Heresy 151

[PrettyPig]

Ooof...so many things to say and never enough timeto say them....

Re: Lyanna being taken as hostage - during my last reread I was taken by the chapter in which Jaime pays his visit to Jonos Bracken and Tytos Blackwood. You may recall that he takes a Blackwood boy with him as hostage, but Tytos suggests that he also take Jonos' only daughter as a hostage as well - a maiden that he doted on. Jaime speaks with Jonos and sees his despair at the thought of losing his daughter, so he opts not to take her with him but tells Jonos "Have her at court within the year or [insert threat that I can't remember here]."

It struck me that if Lyanna was indeed the KotLT and Aerys found out, it wouldn't be unreasonable that he would expect some sort of pennace from the Starks - Brandon and Ned are too old to serve as hostages, Benjen is the right age but 3rd in line to Winterfell so not much good as far as hostages go, but Lyanna....the only daughter of Winterfell AND the perpetrator of the act....

So we know that about a year passed between the tourney and her abduction. If the king's order was to have her at court "within the year" and then she chose not to show up, Aerys would have no choice but to send someone to catch her and bring her back. I have trouble reconciling in my head why 1) Rickard/Hoster/etc didn't immediately react to the 'kidnapping' and 2) everyone assumed that she was headed to KL. Is is possible that this was a deal previously worked out between the crown and Rickard?

Normally such a retrieval would have been tasked to the Hand or some other house guards, but my thought was that Rhaegar actually volunteered to do it...not out of Twoo Wuv or whatever but because Lyanna Stark could connect him to what I suspect he REALLY wanted, which was Howland Reed, the Green Men, and the Isle of Faces. I just can't shake the idea that Rhaegar's prophecy interests are connected to the CotF and/or the God's Eye.

[Matthew.]

Yet Jon had a fairly happy childhood, Ned and Cat a good marriage. What price?

This is debatable. He certainly had a better childhood than your average peasant, and he gets along well with his siblings, but it seems clear that there are problems there. He feels like an outsider, and Cat has treated him pretty poorly.

If you re-read the conversation between Benjen and Jon in aGoT during the feast where Winterfell is hosting Robert; there are, IMHO, some subtle tells there--Benjen's obvious toward Jon, the frown when Jon talks about being a bastard, Benjen saying "More's the pity" when Jon has his outburst about how Benjen isn't his father.

I think these all reinforce, at the least, the notion of Lyanna being his mother, and the fact that Benjen isn't pleased with Jon having been raised with such a low opinion of himself; or, that he's nearing adulthood, and he still doesn't know the truth.

[JNR]

Thanks for sharing this. “People are going to die who don’t die in the books, so even the book readers will be unhappy. So everybody better be on their toes." ha! you're all gonna think I'm dark and twisted. . . but am rather looking forward to it. . . Likely it will come with more Pythonesque antics. Will they kill some key book players, so he can protect his ending? Jon? :devil:

Yes, this is an interesting quote because we are perfect instances of the audience he has in mind above. And we're not going to be happy?

I interpret this to mean GRRM's long-predicted butterfly effect, of show vs. book divergence, is more powerful than ever in the next season and yes, as you suggest, characters we book-readers consider major will die prematurely.

Of course, that's already happened once, in the case of Jojen, and it was really a spectacular display of divergence, too. Skeleton wights, fireball hand grenades, and Meera cutting his throat -- all intensely noncanonical.

And GRRM was right; I wasn't happy with that. But it wasn't really because it was different from the books. It was because it made little sense, even in the variant world of the show, that the fireball-equipped CotF could ever have been displaced as masters of Westeros. So I hope whatever major character deaths occur in season five, they don't render the whole story internally problematic.

[kimim]

Where in the book does it say Lyanna died of puerperal fever?

She's in a bed of blood, which is associated with childbirth, and she's weak with fever--sounds like puerperal fever.

[WeaselPie]

I remembered a few things from my (not in my possession at the moment) notes.

The KG "certainly" knew what was in the Tower of Joy according to this SSM.

Which means they were not there alone. If Lyanna gave birth to their "king" a week or two earlier, that would presume that they somehow knew the baby would be male and alive before it was even born, since they had been positioned in Dorne much, much longer than that.

Aegon being at the TOJ makes more sense in this context (to me) even if they were also protecting a pregnant Lyanna.

A few other things from SSMs and AGoT. I will add links when I find them.

- Jon "has a bastard's name" according to Ned. Distinction between a bastard and one having the name of a bastard

- Ned named Jon, Distinction between birthday and nameday.

