Rickard Stark

Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North in the years before the tale, remembered for his four children and his southron ambitions.

The fuller tale

Before the tale has a single scene, it has Rickard Stark's fingerprints on it. Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North in the last years of Targaryen rule, he broke with eight thousand years of northern habit: where his forebears married crannogmen and Karstarks and kept the Neck between themselves and southern politics, Rickard reached below it. He betrothed his heir Brandon to Catelyn Tully of Riverrun, fostered his second son Ned in the Vale with Jon Arryn, and promised his daughter Lyanna to Robert Baratheon of Storm's End — a web of southern alliances the like of which no Stark had ever spun.

The old northern houses muttered about it. 'Southron ambitions,' Lady Dustin calls it years later, and hints that a maester's counsel — not a Stark's own instinct — sat behind the strategy. Whatever Rickard intended, the effect was to bind the great houses of half the realm to Winterfell by blood and word. It is one of the story's quieter ironies that a plan meant to secure the Stark future instead armed the rebellion that would need securing: when the crown wronged his family, the wronged included Riverrun, the Eyrie and Storm's End.

Of the man himself the tale keeps only edges — a stern, proud lord in the northern mold, remembered by his surviving children with the careful brevity people use for wounds. His statue sits in the crypts below Winterfell among the Kings of Winter, and everything the story becomes — the rebellion, the friendship of Ned and Robert, Catelyn in the North — flows downhill from choices he made in rooms the tale never shows us.

The page and the screen

Neither telling ever puts Rickard on stage; he exists in both as testimony. The difference is texture. The show gives him a handful of lines of dialogue — Ned's clipped account of what the Mad King did — and moves on. The books keep circling back: Jaime, who stood in the throne room that day as a Kingsguard of sixteen, carries the memory like a stone; Lady Barbrey Dustin serves up the revisionist reading of his marriage politics in A Dance with Dragons; and the crypt statues give him a fixed address in Bran's chapters. Book readers can assemble a portrait of Rickard's ambitions that show viewers are never offered.

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

Before the tale: Died before the story

When Brandon Stark rode to King's Landing shouting for Rhaegar's head, Aerys arrested him — and summoned his father to answer for it. Rickard came south demanding trial by combat, an old right no king could decently refuse. Aerys granted it, and named fire as the crown's champion. They hung the Lord of Winterfell from the rafters of his own king's throne room in his full armor and cooked him in it, while pyromancers tended the flame and the court watched.

The books add the detail that makes it unbearable: Brandon was made to watch, a Tyroshi strangling device around his neck and his sword laid just out of reach, so that the son choked himself to death straining to save the father. The show, wisely, only ever describes it — even that story flinches from staging it. Every sword raised in Robert's Rebellion answers this one afternoon, and 'burn' is not a word the Stark children ever use lightly afterward.