[ASOIAF SI] The Gilded Stag: A Ruthless Joffrey Uplift | Chapter 22: NED (Public) (Patreon)

The waters of the black pool were cold and still, reflecting the carved visage of the heart tree. Eddard Stark sat on the mossy bank beneath the ancient weirwood, a piece of oiled leather in his hand. Across his lap lay Ice. The greatsword was as wide across as a man’s hand, and taller even than Robb. The Valyrian steel was dark and smoky, rippling with the folds of its forging.

Ned wiped the blade slowly, methodically, drawing the oiled leather down the length of the flat to clear away the blood. The iron tang of death mingled with the deep, earthy scents of pine needles, damp loam, and the faint, sulfurous draft of the hot springs that ran beneath the walls of Winterfell.

He had taken off the deserter's head before the sun had reached its peak. The ragged man, a veteran of the Night's Watch named Gared, had been half-mad with terror. The poor soul had babbled of cold shadows and dead men walking in the snows. The laws of the First Men were rigid; the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. It was a heavy duty, a grim one, and Ned had never learned to find any joy in it. When he brought the greatsword down, the man’s life had ended in a single, clean stroke.

Yet the blood on the steel today felt heavier than usual. The execution had been a dark enough business, but the ride back to Winterfell had delivered an omen that still gnawed at the edges of Ned’s mind.

They had found it in the summer snows near the bridge. A direwolf, a beast out of legend that had not been seen south of the Wall in two hundred years, dead and rotting on the frozen earth. Driven deep into the beast’s throat was a shattered antler, broken off from a stag that had left the wolf to die in agony. Crawling blindly about their dead mother’s belly were the pups. Six of them. Three male, two female, and a white one with eyes like blood that Jon had found driven away from the rest. One for every Stark child in his hall.

Ned had let the boys take them, but the sight of the dead wolf and the splintered horn had settled like a stone in his gut.

The direwolf was the sigil of House Stark. The crowned stag belonged to House Baratheon.

And the King was coming to Winterfell.

Three days past, the ravens had descended on Maester Luwin’s rookery, bearing heavy seals of golden wax. Robert was dragging half his court north up the Kingsroad. That alone would have been cause enough for unease—the North had no patience for southron pageantry, and Winterfell’s larders would groan under the weight of so many hungry mouths.

But it was the words stamped beneath the King's seal that haunted Ned’s waking hours.

Jon Arryn was dead. The man who had fostered him, the man who had been a second father to both him and Robert, taken by a sudden, violent sickness in the night. The grief had struck Ned like a physical blow, a hollow ache in his chest that refused to fade. Yet the grief was quickly swallowed by the bewildering, bloody tidings that followed close on the heels of the Hand’s demise.

According to the precise, flowery script of Grand Maester Pycelle, the Crown had uncovered a tragic treason.

Lady Lysa Arryn had attempted to flee the capital in the dead of night, only to be detained by the gold cloaks. Before the Iron Throne, the official raven proclaimed, the Lady of the Eyrie had broken down and wept, confessing to poisoning her own husband with the tears of Lys.

Ned’s hands stopped their rhythmic wiping of the blade. He stared down into the dark water, watching the red sap weep from the weirwood’s carved eyes. Lysa. He remembered her at Riverrun, a shy, nervous girl who sought only her father's approval. He knew the woman she had become—fearful, soft, and fiercely, obsessively protective of her frail son, Robert Arryn. Their marriage had been built on duty, not love, but that Lysa would murder the Hand of the King defied all reason. She was too timid to plot such a thing, and far too frightened of the Queen to risk it.

However, if men in crimson cloaks had threatened her boy... if they had placed cold steel against little Robert's throat in the dark of the Red Keep... Ned knew Lysa would confess to murdering Aegon the Conqueror himself if it meant saving her son.

And then there was the Master of Coin. Petyr Baelish had been found dead in the black cells, a rope fashioned from his own slashed velvet cloak pulled tight around his neck. By his own hand, Pycelle had written, mourning the theft of the Crown's gold and the betrayal of the King's trust.

Ned’s jaw tightened. He remembered the stories his family had told of the arrogant, smiling boy who had challenged his brother Brandon to a duel for Catelyn’s hand at Riverrun, only to be cut down like a stalk of wheat. Baelish was a creature of naked ambition, a man who survived by making himself useful to greater lords. Men like Littlefinger did not string themselves up in the dark out of shame. A dead lord in the dungeons was a murdered lord, silenced before he could speak.

With Lord Stannis fleeing in the night to Dragonstone, and the eunuch Varys vanishing from the castle entirely, the small council had been swept clean as a freshly scrubbed floor.

At the center of it all stood a boy of fifteen.

Robert’s own letter had been full of boisterous pride, his scrawl large and sloppy. He boasted of a son who had grown into a giant, a "golden stag" who had unhorsed the Kingsguard in the tourney tilts. Robert wrote that the Prince had taken the King's justice in hand, rooting out the rot in the court while Robert mourned his Hand.

Ned did not feel pride. He felt a deep, creeping chill that had nothing to do with the northern wind.

He knew Robert. Robert was a man of fire and impulse, a man who loved the clash of war, the taste of strong wine, and the warmth of a willing wench, but despised the quiet, methodical work of ruling. Ned knew the Baratheon blood carried cold iron as well—Stannis was proof enough of that, a man who would break before he bent. But this? If a fifteen-year-old boy was ordering arrests, examining ledgers, and delivering high lords to the black cells with such sweeping, surgical perfection, he was not acting with Baratheon fury or Stannis's rigid spite.

