A History of Haus Stark

No house in Westeros keeps older blood than the Starks of Winterfell, and none is harder to see clearly, for their beginnings lie in the long dawn of the Age of Heroes, where record and song are so thoroughly wed that no maester can say with certainty where one ends and the other begins. The tales name Brandon the Builder as their founder — the same Bran who is credited with raising both Winterfell and the Wall, and whose descendants took the name Stark. That one man did all the singers ascribe to him strains belief; more likely Brandon is a dozen forgotten men gathered under a single famous name. Yet a hall was raised above the hot springs of the wolfswood in some grey and distant year, and the wolf lords have held it ever since.

For thousands of years the Starks ruled as Kings of Winter, and later Kings in the North, subduing rival kings one by one — the Barrow Kings of the great barrow, the Red Kings of the Dreadfort whose Boltons flayed Stark captives and wore their skins, the Marsh Kings of the crannogs, and a hundred lesser lords besides. Southron kings who thought to take the North learned the cost of it at Moat Cailin, where the causeway through the Neck has thrown back every host that ever marched against it. The North, the saying went, could not be conquered; it could only be entered, and then only by those the Starks allowed.

Darker tales cling to the family as well. The singers tell of the Night's King, a Lord Commander of the Night's Watch — some say a Stark himself — who took a corpse-cold woman with eyes like stars to wife at the Nightfort and ruled thirteen years as a god of terror, until a King of Winter and a King-beyond-the-Wall joined swords to bring him down and struck his very name from the records. Whether he lived at all, the maesters will not vouch. But the Starks alone remember that the Wall was raised against something, and they have never wholly forgotten why.

For eight thousand years, by the boastful reckoning of the singers, the Starks wore a crown. It ended on the banks of the Trident, three hundred years before our own day, when Torrhen Stark marched south to meet the dragons and found the whole strength of the North insufficient against three of them. Aegon the Dragon and his sisters had already burned two kings to ash upon the Field of Fire, and Torrhen, camped across the river with his host, weighed the pride of his line against the lives of every man who followed him.

He chose his men. In the grey light of morning he crossed the water, laid his crown at Aegon's feet, and rose again as Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North. The singers name him the King Who Knelt, and there is contempt in the title, but a wiser man hears something else in it — a king who understood that a crown of bronze and iron was worth less than the North that wore it. His people were not burned. His line endured. There are worse epitaphs for a king.

The Starks kept to their frozen fastness through the reigns that followed and were seldom seen south of the Neck — until the Targaryens fell to warring among themselves in the Dance of the Dragons, and the North stirred. Cregan Stark, Lord of Winterfell, pledged his swords to Rhaenyra and her blacks and marched an army down the kingsroad, though the war had all but burned itself out before ever he arrived. He reached King's Landing in the year 131, when both queen and king lay dead and the boy Aegon III sat a scorched and empty throne.

What followed the northmen remember as the Hour of the Wolf. For six days Cregan's host held the capital and answered the murders of the war with cold northern justice, sitting in judgment on those who had poisoned Aegon II. He was named Hand of the King — and served in that office for a single day, long enough to see the trials done, before he resigned it and turned his horse for home. The Hand of a Day, the court called him after, half in mockery and half in awe. He had come late to the war, but no man left King's Landing doubting that the wolf had come.

The centuries after are quieter in the histories, as the North's usually are, though not without their storms. The chroniclers speak of the she-wolves of Winterfell in the years of the boy king's regency, Stark women who rode and fought and disputed the wardenship as fiercely as any man, and the family sent its share of sons to the Wall and its daughters to southron beds. But the Starks remained, by long habit, a house that looked north and inward, wary of the games played beyond the Neck.

That changed with Rickard Stark, whose southron ambitions would undo him. He betrothed his heir Brandon to Catelyn Tully of Riverrun, sent his second son Eddard to be fostered by Jon Arryn in the distant Vale, and promised his daughter Lyanna to Robert Baratheon of Storm's End — knitting the North to the Vale, the Trident, and the stormlands in a web of marriage alliances no Stark had ever thought to weave. Then Prince Rhaegar Targaryen carried Lyanna off, and the web caught fire.

Brandon rode to King's Landing demanding satisfaction and was seized; Rickard came to answer for him and was burned alive in the throne room while his son strangled himself trying to save him. Aerys II demanded the heads of Eddard and Robert next, and instead of heads he got a rebellion. When it ended, Rhaegar was dead in the Trident, Lyanna was dead in a Dornish tower, and the quiet second son who had never expected to rule sat in Winterfell as Eddard Stark, Lord of the North — carrying home only his sister's bones and a promise he never spoke aloud.