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She didn’t mind that he had been with another woman. It was to be expected--a man rides off to war and is gone for the better part of the year; it would be cruel to begrudge him the comfort of some whore’s bed. No. She didn’t mind.
The trouble was that he clearly had loved the girl.
He was a stoic man, her Ned. But when he looked at Jon his face softened like thawing ice. A look of pure, undiluted longing. He ached for her, the girl who had given Jon those sad brown eyes.
And Jon himself was another thing. Following her Robb like a shadow. Sleeping beside him in the nursery--in the nursery! This boy who was half whore or farmer’s daughter or camp follower, pressed up against her son on storming nights, wrapped in wolfskin and bear hides. And Robb loved him, too, loved him the way Ned loved him. They were never without each other, Robb and Jon. Though Robb was older, the two boys quickly grew to be of the same height. Her only consolation was that her Robb was broad-shouldered and wide-chested, a proper Northman, while Jon was slender as a willow-switch.
“But it’s always a fair match when they wrestle,” Bran once explained to her. “Robb is stronger, but Jon is quicker.”
She couldn’t stand it. He sat there in the fine clothes of a highborn son, ate the fatted geese and deer they had slaughtered, taught Arya how to skip stones and Rickon how to scratch his name out with a quill.
“Robert’s bastards sleep on the streets in Flea Bottom,” she had told her husband one night. And Ned had shot her a look of warning so quelling that she felt it again: yes, certainly, Ned had loved this girl. Perhaps loved her still. Loved her more than his own wife. Loved Jon more than Robb. Jon, who spoke little and slept less. Who had the eyes of a hundred-year-old man and the high, prominent cheekbones of a stranger who had kissed her husband and lain with him and haunted him all these years.
She had hit him once, Jon, not the gentle chiding pats that she gave her children but an open-handed slap, the like of which she had not delivered since girlhood. She couldn’t remember, now, what he had done, but she does remember that the right side of his face was red for a day and then purple for a week and that Ned was furious.
“We swore we’d not lay hands on our children,” he’d reminded her.
“I did not lay a hand on any of our children, Ned.”
That had quieted him for a moment, but later he had said, quietly now, “Cat, I shouldn’t have expected you to love the boy. But you must promise me that you’ll protect him. When--if--the time comes.”
She had frowned. “He doesn’t need--”
“Cat, someday when we’re so old that it won’t matter any longer, I’ll tell you. But for now...Jon is greater danger than I could ever have imagined. Perhaps it would have been kinder to kill him in the cradle.”
She had never seen her husband cry. Not over the murder of his brother and father and sister. Not when the nameless little girl between Bran and Rickon died before she lived. But now, over a woman who is not Catelyn, he wept silently.
Someday never came.