Chapter Text
238 A.C.
Twin drawbridges croaked down on their chains and met in the middle. Duncan had no precise numbers for how tall the inner and outer walls of Winterfell were – he was far more excited about the world and people that awaited him within those walls – but as Winterfell’s servants and men-at-arms secured the bridges in place with heavy iron, he found himself staring at the heights, the depths, the gap. Towers thronged with guards in a grey that matched the stone loomed overhead, easily as tall as the aboveground portions of the Red Keep, and the moat was so far beneath them that he couldn’t tell if those still white patches were churning flotsam or lingering snow. And when the signal was given that it was now safe to proceed, it took an entire minute for the Kingsguard and standard-bearers ahead of Duncan to start up, and therefore another minute to wait, and still another to walk his horse across it.
That gave his father time to catch up with him. He matched his horse’s pace with Duncan’s, turning a shake of his head and an awed whistle into a sidelong smile. “I thought it might not be as impressive now as it was then,” he said, leaning over conspiratorially. “But it seems to have knocked you flat too.”
Duncan laughed and corrected him. “I’m still on the horse.”
“Just wait,” his father teased, and peeled a length ahead as custom required. On his black palfrey and in his heavy scarlet cloak, with his circlet shimmering in the noontide sun, he stood out like a pupil and iris in the white shell of the flanking Kingsguard, focusing ahead. And once Duncan too was across the bridge, he immediately saw why that figurative eye stared forward.
His father had been king for over five years now, but Duncan still could not get over the strangeness of entire manors standing at attention for his family, let alone entire city-castles like this one. King’s Landing was more populous, but the streets were thin and dense, and Winterfell was the opposite, as vast within as tall without. Thousands lined the bailey and the walls and turrets above: soldiers, servants, craftspeople, tradesmen, a crowd so thick it seemed to have its own lungs, its own heart.
The advance guards had claimed a place ahead, near the granite archway that marked the entrance to a keep-within-this-Keep, a collection of peaked towers and covered overground bridges looming overhead like judgmental gods. Duncan rode up to join them, the carriage with the rest of his family on his heels, as a herald with a booming bass voice and a frosted northern accent announced:
“His Grace King Aegon Targaryen, Fifth of his Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms–”
Duncan distinctly heard his father chuckle, “Nine,” but only because he was used to it.
“–and Protector of the Realm!” the herald went on, undeterred.
If it was strange to see three thousand people he’d never met standing at attention for his family, it was downright preposterous to see them all bow or kneel. As soon as King Aegon swung down from his horse and his boots hit the earth, it was as if he’d dropped a stone into once-still water. From the lords and ladies at the center all the way out to those looming grey walls, a cascade rippled out of lowered heads and hidden faces.
Duncan’s father was right, as usual: were he not braced for it, this would have struck him off the horse.
But his father only laughed, and waved at the people nearest him to rise, and the herald was not done. “Her Grace, Queen Betha,” the man continued, and Duncan felt as much as heard the carriage rock behind him as a groom jumped down to let his mother out. Not waiting for her to emerge, the herald went on, “Their son, Ser Duncan, Prince of Dragonstone and Heir to the Iron Throne.”
All of those faces that had been dutifully inclined toward the earth seemed to fix on Duncan at once.
He remained on the horse.
He’d had five years to get used to the latter two titles. They still sounded like they belonged to his late uncle, though they no longer made his throat thicken. It was a matter of trying to match them, to live up to them, that’s all. But the first, that simple ser, was both someone else’s entirely and indisputably his, new enough to stick like silverskin in his teeth.
He smiled, and dismounted gracefully, and handed off the reins to stride over and join his father.
By the time he reached them, the herald had finished listing all of Duncan’s younger siblings, and stood down, which meant King Aegon’s voice and gesture were unimpeded. A Stark servant had raised a copper plate of fresh bread, its slices lightly steaming in the cool air, and another held a matching bowl of salted oil – tinged greenish-black, not the pink or plain white varieties of salt Duncan was used to down south. Aegon, smiling broadly, went through the guestright ritual, raising his chosen piece of bread so that all near could see it, then dipping it in the salted oil, shaking a few droplets off, and taking a bite. He chewed quickly, that smile still clear-sky plain on his face, and said, “I had missed northern bread. Does Mara still have charge of your ovens?”
The young lord directly across from King Aegon’s eyes and lips parted in shock at such an informal opening question – and so did Duncan’s, for an entirely different reason.
Duncan knew, in the same way as any facts or figures or names, that this was his cousin Lord Edwyle Stark. He knew that Edwyle was twenty years old. That the previous Lord Stark had died in battle with wildlings when Edwyle was a child. That Edwyle’s mother – Duncan’s aunt Melantha – had served as his regent until only four years ago. That this was why they had never met until now. That he was, reputedly, fond of hunting and a truly skilled marksman. That he was, as yet, unwed.
No one had told him that Lord Edwyle Stark was handsome.
