Chapter 46: An Unexpected Encounter
The sept at Castle Black was not a place that invited lingering.
It was small, cold, built from the same grey stone as everything else at the castle, with three tallow candles doing inadequate work against the shadows that collected in the corners around the statues of the Seven.
The figures themselves had the look of things carved by men who were doing their best with limited time and colder fingers than was ideal for detailed work — recognizable in their symbols rather than their craftsmanship, the Warrior with his sword, the Smith with his hammer, the Maiden with her downcast eyes. The stone floor was bare. There were no windows.
It was, in other words, exactly the kind of place where a vigil felt like what it was — a serious thing, undertaken seriously, without comfort to distract from the weight of it.
Joffrey and Dominic kept the vigil through the night.
Henry had given the order without ceremony, the way he gave most orders that he considered already decided. They had fought. They had killed. They had conducted themselves through a wildling raid and weeks of hard northern road in a manner that went well past the formal requirements. The knighthood was not a gift — it was a recognition of something that had already happened, formalized in the correct way, in the correct place, with the correct witness.
In the morning, Henry stood in the Castle Black yard with his sword and performed the ceremony.
Celladar, the sept's septon — a quiet man who had taken the black twenty years ago and had been ministering to the Wall's garrison ever since with the steadiness of someone who had made his peace with reduced congregations — produced the holy oil and marked each of them in turn. The touch of his oiled fingertips on their foreheads, the spoken words, the moment of rising from their knees as something different from what they had been when they knelt.
Ser Joffrey Baratheon.
Ser Dominic Bolton.
Nine years of carrying swords and holding horses and learning what was expected and working toward it. Done.
Henry returned his sword to its scabbard and looked at the two young men in front of him and said nothing for a moment, which was its own kind of acknowledgment.
Jon watched from the edge of the yard, his arms crossed against the cold, his expression doing several things at once. He was glad for them. He was also seventeen and a bastard standing in a Night's Watch courtyard watching his friends receive something he was not certain he would ever receive, and he was working very hard to make sure none of that showed, and he was mostly succeeding.
Henry looked at him briefly.
"You're my squire now," Henry said. "Just you."
Jon nodded once and said nothing. It was enough.
Three days later they boarded the Blackbird at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea.
The Night's Watch maintained a small fleet out of Eastwatch — patrol galleys mostly, narrow and fast, built for the Bay of Seals rather than open water, good at running down smugglers and capable of coastal passage south in decent weather. The Blackbird was one of the larger vessels, two-masted, with enough cabin space for the party and enough hold for the equipment that would make the return trip worthwhile.
The bay was grey and cold, the water the color of slate, and the wind off it had an edge that made the temperature on deck a matter of active management. Joffrey and Dominic had found the best position at the rail — slightly sheltered by the mainmast, with a sightline to the harbor entrance — and Jon had drifted into their company the way he had been drifting into their company since Winterfell, naturally and without announcement.
White Harbor appeared on the second day. The Blackbird put in for supplies, and the harbor smell came aboard with the gangplank — salt and fish and the particular mustiness of grain warehouses working at capacity.
Dominic was in the middle of a sentence about Sansa Stark and the journey south when he noticed the three figures coming up the gangplank.
All three wore traveling cloaks with hoods up against the harbor wind. The lead figure was built like a woman and moved like one carrying something heavier than luggage. The second was an older man with a grey beard who had the bearing of a man-at-arms regardless of what he was currently wearing. The third was a young man in his twenties who was doing an unusual amount of looking at the deck.
Henry had been near the gangplank. He looked at the third figure and recognized what recognition looked like in a man trying very hard not to be recognized.
"Lady Stark," he said.
The hooded figure stopped. Then Catelyn Tully Stark pulled back her hood with the expression of a woman who has been found out and has decided that composure is the appropriate response.
"Ser Henry." She looked at him, then past him to Joffrey, and made the adjustment. "Your Grace."
Ser Rodrik Cassel bowed. Theon kept his eyes on the deck and his hands very still.
Joffrey looked at the group with the alert attention of someone sorting out what he was looking at. His gaze settled on Theon last — on the rigid posture, the careful stillness, the studied avoidance of eye contact with the man in red armor at the gangplank.
"Lady Stark," Joffrey said. "What brings you to White Harbor?"
Catelyn's throat moved. She was calculating — Henry could see it, the rapid assessment of what to say and how much to say and who was standing in front of her and what they were likely to do with the information.
