Ties that bind

Ned rode in silence, mostly ignoring Theo Wull's exchange of boasts with Ethan while he worried his reins between gloved fingers.

His lessons on lordship disagreed with that, urging him to be present in the conversation even if he said little, but he had done nothing else over the last months but be a lord. Deep down, it still didn't feel quite right.

The choice was taken from him by the outrider headed his way, a trident-wielding merman over his heart.

Ned was riding with a vanguard of cavalry, only a scattered handful of horse left with the main host a few miles behind them. There was some hope of dealing with Mace Tyrell's forces through diplomacy and not battle, and for that he wished to be there whenever first contact was made. The effort might also spare his Northmen some miles of marching.

But those considerations were a few weeks in the future. They were still in the Kingswood yet and expecting no resistance for days.

The rider was let through by his guards after a few short words and grasped the lip of his helmet while dipping his head into a quick bow. "Pardons, milord Stark. Mark Ryswell sent me. He said to tell you there is a situation down the road he would have you see yourself."

"What kind of a situation?"

"I couldn't see much before being told to return, milord," the man admitted, scratching at his neck. "But there were corpses."

Corpses were nothing new. The last year had seen plenty of them all over the Seven Kingdoms and Ned himself had been present when many of them had been created. But there was always a cause for them, and he knew of no battles anywhere close to these parts.

The Stormlands had seen a few at Robert's hands, but those had been fought hundreds of miles further south.

That left the aftermath of either banditry or deserters, neither of which should require his immediate attention. This was not the North and men here owed him no oaths. At war and marching through foreign lands, a noose would do just as well as Ice. Yet Mark Ryswell was no fool, and he trusted the man's word.

Ned decided and exchanged a few quick words with Lord William Dustin astride his red stallion. The men in good hands, he nodded at the outrider. "Lead the way."

As companions and a few guards fell in around him and they followed the Manderly man down the kingsroad at a clipped pace, Ned found his thoughts turning to Robert.

The aftermath of victory at the God's Tear had seen them all taking stock and dealing with those left standing, most important of those the men that had found safety across the river or had never even been able to cross to participate in the fighting, as well as the men that had surrendered to them, all of which had found themselves without a king to lead them.

Robert had been all too happy to accept their oaths and loyalty, after Maesters had worked hard to preserve his life from being wrested away through the wound of fire he had earned fighting Rhaegar Targaryen.

Wildfire did not care whether it burned steel, cloth, or flesh; it was all the same kindling to the emerald concoction. And it had eaten greedily of his friend.

Ned had seen the arm only once, immediately after the battle, when smiths and Maesters had managed to split fused armour and cut away cloth to reveal the damage underneath.

It had been a sobering sight, ghastly to look upon, and for once Robert had been unable to hide his agony completely. He had roared and shouted and screamed all through the first efforts of treatment, though he had also already returned to his boisterous, familiar ways days later as they rode for the capital, unconcerned with the useless limb. He'd named it a fair price for Rhaegar's life.

Time would tell how much of the arm he would have back in the end.

Until Robert had fully recovered, Jon Arryn had stepped in to handle all the necessary matters that came with bringing two sides of a war together and shaping a new kingdom of them both. While the Lord of the Vale dealt with that and all the trouble that came with it, Ned had been sent south.

They might have won a great victory, but there were still armies in the realm, most important of them Mace Tyrell's host laying siege to Robert's home at Storm's End. They did not expect much resistance from the rose lord, not with his king dead and some of his lords already sworn to the new Baratheon crown, but he still led a significant force.

It would not matter to the two younger Baratheon brothers, Stannis and Renly, whether the men sitting outside their walls and keeping them from supplies were fighting a losing war or not, after all. Even a now fruitless siege was still a siege.

In the privacy of his own mind, Ned could admit that he was glad for this opportunity to escape the royal court. Seeing the throne room, and the winding spire of melted swords that stood at the end had been nothing but a reminder.

That had always been the intention of course, from the very moment that Aegon the Conqueror had fashioned the idea for the first time.

A reminder of strength, of victory, of conquest. A reminder of the power that had ensured the Targaryen rule for more than a century. Now, that rule had found an end in his best friend's fury and spiked warhammer, but Ned had seen only the death of his father and brother.

If he could, he would gladly take them back in exchange for a return to what had been. But he could not. The past was done and over with, the ink long since dry. Seeing southern lords flock to Robert not days after their arrival in the capital only to speak of rights and lands and bounty with words drowned in honey had only strengthened his resolve to leave even more. When Jon had offered, Ned had not hesitated.