He stood a hand taller than Duncan, with his cheeks and the sides of his head shaved down to stubble and a thick, sleek brown braid down the center of his skull – a style that Duncan had seen in Valyrian dragonrider tapestries and on a few Essosi people, performers mostly, trick riders and fire dancers, but on Lord Stark it looked somehow more martial and practical than precious. His nose and chin seemed carved from stone, and his eyes were a staid blue-grey that matched the shining granite and deep-dyed wool that surrounded him.
And when he said, quiet but resonant and only a little unbalanced, “The old gods called Mara home this winter past, Your Grace, but her daughter was sedulous in her work,” Duncan’s ears fell into the same black whirlpool as his eyes.
Duncan had met none of the people that turned up in his dreams. Not the woman dancing in the field of poppies and dragonflies, nor the girl who shrieked death from her unwilling pyre, nor the laughing king that wasn’t his father but shared his eyes, nor the hero with the harp. And he had not seen anyone shaped like Lord Stark in them either. He would surely remember if he had – and likely have lingered in bed to keep the sight burning as he worked his hand on his cock, portents be damned.
But he’d heard an otherworldly, wordless call slice through a sky of churning red-edged clouds, like the crow of a wounded bird or the thrill of an arrow too close to his ear: and a wolf had mourned that creature’s death, howling, too late, too late.
The wolf had Lord Stark’s voice. Or he, the wolf’s.
“I am honored that you remember those who served you here as a child,” Lord Stark was saying, though Duncan heard it all as if his head was underwater.
“I flatter myself that I have forgotten very little of my time here,” Aegon laughed. “Skullduggery that it was. At least Ser Duncan wasn’t here on false pretexts.”
At the sound of his name, Duncan snapped back to the present, and blinked – and then remembered that this version of the name was not his own.
Ser Duncan the Tall, or rather, Uncle Dunk, laughed robustly and inclined his head politely at Lord Stark, though that might have been more to get a better look at him from up so high. “Indeed I was not, my lord. I thank you for having us.”
Unflinchingly polite, but not quite smiling, Lord Stark said, “And I you, for venturing north, then and now. It has been over a century since anyone from your family treated with mine in my home.”
“Openly, at any rate,” Aegon joked. “And it would have been much easier for them, with dragons. But at least this gives me the chance to bring my entire family along.” He swept out his arm to indicate Duncan – and the younger Targaryen siblings, who from the chatter and whispers had amassed behind him–
–but Queen Betha shot past them all and ran into her sister’s awaiting arms with a girlish cheer. “Mel! Dearest!”
“About time,” Lady Stark said, beaming – and the force of her embracing her little sister set Lord Stark off balance, staggering forward.
His cowled shoulder clipped Duncan’s chin. Both of them balked apart, Duncan laughing, Lord Stark quietly and brusquely apologizing.
“No harm done,” Duncan tried to assure him, waving it off.
Lord Stark continued to stare down at him, mouth parted as if it were a third eye.
But Lady Melantha Stark, as soon as she’d let go of Duncan’s mother, cut between them. “Gods, look at you,” she cooed, hugging Duncan the same as she had when she’d come to court for the Great Council and coronation five years ago. “Stop making me feel old! Ser Duncan indeed. You’d better stick to black armor lest someone mistake you for your namesake.”
She was, of course, being facetious – Duncan was over a foot shorter than Uncle Dunk, and though he was still growing he knew he’d never catch up – but at least she wasn’t calling him Duncan the Small. “Well met, Aunt Melantha,” he said, grinning as he returned her hold and kissed her high on the cheek – which he had to lean down to do, for the first time. “And you’re not old until father says you’re old.”
She withdrew to pat his cheek. “Oh, you charming thing. Now move out of the way so I can get a look at the others – and please, Edwyle, Jocelyn, don’t leave yourselves out.”
As Melantha moved on, Betha and Aegon had as well, Betha lavishing gleeful kisses and attention on a thin girl a little older than Duncan’s sister Shaera: this must be his cousin Jocelyn. But that left Duncan directly across from Lord Stark. Who was still gawking at him.
Duncan met his eyes and blinked up at him. “Was there harm done?”
Lord Stark shaped a few attempts with his mouth, but no sound came out.
–Right. Guestright. Northerners put great stock in it. And those servants with the bread and salted oil were still nearby, and Duncan had precedence over his siblings. He was holding up the queue.
Really, this Heir-to-the-Iron-Throne status was a recipe for trouble.
So he waved the servants over, and went through the ritual with a little less aplomb than his father. The bread was as delicious as Aegon had intimated, the salt faintly tinged with a tang like seaweed, and this northern oil clung to Duncan’s fingertips in a different way than the Dornish olive oil he was used to. He wondered which plants they pressed it from – or animals, perhaps, up here. But either way, he swiftly licked the residue from his fingers, then washed his hands when a third servant presented him with a bowl and cloth.
Let’s try this again, he thought, but did not say aloud, as he met Lord Stark’s grey eyes for a third time.
Lord Stark may not have even blinked. He certainly hadn’t moved.
