[Look To The Stars] Chapter 65: The Binding Song (Patreon)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and all rights for character, plots and settings belong to GRRM and George Lucas/Disney. I have no ownership.

A/N: Hope you like the lore mixing going on! Enjoy :D

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Year 299 AC/8 ABY

The Green Fork, The Riverlands

The command tent held three men and the slow quiet that followed a death in the yard.

Ice leaned against the central pole, blade cleaned, the dark length of it still catching fire light along the smith's grooves. The sheath waited on the camp table, where Lord Stark had finished the work and left the weapon standing where he could see it. The stain outside was fresh, and Luke had stepped around it on the way in.

"What did you feel, Skywalker?"

He was asking about the execution they had just witnessed, about the words Bolton had left them with. The camp was still settling from the swing of the sword, but Lord Stark's mind was already dissecting the intelligence.

Luke sat with his right hand, the metal one, resting open on his thigh. Jon had taken the stool across from him, the boy's face closed off.

"He believed what he was saying," Luke began, and chose his words slowly. "There was no terror in him at the end. Only the cold certainty of a man who believed his contingency was intact."

Lord Stark accepted that with the small nod.

Luke hesitated, feeling the faint edge of something else—the vague, thin drag in the Force he had filed away during the council an hour ago, a static that had not yet broken into a shape he could name. He considered mentioning it, but the immediate puzzle of Bolton's death demanded the room's attention.

"He told me that Tywin's letter was the second letter he received. But what truly worries me is that he said his son has instructions." Lord Stark's good hand rested on the map weight that was still a lion's head. "Lord Bolton's son Domeric has already died. So, now it seems Lord Bolton has a second son somewhere in the North or even this army. With instructions to harm my family or m—"

Lord Stark’s spine straightened, a lift that started at the base and ran the length of him. "Winterfell." Lord Stark said, his eyes widening.

Luke walked backward through the day at Winterfell. "When the Imperial broke into your castle," he said, "she killed a man on her way through. A guard. Newly hired, by every account I heard after. Your children had flagged him to your lady wife before the Imperial laid eyes on him. Your lady wife had taken it to Ser Rodrik. The man was to be turned out at first light the next morning. The Imperial reached him before first light did."

Lord Stark's hand shifted on the map. "How can you be sure it was him?"

"When I arrived at Winterfell, I did not sense any hostile presence except for the Agent. I am sure Lord Stark."

Lord Stark weighed his words. "If Bolton's son was set into Winterfell under another name, and if he was the man the Imperial put down on her way in, then —"

"Then the instructions Bolton spoke of are held by a man already dead," Jon finished, low. "Probably. If so, they died with him."

Lord Stark let his good hand open across the map. "Small mercies," he said, and left it there. "But I need to be sure. I will send a message… or maybe you can take that ship of yours?"

"No need Lord Stark."

Luke drew the comlink off his belt and placed it in the lamplight between them.

Lord Stark watched the device with hesitation and confusion, turning to look at Jon with an inquisitive look. Jon for his part, just shrugged. The channel keyed open under Luke's thumb, and a hiss came through, then a thinner hiss beneath it, and a child's breath very close to the pickup.

"Bran, can you hear me?"

"Master Luke?" The voice came through in pieces, small and serious. "I hear you. The light is green. That is the right one, is it? The green light?"

"Green is right," Luke said steadily. "You are doing well. We have some questions for you." His own voice was steady in the tent, but his eyes tracked Eddard Stark’s face across the device.

A pause held on the channel while the pickup caught the breathing of a ten-year-old boy arranging himself seriously.

Lord Stark stood utterly still. He was looking at the small black device as if it were a forge suddenly lit in a dark room. Jon moved to stand beside his Luke. He leaned down, to speak into the comlink. “Bran?”

A sharp intake of breath on the channel.

“Jon?” The word was just a boy’s, warm and sudden. Then a pause, as if the speaker remembered himself. The tone settled back into seriousness, but the warmth didn’t leave. It was in the space between words. “And Father. Is he there? I can… it feels like the tent is crowded.”

"Bran." Ned's voice was low, roughened at the edges. "My boy… it is good hear your voice. Are you well?"