He had left, hoping for a true and final end to this entire war and also a distraction for his heavy heart.

That was for after. For the North and Winterfell's warm walls. For the only brother left to him and a wife he barely knew. For the hope of a child of his own revealed in short, heartfelt letters from Riverrun and for the small hope of his sister still alive, delivered furtively by a man barely an acquaintance.

The foul stench of decay drifted towards them, brought by a light breeze, and tore Ned's mind away from any further deliberations. It was a biting smell, pungent and thick, and entirely unignorable. Even the aftermath of battle had never smelled this bad, when Silent Sisters moved like cowled grey wraiths among the dead and prepared the nobly departed for burial.

No matter the experiences of the last year, Ned still found a faint taste of bile invading the back of his mouth.

Judging by the expressions of his companions, they felt similarly.

Mark Ryswell was waiting for them on the side of the road. Half a dozen horses had been tethered to nearby trees, restlessly pawing at the ground and pacing in the little space they had. The beasts liked these surroundings even less than the people.

Not much further away, Ned could see steel and large dark lumps dotting the road and surrounding forests in the dozens. It was a discomforting sight.

"My lord," Mark Ryswell said as they drew up beside him, the edge of a frown on his face. "It's not a good thing we have found, or a pretty sight." He motioned to his side. "I would leave the horses. One of my men was thrown from his saddle when we tried to investigate the first time. It's the smell that makes them skittish, I believe."

Ned dismounted, his courser already throwing its head nervously. A Ryswell's word on horses was as good as an oath sworn in winter.

Mark led the way further down the road, towards what him and his men had found, explaining all the while. "Truth be told, the men like it just as little as the horses. They know battle and its aftermaths, but this..." He shook his head as more and more came into view, the scents growing stronger every step. "I can make little enough sense of it myself."

It was a field of carnage, there was no better way to describe it, with well over a hundred bodies long since rotted away in their armour. The numbers had been eclipsed many times over in the battles fought during this rebellion of theirs, and yet Ned could feel the way this view was wrong somehow, far more than simple death could accomplish.

Most of the corpses littered the kingsroad itself, stretching over its entire breadth – large dark lumps with scraps of rotting leather for the horses and smaller bundles of steel and bone for their riders – but to one side the battle had spilled out into the woods as well.

On that side, some dozen felled trees also littered the ground, the remaining stumps unnaturally tall for their kind and the lumber itself simply discarded where it had fallen near the dead.

Ned looked at it all from the edge, trying to make some sense of what he was seeing. It did not really look like what you usually found after battle. "Who were these men?"

"Dornishmen, by the sigils we can identify. At least some of them," came Mark's answer from his right. "Most carry none at all, and we could find no banners either."

He mulled over the words for a time, unable to help the frown creasing his brow. He did not like this. Resting a hand on the pommel of his sword, he stepped forth to walk among the remains of battle anyway, hoping to see something that would tell him more than he was already sure of.

Ned had been one of the first to know of Elia Martell's absence in the Red Keep, after Tywin Lannister had opened the way through the city gates with his men on the inside of the walls. He had been relieved then, secretly, for mother and children both.

No matter what decision Robert might have made among the flurry of differing opinions brought by rivalling lords, Ned had been glad to see the necessity of it be gone together with the Queen.

His friend had still demanded them returned to his reach, wherever they turned out to be, but for now that demand was only empty words. And even a king could not change the world by word alone. If the gods were kind, Elia and the royal children were gone with the wind, never to be found.

Looking down at the armoured corpses as he stepped deeper into the former battle, their breasts decorated with sigils wrought in steel or coloured into faded, rotting fabric, Ned began to doubt that small hope. South had been the obvious path for a Dornish Princess seeking refuge, but it had clearly not gone without issue.

Behind him, he heard Theo Wull bark a bellowing laugh. A quick glance revealed a pale Ethan Glover standing next to the bearded mountain clansman. "Chin up, Glover! I'd reckon this is the worst thing you'll ever have to smell. Back home, the frost makes death almost pleasant if you stumble upon it."

Ethan only scowled. Then he spat to the side and firmed his jaw, any discomfort he felt hidden away again.

Turning away, Ned looked at the dead around him. Pale bone peeked through the holes and gaps in rusted mail or plate, and the cloth on either side of the metal had clearly been marked by the continued exposure to the elements. Most of the flesh was dark and sludgy, sometimes closer to being liquid than solid.