“Well, I’m in your hands now,” Duncan offered. Embracing him would obviously be a terrible idea, so Duncan proffered his now-cleaned palm in Lord Stark’s general direction. Angled to grasp, not to kiss: he took that cue from his father.
That gesture did what apparently Duncan’s words could not. Something startled in Lord Stark from the shoulders down, and he shook like a tree at the first bite of an axe. Then he exhaled, and clasped Duncan’s hand. He did not pull him in for an embrace as his mother had done, nor did he actually shake it, but he did not immediately let go either. His grip was firm, his calluses an archer’s, thicker in the grooves between his knuckles than across the top of his palm.
So Duncan directed the handshake, and kept it brief. One shake, and pulses like bookends, despite everything in Duncan’s heart singing that it was not enough.
As Lord Stark’s hand slipped out of Duncan’s like sun-warmed sand, he said, hardly above a whisper, “Welcome to Winterfell, my prince.”
Duncan smiled, and nodded, and knew he would not be calling Lord Stark Cousin Edwyle any time soon.
* *
Lord Stark’s frostiness aside, these northerners threw Duncan’s kind of feast.
After a tour of the grounds – well, of the immediately necessary parts of the grounds, this place was enormous and the rest of the Keep would keep – and a thorough introduction to the Guest Tower (which was entirely separate from the Great Keep, because, again, enormous), the royal family was conveyed to the great hall, which was, indeed, great. Thousands had greeted them outside, and though the castellan and chief steward (Will Cerwyn, a much younger brother of the Lord Cerwyn that had hosted the royal family two nights ago, and would do the same on their way home) asserted that the hall could seat five hundred, it seemed like well over a thousand souls had packed in to this building. There were certainly over a thousand cups of ale and beer and cider poured for the company, possibly ten thousand: brews, not wines, not even for the king. Winterfell evidently took great pride in its brewery, and during the tour Aunt Melantha waxed about all the formidable women she’d installed in the castle hierarchy over her decades here. In addition to the master brewer, the horsemaster, kennelmaster, chief blacksmith, head cook, head weaver, and the housekeeper for the Guest Tower were referred to, affectionately and openly, as The Bitches. Not the she-wolves from the bawdy songs about Uncle Dunk, but ‘their domestic equivalent,’ Aunt Melantha insisted. Uncle Dunk blushed up to his ears. Aegon and Duncan found it hilarious. (Lord Stark said nothing.)
But Lord Stark did not matter to the revels. Aside from the opening toast, and a few politenesses, he said little and hardly ate or drank. Once the king and most of the Kingsguard were enmeshed in conversation with the local lords and older men (including Lord Stark’s last remaining uncle Errold, the new master-at-arms), and Duncan’s siblings were taken care of by the youths and little court of Lord Stark’s sister, Duncan thought that this might be an ideal time to try and actually converse. Maybe ask about the next hunt, or offer to spar.
But Lord Stark swiftly excused himself to deal with something, and left Duncan to the care of the captain of the guard, a brash and formidable mountain clansman some ten years their senior named Harwin Norrey. Captain Norrey was immediately genial, and might have already been drunk, and told the sorts of stories that bled into one another like strong dyes. But when Captain Norrey found out how well-traveled Duncan was and asked him about Dorne, that roped a half dozen more men into their corner of the high table. And then another handful, and another, until Duncan might as well be holding court from Lord Stark’s own hearth.
“Did you ride there, or sail?” asked Yohn Cerwyn, the castellan’s son.
“Rode there, sailed back,” Duncan said. “We’d stopped at High Hermitage and Starfall first, to see my other cousins, so we went through all three, stone, sand, and salt. But I think crossing the desert once was enough for me.”
The northmen laughed, and one of the four Umber men (all of them were taller than he and named some variation on Jon, but Duncan vowed to differentiate them before the sennight was out) added, “Once is more than enough,” which set off another round of laughter.
“You know most Dornishmen would say the same of snow,” Duncan said gamely. “Though they’d be wrong.”
“You don’t fear the snow, my prince?” asked another of the Jons Umber, the one with a knobbled scar replacing most of the hairline over his left eye.
“Why, do you fear the sand?”
While several laughed, Captain Norrey included, a third of the other Jons Umber pointed out, “Last time one of our kind went into those red sands, the North lost its heir.”
Duncan did not permit his fret of a misstep to show on his face: honest curiosity would surely hide it. “When was this?”
“A hundred years gone,” Captain Norrey explained. “The Old Wolf’s son, it was. Old Cregan Stark had to take a third wife after that, since Black Aly gave him only daughters.”
“You Blackwoods can’t stay away, can you,” someone teased, and another round of toasts welled up, to the Queen and to Lady Melantha. Duncan drank, happy to be grouped in as much with them as with his royal blood.
But that hairline-scarred Jon Umber hadn’t drank, and didn’t let it go. “Can’t help but think you’re light-footing that question, my prince.”
One of those, then. Duncan leaned a little nearer, smirking over the tankard’s rim. “Which question was this?”
