Chapter Text
𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐤 ; 𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐥 - 𝟖𝟒 𝐀𝐂
Rickard Karstark I
From Karhold to Winterfell – 84 AC
The journey from Karhold was a grueling trek across three hundred and fifty miles of unforgiving terrain. It was a path he knew well enough that cut through the jagged hills and the dense and dark shadows of the Wolfswood. For Lord Rickard Karstark, the twenty days spent in the saddle were a slow and rhythmic torture. He rode at the head of a column of fifty sworn swords as their grey cloaks were stiff. Beside him rode his sons, Torrhen was the eldest and heir at one-and-twenty, Harlan, a sturdy youth of nine-and-ten who had just lost his twin sister; and finally, the young Rodrik, barely four-and-ten and still wearing the raw grief of a boy who had never known a mother’s touch.
To the Karstark men, Alys had been more than a sister or a daughter. She had been the fire of their cold stone hall, which was a surprising way to describe a daughter of Winter. After Rickard’s own wife had perished bringing Rodrik into the world, Alys had become the sole feminine grace in a house of iron and winter. She was the one who had softened her father’s edges and tempered her brothers' brawling spirits. At eighteen, she had been the North’s brightest hope, a "True Daughter of Winter". Her laughter had once echoed against the rafters of Karhold. Now, that laughter would be buried in the silent stone of the Stark crypts, and the men of her family were coming to Winterfell not just to mourn, but to see what was left of the light she had carried into this unforgiving world.
When they finally arrived at Winterfell, they didn’t bother with pleasantries as few Northerners bothered and immediately ushered themselves into the Lord’s Solar. The Karstarks were miffed to find a man unbroken by a widower’s lethargy, rather, he seemed more focused on a ledger of grain stores. And most surprising was the small and breathing bundle strapped against his chest in a sling of shadow-cat fur.
Of course, they might not employ Septas like the Southerners did and tended to care more for their young that the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, but it didn’t mean they had ever seen a lord as sullen and burly as Lord Stark care for his child in the same way as they were witnessing. Rickard stopped short, his heavy boots silent on the rushes. He had expected the babe to be tucked away in some distant nursery, to be overseen by wet-nurses and shielded from the "grim business" of a Lord’s life. Instead, his granddaughter was here, accompanying her lord father at the very center of the North’s power even when she wasn’t even a year old.
“You received the raven,” Ellard said. His voice had a low and textured rumble that seemed to vibrate from his chest into the small bundle he held. He didn't rise to greet them. No, instead, his hand came up instinctively to cup the back of the babe’s head as if he was shielding her from the sudden draft of the open door. Perhaps the maid that had welcomed them understood well enough and decided to close the door behind her as to let them keep their privacy and to protect their newest addition from the frost.
Rickard Karstark stood frozen for a long moment. His traveling cloak felt heavy and was still dusted with the frost of the road. He looked at the empty space beside the desk where Alys should have sat and then back to the man sitting in the High Seat with a child strapped to his heart.
"We received it," Rickard finally rasped. It was truly heartwrenching to even speak – he couldn’t imagine a worse news to receive by raven, and he damned himself again for not having been close to his daughter when she had drawn her last breath. He stepped forward, his eyes fixed on the tuft of dark hair peeking out from the shadow-cat fur. "I expected to find you in the Godswood, Lord Stark. I expected to see you kneeling before the heart tree until your knees bled. I did not expect to find you playing nursemaid while the North waits for its Lord."
He was being impertinent against his liege lord, and only the fact that he was a grieving father was actually protecting him from the anger of his good-son. He might be kin now, even more so since the birth of his granddaughter, but it didn’t mean he could afford to insult the Warden of the North and Lord of Winterfell in his own keep.
Ellard’s flint-grey eyes didn't waver for even a second, apparently deciding not to rebuke Lord Karstark for his insolence. "The Godswood is for the dead and the silent. This room is for the living. I am doing both my duties at once, which ruling the North as well as raising its future."
