Chapter 34: Winterfell
The wheelhouse was too large for the gates.
It had been too large for half the gates between King's Landing and the Neck, which had required creative solutions involving advance riders, hasty carpentry, and on one memorable occasion near the Trident, the temporary demolition of a gatehouse arch that the local lord had not been consulted about.
The wheelhouse was forty feet long, pulled by teams of horses rotated every few hours, and it was the most impractical thing Henry had watched move across a landscape in recent memory. Robert had commissioned it for Cersei and used it himself whenever the road turned bad and his knees made riding impossible, which was more often than it had been a decade ago.
For the final approach to Winterfell, Robert had insisted on horseback regardless. Henry suspected this was vanity — some remnant of the man who had ridden to war at the head of armies — but it might equally have been respect. Either way, the king rode at the head of the column through the last mile, sitting the stallion with more ease than his frame suggested he should be capable of, the black stag banner snapping overhead in the northern wind.
Winterfell rose ahead of them. Henry had been here once before, years ago, when he had been young enough and obscure enough to stand at the edge of a room and wait to be introduced. The walls looked the same. Granite, ancient, built to last longer than the families who sheltered behind it. Guards in grey watched from the arrow loops, and the smoke from the castle's hot springs drifted south across the gray sky.
The Stark family was waiting in the yard.
Eddard Stark stood at the front — tall, dark-haired, with the stillness of a man who had learned not to fidget in the cold. His wife Catelyn stood at his shoulder, Tully-red in her coloring, her expression composed and watchful. Behind them the children ranged in descending order of height: Robb, who had his mother's coloring and his father's bearing; Sansa, auburn-haired and already holding herself like someone who had been told she was pretty often enough to believe it; then the others, Arya and Bran and a bundled shape in a nurse's arms that was presumably the youngest.
Theon Greyjoy stood somewhat apart from the Stark children, which Henry noted without surprise.
Robert dismounted and crossed the yard in three strides and pulled Eddard into the kind of embrace that lifted the smaller man slightly off his feet. He clapped him on the back hard enough that it was audible.
"Ned." The king's voice had the raw quality it got when he was feeling something he wasn't going to pretend otherwise about. "Gods, it's good to see you. You look exactly the same. How does a man live up here for fifteen years and not age?"
"Carefully, Your Grace." Eddard's face had the particular expression of a man who was glad to see his friend and slightly alarmed by his friend's condition. "Winterfell is yours."
Henry had ridden in near the front of the column, which put him alongside Jaime Lannister whether he wanted it or not.
Jaime had the ease of a man who was comfortable being watched, which made sense given that he had spent his entire adult life in white armor specifically designed to be noticed. He had been testing Henry's patience since the Neck in the mild, persistent way of someone who was too intelligent to be bored and had decided that Henry was the most interesting target available.
"Second time here, isn't it," Jaime said, not quite a question, as they passed through the gates. "The first time you were someone's squire. Now you're the one with the squire." He glanced back at Joffrey, who was managing Henry's sword with the studied seriousness of a boy who had decided to do the thing properly. "Strange how quickly things change."
"Not that quickly," Henry said. "It's been nine years."
"Nine years is nothing. I remember when you were—"
"If you finish that sentence with anything about my height, Ser Jaime, I'll ask Joffrey to repeat back whatever you said. He'll do it at dinner."
Jaime considered this. "Fair enough," he said, and was quiet for almost a minute, which was approximately his limit.
Joffrey, who had caught enough of the exchange to be amused by it, said nothing. He had learned when to leave things alone, which was a skill Henry had been quietly glad to watch him develop.
Henry spotted the Manderly brothers while the court was still sorting itself out in the yard — Willis and Wendell, standing together in the crowd of northern lords with the particular ease of men who had known each other their entire lives and no longer needed to communicate anything complicated. Both were broad, both were bald on top with thick brown beards below, and both had put on weight since Henry had last seen them, which given the trajectory they'd been on was not surprising.
He dismounted and walked over. Willis saw him coming first and said something to his brother, and by the time Henry reached them they were both grinning.
"Well," Willis said, looking him over. "You've grown."
"You've noticed."
"Hard not to. You were half a head shorter than me last time." Willis gave him the firm grip of a man who still thought of himself as vigorous regardless of evidence to the contrary. "Commander of the City Watch now. Father sends his regards — he wanted to come himself but—"
"How is Lord Wyman?"
Willis and Wendell exchanged a glance that conveyed something entire without words.
"His health is good," Wendell said carefully.
"He finds travel more difficult than he used to," Willis added.
"How many men does it take to carry his litter now?"
Willis opened his mouth. Wendell elbowed him.