“Old Cregan’s son didn’t fear the Dornish sand, but it scoured his bones all the same,” the man said, an unsavory edge to his smile, like a raconteur telling of Others and faceless assassins. “Should a Dornishman try our winter, the snows would strip him the same, fear or no. And your like’s meant to have fire in its blood, but there’s a reason me and mine call our home Last Hearth.”
Still not a question, Duncan thought. This was getting dangerously political, though the last jibe was probably just regional pride, too much like the rest of this informal chat to be called an insult. They’d just toasted the Queen, after all. So he grinned. “I know I haven’t seen a proper winter yet, not the way you have them here. And it would be disrespectful not to fear it, wouldn’t it? But there’s fright, and then there’s flinching. I can fear a northern winter the way it deserves to be feared, but that doesn’t mean I’d run from the chance to see one through.”
The northmen clearly didn’t expect to hear an answer like that. Which was good, because Duncan had spoken entirely the truth. Several men looked candidly impressed, mostly the ones closer to Duncan’s age, but the slightly older ones, including Captain Norrey, simply nodded and glanced among themselves.
“Aye, that’s your lady mother’s blood,” Captain Norrey said, patting Duncan on the back as easily as if they’d been kin all their lives. “The Wolfswood beats in Blackwood hearts still, for all they’re south of the Neck now.”
Niel Dustin raised his tankard. “To more Blackwoods back up here where they belong.”
Duncan laughed and toasted along with the rest.
That Duncan took after his mother physically had never been a barrier to him: if anything, the opposite. It had only vexed him as a child when three of his younger siblings in a row came into this world silver-haired and violet-eyed. But by the time Rhaelle was born (with the latter but not the former), Duncan was already over that insecurity. His curly black hair and eyes nearer to black than purple made it easier for people to see him, talk to him, even after he became a proper prince. It meant he could play with his Riverlander and Dornish cousins in forests and pools and not shrivel beneath the sun. It made him stand out less on the battlefield when he was squiring (though now that he was knighted and carried his variation on the Targaryen arms, he stood out plenty, but that hadn’t yet been tested in war, and hopefully would never). His grandfather King Maekar had once looked at him with barely-deniable tears in his eyes, and told him about his great uncle Baelor, who’d looked not Targaryen at all save for his right eye and should have been king, and half the people had loved him for it, and the half that didn’t were Blackfyre traitors. So even after this absurd turn of events where Duncan was heir to the throne, the country might be ready for someone like him.
If only he were also ready. But he had time.
“But someone’s got to guard the Raventree weirwood, lest the southrons forget,” Duncan pointed out, which earned him another round of laughter and hearty thumps on the shoulder, and another two rounds of this excellent dark beer.
Once the night had progressed from stories to songs, Duncan found himself equally popular. The men introduced him to their wives and sisters and daughters, and this was an aspect of his role that Duncan had taken to with no trouble at all. It was natural to charm and flirt, to tell these northern ladies truly how pretty they were and how their bold and braided styles compared (positively) to the fussier ones at court down south. He knew many of the songs and steps from his seasons at Raventree Hall, and the ones he didn’t know were a pleasure to learn. He retained as many of their names and faces as he could, though the drink had begun to fog his eyes at the corners. And he did not even need to worry about those who seemed more ambitious than interested, for it was widely known throughout the realm that he’d marry Lady Tempest Baratheon within the next few years, and if a northern girl wanted so desperately to come south and be his mistress, she’d surely want the south as much without him. In the same way, it was easier to fool about with his (former) fellow squires and friends knowing naught could come of it, frankly.
The woman from his dreams, from the field of poppies, might not exist as more than a metaphor: even if she did, she would not be his queen.
But that meant a night of dancing and laughter, of new faces and new stories and the greatest joy of his life as a prince. Unless another war began, and until his father put him on the small council – which he swore he would not until Duncan was ready – Duncan’s chief duty to the realm was giving its people happiness and hope. And to do so for these northerners was so facile that Duncan thought he must have forgotten something.
When a rollicking dance left him out of breath, he took his time to catch it and look the great hall over. He scanned the room for silver-gold hair and flashes of scarlet, and found his parents and siblings had settled into their niches too. His father, of course, was happy as a pig in shit, as he had been since they crossed the Neck, regaling the northmen with stories of his own, and Uncle Dunk and the rest of the Kingsguard surrounded him all flushed with drink and joy, hopefully more joy than drink. His mother was atwitter with Aunt Melantha and their ladies, alternating between boisterous conversation and the dance floor. Jaehaerys was a little harder to spot, but Duncan eventually tracked him to one of the interior balconies, where he and Maester Antyn and the apprentice Pate, Jae’s bosom friend, were listening intently to Winterfell’s maester as he lectured and pointed at some intricacy of the architecture overhead, or maybe something about the solar eclipse due to come a sennight from now. Daeron and Rhaelle were in the care of some nursemaids and the somewhat scandalized septon and septa who’d accompanied them north: Rhaelle was dozing off and cranky, and by the impatient twists in his napkin Daeron looked about two seconds from starting a scuffle with the little Mormont boy, so Duncan sent one of his younger dance partners over to fawn over Daeron and ask him to dance too. And Shaera was dancing as well, already giggling with Cousin Jocelyn between songs.