"Do you have a count?" Ned asked of Mark Ryswell.

"Six score men at least, but more than seven is doubtful. With what the wolves and other scavengers did to what remained of some of them there is no way to make an exact count."

Ned nodded. Near a hundred and fifty men, when what he knew of the Dornish presence that had been in the capital before their flight allowed not even the first hundred to be filled. That only made for even more questions. "And you say they bear no devices?"

Mark shook his head and glanced at the bodies around them. "A third of them do, and the ones me and my men know are Dornish. The others might be too, from some minor knight no one's ever seen or heard of before this, but they could be from anywhere else just as well." He scratched his neck, where mail was snug with the thin garment beneath. "Makes me wonder though. If the rest of this lot aren't Dornish, who were they? And what happened to the victors?"

Ned gave Martyn Cassel a short look – a silent invitation for his thoughts. A minor noble house, the Cassel's had been a loyal Stark vessel for centuries now, their thoughts and support valued by the lords of Winterfell. He had no intention or reason to break with tradition in that regard.

"If those numbers lie here, how many more could there have been? Without men to do the burying you would expect to find this by the end, surely."

Mark looked at the road and surrounding forest again, considering it all with new eyes. After a few moments, he frowned, his brow wrinkling harshly. "There is room enough here for a hundred more, in a layered charge at least, and even more on foot or with a supply train. Surely there were more here who could have done the work afterwards." He shook his head. "If not, these men would have fought and died to the last."

Ned wondered at that too. He knew there had been no more Dornishmen in the capital and it seemed impossible for them to have been hiding in the forest for just this kind of situation. That men would die, even to the very last, in protecting their charges, he could almost believe. That they would do so to murder children and their mother, as seemed likeliest here, was much harder to swallow.

And yet that seemed to be what had happened.

Either that, or the Dornish had been outnumbered even more harshly than these corpses suggested and managed to slay double their own number despite that before succumbing to their opponents.

"Whether there were no more men to do the burying or none with the honour to care will only tell us so much," Ned said to both men. "These men have been dead for weeks and the men that killed them will be long gone. But if they are still close by, they will not balk at repetition. I want everyone prepared should we face any trouble."

The kingswood was enormous and had served as the royal hunting ground for centuries, first for the Stormkings of House Durrandon, before House Baratheon had even existed, and after the Conquest for the Targaryen monarchs on the Iron Throne. But even a king could not hunt so often and so much as to require the entire stretch of these woods, and neither could the royal huntsmen.

Outside of the prestigious hunting grounds, there were charcoal burners, foresters, leatherworkers, and another hundred different kinds of peasant living relatively simple lives in the forest. And in war, a place like this was a breeding ground for bandits and a gathering point for deserters. Far enough from the next castle to evade the eye of lords and knights who had the strength to deal with either and also situated on one of the most trafficked roads in the kingdom.

Ned knew, of course, that it was a rare bandit that chanced harrying a defended target. There was too much danger involved. Men, even rough men living rough lives, had to be assured of success or payment or both to attempt it. But he would not find their paymaster like this.

"I want an account made of all the sigils here. A Maester's eye will make certain of all the details." Martyn nodded and went to see it done, and Ned turned to Mark next. "Send a few men searching for the nearest settlement. There must be some local septry or chapel with a holy man to take care of any rites once we are through here. The smallfolk will know where to find them." He looked around the battlefield again. "And have a few of your men prepare clearing the road once everything else is done. I'll have William send hands for the digging."

"At once, my lord."

Ned found himself alone for now, the others busy making their own thoughts or carrying out his orders while the guards formed a distant perimeter. He did not mind the time to gather his thoughts and wonder at this entire matter further.

He looked at the bodies and their positions, and found his mind imagining the battle that had taken place here. The way men had charged and met with steel, the way that order had been abandoned for the wild savagery of a melee. There must have been some intricacy to it all he could not see, for the Dornish to have beaten so many, despite their eventual defeat.

A rout of some sort? Some distance through the trees or perhaps a full encirclement by a wider path. There were some smaller tracks through these woods beside the kingsroad itself that might have been used, though ordinarily of little use for wagons and armies.

Ned found himself walking aimlessly among it all, trying to see and understand.

Slowly but surely, something began to change. Ned knelt at the edge of the road, where there were less of the horse remains and more piles of armour. The men that had fought here had dismounted eventually, whether of their own will or by the power of lance or blade. He touched gloved fingers to the edge of a breastplate, ignoring the bones and fetid flesh beneath.

