It is a truth universally acknowledged in the northern counties of Verentshire that a king in possession of a failing kingdom must be in want of a better man to run it.
How little the king himself may feel this want is a matter on which his subjects have learned, through long experience, to hold their tongues. That his subjects nearest the throne feel it most acutely, and that the king's oldest friends feel it with the particular anguish of those who remember when it was not so, is a circumstance which neither propriety nor self-preservation encourages them to express aloud. It is expressed instead in the set of certain shoulders at certain dinner tables, in the pauses that follow certain names, and in the faces of certain northern lords who have spent twenty years perfecting the art of loyal silence.
It was therefore with a feeling considerably more complex than simple pleasure that the household of Wintermere Park received, on the fourteenth morning of October, not the advance notice which royal protocol required, nor the formal correspondence which common courtesy suggested, but the sound of horses — a great many horses, and a great many of them poorly managed — on the approach road, followed shortly by a footman arriving at Lord Eddard Starkton's study door with the expression of a man delivering intelligence he would prefer to have left in the hall.
"His Majesty King Robert Barroway," said the footman, "with party, my lord."
Lord Eddard set down his pen.
He was a man who set things down with deliberation, as he did everything else: the pen was placed parallel to the edge of the desk, the inkwell closed, the document weighted. Only then did he look up, and his face when he looked up was the face of a man receiving entirely expected news with entirely unfeigned resignation.
"How large a party?" he said.
"I have counted," said the footman carefully, "forty-seven horses, my lord. I may have miscounted."
"I trust you have not." Lord Eddard rose from his desk. "Inform Mrs. Poole that we shall require dinner for — let us say sixty, in the event that the remaining horses carry personages of consequence. And tell Lady Starkton."
The footman's expression suggested that informing Lady Starkton was the element of this programme he found most demanding.
"At once, my lord."
There was a great deal of noise outside, of the kind that forty-seven horses, a royal household, and a king who had not been told he was a burden for so long that he had entirely forgotten the possibility, reliably produce. Lord Eddard straightened his coat, which was perfectly straight, walked to the window, and observed for one unguarded moment the cavalcade resolving itself in the courtyard below: the banners of the Barrowmere house catching the autumn wind, the grooms hurrying from the stables with the beleaguered efficiency of men who had not been informed there would be forty-seven horses, and, at the centre of it all, descending from his carriage with the assistance of two footmen and the complete absence of embarrassment, King Robert Barroway.
He was, Lord Eddard thought, as he always thought when faced with the evidence, considerably stouter than he had been. It was not a new thought. He had been having it with increasing conviction for fifteen years, and the conviction this October morning was such that he would have been entirely justified in calling it a conclusion. Robert had been a great man once, in the way that young men are great when they have strength and charm and an enemy worth the having, and he had retained the charm — one always gave him that — while the strength had redistributed itself according to the appetites of a man for whom peace had proved considerably more fattening than war.
He was laughing at something one of his companions had said, a laugh of such genuine and encompassing delight that three of the grooms smiled at the sound of it before they recalled themselves. Lord Eddard, watching from the window, allowed himself the same brief weakening before recalling himself also.
He went down to meet his king.
Robert embraced him in the entrance hall with a vigour that suggested an affection uncomplicated by the formalities of rank and undimmed by the years between, and in those first moments, with the King's great arms around him and the King's booming voice declaring that he looked older, Ned, considerably older, have they been working you too hard up here, it was possible to feel something very near to what one had felt twenty years ago, before thrones and marriages and time had done their patient, irreversible work.
"Robert," said Lord Eddard.
"Ned." The King held him at arm's length and looked at him with an approval that was perfectly sincere and required no effort whatsoever. "Look at you. Respectable as ever. I sometimes think you were born respectable. Were you born respectable? I was not." He released Lord Eddard and looked about the entrance hall with the bright proprietary interest of a man accustomed to treating other people's houses as extensions of his own. "By God, it's cold. You keep it very cold, Ned. Is there wine?"
"There is," said Lord Eddard, "everything."
There was, in very short order, everything: the best wine from the Wintermere cellars, fires in all the principal rooms, and Lady Catelyn Starkton descending the main staircase with the expression of a woman who has managed, in twelve minutes, to transform legitimate alarm into the appearance of composed welcome, a feat that her husband acknowledged with a glance that contained an entire conversation about mutual obligation and extraordinary wifely competence. She made her curtsey to the King with genuine grace.
Robert bowed over her hand with a gallantry that was not quite all performance. "Lady Starkton. You grow more handsome each time I impose myself upon your hospitality, and I impose myself more frequently than any man of conscience ought. I am very grateful for both these facts."
"Your Majesty is very welcome at Wintermere Park," said Lady Starkton, which was technically true in the way that many things at royal visits are technically true.
