Chương 31: Chapter 32: A Not-so-Short POV

Tyrion Lannister's POV The Wall had been, in the end, everything I'd hoped it would be — more, in fact, a wonder that could make even a man my size feel smaller still — and yet rather less than I'd wanted it to be, which I was coming to understand was the natural condition of most things a man travels a very long way to see with his own eyes.

Seven hundred feet of ice, older than memory, older than the Andals, raised, if the old legends were true, by the same giants and tree-singers said to have broken the Arm of Dorne beneath the sea thousands of years before — and I have generally found legends more believable than maesters and septons both. I had stood at its base and felt appropriately small, which is not a sensation I go out of my way to court; my own stunted body manages that well enough on its own.

Still, I enjoyed the wonder of it rather more than I expected to, in the way a man enjoys anything that reminds him he is still capable of being taught something new. The Watch itself had been a genuine disappointment, though an expected one.

Nine hundred men to hold three hundred miles of Wall, with only two other manned castles besides Castle Black to speak of, more than half of them too old, too young, or too broken to matter much in a real fight — or a real conversation, for that matter — given that some seven or ten brothers out of every ten had found their way here by way of the block, or a judge's mercy in place of it. The whole of it propped up by an idea of honor grander than its numbers, or its men's bearing, could presently support.

Lord Commander Mormont had been gracious enough, in the manner of a man too tired to be anything else, and Benjen Stark had been — well. Benjen Stark had been exactly what everyone always said of him, which is to say competent, quiet, and entirely uninterested in whether a Lannister found him interesting in return. I liked him rather more for it.

But it was the ride back that had done the most for me, I thought, watching the Wolfswood thicken around us as Winterfell drew nearer with each mile — not the Wall itself, but the company I'd kept coming home from it. Jon Snow rode a little ahead of me, dark and quiet in the way of a boy who had spent many years being told, gently or otherwise, that even though he was blood, he was somehow lesser for it.

Theon Greyjoy rode beside him, full of easy noise and performed indifference — the kind of young man who proclaims who he wants to be so often and so loudly that you begin to suspect he's still arguing the point with himself more than with anyone else. Both of them, I noticed, carried themselves like trained men — straight-backed even at rest, eyes taking in every detail without any apparent hurry.

They had trained a great deal with Robb Stark, I gathered, who, much like my own brother Jaime, seemed to have been born with a sword already in hand. I had gone North to go to the Wall expecting to find, at best, polite jailers dressed up as members of some old and slowly dying honorable order. Instead, somewhat to my own good fortune, I found two young men I rather liked as companions.

Jon had listened to me — actually listened, the rare and expensive thing so few people bother to spend on a dwarf — through three separate evenings of wine and half-drunk philosophy, and had offered, by the end of it, an opinion or two of his own that hadn't simply been calibrated to what he assumed I wanted to hear. Theon had tried, with the transparent enthusiasm of a much younger boy, to out-drink me twice, lost both times, and taken the losing with better grace than I'd expected of a Greyjoy.

I did not think either of them believed they truly knew me yet. I did think, and this was rarer, that they had each formed an opinion of me that was actually their own, rather than one inherited whole from the royal court, from Cersei's dinner-table cruelty, or from the songs about imps and monsters that followed me from castle to castle like a smell I couldn't wash off.

Robb Stark's doing, I suspected — a hand in nearly everything seemed to be a common occurrence at Winterfell, though I couldn't yet have said exactly how I knew it. Some men send their brothers off to watch a guest. Fewer send them off having quietly suggested the guest was worth actually getting to know. I turned the thought over once more, then let it go, looking ahead instead to seeing Myrcella again.

Winterfell soon rose out of the grey afternoon, and struck me at once as different from the castle I'd left some weeks before — not in its bones, which were unchanged, ancient and grim and exactly as forbidding as every Southern song about it promised, but in its feel, if I can call it that. A castle preparing to host a king wears one kind of face: scrubbed, ceremonial, faintly breathless with the effort of it. A castle simply going about its own business wears another.

This was the second face, and it was, I thought, the more honest of the two. Guards drilled in the yard with an intensity that had nothing performative in it. Carts moved with purpose rather than pageantry. Even the smoke from Wintertown's chimneys seemed to rise with less ceremony and more plain, unwatched industry — the bustle of ordinary work, boys and sons and cousins helping in the family trade. It was a novel sight altogether.