Smooth, far too smooth, for a breastplate that had, somehow, been split in half horizontally. There had been holes driven by lances before, where the charge of a warhorse supplied the strength necessary to punch through, or even the dented steel of mace and hammer impacts, but this sort was rarer on the road proper, and almost too common where he was now near the edge of the woods.

He had seen the sort before, though very rarely, and not quite identical.

Men clad in plate had good reason to feel secure on battlefields. Ordinary steel would not have an easy task when trying to penetrate it. Largely, it was impossible. Valyrian steel, on the other hand, made it more reasonable to achieve, though still a feat of strength. Ice was unsuited to the task for its size, but there were plenty of longswords or other weapons forged of the rare material in the Seven Kingdoms and their owners knew well what they had in them. Such weapons did not normally lie forgotten in some storage room or wait to be used in a display case, they were kept to hand by the lord or their heir.

With dozens of such weapons scattered over the land, it was certainly not impossible for one to have been in Dornish hands for this confrontation. A blade like that, with a dangerous man to wield it, could do incredibly damage.

And yet that could not be all there was to the story here.

The call of a bird sounded in the distance, shrill and piercing.

Still kneeling between the corpses, Ned raised his eyes to look around again, wondering at cut armour and felled trees that defied understanding. It was like a giant had come, enormous scythe in hand, and had swiped it across this spot, felling everything in its path.

It made no sense at all.

He stood, pulled by some unknown instinct to the centre of the queer destruction. There, among the remains of decaying bodies, he found something even stranger than the sight of steel carved away like soft silk.

The pale skull visible below the simple helmet had been picked nearly clean by the scavengers, which allowed an unobstructed view of its brutalised state. Half the jaw was missing entirely, likely carried off by wolves or wild dogs, and a cut from nose to side had left one cheekbone barely hanging onto the rest of it all. The dark breastplate below, though marked by rust and scuffed by a few ineffectual strikes, was entirely intact. A manticore, an Essosi marvel not unlike the scorpions of Dorne, had been fashioned into the steel.

As if to make an intentional contrast, only feet away the opposing remains did not resemble a man at all. Steel had been cut to ribbons, somehow. Sometimes it had been shaved away in pieces no bigger than his pinkie, and the pale white flecks visible among the pile meant bone had followed the same fate. Broken buckles and articulations, mail shredded apart so that some of the pieces were barely two rows of rings, and leather that had been kept from rotting away like thinner cloth left in nothing but strips with a rough edge.

Multiple helmets laid close together, mostly undamaged and easily recognised, while what had surely once been an equal number of sets of armour were almost unrecognisable.

He had never seen even Valyrian steel do something like it, though he had never seen anyone try either. The edges of the cuts were rougher here, at least, not like the controlled parting he had seen before. The savagery that would have been necessary for it awed him as much as it made him uncomfortable.

A chill breeze blew through the trees, worming its way through his tabard and mail.

"A curious sight, is it not, my lord?" Ned turned, barely managing to cover his surprise behind a questioning look. He had not noticed Howland Reed, the lord of Greywater Watch. The small man did not acknowledge him, only looking at what Ned himself had been watching with those distant green eyes. "Perhaps even frightening, to men such as we. For what it means, if not for what it is."

"'What it means'?" Ned felt an odd anxiety tingling in his fingers, making him clutch the pommel of his sword more tightly than intended.

Howland gave him a look that spoke of knowledge, and yet also a well-veiled frustration. Of not quite understanding fully. "Old powers are waking; the wind is shifting. Slowly, perhaps, but the world will change." A hand appeared from beneath the Crannogman's dark green cloak, a piece of parchment held carefully within. Howland held it out to him. "Further down the road there are a few more scattered corpses, and a ransacked wagon with a broken axle and a bit of rotten food left behind. And there was also this."

It was larger than the thin rolled up pieces that would be attached to a raven, though not by much, and there was no wax to hold it close or announce the recipient. Instead, there was only the same black spiral Ned remembered from the message delivered to him by arrow at Harrenhal. It quelled any doubts as to the purpose or validity of this message.

A stone settled in his stomach as he began to read the smattering of words.

When he was finished, relief was a rush of air from his lungs. Still staring at the message without really seeing, his mind was already gauging distances and remembering maps, overcome with hope he had harboured for a few moons now but had never let himself fully acknowledge.

