(POV Elias)
Snow sifted down through the godswood in lazy flakes, clinging to the red leaves like dried blood caught in frost. I knelt before the heart tree and let the cold bite my knees. The roots under the snow thrummed the way they always did when the Old Gods were listening—low, steady, patient as winter.
I'd fasted the past day and a half, only consuming water and a heel of bread, nothing more. Not to impress anyone. Just to still the body so the mind held steady. The vault below the roots waited for me: wolf-amber, hound-gold, the faint white chaff of hare and squirrel, a single distant crimson I wouldn't touch.
"Two," I said to the face in the bark. "No more. A matched pair for hunting and guarding. Loyal to me. Loyal to the North."
The weirnet opened when I closed my eyes. Not a place, more like a pressure behind the eyes that wasn't pain. The dark beneath the roots lit itself with floating orbs. I drew two wolf amber spheres pulsing with the memory of snow and teeth and two prime hounds, steady, disciplined. The similarity made the path smooth; I didn't need to crush incompatible lines into one another. Wolves and dogs were family already.
I split them cleanly.
Male: two parts wolf, one part hound—mass, endurance, threat.
Female: one part wolf, one part hound—speed, hearing, edge.
Mana flowed out of me in a controlled thread. Not a flood. Floods drown. I could feel the exchange rate in my bones—soul-value set against the weight of what I was shaping. No human soul. Not for this. This didn't need it, and I wouldn't spend it cheaply. The Old Gods pressed back just enough to test my hands. I kept pressure even, made the bones first—shoulders broader for the male, chest deeper; the female's ulna lighter, metatarsals longer for quick footwork. Lungs expanded, larynx tightened for a low warning growl that carried far but didn't echo. Coats grew in with thick underfur and guard hairs that shed water; a crest along the spine stiffened with cold.
I layered instinct over structure. The wolves' drive to harry and circle. The hounds' discipline to hold a line, to break off at a whistle, to remember.
The first form took. The second followed it like a shadow finding its source.
I opened my eyes to a male and a female standing in the shallow bowl I'd scooped in the snow. The male's coat was iron-grey with a black-dusted ruff and a faint silver stripe along the spine that caught what little light there was. He stood like a door with steady unblinking amber eyes. The female was smoke and cream marbled into camouflage, smaller through the chest, longer through the legs, ears twitching to a rhythm I couldn't hear. Her eyes were brighter, constantly moving. Both watched me with a quiet that wasn't submission; it was attention.
"Come," I said, and set my hands to their skulls. The bond closed with the soft pressure of an invisible clasp. Heat ran from their crowns into my palms and then back again—recognition, imprint, obedience without fear.
"Alpha," I told the male. "Shade," I said to the female.
Alpha's tail wagged once, heavy, like a slow pendulum. Shade flicked an ear toward a sound outside the godswood and then dismissed it.
No one else saw the shaping. No one ever would.
I stood and led them out into the white snow.
(POV Ned)
From the covered walk above the inner ward, I watched my eldest lead two great hounds out of the godswood and into the yard. I'd heard from the stewards that dogs had been bought or bartered in ones and twos from the Rills, from Bear Island, even from a trapper east of the Long Lake. Elias hadn't asked me for a coin. He'd used his small allowance, if the ledger was true, and traded pelts from his hunts.
The North could always use good dogs. But these were different. Broader through the shoulder than our kennel dogs, thicker in the foreleg, but they moved quietly—heads low, ears up, eyes forward. They didn't strain at the lead because there was no lead, and yet they heeled like sworn men.
Elias did not make speeches. He didn't strut the way boys strut when they have new toys. He walked, and the dogs watched what he watched. There were moments—only moments—when I saw Ashara in him: the stillness about the eyes, the way he looked past a thing to its edge. He'd asked me, months past, to allow certain… measures in the kitchens and wellrooms. Boil the water. Hands are to be washed before making bread. It was odd requests for a boy of his age, but they'd cost little coin, and fewer fevers were a blessing I wouldn't question.
Catelyn had asked questions. She saw secrets where I saw a son growing into his own ways. Perhaps we are both right.
He crossed the yard and the hounds matched him step for step. They didn't bark at the kennel's chorus. They didn't even look. I felt a small unease then—a prickling at the base of the skull you get on a ridge when the wind changes. Useful unease. Winterfell needs strong teeth. But strong teeth bite where you point them… and where you don't, if you forget yourself.
I pressed a palm to the walkway rail until the wood bit my glove. The boy had a weight in him. I only hoped it was the kind that holds a hall up, not the kind that drags it down.