Torrhen kept his hands clasped behind his back with a rigid posture. "The courtyard is full of whispers, my Lord. The Glovers and the Umbers... they speak of the 'Winter Child' and the impropriety of a Lord carrying a girl-babe into open council. They fear grief has clouded your judgment of how a Stark should be seen."
"Let them whisper," Ellard snapped, the sharp edge of the Warden cutting through the room. Compared to his father and brother, it was widely known that Ellard was more forthcoming, but it didn’t mean he would take kindly to others’ insult towards himself or his chosen heir.
Torrhen flinched. He had no choice but to bow his head under the rebuke of his good-brother.
"Let them look into her eyes and tell me she is not a Stark”, continued the current Warden of the North. “She has the winter in her, Torrhen. She does not need a nursery to keep her warm when she has the blood of the First Men and the heat of these walls. She stays with me." It was clearly apparent that Ellard was proud of his daughter, even if she hadn’t done much for the moment. It was impossible to hide his affection towards the last remnant of his wife and the future of his House.
Harlan, Alys’s twin, moved closer only after a silent nod of permission from his liege lord. He looked at the babe, the creature that had traded his sister’s life for its own, and felt a jagged ache. Still, he kept his voice hushed and deferential. "She is so small, my Lord," he whispered in genuine wonder. He didn’t remember Rodrik being so small when he had been born. "I only meant... Alys was so full of life. She always seemed so much larger than life. It is strange to see her legacy contained in such a scrap of a thing."
"She is more than a scrap, Harlan," Ellard said, his tone slightly annoyed even though his expression softened slightly as he looked down at his daughter. "She doesn't cry much, which worries me. Thankfully, Maester Kennet has assured me that she was in perfect health,” he grudgingly admitted. He had never appreciated the presence of the Maester before the birth of his daughter and it was mainly because Kennet seemed to agree with his choice of heir. For all that he was a follower of the Seven, he wasn’t dismissive towards the Old Gods as any other Maester would have been. “She sits through every petition, every raven and every bickering dispute I settle. She will know the faces of her subjects before she knows the taste of pottage. She will be the Lord they deserve."
‘And the first woman who will rule Winterfell if the Old Gods are good,’ grimly thought Rickard. He might not appreciate the fact that his daughter seemed to be forgotten in the excitement, but his liege lord was clearly doing everything he could to protect her legacy.
Young Rodrik craned his neck from behind his brothers, his face twisted with awe. "Does she... does she look like my sister, my Lord?"
Ellard shifted slightly, allowing the fourteen-year-old a glimpse of the infant's sleeping face. "The Karstarks and Starks share the same roots, lad. We’ll not know which branch she takes from until she grows. But the eyes... those are the eyes of the Winter Kings."
Rickard Karstark did not sit until Ellard gestured toward the chair. Even then, he decided to sit on the edge of it. His posture reflected the weight of his duty. He glanced towards the ledger, then at the babe and finally at his Liege.
"You truly mean to hold to the letter, then," Rickard said. His voice was heavy with the gravity of the choice the Lord of Winterfell was making. "No second marriage ? No search for a son to 'secure' the Great Keep as tradition demands? You would risk the stability of the North for a girl ?"
He didn’t try to look at his sons: he knew how aghast they would look at the fact he was calling his granddaughter and their niece a mere girl, as if she was not from two branches who literally came from Winter Kings that had ruled the North for eight-thousand years.
"I have my heir," Ellard stated, leaving no place for negotiation. His hand tightened almost imperceptibly around the bundle he was carrying. "Alys was my heart, Rickard and I’ll not put another woman in her bed to satisfy the vanity of lords who fear a woman's rule. Frigga is the North. I will spend every breath I have left ensuring that by the time I join Alys in the crypts, there isn't a man from the Neck to the Wall who dares question her right to lead."