Ned raised his head to give the command to change goals, and stopped himself before he could even form a single word. He had duties of his own, as lord of House Stark and the North, and as a loyal subject to his king. He was no longer a second son sheltered from the scrutiny reserved for the heir, free to ride off as he liked for the most part.

Yet he wanted to ride right now, even facing such a distance.

Much as he had never included himself with Brandon and Lyanna when their father had spoken of wolf's blood, he felt it now.

Naming it so made him want to resist. Acting this way had been Brandon's death, had led their father and the good men he had brought south with him to be executed. Yet what kind of brother would he be if he did not ride to find his sister now that he knew where to look?

Ned had never thought to judge his brother for his actions, and definitely not for the impulse to act when confronted with Lyanna's disappearance. The Starks cared for their own, for the pack, even if it was sometimes not to their benefit.

So he allowed himself that instinctive wish but did not let it take control of him. He could not do that, not when he knew what it could lead to. Folding the parchment, he tugged it into his belt. He would stash it somewhere safe later.

He would ride, but not without a plan and he hoped not alone.

"The march south will continue," Ned said eventually. "Mace Tyrell has no reason to resist us long, even if he has the numbers to make trouble for the entire realm, but it will be another moon yet until the men reach Storm's End without pushing them too much. I mean to find my sister before then."

"You know where to find her?"

"I do now," Ned admitted. "A small party will be enough. Half a dozen men, no more, so we might move swiftly."

"I would ask to be among them, lord Stark."

Ned considered the small lord in silence for a long moment. He had thought of the others first, Theo Wull and Martyn Cassel, even Ethan Glover. "We will ride hard and as long as we can, with little time spared for rest until we arrive at our destination. A destination where two knights of the Kingsguard await us."

The way alone would take more than a week, and the same went for the trek back to Storm's End once his sister had been found. Even that pace was only possible with multiple horses to switch between, so that the beasts would not die from the exertion halfway there.

Howland took the words in stride where another might have taken offense at warnings misconstrued as insults. "My people are not known for their prowess in the field, but I would feel much lesser if the potential of danger made me hesitate here." The Crannoglord smiled a slight smile. "Lady Lyanna stood for me at Harrenhal, though she knew me for nothing but a man of the North. I need no more to come to her aid." His cloaked form bowed deeply. "If you will take me among your company, my lord."

Ned did not think long. "I will not force anyone to stand with me on this, and I would be a fool to turn away such loyal and capable assistance."

"You honour me, my lord." The small lord bowed his head again. "When will we depart?"

"Tonight, ideally. By the morn at the latest," Ned answered, even if his heart wanted to say 'right now'. "Once I have made the arrangements for the army with William and my other lords, I see no reason to wait."

"I shall be ready by then."

As the other man left, Ned found his thoughts turning to the field he stood on and the events of its creation. Its mystery would have to wait for another time, as would those that had managed to flee in its wake. His family awaited.

The Queen and her children would keep, wherever they were, royal blood and all. Had they been here or otherwise within reach, the situation would have been different, but they were not, and he had other things to worry about: his sister and the North, both of them dearer to his heart.

I hope you enjoyed chapter 50. We are back to a more reasonable length with this one, which I am aiming for with the following chapters as well, but we'll see how it works itself out. Editing took a bit longer than anticipated, therefore the delay from what I thought.

Not a ton to say about this chapter. For all that George does a lot of honour/duty work through Ned, he pretty consistently sacrifices both for what is right, and more importantly for love. He did it for Jon/Lyanna, he basically did it for Dany, he does it again for Sansa/Arya before his death. Jon's own struggle is much more directly influenced by his idealised view of Ned than the actual reality of the character. Which does not make his conclusion's automatically illegitimate, of course.

The exact timing of the Storm's End siege, the combat at the Tower of Joy, and the return of Dawn at Starfall (with Ashara's ensuing death) is unclear in the books. We know all those things happened, but since there is no known source for the information of Lyanna's location in canon, some things are unclear. As an older brother myself, I can't see Ned hesitating to act, even if he is juxtaposed with Brandon when it comes to recklessness/caution.

I don't think canon Valyrian steel is actually this powerful. It's lighter and holds a sharper edge than ordinary blades, but that isn't the same as cutting through a breastplate. But here it does, since it would actually make any man wielding it a real terror on the field, which would only compound the tales and stories told about it and the blades made of it.

As always, thanks for reading and reviewing. Until next time.