Theon, apparently having decided that silence was more uncomfortable than speaking, said, without looking up: "We're going to King's Landing. To seek justice."
Joffrey raised an eyebrow. "And you are?"
The pause was long enough to be its own answer.
"Theon Greyjoy," Theon said, to the deck. "Son of Balon Greyjoy."
Joffrey turned to Henry with the expression of someone who has just made a connection. "Is this the one you brought back from Pyke?"
"He is," Henry said.
"He seems..." Joffrey studied Theon's posture with the dispassionate interest of someone who has not yet learned tact but has learned observation. "He seems very interested in the deck."
Theon said nothing. The deck remained compelling.
Henry cleared his throat and returned to Catelyn. "Lady Stark. What's happened?"
Catelyn looked at him. The decision resolved itself in her face, and she spoke.
"Bran was poisoned," she said. "In his sickbed. Someone applied poison to the heart tree leaf that was placed beside him." She paused. "Maester Luwin found it in time. Bran is alive, but still unconscious."
The deck was quiet for a moment, the sounds of the harbor filling in around the silence — ropes, water, the creak of the hull adjusting to the tide.
Jon had gone very still.
Joffrey's expression had changed entirely. The princely assessment was gone, replaced by something younger and more immediate — a boy who had left a knife at a sick child's bedside and was now being told that someone had tried to finish the job while he was away.
"Who?" he said.
Catelyn met his eyes directly. "Tyrion Lannister arranged it. The poison was on the leaf. The leaf was delivered by—" A pause that measured something carefully. "The leaf was delivered by the Queen."
The silence this time was a different kind.
Joffrey said nothing. His jaw was set and he was looking at a point past Catelyn's shoulder and working through something that he was not going to show on his face if he could help it, which was a habit Henry had spent years cultivating in him and which was serving him now even though the thing he was working through was the possibility that his mother had tried to murder a child.
"Do you have evidence?" Henry said.
Catelyn reached into her satchel and produced a book — old, leather-bound, a volume from Winterfell's library. She opened it carefully. Inside, pressed flat, was the heart tree leaf. Even dried and sealed in parchment, it retained something of its original quality — the red veining, the waxy sheen, the faint sweetness that Henry could detect even from where he was standing and that he recognized because he had read about it, once, in a list of things that had been used on people who were not supposed to appear to have been murdered.
The Long Farewell. Slow-acting, tasteless, administered through prolonged skin contact. The preferred method of someone who wanted the outcome to look like a natural decline.
"The leaf was Tyrion's," Catelyn said. "He gave it to the Queen. The Queen brought it to me herself and told me to lay it against Bran's face. She told me it was a northern custom — that it would call on the old gods for his healing."
Henry felt Dominic shift slightly beside him. He did not look at him.
"The custom is real," Henry said. "I told Tyrion about it. Several years ago, at a gathering at my keep. I mentioned it in passing." He looked at Catelyn. "I'm not telling you this to complicate your case. I'm telling you because if the accusation reaches the king, that detail will come out and it's better that you know its source."
Catelyn absorbed this. "You're saying someone used information from you without your involvement."
"Yes."
"Then I retract any implication that you were involved." She said it plainly, without elaboration, which was the efficient Tully way of handling corrections.
"The leaf alone may not be enough," Henry said. "The poison could have been applied by anyone with access to it. Tyrion's knowledge of the custom establishes means, not action."
"I know." Catelyn closed the book. "I'm not going to King's Landing to present a case to a jury. I'm going to ask the king to investigate. To use his authority to find out what was done and by whom." She looked at Henry steadily. "That's all I'm asking for. Justice from the man who is supposed to provide it."
Joffrey had been listening through all of this with the stillness of someone who has decided that listening is the most useful thing he can do. Now he straightened, and the princely posture came back — not performance, Henry thought, but the genuine version of it, the thing Joffrey reached for when he needed to be something specific.
"You'll travel with us," he said to Catelyn. It was not phrased as an invitation. "We're making for King's Landing directly. When we arrive, we go to the king together." He paused. "My father will hear this. Whatever he finds — he'll deal with it. That's what he does."
Henry looked at Joffrey. The boy believed what he was saying, which was both admirable and something Henry was going to have to think carefully about over the course of a long sea voyage south.
The king would hear it. That much was certain.
What Robert would do with it was a considerably more complicated question.
"Welcome aboard, Lady Stark," Henry said. "We sail on the evening tide."
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