Torrhen looked at his father, then dropped his gaze to the floor. "Karhold is yours to command, my Lord. If the Umbers want to glower, they will find our spears between them and your heir. We are your men, now and always."
Rickard Karstark shifted his weight as his leather breeches creaked against the chair. The transition from the grief of his daughter’s death to the cold reality of the southron court was a jagged one, but a Lord of the North could not afford the luxury of prolonged silence.
"The ravens from White Harbor bring sour news, my Lord," Rickard rumbled, his voice low and heavy. "King Jaehaerys has finally found a use for his remaining bargaining chip. Princess Viserra is to be wed to Lord Manderly. A girl of thirteen namedays shackled to a man with more chins than the Mander has fish." Rickard couldn’t help but spat into the rushes. His gesture was blunt and final. "Manderly is fat on Southron gold and Southron ways. He’ll drape her in velvet and call it a victory for the Faith, but the girl is a Targaryen. She has the blood of the dragon and the vanity of a queen, which was the title she was surely looking for. She’ll find no joy in a husband who can barely climb his own stairs, let alone a horse."
Ellard Stark didn't look up from the babe at his chest, but Rickard saw the subtle tightening of the Warden’s jaw. "Manderly is a loyal man," Ellard replied, even though his tone was clipped. "But he is a man of the Seven and he eats at the King’s table more often than he hunts in the Wolfswood. The Targaryens are weaving a web, Rickard. They seek to plant their daughter like seeds in our soil, in the hopes of turning the North into another garden for the Iron Throne."
"It is an insult to the Old Blood," Rickard spat, his mind flashing to the golden-haired Targaryen girl who was said to be the most beautiful of the King’s fourteen children. For a fleeting and traitorous second, a thought flickered through his mind: if his granddaughter had not been named the uncontested heiress of Winterfell—if she were just a girl to be bartered—she might have been the one to wed a Prince. Perhaps one of young Baelon’s boys since neither were in line for the Iron Throne. But he brushed the thought away as if it were a biting midge.
No.
Frigga was a Stark of Winterfell. She was the stone of the castle, not a piece of furniture to be sent to the Red Keep to satisfy a King’s whim.
"And it is not just the marriages," Ellard continued as he finally looked up. His grey eyes were hard as flint. "I have more issue with Septon Barth: the King’s Hand spends more time with his nose in dusty scrolls of 'magic' and dragon-lore than he does with his prayers. Jaehaerys listens to him as if the man were one of the Seven themselves. I do not like the shadow he casts. I care not for what they call him in the South. Here, we call a man who meddles in things he does not understand a fool or a threat."
The Northerners weren’t stupid: they were acutely aware of how the rest of the Seven Kingdoms perceived them. Nothing more than barbarians and tree-worshippers, and yet, they were still the largest kingdom the Iron Throne ruled over.
Rickard nodded grimly. The North had little love for the Septons, and even less for the incestuous sovereigns who sat upon a throne of melted swords. They tolerated the Targaryens because dragons were a fire that could not be quenched by common steel, but the memory of the King Who Knelt was a scab that never truly healed.
His mind wandered to the legends whispered around every holdfast in the North. The tales of Brandon Snow: the only bastard brother of King Torrhen. He thought of the three weirwood shafts Brandon had supposedly carved. They were rumored to be ancient and soaked in the magic of the First Men and intended to strike the dragons from the sky or while they slept. Torrhen had forbidden it, thus choosing the safety of his people over the glory of a bloody field.
‘What if he had let the bastard loose?’ Rickard wondered inwardly. If Brandon Snow had possessed the aim of the Dornishmen who had brought down Meraxes, perhaps there would be no 'Warden' of the North. Perhaps there would still be a King. He looked at Ellard, then at the tiny silver-eyed babe and felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the draft.