- Tourney of Harrenhal is dated as 281. Year of the False Spring was "a year or two before Robert's Rebellion." False Spring was about a year long, so Harrenhal could be pushed to 282.

- GRRM says the new Sword of the Morning shall arise. Must be House Dayne and we have few contenders.

- Dorne to Winterfell is a "journey of months"

[JNR]

This is debatable. He certainly had a better childhood than your average peasant, and he gets along well with his siblings, but it seems clear that there are problems there. He feels like an outsider, and Cat has treated him pretty poorly...

Yeah, I think Jon must have been pretty heartsick of being treated like a second-rate son of Ned's even to consider the Watch as a lifetime commitment. So his theoretically happy childhood was definitely a mixed bag.

Benjen is interesting in that his focus, in trying to get Jon to think more carefully about what he's doing, is women.

Various ways to interpret that, of course. The one I like best is that he himself enlisted in the Watch too young and too emotionally, and yet he also takes his vows more seriously than many of his NW peers. So women are not an area where Benjen has had much if any experience and he regrets that.

And at only thirty years old or so, he expects to carry on regretting it for decades.

[King Tyrion XX]

She's in a bed of blood, which is associated with childbirth, and she's weak with fever--sounds like puerperal fever.

Bed of blood could mean many things besides childbirth. Maybe the KG attacked her. Maybe for (insert reason here) she was injured and bleeding from it. Infections from wounds would cause fever.

[Black Crow]

In theory it could, but the term "bed of blood" is unambiguously used elsewhere in the story as a metaphor for childbed. However since it is a metaphor it needn't necessarily be literally true. Lyanna may well, and indeed probably was delivered of Jon some time earlier, perhaps several days earlier and cleaned up, but still be lying in childbed and so metaphorically lying in a bed of blood. Theon for some reason thinks of her in a blood spattered gown but since he obviously wasn't an eye-witness we ought to discount this as being significant.

[Black Crow]

- False Spring was about a year long

Its referred to as lasting "two turns" or two months. I think the excitement arose from the warm weather coming unseasonably late - towards the end of the year.

[Urrax2]

...Lyanna may well, and indeed probably was delivered of Jon some time earlier...

It's a pleasure to find somebody who knows mothers don't deliver babies, they are delivered of them.

[kimim]

...

Exactly- Lyanna was dying when Ned got to her. If it was Jon they were protecting, they should have taken him elsewhere. As for Ned killing his sister- why would he do that? The official narrative is that she was kidnapped and raped- that is not something westerosi women were killed for by their brothers. (Well, unless you were ironborn and married to Victarion).

The baby must have been very young, possibly less than a week old, and running off with him would be taking a huge risk. Also, this is Westeros, so the guards would have no idea when/if/how Ned would arrive.

Ned killing his sister or the baby: Killing babies for dynastic reasons seems to happen, so the three guards would know the baby's at risk. I agree killing the sister is a stretch, but, again, in a land where virginity and family honor are almost fetishized, it would be a possibility. Main concern would be the baby, though, as it would be Rhaegar's surviving son.

1. Lyanna's death: "Bloody bed," and "bed of blood" are consistently associated with childbirth, and with Lyanna. Add fever, and you get puerperal fever. Sure, she could have died of some other bloody cause, but then why the endless references to beds of blood? It could be misdirection, but given the rest of the situation, the misdirection doesn't make a lot of sense.

2. People who were there when Lyanna died: We hear that Howland Reed has to pry Lyanna's dead fingers from Ned's hand. So Reed, the other survivor of the battle before ToJ, was there.

3. Location of Lyanna's death: We hear that Ned left Robert in a rage over the deaths of Rhaegar's kids, and fought the last battles of the war alone in the "south," where he found Lyanna. So Lyanna died in the south, and Howland Reed was there.

4. Rhaegar's guards: In the dream where Lyanna and the battle before the ToJ are connected, Ned asks the three kg why they didn't fight for Rhaegar. They say that if they had, Rhaegar would have won, but they had made a vow which kept them away.

The only reason why three powerful knights would protect a tower in Dorne instead of fighting for their prince is that there was something extremely valuable in that tower. We are given zero info about Rhaegar getting his hands on a superweapon, or anything else of the sort. Even given the most romantic fantasies of Rhaegar, I don't believe he would have left his three best knights to simply protect his paramour. We are given hints that there is a woman dying of childbirth in there. Childbirth=baby. The only kind of baby valuable enough to be protected by Rhaegar's three best knights would be the heir.

