Work Text:
“He did promise to take my breath away,” Arya said, and laughed. Ned had told her time and time again, while recuperating at Winterfell after the War, that no keep in the whole of Westeros could compare to Starfall. She had laughed then, too, sure that she had seen enough of the world that nothing short of Winterfell restored could take her aback, but she owed him a fistful of coin now.
“My lady?”
Bran had insisted on her keeping a guard with her, and Arya had not had the heart to once again argue her position as the deadliest woman in Westeros. Aron was a reasonable enough choice, only a year or two Arya’s senior and well over a foot taller than her. He was capable and he was quiet, so she did not mind accepting him as her sworn shield as much as she might another man, one who smugly assumed the sword she carried on her own hip was an indulgence on her brother’s part.
She suspected that Aron was spying on her on Bran’s behalf, but that did not worry her. Even if she had been caught up in a torrid affair, Bran had long ago made his peace with having no chance of using her or Sansa’s marriages for political gain, not that he would have. And if she became enmeshed in some plot against the Iron Throne, well, King’s Landing was nothing to the King in the North.
They had sailed from White Harbour, putting in at Braavos and then at Sunspear so as to avoid the Targaryen holdings, all the same. Dorne had retreated into his mountains and deserts just as firmly as the North had retired to her cold, and no one had the strength or hunger to try and put either one back under a unified rule - but that did not mean that a Stark could safely walk the streets that remained of King’s Landing.
Not that Arya ever wished to return to that city - not with her own face, at least.
But Starfall… Yes, she would allow Ned his pride. She would still reserve judgment until the building works were completed at Winterfell, but Starfall was not without its charms. She could understand his certainty, seeing the whirl of the tower above the bright white cliffs.
The seaward approach, at least, was worth talking about, like something from the illuminated books Sansa had ordered, with their brightly coloured panels that held Rickon’s attention long enough that they had been able to teach him to read. Arya loved the sea - the long road to White Harbour was the one thing she regretted about returning to Winterfell. She could hardly imagine how sweet it must be to wake every morning and look south across shining waves, unbroken to the horizon.
“The harbour is underneath the cliff, Aron,” Arya called back over her shoulder, not looking away from the cleft in the cliff face, a thin shadow against all the gleaming chalk. She could hardly believe that it was wide enough to take even her narrow little boat, but Ned had assured her that she would have safe passage all the way here, and she was inclined to believe him.
The Lord of Starfall was not in the harbour to greet her, but Arya did not mind. There was enough to look at here without Ned to distract her.
The vaulted ceiling of the covered harbour was high enough that Arya could not see its peaks - only the towering columns supporting it, disappearing into the distant gloom. It was impressive, comfortably holding the three ships that had docked before Arya’s own, but most impressive of all were the walls. They were covered all around with what looked like vivid paintings, but on closer inspection - once Arya had leapt from the prow and landed light as a cat on the dock - revealed themselves to be mosaics. She had not seen the like since her return from Essos, and was busy tracing her fingers across the cool tiles when someone cleared their throat at her shoulder.
“Lady Arya?” the girl - no more than twelve or so - said, her eyes very dark above the pale silk of her veil. “Lord Dayne bids you welcome to Starfall, and would invite you to take your time moving through the town. He offers you the use of these steeds, for yourself and your personal guard, and asks that you meet him in the Garden Hall of the castle when you are ready.”
The girl’s crown of tightly-curled hair was a magnificent sunset red, darker than Sansa’s, and held together in a puff atop her head by a lavender ribbon. Her neat tunic and breeches, under the sandsilk overgown that looked very much the same style as the one Arya had purchased in Sunspear, were lavender and white, too.
“You are one of Ned’s pages, then?” she asked, unable to keep from smiling. He had promised her that he would take girls as well as boys under his protection, that he would allow them all to train together and that he would take the best of them to squire, regardless of their sex. It was no small thing, even in Dorne, to take girls on with a mind to teaching them the sword - but Ned had done it. It was good to see that he could be trusted in something so grand as this, not only in the small things.
“Lord Dayne took many of us in, after the War,” she said proudly, “but only a few of us have already been elevated to squire , my lady.”
“Well, then squire,” Arya said, “I am Arya of House Stark, and it is a very great pleasure to meet you.”
The town below Starfall was pretty as a picture - small, yes, but busy with the harbour below, and unmarred by the War. They had been too far south for the Others, too far east for the Greyjoys, and too far below notice for everything else.
