Chapter Nineteen
**Catelyn Stark's POV**
Catelyn was having a nightmare the same nightmare repeated again and again.
She knew it was a nightmare because she had lived it already, and could not stop living it, those is the way of terrible things, playing again and again in the dark behind closed eyes with the relentless patience of something that intended to be to pounce at the first moments peace.
The Twins (Earlier).
Walder Frey was being even more insufferable than usual, which was saying a great deal, his small wet eyes moving over everything with proprietary satisfaction, the kind of man who had waited his entire life for a moment like this and intended to savor every second of it.
The feast, the wine, the false warmth of it. Her brother being happy enough such as all men were when presented a pretty new wife
Then the song began.
*The Rains of Castamere.*
She had known, the instant she heard the first notes, the way you know certain things in your bones before your mind has caught up. The recognition of it moved through her like cold water and she had reached for Rob's arm and the doors had opened and it had begun.
Robb's new bride was the first to fall, the girl with her whole life ahead of her and the next generation of Starks already growing beneath her heart, and Catelyn had watched and been unable to stop it, unable to do anything but watch as Rob's men tried to fight back, unarmed, caught from all sides, outnumbered and outmaneuvered in a trap that had been set and baited and waited for them with patience she had not recognized for what it was until it was far too late.
Walder Frey cackling all the while, that thin, gleeful, triumphant sound that she knew she would hear in her sleep until she had no more sleep left to give.
And then it was only Rob and herself.
Her poor Rob, with arrows in him, more than she cared to count, more than anyone should be able to withstand and still remain on their feet, but that was her son, her Rob strong just like his father. She had been screaming something, she could not now remember and thinking with the strange clarity that comes at the very end of things. That this was where it ended, of everything she had tried to hold together, here in this horrible place with that horrible old man laughing was where they would die.
Just before she could come up with any plan to try and save Rob...the light came.
A great bright crack of it, the kind that makes the world go white for a moment and resets the eyes. And in the ringing silence that followed the loud *CRACK*, everyone in that hall, attacker and victim alike, had gone momentarily, completely still.
There standing or was she floating was a girl.
Very pretty, young, perhaps Rob's age or a year or so older, wearing a dress that under any other circumstances Catelyn would have stopped to admire, deep blue and rich green with golden trim and leaf patterns flowing over the entire length of it, the kind of dress that looked as though it had been made for someone who moved through the world expecting to be looked at and found the whole business beneath there notice.
She had a silver glow around her, sparks of gold flickering in a chaotic way inside the silvery glow.
She was looking around the hall with an expression of stunned horror, taking in the scope of what she had arrived into, and then her eyes found Rob's wife on the ground.
Catelyn would remember what she saw in that girl's face for the rest of her life.
The fury that moved into those eyes was not the hot and human fury of anger or grief. It was something older and deeper and far more frightening, the kind of fury that does not raise its voice because it does not need to, the kind that simply decides that something must stop existing and acts on that decision without hesitation or doubt.
Her eyes began to glow, a deep bright, terrible gold.
Then she screamed.
It was the strangest sound or not sound Catelyn had ever heard because it was simultaneously the loudest thing she had experienced and also somehow perfectly, completely silent, a sound that seemed to exist outside the normal rules of sound entirely, it was as if sound itself stopped existing as the anger on her face grew, she felt it in her chest and her bones rather than heard with her ears.
She threw her arms out to her sides, hands open, and reality obliged her.
The entire upper half of the castle simply stopped existing in a massive explosion that turned everything around into dust as well as everything and everyone else still inside.
Not collapsed, not fallen, stopped. As though it had never been there, a perfect line drawn across the entire upper half of the castle staring at waste height, as though the world had quietly revised its memory of what had stood there and arrived at a different answer. The explosion seemed to radiate outward from the girl herself, her as the central focal point outward in a perfect circle from the girl.
When the smoke of the dust cleared and Catelyn's eyes adjusted to the open sky above where a ceiling had been, she saw that Roose Bolton had escaped down the back stairway at the last possible moment, the coward's instincts serving him well as they always had.
Walder Frey had not been so fortunate.
In fact, no one in that hall except for Rob and herself had been fortunate. They were simply gone, well mostly gone as the upper halves of the ones at our level were missing from the now dreadfully pooling lower halves. Just gone exactly, perhaps the Gods have come to aid Rob Cat thought to herself.
The girl had gone completely still.