5. Lyanna, dying, begs Ned to keep a promise, which haunts him. Ned is an honest guy, with one dirty secret: His 14-year-old bastard son, whose mother he won't divulge. Ned thinks that "he had lived his lies for fourteen years, and they still troubled him." What "lie" is Ned living, if he's already told everyone that the kid is his bastard son? What other secret did he bring with him from Dorne?

[JNR]

1. Lyanna's death: "Bloody bed," and "bed of blood" are consistently associated with childbirth, and with Lyanna. Add fever, and you get puerperal fever. Sure, she could have died of some other bloody cause, but then why the endless references to beds of blood?

Based on the references we've seen so far, I agree there is a consistent pregnancy motif.

However, are these references "endless?" Someone should do a search through all the books. I'm not sure there are even as many as ten iterations across the whole canon of thousands of pages, and small sample sets make for problematic interpretations.

The only reason why three powerful knights would protect a tower in Dorne instead of fighting for their prince is that there was something extremely valuable in that tower. We are given zero info about Rhaegar getting his hands on a superweapon, or anything else of the sort. Even given the most romantic fantasies of Rhaegar, I don't believe he would have left his three best knights to simply protect his paramour. We are given hints that there is a woman dying of childbirth in there. Childbirth=baby. The only kind of baby valuable enough to be protected by Rhaegar's three best knights would be the heir.

This is a little tricky for several reasons.

1. We are given a heavyhanded hint by GRRM why they were there via this interview:

Shaw: Can you explain why the King's Guard chose to stand and fight Ned at the Tower of the Joy instead of protecting the remaining royal family members?

Martin: The King's Guards don't get to make up their own orders. They serve the king, they protect the king and the royal family, but they're also bound to obey their orders, and if Prince Rhaegar gave them a certain order, they would do that. They can't say, "No we don't like that order, we'll do something else."

The simplest reading of this is that Rhaegar gave the three KG orders well before he died at the Trident, and those orders remained in effect at the time Ned showed up, months later. (I think Ran, Black Crow, and I all agree on this, which is certainly not always the case.)

Now, as Weasel Pie has pointed out, Jon can't have been born at the time Rhaegar issued those orders, and Rhaegar couldn't have known the baby would be born either alive or a boy. So the orders couldn't have been to protect Jon.

Even if we assume Rhaegar somehow knew he himself would die, which he doesn't seem to have known, he couldn't also have known his father would die and his son Aegon would die. And if he thought there was any danger to Aegon, presumably he would have commanded the three KG to defend Aegon as his, Rhaegar's, direct heir, as opposed to the unborn fetus.

2. The World book suggests that following the Trident, Aerys named Viserys his own direct heir, skipping Aegon (who was obviously still alive). This would also take Jon, if Rhaegar's son, out of the loop as long as Viserys was alive, which he was and remained after the Sack.

Based on Ned's dream, we have reason to believe the three KG are well informed of everything that has happened, at least as of the Sack, by the time Ned shows up. This means they would probably have known of Aerys' decision in this matter: that Viserys was his heir.

So if Jon was present, and he was Rhaegar's son, the three KG would be aware he couldn't possibly be the Targ heir. They would know that Targ heir could only be Viserys.

3. If, despite the above, the goal of the three KG was to protect the Targ heir and they believed that heir to be Jon, they should have taken action long before Ned showed up to get Lyanna and her baby proper medical attention. Really, that should have happened before Jon was even born.

The premise that the three KG were best protecting the unborn heir by keeping his very pregnant mother in a remote tower far from civilized medical facilities, and then continually kept both the mother and the newborn baby in that same isolated spot after birth, seems a bit shady.

[Voice]

This is debatable. He certainly had a better childhood than your average peasant, and he gets along well with his siblings, but it seems clear that there are problems there. He feels like an outsider, and Cat has treated him pretty poorly.

If you re-read the conversation between Benjen and Jon in aGoT during the feast where Winterfell is hosting Robert; there are, IMHO, some subtle tells there--Benjen's obvious toward Jon, the frown when Jon talks about being a bastard, Benjen saying "More's the pity" when Jon has his outburst about how Benjen isn't his father.

I think these all reinforce, at the least, the notion of Lyanna being his mother, and the fact that Benjen isn't pleased with Jon having been raised with such a low opinion of himself; or, that he's nearing adulthood, and he still doesn't know the truth.

