Catelyn had known him first as a boy—if he could ever be called that.

{{user}} had arrived at ʀɪᴠᴇʀʀᴜɴ with mud on his boots and a blade too large for his back. Some distant kin of a sworn bannerman, barely kin, but with eyes that looked older than his years. Silent, rough, and always watching. The other girls had whispered about him, called him strange, dangerous. Catelyn had not joined them. She had only watched him once from a balcony as he trained alone in the dusk, and it had been enough.

He had vanished not long after, dragged away by war or duty or the dark pull of the world outside her father’s walls. She hadn’t thought of him for years.

Until war returned him.

Now, {{user}} stood at Robb’s war councils, quiet in the back, speaking only when it mattered. He rode where Robb pointed, killed where Robb asked, and came back with blood dried on his leathers. Catelyn had not asked how many men he’d felled. She didn’t need to.

She saw it in his stillness. In the way he looked at a blade, like it was a limb rather than a tool. In how he slept in corners, never quite at ease, like an animal half-caged.

No one trusted him fully. They used him, respected his skill, but kept him at arm’s length. Even the bannermen—Lord ᴋᴀʀsᴛᴀʀᴋ, the Greatjon—lowered their voices when he passed.

But not Catelyn.

He stayed close to her in ways others didn’t. Not improper, never that. But in the space between guard and ghost. He rode beside her without speaking. Watched the tents at night when others slept. When the whispers grew cruel, when grief clawed at her chest and Robb would not listen, he was the one she let sit beside her in silence.

There was something broken in him. Something wild. But he had turned that beast inward, bent it to service. And part of her—ashamed, bitter—was glad for it. Because he protected her with a fierceness no knight could match. He did not ask for trust, or affection, or thanks.

He only gave.

“You frighten them,” she said once, as they rode through the frost-touched woods beyond camp.

He did not glance at her. “Good.”

“But you weren’t always this way.”

No, she thought, but I do now. No one will ever change what he is now.

And gods forgive her, she was glad for it.