A pause, filled with the faint static of a connection spanning a continent. "I am well, Father. So is mother, Sansa, Arya and Rickon!" Another pause. "You sound strange. Far away and close, both."

"Bran," Luke said, trying to stay on topic. "I need to ask you about the man who died at Winterfell on the night the Imperial broke through."

"Oh, him." The boy hesitated. "He was a creepy man. Arya would stay out of any yard he was in. And he would stare at Sansa strangely all the time, it really upset her. We told Mother, and Mother told Ser Rodrik, and Ser Rodrik meant to send him away the next morning... but the woman killed him. What about him?"

Luke extends his senses towards Winterfell as Bran spoke and still didn't sense anything truly hostile to the Starks except for the Imperial Agent.

Luke eased his breath out. "Thank you, Bran. That was what I needed to hear."

"Master Luke." The boy hesitated, and then the voice arrived with a different weight behind it, the burden of a child carrying something large with no adult near who understood it. "There is one other thing. If I may."

"Go on."

"I have been reaching farther through the trees. When I go far north, the roots touch something old at the wall, they brush up against it and go no deeper. It is like a pit under the snow. Something is there, Master Luke, buried deep under the wall."

Luke's straightened at Bran's words. "Just the one thing?" Luke asked carefully.

A silence came from the pickup while the boy thought on the other end. "…There is another," Bran answered at last. "I cannot see it properly but something is pushing at the wall."

Luke took that in and kept his face flat for the boy, the way he kept it for his students. "Thank you, Bran, but do not go further North anymore. And I hope you keep your promise of not venturing past the wall again."

"I will."

Lord Stark leaned toward the comlink. "Bran. Fetch your mother for me."

"Yes, Father." A pause, then the boy's voice turned aside, the words half-lost to the comlink's pickup. "Master Luke, hold on. I need to find her."

The sound of movement, a scuff of boot leather on stone floor.

"Mother." Bran's voice carried faintly, calling down some corridor of Winterfell. A door hinge groaned somewhere distant. "Mother, come quick. Father is on the box."

A muffled reply, indistinct.

"This box, Mother. Here. Yes, that's him."

Cloth moved on stone somewhere hundreds of leagues away, and a woman's breath arrived closer to the pickup than she meant it to be.

"Yes, that is Father. He hears you. Bring it closer to your mouth."

A fractional pause drifted across the channel.

"Husband?" Lady Stark voice came through with uncertainty.

"My lady."

"NED — GODS, I CAN HEAR—"

"Mother, you do not have to scream. They can hear your normal voice."

Lady Catelyn took a second to adjust. "Ned, please tell me you are safe."

Lord Stark took a deep sigh.

"I am safe, my Lady. Now I need you to listen to me. There might be a traitor in your guard. Keep our children close. Put Winterfell on a full alert from tonight. Check every new hire, every traveller granted leave to stay, every face that came in after we rode south. I want each one looked at by someone who was there before we left."

"You believe someone came in under guise?"

"Someone did. He is dead now, we think, but there may be others, and I would rather be wrong in a careful direction than right in a careless one."

"Understood, I will put the castle on alert."

"Do not take any chances." A beat passed. "Stay safe, Cat."

A longer pause drifted from the other end of the channel. "I await your return in one piece, Ned." Lady Stark's tone cooled by a full season. "And please make sure Robb doesn't get into too much trouble. And Jon…"

Lord Stark eyes shifted to Jon for a moment. "I understand Cat. I will."

"Bran, how do I close it?"

"Pass it back to me, Mother."

Lord Stark pocketed the comlink by habit, caught himself, and set it back on the table for Luke.

Jon had been still for a long minute.

"A second letter," Jon said. "There are two knives at your throat, not one."

Lord Stark drew a breath to summarize the thought, to name the open threat they were still looking for, when the night shattered.

A scream tore across the camp. It was not human. It was the primal, aggressive roar of a dragon in distress—Morghaes. Immediately, the camp's horses began to scream in panic along the picket lines.