Prices paid. :agree:

I'm of the mind Cat was a horrible wife and mother, but of the prices paid, there are some glaring examples. First the rebellion itself, the death of his father and brother, the 5 who died at the ToJ.

Cat almost pushes Ned out the door to be Robert's Hand. The motivating factor that convinces him to go is Cat's suggestion they must appear loyal to Robert, and not draw the scrutiny of the crown as the Lannisters act upon their ambitions. This portion comes to us from Cat's POV, so we don't know Ned's exact thinking, but I don't think it's farfetched to assume shielding Jon from the crown was part of it. So I would list this as the greatest price of all: leaving his place in Winterfell.

[FC_Lymond]

And don't forget Rhaegar was never King, Aerys was. So we are talking about the Crown Prince's orders.

[MaesterSam]

Oh, I wasn't criticizing you personally, MaesterSam - I was just using your post as an occasion to semi-rant. (Sorry if it came off the wrong way.) That said, the extent to which Rhaegar would have trusted Varys is one of those things I just don't think we have enough information about to state with certainty. On top of which... I'd argue that trust would not necessarily have been a prerequisite for Rhaegar, if he needed Varys to help him carry out a plan. Nobody really trusts Varys, after all... but they use him anyway, because they need him. And frankly, if you're going to carry out a plan to deceive the king, Varys is going to know about it anyway. If you want him to keep that knowledge to himself, your best bet is to make him a participant - force him to share the guilt, and the risk of penalty should anything go wrong. (See, for example... the way Jaime ropes Varys into freeing Tyrion from the black cells.)

Well, it's not hard at all to come up with a plausible reason for the fight itself. What's difficult is coming up with a plausible reason for anyone to keep an infant (or a very pregnant woman) at the tower of joy for any extended period of time. The thing to do is to leave the baby (or the pregnant mother-to-be) at Starfall. Then your three KG knights can travel north through the Prince's Pass... on their way to rally loyalist forces perhaps, or (more likely) to set up a watchpost along the way to Starfall. Perhaps two of them had been camping there for some time, and the third had just arrived for a changing of the guard. Or perhaps some variation of these explanations would explain their presence there, just at the moment when Ned Stark came riding up into the hills.

And there you have it. They fought at the tower of joy, because that's where they found each other.

Oh no worries, you had a totally valid point. I was mostly thrown off by (f)Aegon's account of how he was switched for a peasant baby just before the sack of KL. This doesn't work with the rest of my theory on Aegon being sent to Dorne without ever setting foot in KL, so I was trying to dismiss Varys' involvement. But seeing how he seems to have ended up with the baby, it's quite likely he was involved from the start. He easily could have lied to Young Griff about the details of his escape, especially if the septa also has an identity to hide.

About the KG and the TOJ. If there was nobody there to protect, why order them to be there at all? You mentioned a watchpost, but they weren't watching, they were sitting outside, waiting. They didn't make any attempt to alert anyone,and no army came charging up the pass after Ned and Howland killed them. KG are the best knights in the realm, you don't sit them in a tower to light a beacon if someone comes by.

You also couldn't realistically expect 3 men to hold a pass. Rhaegar (who I assume gave the order) couldn't have known that Ned and Robert would get in a fight and Ned would only have 6 guys with him. He just as easily could have brought 60, or 600. Even if the KG had won- Robert would have followed Ned with the rest of the army. Aside from protecting someone or something important, there was nothing to be accomplished by three guys at the TOJ, when their side had already lost the entire war.

If the pass needed to be held, why not keep back 1,000 of the Dornish forces for this purpose? Or at least scrape together 100 peasants or something. But don't expect three men to hold back what could just as easily have been an army.

I"m also not sure that the encounter was reason enough for the fight. In Ned's dream, both sides are quite reluctant, smiling sad smiles and making conversation before finally drawing their swords. They have a lot of respect for each other. Yet both sides see the coming fight as inevitable. Why? Ser Barristan bent the knee, why couldn't these three?

I agree, it's not a good place to keep a pregnant woman, or a baby. But what else could it have been? And why would anyone keep anything important in a tower on a mountain pass, when the enemy is expected to be coming down that pass sooner or later? I think that's the real issue here. If something/someone precious was to be protected in Dorne, this was about the worst place anyone could have chosen. Which is why no scenario, whether Aegon, Lyanna & Jon, or whatever else, makes any sense. No matter what was being protected, surely there would have been a hundred better places to keep it. Grrr, so frustrating! :bang:

Yeah, I think Jon must have been pretty heartsick of being treated like a second-rate son of Ned's even to consider the Watch as a lifetime commitment. So his theoretically happy childhood was definitely a mixed bag.

