Chapter 147: The Wolf That Hunts
The morning sun had barely risen above the walls of King's Landing when Joffrey Baratheon found himself flat on his back in the training yard.
Again.
His practice sword landed several feet away.
Dust clung to his golden hair and the back of his crimson tunic. The prince stared upward, breathing hard, his face twisted between humiliation and rage.
Artos stood over him with a wooden sword resting against one shoulder.
"Get up."
Joffrey's eyes narrowed. "You struck me when I wasn't ready. You are cheating."
"A man trying to kill you won't ask if you're ready.
"You're supposed to be teaching me."
"And I am. I am teaching to you how to survive. If I spar according to your speed and reactions. I would be putting a performance and not a spar you fool."
Jofferey sneered at that but still...
Joffrey climbed to his feet and snatched up his sword. A dozen men stood around the yard—Winterguards, royal guards and several servants who had been ordered to remain nearby. None of them dared laugh.
Artos almost wished they would.
He had trained Arya in this same yard, and the girl had been better than this. She was smaller, younger and less disciplined, but she listened when the lesson interested her. More importantly, she understood that losing was part of learning.
Joffrey treated every failure as an insult.
"Now Again," Artos said.
The prince rushed him.
There was no patience in the attack. No thought. Joffrey swung for Artos's face with enough force to break a nose.
Artos stepped aside and struck him behind the knee.
Joffrey stumbled but remained standing. He turned with a snarl and swung again, faster this time. Artos caught the blow, forced the prince's blade down and drove the flat of his practice sword into Joffrey's chest.
The boy fell backwards for the third time that morning.
Artos sighed.
This is a waste of time.
Not the training itself. Even a poor swordsman could improve with enough work. The problem was that Joffrey did not need a better sword arm. He needed to learn restraint, patience and the simple truth that the world would not always bend because he commanded it to.
Not everyone needs to be warrior, not everyone is upto it. It takes something natural inside the man. The guts and instincts.
Artos was not trying to make him a warrior.
He was trying to stop him from becoming another Mad King.
That would not be the work of days or months. It might take years, and Artos was not certain there were enough years in the world to make that happen.
"Get up," he said again sighing a lot.
Joffrey pushed himself onto one elbow. Hatred filled his green eyes, but fear lived beneath it.
Artos had placed that fear there.
Their last confrontation had broken something in the prince's certainty. Joffrey still spoke arrogantly and still tried to command him, but his body remembered being helpless. He had also watched the trials. He had seen Artos pass judgement without caring for wealth, blood or rank. Jofferey has experienced himself being slapped and threaten and Artos still doesn't giving a flying fuck.
The boy now understood that his title would not protect him here. His father is the one who saw this and supported this.
He tried to complain to his mother but Father didn't seem to listen.
That knowledge frightened him more than any sword.
"I am the prince," Joffrey said."You cannot keep striking me."
"I just did, Did my hand fall off" Artos said in a dramatic manner to mock him.
"My mother will hear of this."
"Stand up." Artos already sick of this banter for the hundredth of time.
Robert really fucked me over with this one.
Joffrey slowly rose. His fingers tightened around the practice sword.
Joffrey stared at him.
"You need men to believe that serving you is better than killing you. So yeah you don't need to be the warrior prince but learn enough you won't fear battle that is to come, Fool Prince."
Something uncertain moved across Joffrey's face.
Artos pointed toward the far end of the yard. He needs to break him while he still has the time. He needs to break his whole personality nor it is possible but just enough.
One of the servants was gathering scattered shields from the ground, struggling to carry too many at once.
"Boy, Go help him."
Joffrey blinked. "What?"
"You heard me."
"I am not carrying shields like a mere servant."said arrogantly Jofferey.
"Then you can run around this yard until midday." Artos said scoffing.
The prince looked toward the royal guards, expecting one of them to intervene. They looked away. Artos had already made it clear that anyone interfering with the boy's lessons would join him in them.
Joffrey's face reddened.
"You cannot order me to do that."
Artos smirks "Oh But I can. Your father ordered you into my care."
"My mother—"
"Isn't here."Artos already sick of this now.
For one dangerous moment, Joffrey looked ready to attack him again.
Then his eyes fell to Artos's sword.
The anger remained, but the courage behind it died.
Joffrey threw his own sword into the dirt and marched toward the servant.
Artos watched him go.
Ethan stood nearby, arms folded.
"Progress, My Lord?" he asked.
"No."
"His footwork looked better."
"I'm not talking about his footwork. I don't need his skills to grow but him. "
Joffrey seized several shields from the startled servant and carried them toward the armoury, holding them as though each one had personally offended him.
Artos rubbed at his brow.
Still, he had picked up the shields.
It was little more than a single step along a road a thousand leagues long, but it was a step.
For now, that would have to be enough.
Kingsroad.
The Kingsroad had become mud after two days of rain.
By evening, the Northern party had made camp beside a shallow stream. Fires spread between the trees while men raised tents, watered horses and cursed the southern weather.
Bjorn sat near one of the smaller fires, staring into the flames.
He had been quiet for most of the day. He had barely spoken during supper, and when Robb tried to draw him into an argument over whose horse would last longer in the North, Bjorn had answered with little more than a grunt.