Before Lord Stark could even give the order, Jon was moving toward the tent flap. Luke was instantly behind him, the vague, thin drag he had been filing all day suddenly snapping into sharp, terrifying focus in the Force. A life in the camp was being extinguished, and another was exploding with unnatural heat. The retroactive guilt hit him mid-stride: the static he had felt during the council had not been mere unease. It had been an embedded threat, and he had ignored it.

When they reached the queen's tent, the canvas was torn open. Inside, it was already over.

Grey Wind had ripped the throat out of the assassin. The Stark heir was standing over the body, his lightsabre drawn and ignited. The queen was on the ground, unharmed but radiating a residual, shimmering heat. And the face of the man who had called himself Jorah Mormont had just slid away from the dead assassin, revealing a stranger underneath.

The queen was still on her knees. Her weight was through her shins, palms open on her thighs, the air above her hands shimmering a fraction. Her breath came short and paired. She was looking at the face on the stranger with horror and disbelief.

Outside the canvas, Morghaes was making a sound strange even to Luke, low and long, as if he were mourning.

The queen's mouth kept opening and closing on words that refused to come.

Luke stepped into the ruined tent and finally looked directly at the magic he had been feeling as static. He knelt beside the dead Faceless Man. He closed his eyes and reached for the signature of whatever had lent that face to the binding.

The Force signature was distinct now.

He began to speak, piecing the thought aloud for the Stark men, but really for himself.

"This was not just a dead face," he said. "The spell used need a living one."

"…a spell?" Lord Stark replied. "The assassin used a spell?"

Luke kept his hand on the rushes, his palm flat against the packed earth. The two signatures pulsed beneath it, one fading, one stubbornly present.

"I have dealt with a cult that practiced these kinds of spells," he said, his voice low in the ruined tent. "They called themselves the Nightsisters. They worked through song and shadow."

Robb's presence was a tight heat at Luke's back. Jon's was cooler, already working.

"Song?" Jon asked.

"A binding song," Luke said. "It doesn't just borrow a face. It steals the shape, and the real man is pulled along like a fish on a line while his life feeds the illusion. The song holds the tether."

Robb made a rough sound in his throat. "That's a foul magic."

"The force is not the foulness. What it was turned to and used for is," Luke said. He lifted his hand at last. The residual heat from the queen's palms still shimmered above the rushes. "The Nightsisters wove their craft from the land itself, from the dark places in it that remembered pain. What they made needed a living face and a living heart, and a voice to hold both together."

"So Jorah Mormont's face…" Jon started.

“Was worn. And Jorah Mormont himself was somewhere close, probably in a cell or a stupor, his life being drawn out stitch by stitch to keep the mask in place.” Luke looked at the cooling body on the floor. “When the wearer dies, the tether snaps. The source feels it. A violent recoil. If he’s strong, he survives the shock. If not…” He let the sentence hang.

Jon’s grey eyes were on the dead man’s slack features. “Could there be others? More masks in this camp?”

It was Robb who answered, his jaw tight. “We must check every man. Every face.”

Daenerys finally stood on her own. She came up in one motion and did not sway. The heat above her palms went back into her and the air cooled for it. She looked from the dead man’s slack features to Luke’s bowed head.

“We need to find him.” Her gaze swept Lord Stark, then Robb. “If Ser Jorah is dying, we need to find him now, before it's too late.”

"If he is in this camp." Lord Stark was already turning, his voice dropping into the command register. "We will find him Princess, I promise."

"Alert the camp to our purpose," Lord Stark ordered, addressing his eldest son. "Skywalker, your understand this…spell. Lead us."

"I will try."

Luke went back out into the cold, with the sound of the camp in half panic.

Lord Stark's order went down the picket line in a single sentence passed from captain to captain. No riders east, guards doubled along the rope, every tent and cart walked through by a man who could swear to the contents. Northern captains worked the search together.

Luke split off at the first crossing of lanes and walked back to the ruined tent. He stopped at the torn flap and laid his living hand against the canvas.

The tether point was still warm.

He closed his eyes and reached for it. The working had collapsed when the blade went through the throat, but a binding of that kind left a burn-scar on the Force, angled and fading by the minute.

The bearing ran east, east by a touch toward the south, inside the perimeter, inside the line. The Force gave him direction but not a measure. A few hundred paces at most.