No two Westerosi girls the same age have ever looked less alike, Duncan thought. Cousin Jocelyn was very like her elder brother, tallish and willowy, ice-pale and smooth-haired, with black Blackwood eyes to match her ebon gown; Shaera, a silver-haired Targaryen princess right out of the tapestries at Dragonstone save for the burnished Dornish skin she shared with their father, was pudgy and callibombe, which made her seem a little older than her twelve years. And she was thus at least as popular a dance partner as Duncan, if not more so.
Too popular.
Yes, Duncan had forgotten something. More than one of the men Duncan had spent the earlier part of the night sharing stories with were now focused on his sister instead.
Shaera was spoken for – all four of the older royal children were, only Rhaelle thus far spared a betrothal – but that didn’t mean she was safe from lewd remarks or roaming hands.
Duncan spent the next song making his way around the hall, and reached the girls by its end. They laughed with their partners, and then with each other, and when Duncan waved and approached they giggled about that too.
“My prince,” Jocelyn said with a stately curtsy.
“Oh, don’t my prince him, he hates that,” Shaera said, swatting his chest with the corner of her sleeve.
“Does he now?” Jocelyn asked, with the same deadpan teasing some of the Raventree Hall cousins practiced so well – and a little like Lady Fossoway, if less worldly.
“From family,” Duncan clarified gently. And in general, but I have to get used to that, don’t I? They’ll call me that until I’m king.
Jocelyn crinkled her nose – so it wasn’t made of stone, maybe her brother’s wasn’t either – and looked him up and down with a little smile. “Cousin Duncan, then,” she offered, and somehow made it sound like she was doing him a favor.
Which she was, technically. He gave her a little bow to show that he knew what she was doing, and then saw that smile and raised her a proper grin. “Cousin Jocelyn. I’ve been remiss, but I seem to have taken a little too well to northern informality.”
“Oh,” she asked leadingly, clearly intuiting what he was about, “have you?”
“I haven’t danced with you or Aunt Melantha yet,” he said.
Shaera’s laughter pealed enough to cut through every conversation around them, probably straight to the ceiling; Jocelyn didn’t laugh this time, but looked Shaera up and down sidelong. Yes, this canny girl knew what Duncan was trying to do. Her brother probably did the same for her. “Far be it from me to deny you the opportunity,” she said.
The next song was, as luck would have it, a slower one, though still the sort of line dance that would have them standing aside as often as dancing with each other. Shaera was accordingly snatched up by one of the Jons Umber, the one with the hairline scar who’d asked if Duncan feared the snow, and just before everyone was in place in their parallel lines, the dance began.
Jocelyn turned out to be, if not an enthusiastic partner, a practiced one, who did not seem to mind at all that Duncan’s attention was split ascertaining that the Umber man kept his hands to himself. If anything, Jocelyn was just as attentive about her new friend. When a pass brought her and Duncan close together for an entire count of sixteen, she stood on her toes to say close to his ear, “I thought her betrothed was dead.”
Not the conversation Duncan expected to have, at least not yet. “He is,” Duncan told her. “But they’re passing her on to the next Tyrell in line. Luthor.”
Jocelyn nodded knowingly, her steps only faltering a little. “She’s been telling the men about his heroic death, though she hasn’t outright said she’s free.”
Duncan sighed. He couldn’t blame Shaera for having her fun, but she didn’t know the strength of the fire with which she played.
“If she said nothing, they’d still try,” Jocelyn went on. Their promenade-step turned their views toward the parliament of mothers and aunts, who were looking upon Duncan and Jocelyn with candid affection and ambition. “Look at them, thinking the same of us.”
Chuckling, Duncan knelt to let her circle him, and raised his eyebrow at his mother to remind her. She laughed, and elbowed Aunt Melantha in the ribs, who then laughed as well and thumped her sister’s shoulder.
As soon as they were both on their feet again, Duncan asked Jocelyn, “Are you still for the North?”
“The Vale,” she said easily, plainly. “It’s down to Heart’s Home or Runestone.”
“Whichever can provide more goats?” Duncan asked.
“Whichever I can provide more heirs,” she answered. “If Janos Corbray survives whatever pox he’s got, he gets Lady Forlorn and me too. If not, I’m a Royce this time next year.”
Gods, she said it as if it didn’t chafe her at all. A fact of life, like the depth of the moat or the direction of the wind.
“Though goats might also be involved,” she added wryly.
The next several counts saw them waiting apart while others claimed the center. Duncan took the time to check in with Shaera. She didn’t look to him at all, gazing up at her partner as he spun her, then down as he knelt the way Duncan just had for Jocelyn. As Shaera circled him, Umber’s eyes inevitably left hers. And lingered on her backside.
Duncan caught Jocelyn’s eye. Yes, she’d noticed as well.
But so long as Umber remained within the bounds of propriety, Duncan needed to do no more. He let his presence be a warden’s, and refocused on finishing this dance with Jocelyn. Their lines came together again, the sequence repeating. Was Lord Stark watching out for her right now too? Perhaps he didn’t have to in his own Keep, surrounded by friends and bannermen. And surely not on Duncan’s behalf.
