About as well as the author wants it to...
Reminds me of my favorite JMS quote regarding B5...
Q: "How fast are the White Star ships?"
A: "They travel at the speed of plot."
The Logistics of Good Living (ASOIAF, Brandon Stark SI)
- Thread starter Karmic Acumen
- Start date
Reminds me of my favorite JMS quote regarding B5...
Q: "How fast are the White Star ships?"
A: "They travel at the speed of plot."
Tryglaw
Well-known member
It's been a few years since I was there, and the phone I took pictures with died on me in the meantime (I think I should have backups though, somewhere...). From what I recall replacing the wound spring an electric motor provided the motive force, but other then that the entire mechanism, all the gears and sprockets and such, were made of wood.
Quite the masterwork, very impressive.
CmirDarthanna
Well-known member
Just the sap then. Soak or stain cloth and other woods in it to make it stronger, not rot and be immune to mundane fire and frost while resisting magical ones.
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
Interesting. It's too bad the si doesn't know about this, or any clockwork. I wonder if someone else could be appropriately inspired.
Chapter 4: The Joys of Womanhood Are Many and Troublesome (IV)
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
A/N: This chapter is dedicated to @sandmanwake.
Lyarra Stark hadn’t expected to derive so much amusement out of watching the North’s newest noble stumble through his hapless introduction to highborn life. Or perhaps ‘confused flailing’ was a better thing to call it. The man had done little since his sudden elevation besides nodding jerkily and haltingly replying to Lord Cerwyn and her husband as they educated him on his new responsibilities and lands. Then came the closing feast, held in the grand hall with its doors open wide to give clear view of the sky lamps outside, hovering high in the air like sentries on both sides of the stairs and sloping path, tethered in place by flaxen strings. But the more her husband spoke, the less the newest nobleman seemed to even register them or anything besides. He instead looked fit to run away and hide under a rock in the woods.
“The forests in your territory are rather sparse, but re-planting and coppicing should see them grow back into something sustainable by the time your heirs are grown. There is a limestone quarry on your lands as well. It’s largely depleted but we’ve recently discovered that the scrap rock from limestone and dolostone can be smelted into an all-new metal suitable for many things. That should provide you with a solid income stream immediately, and the red clay waste can easily be turned to any number of building applications. What you sadly won’t have too much of is farmland, but we should have a solution for that as well, come spring. Even if it turns out to be sub-prime for food crops, you should be able to raise hemp just fine. Of course, a full prospecting will have to be done to know everything you do or don’t have available beyond these generalities. Do you know your letters and numbers?”
“… I can count to one hundred, m’lord,” the man said helplessly. “You gotta know how many logs everyone be wantin’, you see. But I can’t read or write none.”
“You’ll have to learn then. You and yours will come to Winterfell to be educated on everything you need. That is, if your new lord agrees?”
“We have the means and a Maester of course,” Robard said. “But if House Stark has even more Winterfell Wonders to be doling out, best if he goes learn it all from the horse’s mouth so to speak.”
Oh if only he knew the name of that horse, Lyarra thought with a hidden smile. Wait, where was Brandon? He still hadn’t shown up, and neither had his guard. Come to think of it, Medger seemed to be missing as well.
“House Stark will match what starting funds house Cerwyn provides, and you can expect various gifts from the other noble houses once you throw your inauguration feast. I suggest waiting for spring to maximise attendance,” Rickard was saying. “That said, more coin can be made available as investment on top of the knowledge and techniques I just described, to be returned as a percentage of the income of whatever enterprises are financed with them. But such things can be discussed once you’ve been properly armed for such talks. Now eat and drink. We wouldn’t want our newest Master to come out of a feast still hungry.”
That would be the day, Lyarra thought. She still wasn’t sure the new Master Winterstone would be able to rise without help at all, given how unsteady the man’s legs had gotten from sheer shock by the time Rickard and Robard sat him down at the high table between them. Admittedly, that had proven fortunate in a way. It eliminated all chances of the earlier scene being repeated, when the man barely made it to a bench after being ennobled and was promptly charged and embraced desperately by a heavily pregnant woman. The North’s all-newest dame now sat next to their lady host doing a fair impression of a shy wallflower. She was another surprise for everyone involved, though for Lyarra herself it was secondary to Lady Sera’s approach to the situation. Which is to say, the Lady Cerwyn immediately took charge of the young woman and spent the hours leading up to the feast bathing her and dressing her and fussing over her appearance and proving she owned far too many pregnancy gowns for a woman who’d only ever had the one child. Lyarra decided not to mention all the things she read into that.
She also held back from speculating on how severe a boredom Lady Sera must be suffering from, to so tightly latch onto this unexpected distraction. Lyarra didn’t remember her being particularly invested in the smallfolk. Then again, there could be a lot of soft prestige in mentoring the wife of the person who rediscovered the secret to Bran the Builder’s greatest accomplishment. Or half of it, depending on how much magic may or may not otherwise have contributed to the making of the Wall.
Lyarra would wish Sera luck if she hadn’t just learned it would be her job to get her trained up. She hoped Lady Della was just overwhelmed rather than timid. After the last seven years, Lyarra was far too weary of coaxing others out of their shell. It was a tiresome skill, and she’d never been particularly adept at it to begin with.
That was when Medger Cerwyn finally entered the hall, and while he looked normal enough, the lute he was carrying was out of the ordinary for him. More curious to Lyarra, though, was the sight of her eldest son trailing the man, carrying what looked like a stack of papers in one hand and a bunch of wooden sticks under the arm. Medger eschewed the high table entirely, going instead to the spot where the minstrel had been playing his tunes all evening. He quietly conferred with the spindly man, who then backed off with a bow.
Medger then sat down on the minstrel’s chair, set his lute on one knee and waited for Brandon to set up what turned out to be a small tripod stand for the stack of papers he’d brought along. When he was done, the papers were at eye-level with the sitting man and Brandon, after looking around for a seat and not finding one, chose to step back and sit right there on the ground. Then he pulled a two-pronged fork from his trouser pocket.
Pockets. Another thing her son refused to leave home without, Lyarra thought absently. He disdained belt pouches for some reason. He’d expressed to her in no uncertain terms that clothing without pockets sewn in was worthless because no, the ones in his cloak’s inner lining weren’t nearly enough and Maester Walys’ pocket-dappled inner sleeves obviously agreed with him.
Brandon motioned for Medger to do something or other. So the man did. From where Lyarra sat, it almost seemed like he wasn’t doing anything except looking at the paper in front of whim while tilting his head. But then Brandon made a ‘so-so’ gesture with his hand, and she realised from the way his throat moved that he was probably humming the starting tunes to prepare himself. That was as much as she understood though. Brandon then knocked his odd fork against the leg of Medger’s chair and held it up near his ear right after. Then, when the man hummed again, Brandon nodded in satisfaction and held up a thumb.
Medger then began to pluck the cords of the lute. It was a simple, repeating tune, but it sounded pleasing to the ear. And when the man actually started to sing a song she’d never heard before, Lyarra Stark was surprised that his voice sounded pleasing to her ear as well.
Are you going to Winterfell Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
For she once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a Dornish shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without any seam nor needlework
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Tell her to wash it in yonder dry well
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Which never sprung water nor rain ever fell
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Which never bore blossom since First Man was born
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Ask her to do me this courtesy
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And ask for a like favour from me
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Have you been to Winterfell Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me from one who lives there
For he once was a true love of mine
Ask him to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea-sand
For then he'll be a true love of mine
Ask him to plough it with a lamb's horn
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And sow it all over with one peppercorn
For then he'll be a true love of mine
Ask him to reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And gather it up with a rope made of heather
For then he'll be a true love of mine
When he has done and finished his work
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Ask him to come for his Dornish shirt
For then he'll be a true love of mine
If you say that you can't, then I shall reply
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Oh, let me know that at least you will try
Or you'll never be a true love of mine
Love imposes impossible tasks
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
But none more than any heart would ask
I must know you're a true love of mine
When the song was over, Lyarra was pleasantly surprised to find herself joining in the applause and cheers without any artifice. The song was slow and meandering, but had endearingly absurd lyrics for all that. More importantly, the young man had actually done a good job of holding the right tune throughout, and never missed a word or line even though he obviously didn’t have them memorised, relying instead on Brandon turning the page at the right time. Her son never failed to do just that. There were two or three points where Medger seemed to veer into a wrong note. But then Brandon would knock on wood with his fork and hold it to the man’s ear again like some sort of magic wand, and Medger would regain his flow and hold it longer and longer until he hit the last third of the song and didn’t need any more help at all.
As a smug Brandon Stark and blithesome Medger Cerwyn picked up after themselves and finally came forth to take their seats at the high table, Lyarra watched her son and what may already be his most loyal subject. She wondered where the song came from. Wondered if they knew the significance of the words. The one line that repeated throughout. The meanings she could trace back to ancient lore and stories from Old Nan, where parsley removed bitter feelings, sage granted wisdom and inner strength, rosemary symbolised love and fidelity, and thyme conveyed the greatest strength of conviction in matters of the heart.
She also wondered if she should ask what sort of wager Brandon must have surely roped Medger into, for the man to risk making a spectacle of himself had this gone poorly.
She decided not to inquire after the former in case Brandon’s dreams were the source of the song, which would lead to far too many questions for there and now. She asked about the latter instead.
“Oh, I wagered I could make it so he didn’t need a bard along to start him off,” Brandon said smugly as he served himself one of everything. He was eating more normal amounts now, Lyarra was glad to see. “Obviously, I won.”
“So you made a magic wand?” Benjen asked in wonder.
“Ha!” Brandon laughed and shook his head, pulling out the fork-shaped item. He knocked it against the edge of the table and reached over both Ned and Lyanna to hold it close to Benjen’s ear. And since Lyarra was sat right next to him, she leaned close to listen as well, the same as her other children. She was granted the sound of the smoothest, clearest note she’d ever heard that didn’t come from someone’s mouth.
Lyarra straightened and looked at her son, astounded.
Her son could make steel sing.
“This,” Brandon said grandly once the note finally faded to silence, “is a tuning fork. Nothing magic about it.”
“So he says,” grunted Medger as he ravenously bit into his roast pork. “I’m still not sure I believe him.”
Brandon ignored him. As well as everyone else listening in, which was the entire high table and then some. “One of the copper ones turned out right too, but it can’t sing as long and the pitch is lower. Not a great reference point for vocals. Well, unless you’re an Umber with the voice of a bear which would be awesome, but alas, is not the case for us. It should be great for tuning string instruments though.”
From the corner of her eye, Lyarra caught Robard Cerwyn looking strangely in Brandon’s direction, and then between him and Rickard before turning away to quietly mutter something or other. Lyarra was no lip reader, but if the words “Winterfell” and “Wonders” weren’t included in whatever it was, she’d eat Lady Sera’s entire collection of pregnancy dresses.
That could be trouble.
They ended the feast on a high note, so to speak. Lord Robard Cerwyn held a speech, Lord Paramount Rickard Stark added a few words to end the festivities, and the fair closed under the orange light of sky lamps and bonfires with much good-natured jeering and backslapping of the newest Master by his smallfolk family and friends.
The Starks left for Winterfell the very next day, with thanks and good wishes from the Cerwyns and a promise on Rickard’s part to send the sledhouse back for the Winterstones to make the journey north without delay. But even that didn’t go by without Brandon disrupting it somehow. At this point Lyarra was becoming resigned to it. She still wished her son hadn’t chosen to do it through something so blatantly preposterous though. Medger Cerwyn’s words upon being presented with the two full dozen pages covered in “everything you need to learn and collect every last song ever” quite aptly summarised her state of mind.
“You made a language for music?”
Her son did what now?
“I didn’t make shit. Some guy came up with it whose name I can’t remember, then he died,” Brandon said as if he weren’t even trying to be subtle. “I have a pretty long memory these days, don’t you know.” The sheer preposterousness of his words seemed to belatedly dawn on him. “And I had nothing to do with it! He was way before my time.” Correction: it dawned on him in precisely the wrong way, Lyarra thought exasperatedly. “Now remember: practice, practice, practice and do not sing outside your vocal range. If singing makes your throat tired or raw, you’re doing it wrong and should stop immediately.”
The young man seemed absolutely stunned. “… You made a language for music.” Medger Cerwyn looked incredulously between the papers and her son. The man spoke with all the bitter resignation of a man who’d just realized he’d live all that remained of his life in the shadow of his betters. Then he begged off to confer quietly with his father some ways off. Over the next couple of minutes, Lyarra Stark got to see Robard Cerwyn turning increasingly astounded at whatever Medger was saying, and from the way they gesticulated it barely had anything to do with Brandon’s latest fancy at all. At least directly. Whatever it was, the younger man seemed to get his way, but Lyarra still wasn’t expecting the request when the men finally rejoined them.
“Lord Stark,” Medger Cerwyn said formally. “I request permission to join you at Winterfell until such a time as I have mastered this system of song.”
Well now.
"Granted. You will accompany the Masters Winterstone on their trip hence." Rickard agreed and they were off.
“I don’t get it,” Lyanna said on the trip back. “He was upset, but it still made him want to come with us? How does that make sense?”
Brandon rolled his eyes but it was Benjen who replied. “It’s the fulfilment of a man’s romance! You can’t possibly understand, you’re a girl!”
Lyarra had to hold her daughter down lest she jump up and down the carriage in revenge.
“We really need to figure out how you keep plucking the thoughts right out of my head,” Brandon said.
“What?” Lyanna balked. “I knew it! You’re both jerks!”
And so it was that Medger Cerwyn ended up accompanying the Winterstones when they made their own trip to Winterfell in the sledhouse three days after their own return home. It wasn’t clear to Lyarra how well the North’s newest nobles appreciated the company and guidance he provided. What was clear was a certain Maester’s feelings on finding out just why they were entertaining such an august guest.
“You made a language for music!? In one night!?”
Lyarra had laughed herself almost to tears at that reaction. The poor man seemed to take it as such a personal insult! She knew her son’s haphazard genius offended every last one of his sensibilities as a Maester and learned man, but she never got tired of seeing it. Sketches of windmill power, water wheels, machines that could supposedly drill seeds right into the earth and improve crop yields ten times over. With every new idea from her son’s mouth, the Maester’s reactions seemed to get more and more overwrought. It made for some truly boisterous dinners.
The Winterstones, by contrast, were extremely impressed by the alum. “Ain’t gonna deny none, that new kyln just makes me feel more of a fake, m’lord.” For such a large and strong man, Master Varr was too humble by half. “That wheel power you be talking of though…”
“Yes?” Brandon asked.
“Could someone be usin’ it to cut wood any?”
“If you made the saws round or put them on a chain, sure.”
“I’m really starting to wonder what all we’ve been doing these centuries,” Medger grumbled from here he was chewing on a pork rind. “None of this is even difficult! Now if someone came up with a summer stone of some sort to go with the winter one, then I’ll really be impressed.”
“Sand, gravel and baked lime.”
“Wait, what?”
Medger Cerwyn ended up living at Winterfell for near the whole year. He brought more than enough supplies and coin to cover his stay when they finally opened the road back up. He never got much further than he already was in the training yard, but learned everything Rickard spared time to teach him. He won himself the fondness of her children, especially Benjen who turned out to be a singer every bit as good as her eldest and twice as inspired, it seemed. “He literally picks the songs right out of my head!” Brandon would complain. Most of all, Medger paid very close attention to everything her firstborn ever said. Indulged every one of Brandon’s fancies no matter how outlandish on the surface. Lyarra Stark wondered what the young man felt some days. How deep his feelings ran, whatever they were, as he became more a student than mentor to a boy half his age. Wondered how much he suspected too, at the end of it.
It was a damned shame that she didn’t get to witness most of it. She got her moonblood just a over a sennight after they got back. It was a bad one, longer and more painful than any of the ones before, and the pain in her womb never fully left her afterwards. Then she took with a winter chill and was confined to her bed on and off for weeks at a time. That became her life for the next ten moonturns. And whenever the Maester asked her to try a new medicine that worked for everything other than what ailed her, oh, those days were the most frustrating. Her moonblood came at increasingly irregular times thereafter too. At times it was enough to make her think she’d miscarried, no matter how many times Maester Walys assured her that wasn’t the case.
Her worry didn’t seem to compare to the one suffered by her children though. Maybe not so much Lyanna and Benjen who had Old Nan, Lady Della, Master Varr and Medger to distract them. But Ned was as perceptive as he was quiet, and Brandon seemed to take it worst of all. He swung wildly between condescending scorn at her sickness for having the gall to make her life difficult, and nerve-wracking worry bad enough to make him all but lock himself in a cellar for days on end glaring at moldy bread as if it was responsible for everything wrong in the world. That’s how Ned and Lyanna described it at least, when they came without him. All this over a chill and her womanly pains proving more stubborn than they should be. Honestly! It had certainly been amusing the first few times Brandon came to visit her sick room dressed like a bird, but really! She’d have thought her son would’ve learned better from his father by now!
