CATELYN
Her Ned was dead. They had killed him.
The words echoed in her mind like a death knell, each repetition driving the knife deeper. I was not there for him. I should have been with him. I should have died with him.
The thought came unbidden, a whisper of want so strong it made her knees buckle. To simply... stop. To let the grief swallow her whole and drag her down into that dark place where pain couldn't reach. Where she could be with him again.
But I didn't die. And I won't. I have children still. I cannot break.
Not yet. Not when her husband was dead and her daughters—gods, her beautiful girls—still trapped in Lannister hands like caged birds. The image of Sansa's terrified face, of little Arya's defiant eyes, cut through her like broken glass. Maybe Robb would execute Jaime in his rage. No—they needed the Kingslayer alive. They needed him to bring her girls home.
She walked toward the woods, spine rigid as an iron rod, barely hearing the men's mumbled condolences. Their words felt distant, muffled, as if she were drowning and they were calling to her from the surface. Once she was far enough from camp that their voices faded to nothing, she stumbled toward a thin birch tree and pressed her back against its bark.
Then the dam broke.
The tears came in waves, violent and uncontrolled, ripping sobs from her chest that felt like they might tear her apart. Eighteen years of marriage collapsed into fragments—their wedding night when he'd been so gentle, so careful with her fears; the morning he'd left Winterfell for the last time, how she'd watched him ride away and felt that terrible premonition in her bones; the way he'd said her name, always her name, like a prayer.
She pressed her face against the rough bark until it scraped her cheek raw, welcoming the small pain as penance for being alive when he was not.
Through her weeping, she heard it—the rhythmic thwack of steel against wood, punctuated by ragged sobbing. She followed the sound on unsteady legs and found him.
Robb stood before the largest oak in the grove, still in his mail, hacking at the ancient trunk with his sword. Each blow sent vibrations up the blade that had to be jarring his arms, but he didn't stop. Tears streamed down his face as he struck again and again, his technique forgotten, his form crumbling with each swing.
Her poor boy. Her son who had to be a lord now, who had to lead men to war when he should have been learning to govern in peacetime.
"Robb." The name escaped her lips like a wound.
When he turned to look at her, she saw Ned's eyes drowning in anguish, and it felt like a dagger sliding between her ribs. Her already shattered heart cracked further, threatening to break completely.
"You've ruined your sword," she said. The easiest thing to say that came to mind.
"I'll kill them." His voice cracked like a boy's changing, raw and broken. He released the sword and let it fall to the forest floor with a dull thud. His shoulders sagged as if the weight of his mail had suddenly tripled. "I'll kill them all. Every one of them."
The words came out between harsh sobs, and she saw him not as the young lord
his bannermen acclaimed, but as her little boy who used to crawl into her bed during thunderstorms, who'd wept when his first pup died, who'd never wanted to hurt anything.
She moved to him without thought, pulling him into her arms. He collapsed against her, all his height and strength folding inward as she cradled his head against her neck. The familiar weight of him, the scent of his hair—still her child, despite the lordship he just inherited.
She cradled his head against her neck, just like she had when he was little and fevered, whispering the same nonsense words she used to soothe him then.
"They have your sisters," she whispered against his hair, her voice finding strength she didn't know she still possessed. "We can't lose them too, Robb."
A pause. She felt him still in her arms, felt the moment he began to listen rather than just grieve.
Her voice hardened like steel quenched in ice water. "We have to get the girls back."
Another pause, longer this time. When she spoke again, her words carried the cold promise of a mother's vengeance.
"And then we will kill them all."
RUYAN
Robb had stormed from the castle without explanation, leaving her to read the missive alone. The parchment felt like ice in her hands as the words burned themselves into her mind: Lord Stark executed for treason.
The Starks and the whole North were grieving. She would grieve too. She had to.
He had been her good-father—a man who had never treated her as the enemy, even when her homeland had wounded his family and his son. Where others might have shown coldness or suspicion, Lord Stark had offered measured acceptance. He had mediated when she and Lady Stark clashed over customs and expectations, never showing her ill will even when tension crackled between the women like winter lightning.