Benjen is interesting in that his focus, in trying to get Jon to think more carefully about what he's doing, is women.

Various ways to interpret that, of course. The one I like best is that he himself enlisted in the Watch too young and too emotionally, and yet he also takes his vows more seriously than many of his NW peers. So women are not an area where Benjen has had much if any experience and he regrets that.

And at only thirty years old or so, he expects to carry on regretting it for decades.

Yes ok, Jon didn't have a perfect childhood. But I doubt Ned has been lying awake at night for 14 years b/c he is worried that Jon isn't happy. Jon is a bastard, and an orphan. Ned gave him a better life than pretty much any other uncle would have, so I don't really think he feels guilty about Jon's quality of life. Or if he does, I don't think it's THE thing that's been stressing him out all these years.

The Benjen backstory is definitely something I'd like to learn more about. It's interesting when he talks about women, how he tells Jon he doesn't know what he'd be giving up. To me, it actually sounds more like Benjen did have a woman at one point, so he knows what Jon would be giving up. Maybe she died, or left him. Or maybe he was forced to go to the Wall somehow, and had to leave her. The way he talks, I could see a lost love in Benjen's past. But I doubt that's something we can figure out until we get some more info when book 6 comes out in 2017.

[kimim]

Based on the references we've seen so far, I agree there is a consistent pregnancy motif.

However, are these references "endless?" Someone should do a search through all the books. I'm not sure there are even as many as ten iterations across the whole canon of thousands of pages, and small sample sets make for problematic interpretations.

This is a little tricky for several reasons.

1. We are given a heavyhanded hint by GRRM why they were there via this interview:

The simplest reading of this is that Rhaegar gave the three KG orders well before he died at the Trident, and those orders remained in effect at the time Ned showed up, months later. (I think Ran, Black Crow, and I all agree on this, which is certainly not always the case.)

Now, as Weasel Pie has pointed out, Jon can't have been born at the time Rhaegar issued those orders, and Rhaegar couldn't have known the baby would be born either alive or a boy. So the orders couldn't have been to protect Jon.

Even if we assume Rhaegar somehow knew he himself would die, which he doesn't seem to have known, he couldn't also have known his father would die and his son Aegon would die. And if he thought there was any danger to Aegon, presumably he would have commanded the three KG to defend Aegon as his, Rhaegar's, direct heir, as opposed to the unborn fetus.

2. The World book suggests that following the Trident, Aerys named Viserys his own direct heir, skipping Aegon (who was obviously still alive). This would also take Jon, if Rhaegar's son, out of the loop as long as Viserys was alive, which he was and remained after the Sack.

Based on Ned's dream, we have reason to believe the three KG are well informed of everything that has happened, at least as of the Sack, by the time Ned shows up. This means they would probably have known of Aerys' decision in this matter: that Viserys was his heir.

So if Jon was present, and he was Rhaegar's son, the three KG would be aware he couldn't possibly be the Targ heir. They would know that Targ heir could only be Viserys.

3. If, despite the above, the goal of the three KG was to protect the Targ heir and they believed that heir to be Jon, they should have taken action long before Ned showed up to get Lyanna and her baby proper medical attention. Really, that should have happened before Jon was even born.

The premise that the three KG were best protecting the unborn heir by keeping his very pregnant mother in a remote tower far from civilized medical facilities, and then continually kept both the mother and the newborn baby in that same isolated spot after birth, seems a bit shady.

1. That Rhaegar left before the birth of the baby doesn't mean that he would leave said baby undefended. Rhaegar is functioning on a prophetic level. We don't know why he felt this baby would be important (aside from the fact that it was his baby). He could have believed that this kid would be the ultimate heir, or the totally necessary third head of the dragon, or a savior reborn, or the master chef who discovers how to make ice cream. For some reason, he felt this kid would be important, and asked the guard to protect it. His behavior toward his wife and kids under his dad's care, of course, was despicable, but then this is Rhaegar. Man makes no sense.

2. The KG, as you say, would then protect the kid, whether Rhaegar is alive or not. They didn't go to war, and their prince was defeated. This is his last request from them. As far as believing that the only heir could be Viserys, hence this kid is out of the running--that's really questionable. Heirs are fluid in this world, and nothing is set in stone. However, their knowledge that this is the only living child of Rhaegar would make them more willing to protect it.