Something else surfaced as he held the bearing. A second signature, laid into the carpet a few paces off, where the charred insect had landed. The mark of someone who had called fire and pulled it back in.

A lamp guttering out. He had seen the like on Jon, the first time the boy learned his true name and could not hold the fire back, and a dozen times in training since. Only a Jedi who cared to look would see it, and he looked.

She had done it on her own. She had called the flame, shaped it, closed it around the thing that had come at her, and opened her hands again. No teacher. No name for any of those verbs. Only what her own palms had done.

Luke opened his eyes. Jon was watching him.

"Something?" Jon asked.

"Yes, a direction." Luke rose, and his knees answered slowly. "East and slightly south. Inside the camp."

Luke and Jon found Lord Stark's commanders at the edge of the lane. Prince Oberyn had come out of his tent, his dark Dornish face drawn tight over the collar of a black coat with no ornament on it at all, and the Lady of Bear Island stood with him, a broad, iron-grey woman grounded like a boulder in the lane, with her mace in one hand and her helm under the other arm. Three Northern guards waited behind.

Luke spoke to Maege directly. "My lady, the man whose face was taken is your nephew, Ser Jorah Mormont. He is alive, and he is somewhere inside this camp."

The Lady of Bear Island shifted her grip on the mace. Her face did not move. "Where."

"East. South of the command tent by a few points, inside the ropes. No more than a few hundred paces."

"Lead on."

They went into the lanes.

Torches lit the lanes between tents too bright for the hour. Men stood at the flaps of their own tents with weapons at their shoulders, and men spoke at the level a watch required and no louder. Horses shifted along the picket lines and a cook fire spat once where a log had been moved. The sky above the camp was the blue-black it went to an hour before morning, and the east along the river had not yet lightened.

Luke kept the bearing in his mind and walked into it.

The trace narrowed, but it refused to focus. He knew the direction and he could tell when he strayed from it, and that was all.

Prince Oberyn walked at his left shoulder, voice low. "In all my travels in the Free Cities, I have never encountered a Faceless Man. A mummer's trick, they called it. Paint and resemblance and the confidence of the room. Knowing that it wasn't a trick now shouldn't be all that shocking… but somehow it still is."

"When you are taught magic is a lie," Luke said, "learning what it is capable of feels like waking from a dream. That is the waking you are in now."

"And what more is this magic of yours capable of?"

Luke glanced at Oberyn with a raised eyebrow and turned his face forward again.

"That is not a comforting answer, Ser Luke."

"It is the one I have."

Jon spoke from Luke's right, quiet. "The force is capable of more than I ever tale I have heard of magic. It's not just a thing you do once in a while, it's a way of life."

Prince Oberyn took that in. "Hmm… still not an answer."

"Somethings are just meant to be revealed when the right time allows it," Luke said.

They passed a wagon line where a horse blew air out through its nose and settled. On Luke's other side, Lady Maege walked with her mace across her forearm and her eyes on the lanes ahead, and when she finally spoke it was to the ground between her boots.

"I thought Jeor's boy couldn't get up to more trouble than he already had. Yet I find myself surprised."

"I do not know, my lady. I do not think he had a choice in this matter."

Lady Maege did not reply to that with words and only grunted back.

Luke stopped at the corner of a canvas structure in the lee of a supply wagon. The trace had narrowed to a point, and the point was the cloth in front of him.

The tent was pitched wrong. The frame went up a head too high for a storehouse and was not wide enough for a barracks. One guy rope ran into the ground at a sloppy angle, and the peg had been hammered an hour before by a man with no time to do it properly. No fire had been lit against the river cold.

Luke laid his palm against the canvas and reached once more. The tether pulsed under his hand.

"A man is alive on the other side of this cloth," he said. "Weakened. Close to going out."

Maege did not ask how he knew.

Prince Oberyn put his fingers to his mouth and gave a short low whistle. Two of the Northern guards came up at either end of the canvas, Ghost lowered his head, and Jon unhooked the weapon at his belt.

"Stand back." Luke set his living hand on the flap and pulled it open.

A candle burned low on a crate inside, and the air smelled of tallow and old sweat. No one moved to meet him. A man lay on a pallet against the far wall.

