all men must die / calla's game of thrones

He's going to die.

He tries to take as many people as he can down with him. It's a strangely self-destructive decision, and he doesn't really have anything against the princess besides briefly wanting her dead.

The throne burns for a short while, King's Landing flutters around a betrayal and an assassination attempt, but Eden is soon forgotten just as quickly as he was learned. He flees north and isn't followed. The Red Council firmly places themselves under the assumption that he's planning to repent and heading for the Night's Watch and will then die at the Wall, or will, at least, die in the snow before he reaches it.

They're right in the fact he doesn't reach the Wall. But they're wrong about the whole dying thing. He follows the Kingsroad as much as he can, travels along the Green Fork and eventually makes it to Greywater Watch. It's the bog, more than anything else, that makes him stop. But Lord Reed has no use for an exiled sell sword and the season threatens to change early that year.

There is one more mention of Eden in Greywater before all records of him abruptly stop. One of the swampmen says that there was a blacksmith in the area at the time, travelling with a shipment that came from further North, and instead of staying in the Neck or turning back to the South, Eden decided to travel with the blacksmith, returning with him to one of the settlements near Barrowton.

Life in the Vale isn't so bad. Curt swears fealty to Lord Arryn, marries his third youngest daughter, and is given a sizeable wing of the Eyrie once his children were born. They are twins, nearly identical, and so far down the line of succession that they will never see the throne.

He's glad for that.

If Curt was younger, without these children or this liability, or if he was more like his foolhardy father and his foolish brothers, he might've thought of retaking Bear Island. He might've thought about restoring House Mormont and raising his children in the halls that he himself was raised in. It might've been something other than a fanciful, treasonous idea.

But one man cannot change so much.

Lord Arryn likes to demand the songs of Mormont and of Arryn. He likes to look at Curt while he does it. The bard sings of Eyrie's glory, of the beauty of the Vale and the victories of the Lord, but sometimes he does it in a way that isn't particularly victorious. Curt's children sit primly in their grandfather's hall and clap when they hear the decades of blood and war between their ancestors. One day, close to the twins' birthday, Kody is given the choice of story. He asks the bard to sing about the Bloody Gate, and Lord Arryn grins so wide that it nearly splits his face.

Curt almost storms the sky cells before he turns back and joins his wife in the atrium. He makes it to the hall the next time, then the stairs, then the first guard posting. But never further.

The bard falls, and Lord Arryn calls for another. Kody gets to pick the song again and asks for the one between the bird and the bear.