I found myself also admiring the stream diverted from the castle's hot springs to carry off the sewage, not unlike my own efforts, in another life, to do something about the smell of Casterly Rock and Lannisport both. By the time we passed through the main gates, though, I realized how tired I truly was.

So, after thanking my riding companions and Robb Stark for welcoming us all back — as well as his invitation to stay on a few days or weeks longer, to spend more time with my niece and read all the books Winterfell had to offer — I called for some wine and went to recover in my rooms.

I found Maester Luwin in his rookery two days after our return, ostensibly to send a raven — a small, harmless letter to an old correspondent at the Citadel, the sort of thing that raises no eyebrows and answers no real curiosity — and found Vayon Poole there ahead of me, the two of them bent over a ledger with the particular satisfaction of men who enjoy their own competence and rarely get to share it with anyone who'd appreciate it properly.

"Ah — Lord Tyrion," Luwin said, straightening.

"You'll forgive us. Steward's business. Vayon was telling me the new bathhouse in Wintertown is nearly finished."

"A bathhouse," I said, settling myself into the room's one chair built for a man my size, which I suspected Luwin had moved in here and kept for exactly this purpose.

"In the North. I confess I'd assumed cleanliness up here was considered a Southern affectation, like sarcasm, or teeth." Vayon, whom I was coming to understand possessed a very dry sense of humor buried under a very correct manner, allowed himself a small smile.

"Lord Stark and young Robb both have strong opinions on the matter," he said.

"They argue a clean household is a healthier one — fewer fevers in the winter months — and he hasn't been wrong about much else he's put his mind to, so we've stopped arguing the point."

"Lord Stark and young Robb," I said, "have strong opinions on a great many things, it seems." I meant it half as a jest and half as genuine fishing, and found myself, not for the first time since arriving in the North, quietly impressed with how much a man could learn simply by being underestimated in a room.

"The roads, I noticed, coming in. Better than anything south of the Neck, which I'll admit galled me somewhat to discover." This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Aye, the roads were Robb's notion, with Vayon's hand in the doing of it," Luwin said, warming to the subject the way old men do when a young one shows genuine interest rather than idle courtesy, as well as giving the chance to talk about a bright pupil.

"Trenches to drain off the worst of the wet, sawdust and crushed stone to bind the surface — nothing so clever it couldn't have been thought of before, though I've only ever seen the like done in the Riverlands, and only then after their worst floods. No one had thought to do it here, not at this scale, not with the labor properly organized for it. The pit houses in Wintertown, the same — half-sunk into the earth, easier to heat through the winter.

Lord Eddard and I were both skeptical at first, if I recall, thought it a strange use of the smallfolk's labor, but we came around once we saw the first few finished." I felt something shift, quietly, in the shape of the picture I'd been assembling since I first rode through Winterfell's gates.

I had assumed, without quite examining the assumption, that I was looking at Lord Eddard Stark's North — the Quiet Wolf, slayer of the Sword of the Morning, a lord of five-and-thirty years' experience, tempered by war and grief and a decade and a half of careful governance, the kind of competence a man accrues if he lives long enough and pays proper attention. It was, I realized, listening to Luwin's easy litany of Robb thought, Robb pushed for, Robb insisted, not entirely Eddard Stark's North after all.

Or not only his. A boy of fifteen no sixteen now, though you'd not have guessed he was so young by his look or build — had apparently spent the last two years quietly redesigning his father's holdings from the ground up, road by road, house by house, and had done it with enough tact that half the North seemed to have concluded it was simply the natural, inevitable good sense of the Starks, rather than the particular obsession of one very unusual young man.

"He speaks the Old Tongue too, I've noticed," I said, carefully light.

"To some of the guards. To you, once or twice, at supper."

"More than passably well, for the time he's put into it," Luwin said, a shade too smoothly.

"It started, I believe, from an old interest in his grandmother's people — the Starks still keep some family ties to the mountain clans, the Flints among them." Here, for the first time, something guarded crept into his voice, the careful vagueness of a man who has decided a subject is not, in fact, for casual discussion over a ledger.

"An interest in the old histories, mostly. Robb's always had a scholar's curiosity buried under the soldier's build, whatever the songs will make of him." I let it drop. A man learns, if he's clever and small and has spent his whole life going unnoticed or underestimated by people twice his size, exactly when a door has been closed politely rather than left merely ajar.

But I filed it away all the same, the way I filed away everything — a dying language, revived for reasons a maester wouldn't quite discuss freely, in a castle that had apparently spent two years quietly building better roads, better sanitation, and better-trained men than any Northern holdfast should reasonably need, even allowing for the excuse of training up a household for the melee to come. I thought, not for the first time, that I would very much like to know what Robb Stark thought was coming.

