POV: Ned Stark
Ned Stark had led men to war before, had ridden at the head of columns twice this size down roads twice as dangerous, and he could not say why this march felt different from all the rest. The gates of Riverrun fell away behind them under the pre-dawn morning sky, banners snapping overhead, horns sounding along the column from front to back, and none of it should have troubled him. He was free, his daughters were free at least one of them safe behind Riverrun's walls with Catelyn while the host marched out to finish what the Lannisters had started at King's Landing. He should have felt something like triumph. Instead there was a tightness under his ribs that had not eased since he had woken that morning, a feeling he knew from old battlefields and could not, for the life of him, place a cause to.
He had felt this before, or something enough like it that the memory of the feeling troubled him more than the feeling itself. Once, on the Trident, the morning of Robert's fight with Rhaegar, he had woken with the same tightness and told himself it was only the cold. Once at the Tower of Joy, before the end of it, before Lyanna.
Robb rode near the front of the column, the crown made by Hoster Tully's smiths sitting on his brows. Lords rode to either side, northern and riverlands both, close enough now after these moons of war, people of two different kingdoms joined by blood and marriage and a shared hatred that had, until lately, seemed to run only many direction.
That hatred was the trouble and Ned understood it well enough, had understood it since the hall days past, when Howland Reed had stood up before the lords of the North and the Trident and said what he had sworn, for fifteen years and never to say aloud.
Ned had not stopped him, he had sat at the high table with his hands flat on the wood in front of him and let the words fall into that hall, because Howland had earned the right to say them a hundred times over at the Tower of Joy, and because some part of Ned, buried under years of careful silence, had wanted them said at last.
He had not expected what came after, he had known there would be anger. It came dressed in Catelyn's white, tight face, in Edmure's shout, in old Lord Hoster's wheezing demand to know why a rape-spawn thought himself fit to wear a crown when Robb Stark already wore one.
A spawn, that was what they called him now, the boy Ned had raised as his own since he was a babe still slick from the birthing bed, the boy who had a right to a different name than the one Ned had given him, a name Ned had known the truth of for fifteen years and told no one, not even Catelyn, not even Jon himself, Aemon. It still did not sit easily in Ned's mouth, that name when he had practiced it alone at night.
He knew only that his son, the son he had raised, the son whose true blood was not his own but his sister's, had asked the North and the Trident to kneel, and the North and the Trident had answered by crowning Robb instead, and now there were two kings riding two different roads, and Ned knew that these road would one day face against each other.
He thought of Lyanna, as he had thought of her nearly every day for past fifteen years, though of her last breaths since the Tower. He thought of the smell of that room, blood and sweat both, and the sound of her voice gone thin with fever, and the words she had made him swear before she let go of his hand. Promise me, Ned. He had promised. He had kept the promise the only way he had known how, by raising the boy as his own and burying the truth so deep that even he had half forgotten, some days, that it was a lie he carried. He had never once considered, in fifteen years of carrying it, that keeping the promise might mean watching Robb and Aemon meet across a battlefield with drawn steel between them.
Not today at least, he heaved a sigh in relief. Today the swords they carried were meant for Lannister men, and Ned told himself that was some small mercy, though the tightness under his ribs did not leave.
He became aware of hoofbeats drawing alongside his own, a big man on a bigger horse, and did not need to turn to know who rode there, Rickard Karstark had come by his side.
"You've the look of a man chewing on something that won't go down easy, Lord Stark," Karstark said, when Ned did turn to him.
"Have I."
"You have been wearing it since Riverrun's gates, unless I miss my guess, and I don't often." Karstark's beard had gone half to gray since Ned had last ridden beside him, and there were new lines cut deep around his eyes that war put there faster than years did. "I'd wager coin on what's chewing at you, if you cared to hear my wager."
"Say it, then."
"The boy," Karstark said, and did not trouble to soften it with a title, not Jon and not Aemon either, simply the boy, the way half the camp had taken to calling him now that neither name sat easy on northern tongues. "Half my men still don't know what to make of him and asking northmen to bend the knee to it. My lad Torrhen asked me plain, two nights back, whether it was true what Reed said in the hall and I told him I didn't know. Wasn't a lie, not truly. I know what I heard. I don't know what to make of it."