It was a relief, somehow. Everywhere else had carried so much grief that even Arya’s determination to move forward had wavered, but here, with the streets thick with laughing children and the merchants busy with their wares, it might be another life. Arya’s own scars feel diminished in the hot white sunlight, and she squints at every stall they pass, buying persimmons to share with Aron and the little squire, whose name, they were told, was Leandra.
“People were worried that Lord Dayne would come home from the War with funny ideas,” Leandra said, waving to someone across the square and forgetting herself a moment - good. Arya burned with envy to see children living normal childhoods, but it was good that the children had the freedom to laugh and play and wave to their friends without fear. “He was away in the north for so long that we were all certain he’d come home thinking he’d need a brace of sons as heirs, but he seems to have kept his head. That’s what my grandmother says, anyway.”
Ned had immaculately courteous manners, trained in King’s Landing and better for it than anyone else she knew, but she could not imagine that he would have been otherwise even without the lessons learned in the shadow of the Red Keep. It was in his nature to be kind and generous, to be attentive and polite - he had tried it with her, years and years before, and while that chance for friendship had been spoiled, it had sown the seed that had allowed them to grow close during and after the War.
Bran had teased her about it, once he’d relearned the knack, but Arya had paid him no mind. She was as entitled to Ned’s friendship as Sansa was to Tyrell’s letters, was she not?
“He was always sensible,” Arya agreed instead of saying any of that. “Even when I knew him as a child, he was sensible.”
And during the War, during those terrible nightmare slogs at the Wall, Ned had kept his head, hadn’t he? With Dawn slung over his back, near as tall as he was himself until he took that sudden jump, he had remained calm and clear-headed even as seasoned warriors had quivered and quailed. Everyone spoke well of him, even the reluctant Reachers, because he had stood firm and steady against all the grumkins and snarks that had come forth out of the Long Night.
He had been the only one brave enough, when she insisted that she had heard her brother’s voice in the trees, that Theon Turncloak hadn’t been mad before his sister brought him home, to turn once again into the heart of winter. Ned had bound his wounds too tight for comfort and taken to the road with her, when still they had only come so far south as Last Hearth, and he had carried Bran out of the dark while Arya struggled under Meera’s gaunt weight. The North loved the Starks, but they didn’t mind the Dornishman who’d saved their King either.
Aron pressed a neat little bunch of grapes into Arya’s hand, and when she turned her face away from Starfall’s towers, she knew he was smiling underneath his veil.
Little squire Leandra - who was twelve, and a scant two inches smaller than Arya - led them proudly up the sweeping steps to Starfall’s wide-open doors. There were stained glass windows on either side, tall, narrow things all in purple and lavender and indigo, scattered with silvery falling stars. Even the smooth slate of the roofs had a purplish tint where it caught the light, and Arya wondered how even famous Highgarden could compare to Starfall in the soft evening light.
“This way, my lady!” Leandra sang back over her shoulder, bounding deeper into the shade of the castle. It was cool now, dew settling like diamond dust on the citrus trees that lined the path from gate to door behind them, and Arya followed slowly after Leandra into the quiet.
Well, quiet - not quite. A little ways ahead, they could hear her bickering with some of the other children - “Get off, Dorian! Go away, Velanna!” - as she forged on ahead.
“It is a very fine keep,” Aron said quietly, two steps behind Arya. “As fine as Lord Dayne said, I think.”
“Very nearly,” Arya agreed, unpinning her veil so she could take a deep breath of the heavy scent of blossom that hung thick in the air. She had missed flowers at Winterfell - she could not love the winter roses anymore, not tainted by Targaryen princes as they so wholly were now, and little else with a sweet scent grew in the cold. They had done their best with the glass gardens, she and Sansa, but they had been given over almost entirely to food, and there had been no room for such frivolous things as pretty blooms. “I wonder if we have arrived in a particularly good season, that everything looks so fine.”
“I told you that Starfall does not suffer the seasons as Winterfell does, and still you do not believe me, even now that you can see it for yourself.”
And here at last was the Lord of Starfall, the Sword of the Morning himself. Plainly dressed in white shirt and dark breeches, his hair ruffled and his elbows dirty, Ned Dayne was as handsome now as he had been combed and coiffed during his last meal at Winterfell, and Arya felt pink with smiling.
“I have not even been here a full day,” she complained, striding across to accept his embrace. “Allow me at least a week before demanding my judgement.”
The children - none older than thirteen, by Arya’s guess - were all crowding nearby, whispering and giggling, and Arya cheerfully ignored them as she looped her arm through Ned’s.
