**Grief and Crowns**
"There's more," Yohn Royce continued, unrolling a second scroll beside the first. "Renly Baratheon has sent his own raven. His terms differ somewhat from his brother's." He scanned the parchment briefly before continuing. "Should we back his claim, he offers Arryn and Stark both seats on his small council—not merely one, as Stannis proposes. And for the North specifically, he's offered a thirty percent discount on Reach grain, held for the next ten years."
A low murmur moved through the hall again, lords weighing one offer against the other with the particular care men gave to promises made by kings who had not yet won their crowns.
Michel took the second letter, reading it through once, twice, his mind already working through the tangle of competing claims and competing promises that had settled over this war like a second battlefield entirely—one fought with ravens and small council seats rather than swords.
"We'll decide tomorrow," he said finally, setting both letters down upon the table. "After we've dealt with Jaime Lannister. There are debts owed before there are crowns to be chosen, and I'd see the first paid before we turn to the second."
No one argued the point. The lords nodded, grim and united in that much at least, and the council dispersed slowly into the gathering evening, small knots of men breaking off toward their own quarters, the day's grief and fury still hanging heavy over every exchange.
---
Robb found his way to his mother's chambers alone, having sent no word ahead, needing no announcement for what he carried. The door stood slightly ajar, and through the gap he could see Catelyn seated near the window, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on nothing at all—the particular stillness of a woman who had spent the day waiting for news she already feared, in her bones, was coming.
He pushed the door open, and the sound of it made her turn, and whatever composure Robb had managed to carry through the war council and down the long corridor to her door broke apart entirely the moment their eyes met. He was crying before he'd said a single word, the tears coming hot and unstoppable, his broad shoulders shaking with a grief he had held in check for hours through sheer force of will.
Catelyn was on her feet immediately, alarm flooding her face. "Robb—what's happened? Tell me."
He could not speak. He only crossed the room and pressed the crumpled letter into her hands, unable to say the words himself, needing her to read them rather than hear them from his own mouth.
Catelyn's eyes moved across the parchment, and Robb watched his mother's face drain of color in slow, terrible stages—watched understanding arrive, then disbelief, then something that broke entirely as the truth of it finally settled through her. Her knees gave slightly, and she caught herself against the windowsill, the letter trembling in her grip.
"No." The word came out broken, barely audible. "No, no—"
She had married Ned Stark for duty, all those years ago, a political match forged in the aftermath of a rebellion neither of them had chosen—two strangers bound together by their fathers' calculations rather than their own hearts. But duty had grown, slowly and without either of them quite noticing the exact moment it happened, into something real. Into love, deep and quiet and entirely unshakeable, built across years of shared children and shared winters and a thousand small kindnesses that had turned a political arrangement into the truest thing in both their lives.
And now that was gone. Taken by a boy king's cruelty and a city's indifference, ended on the steps of a sept a thousand leagues from the only home Ned Stark had ever truly loved.
Catelyn's tears came without restraint now, the letter still clutched in her shaking hands, and Robb crossed the remaining distance and gathered his mother into his arms, both of them weeping together in a way neither had allowed themselves to do since the day their world first began unraveling.
They held each other a long while, grief filling the small chamber entirely, until at last Catelyn drew back, wiping at her face with hands that still trembled, and looked up at her son with eyes red and raw and suddenly older than they had been that morning.
"What do we do now," she whispered.
Robb drew a slow, unsteady breath, forcing himself back toward the hard, practical ground his father had always taught him a lord needed to stand upon, even when—especially when—the grief threatened to swallow everything else whole.
"Father told the truth before they killed him," Robb said quietly. "That Joffrey isn't truly Robert's son. That he was born of incest, between Cersei and Jaime." He watched his mother absorb this, saw her jaw tighten with fresh fury beneath the grief. "By right, that makes Stannis the true heir. Robert's eldest living brother, the crown passing to him exactly as the laws of succession say it should."
"But," Catelyn said slowly, reading the hesitation still sitting unresolved in her son's voice.
"But the northern lords don't love him. Never have. He's cold, and distant, and half the bannermen who'd need to fight for his claim would do it reluctantly, if they did it at all." Robb shook his head slowly. "And Renly's offering more besides—better terms, warmer promises. Grain for the North. Seats on his council for both our houses." He let out a breath that was half frustration, half exhaustion. "We don't know yet, Mother. Michel says we'll decide tomorrow. Tonight, there's only one thing left to settle."
Catelyn's eyes sharpened, understanding arriving before he finished the thought. "Jaime Lannister."
"Tomorrow," Robb said, and something harder, colder, entered his voice now—his father's voice, Catelyn realized with a fresh ache, the particular flat certainty Ned had always carried when justice demanded something of him he did not relish but would not shrink from either. "Tomorrow we answer for what they did to Father. Blood for blood."
Catelyn nodded slowly, and reached out to take her son's hand, holding it tight in both of hers the way she had when he was small and frightened of nothing worse than thunder.
Neither of them said anything further. There was nothing left that words could properly carry, not tonight, not with grief and fury and the terrible, necessary business of tomorrow all pressing so close together in the same breath.
They sat together instead, mother and son, long into the night, and both of them understood without needing to say it aloud that sleep would not come for either of them before the sun rose again over Riverrun.