Mother of Theories — Part 3 of 5 (The Walk-Through, Resumed)

This was originally posted on Reddit, [HERE].

This post is a direct continuation of Part 2, which you can read [HERE]. By “direct continuation”, I mean DIRECT continuation: it begins “in the middle” and makes no sense on its own.

Let’s  get back to my roughly chronological walk-through of ASOIAF in support of BAJRALD.

AGOT Catelyn II: Cat Asks Ned About Ashara, Ned Flies Off The Handle

In the same chapter in which Cat convinces Ned to head south, revealing in the process her deep-seated Tullyness, she recalls hearing (probably albeit perhaps indirectly from Benjen, leading Ned to banish him to the Watch) that Ashara Dayne was Jon’s mother. She wonders whether it’s true, but she never considers whether she should doubt Jon’s paternity, and thus neither do we, at least at this point in the narrative. (When we’re later presented with the possibility that Lyanna is Jon’s mother via the nexus of her “bed of blood” and Mirri Maaz Duur’s mastery of “the bloody bed”, we break our arms patting ourselves on the back for realizing that Lyanna must be his mother and thus that Rhaegar must be Jon’s father. Again, we never think to question his paternity first, and then figure out his maternity.)

Because convention-savvy readers “know” that the first solution offered to a mystery is always wrong (especially if it’s considered in-world), many first-time readers take a jaundiced view when Cat proffers Ashara as a possible Jon-mom (save for those poor benighted souls who somehow just lap the whole Ned + Ashara thing up). In truth, the fact that Ashara is Jon’s mother doesn’t really break with this mystery-novel convention, at least as it’s usually understood, since Cat’s answer of “Ashara” addresses a perniciously framed question which assumes Ned sired Jon, and since “Ashara + Ned” is not the right answer to the real question: Who are Jon’s parents?

Anyway, here is how Catelyn remembers events:

“Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single combat. And they told how afterward Ned had carried Ser Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited him in a castle called Starfall on the shores of the Summer Sea. The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes. It had taken her a fortnight to marshal her courage, but finally, in bed one night, Catelyn had asked her husband the truth of it, asked him to his face.”

GRRM hides the specific question Cat asked of Ned behind the pronoun “it”, but the context hints strongly at what she asked—and what she didn’t ask. While Cat initially broaches “the mother”, she also thinks about Arthur Dayne and his duel with Ned before recalling the rumors of Ned meeting Ashara at Starfall, thus insulating the “it” from the only nearby reference to Jon, which is in any case very oblique: “the” mother rather than “his” mother. The tale of Ned meeting Ashara at Starfall constitutes the most immediate, grammatically sensible antecedent (i.e. the word or phrase to which a pronoun refers) for the mysterious “it”. Moreover, hearing the story of Ned and Ashara is plainly the reason she questioned Ned, so why wouldn’t Ashara have been the focus of her question as well? Indeed, we know that Cat said Ashara’s name, because after Ned exploded in response, he said:

“And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.”

Meanwhile, there’s good reason to doubt that Cat said Jon’s name, if she referred to him at all. She’s Hoster’s daughter in every way, and Hoster made a habit of not naming those who cross him, as discussed in my posts on House Tully. Cat literally thinks only of “the mother”, a strange construction that goes out of its way to avoid direct reference to Jon even as a pronoun. Indeed, she never used Jon’s name around him prior to AGOT J II:

He was at the door when [Cat] called out to him. “Jon,” she said. He should have kept going, but she had never called him by his name before.

GRRM chose to show Hoster refusing to say “Petyr” or “Brynden”. He decided Catelyn would eat her meals with Jon year after year without saying “Jon”. Why? Yes, they’re colorful bits of characterization, but doesn’t that intentional, peculiar characterization suggest that Catelyn would refer to Jon as obliquely as possible, if at all? So why, then, does Ned’s response imply that Cat asked Ned about Jon?

That was the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her. “Never ask me about Jon,” he said, cold as ice. “He is my blood, and that is all you need to know.”

I believe this is because for Ned, a question about Ashara was a question about Jon, precisely because Jon is Ashara’s son by Brandon. Consider further: This is “the only time in all their years” Ned explodes like this. Ashara’s name and the insinuation that she’s Jon’s mother was uniquely provocative to Ned, and that’s entirely consistent with Ashara actually being Jon’s mother by Brandon and with Ned needing to keep BAJ from Catelyn, specifically, at all costs.

If I’m wrong, why does GRRM go to the trouble of hiding Cat’s question behind such an oddly circuitous and awkward phrase? In my opinion, it’s to create the ever-so-subtle implication of a telling non sequitur.

Many argue that Ned’s anger is a hint that while Jon is Lyanna’s son, Ned boned Ashara at Harrenhal and felt guilty about it. But Harwin states categorically that if that happened, “there’s no stain on [Ned’s] honor.” (SOS A VIII) A better (but still misguided) argument is that Ned’s rage stemmed from the guilt of boning Ashara at Starfall, after he was married. Let’s set aside that Ned doing so would have been utterly out of character and lacks any dramatic motivation or payoff. If Ned boned Ashara, who is no relation to Jon in this RLJ scenario, why would his guilt have manifested itself in the immediate response, “Never ask me about Jon”? If RLJ is true, did Cat’s question about Ashara threaten to expose RLJ? Hardly. Wouldn’t Ned’s guilty, angry retort be about Lady Dayne, whom we know Cat asked about by name? While RLJ-Ned might afterward have added “Never ask me about Jon” (to avoid better guesses), his words don’t make sense if he is merely guilty about Ashara, who is unrelated to Jon.

Let’s be clear about something else: if Ned was guilty about boning Ashara, who had no relationship to Jon, he isn’t nearly canny enough to have seamlessly pretended a question about her was about Jon in order to avoid the topic of his infidelity and coyly change the subject. To the contrary, Ned is a man whose words and manner give away his thoughts and feelings, not the sort who can effectively hide them, as Bobby B. well knows:

“You never could lie for love nor honor, Ned Stark.” (GOT E VII)

“You are… such a bad liar, Ned Stark,” [Robert] said through his pain. (GOT E XIII)

Thus Ned’s pivot back to Ashara—

“And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.” She had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne’s name was never heard in Winterfell again.

—can only mean that Cat indeed asked about her. Ned’s icy reply was a guileless man’s instant, visceral response to a name he hoped never to hear and to Cat’s absolutely correct insinuation that Ashara was Jon’s mother. In a sense, Ned panicked: if Cat learned that Ashara was Jon’s mother, she’d be one (tricky) step from the epiphany that Jon’s father was Brandon, not Ned, something that had to be kept secret at all costs, most of all from Cat. Ned knew he was a terrible liar, yet he couldn’t tell the truth, so he lashed out. Thou does protest too much, Eddy-baby. You’d be a terrible poker player, and if Catelyn had any reason to think you’d lie about Jon being your bastard son you’d be in deep shit. She doesn’t, fortunately for Ned.

Because of Ned’s anger and Ashara-ban, Cat “now” tacitly assumes Jon probably is Ashara’s son by Ned, and is thankful both that Ned’s tryst was at Starfall, well after Robb was conceived, and that Ned shows no inclination to see Jon legitimized.

“NAJ” at least makes some sense of Ned’s “cold as ice” response to Ashara’s name, which is more than I can say for RLJ. (We’ll explore this further in a moment.) But BAJ makes better sense. If BAJ, it’s not merely the case that Ned wanted to protect the truth from Cat and that she had unwittingly stumbled upon a piece of it. It’s that he had to protect that truth, and moreover that Cat’s question about Brandon’s wife Ashara and its insinuation regarding Jon reminded him that his entire life would henceforth hinge on a shameful lie and his usurpation of Ashara’s son, the very boy Cat was obliquely asking about, totally oblivious to the fact that were the truth of what she asks revealed, her entire world would crumble.

Recognizing that it’s nearly impossible to reconcile Ned’s instantaneous “Never ask me about Jon” response with the theory that Ned’s anger stemmed from his guilt over his dalliance with Ashara, some folks argue that Ned seethed simply because Cat asked him, however indirectly, about Lyanna’s son Jon, of whom Ned was understandably hyper-protective, given that “the truth” about RLJon was so very dangerous. This is sometimes paired with the Ashara-guilt rationale and it’s argued that Ned, angry out of both guilt and protectiveness, simply addressed the “Jon part” first. There are several problems with these scenarios beyond the fact that Cat’s question was very probably not literally about Jon.

First, Ned is normally nothing if not honest, so if RLJ is true and Cat asked whether Ashara was Jon’s mother, what is Ned’s dramatic motivation for not simply denying that Ashara is Jon’s mother? Why would he behave like some kind of modern day public relations guy or government spokesperson, refusing all comment? An analogy comes to mind. In The Godfather, Connie rightly accuses Michael of killing her husband Carlo. Michael has her removed, and his wife, Kay, is horrified:

Michael: She’s hysterical. [lights a cigarette] Hysterical.

Kay: Michael, is it true?

Michael: [pauses] Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.

Kay: Is it true?

Michael: Don’t ask me about my business.

Kay: No!

Michael: [slaps the desk] ENOUGH!!! [calms down] Alright. This one time…this one time, I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.

Kay: Is it true? Is it?

Michael: No.

There’s one huge difference, of course. In this RLJ-scenario, Ned wouldn’t have been lying if “this one time… this one time” he answered Cat’s query—about Ashara, remember—and confirmed that Ashara wasn’t Jon’s mother. What would telling the truth, which is eminently Ned-ish, have cost him? If RLJ, there’s simply no dramatically compelling motive for him to have not answered the question—which tells us something about RLJ. But if BAJ, his impassive stonewalling makes all the sense: he couldn’t possibly tell the truth, and—with the dramatically profound exception of the one great “lie-for-the-greater-good” he lives with every day consequent to the oath Lyanna extracts from him—lying isn’t something Eddard Stark does, so he can’t bring himself to deny that Ashara is Jon’s mother.

There’s a second problem with the argument that Cat’s question caused Ned to seethe because he’s just that protective of RLJon and radioactive truth thereof. If a bad guess at Jon’s mother triggered “the only time in all their years that Ned had ever frightened her,” shouldn’t Rhaegar’s name be unmentionable around Winterfell, known for its chilling effect on the (ahem) volatile Lord Stark? Shouldn’t the mention of Rhaegar at least make Ned uncomfortable, and wouldn’t Cat pick up on this at some point? Ned even has a perfectly good reason to forbid mention of RLJon’s father: the public “fact” that Rhaegar kidnapped and raped Ned’s baby sister. Yet there’s no evidence of this: To the contrary, Ned muses gently about Rhaegar a few times and Robert’s ranting about Rhaegar doesn’t seem to worry him in the least. It’s only Ashara’s name that’s verboten.

Third, if Ned wasn’t guilty/angry about Ashara but merely overly protective of RLJon, why in the world would Ned forbid mention of Ashara’s name (which makes sense per BAJ)? If Ashara is innocent on all counts, why not just say so, and why not talk about her? This objection is the reason people make the “combination” argument mentioned above—that Ned is both protective of Jon and guilty over his supposed (fruitless) affair with Ashara. Setting aside the dramatic muddiness of this idea, it still doesn’t explain why Ned doesn’t at least deny that Ashara is Jon’s mother nor why Ned answers Cat’s question about Ashara by leaping to Jon.

In reality, Ned’s eruption threatened to give the BAJ game away, but (like Cat) we don’t notice: During our first reading we still believe Jon is Ned’s son (and thus not possibly Brandon’s), while later we believe he’s Lyanna’s (and thus not possibly Ashara’s). Knowing he’s a terrible liar whose kneejerk response hinted at the truth, Ned realized he’d eventually fail if he tried to sell Cat or his household on the cover story he and the Daynes had settled on: that Jon is Wylla’s son. In the heat of the moment he opted for silence and a hard ban on Jon-questions and Ashara’s name, which is why we only hear about Wylla from from Robert and Edric.

Why Not Tell Catelyn, Then Or Now?

Having outlined some problems with RLJ’s claim that Ned’s reaction stemmed from his affair with Ashara and/or his protectiveness of Jon’s Targaryen identity, and having also argued that BAJ explains Ned’s reaction perfectly, let’s consider a simple question RLJ can’t adequately address: If Jon is Lyanna’s, why the fuck wouldn’t Ned tell his Lady Wife at some point in their 14 years of subsequent happy marriage?!?

• Why not say “I love and/or trust you, so here’s the deal: Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna’s kid, which we can’t tell anyone because TARGARYEN DUH, so give us both a break with the scorn show, huh?”
• Surely Cat would warm to Jon if he didn’t remind her of Ned’s imagined infidelity and wasn’t even a Stark bastard, making everyone’s life easier?
• What marginal safety for Jon Targaryen did Ned gain by by terrifying his wife, whose prospects are bound to his by law and who would gain nothing and risk all by exposing RLJ?
• Where does the narrative hint that Ned ever thought Cat might expose Jon? Jon Targaryen would be far less apt to usurp Robb Stark than would Ned’s bastard Jon Snow.
• How would a man this irrationally obsessed with keeping RLJ secret be incredulous that Robert might ever “harm me or any of mine”? To the contrary, he would believe the opposite: that Robert absolutely would harm his adopted son! If RLJ’s arguments for Ned not telling Cat are valid, he wouldn’t be nearly laughing at Cat’s fears about Robert earlier in AGOT C II, he’d be lapping them up!

By AGOT Cat has been privy to all Ned’s counsels for over a decade. The need to hold RLJ close has surely passed, yet Ned maintains a fiction that is the primary source of friction in their relationship?!

A narrative rooted in the idea that Ned is prevented from telling Cat RLJ by the precise wording of his promise/s (e.g. “I promise not to tell anyone“) is neither compelling nor believable. Being honorable doesn’t make Ned a computer script. And “it’s just safer to keep quiet” is no better. That’s the credible, robust motivation behind the solution to the obvious (but hardly only) Great Mystery of a 7000 page story? Seriously?

In sum, for a possible tiny decrease in the likelihood Jon’s paternity reaches the wrong ears, RLJ means Ned condemns Jon to Catelyn’s scorn and subjects himself to the same, because (a) Ned thinks his loved and trusted wife might spill the beans, cutting off her nose to spite her face; and/or (b) Ned’s strict adherence to the “legalese” of his promise/s to Lyanna is thought to be a believable, reasonable motive around which to build the narrative of an epic saga. I can’t buy that.

AGOT C II: Jon Joining The Night’s Watch

AGOT C II ends with Ned, Cat and Lewyn talking about Jon joining the Night’s Watch. Two major points emerge:

1. Ned usurping Jon’s inheritance weighs heavily on his conscience.
2. Even as Ned’s second-oldest bastard son, Jon isn’t a comfortable presence for Catelyn. Logically, then, if he is instead Brandon’s only trueborn son, that would clearly be a major problem for and threat to Catelyn, House Tully, Ned’s marriage and the North-Riverlands alliance.

Luwin begins the discussion by addressing Ned:

“Your brother Benjen came to me about Jon a few days ago. It seems the boy aspires to take the black.”

Ned looked shocked. “He asked to join the Night’s Watch?”

Catelyn said nothing. Let Ned work it out in his own mind; her voice would not be welcome now. Yet gladly would she have kissed the maester just then. His was the perfect solution. Benjen Stark was a Sworn Brother. Jon would be a son to him, the child he would never have. And in time the boy would take the oath as well. He would father no sons who might someday contest with Catelyn’s own grandchildren for Winterfell. (AGOT C II)

“Jon Snow” is merely Ned’s younger, bastard son, yet Catelyn still worries about his sons challenging hers for control of The North. Her attitude derives from Hoster’s and is reflected in the words GRRM carefully chose for House Tully: Family. Duty. Honor. Her relief at the prospect of Jon’s shadow lifting from her children’s futures is almost palpable. Were Jon Snow instead Brandon’s trueborn son—or even Brandon’s bastard—her current worries would seem a happy memory. (Thus the need to keep Jon’s lineage from Cat.)

There are major hints about Jon’s true paternity in what follows:

Maester Luwin said, “There is great honor in service on the Wall, my lord.”

“And even a bastard may rise high in the Night’s Watch,” Ned reflected. Still, his voice was troubled. “Jon is so young. If he asked this when he was a man grown, that would be one thing, but a boy of fourteen…” …

Ned turned away from them to gaze out the window, his long face silent and thoughtful. Finally he sighed, and turned back. “Very well,” he said to Maester Luwin. “I suppose it is for the best. I will speak to Ben.” (GOT C II)

Ned immediately focuses on the prospect that Jon might “rise high” in the Night’s Watch, because it provides an eagerly sought palliative for the 15 years of guilt he’s endured since claiming Jon as his bastard and denying him his identity as Brandon’s son Jon Stark, rightful lord of Winterfell. Still, he sounds “troubled”—then grows quite and contemplative—because the import of the moment is dawning on him. Until now Ned could perhaps idly, vaguely assuage himself by flirting with the idea that he might someday, somehow set things right, but now he’s about to see his line’s usurpation of Jon’s rights made permanent and legal. By taking an oath to hold no lands and father no children, Jon will forswear Winterfell in the eyes of the realm, securing Ned’s position as Lord, Robb’s as his heir, and the rights of Catelyn and House Tully. Ned disinherited Jon long ago, but now Jon is unwittingly disinheriting himself.

The passage works for RLJ, too, but not quite as well. RLJ-Ned seizing on Jon’s chance to rise high lacks the weight of BAJ’s flawed, guilt-ridden, usurper Ned doing so. For BAJ-Ned, the Wall is an improvement on the only life he can possibly allow Jon to lead: the bastard’s life to which he condemned Jon when he chose the welfare of House Stark, The North and his family—and his sister’s deathbed plea—over the Truth and the rights of his brother’s son. BAJ-Ned has been illicitly sitting in Jon’s High Seat for years, in part because Jon’s Brandon-blood was deemed to dangerous to rule. He cannot undo his actions without grave consequences, yet he believes Jon is becoming a far better man than his sire was. Thus his belief that the Watch offers Jon a place and an opportunity is a salve for his pained conscience.

There’s also the issue of Jon’s safety at the Wall. For BAJ, this is simply not an issue, period. Not so for RLJ, which has a hell of a time trying to fix the exact nature of Ned’s promise to Lyanna, but generally says it was about keeping Jon safe. Shouldn’t Jon going to the most dangerous place in Westeros be a problem for Ned’s promise? Those who acknowledge the discrepancy usually argue that Ned’s promise must therefore be to keep Jon safe from Robert, or to keep Jon’s identity secret, or to keep him safe as a child, etc. This yields a plot and a major character that are laughably inorganic, working like the output of an arbitrary set of programming instructions rather than elements in a dramatic narrative.

AGOT C II: “He Is My Blood”, “He Is Mine Own Blood.”

Let’s touch on two final tidbits from AGOT C II that didn’t quite fit in any of the topics I’ve been reviewing. When Ned frightens Cat, he says:

“[Jon] is my blood, and that is all you need to know.”

RLJ rightly touts this as allowing that Jon is not Ned’s son. In Westeros, though, a father’s blood creates identity and is believed dominant. While plausible either way, “He is my blood” is thus if anything a better fit for BAJ.

Sure enough, it so happens that another second son who has been presented with a child left behind by his older, lustful brother, says almost exactly the same thing to his wife:

[Selyse] threw her arms around [Stannis’s] legs. “”[Edric] is only one boy, born of your brother’s lust and my cousin’s shame.”

“He is mine own blood. Stop clutching me, woman.” (SOS Dav V)

I’ll discuss it in detail later, but notice that Selyse’s reference to Edric being “born of [Robert’s] lusts” dovetails perfectly with the idea that when Ned laments the “lusts” that produce children like Jon Snow—

Ned saw Jon Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own. If the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they fill men with such lusts? (GOT E IX)

—he is thinking not of a monastic, dutiful man like Rhaegar, but of the lusts of his own older brother, the eminently Robert-esque Brandon Stark. We’ll return to this point.

AGOT C II: Benjen

At the outset, I alluded to the idea that Benjen is probably responsible for the whispers regarding Jon. Why do I think this?

We very pregnantly aren’t told when and why exactly Ben joins the Watch. The closest we get is the AWOIAF App, which tells us that at Harrenhal he takes a Black Brother’s plea “to the gathered chivalry to take the black… to heart”. But Benjen didn’t join then. He didn’t join prior to Ned’s return to Winterfell after the war, as “there must always be a Stark in Winterfell”—something we curiously learn less than two pages prior to Catelyn recalling the rumor about Arthur, Ashara and Ned she heard her maids repeating. But look at the exact verbiage of that rumor again. Ashara’s name is separated from the rest of the tale:

Ned would not speak of the mother, not so much as a word, but a castle has no secrets, and Catelyn heard her maids repeating tales they heard from the lips of her husband’s soldiers. They whispered of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, deadliest of the seven knights of Aerys’s Kingsguard, and of how their young lord had slain him in single combat. And they told how afterward Ned had carried Ser Arthur’s sword back to the beautiful young sister who awaited him in a castle called Starfall on the shores of the Summer Sea. The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes.

Read literally, Cat’s maids told her about Arthur’s “beautiful young sister.” Full stop. It’s of course presented as “obvious” that they must have also told her the sister’s name, but that’s not strictly dictated by the text, per which Catelyn fills in the sister’s identity in a separate sentence. Might this be a subtle hint that having overheard these general rumors, Catelyn asked someone who she trusted and talked to—namely Benjen—what he knew of “the beautiful young sister” of the famous Ser Arthur Dayne, and that it was Benjen who actually told her Ashara’s name? It is, after all, quite impressive that Ned was able to curtail at a stroke any further mentions of “that name”:

“And now I will learn where you heard that name, my lady.” She had pledged to obey; she told him; and from that day on, the whispering had stopped, and Ashara Dayne’s name was never heard in Winterfell again.

It’s as if Ned cauterized a singular wound at the source and/or provided a chilling example of what might befall any who continued such gossip. The most chilling example I can think of would be a one-way trip to the Wall, and the only person we know of who disappeared from Winterfell in the correct time frame is Benjen Stark.

AGOT Arya I

Ned tells Arya that Brandon had more Starky “wolf blood” and “wildness” than Lyanna—a wildness RLJ (and Lyanna = Knight of the Laughing Tree) theorists cite as evidence that Lyanna is Jon’s mother, when it’s actually much better evidence for Brandon siring Jon-the-warg.

Her father sighed. “Ah, Arya. You have a wildness in you, child. ‘The wolf blood,’ my father used to call it. Lyanna had a touch of it, and my brother Brandon more than a touch.

All Jon’s indubitable “wildness”, cited by RLJ theory as proof he is Lyanna’s son, thus points more directly at Brandon, who had more wolf-blood than Lyanna. Jon’s impetuosity is Brandon’s. There’s a clear parallel between (a) Brandon riding heedless to the Red Keep to demand that Rhaegar return Lyanna and (b) Jon’s two impulsive, vow-breaking decisions: (1) to go AWOL and ride south when Joffrey imprisons Ned, and (2) to march to war on Ramsay at Winterfell. The parallels are enriched if Jon is unwittingly aping not his uncle’s but his father’s (literal) fatal flaw. Indeed at the end of ADWD it appears Jon pays the same fatal price his father paid.

On a totally separate note, we’re told it’s a “great scandal” that Arya names her wolf Nymeria:

Arya had named her after the warrior queen of the Rhoyne, who had led her people across the narrow sea. That had been a great scandal too.

This hints that Dorne is not well-regarded in Winterfell? Could this stem from Ned having ill-will towards Ashara Dayne, perhaps regarding her as a Dornish wanton who was the undoing of Brandon and whose son threatened to be the undoing of House Stark?

AGOT Eddard II

On the ride south from Winterfell, Robert broaches the subject of Jon’s mother:

“And yet there was that one time… what was her name, that common girl of yours?… You know the one I mean, your bastard’s mother?”

“Her name was Wylla,” Ned replied with cool courtesy, “and I would sooner not speak of her.”

“Wylla. Yes.” The king grinned. “She must have been a rare wench if she could make Lord Eddard Stark forget his honor, even for an hour. You never told me what she looked like…”

Ned’s mouth tightened in anger. “Nor will I. Leave it be, Robert, for the love you say you bear me. I dishonored myself and I dishonored Catelyn, in the sight of gods and men.”

Ned angers after Robert mentions Ned’s honor. If RLJ, he didn’t actually do anything dishonorable (at least not to produce “Jon Snow”). To the contrary, he allows himself to appear dishonored to honor a promise he made his dying sister and safeguard an infant. Nothing could be more honorable. Are we to think Ned gets petulant because he didn’t really “forget his honor”? And why appeal to Robert’s love for him, as if there’s a pain Ned wishes to avoid? He certainly didn’t dishonor himself nor Catelyn, nor do anything particularly painful. As is so often the case when we take the story at face value (or nearly so), we’re left thinking “ok, words, words, to some vague effect not worth thinking too hard about.”

The only “hope” for RLJ is that Ned is vaguely reminded of cheating on Cat with Ashara.

But if BAJ, Ned grows angry when Robert speaks of him forgetting his honor for a reason, appeals to Robert’s love for him for a reason, and mentions dishonoring himself and Catelyn for a reason. He has lied to Catelyn about Jon and Brandon, married her under false pretenses and disinherited his brother’s son, actually “forgetting his honor” by becoming a usurper at the behest of the same “rare wench” (Lyanna) Robert professes to love, for which he is wracked by guilt. He suffers Catelyn’s wrath while in fact doing her—specifically her—a great unrequited service. The truth must remain hidden lest his whole world come undone, and Robert cannot know that, but without telling Robert, he cannot understand. Which is why he asks Robert to leave it alone “for the love you say you bear me.” Shit sucks, dude.

As Ned and Robert talk amidst a bunch of old barrows (redolent of death, of their first scene together before Brandon’s and Lyanna’s tombs, and of the cairns Ned erected at the Tower of Joy), Robert shows Ned news of Dany’s marriage to Khal Drogo. The presentation is curiously oblique: we’re not inside Ned’s head in the moment he’s taking in what may be the first news he’s heard about Lyanna’s daughter in years:

There was a rider in the night, from Lord Varys in King’s Landing. Here.” The king pulled a paper from his belt and handed it to Ned.

Varys the eunuch was the king’s master of whisperers. He served Robert now as he had once served Aerys Targaryen. Ned unrolled the paper with trepidation, thinking of Lysa and her terrible accusation, but the message did not concern Lady Arryn. “What is the source for this information?”

“Do you remember Ser Jorah Mormont?”

This pattern continues throughout Ned’s POVs: He speaks of Dany, and indeed her safety becomes the focal point of his story, yet we only see him think of her once. The near-blackout on overt thoughts of Dany may be GRRM’s way of staying “honest”: rather than present us with thoughts that will feel artificially “edited” in retrospect, we simply get no thoughts.

Ned moves quickly to discredit Jorah:

“Ser Jorah is now in Pentos, anxious to earn a royal pardon that would allow him to return from exile,” Robert explained. “Lord Varys makes good use of him.”

“So the slaver has become a spy,” Ned said with distaste. He handed the letter back. “I would rather he become a corpse.”

Boiling this down: There’s an informant near Dany. And what does Ned do? He suggests killing him. Sure, there’s an “innocent” explanation for this (Jorah’s crimes), but it’s more interesting, dramatically, if it’s eventually revealed that Dany is Lyanna’s daughter, regardless of whether Ned knows this or not.

Robert’s not having it.

“Varys tells me that spies are more useful than corpses,” Robert said. “Jorah aside, what do you make of his report?”

Ned tries playing casual—

“Daenerys Targaryen has wed some Dothraki horse lord. What of it? Shall we send her a wedding gift?“”

—but Robert suggests giving her a sharp knife “and a bold man to wield it.” Ned almost immediately thinks of “Rhaegar’s wife and children” which will prove more dramatically sensible if Lyanna was Rhaegar’s wife and if Dany is their child:

Ned did not feign surprise; Robert’s hatred of the Targaryens was a madness in him. He remembered the angry words they had exchanged when Tywin Lannister had presented Robert with the corpses of Rhaegar’s wife and children as a token of fealty.

