Nerd In the North 4-18

The black cells were a place of honesty.

Walls that wept with salt from the sea, dark mildews creeping across unclean surfaces, and a darkness that made all that slightly more pleasant. Even with that slight blessing,  the air rang eternally with a stench one could only assume was that of old straw, rotted fish, dried blood and the bitter smell of naught but urine, a reek had curled in this foul air for the generations of the Red Keep’s existence.

Honest suffering, yes, but honesty still.

Cold and unfeeling they may have been, they bore no deceit and what little delusion they may have allowed was not one to last. It was this conclusion that Eddard Stark could hold as some distant comfort as he sat with his back against the rough stone, breath steady, though each inhale dragged a little more of the horrid smell through his lungs. There were no stars in this place, only the soft flicker of torchlight from the corridor beyond, and even that seemed hesitant to linger.

His body ached in the places where memory pooled: ribs bruised from the beating he’d received days past before he was thrown to rot, wrists scraped from the manacles, knees stiff from stone and time. But pain was a thing he had carried longer than any blade. 

Above all else, it wasn’t the hurt that weighed him.

Far from it.

No, even to himself, Ned could not deny that it was the faces.

Jory, cut down in the great hall. Fat Tom, left to rot in the sun. Vayon. Desmond. Cayn. Men of the North, whose oaths had outlasted their lives.

And then his girls. Sansa, too still, too silent in the Queen’s presence. Arya, wild-eyed, gone like wind between fingers. He closed his eyes and saw them not as they were, but as they had been, beneath Winterfell’s sky. He opened them again and found only blackness.

Footsteps, and voices accompanying them. Neither yet close and both quite muffled but both grew more and less so in equal measure as the seconds drew on. Ned narrowed his eyes to no avail, yet his ears seemed to sharpen nonetheless as he properly deciphered the stuttering pattern of twin footsteps, heavy and swaggering.

Familiar, yet dreaded.

Two guards. No sooner had he come to this realization than words drifted in through iron and dark like flakes of summer snow through tree leaves.

“Ye see the thing he carries ‘round?” A voice, rough with an accent that was as much Flea Bottom as it was Westerlands, rough and rolling all at once, spoke the little that was on his mind. “Sittin’ on ‘is shoulders, wings twice as wide as it is tall, never thought i’d see one of ‘em myself.”

“Aye,” his fellow returned, the Flea Bottom in his voice stronger than anything else. “An’ th’ Prince Tommen, too, ‘imself the sight. Been at the Keep since th’ Ironmen got their blood up, I ‘ave. And I never seen the lad so proud and strong. Like a little gold King Robert, ‘e is.”

The first clicked his tongue, the man slowing his heavy steps. “…d’you see ‘is eyes, have you? Purple. Like the dragonlords. Not a lick o’ green no more, no Baratheon blue neither.”

Ned did not move, the once-Hand of the King drawing his quietest breath through his nostrils as his mouth stayed shut.

“Queen’s been callin’ it a sign of the gods,” the second said with a chuckle. “’Tommen the Blessed,’ they’re saying now. Funny, innit? First Targ to live after wildfire, and come out with a dragon. Glad ‘is brother ain’t got one, though.”

Ned’s blood slowed in his veins as the words spun in his thoughts like the wheels of a workman’s cart. Purple eyes had been a shock to hear, at the very least, especially when connected to Tommen of all people. Wildfire, even more so, and rather confusing at that. But it was the word dragon that brought it all together and forced Eddard’s heart to pound in his chest with the dull thump of a poorly made drum.

A hatchling. A dragon.

Eddard Stark shut his eyes, almost in the hopes that this was naught but a nightmare, a horrid dream he would awake from. If not in his own bed, then at the very least in the same cells, that would have been a reprieve.

But his wish, as always, was for naught and no one.

No, Ned let out a shudder of a breath from his lips. No, it can’t be…

The first guard’s voice dropped as the footsteps drew ever nearer, the Flea Bottom in his tone dropping away as he spoke again, both men coming to a stop just outside his cell. “Quiet. Don’t mention the king near the prisoner.”

His words must have escaped his thoughts, flown past the gate that was his dry lips, because the sneer that met him as he raised his head was practiced cruelty of the kind learned at the hands of Westerlanders.

“What’s the matter, Stark? Worried now?” The guard chortled, mouth drawing up into a rotten-toothed smile that Ned simply stared at, eyes blank as fears flashed behind them. “Prince Tommen’s dragon’ll grow big enough to burn the whole North, bring some warmth to that mess, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Maybe your daughters’ll get a good look at it before it happens.”

Rather than respond to the man’s barbs, Eddard simply bowed his head, letting the dark curtain of his hair hide his eyes as it fell forward over him. There was no humility to his silence, as he was simply aware that words would have done no good. There was nothing to say that hadn’t already been broken against iron bars.

Even in his silence, total and unyielding in the face of their continued insults, the guards laughed on, and then awhile longer, before —thankfully— they left him to his silence.

Yet, even as his lips remained unmoving, his mind refused to grant him the same peace.