"Nor do I, some days," Ned admitted, and found there was a strange relief in saying it plain to a man who would not repeat it to twist it into something else.
Karstark grunted, not quite satisfied, not quite pressing further either. "I fought at the Trident, Lord Stark. Lost a good cousin at the Ruby Ford, cut down not ten feet away from me by Rhaegar himself before the fighting was done. I've spent years hating that name, dragon, same as every man riding in this column old enough to remember why. Now you're telling me the boy I have heard grow up at Winterfell, the one carries blood of Rhaegar himself, and asks me to kneel to it." He shook his head slowly. "It sits wrong in a man's chest, my lord. However true it is. However good the boy's own heart might be, and I'll not say a word against his heart. It still sits wrong."
"I know it," Ned said. "I have known it longer than any man riding in this column, Lord Karstark. I spent had fifteen years seeing that face in him, and I confess to you now, it has not gotten easier with the years. Only more familiar, there is a difference."
"And the King himself? Does he hate his brother for it?"
The question caught Ned out his guard, and he took a moment before he answered, watching the column ahead, the dust rising pale under so many hooves and boots. "Robb does not hate him, I hope he doesn't. But a crown changes what a man is permitted to feel, Lord Karstark, whatever he might wish to feel underneath it. Robb wears the North's crown now because the North and the Trident put it on his head and swore their swords to it. He cannot simply set that aside because the boy he grew up beside asks him to kneel instead. No more than I could have set aside my own oaths, whatever this old heart of mine might have wished."
"Then it comes to blood eventually. Robb's crown against the boy's claim." Karstark said it without relish, only the flat certainty of a man who had seen enough wars to know how most of them ended. "Doesn't sit right either, my lord, if you'll forgive me saying so. Two Stark blood princes with swords drawn on each other while the Lannisters laugh from the Westerlands and sharpen their own."
"It does not sit right with me either," Ned said. "That is why I mean to see it never comes to that, so long as I have breath left to prevent it. But that is a fight for another day, Lord Karstark. Today we have Tywin Lannister's host in front of us, and Randyll Tarly besides, and that will want the whole of a man's attention, without borrowing trouble from tomorrow."
"Tarly." Karstark said the name the way a man spits out a bad tooth. "The only lord living who ever put Robert Baratheon on his backside in a real fight, so they say. At Ashford, before your king finally found his feet again and won the war anyway. I don't relish meeting a man with that reputation across a field, my lord, and I'll say so plain, since we're being plain with each other this morning."
"Nor do I," Ned said. "But Tarly and Rowan are held back in the rear, by every scout's word that's reached us. Tywin means them as his reserve, not his vanguard. If the center holds long enough to damage Lannister vanguard enough then we needn't meet Tarly's spears at all, capturing Jaime would give us our win."
"If the center holds." Karstark's mouth twisted. "You always did have a soldier's tongue for saying the hard part soft, Lord Stark. My father used to say the same of you, back when you were still a boy fostered at the Eyrie and thought no one was watching you close enough to notice."
Despite himself, despite the tightness that had not left his chest since the gates, Ned felt something in him ease at that, some old warmth from a life lived before crowns and dragon's blood had complicated everything a man once thought simple. "Your father was a hard man to lie to," he said. "I remember that much."
"Aye. And his son's no easier, whatever comfort that brings you." Karstark's eyes went past him, toward the head of the column, toward the crown that still sat strange on Robb's brow. "Lord Tytos Blackwood went home rather than march under Stark banner against the Targaryen. Mallister stayed, though he's sour about it, and I don't think he's forgiven the council for not hearing his counsel out in full before the vote was called. My own sons are with me, all three, and not one of them asked me twice whether we ought to be here. That's the whole of the North's answer, near enough, if you want to know how it sits with most of us. We'll fight the Lannisters today gladly, Lord Stark. What we do the day after, when there's no lion left in front of us to give us a common enemy to stand behind, that I could not tell you, and I don't think you could either, however soft you say it."
There was nothing to answer that, so Ned said nothing at all, and after a moment Karstark nodded, as if the silence itself had answered him well enough, and put his heels to his horse and rode on ahead to see to his own sons and his own banners.
