Chapter Text
If Shiera knows anything, it is that Robert wishes she were a brother. A sister is a burden, to be married off. Why else would he have taken so to his fellow ward if he didn’t wish for a brother near his own age?
one.
They first meet at Harrenhal, in the spring that was not to be. A portent, Shiera thinks later. Eddard Stark asks her to dance because Robert tells him to. He is all stiff arms and clumsy feet, which make her feel even less graceful than usual.
She has been expecting the betrothal. It aligns well with the match between Robert and Lyanna, and Stark is less objectionable than some of the choices Robert has threatened her with when she speaks out of turn. She thinks she will not mind a second son, if that is to be her fate.
The second time, he has just lifted the siege and she meets him in the courtyard of Storm’s End, Renly clinging to her skirts.
"My lady," he says and brings her hand to his lips stiffly.
"Lord Stark." She notices the tightness in his face when she uses the title. She must prepare herself for being Lady of Winterfell. Has being Robert’s hostess been enough? What does a northern lord expect? She tries to pretend her gown isn’t hanging off her like a potato sack.
“Would that I had more time,” Lord Stark says, his eyes not meeting hers, “but my sister is said to be a prisoner in Dorne.”
“Then you must go to free her,” she says, wondering if Robert would ride after her like the hounds of hell, if she had been the one carried off. If Eddard -- Ned -- would have risen in rebellion. “Come back safe, my lord.” The words feel wrong on her tongue. Her sweetest smile is barely more than a wince.
“I will, my lady.” He turns and strides to his horse without a backward glance.
The third time she greets him, it is at the Red Keep, and the brother beside her is the king.
Ned goes to Robert first, his face full of fallen hope. “I’m sorry,” he says, and the king breaks down in his arms. Shiera watches, a detached observer, knowing not what to do or say. Lyanna Stark should have been my sister, she tells herself. We should have been friends.
And then there is the wetnurse, with the babe in her arms, and any hope that Ned would be different from Robert vanishes with the rueful look he gives her.
two.
“If you make trouble for him, so help me, Shiera,” Robert mutters through his teeth as he removes her maiden’s cloak in the sept.
She says nothing, but her jaw locks as Ned replaces it with the direwolf cloak. His fingers fumble the clasp, but her hands remain fists at her sides. The kiss he brushes to her cheek is dry and perfunctory, as are the words, barely audible. Everyone in the sept knows that this should have been a joyful double wedding, uniting Baratheon and Stark, brothers to sisters. They must think the stoic manner of the three is only grief for Lyanna.
“We should not have been wed in these circumstances, my lady,” Ned says when they are finally alone, after the horrid ordeal of the bedding.
“We should not have wed,” she bites out. No man will suffer a wife with a tongue like yours, she hears her septa say, but she ignores the thought. Her septa is dead.
He lowers his head. “You may be right, aye. But I would do you a disservice to refuse the match. People might question your honor.”
No one would question the presence of Shiera Baratheon’s maidenhead, except to wonder if it is made of ice. “I think your honor is the one in question here, Lord Stark.”
“My lady, please, I will do anything to make this up to you.”
She looks away from his penitent grey eyes and her tongue skims her lips. Then leave it. With its mother wherever she may be. Instead, she says simply, "Perhaps I should apologize. We could have been wed earlier if not for the siege." Shiera knows she is no great beauty and a year of starvation has just made her figure bonier and her hair limper. Whatever magic her maids did that morning has evaporated and it hangs, brittle, around her shoulders.
“It’s not your fault. I thought of you all through the war, waited for you--” He stops, having realized the obviousness of the lie. “We should have been married before,” he agrees. “All four of us.” He hesitates, looking at her her warily. He lifts a hand.
“There’s no point. My courses stopped during the siege.” At his worried look, she adds, “The maester says they will return. But until they do, there is no point to this.”
He nods and they lie, stiff and silent, beside each other. In the morning, she realizes Ned has spent the entire night half off the edge of the bed.
three.