We’re then invited to happily conclude that Ned simply hates the murder of children:

Ned had named that murder; Robert called it war. When he had protested that the young prince and princess were no more than babes, his new-made king had replied, “I see no babes. Only dragonspawn.” Not even Jon Arryn had been able to calm that storm. Eddard Stark had ridden out that very day in a cold rage, to fight the last battles of the war alone in the south.

To be sure, Ned does abhor child-murder. But that’s not all that’s going on here—Dany’s daughter’s life is at stake—and so it makes sense that Ned then immediately thinks of Lyanna’s death.

It had taken another death to reconcile them; Lyanna’s death, and the grief they had shared over her passing.

Sure, we’re spoonfed the idea that Ned remembers his fight with Robert and therefore remembers the event that reconciled them. But if Dany is Lyanna’s child, an alternate interpretation is just as immanent: The talk of murdering Dany already has Lyanna on the edge of Ned’s consciousness, so of course he remembers that it was ironically Lyanna’s death after giving birth to Rhaegar’s child that reconciled he and Robert. Even if Ned is ignorant of Dany’s identity, the reader is able to savor the irony.

Clearly wanting with all his heart to convince Robert to spare Dany, Ned swallows his counterproductive anger and appeals to Robert’s better angels:

This time, Ned resolved to keep his temper. “Your Grace, the girl is scarcely more than a child. You are no Tywin Lannister, to slaughter innocents.”

Ned then thinks back on the horrors visited on Rhaenys and Aegon, which he may be remembering as vivid warnings of what awaits his niece—”Rhaegar’s [other] little girl”—should he fail to quiet Robert’s murderous impulses.

It was said that Rhaegar’s little girl had cried as they dragged her from beneath her bed to face the swords. The boy had been no more than a babe in arms, yet Lord Tywin’s soldiers had torn him from his mother’s breast and dashed his head against a wall.

“The boy” is an infamous construction that’s contrived to be consistent with “Aegon’s” survival. But I would note something else: The contrast between “Rhaegar’s little girl” and, simply, “the boy” may also hint that the original Aegon was not sired by Rhaegar, but by Arthur Dayne. (Arthur played Aemon the Dragonknight to Elia’s Naerys.)

Robert wails about Dany “breeding more dragonspawn to plague me,” juxtaposing breeding and Dany, who may well be an intentionally “bred” genetic chimera. Ned presses him:

“Nonetheless,” Ned said, “the murder of children… it would be vile… unspeakable…”

Ned’s passion is dramatically sensible if Dany is Lyanna’s daughter, regardless of whether Ned knows this.

Robert’s response is a fat, tasty irony bomb if RALD:

“Unspeakable?” the king roared. “What Aerys did to your brother Brandon was unspeakable. The way your lord father died, that was unspeakable. And Rhaegar… how many times do you think he raped your sister? How many hundreds of times?”

It’s pretty hard to justify killing a girl to avenge a supposed atrocity when the victim of the atrocity being avenged is the girl you’re trying to kill’s mother.

Robert rages on, but Ned realizes it is out of impotence; Dany is safe for the moment with Illyrio. Robert mentions that Jon Arryn took the same stance as Ned:

“I should have had them both killed years ago, when it was easy to get at them, but Jon was as bad as you. More fool I, I listened to him.”

I suspect Jon, a childless man who surely viewed his ward Ned as a son (he started a war over the murder of Ned’s father and brother!)—

In his youth, Ned had fostered at the Eyrie, and the childless Lord Arryn had become a second father to him and his fellow ward, Robert Baratheon. When the Mad King Aerys II Targaryen had demanded their heads, the Lord of the Eyrie had raised his moon-and-falcon banners in revolt rather than give up those he had pledged to protect. (GOT C I)

—and later came to be a “brother” to Ned as well—

And one day fifteen years ago, this second father had become a brother as well, as he and Ned stood together in the sept at Riverrun to wed two sisters, the daughters of Lord Hoster Tully. (GOT C I)

—may have taken the stance he did in part because Ned, his surrogate son, his good “son”, implored him to do so, thereby holding to his promise to Lyanna to try to protect her Targaryen daughter’s remaining Targaryen family members from Robert’s wrath. The conversation is easy to imagine:

“Once you went to war to keep me safe, though I did not ask you to. I am asking you for the sake of the love we bear one another not to let the Targaryen children go. It was my brother and my father that Aerys killed. It was my sister Lyanna that Rhaegar took, yet on her deathbed she asked that no vengeance be taken against his family, and I tell you now that as Lord of Winterfell I foreswear further retribution against the Targaryens for the sins their fathersr visited on her, on Brandon, and on my lord father.”

As Robert fulminates, though, he touches on a sea motifs fraught with importance if BAJRALD:

“I tell you, Ned, [1] I do not like this marriage. There are still those in the Seven Kingdoms who call me [2] Usurper. [3] Do you forget how many houses fought for Targaryen in [4] the war? They bide their time for now, but give them half a chance, [5A] they will murder me [6] in my bed, and [5B/7] my sons with me. If the beggar king crosses with a Dothraki horde at his back, the traitors will join him.”

“He will not cross,” Ned promised. “And if by some mischance he does, we will throw him back [8] into the sea. Once you choose a new Warden of the East—”

The king groaned. “For the last time, I will not name the Arryn boy Warden. [9] I know the boy is your nephew, but with Targaryens climbing in bed with Dothraki, [10/11] I would be mad to rest one quarter of the realm on the shoulders of a sickly child.”

The [1] dangers posed by Jon, the fruit of Brandon’s marriage to Ashara and [10] the fear that Jon would grow to be a deeply flawed ruler led Lyanna [6] “in her bed of blood” to beg Ned to claim his [9] nephew Jon as [7] his own bastard son (note that Robert’s “sons” are [a] bastards and [b] not his sons), making Ned a [2] usurper. This took place at the end of [4] Robert’s Rebellion, which was set off by [5A] the double murder of Lord Rickard and [5B] his son Brandon by [11] the Mad King. Then [8] Ashara “jumped… into the sea”. (SOS Arya VIII) And as we’re about to see, Ned can’t [3] forget any of this.

The song, it rhymes.

In the wake of Robert literally saying what Ned is (a “Usurper”) while musing about the loyalists who could someday emerge to “murder” him and his sons—a fear usurping Ned could perhaps relate to—Ned speaks of how the Lannisters “had taken [King’s Landing] by treachery” during Robert’s Rebellion. As Jon’s usurper, Ned knows a thing or two about taking something that doesn’t belong to him, right? We might even expect that between his own talk of treacherous acquisition and Robert’s chatter about Usurpers, Ned’s nephews, and dangerous marriages, Ned might be feeling guilty about his own sins. And sure enough, when Robert tells Ned…

“I shall not trouble my sleep over it.”

…Ned the Usurper immediately begins to brood on the “troubled sleep” he’s suffered as he’s “lived his lies for fourteen years”, having claimed Winterfell as his own via the “treachery” of calling Brandon’s trueborn heir Jon his own bastard:

Troubled sleep was no stranger to [Ned]. He had lived his lies for fourteen years, yet they still haunted him at night.

BAJ knows exactly what “lies” have Ned “haunted him at night”. Notice that they do have something to do with Ashara Dayne of the twice “haunting” eyes, just as the more sensible versions of RLJ claim. But Ned isn’t haunted by shame of having loved/married/impregnated Ashara; he’s haunted because he dispossessed Ashara’s son of Winterfell and of a life in Dorne (where even a if Jon were “known” to be a bastard he could have risen high as the son of a Dayne). Ned’s “lies” are legion; every time someone calls him Lord Stark and he answers, he lies anew.

As Ned thinks on the “lies” that “trouble [his] sleep”—lies that saw him become Lord of Winterfell—he responds to Robert’s remark about not losing sleep over the “treachery” Tywin employed to take King’s Landing. His response could not be more ironic:

“There was no honor in that conquest.”

As if there was honor in using “lies” to take the North from Brandon’s son! (Or wasn’t there? Remember, Ned will soon tell Arya that lying to protect Nymeria was “not without honor”, because the lie kept Nym safe. Ned’s lies prevent/ed disastrous conflict/war between Winterfell and Riverrun, kept baby Robb safe, keep/kept Jon safe from Tully wrath, etc. Shades of grey…)

Robert’s rebuttal is just as ironic. He adduces Lyanna, the very person who begged Ned to disinherit Jon via the “treachery” of lies:

“The Others take your honor!” Robert swore. “What did any Targaryen ever know of honor? “Go down into your crypt and ask Lyanna about the dragon’s honor!”

Between (a) the immediate context of “Lyanna” and dishonorable conquests, (b) Ned having just been moved by talk of Usurpers, his nephew, etc. to think on “his lies” and how they haunt him, and (c) the underlying topic of the conversation (i.e. Robert’s desire to kill Dany), it makes perfect narrative sense that Ned finds himself thinking again of Lyanna’s deathbed pleas, with which she’d extracted his promises: to get her daughter to safety and to claim Jon as his bastard son, thereby claiming Winterfell and the North.

“You avenged Lyanna at the Trident,” Ned said, halting beside the king. Promise me, Ned, she had whispered.

Ned promised, and his promises produced “his lies”, which he’s “lived” and been “haunted” by “for fourteen years”.

Robert laments that his vengeance did not bring Lyanna back, and asks Ned a question Ned’s surely asked himself:

“I ask you, Ned, what good is it to wear a crown? The gods mock the prayers of kings and cowherds alike.”

Robert’s question recalls Ned’s own disinterest in taking up and drinking from Brandon’s proverbial “cup”.

Ned’s response is again slathered in irony per BAJ. Even as he is privately plagued by the guilt of his own, Lyanna-inspired usurpation of Jon’s “crown”, Ned tells Robert about another (would-be) usurpation: Jaime’s. Notice how Jaime’s helm is a symbolic crown: his “wearing a helm” plays off Robert’s comment about “wear[ing] a crown”.

“I cannot answer for the gods, Your Grace … only for what I found when I rode into the throne room that day,” Ned said. “Aerys was dead on the floor, drowned in his own blood. … Jaime wore the white cloak of the Kingsguard over his golden armor. … He was seated on the Iron Throne, high above his knights, wearing a helm fashioned in the shape of a lion’s head. …

“I looked at him seated there on the throne, and I waited. At last Jaime laughed and got up. He took off his helm, and he said to me, ‘Have no fear, Stark. I was only keeping it warm for our friend Robert. It’s not a very comfortable seat, I’m afraid.'”

Again, the irony is incredible! Jaime was merely doing what Ned rightfully should have been doing these last “fourteen years”: “keeping [the throne] warm” as Jon’s custodian and regent. Just as the Iron Throne is literally “not a very comfortable seat”, so has Ned sat uncomfortably in the High Seat of Winterfell, fretting as Jon grew over the fact that he’d promised Lyanna he would “live his lies” to grave.

SIDEBAR: I believe the quoted vignette is one of the dramatic pay-offs for Aerys II’s portentous belief that “The gods will not suffer a bastard to sit the Iron Throne,” (TWOIAF) because I think that it, coupled with Aerys I’s refusal to have sex, suggests that there is a prophecy which augurs that a king named “Aerys” will have a son who kills his royal father and sits the iron throne. (Obviously I think Jaime, who killed Aerys, is Aerys’s bastard son.) END SIDEBAR

Robert just laughs Ned’s story off, telling Ned:

“Jaime was all of seventeen, Ned. Scarce more than a boy.”

Just as Ned was “scarce more than a boy” when he claimed Jon as his son and thus claimed the North. Ned’s response is again ironic:

“Boy or man, he had no right to that throne.”

Pot, kettle, black.

Robert’s response foregrounds the idea that the conversation I’ve been analyzing is indeed about more than it seems: that there are [1] “more ways than one” to read it, that it is about Ned’s [2] secret, [3] “dark sin” of [4] usurping [5] his brother’s line, which [6] haunts Ned—[7] he never forgets what he’s done—such that he constantly hears Lyanna whispering to him from [8] beyond the grave:

“And he spoke truly, it is a monstrous uncomfortable chair. [1] In more ways than one.” The king shook his head. “Well, now I know [3] Jaime’s dark sin, and [7] the matter can be forgotten. I am [6] heartily sick of [2] secrets and [5] squabbles [a term constantly associated with sibling strife] and [4] matters of state, Ned. It’s all as tedious as counting coppers. Come, let’s ride, you used to know how. I want to feel the wind in my hair again.” He kicked his horse back into motion and galloped up over [6 & 8] the barrow, raining earth down behind him.

Note the way Robert’s horse in effect digs up a grave and dumps the contents on Ned, and the way Robert’s zeal for riding evokes Brandon, the “centaur”.

This raises a key point: I submit that Ned was drawn to Robert because he was so like his older brother Brandon: wild, lusty, wanton, full of laughter, with no time for deep thought or subtlety. As Robert rides off, Ned paints a picture of him that I believe could as easily apply to Brandon (“the wild wolf” possessed of “more than a touch” of “wildness”):

[Ned] was no Jon Arryn, to curb the wildness of his king and teach him wisdom. Robert would do what he pleased, as he always had, and nothing Ned could say or do would change that.

Brandon, too, did “what he pleased”: He wed Ashara, which threatened to visit Hoster Tully’s “fire and sword” upon the North.

Brandon likely drew away from Ned as he aged, choosing new “brothers” like Jeffory Mallister, Kyle Royce and Elbert Arryn much as Robb (who so ironically follows in Brandon’s footsteps) draws away from Bran and Rickon:

Robb the Lord seemed to have more time for Hallis Mollen and Theon Greyjoy than he ever did for his brothers. (GOT B IV)

Robb seemed half a stranger to Bran now… (B VI)

Ned unconsciously sought to replace Brandon with the eminently Brandon-esque Robert, who he loved as a brother—

“You say you love Robert like a brother.” – Cat to Ned (GOT C II)

“Robert loves the man [Ned] like a brother.” (B II)

“[Robert and Ned] were as close as brothers, once.” (GOT J VII)

—and, thanks to Brandon’s failings as a brother, as more than a brother:

He looked across the room at Robert. His old friend, closer than any brother. (GOT E III)

Robert Baratheon, who had been more than a brother to him. (GOT E XIII)

“Robert would never harm me or any of mine. We were closer than brothers.” (GOT C II)

I submit that even TWOIAF nudges us to realize that Brandon was Robert-esque, when it literally discusses the two men’s births in tandem and then introduces Ned:

Yet even as Aerys donned his crown, in that fateful year of 262 AC, a lusty blackhaired son named Robert had just been born to his cousin Steffon Baratheon and his lady wife at Storm’s End, whilst far to the north at Winterfell, Lord Rickard Stark celebrated the birth of his own son, Brandon.  Another Stark, Eddard, followed within a year.

Notice that Robert is tagged as verbatim “lusty” even as he is implicitly compared to Brandon. It’s my contention that Brandon was no less “lusty” than Robert, and that his lust for Ashara is at the center of our story.

If anything, Brandon was more mercurial than Robert, to judge by their actions at Harrenhal:

Brandon Stark… had to be restrained from confronting Rhaegar at what he took as a slight upon his sister’s honor, for Lyanna Stark had long been betrothed to Robert Baratheon, Lord of Storm’s End. … As for Robert Baratheon himself, some say he laughed at the prince’s gesture, claiming that Rhaegar had done no more than pay Lyanna her due…but those who knew him better say the young lord brooded on the insult, and that his heart hardened toward the Prince of Dragonstone from that day forth. (TWOIAF)

As our “walk-through” continues, we’ll see that this Robert/Brandon “rhyme” is in many ways a Rosetta Stone unlocking the truth of BAJ.

AGOT Eddard II ends as Robert rides away and Ned broods. There is again “more ways than one” to read his final thoughts:

He belonged in Winterfell. He belonged with Catelyn in her grief, and with Bran.

I suspect this thought rhymes with part of Lyanna’s dying appeal: “You’ve become a better man than Brandon ever could have been, Ned. You know you are. Benjen knows, too. We all do. You belong in Winterfell, and for the good of the realm you belong on its high seat. You should rule, and your son and their sons after you. Better that than that Hoster Tully should make a hostage of your new son Robb and perhaps make your new wife Catelyn a grieving widow. Better that than undo this fragile peace and plunge the North into war again, when already so many are grieving for those lost at the Trident. And if that happens, Robert’s alliance is broken, and that will only plunge Westeros into war again, as Dorne and the loyalists will surely rises again and crown Viserys. Do you mean to undo Robert’s kingdom, such that so many will have died for naught? You can prevent so much suffering if you only take up Brandon’s cup and rink from. Promise me you will do this, Ned. Promise you will call Jon your bastard. Raise him well, and treat him kindly, but neither he nor the world can know who he truly is. Take him to Winterfell as your bastard, send for Catelyn and your son, and be the good ruler Brandon could never have been. Promise me, Ned.”

The idea that Lyanna appealed to what was surely Ned’s quiet (and correct) belief that he’d make a better Lord than his elder brother Brandon—and thus, per in-world beliefs about “bad blood”, “wolf blood”, etc., that his line would produce better rulers than Brandon’s—”rhymes” with how Littlefinger takes in Nestor Royce and illicitly grants him title to the castle to which he is properly only the steward (as Ned is properly only the steward of the North):

Sansa hesitated a moment. “You gave Lord Nestor the Gates of the Moon to be certain of his support.”

“I did,” Petyr admitted, “but our rock is a Royce, which is to say he is overproud and prickly. Had I asked him his price, he would have swelled up like an angry toad at the slight upon his honor. But this way . . . the man is not utterly stupid, but the lies I served him were sweeter than the truth. He wants to believe that Lysa valued him above her other bannermen. One of those others is Bronze Yohn, after all, and Nestor is very much aware that he was born of the lesser branch of House Royce. He wants more for his son. Men of honor will do things for their children that they would never consider doing for themselves.”

Ned knew he was a better man than Brandon, and having lived in Brandon’s shadow and seen how close Brandon and Lyanna were (“a pair of centaurs”, sharing the “wolf blood”), he surely “wanted to believe that Ly[anna]”, who is loved, recognized his worth, too—that she in the end “valued him above her other” brother. Like Nestor, his fellow “man of honor” (about which, more below), Ned “would never [have] considered doing” what he did for selfish reasons: Ned did not even want to rule. But rhyming with Nestor doing what he did “for [his] children”, Ned did what he did for his sister: Indeed, he “would hever [have] consisdered doing” what he did at all if Lyanna did not beg it of him on her deathbed.

Lest we doubt this reading, Littlefinger calling Nestor “overproud and prickly” and a “m[a]n of honor” cements the Nestor/Ned rhyme three time over. First, when Littlefinger likewise calls Ned “prickly” as his mouth twists, just as Ned’s mouth twists when Ned speaks caustically of Brandon and of Brandon’s “cup” passing to him:

“The direwolf must be a prickly beast,” said Littlefinger with a sharp twist of his mouth. (GOT C II)

That brought a bitter twist to Ned’s mouth. “Brandon. Yes. Brandon would know what to do. He always did. It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was born to be a King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never asked for this cup to pass to me.”

Second, when Ned has a vision of Littlefinger all but calling him “overproud”, like Nestor, in a context rife with allusions to Ned’s deceitful usurpation. (Note the king the ruler—who isn’t really the king.)

I failed you, Robert, Ned thought. He could not say the words. I lied to you, hid the truth. I let them kill you.

The king heard him. “You stiff-necked fool,” he muttered, “too proud to listen. Can you eat pride, Stark? Will honor shield your children?” Cracks ran down his face, fissures opening in the flesh, and he reached up and ripped the mask away. It was not Robert at all; it was Littlefinger, grinning, mocking him. (GOT E XV)

Third, when Ned is twice called out as, like Nestor, one of Littlefinger’s “men of honor”, in contexts just as pregnant with relevant allusions. First:

[Stannis, Robert’s younger brother and true heir, who is fighting against Robert’s false sons, who are his goodbrother’s bastards but who claim to be his trueborn heirs, to Jon, “the bad brother” Brandon’s trueborn heir, who Brandon’s younger brother and false heir (Ned, seemingly “the good brother”) claimed as his bastard:] “Your father [Ned] was a man of honor. He was no friend to me, but I saw his worth. Your brother was a rebel and a traitor who meant to steal half my kingdom, but no man can question his courage. What of you?” (SOS Jon XI)

Like Stannis, Lyanna “was no friend to” Ned: It was she and Brandon who were “a pair of centaurs”. But also like Stannis, Lyanna “saw [Ned’s] worth”, as against the chaos and woe Brandon wrought, which is why she wanted him to rule the North. Ned’s brother Brandon was killed as “a rebel and a traitor” after courageously (if rashly) riding to the Red Keep to challenge Rhaegar. He was killed with his father, who was almost certainly part of a plot to “steal” Aerys’s kingdom away from him.

But there’s also a less direct, more “rhyme-y” rhyme here, inasmuch as everything Stannis says about Robb, who is juxtaposed as a counterpoint to Ned, is also true of Ned. That is, Ned is also a kind of “rebel” and a “Traitor” who stole the North, which is literally “half [the] kingdom”—

“In the south, the way they talk about my Seven Kingdoms, a man forgets that your part is as big as the other six combined.” (GOT E I)

—from it’s rightful ruler, but whose manner of rule demonstrates true “courage”:

 “Do it yourself then, Robert,” he said in a voice cold and sharp as steel. “At least have the courage to do it yourself.”

Robert looked at Ned with flat, dead eyes and left without a word, his footsteps heavy as lead. Silence filled the hall.

…

“Send for Ilyn Payne.”

“No,” Ned said. “Jory, take the girls back to their rooms and bring me Ice.” The words tasted of bile in his throat, but he forced them out. “If it must be done, I will do it.”

Cersei Lannister regarded him suspiciously. “You, Stark? Is this some trick? Why would you do such a thing?”

They were all staring at him, but it was Sansa’s look that cut. “She is of the north. She deserves better than a butcher.” (GOT E III)

At the same time, as Rickard’s son he does belong in Winterfell, just as Jon’s custodian and regent rather than as Lord. His thoughts of Catelyn and their son,

A man could not always be where he belonged, though. Resigned, Eddard Stark put his boots into his horse and set off after the king.

Ned’s duty to his wife and child—a duty Lyanna surely appealed to on her deathbed—are foremost on his mind as he “resigns” himself, now as he did then and every day after, to a life led walking in the proper Lord Stark’s boots, where as a usurper he has never “belonged”.

AGOT Tyrion II

Tyrion Lannister—a chimera sired in part by Aerys Targaryen—tells Jon he’s reading about dragons. Some proponents of RLJ seize on this passage—

“What good is that? There are no more dragons,” the boy said with the easy certainty of youth.

“So they say,” Tyrion replied. “Sad, isn’t it? When I was your age, I used to dream of having a dragon of my own.”

“You did?” the boy said suspiciously. Perhaps he thought Tyrion was making fun of him.

—to argue that Jon has dragon dreams.

The idea that Jon is “suspicious” because he has dragon dreams too! is a tough sell (although the ambiguity is likely intentional given that GRRM wants us to believe RLJ). After all, Jon begins by scoffing at dragons. He’s suspicious, yes, but likely only because Tyrion is making fun of his age. When Tyrion describes his fascination with dragons and fire, Jon’s response again cuts both ways:

“I used to start fires in the bowels of Casterly Rock and stare at the flames for hours, pretending they were dragonfire. Sometimes I’d imagine my father burning. At other times, my sister.” Jon Snow was staring at him, a look equal parts horror and fascination. Tyrion guffawed. “Don’t look at me that way, bastard. I know your secret. You’ve dreamt the same kind of dreams.”

“No,” Jon Snow said, horrified. “I wouldn’t…”

“No? Never?” Tyrion raised an eyebrow.

Jon is horrified, but of course RLJers often argue that he was merely going to object to what Tyrion said about wanting to burn his father, whereas he does dream of dragons, while handwaving Jon’s future silence on the topic, as well as his refusal to discuss these putative dragon dreams with a guy who just admitted to having them and who thus would be disposed to sympathy. Doesn’t really add up.

In any case, Tyrion continues:

“Well, no doubt the Starks have been terribly good to you. I’m certain Lady Stark treats you as if you were one of her own. And your brother Robb, he’s always been kind, and why not? He gets Winterfell and you get the Wall. And your father … he must have good reasons for packing you off to the Night’s Watch…”

“Stop it,” Jon Snow said, his face dark with anger. “The Night’s Watch is a noble calling!”

Tyrion laughed. “You’re too smart to believe that. The Night’s Watch is a midden heap for all the misfits of the realm. [Insults the Watch.]

“Stop it!” the boy screamed. He took a step forward, his hands coiling into fists, close to tears.

Tyrion moves towards Jon to apologize and Ghost flattens him. He asks Jon for help and Ghost (obviously half-warged by Jon) threatens him. Jon petulantly makes Tyrion “ask… nicely” for help.

Jon’s behavior is consistent with Brandon’s wild rages. He is almost literally a “wild wolf” here. Of the monastic, “determined, deliberate, dutiful, single-minded” Rhaegar Targaryen I see nothing. RLJ makes much of the close of the chapter:

[Tyrion] paused and looked back at Jon Snow. The boy stood near the fire, his face still and hard, looking deep into the flames.

It’s tempting to take this detail and run with it towards “Jon has Targ blood!”—certainly RLJ does. True, it’s not the only time Jon does this:

Jon slumped against the wall, hands around his knees, and stared at the candle on the table beside his narrow bed. The flame flickered and swayed, the shadows moved around him, the room seemed to grow darker and colder. (GOT J VII)

However, many, many characters do the same thing—including Ned, Ygritte, Theon, Davos, Stannis (Targ blood, though), Bran, Coldhands, Gilly, and Quentyn—so we can hardly treat this as definitive evidence. (One thing to keep in mind: it’s entirely possible that Ashara may have some Targaryen blood—notwithstanding GRRM’s denials—via recent intermarriage with the Martells and/or Rhae or Daella and/or the original Rhaenys, who I suspect survived her dragon’s death in Dorne.)

AGOT Sansa I

Barristan Selmy likes and esteems Ned.

“Well spoken, child,” said the old man in white. “As befits the daughter of Eddard Stark. I am honored to know you, however irregular the manner of our meeting. (GOT S I)

This makes little sense if Selmy feels Ned “dishonored his” secret crush Ashara in whatever fashion, let alone if he thinks she killed herself as a result, as some conclude from this:

But Ashara’s daughter had been stillborn, and his fair lady had thrown herself from a tower soon after, mad with grief for the child she had lost, and perhaps for the man who had dishonored her at Harrenhal as well…. If I had unhorsed Rhaegar and crowned Ashara queen of love and beauty, might she have looked to me instead of Stark? (DWD KB)

Selmy’s pro-Ned attitude is consistent though. When Cersei asks where Lady is so she can kill her, he answers reluctantly. (GOT E III) After Ser Hugh dies in Ned’s Tourney, Selmy and Ned talk at length, walk together, and conspire to convince Robert to sit out the melee, laughing as they do. (GOT E VII) Thus Selmy clearly doesn’t blame Ned for anything untoward regarding Ashara.

That doesn’t mean he thinks the same of Brandon, though, although it does suggest that “dishonored” might not be the end of the world in every case, as it’s hard to imagine Selmy being friendly with Ned if Brandon had, say, violently raped Ashara at Harrenhal. I’ll return to this in the future when I talk about Harrenhal in greater detail.

AGOT Bran III

Bran has his famous vision of the Heart of Winter. Before that, though, his vision provides evidence for RALD:

He looked south, and saw the great blue-green rush of the Trident. He saw his father pleading with the king, his face etched with grief.

Ned’s face is grieving as he pleads. What does Ned plead about throughout AGOT (as we’ll soon see)? Dany’s life. Why do we grieve? For the dead. When Ned pleas for Dany, it’s tied to his grief for her mother Lyanna, and the promise he made to her to keep Targaryens/Dany safe. Where Bran sees grief, Ned’s POVs register memories, dreams and the words “Promise me, Ned.”

AGOT Jon III

The first line of the chapter—of Jon’s subjective POV—describes his drilling with the other new recruits in Castle Black’s yard this way:

The courtyard rang to the song of swords.

