The Winter Beast and River Beauty

Chapter Seven / Underneath the Same Old Mourning Star


My home is far but the rest it lies so close
With my long lost love under the black rose
You told I had the eyes of a wolf
Search them and find the beauty of the beast


"Hello, Lord Stark."

He leans against the doorway, cloak trailing the ground and arms tucked within its folds. His icy eyes and sonorous voice are unchanged, but his face has an unremembered gauntness. Ned holds himself back, barely.

The sorcerer smiles, lips higher on one side than the other. "Your future king sent me to play nurse to his ladylove. Odd choice—I'm an awful healer."

Lyanna's scent is heavy in Ned's nose now, but something is wrong. It smells too coy, too drenched in sweat.

The sorcerer cocks his head, tipping the stone just enough to cause a rockslide. "Still in your fur coat? I thought northern women loved that kind of thing. Except your sister."

Ned flies at him, knowing the moment his paws leave the ground the sorcerer wants him to. He braces for the painful crash. Instead the man frowns, hands moving from beneath his cloak.

A crack and wet crunch fill Ned's ears, then a strangled shriek. He does not hit the ground, not immediately. Instead he looks down at the magic-wielder, confused why he—

The spear juts from his chest, the point somewhere in his guts. The sorcerer lets go and Ned at long last smashes to the ground. Only then does the pain come.

Ned snarls and yelps, flopping onto his side as every nerve blazes white-hot beneath his coat. Blood pools around his muzzle, smothering him as it fills his throat and nose. His lord father roasted aurochs at harvest feasts, the metal spit jammed through mouth to back. He hates them for the mercy of having their throats slit first.

Every tale of torture skitters in his mind—about pains so great the prisoner would agree to strangle their own children if only it stopped. Agree to forget a name, a kingdom, a vow. Ned can barely think, but any scrap cognizant thought begs for what he must do to end it. He feels it coming, worming its way up his throat. A cry for mercy. For once, the beast saves him. His jaws snap closed, coppery drool oozing between his teeth. The beast would gnaw its own foot off before it begged.

The sorcerer grimaces and flexes his wrists like they hurt. They are pale, delicate even, and still he has the beast whimpering like a gored hunting hound.

"You've bloodied some of my best work," he says with disapproval.

A female voice calls on the edge of his hearing, drowned out by the pounding in his ears. The sorcerer looks back to the top of the tower, scowl vanishing. Just as his eyes sharpen once more and he snaps out a hand too fast to see. The arrow stops in his clenched fist.

Howland…Ned knows he has a full quiver.

The pain remains, making every breath a fight, but his limbs are cold enough to dull some of the fire. He snorts a mess of half-congealed blood and drags his legs under him. It seems impossible he can stand.

Thwish. Quicker than a cat, the sorcerer snatches the second arrow with his free hand, eyes slitted as he tries to follow the arrow's flight.

Ned knows he has one chance, gone in scant moments. He has no strength to leap, not that leaping at the bastard has ever helped. His haunches brace, uncoordinated and numb. Throwing his mind far away from the pain he knows will come, the beast pitches at the sorcerer. Hunters say never take an eye off a wounded animal.

His jaws almost miss, but not quite. The side of the man's neck tears like wet parchment, his yowl just as sopping. Ned follows him to the ground and into the doorway of the Tower, forelegs buckling. Somehow, the man wrenches away.

Leaning back on one arm, the sorcerer puts a hand to his gushing neck. Nothing staunches the blood streaming between his fingers. He shoots Ned a petulant glare.

"I was jesting, you know. I probably could have saved her." He coughs, lips glistening with blood, and manages a bitter smile. "I should have made you a sheep." Then his arm gives out, and he slumps into the pool of their mingling blood.

Ned knows he was a liar, even if his pulse never wavered until he collapsed. Still, he wanted to believe if the sorcerer died his magic would die too. But Lyanna—the thought of her keeps him from wallowing in discontent, keeps the pain just beyond madness.

"My lord," Howland says as he crouches beside him. Again, the slight man has saved his life, and Ned has no time to thank him. He has come so far but death has beaten him here.

He takes a breath, willing his black-edged vision to steady. "Pull it out."

The crannogman is shaking his head, reaching into a sack for something. "You'll bleed out in minutes." He freezes at the growl deep in the beast's throat.

"I cannot climb the stairs with it in me." Ned does not know if he can climb without it in him, but feels surer about the other.

Lord Reed does not warn him that it will hurt. Sometimes, pain reaches places where counting it is a waste, though it takes biting through the sorcerer's arm to keep from disemboweling the crannogman. Worse than the pain is the sound of his guts and splintered bone scraping and sucking as the spear pulls out. When he looks up from the ruin of the sorcerer's forearm, Howland has cast it aside and is trying to bind his chest.

