Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 20

Episode 4 years ago

Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 20

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“It was supposed to have been you,” she said.

Her son had been unconscious in his sickroom since his fall had left him with a broken back, and was under the care of Maester Luwin. Catelyn never left his bedside for one second.
Their maester told her that her son’s life was hanging in the balance, and that he was at the mercy of the gods, whether he lived or died.


Her son lay on the bed, alive surely, breathing, but he didn’t wake up. Catelyn poured honey and water down his throat to sustain him, and could only watch as her son began to grow emaciated, his warm, fleshy fingers becoming no more than talons, all skin and bone.
Catelyn spent so much time beside her son that she began to neglect her duties as lady of Winterfell and as a mother to her two remaining children, not even caring about anything else in the world aside from Bran. One night, her firstborn Robb came in to plead with her that Winterfell needed her, that her baby Rickon needed her, and that HE needed her, but with Catelyn’s son still unconscious, she no longer cared.


Before Robb left that night, he opened the windows of the sickroom to let in the night air, and with the breeze came in the howling of Bran’s direwolf from the foot of the tower, rising and falling, and then getting picked up by the wolves of her other two children. The sound chilled her to the bone and terrified her so much that she screamed for her son to shut the window, and even agreed that she would no longer isolate herself in the sickroom if he did. As he did, he raised the alarm of the library tower burning across the yard, and ran to see about putting it out with some of the guards.
Catelyn didn’t care that all Winterfell’s precious volumes would probably be gone by the time the fire was over, but felt palpable relief that there was no chance of the fire reaching the sickroom and harming her son. But no sooner had Robb left than the door opened and a man entered. He looked filthy and stared at her stupidly, and said that she wasn’t supposed to be there. Then he brought out a dagger and raised it over the body of her son.

With the undying love of a mother, Catelyn jumped out of her chair and threw herself at him. The man was a commoner, but he was a man regardless, and he easily overpowered her from behind and tried to stab her in the belly. Catelyn had to grab the blade with both hands to prevent herself from getting stabbed to death, and as it bit straight through the flesh on her fingers and into bone, she screamed in pain for someone to come and help, but everyone had gone to the library tower because of the fire.

The man smelled unwashed and stank of horses, and all the while he kept repeating that she wasn’t supposed to be there, and it was only supposed to be the boy.

It seemed as if the man would finally kill her and then go on and kill her son, but then the door opened and a shadow slipped in. As quick as lightning, the man was pulled away from her to fall on the floor, and Catelyn saw brown fur as the direwolf dragged him into a corner. It was the man’s turn to scream as the beast locked its jaws around his throat, but the screaming didn’t last long.
The wolf wrenched back its head, and its teeth came away with his throat.

After the man was dead, the wolf came and curled itself up on the bed beside Bran. Catelyn looked at it, then at her slashed hands, and for some reason, it all seemed funny to her. She began to laugh, and then to cackle uncontrollably, and that was how the maester found her when dawn broke.
She slept for two weeks after the incident, and when she awoke, she realized what she had done to herself because of her son’s tragedy, and decided that it would continue no more. She took her son’s advice to heart. Robb had a heavy burden to carry as lord of Winterfell in his father’s stead, and she would help him carry it.

That very day, she convened a meeting in Bran’s room and let them know that, contrary to what they thought, the tramp had actually come for BRANDON, and not for her. She was sure the Lannisters were trying to do away with her boy because he knew something he was not supposed to know, so she decided to go to King’s Landing to warn her husband, along with her faithful master-at-arms, Ser Rodrik.

Of course, many of her husband’s men opted to accompany her, even Theon Greyjoy, but she declined. Riding down the Kingsroad under the direwolf standard of her husband’s house would attract more attention than she wanted, but she and Ser Rodrik would turn far less heads, and even less than that when they didn’t travel the Kingsroad at all.

So, before Bran even woke up, Lady Catelyn Stark left her home, leaving her children without a mother. But she knew that her decision, though painful, would save the lives of her children and husband who had gone South, while no harm could possibly come to the ones that remained at Winterfell.
She and Ser Rodrik rode down to White Harbor where they were recieved warmly by Lord Wyman Manderly, the fat lord of White Harbor who was also one of her husband’s lords bannermen. The both of them boarded a swift galley from there that plied the Trident, all the way to King’s Landing.