A blanket had been pulled up over his chest. His eyes were shut and his mouth had fallen open. The skin at his throat and along the backs of the hands that rested on the blanket had gone paper thin with blue veins stark against the pallor. The sparse hair left at his temples had turned white. He had a soldier's frame. There was no soldier left in it.

Luke knelt beside the pallet and watched the chest rise, fall, and the interval between was a long one.

Lady Maege came past him and knelt on the other side. Two of her fingers went to the side of the man's throat, waited, moved to the hollow at the collarbone, waited. Her palm settled flat on his forehead and stayed there, and no word came from her. The mace lay at her side. Her mouth was shut, her vision wet, and she gave the wetness no consent to fall, processing grief in her own way.

The man on the pallet drew another of his long breaths.

"He is alive," Lady Maege said, her voice flat the way a Bear Island voice goes flat when it has decided to keep alive a thing that wants to go the other way. "We need a maester!"

"I will tell my Uncle and send one," Jon said. "And I will send word to the Princess."

Jon left at once with Ghost hot at his heel.

They carried Jorah out of the storehouse tent on the pallet itself, four Northern men at the corners and Lady Maege walking the head with her palm bracing the back of his skull. Luke went ahead and cleared the lane to the secured tent beside Lord Stark's. It had been emptied of its maps within a quarter of an hour, and a brazier had been lit in the corner against the river cold. They set the pallet down on a low frame. Lady Maege placed her mace beside it within reach of her hand, then thought better of the placement and slid the weapon under the cot.

The Princess was coming. Word carried fast in a camp that had been up all night, and Daenerys arrived before the guard at the flap announced her.

She came in alone and had changed out of the torn sleeve from earlier, her silver-gold hair pulled back in a plain braid. Her face was composed, her presence in the Force pulled tight around her like armor.

She looked at the face on the pallet for a long moment, standing. The Lady of Bear Island rose and stepped back a pace, and Luke did the same on the other side.

"He is alive, Your Grace," Maege said. "His breath is poor but his pulse holds."

The Princess lowered herself beside the pallet and covered his hand with hers. Her fingers were steady. His skin gave under them, thin as old parchment. For a long moment nothing in him answered. Then, once, his hand twitched under hers and went quiet again.

"He told me to stay with him," she said to the air above the pallet, where Luke also happened to be. "On the night the dragons hatched. The tavern was burning and he reached for me and he said it — stay with me. It would never be but I do not want to see him in pain like this."

Luke received that in silence, then lowered himself at the opposite side of the pallet and laid his living hand a finger's width above the man's sternum. The metal hand he kept at his knee. The Force ran warmer through flesh for work of this kind, and the work wanted the warmer channel.

He closed his eyes and reached.

The body under his palm was the wrong shape in the Force. The frame of the man Jorah had been was intact. The living that should have filled the frame had been taken out of him, and what remained was a rind. Between the frame and the rind ran a scar where the binding had done its extraction. The years drawn through it were gone, and the tissue that had been theirs was dead. Force-work could not touch that scar.

He could not put back what was not there, he could only work with what he had. He started with the breathing. Warmth moved along Jorah's lungs and steadied them. The heart stuttered under his hand through three beats, and the fourth came even. Where the damage had left edges that would fray, he smoothed them. He left the scar alone.

He stabilized what the body still wished to do and he asked the rest of it to rest, and he did his asking in the quiet register a man's own body would answer to.

The breath went smoother under his palm, and between each rise and fall the interval shortened by a count. But the skin did no knitting, and the hair at the temples stayed white. The years were in him now.

He took his hand away.

"He will breathe through the morning," Luke told the Princess, and kept the rest of what he could and could not do off his face.

"Then I will sit with him through the morning," she answered.

A chair was brought. She took it without thanks and settled into it as she had settled onto the pallet's edge, which was to say she did not settle. Morghaes made a low sound beyond the tent that moved the canvas a finger's width, and the Lady Maege lifted her face at it and went back to what she had been doing.

Luke withdrew from the tent, and a sentry came for him an hour later, when the eastern sky above the lane had gone from blue-black to the grey that came before dawn. Lord Stark's command tent was lit low against the coming light. When Luke ducked inside, the lords were already at the table. The Riverlands map between them had been laid flat but no one's attention was on it.