Gods bless her husband because Rickard was the only one that seemed to keep his head.
“Be glad you’re not there for Walys and Bandon’s discussions on your welfare,” Rickard would tell her in the evenings as he rubbed her back. “Last I saw them, they were arguing over whether or not our son was secretly out to poison you.”
Lyarra groaned into her pillow, and not just from the pain relief after having been abed for too long. Again. “You really don’t need to pamper me so much, husband,” Lyarra lied like the lying liar she didn’t need to grow old and bald and toothless to become, clearly. “I’m sure you – nnh! – have mo–oh!–re… important things to be doooooing.”
“Hardly. Everything is far enough along now to delegate. There is a matter out east that will need my attention soon, but I cannot be there in person for it regardless and it is not more important to me than this.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she moaned as her man brought out the rosemary oil and went from firm to soft strokes between one moan and the next. “At… at least one of you has his priorities in order. Honestly, those two! Ah… Some days I feel like banging their heads together until they see sense.”
“Don’t be too hard on them. I’ve a thought to indulge them myself on what few points they do agree on. Speaking of which, here.” Rickard wiped his hands on a rag, reached into a satchel and put a large empty jar on her bedside table. “We’re going to need you to fill that up.”
“With what!?”
Fortunately, Maester Walys finally came through with a concentrated extract of chamomile, peppermint, fennel and red raspberry leaf, so she finally started feeling better. The worst of the chill passed and her womb pains faded to dull twinges she could ignore after so long dealing with worse. Then her appetite returned and the Maester reluctantly agreed that she could start taking up her duties again – slowly.
She was very happy for it. It meant she wouldn’t have to miss her firstborn son’s first unaided horseback ride. The Maester had strongly advised against exiting the Great Keep, but her husband decided that walking out onto the veranda overlooking the main grounds was enough of a compromise. She wasn’t entirely pleased, but she was no fool to ignore good advice and the view stretched all the way to the stables anyway.
She found Lady Della already there, to her pleasant surprise. The young woman looked almost natural now in her finely cut dress, almost comely instead of plain, and she gave Lyarra a perfect curtsy as she walked to stand next to her at the railing. To her chagrin, Lyarra had ended up unable to see to her education. Fortunately, Old Nan did good work. Shortly after, Lyanna emerged from inside and hugged both her and the younger woman, if only briefly. She seemed to have missed quite a lot in her convalescence, Lyarra thought somberly. As soon as she felt completely back to her old self, she’d have to remedy that. That and a lot of things. She’d not even gotten introduced to Della’s twin sons.
Then her heart all but stopped when her son went and did the opposite of everything his father and the stablemaster and Varr Winterstone and Medger Cerwyn had wasted their time trying to teach to him that whole morning.
Brandon Stark sunk his heels into the horse’s sides, bent forward and lashed sharply on the horse’s reins, sending the black stallion shooting forward as if launched from a catapult. “HYA!”
Master Winterstone gasped, Ned and Ben cried out from the side, the stable master vainly called a halt, Medger jumped out of the way with a cry of shock, Rickard Stark reached after him in horror, and all of their dismayed cries were drowned out by the fool boy’s mad laughter as he rode off on the large, black stallion just barely saddle-broken.
Lyarra Stark thought she’d die on the spot when the steed broke into full gallop and her son seemed about to fly clear off the horse’s back.
But none of that happened.
Instead, the mad boy leaned back and yanked sharply on the reins just short of the great keep itself. And so did the proud steed rear back majestically just below where the lady of the castle watched from on high, neighing in rhythm with is rider’s mad laughter.
Then Rickard caught up and Lyarra got to see for the first time what Rickard was like when he was too angry to even talk. The man stormed up to the horse, snarling like the wolf on every last one of the banners covering the walls, pulled Brandon off the saddle and then spun him around, holding him up in the air while laughing loudly, free and uproarious.
… That little monster! And her husband too, the boorish arse! She was going to kill them both if it’s the last thing she did!
Alas, her righteous vengeance failed before it even began because she turned out to be the only Stark alive who even bothered assuring the Winterstones that no, being present wasn’t the same as being responsible and they should really rethink their assumptions about highborn and no, Medger dear, it’s not your fault my mad son chose to be a reckless idiot as way to thank you for gifting him the precious steed you’ve raised and cared for and reared all these years for your own. Now are you sure you don’t want to keep it after all? You’re not likely to find another destrier birthed from a garron mare any time soon you know.
The young man assured her that he, indeed, remained as certain as the day he asked to join them at Winterfell – so that’s why Robard seemed so aghast! – and could she perhaps prevail upon the Flints to teach him whatever ways they knew to cross horse breeds the way they did?
She said yes of course. Someone in House Stark had to show good sense.
That day she went around calming spirits, spent most of her meals scolding her entirely too unapologetic firstborn, reassured her other children that she wasn’t going to forbid them from ever climbing on a horse just because their brother was going to end up in the crypts when she was done with him, and used the time left to bicker with her husband for egging him on the way he did. Then night fell and she was faced with the inescapable truth that one should thoroughly explore the full range of reconciliation opportunities resultant from a woman returning to her husband’s bed. It took hours before they were finished, and they still needed to spend some half of the next morning going over the methods that worked the best.
She remained cross with Brandon for some time yet, but at least she wasn’t alone in being out of patience with him. Rickard himself was just about done with everything he’d been put through that she hadn’t had to deal with during her sickness, thank the Gods. So it was on the first day of the third sennight of the eleventh moon that he invited her to sit in on a game of cyvasse between him and the Maester.
Lady Lyarra Stark didn’t relish the thought, in all truth. She disliked the game. She disliked even more the way the Maester never failed to ruin even Rickard’s best strategies through some tactic or rule that he’d never before mentioned. It was like seeing her man set up to fail over and over again. She wondered sometimes if the Maester was even using real rules to eke out his wins anymore. She wondered if he hadn’t been lying about them all along. She didn’t understand why Rickard never gave voice to similar thoughts.
Then Rickard paused mid-way through the game to announce that Eddard would foster with Jon Arryn at the Eyre.
The world seemed to go on without Lyarra Stark thereafter. All the way to the end of the game which Maester Walys won through the latest of his underhanded plays.
Which was when Brandon, who’d watched the game while becoming more and more grim and quiet with every move and piece moved off the field, slipped off his chair, ambled behind his father’s desk, pulled Ice from its sheath and levelled it at Walys’ throat, no by your leave, no nothing.
“How long must you gaslight my father?”
=====================================
“-. 273 AC .-“
“-. 273 AC .-“
Lyarra Stark hadn’t expected to derive so much amusement out of watching the North’s newest noble stumble through his hapless introduction to highborn life. Or perhaps ‘confused flailing’ was a better thing to call it. The man had done little since his sudden elevation besides nodding jerkily and haltingly replying to Lord Cerwyn and her husband as they educated him on his new responsibilities and lands. Then came the closing feast, held in the grand hall with its doors open wide to give clear view of the sky lamps outside, hovering high in the air like sentries on both sides of the stairs and sloping path, tethered in place by flaxen strings. But the more her husband spoke, the less the newest nobleman seemed to even register them or anything besides. He instead looked fit to run away and hide under a rock in the woods.
“The forests in your territory are rather sparse, but re-planting and coppicing should see them grow back into something sustainable by the time your heirs are grown. There is a limestone quarry on your lands as well. It’s largely depleted but we’ve recently discovered that the scrap rock from limestone and dolostone can be smelted into an all-new metal suitable for many things. That should provide you with a solid income stream immediately, and the red clay waste can easily be turned to any number of building applications. What you sadly won’t have too much of is farmland, but we should have a solution for that as well, come spring. Even if it turns out to be sub-prime for food crops, you should be able to raise hemp just fine. Of course, a full prospecting will have to be done to know everything you do or don’t have available beyond these generalities. Do you know your letters and numbers?”
“… I can count to one hundred, m’lord,” the man said helplessly. “You gotta know how many logs everyone be wantin’, you see. But I can’t read or write none.”
“You’ll have to learn then. You and yours will come to Winterfell to be educated on everything you need. That is, if your new lord agrees?”
“We have the means and a Maester of course,” Robard said. “But if House Stark has even more Winterfell Wonders to be doling out, best if he goes learn it all from the horse’s mouth so to speak.”
Oh if only he knew the name of that horse, Lyarra thought with a hidden smile. Wait, where was Brandon? He still hadn’t shown up, and neither had his guard. Come to think of it, Medger seemed to be missing as well.
“House Stark will match what starting funds house Cerwyn provides, and you can expect various gifts from the other noble houses once you throw your inauguration feast. I suggest waiting for spring to maximise attendance,” Rickard was saying. “That said, more coin can be made available as investment on top of the knowledge and techniques I just described, to be returned as a percentage of the income of whatever enterprises are financed with them. But such things can be discussed once you’ve been properly armed for such talks. Now eat and drink. We wouldn’t want our newest Master to come out of a feast still hungry.”
That would be the day, Lyarra thought. She still wasn’t sure the new Master Winterstone would be able to rise without help at all, given how unsteady the man’s legs had gotten from sheer shock by the time Rickard and Robard sat him down at the high table between them. Admittedly, that had proven fortunate in a way. It eliminated all chances of the earlier scene being repeated, when the man barely made it to a bench after being ennobled and was promptly charged and embraced desperately by a heavily pregnant woman. The North’s all-newest dame now sat next to their lady host doing a fair impression of a shy wallflower. She was another surprise for everyone involved, though for Lyarra herself it was secondary to Lady Sera’s approach to the situation. Which is to say, the Lady Cerwyn immediately took charge of the young woman and spent the hours leading up to the feast bathing her and dressing her and fussing over her appearance and proving she owned far too many pregnancy gowns for a woman who’d only ever had the one child. Lyarra decided not to mention all the things she read into that.
She also held back from speculating on how severe a boredom Lady Sera must be suffering from, to so tightly latch onto this unexpected distraction. Lyarra didn’t remember her being particularly invested in the smallfolk. Then again, there could be a lot of soft prestige in mentoring the wife of the person who rediscovered the secret to Bran the Builder’s greatest accomplishment. Or half of it, depending on how much magic may or may not otherwise have contributed to the making of the Wall.
Lyarra would wish Sera luck if she hadn’t just learned it would be her job to get her trained up. She hoped Lady Della was just overwhelmed rather than timid. After the last seven years, Lyarra was far too weary of coaxing others out of their shell. It was a tiresome skill, and she’d never been particularly adept at it to begin with.
That was when Medger Cerwyn finally entered the hall, and while he looked normal enough, the lute he was carrying was out of the ordinary for him. More curious to Lyarra, though, was the sight of her eldest son trailing the man, carrying what looked like a stack of papers in one hand and a bunch of wooden sticks under the arm. Medger eschewed the high table entirely, going instead to the spot where the minstrel had been playing his tunes all evening. He quietly conferred with the spindly man, who then backed off with a bow.
Medger then sat down on the minstrel’s chair, set his lute on one knee and waited for Brandon to set up what turned out to be a small tripod stand for the stack of papers he’d brought along. When he was done, the papers were at eye-level with the sitting man and Brandon, after looking around for a seat and not finding one, chose to step back and sit right there on the ground. Then he pulled a two-pronged fork from his trouser pocket.
Pockets. Another thing her son refused to leave home without, Lyarra thought absently. He disdained belt pouches for some reason. He’d expressed to her in no uncertain terms that clothing without pockets sewn in was worthless because no, the ones in his cloak’s inner lining weren’t nearly enough and Maester Walys’ pocket-dappled inner sleeves obviously agreed with him.
Brandon motioned for Medger to do something or other. So the man did. From where Lyarra sat, it almost seemed like he wasn’t doing anything except looking at the paper in front of whim while tilting his head. But then Brandon made a ‘so-so’ gesture with his hand, and she realised from the way his throat moved that he was probably humming the starting tunes to prepare himself. That was as much as she understood though. Brandon then knocked his odd fork against the leg of Medger’s chair and held it up near his ear right after. Then, when the man hummed again, Brandon nodded in satisfaction and held up a thumb.
Medger then began to pluck the cords of the lute. It was a simple, repeating tune, but it sounded pleasing to the ear. And when the man actually started to sing a song she’d never heard before, Lyarra Stark was surprised that his voice sounded pleasing to her ear as well.
Are you going to Winterfell Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
For she once was a true love of mine
Tell her to make me a Dornish shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without any seam nor needlework
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Tell her to wash it in yonder dry well
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Which never sprung water nor rain ever fell
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Tell her to dry it on yonder thorn
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Which never bore blossom since First Man was born
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Ask her to do me this courtesy
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And ask for a like favour from me
And then she'll be a true love of mine
Have you been to Winterfell Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me from one who lives there
For he once was a true love of mine
Ask him to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea-sand
For then he'll be a true love of mine
Ask him to plough it with a lamb's horn
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And sow it all over with one peppercorn
For then he'll be a true love of mine
Ask him to reap it with a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And gather it up with a rope made of heather
For then he'll be a true love of mine
When he has done and finished his work
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Ask him to come for his Dornish shirt
For then he'll be a true love of mine
If you say that you can't, then I shall reply
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Oh, let me know that at least you will try
Or you'll never be a true love of mine
Love imposes impossible tasks
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
But none more than any heart would ask
I must know you're a true love of mine
When the song was over, Lyarra was pleasantly surprised to find herself joining in the applause and cheers without any artifice. The song was slow and meandering, but had endearingly absurd lyrics for all that. More importantly, the young man had actually done a good job of holding the right tune throughout, and never missed a word or line even though he obviously didn’t have them memorised, relying instead on Brandon turning the page at the right time. Her son never failed to do just that. There were two or three points where Medger seemed to veer into a wrong note. But then Brandon would knock on wood with his fork and hold it to the man’s ear again like some sort of magic wand, and Medger would regain his flow and hold it longer and longer until he hit the last third of the song and didn’t need any more help at all.
As a smug Brandon Stark and blithesome Medger Cerwyn picked up after themselves and finally came forth to take their seats at the high table, Lyarra watched her son and what may already be his most loyal subject. She wondered where the song came from. Wondered if they knew the significance of the words. The one line that repeated throughout. The meanings she could trace back to ancient lore and stories from Old Nan, where parsley removed bitter feelings, sage granted wisdom and inner strength, rosemary symbolised love and fidelity, and thyme conveyed the greatest strength of conviction in matters of the heart.
She also wondered if she should ask what sort of wager Brandon must have surely roped Medger into, for the man to risk making a spectacle of himself had this gone poorly.
She decided not to inquire after the former in case Brandon’s dreams were the source of the song, which would lead to far too many questions for there and now. She asked about the latter instead.
“Oh, I wagered I could make it so he didn’t need a bard along to start him off,” Brandon said smugly as he served himself one of everything. He was eating more normal amounts now, Lyarra was glad to see. “Obviously, I won.”
“So you made a magic wand?” Benjen asked in wonder.
“Ha!” Brandon laughed and shook his head, pulling out the fork-shaped item. He knocked it against the edge of the table and reached over both Ned and Lyanna to hold it close to Benjen’s ear. And since Lyarra was sat right next to him, she leaned close to listen as well, the same as her other children. She was granted the sound of the smoothest, clearest note she’d ever heard that didn’t come from someone’s mouth.
Lyarra straightened and looked at her son, astounded.
Her son could make steel sing.
“This,” Brandon said grandly once the note finally faded to silence, “is a tuning fork. Nothing magic about it.”
“So he says,” grunted Medger as he ravenously bit into his roast pork. “I’m still not sure I believe him.”
Brandon ignored him. As well as everyone else listening in, which was the entire high table and then some. “One of the copper ones turned out right too, but it can’t sing as long and the pitch is lower. Not a great reference point for vocals. Well, unless you’re an Umber with the voice of a bear which would be awesome, but alas, is not the case for us. It should be great for tuning string instruments though.”
From the corner of her eye, Lyarra caught Robard Cerwyn looking strangely in Brandon’s direction, and then between him and Rickard before turning away to quietly mutter something or other. Lyarra was no lip reader, but if the words “Winterfell” and “Wonders” weren’t included in whatever it was, she’d eat Lady Sera’s entire collection of pregnancy dresses.
That could be trouble.
They ended the feast on a high note, so to speak. Lord Robard Cerwyn held a speech, Lord Paramount Rickard Stark added a few words to end the festivities, and the fair closed under the orange light of sky lamps and bonfires with much good-natured jeering and backslapping of the newest Master by his smallfolk family and friends.
The Starks left for Winterfell the very next day, with thanks and good wishes from the Cerwyns and a promise on Rickard’s part to send the sledhouse back for the Winterstones to make the journey north without delay. But even that didn’t go by without Brandon disrupting it somehow. At this point Lyarra was becoming resigned to it. She still wished her son hadn’t chosen to do it through something so blatantly preposterous though. Medger Cerwyn’s words upon being presented with the two full dozen pages covered in “everything you need to learn and collect every last song ever” quite aptly summarised her state of mind.