3. Westeros is medically pre-modern, so there are no civilized medical facilities. There is no cure for infection. We don't know if Lyanna had decent care while giving birth. Even if she had the best of care Westeros and Essos could provide, her odds of dying of infection would be high.

[MaesterSam]

(....)

Normally such a retrieval would have been tasked to the Hand or some other house guards, but my thought was that Rhaegar actually volunteered to do it...not out of Twoo Wuv or whatever but because Lyanna Stark could connect him to what I suspect he REALLY wanted, which was Howland Reed, the Green Men, and the Isle of Faces. I just can't shake the idea that Rhaegar's prophecy interests are connected to the CotF and/or the God's Eye.

Funny how nobody has made this connection before. Lyanna disappeared about 10 leagues from Harrenhal, and what's right next to Harrenhal? The God's Eye and the Isle of Faces. Why was Lyanna in the Riverlands? If I had to guess, I'd say she had heard exciting tales from the little crannogman and wanted to see the Isle for herself. But then nothing worked out the way she planned...

Now I realize you suggested Rhaegar was there for such a purpose, not Lyanna. Maybe they both were? If they visited the Isle of Faces at least that would explain why nobody saw them for many months, and they would have been cut off from the normal world and possibly unaware that it was falling apart around them. Or they were aware, but not allowed to leave?

In theory it could, but the term "bed of blood" is unambiguously used elsewhere in the story as a metaphor for childbed. However since it is a metaphor it needn't necessarily be literally true. Lyanna may well, and indeed probably was delivered of Jon some time earlier, perhaps several days earlier and cleaned up, but still be lying in childbed and so metaphorically lying in a bed of blood. Theon for some reason thinks of her in a blood spattered gown but since he obviously wasn't an eye-witness we ought to discount this as being significant.

True, and I actually do believe she most likely died in childbirth.

The metaphorical meaning, however, does not work, as Ned remembers smelling blood and roses in the room. He mentions this more than once. If the birth was a few days earlier, the room shouldn't still smell of blood. Women don't lose that much blood in childbirth.

(...)

The only reason why three powerful knights would protect a tower in Dorne instead of fighting for their prince is that there was something extremely valuable in that tower. We are given zero info about Rhaegar getting his hands on a superweapon, or anything else of the sort. Even given the most romantic fantasies of Rhaegar, I don't believe he would have left his three best knights to simply protect his paramour. We are given hints that there is a woman dying of childbirth in there. Childbirth=baby. The only kind of baby valuable enough to be protected by Rhaegar's three best knights would be the heir.

5. Lyanna, dying, begs Ned to keep a promise, which haunts him. Ned is an honest guy, with one dirty secret: His 14-year-old bastard son, whose mother he won't divulge. Ned thinks that "he had lived his lies for fourteen years, and they still troubled him." What "lie" is Ned living, if he's already told everyone that the kid is his bastard son? What other secret did he bring with him from Dorne?

Yes, to all of this!

Something was in the tower. Something that probably was not a baby or Lyanna, yet very, very valuable. Valuable enough to have your KG protect it while leaving the king and his family vulnerable. And presumably something that can't easily be moved, as otherwise there are many other, better places to hide it.

What if, instead of a person, it was something else? A baby dragon, the Bloodstone, an obsidian candle, faces hanging on the walls... :dunno:

Or, it wasn't precious at all, but something dangerous, or a secret that couldn't be shared. Something happened in that tower, something so terrible that no one must ever know. Maybe Rhaegar and his friends kidnapped CotF and sacrificed them in the tower. Or it's where he takes all his mistresses' malformed dragon children. You know I'm joking, but it could be something along those lines. Nobody must know what's in the tower. Nobody must know that the stones are bloody.

[Black Crow]

I'm still very much of a mind that given GRRM's very explicit warning about taking the dream literally the tower itself is not important. Here's my Ronin essay which I referred to [had the faithful in fits]:

In AGoT chapter 39, Ned has his infamous dream about the fight there as quoted many a time. He's woken from it by Vayon Poole and becomes involved in various bits of business, and on learning that Alyn, the new captain of his guard, has given the body of Jory Cassel into the keeping of the silent sisters to be taken home to Winterfell to lie beside his grandfather, he reflects:

It would have to be his grandfather, for Jory's father was buried far to the south. Martyn Cassel had perished with the rest. Ned had pulled the tower down afterward, and used its bloody stones to build eight cairns upon the ridge. It was said that Rhaegar had named that place the tower of joy, but for Ned it was a bitter memory. They had been seven against three, yet only two lived to ride away; Eddard Stark himself and the little crannogman, Howland Reed.