Prince Oberyn sat opposite the Queen of Thorns, who was propped on cushions a boy had brought her, swallowed in Tyrell green with her cane across her lap. Her eyes moved between the men at the table. Jon stood at his uncle's right shoulder. Robb was at the left, cloaked for riding.

The Princess came last and she took the empty chair.

"This has been a troubling night we have just endured," Lord Stark asked. "Ser Jorah is alive but… if he will fully recover…" Lord Stark looked at Luke who just nodded his head no.

With a sigh, Lord Stark continued. "Now the question remains, who would hire a Faceless Man?"

"A man with more coin than patience," Prince Oberyn offered lightly, testing the room for a smile.

None came. The Northern men stared at him with the flat, dead eyes of people who had just finished burying their own.

"At least this confirms that Northern sense of humor is as dead as the assassin." Prince Oberyn muttered under his breath.

The Queen of Thorns lifted her chin a fraction. "It is not a Faceless Man's habit to fall prey to a pretty promise. Prince Oberyn is not wrong. They are paid, and paid well. So."

She counted her eliminations on the cane. "Varys is dead. Why those idiots would kill their spymaster is a dizzying puzzle on its own, but it shortens our list. That leaves Lord Tywin, with a treasury at his back and cause enough to want Her Grace gone. And Lord Baelish, whose chair in the small council has been empty for some weeks. He took no formal leave of the court and named no destination. My people can place him nowhere in the capital. Where he went, I do not know. Which is not comfort."

"I have not a single doubt that it was Tywin," Oberyn said, low. "Tywin has no morals in his quest for power. If he had known about young Daemon here, the Reach would have had assassins in every corner by now."

Olenna tapped the cane once against her knee. "You are not wrong about the Lannister, Prince Oberyn. I do not think you are wholly right, either. Tywin is ruthless. He is not reckless. A Faceless contract placed across the Narrow Sea at the price of a dragon queen would be a worth a kingdom's ransom, one even Tywin won't pay for."

"Lord Baelish, on the other hand, has spent a decade making coin appear where none should be. He has the means, and as we have already noted, he has the absence."

"A coordination?" Lord Stark asked.

"Or a race." Olenna did not look at him as she said it. "Tywin has the coin. Baelish has the appetite. Whether they moved together or moved against each other, Her Grace is the piece they were both reaching for."

Oberyn's hand drifted off the armrest to the knife at his belt, and the Queen of Thorns tracked it and did not address it.

“It has to be the Lannisters,” Jon said. “The catspaw came for Sansa after they left Winterfell. Joffrey had already shown his cruelty to her and from the rumors… he is a sadistic monster. It fits.”

Robb shifted his weight beside him, the leather of his armor creaking. “It does fit. But Joffrey is not a mastermind.”

“A boy with a crown,” Prince Oberyn countered, his thumb tracing the pommel of his knife. “And a mother who would burn cities for him. Cersei has the malice. Joffrey has the petulance. Either could have given the order.”

Daenerys finally spoke, and when she did, she was looking at no one in particular and at all of them. "It does not matter if it was this Baelish or Tywin."

She rose as she said it.

"Whoever paid for it will die by my dragons."

Luke spoke before she had crossed a step. "Princess."

She stopped. The air above her palms had gone warm again, shimmering a hand's width from her skin.

"Revenge is a road that eats the one who walks it," Luke said. He kept his voice low and even, the voice he used with Jon in training. "But justice, justice is your right. The man who paid for your death should answer for it. Take him in chains, and let the realm see it done. That is the difference, and it will matter when the dragons are in the sky and the people see you the way we see you."

For a long moment she did not move. The heat above her palms pulled back into her skin and the air cooled for it.

"Justice, then."

Daenerys stood and left the tent. The flap closed behind her, and for a breath nothing in the tent moved except the torch.

Olenna huffed a laugh. "Let's see if she can keep those words. Well, Lord Stark and Your Grace, I shall go and get ready for our departure."

Lady Olenna left the tent at her leisure pace.