"Eight," Wendell said, with the tone of a man who has made peace with something. "It was four, for a long time. But he's been — the cook situation at White Harbor is—" He stopped. "Eight."
Henry reached out and patted both their stomachs in turn, a liberty he took because he had known them since he was young enough that they couldn't reasonably object. "You've been eating his leftovers."
"Don't," Willis said.
"I said nothing."
"You had a look."
"I always have a look. I'm a Reyne."
Willis laughed despite himself, a big booming sound that turned a few heads. Wendell followed half a beat behind, the way he always had — Willis first, Wendell after, the same rhythm they'd had since childhood. Their stomachs shook. Henry decided not to comment on that either.
Across the yard, the formal greetings were proceeding.
Robert had recovered his composure and was working through the Stark children with the deliberate attention of a man fulfilling an obligation he took seriously. Joffrey had been brought forward, stiff and correct in his good clothes, and was conducting himself with more grace than Henry had expected — he had been coaching the boy, quietly and consistently, on the difference between what you were thinking and what you showed, and some of it had apparently taken.
Sansa Stark was watching Joffrey the way young girls sometimes watched things they had decided in advance to find wonderful. Henry made a note of it and filed it away.
Arya, standing slightly apart from her siblings, was watching Henry.
She was perhaps nine, small for her age, with the Stark coloring — dark hair, grey eyes — and the look of a child who had already figured out that the adults in the room were frequently not as reliable as they claimed. She had gotten hold of someone's helmet, far too large for her, and had it tilted back on her head at an angle that required her to crane her neck to see anything. The effect was considerably more comical than she appeared to realize.
Her older brother Robb removed the helmet from her head with the practiced ease of a sibling who had done it before. She rounded on him.
"Who's the knight in red?" she demanded, apparently having been building up to this.
"That's Ser Henry. Lord Henry, properly — he commands the City Watch in King's Landing."
"Is he good?"
Bran, who had been listening: "Father says he led the assault through Pyke's sea gate. He was with Jorah Mormont and Thoros of Myr."
Arya's expression shifted slightly — interest tempered by existing information. "Jorah Mormont sold slaves."
"He did," Robb said, with the careful neutrality of an older brother who had learned not to take the bait directly. "Father wasn't endorsing him. He was describing what happened."
"If he sold slaves he's not honorable."
"He's in exile. Henry is not him."
Arya appeared to be running calculations. Henry, who could hear this conversation from fifteen feet away because the yard had quieted somewhat and Arya had not yet learned to modulate her volume, kept his face neutral.
She looked at him directly then, the grey eyes evaluating. He looked back at her.
After a moment she turned to Robb and said, "Fine. He seems all right."
High praise, Henry suspected, from that particular quarter.
He noticed Theon Greyjoy when the crowd shifted.
Theon was standing at the base of the wall — close enough to be part of the assembly, far enough from the Stark children to be clearly not part of them. He was lean, dark-haired, with the particular quality of stillness that was not calm but its opposite: the stillness of a man who had decided very carefully not to move.
He was not looking at Henry. He was looking at the ground, or the wall, or something in the middle distance that was neither, and he had been doing it since the column came through the gates.
Henry knew why.
Nine years ago, in the aftermath of the assault on Pyke, he had pulled a ten-year-old boy out from under a bed in a burning keep and handed him to a soldier to be secured for transport. The boy had been in shock, or close to it — Henry had not had time, in that moment, to be gentle about it. Pyke had been chaos and he had had other things to manage.
He had not thought about it much afterward. There had been a great deal happening.
Looking at Theon now — at the way the man's shoulders were set, at the careful absence of his gaze — Henry thought that perhaps he should have.
Across the yard, Robert was speaking to Eddard in the low serious voice that meant something had shifted in him. Henry caught enough to understand: the crypt. Robert wanted to go to the Stark crypt.
"We've been riding for a month," Cersei said, her tone the carefully calibrated one that was just short of objecting. "The dead can wait a little longer, surely."
Robert looked at her. The look lasted exactly long enough to communicate everything it needed to communicate.
Jaime, who had been standing close enough to his sister to intervene, put a hand briefly on her arm. She said nothing further.
Eddard called for a lantern and led the king toward the stairway that descended into the rock beneath Winterfell, and the yard began to breathe again now that the tension had somewhere to go.
Henry watched them go and turned back to the Manderly brothers, who had been waiting with the patience of men who understood that royal households required occasional management.
"Tell me about the northern situation," he said. "Properly. Not the version for the Small Council."
Willis and Wendell exchanged another of their wordless communications.
"Walk with us," Willis said. "It's a long story."
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