This is language someone who enjoys training at swords might use, right? Indeed, Jon clearly relishes his “victory” over Grenn:

Jon took off his helm as the other boys were pulling Grenn to his feet. The frosty morning air felt good on his face. He leaned on his sword, drew a deep breath, and allowed himself a moment to savor the victory.

Jon’s obvious enjoyment of “the song of swords” is underscored when Donal Noye dresses him down:

“Does that [i.e. easily defeating the other trainees] make you proud?”

Jon hesitated. He did feel proud when he won. Why shouldn’t he? But the armorer was taking that away too, making it sound as if he were doing something wrong.

Later, in ASOS Jon XII, when he is again drilling in Castle Black’s yard, this time against Iron Emmett, Jon flashes back to his memories of training “every morning” with Robb, and his language again shows that Jon has always enjoyed training at swords, doing so joyfully since he was “big enough to walk”:

Every morning they had trained together, since they were big enough to walk; Snow and Stark, spinning and slashing about the wards of Winterfell, shouting and laughing, sometimes crying when there was no one else to see. They were not little boys when they fought, but knights and mighty heroes. “I’m Prince Aemon the Dragonknight,” Jon would call out, and Robb would shout back, “Well, I’m Florian the Fool.” Or Robb would say, “I’m the Young Dragon,” and Jon would reply, “I’m Ser Ryam Redwyne.”

And what does Jon again call such training, which he so clearly savors, after his memories of training with Robb lead him to lose his head and batter Emmett into submission? Again, “the song of swords”:

Emmett was an amiable man, and he loved the song of swords.

Obviously Iron Emmett isn’t the only person in the scene who “loved the song of swords”, right? Jon clearly does too, as he has since he was “big enough to walk”. And that makes him nothing like his RLJ-father Rhaegar, who (we just so happen to be told verbatim) “never loved the song of swords”, who never played with other children as Jon played with Robb and Arya, who only trained at swords because something he read made him believe he “must”:

“[Rhaegar] never loved the song of swords the way that Robert did, or Jaime Lannister. It was something he had to do, a task the world had set him. He did it well, for he did everything well. That was his nature. But he took no joy in it. Men said that he loved his harp much better than his lance.” (SOS Dae IV)

“As a young boy, the Prince of Dragonstone was bookish to a fault. He was reading so early that men said Queen Rhaella must have swallowed some books and a candle whilst he was in her womb. Rhaegar took no interest in the play of other children. The maesters were awed by his wits, but his father’s knights would jest sourly that Baelor the Blessed had been born again. Until one day Prince Rhaegar found something in his scrolls that changed him. No one knows what it might have been, only that the boy suddenly appeared early one morning in the yard as the knights were donning their steel. He walked up to Ser Willem Darry, the master-at-arms, and said, ‘I will require sword and armor. It seems I must be a warrior.'” (SOS Dae I)

If Jon’s life-long love of “the song of swords” sounds nothing like Rhaegar, it sounds everything like Brandon:

“Brandon loved his sword. He loved to hone it. ‘I want it sharp enough to shave the hair from a woman’s cunt,’ he used to say. And how he loved to use it. ‘A bloody sword is a beautiful thing,’ he told me once.” …

“I still remember the look of my maiden’s blood on his cock the night he claimed me. I think Brandon liked the sight as well. A bloody sword is a beautiful thing, yes.” (DWD tTC)

Indeed, Jon’s relentless utter domination of Grenn—

Under black wool, boiled leather, and mail, sweat trickled icily down Jon’s chest as he pressed the attack. Grenn stumbled backward, defending himself clumsily. When he raised his sword, Jon went underneath it with a sweeping blow that crunched against the back of the other boy’s leg and sent him staggering. Grenn’s downcut was answered by an overhand that dented his helm. When he tried a sideswing, Jon swept aside his blade and slammed a mailed forearm into his chest. Grenn lost his footing and sat down hard in the snow. Jon knocked his sword from his fingers with a slash to his wrist that brought a cry of pain.

Enough!” Ser Alliser Thorne had a voice with an edge like Valyrian steel.

… Grenn cradled his hand. “The bastard broke my wrist.”

—and what could fairly be called the “madness” that possesses Jon when he beats down Emmett—

In the end Halder and Horse had to pull him away from Iron Emmett, one man on either arm. The ranger sat on the ground dazed, his shield half in splinters, the visor of his helm knocked askew, and his sword six yards away. “Jon, enough,” Halder was shouting, “he’s down, you disarmed him. Enough!”

No. Not enough. Never enough. Jon let his sword drop. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Emmett, are you hurt?”

Iron Emmett pulled his battered helm off. “Was there some part of yield you could not comprehend, Lord Snow?” It was said amiably, though. Emmett was an amiable man, and he loved the song of swords.

—are together ominously reminiscent of Brandon’s relentless domination of Littlefinger and more importantly of the “madness” that seems to have possessed Brandon during their duel, seemingly causing him to forget all about his promise to spare him:

“It was madness. Brandon was twenty, Petyr scarcely fifteen. I had to beg Brandon to spare Petyr’s life. He let him off with a scar.” (GOT C IV)

“He is only a foolish boy, but I have loved him like a brother. It would grieve me to see him die.” And her betrothed looked at her with the cool grey eyes of a Stark and promised to spare the boy who loved her.

That fight was over almost as soon as it began. Brandon was a man grown, and he drove Littlefinger all the way across the bailey and down the water stair, raining steel on him with every step, until the boy was staggering and bleeding from a dozen wounds. “Yield!” he called, more than once, but Petyr would only shake his head and fight on, grimly. When the river was lapping at their ankles, Brandon finally ended it, with a brutal backhand cut that bit through Petyr’s rings and leather into the soft flesh below the ribs, so deep that Catelyn was certain that the wound was mortal. (GOT C VII)

It wasn’t Brandon’s promise so much as luck and a good maester that saved Littlefinger’s life. Just as Jon loses his head when training with Emmett, Brandon lost his head when dueling Littlefinger. Like father, like son.

Who else surely trained from an early age with his sword and relished it enough to become the “deadliest” of the Kingsguard? Ashara’s brother, the Sword of the Morning, Ser Arthur Dayne.

After his training yard victory, Jon gets angry — again, a la Brandon, not Rhaegar — when Benjen tells him he cannot come on a ranging until he completes his training. He specifically mentions Jon’s “Stark blood” and “Your father” in saying he’ll get no special treatment. Jon gets pissed, and ends up clashing violently with Grenn, Toad and the rapers. Brandon’s wolf blood shines through as he argues with Donal Noye in the aftermath: “Jon’s anger flared,” “Jon said icily,” “Jon was cold with rage,” “Jon stared sullenly,” and then this:

“Words won’t make your mother a whore. She was what she was, and nothing Toad says can change that. You know, we have men on the Wall whose mothers were whores.”

Not my mother, Jon thought stubbornly. He knew nothing of his mother; Eddard Stark would not talk of her. Yet he dreamed of her at times, so often that he could almost see her face. In his dreams, she was beautiful, and highborn, and her eyes were kind. (GOT J III)

Both Lyanna and Ashara were beautiful. Both were technically highborn, but did the daughter of a half-mountain-clan mother (i.e. Lyanna) appear so? Dubious. After all, Ned explicitly says that Arya looks like Lyanna, and Arya doesn’t look notably highborn, if we can trust the hookers GRRM just “so happens” to have answer that exact question:

He was turning red again. “What are you doing here, then?” he demanded. “A brothel’s no fit place for no bloody highborn lady, everybody knows that.”

One of the girls sat down on the bench beside him. “Who’s a highborn lady? The little skinny one?” She looked at Arya and laughed. “I’m a king’s daughter myself.” (SOS A V)

She’s not the only one to so testify. After Lady Smallwood learns Arya is highborn, she dresses her in proper clothes. And Gendry’s response?

Gendry took one look and laughed so hard that wine came out his nose, until Harwin gave him a thwack alongside his ear. (SOS A IV)

Anguy doubles down after she tussles with Gendry (who, yes, does later say she looks “different now. Like a proper little girl.”)

Anguy smiled one of his stupid freckly smiles and said, “Are we certain this one is a highborn lady!” (SOS A IV)

Thus even if there’s an “ugly duckling” effect, it’s not a huge one, and there’s simply no way it can be argued that Arya “looks clearly highborn”, period. Yet Ned says Lyanna looked like Arya, and not like Renly’s painting of the indubitably highborn Margaery Tyrell.

Kevan Lannister also strongly suggests that Lyanna didn’t look highborn, per se—

…Rhaegar might never have looked twice at Lyanna Stark. The northern girl had a wild beauty, as he recalled, though however bright a torch might burn it could never match the rising sun. (DWD Epilogue)

—as does TWOIAF:

…the Stark girl, who was by all reports a wild and boyish young thing with none of the Princess Elia’s delicate beauty…

It’s difficult to square Lyanna’s “wild and boyish” look or even her “wild beauty” (as again Cersei’s obviously highborn look) with her looking “highborn”. Surely looking “wild” is the opposite of looking “highborn”.

On the other hand, if there were ever a generically “highborn” look, Ashara’s “purple eyes” fit the bill, from the first implication of a highborn look in ASOIAF—

“Look at her. That silver-gold hair, those purple eyes … she is the blood of old Valyria, no doubt, no doubt … and highborn, daughter of the old king, sister to the new, she cannot fail to entrance our Drogo.” When he released her hand, Daenerys found herself trembling. (GOT D I)

—to Ashara’s distant cousin Gerold Dayne:

Arianne watched him warily. He is highborn enough to make a worthy consort, she thought. Father would question my good sense, but our children would be as beautiful as dragonlords. If there was a handsomer man in Dorne, she did not know him. Ser Gerold Dayne had an aquiline nose, high cheekbones, a strong jaw.* He kept his face clean-shaven, but his thick hair fell to his collar like a silver glacier, divided by a streak of midnight black. He has a cruel mouth, though, and a crueler tongue. His eyes seemed black as he sat outlined against the dying sun, sharpening his steel, but she had looked at them from a closer vantage and she knew that they were purple. Dark purple. Dark and angry.

As with every mention of “highborn” in ASOIAF, it’s easy to read these as referring purely to a noble bloodline—and certainly they do—without reference to physiognomy. But if GRRM stated plainly that Lyanna Stark did not look highborn and Ashara Dayne did, what kind of mystery would this be? Association and innuendo is the bread and butter of dramatic foreshadowing, and (as regards the identity of Jon’s mother) that’s what a whore laughing at Lyanna’s doppleganger being called highborn or Kevan recalling Lyanna’s “wild beauty” are, as is calling out the “highborn” looks of characters with purple eyes.

What about Jon’s vision of his “highborn” mother’s “kind” eyes? Lyanna-twin Arya has the “Stark look”, and we know that means “the cool grey eyes of a Stark”. (COT C VII) “Cool” does not generally connote “kind”—if anything, the opposite. Ashara’s “laughing purple eyes”, on the other hand? Kindness and laughter go hand and hand. Arya describes Ashara’s first cousin Edric as “good-natured”, which implies kindness:

The squire seemed nice enough to Arya; maybe a little shy, but good-natured. She had always heard that Dornishmen were small and swarthy, with black hair and small black eyes, but Ned had big blue eyes, so dark that they looked almost purple.

• good-natured adjective 1. having or showing a pleasant, kindly disposition; amiable

And he certainly seems to have Ashara’s eyes. It seems more likely than not that Ashara’s brother Arthur was a kind man, as well:

“If you want [the smallfolk’s] help, you need to make them love you. That was how Arthur Dayne did it, when we rode against the Kingswood Brotherhood. He paid the smallfolk for the food we ate, brought their grievances to King Aerys, expanded the grazing lands around their villages, even won them the right to fell a certain number of trees each year and take a few of the king’s deer during the autumn. The forest folk had looked to Toyne to defend them, but Ser Arthur did more for them than the Brotherhood could ever hope to do, and won them to our side. After that, the rest was easy.” (FFC Jai IV)

Indeed, I happen to believe he is more associated with kindness than anyone else in ASOIAF, but that’s something I won’t get into here. (OK, I’ll mention it: I suspect Arthur Dayne is Arya’s kindly man.)

AGOT Eddard IV

Despite most RLJers belief that Ned’s promise is to keep Jon safe, Ned doesn’t think about Jon at all while talking about the attack on his son Bran:

“If the queen had a role in this [i.e. the attack on Bran] or, gods forbid, the king himself… no, I will not believe that.” Yet even as he said the words, he remembered that chill morning on the barrowlands, and Robert’s talk of sending hired knives after the Targaryen princess. He remembered Rhaegar’s infant son, the red ruin of his skull, and the way the king had turned away, as he had turned away in Darry’s audience hall not so long ago. He could still hear Sansa pleading, as Lyanna had pleaded once.

The attack on his son, and the mere thought that Robert could have played some part, leads him to think not of Jon but of Dany, a dead Targaryen baby, Robert’s complicity therein, and the pleading of both his daughter Sansa and Lyanna, in quick succession, which makes perfect sense if Lyanna is Dany’s mother. His fears for Dany renew, yet Ned has not thought of Jon since he left.

As the chapter continues, I wonder whether there isn’t a subtle clue regarding Brandon’s death buried in Ned’s conversation with Littlefinger. Petyr suggests forgetting about the attack on Bran, and Ned replies:

If you truly believe I could forget that, you are as big a fool now as when you took up sword against my brother.“

Littlefinger’s reply contains a trace of pique that gives me goosebumps:

“A fool I may be, Stark… yet I’m still here, while your brother has been moldering in his frozen grave for some fourteen years now.”

Littlefinger essentially implies that Brandon was the real “fool” for riding to King’s Landing, which is exactly what Hoster Tully called Brandon at the time. It’s almost as if he’s claiming to have gotten the last laugh on Brandon, which reminds me that he seems to have learned about Brandon’s death very quickly for a man supposedly living in a raven-less tower in the middle of nowhere:

“[Littlefinger] wrote to me at Riverrun after Brandon was killed, but I burned the letter unread. By then I knew that Ned would marry me in his brother’s place.” (GOT C IV)

Long story short: we don’t have all the pieces, but I wonder if Littlefinger didn’t somehow help get Brandon killed out of jealousy and spite. I wonder if he wasn’t aware that Lyanna would be kidnapped, having gleaned that information from Hoster Tully’s maester, who could have known if Hoster Tully was forewarned and/or complicit. Regardless, might Petyr have stayed near Brandon, feigned goodwill when Lyanna was taken, and encouraged Brandon to confront Aerys, who Littlefinger knew would begrudge Brandon over Ashara’s affections? (I suspect Aerys at least tried to rape Ashara at Harrenhal, and perhaps again when they returned to King’s Landing.) From a narrative, characterization and motivation standpoint, it works.

AGOT Arya II

Arya cries to Ned about her fight with Joffrey, telling Ned that Sansa “lied” just as surely as Joffrey did. In response, the honorable Eddard Stark plainly states that he sometimes lies, too, which is obviously true per any theory of Jon’s lineage.

“I hate all of them. Joffrey lied, it wasn’t the way he said. I hate Sansa too. She did remember, she just lied so Joffrey would like her.”

“We all lie,” her father said. “Or did you truly think I’d believe that Nymeria ran off?”

Arya blushed guiltily. “Jory promised not to tell.”

Ned’s response here, though, may have ironic resonance with his own past if BAJ:

“Jory kept his word,” her father said with a smile. “There are some things I do not need to be told. Even a blind man could see that wolf would never have left you willingly.“

Arya is clearly a mother figure to Nymeria, right? And Nymeria is named after a famed woman of Dorne, right? I suspect the bolded text is a hint that Ashara was told some lie in order to convince her to give up Jon—perhaps that the child she’d just birthed had died, or perhaps that Jon would be raised to be Lord of Winterfell and/or returned to her (either soon or at some future point). Or perhaps it “merely” hints that Ashara did not “willingly” let her half-Dornish “wolf pup” go.

Arya tells Ned they’d forcibly driven off Nymeria:

“We had to throw rocks,” she said miserably. “I told her to run, to go be free, that I didn’t want her anymore. There were other wolves for her to play with, we heard them howling, and Jory said the woods were full of game, so she’d have deer to hunt. Only she kept following, and finally we had to throw rocks. I hit her twice. She whined and looked at me and I felt so ‘shamed…”

Could this, too, allude to how Ashara was treated? Did she attempt to stay in Jon’s life, and have to be coldly rebuffed? And/or did she try to do what Catelyn did with Ned and substitute Ned for her dead love and husband, Brandon? Did Ned have to rebuff Ashara, first telling her there were “other fish in the sea” (per “the woods were full of game”), then treating her coldly and telling her he did not love her (per “finally we had to throw rocks”)? If so, was he lying, given that lies are the topic at hand?

What follows foregrounds the basic premise of the RLJ red herring:

She whined and looked at me and I felt so ‘shamed, but it was right, wasn’t it? The queen would have killed her.”

“It was right,” her father said. “And even the lie was … not without honor.”

RLJ likes to say, “See, Ned admits he lies—he says ‘we all lie’—and then this exchange proves that Ned would lie about Jon to protect him from the king, even though Ned is honorable. It’s proof of RLJ.”

But there’s a problem: While Ned’s answer here clearly indicates he thinks it is honorable—or nearly so—to lie to protect a mere pet wolf, and while he warmly absolves Arya of the guilt she feels for lying to keep Nymeria safe (“we all lie”; “the lie was not without honor”), Ned takes an infinitely less sanguine view of his own lies. His lies have “haunted” him for years—

Troubled sleep was no stranger to him. He had lived his lies for fourteen years, yet they still haunted him at night. (AGOT E II)

—and as we’ll soon see he’s plagued by “relentless… old guilts” and deep “shame” over Jon. (Eddard IX, XV) But if Ned has simply lied to keep Jon safe from the king, as RLJ believes, and if Ned’s response to Arya’s visible “guilt” over lying to protect Nymeria from the queen is the placid one it is—to smile, gently tell her “we all lie”, assure her she did the “right” thing, and suggest that her lie was honorable—then why do Ned’s nearly identical lies, made to safeguard Jon (no mere pet, but his own sister’s son!), cause Ned to be haunted by sleepless nights and relentless guilts? This makes no narrative sense.

But it does make sense that Ned is simultaneously (a) “haunted” by “his lies” and “relentless… old guilts” and (b) nonetheless able to warmly absolve Arya of her “guilt” by telling her “we all lie” and that her lie to protect her pup from the queen was “not without honor” if his lies and guilt are of a completely different character than Arya’s—if they’re the lies and guilt of a reluctant usurper. Which they are.

This isn’t to say there’s no resonance between Arya lying to protect Nymeria from “the queen” and Ned’s lies about Jon. Indeed, one thing that doesn’t trouble Ned about the lie that Jon is his bastard is that it does keep Jon safe from a figure analogous to “the queen”. Not from King Robert, as per RLJ, but from at least one figurative queen who would have every reason to harm Jon if she knew his true lineage: Catelyn. Meanwhile, I suspect the more specific claim that Jon was Ned and Wylla’s son kept Jon safe from another queen-figure: Ashara’s father Lord Dayne’s new, young wife—Allyria’s mother—who hoped to see her own children inherit Starfall. (Remember, Ashara’s oldest brother, Edric’s father, had no children yet, so Ashara was second-in-line… unless, that is, she was at the time the heir to Starfall because her oldest, childless brother had taken the vows of a maester or septon—vows which he later “set aside” so he could wed and sire a male heir to Starfall, which he did in the form of Edric. )

Was Jon the only one Ned kept safe, though? I’ve speculated that Arya’s treatment of Nymeria speaks to how Ashara was treated c. 283. Was Ashara also threatened by a “queen” figure? Did Lord Dayne and/or Arthur and/or Ned recognize the venal new Lady Dayne’s animosity towards Ashara (like Cat’s toward Jon, but turned up to 11 by the revelation that Jon was Ned’s legitimate son by a previous wife) and, fearing for Ashara’s safety, encourage her to go far away and never return, much as Arya drives off Nymeria for her own good? Was Ashara ultimately forced into exile, as Arya forces Nymeria away? Perhaps by Ned? It’s possible Ashara’s father (also) wanted her gone. As a stony Dornishman, he may have wanted a male heir, and he may have seen Ashara and her wild blood as as dangerous to House Dayne as Lyanna thought Brandon’s blood was to House Stark. If so, did Ned and/or Arthur do what Arya did to Nymeria and make Ashara leave for her own good? Did Ashara despair of things and commit suicide? Or was a faked “suicide” how she foreswore her rights to Starfall?

After Arya tells Ned about driving off Nymeria, and after Ned absolves her of her guilt, Ned grows deeply contemplative:

He’d put Needle aside when he went to Arya to embrace her. Now he took the blade up again and walked to the window, where he stood for a moment, looking out across the courtyard. When he turned back, his eyes were thoughtful.

Given that Robert had already made plain his desire to kill Dany, and given that Arya has just talked about “exiling” her pup to protect it from the royal axe, I suspect Ned is thinking about Lyanna’s girl, either hoping she is somewhere safe, and wondering if they did the right thing in letting her care fall into the hands of others, or knowing she is not, and ruing that decision.

Ned calls Arya”a Stark of Winterfell” and delivers a famous speech:

“Let me tell you something about wolves, child. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths. So if you must hate, Arya, hate those who would truly do us harm. Septa Mordane is a good woman, and Sansa … Sansa is your sister. You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you … and I need both of you, gods help me.”

While Ned’s paean to family bonds and to “protect[ing] one another” is consistent with the theory that he is protecting his sister’s Targaryen boy from Robert, that reading ignores what the speech is really about: the rifts that divide a family. He is thinking about Lyanna’s children, who are not with them. And he’s thinking about his own intrasibling strife. Who was “the sun” to Ned’s “moon”? Who was “as different ” from Ned as Sansa is from Arya? Who had “the same blood flow[ing] through” his heart as Ned, no matter what Jaime Lannister says in ACOK C VII? (“Brandon was different from his brother, wasn’t he? He had blood in his veins instead of cold water. More like me.” Sidebar: Of course, Brandon was very much “more like” Jaime in that his lust led him to have sex he wasn’t supposed to have, the product of which gets claimed as another man’s son: in Jaime’s case, his bastards are legitimized; in Brandon’s case, his heir is called bastard and disinherited.) Brandon, the yin to Ned’s yang who fathered not a Targaryen with Stark blood, but a true “Stark of Winterfell”.

It is because Ned has such deep respect for family bonds and family loyalty—a trait Lyanna surely exploited when she convinced him he needed to claim Brandon’s son as his own bastard—that he is so tormented by his “promises” and the “lies” from which they stem. It is because he has usurped the seat of his own brother’s son (albeit at the behest of his beloved sister) that Ned can’t rest easy, no matter how much “the good of the realm” demanded he do what he did.

If RLJ, though, the devotion to family Ned evinces here is at sharp odds with the deep, anguished guilt Ned suffers over Jon. Ned should be comforted by thoughts of Jon and of his promises—he’s safeguarding his sister’s son, which he’s just told Arya is exactly the sort of thing the Starks need to do for another! He’s likewise just told her there is “honor” in lying to protect a loved one, yet his lies fill him with guilt. Of course, Jon is Brandon’s, not Lyanna’s, and the lies and promises that haunt Ned aren’t about protecting Jon, but about disinheriting him.

In summary, everything about Ned’s conversation with Arya suggests he shouldn’t be “haunted” if he is merely lying to keep Jon safe. (Yet he is.) Ned clearly values keeping family close and protected above everything, and he sees no harm in lying to protect a pet wolf, making it wholly implausible that he’d think it scandalously dishonorable to lie to protect “Jon Targaryen” from Robert. (Yet he is haunted by his lies.) The variations of RLJ that have an answer for this that isn’t textual nihilism (see: “Wellll, Ned can see how Arya shouldn’t feel guilty, but he’s just so honorable that he feels guilty even though he knows he shouldn’t and finds Arya’s and Jory’s deception almost funny”) posit that Ned’s “haunting” lies aren’t about Jon at all, but about his past relationship with Ashara (e.g. “Ned cheated on Cat” and/or “Ned married Ashara at Harrenhal/Starfall” and/or “Ned + Ashara = Allyria”), so Ned’s sanguine response to Arya’s lies and his talk about the importance of protecting family makes sense and his “lies” and “guilts” have nothing to do with Jon.

But what does GRRM say he is interested in writing about, over and over?

I’ve always agreed with William Faulkner—he said that the human heart in conflict with itself is the only thing worth writing about. I’ve always taken that as my guiding principle, and the rest is just set dressing.

Per all non-nihilistic versions of RLJ, Ned’s decision to keep Jon safe is a no-brainer, per the principles he articulates to Arya in this chapter. Denying Jon’s identity to keep him safe when there are literally no significant negative consequences isn’t a hard choice. It’s not like if Jon only knew we was Rhaegar’s son, he’d magically become king. Ned’s lie costs Ned nothing. He has nothing to feel guilty about. Where is his heart in conflict with itself? Because he loved Ashara a long time ago? Psssh. Ned’s heart isn’t divided against itself if RLJ.

But if BAJRALD, Ned’s soul is truly torn, because he’s not just telling a fib, he’s usurping Jon’s place and ruling the North in Jon’s stead, all because Lyanna convinced him it was in interests of the greater good. From the beginning, then, he was torn: between (a) loyalty and duty to his brother and his brother’s heir and (b) and his love of his sister and her entirely sound argument that if it is Known that Brandon wed Ashara and produced a trueborn heir, it will cost Ned his immediate family and likely mean war between the North and the Riverlands. And once he made his decision, it never retreated into the background. At any moment, he could choose to admit the truth and live by it, and if he did, Jon would instantly, “magically” become Lord of Winterfell, dispossessing his own children.

This is why Ned can’t sleep, why his lies “haunted him”. His is “the human heart in conflict with itself”.

AGOT Daenerys III

There’s a nifty metatextual clue that Ned is, in truth, a usurper, after Dany tells Jorah that the “common people [of Westeros] are waiting for [Viserys]”. Note the chain of associations:

“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”

Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or a usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.

“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked him.

“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with longing. (GOT Dae III)

Dany speaks of a “puzzle box”, which immediately reminds us of the arrival of Lysa’s heavily secured and encoded message-in-a-box regarding the death of Jon Arryn. Luwin’s words regarding the box Lysa sent seem like nothing so much as a metatextual message to the reader regarding ASOIAF in general:

“Clearly there was more to this than the seeming.” (GOT C II)

And then Dany considers the possibility that the smallfolk might not care if they are ruled by “a usurper” so long as that rule is just and they are left to live their lives in peace and prosperity. Which is exactly how the North has fared, of course, under Ned Stark. And what immediately follows? A reference to Jorah’s longing for home, from whence he’s been banished by none other than…? The usurper, Ned Stark.

AGOT Bran IV

I have written that ASOIAF is constantly recursively “rhyming” with itself—especially with its own “history”. The canon is a kind of funhouse of mirrors, in which the same linguistic elements and motifs tend to reappear, scrambled up, again and again. I believe GRRM makes references to this on a meta-level, via his use of the number 44 or the HH/HH pattern in the veil with its reference to Steppenwolf, a novel about a novel inside a novel (as /u/elpadrinonegro put it to me). I’ve written about one of the more striking examples of this—the insanely pervasive “rhyming” between the Vale storyline in ASOIAF and The Mystery Knight—in the latter 2/3s or so of this piece. What immediately follows may only make sense if you’re familiar with the concepts discussed in the foregoing links.