This, incidentally, is the only use of the term tower of joy [no initial capitals] anywhere in the books, and at this point we need to qualify the dream and its aftermath with this comment by GRRM:

http://www.westeros....he_Tower_of_Joy

You'll need to wait for future books to find out more about the Tower of Joy and what happened there, I fear.

I might mention, though, that Ned's account, which you refer to, was in the context of a dream... and a fever dream at that. Our dreams are not always literal.

So there’s something wrong with the dream passage, but what? To a large extent the encounter itself is confirmed by the passage about Ned’s thoughts on waking. He’s not dreaming, feverishly or otherwise, when he thinks of Martyn Cassel and the aftermath of the fight, so it obviously happened and it ended with all of them dead except Messrs Stark and Reed. Nor do I think there’s a problem with the exchange between Ned and the Kingsguard that preceded the fight. It’s too clear, too precise, not to be a memory of an actual conversation, or at least an accurate memory of the gist of what was said. Nor can Ned seeing his dead friends as wraiths be regarded as significant enough to justify GRRM’s warning. That then leaves Lyanna.

Is GRRM therefore hinting that in his “fever dream” Ned is conflating two related but different memories; that of the fight and that of Lyanna’s death afterwards, not in an old watchtower in the Prince’s Pass, but somewhere else entirely and not improbably Starfall?

Hold that thought and consider, because transferring Lyanna to Starfall actually resolves a lot of practical problems. After the fight at the tower, Ned and Howland bury their dead and then do carry on to Starfall, ostensibly to return Ser Arthur Dayne’s sword:

So suppose there they are told that Lyanna is dying. Ned goes to her alone and sits with her long after she has died. Eventually Howland and some of the others intrude upon his grief and take him away so that the body can be washed and prepared for the long journey home.

It’s not only an interpretation that makes sense, but one which makes a lot more sense than star-crossed lovers spending all that time at the tower. In the first place the tower in question wasn't a remote hideaway by any stretch of the imagination, but a watchtower sitting on a ridge overlooking one of only two roads into Dorne. It was not after all a castle, or even a holdfast, but a simple watchtower which in these here parts rarely amounts to more than one bare room at the bottom, another reached by a ladder above and then a walkway above that to do the watching. All in all; very small, very squalid and very Spartan. There is no way it could have been used as a hideout for a prince, and a young [and latterly pregnant] girl attended by two and eventually three members of the famous kingsguard, bickering over whose turn it was to fetch the bread, milk and morning papers over a period of several months.

Re-locating Lyanna to Starfall on the other hand gives us an explanation for Ned and Howland travelling there after burying the dead. It explains the presence of “others” when Lyanna dies and afterwards shipping both straight home from Starfall similarly makes a lot more sense than making a detour to Starfall from the Dornish Marches with a corpse and a suckling babe. After all, are we really expected to believe that having found a dying Lyanna and a new-born babe in an old tower at the northern end of the pass, Ned then took them both all the way round by Starfall to tip the chivalrous bit and return Arthur's sword? A splendid thing to do later, perhaps years later, but at that point in time he surely had far more pressing things to worry about; which suggests there was a far more important reason for going there.

All very well says you, but what about the Kingsguard and why the tower?

Again it’s worth turning back to GRRM, specifically answering that question:

http://web.archive.o...s3/00103009.htm

Martin: The King's Guards don't get to make up their own orders. They serve the king, they protect the king and the royal family, but they're also bound to obey their orders, and if Prince Rhaegar gave them a certain order, they would do that.

Again hold this for a moment, because there’s a clear implication here that the reason they were so far from home in the first place is that they were obeying an order given by Prince Rhaegar. Exactly what that order was we don’t know but it is apparent from the exchange with Ned it was an order they didn’t like. It’s also important at this point to consider the timing of that order.

Rhaegar has been absent for months, but at some point Hightower catches up with him bearing Aerys’ summons to return. Rhaegar then does so, not improbably leading those 10,000 Dornishmen, later commanded at the Trident by Lewyn Martell. However before returning he in turn orders Hightower, Dayne and Whent to remain behind. I’ll discuss a possible reason for this shortly, but at this particular moment when Rhaegar returns to Kings Landing, Aerys is the King, Rhaegar is the Crown Prince, and Rhaegar’s own son and heir, Aegon is still living. Jon is still just a bump, so with war raging up north, leaving three out of the seven members of the guard to protect an unborn child who at best will be third in line after Aerys seems a touch odd.