(POV Elias)
I took Alpha and Shade to the smaller yard, away from the daily chaos of the kennels. The snow there lay smooth, trampled only by my boots. "Sit," I said, and tapped my thigh. Both sat, spines straight, eyes on me. "Down," with a palm to the snow; they folded at once. I snapped my fingers twice: "Guard." Their eyes left me and swept the fence, the gate, the shadowed corners, in a steady, shared rhythm—left-right, right-left, alternating, a two-dog net.
I tossed a stick into the powder. Shade's head flicked without a sound, and she was up and back in a breath, the stick in her jaws, snow barely disturbed. Alpha didn't move. That was the point. He watched while she moved. When I whistled low, both bared their teeth and held—no sound, no rush, just a mask of threat waiting for a reason.
Footsteps scuffed behind me—small, careful. I didn't turn.
"Come forward, they will do you no harm while I am here." I said.
(POV Sansa)
Elias always looked like he knew secrets, not the kind you giggle about in corners, but the kind the oldest stones know. When I saw him in the quiet yard with the two great dogs, my mouth said "oh," and it was not because I was scared. They were beautiful.
They weren't like Father's hunting hounds that smell like wet leaves and bark at shadows. These two were clean and very still, as if they were standing in a portrait, waiting for the painter to finish their eyes.
"May I…?" I asked and pointed at the nearer one.
Elias didn't laugh. He never laughs at me. "This is Alpha," he said, touching the big dog's head. "He will let you touch him if you keep your hand low. No sudden movement."
I put my hand out. Alpha lowered his head slowly until his fur touched my glove. It was warm and thick, and I could feel, underneath, the shape of the bone and the weight of him. The other dog—Shade, Elias said—sniffed the edge of my cloak and then turned her head to stare at the gate. It felt like she counted things, even when nothing moved.
"They mind you," I said.
"They mind the house," he said. "I am part of that."
I liked that answer. It made something sit right in my chest.
(POV Jon)
I'd watched him go to the godswood more often these days. Not like a septon with prayers. More like a ranger going to a map he keeps in his head and checks before dawn.
The dogs smelled like cold and iron and a kind of clean I didn't have words for. Elias didn't signal much; he didn't need to. They read his shoulders. When he shifted, they shifted. He said "guard," but they didn't bark. They just made your neck feel cold.
I crouched, so I didn't loom. "They'd follow you into a blizzard and never look back," I said.
"That's the idea," he said.
He didn't tell me how he'd made them so perfect. I didn't ask. Some things, if you say them wrong, make them smaller. Better to wait and watch.
I reached out. The female—Shade—touched my glove with her nose once. Then she angled her body to the yard like I wasn't there at all. The male watched my hands. Not threatening. Just… marking.
Robb would be jealous when he saw them. Or he'd ask to run them till dusk. Or both.
(POV Elias)
They needed a first task that was simple and clean. I led them along the inner wall, across the bridge to the outer bailey, and into the lane between the granary and the smokehouse. A kitchen lad came out with a bucket; he set it down, poured it into a kettle already steaming on a brazier. He glanced up at me and—because I'd told him to—wiped his hands on a clean cloth before touching the ladle.
"Good," I said, not stopping. "Keep at it."
The water now boiled before it touched lips. Hands were washed before cooking. Sickness shrugged off a hall that boiled and washed. It wasn't magic. It was remembering what a man remembers when the only kind touch he knew was fur curling against him on a night so cold your breath felt like glass. You don't forget the things that keep you alive.
Alpha and Shade matched my pace. We cut through the mews; the ravens rustled, but the dogs didn't look. At the small gate that opened toward the lower pasture, I stopped and faced them.
"Hold," I said, and stepped five paces away, then ten, then twenty. Their eyes tracked me, bodies carved from ice. I turned my back, walked away until I felt the line of the bond go taut as a bowstring. "To me," I said, and didn't raise my voice. Snow whispered. Two shadows appeared at my flanks like they'd grown out of mine.
"Good," I said, and meant it. I let them scent my wrist, breathed on their noses so my breath sat in their heads like a fire token they'd keep.
You protect what you remember.
(POV Ned)
I signed two parchments in my solar and didn't light the third. Through the slit of the window, I could see the lower yard where Elias had them working. He set no great trials—no boar, no bear. He set simple ones that test more than teeth. Stop. Stay. Come. Circle the smokehouse twice and return. Most men skip the small orders and wonder why their hounds fail the big ones.
Somewhere under all our feet, winter was moving. I felt it. You can smell it in the wood, in the stone. You can hear it in the talk: grain, salt fish, how long the ice will hold on the White Knife. If those two animals make our hunting surer, our patrols safer, I won't ask the gods where they came from, not yet. I was young once. A boy with work in his hands is a good sight.