It is a long journey to Winterfell, with Lyanna’s bones and Ned’s bastard. The castle is cold, sprawling, and too far from the sea. At least her moon’s blood has returned. She listens to Maester Luwin tell her of the hot spring, the reason her rooms are so much warmer than the rest of the castle. She can sense he is trying to be kind, but she longs for Maester Cressen.
“We may be strangers here together, my lady,” he says. “I am a southerner myself.”
He thinks I am homesick, she realizes, and perhaps she is. If I were a man, I would be Lord of Storm’s End and not have had to leave.
The crypts, at least, remind her of home. As they bury Lyanna, Shiera thinks of the tombs of Storm Kings stretching on into blackness and Robert threatening to lose her down there. Ned stands over the tomb for a long time and she watches him, trying to make sense of the man with the dour face, before she leaves him there, holding the babe.
She moves through the castle like a ghost. The servants can sense the tension, she fears, which will not help Ned’s lordship. She still must manage his household, even if she is never his proper wife.
When evening falls, she is in the godswood. It feels a bleak place, and even though she has little to fear after living through a siege, she feels primal dread stir inside her. I should have refused the match. Robert would have been angry, but she could have withstood it. She always has.
A sound behind her makes her turn. Ned stands there, alone. "I'm sorry," he says gruffly. "I didn't know you were here."
"It’s all right." She goes to him, the hem of her skirt slipping over pine needles. "This is not like the godswood at Storm's End."
"Do you prefer the old gods, my lady? Your brother has never said."
"I prefer no gods." The sun has slipped away and Shiera wishes for a heavier cloak. She hugs her elbows, trying not to betray how she feels the cold. The Lady of Winterfell must not.
Ned's face registers obvious surprise. "I would have thought you kept the new gods. They are southern."
"If they existed, I would still have my mother and father."
“I do not believe the gods have such a hand in our world. But I feel their presence here.” The wind rattles the pines and Shiera shivers.
Ned removes his cloak and drapes it around her shoulders. It reminds her of the awkward moment in the sept.
“What does it mean to you to have been married in a sept when your gods are here?”
He says nothing for so long a moment that she thinks he has not heard her. “I trust that they saw,” he says finally. “And we are here before a heart tree now. That is good enough.”
“Is it?”
“It was for all the years before the new gods came.”
Shiera stares at the heart tree in the moonlight. Her breath clouds the air. Ned’s fur cloak is a heavy weight on her shoulders. “Maester Luwin tells me I may bear a child now.”
“Do you wish it?”
“You must have a son. A trueborn son.”
He sighs. “You are right.”
There is a long silence. Finally, she asks the question she has wondered since King’s Landing. If he strikes her for it, so be it. She will at last know what kind of man he is then. “Why did you take the babe from his mother?”
It is dark, though the weirwood tree has a queer light of its own. It truly seems to have a face now, and it seems to be watching them. Oddly, Shiera does not feel anything like fear. It feels like an old friend. Ned’s answer is a low rumble. “He is my blood, Shiera.”
He has never used her name before and and for once, Shiera holds her tongue. Perhaps it is time she heeded her septa’s advice.
That night, when he doesn’t come to her yet again, she dons her robe and goes to him. He sits up, surprised. “Shiera, you don’t need--”
“I do. We are married and Winterfell needs an heir.” She also wants to test her suspicions.
It is no proof, and Shiera has nothing to compare it to, but the way he touches her seems like that of a man who has never had a woman.
four.
In the morning, she wakes beside him, the memory of last night the first thing on her mind. The next thought that worms in is her husband’s dishonesty. She does not flatter herself that she’s figured out the whole story, but some part of it is clear.
He is my blood.
But not his bastard.
“Are you awake?” he asks softly, reaching for her shoulder. She stiffens. “Shiera?”
“Dishonest you may have been, I don’t think you’ve lied to me.”
He draws back. “Shiera…” He will not stop saying her name now.