AGOT Bran IV contains a story about Nan’s origin—

Nan had come to the castle as a wet nurse for a Brandon Stark whose mother had died birthing him. He had been an older brother of Lord Rickard, Bran’s grandfather, or perhaps a younger brother, or a brother to Lord Rickard’s father. Sometimes Old Nan told it one way and sometimes another. In all the stories the little boy died at three of a summer chill, but Old Nan stayed on at Winterfell with her own children. She had lost both her sons to the war when King Robert won the throne, and her grandson was killed on the walls of Pyke during Balon Greyjoy’s rebellion. (GOT B IV)

—that I believe is little more than a motif-scramble encoding the fact that Ned’s brother Brandon is Jon’s father. We have:

• A wet nurse, which is what we’re told Jon’s mother was at Starfall for House Dayne in ASOS.
• “Brandon Stark”, which immediately reminds us of Ned’s brother Brandon.
• A mother dying in child birth, which immediately reminds us of Lyanna and thus of the RLJ idea/red herring.
• An older brother of a Lord Stark, which is a strange concept (since the oldest brother would normally be “Lord Stark” himself) that brings to mind Ned ruling rather than his older brother Brandon ruling.
• Death of a chill, inverting Lyanna dying in a fever.
• An invocation of Robert’s rebellion—i.e. the backdrop of Jon’s birth—and the death therein of two male relatives, which reminds us of the deaths of Rickard (who is mentioned) and Brandon, which precipitated the rebellion.

This is a scrambling of motifs surrounding Jon’s birth, to be sure, but one which puts Brandon (and his death!) weirdly in the middle of it all. But it makes strange sense if (a) ASOIAF “rhymes”, as I believe it does, and (b) Brandon is Jon’s father.

For good measure, on the next page Bran remembers being promised “he would ride a real horse to King’s Landing”, which is what led to Brandon’s death. And then he thinks of how Robb is increasingly martial (like Brandon), increasingly distant, and growing closer to other proxy brothers:

He was Robb the Lord now, or trying to be. He wore a real sword and never smiled. His days were spent drilling the guard and practicing his swordplay, making the yard ring with the sound of steel as Bran watched forlornly from his window. … Even when he was home at Winterfell, Robb the Lord seemed to have more time for Hallis Mollen and Theon Greyjoy than he ever did for his brothers.

The parallel is obvious. Brandon loved his “swordplay” as well. Brandon and Ned were not particularly close. And we know that Brandon assembled an entourage of proxy brothers, just like Robb:

“[Brandon] rode into the Red Keep with a few companions, shouting for Prince Rhaegar to come out and die. But Rhaegar wasn’t there. Aerys sent his guards to arrest them all for plotting his son’s murder. The others were lords’ sons too, it seems to me.”

“Ethan Glover was Brandon’s squire,” Catelyn said. “He was the only one to survive. The others were Jeffory Mallister, Kyle Royce, and Elbert Arryn, Jon Arryn’s nephew and heir.” (COK C VII)

At the core of my BAJRALD lies the profound tragedy that Robb ultimately does exactly the kinds of things Lyanna believed Ned and his children would never do if he were to usurp Brandon’s line. And here we see the beginnings of the poignantly ironic parallel between Robb and Brandon. Indeed, I think Bran’s thoughts regarding Robb here likely inform us about the relationship between Brandon and his brothers.

AGOT Jon IV

As mentioned when I talked about AGOT Eddard I, Jon describes his recurring dreams of Winterfell in a way that makes sense if he is Brandon’s son and the usurped rightful lord who will one day reclaim his seat, which would displace Ned’s line:

“Sometimes I dream about it,” he said. “I’m walking down this long empty hall. My voice echoes all around, but no one answers, so I walk faster, opening doors, shouting names. I don’t even know who I’m looking for. Most nights it’s my father, but sometimes it’s Robb instead, or my little sister Arya, or my uncle.” The thought of Benjen Stark saddened him…

“Do you ever find anyone in your dream?” Sam asked.

Jon shook his head. “No one. The castle is always empty.” He had never told anyone of the dream, and he did not understand why he was telling Sam now, yet somehow it felt good to talk of it. “Even the ravens are gone from the rookery, and the stables are full of bones. That always scares me. I start to run then, throwing open doors, climbing the tower three steps at a time, screaming for someone, for anyone. And then I find myself in front of the door to the crypts. It’s black inside, and I can see the steps spiraling down. Somehow I know I have to go down there, but I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what might be waiting for me. The old Kings of Winter are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it’s not them I’m afraid of. I scream that I’m not a Stark, that this isn’t my place, but it’s no good, I have to go anyway….”

Notice how Jon speaks as if he only has one uncle. Our POVs mostly forget about Brandon, so most readers mostly forget about Brandon.

When Jon wakes from his dream, he takes comfort in Ghost:

Ghost would leap up beside him, his warmth as comforting as daybreak.

Daybreak. Dawn. The Dayne’s ancestral sword.

Sam replies by telling Jon his story:

“You have given me no cause to disown you, but neither will I allow you to inherit the land and title that should be Dickon’s. Heartsbane must go to a man strong enough to wield her, and you are not worthy to touch her hilt. So I have decided that you shall this day announce that you wish to take the black. You will forsake all claim to your brother’s inheritance and start north before evenfall.

Notice that if BAJ, Sam’s story of being disinherited in favor of his younger brother ironically “rhymes” with Jon’s story: Ned, a second son, usurped his older brother’s line and disinherited the heir Jon without Jon giving him cause to do so, in part because he believed Jon would prove unworthy, albeit for different reasons than Randall Tarly thought Sam was unworthy. Jon’s disinheritance was then codified when he joined the Watch, as was Sam’s.

AGOT Catelyn V and Tyrion IV: The Evil Freys

In AGOT Catelyn V and Tyrion IV the stage is set for readers to think of the Freys as aberrantly evil. We’re already invested in Catelyn given her position as a seeming protagonist and POV, so when Catelyn recalls her father calling Lord Walder “the Late Lord Frey” after he no-showed at the Trident, and when the Frey men don’t help her confront Tyrion at the Inn of the Crossroads, few question the implications. Later, with Robb, Catelyn’s castigation further seduces the reader:

“There’s no crossing on the Green Fork above the ruby ford, where Robert won his crown. Not until the Twins, all the way up here, and Lord Frey controls that bridge. He’s your father’s bannerman, isn’t that so?”

The Late Lord Frey, Catelyn thought. “He is,” she admitted, “but my father has never trusted him. Nor should you.” (GOT C VIII)

Might as well cue the ominous music. Sure enough, Tyrion VII and Catelyn IX show that the Frey levies have not marched to Riverrun as ordered. Still, while Walder Frey isn’t racing to war on behalf of Lord Tully, he’s not jumping in on the side we’re encouraged to think of as “the bad guys” either. He is cautious and self-interested. He doesn’t want to see his forces lost for naught. And in Catelyn IX, we learn why he isn’t particularly motivated to jump at Hoster Tully’s whim:

“Your lord father did not come to the wedding. An insult, as I see it. Even if he is dying. He never came to my last wedding either. He calls me the Late Lord Frey, you know. Does he think I’m dead? I’m not dead, and I promise you, I’ll outlive him as I outlived his father. Your family has always pissed on me, don’t deny it, don’t lie, you know it’s true. Years ago, I went to your father and suggested a match between his son and my daughter. Why not? I had a daughter in mind, sweet girl, only a few years older than Edmure, but if your brother didn’t warm to her, I had others he might have had, young ones, old ones, virgins, widows, whatever he wanted. No, Lord Hoster would not hear of it.…

I proposed that Lord and Lady Arryn foster two of my grandsons at court, and offered to take their own son to ward here at the Twins. Are my grandsons unworthy to be seen at the king’s court? They are sweet boys, quiet and mannerly. Walder is Merrett’s son, named after me, and the other one… heh, I don’t recall… he might have been another Walder, they’re always naming them Walder so I’ll favor them, but his father … which one was his father now?” His face wrinkled up. “Well, whoever he was, Lord Arryn wouldn’t have him, or the other one, and I blame your lady sister for that. She frosted up as if I’d suggested selling her boy to a mummer’s show or making a eunuch out of him, and when Lord Arryn said the child was going to Dragonstone to foster with Stannis Baratheon, she stormed off without a word of regrets and all the Hand could give me was apologies. What good are apologies? I ask you.“

Walder Frey, like all lords, acts in his family’s interest. His embitterment is understandable given the constant rejection he’s faced, foremost his liege lord’s. The Freys are “new money”. The Tullys are their disdainful old money bosses.

At no point does Catelyn refute Frey’s narrative. Privately she casts aspersions, labels him, and “others” him, but he’s basically right. Indeed, Catelyn’s response to his diatribe is completely narcissistic: she totally ignores everything he’s concerned about and fixates on what Frey says about where Robert Arryn was to have fostered, of all things. (It’s understandably of interest, but Catelyn pays no heed to Frey’s complaints.) Frey finally states the truth, plain as day:

“The Tullys and the Starks have never been friends of mine.”

Well, have they? No. The Tullys and Starks have given Walder Frey little reason to be favorably disposed to either House (setting aside that this is a novel and they’re positioned as “the good guys”). And yet what happens? Lord Frey joins his levies to Robb’s in exchange (basically) for Robb marrying his choice of Frey’s daughters and Arya a certain son. They fight “bravely in the Whispering Wood”, and Stevron Frey loses his life on Robb’s behalf. (COK C V)

And in response? Robb. Betrays. His. Oath. (An irony: Edmure is absolutely delighted at the appearance and manner of Roslin Frey. She could have been Robb’s wife, but because Robb hurried on so quickly, with no time for even a half hour’s pleasantries with the family of an insecure Lord his mother loathes, he never knew what a catch she was.)

Before that, though, we get some truly glorious irony when Robb “solemnly” consents to the marriage pact.

He had never seemed more manly to her than he did in that moment. Boys might play with swords, but it took a lord to make a marriage pact, knowing what it meant. (GOT C IX)

Hilarious. Catelyn couldn’t be more smug, but meanwhile fate is mocking her pride from all sides. Most obviously, Robb is about to demonstrate he ain’t nearly the “lord” she thinks he is. Even better, Cat remains blissfully unaware that her idealized dreamboat Brandon took a giant dump on her marriage pact before getting himself killed, even as she implicitly shits all over the far better man who selflessly vowed to clean up Brandon’s mess by pretending he, not Brandon, failed at “knowing what it meant.” She endlessly begrudges Ned his imaginary sin, whereas it is only by his real, unimaginable sin that Ned ensured that she and Robb are in the position they’re in right now, that being one from which Robb can screw up everything by thinking with his dick, just like Uncle Brandon… whose son, remember, was reminded not long before that he would think twice about taking the black and vowing not to marry “if you knew what it meant”. You can’t make this stuff up. Oh wait. GRRM did.

AGOT Eddard VII

During Ned’s tourney, Selmy and Ned speak of Robert’s drunken announcement that he will participate in the melee. The language is loaded once you realize that Robert and Brandon are “rhyming” figures: they are Ned’s two older “brothers”, each an impetuous warrior with a lust for battle and for women alike. (I’ll have lots more to say about Robert and Brandon “rhyming” when I talk about AGOT Eddard IX.)

Ser Barristan’s look was troubled. “They say night’s beauties fade at dawn, and the children of wine are oft disowned in the morning light.”

“They say so,” Ned agreed, “but not of Robert.” Other men might reconsider words spoken in drunken bravado, but Robert Baratheon would remember and, remembering, would never back down.

It is my argument that this dialogue about “disowned… children” and Robert’s promises at a tourney is contrived to play with what happened between the Robert-ish Brandon and Ashara, beginning at the Harrenhal tourney. Drunk—on lust or love and perhaps on wine as well—Brandon did not “reconsider” any “words [he’d] spoken in drunken bravado” en route to or after bedding Ashara. Despite what it could mean for the Starks’ relations with the Tullys, Brandon did not “back down” from his professions of love or devotion, and he wed Ashara, thereby assuring her (for the moment) that she would not be dishonored by being left to give birth to a “disowned”, “fatherless” bastard child. The references to “dawn” and “the morning light”—the hallmarks of House Dayne—and to “beauty”—the hallmark of Ashara Dayne—are signposts helping to point us towards this reading, even as Selmy’s statement reminds us that in the end, Jon was “disowned” after all, including by the Dawn-bearing Daynes.

Ned then goes to Robert to tell him to do what he is not wont to do—to “reconsider words spoken in drunken bravado”, to “disown… the children of wine”. Robert complains that Lyanna “would never have shamed him” as Cersei had when she forbade him to participate in the melee. Ned’s reply speaks volumes:

“You never knew Lyanna as I did, Robert,” Ned told him. “You saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath. She would have told you that you have no business in the melee.“

This obviously speaks to Lyanna’s character, to the idea that she would have recognized the dangers should Jon’s lineage be revealed. More importantly, when Ned says that Lyanna “would have told” Robert he has “no business in the melee”, he is in effect saying that Lyanna would have told him that he must “disown… the children of wine”, just as she told Ned that Jon, the literal “child” of the Robert-ish Brandon, must be “disowned” as Brandon’s heir.

And then what happens?

Robert took up his horn again, filled it with beer from a barrel in the corner, and thrust it at Ned. “Drink,” he said brusquely.

A call-back to the “cup passing”/”cup drinking” symbolism from Jon I and Catelyn II. Robert does, symbolically, what Lyanna did when she forced Ned to take up Brandon’s “cup” and to usurp Jon’s line and rule the North.

And then, as Ned holds Robert’s cup, Robert complains about being King, basically saying he (like Ned) never wanted the job:

“Drink and stay quiet, the king is talking. I swear to you, I was never so alive as when I was winning this throne, or so dead as now that I’ve won it.”

Robert then takes back his cup and drinks it, at which point he explains why he has remained king despite a wish to abdicate (to “pass the cup”, so to speak) and leave the throne to his “son” Joffrey:

“Here, give me that beer if you won’t drink it.” He took the horn, upended it, belched, wiped his mouth. “I am sorry for your girl, Ned. Truly. About the wolf, I mean. My son was lying, I’d stake my soul on it. My son … you love your children, don’t you?”

“With all my heart,” Ned said.

“Let me tell you a secret, Ned. More than once, I have dreamed of giving up the crown. Take ship for the Free Cities with my horse and my hammer, spend my time warring and whoring, that’s what I was made for. The sellsword king, how the singers would love me. You know what stops me? The thought of Joffrey on the throne, with Cersei standing behind him whispering in his ear. My son. How could I have made a son like that, Ned?”

The “rhyme” with BAJ is overwhelming: just as Robert does not want to be King, Ned did not want to rule the North. But what was one of the major things compelling Ned to nonetheless “drink from” the cup of rule he “never asked for”, “like it or not”? “The thought” of a bad seed like Joffrey “on the throne”—on the High Seat of Winterfell. The thought of Brandon’s child, born of the oath-breaking lust of a “wild wolf”, ruling the North.

That’s “enough” to bowl us over, but could the rhyme go even deeper? Maybe, just maybe, Ned and/or Lyanna didn’t have the esteem for Ashara everyone assumes. Maybe, just maybe, Ned and/or Lyanna thought of Ashara as a wild, typically “wanton” Dornishwoman with ambitions of her own, and thus maybe, just maybe, Ned and/or Lyanna feared what Jon would become with Ashara “standing behind him whispering in his ear”, just as Robert fears . Did Lord Dayne (and the surviving Arthur?) fear the same? Did he fear that Ashara would raise a bad seed who would covet Starfall, as well, and was he consequently grateful to Ned for claiming Ashara’s lust-born boy as his bastard and taking him far, far away?

Having told Ned that he remains king only to keep Joffrey off the throne, Robert asks Ned to call him a good king. Ned hesitates, and Robert’s words are poignantly ironic.

Robert slapped Ned on the back. “Ah, say that I’m a better king than Aerys and be done with it. You never could lie for love nor honor, Ned Stark. (GOT E VII)

Ned in fact has lied precisely for love and honor: love of his sister, new wife, new son, House and people, and the honor of his brother and his House. While being a usurper causes him deep private shame, his public face is still that of a deeply honorable man simply slipped up once and sired a bastard. Men do not scorn him as they might if they knew he was a usurper. (But yeah: Ned’s bad at lying, so he forbids any discussion of Ashara or Jon’s lineage.)

As if to confirm that the subtext of all this is indeed all about the fate of Ashara Dayne’s son Jon, GRRM has Robert ramble on about the tourney such that, at the end of the very same paragraph, he makes a remark which evokes exactly who I believe Ashara was at Harrenhal:

“Renly says [Loras] has this sister, a maid of fourteen, lovely as a dawn …”

But surely that could a reference to Lyanna, and all this could be about RLJ, some will say. There are major problems with this, though. First, while “lovely”, Lyanna was “sixteen”, not fourteen:

Lyanna had only been sixteen, a child-woman of surpassing loveliness. (GOT E I)

Second, “dawn” is quintessentially redolent of House Dayne, holders of the sword Dawn. And third, what makes a dawn “lovely”? Indeed, what makes a dawn, period? The sun, right? And it just so happens that the ADWD Epilogue explicitly juxtaposes the sort of wild beauty Lyanna possessed against the “rising sun” (i.e. dawn) that is Cersei (who, remember, we’ve just seen as playing the same role vis-a-vis Joffrey that it was perhaps feared Ashara would play vis-a-vis Jon):

Cersei could have given the prince the sons he wanted, lions with purple eyes and silver manes … and with such a wife, Rhaegar might never have looked twice at Lyanna Stark. The northern girl had a wild beauty, as he recalled, though however bright a torch might burn it could never match the rising sun.

Robert’s reference to Margaery is thus metatextly telling us that Ashara was “a maid of fourteen, lovely as a dawn” at Harrenhal, when she met the wild wolf Brandon, which led to Jon’s birth and Lyanna’s insistence that Ned steal his “cup”.

AGOT Tyrion IV

Tyrion calls Ned a “proud, honorable, and honest man”, while sardonically implying that these are not actually good things:

Lord Eddard is a proud, honorable, and honest man, and his lady wife is worse. (GOT Tyrion VI)

The irony here is fabulous: Ned is proud (indeed, his story of usurpationrhymes with the story of the “overproud” man “of honor”, Nestor Royce), and Ned is as a general rule as honorable and honest as his reputation, but Ned is also forever haunted by his ultimately dishonorable and dishonest usurpation of Jon’s seat.

AGOT Eddard VIII

The first line of this chapter suggest Dany’s life is now foremost on Ned’s mind:

“Robert, I beg of you,” Ned pleaded, “hear what you are saying. You are talking of murdering a child.”

“The whore is pregnant!” The king’s fist slammed down on the council table loud as a thunderclap. “I warned you this would happen, Ned. Back in the barrowlands, I warned you, but you did not care to hear it. Well, you’ll hear it now. I want them dead, mother and child both, and that fool Viserys as well. Is that plain enough for you? I want them dead.”

First, the “child” Ned speaks of is obviously not the gestating fetus in Daenerys’s womb. It’s Dany, a wife and mother to be—a woman grown by many in-world standards. That she is the topic of what was said off-stage—some variation of “I want her killed”, surely—is implicit in the epithet in Robert’s rejoinder, “the whore”.

I think GRRM opens the chapter this way for a reason. From the above context, I suspect the discussion prior to this point would show that Robert and the Council think of Dany simply as a married woman about to prolong her line. By leaving this “off-screen”, AGOT makes Ned’s argument that Dany is a “child” (thereby worthy of mercy) appear even more “Just So” to us than it otherwise would, given our 2016 2018 2019 developed-world predispositions, which agree that a girl her age is indeed a child.

Ned’s argument that Daenerys is a child also jibes with the idea that she is always going to be Ned’s sister’s baby girl to him, literally Lyanna’s “child”, no matter how old she is, regardless of marriage or pregnancy. But it’s arguably Ned and the readers that are out of step. Born at the Tower of Joy in late 283, Dany is at most a year younger than Lyanna c. Harrenhal, whom even Ned thinks of as a “child-woman”. Even Daenerys recognizes that she’s “no child” by many in-world standards:

“[Viserys] could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave him one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of his weakness. He will never take us home.”

“Wise child.” The knight smiled.

“I am no child,” she told him fiercely. (GOT Dae III)

Sure enough, Ned’s “she’s a child” argument seems to confuse Robert, to whom Dany is a mother-to-be, not a “child”. Thus he responds by calling Dany “the whore” and then saying he “want[s] them dead, mother and child both”, as it to say “Wait, did you just say child? I’m talking about killing Daenerys. But since you mentioned it, yes, kill her ‘child’ too, and Viserys as well!”

Ned knows what it is to live with shame and dishonor because of Jon, and here his promises come together as he argues with Robert to save Lyanna’s girl:

“You will dishonor yourself forever if you do this.”

Ned casts about desperately for a lifeline for Dany. He tries impugning Jorah’s credibility:

Ned looked at the eunuch coldly. “You would bring us the whisperings of a traitor half a world away, my lord. Perhaps Mormont is wrong. Perhaps he is lying.“

While he has no regard for Jorah, Ned’s exaggerated disbelief in his plainly credible report makes sense if he’s predisposed (consciously or not) to protect Lyanna’s daughter and keep his promise.

Robert presses on, and Ned plays for time:

“If you are wrong [about Dany’s pregnancy], we need not fear. If the girl miscarries, we need not fear. If she births a daughter in place of a son, we need not fear. If the babe dies in infancy, we need not fear.”

Varys’s response is rich with irony if BAJ:

Varys gave the king an unctuous smile and laid a soft hand on Ned’s sleeve. “I understand your qualms, Lord Eddard, truly I do. It gave me no joy to bring this grievous news to council. It is a terrible thing we contemplate, a vile thing. Yet we who presume to rule must do vile things for the good of the realm, however much it pains us.”

This is, I believe, a kind of grotesque parody of how Lyanna pleaded with Ned to usurp Jon’s seat. Varys smiles, and puts his lady-like hand on Ned’s arm, mirroring Lyanna smiling and holding Ned’s hand after he agreed—despite his “qualms” and “however much it pain[ed]” him—to do a “vile thing” and literally “presume to rule” the North, which by rights belonged to Brandon’s son Jon, “for the good of the realm”.

We learn that

Lord Renly shrugged. “The matter seems simple enough to me. We ought to have had Viserys and his sister killed years ago, but His Grace my brother made the mistake of listening to Jon Arryn.”

As the tide turns against him, Ned is unrelenting, as we’d expect if Lyanna is Dany’s mother:

“…Daenerys is a fourteen-year-old girl. Ned knew he was pushing this well past the point of wisdom, yet he could not keep silent. “Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?”

The murders of Rhaenys and “Aegon” Ned swallowed, if bitterly. Not Dany, and she’s arguably a woman, not a small child.

Pycelle then makes an argument that is surely another ironic recapitulation of Lyanna’s deathbed pleas with Ned, an echo of what Lyanna must have said regarding the potential horrors that would ensue should the Tullys and the Riverlands respond to Brandon’s lust-driven treachery by visiting war on an already war-weary realm:

Grand Maester Pycelle cleared his throat, a process that seemed to take some minutes. “My order serves the realm, not the ruler. Once I counseled King Aerys as loyally as I counsel King Robert now, so I bear this girl child of his no ill will. Yet I ask you this—should war come again, how many soldiers will die? How many towns will burn? How many children will be ripped from their mothers to perish on the end of a spear?” He stroked his luxuriant white beard, infinitely sad, infinitely weary. “Is it not wiser, even kinder, that Daenerys Targaryen should die now so that tens of thousands might live?”

Lyanna bore Jon “no ill will”, and asked Ned whether it wasn’t “wiser, even kinder” for him to do the “terrible thing we contemplate” and usurp Brandon’s line—”presume to rule”—”so that tens of thousands might live”. Meanwhile, everything else going on in the paragraph points us in the direction of the Lyanna connection. To wit, Pycelle’s remark about serving both Aerys and Robert reminds us of the war that transferred power between them, during which Lyanna died, while Pycelle’s difficulty speaking (i.e. his prolonged throat clearing) and his “infinitely sad, infinitely weary” manner all rework things GRRM wrote about Lyanna on her deathbed: her “faint as a whisper” voice, how she “cried”, and how “the fever had taken her strength”. (GOT Eddard I)

Pycelle is no more successful than Varys was in swaying Ned with his ironicially Lyanna-echoing argument. While their formulas might ape Lyanna’s, Pycelle and Varys just aren’t Ned’s beloved dying sister, and while Ned’s love for Lyanna might have led him to soil himself as a secret usurper, he did so not just for “the realm” but also to keep Stark children—Jon and Robb—safe, while also promising to get Dany to safety. Whether Ned consciously remembers who Dany is or not, it’s thus dramatically sensible that he won’t countenance her murder.

All but Selmy concur wtih Pycelle that Dany must be killed. As the manner of assassination is discussed, Ned grows apoplectic.

Ned had heard enough. “You send hired knives to kill a fourteen-year-old girl and still quibble about honor?”

“Ned had heard enough”, much as he’d once declared that he’d heard enough about Ashara Dayne, such that her name “was never heard in Winterfell again.” That little “rhyme” makes dramatic sense if Ned’s promises to Lyanna are at stake in both scenes.

Ned then says something that strongly suggests that Dany is half-Stark:

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Do it yourself, Robert. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

What does this recall if not what Ned says to Robert when Robert decrees that Sansa’s direwolf pup Lady must die, since Lady’s sister Nymeria, the wolf who actually attacked Joffrey, cannot be found?

“Do it yourself then, Robert,” he said in a voice cold and sharp as steel. “At least have the courage to do it yourself.”

The rhyme hints that Dany, too, is a “direwolf”, daughter to Lady Lyanna Stark. I’ll discuss the Dany/lady direwolves rhyme, which is incredibly rich and revealing, in greater detail after I finish the walk-through of this chapter.

Ned continues with more echoes of Lyanna on her deathbed:

“Look her in the eyes before you kill her. See her tears, hear her last words. You owe her that much at least.“

Robert hears “you owe Daenerys that much,” but dramatically, what’s being said (whether Ned know it or not) is “you owe Lyanna, Daenerys’s mother, that much if, if you ever really loved her at all. You could not do this if you had looked Lyanna in her eyes, seen her tears and heard her last words, including her wishes for her baby girl Dany.”

Robert’s response once again invokes the symbolism of the “cup” of rule Ned long ago agreed to “drink from… like it or not”:

“Gods,” the king swore, the word exploding out of him as if he could barely contain his fury. “You mean it, damn you.” He reached for the flagon of wine at his elbow, found it empty, and flung it away to shatter against the wall. “I am out of wine and out of patience. Enough of this. Just have it done.“

Most obviously, Robert’s empty flagon symbolizes his inability to “swing the sword” himself, while him hurling the flagon away mirrors his pushing the responsibility for Dany’s murder onto others. More subtly, it’s Robert who is endeavoring to have Dany killed, and thus he “shatter[s]” his flagon as if its the cup of Ned’s now-imperiled covenant with Lyanna to safeguard Dany.

Robert orders Ned to “do as I command”. Ned refuses and resigns as Hand in emotional fashion:

Ned unfastened the heavy clasp that clutched at the folds of his cloak, the ornate silver hand that was his badge of office. He laid it on the table in front of the king, saddened by the memory of the man who had pinned it on him, the friend he had loved.

Whose memory makes Ned sad? Lyanna’s. Who else had Ned “loved”? Lyanna.

Ned had loved [Lyanna] with all his heart. (GOT E I)

And when Lyanna convinced Ned to usurp Jon, she “made” him Lord of Winterfell. It could be argued that she figuratively “pinned… his badge of office… on him”. And yes, GRRM absolutely intends this “rhyme”. What does “unfasten[ing] the heavy clasp that clutched at” him—a clasp that is a “hand”, no less—remind us of if not, again, Lyanna on her deathbed:

Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his. Ned could recall none of it. (GOT E I)

What follows “confirms” this reading:

“I thought you a better man than this, Robert. I thought we had made a nobler king.”

Ned was “made” a noble lord—”made nobler”, we might say—by virtue of his lie, carried out in acquiescence to Lyanna’s dying wishes. Men think Ned is “a better man than” he is, a “nobler” lord.

Separately, the line also resonates as an allusion to the idea that Rhaegar attempted to use bloodmagic engineer or “make” the Price Who Was Promised.

Anyway, Ned has now completely broken with his oldest friend over Dany, right? Why does GRRM make Dany a focus of conflict in Ned’s storyline if their relationship is no more than it appears? Why choose to write so much about Ned trying to protect her, and especially why stage this “break-up” with Robert if there’s nothing interesting here from the perspective of constructing a narrative drama? There is, of course: Dany is Ned’s dead sister’s child, who Ned swore to protect, and trust me—once you know that, his storyline sings upon reread.