“Alright then, my lord,” she said, gesturing toward the towering windows that looked down across the dimming gardens, lit here and there by pretty glass lanterns. “Show me your domain.”
“I swear to you now, my lady, that you will enjoy this almost as much as I.”
Ned was such easy company that the days passed Arya by without notice.
She had expected the heat to be harder to tolerate than it was, but the breezes that blew spring-sweet off the sea kept it bearable - even at noon, if she keeps to the shade, it is better to be outside than in.
At Winterfell, they had kept inside aside from training and praying - Bran’s chair had prevented him from leaving the keep at all, until clever Beth Cassell had suggested runners for his wheels. Summer was always happy to wear a harness for Bran’s benefit, when they had to go further than the main gate, but it had freed them all from the guilt of leaving them behind, and so they had begun to venture down into the town more. The physical work of helping put the winter town back together had done Rickon good, because there had been no avoiding speaking in Common when he was elbow-deep in clearing stones and rubble alongside the other boys.
People had returned to the winter town, after the War. So many had been gathered in Winterfell when the dead began to walk, and they had fled to seek their families in the immediate aftermath - who could blame them? Had Arya not done just the same? But they had come back, some alone and brokenhearted, some with children on their hips or greybeards in their carts, and all eager to work. All eager to see Winterfell restored.
Starfall, unscarred as it was, felt at once alien and like a near-forgotten dream. Arya remembered how the winter town was when she was a child, before Robert Baratheon and all his Lannisters came to call, and it was… Not this, exactly. The North in all her sparse, bare-faced beauty would never be so comfortable as Starfall, nestled in the valley of the Torentine and lush with life. But the people, before the War, had been much the same - people always were, in Arya’s experience, so long as they were left to live their lives. Marketplaces all had the same cadence. She had never met a seamstress or tailor who didn’t squint around a mouthful of pins, or a blacksmith who didn’t emerge from their workshop with a hand over their eyes, even into the night. Nowhere she had gone had revealed anything strange or new about people - some were good, some were bad, and most were somewhere in between.
What she liked about Starfall - and what she had started to see at Winterfell, in the months before she finally accepted Ned’s invitation to visit his beloved home - was that the people seemed happy. This was their home, and they belonged here, and they were pleased to be here.
“They don’t seem to hate you,” she said to Ned, knocking her hip against his as they walked through the marketplace. Veiled and robed though they were, the same as everyone else, Ned’s height and gleaming-fair hair stood out in any company. Everyone they passed knew well who he was, which meant of course that they knew who Arya was - not that her accent did not give her away every time she opened her mouth. “You’re doing well, you know.”
“My aunt had them well trained even before I came home,” he said, his eyes crinkling merrilly. “She kept them all in hand while I was away at Blackhaven, and again when I took Dawn and fled my responsibilities to play with swords.”
“When you took Dawn and became a great hero of the realm, you mean?”
“When I abandoned my aunt to keep our people for another two years, while I took advantage of your family’s generosity and avoided anything that even sounded like it involved duty,” he said, offering her his arm when they came to the sloping road that led down to the harbour. It branched off a little ways down, and the smaller path led down to the beachy cove the waterfall the Torentine made as it hurled itself into the sea. Ned had sent some of the pages down there to cool off, when he had found them arguing under the peach trees, and Arya had been curious all week since.
She hadn’t wanted to trouble Ned, though, and had asked the squires - six of them, two girls and four boys who all looked at Ned as though he hung the moon - if she could accompany them when they took their half-day to go swimming, as they apparently did every week. Some of them had told Ned about her interest, though, and so here she was, on Lord Dayne’s right arm while over his left was a pretty woven basket full of food and a pretty blanket.
So many things at Starfall were pretty, from the dainty pattern of starflowers embroidered into the linens on Arya’s bed all the way to its lord.
"Once I came home,” she said, swaying closer to Ned to catch more of the breeze, “I was sure that I could find joy in doing my duty. I have, I think. My brothers and sister all lost something of themselves after our parents were killed - I did too, I will not pretend otherwise. But we owed it to our parents and to our brother to find ourselves, to find one another, and we did. We owed it to them and to ourselves and to everyone who kept faith with our House to restore Winterfell, and we are doing that. But I do wonder…”
“What more there is?” Ned asked, head bowed close to hers. “I understand that. When I was still with Lord Beric and- the others,” and the pause would be invisible if she hadn’t been expecting it, “my duty was to keep him as safe as I could, and then it was to try and balance the bloodlust of the rest, once he was gone. But as soon as the chance came to abandon them, I did. I knew that my duty to Lord Beric could not be all that I was. My fate was not bound to his, not to the end of things.”
