A loss too keenly felt
It has been more than a week since Catelyn disappeared from the island, and her eldest son is finding no easier rest than he had the day they discovered her gone. He has slept little, haunted by losses and wounds he had thought long since scabbed over, staunched if not healed. When he closes his eyes he hears her voice as he knows it--on the island, in Winterfell, in Riverrun, faded snatches of long-completed conversation. He relives quarreling with her over Jon at Riverrun, recites her not-always-welcome attempts to advise him, recalls the desperation in her voice when she'd pled with him to trade the Kingslayer for his sisters. It is a long series of broken hearts and ill fortune, and guilt gnaws at him as much as the pain of loss of a young man devoted to his mother. There have been too many losses, and it does Robb credit but no good that he can recount all their names, the litany always ending with four more dear than the rest: Bran. Rickon. Catelyn.
He had sat near the heart tree before he came to bed, his fingers tense and white in Grey Wind's fur, the wolf an equally pensive and quiet companion. It had done no real good, but he had gone to bed anyway--partly in a vain attempt not to worry his lady wife, and partly because really, the place matters little. He may as well be in bed as anywhere else, the despair follows him all the same. It bothers him, striking a lean and empty place in his gut, but he does not know what to do with it.
And for a while, he sleeps. His dreams may even have begun pleasant, though if so, the memory of them is too fleeting to remain. He dreams then of wolves and crypts, of blood and swords and his mother's desperate pleading--but all in vain, and he wakes in a sweat, with a jolt and her name on his lips.
He had sat near the heart tree before he came to bed, his fingers tense and white in Grey Wind's fur, the wolf an equally pensive and quiet companion. It had done no real good, but he had gone to bed anyway--partly in a vain attempt not to worry his lady wife, and partly because really, the place matters little. He may as well be in bed as anywhere else, the despair follows him all the same. It bothers him, striking a lean and empty place in his gut, but he does not know what to do with it.
And for a while, he sleeps. His dreams may even have begun pleasant, though if so, the memory of them is too fleeting to remain. He dreams then of wolves and crypts, of blood and swords and his mother's desperate pleading--but all in vain, and he wakes in a sweat, with a jolt and her name on his lips.