I lay in the dark with my eyes open for a long time.
The wind came through the cracks with that sound Winterfell makes at night, low and constant, that I have known since I can remember. The guards' footsteps on their rounds passed in the corridor outside, moved away, disappeared. I lay there staring at nothing, and the scratch of quill on parchment kept reaching me as though it were still happening even after it was long behind me.
Bloody bastard.
I got up when the castle was quiet enough.
The silver needle was in the drawer, where I had kept it for weeks. Thin, a finger's length, the tip I had sharpened myself at the forge one afternoon when the smith was busy elsewhere. I took it. I took also the two pieces of fine wire from the small pocket in my sleeve, where I kept them out of habit.
I left my room without a candle. I already knew the way to the Maester's quarters.
The lock was old. Less than two minutes, and I was inside.
The smell reached me before my eyes had time to adjust. It was the accumulated smell of years, dried herbs hanging from the rafters in bundles that had seen better days, thyme and valerian and something more bitter I had never managed to name. Beneath that, old parchment, that specific dampness of leather and ink that settles in rooms where books have lived for a long time without enough air. And beneath everything, the smell of stone and wood and the mould that grows quietly near the floor, the dust mites that inhabit rugs no one has beaten in years.
It was the smell of a man who had spent his life accumulating knowledge and not opening the windows.
Walys snored in the far corner, heavy and regular, the sleep of someone with nothing troubling his conscience.
I went along the wall with bare feet, avoiding the rug, following the stone where the floor was more predictable. The herb shelf was where it had always been, and the flasks were in the order I had learned over years of lessons, the order Walys never varied because he was a man of fixed habits in everything that did not involve lying.
I searched with my fingers more than my eyes.
The milk of the poppy was in the third flask on the second shelf. I lifted the stopper carefully, touched the needle's tip to the milky consistency, replaced it. The smell of the poppy is of earth and deep sleep, and while I smelled it I thought it was probably the last smell many people had ever known.
I crossed the room.
Up close, Walys looked older than he did in lessons. A face relaxed by sleep has an honesty that a waking face does not, and the honesty of Walys's face was that of a tired man, sunken cheeks and heavy eyelids, his chest rising and falling with his breath. The peace that sleep gave him irritated me in a way I had not expected.
I laid two fingers of my left hand behind his right ear. The point between the mastoid bone and the base of the skull, where the nerve runs close to the surface.
I pressed the needle's tip with my right hand.
The snoring stopped. The body went slack.
I kept the needle in place, pressing the point.
I went to the table.
There were parchments spread across it, some folded, others held open with small stones at the corners to keep them from curling. I passed my eyes over them in the dim light, half-written letters, notes on herbs, a draft report with crossed-out lines. What I was looking for was not in sight.
I took a step to go around the table and the floor creaked under my foot.
I stopped. I listened. Walys did not move.
I looked down. I knelt, ran my fingers along the seam of the board, and with the dagger blade lifted it slowly.
The box was there. Dark wood, simple lock. The same wire opened it in seconds.
I brought the box to the table, lit the candle with the flint I had brought, and opened it.
The oldest letters were at the bottom, as it always is with things someone has kept over time. I recognised Walys's hand from years of lessons, that precision slanting slightly to the right. The replies were in another hand, more compact, more formal.
Archmaester Walgrave.
The first letter I read was about my mother.
It was not a letter about her. It was a letter that used her as the subject of a report. The colour of her hair, her estimated age, her likely origin in Essos based on her accent. And then Rickard's affection described with the precision of someone who had been observing it up close long enough to know it was real.
At the end, one line.
I request instructions on how to proceed.
The Archmaester Walgrave's reply had three words.
Wait. Watch. Report.
I read the following letters with the candle trembling slightly because the window did not seal well and the night wind came in underneath. There were letters about the pregnancy. About my mother's health. And in a letter dated a few months before my birth, buried between two lines about the castle's provisions, the name of an herb.
I got up and went to the shelf.
