Dark Wings, Dark Words

[Catelyn is making a prayer wheel. Talisa approaches her]

Talisa Maegyr: May I help you, Lady Stark?

Catelyn Stark: No.

Talisa Maegyr: I'm sorry, I shouldn't have...

Catelyn Stark: You can't help because a mother makes one for her children to protect them. Only a mother can make them.

Talisa Maegyr: You've made them before?

Catelyn Stark: Twice.

Talisa Maegyr: Did they work?

Catelyn Stark: After a fashion. I prayed for my son Bran to survive his fall. Many years before that, one of the boys came down with the pox. Maester Luwin said if he made it through the night, he'd live. But it would be a very long night. So I sat with him all through the darkness, listened to his ragged little breaths, his coughing, his whimpering.

Talisa Maegyr: Which boy?

Catelyn Stark: Jon Snow. When my husband brought that baby home from the war, I couldn't bear to look at him, didn't want to see those brown stranger's eyes staring at me. So I prayed to the gods "Take him away, make him die". He got the pox and I knew I was the worst woman who ever lived. A murderer. I'd condemned this poor, innocent child to a horrible death all because I was jealous of his mother, a woman he didn't even know! So I prayed to all Seven Gods "Let the boy live. Let him live and I'll love him. I'll be a mother to him. I'll beg my husband to give him a true name, to call him Stark and be done with it, to make him one of us".

Talisa Maegyr: And he lived?

Catelyn Stark: And he lived. And I couldn't keep my promise. And everything that's happened since then, all this horror that's come to my family... it's all because I couldn't love a motherless child.