"And the children! The young Starktons — are they to be produced? I remember your eldest as a girl of, what, seven? Eight? She must be quite the young lady now."
"She is eighteen, sir," said Lady Starkton, and something in her voice tightened by a fraction that only Lord Eddard, who had known her voice for two decades, would have noticed.
"Eighteen! Good God. Where does the time — never mind, never mind. I have brought my Joffrey, you know, he is somewhere behind me, excellent boy, you will be very charmed by him." He clapped Lord Eddard on the shoulder with a force that rocked him slightly. "But first — wine, and a fire, and I shall tell you why I have come."
"I had assumed," said Lord Eddard, "that you had come for the shooting."
Robert's laugh filled the hallway. "The shooting! Yes. Yes, we shall say it is the shooting. Come, Ned. Let us say it is the shooting for another hour, and then I shall tell you what it actually is."
Lord Eddard followed his king into the drawing room with the measured tread of a man walking toward a conclusion he has already, in the quietest part of himself, reached.
Miss Sansa Starkton and Miss Arya Starkton had been informed of the royal arrival by the oldest and most reliable method available to young women in large households, which is to say that they had heard the horses from the upper landing, and had formed their respective responses to this intelligence without adult assistance.
Sansa had gone immediately to her room to assess the condition of her dress.
Arya had gone immediately to the window at the end of the upper landing, from which one could observe the courtyard below, and had hung out of it with an attention to detail that her mother would have found objectionable on multiple grounds simultaneously.
She was still there when Sansa reappeared, her dark hair arranged with the neatness that Sansa regarded as elementary courtesy and Arya regarded as an extraordinary investment of time for a very modest return.
"Come away from the window," said Sansa. "You will be seen."
"I am already seeing," said Arya, without moving. "There are forty-seven horses. I counted. And three carriages, and at least ten Kingsguard, and someone in the third carriage who has been looking out at the house since they came around the drive. There." She pointed.
Sansa, despite herself, looked. The third carriage had its curtain drawn back, and at the window there was a young man of perhaps seventeen, fair-haired, with the sort of face that Sansa's reading had taught her to identify as significant. He was, she felt, looking at the house in the manner of a person looking at something he already considers his.
"Prince Joffrey," she said, without quite intending to say it aloud.
"I suppose," said Arya, returning her attention to the horses with the interest of a person who finds horses more reliably interesting than people. "He arrived in a private carriage with the curtains mostly drawn. That seems particular, for a prince."
"He is probably tired from the journey."
"He has been watching from that window since the carriage stopped," said Arya. "He has not moved. He is not tired."
Sansa found she had nothing useful to say to this, and so said, "We are to come down for dinner, I believe," and smoothed her skirt, and began to consider the evening.
Dinner, which Mrs. Poole had assembled with the speed and competence of a woman whose domestic arts partook of something very near military genius, was a production of considerable splendour: eleven covers laid in the great dining room, fires banked high against the October evening, candles in the silver holders that came out only for company, and a succession of dishes that represented, collectively, the determined hospitality of a household that had not been given adequate notice and intended that no one should notice.
Lady Starkton noticed everything.
She sat at her end of the table and managed the service with the invisible precision of a woman who is simultaneously conducting a dinner for eleven, assessing a guest list she has had no hand in composing, and maintaining a conversation on four subjects with the peripheral attention of her considerable mind engaged entirely upon a fifth. The fifth subject was the reason for the visit, which had not yet been announced but which she had arrived at by the simple method of observing her husband's face when the King had said, let us say it is the shooting, Ned.
Lord Eddard sat beside the King, as he always sat beside the King, and performed the office of companion with the quiet competence of a man who has done it long enough to know which topics Robert would pursue and which he would abandon, and how to manage the transitions. They spoke of the northern estates, the autumn weather, the state of the approach roads, and the quality of Wintermere's cellars, on which the King had opinions both numerous and enthusiastic. The cellar bore up under this scrutiny with considerable credit.
Sansa sat three places removed from Prince Joffrey, which she regarded as both ample and insufficient. She had observed, since his entrance with the royal party, that he moved with the ease of a person entirely accustomed to being looked at, and that his manners at table were polished to the degree one associated with instruction rather than nature, which in Sansa's reading signified a romantic hero of the most reliable type. He had spoken to her twice: once when he was introduced, with a bow that managed to be both correct and somehow more personal than a bow strictly needed to be, and once to ask her opinion of the soup, which she had given with a care that she afterwards felt was perhaps excessive care for a soup.
Arya, seated between a Kingsguard captain and a royal equerry, was giving neither soup nor Joffrey her attention. She was watching the King and her father.
