White Knife, Barrowlands, The North, first week, third moon of 294 AC
"This whole affair is nothing but trouble, my lord," Jory Cassel said with a frown. "Sorcery is a sword without a hilt."
"This sorceress has given great service to the North more than once," Ned informed his guard captain with a tired huff. He picked up Ice and lay it across his knees, scabbard and all. "I would not discount her words, brazen though her manner has been." He glanced over to his still scowling scout. "Do you know how she visited us here?"
"No. She could do nothing like it the year before," Keera stated, disquieted. "She once mentioned learning to visit me in dreams. One or two Crannogmen in living memory could do it, no sacrifice involved. But this was no dream." She touched the cuff of bronze around her wrist, muttering curses under her breath. "She grew faster than I expected."
"War has such impact," Ned told her, not unkindly. "Jory, I want the men ready to break camp early on the morrow. Keera, ready the scouts. These might be Stark lands still but we can never be too careful when there is dark business afoot." The guard captain saluted and left and the young-seeming woman followed wordlessly, leaving Lord Stark alone in the tent with Robb, Jon and Theon. He looked down at the children and his ward, his expression softer than before. "Be ready for surprises, whether in soldiering or ruling, for they often come when you least want them to," he told them. "Now, what did you think of our guest?"
"...were all Targaryens that beautiful?" Robb asked with a hint of awe in his boyish voice..
"...some were," his father replied all too neutrally, "and more dangerous for it." None of the youths noticed his clenched fists under the map table.
"Is she a Targaryen then?" Jon asked, causing the Warden of the North to stare at him for longer than any of the boys felt comfortable before replying.
"Appearances can be deceiving, for not all children look like their fathers." In that moment it seemed that the weight of his thirty namedays had suddenly doubled, his shoulders bending and face crumpling in exhaustion and something darker. Then he breathed deeply once and the weight seemed to vanish as if it had never been. "Let this be a lesson against haste when you can afford it."
"She could deceive me any day," Theon proclaimed with a sly smirk, which widened when the younger children didn't seem to catch his meaning. Lord Stark winced instead.
"Just go get some meat from the cooking fires then go to sleep. We have a long road ahead of us on the morrow," the elder Stark ordered. "Off you go, now." They went, leaving the thirty-year-old lord with his troubles.
"Not very perceptive is he, your ward," I said, my shadow turning visible once more as soon as Ned Stark was alone in the tent. Unlike just about everyone else I'd pulled that trick on before, he did not react in surprise. Then again, he had not so subtly gotten the tent empty of eyes and ears but his and mine.
"Few are." He turned slowly, taking me in with those dark grey eyes hard as stone. "You can see and hear without being noticed in turn, then. I did wonder how you could scout the river for us without being seen."
"I am here in mind and shadow, Lord Stark, not body. Making myself noticed takes additional effort..." I paused for a moment and thought about it. "I suppose another with some gift in magic might notice. Your sword certainly did."
"There is no mention in Winterfell's library of Ice ringing so in warning before," he noted, his hands gripping the huge black sword's hilt that was still almost imperceptibly vibrating.
"Few mages would have reason to visit the Starks as I did in the past," I mused, voicing my own thoughts about his ancestral sword's odd reaction. "Or it might be something about me specifically that caused it. If so, I know not what. I have yet to learn how to forge Valyrian Steel, let alone add further spells to it."
"'Yet' implies you might, in the future," he stated and I nodded. Those grey eyes tried to look through me, as if just looking could uncover all my secrets. Fortunately for both of us, Lord Stark had no talent in divination. "Why are you really here, young lady? Why now?"
"Because only a strong, united North might survive what is coming, Lord Stark, and you are the only one who could achieve it." Whatever skills Robb, Jon, even Bran might develop, they would not grow into them until it was far too late.
"Might?" he asked.
"Might," I confirmed.
"Should we take you up on your offer, how will it happen?" he asked, fingers tapping idly against Ice's hilt.
"You are a better leader of men than I, Lord stark," I told him. My hands returned to the map, trailing its features carefully. "You would know better than I the value of a scout that cannot be seen or heard or tracked, one who might move a mile with every step. Not to mention a messenger faster than any raven." The map did not look like a crude, medieval sheet with distorted representations of lands but of a much more accurate, almost modern make with details down to villages and individual mountains and even local roads. The kind of detail maps back on Earth would not see until the eighteen hundreds and certainly more detailed than the official maps of Westeros provided by a certain author. Then again, in this world an order of natural philosophers had been accumulating knowledge and forming long-range communications for thousands of years, and its rulers had had aerial reconnaissance only a couple of centuries before.
"Here," I finally said, trailing a line across the lower edge of the Lonely Hills. "Just below the borders between Umber and Bolton lands is the most sparsely inhabited area under Lord Bolton's control. With his men focused on the border itself and the rivers, it is also the least patrolled. A sizable force could sneak through if they knew to avoid the few lookouts."
"I mislike sneaking through the night like a thief," the Warden of the North said with a scowl, then sighed, "but only a boy speaks of likes in times of need and death... and I would like a full war with the Boltons even less. I would have you be our guide, but what of Lord Manderly's men?"
"Timing would play a big part. It is six hundred miles down then up the White Knife then across the Bolton lands to the Dreadfort," I noted, marking the path. "How long would it take you to cross, two weeks?"
"Two?" He blinked. "No, five, maybe six. The barges are much slower upriver."
"Then we have time to make arrangements. Lord Manderly's men do not need to wait for you, or take the same route." I looked at where we both knew the new Manderly shipyard was hidden, then again from White Harbor to the Dreadfort. "Though I should probably talk with Lord Manderly first."
"Yes you should," Lord Stark readily agreed with me and despite the grim business we were about, his expression softened and his lips twitched upwards. "It would only be polite."