A prince with golden hair and emerald eyes wielding the headsman's axe in the King's name with such calculated, bloodless efficiency did not sound like a stag. It sounded like the quiet, methodical cruelty of Tywin Lannister.

A soft crunch of footsteps on the fallen pine needles broke him from his reverie.

Ned looked up. Catelyn stood at the edge of the clearing, drawing a heavy wool cloak tight around her shoulders. She had always shunned the Godswood. The old gods of the North made her uneasy; she preferred the familiar, colored glass and sweet incense of her sept. To see her here, beneath the bleeding face of the weirwood, meant she brought a burden too heavy for the stone walls of the keep.

She looked pale, her auburn hair stark against the grey sky. Beneath her cloak, her hands were trembling as she held out a small object. It was a carved wooden box, smooth and unadorned.

"My lady," Ned said, setting the oiled leather aside and rising to his feet. He sheathed Ice in its heavy scabbard of wolfskin and slung it across his back. "You should not be out in the chill. The wind is biting today."

"There is no warmth to be found in the castle today, Ned," Catelyn said, her voice tight and thin. She stepped closer, offering the box. "A merchant caravan arrived from White Harbor this morning. Men claiming to trade in Myrish lace and saffron. They asked for an audience with the steward, to discuss tariffs... but one of them slipped this to Vayon Poole, insisting it was meant only for the Lady of Winterfell."

Ned frowned, taking the box. It was surprisingly heavy. "A merchant’s gift?"

"Not a merchant," Catelyn breathed, glancing over her shoulder at the thick shadows of the sentinels and ironwoods, as if afraid the trees were listening. "The man who delivered it bore a hidden mockingbird stitched inside his cuff. Petyr’s men."

Ned’s face hardened. Baelish. Even from the grave, the flesh-peddler was spinning webs. "Lord Baelish is dead, Cat. Hanged in the black cells for treason."

"He was murdered," Catelyn said fiercely, her blue eyes flashing with a sudden, desperate certainty. She reached into the folds of her dress and produced a tightly rolled scrap of parchment and a curved disc of polished glass—a Myrish lens. "Open the box, Ned."

Ned flipped the brass catch. Inside rested a false bottom of dark velvet. He looked at his wife, then took the parchment and the lens. The paper seemed blank, save for a few meaningless smudges of ink. But when Catelyn urged him to hold the thick glass lens over the parchment, the smudges stretched and twisted, resolving into a frantic, hurried script.

The handwriting did not belong to the Master of Coin.

The Lannisters. The words seemed to burn against the vellum. The Queen. They murdered him. They poisoned Jon. For the love of the gods, Catelyn, tell Robert. The lions have the castle.

The breath stopped in Ned’s chest. The quiet of the Godswood was suddenly deafening, broken only by the faint bubbling of the hot springs.

"Lysa," Catelyn whispered, a tear finally breaking loose to track down her pale cheek. "Petyr must have smuggled it out before the gold cloaks took her. He tried to save her warning, Ned. And they killed him for it."

The pieces of the puzzle, fragmented and jagged, suddenly slammed together in Ned’s mind. A mummer's farce, painted in the King's own colors.

Two conflicting truths had waged war in his head, but now the dark shape of the reality beneath became horrifyingly clear. The official ravens from the Crown were a lie. Jon Arryn had discovered something—something so dangerous the Queen had poisoned him to keep it hidden. Before Lysa could flee to the safety of the Vale with her son, the Lannisters had caught her. They threw her into the dungeons, threatened her boy, and forced the widow to confess to her own husband's murder to cleanly wash the Lannister name of the crime.

And Baelish. Ned despised the man, but he understood the grim mechanics of his death. Baelish had been Jon Arryn's creature, and he had known too much. He had secured this box, sent his men north on the Kingsroad, and the Lannisters had realized it. They snapped his neck in the dark and called it a suicide, sealing the truth in a coffin.

"They silenced them," Ned said, his voice a low, rough rasp. The weight of the greatsword on his back felt heavier than it ever had. "They murdered the Hand, forced his widow to take the blame, and strangled the man who tried to send word."

"Robert is riding straight into our gates," Catelyn said, her voice shaking with terror. "He is bringing the Queen. He is bringing the Lannisters."

He is bringing the boy, Ned thought, the dread settling over him like a burial shroud.

The golden stag. The fifteen-year-old Prince who had supposedly rooted out the rot. If the Lannisters had spun this bloody web, then the Prince was not a hero delivering the King's justice. He was the executioner. A prince who had learned how to use the law to eliminate his mother's enemies, tying off loose ends with a terrifying cunning.

"Robert is a blind man stumbling through a den of lions," Ned said, looking up from the parchment to the weeping face of the heart tree. "He sits on the throne drinking wine while they feast on his court from within."

"You must guard yourself, Ned," Catelyn pleaded, gripping his arm, her fingers digging into the boiled leather of his jerkin. "When he arrives... Robert will ask things of you. If you cross them, they will do to you what they did to Jon."

Ned looked down at his wife. He saw the terror in her eyes, the very real fear that she would be made a widow by the same poison that had taken her sister's husband. He wanted to bar the gates of Winterfell. He wanted to remain here, in the cold, clean air of the North, where a man's honor was written in his deeds and his justice was dealt by his own hand.

But the stag had already killed the wolf in the snow, and the King's wheelhouse was rumbling ever closer to his home.

"I will guard our house, Cat," Eddard Stark vowed, the wind howling through the branches of the Godswood. "I will hear what Robert asks of me. But if I must go South, I go to find the truth of Jon's death, and to save my King from the monsters he calls his own."