“You made a language for music?”
Her son did what now?
“I didn’t make shit. Some guy came up with it whose name I can’t remember, then he died,” Brandon said as if he weren’t even trying to be subtle. “I have a pretty long memory these days, don’t you know.” The sheer preposterousness of his words seemed to belatedly dawn on him. “And I had nothing to do with it! He was way before my time.” Correction: it dawned on him in precisely the wrong way, Lyarra thought exasperatedly. “Now remember: practice, practice, practice and do not sing outside your vocal range. If singing makes your throat tired or raw, you’re doing it wrong and should stop immediately.”
The young man seemed absolutely stunned. “… You made a language for music.” Medger Cerwyn looked incredulously between the papers and her son. The man spoke with all the bitter resignation of a man who’d just realized he’d live all that remained of his life in the shadow of his betters. Then he begged off to confer quietly with his father some ways off. Over the next couple of minutes, Lyarra Stark got to see Robard Cerwyn turning increasingly astounded at whatever Medger was saying, and from the way they gesticulated it barely had anything to do with Brandon’s latest fancy at all. At least directly. Whatever it was, the younger man seemed to get his way, but Lyarra still wasn’t expecting the request when the men finally rejoined them.
“Lord Stark,” Medger Cerwyn said formally. “I request permission to join you at Winterfell until such a time as I have mastered this system of song.”
Well now.
"Granted. You will accompany the Masters Winterstone on their trip hence." Rickard agreed and they were off.
“I don’t get it,” Lyanna said on the trip back. “He was upset, but it still made him want to come with us? How does that make sense?”
Brandon rolled his eyes but it was Benjen who replied. “It’s the fulfilment of a man’s romance! You can’t possibly understand, you’re a girl!”
Lyarra had to hold her daughter down lest she jump up and down the carriage in revenge.
“We really need to figure out how you keep plucking the thoughts right out of my head,” Brandon said.
“What?” Lyanna balked. “I knew it! You’re both jerks!”
And so it was that Medger Cerwyn ended up accompanying the Winterstones when they made their own trip to Winterfell in the sledhouse three days after their own return home. It wasn’t clear to Lyarra how well the North’s newest nobles appreciated the company and guidance he provided. What was clear was a certain Maester’s feelings on finding out just why they were entertaining such an august guest.
“You made a language for music!? In one night!?”
Lyarra had laughed herself almost to tears at that reaction. The poor man seemed to take it as such a personal insult! She knew her son’s haphazard genius offended every last one of his sensibilities as a Maester and learned man, but she never got tired of seeing it. Sketches of windmill power, water wheels, machines that could supposedly drill seeds right into the earth and improve crop yields ten times over. With every new idea from her son’s mouth, the Maester’s reactions seemed to get more and more overwrought. It made for some truly boisterous dinners.
The Winterstones, by contrast, were extremely impressed by the alum. “Ain’t gonna deny none, that new kyln just makes me feel more of a fake, m’lord.” For such a large and strong man, Master Varr was too humble by half. “That wheel power you be talking of though…”
“Yes?” Brandon asked.
“Could someone be usin’ it to cut wood any?”
“If you made the saws round or put them on a chain, sure.”
“I’m really starting to wonder what all we’ve been doing these centuries,” Medger grumbled from here he was chewing on a pork rind. “None of this is even difficult! Now if someone came up with a summer stone of some sort to go with the winter one, then I’ll really be impressed.”
“Sand, gravel and baked lime.”
“Wait, what?”
Medger Cerwyn ended up living at Winterfell for near the whole year. He brought more than enough supplies and coin to cover his stay when they finally opened the road back up. He never got much further than he already was in the training yard, but learned everything Rickard spared time to teach him. He won himself the fondness of her children, especially Benjen who turned out to be a singer every bit as good as her eldest and twice as inspired, it seemed. “He literally picks the songs right out of my head!” Brandon would complain. Most of all, Medger paid very close attention to everything her firstborn ever said. Indulged every one of Brandon’s fancies no matter how outlandish on the surface. Lyarra Stark wondered what the young man felt some days. How deep his feelings ran, whatever they were, as he became more a student than mentor to a boy half his age. Wondered how much he suspected too, at the end of it.
It was a damned shame that she didn’t get to witness most of it. She got her moonblood just a over a sennight after they got back. It was a bad one, longer and more painful than any of the ones before, and the pain in her womb never fully left her afterwards. Then she took with a winter chill and was confined to her bed on and off for weeks at a time. That became her life for the next ten moonturns. And whenever the Maester asked her to try a new medicine that worked for everything other than what ailed her, oh, those days were the most frustrating. Her moonblood came at increasingly irregular times thereafter too. At times it was enough to make her think she’d miscarried, no matter how many times Maester Walys assured her that wasn’t the case.
Her worry didn’t seem to compare to the one suffered by her children though. Maybe not so much Lyanna and Benjen who had Old Nan, Lady Della, Master Varr and Medger to distract them. But Ned was as perceptive as he was quiet, and Brandon seemed to take it worst of all. He swung wildly between condescending scorn at her sickness for having the gall to make her life difficult, and nerve-wracking worry bad enough to make him all but lock himself in a cellar for days on end glaring at moldy bread as if it was responsible for everything wrong in the world. That’s how Ned and Lyanna described it at least, when they came without him. All this over a chill and her womanly pains proving more stubborn than they should be. Honestly! It had certainly been amusing the first few times Brandon came to visit her sick room dressed like a bird, but really! She’d have thought her son would’ve learned better from his father by now!
Gods bless her husband because Rickard was the only one that seemed to keep his head.
“Be glad you’re not there for Walys and Bandon’s discussions on your welfare,” Rickard would tell her in the evenings as he rubbed her back. “Last I saw them, they were arguing over whether or not our son was secretly out to poison you.”
Lyarra groaned into her pillow, and not just from the pain relief after having been abed for too long. Again. “You really don’t need to pamper me so much, husband,” Lyarra lied like the lying liar she didn’t need to grow old and bald and toothless to become, clearly. “I’m sure you – nnh! – have mo–oh!–re… important things to be doooooing.”
“Hardly. Everything is far enough along now to delegate. There is a matter out east that will need my attention soon, but I cannot be there in person for it regardless and it is not more important to me than this.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she moaned as her man brought out the rosemary oil and went from firm to soft strokes between one moan and the next. “At… at least one of you has his priorities in order. Honestly, those two! Ah… Some days I feel like banging their heads together until they see sense.”
“Don’t be too hard on them. I’ve a thought to indulge them myself on what few points they do agree on. Speaking of which, here.” Rickard wiped his hands on a rag, reached into a satchel and put a large empty jar on her bedside table. “We’re going to need you to fill that up.”
“With what!?”
Fortunately, Maester Walys finally came through with a concentrated extract of chamomile, peppermint, fennel and red raspberry leaf, so she finally started feeling better. The worst of the chill passed and her womb pains faded to dull twinges she could ignore after so long dealing with worse. Then her appetite returned and the Maester reluctantly agreed that she could start taking up her duties again – slowly.
She was very happy for it. It meant she wouldn’t have to miss her firstborn son’s first unaided horseback ride. The Maester had strongly advised against exiting the Great Keep, but her husband decided that walking out onto the veranda overlooking the main grounds was enough of a compromise. She wasn’t entirely pleased, but she was no fool to ignore good advice and the view stretched all the way to the stables anyway.
She found Lady Della already there, to her pleasant surprise. The young woman looked almost natural now in her finely cut dress, almost comely instead of plain, and she gave Lyarra a perfect curtsy as she walked to stand next to her at the railing. To her chagrin, Lyarra had ended up unable to see to her education. Fortunately, Old Nan did good work. Shortly after, Lyanna emerged from inside and hugged both her and the younger woman, if only briefly. She seemed to have missed quite a lot in her convalescence, Lyarra thought somberly. As soon as she felt completely back to her old self, she’d have to remedy that. That and a lot of things. She’d not even gotten introduced to Della’s twin sons.
Then her heart all but stopped when her son went and did the opposite of everything his father and the stablemaster and Varr Winterstone and Medger Cerwyn had wasted their time trying to teach to him that whole morning.
Brandon Stark sunk his heels into the horse’s sides, bent forward and lashed sharply on the horse’s reins, sending the black stallion shooting forward as if launched from a catapult. “HYA!”
Master Winterstone gasped, Ned and Ben cried out from the side, the stable master vainly called a halt, Medger jumped out of the way with a cry of shock, Rickard Stark reached after him in horror, and all of their dismayed cries were drowned out by the fool boy’s mad laughter as he rode off on the large, black stallion just barely saddle-broken.
Lyarra Stark thought she’d die on the spot when the steed broke into full gallop and her son seemed about to fly clear off the horse’s back.
But none of that happened.
Instead, the mad boy leaned back and yanked sharply on the reins just short of the great keep itself. And so did the proud steed rear back majestically just below where the lady of the castle watched from on high, neighing in rhythm with is rider’s mad laughter.
Then Rickard caught up and Lyarra got to see for the first time what Rickard was like when he was too angry to even talk. The man stormed up to the horse, snarling like the wolf on every last one of the banners covering the walls, pulled Brandon off the saddle and then spun him around, holding him up in the air while laughing loudly, free and uproarious.
… That little monster! And her husband too, the boorish arse! She was going to kill them both if it’s the last thing she did!
Alas, her righteous vengeance failed before it even began because she turned out to be the only Stark alive who even bothered assuring the Winterstones that no, being present wasn’t the same as being responsible and they should really rethink their assumptions about highborn and no, Medger dear, it’s not your fault my mad son chose to be a reckless idiot as way to thank you for gifting him the precious steed you’ve raised and cared for and reared all these years for your own. Now are you sure you don’t want to keep it after all? You’re not likely to find another destrier birthed from a garron mare any time soon you know.
The young man assured her that he, indeed, remained as certain as the day he asked to join them at Winterfell – so that’s why Robard seemed so aghast! – and could she perhaps prevail upon the Flints to teach him whatever ways they knew to cross horse breeds the way they did?
She said yes of course. Someone in House Stark had to show good sense.
That day she went around calming spirits, spent most of her meals scolding her entirely too unapologetic firstborn, reassured her other children that she wasn’t going to forbid them from ever climbing on a horse just because their brother was going to end up in the crypts when she was done with him, and used the time left to bicker with her husband for egging him on the way he did. Then night fell and she was faced with the inescapable truth that one should thoroughly explore the full range of reconciliation opportunities resultant from a woman returning to her husband’s bed. It took hours before they were finished, and they still needed to spend some half of the next morning going over the methods that worked the best.
She remained cross with Brandon for some time yet, but at least she wasn’t alone in being out of patience with him. Rickard himself was just about done with everything he’d been put through that she hadn’t had to deal with during her sickness, thank the Gods. So it was on the first day of the third sennight of the eleventh moon that he invited her to sit in on a game of cyvasse between him and the Maester.
Lady Lyarra Stark didn’t relish the thought, in all truth. She disliked the game. She disliked even more the way the Maester never failed to ruin even Rickard’s best strategies through some tactic or rule that he’d never before mentioned. It was like seeing her man set up to fail over and over again. She wondered sometimes if the Maester was even using real rules to eke out his wins anymore. She wondered if he hadn’t been lying about them all along. She didn’t understand why Rickard never gave voice to similar thoughts.
Then Rickard paused mid-way through the game to announce that Eddard would foster with Jon Arryn at the Eyre.
The world seemed to go on without Lyarra Stark thereafter. All the way to the end of the game which Maester Walys won through the latest of his underhanded plays.
Which was when Brandon, who’d watched the game while becoming more and more grim and quiet with every move and piece moved off the field, slipped off his chair, ambled behind his father’s desk, pulled Ice from its sheath and levelled it at Walys’ throat, no by your leave, no nothing.
“How long must you gaslight my father?”
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Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
And very good one.Althought i would not sing it near Lyanna,she could try become main character.
You should find it on YT.
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
Chapter 5: Confirmation Bias Is a Thankless Task (I)
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
Chapter 5: Confirmation Bias Is a Thankless Task
“-. 262 - 273 AC .-“
He’d come prepared for many things when first sent North, but even so he was surprised. Not so much because his expectations weren’t met, but more how they were met. Yes, the North proved just as bleak and cold and dreary as he’d expected. Yes, the people were stand-offish and suspicious and disdainful of southrons like him. He’d even anticipated being left adrift and unused during that first year, when he’d been called upon for little else besides sending letters and beginning the long and laborious task of replenishing the rookery from the ravens he brought with him. The old ones all had to be replaced after Lord Stark had ordered every last one of them slaughtered when the wasting sickness passed from man to bird. Much as it had been the right decision at the time, it did strain the maester’s sufferance at times, that he could admit. Near as much as the cold that bit and ground at him and seeped all the way into his bones on all but the brightest days of summer. He’d not even been allowed in the birthing chamber when the Lady of the North had her first child. The matter of begetting the heir to the whole North had instead been dumped in the hands of some midwife or other. It had been dangerous and unconscionable and an insult to which few others in his life could have compared. A maester’s best and only coin was his competence, how was he to make use of his when denied even the chance to try?
But a wise man knew when to act and when not to. Patience stood him in good stead when everyone around him proved how much less wise they were than he. And time was, as ever, a healing salve unto itself when it came to everything else. Thus he took charge of everything pertinent to happenings in the Maester’s Tower. Thus he began carving a larger and larger place in the Lord’s household. More so once Lord Rickard’s disposition began to thaw with every passing moonturn after his first child’s birth. By the time young Eddard began to grow in the Lady’s womb, there was no longer a question as to who should deliver him into the world, or any other Stark babes that may follow. Thus did Walys Flowers ascend to his position. Thus did a mere bastard become the healer and scholar and chief advisor of the Stark in Winterfell and wise man of the North.
From there, life was everything his fellows and teachers and his father told him it would be. The servants were obedient and discreet. The Lady was courteous. The men in the Lord’s council eventually grew appropriately deferential. The guards were competent and loyal but no more observant or clever than the South. And the Warden of the North himself, Rickard Stark, oh, he was a delight. Young and bitter and already so weary, but competent and driven and just self-aware enough to know how unprepared he was for his position that he literally craved whatever guidance he could grant.
Then the demon came.
It came when things were at their brightest. Stole a life that wasn’t its to take. Insinuated itself into the North’s highest family through pretense, guile and sympathy pulled out of grief and guilt for the soul it devoured. It all but annihilated the ability of the Warden of the North to think more than one step ahead, all in one great stroke.
“Seven curse me for a fool!” the maester lambasted himself as he paced back and forth at the top of his tower, waiting for the ring of bells that wouldn’t come. “All those Septons and maesters, all their writings and sermons and it never occurred to me that when they called the old gods demons, it wasn’t all just empty zeal!”
“Zeal! Zeal! Zeal!” Cawed Alban from his perch.
To his shame, he was as taken in by the helpless lackwit act as much as everyone else at the start. He felt nowhere near the panic and despair and vain hopes of the Lady and Lord, but even his small share of it had been plenty. He’d played no part the little lord’s coming into the world, but he’d inquired after him and watched over him and cared for him in the years after. He’d even grown fond of the boy. He’d been looking forward to seeing and guiding the child’s growth. If the boy inherited just the tiniest lick of sense and grew up to be even half as biddable as his sire…
Instead, Walys Flowers was forced to counsel a father to murder his own child for the sake of his family and the North and the good of the realm. Never mind the mercy it would be for the boy himself.
“I thought the chill and dreariness of this gods-forsaken place would harden me. Instead I’ve damn up and gone soft!”
“Soft! Soft! Soft!”
Had he realized the truth in time, he’d have strangled the thing with his own hands and damn the consequences.
But he didn’t. Despite the thing being a horror straight out of Valyria or Asshai by the Shadow. By the time he did awaken to the terrible truth, it was too late. The demon’s moment of vulnerability had passed. Rickard Stark had broken at precisely the worst time. The creature gained enough control over its stolen body to play at a facsimile of life. Rodrik Cassel proved to be as loyal as he was gullible, oh, how quick damnation claimed the noblest knights! And the Lady Lyarra had done as women always did, thought with her heart instead of her mind and unwittingly become the monster’s greatest ally.
“So oft the people of the Faith decry northern barbarians as demon worshippers,” Walys lamented to his trusted raven, once again the only living thing he could rely on. “I never imagined how rooted it would be in actual fact!”
“Fact! Fact! Fact!”
He didn’t want to think how many hours and days he wasted stewing over his failure to do what needed doing. Stewed in his outrage and anger and bitterness and shame.