The last impression I got from him as I vanished was of having missed something...
xxxx
I found Keera standing watch just outside the camp, all but invisible in the darkness of the thickly wooded riverbank. My aunt was sitting on bare rock, heating wooden sticks over a lantern flame with its light shielded from most angles, before straightening and stripping them. She had always liked making her own arrows, though when she'd been busy teaching me she had left it up to the Twins, if only to keep them busy and away from trouble. I watched her going through the motions for a good ten minutes before I made myself visible once more and approached, taking care to add sounds too. Then I pretended to sit on a rock across from hers and we proceeded to stare at each other for a good five minutes before either of us talked. In the end, it was her that broke the silence first.
"That was sloppy," she noted caustically. Naturally, her first words to me were both critical and vague.
"You will have to be more specific."
"Your approach," she clarified, setting the stick she'd just straightened aside, then snapping the custom lantern shut. "Footsteps squelching in mud, breathing, a wooden stick breaking underfoot... but you forgot the wind."
"The wind?" What did she...
"The wind sounds different whistling through empty space than it does around obstacles," my Aunt explained in the same tone she had taken during our lessons. "People and animals have a wind-shadow, one not even the stealthiest can avoid. It is sometimes the only warning you get of an enemy coming at your back." She looked me up and down. "This... illusion of yours has no such thing. It is quite disconcerting to those that know to listen."
"There is no way your hearing is that sharp," I scoffed.
"It is less about a sharp ear and more about paying attention," she shot back drily. "And my hearing was plenty sharp back in my maidenhood."
"...did you get married when I was not looking?"
"Insufferable brat," she grumbled, staring at me with shining eyes and muttering about ghosts and hugs. "Your battle in Essos. Tell me about it."
"Which one? The one with the Squids in the Narrow Sea, the assassination attempt, the raids against enemy companies, the second assassination attempt, the big siege, or the naval battle on the return trip?" She threw a rock at me, hitting me right between the eyes. Naturally, it passed through my image with no effect and she grumbled about it. Then we talked. We talked for hours, mostly about what had happened to me after we had last seen each other, and gradually my Aunt's face softened even as her fists clenched harder and harder until her knuckles creaked ominously.
"...that was as bad as Balon's folly," Keera finally said, coal-black eyes searching my face for something and closing tiredly afterwards. Whether she'd found what she'd been looking for, I could not tell. "Flann, how many people have you killed?"
"Since I left Westeros?" I took a moment to make a rough mental tally of everything before answering. "Nearly three thousand."
"No, not your sell-sword company," she said, shaking her too young-looking head. "You personally."
"Auntie... that was the number for me personally." She stared. "In my defense, they were slavers and rapists?"
"...how?" she demanded. "Even with two battles and half a dozen skirmishes, that number sounds very high."
"It's the slaver ships," I explained. "I told you how I have started burning them in the open sea, right?"
"Good riddance to the scum, but a slaver ship can't have more than a crew of a hundred," she argued.
"Yes?" I did not see the issue... unless... "Right, numbers. Multiply that by..." another mental tally "seven and twenty... no, eight and twenty ships."
"..." She stared at me. I stared at her. We stared each other for a moment, then she leaned back against her rocky seat with a groan. "You do understand many men would react badly to such a tale, yes?"
"Yes, auntie, I am not dumb." I had not said anything to anyone else about those ships for many reasons, this one among them. "But I bet Lord Stark would think otherwise."
"You would lose that bet, Flann," she told me with another long-suffering sigh. "You must better watch the people around you. See their decisions and reactions to events to learn how they think and behave so you can match their expectations. To many it will not matter that slavers are scum, a maiden that fights and kills is already disquieting. One that has slain more than they is a nightmare to flee from, or destroy."
"Because they would prefer women be pretty things that only exist for their amusement," I shot back. "I'd rather be a nightmare than their idea of a maiden." I'd make that trade gladly even if it weren't the result of giving some slaving, raping scum their just deserts. "But enough of the opinions of small minds. What's the Old Man doing these days? What about Josh and Kell? Have they started their training yet?"
I could tell Aunt Keera did not quite agree with the topic change but after a minute we had left talk of fools behind and started discussing family. Of how the Old Man had refused to leave the lake that had been home for years, stubbornly clinging to his fishing rather than coming to Winterfell. Of how Josh and Kell were doing in their archery lessons - way better than I had, minus the magical cheating. Of the comings and goings of the Starks and how Winterfell was changing. We talked long into the night and when the darkness finally broke into the predawn gloom I yawned and stretched, both in my illusion and back on my bed in Lys.
"I'd better be off, Auntie," I told her as I sat up. "There will be recruits to oversee and forging to be done back in my camp and I need my beauty sleep."
"That is your excuse, is it?" she told me with wry amusement. "Maybe it would have been believable six moons before but now?" she scoffed.
"...but it is no excuse?" She looked at me oddly at that.
"You are really telling me you are not using magic to ward away sleep?" she accused with a smirk. "You? The girl who snuck away every night for years to hunt small animals for her... experiments? Who would take every opportunity to stay up late?"
"I do stay up sometimes," I admitted, then threw her a suspicious look. "But how would you know magic can do that?"
"You mean besides the Old Man sleeping half as long as he used to since the healing?" She huffed and raised her arm, bronze bracelet gleaming around her wrist. "I admit, some of the side effects of your gift can be annoying, but only sleeping when I want to is not one of them."
She grumbled about stupid boys and no respect but I hardly paid any attention. There was a rush of pressure, a roar in my ears, and back in Lys I nearly fell off the bed. The spells I had put on the bracelet gave pretty broad boosts but sleeping less was not one of them... or had not been. Come to think of it, my aunt's youthful looks were more intense than what good healing should grant.
What was going on?