She stood looking down at Rob's wife for a long moment, her stillness almost unnatural, the stillness of someone taking the full weight of a thing and deciding what to do with it.
Then she walked to Rob as he just stared at her, confusion and sorrow written in his eyes.
And Catelyn, with arrows flying not ten seconds ago and her son bleeding and a stranger glowing gold in the ruins of a castle, felt no fear that this girl would hurt him. She did not know how to explain it, maybe just a mothers intuition. Perhaps it was the look of pity on the girls face. Perhaps it was the simple logic that if she had wanted them dead they would already be as gone as everyone else.
The girl touched two fingers gently to Rob's forehead and whispered something soft and Rob smiled.
He seemed to simply fall asleep standing up, his face going peaceful and slack, and then he began to float as if he were sleeping on a bed in the air, Catelyn's mind stopped trying to process things normally and simply recorded them instead, was this the power of the Old Gods of Ned's was this something from the Seven?
The girl's eyes locking on her own, at that moment she felt completely exposed as if there were zero secrets that could be hidden from this being. Then the girl's eyes softened as she then felt a moment of dizziness almost overcome her.
The golden glow was fading from her eyes, slowly, like embers cooling. She looked not exhausted but sad and younger than she had a moment ago almost uncertain.
And then Catelyn heard a voice, not with her ears but somehow inside her head, quiet and direct and very troubled.
*Sleep now, when you wake, your son will be healthy and whole. But he will need you.*
And then there was darkness.
---
The darkness did not last forever.
Awareness returned slowly, the way it does when the body has decided it is finished sleeping and begins the process of returning to the world to normal. Unfortunately there was no normal at the moment, whether her mind was ready or not. The first sensation she felt was warmth, softness beneath her and a blanket draped across her lap. The unfamiliar smells of something sweet and faintly herbal.
Voices.
A young woman's voice,(was it the same voice as her memory, she was unsure) talking to someone, and Catelyn kept her eyes closed and her breathing slow and listened unsure of her surroundings, but wishing to listen while whoever had them at the moments guard would be down, and they might divulge a secret.
"Naturally I questioned them first and erased their memory of my questioning afterward." A pause. "But when I saw the evidence for myself..." The voice caught slightly, steadied itself. "I am afraid I may have let my anger get the best of me."
Another pause, longer.
"Seeing that poor woman on the ground like that, murdered with her unborn child..." The voice had gone quieter, rougher at the edges. "It reminded me of a friend of mine, she died not in the same way but they share a resemblance. She never got to see her son grow up, neither did the father. Her son became an orphan, as did many others, all because of one man's greed for power." The girl said with venom now in her voice, causing Cat to shiver slightly.
The silence seemed to stretch for a time.
"I suppose I still have things to work out," the voice said finally, quieter still, and there was something in it that sounded very young and very tired. "And this extra bond is not helping any." A pause, and then the tone shifted slightly, a small recovered warmth in it. "So why don't we ask our guest? She seems to be awake."
There was a soft giggle at the end that landed with the precision of a needle.
Catelyn opened her eyes.
She did not waste time on further pretense. She turned immediately seeing Rob laying calmly on a strange bed.
He was beside her, sleeping deeply and peacefully, and she ran her eyes over him with the focused attention of a mother conducting an inventory of her child. The arrows were gone, all of the new wounds were gone. The skin where they had been was pink and new, there was not even a scar of the event.
She did not know how this was accomplished but she was grateful all the same.
She had a feeling she was about to find out just who had saved them.
The room in this tent she was in was remarkable, far larger than any tent had a right to be, hung with warm light and furnished with quiet competence, the kind of space that had been made by someone who thought only about comfort not practicality. She sat up carefully from the heavenly comfortable chair, testing her own steadiness, and looked around properly.
Two knights entered first, She recognized Ser Barristan Selmy immediately who could not know of Ser Barristan the Bold, but what was he doing here of all places? His presence did help ground her thoughts, in a way very little else could have at the moment all things considered, because Ser Barristan was real and solid and a thing she understood. The other knight while not as impressive was still a very large and solid man with the look of a Northern Lord, (curious)
Then three very different women came in.
All three were young and were of the same range in age. The first was perhaps Sansa's age or a year or two beyond, with hair so pale it was almost white and eyes of a violet so vivid they did not look entirely real, Obviously of Valyrian decent, wearing silver silk that moved with her like water. Catelyn had seen enough Targaryen portraits growing up as a Lords daughter to know what she was looking at.
