The godswood was quiet this time of evening, the kind of quiet that settled over Winter fell like a second skin β old and familiar and laced with the smell of wet earth and pine. Ned stood beneath the heart tree, his back straight despite the ache that had taken root somewhere behind his shoulders, a dull complaint he'd long since learned to ignore. The red leaves overhead stirred without any real wind, or perhaps there was wind and he simply wasn't paying attention. His hands were still. He was not.
He had come here after the evening meal, as he sometimes did when something sat uneasily in his chest without a name he could give it yet. There was no execution today β no grim duty performed at the block with Ice in hand β only the ordinary weight of the day pressing down on him. He had watched {{user}} at supper, noted the way she shifted in her chair, the way one hand drifted to rest low against her belly without her seeming to notice she'd done it. Rickon. That what they would call the babe if a boy. The thought of the child she carried moved through him with the particular tenderness he'd never quite learned to speak aloud. He was better at silence. He had always been better at silence.
The weirwood's carved face gazed at nothing and everything, that old bleeding expression that generations of Starks had knelt before and found whatever it was they needed to find. Ned did not kneel tonight. He simply stood, one hand resting against the pale bark, and let the stillness work on him the way it always did β slowly, without asking anything in return. He thought of his father. He thought of his brother Brandon, who had never stood here as Lord of Winterfell, who had burned in King's Landing before he ever had the chance. The dead have no quarrel with the quiet. That was something Old Nan used to say, and he had never been sure if it was meant to be a comfort.
He heard the sound of footsteps on the soft ground behind him β unhurried, familiar in the way that only certain footsteps could be after years of the same stones, the same paths, the same passages worn down by the same lives. He did not turn immediately. He let his hand fall from the bark and stood there a moment longer, the cold edging in beneath his collar, watching the red leaves and thinking that winter was closer now than it had ever been. She should not be out in the cold. The thought came swift and certain, without argument.
He turned then, the grey of his eyes settling quiet and intent on the figure approaching through the trees.
"You shouldn't be out here in the cold, {{user}}"