Westeros Chapter 1/14
Everyone has a coping method. Sometimes it’s a puzzle, an unanswered question or a philosophical riddle; sometimes it’s stories made up in one’s own heads.
The Scott children have Westeros. It’s always there, in their imaginings, in their daydreams, in their nightmares. The game has a magnetism to it, a sort of sick darkness that pulls at one to play.
But now people are dying, one after the other, and some of the players are starting to wonder just what, exactly, that magnetism is.
The Miss Oxford Undergraduate Beauty Contest is an annual scholarship contest held at Oxford University in England. Originally, it was designed to provide scholarship opportunities to beautiful, yet underprivileged students. Instead, it became a contest to see who among all the students was the most desirable, whether underprivileged or not.
In recent years, the competition has been accused of fraud, vote tampering and practices that would be illegal in professional beauty contests.
In 1998, Lyanna Scott won the Miss Oxford Contest. This was notable because that year, the contest runner’s daughter-in-law entered the competition as well. Everyone expected her to win, though Lyanna was the fan favourite. Instead, Lyanna won and Ray, the contest runner’s son, placed the crown on her head. In that moment, no one could deny that she was the most beautiful woman there.
She used the scholarship money to pay for her last two years of design school. Her graduate project was a game board she hoped to give her daughter someday.
It was not to be. At her graduation ceremony, the cough Lyanna had been ignoring all spring became suddenly worse. Blood speckled her hands when she tried to cover her cough.
The doctors said it was pneumonia. It could be cured with enough rest and medicine.
Lyanna died within the year.
ØØØ
It was supposed to be a gift for Sansa when she got older, a game of knights and ladies. Robb had been six and greedy in a way he would never be in later years. He felt entitled to everything. There was no way he could know this was one gift that couldn’t be rewrapped.
A rectangular board with a map of a mystical otherworld drawn on it. Little carved play pieces and pretty pictures along the border. Theon told Robb to put it back. He didn’t want to play a girly, piece of rubbish game. Jon told Robb to play with it.
They bastardized the game that summer, each of them creating their own terrible visions of blood and guts in the way only little kids could. Theon took claim to the sea and the coastlines, telling horror stories of killing man-eating sharks and sea monsters, and krakens. Jon took the far north, clothed himself all in black (he was always an odd one) and talked of zombies and wild people, and sorcerers. Robb, never the imaginative one, closed his eyes and picked the first spot his finger landed on. He said it was rather like their home except colder and with more horses. Theon promptly called him stupid.
That left the whole rest of the game board. One was supposed to take only a single place in the beginning, then one could conquer the rest or simply let them be. Robb wouldn’t let them cheat.
Besides, Mrs Cat was furious when she found out and made them include Sansa. Theon never was sure whether Cat was madder at them taking Sansa’s game or Robb thinking to include Jon before his sister. Cat really didn’t like Jon. Theon didn’t either.
Sansa, all of four, had little interest in the game. But she had as little control over the situation as they did, so she played. She didn’t want to play with them, she declared. Their games were too rude and boyish. Robb told Sansa she could have all the rest, see? There were many different Houses; she could have any which one she wanted.
Soon after, Arya and Bran wanted to play, though both were too young to understand the rules. Robb let them play anyhow.
Then summer was over and school had begun. The game was packed away for the next year.
ØØØ
Theon’s grades in school had never been noteworthy, as Robb’s had been. The eldest Scott child had papers lovingly affixed to every appropriate surface possible. At times, it seemed Robb was the only child in the house anyone had any pride in. There were other reasons for Theon’s to be kept away, ones that weren’t like Arya’s, whose reading was abysmal.
They were rather equal to Jon’s in fact, which only made Catelyn’s reactions all the odder. Once a month, Theon’s case worker would come and Cat would show her about the house, pointing out this or that paper, this or that picture that had magically appeared that morning. At least she kept them, Theon conceded.
Looking around the Scott residence, it was not apparent seven children lived there. Over the mantelpiece were the ever present pictures of Catelyn and Ned’s children, Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran and baby Rickon. Theon was shoved in there on visitation days, like some forgotten delinquent who only showed up on holidays and only then to ruin them. He hadn’t the worst of it. Jon…Theon might hate Jon but he never understood Cat’s abhorrence of her husband’s eldest son.