Notice that this heightened drama and depth is there whether you (a) conclude that Ned knows or suspects that “Dany” is Lyanna’s girl or (b) decide that Ned believes that “Daenerys” is Rhaella’s daughter, blithely assuming that Lyanna’s girl is safely in hiding. In the former case, Ned is desperately, intentionally trying to stop the murder of his dead sister’s baby girl, while in the latter case, his actions are saturated in dramatic irony. (His motivation in the latter case is, yes, his general character—he’s no child murderer—but also his duty to family and his promises to Lyanna: Ned will not visit murder on someone he believes to be one of Lyanna’s long-hidden-away Targaryen daughter’s only living Targaryen relatives—especially when he almost certainly promised Lyanna that he would try to protect her daughter’s remaining family from retribution.)

It’s worth noting that as big a deal as Ned resigning as Hand is, one could argue that if Ned knows or suspects that Dany is Lyanna’s daughter—his niece, his blood, and his last link to her—he “should” do more than “merely” quit and go home; he should tell Robert that Dany is Lyanna’s child, trusting that the love Robert bore for him and/or for Lyanna would stay his hand. The fact that Ned doesn’t do this at minimum suggests he think “Daenerys” is merely the daughter of the Mad King.

Robert melts down and threatens to kill Ned:

Robert’s face was purple. “Out,” he croaked, choking on his rage. “Out, damn you, I’m done with you. What are you waiting for? Go, run back to Winterfell. And make certain I never look on your face again, or I swear, I’ll have your head on a spike!”

Ned returns to the Tower of the Hand. He tells Poole to pack in a hurry, and, following a little gallows humor, thinks the same thing he told Catelyn back in Winterfell: that Robert won’t “harm him”, that his “rage would cool as it always did”.

“We may not have a fortnight. We may not have a day. The king mentioned something about seeing my head on a spike.” Ned frowned. He did not truly believe the king would harm him, not Robert. He was angry now, but once Ned was safely out of sight, his rage would cool as it always did.

Such sanguine thoughts belie the idea that Ned has knowingly hidden Rhaegar’s son from Robert’s wrath for 15 years. As does what follows.

Seemingly apropos of nothing, Ned abruptly second-guesses himself when he is “suddenly” thunderstruck by the “disturbing notion” of just how much Robert hates Rhaegar:

Always? Suddenly, uncomfortably, he found himself recalling Rhaegar Targaryen. Fifteen years dead, yet Robert hates him as much as ever. It was a disturbing notion …

Clearly Ned is only now (“suddenly”) truly grokking the depth of Robert’s hatred of Rhaegar. It’s hard to imagine how Ned could have spent 15 years raising Rhaegar’s son as his own bastard in order to keep Rhaegar’s son safe from Wroth Robert without regularly brooding on Robert’s hatred of Rhaegar. But Ned’s sudden unease over how much Robert hates Rhaegar makes perfect sense if such thoughts about his friend are new to him, which they are if BAJRALD. Assuming Ned believes that “Daenerys” is who she’s “supposed” to be—Aerys and Rhaella’s daughter—he’s almost certainly spent the last 15 years imagining Lyanna’s daughter tucked safely away in an undisclosed location of which he remains blissfully ignorant. So while he’s “known” in an abstract sense that Robert hates Targaryens, it hasn’t troubled him, since Lyanna’s girl was safe. Now, though, Robert has ordered the murder of “Daenerys” and Viserys—who Ned believes to be Rhaegar’s siblings and the only surviving trueborn dragon relatives (besides Maester Aemon) of the hidden dragon-daughter Rhaegar spawned on Lyanna. And Ned has defied him.

It is “uncomfortabl[e]” for Ned to think about Robert’s abiding hatred for Rhaegar for the simple reason that doing so raises the “disturbing notion” that Robert may never stop being angry at him. It doesn’t feel good to think that your best friend might stay mad at you forever: What does it say about your supposed best friend if he values hatred over his friendship with you?? At the same time, notice that Ned doesn’t second-guess his “belief [that]…the king would [not] harm him”. He only fears that Robert still stay angry with him.

Finally, I want to address something that throws a lot of readers for a loop. In Ned’s next chapter, GRRM wrote a sentence—

 For the first time in years, [Ned] found himself remembering Rhaegar Targaryen.

—that seemingly contradicts Ned already “recalling Rhaegar”, here. People leap to all sorts of conclusions. But when Ned finds himself “remembering Rhaegar” in his next chapter, he is ruminating on the sort of man Rhaegar was, on his nature, and thus for the first time in AGOT truly remembering Rhaegar as a person, whereas here Ned paradoxically doesn’t actually find “himself recalling Rhaegar” at all; he merely recalls the fact that Robert’s hatred of Rhaegar never “cool[ed]”. Basically, Ned is in the middle of a comforting internal narrative when “BUT RHAEGAR!” pops into his head as a counterpoint, such that he worries his BFF might stay mad at him forever. Essentially, the key line could/”should” read:

“Always? Suddenly, uncomfortably, he found himself recalling Robert’s abiding hatred of Rhaegar Targaryen.”

So why write the sentence as he did? For a few reasons. First, to coax us to realize that the impressions a “normal” reading of GRRM’s prose might give readers (“hey! he just remembered him though!”) may be deeply misleading.

Second, to get us to wonder whether something’s going on with Ned’s memory. And there is:

After that he remembered nothing. They had found him still holding her body, silent with grief. The little crannogman, Howland Reed, had taken her hand from his. Ned could recall none of it. (GOT E I)

But it doesn’t cause Ned to forget within a few hours that he thought about Robert’s hatred for Rhaegar here.

And third, GRRM is using the seeming “contradiction” as a kind of breadcrumb inviting comparison of the two sentences, which reveals that both (a) Ned “recalling” and (b) Ned “remembering” Rhaegar butt up against Ned frowning and the notion of a sunrise:

Ned frowned. He did not truly believe the king would harm him, not Robert. He was angry now, but once Ned was safely out of sight, his rage would cool as it always did.

Suddenly, uncomfortably, he found himself recalling Rhaegar Targaryen. Fifteen years dead, yet Robert hates him as much as ever. It was a disturbing notion … and there was the other matter, the business with Catelyn and the dwarf that Yoren had warned him of last night. That would come to light soon, as sure as sunrise…

with…

“Allow a man like that to live, and next he’s like to blurt out that the sun rises in the east.”

There was no answer Ned Stark could give to that but a frown. For the first time in years, he found himself remembering Rhaegar Targaryen. He wondered if Rhaegar had frequented brothels; somehow he thought not.

I believe that in the first case, thinking about “Rhaegar” as the object of Robert’s hatred makes Ned think of a “sunrise”, and that in the second case, hearing Littlefinger say “the sun rises in the east” makes Ned think of Rhaegar. Why do I think Ned free-associates Rhaegar with sunrises and frowning—and especially with “the sun rising in the east”? Remember this?

“When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” said Mirri Maz Duur. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.” (GOT D IX)

I think Mirri Maz Duur is giving us a piece of the prophecy of the Prince That Was Promised and/or Rhaegar’s tear-inducing (see: Ned’s frowning) Song of Ice And Fire, the lyrics of which seem to have great effect on women but which men seem curiously uninterested in and unable to retain. Thus when Littlefinger off-handedly says “the sun rises in the east”, Ned is (subconsciously) reminded of Rhaegar’s sad song because Rhaegar sang the sad song with its lyrics about the sun rising in the west at Harrenhal/to Lyanna.

Back to business. Thinking about how irrationally angry Robert is at Rhaegar leads Ned to think about Catelyn’s rash seizure of Tyrion Lannister, an act he knows was fueled by Catelyn’s rage over the attack on Bran and by her normal but irrational instinct to defend her children:

Suddenly, uncomfortably, he found himself recalling Rhaegar Targaryen. Fifteen years dead, yet Robert hates him as much as ever. It was a disturbing notion … and there was the other matter, the business with Catelyn and the dwarf that Yoren had warned him of last night. That would come to light soon, as sure as sunrise, and with the king in such a black fury … Robert might not care a fig for Tyrion Lannister, but it would touch on his pride, and there was no telling what the queen would do.

Notice: it’s the queen’s response—to an attack her family, no less—that more worries Ned, just as he worries about how his “queen”, Catelyn (and her House) would respond should it “come to light” that Jon is Brandon’s heir (born to Ashara of the “sunrise”-adjacent House Dayne), a fact which would threaten her children, rendering them no more than a second son’s get.

Ned “brood[s]”. He thinks that…

Robert had left him no choice that he could see [but to refuse to carry out Dany’s murder and to resign].

This jibes with RALD, of course, but there’s again an allusion to BAJ here, since Lyanna convinced Ned that “for the good of the realm” there was “no choice” but to disinherit Jon and claim Winterfell for his own. This reading jibes with the rest of the paragraph, in which Ned takes refuge in happy thoughts about the fruits of that decision, about Winterfell, “his sons”, and his happy marriage to Catelyn:

He ought to thank him. It would be good to return to Winterfell. He ought never have left. His sons were waiting there. Perhaps he and Catelyn would make a new son together when he returned, they were not so old yet. And of late he had often found himself dreaming of snow, of the deep quiet of the wolfswood at night

And then, with Catelyn again on his mind, he literally thinks about the murder of the guy for whom Jon Snow is named:

And yet, the thought of leaving angered him as well. So much was still undone. Robert and his council of cravens and flatterers would beggar the realm if left unchecked … or, worse, sell it to the Lannisters in payment of their loans. And the truth of Jon Arryn’s death still eluded him. Oh, he had found a few pieces, enough to convince him that Jon had indeed been murdered, but that was no more than the spoor of an animal on the forest floor. He had not sighted the beast itself yet…

Ned is considering returning home by sea—which he almost certainly did after the Tower of Joy—in order to consult with Stannis at Dragonstone when he suddenly thinks about “secrets [that] are too dangerous to share” even with people like Catelyn, just before he again thinks about how Catelyn defended her child against an assassin’s knife and then, she believed, by seizing Tyrion:

Some secrets are safer kept hidden. Some secrets are too dangerous to share, even with those you love and trust. Ned slid the dagger that Catelyn had brought him out of the sheath on his belt.

Clearly, then, Ned isn’t thinking as generally as it seems—as generally as RLJ would have you believe. He is thinking about a secret that is “too dangerous to share” with, quite specifically, Catelyn Tully: BAJ, the secret that would mean the end of happy times in Winterfell, the secret that could prompt Catelyn and the Tullys to lash out in a rage in defense of Catelyn’s position and of her children’s rights, thereby threatening the life of another “Jon”: Jon Snow.

Reviewing the thought-chain with BAJ in mind: Ned’s thoughts about irrational anger lead him to think about Cat’s kidnapping of Tyrion—a rash, ill-considered act carried out in defense of her children, which is just the kind of thing Ned fears from Cat and from House Tully should Jon’s lineage “come to light”. Naturally, Ned then worries about how a “queen” will respond to an attack on her family: the same basic worry he has about Cat in light of BAJ. This leads leads him to take solace in thoughts of Winterfell, his happy marriage with Catelyn, and their sons—which he values but which he believes are not truly his, but Jon’s. And suddenly he’s thinking about the murder of a guy named “Jon”, i.e. about the very thing he fears should BAJ “come to light”. He considers taking a sea voyage as he did in the aftermath of making Jon his bastard, at which point he thinks about how it would be “dangerous” to tell certain secrets to Cat—who he seems to love and trust infinitely—as fingers a knife, the symbol of Cat’s desperate defense of her child. The idea that Ned has a secret that pertains uniquely and specifically to Cat, which would be “dangerous” to tell her because it would threaten her family, is immanent, and BAJ is that secret.

Handling the dagger leads Ned to brood on the attack on Bran, and, in an abrupt change from everything he’s said and thought previously about the possibility of Robert harming “my or any of mine”, he now ponders whether Robert might have been party to the attempt on Bran’s life:

Could Robert be part of it? He would not have thought so, but once he would not have thought Robert could command the murder of women and children either. Catelyn had tried to warn him. You knew the man, she had said. The king is a stranger to you. (GOT E VIII)

It’s clear that until now, Ned has believed Robert categorically “would not” do violence against Ned’s family nor “command the murder of women and children”, including, implicitly, Targaryen women and children, as he just did. This defies all “Ned knows about Jon” iterations of RLJ, per which Ned has supposedly been hiding a Targaryen family member from murder-by-Robert for 15 years. (Yes, some attempt tortured readings per which Ned was only hiding Jon’s identity because he promised to, and not because he actually believed it was necessary. I doubt these people author successful dramatic fiction.) Ned’s new-found concern makes perfect sense if RALD, though. In the aftermath of Robert ordering the assassination of Dany, who Ned believes to be his niece or his goodsister via Lyanna, who Robert supposedly loved, Ned worries Robert could have ordered the assassination of Bran, the son of his supposed best friend. (If Ned is utterly ignorant—if he doesn’t know that he has Targaryen relatives via Lyanna—Ned’s novel fears are utterly saturated in dramatic irony; Robert already is trying to murder a member of his family: his niece.)

The chapter ends when Littlefinger calls on Ned and promises to take him later that day to the brothel Stannis and Jon Arryns visited.

“Do It Yourself, Robert.” The Dany/Lady Direwolf Rhyme.

Let’s look in more detail at the “rhyme” between Ned’s defense of (a) Dany and (b) the Stark girls’ direwolves, Lady and Nymeria, a rhyme which suggests that Dany is a “Lady direwolf”: a matrilineal Stark. We already noted that Ned’s insistence that Robert “swing the sword” against Dany—

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Do it yourself, Robert. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

—rhymes with his insistence that Robert also do so vis-a-vis Sansa’s direwolf pup Lady, who is a “substitute”/stand-in for Nymeria, the wolf who actually attacked Joffrey:

“Do it yourself then, Robert,” he said in a voice cold and sharp as steel. “At least have the courage to do it yourself.”

Just as Robert holds the innocent direwolf Lady responsible for her sister Nymeria’s supposed crimes (which were in fact justified), so does Robert hold the innocent lady “direwolf” Dany responsible for her supposed “father” Aerys’s real crimes and for her supposed brother and actual father Rhaegar’s supposed crimes:

“Your Grace, the girl is scarcely more than a child. You are no Tywin Lannister, to slaughter innocents.” …

“And how long will this one remain an innocent?” Robert’s mouth grew hard. “This child will soon enough spread her legs and start breeding more dragonspawn to plague me.”

“Nonetheless,” Ned said, “the murder of children … it would be vile … unspeakable …”

“Unspeakable?” the king roared. “What Aerys did to your brother Brandon was unspeakable. The way your lord father died, that was unspeakable. And Rhaegar … how many times do you think he raped your sister? How many hundreds of times?… I will kill every Targaryen I can get my hands on, until they are as dead as their dragons, and then I will piss on their graves.” (GOT E II)

And just as Robert puts a bounty on Dany’s head—

“…Varys will quietly let it be known that we’ll make a lord of whoever does in the Targaryen girl.” (GOT E VIII)

—so does Cersei put a bounty on Nymeria’s head:

The queen raised her voice. “A hundred golden dragons to the man who brings me its skin!” (GOT Arya III)

Notice that Lady and Nymeria are merely “pets” and “pups”, but (in Nymeria’s case) actually quite dangerous. This rhymes with Dany being a “child” Ned cannot countenance who shortly becomes a conquering warrior-queen—a conquering warrior queen like Nymeria, the eponym for Arya’s direwolf, who survives what “should” have been her execution by Robert’s order, just as Dany survives the assassin Robert sends for her. Indeed, Dany’s response to her assassination rhymes with the fact that Lady, “the most gentle and trusting” of the Stark wolves—dies in Nymeria’s place. Not one page later, Dany thinks, “The Usurper has woken the dragon now”, and is “seized” by a “madness” to put her hitherto neglected eggs into a brazier before implicitly endorsing the brutal treatment of her would-be killer:

Khal Drogo led them on his great red stallion, with Daenerys beside him on her silver. The wineseller hurried behind them, naked, on foot, chained at throat and wrists. His chains were fastened to the halter of Dany’s silver. As she rode, he ran after her, barefoot and stumbling. No harm would come to him … so long as he kept up. (GOT Dae VI)

Thus Robert’s orders cause the “Lady” in Daenerys to die, while the “Nymeria” in her lives. Sure, this works as a “cute” rhyme regardless, but it sings if Dany is a lady-direwolf/matrilineal Stark.

Once we realize that Dany “is” a “direwolf” like Nymeria, the story of Nymeria’s would-be execution seems to speak volumes about how Dany was kept safe as an infant. Arya and Jory pretend to know nothing about what happened to Nymeria:

“And what of the direwolf?” [Cersei] called after him. “What of the beast that savaged your son?” …

Ned could see Arya tense in Jory’s arms. Jory spoke up quickly. “We found no trace of the direwolf, Your Grace.” (GOT E III)

This rhymes with Ned and his stalwart, Howland Reed, never speaking of Lyanna giving birth, such that there seems to be “no trace” of the fact that she did. In fact, Arya and Jory do know what happened to Nymeria, at least initially. Even though it hurt Arya to do so, they drove her off into a kind of exile:

“We had to throw rocks,” she said miserably. … She whined and looked at me and I felt so ‘shamed, but it was right, wasn’t it? The queen would have killed her.”

“It was right,” her father said. “And even the lie was … not without honor.” (GOT A II)

Ned says “it was right” for Arya and Jory to drive Nymeria away, and that Arya’s feigned ignorance was “not without honor” because he believes it, which makes sense since Arya’s decision to “exile” Nymeria so neatly rhymes with his and/or Lyanna’s decision to “exile” Dany c. 283. Despite Ned’s absolution, Arya feels “shamed” and harbors guilt over driving away Nymeria, much as Ned harbors boundless guilt for his usurpation, despite the fact that Lyanna told him that “for the good of the realm” he had “no choice”.

It’s captain-of-the-guards Jory who  convinces Arya she has “no choice” if she wants to keep Nymeria safe:

She hadn’t wanted to, but Jory said they had no choice, that if the wolf came back with them she’d be killed for biting Joffrey, even though he’d deserved it. (COK Arya II)

I suspect it was either Arthur Dayne or Lord Commander Gerold Hightower who convinced Lyanna, who in turn (with Howland Reed?) convinced Ned, that Dany would not be safe in the North, for the obvious reason that’s finally spelled out in the story of a Prince of the original Nymeria’s House Nymeros-Martell who is then sent to marry Dany (and who I suspect is Elia’s son Aegon, safely hidden all these years in plain sight in Dorne, where he could pass as Doran’s son):

More recently, the youngest of Lord Yronwood’s daughters had taken to following him about the castle. Gwyneth was but twelve, a small, scrawny girl whose dark eyes and brown hair set her apart in that house of blue-eyed blondes. (DWD tMM)

Lyanna and Ned had to concede that Lyanna’s obviously Valyrian-looking girl would stick out like a sore thumb among the dark-haired, dark-eyed Starks of Winterfell, just as Gwyneth’s appearance “set her apart” in House Yronwood (who about to play a huge role in the continuing Dany-Nymeria rhyme).

In order to fight her instinct to keep “her pack” together and salve her “shame” over driving Nymeria off, Arya tells herself (by telling Nymeria) that Nymeria will have an idyllic life without her. (Note: Colored text used help to connect the elements of the rhyme.)

“I told her to run, to go be free, that I didn’t want her anymore. There were other wolves for her to play with, we heard them howling, and Jory said the woods were full of game, so she’d have deer to hunt.”

I suspect Ned’s/Lyanna’s aversion to sending Dany anywhere but Winterfell was likewise assuaged by an idyllic image of the life they were told awaited her in Dorne. Consider first the way so much of what we’re told about the Yronwoods, who “coincidentally” just explained why Dany wouldn’t have been safe in the North, seems to speak to Arya’s evocation of hunting and general natural idyll. (Note the other appearance of Gwyneth, who sticks out like Dany would in Winterfell.)

I want to go back to Yronwood and kiss both of your sisters, marry Gwyneth Yronwood, watch her flower into beauty, have a child by her. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk and hunt, visit with my mother in Norvos, read some of those books my father sends me. (DWD tDT)

I want to go back to Yronwood…. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk and hunt… (DWD tMM)

The Wyls kept him hunting and hawking for eight days on the Boneway, and Lord Yronwood feasted him for a fortnight when he emerged from the mountains. (FFC PitT)

It would be sweet to see the Greenblood again, to visit Sunspear and the Water Gardens and breathe the clean sweet mountain air of Yronwood…

SIDEBAR: The “Wyls” recall Ned Stark’s man Wyl, who we’ll meet in the next chapter when he more or less pantomimes the story of Brandon breaking his betrothal vows and fucking Ashara Dayne. END SIDEBAR

Houses Nymeros-Martell and Yronwood together with the blissful Water Gardens provide Dorne’s answer to Arya’s telling Nymeria “there were other wolves for her to play with” where she was going. The Water Gardens are not only an idyllic country retreat, they’re also a place where “there are other children” for Princess Myrcella “to play with”—just as there would have been other children for Dany to play with c. 283—as we learn when Doran sells them to Arys Oakheart as an ideal spot to keep Myrcella (who may have switched places with her handmaid, rhyming with Dany pretending to be her own aunt) hidden and safe:

“Sunspear wearies me, with its noise and dirt and smells. As soon as my duty allows, I mean to return to the Water Gardens. When I do I shall take Princess Myrcella with me.” Before the knight could protest, the prince raised a hand, its knuckles red and swollen. “You shall go as well. And her septa, her maids, her guards. Sunspear’s walls are strong, but beneath them is the shadow city. Even within the castle hundreds come and go each day. The Gardens are my haven. Prince Maron raised them as a gift for his Targaryen bride, to mark Dorne’s marriage to the Iron Throne. Autumn is a lovely season there . . . hot days, cool nights, the salt breeze off the sea, the fountains and the pools. And there are other children, boys and girls of high and gentle birth. Myrcella will have friends of her own age to play with. She will not be lonely.” (FFC tSK)

It’s not just the “other children… to play with” who were the “other wolves” for Lady Lyanna’s “Lady Nymeria”, i.e. Dany. It’s specifically the Martells and Yronwoods. Where Daenerys is a Targaryen who is also a matrilineal Stark direwolf, the Martells are matrilineal Targaryens (descended from the first Daenerys!) who also descend from Nymeria—for whom Arya’s wolf is named—via Maron Martell, who built the Water Gardens for the first Daenerys, where “innocent” (like Lady! like Dany!) highborn and lowborn children “play with” one another in explicit anonymity:

“As the children splashed in the pools, Daenerys watched from amongst the orange trees, and a realization came to her. She could not tell the highborn from the low. Naked, they were only children. All innocent, all vulnerable, all deserving of long life, love, protection.” (DWD tW)

Meanwhile the name “Maron” Martell again points to wolves, in that it recalls Maron Greyjoy, brother to Theon, a quasi-Stark who was warded by the Starks (as Dany was by the Martells?) and whose name in turn recalls Theon Stark. Moreover, the ironborn are the “wolves of the sea”. But most importantly, [Maron Greyjoy is in fact the explicitly “wolfish” Bronn]. (So the builder of the Water Gardens who wed “Daenerys” shares a name with royalty in disguise. Hmm.)

As for the “Yronwoods”, their name clearly evokes House Blackwood, since iron is all-pervasively coded as “black” and ince the Yronwoods were Blackfyre supporters. (Tonight we’re settin’ the woods on fire!) The immanent Yronwood/Blackwood/Wolfswood rhyme can’t be handwaved, as it was codified in TWOIAF in a passage that points straight to both wolves and the Starks:

[T]he Blackwoods of Raventree, whose own family traditions insist they once ruled most of the wolfswood before being driven from their lands by the [Stark] Kings of Winter… . (TWOIAF)

Unsurprisingly, the details of Arya’s story of driving off Nymeria serve to further rhyme Dany with the Stark girls’ wolves and thus connote that Dany is matrilineal Stark.

“I told her to run, to go be free, that I didn’t want her anymore. There were other wolves for her to play with, we heard them howling, and Jory said the woods were full of game, so she’d have deer to hunt. Only she kept following, and finally we had to throw rocks.”

To wit, Dany, freer of slaves, breaker of chains, has been running for a long as she can remember, including in her wolf-mother Lyanna’s womb:

It was not by choice that she sought the waterfront. She was fleeing again. Her whole life had been one long flight, it seemed. She had begun running in her mother’s womb, and never once stopped. (COK Dae V)

Note how it’s “not by choice” that Dany “was fleeing”, just as Arya had “no choice” but to drive off Nymeria, and just as Lyanna and/or Ned came to conclude they had no choice if they wanted to keep Dany safe.

In Dany’s dreams she’s howling and running like a wolf (before transforming into a dragon):

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run. (GOT D IX)

When Arya and Jory told Nymeria to go “play with” the “other wolves”, they “heard them howling”. One of the first things we’re told about Dorne is that it “howls”:

The captain hesitated. “When this is known in the streets, the common folk will howl.”

“All Dorne will howl,” said Doran Martell in a tired voice. (FFC CoTG)

So what about the rocks Arya throws? She hits Nymeria “twice” or is it “a few” times:

I hit her twice. (GOT A II)

…it wasn’t until a few of Arya’s stones struck home that the direwolf had finally stopped following them. (COK A II)

Could this suggest that an infant Dany was slapped to get her to stop clinging to/suckling Lyanna? Or perhaps it alludes to two other children being sent away? Or to Ned or Lyanna having to be stopped from trying to prevent the Dany’s “exile”, before they were finally quieted with soothing words?

Before we move on, a few more ways I suspect Nymeria’s story of being exiled from her pack by her “mother” Arya rhymes with her fellow lady-direwolf Dany’s story of being exiled from her pack by her Arya-ish mother Lyanna. Jory and Arya know where and how Nymeria’s “exile” started but are ignorant of what befell her afterward. This suggests Ned knows nothing of what befell Lyanna’s daughter after they parted, the better to ensure her safety should the fact that she exists leak out. (Indeed, if we read Jory and Arya as Arthur/Gerold and Lyanna, it’s quite possible the decision was made and Dany was gone before Ned ever arrived.)

Certainly Dany doesn’t know who Ned is; indeed, she curses him as a “dog” and “a traitor who met a traitor’s end”. Thanks to Arya’s musings about her pup—

[Nymeria] probably wouldn’t even know me now, Arya thought. Or if she did, she’d hate me. (COK Ayra II)

—Dany’s ignorance and hatred of Ned deepens her rhyme with Nymeria and thus the suggestion that she is Lyanna’s daughter. But actually, Arya doesn’t remain ignorant of what befell Nymeria, does she? In her wolf dreams, Arya’s soul co-habitates with Nymeria’s; Arya experiences what Nymeria experiences. At the same time, the text refuses to confirm that Arya understands these are not dreams and that she is warging Nymeria. If anything, it’s implied she doesn’t get this, since she only thinks of Nymeria by name twice after ACOK, both times merely remembering the she’d “once” had a direwolf named Nymeria. So if anything, it’s Arya who doesn’t recognize Nymeria, whereas we know Nymeria would recognize Arya, since she recognizes Arya’s mother’s body and drags it out of a river.

But—and here’s where Nymeria seems to rhyme again with Dany, this time by inversion/mirroring—isn’t it curious how Nymeria pulling Cat ashore as if trying to save her without directly registering the identity of her “cold white prize”, just as Ned tries to protect Dany from Robert, even as there is no overt sign that he knows who she is. And just as it remains unclear whether Arya understands who it is she’s warging, so is it unclear whether Ned understands who it is he’s trying to save: Does he know that “Dany” is Lyanna’s daughter? Does he think “Dany” is Rhaella’s daughter but also his “safely hidden” lost niece’s last living, trueborn relatives? (Either case would entail GRRM playing coy via the POV conceit.) Or is Ned merely trying to save an “innocent”, perhaps because Lyanna made him promise to try to protect the remaining Targaryen’s from Robert’s retribution… but  perhaps also because Ned has some inchoate, subliminal sense that Dany is a direwolf. After all, he shows signs of untapped psychic wolf blood:

And of late he had often found himself dreaming of snow, of the deep quiet of the wolfswood at night. (GOT E VIII)

In the end, regardless of whether Ned knows Dany is Lyanna’s daughter, he tries to help her as if she is, just as Nymeria drags Cat out of the river as if Arya was “at the helm” rather than merely along for the ride.