The second was beautiful in a different way entirely, olive skinned and bright faced and wearing something rather more revealing than anything Catelyn would have chosen, with the composed bearing of someone who did not entirely fit the role as servant or Nobel but had learned to make intelligence invisible until it was needed.
The third was same girl who saved her son from the Walder Frey's trap.
She still had the glow, still beautiful with the same wild mane of hair. She noticed now, not the blazing gold of before but a softer constant silver, that seemed to be just shimmering on the surface of her skin, brightening and dimming in a rhythm that seemed tied to her breathing, as though there was something inside of her waiting to come out at a moment's notice. She was younger than Catelyn had registered in the chaos of the Twins, young enough that the youth in her face sat oddly with the look in her eyes, eyes far too old for her features.
The olive-skinned girl spoke, her voice carrying the precision of someone who had delivered formal introductions many times and seemed very good at it.
"I have the pleasure to present Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, rightful Queen of the Andal's, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lady Regnant of the Seven Kingdoms, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, the Unburnt, and Sister to the Fallen Star."
Catelyn's mind was doing several things at once, she had of course heard rumors of a star having fallen from the sky but deemed it fantasy.
The girl did look exactly as a Targaryen should look, exactly as the portraits in the histories looked, as though the blood had bred true in every detail. She had heard rumors, whispers mostly, of a Targaryen girl somewhere in Essos with dragons, actual living dragons, which she had dismissed as the sort of story desperate people tell themselves.
She was revising that assessment, hearing the title mother of dragons.
Ser Barristan's presence confirmed everything much more than anything else could have. He was a true knight, and she had met him, and she had heard the rumors of his dismissal from the Kings guard. Here he was standing in this tent with the quiet deference of a man who had found the monarch that he had been searching for.
Catelyn's legs were unsteady when she stood but she stood, because she had been raised to meet moments of importance on her feet, and she was Catelyn Tully of Riverrun and she had not survived everything she had survived to embarrass herself now.
"Thank you for your aid, Milady." She kept her voice level. "My name is Catelyn Stark of Winterfell, formerly Tully of Riverrun. And this is my son Robb Stark of Winterfell."
She did not mention him being named the King in the North. She did not yet know what that title meant in this room or what it would cost him if she said it aloud.
But there was a question burning in her chest that had priority over strategy and politics and everything else, a question her heart was asking in a voice that would not be quieted.
"Are we prisoners?" She met the violet eyes directly. "And regardless of that answer, what do you want from us?"
The young queen tilted her head slightly, there was something calculating in the look, assessing and careful.
"I have no need to keep you prisoner," she said. "In fact, we have spent resources on you and your son that we cannot easily spare. The fact that you are alive is because you may have knowledge of a certain person I am looking for. That is your only real value to me at this moment. As soon as I have the information I need, you are free to go wherever you choose." She paused. "As I see it, you and your son are no longer threats to me or mine."
It was said without cruelty, that almost made it worse, it was simply accurate, and they both knew it.
Catelyn felt the truth of it move through her like cold water.
Half their army gone after the Karstark execution. Half the remainder turned traitor and turned on the other half. Her sons at Winterfell murdered by that deceiving bastard Theon Greyjoy. Her daughters kept hostage in the Capital or worse. Winterfell itself likely in Bolton hands before the seasons turn.
She had been the start of all of it, she knew it deep down inside herself. She had not kept her deal with the Gods she had admitted this to Rob's now dead wife, all because she could not find it in her heart to love a bastard. Now everything had gone wrong, catastrophically wrong, and the gods had collected the debt she owed with the kind of thorough patience that brooked no argument.
She did the only thing left to do.
She lowered herself, steadied her shaking knees, and asked for mercy she had no right to expect.
"I must ask, on behalf of my son, for your protection."
The queen raised one hand, gently, stopping her.
"That is fine, Lady Stark, But I need one answer first."
Catelyn nodded, bracing herself for whatever price was about to be named.
The question, when it came, was not what she expected.
It was short. Simple. And it made her mind go completely blank for a long, bewildered moment, all her prepared composure failing her entirely, because it was the last question she had anticipated and simultaneously the most complicated question she had ever been asked, wrapped up in four words she did not know how to begin to untangle.
"Lady Stark," said the young Queen with the calm of someone asking about the weather, "where is my nephew Jon Targaryen? Or as I believe you may know him by another name, Jon Snow?"
Catelyn stared at her.
Her mouth opened.
"HUH?" she said.