Ned rode alone after that, or as alone as a man could be in the middle of eight thousand marching soldiers, and let the tightness in his chest have its way with him a while longer. The wolf blood, his father had called it once, half in jest, the strange magic that ran in Stark blood alongside the solemn duty everyone always spoke of when they spoke of the North. Ned had never felt he owned much of it himself, not the way Brandon and Lyanna had, not the way Arya seemed to now but something in him this morning was awake and unhappy in a way he did not have words for.
By mid-morning the column had cleared the last of the lines south of Riverrun and come out onto the wide floodplain where the Lannister host had made its camp, banners of crimson and gold thick enough along the horizon to look, from this distance, like a wound the land had not yet finished bleeding from. Scouts had already ridden the ground twice over.
Robb called the column to a halt a half mile short of the plain, and the lords gathered around him in a loose ring while the banners were dressed and the lines began, slowly, to form themselves out of a column into something that could actually fight.
"My lords," Robb said, and his voice, Ned thought, had grown steadier this last year than it had any right to at his age, though there was a rawness under the steadiness this morning that only a father would have caught. "You know the plan as well as I do by now. I'll not waste breath repeating what you've already heard twice over. I'll only say this. Whatever comes after today, whatever crowns or claims still stand between us when the sun goes down, that is a fight for another sun to rise on. Today there is one enemy in front of us, and he has stepped on our tails enough time that its time we cut their throats."
A rough cheer went through the crowd and there was Karstark's voice was in it, and Mallister's, and a dozen more Ned could not pick apart from each other.
"Take your positions," Robb said. "And may the old gods and the new watch us all."
Ned rode to his place at the head of the left wing without another word and took up his position at their front, and drew his sword from its sheath, feeling the familiar weight of it settle into his hand.
Across the plain, distant enough still that the crimson and gold looked more like a bruise on the horizon than an army of living men, horns began to sound in answer to his own side's, and the wolf blood in him, silent for years, went on pacing and would not be still.
POV- Arya Stark
She knew she should be happy. The Lannisters were going to pay, finally, truly, for Father's imprisonment, for Mycah and everything that had come after, and any sane person would have called that cause enough for happiness on a morning like this. But the last handful of days had not gone well for her, nor for anyone in her family that she could see, standing on Riverrun's walls with the whole weight of the world about to come apart in the fields below.
Jon was not her brother. He was her cousin, Rhaegar Targaryen's son by Aunt Lyanna, and his true name was Aemon, and he had known it, or half known it, for weeks before any of the rest of them had, and Father had known it for years and never said one word. That was the part that sat worst with Arya, worse even than the crown business, worse than the shouting in the hall. Not that Jon was different than she had thought. She did not much care whose blood he carried, not truly, not in the part of her that still remembered him gifting her a sword made out of Mikken forgery for her. What she could not forgive, not yet, not fully, was that Father had known and said nothing, had let her grow up loving a brother who was never quite the brother she thought, and had never trusted her, or any of them, enough to say so.
Then there was the rest of it, the part that had turned Riverrun's halls into something closer to a viper's nest than a castle these past days. Aemon had declared himself king, true king, dragon's blood and all, and asked the North and the Trident to bend the knee to him instead of to Robb. Robb had answered by ignoring his words. Mother had gone white with fury the day when raven with three dragon head arrived, had called Aemon everything from a bastard to a usurper in the same breath, sometimes in the same sentence, and Uncle Edmure had matched her fury nearly shout for shout, and Grandfather, when he had strength enough in his lungs to shout at all these days, had matched them both. Only Father had stayed quiet through all of it. He had stayed quiet since the night Howland Reed stood up in the hall and said, in a voice that had shaken the rafters more than any shout could have, that he had stood at the Tower of Joy himself and heard Lyanna Stark's dying words with his own ears, and that the boy called Jon Snow had never once, in all his life, been anything so simple as a bastard.
Arya had not been in the hall for that. She had heard it secondhand from servants and she had spent an angry, sleepless night trying to work out. Father had known and he had said nothing. That much, everyone agreed on.