Fire & Blood’s “Rhyme” To Ned’s Resignation as Hand (added 7.2020)

In Fire & Blood, GRRM sets up a mirror-image, inverted-parallel between Ned’s resignation as the hand of Robert Baratheon and the dismissal of the blatant Robert-analogue Rogar Baratheon as the Hand of Jaehaerys I and his mother, the Queen Regent Alyssa Velaryon. The “rhyme” gets infinitely richer if BAJ is correct. Let’s take a quick look.

Both scenes feature an isolated Hand, the anger of the monarch, and the dramatic unpinning and return of the Hand’s badge of office:

[Robert] pointed an angry finger at Ned. “You are the King’s Hand, Lord Stark. You will do as I command you, or I’ll find me a Hand who will.”

“I wish him every success.” Ned unfastened the heavy clasp that clutched at the folds of his cloak, the ornate silver hand that was his badge of office. He laid it on the table in front of the king, saddened by the memory of the man who had pinned it on him, the friend he had loved. “I thought you a better man than this, Robert. I thought we had made a nobler king.”

Robert’s face was purple. “Out,” he croaked, choking on his rage. “Out, damn you, I’m done with you. …”

Ned bowed, and turned on his heel without another word.  (GOT E VIII)

When [Queen Alyssa] turned to her lord husband [Rogar], Benifer tells us that her eyes looked as hard and dark as obsidian. “Your service no longer pleases me, Lord Rogar. Leave us and return to Storm’s End, and we need never speak again of your treason.”

Rogar Baratheon looked at her incredulously. “Woman. You think you can dismiss me? No.” He laughed. “No.”

That was when Lord Corbray rose to his feet and drew his sword… . “Yes,” he said, and laid the blade upon the table, its point toward Lord Rogar. Then and only then did his lordship realize that he had done too far, that he stood alone against every man in the room. Or so Benifer tells us.

His lordship said no further word. His face pale, he stood and removed the golden brooch that Queen Alyssa had given him as a token of his office, flung it at her contemptuously, and strode from the room.”

He took his leave of King’s Landing that very night… . (F&B 173-174)

Note the way the details play with one another. Rogar’s face is pale, Robert’s (in the opposite role) face is purple; Ned leaves “without another word”, Rogar “said no further word”; Rogar pointedly vacates King’s Landing immediately (and ultimately survives to do lots more stuff) while Ned’s delay spells his doom.

The point as regards BAJ lies in the inversion, in the fact that Ned resigns to avoid being party to what he rightly perceives as an injustice, one which aims at, in a sense, “usurping” the would-be rightful return of Daenerys as scion of the Targaryen dynasty, whereas Rogar is fired for attempting what clearly is de facto usurpation, even though he expressly denies this:

“We were fools to crown Jaehaerys. He thinks only of himself, and he will be a worse king than his father was. Thank the gods that it is not too late. We must act now and put him aside.”

A hush fell over the chamber at those words. The Queen Regent stared at her lord husband in horror… . … Lord Tully said, “Do you mean to claim the Iron Throne for yourself, then?”

This Lord Rogar denied vehemently. “Never. Do you take me for a usurper? I want only what is best for the Seven Kingdoms. No Harm Need come to Jaehaerys. …”

“Then who shall sit the Iron Throne?” demanded Lord Celtigar.

“Princess Aerea,” Lord Rogar answered at once. … “She has the stronger claim, her mother and father were King Aeny’s first and secondborn, Jaehaerys was fourth.” (F&B 172-3)

Rogar is almost certainly playing a cynical and disingenous game here. In truth, he wants to continue to be de facto ruler of the Kingdom as the Hand of a very young girl-queen, whereas if Jaehaerys remains king Rogar will be either out of a job or second-fiddle in less than a year, when Jaehaerys turns 16 and assumes the rule in his own right. Thus his proposal is dubbed “treason”.

While Ned resigning rather than endorsing injustice inverts Alyssa firing Rogar for attempting to perpetrate an injustice, Ned usurping Brandon’s son Jon inverts the prevention of Rogar’s usurpation. When Ned calls Brandon’s trueborn son his bastard and thus enacts “treason” against the true Lord Stark, he is truly acting out of “what [he sincerely believes, thanks to Lyanna] is best for the Seven Kingdoms” and the North. It’s an injustice according to the letter of the law, beyond question (again, unlike Rogar’s gambit). Ned carries it out despite the incredible shame and dishonor it causes him, internally, whereas Rogar feels no shame, claiming the law is with him. Rogar wants power and glory, damn what is “right”; Ned has no interest in such things, but reluctantly agrees to seize them to avoid war with the Tullys, a disastrous “wolfblooded” ruler in Winterfell, etc. There’s even a nice rhyme in the age of the children: Rogar “merely” wants to rule as a young child’s regent, claiming he’ll be able to “shape her, guide her, teach her all she must know,” whereas Ned is convinced that “crowning” (so to speak) Brandon’s scion would be too dangerous, and thus he turns his back on what would have been a long regency for an infant in favor of actual usurpation and ruling outright.

A further note of harmony/suggestion: Rogar attempts to seize and take Aerea with him on his way out of King’s Landing, but is foiled by the Queen. How? She dressed Aerea as a commoner and had her work in a stable until her brother came of age and became king. Aerea loved this, as she loved horses. Thus the story points both toward Dany (who loves horses and who we first meet smelling like a stable) and Jon, who Ned usurps by pretending he is a bastard.

If readers of ASOIAF notice the superficial aspects of the Rogar-Ned “resignation rhyme”, they’ll wonder what the point is. The answer, I think, is to set up another possible entree into the possibility of BAJ, by likening-while-contrasting Ned to the power-hungry would be quasi-usurper Rogar Baratheon. And once we have the possibility of BAJ in mind, the rhyme is dramatically amplified and its point is clear.

The law of mystery writing is to lay more and more hints as you go along. Hence the fact that GRRM is at this late date feeding us a “rhyme” that gets infinitely “tighter” if and only if BAJ is correct is, for me, awfully suggestive.

AGOT Eddard IX

AGOT Eddard IX takes place mere hours after Eddard VIII, when Robert orders Ned to murder Dany and Ned resigns as Hand. It begins as Littlefinger and Ned are leaving Chataya’s brothel, where Ned has just met Robert’s bastard daughter Barra and Barra’s mother, a nameless whore I’ll call “Barramom”.

Ned says “My business here is done.” Littlefinger makes a sexually-charged jape that foregrounds the fact that as Hand, Ned acts in the king’s stead, which is notably also what Ned the Usurper is doing vis-a-vis Brandon’s heir:

“Your business,” he said lightly, “or Robert’s? They say the Hand dreams the king’s dreams, speaks with the king’s voice, and rules with the king’s sword. Does that also mean you fuck with the king’s—”

Ned objects—which makes doubly dramatic and ironic sense if Littlefinger’s words remind Ned of his sordid shame as a usurper—telling Littlefinger…

“…you presume too much.”

His choice of words just so happens to recall Varys saying that “we who presume to rule must do vile things for the good of the realm, however much it pains us”, which was an ironic reworking of Lyanna’s argument when she told Ned he must “presume to rule” the North, “for the good of the realm”, and which surely reminded Ned of his great sin, just as Littlefinger’s jape does.

Littlefinger’s response indicates that GRRM is carefully choosing his verbiage to tell us about Lyanna, Ned, Brandon and Jon, as we see a familiar motif—a “twist of the mouth” like Ned’s when he spoke of drinking from Brandon’s cup and Benjen’s when Jon talked about being a bastard and Benjen took Jon’s cup and drank from it:

“The direwolf must be a prickly beast,” said Littlefinger with a sharp twist of his mouth.

The rest is also pregnant with allusion: Brandon was, of course, “the wild wolf”, destined to be the direwolf, until he was doomed by his “prick”, so to speak. He was also a “prickly beast” in more or less the sense Littlefinger intends, as his brutal response to Littlefinger(!) challenging him for Cat’s hand indicates.

It begins to rain, and we get a coy wink at House Dayne, whose sigil is a falling star:

A warm rain was pelting down from a starless black sky as they walked to the stables.

Falling rain and a starless sky, as if all the stars had fallen.

The rest of the paragraph is seemingly innocuous filler/transition, but actually the vignette is overflowing with import:

Ned drew up the hood of his cloak. Jory brought out his horse. Young Wyl came right behind him, leading Littlefinger’s mare with one hand while the other fumbled with his belt and the lacings of his trousers. A barefoot whore leaned out of the stable door, giggling at him.

First, the name Wyl recalls Jon’s supposed mother Wylla. (As if to affirm/draw attention to this, there’s a “Wylla of Wyl” in TWOIAF.) “Wylla” invokes the question of Jon’s maternity/lineage, which from early in AGOT invokes Ashara Dayne. The name Wyl also points to House Wyl and thus Dorne, home of Lyanna’s Tower of Joy and of Ashara. With Jon, his lineage, Ashara, and Dorne already on our mind thanks to “Wyl” and hence “Wylla”, the full “Young Wyl” recalls “The Young Dragon”, who we’ve already been told is Jon’s hero and who “conquered Dorne” (before being killed by… the Wyls):

“Daeron Targaryen was only fourteen when he conquered Dorne,” Jon said. The Young Dragon was one of his heroes. (GOT Jon I)

We’re also told that Young Wyl (ahem) “came”. And what is he doing? “With one hand”, he is “leading Littlefinger’s mare”, while with “the other” he attempts to comport himself after fucking a whore. A mare is a mature female horse. Mare has marital connotations in ASOIAF per various references to child-bearing married women as “broodmares”. So, around the time Ned was supposedly fucking Wylla, who was Littlefinger’s would-be “mare”? Surely Catelyn Tully, for whose hand in marriage he dueled Brandon. Thus “Young Wyl” represents Brandon’s failing to keep his trousers on and fucking Ashara after he agreed to wed “Littlefinger’s mare”, Cat, thereby begetting Jon, Wylla’s supposed son, on his Dornish “conquest”, Ashara Dayne, when she “was only fourteen” (like Daeron).

Young Wyl fucking his whore in the stables jibes completely with my belief (argued in the [Ashara post-script] to this series and in my Knight of the Laughing Tree post) that Ashara was a great rider, a la Daena Targaryen or the Lady Lance Elia Sand. Since Chataya’s is a classy joint, it also suggests Wyl may have been getting a “freebie”, which in turn hints that he is quite attractive, just as Brandon clearly was.

At the same time, Catelyn being represented as a mare fits perfectly with how Hoster Tully viewed his daughters: as broodmares, as marriage assets to be bred for maximum political gain. It also fits with the idea that the Tullys, including Catelyn, would have been apoplectic at Brandon’s betrayal, inasmuch as mares are often thought to be “marish”: aggressive, moody, impatient, and tempermental.

There is much more to say about House Wyl and the Starks, all of which connects back to this vignette involving Young Wyl and much of which “confirms” BAJ, but in the interests of cogency let’s first walk through the rest of Eddard IX.

Before we got sidetracked by the metatextual wonderland that is Young Wyl, Littlefinger was japing about Ned acting in the King’s stead in a way that reminded us—and certainly could remind Ned—of Ned’s usurpation of Jon’s right to rule. Then a rain began to fall out of the starless sky, evoking House Dayne, and Ned took note of Wyl, a seemingly attractive man who is unable or unwilling to govern his sexual appetite, i.e. a man who could have remind Ned of Brandon. And so Ned does something that makes contextual sense: he thinks about warm blood and relentless old guilts.

The rain had driven everyone under their roofs. It beat down on Ned’s head, warm as blood and relentless as old guilts.

Given not just the immediate context but all the ironic reminders in Ned’s last chapter of the way Lyanna had persuaded him to “presume to rule” the North “for the good of the realm”, it makes sense that Ned is troubled by guilt, and that the guilt is falling (like falling stars) from the “starless”, Dayne-evoking sky. It makes sense that they’re “old guilts” because Ned has felt soiled ever since the day he claimed Jon was his bastard and thereby usurped the rights of his brother’s son—rights Ned never wanted but felt forced to claim to preclude catastrophe. It makes sense that they’re “relentless” guilts because they plague him every minute of every day he calls himself “Lord of Winterfell”.

Ned also likening the rain to warm blood may be just another symptom of the guilt he feels for usurping Brandon’s line by claiming Jon at Lyanna’s behest. After all, Brandon was his “blood” and is associated with blood and warmth—

“Brandon was different from his brother, wasn’t he? He had blood in his veins instead of cold water. More like me.” – Jaime Lannister, driven by lust to fuck his sister (COK Cat VII)

—and Lyanna was lying in a “bed of blood” when Ned promised to claim Jon, who he tells Cat “is my blood”.

But I think Ned (also?) thinks the rain is “warm as blood” because he’s worried about the threat of imminent murder now hanging over Dany like a stormcloud. Only hours before, Robert’s determination to kill Dany led Ned to wonder if Robert had something to do with the attack on Bran, which just so happens to have produced literal blood that “felt like warm rain”—

[Bran’s attacker’s] blood felt like warm rain as it sprayed across her face. (GOT C III)

—and which Cat told Ned about in terms of literal spilled blood:

“This blade was sent to open Bran’s throat and spill his life’s blood.” (GOT E IV)

Regardless, we know Ned is feeling the guilt of his usurpation, and we know it was Lyanna’s pleas and fear that persuaded him to claim Jon as his bastard, so what we read next—Ned’s memory of a conversation he had with Lyanna about a different child born to a different betrothed man who was similarly unable to control his appetites—flows perfectly naturally from what leads up to it (Littlefinger’s jape, the Dayne-ish sky, Young Wyl trying to pull his pants back on, and Ned’s thoughts of blood and “old guilts”), even if we didn’t know we were about to “meet” Barramom in flashback:

“Robert will never keep to one bed,” Lyanna had told him at Winterfell, on the night long ago when their father had promised her hand to the young Lord of Storm’s End. “I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale.” Ned had held the babe in his arms; he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister…

Choice irony, because Ned later “held the babe” Jon—living proof that Brandon, like Robert, could “never keep to one bed”—”in his arms” and “could scarcely deny” Lyanna when she bade him to promise to do to Brandon’s son Jon what he had not been able to bring himself to do for Robert: “lie” and “deny” Jon’s identity. Moreover, Ned could no more “lie to his [brother]” Benjen about Brandon siring Jon than he could “lie to his sister” Lyanna about Robert’s girl.

Ned remembers how he responded to Lyanna, naively swearing that Robert would change now that they were betrothed. It’s clear he now knows he was foolish and that Lyanna was right that “a man’s nature” always tells, in the end:

…[Ned] had assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. “Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature.”

The “obvious” reading is that it’s Robert’s bastard-making and whoring over the years that has disabused Ned of his illusions and made him see that Lyanna was right. I submit that it was actually Brandon’s violation of his betrothal vows to Catelyn that truly shattered Ned’s youthful illusions.

Ned then thinks back to his just-concluded visit with Barramom. He remembers her asking him to tell Robert “how beautiful [their daughter Barra] is” and how much “she looks… like him”. He remembers that he “promised her” he would, and thinks:

That was his curse. Robert would swear undying love and forget them before evenfall, but Ned Stark kept his vows. He thought of the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying, and the price he’d paid to keep them.

To Ned, keeping “his vows” is “his curse” because one of “the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying” was to claim Jon as his bastard and thus become a usurper, and he knows that so long as he holds to that vow he will continue to suffer the relentless guilts besetting him now. Those guilts are a huge part of “the price he’d paid to keep… his vows” to Lyanna, and they’re deep indeed. Far deeper than if Ned is keeping Jon’s identity secret to keep Jon safe while another man far away rules in what is, anyway, only Jon’s place in theory, with Ned having no ability to restore Jon’s would-be throne to him even if he wanted to, as RLJ would have it. There’s just not much to be guilty about in such a scenario, especially for a man like Ned who thinks there is “honor” in the lie Arya told to keep a direwolf safe from royal “justice”.

But BAJ explains that Ned endures horrible, abiding guilt because he is himself Jon’s dispossessor, personally standing between Jon and his rightful inheritance, “swinging Jon’s sword” and “drinking from Jon’s cup” every day, even as it sickens him to do so. Unlike with RLJ, Ned does have the ability to restore Jon’s seat to him, in an instant, with a stroke, and he knows it. Ned’s guilt has only compounded as he’s watched Jon grow into a fine young man who is clearly smarter, more deliberate, and fundamentally less libidinal than Ned’s own son Robb (a rash boy who proceeds blithely, secure in his inheritance, oblivious to the truth that’s he’s a second son’s son). And what guilt, what shame Ned has felt whenever Cat’s heaped scorn on Jon, when he knows that she is not the rightful Lady of Winterfell, and that all she arrogantly presumes to be hers is by rights Jon’s.

Ned thinking here about “the price he’d paid to keep… the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying” is dramatically sensible in this moment because he’s just felt a rain of “relentless… old guilts” and because his promises to Barramom reminded him of his promises to Lyanna, from whence stems his usurper’s guilt. But I suspect it’s dramatically sensible for another reason: Whether or not Ned realizes Dany is Lyanna’s daughter and whether or not he made promises regarding her, he surely promised he would try to stop Robert from pursuing vengeance against Rhaegar’s family, and he’s just seen his efforts to do so cost him his friendship with Robert, his office as Hand of the King, and possibly the neutrality of the crown in a simmering conflict with the Lannisters, endangering his family and people.

It’s similarly dramatically sensible that it’s now, mere hours after Ned’s break with Robert put Lyanna’s daughter Dany in mortal danger, that Ned thinks for the first time of multiple “promises” made to Lyannna. It’s as if Ned realizes that old promises he made Lyanna about her daughter and/or standing between Robert and the Targaryens just became very relevant. Any way you slice it, multiple promises make more sense per BAJRALD. Even the act of claiming Jon as his bastard is more obviously multifaceted: He promised to raise Jon as his own, but also to rule the North in Jon’s stead. He promised to keep Jon safe from the Tullys, but also, perhaps, from certain Daynes.”

After thinking of “the price he’d paid to keep… the promises he’d made Lyanna as she lay dying”, Ned recalls the end of his meeting with Barramom. He remembers Barramom telling him Robert “was always good to me, truly”, which we are strongly encouraged to read as an echo of what Lyanna told him about Rhaegar, given that GRRM has Ned’s thoughts literally echo what Barramom says, which makes sense as Ned registering the resonance between Barramom’s words about Robert and Lyanna’s about Rhaegar:

“He was always good to me, truly.”

Good to you, Ned thought hollowly.

Ned recalls Barramom asking him to tell Robert that she is waiting for him, and Ned saying he would do so, adding another (unasked for) “promise” that “Barra shall not go wanting”. Her response causes Ned to think of Jon Snow and the “lusts” that produce bastards:

She had smiled then, a smile so tremulous and sweet that it cut the heart out of him. Riding through the rainy night, Ned saw Jon Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own. If the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they fill men with such lusts? “Lord Baelish, what do you know of Robert’s bastards?”

Barra’s mother’s explicitly “tremulous” smile—

• Tremulous: adj (of the voice) quivering as from weakness or fear; quavering

—obviously reminds Ned of the explicitly weak and fearful Lyanna’s surely “tremulous” smile after Ned “gave her his word”:

The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister’s eyes. Ned remembered the way she had smiled then… (GOT E I)

Notice that Ned remembers “the way” Lyanna smiled. Thus it’s the “tremulous” way Barramom smiles that reminds Ned of Lyanna’s death bed smile, and thence of Jon Snow. Indeed, “tremulous” smiles recur throughout ASOIAF when people are weak/sick/fearful, including on their deathbed, reaching for a hand like Lyanna reached for Ned’s:

Hoster Tully… seemed shrunken, the muscle and meat melted off his bones. Even his face sagged. …

His eyes opened to the sound of Edmure’s voice. “Little cat,” he murmured in a voice thin and wispy and wracked by pain. “My little cat.” A tremulous smile touched his face as his hand groped for hers. “I watched for you …” (COK C XI)

Ned thinks of Jon after remembering Barramom’s smile and thus Lyanna’s not because Jon is Lyanna’s son, as RLJ believes, but because Lyanna smiled only after Ned “gave her his word” that he would raise Jon—Brandon’s son Jon Stark—as his own bastard, disinheriting the blood of the wild wolf but preserving his marriage with Catelyn, the Tully alliance, the peace, and the honor of House Stark.

No sooner does Ned think of Jon than does he think of “such lusts” as “fill men” such that they produce bastards, presumably like Barra, yes—after all, Barramom’s smile sets off Ned’s thoughts, and Ned immediately follows his musing on lusts by asking Littlefinger about Robert’s bastards—but unavoidably also like the “bastard” Jon Snow, whose face he is seeing before him in the rain.

Now, while Brandon was lustful-like-Robert (about which more, shortly), Rhaegar plainly wasn’t. This is most obviously evident when Ned thinks about Rhaegar and brothels a mere page later:

For the first time in years, [Ned] found himself remembering Rhaegar Targaryen. He wondered if Rhaegar had frequented brothels; somehow he thought not.

Ned clearly doesn’t believe Rhaegar was the brothel-going sort. Thus to buy that Ned is thinking of Rhaegar when he thinks of Jon and “such lusts” as those that make “bastards” requires a tortured parsing per which “such lusts” are somehow utterly independent of and distinct from the other “lusts” that drive men to brothels, despite the fact that the context of all this is a story about how Robert’s lust drives him to brothels and makes bastards. It also requires us to ignore that Ned’s thoughts about Rhaegar and brothels are “the first time in years” he’s “remember[ed]” Rhaegar. Yes, Ned seems to have memory issues, but this is some absolutely guppy-brained stuff if Ned has had deep thoughts about Rhaegar’s “lusts” not a minute or two earlier. Plainly, he hasn’t, because plainly, Rhaegar wasn’t lustful, whereas thoughts of Lyanna’s smile and of Jon did prompt Ned to think of men’s lusts, indicating Ned believes someone else—someone lustful—is Jon’s father.

The early picture of Rhaegar as a lusty rapist we’re sold by (lusty-like-Brandon, whore-frequenting) Robert Baratheon—a picture Ned notably never endorses—is again belied when Jorah tells Dany she is Rhaegar’s “sister, in truth” after she orders Jorah and her bloodriders to stop the (blood)lust-crazed rape of a Lhazareen girl in AGOT Daenerys VII.

In ASOS Daenerys I, Dany asks Barristan Selmy what Rhaegar was “truly like”. Selmy describes Rhaegar as more or less the opposite of lusty:

The old man considered a moment. “Able. That above all. Determined, deliberate, dutiful, single-minded.”

Rhaegar was a veritable monk, not a raper, not a whore-monger, not even a lover, truly. He had no passion for his wife. He was joyless, almost sour, and he brooded as well:

“If Rhaegar had been happy in his wife, he would not have needed the Stark girl.”

“…I am not certain it was in Rhaegar to be happy.”

“You make him sound so sour,” Dany protested.

“Not sour, no, but . . . there was a melancholy to Prince Rhaegar, a sense” … “of doom. He was born in grief, my queen, and that shadow hung over him all his days.” (SOS Dae IV)

So who does Rhaegar—the Prince of Dragonstone, “able”, “determined, deliberate, dutiful, single-minded”, unhappy, almost “sour”, melancholic, beset by a “shadow… of grief” and a “sense of doom”, unhappily married but dutiful enough to produce an heir—sound like?

It just so happens that he sounds very much like the Lord of Dragonstone, the “able,” (ACOK Prologue) “stern, sour, and prickly proud… Stannis Baratheon”, (ACOK Tyrion III) including Stannis as he was described back in Eddard VI when Ned (a) hears about Stannis’s desire to ban brothels, which Robert mocked, and then (b) learns that Stannis and Jon Arryn visited a brothel to research Robert’s bastards, a revelation that causes Ned to muse on “Robert’s lusts” and on how the implicitly Rhaegar-ish Stannis is “utterly unlike” Robert:

Lord Renly laughed. “We’re fortunate my brother Stannis is not with us. Remember the time he proposed to outlaw brothels? The king asked him if perhaps he’d like to outlaw eating, shitting, and breathing while he was at it. If truth be told, I ofttimes wonder how Stannis ever got that ugly daughter of his. He goes to his marriage bed like a man marching to a battlefield, with a grim look in his eyes and a determination to do his duty.“ (E VI)

“The boy says that they visited a brothel.”

“A brothel?” Ned said. “The Lord of the Eyrie and Hand of the King visited a brothel with Stannis Baratheon?” He shook his head, incredulous, wondering what Lord Renly would make of this tidbit. Robert’s lusts were the subject of ribald drinking songs throughout the realm, but Stannis was a different sort of man; a bare year younger than the king, yet utterly unlike him, stern, humorless, unforgiving, grim in his sense of duty.” (E VI)

“Grim in his sense of duty”, with a “grim look in his eyes and a determination to do his duty” could as well describe “determined, …dutiful”, doom-shrouded Rhaegar as Stannis, right? And Ned being “incredulous” when he hears Stannis visited a brothel prefigures his dismissal of the idea that Rhaegar visited brothels. Thus in these earlier scenes—one of which just so happens to be about the same brothel Ned is leaving when he thinks of Jon, bastards, and the “lusts” of the men who produce them—dutiful, grim, lustless Stannis is set-up as “rhyming” with dutiful, melancholic Rhaegar, while at the same time, Stannis is explicitly contrasted to Robert, specifically by virtue of not possessing “Robert’s lusts”, a phrase which clearly speaks to Ned’s “such lusts” as produce bastards. There is no way to read this and not conclude that we are being forcefully told that Rhaegar wasn’t lustful.

This Robert vs. Stannis distinction was redoubled, this time vis-a-vis bastards rather than brothels, in AGOT Eddard VII:

That the armorer’s sullen apprentice was the king’s son, Ned had no doubt. The Baratheon look was stamped on his face, in his jaw, his eyes, that black hair. Renly was too young to have fathered a boy of that age, Stannis too cold and proud in his honor.

Yet knowing all that, what had he learned? The king had other baseborn children scattered throughout the Seven Kingdoms. He had openly acknowledged one of his bastards, a boy of Bran’s age whose mother was highborn.

The Stark look, is, of course, “stamped on [Jon’s] face”. RLJ has an explanation for this, yes, but the Song “rhymes” if the Robert-ish Brandon not only stamped his look on Jon, but also wanted to “openly acknowledge” his paternity as Robert did, which could not be allowed. Meanwhile, Ned think the Rhaegar-ish Stannis is simply not the sort to sire Gendry, which makes little sense if Ned knows that the Stannis-ish Rhaegar was exactly the type to sire Jon.

To be sure, while Rhaegar is celebrated as honorable and was certainly gloomy and melancholic, as an inspirational leader he may not have been “cold” in quite the same way Stannis is said to be in the very moment Ned thinks him incapable of having sired Gendry. However, GRRM weirdly contrives to nonetheless “tag” Rhaegar as “cold”, auspiciously in a passage which otherwise remind us of nothing so much as… Stannis and his weirdly color-shifting, cold-but-“on fire” sword:

Prince Rhaegar burned with a cold light, now white, now red, now dark. (SOS Jaime VI)

“[Stannis’s sword] glows. As if it were on fire. There are no flames, but the steel is yellow and red and orange, all flashing and glimmering… (SOS Sam IV)

“The sword is wrong, she has to know that … light without heat [i.e. cold!] … (FFC Sam IV)

Ah, but what about Rhaegar’s harp-playing? “Stannis isn’t musical! He doesn’t ‘rhyme’ with Rhaegar in that respect,” you say? True, Stannis isn’t a musician, but where Rhaegar is a harp-player, Stannis is (not!) “coincidentally” a literal (and figuratively audible!) organ grinder:

…he could hear Lord Stannis grinding his teeth half a castle away. (ACOK Prologue)

Davos could hear the faint sound of the king grinding his teeth. (ACOK Davos II)

(Yes, the teeth [are considered an organ].)

