A single comment on POVs: they are points of view. Whether it's true or just an exaggerated perception of the character, you can not tell. Unreliable narrator is a blessing.

Likewise, Cat does not know how to compartmentalize emotions.

The disclaimer is that I do not own ASOIF book series or The Game of Thrones Tv Show. I'm just here for the fun and the drama.


A Song of Ice and Snow

Ch. 2 - Catelyn

Catelyn wondered from time to time if she would ever stop feeling like she didn't belong in Winterfell, even when she had long since married the Warden of the North and given him five trueborn children.

There was an eternal pendulum movement within her. Intermittent, it is true, but it undeniably traced the repetitive back-and-forth motion. Most of the time, she was Lady Winterfell, wife of Eddard Stark, mother of her children, with a straight and relentless assertiveness. However, there were those moments when she felt as though she had come for the first time to the North, disconnected and without any certainty.

Generally, these feelings of detachment left her as she walked into the Godswood and was at peace when within the deep ancestral immensity, or similarly being caught up looking at the fields in their wide, remote, gray expanse. But sometimes, those feelings returned when she looked at her husband's bastard.

Lyarra Snow was not to blame for Ned's infidelity, Cat kept repeating to herself often. A child without a mother, coming from Dorne or from where only the gods would know. But looking at those gray eyes seemed to be able to obliterate every year the Tully woman had spent with her husband, the value of her children. She was living proof of how Eddard Stark could put his honor in a relative perspective.

If only she were not there, growing up along with her children, so much more northern than all of them - maybe Arya as the only exception, but this was a special case because of the poor example that the bastard gave to the younger girl, always in the stables and riding as if training to be a knight.

Not to mention Lyarra's success with the men of the family. Ned clearly favored his eldest daughter - or at least paid more attention to her than to his trueborn daughter Sansa - and the boys. All bewitched, making Catelyn wonder how much of Lyarra's charm was inherited from a woman whom her husband had never spoken a word about. Bran and Rickon adored her, and Robb ... Robb practically kissed the ground on which the bastard passed.

Catelyn's guts always twisted at the thought. They were close, too close.

When they were younger, it did not seem to matter so much. Of course, Cat had never fully approved of how her son interacted with his bastard sister, but until Theon arrived there was no one else at a near age, and she did not have the heart to deny a child company to play with … she never forbade.

That reasoning had only proved to backfire on Catelyn with vindictive force.

If not in lessons or doing chores, they were together, weaving murmured comments, buried in some part of the keep, laughing and touching with an energy that could be forgiven in children, but in which for a seventeen-year-old girl and boy … was utterly indecent.

Ned did not think much about this behavior, no doubt transferring to Lyarra and Robb the relationship he himself had with his siblings, especially Lyanna, gods kept her in their peace. Her husband did not believe that at times and without reason, sin and perfidy infested the hearts of Men, the younger an easy prey. But she saw with a growing sense of dread every time Robb took Lyarra's hand in his or the bastard girl discreetly kissed her brother's cheek.

Cat had tried to separate them, pressuring her husband to arrange a marriage for Lyarra or to dispatch her to the Faith, to make her a Septa. Ned denied it every time, claiming that for the first option; the lass was still too young and for the second, that the bastard belonged to the Old Gods, had not been blessed with the oils of the Seven as Catelyn had insisted on doing with her children. He would not insult the heavens, new or old, using creed and religion as an excuse to cast Lyarra away from Winterfell.

Catelyn still broached discussions on the subject, as she knew that nothing good could come from Lyarra Snow's permanence.


She looked down at the letter open in her hands, the royal seal still attached to the piece of parchment. Somehow, Cat also felt that nothing good would come from the arrival of the king to the North.


TBC