“Tell me one thing, Ned.”
“I will if I can.”
She frowns. At least he is honest. “Why?”
“A promise.” He reaches out again and she doesn’t pull away. “That is all I can tell you, Shiera. I’m sorry it can’t be more, but I gave my word.”
She stares at him. It is a strange honor, but honor she sees in there. “You didn’t tell my brother.”
“I couldn’t.”
“I wouldn’t have imagined such disloyalty from you.” Her tone is curious, not condemning. She has always seen him as one of Robert’s followers, nothing more. She’s pleased to be wrong.
He closes his eyes. “I know. You know Robert and I quarrelled before I left for Storm’s End?”
She thinks back to him that day in the courtyard. Perhaps his brusqueness was not just shyness. “What over?”
“Princess Elia and her children.”
What must have transpired clicks into place in her mind. She will not ask him for confirmation; he has made it clear he will not tell her, but it isn’t hard to guess. And she knows her brother’s dark rages. She remembers how he treated their cousin Aemon Estermont after he captured Dragonstone without the prince and princess.
“And yet you would still have his sister.”
“You are not your brother, my lady. And Robert and I reconciled.”
“You could have stayed. He would have given you a seat on the small council.”
Ned shakes his head. “I belong in Winterfell, not there.” He pauses. “Would you rather have stayed in King’s Landing?” There is worry in his eyes, as if he regrets not asking her before.
“No.” His room is not quite as comfortable as hers, but she thinks she may yet become used to this cold land. She was never a soft southern maiden. Be a child, she wills the seed inside her. Be a son.
five.
Ned rests his hand on her back as the royal party rides through the gates of Winterfell. Robert is such a different man that Shiera first mistakes Renly for him. She and Ned exchange a silent look. Shiera has no love for her brother, and Ned has no love for the Lannisters. She is already looking forward to seeing the back of them.
There are greetings, then Robert insists on seeing Lyanna’s tomb, leaving Shiera to deal with what he leaves behind. Her eldest son, Steffon, is talking animatedly with Renly and the Tyrell knight who accompanies him. Brandon and Rickon are with their cousin, Joffrey.
“You will want to rest, Your Grace,” she says to the queen. “Let us go to your quarters.”
Cersei takes Tommen by the hand. “Myrcella, come.”
“Can’t I stay with Lyanna, Mother?” The two cousins clasped hands as soon as they spotted each other. They have never met, but they have been exchanging letters for years.
Something passes over Cersei’s face.
“They will be alright,” Shiera says. “Jon, when your father returns, tell him where we’ve gone.”
“Of course, Lady Stark.”
“You allow his bastard with your trueborn children,” the queen says, as they leave the courtyard.
“He is my husband’s blood.” Shiera looks back.
The black-haired, blue-eyed Stark children are a sharp contrast with their golden-haired royal cousins. Her eyes meet Renly’s and she wonders if he is thinking the same thing.
That night, in his bed, Ned tells her what Robert asks him to do
“Did you say yes?”
“I said I would ask you first.”
Shiera smiles. “And what was his reaction to that?”
“He urges his sweet sister to agree.” His gaze is far away. “Look at him, Shiera. I had no idea. He wasn’t like this the last time I saw him.”
She frowns. “Renly asked me an odd question this afternoon. He had a picture of a girl. Mace Tyrell’s daughter, he said. He asked me if she resembled your sister.”
“Did she?”
“Not particularly.”
He sighs. “I have a mind to refuse. I have no head for these games.”
“Do. Let Robert lie in the hole he has dug for himself.”
Ned smiles. “I did tell him I would ask you.” He kisses her. “He won’t be happy.”
“Blame me. He’ll be expecting it.”
Ned brushes dark hair back from her face. “You’re right, though. My father involved himself in southern affairs.” He pauses. “Do you not wish to see the south again? Your brothers?”
Shiera lets herself relax in his arms. “No,” she answers him. “We belong here.”
It’s the truth.