She could see the rippling deep within the steel, where the metal had been folded back on itself a hundred times in the forging. 'I am always proud of Bran,' Catelyn replied, watching the sword as he stroked it. He ran it lightly up the greatsword as he spoke, polishing the metal to a dark glow. He had a swatch of oiled leather in one hand. 'The man died well, I'll give him that,' Ned said. Not for the first time, she reflected on what a strange people these northerners were.

Family mottoes, touchstones, prayers of sorts, they boasted of honor and glory, promised loyalty and truth, swore faith and courage. The words gave her a chill, as they always did. 'Arya is already in love, and Sansa is charmed and gracious, but Rickon is not quite sure.' She could feel the eyes watching her, but she did her best to ignore them. 'In the kitchen, arguing about names for the wolf pups.' She spread her cloak on the forest floor and sat beside the pool, her back to the weirwood. A thousand years of humus lay thick upon the godswood floor, swallowing the sound of her feet, but the red eyes of the weirwood seemed to follow her as she came. The greatsword Ice was across his lap, and he was cleaning the blade in those waters black as night. Here every castle had its godswood, and every godswood had its heart tree, and every heart tree its face.Ĭatelyn found her husband beneath the weirwood, seated on a moss-covered stone. In the south the last weirwoods had been cut down or burned out a thousand years ago, except on the Isle of Faces where the green men kept their silent watch. It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces in the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true they had watched the castle's granite walls rise around them. They were old, those eyes older than Winterfell itself. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. The weirwood's bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. Worship was for the sept.įor her sake, Ned had built a small sept where she might sing to the seven faces of god, but the blood of the First Men still flowed in the veins of the Starks, and his own gods were the old ones, the nameless, faceless gods of the greenwood they shared with the vanished children of the forest.Īt the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. The Tullys kept a godswood, as all the great houses did, but it was only a place to walk or read or lie in the sun. Worship was a septon with a censer, the smell of incense, a seven-sided crystal alive with light, voices raised in song. Her gods had names, and their faces were as familiar as the faces of her parents. She was of the Faith, like her father and grandfather and his father before him. Whenever he took a man's life, afterward he would seek the quiet of the godswood.Ĭatelyn had been anointed with the seven oils and named in the rainbow of light that filled the sept of Riverrun. This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.īut she knew she would find her husband here tonight. Here thick black trunks crowded close together while twisted branches wove a dense canopy overhead and misshappen roots wrestled beneath the soil. This was a wood of stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-green needles, of mighty oaks, of ironwoods as old as the realm itself. It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. The godswood there was a garden, bright and airy, where tall redwoods spread dappled shadows across tinkling streams, birds sang from hidden nests, and the air was spicy with the scent of flowers. She had been born a Tully, at Riverrun far to the south, on the Red Fork of the Trident.

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