She remembered their private conversation upon returning from Yi Ti, his weathered face grave but not unkind. "I still haven't forgiven what was done to Robb," he had said, his voice carrying the weight of a father's pain, "but to move forward, we must work together. I ask you to be a true wife to my son, not merely an instrument of your father's ambitions."
His next words had surprised her with their warmth: "You will be a Stark, and part of this family. In this family, we protect each other as part of the pack."
She had only nodded then, understanding the covenant he offered. Loyalty to her new family, not just to Yi Ti. She wasn't given to sentiment, but now memories of their interactions surfaced unbidden. After Robb had shown her the bamboo garden—his awkward attempt at bridging their cultures—Lord Stark had quietly reminded her that his son was trying. She had responded gracefully, recognizing the olive branch for what it was.
Now a hollow ache spread through her chest like slow poison. She identified the emotion with clinical precision: grief. Sharp and confusingly somewhat familiar, settling in her bones like the northern cold. She could only imagine what Robb and Lady Stark were enduring—their pain would be a howling storm where hers was winter fog.
She released a careful breath, forcing her mind to clarity. Emotion was a luxury she couldn't afford. Lord Stark had been branded and executed as a traitor, which meant his household would share his fate—executed or worse, sold. Such was always the way when lords fell from grace.
The Stark girls would be valuable as hostages, but the rest? Expendable. She thought of Sansa's friend Jeyne—the steward's daughter with frightened eyes and courteous manners. There were no slaves in Westeros, but there were precious few places a girl from a traitor's household could end up, and none of them were kind.
Moving to her writing desk, she composed a letter in flowing Yi Tish script to Junren, her steward in White Harbor. He was quiet, dependable, and knew how to operate unseen—qualities that would serve her purposes now. The letter instructed him to find a trustworthy foreign trader or discreet Westerosi to locate and extract the girl. Not her own men, who would be too recognizable, too obviously foreign. Her intelligence network from King's Landing had revealed nothing about the Stark girls' fates weeks ago, but the execution was public now. Information would follow.
She walked through Riverrun's halls, her footsteps echoing in the unnatural quiet. Despite the silence, tension hung in the air like smoke, thick enough to taste. Every banner, every stone seemed to hold its breath. She handed the missive to the maester with careful instructions for its swift delivery.
The North would not submit to Joffrey or the Iron Throne. Of this, she was certain. The wolf lords would bare their teeth, and blood would follow.
Finally, she reached the dungeons where Jaime Lannister was kept. Lihua followed at her shoulder like a shadow, silent and deadly.
"A royal visit," Jaime drawled from behind the bars, his smirk intact despite weeks of captivity. "How honored I am."
"Your son executed Lord Stark." She let the words settle between them like stones dropped in still water.
"He had his head cut off with his own sword." The mockery in that detail—using Ice, the ancient Stark blade, for the execution—was not lost on her.
She signaled to Lihua with the barest inclination of her head. Her bodyguard moved like flowing water, pressing precise points on Jaime's neck that controlled both breath and movement.
The Kingslayer's eyes widened as his skin began to change color, panic flickering across features that usually wore only arrogance. Ruyan nodded again, and Lihua released the pressure point controlling his breathing.
Jaime gasped, his composure finally cracking. "Kill me now then. Does the wolf boy want my head too?"
She regarded him with the cold assessment of a winter morning. "My husband grieves. He doesn't know I'm here." Another signal, another application of pressure that brought him to death's threshold.
This time when Lihua released him, his gasps were more desperate. "What are you doing?! Are you here for vengeance, devoted wife?" The mockery in his voice was strained now, fear bleeding through his bravado.
"I will not kill you," she said with the detached precision of a master explaining technique to a student. "But I will make you feel death. What Lihua has done is one of many Yi Tish martial arts secrets. Your body is locked. She controls your breathing. The longer she holds you at death's door, the sharper the pain in your chest becomes."
She paused, studying his face as understanding dawned.
"I hear grieving feels exactly like that."
She stepped from the cell with fluid grace, her silk robes whispering against stone. "Lihua will remain with you during the day. At night, Gao Shan takes over the watch. You'll learn precisely how long a man can hover at death's door without crossing over."
Let the others mourn through tears and broken swords. She mourned through control, through the careful application of pressure until even the Kingslayer learned what it meant to suffocate on grief.