Eyes of purple. Scales like fire. Eddard Stark thought of Jon Arryn, the man he considered a second father, now dead and cold in his tomb, voice unheard but not unheeded. The seed is strong.

And he thought of Robert—his brother in all blood—both man and king as filled with wroth as he was empty of thought. Robert, despite the words of his house, whose blood had never burned anywhere near bright enough to match the pride of his that seemed to have grown with his waistline, if that was possible. Hair black as coal, eyes of sapphire,strength of House Baratheon, passed through his brawling get and their uncountable nameless kin alike.

Mya. Gendry.

All the boys and girls in Flea Bottom. It had all seemed so simple.

And it had, hadn’t it?

As plain to see as the nose on his face, and he had barely questioned it for that. The final actions of Jon Arryn only made him more doggedly determined to uncover what truth the former Hand could have been searching for.

Like a fool, he had built his certainty on that ground, that simple simple ground. Had watched for only the signs he could see with his eyes. Was it not Robb, Sansa, Bran and Rickon all that favored his wife in appearance? The same bright blue eyes and red hair of Tully blood? Robert’s first child with Cersei had been black of hair and eyes green as any Lannister. Had Robert not been struck down, the fifth may as well have been the same.

The truth he sought to uncover was simply no truth at all. He had clung to Jon Arryn’s warning like it was a rope tossed down into a pit. The seed is strong.

A man could chase those words until they bent in front of his gaze into prophecy. He had and it did. He’d seen bastards with black hair and called it proof, seen golden curls and named them treason. But the seed had never been strong. Not Baratheon seed, not truly.

The Quiet Wolf, known for his caution and diligence, and yet I betrayed myself, was all Eddard could think as he stared down at his hands. He’d been too quick, too eager, blinded by suspicion of Lannister to ground himself properly, and the ground beneath him proved to be little but sand.

Robert’s grandmother had been a Targaryen. Rhaelle. A name not uttered near the king by any blessed with good sense and even most of poor cunning knew better than to make any connection with Robert to the dragons he hated so much. Rhaelle… It was clear now, more than anything. Targaryen seed was strong, but like any other, it could falter. Foolish. He knew that more than anyone. He had been grateful for that simple gift since the Rebellion had come to a very close. 

Foolish, he repeated.

To many, Robert’s ancestry was likely unknown.

And now the boy bore wings and scale and fire of his own.

Robert’s blood had spoken in a manner so loud that none could deny. 

He pressed his hand flat against the damp floor, the stone cool beneath his palm as he sought to ground himself and his thoughts.

Again, like everything else, it failed him. The Foolish Wolf, they will call you. Plunging the Seven Kingdoms into war off your own stupidity and honor. If he had been speaking, he might have spat the word.

He had followed honor into a pit, his reputation shattered and his legacy one of a betrayer of the Seven Kingdoms. Regret sat in his mouth like ash. Robert was gone. Jon Arryn was gone. And he, Eddard Stark, sat caged in the dark with ghosts and failure for company.

He had thought himself wiser than the game. He had not lied. He had warned Cersei plainly. Had given her mercy, thinking it strength. “Flee,” he’d said. “Take your children, go.” And she had smiled, as if his decency were the thing she’d counted on most.

A fool’s mercy. A good man’s mistake.

No, he thought, eyes fixed on the nothing in front of him. Not mercy. Pride.

He had wanted to be better. Better than Robert, better than the players in this foul city. He had thought his truth would cut through all of it, like Ice through flesh. That the truth alone would make them yield.

But this city did not yield. It devoured.

He rubbed at his beard with one slow hand, the hairs coarse beneath his fingers, flecked now with white. He had always known the world was not fair, not kind. But he had believed, with the dull stubbornness of Northern men, that honor could shield a family. That justice could keep the snow from their bones.

He had been wrong.

And they will die for it, he thought, and that truth hurt more than the chains ever had. Robb in the field, too young, too proud. Sansa held in a den of wolves dressed as lions. Arya… gone. The men who had followed him, bled for him, gutted in alleys and left as warnings.

They would call it treason, all of it. But the treason had never been his.

His jaw tightened. In the silence, he heard the faint drip of water down the far wall. It marked time without mercy.

He remembered his father’s voice in the godswood of Winterfell, low and steady in the still air. He remembered the sound of wind in the leaves.

Just the quiet weight of old trees, old vows.

Here, in this hole, there were no godswood leaves. But he looked up all the same.

“If you still watch,” he muttered, voice roughened by disuse and doubt, “watch over them. My children. Keep them from the fire.”

The torch outside crackled. A rat rustled in the straw. No voice came to answer.

He did not expect one.

But he sat straighter.

He had no sword. No court. No name worth anything here. But he had blood. And if the dragon flew again—if Tommen, sweet soft Tommen, bore fire in his lungs and purple flame in his gaze—then war would come again. 

Real war. Not the games of lords, but fire and ash and ruin. 

And the North would burn first.

No more songs. No more myths.

Only cold. Only truth.

Only Winter.