Where had Lord Stark gone off to, anyway? Duncan could not picture that serious and stiff man dancing, but every man had his preferred company, and perhaps Lord Stark simply sought his pleasure elsewhere. Or–
“What about your brother?” Duncan found himself asking Jocelyn as they promenaded.
Her eyebrow arced. “We don’t marry siblings in this family.”
Ha – at least this was proof that she couldn’t read his mind. He laughed self-deprecatingly, knowing he’d implied something undue. It was hardly the first time. “We don’t anymore in mine,” he said. Which was true: no Targaryen still living was wed within the family, and Duncan’s particular branch had refrained from incest entirely for three unbroken generations, longer than any other in history. In fact, thanks to his mother he was far more First Man than Valyrian or Dornish.
Jocelyn snickered. “I know your meaning. But you’d have to ask him. I’m not privy to those negotiations.”
So Lord Stark wasn’t just unwed, he was unbetrothed.
Lucky him.
“His Grace and Aunt Betha’s love story was a common bedtime fixture before I could read,” Jocelyn went on leadingly as she circled Duncan’s raised hand. “Folded in with all the tales of dragons and wights and Others.”
“Oughtn’t a Blackwood girl have more respect for faerie tales?” Duncan teased.
She laughed low without parting her lips. “I have immense respect for them; I believe them all. Perhaps Lord Corbray’s pox is a spell cast by Lord Royce to ensure that I come to Runestone.”
Duncan could not help himself: “So that Corbray’s sword withers in its sheath, and leaves an unluckier lady forlorn?”
Perhaps that much innuendo was unfit for a noble girl, but Jocelyn only gently slapped him on the knuckles with a scrunched and catlike smirk. “You make such a show of protecting your sister, but you say such wicked things to me?” she taunted.
“I’m harmless,” Duncan pointed out.
“You’re the Heir to the Iron Throne,” she corrected. “Your words are sharper than you think.”
So are yours, he thought, as the dance lost its luster all at once.
Thankfully, this pass separated them to their lines again. Duncan watched over Shaera and took a few long breaths, intending to regain his composure.
He was not near enough to hear his sister and her partner’s conversation over the music. But Shaera’s expression looked much the way Duncan now felt: as a glove on the wrong hand, yet too cold without to remove. As Umber rose his lips passed close to Shaera’s cheek, enough that his breath distressed the stray silver curls from her coiffure. Her eyes shot wide, her cheeks pink. She stammered her response, canines flashing.
And when she caught Duncan’s eye, he knew that look, and what he must do.
Despite it being his and Jocelyn’s next turn in the center, he raised a hand to excuse himself, then curled it into a fist as he locked his eyes on Umber’s–
–who stiffened and turned, to address Lord Stark behind him.
Lord Stark’s hand, knuckles bone-white, tensed on Umber’s shoulder and drew him back a step. He whispered something into Umber’s ear: Umber immediately nodded, and bowed to Shaera with a grin, then excused himself from the floor. Expressionless, Lord Stark cut in to take his place.
Shaera’s fear evaporated into romantic awe: Duncan hoped his plain relief did not look quite the same. But then again, Lord Stark was not looking at Duncan at all, purely focused on Shaera and the dance.
When Jocelyn startled Duncan and prompted him with the next steps, her voice had retained that lilt of humor from before. “You must have reminded him of his duty too.”
Lord Stark did not look as if he required the reminder. Nor did he look entirely out of place on the dance floor, moving gracefully and on-beat, if unspectacularly. In fact, he looked…perfect. Gallant, courtly, unselfish. Like he required nothing from the girl he’d saved, not even a smile. Like he quietly defended people’s honor every day and it was no more remarkable than breathing or blinking or standing upright.
Like he’d tell Duncan It was merely my duty, and it would feel true.
But Duncan took Jocelyn’s praise in the spirit it was meant, and finished out the dance with appropriately gregarious humor.
As soon as the music stopped, Duncan swept directly from bowing to Jocelyn to turning toward Shaera and Lord Stark – or would have, were Lord Stark still there. He’d been even swifter in his departure, already several strides off the floor and disappearing into the crowd. But that left Shaera to swing herself into Duncan’s space and sigh, dreamily, “Wasn’t that so kind?”
Duncan let out a relieved sigh of his own and agreed. “He was. Are you all right? What did he say to you?”
“Nothing,” Shaera chirped, trying to look around Duncan in the direction Lord Stark had gone.
“He meant Halfjon,” Jocelyn supplied helpfully as she too came to Shaera’s side.
Duncan would not forget which Umber brother was named Halfjon.
“Oh,” said Shaera as her mood dimmed. The flush to her cheeks had returned, though it seemed more embarrassment than anger now, which was only marginally a comfort. She kept her voice low, so both Duncan and Jocelyn leaned down to hear her. “He asked how old I was, so I told him. Then he said I was proof that dragons hatched already flowered.”
