Howland found Ashara where the castle gardeners had tried their best to tame the gods.
Starfall's godswood had its paths raked smooth, the shrubs trimmed, and the little pools edged in pale stone. Jasmine climbed one wall in neat obedience. Lemon trees stood in ordered rows. Even the shadows seemed arranged. It was beautiful in the southern way, deliberate and costly, but it still felt wrong to Howland Reed. Nature was untamed freedom, and a place of the gods should represent that.
Yet for all its other faults, this godswood still had a weirwood heart tree.
Its bark was bone-white in the dusk, its leaves dark red and whispering. The face carved in its trunk was narrower than the old faces of the North, almost delicate, but sorrow had settled into it all the same. The mouth drooped faintly. The eyes looked downward as if the tree had spent centuries studying grief and found no end to it.
Ashara stood beneath it with baby Jon in a cloth hammock slung between two low branches. She rocked the hammock with one hand and watched her son's face as if it were the only thing in the world keeping her tethered to her body. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she seemed not to notice.
Howland stopped a few paces away and let the silence sit for a moment.
"I was worried."
Ashara said nothing, but baby Jon made a tiny sound in his sleep.
"I am here for you," he continued. "For both of you."
Ashara let out a hollow laugh, forcing courtesy. "You are a curious man to hear that from."
"I officiated your vows," Howland said. His voice came out blunt, because it always did when he meant something. "That makes them my duty too."
That brought her eyes to him at last, red-rimmed and exhausted. Beautiful in a way that made him ache for Ned as much as for her.
"I do not know what worth those vows hold anymore," she said.
"Vows of the heart have the greatest worth of all," Howland answered.
She looked back down at the sleeping child. The hammock swayed gently.
"Ned meant those vows," Howland continued. "And he means what he said today. He wants to take you north. He wants to do right by Jon."
Ashara's fingers tightened on the hammock rope. "How?"
"He can give you a place," Lord Reed clarified. "A holdfast near Winterfell. Maybe even Winter Town itself. He has land and empty halls enough. Jon would be close to his father. You would not be hidden."
Ashara was quiet for a long while. The red leaves overhead moved in a breeze Howland did not feel at ground level.
At last she said, "Do you know what this tree is."
Howland looked up at it. "Not to boast, but you would struggle to find a man more familiar with heart trees than I."
Her mouth twitched faintly. "It is the only weirwood left south of the Red Mountains. Or so my maester told me. The Andal kings and the faith militant cut the others down long ago. Most of the south thinks the trees are passageways to the seven hells."
She laid a hand against the white trunk beside her shoulder.
"I never did," she said. "There is something… gentle in them. Sad, perhaps. But soothing." Her gaze drifted up into the carved face. "When I was a girl, I would come here to sit beneath this tree and imagine what the North is like. Summer snows. Towering trees in endless forests. Enormous elk and moose and bears. I thought I might make a good lady there."
The words were simple, but Howland heard the life that had once been wrapped inside them. The one that had died before it was properly born.
"I thought so too," he said.
Ashara's hand stayed on the bark. "And now I do not know what I am meant to be."
Howland wished, not for the first time, that he knew how to talk with women. All he could speak was of crannog practicality.
"You are his mother," he said, glancing at the hammock. "If nothing else, be strong for him."
Howland thought of Lyanna on the Isle of Faces, sharing her green dreams. She had told him of a black-haired boy in Winterfell, a bastard raised under Catelyn Tully's cold gaze. A solemn child, brave and lonely and hungry for a place in the world. Wishing, more than anything else, for a mother's love.
He looked at baby Jon now, at the little long face and the violet eyes shut in sleep.
"Your son will do great things," Howland said.
Ashara turned toward him slowly. "How can you know that."
He hesitated. Lyanna's visions were not his to share.
"I know it," he said simply. "Some children are born with the world already turning toward them. He is one."
Ashara searched Howland's face for the truth. Whatever she found there seemed to steady her. At last she bent and placed two fingers lightly on Jon's little chest, feeling it rise and fall.
"Then I will be there for him," she whispered. "If I cannot be anything else, I will be that."