She had watched them throughout the fish course, as Robert grew louder and more comfortable and refilled his glass with the frequency of a man unwinding, and her father grew quieter by corresponding degrees, which was, in Arya's experience, the direction her father grew when he had decided something and was preparing the rest of himself to accept it. She could not hear what they were saying above the general noise of eleven people at dinner, but she did not need to hear it. She could read it in the angle of her father's shoulders and the way his hands rested flat on the table between courses: the posture of a man holding himself very still so as not to show the effort.
Robert, at the head of the table, had reached the stage of wine and company at which he could no longer maintain the fiction that he had come for the shooting, and leaned toward Lord Eddard with the openness of a man who has been carrying something heavy and has finally reached the point at which he can set it down.
"Jon Arryn is dead," said the King, in a voice pitched below the general table. "Forty years I have relied upon that man's brain, Ned. Forty years, and without him at my right hand I do not — the business of the kingdom becomes —" He stopped. He moved a fork. He was not, Lord Eddard observed, entirely comfortable with the word that came next, which was: "There is no one I trust."
"You have advisors, Robert."
"I have men who smile at me," said Robert, "and I have men who are clever, and I have men who are my wife's family, which is not the same as having men I trust." He looked at his oldest friend with the expression of a man who is about to ask something he knows he has not entirely the right to ask. "I am going to ask you to be my Hand."
The table continued around them. The equerry was telling Arya about the autumn manoeuvres at King's Landing-upon-Thames and receiving monosyllables in return. Sansa was listening to Prince Joffrey describe the palace gardens with an attention she had organised into her very best listening expression. Lady Starkton had tilted her head by two degrees, which meant she had heard.
Lord Eddard looked at the tablecloth.
"I am," he said at last, "not suited to King's Landing-upon-Thames."
"You are the only man in Verentshire too honest to say you are suited to it," said the King. "Which is precisely the qualification."
"I have Wintermere. I have the north."
"The north will manage," said Robert. "The north always manages. It is the south, Ned, that requires management of a kind I can no longer —" Again he stopped. The stop was more eloquent than the sentence. "I am asking as your king, and I am asking as your friend, and I will not pretend one holds less weight with me than the other, because that would be dishonest and you will see through it immediately."
Lord Eddard's hands moved on the table, and then were still again.
At the far end of the table, Arya set down her fork. She had stopped eating some moments ago, and now sat with the stillness of a creature that has identified the sound it has been listening for and requires all available attention for the hearing of it. Her face gave nothing away. She was eleven years old and she had her father's face in these moments: the one that went quiet when something that could not be said needed, nonetheless, to be understood.
Sansa, who had glanced toward her father at some obscure prompt she could not have named, looked from Lord Eddard to the King and back to Lord Eddard, and then at Joffrey, who was watching Sansa notice something with an expression of mild, princely interest. She smiled at him. He returned it. The expression he returned it with was entirely charming and told her nothing about him whatsoever, though she was not yet equipped to know this.
"You are asking me," said Lord Eddard, to the King, "to move my household south. My daughters. My wife."
"I am asking you to serve your kingdom," said Robert, with the simplicity of a man who has always found it easier to name a duty than to imagine the cost of it to another. "But yes. I am also asking you to move your household south."
The pudding arrived. Mrs. Poole's kitchen had, under extraordinary circumstances, produced a dish of the sort that generally requires forewarning, and the resulting moment of general exclamation served Lord Eddard the perhaps doubtful mercy of a pause.
He took the pause. He ate a portion of pudding. He set down his spoon.
"I will," he said, "give you my answer in the morning, Robert."
It was not a refusal. Everyone at the table who was attending — Lady Starkton, Arya, and, with the instinct of a woman who has managed men for thirty years in a great household, Mrs. Poole, hovering at the door — understood that it was not a refusal. It was the answer of a man who has already given the only answer he is capable of giving, and requires a night to make peace with the consequences.
Robert nodded, and reached for the wine, and said, with the warmth of a man whose oldest friend had never once let him down and who saw no reason to anticipate that this occasion would differ, "I knew you would."
Arya looked at her plate for a long moment. Then she looked at her father, who was not looking at her, and who wore the expression she had seen once before: the morning he had told them that their mother's brother had died, and that grief was a thing one attended to after one had done what was required. She reached under the table and gripped the edge of her chair with both hands, and released it, and folded her hands in her lap instead.
Sansa, who had turned back to Joffrey and was receiving from him a very handsome account of the court entertainments at King's Landing-upon-Thames, felt something that was not quite excitement and not quite apprehension arrange itself somewhere below her breastbone. She did not, at seventeen, have a name for the feeling of one's life making a sound like a door being closed. But she felt it, obscurely, as the candles burned lower and the King called for more wine and her father sat beside him wearing his quietest face, and she told herself, firmly, that it was merely the pleasure of anticipating an adventure.
At the far end of the table, Arya said nothing.
She was, in this moment as in most, considerably more her father's daughter than anyone in the room — except her father — yet understood.