It was a dump, a huge, sprawling dump, but a dump nonetheless. Winterfell's 'grandeur', such as it was, was lost on her. All she saw was endless grey stone, grey slate roofs, stone or cobbled courtyards, grey of course. The only splash of colour, if you could even call it that, was the hard, pure frost that had fallen that first morning in Winterfell, covering everything in a brilliant sheen of white that sparkled like fire when the sun reflected from it.
She looked down at her left hand, and at the diamond ring that Ned Stark had given her, this was what must have inspired him to have the gem cut and what did he call it again? Faceted….what a strange word, she had never heard it before, must be a foreign word, probably from Essos she mused.
But even then the layer of white on the ground soon became soiled by the many residents of Winterfell going about their business, soon the frost was just grey, like everything else, grey, grey and moiré fucking grey. At least the sky was not grey, unlike when they had arrived, for the last few days it had been a brilliant, harsh blue, with only the odd fluffy cloud to mar its horizon to horizon cerulean vault.
Winterfell was a warren of, well, grey stone corridors and rooms, most of which seemed to be undecorated, apart from the Stark's direwolf crest carved into keystones and lintels above every door. Only in the Stark family apartments were there rugs on the floors and tapestries hung on the walls. And even them they were poor in comparison to the exquisite examples that Casterly Rock sported in abundance. And the rooms themselves were always small, cramped and totally lacking in furnishings fit for any decent noble, even the private apartments of Lord Stark had this same, spartan feel to them. And she had been utterly horrified to learn that the Lord and Lady Stark did not have separate bedchambers, that they shared a bedchamber! Why she would have to suffer the attentions of Ned Stark every night in that case, why the sheer horror and uncouthness of if all!
A tiny part of her brain thrilled at this thought, imagining lying naked beside the muscled form of her husband to be, inhaling his man smell and feeling a turgid wetness grow between her legs at the thoughts of Ned Stark naked.
She stamped her foot in annoyance and forced her thoughts back onto the subject she wanted them to take.
The so called 'Great Hall' was nothing of the sort, more like a great stone barn that any 'Great Hall' she had ever seen. A simple, cavernous space of stone and slate roof, a few Stark banners hung from the rafters, the stone pillars that supported the roof were carved with what appeared to be strange figures and beasts, but unpainted. In the south a real Great Hall would be a riot of colour and banners, a place to proclaim the grandeur of a House, to show its lineage and history with pride. This 'Great Hall', why the stables beside the Lions Gate in Casterly Rock were bigger than it!
It appeared that little concession had been made to the comfort of the occupants of Winterfell down the centuries that it had stood like a grim, dare she say, stark, guardian of the north. From what she had overheard her father say it was a formidable fortress, its double walls think and strong, made from giant blocks of stone, some of them tens of yards long, high and equally thick. Each gatehouse was a powerful Keep in its own right, and the network of interior walls divided up the large space enclosed by the walls into five separate areas. Each area was dominated by towers or keeps and by the defences of the interior walls, which did double duty as means of covered access around Winterfell so that in winter you did not need to go outside to access any of the sprawling fortress. Defensive gates and structures were evident everywhere an interior wall abutted to a structure, great doors of the fabled ironwood, their outer faces lined with stone, could be swung shut to cut off access to buildings and the interior sections of Winterfell.
The buildings scattered around inside the walls, again uniformly of grey stone, were a slightly motley collection, it was easy to tell the original buildings, these were built on a scale to the walls; the stone blocks used in their construction only marginally less massive than those used to build the walls and thus a giveaway to their age. The later built buildings were constructed of smaller stone blocks; stone blocks of a more normal size, interestingly these supposedly newer buildings looked to be more weather worn than the older buildings.