Prince Oberyn's dark eyes held Luke's, unblinking. "Justice. A word with many edges, Ser Luke. I have seen men use it to dress revenge in noble clothes."

The lamp threw shifting shadows across Luke's face. "So have I."

"Then you know the difference is often only in who holds the sword." Oberyn leaned forward, his voice dropping to a low rasp. "If your sister lay butchered, your brother's children murdered, and the law stood with the butcher... would you speak of justice still? Or would you want blood?"

Luke did not answer immediately. The question hung between them, a blade offered hilt-first.

"I would want them dead," Luke said, his voice quiet. "Whether I called it justice or revenge... I suspect it would not matter at heat of the moment."

Oberyn smiled, a sharp, dangerous thing. "So. We understand each other."

With those words, Prince Oberyn too left the tent.

Robb pushed his stool back with a scrape of wood on hide. "I should make preparations for our departure too."

He stood in one easy motion, getting ready to leave.

Lord Stark raised his hand and pointed at a stool. "Sit, Robb. The Falcon can wait another quarter-hour. We have one more thing to settle."

Robb, already turned toward the flap, came back and took the stool Oberyn had vacated.

Lord Stark's eyes went to Jon. "You stood up at Storm's End and claimed the your heritage. That means you have laid claim to the Iron Throne. It seems the Tyrells have thrown in their support behind you. The Princess has yielded her claim to yours in front of every banner in this camp. Are you ready for the responsibilites that are going to be places on your shoulder?"

Jon’s answer came steady, a fact laid on the table. “It doesn’t matter if I think I am or not. The claim’s been made. Now, only the work follows.”

“You will not be doing it alone.” Ned’s voice held no warmth, only certainty. “I will be behind you. As I have always been.”

Luke, who had been watching the flame, looked over. His expression was calm, his words plain. “Wearing a crown is a hard road, Jon. No man is ever ready to bear that burden and I’ve seen men crushed by its weight. But I’ve seen you bear heavy things before. I believe you have the strength for it.” He glanced at Ned then, a brief, acknowledging look. “He was not raised like Joffery.”

"Remember Jon, the man who passes the judgment is the man who swings the sword."

"I will."

Robb cleared his throat quietly. "And the Tyrells?"

Lord Stark did not answer at once. His hand on the map shifted once, weighing something heavy.

"Lady Olenna left this tent without naming her terms," he said finally. "Anyone who has negotiated with the Queen of Thorns knows what that means."

Luke glanced up. "Oh, she most certainly has terms."

"It means she wants us to ask her at the gates of King's Landing, when we have already spent her men to get there." Lord Stark's mouth was grim. "She is Margaery's grandmother first and the Reach's shield second. Whatever she asks, it will have Margaery's name on it."

Jon's weight shifted at the pole.

Robb coughed into his fist, badly. "Is that why you took the Tyrell alliance as fast as you did, brother?"

"Robb."

"I am only saying. She is quite pretty and I had quite the interesting conversation with Ser Loras about her standing between you and a blade."

"Yes, Margaery is brave. Now, can we move on."

"Are you sure you want to move on from Margaery?"

Jon’s fingers closed on a wood carving curled near the map’s edge and he flicked it at Robb.

The carving stopped in mid-air. It hung for a breath, spinning lazily an arm’s length from Robb’s nose, before dropping to the rug.

A choked sound escaped Robb, half laugh, half cough. His shoulders shook.

Luke watched the carving fall. He’d felt the ripple in the Force, a small, tidy tug of telekinesis, the kind a Padawan learned before they built their first training saber. Robb’s version was all instinct, wrapped in a wolf’s amusement.

“Enough,” Lord Stark said. He didn’t raise his voice but it had the same effect of a scream.

Robb’s grin faded. He cleared his throat, the sound wet and stubborn. Jon straightened, his expression settling back into that Northern blankness. The two brothers looked at their father, chastened in the particular way of boys caught mid-mischief by a man who’d never needed to shout.

"I know," Lord Stark said, before Jon could turn the stare on him. "You have a kindness for the girl. That is your affair. But the house she belongs to has just bought you a throne on credit, and she is the coin they will ask for first. I hope you are prepared for it when the request eventually comes."