Oh how life could change! If there was any word that could never before have been used to describe his life, it was shame. There was no shame in his father when he put him into the belly of a Hightower girl while oath-bound to a life of celibacy. There was no shame in his lady mother when she washed her hands of him the moment he popped out of her. There was no shame in the whores of Oldtown either, when they cut him loose with not a copper to his name once he was old enough to want to avail of them himself. And as he grew every bit as quickly as the Seven-Pointed Star warned trueborn to beware, the bastard felt no shame of his own either. As he begged and swindled and thieved and bartered his way into becoming an acolyte of the Citadel, Walys Flowers resolved to rise higher than all others. Vowed that by the time he found out who’d spawned and abandoned him so heedlessly, he’d be so far above them that they would have little way to feel anything other than shame. Then, when he forged his chain and underwent his last test that night in darkness, he emerged an all-new man seized with the absolute certainty that he would never feel shame again.
“To think I felt so proud,” Walys muttered as he tied the message around the leg of the white raven. “Such vindication! A whole night spent in total darkness with not a spark or glimmer in the glass candle. How proud I was to think all that time wasted on the higher mysteries proved something about the world rather than myself. What conceit it must have been.”
He sat gazing southwards for a long time that night, well after Alban disappeared into the distance with his damning burden.
And so began the grimmest and darkest chain of correspondence the North had likely ever seen. Or not seen, as would have to remain the case. For the sake of his neck. And that of everyone else. To think that his vows to Winterfell would be broken so swiftly! And he couldn’t even use it to teach the young lord a lesson. One of so very many he had yet to grasp. But it wasn’t the first time Walys Flowers broke an oath and it wouldn’t be the last. He’d begged and swindled and thieved and bartered his way into becoming an acolyte of the Citadel, his promise to himself the only thing pushing him forward. Walys Flowers had vowed to rise higher than all others. Swore that, by the time he found out who’d spawned and abandoned him so heedlessly, he’d be so far above them that they would have little to feel other than shame under his gaze. Vowed that he’d then spit in their eye, turn his nose at them like the shit stains they were and walk away. But when he finished his chain, Archmaester Walgrave summoned him to his private chambers and proceeded to teach him life’s chief lesson: the grandest and mightiest of oaths weren’t worth the shit of the ones who made them.
“What more should I have done for you, boy? I made you. What have you ever done for me, hmm? The world doesn’t owe you anything. Let this be your first lesson: you don’t make any investment unless you can see what you’ll get back. And how. Now, have you ever heard of cyvasse?”
The young lord was lucky to learn this lesson from him instead of anyone else, let alone the thing that now used his heir’s bone and body for a second skin. One day Walys might even divulge all secrets, when everyone knew the proper place where they should stand. Then young Rickard would erupt and rage and impugn and have every last shred of righteous anger crushed. Ground out from his heart along with every dream and delusion. As it had been for him, so it would be for him.
The first response from the Citadel was sceptical. The next few increasingly less so with every code word and phrase and cypher used to convey his messages in that way that only scant few at the citadel were taught. He’d thought it a privilege when his father first showed them to him, quietly divulging to him the existence of that exalted circle of minds. He could see the burden in it now though. The amused dismissal conveyed by the archmaesters was turned entirely on its head within a year. First it gave way to alarm, then to unease, then to the sort of grim purpose that Walys had never even bothered hoping he’d somehow escape. If only they’d given him some advice he could actually act on!
“Seven forbid they come up with something actually useful,” Walys quietly murmured as he stroked Alban’s chest feathers, feeling every ounce of dread weighing him down. “How am I to relish knowing my judgment is considered equal to that of all the archmaesters? When all it tells me is to wait and see?”
“See! See! See!”
He lost count how many plans he devised to use one of his concoctions to bring a swift end to the nightmare. But with the Lady and her children and even its guard completely fooled by its mummery, there was no way. The fiend would likely decide to be doubly cruel and have one of those around it fall prey to the poison in its stead while Walys took the fall for its wickedness. The maester was certain the demon knew it too. Knew that he knew. He could tell from its refusal to accept anything he brewed. He knew it from its brazen intrusions into his quarters when he was away. He saw it in its eyes when it thought it wasn’t being observed. There was no way to fully hide that unworldly madness. If only the others could recognize it! Awaken to the infernal nature of the fell speech it growled and grunted when its control lapsed as it so often did. Walys had counted five different tongues that existed nowhere else in the known world, on top of the infernal mockery of common it used for its blandishments. And he did mean infernal. Had he a way to observe it uninterrupted, he had no doubt the count would climb to seven soon enough. Seven fell tongues to go with the seven hells that spat it out.
In his darkest moments, the maester seriously considered lunging at it with a knife to get it over with.
“Knights of the mind, they call us,” Walys said bitterly as the raven groomed his hair. “Cassel would cut me down like a scythe through wheat before I made a step.”
“Step! Step! Step!”
The last hope for the North, in a mockery that had to spring straight from the Crone, turned out to rest with the Lord Stark himself. Hopeless and bitter as he’d once more become, Rickard Stark’s weakness had nonetheless somehow led him to make precisely the right choices to remove himself from the demon’s immediate sphere of influence. Father forgive him, as distasteful as Walys found it to take advantage of a young man so broken and wretched, it was the only path left open. He had to bring the young man fully around to his way of thinking as swiftly as possible or everything would be lost. He consoled himself with knowing that reason and sanity would likely have demanded he step up to the plate regardless, sooner or later. Mother help him, someone had to think of the North and its children.
“Break a man’s morale and he won’t revolt even if he sits on a massive widlfire keg of frustration” Archmaester Walgrave had told him once, after Walys suffered one too many humiliating defeats in that Essosi game his father so loved to school his lessers through. “But credibility counteracts demoralization, and that frustration can be released with immense energy if given a credible cause or leadership.”
So the maester harnessed the carefully cultivated mien that all maesters were trained to affect. He’d once disdained the mummery, but he gained an all-new appreciation for it the more he relied on it. He took the initiative in his interactions with the young lord and resolved to never relinquish it. Not even in those rare moments when Rickard Stark seemed close to forgetting his grief and emerging from his despair, however briefly. He also made sure to always have criticism ready whenever the young lord showed self-assurance in his rule or as a father. And if he sometimes had to be harsh on the lad and underhanded in their cyvasse games, well, it wasn’t any worse than how his own father taught him life’s real lessons once he finished his chain. For Rickard Stark to revert to his previous, brittle self could not be borne. Not for his sake or anyone else’s. Who knew which way he’d shatter when he broke again? The demon grew more cunning and skilled in his mummery with every passing day.
The deadlock stretched agonisingly, for sennights, moons and then whole years of fighting the demon’s sway with his own, growing influence. On the young lord, his court, his household, and his wife. Even his children, once little Lyanna came along and young Eddard’s education under him finally began. The growing self-reliance of the demon itself was becoming something of a boon as well, much as Walys hated to admit it. He only needed to bide his time a while longer. Just wait for the lady to loosen the unwitting leash she had on the monster and perhaps some of the options previously discarded could be reassessed.
Then came Benjen Stark’s birthing day and the deadlock was broken in the most catastrophic manner. The demon cast off all pretense when everyone was distracted. Vanished for hours. Went and did the one thing Rickard Stark had unwittingly shown wisdom in, when he forbid it from communing with the rest of its fell kin. Its body’s mother was distraught, its guard was forfeit and Rickard Stark was seized by such cold fury that even Walys could find no purchase on his mood or on his time. The demon’s helpless act was refreshed against all reason. Its guard was killed without even the barest chance for Walys to uncover whatever he’d heard or seen that he must have for the thing to orchestrate his removal despite Cassel’s continued loyalty. As for whatever the demon did in the Godswood – feh! – it eliminated whatever last hurdle was stopping it from perfecting its mummery. Thus did the demon cast Winterfell into chaos unequalled since its first arrival.
The thing even had the gall to then go and snare Cassel’s brother as well. As if to warn him that he could and would do everything again unless he stayed out of its way! Then it started to pretend like Walys was the suspicious one!
“Thus does the good liar lose to the better liar,” Walys snarled as he paced within his tower like a caged animal. “Seven take the fiend and its infernal skill in bestirring strong feelings even in men with literal ice in their veins instead of blood!”
“Blood! Blood! Blood!”
Feeling outraged, humiliated and seized by utter dread that never went away after, Maester Walys bitterly conceded defeat and turned to his one, final resort short of poison: persuading lord Rickard to have it fostered.
That was how the Seven finally sent him the sign he hadn’t realized he so desperately needed. The young lord turned out to already be thinking about it. In fact, he’d been thinking along similar veins for quite some time. If not for his poor and helpless firstborn – may it burn in the deepest fires of the Seven Hells for the rest of time! – lord Rickard had already been considering matches for his other children. Oh, the lost opportunities! Even in this the demon had run circles around him, having him convinced for years upon years that it would be folly to even broach the topic of southron fosterage and marriage alliances.
Thank the Seven it worked, hallowed be their name. Five whole years it cost him, but it worked. All that was left was to confer with his masters at the citadel on whether or not to risk pushing for a southron option. As much as he wanted to get rid of the monster, having the heir to the North – ha! – fall to treachery down south could be a major setback in the mission that Walys was given when dispatched to Winterfell in the first place.
“The flames of chaos sown during the Conquest and the Dance are only now guttering out,” the Archmaesters had told him when giving his assignment, what felt like a lifetime ago. “The Citadel’s finest minds have long toiled to put the realm in order. We’ve snuffed out what embers we could, fanned what fires needed burned out fastest, and have done our best to set the groundwork for a better world. You will help us from here on. Perhaps with a bit less madness this time. We already have four of the Seven Kingdoms and the Iron Throne. You will go to Winterfell. Go and get us the North.”
When Alban finally came back from their distant home, he carried with him an answer which, though not the one he wanted, was nonetheless the one he’d expected the most. The one he’d most prepared for. So he thought and watched and waited for the right moment to nudge the young lord towards the mindset he wanted before making his case. It was harder than he expected not to be too blatant about his southron aims. The North had so many valid grievances. But he had a duty and he would carry it through.
Then he braced himself as well as he could for the demon’s inevitable retaliation.
Only… it never came. Just like the enmity and escalation he’d been on guard against for that entire time never materialised either.
Instead, the demon just… made nice. Played the perfect storybook prince to his mother, the wise elder brother to the surviving Stark children, and the dutiful son to its body’s father in whatever rare moments they happened to share breathing space. That wasn’t the be-all of its changes in behaviour, but the creature seemed completely disinterested with Walys now, its only real opposition. Instead, it took to wandering the keep grounds and Wintertown, meeting new people, watching tradesmen and buying the occasional trinket. To Walys’ renewed shame, even he was almost taken in all over again. Could it be he was wrong? Or perhaps… perhaps little Brandon had never been fully gone? Maybe he’d somehow prevailed against the creature and come back? Had the Seven answered his prayers after all? It was enough to drive a mad man sane, fool the most watchful eye and dispel even the deepest suspicions by dint of sheer persistence. Or it would have been, if not for two things. For one, the thing came up with a torturously labyrinthine game just to indulge its craving to play god. And for the other, it disguised its fell knowledge as a windfall to the great unwashed masses, just so the young lord would change his mind about sending him away and thus destroy Walys’ last hope.
“It knows!” Walys hissed to his only confidant as he paced alone in his tower the day of the fair. “What else does it know? What else has it done that was specifically aimed at me, even as I didn’t see it? Some days it feels like there are none here he ever sets to vex except myself!” The maester suddenly froze in dawning horror. “Could the thing have been aimed against me from the start?”
Could the only aim of the thing and its kin have always been to thwart the Citadel’s noble purpose? Here, in their last stronghold they had in man’s world?
“Ware the arts and blandishments of so-called warlocks and witches, for they are a crafty and deceitful lot,” his Archmaester father had told him once. “Stomp them out when you can, discredit them when you can’t, and teach the truth at every turn. It will be a toilsome task. Even our noble patrons have been taken in by such lies and their empty promises, but you must persevere! The world the Citadel is building has no place in it for sorcery or prophecy or glass candles.”
“But magic was real once,” Walys had protested, despite himself. “You need only look at the dragons and everything else the Targaryens brought with them from Dragonstone and Valyria before then.”
“And who do you think killed all the dragons the last time around?” Walgrave had scoffed. “Gallant dragonslayers armed with swords? Ah, but I have said too much.”
Walys had dismissed it as just another one of his father’s ways to test him on how well (or all too often badly) he could spot a lie. Now, though, his mind went back to that exchange and he felt shame all over again. Shame and fury. “Could it be that the only reason it emerged was because of me? It must be! It’s the only answer left!”
“Left! Left! Left!”
“By the Seven, it makes perfect sense!” Walys moaned as he redoubled his pacing. “The thing never ceased its machination, it just changed tactics! Rather than throwing chaos at me to set back our aims, it’s accelerating them! Could it be I’ve underestimated the creature? Because it is starting to feel like it has only been set to spite me and me alone!”
“Lone! Lone! Lone!”
Had his coming doomed little Brandon to oblivion?
The more he thought about it, the clearer the thing’s plans became. Every one of its inventions were such that chaos would inevitably follow in their footsteps. Paper would devour woods wholesale and devastate every farmer or tradesman that relied on parchment or vellum as a source for coin. Four-field farming would cause unrest by enriching already wealthy landowners and leave behind the small, even if it didn’t lengthen the harvest season. To say nothing of what would happen if it caught in the Reach. Double-entry bookkeeping would buy the demon people’s favour not once but every time they saved on coin thanks to its use. Carvings and toys were a sure way to charm the next generation – he was already doing it with the Stark children! And the plants and mushrooms, by the Warrior, the creature wasn’t even trying to be subtle with those. The only thing missing was the redcap that ancient Ironborn used for their battle madness and the thing would be ready to revert even warfare to the savagery of those dark ages. As if war wasn’t already savage enough! But he supposed the blood to feed the trees had to come from somewhere, Walys thought bitterly.
He’d missed it when considered individually, but all of that together? They were practically designed to bring the realm to the verge of schism years before even the rashest time the Citadel ever dreamed up! Always something new. Always something grand. Always something to drive one just that little bit closer to the brink of madness. What next, will it entice men to defy the Seven outright and aim to claim the skies themselves?
When Maester Walys saw the floating fires converge upon Winterfell, he thought he was at the end of his rope. The night passed in a haze of nightmares where the world died in a rain of fire.
Then he woke up to learn that Rickard Stark had fallen completely under the demon’s sway within the span of a single night.
Walys Flowers had never felt so alone. He hated the feeling. He cursed the thing that had done this to him. He grieved the man that in another life he might have called a friend.
He didn’t know how he kept his mien after that, especially once the thing became a fixture of the lord’s routine and Winterfell’s daily life. To say nothing of the lord and the demon’s frequent time spent in private and secrecy. By the time he watched Rickard Stark ride out in the middle of Winter while committing treason – a crown! A crown bare on his brow! – Walys Flowers though he might go mad.
“Maybe I’ve already gone mad,” the man said darkly as he finished the final brewing step of his concoction the day after the Starks’ trip to the Cerwyns. “But if there is any time to go mad, it is now.”
The glass candle hadn’t lit for him, but that didn’t change that his study of the higher mysteries had been extensive. Even if magic had passed him over, alchemy could serve to lay it bare before him, and securing permission to forage the Godswood for ingredients was among the first things he did when he came North in the first place. The visions were a confusing jumble of colours, dead crows, one-eyed ravens and him standing before the heart tree feeling calm and safe as if whatever had been gazing out from it had disappeared. It was a hope long sought but one he didn’t trust in the slightest. A feeling justified when he awoke from delirium into that half-state where he still had one foot in the other side. The vision that met his sight when he looked south at the returning sledhouse vindicated every suspicious and ill thought he’d ever held.
The bloodline of the Kings of Winter indeed. There was nothing of winter in that abomination of pitch blackness studded with a thousand and one fiery eyes.
Somehow, the thing didn’t notice him pierce its disguise. Or perhaps it did but didn’t realize anything different about him. Or pretended as much. Or didn’t. It mattered little in the end. His path was set on the only option left: setting everything aside to move against the thing directly.
“I’ve been trying to do too much at once, haven’t I? It stopped me from doing what I should have done from the very start. Or perhaps I simply hadn’t the heart for it,” Walys murmured in the dark that night as his weary soul filled with terrible purpose. “No more. If working around it won’t do anything, the only thing left is to move against it outright.”
Alban, for once, had nothing to say.
When their reply came, the Archmaesters didn’t have much to say either, save to remind him of the proper order of things. Namely that it was folly to engage an enemy without first sabotaging its support structure. Walys Flowers had never felt so stricken or hopeless. But he had the knowledge, he had a duty, and the Citadel had a vision in which he trusted with his whole heart. And in the end he’d always expected that it would come to this, deep down.
He still wanted to knife the thing whenever he laid eyes on it, if only so it wouldn’t claim another innocent. Unfortunately, opportunities remained as rare as water in the desert. He also couldn’t go a day without finding a new reason against the direct option. Like on finding out just why Medger Cerwyn came to Winterfell for an extended stay. The obstacle was the maester’s own temper.
