Capítulo 7: True Lord of Winterfell
Robb placed some pillows on his bed and covered them with the blankets.
"It's not perfect but at first sight it will fool the servants and guards." he mutters as he picks up a backpack.
The boy walks to the window and opens it, he climbs to the window sill.
The rooftops of Winterfell were Robb's second home, when he was still very young he learned a very important lesson: people rarely look up. For Robb, who likes to have his time alone to design his inventions or read books, the rooftops are the perfect place. He not only gets to enjoy some time alone but he also finds a lot of inspiration, whether it's from the gray skies, the green or white landscapes depending on the season, or the many buildings as old as his family.
Another thing he likes about climbing is the feeling of freedom, as he runs across rooftops and jumps from one to another Robb feels like he is a bird.
For many, Winterfell is a labyrinth of gray stone made up of walls, towers, courtyards, and tunnels that stretch out in all directions, but for Robb Winterfell is his game ground, he knows each building like the back of his hand.
In the older parts of the castle the buildings were leaning and at different levels, so you never knew for sure which floor you were on. Maester Luwin had told him long ago that the structure had grown over the centuries like a monstrous stone tree, with thick, gnarled, twisted branches and roots deep in the earth.
When he was on the rooftops, Robb could see all of Winterfell at a glance. Up there, tens of meters above the ground, with Winterfell at his feet and the blue sky above, Robb felt more Lord of Winterfell than his father.
Ned Stark may be the ruler of this castle but he doesn't know his domain half as well as his son.
Robb loved to sit on top of a gargoyle and watch people go about their day-to-day life, watching servants going from one place to another, guards patrolling or training,...
Thus Robb learned the secrets of the castle. Robb knew more about the castle than anyone, he knew that the builders never bothered to level the ground which caused things like one to cross the covered bridge from the fourth floor of the bell tower and reach the second floor of the tower of the ravens. He also knew that it was possible to enter the inner wall through the south gate, climb three stories and circle all of Winterfell through a narrow tunnel in the stone, and then exit to ground level through the north gate.
Robb also discovered long-forgotten secrets of the castle that no Stark knew of for generations, such as the secret passageway that connects the crypts to the basement of the Great Keep. Or the secret vault in the First Keep, which served millennia ago as a secret treasury for the Stark dynasty. When Robb found it it was an empty room full of dust and cobwebs, but Robb found some treasures there: some coins of the ancient Kings of Winter dating back more than five thousand years! Inside there were also some trinkets that did not attract his attention.
Robb only told Jon about the secret room and both boys made it their secret hideout. They cleaned the room and filled it with furniture to make it more comfortable. The two boys go there to play or hang out. The Wolf's Den they called it.
His parents know about his climbing habit and more than once they scolded him for it, they tried to forbid him to climb but Robb didn't pay any attention to their orders. From a very young age Robb had a tendency to ignore orders, either from his father or his mother. Robb never liked being told what to do, he lisens to his father more times than not but not even Ned has complete authority over his son, Robb will ignore his orders if the orders seem foolish or stupid.
The first time Ned caught him climbing after forbidding him, he ordered him to go to the godswood to purify himself. He put several men on guard, to make sure Robb spent the night alone there reflecting on his disobedience. Robb spent the night coming up with a new invention instead of reflecting on his mistakes.
A few days later his father caught him climbing again and the punishment was repeated, which happened several times before Lord Stark gave up. His father called him to his solar and looked at him with the face of Lord Stark, not the father face. Robb didn't flinch from his father's cold stare and glared at him with his own version of Lord Stark face.
The two looked at each other for a while before Ned burst out laughing muttering something about `Wolfs blood`, since that day he was allowed to climb but his father told do it out of his mother's sight, he will not protect him from her anger. Robb shrugged, his mother never scared him, the only parent he has a certain healthy fear of is his father.
Robb pulled himself up a wall, moving from one stone to another, feeling for cracks between them with his fingers. He inhaled the air at the top, sweet and cool as a winter peach, and kept moving. His target was the broken tower.
The broken tower used to be a watchtower, the tallest in Winterfell, but a hundred years ago a lightning strike burned it down and the top third of the tower was left in ruins. Robb asked his father why no one repaired it and Ned shrugged saying that no Lord Stark found any use for the tower and that they weren't about to waste gold to rebuild a building that no one used.
Robb jumped to one of the gargoyles of the broken tower, there it was safer to jump from gargoyle to gargoyle than to use the wall of the tower to move because there were many stones half dislodged while the gargoyles were well attached to the structure of the tower and they could handle Robb's weight with ease. The boy jumped from gargoyle to gargoyle like a rabbit until he reached the side that was near the First Keep.
The First Keep is the first fortress that the Starks called home, it is a tall building in a round shape.
The distance between the tower and the First Keep is so small that Robb could touch the wall of the First Keep from the gargoyle he was on. Robb scaled the First Keep until he reached another building, which he jumped into. He moved from building to building, crossing the roofs of the guard room and the armory, and finally reached the wall of the Godswood. There was a branch of a huge tree lying on the wall, as if leaning on it.
Robb climbed onto the branch and crossed the tree to its other side, where he jumped onto another tree branch. The boy crossed the forest without touching the ground, moving from branch to branch until he reached the Heart tree.
Robb climbed down from the tree and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
"Winterfell is huge," the boy complained as he took off his backpack.
Robb took a drink of water to cool off and started working, with the moon and stars giving him light, the boy assembled all the parts of his invention and after an hour the Air Bubble was ready for the dive.
Robb looked at his invention with a satisfied smile, the pulley system that is anchored to several trees is ready and all that remains is to dive into the water.
"Over half a year of hard work," Robb looks proudly at his invention. The boy tried a dozen different models, first building them on a small scale to see if they worked. One of his favorite designs was the Air Armor, an armor-like suit that would allow him to breathe underwater, unfortunately the suit was too heavy for him and it relied on a tube to provide air.
So in the end he settled on the Air Bubble, which didn't depend on his physical strength to maneuver it but on a pulley system.
The Air Bubble is as tall as Robb, and weighs much more than the boy but thanks to the water and the pulleys Robb will have no problem maneuvering it during the adventure.
Robb ties a harness around his waist with a rope that is tied to a tree, the rope is two hundred meters long. Robb commissioned it from a craftsman and it took several weeks to be made. Pulling the rope is a much faster way to ascend than swimming, though Robb doubts it will do much good if something goes wrong more than a hundred meters underwater.
"Fortune favors the bold." Robb tells himself as he dives into the water.
***
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