"I am. And I will speak to her myself before then."

"Do so."

Lord Stark's hand opened on the map and settled. "Go, both of you. The Falcon has waited long enough."

After both Jon and Robb left, it was only Eddard and Luke left.

Lord Stark held the map with his good hand, fingers curled, steady. Then he turned to Luke.

"You gave my lords a star map once. You told them about the Empire you fought, and the men who come with chains when they find a world they want. You gave them enough to understand the threat. I want the rest of it."

Luke took a moment. The question deserved an answer as plain as the asking.

"I did not speak of the good of it before, Lord Stark. The room was listening for threats. But there are worlds out there where it has never rained, and worlds where no land has ever been mapped. There are people who are not human, and who have never met a man with a sword. Healers who could close the wound in your shoulder by sundown. Libraries that hold the story of every world we have found, and the names of those we have lost. Sciences that look like sorcery until you learn them. Songs in tongues no human throat can shape."

Lord Stark did not speak for a moment.

"And the horrors I did not hear in the briefing."

"Force traditions older than mine. The tradition that came for the Princess tonight is one of them, and it is not the worst. Men still alive in the galaxy who hunted my Order to the last. They learned uses of the Force my teachers refused to name. Some served the Empire. Some served powers older than the Empire, and outlived it."

"Will your people come for us, Skywalker. The politics of it, not just the soldiers. Your man Han was clear about the outcome. But maybe they are already coming, seeing this agent that is imprisoned at Winterfell."

"She is the only one other than us that knows about this world. She cannot contact her side from this world and this I know for sure. There is something that blocks communications and I think it is the Wall itself."

Luke took a cup and sipped a drink.

"As for my sister, she is in the senate of the New Republic. I did not write the peace that follows the Empire. She did, as much of it as one person can. When they learn of Planetos, the question will be decided by the council she sits on. Some of her colleagues will argue that Planetos joins the Republic. Some will argue that your world is a market. Some will argue that it is a prize. She is one vote on a floor of hundreds."

Ned took that in.

"And which side will you be on, Skywalker."

"Neither, Lord Stark. I came alone. I speak for no one but myself."

"That is not an answer that comforts a king's man."

"No, but I am the wrong man to give you the answer that does. I am a Jedi, not a politician. I fought the war, I did not write the peace."

"Then I will speak with your sister. I have a son who will carry a galaxy's burden on a Westerosi throne," he said at last. "I want to make sure he has all the help he can get."

"You seem to forget that Jon is my apprentice before all else. He will always have my support."

"That will serve." Lord Stark said as he inclined his head toward Luke in a show of respect.

--------------------------------------------------------

The ship rested in a cleared square of trampled grass two hundred paces east of the command tent, ramp lowered, running lamps glowing amber along the hull. Robb walked the perimeter of it with a Tyrell captain on one side and a Northern bannerman on the other, giving a tactical briefing on the march.

Grey Wind, Ghost, and Amidala had gone aboard ahead of him, and a long low howl rolled out of the open ramp as Robb set foot on it.

Above the assembling column, two dragons banked.

Jon had taken Rhaegal up an hour before. Daenerys had taken Morghaes up with him. The flight was a different shape from the one Luke had watched a day before. That had been a man who had reached for a creature with an open hand and let the creature decide; this was two riders in control, circling once together, then a second time, descending a few hundred feet, banking again over the Northern van to put two shadows across it. The column below saw them and the pikes lifted. A ragged cheer ran along the line and was cut by a captain's shout.

Jon and Daenerys were showing the North what rode with them.

As Luke enters the Falcon, the ramp comes up behind him. The pre-flight cycle ran, and the repulsors coughed to life a fraction after the hum came up through the ground, the Corellian note Luke had known since Tatooine.

Dust lifted along the square as the Falcon lifted off into the sky.

Rhaegal and Morghaes came around to meet her. The three shapes settled into the first formation of a war they had not yet declared, the Falcon between the two dragons, and Luke felt the heat of Daenerys in the Force as they turned south, no longer banked, open. He would need to have a conversation with her about her abilities but that was for later, after this war.

A Northern trumpet sounded the long march somewhere along the column.