“You made a language for music? In one night!?”
That the demon was the only one besides lord Rickard who didn’t laugh at him was somehow more infuriating than everything it had done and not done up to then.
The winter chill that beset Lady Lyarra was the darkest of all the Seven’s sign’s he’d lived to see.
“What a world this is, where murderers are wont to mourn their victim as much as their blood!” The maester lamented as he mixed the remedy for the chill that now masked the true illness sapping Lady Stark’s life. “Will the Seven curse me for my part in changing it? Or is this their way to show approval?”
Shockingly, the demon was the one who took Lyarra’s sudden sickness the worst. If he didn’t know better, Walys could have sworn it was genuinely distraught. It certainly acted mad enough for it, even if the maester didn’t believe for one second its grief was real. Not beyond losing its greatest enabler at any rate. Even so he might have bought it. But then the thing went and ‘invented’ a mechanical loom through another one of his damnable contests, ostensibly so the woman wouldn’t suffer boredom! Another trade added to the list of those that would be trampled over before winter’s end!
It was a mixed blessing that lord Rickard kept it so occupied, if only for the opportunities to gain further insight into the thing’s reach without having to converse with it directly.
“What a sight,” he mused as he watched Rickard Stark put it through weapon drills. Spears this time. “Until just moons ago you wouldn’t have thought the Lord was so fond of Lord Brandon.”
“Feh!” Medger Cerwyn scoffed in amusement. “Lord Stark is fond of roasted chicken. He is fond of Ice. He is fond of his bannermen. None of that even begins to compare with what he feels for the Young Lord.”
Maester Walys wondered how the young man’s eyes could already be failing him. Or if his own did. Even he could rarely tell what Rickard Stark was thinking, let alone feeling. The man’s expression barely ever changed, even during the fair. Or the morning after his fall under the sway of the hellish creature. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time heir Cerwyn was failed by his own eyes. Or his own sense at that. The lad was all broken up over having handed out his proud steed to the demon. But he’d never even thought to ask Walys for his expertise in breeding a replacement, as he said he wanted to do. Repeatedly. Animal husbandry had been a field of study at the citadel for thousands of years. There was no one better than a maester to know how to mix, match and cultivate the best traits! But instead, the man was making noises about begging for help from the savages in the mountains. The odds of that doing anything good were about as high as the clans becoming literate before the sky fell down.
That’s when he learned the demon had taken to teaching letters and numbers to the youth of Wintertown. Half of whom were the children of those very clans. Somehow, the idea that the Mountain Clans might become the most literate people in the North didn’t spark any amusement anymore. Far be it from Walys to advise a demon not to waste its time but how did it even know he was thinking about that? Was it reading his mind somehow? Seven save him!
“I don’t understand why you bother,” Walys told the thing during its body’s name day feast, which even the maester couldn’t afford to miss. Lady Lyarra was the only one not in attendance, on account of her illness. “They’ll not find any use in it.”
The thing shrugged. The motion looked perversely natural. “Teach letters and numbers to people and maybe anatomy and medicine, then let them research history themselves and there you go! Free will. Maybe even wisdom.”
“You might be overestimating them a tad.”
“Am I? Man’s quest to master nature began when a bunch of barbarians stuck their hands into fire and found out that it was bad and shouldn't be done ever again. Then they found that staying a safe distance away from the same fire keeps you warm without burning you, which is good. That tried and true method has continued and evolved in complexity to this very day. All hail science.”
Maester Walys was acutely aware of the sheer hypocrisy that had just been uttered. He was even more aware of the knife in his sleeve pocket and the table between him and the monster. “Sometimes I wish I knew what goes on in that head of yours, lad.”
“No you don’t,” the creature said as Walys’ heart stuttered. “People who say that are the same ones who’ll start complaining about boredom after the first hundred words. At least that’s my experience. Look what Rodrik did after prolonged exposure.” Walys couldn’t… had the mask just slipped? The man’s brother was easily within hearing range. “I’m sorry, Martyn I shouldn’t make light of it.”
“It’s alright, my lord,” the knight said as if he was at peace with its disrespect. “I’ll take it out on you in your next flying run.”
“Fair.”
Gods, how many noble knights would he have to watch be damned one after another?
Sometimes, during those times when he couldn’t avoid its presence – like their lessons, Father grant him patience – he tried tripping it up with pointed questions. Like that new metal that wasn’t a metal. Alum. The demon admitted it was actually ash but claimed in the same breath that it was also salt, somehow.
“I wouldn't be surprised if the law of narrative inconvenience uses cryolite to manifest through,” the thing said as if that was supposed to make any sense. “Knowing how much of a cunt fate tends to be in this world, odds are the rock is only a natural resource in fuck-you places like Leng or the Thousand Islands. Maybe underwater so it's completely invisible and breaks the keel of every ship that sails by. Failing that, beyond the Wall.”
Maester Walys stopped everything he was doing at the sheer audacity he was hearing.
“Oh well,” the creature said, looking back down at the High Valyrian test it was taking. Incidentally baring the back of its neck. The desk between them and Martyn Cassel’s presence in the corner had never been a heavier burden. “I guess it’s just as well. Even if I do manage to harness lightning, good luck getting the fire hot enough to melt that stuff down.”
Walys, who was apparently going mad after all, went and asked why it can’t just use fire magic or electromancy for whatever it was. He immediately cursed himself for slipping and-
“Do you know any?” the thing wearing Brandon Stark’s face asked, seemingly guilelessly.
“… Sadly no.” Or he might have already used it for its real purpose by now. “Magic is gone from this world.” Oh how the Seven loved their irony!
“Hmm…”
There was just one last thing that didn’t mesh with anything else. The recognition of the demon’s ‘contributions’ to the North and its people. Or rather, the shortage thereof. Barring the New Year’s Fair, Rickard Stark always made sure to blur the demon’s role in the crops and trinkets and inventions and new industries that would turn the realm upside down come spring. But the demon just took it without protest. Even seemed to appreciate it. Or pretended to.
Walys asked about it during cyvasse, the only part of their old routine that remained. The one pillar that stood him in good stead with the young man, even now.
“My son asked me to. He worries about rumors harming our image down south. Far too often down there, bright children who are too smart are feared and thought witches of some kind, granted magical and unholy knowledge by some demons from the Seven Hells.” Walys barely managed not to react. “I’ll make sure our bannermen know the truth of the matter, but otherwise I’m willing to indulge him this.”
That and far too much besides, Walys thought bleakly but didn’t say.
“Where does young Brandon come up with his ideas?” Walys instead asked lady Lyarra one evening while he was treating her winter symptoms. Only those, Seven forgive him.
“My son is touched by the gods,” the woman told him.
He was touched by something alright. Walys didn’t even want to think about the return message the Archmaesters had sent about the printing press. The latest in the demon’s ‘contests’ that eroded professional standards and confidences. An obvious move to erode what little foundation existed for the guilds to make it past White Harbor and finally bring the North in line with the rest of the realm on taxes and trade. Yet another means of stability that was being smothered in its cradle.
“Or so I like to think,” Lady Lyarra said. Neither of her sicknesses should have made her drift off mid-speech, but it was a known effect of the mixes he was using. Not much longer now. “He claims otherwise, but he can never give me a straight answer as to why, and it wouldn’t be the first thing he’s wrong about.”
She could tell that much but couldn’t see through even its flimsy mask of early on?
“Think of the future. Think of the North and its children,” Walys would tell himself in his quarters some evenings, when his silent raven was his only company. “Think of the children. The human ones, not the ones that spring from trees to play with the bodies of small boys.”
It was torture to work so slowly, but it was either that or risk being found out and throwing the Starks and the North even further into the arms of the creature manipulating all of them. And losing his neck of course. Walys tried not to let the thing’s existence provoke him any further. Unfortunately, it proved easier said than done. Increasingly so the more the lady weakened despite the worst of her symptoms fading thanks to his recipes. The thing was determined to persist in its fretful mummery. The creature even went as far as to start work on a ‘cure’ made out of mold.
Mold!
In a fit of madness, Walys actually demanded to be brought in whatever project the thing was working on. To his shock, the creature agreed even without the lord having to command it. To his even greater shock, what he found was enough to upturn everything he’d set out to do since the fair. It was enough to make him argue with the creature with lord Rickard right there to witness.
Somehow, he lost neither his head to a sword nor his respect in the lord’s eyes. He didn’t give himself away either. If anything, it was the opposite. But that only made his unexpected realization all the more frantic.
“It doesn’t want to save her, it wants to kill her!” He hissed to Alban that same night. He was a fool, never even considering that the thing might reach a point where the lady’s leash was more a hindrance than a help. The containers, the process, the distillery, the need for a myriad steps. “Over half of the poisons I know are made that way!” Could it be he’d overestimated the creature? Was it a simple demon for a simple people? Because he couldn’t fathom why it’d let him inspect what it was doing unless it was sure he wouldn’t understand it. “The thing even went and explained everything, Seven Hells!”
It was folly to cease the plan without input from his southern masters, but the irony that both he and a demon from the seven hells were out to murder an innocent woman for the exact same aim was not lost on him. He immediately stopped what he was doing to her and set about undoing the damage before it was too late. Then he gathered up whatever substances he had left and distilled a concentrated remedy for the real troubles ailing her. Chamomile to deaden pain and fight the chill and infection, peppermint for the spasms, fennel to relieve her womb cramps and red raspberry leaf to correct her moon cycle. Each could make for a potent tea unto themselves, but he went further. Extracted and mixed the most concentrated essence of each, then mixed them together in the proportions that would best suit her specifically. Days of collecting and pressing and distilling essences. That the process was also similar to what he’d just seen the demon working on was another irony not lost on him.
Smith be praised, it worked. The lady’s true symptoms lifted. It wasn’t an actual cure for her condition, but there was no such thing for consumption regardless, not even in the Citadel’s whole knowledge trove. Even the books and scrolls it never doled out, for obvious reasons. Hearty food and drink were the only things that could bolster the woman, now that she’d be regaining the proper appetite for them. Food, drink, exercise and the mercy of the Gods might just see the Lady Stark still live.
For now.
Perhaps.
The day Lady Lyarra started walking about again, it was all he could do to put the proper act under the praise coming at him from all corners. Much harder was to keep up the guise upon lord Rickard’s painfully earnest overture of friendship in the wake of it. The man invited him to sit on one of the demon’s games. Which the lord himself chaired while all ‘four’ of his children played the heroes for the first time together. First Men fighting the early stages of the Andal Invasion, with the demon playing the part of Tristifer Mudd while lord Rickard controlled Armistead Vance.
Maester Walys awoke in his bedchambers the next day, head pounding from a hangover and memories muddled by the Blank Mind he fed himself after retreating to his tower the evening prior, rattled and drunk enough to inflict upon himself even that. He vaguely remembered the laughter of Winterfell’s guards and councillors for having taken so long to finally turn into a proper Northman. It made him vomit everything he hadn’t already upended the previous night.
He never thought he’d drink his own poison, but the reason why was still clear in his mind, even if the memory had been mercifully purged from his recollections. The little Starks playing hero through toys and numbers. Myriad attempts by them to play and act as a way to avoid the roll of the dice they seemed to shun. Lord Rickard staying faithful to history wherever they failed to make a stand. And worst of all, the speech that the demon held just before the last battle. Walys couldn’t remember it anymore, thank Gods. He’d drank the Blank Mind to make himself forget those blandishments above all others. He couldn’t afford any cracks in his resolve, not now. But the thing’s words, they’d almost gotten him. Even with all his knowledge and insight and suspicions, they’d still almost gotten him. Whatever they’d been. The words. The speech. The dumbfounded silence at the end of it, when everyone stared at the thing as if they’d finally seen through its fell seeming. Even as Walys was on the verge of losing faith in all of his beliefs about its purpose, despite that his conviction as to its nature remained the same. Then little Eddard asked if his ‘brother’ could write all of that down and the thing mildly said ‘I want to roll persuasion,’ at which point the man cast from ice known as Rickard Stark burst out into uproarious laughter and embraced the demon along with his three children, tears flowing down his cheeks like a man who’d suddenly had a life-long crisis of faith completely healed.
Turning Rickard Stark to the Seven had been an idle side project compared to everything else. Just another step in finally aligning the North with the good of the realm.
“The difference between brilliance and insanity is success,” his father once told him.
Now, even his last and smallest accomplishment had been taken away. All those years of guidance he gave the man, ruined.
Walys spent the morning all through afternoon kneeling in his chambers praying to the Seven with all the fervor he spent all his youth failing to muster. Then he prayed even more, up until the time he’d set aside to play his regular game of cyvasse with Rickard Stark in the lord’s solar.
He frowned at Lady Lyarra’s presence when he walked in. He glowered at the sight of the demon when he saw it was also there. Young Rickard was amused, thinking Walys was still suffering from a hangover. Somehow, the maester still played his role like he usually did afterwards. But for the first time even here, he found no stability or solace in their ritual.
Then the demon took all leave of its senses and held him at sword point.
“How long must you gaslight my father?”
This was it, Walys thought emptily as his gaze travelled along the sword’s blue blade to the dark glare of the fiend holding it to his neck. This was the moment it all came to a head and how long must he what? Gas? Light? What was it talking about?
“Son,” Rickard Stark said lowly. “What are you doing?”
“Father,” said the creature. “Indulge me in a thought exercise. Picture the young Warden of the North, newly ascended amidst a sea of corpses. Bereft. Isolated. To say nothing of how your fight against the consumption sickness back then messed up your head. Then comes the wise maester, learned on your likes and dislikes thanks to the missives of his predecessor. Knowing just how to connect with you. Suddenly you have a friend. A mentor even! And that mentor has a host of other friends just as learned and wise as him! He teaches you. Heals you. Tends tend to us when we are sick and injured, or distraught over the illness of a parent or a child. Whenever we’re weakest and most vulnerable, there he is. Sometimes he heals us, and we are duly grateful. When he fails, he consoles us in our grief, and we are grateful for that too. Out of gratitude we give him a place beneath our roof and make them privy to all our shames and secrets, a part of every council. And before too long, the ruler has become the ruled.”
… The thing had the gall to throw stones first even now. It hadn’t even mentioned the lady’s poisoning but the emptiness in Walys’ heart suddenly churned hot and boiling and he was going to-
Rickard Stark rose to his feet, walked around the desk, stopped behind the thing wearing his son’s skin and grabbed Ice by the hilt. “Son. You will not break guest right in my halls.” The thing twitched in place. Walys swore he felt the edge of the Valyrian steel touching his neck. “The penalty for that is death. Do not ask me to behead you. You know I’d never be able to go through with it. Then the King of Winter will be forsworn and made an oathbreaker not fit for rule or crown, and where would we be?”
That… Walys had no idea what to say to that.
Seemingly, neither did the demon. It surrendered the sword hilt and obediently went back to his seat under the nudge of its body’s parent and the aghast gaze of the lady mother watching from nearby.
Then Rickard stark pointedly didn’t remove the blade from Walys’ neck. Instead, he sat on the edge of his desk facing the creature.
“I do believe…” The man never turned his eyes away from the thing before him, but Ice moved to rest flat on top of the back of Walys’ chair, next to his jugular. “That I’m being underestimated.”
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Poor Walys.Not smart enough to see that Brandon is fellow scientist.
But also funny - entire Brandon life is for Walys only one big plot against him.
P.S If Walys was smart,he would forget about Southern plans and do everything to help North.What Citadel do for Walys? nothing.He had no reason to be loyal to them.
But also funny - entire Brandon life is for Walys only one big plot against him.
P.S If Walys was smart,he would forget about Southern plans and do everything to help North.What Citadel do for Walys? nothing.He had no reason to be loyal to them.
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
Blood ties are quite the thing, especially when considering that Walgrave did to Walys successfully what Walys tried with Rickard. Gaslight, demoralise, mould to your liking.
Ironically, Walys would have been 100% right in his conclusions if this was any other SI story. Most of them pretty much are cases of children being possessed or hijacked by otherworldly things.
To say nothing of those years when Brandon was a mad, unstable mess of a creature. It's not like Walys can know the SI was being OPPOSED by those demons he fears so much.
You have a point.But Walys cheated to become acolyte and always cared only about himself - so even if Walgrave take him as pupil,he still should care about himself only.
After sending North it mean making North as strong as possible.Becouse it made him more powerfull.
Chapter 5: Confirmation Bias Is a Thankless Task (II)
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
A/N: I originally meant to make this a big one, but the section is starting to run away from me and real life has notified me that she will command most of my attention for the next little while. So it was either breaking it into scenes and updating today, or letting you wait for a while and probably still break it into scenes when I updated later. So while you won't be getting all the insights this time around, on the whole I think you'll still get them sooner than if I decided to hold this back along with the rest.