Perhaps it was her upbringing. Cat had been born in Nitra, Slovakia, the eldest daughter of an MD rumoured to also be a crime boss. She was fiercely loyal to her family and cold to anyone and everyone else.
Perhaps it was a sign of the only problem in her marriage. Cat and Mr Scott had a strange courtship. Cat had been university sweethearts with Mr Scott’s elder brother, a professional soldier who had died in a training manoeuvre a few months before their wedding. Mr Scott had married Cat either to keep her from being deported or as part of the conditions of an arranged marriage, no one knew for sure. For a few months, they were happy.
Then Ned’s ex-girlfriend showed up with a bundle of bambino and Cat’s world shattered. She was nine months pregnant.
Cat, perhaps because she didn’t truly understand British inheritance law, had Ned draw up a will that explicitly stated that Jon, the half-brother to her own children, would never inherit anything of Ned’s. Since the money had all come from Cat in the first place, Theon didn’t understand how she went to such strange measures.
Good old Cat. She was fair to him. She hadn’t wanted to foster Theon any more than she wanted Jon but she had never been unkind to him. Theon hoped she would one day agree to adopt him.
The foster care system always prefers to place a child with relatives. Theon was not allowed contact with his family but he was pretty sure they were all still alive when he was a child. They were just too irresponsible to have him back.
He had heard his dad had gone Muslim in gaol, something about ultra-conservative fundamentalism. Strange that, since he had been so secular when Theon was growing up with him.
His mum was dead or hiding somewhere. His uncle was taking care of his brothers and sister.
The case worker said he was better off with Mr Scott: “He’s a good man, if a bit strict. You can’t ask for a better role model.” She meant he didn’t drink or touch his children like the other fathers. She meant he didn’t leave them wandering in the park until some lady walking her dog told the police there was a little boy and he was lost, had been lost for hours.
It would be harder for the younger ones, his uncle had told him, to be in foster care.
“Cheer up, Theon, I’ll have ye back in a year.” Three years passed and Theon was still with the Scotts. His uncle stopped coming to the visitations. His father never came in the first place.
“Oww!” Theon complained as a stick came crashing over his head. Childish laughter came from the bushes where Robb and Jon were hiding, poorly.
“Let’s be knights!” Jon announced excitedly. He’d been a happy child then, too young to understand Cat’s hatred.
“Yeah,” Robb joined in. “We already got you a stick, Theon!” He giggled pointing at the leafy, filthy branch on the ground.
Seven years old and constant companions, Robb and Jon didn’t quite grasp the concept of “half-brothers”. It didn’t help that Jon had never kenned his mum. No one knew who she was or where she was.
Sansa scowled at them.
“You have to be Catholic to be a knight,” Sansa said.
So they became warriors, instead.
ØØØ
When Robb was nine and Theon was thirteen, Catelyn decided that the Scott household could use a pet. She had been too busy taking care of her children before, she said, but now she thought it would do Robb good to learn some responsibility. Sansa had been quiet about it, polite as ever, but it soon became apparent that she wanted a pet, too. Then, Arya, a mere child and not the sort of thing anyone should listen to, demanded one of her own, so it was off to the pet store.
Only, Bran had begun crying at the thought of puppy mills and breeding farms (which Theon might have been responsible for putting in his head- Theon was not daft enough to think three pets would be adequately taken care of by those three), and Robb began to reconsider. No one at that point had considered getting Bran a pet (he was five), yet Robb still felt the need to talk to Bran quietly and beg him not to cry.
Bran sniffled and said they should go to the animal shelter instead. Theon tried not to beat his head into the windshield. Jon, of course, felt the need to butt in and agree. The animal shelter was an excellent idea.
So they went all the way out to Glasgow to the Dogs Trust and Theon hated his existence. Because he knew Mr Scott and Mr Scott was not going to rest until each and every one of his children acquired a shelter animal. Theon did not want an animal.
Those animals had been abandoned for a reason. Either they were so broken that their owners could not care for them- or their owners had broken them so badly that they could not be used for anything else. They were ruined. They could not be fixed.
Arya was the first to pick one out. They had agreed to dogs, since a medley of cats and dogs was likely to end in squabbles and bickering. She was walking among the cages, dismissing the small lapdogs and toys. Theon was expecting her to pick one of the hunting or sport dogs Bran was mooning over. Instead, she found a fat little orange and white Corgi and declared it hers.