Loras finally lowered the whetstone he had been running across his blade.
"You've looked ready to murder that fire for the past three nights."
Bjorn glanced at him.
"Are you well?" Loras asked. "Or has becoming a lord already made you miserable?"
"That usually takes a year," Robb said. "My experience says the petitions will do it. But that doesn't seem possible in this situation."
Bjorn gave them a faint smile. "I'm well. I've only been thinking."
"That explains the gloominess, it must be tough using the mind after you haven't used in your whole life." Robb said.
Bjorn threw a small piece of wood at him. Robb caught it and tossed it into the flames.
"Thinking about what?" Loras asked.
"The future. House Startos." Bjorn looked back into the fire. "What Father said to me. You know I told you and.... "
Neither interrupted him.
"And now?" Robb asked.
Bjorn slowly nodded. " And I think I know."
Robb leaned forward curious . "What is it?"
Bjorn looked at them, and the uncertainty that had followed him since King's Landing was gone. In its place was the brightest smile either had seen from him in days.
"My father spent his life protecting his family," he said. "Everything he did, even the cruel things, came back to that. His brothers. His wife. His children. His Wards. House Stark."
Robb's smile faded into something more serious.
"I'm not like him in every way," Bjorn continued. "I don't have his mind for councils, and I don't want to spend my life sitting in a solar reading petitions. I'm a warrior. A hunter. Skagosi blood runs through me."
He rose.
Only one thing had ever felt natural to him—moving through cold forests with a weapon in his hand, stalking something dangerous before it could turn upon those behind him.
Only one future felt truly his.
Bjorn walked around the fire and stopped before Robb.
Then he knelt.
Robb's eyes widened.
"Bjorn?"
Loras slowly stood but said nothing.
"I swore my allegiance to Lord Eddard before the whole realm," Bjorn said. "But Eddard Stark will not rule forever."
Robb went still.
"One day you'll hold Winterfell. You'll carry the North, and every enemy that wants it will look to you." Bjorn raised his head. "So I'm asking this of you now—not as my cousin or the boy I grew beside, but as the heir to House Stark."
Robb opened his mouth, but no words came.
"My father was the sword that protected his pack," Bjorn continued. "I want my house to carry that duty after him. Not for one generation. For every generation that follows."
The camp continued around them. Men shouted beside the wagons. Horses stamped against the wet ground. Somewhere beyond the light, a wolf howled into the darkness.
Yet around that fire, there was only silence.
"We are wolves," Bjorn said. "But when danger comes, I don't want Winterfell to call its whole pack to war before knowing what waits in the dark. I want House Startos to go first."
Robb stared at him.
"I want us to be the hunters of the North. The wolf that runs ahead. The wolf that finds the enemy, brings warning and tears out its throat before the pack ever needs to move."
Bjorn drew his dagger.
Loras's hand twitched toward his sword before he understood. Bjorn turned the blade and cut it across his own palm.
Blood gathered along the line.
He closed his fist.
"Robb Stark, heir to Winterfell, I ask you to remember this when your time comes. Let House Startos serve as the hunters of House Stark. Let our sons guard your sons, as my father guarded yours. Let us hunt your enemies, wherever they hide and whatever names they carry."
Blood ran between his fingers and fell into the mud.
"That is the legacy I want. A wolf that protects the pack by hunting before danger reaches it."
Robb's throat tightened.
Bjorn was his cousin by blood, but that had never been enough to describe them. They had trained together, fought together, lied for each other and taken punishments meant for the other. They had grown beneath the same walls and eaten at the same table.
Now Bjorn knelt before him and offered not only his own sword, but the swords of children who had not yet been born.
Robb had watched his father accept such oaths.
He had always imagined he would know what to say when his own moment came.
He knew nothing.
"Pack above all," Bjorn said. "Those are our words. This is how I mean to fulfil them."
Robb stood slowly.
"You bloody fool," he whispered.
Bjorn frowned. "Is that a refusal?"
"No."
Robb stepped around the fire and grabbed Bjorn by the arm, pulling him to his feet.
"It means you could have told me without kneeling in the damn mud."
Bjorn looked at him for a moment. "Wouldn't have meant the same."
"No," Robb admitted. "It wouldn't."
He looked down at Bjorn's bleeding hand, then drew his own dagger.
Loras watched as Robb cut his palm.
Robb seized Bjorn's hand, pressing their blood together.
"I'm not Lord of Winterfell yet," he said. "I can't bind every Stark who comes after me."
"I know."
"But I can bind myself."
Robb tightened his grip.
"When my time comes, House Startos will hunt for Winterfell. Your enemies will be mine, as mine will be yours. If you run ahead of the pack, you will never run alone."
Bjorn's eyes burned, though he refused to look away.
Loras stepped closer and placed a hand over both of theirs.
"And someone will have to keep the pair of you alive," he said.
Robb laughed first.
Bjorn followed, quieter, his hand still locked with Robb's beneath Loras's.
Three young men stood together beside the fire—one who would inherit the North, one who had sworn to hunt for it, and one still searching for the purpose Artos had told him to find.
For that moment, none of them needed to know what waited farther along the road.
The pack had chosen its hunter.
---
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