Duncan did not see red, precisely. More of a deep orange, like a branding iron just beginning to smolder.
“And then he said he was glad Ser Justian was dead, because the Tyrells had flowers enough, and so someone more a man could pluck me.”
…and Duncan saw not just the branding iron but the blazing crucible as well. How dare he.
Jocelyn took Shaera by the upper arms and leaned their brows together. “Why don’t we see if the marchpane is out?” she offered, projecting just enough for Duncan to hear. A tactful signal, This part is mine; you are needed elsewhere. “It’s the first time we’ve made it here since last summer.”
“That sounds lovely,” Shaera said. A smile seemed to creep in from her profile to the center of her face, and she looked up at Duncan, “Do you want some too?”
Not in a mood like this, Duncan thought. “I’ll go thank Lord Stark for you,” he said instead, and left out the part where he intended to inquire after the necessity of Halfjon Umber’s tongue remaining attached to his throat.
Shaera beamed again, violet eyes lighting up all at once. “Oh, please do! Tell him he was like Aelerik the Soulkeeper, but all the wrong colors.”
“He prefers his own,” Jocelyn said tartly as she escorted Shaera off the floor. “Who’s Aelerik the Soulkeeper? I haven’t heard that one.”
“Oh! It’s so romantic. He was the son of an Archon, awaiting his father’s dragon. And he was sick and sad and empty, so he traveled the world with his hollow sword, and the sword trapped the souls of all the people he killed so that he could hold on to his own. But that meant he lived when he should have died – and when he came home to Valyria, the cousin he was supposed to marry had married her brother instead…” Shaera’s voice faded as they slipped into the crowd together.
That left Duncan to seek out Lord Stark. Considering the man’s head start, and how easily he seemed to blend into his fief, that would be an uphill battle, but Duncan had his ways. It was simply a matter of checking with Captain Norrey or Yohn Cerwyn, who would inevitably have one eye on their liege the same way Uncle Dunk’s never really left King Aegon. Lucky for Duncan, both Norrey and Cerwyn were near at hand, and sober enough to tell Duncan that Lord Stark had gone to the Guest Tower to check the guard assignments. And, Duncan inferred, to remove Halfjon Umber from them. Perfect.
Duncan remembered the route, and no one had cause to impede or escort him. He endured the stares of wonderment from Winterfell’s denizens who hadn’t met him yet and pretended they were hidden in the twilight and the shadows of the braziers. And the cool air – more like late winter down south, though it was indisputably spring else they would not be here at all – went a long way toward soothing Duncan’s rising temper, but the embers still burned in their cradles of ash.
What good was being a prince if he couldn’t protect his family?
By the time he’d reached the fire-lined path to the Guest Tower, he’d caught up with his quarry: Lord Stark stood in the open frame of the entryway, conversing with the housekeeper, a garrulous and plump woman around Uncle Dunk’s age who insisted she be called Nan, though her given name was Dyanna. She had a sort of pegboard tucked under her arm and was shuffling markers on it as Lord Stark calmly pointed out this placement or that. Just as stately and placid as he had been inside, stopping an altercation before it happened, with perfect control and gentle command.
Lord Stark looked far more a prince that Duncan ever would. If not a king. It ought not sting so.
He even looked up at Duncan’s approach before Nan did. If he was shocked, he didn’t at all show it, though shadows of the firelight beneath him proved that his expression wasn’t quite the same from that first moment to the next. “My prince,” he said, as Nan curtsied and Duncan stopped a casual length away. “How may I be of service?”
The part of Duncan’s brain that had made jokes about Corbray’s poxy sword immediately supplied several means by which Lord Stark might serve him. Most of them involved Lord Stark grunting Duncan’s name in incoherent fragments. The ones that didn’t involved his mouth being otherwise occupied.
Thankfully, that was not the only functional part of Duncan’s brain. “A word, if you don’t mind, Lord Stark?”
He assented, and left Nan to carry that pegboard inside. And he took the time to, if not precisely close the distance, come closer enough to Duncan that it was clear he understood that this was meant to be in confidence.
So Duncan took one step still nearer – far enough that he did not have to tilt his chin to look up, but well within striking range, and said the most crucial and regal of all he needed and wanted to say. “I appreciate what you did for Shaera in there. Thank you.”
Lord Stark did not smile, but the corners of his eyes and mouth relaxed, along with a brief nod. “You are welcome,” he pointed out, “but you had already done the same.”
“But I hadn’t,” Duncan said. “Because if I had, you wouldn’t have had to.”
“You became my responsibility as soon as you crossed the bridge.” Lord Stark shook his head, his braid so tight that it moved in perfect tandem with his skull.
“Technically, you could have thrown me out until I ate that bread,” Duncan countered, laughing. “Which was delicious, by the way.”
“I have passed your father’s compliments onto the head cook.”
“Add mine,” Duncan said. And then sighed, because however easy and fun the banter was, Lord Stark’s words had struck as inadvertently deep as his sister’s. “Did Shaera tell you what that cur said to her?”