So let’s look at what happens:

"I looked for you on the Trident," Ned said to them.

"We were not there," Ser Gerold answered.

"Woe to the Usurper if we had been," said Ser Oswell

The use of the term Usurper is interesting. Robert is no longer a rebel, he has usurped the throne, they acknowledge that he holds the throne, they just refuse to recognise him as their king.

"When King's Landing fell, Ser Jaime slew your king with a golden sword, and I wondered where you were."

"Far away," Ser Gerold said, "or Aerys would yet sit on the Iron Throne, and our false brother would burn in seven hells."

Here Aerys is still their king and still would be if they had anything to do with it.

"I came down on Storm's End to lift the siege," Ned told them, "and the Lords Tyrell and Redwyne dipped their banners, and all their knights bent the knee to pledge us fealty. I was certain you would be among them."

"Our knees do not bend easily," said Ser Arthur Dayne.

Now again this one is consistent with the bit about the usurper. Tyrell, Redwyne and the others did bend the knee, because their king and his heirs and successors were gone and there was no point in fighting on in the name of that boy fled to Dragonstone. On the other hand Messrs Hightower, Dayne and Whent decline to do so because their pride and their honour as members of Aerys’ guard do not allow it.

If we separate Lyanna from the tower, there is nothing in the exchange with the Kingsguard to suggest that they are guarding anybody; whether Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow or even, the gods help us, Aegon Targaryen.

Conversely if we read everything as an encounter on the road - the only road - between the three knights heading north from Starfall and Ned Stark heading south to Starfall, the language makes sense, Ned's recollection of burying them [when he's awake] makes sense, his journey to Starfall afterwards makes sense, his recollection of the dying Lya, not at a lonely watchtower but in Starfall makes sense, and so too his learning there that Rhaegar called the place where they all died the tower of joy.

So why are they at the tower?

The obvious answer is that it’s a landmark and human nature being what it is their eyes will be drawn to it – as will Ned’s.

As to why they fight, whatever the reason for his absence, Rhaegar was gone from Kings Landing for some time. Given the way things went when he re-appeared I think it’s reasonable that he came north with those 10,000 Dornishmen and that learning of them Aerys despatched Martell to command them. Whether Martell and Rhaegar met on the road, or passed each other en route probably doesn't much matter, but what does is that remark about Rhaegar recognising "in the end" that Aerys was mad.

We now know from the World Book about Rhaegar’s involvement in a coup to overthrow Aerys and the Harrenhal tourney being a cover for a gathering of conspirators or would-be conspirators. However the three guards in the Pass, and certainly not Hightower, were not party to the possible coup. Their loyalty to Aerys is unambiguously expressed. Whether Rhaegar ordered them to remain behind for that very reason, perhaps only using Lyanna and her bump as a pretext, we don't know but it’s a very strong possibility given that the exchange with Ned affirms their loyalty to Aerys but mentions no other king.

Therefore if we look at the exchange between Ned and the three knights without preconceptions it all makes sense. In the first place the knights are not defending or protecting anything, the three of them have lined up to fight.

It is more like the OK corral than the defence of Kings Landing.

We're actually given some very strong clues as to this. They speak of their king, Aerys, who they failed by being far away. They refer to Bob as the Usurper, because he has usurped the throne. He is the King now. Then both Viserys and Danaerys refer to Ned as the usurper's dog. He is recognised as Bob's right-hand man and just as responsible for everything that has happened.

The knights also speak of Jaime Lanister with some understandable venom and how he should burn in seven hells

And then there's the final exchange: "And now it begins..." to which Ned replies no, "Now it ends..."

That bit tends to get passed over in discussion but it’s of a piece with the rest. The three knights have failed in their duty and their king is dead. They are now Ronin and all that remains is their honour. That not only means that they will not kneel, but they will die avenging him. This is the vow they have sworn. "It begins" with killing the Usurper's Dog and if they're not stopped the forsworn Jaime Lanister and the Usurper himself are next on the list. But to Ned "Now it ends", because the war is over and too many have already died. And so they fight, and so the three Ronin die.

[Black Crow]

Funny how nobody has made this connection before. Lyanna disappeared about 10 leagues from Harrenhal, and what's right next to Harrenhal? The God's Eye and the Isle of Faces.

The Faithful get excited about it all the time and reckon it means that Rhaegar and Lyanna were lawfully wed in front of a heart tree on the Isle of Faces

[Black Crow]

And with that its time to close the book on this one and open Heresy 152 - see you over there.