of a man who had thought long and hard before saying any of this. "You could have stopped. Rodrik called your name. You heard him."
The truth of that sat plainly between them.
"Yes," Alaric said.
"You didn't stop."
"No. I didn't, my Lord"
Ned studied him for a moment. Then he moved to the desk and sat on its edge, arms folded — not the lord's posture, something more like a father's.
"This is not the first time," he said quietly. "The boy from the village last spring. The merchant's son at the harvest fair. The boys at training yard. Even some girls problem I am hearing And now Theon, who is Balon Greyjoy's heir and my ward both."
Alaric's jaw tightened. "They all said things—"
"I know what they said." Ned's voice didn't rise. "I know why you did it each time. I am not standing here telling you that you are wrong to feel it." He paused. "I am telling you that the feeling is not the problem. The losing yourself to it — that is the problem."
Alaric looked at the fire.
Brandon Stark's son. He'd been told that his whole life in various tones — with warmth, with warning, with something that might have been grief. He had never known what to do with it. He had never known his father at all.
"What happens now?" he asked.
Ned was quiet for a moment.
"I am sending you to the Vale."
The words landed flat and clean, the way only honest things do.
Alaric's eyes snapped to him.
"Fostering," Ned said. "There is a house in the Vale — House Starke. A cadet branch, settled there since long time. They hold land near the Bloody Gate, manage the mountain approaches, keep the outer defenses." He kept his eyes on Alaric steadily. "Lord Edwyn Starke is an old friend. More than that — he is my cousin, family. When I was fostered in the Eyrie under Jon Arryn, I got to know him and become friends.He will know you. He will treat you good."
Alaric said nothing for a long moment.
The Vale.
Mountains. Strangers. A house he had never heard of, in a land he had never seen.
"How long?" The words came out rougher than he intended.
Ned remains silent
The fire popped softly.
Alaric looked away first. He hated that he looked away first. He stared at the floor, at the stone flags worn smooth by years of Stark boots, and forced himself to breathe steadily.
He had been punished before some harsher some soft but there is always been Lady Catelyn's role in it He knew that — knew it the way he knew Ned's face and Ned's voice and the particular weight of Ned's silences.
But she had wanted him gone. That much he knew too.
The thought came before he could stop it.
"Is Jon—" He stopped.
Ned waited.
Alaric made himself ask it cleanly. "Jon is not going with me right. He is little . He needs you."
Something moved through Ned's expression — understanding, and beneath it something he kept carefully still.
"No," Ned said. "Jon stays at Winterfell."
The relief was immediate and shameful in equal measure. He was glad. He was glad Jon wasn't being pushed out too — and he was ashamed of how much he'd feared it, of what that fear said about everything he hadn't let himself think too clearly about.
He nodded once. Stiffly.
"When?" he asked.
"A fortnight."
A fortnight. Fourteen days to say goodbye to the only home he had ever known.
"Alaric."
He looked up.
Ned had straightened slightly, and his expression had shifted — not to lordly composure, but to something quieter and more difficult. Something that cost him.
"You are not being cast out," he said. "You understand that. You are not being sent away because you are unwanted."
Alaric held very still.
"What happened out there today is not who you are at your best. I have seen your best."
The grey eyes were steady on him, certain in the way that Ned Stark was always certain about the things that mattered to him.
"Brandon would have been proud of the boy you are. I am telling you that plainly so there is no confusion about what this is. You behave like him but that behaviour got my brother killed . I don't want that to happen with you also."
The stone in Alaric's chest shifted.
He didn't trust himself to speak for a moment.
Alaric didn't go back to the spare chamber after.
He went to the godswood instead, where the heart tree stood pale and still among the snow-heavy branches, its carved face watching with that old, wordless patience. He sat at the roots for a long time, not praying exactly — he had never been sure what to say to the gods — just sitting.
Vale
He said it quietly, testing the shape of it.
He was angry. That was honest and true, sitting in him like an ember that hadn't gone out. He was angry about being sent away, angry at the reasons, angry at the unfairness of a world that punished him for defending the one thing no one had the right to touch.
He thought about what Ned had said.
How to carry what you are without being swallowed by it.
He turned that over for a while. The heart tree offered no answer. The snow fell in soft silence through the branches.
He would go.
He didn't have to be happy about it.
But he would go.
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