"They have five children to marry off and a few other grandchildren, my Lord," Rickard said, his voice dropping to a cautious whisper. He didn’t dare mention Prince Baelon who had recently lost his wife. "Viserra is only the beginning. Between the King’s Hand and the Queen’s matchmaking, they will try to bind every Great House to their dragon-blood. We must be wary: the North is large, but the sky is open."
Ellard’s hand moved, his large thumb tracing the line of Frigga’s jaw. "Let them come," he said, his voice a promise of ice. "Let them bring their Septons and their golden daughters. The North remembers who we are. And I will make sure she remembers, too."
A heavy silence settled over the room, the kind that preceded a burial. For all their talk of how the North remained widely independent, every man in the solar was acutely aware of the invisible chains that bound them; should King Jaehaerys command a marriage, they could no sooner say 'no' than they could command the sun not to rise in the south.
The tension in the solar was thick enough to choke on, a suffocating mixture of mourning and the hard reality of Northern politics. Rickard Karstark stood up. He could feel his joints popping like dry kindling as he walked toward the hearth. His heavy traveling cloak was still dusted with the white frost of the road, the fabric stiff and smelling of the freezing North, but his mind was elsewhere.
"A Winter Child," Rickard rumbled, the words feeling like stones in his throat. He looked once again at the tiny bundle in Ellard’s arms. "A massive blizzard in the height of the year. The smallfolk are already whispering of it, Lord Stark. They say the Old Gods sent the frost to herald her arrival."
All things considered, it was a boon to her. There was nothing more respected in the North than the Old Gods and one who could survive the cold months of winter.
Harlan who was the eldest at one-and-twenty, stepped forward to stand beside his father. His face was set in a mask of Karstark iron. Still, his eyes betrayed a deep and simmering resentment toward the "Gift" the South had taken from them years prior. "They say she was born with the ice of the First Men already in her veins. I’ve seen enough winters to know that nature doesn't stir like that for just any birth. Whether it’s a coincidence or not, we shall never know."
Rickard couldn’t help but notice the way his goodson’s brows furrowed and promised himself he would seek out more information once his sons weren’t alongside them.
Torrhen, eighteen and Alys’s twin, kept his hand tight on the pommel of his dagger. His voice was a bitter hiss and his grief was sharper and more erratic than his brother's. "Perhaps the North needs to change. The Targaryens take our land for their 'New Gift' to the Watch, and we are expected to smile while our borders shrink and our granaries empty. Queen Alysanne smiled and patted our heads, and we lost the best of our grazing lands for her 'charity'."
She knew nothing of the North and had made decisions instead of the Warden, and had patted herself in the back and considered herself wise. It had left a sour taste in the mouth of every single Northerner, and yet, they had been unable to do anything against it.
Rickard grunted, the sting of the New Gift still a fresh wound in the Northern pride. "He speaks the truth, my Lord. You’ve tightened your grip on the remaining lands, and rightly so. But we are a pack being cornered by the dragon's shadow. The Glovers and the Umbers are restless. They see the Crown meddling in our laws and our soil, and now they see a girl-child as the only thing standing between the Starks and a Southern marriage."
"I am the Stark in Winterfell and I still have many years ahead of me," Ellard replied, his voice a low, warning growl that made young Rodrik, barely fourteen and still wide-eyed, straighten his back. "The New Gift was a theft wrapped in pleasanteries, but I will not let them take another inch. My daughter will be raised on the scent of the wolfswood and the hard truth of what we’ve lost. She will not be a 'gift' to anyone."
Frigga Stark I
From her position within the shadow-cat fur, Iolanthe, now Frigga as she tried to remind herself countless times, watched the world through the narrow and unfocused lens of infancy. The solar was a cavern of sensory extremes. She could feel the sharp and metallic tang of ink, the dry scent of old parchment as well the overwhelming heat radiating from the man who held her.