Walys Flowers was blessed with a prodigious imagination. Not the glut that saw people slipping into delusions and hedge fancies. But not the dearth of it either, that saw even the most learned of maesters become little more than droning regurgitators of words when called upon to put their learning to good use. That didn’t mean he could predict every possible turn of events, as indeed no one ever could. It did, however, mean that he could well imagine all the paths that events could take if he knew the starting scenario and the actors involved.
Few things had been on the maester’s mind the last few years besides what would now surely unfold. The shape of things upon succeeding in his purpose. Or, as had instead become the case, being found out.
He rather knew what would now come.
Then the demon walked to the largest window, unlatched the blinds, opened both panes wide and took three steps back, bracing itself as if something was going to bowl him ov-
Alban swooped into the room through the window and landed on the monster’s shoulder.
Walys Flowers felt all the blood drain from his face.
“You used to care for me when I was small, maester,” The monster turned in his direction, some ghastly hellsmoke flowing over both its eyes as it stared at him. “Inquired after me. Worried over me when the mindstorm took me. Even later after we butted heads more and more often and you never made a secret of your disapproval of me… even that seemed just so genuine. For a while I even thought my suspicion of you was totally unfounded. What did I have to go on after all? Pure conjecture from vage dreams and you being a southron Andal.” Maester Walys barely registered what he was hearing, gaping in horror at the sight of his one, closest companion being suborned and taken from him like everything else had been. “And then you go and prove that even baseless suspicion can be right by trying murder my mother you self-absorbed, oathbreaking, bastard shitfuck-!”
“Son-”
“No, dad! I don’t know how you can still sit there and take it but I can’t stand for this anymore.”
“Oh spare me your blandishments, you f-AH!” the sword abruptly kissed the skin of his neck.
“Do not speak out of turn,” Rickard Stark commanded with all the weight of an iceberg. “Brandon is above you. Do not interrupt him. Ever. Do not comment. In fact, until I say otherwise, do not speak at all.”
Maester Walys choked back his words and promptly forgot what he’d been about to say.
“And you, son, will not interrupt me.”
“… I know, father, I’m sorry but even now he can’t help it! He does it to everyone, he even did it to me.” The thing had the gall to glare at Walys as it spoke over its supposed father, finally shedding the guise of the dutiful child. “You even did it to me, you bastard. I watched you rant and rave about me to your pet for months and I felt sorry for you, even guilty sometimes! Even when mom got sick I could never tell if you were really poisoning her or trying to help until I sat and watched you literally code that secret correspondence. You never healed her, did you? You treated her symptoms while the real problem got worse. Even then you only treated her chill so it would seem like she was improving even though that wasn’t the problem. Even after I knew it, it still took me seeing your secret stash to finally do something! It was blind luck you decided to drink yourself stupid enough to go and ransack your own poison stash while I was looking on! And you didn’t even use any of them on mom. You just gave her stuff that only worked without awful side effects when they weren’t in combination. Not that I knew it at first,” it admitted bitterly.
If everyone knew what they needed when they needed it, you'd not have survived past that night, Walys thought thought with ample bitterness of his own.
“I knew chill treatments don’t addle the wits. I knew consumption doesn’t do it either. And I still sat on it like a fool! Congratulations, maester! If not for magic, you’d have had your way and I’d never been able to do a thing! If not for that last message the raven was there for, if I hadn’t watched you apply that cypher, I still wouldn’t know if there was a group of you or if you were bought by someone or just acting alone. Was there any point where you were actually trying to help? How long until you’d have resorted to those dusts and vials under the raven nesting boxes? Or would you have just kept up what you were already doing? Why the hell did you even change your mind? What the hell possessed you to think I want to kill my own mother!? Even if you think I’m a demon, it would’ve been inconsistent with everything I’ve done my whole life, I even told you I’m trying to find a poison for diseases, not people-!”
“Brandon!” Valyrian steel literally drew blood as Walys flinched when Lady Lyarra spoke and rose behind him. “Brandon stop!”
“But… I…he…“ the demon stumbled over its own words as its body’s mother strode for and took its face in her hands. The white raven squawked in startlement and flew away to watch quietly from the top of the display cabinet. Both demon and mother ignored him.
“Brandon, stop. Stop. I’m fine. I’m here, I’m walking and I’m getting stronger by the day.”
“But that’s still a tenth of what you could do before, and you got sick exactly ten years after the wasting decimated Winterfell,” the demon said despairingly. “Your moonblood comes and goes, right? Your womb still pains you, doesn’t it? You still piss blood don’t you? Don’t you?” The woman didn’t seem to have an answer. “…When father takes you to bed, do you bleed afterwards?”
The question only gave way to a deep silence damning enough for even the darkest confessions, but the monster wasn’t satisfied if he didn’t infringe on even that. “The worst part is that it doesn’t even matter now. He can’t heal you anyway. Nobody knows how to heal consumption, not even the Citadel.” The thing looked away from the lady and glared at him again, before just averting its eyes from everyone. It had the gall to look grief-stricken. “And neither can I.”
“Brandon-“
“I know exactly what to make and how to make it!” The gall of the thing to pretend Rickard Stark’s order not to interrupt didn’t include the lady. “I could spit out seven, a dozen, two dozen different steps from memory right now, but it’s worth jack shit! I don’t know what the catalysts are called, or even if they're all known. I know what they should do, but I don’t know what else they can do, or even what they all look like. I couldn’t properly describe them to someone who actually knows natural sciences even if I tried. I can name half again as many of nature’s building blocks than the citadel knows about, but I don’t know even half the reactions for them, let alone for naturally-occurring compounds! And I can’t even make a contest or it, because we don’t have alchemists and our own court healer’s been actively murdering you for the past few months!”
Maester Walys stared blankly at the fretful creature falling to pieces before him. Having had no choice but to look at it due to the sword at his throat, he found himself noticing things he’d not noticed before. The paleness of its skin. The bags under its eyes. The redness creeping up into the white from beneath its lids like gnarly roots. As it spoke, its eyes even grew watery, almost. The thing before him was a despairing, fretful, exhausted mess of a young boy. It really looked and acted like just a boy… Strange and knowledgeable and too precocious by half but… Could it be that…?
“Dad, I’m calling in that one request,” the thing brazenly said, as if it had any sort of rightful claim on anything at all. “Whatever else happens, whatever else you decide to do, don’t send us south. Don’t foster us, don’t betroth us, don’t marry us off. Any of us. Keep us here. Keep us above the Neck.”
… but no. Even here and now its words were poison. The memory of one and a thousand eyes dotting some unthinkable abomination flashed through his mind just as clearly as always. The maester’s face twisted under the realization that it once again got to him. To think a demon would be able to fake even mournful grief and exhaustion. What manifold and disgusting mummery! Did it never grow tired of lying?
What was he thinking, it was a demon from the Seven Hells, it literally thrived on lying and-
“Denied.”
The word crashed the fell mood to pieces with all the grace of House Gardener’s last gasps upon the Field of Fire.
“Wife,” Lord Rickard spoke in the grim silence that followed, breaking Walys’ train of thought completely. “Why don’t you go prepare our son’s bedchambers and have some warm milk and honey summoned up? It seems our son needs an early night. I’ll send him to you shortly.”
“What? But…” Whatever protests the thing wanted to spout died on its lips.
“… That may well be a good idea,” Lyarra Stark agreed, stepping away from the boy-thing and pointedly not looking in Walys’ direction. “… I’ll have some myself, I think.”
“Honey works on infections,” the demon said thickly, turning away to wipe at its eyes. “But not this one.”
“Well I’ll enjoy it regardless,” Lyarra Stark said with barely a waver in her voice as she wiped her son’s tears away before leaving. “I’m not dead yet.”
The door opened and closed, leaving behind two men who hadn’t moved, one by choice and one by lack of it, and the demon of a boy that turned to glare at Walys with moist eyes and opened its mouth to-
“Son.”
The childlike beast bit back whatever it was going to say with a snarl. It then looked between the maester and behind him to the door the Lady had just left through, before averting its eyes from them both and turning to Rickard Stark, who gazed sternly down at his supposed progeny while Ice still bit into-
“What does gaslighting mean?”
… or things could go ahead and unfold in a way completely unforeseen, Walys thought blankly.
“What does gaslighting mean, son?” Rickard Stark repeated himself even though it was one of the things he most disdained.
“… It’s when someone secretly makes you doubt your own memory, perception or judgment so that you don’t know what you believe anymore and start thinking low of yourself.” The thing had the nerve to glare at Walys as he spoke. “It basically makes you incapable of acting in your own interests and dependent on them for validation and emotional support.”
“I thought it might be something like that,” Rickard Stark mused, as if he wasn’t holding a sword to the neck of the chief advisor he’d nearly beheaded scant moments prior in front of his wife and supposed son of eleven years. “But the word doesn’t make any sense, I’m sad to say. The best I can think of are wisps, those burning balls of gas that mislead people traveling the swamps along the Neck. Failing that, maybe bad air? Like if you interfered with the candle light used to detect whether or not there’s bad air about to addle or kill everyone in a mine. Either way, it’s a stretch at best. And even if it wasn’t, no one outside colliers and crannogmen will ever know what you’re talking about. You should be more careful or people will think you addled, if not mad. Do recall that you talked about being screwed almost a moon before you even made the things.”
The demon opened its mouth, closed it and twisted its face into a grimace. “Baelished by my own brain again,” it muttered. “… I know what you’re doing, Dad.”
“Then you should have little trouble not making me repeat my next question. What do you know about Queen Alysanne?”
The maester drew a blank. What did that have to do with anything?
Perversely, the demon before him seemed to be just as dumbfounded. “… This is going to be like the Children, isn’t it?” It muttered to itself before finally answering and what did he just say? “Alysanne Targaryen was the rider of Silverwing and the queen consort of her brother King Jaehaerys the Conciliator between….” Its brow furrowed as it thought further. “I’m sorry, father. I’m still shit with years.”
Rickard Stark said nothing. Merely continued to sit on the edge of the desk and hold Ice to Walys’ neck while he beheld the boy, waiting.
“They say Alysanne Targaryen learned to read before she was weaned,” the boy-thing said with a frown. “That she was an accomplished archer and hunter and she’d have been sent to the Citadel if she’d been born a man. That she was so high-spirited, charming and intelligent that everyone loved her even without accounting for her charities, highborn and lowborn alike. And when she wasn’t gaining the adoration of all women and men, she spent her time on music, dancing, reading, and flying on her dragon. Every last chronicle agrees that she had a great wit and that she made a powerful impression on those who met her.” The childlike thing grimaced near the end. Self-deprecatingly. “I’m guessing this is where you tell me how biased Septon Barth and all these others were when writing their histories?”
“Alysanne Targaryen is the dumbest bint to ever disgrace the halls of power.” Rickard Stark said as his son’s jaw dropped and wait just a moment, what? WHAT!? “That inbred tart was an egoist to rival Aegon the First and Maegor the Cruel combined. The most self-absorbed of hypocrites. The greatest waste of intelligence history has ever seen. She was, and remains to this day, the most famous of House Targaryen’s useful idiots.”
Brandon Stark gaped in shock at the borderline treason coming out the mouth of its father, then the brat haltingly climbed back in its chair so that its shock didn’t make it fall on its arse on the floor outright.
“She eloped with her own brother against her parents’ wishes, ensuring once and for all that incest became seen as an intrinsic Targaryen failing,” Rickard Stark said, sounding every bit like… like… like Walys himself when he gave a lecture. “Inbreeding aside, this destroyed any chances of the Faith Militant dying with Maegor, by giving its supporters and members a permanent grievance to rally around even after they disbanded, one lasting to this day. It also forced house Targaryen to spend virtually all the dregs of political capital left after the Cruel’s reign, on buying special treatment via the so-called Doctrine of Exceptionalism. Jaehaerys shoulders half the blame for it, but that was just the start of the woman’s exceptional contributions. Do you know what happened right after the death of their mother Alyssa Velaryon?”
The boy tried but ended up shaking its head that he didn’t.
“Alysanne went and intruded on her sister Rhaena at precisely the worst time, then ignored her wishes that she leave and even tried to take her daughter away. This was immediately after Rhaena’s husband had murdered all her lovers and friends before confessing it all and promptly committing suicide to deny her all retribution. Her daughter Aerea was the only thing driving her on. Alysanne effectively destroyed any chances of the woman mending fences with the rest of her family, as might instead have happened if she’d had just let things be until time and Rhaena’s hatred of Dragonstone drover her back into their arms on their own. To say nothing of how much it might have contributed to the decision of Rhaena’s daughter to go get herself killed with the great dragon Balerion. This permanently deprived House Targaryen of one of its most influential figures and dragonrider, and possibly killed the largest ever dragon. Failing that, it could have caused a Dance of Dragons a century earlier if Jaehaerys had been any less a silver tongue. Such a civil war could easily have inflicted more damage than their hold on power could cope with after Maegor, depending on how many dragons were left after. More’s the pity.”
Maester Walys gaped in shock at the man who’d just besmirched the name of the one Targaryen against whom all but the most cantankerous of the Citadel’s Archmaesters had never-
“Alysanne Targaryen was eternally displeased by her husband’s refusal to make Daenerys heir over Aemon, even though she should have known the folly of trying to upturn yet another core tradition of the people she ostensibly wanted to rule justly. Clearly, getting her way on everything else up to that point was not enough for her. It was doubly foolish so soon after they’d spent all their political capital on upturning a major tenet of the Faith of the Seven, as I mentioned previously. Later, she was right to support Septon Barth's plan of constructing wells, pipes, tunnels, and cisterns to provide King's Landing smallfolk with clean water. But she was not right to force an ultimatum upon the Master of Coin and her own husband when they rightly balked at the costs. Can you guess why?”
“He was a priest,” the boy said immediately, as if it was something that had been on its mind before. “He wasn’t qualified for it. He was a priest, not a builder. Or an engineer.”
“Correct. However much he might have learned from his blacksmith father or the Red Keep’s library, Septon Barth was a septon. He was not an architect or craftsman or tradesmen or a coin counter. Whatever plan he might have come up with would surely have been riddled with flaws and inefficiencies. The speed with which King’s Landing thereafter degenerated into the sad state of today proves this. If he had anyone helping him on it, they were complete failures or phonies at their job. The proposal should have at most been set aside for expert review over the next few moonturns. But Good Queen Alysanne wanted her victory now, so she served the two men a tankard of river water and challenged them to drink it. Not that the men are blameless for capitulating. Woe the man whose mind is ruled by his emotions. Or, worse, his wife’s emotions. Spineless fools the both of them, but what else can you expect of southron summer children like them?”
If not for the blood slowly welling around the sword blade that was still embedded into the skin of his neck, Walys Flowers would have long since sagged from sheer astonishment in his chair.
“By this point the Good Queen had already done enough to be awarded the crown of fools thrice over, but of course she would not be stopped at just that. The Widow’s Law was innocent enough I suppose. We’ll set aside how vastly she overstated the problem. Or the succession crises it ended up causing all over Westeros. Including the one that gave so much strife to your great grandfather and the rest of his generation, incidentally. But no, what followed was her one, crowning achievement.”
“The Progress to the North,” the boy-thing said when Rickard fell silent and waited for it to speak.
“Her infamous Progress to the North,” Rickard confirmed with a nod. Derisively. “Truth be told, Alaric Stark would have preferred being left well enough alone. He secretly rejoiced when Jaehaerys was detained at King's Landing. Alas, the Good Queen was convinced it would be an insult not to go. So she came North alone. Proceeded to be as southron as possible when judging how we conduct our business, which she did a lot of. Because of course it made sense to judge the North based on our richest smallfolk in the borderline southron-minded White Harbor. Never mind that she only paid attention to the few women who managed to have complaints despite living in the most affluent place of the North. When she later came to Winterfell, she somehow convinced herself Lord Alaric abiding by decorum somehow meant he warmed up to her simply due to her charm and wit, because of course she would. Everyone else in her life did the same, didn’t they? Even Alaric’s daughter Alarra, but more on her later. When Jaehaerys finally came North for all the important talks that ended up not amounting to anything but a slap in our face as usual, Alysanne quickly became bored with the matters of the state she was ostensibly deeply involved in. So she left northwards again. Scared the life out of the smallfolk on the way. I doubt she ever wondered if it wasn’t admiration but fear that made them welcome her and rename their settlements in her so-called honor.”
Was… was he talking about Queenscrown? Preposterous! The smallfolk there changed its name following Alysanne's visit because of how good she was with them. They even painted the merlons atop the holdfast golden to look like the golden crown she had worn during her visit!
“Not satisfied that she’d done enough, the woman then went to the Night’s Watch and started telling them how to do their job. She even used her own jewels to finance an extra castle for them to build as a solution for the Nightfort being just too much for them, poor folk. That Jaehaerys had to later send his own men to build it somehow wasn’t enough of a hint as to how the Watch felt about it. But none of that compares to the last and greatest atrocity she committed before she finally left for the southron pit from whence she came. This, I think, you can well guess.”
