Chapter 153: Stark's Departure
JAEHAERYS
Jaehaerys had cut his thumb twice making the box, and both cuts had scabbed over by the morning the North went home.
He'd started it in winter, in the carpenter's shed behind the stables, with a borrowed knife and a block of ash the carpenter swore wouldn't split. It split. The second split too. The third took the shape he wanted after eleven days he told nobody about, and the lid still sat crooked on its hinge, and the wolf he'd cut into it had one ear bigger than the other. He'd nearly sanded it flat and begun again. Then he decided the ear could stay. A wolf with two matched ears was a wolf off a tapestry. This one looked like it had been in a fight.
Inside, on grey wool cut from an old cloak, lay his father's brooch. Silver. A wolf's head. Grey crystal for the eyes.
"You cut yourself," Jaehaera said, at his elbow, in the cold before dawn.
"Twice."
"The hinge is crooked."
"I know."
"He'll see it." She said it flat and exact, a line read off a list.
"Should I have made a better one?"
"There isn't time to make a better one. There's an hour." She went back to watching the torches move in the yard and didn't mention any of it again.
Their mother came down at the fourth hour, hair braided plain, no crown. Jaehaerys braced for her to take the box, or straighten the wool inside it, or tell him what to say. She kept her hands folded in her sleeves.
"It'll be cold where he's taking it," Helaena said. "Silver doesn't mind cold. Silver remembers hands."
"Is that a true thing, or a thing you saw?"
"Both, mostly." She looked at the box and not at him. "Don't let me carry it. Don't let me say it for you either. If I explain what you meant, then I gave it, and you only held the wood."
"You could tell me if it's wrong."
"It isn't mine to be wrong about."
Ulf came out last, boots loud on frozen stone, breath white. He looked at the box, then at Jaehaerys, and Jaehaerys waited for the offer. A grown man carried the important thing. A boy stood behind him and got praised afterward.
"You want me to put it in his hands?" Ulf asked.
"No."
"Good." He stepped back a full pace and stayed there, arms crossed. "Then I'm no use to you until the gate shuts."
"You could come as far as the line."
"I could. Then they'd watch me and not you." He nodded at the torches. "Twenty thousand men are about to look at whoever's standing closest to Stark. It shouldn't be me."
The yard had been filling since the third hour, and the sound came up through the soles of his boots before it reached his ears: twenty thousand men finding their places in the dark, iron on iron, wagon axles grinding, horses blowing steam. The supply train had been loaded since midnight. Weather was coming up the Blackwater, grey and low, and the drivers wanted the Kingsroad under their wheels before it caught them. A captain in a wolfskin walked the line calling an hour that wouldn't move for rain, or for a queen, or for a boy with a box.
That was the part that frightened him. Not Lord Stark. The hour.
He was nearly eight. He'd spent a year teaching men to stop treating him like a thing carried out of burning rooms, sitting through council in a chair too tall for him, keeping his face still while lords argued over his realm. Now he'd walk out in front of twenty thousand Northmen with a box he'd made badly himself, and if it looked like a child's offering, every hour of that year came undone in front of all of them.
His hands were sweating on the ash. He wiped them on his cloak and picked it up again.
The King's Gate opened at dawn.
They marched out under a sky the colour of a knife, column after column, and the sound of it filled Aegon's High Hill. Jaehaerys stood at the gate with the box against his chest and let the first ranks pass. Then Cregan Stark came down the line on foot, making his last rounds. He pulled a girth strap tighter. He put a boot back through a stirrup. He retied a bedroll that had worked loose.
He stopped in front of Jaehaerys because Jaehaerys did not move out of his path.
"The column doesn't halt, Your Grace," Stark said. "Not for me either. There's weather on the river and forty leagues of Kingsroad before the wagons see a wall."
"Then it won't halt. This is short."
Nobody had told him to hold his voice up. He did it anyway, because twenty thousand men were listening and he'd decided, somewhere between the third hour and the fourth, that he wasn't going to say this quietly.
"Lord Stark. You marched twenty thousand men to restore my throne. You judged the guilty and spared the innocent. I have no army to give you. But I have this. It was my father's. Aegon the Elder meant to give it to you as a token of alliance. I'm giving it now, not as a token, but as a promise. The North will always have a friend on the Iron Throne."
The crooked lid caught once on its hinge and then came open.
Stark took the brooch with both hands. Not two fingers, not the pinch you use for a coin off a tray. Both hands, and he held it a moment in the grey light, and the crystal eyes took what little there was of the sun.
"Your Grace," he said, "your father would be proud."
He unpinned the plain iron clasp at his shoulder, put it in his belt, and pinned the wolf's head through the wet wool of his cloak in its place, pressing it flat with his thumb to be sure. He said nothing about coming back. Not again, not spring, not ever. He set his hand on the boy's shoulder once, the whole weight of it, and then he was in the saddle and through the gate and gone into the column, and Jaehaerys was holding an empty box.
The march took until midday.
It came out of the yard in a slow river, horse and foot and wagon, and the noise went on so long it stopped being noise. Jaehaerys stayed the whole time. Men struck the last tents, and where the tents had been there were rectangles of dead yellow grass in the mud, hundreds of them, the print of something that had slept there a year. The well nobody could reach all winter stood open and unguarded. A woman came out with two buckets, looked at the bare ground, and drew her water without waiting on anyone.
The last banner cleared the gate a little after noon. Grey wolf on white. It went under the arch, the shadow took it, then the road, and the gates came round on their chains and boomed shut.
The city exhaled. Jaehaerys felt it in the stones. The smell went first, horses and cookfires and boiled oats thinning out of the air, and under it came the smells the city kept for itself, wet ash and fish and baking. Then the sounds. Hammers on the Street of Steel. Gulls. Somebody laughing at something that wasn't a soldier's joke.
The occupation was over. For the first time in a year no army but their own stood inside the walls, and nothing at all lay between the city and whatever came for it next.
He'd been afraid the gift would be taken like a child's. It hadn't been. And he understood, holding the empty ash box, that it wouldn't have mattered if every one of those twenty thousand had smirked at it. He hadn't needed their permission. He'd meant it, and Stark had taken it in both hands.
Ulf came and stood on his left. Helaena on his right, looking at the bare ground where the wolf banners had stood since the war ended.
"Tomorrow they'll want to hear me," she said, and started walking toward the keep, and every man left in the yard turned to watch her go.
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