And where Rhaegar (with his “sense of doom”, under his “shadow of grief”) literally sang sad songs, Stannis “came to Robert [figuratively] singing that same dull song in that gloomy aggrieved[!] tone he has.” (ACOK Tyrion VI)

To be sure, the Stannis/Rhaegar rhymes goes on and on. E.g. Where “Cersei had almost drowned in the depths of [Rhaegar’s] sad purple eyes”, which made Rhaegar look “wounded”, causing Cersei to think Jaime in comparison “seemed no more than a callow boy”, Stannis’s eyes are “open wounds” and “a blue as dark as the sea by night”; while Stannis himself was once a “sad, sullen boy” and now has a mouth “made for frowns”. And much as Selmy says “I am not certain it was in Rhaegar to be happy”, Cressen says Stannis “had forgotten how to smile and had never known how to laugh”. (AFFC Cersei V; ACOK Prologue).

So, if Rhaegar and Stannis are rhyming figures, especially as regards lusts, brothels, and bastards—which they clearly are—and if Rhaegar-ish Stannis is “utterly unlike” his lusty, brothel-going, Barra-making brother Robert, why should we think for even a second that Ned is thinking of the lusts of Rhaegar—the decidedly Stannis-y Rhaegar—when Ned remembers Lyanna’s smile, “sees” Jon Snow, and then immediately thinks of the “lusts” of men who make bastards, i.e. of “lusts” like those possessed by Robert (about whose bastards Ned then inquires)? We shouldn’t, because Ned isn’t thinking of Rhaegar, who is nothing like Robert. Nor does he somehow go from remembering Lyanna’s smile and thence seeing Jon’s face to immediately thinking simply of Robert’s-and-only-Robert’s bastard-producting lusts, which have nothing to do with Jon. No, Ned is thinking of “such lusts” as drove Brandon, his lusty older brother who “rhymes” with (and likely reminds Ned of) Ned’s lusty older “brother” Robert, in much the same way that grim, dutiful Rhaegar rhymes with grim, dutiful Stannis.

This reading is borne out and the Robert-Brandon rhyme is extended in ASOS Davos V, when Selyse tells Stannis that it was Robert’s “lust” that produced his bastard son Edric Storm, a child Stannis protects from Selyse’s predations, auspiciously using nearly the same language Ned used to defend Jon from Catelyn years ago:

[Selyse to Stannis:] “[Edric Storm] is only one boy, born of your brother’s lust and my cousin’s shame.”

“He is mine own blood. Stop clutching me, woman.”

So Stannis protects a boy “born of [Stannis’s] brother’s lust” from his wife, saying “he is mine own blood”, just as I believe Ned protected Jon, born of Ned’s brother Brandon’s lust, from his wife, telling Cat, “he is my blood, and that is all you need to know.” Recall, too, that Robert impregnated Selyse’s cousin with Edric Storm in what was to be Stannis’s wedding bed, basically taking a shit on his un-lusty brother’s plans for romance, which rhymes neatly with the idea that Brandon slept with Ashara after he arranged for her to dance with his un-lusty brother Ned.

And where Ned’s ersatz “brother” Robert possessed “such lusts” as to beget the bastard Barra, whose mother’s Lyannna-ish smile leads Ned to think of Jon Snow and the “lusts” that lead men to sire bastards, Ned’s literal brother Brandon possessed “such lusts” as to not only beget the aforementioned “bastard” Jon Snow, but to necessitate that Jon “be” (i.e. be declared and thus made into) a bastard, regardless of whether Brandon wed Ashara. That is, it was ultimately Brandon’s lusts that led him to produce a child whose existence posed such grave threats to peace and stability that Lyanna and thence Ned saw “no choice” but to disavow him as Brandon’s heir and declare him a bastard. Having been declared a bastard and hence being “known” to be a bastard, Jon “is”, in a very real sense, a bastard, and thus it makes sense even if Jon is in truth Brandon’s trueborn heir that Ned should think of Jon and the lusts that produce bastards like him after remembering how Lyanna smiled when he “gave her his word” to make Jon his bastard.

This notion—that Brandon’s lusts “made” Jon Stark into the “bastard” Jon Snow—dovetails nicely with something Jon thinks about lust and bastards in ASOS Jon X:

Bastard children were born from lust and lies, men said; their nature was wanton and treacherous. (SOS Jon X)

Lies made and make Jon a bastard. Jon Stark was literally “born” (in the ordinary sense of born) because of Brandon’s “lust”, but “Jon Snow” was metaphorically “born from” Brandon’s lust and Ned’s “lies”.

In summary, Ned’s thoughts of Jon and “lusts” of the kind that lead to “bastards” are indeed triggered by Barramom’s Lyanna-esque smile, but as surely as that smile leads Ned to remember his oath to Lyanna to disinherit Jon and thus to Ned envisioning Jon’s face, so does it lead him to remember the thing that put him in the position of having to make that oath and thereby make Jon a bastard: Brandon’s Robert-esque “lusts”.

And to be sure, like Robert but unlike Rhaegar and Stannis, Brandon, “the wild wolf”, was clearly lusty:

“Brandon was different from [Ned], wasn’t he? He had blood in his veins instead of cold water.” (ACOK Catelyn VII)

Indeed, a passage I cited earlier to show that Brandon surely “loved the song of swords” (i.e. literal swordplay) as much as Jon clearly does—unlike “bookish to a fault” Rhaegar—also conveys Brandon’s bloodlust and, both overtly and in barely concealed double-entendre, his lust-lust: his love of fucking.

“Brandon loved his sword. He loved to hone it. ‘I want it sharp enough to shave the hair from a woman’s cunt,’ he used to say. And how he loved to use it. ‘A bloody sword is a beautiful thing,’ he told me once.” …

Brandon was never shy about taking what he wanted. I… still remember the look of my maiden’s blood on his cock the night he claimed me. I think Brandon liked the sight as well. (ADWD The Turncloak)

Note that Brandon’s “bloody sword” is the result of Barbrey’s virginity, just as Barramom was a virgin when Robert impregnated her:

No doubt she’d been a virgin; the better brothels could always find a virgin, if the purse was fat enough.

Rhaegar was Brandon’s opposite as surely as Stannis is Robert’s. To wit, consider another passage we looked at earlier vis-a-vis Rhaegar’s disinterest in Jon’s beloved “the song of swords”, this time reading “the song of swords” and “his lance” as sexual double-entendres like Brandon’s “bloody sword”:

“[Rhaegar] never loved the song of swords the way that Robert did, or Jaime Lannister. It was something he had to do, a task the world had set him. He did it well, for he did everything well. That was his nature. But he took no joy in it. Men said that he loved his harp much better than his lance.” (SOS Dae IV)

Where both Robert and Brandon love both “songs of swords”—fucking and fighting—we have every reason to believe Rhaegar “took no joy” in either. Thus where Brandon “loved his [ahem] sword”, Rhaegar “loved his harp much better than his [ahem] lance”. Which man seems more apt to have produced Jon, given that Ned’s thoughts couple Jon with lamentations about men’s “lusts”? (An aside: Rhaegar taking “no joy” in “the song of swords” is doubly curious because ASOIAF heavily, heavily associates having/getting “joy” with having children.)

Brandon’s son Jon shares Brandon’s love of fucking—the “other” song of swords—too. He breaks his vows and falls in lust with Ygritte just as Brandon broke his vows and fell in lust with Ashara (a parallel I’ll discuss more in Part 4), whereas everything we know about Rhaegar suggests he simply wouldn’t do such a thing.

One more thing about the Rhaegar/Stannis rhyme and its Brandon/Robert counterpoint. Earlier I quoted a passage from AGOT Eddard VI in which Renly mocks Stannis’s proposal to outlaw brothels and talks about his decidedly Rhaegar-like “determination to do his duty” in his marriage bed. Ned answers Renly by asking when Stannis “intends to end his visit to Dragonstone and resume his seat on this council”, and Littlefinger makes a joke that reeks of foreshadowing/allusion to BAJ:

“No doubt as soon as we’ve scourged all those whores into the sea,” Littlefinger replied, provoking more laughter.

Jumping “into the sea” is, of course, how Ashara Dayne supposedly died:

“She threw herself into the sea from atop the Palestone Sword before I was born.” (SOS Arya VIII)

Thus amidst a dicussion which codes Stannis as Rhaegar-ish and which thus speaks to Ned’s later thoughts (in the “current” chapter) about brothels and Jon Snow and bastards and men’s lusts and whore-born royal bastards, Ashara is in essence coded as a figurative whore, i.e. the sort of woman the Brandon Starks and Roberts of the world seek out and impregnate.

And how does Ned respond to Littlefinger’s joke?

“I have heard quite enough about whores for one day,” Ned said, rising. “Until the morrow.”

He does the same thing he did when Ashara Dayne’s name came up in Winterfell 15 years earlier: He says he doesn’t want to hear it again. This underlines the inference: Ashara was a “whore”. And then GRRM dots the Is and crosses the Ts by have Ned “rise” and make reference to “the morrow”, which smells like “Dawn” as if to say “That’s three times I’ve told you, Ashara was a ‘whore’.”

Tedious, Ramshackle Blather Regarding RLJ’s Answers to the Dilemma of Ned “Remembering Rhaegar… for the First Time in Years” Approximately Two Minutes After Ned (a) Was Reminded of Lyanna’s Deathbed Smile, (b) Saw Jon Snow’s Face Before Him, and (c) Immediately Mused On The “Lusts” That Lead Men To Sire Bastards. ENTIRELY SKIPPABLE DIGRESSION.

In the foregoing survey of Eddard IX, I noted that it makes little sense to claim that Ned is musing about Rhaegar’s “lusts” when he “sees” Jon’s face in the rain, since this would mean Ned (almost certainly wrongly) believes Rhaegar was lusty, even though Ned “otherwise” never says or even thinks anything even remotely negative about Rhaegar, despite ample prompts when Robert repeatedly and vehemently decries Rhaegar for, more or less, his lusts.

To get around this, a few RLJ believers hand-wave: “Well, they’re both right; Rhaegar was generally not lusty, but he really fell in love/lust with Lyanna for whatever reason, so that was a unique exception.” This often boils down to an absurd hair-splitting argument that it isn’t “really” lust if you fall in some kind of pure love, and it’s pretty much textual nihilism. It means Selmy is “right” that Rhaegar is anything but lusty, and yet Rhaegar still did the “lusty” thing (which Ned indeed thinks about as lusty when he “sees” Jon and thinks of men’s lusts, even though a page later Ned “found himself remembering Rhaegar… for the first time in years” while thinking how Rhaegar isn’t lusty because he wouldn’t go to a brothel), which isn’t “really” lusty because “love”. If it turns out GRRM is being that nihilistic with the text, so be it, but hopefully most readers would expect better.

Others say we’re in for a major revelation about Rhaegar: Selmy didn’t know him at all, really, and his carefully maintained public image was an act. In fact, Rhaegar was lusty, so Ned thinking about Jon in the context of lust makes sense. Some of these folks claim the Targaryen-Lannister looking whore Marei is Rhaegar’s daughter, proving that he did visit whorehouses and thus isn’t the man Ned and Selmy think he was.

The problem here is that this means Ned literally goes from correctly thinking Rhaegar was lusty when he thinks about (Rhaegar’s son) Jon and thus men’s lusts in the same breath (and therefore clearly truly “remembering” Rhaegar and brooding on the sort of man Rhaegar was) to thinking a page later that (a) this second is the first time in years I’ve really thought about the kind of guy Rhaegar was, and (b) Rhaegar wasn’t the lustful sort to visit a brothel. Even setting aside the “first time in years remembering Rhaegar” problem, this brings us back to believing that Ned is for some crazy reason (and wrongly!) distinguishing between (a) “such lusts” as drive men to brothels (which per this scenario he “foolishly” thinks Rhaegar didn’t have) and (b) “such lusts” as drive men to father Jon Snows, which he “knows” Rhaegar did have. Which is just goofy as hell. And which doesn’t solve Ned going from musing on how lusty Rhaegar was to “remembering Rhaegar… for the first time in years” (and thinking how lusty he wasn’t) a page later.

A (momentarily) stronger argument some RLJ adherents make is that Ned is mistaken about Rhaegar when he thinks of Rhaegar’s son Jon and then of men’s lusts: Ned wrongly assumes lust led Rhaegar to produce Jon, whereas in reality Rhaegar was soberly and dutifully carrying out the dictates of prophecy, trying to create the Prince That Was Promised. This respects the text to the degree that it assumes all the slow revelations showing that Rhaegar isn’t in any way lustful are important. It also tries to deal with the “first time in years remembering Rhaegar” issue. The idea is that at first, when Ned “sees” Jon’s face, he casually, unreflectedly thinks “yes, lusty Rhaegar made Jon Snow” and therefore muses on men’s lusts, but then, a page later, when he is truly “remembering Rhaegar… for the first time in years”, he realizes that “wait, Rhaegar wouldn’t have gone to a brothel like Robert the typical-bastard-maker after all”. Ned doesn’t quite connect the dots and circle back to question his earlier assumption that Jon is the product of lust, but the pieces are there for the readers to realize this (and to realize that Jon is trueborn).

The trouble here is that until Ned has his “revelation” when he finally truly “remembered” who Rhaegar was, he blithely thought that yes, lust led Rhaegar to kidnap Lyanna and beget Jon, whereas there is *no* other sign that Ned thinks negatively of Rhaegar or that Rhaegar was lusty in this way prior to his momentary conflation of Lyanna, Jon and men’s lusts. The only response to this objection seems to be more low-key textual nihilism, whereby it simply doesn’t matter that Ned only thinks this one isolated and wrong thought about Rhaegar’s lusts before happily coming mostly to his sense a page later. An epiphany without any set-up seems bizarre, especially when there are so many opportunities (i.e. when Robert is railing about Rhaegar the rapist, etc.).

Finally, some will say Ned correctly knows Rhaegar wasn’t lusty like the men who generally create bastards, and is musing about bastards and men’s lusts either (a) with the knowledge that Jon is trueborn, and thus not a bastard produced by lust; or (b) because he just can’t figure out how a lust-less guy like Rhaegar came to sire (what he thinks is) a bastard like Jon. Each of these paths requires a somewhat tendentious reading of the chain of causality between Ned’s thoughts in the passage in question:

[Ned remembers Barramom’s Lyanna-ish smile.] Ned saw Jon Snow’s face in front of him, so like a younger version of his own. If the gods frowned so on bastards, he thought dully, why did they fill men with such lusts? “Lord Baelish, what do you know of Robert’s bastards?”

If Ned knows Jon is trueborn, something like: Lyanna’s smile & thus Jon → Jon is the trueborn son of Lyanna and Rhaegar → that was fun thinking about Jon, but bastards like Barra are a thing too, don’t forget → “why do the gods fill men with the lusts that produce bastards like Barra?” → ask Petyr about Robert’s bastards. Just a full stop and change of gears between Jon’s face and a thought that seems very clearly inspired by Jon’s face.

If Ned thinks Jon’s a bastard, something like: Lyanna’s smile & Jon → Jon is the “bastard” son of Lyanna and Rhaegar → Jon wasn’t born from lust, but bastards usually are →  take Barra; why do the gods fill men with such lusts as are usually to blame for bastards like her → ask Petyr about Robert’s bastards.

In either case, it is again a huge problem that Ned goes on a minute or two later to find himself “remembering Rhaegar… for the first time in years” and thinking he wouldn’t go to a brothel when he’s just been thinking about Rhaegar’s nature and about how he’s not being lusty.

I’m going to give RLJ its out here, one I can’t believe isn’t more widely assumed: If RLJ, Ned doesn’t know who Jon’s true father is. Lyanna may have told Ned (and perhaps select others) that Jon was sired by someone else, in order to bury his Targaryen lineage even deeper. Perhaps Ned was told that Jon was Arthur Dayne’s son. Indeed, perhaps the Daynes were told this as well, with Arthur’s and/or Ashara’s complicity. This would obfuscate Jon’s royal lineage and explain the Dayne’s esteem for Ned, as Ned has made a (supposed) bastard vanish whose existence would stain Arthur’s sterling reputation and who could potentially challenge for rule of House Dayne, as bastards are wont to do. Or perhaps Lyanna simply told Ned that Jon was hers while refusing to name the father. Perhaps she did nonetheless lie and deny that Rhaegar was the father, assuming this would help keep Jon safe. Regardless, Lyanna made Ned promise to raise her boy as his own bastard.

While there are plenty of problems the “Ned doesn’t know” RLJ scenarios don’t satisfactorily resolve (Ned’s continued refusal after all these years to let Catelyn in on the secret that Jon is Lyanna’s looms once again), they do take care of many pesky issues, including Ned’s thoughts in this chapter. To wit: when Ned thinks about Lyanna and thus Jon, Ned sees Jon as the product of some man’s lust (Arthur’s? Oswell’s? A mystery knight’s?) and thinks about men’s lusts. Then, a few minutes later, he remembers Rhaegar “for the first time in years” and thinks about Rhaegar’s lust-less nature, never suspecting that Jon is Rhaegar’s son. Notice that the issues of Ned not thinking much of Jon’s safety and not fearing for Jon vis-a-vis Robert and being fine with Jon going to the Wall all make sense if Ned is guarding Jon’s identity as Lyanna’s son secret while being ignorant of his royal paternity.

A possible variation: Lyannna claims Jon is someone else’s son, but admits that she and Rhaegar fell in love and were married. She tells Ned that Rhaegar agreed to claim Jon as his own son, which means Jon is Rhaegar’s “trueborn son” by law, and thus a problem for all the usual RLJ reasons, but not actually Rhaegar’s genetic son, which explains his non-Targaryen appearance, and at least to some degree the fact that Ned doesn’t think of Rhaegar much, even when he thinks of Jon. He instead thinks of Jon’s supposed “natural” father, and that father’s lusts. Lyanna might do this because she knows Ned’s a shitty liar, but also thinks he needs to understand the gravity of the situation. Since he’ll “know” Jon has some other “natural” father, he won’t trip up and admit that he’s Rhaegar heir. But since he’ll “know” Rhaegar wed Lyanna and was prepared to claim Jon, he’ll understand the gravity of the secret.

That last scenario is fun to play with as the literal truth (Jon is someone else’s son, but Lyanna admits she and Rhaegar were married and he planned to claim Jon as his son) and a very interesting variation on RLJ, per which Jon is Rhaegar’s heir and “trueborn” son, but not his natural, genetic son. I mean, what if Jon is Arthur’s son with Lyanna, with Rhaegar perhaps asking his noble friend to bed Lyanna in order to do away with the problematic Targaryen incest genes while marrying her and planning to claim Jon as his heir? Now the Daynes have a real reason to be thankful to Ned! Or what if Rhaegar was rescuing Lyanna from Starkcest with Brandon, such that Jon is all Stark but still Rhaegar’s heir?

These ideas are fun to toss around, but Brandon + Ashara = Jon explains everything quite tidily. END SIDEBAR REGARDING AGOT Eddard IX AND RLJ

“Young Wyl”, Brandon, and the House Wyl Code

In the foregoing discussion of Eddard IX, we saw this little vignette—

Young Wyl came right behind him, leading Littlefinger’s mare with one hand while the other fumbled with his belt and the lacings of his trousers. A barefoot whore leaned out of the stable door, giggling at him.

—encode the idea that Brandon made a conquest of the Dornishwoman Ashara Dayne and produced “Wylla’s son” Jon when he was unable to stay faithful to his betrothed, Catelyn (symbolized by Littlefinger’s mare). I promised there was much more to say about the Young Wyl/Brandon “rhyme”, so let’s talk about how everything else we’re told about House Wyl likewise suggests that Brandon boffed Ashara to make Jon.

A quick, skippable refresher: We already know that the name Wyl recalls Jon’s supposed mother Wylla, invoking the question of Jon’s lineage, and thus Ashara Dayne. Wyl recalls House Wyl and thus Dorne, home of Lyanna’s Tower of Joy and Ashara Dayne. “Young Wyl” apes the formula of “The Young Dragon”, Jon’s hero who “conquered Dorne… when he was only fourteen” like Brandon “conquered” Ashara when she was only fourteen.

Much of the rest of what we know about House Wyl comes from TWOIAF, which is a treasure trove, once you understand that “all things [in the canon] come round again” in “rhyming” form. Indeed, that very conceit is actually foregrounded by the “blackadder” sigil of House Wyl itself, which we glimpse in AGOT Eddard VII when Ned and Barristan Selmy are walking together amidst the sea of tents and shields at Ned’s Tourney. The Wyl’s “blackadder” is a blatant reference to the famous BBC comedy series Blackadder, each season of which features the same actors playing variations on the same character types from the same British family dynasty at widely different points in history. Blackadder is thus a show in which history “rhymes”, just as I believe it does, all-pervasively, in ASOIAF. Given that House Wyl references a show about history rhyming with itself, it’s no surprise that we’re about to see that almost everything we’re told about the Wyls riffs on and reworks things we’re told about the Starks. It likewise makes perfect sense that their blackadder sigil is introduced when Ned is talking to Barristan Selmy at Ned’s tourney, as this echoes Ned and Selmy meeting at the Harrenhal tourney, when Brandon made like Young Wyl and fucked Ashara, despite his pledge to wed Catelyn, Littlefinger’s would-be brood mare.

So, what are we told about House Wyl, and how do these things “rhyme” with/speak to the history of House Stark and to BAJ?

House Wyl is a stony Dornish house of First Men, just like Ashara’s House Dayne. Indeed, it’s a kind of mirror-house to House Dayne, as it’s located in the extreme northeast of Dorne, while Starfall is in the extreme southwest, and as the Wyls and Daynes were on opposite sides of historic wars in the days before Nymeria unified Dorne. This mirrors the Stark/Dayne opposite-but-same dynamic, as well, so given the whole “similar opposites attract”, “ice and fire” conceit of ASOIAF, it makes sense for Young Wyl to “code” Brandon as a figurative Wyl if Brandon did indeed bed and wed Ashara.

Sticking with the “mirror” them, “House Wyl of the Boneway” guards the the northern end of the Boneway, whereas the northern end of the Boneway’s eastern counterpart, the Prince’s Pass, is guarded by the Tower of Joy, where Ned made his promises to Lyanna concerning “Wylla’s son” Jon. The sexual connotations of “Boneway” are patent, which jibes with Young Wyl boning a whore and representing Brandon of the “bloody sword”.

I’ve argued that Brandon is like Robert, so it’s interesting to see the Wyls partaking of Robert’s favorite activity, which I suspect “the wild wolf” enjoyed as well:

The Wyls kept him hunting and hawking for eight days on the Boneway… (DWD The Watcher)

Brandon was an easily angered man who savored conflict. No surprise that the Wyls are one of Dorne’s angry, rebel houses:

The white knight did drink, as was only courteous. His companions likewise. So did the Princess Arianne, Lady Jordayne, the Lord of Godsgrace, the Knight of Lemonwood, the Lady of Ghost Hill … even Ellaria Sand, Prince Oberyn’s beloved paramour, who had been with him in King’s Landing when he died. Hotah paid more note to those who did not drink: Ser Daemon Sand, Lord Tremond Gargalen, the Fowler twins, Dagos Manwoody, the Ullers of the Hellholt, the Wyls of the Boneway. (DWD The Watcher)

One famous Wyl is Wylla of Wyl, a “warrior maid”. While we know Lyanna was a “maid” with martial qualities, I suspect Ashara was, as well, and Lyanna-ish Arya is a warrior maid for certain. Wylla of Wyl joined forces with Yoren Yronwood (recalling the proto-Stark Blackwoods and Yoren the Night’s Watch recruiter, who was likely at Harrenhal and who joined forces with Arya) to fight a proto-Baratheon named “Durran the Young” (a la “Young Wyl”) who was called “the Butcher Boy” (like Arya’s friend Mycah the “butcher boy”, who is “wild” like Brandon) in “the Battle of Bloody Pool” (which rhymes with Mirri’s “bloody bed”, which famously suggests that Lyanna’s “bed of blood” was a birthing bed). Given the nature of “rhyming” (motifs forever swirling!) and Brandon’s broad “rhyme” with Robert, I suspect this is indeed (among other things) a heavy reworking of Ashara (a warrior maid from the Wyl’s mirror-house) losing her virginity (“bloody pool”) to Brandon (the “wild wolf”, a hack-and-slash “butcher” in battle, “as previously played by” Young Wyl).

The most famous Wyl was known simply as “the Wyl of Wyl”, a style redolent of many Stark bannermen and of “the Stark in Winterfell” motif. The Wyl of Wyl was called “the Widow-lover”, which rhymes with Brandon having fucked (i.e. “loved”) Barbrey Dustin, now famously a “widow”. It also jibes with BAJ, per which Brandon bedded and wedded Ashara Dayne, who was widowed when Aerys killed Brandon.

This one little line about the Wyl of Wyl seems to encode volumes of Truth about Brandon:

Worse occurred at the hands of the Wyl of Wyl, whose deeds we need not recount; they are infamous enough and still remembered, especially in Fawnton and Old Oak.

If BAJ, Ned “still remembered” but does “not recount” Brandon’s most “infamous… deeds”.

The references to “Old Oak” and “Fawnton” play right into this reading. Brandon married Ashara before the heart tree in the Red Keep, which is a literal “Old Oak”:

The heart tree there was a great oak, its ancient limbs overgrown with smokeberry vines; they knelt before it to offer their thanksgiving, as if it had been a weirwood. (GOT E V)

“Old Oak” also recalls Qhorin Halfhand in a passage that “coincidentally” speaks to how men break their vows in the face of lust/love, just as Brandon did:

“The Halfhand was carved of old oak, but I am made of flesh, and I have a great fondness for the charms of women . . . which makes me no different from three-quarters of the Watch. There are men still wearing black who have had ten times as many women as this poor king. ” – Mance (SOS Jon I)

(It’s also worth noting that a reference to [Qhorin is a reference to Gerold Hightower], who watched Brandon burned alive and was at the Tower of Joy, where Ned agreed to adopt Brandon’s son Jon.)

“Old Oak” is also associated with Dorne—Ashara’s home—in the story of Arys Oakheart, which is “coincidentally” all about his vow-breaking, dishonorable lust-love for a Dornishwoman:

The Dornish garb was comfortable, but his father would have been aghast had he lived to see his son so dressed. He was a man of the Reach, and the Dornish were his ancient foes, as the tapestries at Old Oak bore witness. (FFC The Soiled Knight)

Having hopelessly dishonored himself, Arys seemingly chooses to commit “suicide by Norvoshi” in order to bury his shame and preserve his family name. The “rhyme” to Brandon strangling himself with Aerys’s “Tyroshi device” while trying to save his father is obvious.

What about “Fawnton”? A “fawn” is a doe’s “child”, right? And a “doe” makes us think of Lyanna, but also of “not-Lyanna”, inasmuch as Ned flatly denies that Renly’s painting of Margaery with her “doe’s eyes” resembles Lyanna.

[Renly] had taken Ned aside to show him an exquisite rose gold locklet. Inside was a miniature painted in the vivid Myrish style, of a lovely young girl with doe’s eyes and a cascade of soft brown hair. … The maid was Loras Tyrell’s sister Margaery, he’d confessed, but there were those who said she looked like Lyanna. “No,” Ned had told him, bemused. (GOT E VI)

Who does seem to have eyes something like Margaery’s “doe’s eyes”? By transitive property, Ashara Dayne. How so?

Ashara’s eyes are explicitly “haunting”, while Tyrion notices Sansa’s “haunted… look” even as he (a) notes Sansa’s eyes and (b) compares Sansa to doe-eyed Margaery, thus suggesting that looking “haunted”/having “haunting” eyes may be similar to having “doe’s eyes”.

The Lady Ashara Dayne, tall and fair, with haunting violet eyes. (GOT C II)

He had only to close his eyes to see [Ashara], with her long dark hair tumbling about her shoulders and those haunting purple eyes. (DWD tKB)

As they lurched into motion, Tyrion reclined on an elbow while Sansa sat staring at her hands. She is just as comely as the Tyrell girl [i.e. Margaery]. Her hair was a rich autumn auburn, her eyes a deep Tully blue. Grief had given her a haunted, vulnerable look; if anything, it had only made her more beautiful. (SOS Ty VIII)

With Ashara’s “haunting” look coding her as a doe, who is a “fawn” (as in “Fawnton”), as in a doe’s offspring? “The Stark Boy”.

