Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 19

4 years ago

Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 19

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She knew the bastard was a motherless child who needed the care of a mother, but Catelyn could never bring herself to play that role to Jon. Everytime she looked at him, she saw this illegitimate child of another woman standing in line with the children she had dutifully born to her husband for an inheritance, and she hated her husband for it. But no matter how much she did, she still hated the child more.
And to make matters worse, Jon looked more like her husband than even the children she had borne him, both in looks and in character.
Back when he had first brought the child back, rumors had been floating around Winterfell that the mother was Ashara Dayne, a tall, elegant highborn beauty, the younger sister to Ser Arthur Dayne, a knight who had fallen to her husband’s sword. The servants were the perpetrators of the rumors, and Catelyn knew she should have ignored them, but hearing those things whispered in the shadows made her burn with jealousy and a desire to know, and one day in bed with her husband, she had asked him if it was true.
Eddard’s face had clouded over, and he told her the answer was no, and told her never to ask him about Jon again. Then he asked her to tell him who exactly she had heard that rumor from in the first place. Catelyn didn’t want to put anybody in trouble, but her husband had made her, and the rumors had stopped since that very day.
When the letter arrived from King’s Landing saying that the King was on his way to Winterfell and Catelyn had to go and break the news to her husband in the godswood, she did it with more than just a little apprehension. It had just been a few weeks since her husband had gone out to enforce the King’s justice in the matter of the Night’s Watch deserter and had come back with six direwolves, and Catelyn had been told of the manner in which their mother had been killed. And now the man whose sigil had the animal who had been the killer was coming to their home.

Her husband might not believe in omens, but Catelyn, a worshipper of the Seven— the gods her husband called the new gods —did. And this was a bad omen if ever she saw one.
Omens aside, however, Catelyn sincerely liked Robert Baratheon, even though the fat man who rode through Winterfell’s gates was a complete stranger. And then there were the three children, with the signature, beautiful golden-blonde hair of the Lannisters. If there was one person in the royal family I’m sure Catelyn didn’t like, it would be Cersei.
Everything about the Queen’s manner, her person, her carriage, spokepride. A lot of it. Maybe it was because she was the daughter of one of the richest and most powerful lords in the seven kingdoms, or because she was married to the King, or maybe because she had flowing golden-blonde hair that would still have made her look like a queen even if she hadn’t.

Whatever it was, the queen kept her distance, probably seeing Catelyn as just a lesser woman, and the lady of Winterfell was grateful for it.

Catelyn was naturally wary of Lannisters, but that was even before they recieved the letter from Lysa in the Eyrie that accused them of being her husband’s killers. Her husband was reluctant to go to King’s Landing and was only doing it for the love he bore Robert and because of his duty to his King, and when he heard this piece of information, resolved not to leave his family’s side and expose them to any threats.

But it was Catelyn, who initially was reluctanct for her husband to go, that told him that hehadto go. She knew her sister, and she knew that Lysa would never make an accusation of that magnitude if she didn’t have proof. And she knew that, as Hand of the King, her husband would have the authority and more than enough resources to investigate the death of the former Hand. And if indeed the Lannisters were guilty of the crime her sister had accused them of, then Robert was in grave danger, surrounded as he was by Lannisters; his wife, her family, and her brother who served on his Kingsguard.
Her husband was to travel South with her two daughters and her favourite son, Brandon, even though she begged him again and again not to take away her boy.

And in what Catelyn saw as a cruel jape played on her by the gods, her prayer was answered.

Bran loved to climb, ever since he had been a baby. Catelyn knew he could fall, and had first tried and failed to stop that fancy of his, then tried to get the guards, then Maester Luwin, and then her husband, to get him to stop. But it seemed her son’s legs were made for climbing and nothing else, because they were never able to make him stop.

And finally, on the very day before her husband was to ride South, her fears came to pass. Bran’s body had been discovered lying at the foot of the Broken Tower, with his direwolf keeping the whole castle awake with its howling, as if it knew what was happening to him.

The day of their departure came and went, and her husband and her two daughters started on their Southward journey, and her husband’s bastard Jon on his Northbound one. Jon Snow came to see Bran before he left, and Catelyn loathed every moment he stood there, across the bed from her at Bran’s side, holding his frail hand, but was too weighed down by the cruelty of what had happened to express her anger. It was supposed to have happened to the bastard, not to her trueborn son, and Catelyn said as much.

“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.