I’m jumping into the middle of several posts on the idea that Ned is the father of Ashara’s stillborn child. On the contrary, I think the argument that Brandon’s the babydaddy rather than his kid brother is pretty ironclad, for several reasons.
The first is textual, and I’m cribbing it directly from Elio and Linda iirc: During one of Barristan’s POV chapters, he thinks back to Ashara and “the Stark who dishonored her.” Who this Stark is we don’t know, but we can contrast this characterization of the Mystery Stark with everything else he’s ever thought, said, and did regarding Ned, which has all been neutral to favorable to outright admiring. That wouldn’t be the case if it had been Ned rather than Brandon who’d had an out-of-betrothal affair with Ashara, a woman Barristan cared about deeply. (It’s possible Barristan is as wrong about this as I am, I guess, but that’s getting into Vizzini territory in terms of figuring out what we know and don’t know.)
The second is character-based. Brandon Stark was the Wild Wolf, and his prowess as a cocksman was the stuff of legend. Ned was the Quiet Wolf, and he’d have played the wall (in the parlance of our times) at the Harrenhal tourney the whole time had he not been kind of forced to dance with Ashara. Ned seems like the type to nurse his love for her in secret, not act on it. Brandon’s just the opposite.
The third is thematic, me and Stefan’s bread and butter. The reason R+L=J is interesting where Ned is concerned is that he spends his entire adult life under the cloud of dishonor created by his infidelity to Catelyn. It makes his life tougher and makes Jon’s life miserable. Of course it turns out that Jon isn’t his son at all, which means Ned willingly took a hit to his honor that he didn’t deserve to take in order to keep his promise to his sister and protect his nephew. (He does something similar at King’s Landing, issuing a confession he knows to be a lie in order to protect his daughters.) This is all pretty pointless if it turns out he was unfaithful and did tarnish his honor and did father a bastard, albeit a different bastard and one who didn’t survive childbirth.
There’s an easy answer to all of this, of course, which is “Ah, that’s just what Martin wants you to think!” But at a certain point you have to un-Vizzini yourself and go where the evidence actually leads.
I don’t think evaluation of sources for potential bias or inaccuracy is Vizzining quite – if you don’t do it, then you accept everything on face value even when there are inconsistencies, and that leads to a tangled muddle.
So let’s start with the text:
“But Ashara’s daughter had been stillborn, and his fair lady had thrown herself from a tower soon after, mad with grief for the child she had lost, and perhaps for the man who had dishonored her at Harrenhal as well. She died never knowing that Ser Barristan had loved her. How could she? He was a knight of the Kingsguard, sworn to celibacy. No good could have come from telling her his feelings. No good came from silence either. If I had unhorsed Rhaegar and crowned Ashara queen of love and beauty, might she have looked to me instead of Stark?”
There’s a lot of internal tension here: the “man who dishonored her” vs. “might she have looked to me instead of Stark?” One suggests a largely unwelcome encounter with a cad, the other a genuine romance. There’s also the tension between Ser Barristan’s desire to confess his love versus his commitment to his oath.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s also a careful ambiguity here that points to how Ser Barristan is something of an unreliable narrator on this point. Ser Barristan knows the names of both Ned Stark and Brandon Stark, but chooses not to use them even in the safety of his own mind. Which raises the question: does Ser Barristan know which Stark it was? Because all of these assumptions about Ned as Quiet and Brandon as Wild depends on the assumption that Ser Barristan had definite knowledge of who was involved and what was the circumstances of their involvement. I would argue that the lack of a definite name suggests that he didn’t – after all, Ser Barristan was busy both taking part in the tourney and guarding the king and didn’t have the time to watch over Ashara’s tent every night.
Next, let’s talk about character. Brandon is indeed a Wild Wolf, but we also know that he pushed his brother to dance with Ashara: “The crannogman saw a maid with laughing purple eyes dance with a white sword, a red snake, and the lord of griffins, and lastly with the quiet wolf…but only after the wild wolf spoke to her on behalf of a brother too shy to leave his bench.” In other words, Brandon encouraged his brother to act on his emotions, to literally save the last dance for him. Is it in his character to then sleep with the woman openly enough that it becomes known, right after he’s pushed his brother together with her? That’s not the actions of a cocksman, that’s the actions of an emotional sadist.
Likewise, while Ned is quiet, there are swiftly-moving waters underneath the ice. Hence his strong reaction when Catelyn mentions the name. If all Ashara was to him was an embarrassment and one of his brother’s messes, why get so emotional when her name is brought up?
Third, let’s talk about thematics. I would argue that, if Ned and Ashara were lovers, that in no way did he tarnish his honor: as Harwin says in Arya VIII of ASOS:
That is a big part of why I take this position: the Daynes have absolutely zero reason to give a shit about Brandon Stark – a betrothed man who was never going to take care of Ashara when she got pregnant, a man they likely never met given the timeline of his capture vis-a-vis the Tourney of Harrenhal.
But Ned’s story is undeniably tragic – star-crossed lovers divided by civil war; True Love vs. Family, Duty, Honor; untimely death caused by miscommunication, etc. So you have a sense of why the Daynes would care, and why Ned would freak out in AGOT when he hears Ashara’s name – remember, she doesn’t threaten R+L=J. If anything, Ashara’s a good smokescreen to distract people from the truth. But Ned gets uncharacteristically emotional about it, I think because it hits on a different sore spot.
And I agree, there’s almost no way that Ned wouldn’t have seen a parallel between his dead daughter and his “bastard son” coming into and out of the world so closely together.
“When Ned met this Dornish lady, his brother Brandon was still alive, and it was him betrothed to Lady Catelyn, so there’s no stain on your father’s honor. There’s nought like a tourney to make the blood run hot, so maybe some words were whispered in a tent of a night, who can say? Words or kisses, maybe more, but where’s the harm in that? Spring had come, or so they thought, and neither one of them was pledged.“
But one major part of Ned’s life is that he also had his life completely overturned by his brother’s death – hence his bitter complaining in AGOT that “Brandon would know what to do. He always did. It was all meant for Brandon. You, Winterfell, everything. He was born to be a King’s Hand and a father to queens. I never asked for this cup to pass to me.” Wouldn’t it fit perfectly along with that if one part of that resentment was that Ned couldn’t marry the woman he loved because Brandon went and got himself killed?
Finally, while we’re at it, Ned’s relationship with Ashara is known widely enough that not only the staff at Winterfell have heard of it but also Cersei has, as have had Allyria and Ned Dayne, Ashara’s kin.
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