She stood now at the southern curtain wall with her mother on one side of her and her grandfather, seated in the heavy oaken chair two of Riverrun's guardsmen had carried up for him that morning, on the other. Lord Hoster Tully had grown thin these last days in a way that frightened Arya more than she cared to admit, his face gone gray and sunken under the same white-streaked hair, his hands, folded now over the arms of the chair, trembling faintly even at rest. But his eyes, when he turned them out over the plain, were sharp as ever, sharp as the trout on his own banner, and there was nothing frail at all in the voice that came out of him.
"Watch, my dear," he said to her, without turning his head, as the first lines began to form on the field, Stark grey and Tully red-and-blue and a dozen banners threading themselves into lines. "This will be the last time a Lannister ever sets foot on Riverlands soil, if the gods are kind. And no Targaryen will find a place here either, whatever name he wears now, whatever lies the Reed tells in my own hall to make it prettier." He said it with a kind of grim satisfaction that turned Arya's stomach, though she could not have said, exactly, whether it was the words themselves or the pleasure he took in them that she hated more.
She said nothing. There did not seem to be a safe thing to say, not to a man who had already decided, before any battle had even begun, what the result would be.
Her mother's hand found her shoulder, light, uncertain. "You're quiet this morning," Catelyn said, low enough that it did not carry past the two of them.
"I don't have much to say."
"That's not like you." A small, tired attempt at humor, though it did not quite land as one. When Arya did not answer it, her mother's hand tightened slightly on her shoulder. "You're still angry about the boy."
"I'm angry Father never told us," Arya said, before she could decide whether she meant to say it at all. "Not about Jon being Jon. I don't care what his real name is. I care that we didn't get to know him as himself. We only ever knew half of him, and he now he is standing against us."
Below, on the plain, the horns had begun. The Stark and Tully lines advanced first, a great grey-and-red tide rolling forward at a march that was not yet a run, and across the plain the crimson-and-gold of Lannister answered, their own lines surging out from the shadow of their camp to meet it.
The sound reached her a heartbeat after the sight did, always a heartbeat behind, as though the battle itself were somehow outrunning its own noise. Horns first, deep northern horns and brighter riverlands trumpets tangled together into something that was not quite music and not quite alarm. Then, underneath it, a low continuous rumble that she realized, after a moment, was simply the sound of thousands of feet and hooves striking the same ground at once.
"There," her grandfather said, lifting one trembling hand to point, though his voice had gone thinner now. "The center. That's your uncle's banner, and brother's beside it."
Arya found the shapes he meant, tiny at this distance, trout and stark dressed in ranks that from up here looked almost neat, almost orderly, nothing at all like the chaos she had imagined a battle would be. That orderliness broke apart within moments of the two lines meeting, turning formless and churning that her eyes could not quite hold steady, steel flashing bright and then dark and then bright again as men rose and fell across a field already going dark with trampled mud.
She made herself watch the center a while longer, though her stomach had gone tight and cold in a way that had nothing to do with the morning air, and then, because she could not bear the center any longer, some part of her needed to look anywhere else, she turned her eyes to the flank instead, where the green banners of House Mormont and the giant of House Umber held the right, anchoring the line against the river.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. The Frey banners, two blue towers united by a bridge on silver-grey, had been positioned there since dawn, she was almost certain of it, drawn up in support behind the Mormont and Umber lines the way reserves were meant to be drawn up, waiting their turn. She watched them begin to move now, watched the long grey-blue column surge forward at last, and for one single held breath, she thought only that the reserves were finally being committed, that this was simply how a battle was meant to go.
Then she saw the angle of it. The Freys were not moving to reinforce the Mormont and Umber line at all. They were moving into it, crashing into the exposed flank and rear of their own allies with spears already leveled, and for a heartbeat the bear and the giant seemed almost to shudder on the field, the whole formation buckling inward.
"Mother." The word came out of Arya thinner than she meant it to, all the earlier steadiness gone out of her voice at once. "Mother, look. Look at the Freys."
Catelyn's hand went rigid on the stone of the wall. Beside them, Lord Hoster Tully had gone very still in his chair, his mouth working soundlessly, as though the words he needed had simply refused to come when he called for them.
"What," Catelyn said, very quietly, and then, louder, as if saying it louder might somehow make it less true, "What are they doing."