Catelyn had never liked this godswood.

She had been born a Tully, at Riverrun far to the south, on the Red Fork of the Trident. Thegodswood there was a garden, bright and airy, where tall redwoods spread dappled shadows acrosstinkling streams, birds sang from hidden nests, and the air was spicy¹ with the scent² of flowers.

The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. It was a dark, primal³ place, three acres of oldforest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earthand decay. No redwoods grew here. This was a wood of stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-greenneedles, of mighty⁴ oaks, of ironwoods as old as the realm itself. Here thick black trunks crowdedclose together while twisted branches wove a dense⁵ canopy⁶ overhead and misshapen roots wrestledbeneath the soil. This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived herehad no names.

But she knew she would find her husband here tonight. Whenever he took a man’s life, afterwardhe would seek the quiet of the godswood.

Catelyn had been anointed with the seven oils and named in the rainbow of light that filled the septof Riverrun. She was of the Faith, like her father and grandfather and his father before him. Her godshad names, and their faces were as familiar as the faces of her parents. Worship was a septon with acenser, the smell of incense⁸, a seven-sided crystal alive with light, voices raised in song. The Tullyskept a godswood, as all the great houses did, but it was only a place to walk or read or lie in the sun.

Worship was for the sept.

For her sake, Ned had built a small sept where she might sing to the seven faces of god, but theblood of the First Men still flowed in the veins¹⁰ of the Starks, and his own gods were the old ones, thenameless, faceless gods of the greenwood they shared with the vanished children of the forest.

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