But I will keep my eyes open. A lord owes that to his hall.
(POV Sansa)
I brought them scraps from the kitchen later—the best bits, the ones the cook would not miss. Elias said yes with his eyes, and I held out the meat in my palm the way he'd shown me. Alpha took it very gently. Shade didn't. She didn't want meat from my hand. She wanted to know who was coming through the gate and why their footfall sounded like three men instead of two.
"I like her," I said anyway.
"She's meant for you to like the house feeling safe," Elias said, which was not the same as yes, but it wasn't a no.
I told Septa Mordane later that I had met two very polite dogs. She said dogs are nothing but dirty animals, there is no such thing as "polite dogs". I thought of Elias and how he would not care for that.
(POV Jon)
When the light went thin, he put them in an enclosure he'd had repaired—new straw, a water trough, a low roof against wind. He watched them eat. He watches everything eat. You learn a lot from how a thing takes what it's given.
He didn't use names much. He didn't need to. He spoke in lines pulled tight: a whistle, a hand cut low, a slight turn of shoulder. I tried to copy him when he wasn't looking. The dogs watched me try and looked back at him like they were waiting for a better answer. Fair enough. They weren't mine.
Robb finally came running when it was already almost dark. He did everything loud—praise, a laugh, a question. He asked for a run. Elias said not tonight, and Robb's mouth did that thing where it wants to argue but knows if it does it will lose and then there will be a longer wait next time.
"Tomorrow?" Robb said.
"Tomorrow," Elias said, and that was settled.
(POV Elias)
Night pulled the yard quiet by degrees. I left Alpha and Shade curled nose-to-tail, heat between them like banked coals. The godswood was black-green and red-white under the moon. I went back not to ask for more, but to put things away clean.
Before the weirwood, I set my palms to the roots and opened the vault in my head. The new weave sat where I'd left it: wolf amber fused to hound gold, but not consumed by it. I didn't spend everything. You never spend everything. I stored the memory of this making alongside the souls I hadn't touched. The vault held the shapes like a ledger holds sums.
A squirrel's soul flickered past my mind's eye: pinprick pale, worth pennies. A fox sparked gold—quick, clever, useful in numbers. A wolf pulsed steady—the kind of coin that buys you a winter's worth of meat if you don't waste it. The human soul deep inside burned like a coal you don't touch unless you're ready to carry the scar.
Balance wasn't a sermon to me. It was a math that bit when you got it wrong. Similarity between creations saves your purse. Distant lines cost ten times more and fail nine times out of ten unless you drown them in power and build them a world to fit. That's for later. Bigger things, stranger things. Not today.
Tomorrow I'd take the pack of two into the snow and see how they read the land. After that, I'd start laying the ground for what comes next: more roads tamped flat before the thaw, a drain cut behind the granaries so meltwater didn't rot the bottom sacks, quiet reminders at the well to boil what you drink. Little wins stack. Little wins hold through a bad season when big boasts snap.
I stood, brushed the snow from my knees, and felt the cold as a friend. The first I ever knew. The fur against the ribs. The breath that didn't leave just because night came.
I did not look back when I left the godswood. The heart tree doesn't need thanks in words. It knows the shape of the living when we pass.
(POV Ned)
I met the steward in the passage and signed off on salt fish from White Harbor, oats from Barrow town, a cask of oil from a trader bold enough to wriggle up the White Knife in ice. At the bottom, a note: small payments gone to kennel master's across three holdings. All within the boy's allowance. He'd bartered some besides—pelts, smoked meat, even a promise to repair a collapsed byre roof in spring with men from our own holdfasts. Smart, that. Money you don't spend is no use when winter sits fat on your roof.
I put the slate aside and looked out again, down into the dark. A man learns to see shapes moving in it. Tonight, the shape I saw was my son and two shadows that belonged to him the way a sword belongs to a hand that knows it.
I would not ask questions that make a boy shut his mouth when he ought to speak. Not yet. I would give him rope enough to make a road, not a noose.
And I would pray—not to the Seven I was taught to kneel for when I was a boy, but to the faces in our trees—that the road he lays runs toward our people and not away from them.
(POV Elias)
I slept with the window cracked, the cold turning the room honest. Before dawn, I woke to the thin whine of wind at the shutters and the surety of two steady lives breathing in the yard below. I didn't see them, but I didn't need to. The bond hummed at the edge of thought, quiet, like a line tied to my wrist.
Tomorrow we hunt.
Tonight, we held.
And somewhere under the roots, the Old Gods held with us.