"My lord?" he asks as he pulls the cloth tight. "I have a poison that slows the blood—the heart, actually. If I gave you a dram it might buy you more time."

Ned nods, then grits his teeth as the world pulses. The bandage the crannogman applied is already dark. He only feels a tingle when Howland dabs something in the wound and under his tongue.

Though tempting to lie here longer, he knows there is no strength to gather. He heaves himself to his feet and waits for his head to stop spinning, which proves a wasted effort. Bracing himself for the first of seven hells, Ned starts his climb up the spiraling stairs. It only takes the first few for his nose to again find the cloying reek of sickness.

By the time he tops the stairs, breath shuddering, he has learned the seven hells have a dozen brothers. The wall at his shoulder keeps him up, the thought that Robert would have ignored the wound altogether keeps him walking. Howland keeps to the other side of the stairs—he knows he could not catch him if the beast collapsed and tumbled.

He creeps to the half-open door at the end of the short corridor. Death hangs close, sickly-sweet, ready to collect what remains of House Stark. The door swings wide when he limps past.

"Ned?"

Lyanna.

His sister lies in the center of a low bed, fevered eyes as bright as her sweat-covered skin. Ned tries to tell himself she is delirious, lost in a fever dream. If he thought her merely sick instead of dying, that hope faded before he topped the stairs.

"I would always know your eyes," she murmurs.

She is delirious. When Ned crawls onto her bed and drags himself to her side, he sees her dilated pupils. She lingers in that muddy shore between waking and dreams, where a giant, gore-covered wolf must hardly be a concern.

Howland shuffles in too, staying at the far side of the room and eying a wooden tub.

Lyanna's lips are chapped and bloodless—he breathes deep, nose stinging from the coppery smell—all her blood is soaked into the mattress. Someone has wadded up a pile of dark-splattered sheets and thrown them in a corner.

"Where is the wizard?" she asks, voice faint.

"Dead." He has no strength to add any loathing.

She frowns, just barely perturbed. "He told good stories. Even better than Ser Arthur's."

The black edges of his vision are thickening, and blood has settled in his nose again. "Lyanna, what—"

She reaches out a bone-white hand, fingers burying in his fur. Tears wet her eyelashes.

"It's my fault. Father, Brandon—"

Ned licks her salty wrist, trying to quiet her. But he knows now. His sister never takes the blame of others. If she is guilt-ridden, it is because Ned's murkiest thoughts were true: the war started because of a tryst, not a rape. In another life he might have cursed her. Now, there seems little point. It would only use up his remaining breath more quickly.

"Why?" he asks without anger.

"A song."

Ned sighs inwardly. Of course a song, conjured by a prince who makes girls weep with his harp.

She murmurs something else but fever tangles her words after ice. "Promise me, Ned."

He whines, muzzle lowering to her chest. He must be bleeding on her but she does not notice. Lyanna holds his gaze, and Ned feels something sharpen in her gray eyes, like a curtain drawing back.

"My babe, promise me. Keep him safe. Keep him away from kings, keep him from his father, from me—he must…" Her tears finally fall, cracking her voice. "He cannot know his blood. No one can know. Promise me. Promise he won't chase stars like his fool parents."

He finally realizes what stole Lord Reed's attention. Not a tub, but a cradle. And this is why she dies. No broken heart or strange illness, but birthing her bastard son. What can he say to his sister? He will not leave this bed, he knows this like all beasts know their mortality. Ned lifts his head like a dead weight and turns just enough to see the crannogman.

"Howland?"

"I swear the same, Lord Stark." He stands beside the cradle, knuckles white as he holds the side.

The weight seems less now. Ned looks to his sib, her dark hair and ashen skin making her already half a corpse.

"I promise." He wants to say more, say how he crossed the Reach and Stormlands to rescue her; beg her forgiveness for not coming sooner; curse himself for not stopping Brandon. Promise her that he would be a better man if he left this tower alive.

It is enough. Her colorless lips offer a small smile, but the one in her eyes is stronger. He hears her flighty pulse, and knows neither of them has long.

"I knew you would save him, brother." She leans forward enough that he feels a tendril of her hair on his cheek, and brushes his forehead with a kiss. "I love you."

Something writhes inside him, the beast clawing for every moment. Pitiable thing, to want nothing more than to live. It is not the way he would have imagined the end, during his years in the Vale. At least—

His heavy eyes snap closed as the pain floods back, and the spear takes its revenge for going unheeded.