"Although you are not mine by blood, you are just as much mine as your siblings," Ned reminds him with great affection. He might not have had a hand in his creation, but there was no other man who raised him and taught him as a father should. He lets out a quiet quake of a laugh. "Robert spent many years attempting to learn more about the mysterious woman who'd convinced me to forget my honor, as he put it."

She had, of course, been falsified. Wylla had been a real person - the wet nurse to Edric Dayne - but she had never been Ned's lover, nor had she been the one to give birth to Jon.

"There are far worse things to be, Jon, than loyal. If anything, we saw far too little of it back home." His expression, stern as he spoke, softens. "I'd always wondered whether you'd inherit your mother's Wolf's Blood as you grew."