Whether it was another shift of the shadows or a flicker in his countenance, Lord Stark’s expression seemed to snap back into place without having changed at all. “If it compares at all to the things Halfjon has said to Jocelyn, I don’t have to know.”
Duncan blinked, incredulous. “And yet you keep him around.”
“He will come nowhere near the Guest Tower for the duration of your stay.”
“That’s not enough.”
Lord Stark shut his eyes, and his chest rose and fell without a sigh sounding. “If I turned out every man who’d ever made a coarse remark, I’d have no banners to raise the next time your family called for my aid.”
Duncan’s back teeth clacked against each other like masonry locking imperfectly into place. “This went beyond ‘a coarse remark’,” he said, feeling the words hiss through the gaps between his molars. “Halfjon Umber asserted a burning desire to deflower my sister, who only passed her twelfth nameday a fortnight ago. He likewise implied that the women of my House deserve to be fucked as children.”
Lord Stark breathed, slow and silent, but said nothing at all.
“Furthermore,” Duncan went on, “he insulted a recently killed friend of the royal family. A knight that we not only entrusted with Shaera’s eventual marriage, but with my littlest brother Daeron. Justian Tyrell was Daeron’s knight, you see. Now, his first knight, because he needs another. Dead at Massey’s Hook. A hero. Had your precious Halfjon said that rot within my brother’s hearing, he might find his ear or ankle bitten through.”
This next breath of Lord Stark’s came louder and quicker, but still infuriatingly calm. “And had he said it within yours?”
“I’d have taken his tongue,” Duncan said plainly. “And for what he said about Shaera, replaced it with his severed cock.”
Lord Stark shut his eyes. The nearest braziers crackled, their fresh wood smoking in clear white coils that tossed the few loose parts of Lord Stark’s clothes, the slatted hem of his tunic, his pale shirtcuffs where the oversleeves bared them. He looked entirely different than Duncan’s father when he was deliberating some more measured course than justice demanded: where King Aegon hid one set of teeth behind another like a lizard-lion, veiling his violence while letting its threat ring clear, Lord Stark seemed instead to bury and muffle it, earth and stone.
“Then it is well that you did not hear him say it,” Lord Stark said.
Duncan’s jaw slackened. “Excuse me?”
“I believe you,” Lord Stark said, teeth so even Duncan could practically see his reflection in them. “And, more importantly, her. But please leave it to me, my prince.”
“Leave what to you?”
“You’ve only just arrived. His Grace has made an effort for this to be a mission of good will, and if I may be so bold, you should endeavor the same. It would be imprudent to demand I exact violence on one of my bannermen not an hour after you first ate in my hall.”
“You’re already saying you won’t reprimand him.” Duncan felt his tongue dry from the tip down. “Gods. Truly.”
“That is not what I said,” Lord Stark protested.
“That is exactly what you said. You just prefaced it with if I may be so bold. So, no. You may not.”
“I may not what, my prince?”
You may not call me that, Duncan thirsted to say. Instead, he let out, “What you ‘were so bold’ as to do. Namely, tell me what I should and shouldn’t do.”
A silver cutting edge flashed from Lord Stark’s eyes. “This is not your Keep.”
“I am not your subject,” Duncan parried.
But archer though Lord Stark was, someone had trained him well to hone his words and strike to kill. “No,” he said. “You are my guest.”
Not my family. Not my friend, though that hope seemed well and truly dead. Even my prince would have been preferable to that.
A guest. Here on sufference. As the Heir to the Iron Throne, not as a person worth knowing.
When Duncan said nothing, and those flames snapped on in the slow, mild wind, what little emotion showed through Lord Stark’s countenance slid back into its figurative sheath. Silent. Practiced. Implacable. In that same soft-but-not-gentle voice he’d used from the start, the same voice that Duncan had heard lamenting in his dreams, he said, “Dragon or no, I cannot have you terrorizing my bannermen. Please allow me to see to the matter. For now, Halfjon will not trouble your family. The rest, I will address within the fortnight, and if you are still unsatisfied, we can discuss it thereafter.”
Unacceptable, Duncan nearly said. Similarly, a dismissive and sarcastic Fine stalled halfway up his throat. Instead, he leaned a fraction closer, and locked his eyes on Lord Stark’s, and asked, “Like you addressed it for Jocelyn?”
Some part of Duncan hoped for a reaction like the one he’d nearly forced through a minute ago; a flash of steel, a streak of color.
Well, he got it – but the color was the sheer and hateful white of freshly chipped ice.
“My sister can speak for herself,” Lord Stark said, already breaking away and striding past Duncan, so that the rest of his words hovered at the level of Duncan’s ear. “See to your own if she cannot.”
He left without asking to be excused. He left Duncan no chance to retort without shouting like a child. He left the hanging implication that Duncan had failed his family thrice over in one night. Most importantly, he left.
And it took Duncan a full minute of standing in incredulous silence to realize that the otherwise unstintingly polite Lord Edwyle Stark had not phrased that last statement as a request.
“Fuck,” Duncan said, because his tongue also had not been cut out.
* *