As Lynn's words rang out, the very air in the hall seemed to catch fire.
"Raaah!"
Greatjon Umber was the first to respond.
He smashed his drinking horn onto the floor, splashing ale everywhere.
His face, flushed crimson with drink and fury, blazed with bloodthirsty fervor.
"Well said! That's how a man of the North should talk!"
"Turn their whole world upside down!"
"Kill every last one of those southern weaklings!"
"For the North!"
"To survive!"
The other vassals joined in, brandishing their weapons and venting their thirst for battle in the coarsest language they knew.
In an instant, the hall of the Main Keep transformed from a harvest council into a war council poised to march.
Watching his frenzied vassals, Ned Stark felt his own blood begin to boil.
He knew that, from this moment onward, the North had truly awakened.
Yet amid the feverish uproar, an incongruous voice, soft as a whisper, reached everyone's ears with perfect clarity.
"Everyone, please calm down."
The voice was quiet, yet it instantly quenched the seething atmosphere.
Every gaze swung toward the man seated in the corner, who had remained silent throughout.
The lord of the Dreadfort, Roose Bolton.
The story went back thousands of years, to the Age of Heroes.
Back then, the North had not been a united whole, but dozens of tribal kingdoms constantly at war with one another.
The two strongest powers among them had been House Stark's King of Winter and House Bolton's Red King.
They had been bitter rivals for supremacy over the North.
After countless years of war, House Stark had finally defeated and forcibly conquered House Bolton, making them kneel and swear allegiance.
The Boltons had been forced to submit, but that humiliation, and their ambition to seize the throne, had become deeply etched