In the beginning, the world had been nothing but a terrifying blur of high-contrast shadows but after a few weeks, the fog had begun to lift. It had gotten easier to see her surroundings and the indistinct shapes had sharpened into the heavy stone arches of the solar and the flickering orange glow of the hearth. She could finally track the movement around her and the way the light caught the silver of her father's signet ring.
She could feel the tension in the room. It was literally a physical weight that pressed against her skin and made her shiver, even though she wasn’t cold at all. The Karstark men, her kin apparently, stood like statues of iron, their presence a wall of grief and repressed fury. Yet, it was her father’s heartbeat, steady and slow against her ear, that commanded the space. She couldn’t help but relax in his hold: she had never felt this safe in her entire life. It was weird since she probably had more power than anyone had in this room, but perhaps that was the way a child would behave towards their father. It was truly something she had never known before.
In her first life, as the Girl Who Lived, she had been a symbol. Nothing more than a weapon to be polished and pointed by men who spoke of the 'Greater Good' while keeping her in a cupboard for the first eleven years of her life. James Potter and Sirius Black had loved her, of that she had no doubt. They were progressive men of a magical world where a witch’s blood carried as much weight as a wizard’s. But they had been soldiers in a collapsing world, and their love had been a frantic and desperate thing. They had never stopped to think of the conséquences of their actions nor how it would impact their heir.
This was different.
She felt a strange and blooming warmth in her chest that had nothing to do with the hearth. She recognized the game Ellard was playing. He wasn’t as tactical as Albus Dumbledore had been and his motives here were starkly different.
Ellard wasn't just being a doting father, which had been a point of contention between him and his banner as of late. By keeping her strapped to his chest while he settled grain disputes and stared down surly bannermen, he was forcing the North to swallow the reality of her existence. He was 'acclimatizing' them, sooner rather than later and ensuring that by the time she could walk, the sight of her in the councils of men would be as unremarkable as the stone walls themselves.
He is building a fortress around me, she realized, her infant mind struggling to contain the sheer scale of his defiance. The first time she had realized his intent, she had been unable to interrupt her weeping. People had loved her, she knew, but they had never protected her.
When a lord she had come to know as Lord Glover had dared to suggest with a voice full of patronizing concern that the 'little lady' belonged in the soft warmth of a nursery, she had felt the rumble of her father's chest before he even spoke.
"She is a Stark in Winterfell," Ellard had replied, his voice a flinty snap that brooked no argument. "She will one day be the Stark of Winterfell. She may as well learn the sound of her people's voices and the hard truth of a Lord’s work. She will not be raised on milk and lullabies alone."
It was a balm to a soul that had been a pawn for far too long. But it was the quiet revelation of his personal sacrifice that truly shook her. Through the muffled conversations of the maids and the heavy silences of the Karstarks, she had pieced together the truth. Ellard had known other wives who were mainly as well as women lost to the biting teeth of previous winters, but Alys had been his heart. His one true love. By refusing to wed again, he wasn't just mourning. He was literally closing the door on any potential 'trueborn sons' who might one day rise to challenge her claim.
He was effectively ending his own line of happiness to secure her seat. He was choosing her, a daughter who had cost him the woman he loved, over the stability of a male heir.
Iolanthe shifted her small and heavy head and pressed her cheek harder against the rough wool of his doublet. She couldn't speak and couldn't even reach out to touch his face, but she felt her magic pulse in a silent and fierce vow.
‘I will not let this be for nothing’, she thought as the infant fog began to pull her back toward sleep. ‘You are holding the world back for me, Father. I will make sure it was worth the cost. I will turn these cold stones and frozen fields into something this world has never seen.’
The dormant magic of the castle seemed to echo her, a faint thrum in the foundations that suggested the 'Winter Child' was not the only thing in Winterfell that was starting to wake up.
The silence that followed Torrhen’s vow of fealty was not empty. For Frigga, it was teeming with a life the men in the room were blind to. As she lay tucked against the steady and rhythmic drum of Ellard’s heart, her consciousness drifted away from the political posturing and deeper into the very bones of the fortress.
