A father's guilt was cold comfort regardless of its measure of truth; Robb was a Stark, he understood well enough his father's plain and honest brand of honor, but he knew of no way to explain that plainness and honor had had very little to do with any of it, in the end. That the lives of everyone left behind after he'd died had become more tangled and twisted up than any of them ever might have imagined back when they'd been tucked safely away in their cold and stolid stronghold so far from the rest of the world.

"You couldn't have known," was all he said now, the best he could reasonably do. "None of us could have known what was to come."