“The New Gift.”
“Yes,” Rickard Stark said disdainfully. “She ‘convinced’ Jaehaerys to double the amount of land held by the black brothers.”
Mester Walys flinched in pain as Ice jerked just the slightest bit away from him and out of his flesh as Rickard Stark gripped it tightly by the hilt.
“Never mind that the Night’s Watch had lived and thrived on Brandon’s Gift just fine for eight thousand years. Never mind that the Gift had given them enough to build a surplus when they manned all nineteen of their castles instead of the five back then, let alone their current three. Never mind that the North has the dubious honor of our best farmland being all clustered in the northern-most part of our territory. Her ‘generous’ donation of land that wasn’t hers to give saw the North’s best and most bountiful food source cut in half. The woman had the gall to believe Lord Alaric was charmed. House Targaryen had the nerve to pass it on as a good and charitable act. Chroniclers to this day have the gall to pretend we took it lightly. When it literally doomed the North to generational famine.” Lord Rickard of House Stark had never looked so dark and terrible and full of hate as in that moment. “If not for the six dragons squatting in our castle. If not for the fact that Alarra Stark was off ‘entertaining’ the Good Queen’s while Jaehaerys ‘finalised’ the ‘agreement’ between our houses, the North would have seceded on the spot.”
Maester Walys… Walys Flowers had no words to say or even think about the sheer treason he was witnessing.
“The worst thing is that it was all such a waste. The granting of the New Gift only deprived that land of the lordly oversight and protection. It didn’t last five winters. Wildlings could sail around the wall in summer or walk across the ice in winter and raid the lands with impunity. Suddenly, the Black Brothers had to look not just ahead but behind as well. The Night’s Watch could already barely mind its core mission, how did she think it would have the resources or manpower to manage such a swath of land when they couldn’t handle even the Gift any longer? But there’s the thing – she did not think. All that supposed intelligence, wasted, because she lacked even the smallest ounce of wisdom. But Jaehaerys, oh, he had wit in spades, and the sort of shamelessness than even his sister couldn’t rival him in. He never missed even the slightest chance to exploit his bitch wife’s atrocious marks. Nor did his pet septon fail to put a wondrous spin back in the south on everything she did. Had we revolted then, not even Dorne would have supported us.”
Maester Walys had thought it would be the work of decades to turn the North’s eyes southwards. Now, as his mind tried and failed to recover from this preposterous interpretation of written history, he was starting to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t the eyes of the North he should have been focusing on.
“You’d think the New Gift would be the crowning achievement of her ignorance, but she was barely back in King’s Landing before she managed to attain an even higher standard of hypocrisy, somehow. The ban on the tradition of First Night. Ha! Jaehaerys certainly spun that into the greatest win that house Targaryen ever had with the smallfolk, that’s for certain. Never mind that house Targaryen practiced First Night so much that half the people on Dragonstone from smallfolk to the Velaryons are their dragonseed bastards. Never mind that the queen’s oh so noble second law has absolutely no teeth. My, a highborn took a woman against her will! Their knights do that constantly without censure, while their lords get praises heaped upon them the more bastards they leave behind. There is no provision for actual punishment anywhere. ‘Henceforth a bride's maidenhead will only belong to her husband, whether joined before a septon or a heart tree, and any man, be they lord or peasant, who would forcibly take her on her wedding night or any other night will be guilty of rape.’ That’s all that the law states. And to finish off the good queen’s litany of inbred stupidity, she couldn’t even claim reliance on existing law for methods of censure, seeing as House Targaryen’s decades-long assessment of Westerosi law had barely started at the time.”
Brandon Stark was sitting in front of Rickard Stark, slack-jawed in his chair while staring at him stupidly.
“We allowed the renaming of Queenscrown not as the honor she believed it to be, but as an insult we knew someone as deluded as her would never grasp. We knew it wouldn’t be long before the place was deserted. Save for a small stopover village, the holdfast and surrounding lands have stood empty and barren ever since. What else could happen to something spawned by such a barren mind? Even so, the North still weathered her better than the rest of the realm did. It’s not a cesspool like the capital is nowadays, that’s for certain. Better than her own family, even. You need only think of the disasters that her children ended up becoming later in life. Those that did not get themselves killed or took their own lives over grief at their own poor choices. As terrible as she was as a queen, it wouldn’t shock me to learn she was an even worse mother. But I’ve gone rather far afield I think.”
Ice turned on its edge and lay flat against Walys’ neck. The maester had to sit up and lift his chin so that it couldn’t chip bits off his jawbone.
“Alysanne Targaryen was the stooge through which the Conciliator figured he’d go ahead and play Conciliator with everyone except us.” concluded Rickard Stark his character assassination as he uncoiled his hand from around his sword’s hilt with a grunt. “And it worked out for him and his house very well.”
Maester Walys… didn’t know where to even start on everything that was wrong with what that had just been uttered. In all his time in Winterfell he’d seen no sign of this rabid sentiment. He’d never even suspected that House Stark – that Rickard Stark – would so despise House Targaryen for that one incident. Any one incident. When else did the Targaryens ever bother them? Gods be good, even the southrons didn’t bother them these days. King’s Landing was far too far away to influence the North. The Starks were kings in all but name! In exchange for nothing, the North didn’t have to worry about war against southern kingdoms and they benefitted from abundant trade. Not to mention that the Starks could just marry into southern houses and gain influence like everyone else did. And when was the last time the Sistermen were a thorn to the Northerners? The only nuisance the North even had to worry about at this point were Ironborn raiders, but that was true of the entire west coast!
Rickard Stark just ignored him as before though. Took a deep breath and slowly allowed the tension that had built up in him to seep away before addressing his son again. “I’m telling you all this so you can grasp the fullness of my meaning when I tell you that House Targaryen accidentally harming and insulting us and the North is the anomaly. The only one other such was from Jaehaerys himself. Alaric’s brother Walton only died because Jaehaerys sent Maegor’s former kingsguard to the Wall instead of swinging the sword, the coward. All of our other, many grievances were inflicted knowingly and deliberately and near always from spite. When Alaric showed Walton’s grave to the snake, the great Conciliator responded by inflicting upon us our greatest grievance. One wonders the kind of man the so-called saint truly was on the inside. When Dagon Greyjoy was pillaging our west coast, Aerys Targaryen only got off his royal arse after the Ironborn went down to raid the Reach and sack Fair Isle. I suppose he was upset we didn’t join either side of the Blackfyre Rebellion. The first one, because someone had to outdo the bint in terms of inbred stupidity. I suppose ensuring generational warfare was the only way to do it. The only great Stark woe since the Conquest that House Targaryen didn’t directly contribute to was the death of Willam Stark to Raymun Redbeard. But of course, that invasion was only possible because of the accelerated decline of the Watch and the unattended lands of the New Gift itself, both of which are on their shoulders. Now I personally don’t begrudge the king’s peace, but everything else? It’s enough to make one wish the Seven Hells were real so they can all go burn.”
“Burn! BURN! BURN!”
The maester felt his heart lurch and he flinched away from the sword even though it didn’t move. His eyes wildly sought Alban up in the shadows, then the still open window where an entire conspiracy of ravens seemed to have gathered while the world swam in madness.
When he spoke again in the eerie atmosphere, Rickard Stark sounded calm and serene as if he’d not just spent the past who knew how long speaking sedition. “What do you know about Rhaenys Targaryen?”
=================
“-. 273 AC .-“
“-. 273 AC .-“
Walys Flowers was blessed with a prodigious imagination. Not the glut that saw people slipping into delusions and hedge fancies. But not the dearth of it either, that saw even the most learned of maesters become little more than droning regurgitators of words when called upon to put their learning to good use. That didn’t mean he could predict every possible turn of events, as indeed no one ever could. It did, however, mean that he could well imagine all the paths that events could take if he knew the starting scenario and the actors involved.
Few things had been on the maester’s mind the last few years besides what would now surely unfold. The shape of things upon succeeding in his purpose. Or, as had instead become the case, being found out.
He rather knew what would now come.
Then the demon walked to the largest window, unlatched the blinds, opened both panes wide and took three steps back, bracing itself as if something was going to bowl him ov-
Alban swooped into the room through the window and landed on the monster’s shoulder.
Walys Flowers felt all the blood drain from his face.
“You used to care for me when I was small, maester,” The monster turned in his direction, some ghastly hellsmoke flowing over both its eyes as it stared at him. “Inquired after me. Worried over me when the mindstorm took me. Even later after we butted heads more and more often and you never made a secret of your disapproval of me… even that seemed just so genuine. For a while I even thought my suspicion of you was totally unfounded. What did I have to go on after all? Pure conjecture from vage dreams and you being a southron Andal.” Maester Walys barely registered what he was hearing, gaping in horror at the sight of his one, closest companion being suborned and taken from him like everything else had been. “And then you go and prove that even baseless suspicion can be right by trying murder my mother you self-absorbed, oathbreaking, bastard shitfuck-!”
“Son-”
“No, dad! I don’t know how you can still sit there and take it but I can’t stand for this anymore.”
“Oh spare me your blandishments, you f-AH!” the sword abruptly kissed the skin of his neck.
“Do not speak out of turn,” Rickard Stark commanded with all the weight of an iceberg. “Brandon is above you. Do not interrupt him. Ever. Do not comment. In fact, until I say otherwise, do not speak at all.”
Maester Walys choked back his words and promptly forgot what he’d been about to say.
“And you, son, will not interrupt me.”
“… I know, father, I’m sorry but even now he can’t help it! He does it to everyone, he even did it to me.” The thing had the gall to glare at Walys as it spoke over its supposed father, finally shedding the guise of the dutiful child. “You even did it to me, you bastard. I watched you rant and rave about me to your pet for months and I felt sorry for you, even guilty sometimes! Even when mom got sick I could never tell if you were really poisoning her or trying to help until I sat and watched you literally code that secret correspondence. You never healed her, did you? You treated her symptoms while the real problem got worse. Even then you only treated her chill so it would seem like she was improving even though that wasn’t the problem. Even after I knew it, it still took me seeing your secret stash to finally do something! It was blind luck you decided to drink yourself stupid enough to go and ransack your own poison stash while I was looking on! And you didn’t even use any of them on mom. You just gave her stuff that only worked without awful side effects when they weren’t in combination. Not that I knew it at first,” it admitted bitterly.
If everyone knew what they needed when they needed it, you'd not have survived past that night, Walys thought thought with ample bitterness of his own.
“I knew chill treatments don’t addle the wits. I knew consumption doesn’t do it either. And I still sat on it like a fool! Congratulations, maester! If not for magic, you’d have had your way and I’d never been able to do a thing! If not for that last message the raven was there for, if I hadn’t watched you apply that cypher, I still wouldn’t know if there was a group of you or if you were bought by someone or just acting alone. Was there any point where you were actually trying to help? How long until you’d have resorted to those dusts and vials under the raven nesting boxes? Or would you have just kept up what you were already doing? Why the hell did you even change your mind? What the hell possessed you to think I want to kill my own mother!? Even if you think I’m a demon, it would’ve been inconsistent with everything I’ve done my whole life, I even told you I’m trying to find a poison for diseases, not people-!”
“Brandon!” Valyrian steel literally drew blood as Walys flinched when Lady Lyarra spoke and rose behind him. “Brandon stop!”
“But… I…he…“ the demon stumbled over its own words as its body’s mother strode for and took its face in her hands. The white raven squawked in startlement and flew away to watch quietly from the top of the display cabinet. Both demon and mother ignored him.
“Brandon, stop. Stop. I’m fine. I’m here, I’m walking and I’m getting stronger by the day.”
“But that’s still a tenth of what you could do before, and you got sick exactly ten years after the wasting decimated Winterfell,” the demon said despairingly. “Your moonblood comes and goes, right? Your womb still pains you, doesn’t it? You still piss blood don’t you? Don’t you?” The woman didn’t seem to have an answer. “…When father takes you to bed, do you bleed afterwards?”
The question only gave way to a deep silence damning enough for even the darkest confessions, but the monster wasn’t satisfied if he didn’t infringe on even that. “The worst part is that it doesn’t even matter now. He can’t heal you anyway. Nobody knows how to heal consumption, not even the Citadel.” The thing looked away from the lady and glared at him again, before just averting its eyes from everyone. It had the gall to look grief-stricken. “And neither can I.”
“Brandon-“
“I know exactly what to make and how to make it!” The gall of the thing to pretend Rickard Stark’s order not to interrupt didn’t include the lady. “I could spit out seven, a dozen, two dozen different steps from memory right now, but it’s worth jack shit! I don’t know what the catalysts are called, or even if they're all known. I know what they should do, but I don’t know what else they can do, or even what they all look like. I couldn’t properly describe them to someone who actually knows natural sciences even if I tried. I can name half again as many of nature’s building blocks than the citadel knows about, but I don’t know even half the reactions for them, let alone for naturally-occurring compounds! And I can’t even make a contest or it, because we don’t have alchemists and our own court healer’s been actively murdering you for the past few months!”
Maester Walys stared blankly at the fretful creature falling to pieces before him. Having had no choice but to look at it due to the sword at his throat, he found himself noticing things he’d not noticed before. The paleness of its skin. The bags under its eyes. The redness creeping up into the white from beneath its lids like gnarly roots. As it spoke, its eyes even grew watery, almost. The thing before him was a despairing, fretful, exhausted mess of a young boy. It really looked and acted like just a boy… Strange and knowledgeable and too precocious by half but… Could it be that…?
“Dad, I’m calling in that one request,” the thing brazenly said, as if it had any sort of rightful claim on anything at all. “Whatever else happens, whatever else you decide to do, don’t send us south. Don’t foster us, don’t betroth us, don’t marry us off. Any of us. Keep us here. Keep us above the Neck.”
… but no. Even here and now its words were poison. The memory of one and a thousand eyes dotting some unthinkable abomination flashed through his mind just as clearly as always. The maester’s face twisted under the realization that it once again got to him. To think a demon would be able to fake even mournful grief and exhaustion. What manifold and disgusting mummery! Did it never grow tired of lying?
What was he thinking, it was a demon from the Seven Hells, it literally thrived on lying and-
“Denied.”
The word crashed the fell mood to pieces with all the grace of House Gardener’s last gasps upon the Field of Fire.
“Wife,” Lord Rickard spoke in the grim silence that followed, breaking Walys’ train of thought completely. “Why don’t you go prepare our son’s bedchambers and have some warm milk and honey summoned up? It seems our son needs an early night. I’ll send him to you shortly.”
“What? But…” Whatever protests the thing wanted to spout died on its lips.
“… That may well be a good idea,” Lyarra Stark agreed, stepping away from the boy-thing and pointedly not looking in Walys’ direction. “… I’ll have some myself, I think.”
“Honey works on infections,” the demon said thickly, turning away to wipe at its eyes. “But not this one.”
“Well I’ll enjoy it regardless,” Lyarra Stark said with barely a waver in her voice as she wiped her son’s tears away before leaving. “I’m not dead yet.”
The door opened and closed, leaving behind two men who hadn’t moved, one by choice and one by lack of it, and the demon of a boy that turned to glare at Walys with moist eyes and opened its mouth to-
“Son.”
The childlike beast bit back whatever it was going to say with a snarl. It then looked between the maester and behind him to the door the Lady had just left through, before averting its eyes from them both and turning to Rickard Stark, who gazed sternly down at his supposed progeny while Ice still bit into-
“What does gaslighting mean?”
… or things could go ahead and unfold in a way completely unforeseen, Walys thought blankly.
“What does gaslighting mean, son?” Rickard Stark repeated himself even though it was one of the things he most disdained.
“… It’s when someone secretly makes you doubt your own memory, perception or judgment so that you don’t know what you believe anymore and start thinking low of yourself.” The thing had the nerve to glare at Walys as he spoke. “It basically makes you incapable of acting in your own interests and dependent on them for validation and emotional support.”
“I thought it might be something like that,” Rickard Stark mused, as if he wasn’t holding a sword to the neck of the chief advisor he’d nearly beheaded scant moments prior in front of his wife and supposed son of eleven years. “But the word doesn’t make any sense, I’m sad to say. The best I can think of are wisps, those burning balls of gas that mislead people traveling the swamps along the Neck. Failing that, maybe bad air? Like if you interfered with the candle light used to detect whether or not there’s bad air about to addle or kill everyone in a mine. Either way, it’s a stretch at best. And even if it wasn’t, no one outside colliers and crannogmen will ever know what you’re talking about. You should be more careful or people will think you addled, if not mad. Do recall that you talked about being screwed almost a moon before you even made the things.”
The demon opened its mouth, closed it and twisted its face into a grimace. “Baelished by my own brain again,” it muttered. “… I know what you’re doing, Dad.”