To her heightened and magical senses, literally honed by a century of mastery and thousands of years of careful breeding by the House of Potter and House of Black, Winterfell was not merely a pile of granite and mortar. It was a living and breathing entity that deeply reminded her of her beloved Hogwarts. She could feel the geothermal water rushing through the walls, channeled from the hot springs deep beneath the earth. It wasn't just a clever bit of engineering by some long-dead builder, but rather a circulatory system. Beneath the stone, the conduits for the hot springs acted as a primitive and leaking circulatory system. She could feel the friction of the heat where the ancient runes had worn thin. She could also feel a grating and low-frequency thrum that vibrated through her father's chest and into her own bones, whispering of a power that had forgotten how to roar. It would still last several centuries, as it had done for eight millenia, but that was still something she had to work on as soon as she had the freedom to do so.
In her mind, she couldn’t help but compare it to the Great Hall at Hogwarts in the dead of night, during those rare hours when the students were deep in their dormitories and the enchanted ceiling reflected a silent and starless sky. It was that specific stillness when the candles were extinguished and the castle’s ancient enchantments were dialed back to a low and rhythmic simmer, only waiting for a spark to wake them. She had to admit that before becoming Headmistress, she had never bothered to learn about the inner workings of the castle. It was home and for the longest time, that explanation had been enough.
And then, the Battle of Hogwarts had happened.
It was safe to say that she had grown fonder of the castle after that. For how couldn’t she love every inch of it when the structure itself had battled alongside them in order to drive out the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters? Seeing it destroyed in the aftermath had been a wound in her soul that hadn’t quite healed; which might have explained why she had made Hogwarts her permanent residence afterwards.
Winterfell wasn't just rock from what she could gather. It was a giant, silver-etched battery that had been slowly draining for eight thousand years. For centuries, the lack of a magically active Stark, a true conduit for the blood of the First Men, had left the runes in the foundation to wither into a state of starvation. To her, the potential was staggering but the spark was missing. Even though Frigga couldn’t see the Runes, she could grasp the magic behind them. Whoever had built Winterfell had been thorough, she had to admit it.
As a Master of Ancient Runes, the ‘errors’ in the stone were an itch she couldn't scratch. She could sense the inefficiencies in the heat distribution where the ancient carvings had been chipped by time or ignored by renovators who had forgotten their true purpose. There were wards in the deep dark that were flickering like dying embers, and ‘leaks’ in the ley lines that made her inner scholar burn with a maddening intensity.
She wanted to reach out. She wanted to trace a tiny finger over the granite and whisper the activation incantations that would turn these drafty and grey halls into a sanctuary of eternal spring. She saw a thousand ways to improve this land and even more ways to harness the tectonic heat and the ambient magic of the weirwoods so that no child in the North would ever have to fear the night or the cold they were so accustomed to.
Where Hogwarts had been built for combat and protection of its students, she could feel that Winterfell had much of the same objectives – and yet, she couldn’t understand the reason why. Frigga could only curse her young age for the obstacles she was now facing. After all,
But for now, she was trapped. She was a Master of Death, a Headmistress, and a Hero and yet she currently struggled to coordinate the movement of her own thumb. Frigga couldn’t help but let out a soft sigh against the rough wool of Ellard’s doublet. The infant fog was closing in again, but her vow remained clear.
Still, Frigga couldn’t help but notice the absence of her uncle Benjen. He hadn’t been forthcoming towards her and he was seemingly displeased by the fact she had replaced him and his son as Heir to Winterfell, but he hadn’t acted out on it yet. It was truly a reminder that she needed to focus on creating her power base sooner rather than later.
Though her mind still burned under her thoughts, her small and treacherous body finally won its battle for rest. She drifted into the quiet dark of sleep, still entirely unaware of the royal shadow her grandfather and father were already beginning to fear.