Howland inclined his head. It was not joy or healing. But it was a vow, and vows were sometimes enough to keep someone going.
He left her there beneath the lone Dornish weirwood, red leaves stirring over mother and child, and told himself that some hurts could be lived with if they were given time to scar.
——————————————————
As the stars rose outside the guest chamber of the Palestone Sword, Howland struggled to sleep.
He lay on a bed too soft for comfort, staring at a ceiling crossed by pale beams, while the castle slept around him. Sea wind sighed against the stone. Somewhere below, guards changed watch. The Torrentine murmured in its endless hurry to the sea.
And beneath all of it, just at the edge of hearing, was a hum.
It was not sound exactly. Not like voices or footsteps. It was closer to the feeling he had known on the Isle of Faces when the air thickened around Grandmother, when the trees seemed to breathe in the same rhythm as his own chest.
Howland Reed swung his legs over the side of the bed and went to the narrow window.
Below, Starfall slumbered in silence. The courtyard was still. The godswood lay quiet, its lone weirwood a pale smear among darker branches. Beyond the walls, the sea glittered black and silver without a ship in sight.
Howland wondered if it had been a night like this one when the falling star gave the castle its name. If some ancient man had watched fire tear the heavens open and deliver a celestial blade.
The hum rose in volume.
He rested one hand on the sill, listening harder. He could find nothing out of place. Yet the hairs at the back of his neck rose all the same.
Then came another sound. Footsteps, growing closer from outside his door.
Howland turned at once.
The floorboards were cold under his bare feet. He took up the little frog spear he kept beside the bed more from habit than expectation and opened the door.
Ashara Dayne was halfway up the stair beyond, climbing toward the upper levels of the tower.
She wore only a pale shift. Her dark hair hung loose down her back. She moved neither hurriedly nor slowly, but with the steady, dreamlike certainty of someone walking in her sleep.
"Ashara," Howland called to her gently.
She did not answer.
He followed, the hum growing stronger as he climbed. Not around him now. Ahead.
"Ashara," he said again, louder this time.
She reached the next landing and turned her head just enough that he saw her profile, moonlight and candleglow thinning her face into something almost unreal.
She said something then. A few words, soft and blurred by the spiral of the stair.
Howland could not make them out. He frowned and climbed faster.
At the top of the Palestone Sword, the stairs opened into a round chamber with open arches and a narrow balcony beyond. Starlight poured in from every side. The wind was stronger here, tasting of salt and old stone.
Ashara crossed the room without hesitation.
"Hold the door," she ordered. Her voice was loud and clear this time.
Howland instinctively responded, catching the handle as the door swung back.
Then Ashara turned, and he felt the thrum of magic crash over him like a wave.
Her eyes were wrong, missing the laughing purple so unique to her. Instead they were rolled back so that the whites showed, with only a trembling line of color half-hidden beneath the upper lids. Her face was empty in a way no living face ought to be.
Howland had seen that look before. In skinchangers, when a body was left behind like an untended boat while the mind went walking elsewhere.
"Ashara," Howland screamed her name out in a panic, desperate to wake her.
Understanding came too late. Her soul was not in command. Something was acting through her or upon her, as coldly as a hand on a cyvasse piece.
Howland dropped the spear and ran for her with both hands outstretched. He lunged, trying to pull her back into the safety of his arms.
But Ashara continued onto the balcony, still moving with that terrible calm. The hem of her shift snapped in the wind.
For one heartbeat he thought he had her. There was nowhere left to go beyond his reach.
She walked backward into empty air.
No leap. No scream. No dramatic fling of arms. Just a step where no floor remained.
Howland caught only cloth. It slipped through his fingers with a tearing sound as he hit the rail hard enough to bruise bone.
He looked down to see calm water far below, with a pale shape falling through starlight in serenity. Ashara drew closer to her reflection, accelerating until she could move no faster. She hit the water with a great splash, sending waves crashing into the tower, the shoreline, and the distant sea.
Howland stayed bent over the rail, breath sawing in his throat, his hands clutching torn fabric while the hum of magic faded as quickly as it had come.
Slowly the ripples faded until there was nothing left, and the surface was still once more.