Bran was next with a grey mutt of indiscriminate background. It was big and wiry. He named it Summer, since it was the word least likely to be connected to that thing.
Sansa was cooing over a steel grey whippet with big eyes and prominent ribs. He would never have expected the delicate girl to kneel on the dirty cement floor and yet there she was, reaching her hand out to pet the docile hound.
Theon was already counting the added stress of one more animal when he noticed that Robb was talking to the shelter volunteer and looking pointedly at where Jon was on his knees. The glass-fronted cage before him was crowded with not one massive Irish wolfhound, but three. Theon frowned at Mr Scott but the man seemed not to notice the issue. It was as if they were at a grocery store and picking out candies, not animals.
“Mr Scott-" he began when Robb spoke up.
“Dad, the shelter volunteer says these dogs have to be bought together.”
“I’m afraid,” the volunteer interrupted, “that these three are from the same litter. They were raised in the same household and unfortunately abused there. We would prefer that they be adopted together.” Theon almost laughed there. Adopted? They were buying the animals, not adopting them! They weren’t people. Besides, that white one with the red eyes was freaky.
They ‘adopted’ all three of them. Damn Mr Scott and his bleeding heart.
Jon picked the freaky albino, naturally.
“Don’t you want one?” little Bran asked, pointing at the dog he had named Summer.
The Scotts had always been a rich lot. None of them had ever gone wanting or kenned the hard decision between food and bills, toys and clothes. Of course, one of them would think to ask him if he wanted a pet.
“I haven’t got a quid on me.”
“It’s okay. Dad will pay.”
Completely different worldviews, these Scotts.
Theon let the little boy wander off with his new pet, content to watch the spectacle that was Jon ultimately getting bit by the monster he’d picked out. Checking its teeth, he was, like a complete nutter.
“You didn’t want one?” Robb asked, walking over to him. He had the black monster on a leash. It was an enormous thing, higher than Robb’s hip, looking more like a shaggy pony than anything else.
Theon raised an eyebrow, his smirk firmly in place. Bran he could understand but Robb? He thought Robb would understand.
“We can share,” Robb announced. Theon looked down at the black, slobbering bulldog, then back at Robb, who smiled. “I was going to call him Wind, but now I think Grey Wind would be a better name.”
Theon’s throat felt suddenly tight.
“Thank you,” he said.
Next
Master Post
The Scott children have Westeros. It’s always there, in their imaginings, in their daydreams, in their nightmares. The game has a magnetism to it, a sort of sick darkness that pulls at one to play.
But now people are dying, one after the other, and some of the players are starting to wonder just what, exactly, that magnetism is.
The Miss Oxford Undergraduate Beauty Contest is an annual scholarship contest held at Oxford University in England. Originally, it was designed to provide scholarship opportunities to beautiful, yet underprivileged students. Instead, it became a contest to see who among all the students was the most desirable, whether underprivileged or not.
In recent years, the competition has been accused of fraud, vote tampering and practices that would be illegal in professional beauty contests.
In 1998, Lyanna Scott won the Miss Oxford Contest. This was notable because that year, the contest runner’s daughter-in-law entered the competition as well. Everyone expected her to win, though Lyanna was the fan favourite. Instead, Lyanna won and Ray, the contest runner’s son, placed the crown on her head. In that moment, no one could deny that she was the most beautiful woman there.
She used the scholarship money to pay for her last two years of design school. Her graduate project was a game board she hoped to give her daughter someday.
It was not to be. At her graduation ceremony, the cough Lyanna had been ignoring all spring became suddenly worse. Blood speckled her hands when she tried to cover her cough.
The doctors said it was pneumonia. It could be cured with enough rest and medicine.
Lyanna died within the year.
ØØØ
It was supposed to be a gift for Sansa when she got older, a game of knights and ladies. Robb had been six and greedy in a way he would never be in later years. He felt entitled to everything. There was no way he could know this was one gift that couldn’t be rewrapped.
A rectangular board with a map of a mystical otherworld drawn on it. Little carved play pieces and pretty pictures along the border. Theon told Robb to put it back. He didn’t want to play a girly, piece of rubbish game. Jon told Robb to play with it.
They bastardized the game that summer, each of them creating their own terrible visions of blood and guts in the way only little kids could. Theon took claim to the sea and the coastlines, telling horror stories of killing man-eating sharks and sea monsters, and krakens. Jon took the far north, clothed himself all in black (he was always an odd one) and talked of zombies and wild people, and sorcerers. Robb, never the imaginative one, closed his eyes and picked the first spot his finger landed on. He said it was rather like their home except colder and with more horses. Theon promptly called him stupid.