“Then you should have little trouble not making me repeat my next question. What do you know about Queen Alysanne?”
The maester drew a blank. What did that have to do with anything?
Perversely, the demon before him seemed to be just as dumbfounded. “… This is going to be like the Children, isn’t it?” It muttered to itself before finally answering and what did he just say? “Alysanne Targaryen was the rider of Silverwing and the queen consort of her brother King Jaehaerys the Conciliator between….” Its brow furrowed as it thought further. “I’m sorry, father. I’m still shit with years.”
Rickard Stark said nothing. Merely continued to sit on the edge of the desk and hold Ice to Walys’ neck while he beheld the boy, waiting.
“They say Alysanne Targaryen learned to read before she was weaned,” the boy-thing said with a frown. “That she was an accomplished archer and hunter and she’d have been sent to the Citadel if she’d been born a man. That she was so high-spirited, charming and intelligent that everyone loved her even without accounting for her charities, highborn and lowborn alike. And when she wasn’t gaining the adoration of all women and men, she spent her time on music, dancing, reading, and flying on her dragon. Every last chronicle agrees that she had a great wit and that she made a powerful impression on those who met her.” The childlike thing grimaced near the end. Self-deprecatingly. “I’m guessing this is where you tell me how biased Septon Barth and all these others were when writing their histories?”
“Alysanne Targaryen is the dumbest bint to ever disgrace the halls of power.” Rickard Stark said as his son’s jaw dropped and wait just a moment, what? WHAT!? “That inbred tart was an egoist to rival Aegon the First and Maegor the Cruel combined. The most self-absorbed of hypocrites. The greatest waste of intelligence history has ever seen. She was, and remains to this day, the most famous of House Targaryen’s useful idiots.”
Brandon Stark gaped in shock at the borderline treason coming out the mouth of its father, then the brat haltingly climbed back in its chair so that its shock didn’t make it fall on its arse on the floor outright.
“She eloped with her own brother against her parents’ wishes, ensuring once and for all that incest became seen as an intrinsic Targaryen failing,” Rickard Stark said, sounding every bit like… like… like Walys himself when he gave a lecture. “Inbreeding aside, this destroyed any chances of the Faith Militant dying with Maegor, by giving its supporters and members a permanent grievance to rally around even after they disbanded, one lasting to this day. It also forced house Targaryen to spend virtually all the dregs of political capital left after the Cruel’s reign, on buying special treatment via the so-called Doctrine of Exceptionalism. Jaehaerys shoulders half the blame for it, but that was just the start of the woman’s exceptional contributions. Do you know what happened right after the death of their mother Alyssa Velaryon?”
The boy tried but ended up shaking its head that he didn’t.
“Alysanne went and intruded on her sister Rhaena at precisely the worst time, then ignored her wishes that she leave and even tried to take her daughter away. This was immediately after Rhaena’s husband had murdered all her lovers and friends before confessing it all and promptly committing suicide to deny her all retribution. Her daughter Aerea was the only thing driving her on. Alysanne effectively destroyed any chances of the woman mending fences with the rest of her family, as might instead have happened if she’d had just let things be until time and Rhaena’s hatred of Dragonstone drover her back into their arms on their own. To say nothing of how much it might have contributed to the decision of Rhaena’s daughter to go get herself killed with the great dragon Balerion. This permanently deprived House Targaryen of one of its most influential figures and dragonrider, and possibly killed the largest ever dragon. Failing that, it could have caused a Dance of Dragons a century earlier if Jaehaerys had been any less a silver tongue. Such a civil war could easily have inflicted more damage than their hold on power could cope with after Maegor, depending on how many dragons were left after. More’s the pity.”
Maester Walys gaped in shock at the man who’d just besmirched the name of the one Targaryen against whom all but the most cantankerous of the Citadel’s Archmaesters had never-
“Alysanne Targaryen was eternally displeased by her husband’s refusal to make Daenerys heir over Aemon, even though she should have known the folly of trying to upturn yet another core tradition of the people she ostensibly wanted to rule justly. Clearly, getting her way on everything else up to that point was not enough for her. It was doubly foolish so soon after they’d spent all their political capital on upturning a major tenet of the Faith of the Seven, as I mentioned previously. Later, she was right to support Septon Barth's plan of constructing wells, pipes, tunnels, and cisterns to provide King's Landing smallfolk with clean water. But she was not right to force an ultimatum upon the Master of Coin and her own husband when they rightly balked at the costs. Can you guess why?”
“He was a priest,” the boy said immediately, as if it was something that had been on its mind before. “He wasn’t qualified for it. He was a priest, not a builder. Or an engineer.”
“Correct. However much he might have learned from his blacksmith father or the Red Keep’s library, Septon Barth was a septon. He was not an architect or craftsman or tradesmen or a coin counter. Whatever plan he might have come up with would surely have been riddled with flaws and inefficiencies. The speed with which King’s Landing thereafter degenerated into the sad state of today proves this. If he had anyone helping him on it, they were complete failures or phonies at their job. The proposal should have at most been set aside for expert review over the next few moonturns. But Good Queen Alysanne wanted her victory now, so she served the two men a tankard of river water and challenged them to drink it. Not that the men are blameless for capitulating. Woe the man whose mind is ruled by his emotions. Or, worse, his wife’s emotions. Spineless fools the both of them, but what else can you expect of southron summer children like them?”
If not for the blood slowly welling around the sword blade that was still embedded into the skin of his neck, Walys Flowers would have long since sagged from sheer astonishment in his chair.
“By this point the Good Queen had already done enough to be awarded the crown of fools thrice over, but of course she would not be stopped at just that. The Widow’s Law was innocent enough I suppose. We’ll set aside how vastly she overstated the problem. Or the succession crises it ended up causing all over Westeros. Including the one that gave so much strife to your great grandfather and the rest of his generation, incidentally. But no, what followed was her one, crowning achievement.”
“The Progress to the North,” the boy-thing said when Rickard fell silent and waited for it to speak.
“Her infamous Progress to the North,” Rickard confirmed with a nod. Derisively. “Truth be told, Alaric Stark would have preferred being left well enough alone. He secretly rejoiced when Jaehaerys was detained at King's Landing. Alas, the Good Queen was convinced it would be an insult not to go. So she came North alone. Proceeded to be as southron as possible when judging how we conduct our business, which she did a lot of. Because of course it made sense to judge the North based on our richest smallfolk in the borderline southron-minded White Harbor. Never mind that she only paid attention to the few women who managed to have complaints despite living in the most affluent place of the North. When she later came to Winterfell, she somehow convinced herself Lord Alaric abiding by decorum somehow meant he warmed up to her simply due to her charm and wit, because of course she would. Everyone else in her life did the same, didn’t they? Even Alaric’s daughter Alarra, but more on her later. When Jaehaerys finally came North for all the important talks that ended up not amounting to anything but a slap in our face as usual, Alysanne quickly became bored with the matters of the state she was ostensibly deeply involved in. So she left northwards again. Scared the life out of the smallfolk on the way. I doubt she ever wondered if it wasn’t admiration but fear that made them welcome her and rename their settlements in her so-called honor.”
Was… was he talking about Queenscrown? Preposterous! The smallfolk there changed its name following Alysanne's visit because of how good she was with them. They even painted the merlons atop the holdfast golden to look like the golden crown she had worn during her visit!
“Not satisfied that she’d done enough, the woman then went to the Night’s Watch and started telling them how to do their job. She even used her own jewels to finance an extra castle for them to build as a solution for the Nightfort being just too much for them, poor folk. That Jaehaerys had to later send his own men to build it somehow wasn’t enough of a hint as to how the Watch felt about it. But none of that compares to the last and greatest atrocity she committed before she finally left for the southron pit from whence she came. This, I think, you can well guess.”
“The New Gift.”
“Yes,” Rickard Stark said disdainfully. “She ‘convinced’ Jaehaerys to double the amount of land held by the black brothers.”
Mester Walys flinched in pain as Ice jerked just the slightest bit away from him and out of his flesh as Rickard Stark gripped it tightly by the hilt.
“Never mind that the Night’s Watch had lived and thrived on Brandon’s Gift just fine for eight thousand years. Never mind that the Gift had given them enough to build a surplus when they manned all nineteen of their castles instead of the five back then, let alone their current three. Never mind that the North has the dubious honor of our best farmland being all clustered in the northern-most part of our territory. Her ‘generous’ donation of land that wasn’t hers to give saw the North’s best and most bountiful food source cut in half. The woman had the gall to believe Lord Alaric was charmed. House Targaryen had the nerve to pass it on as a good and charitable act. Chroniclers to this day have the gall to pretend we took it lightly. When it literally doomed the North to generational famine.” Lord Rickard of House Stark had never looked so dark and terrible and full of hate as in that moment. “If not for the six dragons squatting in our castle. If not for the fact that Alarra Stark was off ‘entertaining’ the Good Queen’s while Jaehaerys ‘finalised’ the ‘agreement’ between our houses, the North would have seceded on the spot.”
Maester Walys… Walys Flowers had no words to say or even think about the sheer treason he was witnessing.
“The worst thing is that it was all such a waste. The granting of the New Gift only deprived that land of the lordly oversight and protection. It didn’t last five winters. Wildlings could sail around the wall in summer or walk across the ice in winter and raid the lands with impunity. Suddenly, the Black Brothers had to look not just ahead but behind as well. The Night’s Watch could already barely mind its core mission, how did she think it would have the resources or manpower to manage such a swath of land when they couldn’t handle even the Gift any longer? But there’s the thing – she did not think. All that supposed intelligence, wasted, because she lacked even the smallest ounce of wisdom. But Jaehaerys, oh, he had wit in spades, and the sort of shamelessness than even his sister couldn’t rival him in. He never missed even the slightest chance to exploit his bitch wife’s atrocious marks. Nor did his pet septon fail to put a wondrous spin back in the south on everything she did. Had we revolted then, not even Dorne would have supported us.”
Maester Walys had thought it would be the work of decades to turn the North’s eyes southwards. Now, as his mind tried and failed to recover from this preposterous interpretation of written history, he was starting to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t the eyes of the North he should have been focusing on.
“You’d think the New Gift would be the crowning achievement of her ignorance, but she was barely back in King’s Landing before she managed to attain an even higher standard of hypocrisy, somehow. The ban on the tradition of First Night. Ha! Jaehaerys certainly spun that into the greatest win that house Targaryen ever had with the smallfolk, that’s for certain. Never mind that house Targaryen practiced First Night so much that half the people on Dragonstone from smallfolk to the Velaryons are their dragonseed bastards. Never mind that the queen’s oh so noble second law has absolutely no teeth. My, a highborn took a woman against her will! Their knights do that constantly without censure, while their lords get praises heaped upon them the more bastards they leave behind. There is no provision for actual punishment anywhere. ‘Henceforth a bride's maidenhead will only belong to her husband, whether joined before a septon or a heart tree, and any man, be they lord or peasant, who would forcibly take her on her wedding night or any other night will be guilty of rape.’ That’s all that the law states. And to finish off the good queen’s litany of inbred stupidity, she couldn’t even claim reliance on existing law for methods of censure, seeing as House Targaryen’s decades-long assessment of Westerosi law had barely started at the time.”
Brandon Stark was sitting in front of Rickard Stark, slack-jawed in his chair while staring at him stupidly.
“We allowed the renaming of Queenscrown not as the honor she believed it to be, but as an insult we knew someone as deluded as her would never grasp. We knew it wouldn’t be long before the place was deserted. Save for a small stopover village, the holdfast and surrounding lands have stood empty and barren ever since. What else could happen to something spawned by such a barren mind? Even so, the North still weathered her better than the rest of the realm did. It’s not a cesspool like the capital is nowadays, that’s for certain. Better than her own family, even. You need only think of the disasters that her children ended up becoming later in life. Those that did not get themselves killed or took their own lives over grief at their own poor choices. As terrible as she was as a queen, it wouldn’t shock me to learn she was an even worse mother. But I’ve gone rather far afield I think.”
Ice turned on its edge and lay flat against Walys’ neck. The maester had to sit up and lift his chin so that it couldn’t chip bits off his jawbone.
“Alysanne Targaryen was the stooge through which the Conciliator figured he’d go ahead and play Conciliator with everyone except us.” concluded Rickard Stark his character assassination as he uncoiled his hand from around his sword’s hilt with a grunt. “And it worked out for him and his house very well.”
Maester Walys… didn’t know where to even start on everything that was wrong with what that had just been uttered. In all his time in Winterfell he’d seen no sign of this rabid sentiment. He’d never even suspected that House Stark – that Rickard Stark – would so despise House Targaryen for that one incident. Any one incident. When else did the Targaryens ever bother them? Gods be good, even the southrons didn’t bother them these days. King’s Landing was far too far away to influence the North. The Starks were kings in all but name! In exchange for nothing, the North didn’t have to worry about war against southern kingdoms and they benefitted from abundant trade. Not to mention that the Starks could just marry into southern houses and gain influence like everyone else did. And when was the last time the Sistermen were a thorn to the Northerners? The only nuisance the North even had to worry about at this point were Ironborn raiders, but that was true of the entire west coast!
Rickard Stark just ignored him as before though. Took a deep breath and slowly allowed the tension that had built up in him to seep away before addressing his son again. “I’m telling you all this so you can grasp the fullness of my meaning when I tell you that House Targaryen accidentally harming and insulting us and the North is the anomaly. The only one other such was from Jaehaerys himself. Alaric’s brother Walton only died because Jaehaerys sent Maegor’s former kingsguard to the Wall instead of swinging the sword, the coward. All of our other, many grievances were inflicted knowingly and deliberately and near always from spite. When Alaric showed Walton’s grave to the snake, the great Conciliator responded by inflicting upon us our greatest grievance. One wonders the kind of man the so-called saint truly was on the inside. When Dagon Greyjoy was pillaging our west coast, Aerys Targaryen only got off his royal arse after the Ironborn went down to raid the Reach and sack Fair Isle. I suppose he was upset we didn’t join either side of the Blackfyre Rebellion. The first one, because someone had to outdo the bint in terms of inbred stupidity. I suppose ensuring generational warfare was the only way to do it. The only great Stark woe since the Conquest that House Targaryen didn’t directly contribute to was the death of Willam Stark to Raymun Redbeard. But of course, that invasion was only possible because of the accelerated decline of the Watch and the unattended lands of the New Gift itself, both of which are on their shoulders. Now I personally don’t begrudge the king’s peace, but everything else? It’s enough to make one wish the Seven Hells were real so they can all go burn.”
“Burn! BURN! BURN!”
The maester felt his heart lurch and he flinched away from the sword even though it didn’t move. His eyes wildly sought Alban up in the shadows, then the still open window where an entire conspiracy of ravens seemed to have gathered while the world swam in madness.
When he spoke again in the eerie atmosphere, Rickard Stark sounded calm and serene as if he’d not just spent the past who knew how long speaking sedition. “What do you know about Rhaenys Targaryen?”
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Abhishekm
Well-known member
Well that all escalated quickly. So I take it Rickard Starks wish for fostering and contacts in the South is more of a "If you won't stop messing with us we will start messing up your matters until you no longer have them time" deal? A see how you like it sort of deal?
And as always a lot more thought and reasoning put into the lore than most any other asoiaf fic I've ever seen.
And as always a lot more thought and reasoning put into the lore than most any other asoiaf fic I've ever seen.
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Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
To the first, spoilers? Until next chapter anyway.
To the second, thank you very much!
Tryglaw
Well-known member
Honestly, Northern houses could simply cut a deal with the NW: "rent us the New Gift and we will work the land for you with our smallfolk; in exchange you get your cut in food and supplies, we get our part, Crown gets nothing since it's NW territory."
Also, Ned Stark could have easily gotten the New Gift back: "Hey, Robert?"
Bobby B: "Yes, my bestest bro in all but blood?"
NS: "Would you like to fuck over some Targ legacy?"
BB: "Hah! Say what you mean, I'll have it done by yesterday!"
NS: "There's this bit of land the dragonspawn took from us, could you see it restored?"
BB: "Scribe!!! Get yer lazy ass in here, I want a Royal Decree for my bro Ned!"
Especially if Ned would promise to build a town / city named after his sister, a Crown Charter would be written so fast the parchment might light up from friction...
Also, Ned Stark could have easily gotten the New Gift back: "Hey, Robert?"
Bobby B: "Yes, my bestest bro in all but blood?"
NS: "Would you like to fuck over some Targ legacy?"
BB: "Hah! Say what you mean, I'll have it done by yesterday!"
NS: "There's this bit of land the dragonspawn took from us, could you see it restored?"
BB: "Scribe!!! Get yer lazy ass in here, I want a Royal Decree for my bro Ned!"
Especially if Ned would promise to build a town / city named after his sister, a Crown Charter would be written so fast the parchment might light up from friction...
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
Alas, canon is canon so I couldn't have this be a thing.
Be reassured I have already looked at this very closely.