“Is this your sly way of saying I need not tie myself to Winterfell forever, my lord?”
“I would never presume to tell you anything , Arya,” he said, but his eyes were serious below the bright fall of his fringe. “But I may be so bold as to suggest things, occasionally.”
“You are a terrible man, who spent far too long with all those hateful southron fools,” she said, which returned him to laughter and high spirits. She much preferred that to his lordly face and direct focus, for when he was looking at her so intently there was no avoiding him.
She did not want to avoid him. She wanted to avoid him. She did not know what she wanted, even though she did.
Ned seemed to see something of her troubles, and only tugged her a little closer against his side as they stepped into the shadow of the slowly-spiralling path. The thunder of the waterfall was louder here, and as they came back into the light it was all splintered into rainbows, scattering colour across Ned’s hair and her silver-pale robe, and Arya wished to stay there forever.
“I am a terrible man,” he said, drawing them to a halt, tucked away between the spray of the waterfall and the white cliff face. From above, the curve of the path would hide them, and from below, they would be invisible against all the pale, and Arya was seized with a sudden urge to pull down Ned’s veil, to see his handsome face. “But not in any way that matters.”
“Nothing that came from King’s Landing can be otherwise,” she said, trying to tease and hearing it clang to the ground before them, flat.
“Lucky me that I spent no more than a moon’s turn in that accursed city, then,” he said, his voice very tender. “I was at Blackhaven for a long while, long before I set foot outside the Marches, you know. And then, once Lord Beric was sent to deal with the Mountain, I turned my back on King’s Landing and never returned.”
And of course, once he said that, she knew it to be true. She had held Ned as a creature born of King’s Landing, an aberration by that hellhole’s standards, a rare good man coming from that infestation of Lannisters. It had made it easier to deny his invitations, to ignore the steady line that carried through every one of his letters, to undermine the quality of his affection for her - and hers for him.
“Dearest Arya,” he said, and leaned all the way down to brush his lips to her temple, to rest his nose in her hair where it peeped below her headscarf for just a moment. “I wish- you know what I wish. But we will leave that for now. Come, the cove is beautiful, and you have not even tried the sugar melons yet. Come.”
“You know that I must go home,” she said, curled warm and lazy under Ned’s arm. The gardens at Starfall were full of little alcoves and hide-away corners, but her favourite - the best she had discovered in the six weeks she had spent here with Ned - looked down over the lemon and lime trees, and held within it a broad bench that swung on heavy chains. She liked to tuck her feet up underneath her and lean into Ned’s side, watching the sun set with the bright smell of citrus and the warm smell of him in her nose.
“I know,” he said, his face hidden against her hair. It was still short, far shorter than Sansa’s, but it curled thick and heavy around her ears, and seemed to suit Ned well enough. “I understand, even.”
“But someday,” she said, slipping her hand under his soft linen shirt to feel the scars left behind by wounds she had sewn shut with her own hands, terrified of the creatures that had clawed him half to pieces and by the sudden chance of losing him in equal measure. She knew Ned’s scars better than she did her own, for she had tended him herself in those strange weeks, first at Last Hearth and then at Winterfell. She could map the last weeks of the War and the victorious return to the world using Ned’s scars.
“Someday,” he agreed, one of his hands slipping under the back of her shirt, resting over her hip. His hands were warm and calloused, and near as familiar to her as his scars, or the soft fall of his hair over his brow, or his smiling dawn-dark eyes. “Starfall suits you, my lady. I think you would suit it, too.”
Someday, Winterfell would be restored. Bran would wed some Northern girl - a Manderly, like as not, for none had done so much to fund their restoration as Lord Manderly, and taking his daughter to wife would repay the debt quicker than any coin could. Rickon would too, and be given some keep for his own, a place to raise unruly brats who would help him understand all their many frustrations with him since his return. Sansa would marry one of her suitors - Tyrell, of course, she would marry Highgarden and thrive among the roses.
And Arya? Arya had not dared to think of what might come, once Winterfell was restored, for that had seemed such an impossible thing when Ned had first asked her to come south with him, when he was leaving Winterfell all that time ago.
“When the outer wall is repaired,” she said, shifting to look Ned in the eye, and for once, his serious gaze did not worry her. “I will write to you the moment the final stone is laid.”
Someday, she would come south again. Someday, she would stay.