The Tower of Joy

Seven men, three of the finest knights in the world, ten graves, and the one secret the whole story turns on.

Why it came to this

The war was already won when the last fight of it was fought. The Trident had gone against the loyalists, KingÔÇÖs Landing had fallen, and the Targaryen cause had collapsed everywhere it mattered. There was nothing left to fight for ÔÇö except that Eddard Stark still did not know where his sister was, and three of the seven Kingsguard were not at any of the places where the war had actually been decided.

That second fact is the strange one, and it is the key to everything. When a dynasty falls, its sworn guard is supposed to be at its centre ÔÇö protecting the king, or the queen, or the heir. But three of the Kingsguard, and not the least of them, were not at the Trident with Rhaegar, and were not in the capital, and were not with the queen and the surviving royal children who had been sent to safety at Dragonstone. They were in the Red Mountains of Dorne, at an out-of-the-way tower, guarding something that in the calculation of the finest knights in the realm mattered more than the last Targaryen king or the last Targaryen heir.

Ned Stark had ridden south from the Trident looking for Lyanna, the sister whose taking by Rhaegar had lit the whole war. What he found, at the tower where the trail ended, were three men in the white cloaks of the Kingsguard, standing in the road, who had no intention of standing aside. He came with six companions, all of them northmen or riverlanders who had come the whole war with him. It was seven against three, and the three were the ones everybody there expected to win.

The men

The three Kingsguard were not an ordinary garrison. Ser Gerold Hightower, the Lord Commander, called the White Bull, was the senior knight of the order and had held the white cloak since before the war. Ser Oswell Whent was a hard and capable man of a riverlands house. And Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, who carried the pale greatsword Dawn forged from the heart of a fallen star, was by common and near-universal agreement the finest knight in the Seven Kingdoms ÔÇö the man other great swordsmen measured themselves against and admitted they fell short of. Even Jaime Lannister, who is not generous about other menÔÇÖs skill, regarded Arthur Dayne as the best he ever saw.

Against them Ned Stark brought six: among them Howland Reed, the small crannogman lord of the Neck, and a handful of northern and riverland companions whose names are remembered because of who did not come back rather than for anything they did before. On paper it was a mismatch in the northmenÔÇÖs favour by numbers and in the KingsguardÔÇÖs favour by everything else, and everyone present understood which of those mattered more.

Why the three of them were there is the whole point of the encounter and it is answered only obliquely in the surviving accounts. They were guarding the tower. They had chosen to be there rather than anywhere else in a collapsing realm, and Kingsguard do not choose freely ÔÇö they go where the kingÔÇÖs blood is. That is the shape of the secret, laid out in the open by the mere fact of who was standing guard and where.

How it was fought

There is no reliable blow-by-blow account of the fight at the tower of joy, and there cannot be, because the story of it comes down through exactly two people and one of them never spoke of it and the other kept a secret. Most of what is known is known through Ned StarkÔÇÖs memory, returned to years later in fragments, and through a dream ÔÇö which is to say the most important small battle in the whole story is also the one the story is least willing to describe plainly.

What is certain is the arithmetic of the outcome. Ten men fought and only two walked away from that tower. The three Kingsguard were among the eight who did not ÔÇö the Sword of the Morning among them, which by itself tells you how hard the fight was, because Arthur Dayne did not fall to seven ordinary swords cheaply ÔÇö and so were four of NedÔÇÖs six companions. When it was over, two men were left standing on the northern side: Eddard Stark and Howland Reed.

That the crannogman came away and the greater warriors did not is itself a quiet piece of information the story plants and does not explain, and readers have spent a long time reading meaning into it. The show stages the fight as a set-piece with swords and a twist about how Ned survived it, and it is deliberately not the same as the version in NedÔÇÖs memory in the books; the honest thing to say is that the exact choreography is unknown and probably meant to be. The frequently repeated line ÔÇö that had it been a fair fight, or a chivalrous one, the outcome would have gone the other way ÔÇö comes from Ned himself, and it is as close to an admission of how the northmen won as the story ever gives.

What the fight was for was inside the tower, and Ned climbed to it when the fighting was done. What he found there is the hinge of the entire saga, and it belongs, more than anything else in this whole collection, in the fold below ÔÇö because it is the one secret the books have spent their entire length not saying out loud, and putting it in the open text here would do to a reader exactly what the story has worked hardest to avoid.

What it cost

It cost the lives of three of the seven Kingsguard, including the man widely held to be the best knight who ever lived, and four of Ned StarkÔÇÖs companions. Ten men fought at a nameless tower in the mountains for a war that was already over, and eight of them are in the ground there. Ned took his companionsÔÇÖ bones home and raised a cairn from the stones of the tower, which he then pulled down; the site is a grave and a ruin and nothing else.

It cost Ned Stark something less countable, which the rest of his life is spent paying. He came away from that tower carrying a promise and a secret, and both of them shaped every important decision he made for the following fifteen years ÔÇö his marriage, his reputation, the one stain on his honour that everyone believed they understood and nobody did. The tower of joy is the reason Ned Stark is the man he is in the main story, and the reason he is so badly misread by everyone around him, including the people who love him.

In the ledger of the war it cost almost nothing and changed nothing about who held the throne. In the ledger of the whole story it may be the most consequential ten minutes anyone spends, and its cost is still being paid at the very end.

What it changed

Militarily, nothing. The war was won before the swords came out. This is the rare battle whose entire importance is informational ÔÇö it is not about ground or armies or a throne, it is about what one man learned at the top of a tower and what he did with it for the rest of his life.

It changed Eddard Stark completely and invisibly. He went up to the war a straightforward man and came down from that tower carrying the one thing he could never tell anyone, and he carried it so well that it cost him his reputation and, eventually, his head, because keeping the secret meant letting the whole realm believe a lie about him that he would not correct. Everything tragic about Ned StarkÔÇÖs story runs back to a promise made in that tower.

And it set up the question the entire saga is, at bottom, built to answer. The three best knights in the realm chose to guard that tower rather than their king; a warÔÇÖs worth of consequence follows from why. The story has been unfolding the answer, slowly and by inches, ever since, and the tower of joy is where it is buried.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning, died at the tower, killed in the fight ÔÇö by Ned StarkÔÇÖs account not in a way that reflected well on how the numbers fell. Ned carried the great sword Dawn back to Starfall and returned it to House Dayne, to ArthurÔÇÖs kin, personally; it was the act of a man honouring an enemy he had killed and had no wish to have killed. Ser Gerold Hightower and Ser Oswell Whent died beside him, all three of them keeping a post they had chosen over everything else the falling dynasty could have asked of them.

Four of Ned StarkÔÇÖs six companions died there too ÔÇö among them Ethan Glover, Martyn Cassel, Theo Wull, Willam Dustin and Mark Ryswell in the northern reckonings, though the lists vary. Ned brought their bones north, and Lady DustinÔÇÖs bitterness toward House Stark in later years traces in part to a husband who rode south with Ned and came home as a memory.

Lyanna Stark was in the tower, and Ned found her there, in a bed of blood, dying. What she said to him before she died, and what he took from that room and raised as his own, is the secret the whole story keeps ÔÇö and it is kept here too, on purpose, because it is the one ending in this entire collection that a reader most deserves to reach on their own. Howland Reed, the only other survivor, never spoke of any of it, which is the most reliable thing anyone did with the truth of that day.

Eddard Stark walked down from the tower of joy and did not truly come back from it. He built his whole later life around what happened there, and it killed him in the end, in another southern city, keeping faith with a promise nobody else knew he had made.