That left the whole rest of the game board. One was supposed to take only a single place in the beginning, then one could conquer the rest or simply let them be. Robb wouldn’t let them cheat.
Besides, Mrs Cat was furious when she found out and made them include Sansa. Theon never was sure whether Cat was madder at them taking Sansa’s game or Robb thinking to include Jon before his sister. Cat really didn’t like Jon. Theon didn’t either.
Sansa, all of four, had little interest in the game. But she had as little control over the situation as they did, so she played. She didn’t want to play with them, she declared. Their games were too rude and boyish. Robb told Sansa she could have all the rest, see? There were many different Houses; she could have any which one she wanted.
Soon after, Arya and Bran wanted to play, though both were too young to understand the rules. Robb let them play anyhow.
Then summer was over and school had begun. The game was packed away for the next year.
ØØØ
Theon’s grades in school had never been noteworthy, as Robb’s had been. The eldest Scott child had papers lovingly affixed to every appropriate surface possible. At times, it seemed Robb was the only child in the house anyone had any pride in. There were other reasons for Theon’s to be kept away, ones that weren’t like Arya’s, whose reading was abysmal.
They were rather equal to Jon’s in fact, which only made Catelyn’s reactions all the odder. Once a month, Theon’s case worker would come and Cat would show her about the house, pointing out this or that paper, this or that picture that had magically appeared that morning. At least she kept them, Theon conceded.
Looking around the Scott residence, it was not apparent seven children lived there. Over the mantelpiece were the ever present pictures of Catelyn and Ned’s children, Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran and baby Rickon. Theon was shoved in there on visitation days, like some forgotten delinquent who only showed up on holidays and only then to ruin them. He hadn’t the worst of it. Jon…Theon might hate Jon but he never understood Cat’s abhorrence of her husband’s eldest son.
Perhaps it was her upbringing. Cat had been born in Nitra, Slovakia, the eldest daughter of an MD rumoured to also be a crime boss. She was fiercely loyal to her family and cold to anyone and everyone else.
Perhaps it was a sign of the only problem in her marriage. Cat and Mr Scott had a strange courtship. Cat had been university sweethearts with Mr Scott’s elder brother, a professional soldier who had died in a training manoeuvre a few months before their wedding. Mr Scott had married Cat either to keep her from being deported or as part of the conditions of an arranged marriage, no one knew for sure. For a few months, they were happy.
Then Ned’s ex-girlfriend showed up with a bundle of bambino and Cat’s world shattered. She was nine months pregnant.
Cat, perhaps because she didn’t truly understand British inheritance law, had Ned draw up a will that explicitly stated that Jon, the half-brother to her own children, would never inherit anything of Ned’s. Since the money had all come from Cat in the first place, Theon didn’t understand how she went to such strange measures.
Good old Cat. She was fair to him. She hadn’t wanted to foster Theon any more than she wanted Jon but she had never been unkind to him. Theon hoped she would one day agree to adopt him.
The foster care system always prefers to place a child with relatives. Theon was not allowed contact with his family but he was pretty sure they were all still alive when he was a child. They were just too irresponsible to have him back.
He had heard his dad had gone Muslim in gaol, something about ultra-conservative fundamentalism. Strange that, since he had been so secular when Theon was growing up with him.
His mum was dead or hiding somewhere. His uncle was taking care of his brothers and sister.
The case worker said he was better off with Mr Scott: “He’s a good man, if a bit strict. You can’t ask for a better role model.” She meant he didn’t drink or touch his children like the other fathers. She meant he didn’t leave them wandering in the park until some lady walking her dog told the police there was a little boy and he was lost, had been lost for hours.
It would be harder for the younger ones, his uncle had told him, to be in foster care.
“Cheer up, Theon, I’ll have ye back in a year.” Three years passed and Theon was still with the Scotts. His uncle stopped coming to the visitations. His father never came in the first place.
“Oww!” Theon complained as a stick came crashing over his head. Childish laughter came from the bushes where Robb and Jon were hiding, poorly.
“Let’s be knights!” Jon announced excitedly. He’d been a happy child then, too young to understand Cat’s hatred.