I did not ask Luwin. I did not ask Robb either, when I found occasion to sit with him some days later. However, I watched him rather more closely than I let show — turning over, as I did, the memory of that duel I'd witnessed weeks before: Jaime, sweating and grinning, matched blow for blow by a boy who shouldn't have had the size or the seasoning for it.

I had told myself then that it was simply a Northern prodigy, the kind every generation throws up once or twice — all promise, all the brutish strength the North is famous for, and no true depth behind it. I was no longer so certain. A boy who trains his men like that, mends his roads like that, revives a dying tongue like that, does not do it because he enjoys the exercise of it. He does it because some part of him already knows what it will cost him not to.

That frightened me rather more than I let show — a boy so quietly, actively focused on his house's future, when that house was already older than most the others in the Seven Kingdoms combined. I found, turning the thought over, that I rather admired it. Which brought me, as it always seemed to these days, back to my own family — and to the letter I still hadn't written but will in the coming days at least for Jamie and Myrcella.

I had meant to write to Cersei the very evening we returned — nothing of substance, only the ordinary performance of a brother keeping his sister informed of her daughter, the kind of letter that costs nothing and means less. I found I could not quite make myself begin it. Not from any real affection withheld, though I told myself otherwise more often than was strictly honest; I have never been a fool about my family's feelings for me, whatever hurt I still occasionally allow myself over the matter.

Cersei, Father, and most of the household had never loved me, and never would, and I have made a kind of peace with that the way a man makes peace with a chronic ache — not by curing it, but by learning its particular shape well enough to work around it. Jaime loves me, in his careless, unexamined way, the way he loves anything that amuses him and asks little in return.

My father tolerates me, audits me, occasionally uses me, and would, I suspect, mourn me with genuine grief should I die — in precisely the same way he'd mourn a valuable horse. And yet I found myself still wanting, absurdly, for some measure of whatever it was the Starks so plainly had, and my own family did not. It is a foolish, threadbare hope, and I have carried it my whole life regardless.

I do not think I truly wish to be loved by my family so much as I wish, some nights, to stop being quite so certain that I never will be.

I told myself it was because our stay had already stretched a week longer than strictly necessary, Robb's hospitality renewing itself as a truer reason to stay but, I suspected, it was simpler: I had found something rather more interesting to occupy my mind than my own family's indifference, and a clever man which I was does not often turn down that particular mercy when it's offered to him.

Myrcella found me in the library three days after our return, curled into a window seat with a book of Northern history nearly too heavy for her to hold properly.

"Uncle Tyrion, I haven't gotten to talk to you since you came back!" she said, and was in my arms before I could manage anything more dignified than an armful of niece.

"Did you truly see the Wall? Is it really as tall as they say?"

"Taller," I said, "and colder, and considerably less comfortable to climb than the songs let on. I brought you something for your trouble in missing it." I produced the small carved bear I'd bought from a Mole Town trader for entirely too many coppers, and watched her face do the particular thing a child's face does when a gift has actually been chosen with her in mind.

"Lord Robb's been very kind," she told me, with the grave seriousness of a girl determined to give a full and honest accounting.

"He showed me the godswood. He said I could read whatever I liked from the library, not just lady things."

"Did he," I said, and found the words coming out warmer than I'd quite planned, some quiet calculation already forming behind them that I did not examine too closely.

"Well. Then perhaps, while I'm here, you and I ought to read a few things together — and you can tell me what Robb's own favorites are. I find I'm rather curious about the man's taste in books, among other things." I did not write the letter that night either. Myrcella's borrowed history book remained open on my chest long after she had been sent off to bed by Catelyn Stark.

Instead, I found myself thinking about Robb Stark—the ease of his courtesy, his scholar's curiosity, his soldier's physique, the scar he bore, his way with animals, especially that Snow owel of his, and the now somewhat commonly spoken language of old tongue used softly over meals. I considered the roads, wells, and bathhouses that had somehow sprung from the restless mind of one very young man.

Over the years, I have studied clever men out of necessity more than out of genuine interest, and I flatter myself that I am rarely wrong about them for long. However, I still couldn't grasp the full measure of Robb Stark, and that alone was enough reason for me to want to understand him. Whatever Robb Stark truly was beneath that warm Northern exterior, I found myself wanting very much to figure it out—before, rather than after, he revealed it to me.