When you play the Game of Thrones you win or die.
For Eleanah Karstark those words never held any meaning until she was sent off betrothed to a Stark of Winterfell.
In the midst of war, love and betrayal she will come to know the true threat that l...
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Her lip trembled, and her eyes burned as she tried to keep her tears at bay. Eleanah sang to the seven faces of god; the blood of the First Men still flowed in the veins of the Karstarks, and her gods were the old ones, the nameless, faceless gods of the greenwood they shared with the vanished children of the forest.
At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. 'The heart tree' she called it. The weirwood's bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Karhold itself. In the North, every castle had its godswood, and every godswood had its heart tree, and every heart tree its face.
Eleanah spread her cloak on the forest floor and sat beside the pool, her back to the weirwood. She could feel the eyes watching her, but she did her best to ignore them. She stayed right where she was, even when cold arms held her in a tight embrace.
She jerked away, wordless, her legs crossed, her hands resting on her knees in an odd attitude, and she closed her eyes with the hope of wandering elsewhere.
"Eleanah," her lord father called demandingly.
She lifted her head to look at him. "Father," she said. Her voice was distant and formal.
With anguishness in his grim eyes he shook his head. "Look at you," he said, smiling wryly. "You're stunning. You're every inch a lady."
"I don't want to be a lady."
"Sometimes what we want and don't want doesn't come into it," he said abruptly. "When the time comes, and when the time is right you'll become Lady of Winterfell."
She tried to hold back the seething torrent of tears, "You can't mean it."
"Oh, but I do." With a flushed face, Rickard Karstark stood up, fed up with his daughter's stubbornness. "You will wed him, bed him and give him a child," he said with a low voice, almost dangerous.
His words struck her hard, paining her soul. Northmen were not known for their kind words. They were known for their expertise in battle and for craving the blood of the condemned, and her father was no different. Rickard Karstark was an ambitious man with a mind for war, proud beyond extent. It was clear to Eleanah that he loved his legacy more than he did his children. Rumors of the Lord of Karhold and his cunningness reached all of the North, if not all of Westeros and even beyond the Narrow Sea.
Eleanah glanced behind her at the heart tree, the pale bark and red eyes, watching, listening, thinking its long slow thoughts. She thought of surrendering to his wishes, to accept her duty as the only daughter of the Lord of Karhold, but she went against it. "No, I won't do it."
She knew then she had crossed a line with her father, she did not need to look at him to know he had adopted a wide stance with a tight-lipped smile. "You are my daughter and you will do as I command," he murmured while shaking his stretched arm like a club.
"You will marry Robb Stark."
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