"Oh." She looks down, lips thinning. More war. "Yes, I should have thought of that... you did arrive right from the battlefield." She rubs at a stain on the table, though it is far too old to be easily scratched away. "I'm sorry. It must be hard to be have been forcibly ripped away from the side of your clan's patriarch in the middle of a war."

He had said the Starks are his family but he doesn't carry their name. Unless they do family names differently in his lands, which is of course possible, what would that make him? A cousin who is a Stark on his mother's side, a half-brother to the Stark clan head? Either way, she figures it must pain him.