The flask was there. The label in Walys's handwriting. I opened it and brought it to my nose, and the smell that came out was of peppermint, fresh, completely innocent to anyone who did not know what they were smelling.
I knew.
Pennyroyal. Pulegium, as maesters call it. In repeated doses during a pregnancy, it weakens the body slowly, from the inside out, in a way that would not appear in the cause of death any maester would write afterward. In high doses, it causes haemorrhage. In an advanced pregnancy, in a woman already weakened by months of small doses administered by someone she trusted, childbirth can kill with the efficiency of a knife, and more quietly.
I closed the flask.
I stood by the shelf for a moment with the flask in my hand and the room quiet around me, Walys's snoring absent now, only the deep breathing of the milk of the poppy and the wind outside, and a rage I did not know where to put because it was too large to fit in a single place.
I went back to the table.
I kept reading.
The woman's death went as planned. Unfortunately the child survived.
It was one line. One line in a long letter about other matters, inserted between a report on Rickard's travels and a note about the state of a road in the North. The same hand as the other lines. The same size letters. As though it were the same kind of thing.
I set the letter on the table and looked at it.
The candle sputtered. From outside came the wind.
Then I continued.
There were letters about me. About Old Nan, who had been present both times Walys had tried to give me something when I was still a newborn, his irritation contained in the writing but present, the restraint of someone writing to a superior who cannot be fully honest about what he feels. There was an entire letter about the day I defended Eddard in the training yard. Walys had been watching from the window. He described the speed, the decisiveness, the absence of hesitation, and wrote in the tone of someone documenting a problem that had grown larger than anticipated.
I read about my own life in the hand of a man who had spent that life trying to end it.
The more recent letters were about influence. Alliances with southern houses, marriage arrangements Walys had been putting into Rickard's head over years, the slow work of pulling the North away from itself. And in a letter from Archmaester Walgrave that read like a letter from a general to a field captain, the passing mention that the same work was happening in other houses, other castles, with other lords and other maesters.
The Archmaester Walgrave's letter did not sound like the letter of a man acting alone.
I folded the letters. Put them back in the box in the exact order I had found them. Closed the box. Went back to the hole in the floor.
But I did not close the floor.
I left the board raised, visible to anyone who came in and looked down.
Then I went to the bed.
Walys was breathing with the slowness of the milk of the poppy.
I stood looking at him.
The line from the letter was still there, even with my eyes closed.
I picked up the pillow.
Walys struggled. His arms reached for something they did not find. The body does what it does when it understands before the mind wakes to understand as well, and for the time it lasted I stayed where I was, hands steady, and when it stopped I no longer heard my own heartbeat in my throat with the same clarity I had heard it until then.
I removed the pillow.
I checked the shelf. The milk of the poppy in its exact place. The needle taken out and put away. The candle extinguished, the wax already cooling. The box in the hole. The floor raised. The door.
Locked from outside.
I went back to my room.
I lay down.
I stared at nothing. The wind made its sound.
I waited. I was not sure for what. I had heard enough over the years about what killing a man does to the one who kills, those who never sleep again, those who vomit, those who weep without knowing why for weeks afterward.
None of that happened.
What there was, was a quiet tiredness, more like the tiredness after a long training session than anything else I could name. And beneath the tiredness something else, warmer, which I recognised after a moment as justice. Not the justice in the books of law. The other kind, the one with no name written anywhere but that the body knows when it feels it.
I had died once already. I knew what was on the other side, not from books or from faith, but because I had been there. The peace, the light, the rest before the return. Walys had gone somewhere. Perhaps not the same place. But death I knew, and knowing makes things different.
I fell asleep.
I did not sleep well.
What sleep I had came in pieces, that shallow rest that does not restore, and when the sky outside the window began to lighten I was already awake. I got up, washed my face, dressed. Winterfell's activity began with the sun as it always does, the sound of the guards changing their watch, the smell of fires being relit in the hearths, voices in the corridors.
I went to break my fast.
