Ice

Four hundred years of Stark justice in a single dark, rippled blade.

The blade itself

Ice is a greatsword of the old kind, meant for two hands and for standing work rather than for the press of a battle line. Set on its point it stands taller than the man who carries it. The blade is broad ÔÇö wider across than a big manÔÇÖs palm ÔÇö and it tapers so gradually that the eye reads it as a long slab of darkness rather than a triangle. The steel is smoke-dark, nearer black than grey, and rippled all along its length with faint waves that seem to lie under the surface rather than on it, the way a current shows through clear water. Tilt it and the ripples move. In torchlight they run red at the edges. In the grey daylight of a Winterfell morning they go the colour of wet slate and are almost invisible, which is somehow worse.

For its size it is a light thing. Ordinary steel cut to those dimensions would be a bar of iron with a handle, exhausting to hold level for the length of a sentencing; Ice can be raised and held steady by a man of ordinary strength, and comes down with an authority that has nothing to do with the arm behind it. The grip is bound in soft old leather, worn dark and shiny in the places where generations of the same family have put their hands. The crossguard is plain. There is no jewel, no gold, no boasting anywhere on it ÔÇö the Starks apparently decided a long time ago that the sword was statement enough. It takes no oil to keep the edge and it has never been to a grindstone; nothing a smith could do would improve it. Drawn slowly it makes a low sound like a held breath.

That is the part of Valyrian steel that can be described. The rest cannot, because the making of it is gone. It was forged in the Freehold with dragonfire and with spells whose words died with the men who spoke them, and the Doom took both. No smith living can make a new blade. The best of them, in Qohor, can reheat an old one and beat it into a different shape ÔÇö that is the whole of the surviving art, and even that is a closely held secret and hideously expensive. So every Valyrian sword in the world is a fixed quantity, subtracted from and never added to. Men who own one tend to think of it as the family rather than as a weapon, and men who do not own one tend to think about how they might.

The older Ice

The Starks say there was an Ice before this Ice. The name is far older than the blade that carries it now ÔÇö the Kings in the North are supposed to have had a sword of that name back in the days when they still called themselves kings, and the histories are not agreed on what it was made of or where it went. Some accounts make it Valyrian too. Others suggest a much plainer weapon that simply held the name until something better came along. The one thing everyone agrees on is that Ice is a title as much as an object, and that the North has always had one.

The greatsword that stands in Winterfell now is about four hundred years old, which makes it young by the standards of this list and ancient by any other. Where the Starks got it is not recorded in any way that satisfies. A house that far north, that far from the free cities and that famously uninterested in trade did not simply buy it off a table in Braavos, and yet no Stark boast survives about taking it from anyone. The gap in the record is large enough to have swallowed a story.

In the hands of House Stark

Ice was not a battle sword. Nobody carried it into a charge; a blade that size is a poor thing on a horse and a liability in a shield wall. It was carried out for beheadings, because the Starks kept the old way: the man who passes the sentence swings the sword, and he does it himself, in front of everyone, with the blade the family has used for the same purpose for centuries. Everything the North thinks about justice is contained in that ritual. The lord does not get to order a killing and then look away from it. If he cannot stand to do it, the argument runs, perhaps it should not be done.

So the sword lived a strange, ceremonial life. It hung in the great hall or lay in its case; it came out for oaths, for judgements, and for the occasional visit from a king. Eddard Stark cleaned it himself afterwards, with an oilcloth, though the steel needs no cleaning and takes no rust ÔÇö a habit inherited rather than reasoned, which is a fair description of most of what the Starks do. His sons watched him do it. That was the point.

Carried south

When Eddard Stark rode south to serve as Hand of the King he took Ice with him, and that decision looks stranger the longer one considers it. The sword belongs in Winterfell. It is the instrument of a northern custom that means nothing at all in a southern court where headsmen are hired and lords sign warrants. Taking it to KingÔÇÖs Landing was either a man refusing to leave his office behind him or a man who did not intend to be away long. Both readings are available and neither is comfortable.

In the capital the greatsword was simply a curiosity ÔÇö an antique from a cold place, admired by knights who priced it and by a queen who noticed it. Valyrian steel is not anonymous. Every court in Westeros keeps a rough ledger of who has a blade and who does not, and a house with a sword and no army is regarded very differently from a house with a sword and thirty thousand men. Ice went south into a room full of people who had been counting.

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

After Eddard Stark's execution, Tywin Lannister had Ice melted down and reforged into two smaller swords ÔÇö a deliberate, contemptuous unmaking of a rival house's identity. That the ancestral blade of the Starks was destroyed to make party favours is one of the cruellest things done in a story with a great deal of competition.

The work was done by a smith brought out of Volantis, one of the few men alive with any part of the old craft, and even he could only reheat and rework what already existed. Some of the steel was lost in the process; there was enough for two longswords and not a scrap more. Four hundred years of a familyÔÇÖs justice came out of the fire as a wedding present and a keepsake.