On arrival there had been the usual ceremony to greet the return of the Great Lord, and the endless rounds of greetings to be made. She had met Ned's only surviving family member, Benjen Stark, who bore quite the resemblance to Ned but who seemed much shyer and reserved than Ned, content to remain in the shadows of his brother and Lord. That at least was a good sign as far as she was concerned, Ned's brother knew his place. The servant's on the other hand, why some of them greeted her future husband with a shocking lack of courtesy, and without any seeming indication of their place. This would be among the first things that she would have to put right as the Lady of Winterfell, for she would not tolerate the smallfolk not knowing their place! A few of the serving wenches were eyeing up her future husband in a far too predatory way, she would remember their faces, these slatterns would soon find themselves ejected from employment in Winterfell she promised herself.
Then there was the parade of Northern Lords, who to her mind all looked the same, or at the very least seemed to all fit the mould of 'gruff, mostly bearded and definitely semi-civilised' the so called Northern Mountain Clans for example were barbarians in all but name. The only one that stood out for her was Lord Roose Bolton, the man scared Cersei to her bones, with his pale eyes and soft voice. She knew something of the history of the Bolton's, and their sigil which proclaimed their bloody past; how the Starks let such a powerful threat remain she would never understand. With a smug sureness Cersei knew that her father would have dealt with the Bolton's long ago, that snow would sweep o're their halls now if Tywin Lannister ruled the North. She smiled at that little thought, putting the North into something resembling a proper order was something her husband should embark on at once, and working to destroy banner men who were too powerful would have be his top priority as far as she was concerned.
She had been escorted around Winterfell by Lord Stark's brother Benjen or by the Maester, Luwin, Lord Stark begging off pleading the excuse of an excessive number of things to deal with as Warden of the North. ¡Ja! But the oaf still had time to practice in the yards she noticed, and still had time to jape and drink with his banner men, but yet had no time to show his soon to be wife around their new home? Other, darker thoughts, involving Lord Stark tupping serving wenches as one of the reasons why he seemed to not have time for her, further darkened her already foul mood.
Cersei turned away from her window in her rooms in the First Keep and sighed in frustration. Despite its obvious want in ornamentation, style, decoration or even basic comforts, she was actually expected to live in this, this place for the rest of her days, to at the end of her days lay her bones in the Stark family crypts. After spending most of her life in Casterly Rock it was certainly a shock to go from halls lined with gold veins, lavishly decorated and carpeted, furniture heavy with gold gilt or even made of the precious metal to mostly bare stone and nary a decorative table or chair anywhere. Adjusting would be a little difficult, hah! A little difficult? That was the understatement of the century! And despite its sprawling size Winterfell felt cramped to her; there were no great open spaces, no rooms whose scale and grandeur took ones breath away, no vistas over the Sunset Sea, over Lannisport below, or to the east and the looming mountains of the Westerland's, from which generations of Lannister banner men had dug the treasures of the earth. No, none of that, and what views could be had from the mighty Great Keep or the slightly less impressive First Keep, were just of blasted heath and gloomy forest.
And of course there was no Sept in the place, only a large Godswood, with one of these dreadful weirwoods at its heart. Cersei did not much like the Godswood, it was a place of massed trees, of shadowed pathways and ancient stones blanked in moss, and standing at its heart, a huge, bone white weirwood, with a horrible carved face that wept tears of crimson sap. It made her shiver to looks at it, and to think that in a few days time she would be wed before its visage, in the presence of all the nobility of the North! ¡Ja! Nobility, what a jape! Only House Manderly even approached what she thought of as being a noble House, and probably because they cleaved to the Seven who are One. Walking around the Godswood Cersei had fancied that she could hear the trees whispering at her, moaning strange words and phrases that made no sense, but whose insulting intent was obvious.
A Sept was definitely on a list of long things that Cersei would be demanding of Lord Eddard Stark once they were wed, mayhaps not in Winterfell itself, for the northerners were prickly about their religion, but certainly in Wintertown. I mean who would instruct any daughters that they might have in how to behave as a proper lady and not like those half wild Mormont women who had arrived yesterday?