Brandon was arguing with Lyanna about who had eaten the last slice of honeycake the night before, an argument that had clearly been going since before they sat down and that neither of them intended to resolve quickly. Eddard ate in silence with the look of someone who would have preferred not to hear any of it. Benjen sat with his eyes still halfway between sleep and waking, holding a bowl with both hands as though it were the only solid thing in the world. Lyarra served me without asking what I wanted, because she already knew, and my father was standing by the window with his morning cup, looking down at the yard below.
I sat. I ate. I answered what was asked. Brandon and Lyanna's argument continued and then ended without either of them giving way, which was the normal way their arguments ended.
Maester Walys did not appear.
It was not the first time. There were days when he stayed in his room with his books and did not come down, and no one thought much of it. It was left at that.
But the hours passed and no one saw him. The maid who cleaned the rooms had knocked on his door that morning and received no answer, but assumed he was sleeping and did not press it. At midday, when my father asked that he be called for a consultation about travel time to White Harbor, the servants looked for him in the usual places and found him in none of them.
They knocked on the door. No one answered.
They broke it down.
I was in the solar with my father at that point, maps of the North's trade routes spread across the table, discussing the distribution of the Icefyre and Frostspirit through the Manderly ports. We had been working at it for more than an hour when the guard knocked.
He came in with the expression of someone bringing news they had not wanted to carry.
"My lord. Maester Walys."
Rickard was silent.
"We found him in his room. The door was locked from the inside." The guard paused. "He was in bed. There are no signs of life."
My father looked at the guard for a moment with that closed expression he used for news that needed to be verified before it could be accepted. Then he set his cup on the table.
Rickard looked at me. Looked at the maps. "Come with me."
We left the solar and went to Walys's room.
The door guard stood aside to let us through. The room was as it had been found, the broken door still open, Walys in the bed with the stillness specific to those who will not move again.
Rickard stood at the entrance for a moment, his eyes moving across the room before he stepped in. Then he looked at the guard.
"Were there any signs of struggle? Anything out of place when you entered?"
The guard shook his head. "No, my lord. The door was locked from inside. When we broke it down everything was quiet. He was in bed as though he had fallen asleep."
Rickard nodded and entered. He stood beside the bed, looking at him. He was not a man trained in medicine or in death, but he was a man who had seen enough bodies to know the difference between sleep and the other thing.
His eyes moved across the room. The herb shelf. The table with the parchments. The window.
I did the same, with different attention.
"What now, Father?"
Rickard was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to the guard waiting at the door.
"Send someone to Castle Cerwyn at a gallop. Ask the Maester there to write to the Citadel requesting a new maester for Winterfell, and to come himself to examine and prepare the body. As fast as possible."
The guard left.
Rickard went around the room once more, his eyes passing over Walys's table, the scattered parchments, the shelf. He was already heading toward the door when I stopped.
The board by the table was raised. Not much. Enough that someone looking down at the floor would see it.
I crouched. "Father."
Rickard came back. He looked where I was pointing. His eyes went down to the hole in the floor, to the small dark wooden box inside. He was quiet for a moment with that expression that did not show what he was thinking but showed that he was thinking.
He took the box from the hole. Examined the lock. Searched Walys's body with a brevity that said he did not expect to find anything, and did not.
"May I?"
Rickard looked at me for a moment, then placed the box in my hands.
I set it on the table, took the dagger, pushed the Valyrian steel blade into the lock's hole and with a dry motion the lock gave. The lid opened.
Rickard picked up a parchment at random and began to read.
I watched my father while he read.
He said nothing. He did not move. But somewhere in the second paragraph something changed in him, subtle, the kind that is only visible in someone you know well and for a long time. His shoulders came down a fraction. The hand holding the parchment tightened slightly. And his eyes, which were already serious, became something else, colder and deeper, as though what he was reading had reached a place that words do not normally reach.
He placed the parchment back in the box. Closed the lid. Picked up the box.
"Follow me," he said.
We left Walys's room and the silence my father carried was different from his other silences.