Counsel of Wolves
Twenty-First Day of the Eighth Month 293 AC
When had it all started? Eddard Stark stared down at the sheets of parchment in front of him without truly seeing them. Reports from maester Luwin about what the various witches, cunning men, and maegi who had come to his door could do: heal the sick and mend broken things, throw fire from their fingers and cast a man into deep slumber with a thought. There really should have been a day to pin all this to, a moment when the world stopped making sense as he had understood it to be growing up and had turned into a tale made flesh. Perhaps during the Greyjoy Rebellion when he had first heard that Stannis Baratheon of all people claimed the Ironborn had used magic against him to call storms and fog, perhaps...
He shook his head as though to physically dispel the thoughts. When did not matter anymore, neither did how, for Eddard was not so foolish as to think the wheels of the ages could be turned back. Sorcery had returned to the world, not just in the hesitant half-understood words of a miller's boy making fire or a goose girl soothing her charges. Bridges spanned from Tyrosh to the Stepstones, roads spreading beyond straight and true without crack or seam. Robert just saw a marching army going down those roads and over those bridges, but the Lord of Winterfell knew one does not reforge the Arm of Dorne to ferry over an army, not when you control the sea and half the ports in the Crownlands and all of Dorne would lay open their gates,
invitingly before invasion. No, those bridges were meant to rule and
keep a realm wider than the Seven Kingdoms. Targaryens had tried and failed to hold the Stepstones before, even when they had dragonriders, but now... now it looked like they were to become the keystone to bind together east and west.
Eddard Stark did not even have the solace of prayer to call upon as his lady wife and many of the others who held to the Seven did. The Old Gods it seemed were more than pleased to drink the blood the Dragon King offered. If he was to be believed they whispered in his ear of distant perils.
That
other letter still lingered on his desk, unburnt though maester Luwin and Catelyn both had counseled him to burn it, lest it be taken for a sign of treason. Was it treason for a man to guard his own flesh and blood? Perhaps so if history was to be believed, for he had also the blood of the man who had taken his sister away, who had begun the war in earnest. Did anyone even remember Rhaegar with his brother's name so often on their tongue?
A grand tourney in Sorcerer's Deep. How many knights would turn their coats this time? How many Houses quietly making arrangements to seek favor with those known to have sided with the dragons? How many places where the royal tax collector dare not tread?
For just a moment all the thoughts and worries, the plans and suspicions seemed to grow so burdensome he could not bear them. He felt again as he had in those first years after the war, when he had to stop himself from looking around every time the heard the words 'Lord Stark', an imposter taking his father's place.
There is no one else so you will make do. That inescapable fact steeled him as it always had, for when others might despair Eddard Stark would take up his duty, no matter how heavy he felt it to be.
The door creaked open without a knock, giving lie at least in some small part to the thought as Benjen walked it. Though his oaths were now to the Watch he was still a Stark in blood, still someone Eddard trusted as much as he did Catelyn or Jon Arryn, and there were some questions he could not ask either of them.
He listened as his brother recounted the tales of cold things stirring in the dark of the Haunted Forest, of whole wildling camps laying burned by their own owners, or worse just empty. He listened to the tales of how they had put paid the horror, not just with sword and bow, but with dragonglass shipped from Sorcerer's Deep, dragonsteel gifted from the Dragon King's own hands like the greatsword his brother bore, and the strange wolf creatures that seemed have the sun in their jaws. Ben had not brought his to Winterfell, they were needed too urgently at the Wall... they were
needed.
"Ben," Eddard asked when all the news was spent. "Do you think
he was telling the truth in the letter?" No need to say aloud who 'he' was.
"He wouldn't lie about
Them..." the younger Stark paused as though struggling with himself.
"Not that, no... about the Gods being the ones who told him." A heavy silence descended upon the room. The Old Gods had not seen fit to lift a finger to rescue their father or brother from Aerys' madness, yet now they supposedly gave counsel to the son of the Mad King himself. That Viserys Targaryen had been lying about that, that he had some eyes and ears in Winterfell would have been a far less bitter thing to swallow. Yet Eddard's attempts to find such a spy aided by what magic he could find had uncovered nothing, no unseen watchers lingering at corners, no sudden prosperity that might mark foreign gold being spent.
"If they were then remember they were trying to protect Winterfell, Ned, Winterfell and our House," Benjen said at last, struggling and mostly failing to keep bitterness from his tone. "We Starks don't have much luck in the South. Mayhap it is because we keep it all here."
"Robert is coming North, Ben." the Lord of Winterfell sighed. "He is bringing his court, or at least some of it..." A bitter smile crossed his lips. "The South is coming to us."
"The North is the hills and vales, the woods and the paths through them," the younger Stark replied. "What do you think the Gods care about a few hundred overfed courtiers rolling up the King's Road?"
Eddard Stark reeled back in his seat at the unspoken question behind it:
Do you think the Gods care about Robert Baratheon?
The answer was staring him in the face as clear as the parchments upon his desk. Robert had no gods to aid him, no dragons to rain fire from on high. All he had was friendships forged long ago, ones Eddard would never break even if the gods themselves came forth to command it.
OOC: Here we go, Ned Stark in his natural habitat, not in the south. I do not think he is politically incompetent he just trusts deeply (and at times unwisely like the fiasco in KL).