“Yeah,” Robb joined in. “We already got you a stick, Theon!” He giggled pointing at the leafy, filthy branch on the ground.
Seven years old and constant companions, Robb and Jon didn’t quite grasp the concept of “half-brothers”. It didn’t help that Jon had never kenned his mum. No one knew who she was or where she was.
Sansa scowled at them.
“You have to be Catholic to be a knight,” Sansa said.
So they became warriors, instead.
ØØØ
When Robb was nine and Theon was thirteen, Catelyn decided that the Scott household could use a pet. She had been too busy taking care of her children before, she said, but now she thought it would do Robb good to learn some responsibility. Sansa had been quiet about it, polite as ever, but it soon became apparent that she wanted a pet, too. Then, Arya, a mere child and not the sort of thing anyone should listen to, demanded one of her own, so it was off to the pet store.
Only, Bran had begun crying at the thought of puppy mills and breeding farms (which Theon might have been responsible for putting in his head- Theon was not daft enough to think three pets would be adequately taken care of by those three), and Robb began to reconsider. No one at that point had considered getting Bran a pet (he was five), yet Robb still felt the need to talk to Bran quietly and beg him not to cry.
Bran sniffled and said they should go to the animal shelter instead. Theon tried not to beat his head into the windshield. Jon, of course, felt the need to butt in and agree. The animal shelter was an excellent idea.
So they went all the way out to Glasgow to the Dogs Trust and Theon hated his existence. Because he knew Mr Scott and Mr Scott was not going to rest until each and every one of his children acquired a shelter animal. Theon did not want an animal.
Those animals had been abandoned for a reason. Either they were so broken that their owners could not care for them- or their owners had broken them so badly that they could not be used for anything else. They were ruined. They could not be fixed.
Arya was the first to pick one out. They had agreed to dogs, since a medley of cats and dogs was likely to end in squabbles and bickering. She was walking among the cages, dismissing the small lapdogs and toys. Theon was expecting her to pick one of the hunting or sport dogs Bran was mooning over. Instead, she found a fat little orange and white Corgi and declared it hers.
Bran was next with a grey mutt of indiscriminate background. It was big and wiry. He named it Summer, since it was the word least likely to be connected to that thing.
Sansa was cooing over a steel grey whippet with big eyes and prominent ribs. He would never have expected the delicate girl to kneel on the dirty cement floor and yet there she was, reaching her hand out to pet the docile hound.
Theon was already counting the added stress of one more animal when he noticed that Robb was talking to the shelter volunteer and looking pointedly at where Jon was on his knees. The glass-fronted cage before him was crowded with not one massive Irish wolfhound, but three. Theon frowned at Mr Scott but the man seemed not to notice the issue. It was as if they were at a grocery store and picking out candies, not animals.
“Mr Scott-" he began when Robb spoke up.
“Dad, the shelter volunteer says these dogs have to be bought together.”
“I’m afraid,” the volunteer interrupted, “that these three are from the same litter. They were raised in the same household and unfortunately abused there. We would prefer that they be adopted together.” Theon almost laughed there. Adopted? They were buying the animals, not adopting them! They weren’t people. Besides, that white one with the red eyes was freaky.
They ‘adopted’ all three of them. Damn Mr Scott and his bleeding heart.
Jon picked the freaky albino, naturally.
“Don’t you want one?” little Bran asked, pointing at the dog he had named Summer.
The Scotts had always been a rich lot. None of them had ever gone wanting or kenned the hard decision between food and bills, toys and clothes. Of course, one of them would think to ask him if he wanted a pet.
“I haven’t got a quid on me.”
“It’s okay. Dad will pay.”
Completely different worldviews, these Scotts.
Theon let the little boy wander off with his new pet, content to watch the spectacle that was Jon ultimately getting bit by the monster he’d picked out. Checking its teeth, he was, like a complete nutter.
“You didn’t want one?” Robb asked, walking over to him. He had the black monster on a leash. It was an enormous thing, higher than Robb’s hip, looking more like a shaggy pony than anything else.
Theon raised an eyebrow, his smirk firmly in place. Bran he could understand but Robb? He thought Robb would understand.
“We can share,” Robb announced. Theon looked down at the black, slobbering bulldog, then back at Robb, who smiled. “I was going to call him Wind, but now I think Grey Wind would be a better name.”
Theon’s throat felt suddenly tight.
“Thank you,” he said.
Next
Master Post