While Father plays lion and fawn with the Stark boy, Renly marches up the roseroad. (COK Tyrion V)

Tyrion means Robb, who is Brandon’s “spritiual son”, and strictly textually, the “fawn” is simply “the Stark boy”, which is what Jon would have been in Robb’s stead had Lyanna not begged Ned to “play lion” and usurp the North from “the Stark boy”. (As a bonus, Renly of the doe-eyed, not-Lyanna painting shows up.)

In a portentous passage, Tommen “adopted a fawn”, just as Ned has adopted the Wyl of Wyl-ish Brandon’s son Jon:

“Prince Tommen is hale and happy, my lord. He has adopted a fawn some of my men brought home from a hunt. He had one once before, he says, but Joffrey skinned her for a jerkin.”

The fawn “he had… before” correponds to Ashara, who Ned “had… once” danced with “before” his older brother Brandon bedded her (as Tommen’s older brother Joffrey “skinned” Tommen’s first fawn). The rhyming has layers: Tommen is a good-hearted younger brother to an impetuous, dangerous heir, just as Ned was to Brandon. At the same time, Tommen isn’t actually Robert’s heir and shouldn’t become king, just as Ned isn’t actually heir to Winterfell.

Finally, there is this absolute Rosetta Stone of a passage, in which a “fawn” is three wolves’ prey in the aftermath of (the Lyanna-eque) Arya’s flight from Harrenhal:

Not long after, they came upon three wolves devouring the corpse of a fawn. When Hot Pie’s horse caught the scent, he shied and bolted. Two of the wolves fled as well, but the third raised his head and bared his teeth, prepared to defend his kill. (SOS Arya I)

At the Harrenhal tourney, three Stark “wolves” pursued “the fawn” Ashara. Ned was the “too shy” to talk to her (see: “shied”) so bold Brandon did it for him, then bedded her and refused to disown her, her unborn child, or his misdeeds, consequences be damned, marrying her before the “Old Oak” heart tree in the Red Keep.

The shied/bolted :: shy/bold wordplay, centered around the baker Hot Pie and his horse, clearly also winks at the jouster Barristan “the Bold” being too shy to hit on Ashara, who he says made Elia look like a “kitchen drab”. Hot Pie leading to “kitchen drab” in the context of the hot (Elia) and mega-hot (Ashara), meanwhile, recalls this massage:

“And such a pretty young kitchen wench will incite lust as well as curiosity. She will be touched, pinched, patted, and fondled. Pot boys will crawl under her blankets of a night. Some lonely cook may seek to wed her. Bakers will knead her breasts with floured hands.”

Somebody lonely wanted to wed Ashara. And Elia (see: Arthur). A “cook” is at the top of the kitchen food chain. An Aerys reference? Roose is lurking, as well, per “bolted” and his associations with flour (via his miller’s wife).

All that from…

Worse occurred at the hands of the Wyl of Wyl, whose deeds we need not recount; they are infamous enough and still remembered, especially in Fawnton and Old Oak.

But that passage is hardly the only thing TWOIAF says about the Wyls that hints at the truth about Brandon, Ned, and the STarks.

The Wyls, including the Wyl of Wyl, twice play key roles in TWOIAF’s stories of the Targaryen Kings’ repeated attempts to conquer Dorne. This dovetails with the idea that Brandon made a “conquest” of the Dornish woman Ashara Dayne, and with the idea that Brandon defended Ashara from the predations of King Aerys.

One such tale concerns Aegon the Conqueror’s invasion of Dorne, and “rhymes” with our Brandon-figure Young Wyl trying to do something with one hand (fasten his belt and lace his pants) that requires two hands, as if he only had one hand, or was short a hand. During Aegon’s conquest, the “Wyl of Wyl” infamously cut off the “sword hand” of Orys Baratheon, the Hand of the King, leading Orys to resign as Hand and to become “obsessed with… revenge”. Eventually Orys got his revenge, not on the Wyl of Wyl, but on the Wyl’s son Walter. Orys chopped off both Walter’s hands and feet. Obviously this “rhymes” with/riffs on Ned resigning as King Robert Baratheon’s Hand due to Robert’s obsession with revenge against Rhaegar leading him to want to murder Dany. (The murders of Dany, Viserys, Aegon, and Rhaenys would mirror Orys’s 4-for-1 formula.) And what happens right after Ned resigns? He goes to Chataya’s with Littlefinger, who jokes about Ned ruling with “the king’s sword” (see: Orys the Hand losing his “sword hand”) just before we meet Young Wyl, who symbolically reenacts Brandon’s story, even as he seems one hand short.

Another instance of the Wyls fighting the Targaryens took place in 161 A.C., during the Dornish rebellion against the Young Dragon’s just-completed conquest of Dorne. Everything about it seems to rhyme with the story of Brandon’s death in 282 A.C. In 161, Prince Aemon the Dragonknight (who is basically Rhaegar if you buy that Rhaegar is a tragic, romantic, doomed-lover type) rode into Wyl territory as part of a royal retinue under a peace banner, hoping to negotiate an end to a bloody Dornish rebellion against the Young Dragon’s Targaryen rule, whereas in 282 A.C. the Young Wyl-ish Brandon Stark rode into the Targaryen’s Red Keep with four companions “shouting for Prince Rhaegar to come out and die”, thereby precipitating a bloody rebellion. (COK C VII) In 161, the Wyls attacked the Targaryen royals, captured Prince Aemon, and killed the Young Dragon King and three of the four Kingsguards Aemon rode with, whereas in 282 the old-beyond-his years King Aerys captured Brandon and killed three of the four men Brandon rode with, only to be killed himself at the end of the ensuing war.

In 161, Lord Wyl baited Aemon’s cousin King Baelor into coming to free Aemon; in 282, Aerys baited Brandon’s father Lord Rickard into coming to free Brandon. (Note that King Baelor is very much the ascetic side of Rhaegar, but obsessed with the Faith of the Seven, while there is reason to think his counterpart Lord Rickard was a convert to the Faith. See: Rickard’s his melting gold spurs—

“As for Lord Rickard, the steel of his breastplate turned cherry-red before the end, and his gold melted off his spurs and dripped down into the fire.” (COK C VII)

—which are a universal sign of knighthood in our world and in ASOIAF—

And Daario Naharis is only a sellsword, not fit to buckle on the golden spurs of even a landed knight. (DWD Dae VII)

“I will knight them myself when they are worthy, and give them each a horse and golden spurs.” (DWD tQG)

—whereas knighthood is all but unknown among the old god-worshipping Starks. I suspect old Ser Rodrik is a holdover from Rickard’s “born again” regime.)

In 161, Lord Wyl locked Prince Aemon naked in a cage where he was subjected to temperature extremes (“exposed to the hot sun by day and the cold wind by night”), whereas in 282 Rickard was “roasted” at an explicitly “even heat”:

The pyromancers roasted Lord Rickard slowly, banking and fanning that fire carefully to get a nice even heat. (COK C VII)

Both Aemon and Rickard were hung in the air: Aemon over a pit over vipers, Rickard…

…suspended… from the rafters while two of Aerys’s pyromancers kindled a blaze beneath him.

When King Baelor arrived to negotiate his cousin Aemon’s freedom, Lord Wyl gave him “the key to Aemon’s cage, and an invitation to use it”, which forcd him to walk through the pit of vipers. Baelor did so and unlocked Aemon’s cage, but was repeatedly bitten and nearly died. Lord Wyl’s sadistic, “save him if you can” torture rhymes with the way King Aerys baited Brandon into strangling himself in a vain effort to try to save his father Lord Rickard from the flames:

“When the fire was blazing, Brandon was brought in. His hands were chained behind his back, and around his neck was a wet leathern cord attached to a device the king had brought from Tyrosh. His legs were left free, though, and his longsword was set down just beyond his reach.

“The pyromancers roasted Lord Rickard slowly, banking and fanning that fire carefully to get a nice even heat. His cloak caught first, and then his surcoat, and soon he wore nothing but metal and ashes. Next he would start to cook, Aerys promised . . . unless his son could free him. Brandon tried, but the more he struggled, the tighter the cord constricted around his throat. In the end he strangled himself.”

Finally, as you may have noticed, even the formula for the years in question “rhymes”: 161, 282.

Obviously Brandon isn’t the Wyl this time—he’s “playing Aemon” opposite Aerys “playing Lord Wyl”—but regardless of who’s who, once again Brandon’s story “rhymes” with a tale of House Wyl. What’s more, there are actually several reasons why Brandon stepping into the role of the seemingly (to romance-blinded readers) Rhaegar-ish Aemon the Dragonknight in the foregoing stories makes perfect literary sense and hints that he sired the true heir of Rickard Stark.

First, Fire & Blood tags Aemon as a “lusty” looking infant, whereas “lusts” defined Brandon’s life.

Second, Aemon is identified with the Starks via Jon in ASOS Jon XII:

“I’m Prince Aemon the Dragonknight,” Jon would call out…

Third, the story of Aemon’s death rhymes with both (a) the broader story of Brandon’s final months and (b) the idea that Ashara sought succor from Aerys in Brandon’s embraces:

Bethany found [Aegon IV’s] royal embraces distressing. For comfort, she turned to a knight of the Kingsguard, Ser Terrence Toyne. The pair was discovered abed by Aegon himself in 178. Ser Terrence was tortured to death and both Lady Bethany and her father were executed. When Ser Terrence’s brothers sought to avenge his death, Prince Aemon the Dragonknight was slain while defending his brother, King Aegon. (TWOIAF)

I suspect Aerys wanted Ashara, and discovered Brandon and Ashara together. Brandon was tortured to death as his father was burned alive, much as Terrence was tortured to death while his lover and her father were executed. Both Terrence’s and Brandon’s “brothers sought to avenge [their brother’s] death”. So in that sense, Brandon rhymes with Terrence and Aemon rhymes with Rhaegar, doing this duty and defending a bad king.

At the same time, though, Brandon rhymes with Aemon, too, dying while trying to save his liege lord and father, Lord Rickard, much as Aemon died his kingly brother. (Sidebar: Did Lyanna find Rhaegar’s royal embraces distressing and turn to Arthur for comfort, and thus RALD.)

Fourth, Brandon’s nemesis was Rhaegar, so having Brandon play Aemon’s role here hints that Rhaegar and Aemon were not so similar as romantically-inclined readers might think. While superficially Rhaegar seems like just the sort of paragon Aemon is said to be—

[Aemon] proved the greatest jouster and swordsman of his age—a knight worthy to bear Dark Sister. He became known as the Dragonknight for the three-headed dragon crest wrought in white gold upon his helm. To this very day some call him the noblest knight who ever lived and one of the most storied names to ever serve in the Kingsguard. (TWOIAF)

—Rhaegar almost certainly wasn’t “the greatest jouster and swordsman of his age”. Indeed, it seems likely that he cheated during the Harrenhal tourney, and that Rhaegar’s dishonest defeat of Brandon was a reason for Brandon’s animosity toward him. Note how Brandon’s opinion of Rhaegar after jousting with him is at odds with Cregan Stark’s opinion of Aemon:

“Cregan Stark… fought with Prince Aemon once, and the Dragonknight said he’d never faced a finer swordsman.” (GOT Bran VII)

Other than his skill at arms, Aemon’s defining trait was his deep love for Naerys. This again sets him at odds with Rhaegar, as Naerys was frail, sickly, and delicate like Elia, who Rhaegar clearly didn’t love, while being “unworldly” and having large, striking, purple eyes, which rhymes with Ashara of the “haunting purple eyes”, who was Aemon’s rhyming partner Brandon’s love:

The last of Viserys’s children was his only daughter, Naerys, born in 138 AC. She had skin so pale that it seemed almost translucent, men said. She was small of frame (and made smaller by having little appetite), with very fine features, and singers wrote songs in praise of her eyes—a deep violet in hue and very large, framed by pale lashes.

[Naerys] was beautiful…, but hers was a very fine and delicate beauty, almost unworldy. She was a wisp of a woman… very slender, with big purple eyes and fine, pale, porcelain skin, near translucent. Naerys had none of Dany’s strength, however. She was sickly as a child and almost died in the cradle; thereafter she found most physical activity to be very taxing. She loved music and poetry, played the harp very well, enjoyed sewing and embroidering. …  After the birth of her son, she begged Aegon to have the Faith release her from her marriage vows so she could become a septa, but he refused. … She ate but little and was painfully thin, almost emaciated. …You will probably want to paint her sitting in a window seat, sewing or reading, with a sad and tired look on her face. (https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1463/)

Elia, who was married to a harpist (like Naerys), was likewise beautiful like Naerys—

“Was she a fair maid?”

“She was,” said Meera, hopping over a stone, “but there were others fairer still. One was the wife of the dragon prince, who’d brought a dozen lady companions to attend her.” (SOS B II)

—and a generally, sweet good person like Naerys seems to have been—

“Princess Elia was a good woman, Your Grace. She was kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit. I know the prince was very fond of her.” (DWD Dae IV)

—but sickly and delicate like Naerys as well:

“Elia found it all exciting. She was of that age, and her delicate health had never permitted her much travel. (SOS Ty X)

“I was nine when Elia came, a squire in service at Salt Shore. When the raven arrived with word that my mother had been brought to bed a month too soon, I was old enough to understand that meant the child would not live. Even when Lord Gargalen told me that I had a sister, I assured him that she must shortly die. Yet she lived, by the Mother’s mercy. (FFC CotG)

Elia of Dorne was never the healthiest of women. (SOS Jaime II)

“The Princess Elia was a good and gracious lady, though her health was ever delicate.” (SOS Dae IV)

Naerys’s childbirths almost killed her, and then did kill her, much as Elia’s childbirths almost killed her:

Elia… was frail and sickly from the first, and childbirth only left her weaker. After the birth of Princess Rhaenys, her mother had been bedridden for half a year, and Prince Aegon’s birth had almost been the death of her. She would bear no more children, the maesters told Prince Rhaegar afterward. (DWD tGR)

And clearly this—

[Naerys’s] marriage was a very unhappy one, and it was said that only her son Daeron and her brother Aemon knew how to make her laugh. (https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1463/)

—was contrived to rhyme not just with Elia’s marriage being unhappy, but also with the story of Elia’s brother Oberyn sabotaging her potential betrothals (potential marriages!) and making her laugh:

I preferred to amuse myself by mocking my sister’s suitors. There was Little Lord Lazyeye, Squire Squishlips, one I named the Whale That Walks, that sort of thing. The only one who was even halfway presentable was young Baelor Hightower. A pretty lad, and my sister was half in love with him until he had the misfortune to fart once in our presence. I promptly named him Baelor Breakwind, and after that Elia couldn’t look at him without laughing. I was a monstrous young fellow, someone should have sliced out my vile tongue.” (SOS Tyrion X)

So clearly we can “accept” Brandon as Aemon’s counterpart in their respective stories of captivity and torture, right? Now, notice how the rumors that Aemon sired his brother Aegon the Unworthy’s son Daeron the Good dovetail with BAJ, given that I think Aemon’s rhyming-partner Brandon sired his lordly brother Ned’s (good) son Jon. We’re talking about history “rhyming”, though, not repeating, so the motifs get scrambled. Thus where Brandon was the older, “bad” brother who sired his younger “good” brother’s supposed son, Aemon was the younger “good” brother who (maybe) sired his older “bad” brother’s supposed son. And thus we have on the one hand (color used to high the rhymes) Aemon’s maybe-son King Daeron, a good king whose rule nonetheless splits opinion, who didn’t “look the part”, who was called a bastard and whose claim to the Iron Throne was unsuccessfully challenged in the Blackfyre Rebellion, led by his bastard half-brother Daemon Blackfyre, a pure warrior who did “look the part” and who was beloved by his followers, despite the ruin he brought them; whereas Brandon’s son Jon, who “looks the part” and who is an able leader but whose decisions split opinion, had his would-be rule of the North successfully usurped (at the end of successful rebellion against the Iron Throne) by declaring the actually trueborn Jon to be the bastard half-brother of Robb, a pure warrior like Daemon who doesn’t look the part of a Stark (he looks like a Tully) but who is nonetheless acclaimed a la Daemon, but whose rule proves to be an utter disaster (thanks to his lusts, which is how the world got Daemon). .

AGOT Eddard X

In AGOT Eddard X, wounded, without office, with Dany—not Jon—in mortal danger, Ned dreams the most detailed version of The Tower of Joy we see. I have already discussed this in my writings about Oswell Kettleblack and Qhorin Halfhand being Oswell Whent and Gerold Hightower. Here I will just focus on the BAJRALD aspects of things, and take for granted that the Kingsguard survived, “dying” only in the sense that Elder Brother “died” at the Trident or the Hound “died” near Quiet Isle.

To briefly review a key point, discussed in great detail there, in the line “They had been seven against three, yet only two had lived to ride away”, the subject matter is the “they” who “had been seven”, of whom “only two” had (officially) “lived to ride away”. “They” in no way refers to “all the combatants”, and thus Ned is silent regarding the fates of the “three”. The word “yet” indicates that it’s a surprise that “only two” survived, which clearly indicates that it’s the fate of the numerical majority that’s in question. This interpretation of the sentence (which to be sure is clearly designed to be misunderstood) just so happens to be confirmed by the more obvious meaning of “they” in an identically structured phrase used one chapter earlier, in AGOT Eddard IX:

Ned’s men had drawn their swords, but they were three against twenty.

“They” are obviously “Ned’s men”, not “all the combatants” in some sort of weird collectivity. Again, see my previous work for a much more in depth discussion.

In any case, as RLJ points out, the presence of the Kingsguard strongly indicates royal blood is present. But RALD’s Daenerys fits the bill as well as RLJ’s Jon—better, in light of Maester Aemon’s deathbed speech to Sam:

“No one ever looked for a girl,” he said. “It was a prince that was promised, not a princess. Rhaegar, I thought … the smoke was from the fire that devoured Summerhall on the day of his birth, the salt from the tears shed for those who died. He shared my belief when he was young, but later he became persuaded that it was his own son who fulfilled the prophecy, for a comet had been seen above King’s Landing on the night Aegon was conceived, and Rhaegar was certain the bleeding star had to be a comet. What fools we were, who thought ourselves so wise! The error crept in from the translation. Dragons are neither male nor female, Barth saw the truth of that, but now one and now the other, as changeable as flame. The language misled us all for a thousand years. Daenerys is the one, born amidst salt and smoke. The dragons prove it.” (FFC Sam IV)

Consider the stormy imagery at the start of the battle, hot on the heels of an image of Arthur Dayne, who I believe is Dany’s “other” chimeric father:

“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light.

“No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death.

Blowing wind and a storm of petals? A storm is coming. Daenerys is called Stormborn, and indeed she was. More than that, why exactly is the sky at the Tower of Joy blood-streaked? Is there something “streaking” across it, as there is here?

Catelyn raised her eyes, to where the faint red line of the comet traced a path across the deep blue sky like a long scratch across the face of god. “The Greatjon told Robb that the old gods have unfurled a red flag of vengeance for Ned. Edmure thinks it’s an omen of victory for Riverrun—he sees a fish with a long tail, in the Tully colors, red against blue.” She sighed. “I wish I had their faith. Crimson is a Lannister color.”

“That thing’s not crimson,” Ser Brynden said. “Nor Tully red, the mud red of the river. That’s blood up there, child, smeared across the sky.” (COK C I)

The comet of ACOK—the same comet that oversaw Dany’s rebirth—is described in language eerily reminiscent of Ned’s Tower of Joy dream, which I’m claiming hides Dany’s birth.

And of course there are tears at the Tower of Joy as well. Daenerys Stormborn, “Born amidst salt and smoke, beneath a bleeding star.” Twice, perhaps.

The dream ends with Lyanna seemingly calling her own brother “Lord Eddard”:

“Lord Eddard,” Lyanna called again.

“I promise,” he whispered. “Lya, I promise …”

“Lyanna” seems to refer to Ned as Lord, as he would have been upon Brandon’s death if Brandon had no heir. But then we’re shown that Ned is “merely” conflating Vayon Poole’s words with Lyanna’s:

“Lord Eddard,” a man echoed from the dark.

Groaning, Eddard Stark opened his eyes. Moonlight streamed through the tall windows of the Tower of the Hand.

“Lord Eddard?” A shadow stood over the bed.

Is that all that’s going on, though? Perhaps Lyanna did say “Lord Eddard” to Ned, by way of correcting someone, or at the tale end of saying something like, “Promise me, Ned. Promise you’ll say he’s your bastard, and be Lord Eddard. Remember. Lord Eddard.” Regardless, the sequence winks at Ned only truly becoming “Lord Eddard” at the Tower of Joy when he promised Lya he would claim Brandon’s heir as his bastard and thereby disinherit him.

It’s also worth noting that the dream’s culmination in Ned’s promise makes sense given that Ned believes Robert is currently pursuing the murder of Lyanna’s daughter Dany. If RLJ, Ned knows Jon is safe from Robert at the Wall. Protecting Jon from Robert is supposedly his central motivation, yet Ned has barely so much as thought of him. Ned’s 15 chapters contain 58 paragraphs in which “Jon” appears: only 4 are not about Jon Arryn, and one of those hasn’t happened yet.

Ned talks to Poole, then to Alyn. Having just dreamed of the Tower of Joy, where Lyanna gave birth to her daughter Dany, Ned’s thoughts center not on his “son” Jon, but on his daughters. Alyn says that Jory’s remains are being sent to Winterfell, because “Jory would want to lie beside his grandfather.”

It would have to be his grandfather, for Jory’s father was buried far to the south. Martyn Cassel had perished with the rest.

“The rest” means “the rest of those who perished,” but as I argue in my Tower of Joy piece (a) the Kingsguard didn’t “perish” and (b) the text is replete with instances of “dead” not meaning dead:

The Hound answered. “Seven hells. The little sister. The brat who tossed Joff’s pretty sword in the river.” He gave a bark of laughter. “Don’t you know you’re dead?”

“No, you’re dead,” she threw back at him. (SOS Arya VI)

She isn’t, and he isn’t, but he will be, except he still won’t be.

Continuing:

Ned had pulled the tower down afterward, and used its bloody stones to build eight cairns upon the ridge.

First, “bloody stones” hints at blood magic, surely—blood magic such as that necessary to produce Daenerys, a chimaera of Arthur Dayne, Rhaegar and Lyanna. Second, Ned builds eight cairns. The natural assumption is to believe eight people die. But all we’re actually shown is eight cairns. If you’re trying to fake one or more deaths, surely this makes sense.

While I don’t believe Lyanna was out-and-out kidnapped and raped, I am also not sure she was an entirely willing participant in what Rhaegar had planned for her. Keeping in mind that the Kettleblacks are almost certainly Oswell Whent’s nephews, I believe one passage involving Sansa may give us an echo of what befell Lyanna at the Tower of Joy:

Sansa tried to run, but Cersei’s handmaid caught her before she’d gone a yard. Ser Meryn Trant gave her a look that made her cringe, but Kettleblack touched her almost gently and said, “Do as you’re told, sweetling, it won’t be so bad. Wolves are supposed to be brave, aren’t they?” (SOS San III)

Do as you’re told and it won’t be so bad doesn’t sound like something you say to an equal partner, does it? Lyanna may have gone willingly with Rhaegar, but I wonder if she knew what she was getting in to.

AGOT Eddard X (Post-Tower of Joy Dream)

With open war with the Lannisters and the safety of his family and House at stake, the convalescing Ned is visited by Robert. The exchange is richer by far if RALD:

“…How do you fight someone if you can’t hit them?” Confused, the king shook his head. “Rhaegar… Rhaegar won, damn him. I killed him, Ned, I drove the spike right through that black armor into his black heart, and he died at my feet. They made up songs about it. Yet somehow he still won. He has Lyanna now, and I have her.” The king drained his cup.

“Your Grace,” Ned Stark said, “we must talk…”

Robert pressed his fingertips against his temples. “I am sick unto death of talk. On the morrow I’m going to the kingswood to hunt. Whatever you have to say can wait until I return.” (GOT E X)

What is Ned about to say here? I think it’s possible that in his pain-filled impotence he’s flirting with telling Robert at least part of the truth about Lyanna: At least that she’d asked Ned to keep Robert from pursuing vengeance against the Targaryens in her name, hoping his ruminating friend might then agree to spare his beloved Lyanna’s daughter.

Observe: Robert waxes philosophical about both Rhaegar and Lyanna, blissfully ignorant of how relevant to Ned’s concern for Dany they are. The fury has fled him, just as Ned thought it would. He is, in the end, still Ned’s friend and “brother”. In response, Ned, seeing that Robert isn’t the monster he (newly) feared, but also weary, wounded, and sick that he seems unable to keep his promise to protect the Targaryens from Robert’s vengeance, suddenly finds himself opening his mouth to speak. If he knows Dany is Lyanna’s, he’s about to say something he never thought he would say, the only thing he thinks might save Dany: that she is Lyanna’s daughter. If he knows only that Lyanna had Rhaegar’s child, he’s going to at least tell Robert that Lyanna had made him promise to try to keep Rhaegar’s remaining family safe. But he hesitates, hovering on the precipice, until a modicum of bluster returns to Robert. It’s not that Ned at any point definitively resolves to spill the beans. It’s that the words are inching their way slowly towards his tongue, threatening to spill out if unimpeded.

In any case, Ned responds to what Robert said, but tries to circle back to Dany:

“If the gods are good, I shall not be here on your return. You commanded me to return to Winterfell, remember?”

Robert tosses the badge of the Hand on Ned’s bed.

“Like it or not, you are my Hand, damn you. I forbid you to leave.”

Ned picked up the silver clasp. He was being given no choice, it seemed. His leg throbbed, and he felt as helpless as a child. “The Targaryen girl—”

The clasp now substitutes for Brandon’s “cup” of rule , and just as Ned saw “no choice” but to take up Brandon’s cup 15 years ago and disinherit Brandon’s heir, so does he see “no choice now. Meanwhile, the odd reference to infantilization alludes to a few things: the weakness of a child Lord, the impotence of an infant Lord to stop its own usurpation, and perhaps Dany as a helpless newborn, just as he again begins to consider spilling the beans (at least to some degree) regarding Lyanna and Rhaegar. Robert interrupts him before he can say anything:

The king groaned. “Seven hells, don’t start with her again. That’s done, I’ll hear no more of it.”

“Why would you want me as your Hand, if you refuse to listen to my counsel?”

“Why?” Robert laughed. “Why not? Someone has to rule this damnable kingdom. Put on the badge, Ned. It suits you. And if you ever throw it in my face again, I swear to you, I’ll pin the damned thing on Jaime Lannister.”

End chapter. Robert buffaloes Ned, but it’s interesting that GRRM leans on being able to just end the chapter without showing us the conclusion here. This soft-pedals the degree to which Robert isn’t affording Ned the chance to speak freely, and thus soft-pedals exactly how invested in Dany’s fate Ned is.

AGOT Jon V

More awesome BAJ irony:

By the time the moon was full again, he would be back in Winterfell with his brothers.

Your half brothers, a voice inside reminded him. And Lady Stark, who will not welcome you. There was no place for him in Winterfell, no place in King’s Landing either. Even his own mother had not had a place for him. The thought of her made him sad. He wondered who she had been, what she had looked like, why his father had left her. Because she was a whore or an adulteress, fool. Something dark and dishonorable, or else why was Lord Eddard too ashamed to speak of her?

If not for Ned’s promise, Winterfell would be Jon’s, and it’s “Lady Stark” who would not be entitled to a place there. And while the reason Lord Eddard is “too ashamed to speak” of Jon’s mother is because of “something dark and dishonorable”, it’s naught to do with Ashara, but rather with Ned, who usurped Jon’s line.

To be continued in Part 4, which continues the walkthrough in AGOT E XII. Link is HERE.

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• Mother of Theories