Robb P O V
Hedwig saw them first.
I was on my back in the command tent an hour before dawn, the second day on the west bank of the Green Fork, with Grey Wind's weight across my shins and my eyes shut. I had not eaten. The water skin was on the floor by my hand where I could reach it, and I had rinsed my mouth twice already since midnight. I was sixty feet over the kingsroad on the far bank, riding his cold, quiet attention south along the river, and what he saw was a column of horse coming north toward the Twins at a walk. No torches. Strung out along the road for the better part of a mile.
His eyes did not hold color in the dark. They held edges, and anything that moved. Horsemen two abreast. Outriders on both flanks. A rear guard keeping its proper distance. Lances upright. No banners. At the head, a man on a big grey, sitting easy in the saddle.
Hedwig dropped lower. The man at the head looked up.
I thought it would have been too dark for him to see him, especially with no sound to hear. But he looked up anyway, and turned his head to follow the owl across the road, and I came back into my own body in the tent with my heart going hard. Whoever he was, his eyes were a good deal sharper than most men's.
Grey Wind lifted his head.
"Torvin."
The flap moved. "My lord."
"Wake Jory. Then Theon and Jon. There's a column of horse on the kingsroad, six hundred or so, three miles below the Twins and coming on with no banners." I sat up. "They're not Lannisters, but we'll still send a rider over the bridge to Lord Stevron, and tell him the gate is his to open, as he judges. And tell the pickets on the span not to loose at anything unless they loose first."
Torvin left. Grey Wind stood and stretched himself, and his head came up to my shoulder as I pulled on my boots.
———
Stevron opened his gate to them. They came over the bridge at first light, under the Water Tower and down onto the west bank, and I went out to the end of the span on foot. I did not want the first thing my mother's uncle saw of me to be me sitting on a mammoth.
The column halted on the road below the bridge, and the men with him looked as if they had ridden the saddle for days. Grey faces. Horses standing with their heads down and their flanks dark with sweat. Blue and white on some of the shields. A handful of bronze ones ringed with runes. Other arms I did not know. Not one falcon.
The man on the grey was already down, standing at his horse's head. Tall. Lean. His face had been weathered brown and then hollowed out by age, and there was grey in his hair and in the stubble on his jaw. His armor was plain and well kept. A black fish on the clasp of his cloak.
He looked at Grey Wind first. Most men did. He did not step back. He looked him over, and then he looked at me, boots to face, and his eyes stopped on the scar.
"You have your mother's eyes," Ser Brynden Tully said. "And your father's face. I'm told a wildling king gave you that."
"A Thenn, and a Magnar, not a king. His name is Styr. He knelt to me after, and his people with him. He holds his lands for House Stark now."
"A wildling who kneels." He did not smile. It was not a face that did it often. "That I'd like to see."
"His people hold the Stony Shore for me now, so you'll not see them this side of the Neck. The six standing in that field are the ones you'll want to see. They're taller than your horse."
His eyes went past me to the field and stayed there a moment. Then they came back.
"I'd heard a great deal of foolishness about you on the road, and more of it the closer I got to the riverlands. The first rumors were nobles wondering whether the young Stark would come south for his father. The rest, nephew, were about giants. A white owl that follows you like a hound. A wolf the size of a horse. Half a dozen other pieces of nonsense." His eyes went to Grey Wind again. "Though I'm beginning to wonder how much of it was foolishness."
"Some of it. Not all."
"Hm." He held out his hand, and I took it. It was hard and dry and it did not let go straight away. "Your mother is well?"
"At Winterfell, with my brothers and my sister. She sends you her love, and her anger that you never write."
That got something out of him. Not a smile. A breath through the nose. "That sounds like Cat."
Behind him, two men had come forward from the column and were standing a few paces back with their helms under their arms. Big men. Both of them near a head taller than the riders around them. One with an old scar across his cheek. Both thinner than when they had left Winterfell, the bones standing out in their faces.
Tomm went down on one knee in the road, and Bennard went down beside him. "My lord," Tomm said. "We're late."
I smiled, and stepped forward, and took each of them by the arm and brought them up onto their feet. They smelled of horse and old sweat and road. Bennard's eyes were wet. He looked at the ground, and then at the sky.
"Late," I said. "I would say you both are right on time. You came back with my uncle and some six hundred true men of the Vale behind you. I'd thank you for a job well done, both of you, though it seems it was not without loss."
"Eight, my lord," Tomm said, quietly. "We left Winterfell with ten. Harlon and young Ander. On the high road, coming down. The Burned Men took them."
I had known their names. I had known both of them in the yard. Harlon had a laugh like a goose. Ander was sixteen and had gone red to the ears asking Jory for the place.
"They'll have their respects," I said. "Their names said in the godswood at Winterfell, and their families looked after, in the castle or in Wintertown, whichever they choose. You have my word on it." I looked at the two of them. "Get your men fed, and find me later tonight."
———
Ser Brynden and I sat in the command tent with the flap tied back and the morning coming in, and Olyvar brought bread and cheese with some cold mutton and a jug of wine, and then put himself in the corner. Jon and Theon had come. So had Jory. I sent everyone else away until the lords woke.
The Blackfish ate like a man who had not had time to eat properly in a week. I pushed the board toward him and kept the water skin. He looked at the skin, and at the bread I had not touched, and said nothing about either.
"We came by the clan trails," he said. "North of the high road, over the shoulder of the mountains, and down onto the kingsroad above the Trident. Rode the last three nights in the dark, wide of the road through the farm country above the Trident. Lannister outriders are thick as flies between the Ruby Ford and the crossroads inn, and I'd no wish to explain six hundred Vale horse to any of them." He tore bread. "I'll tell you the worst of it first. Edmure's taken. Jaime Lannister has him in his camp under Riverrun's walls. I had it from a Mallister rider on the road, and I'd trust it."
I had feared it since the first raven came down the kingsroad with the Golden Tooth in it. I had said nothing of it in two councils, because fear is not a thing to put on a map. Now I knew.
"Alive," I said.
"Alive. Jaime wants him alive. He's worth a castle." Brynden's jaw worked once. "My brother's in a bed in that castle, dying by inches, and his son's chained to a tent pole a quarter mile from his window." He drank. "Your men reached the Bloody Gate a little over two months ago," he said, as if he had not just said the rest. "I was Knight of the Gate. I read your letters, and your mother's, and I took them up to the Eyrie myself." He tore bread. "Your aunt read them. Then she had your men put in the sky cells."
Theon said something under his breath that he would not have said in front of my mother.
"Three nights," Brynden said. "I had them out on the fourth, and I'll not tell you how, because Lysa is still my niece. But they were not guests after that. She kept them under watch for most of a month. First they were Lannister spies. Then they were Stark spies. Then the North meant to take her son and raise him in a wolf's den." He drank. "She is not well, Robb. She has not been well since Jon Arryn died. Perhaps before. She sits in the high hall with the boy on her lap and talks to him about the Moon Door."
It was one thing to have guessed at it from her letters. It was another to hear it from a man who had stood in the room.
"And the Vale?"
"The Vale is angry." He wiped his fingers. "Yohn Royce is angry, and half the lords of the valley with him. Jon Arryn was their liege for forty years, and they've read the same letter from your aunt that your father read. And now she'll not call the banners. She says the Vale will stay out of it. She says the Bloody Gate has never fallen and her son is safe behind it, and she's closed the high road." He set the cup down. "They won't rise against her. Not yet. She is the Lady of the Eyrie and the mother of their lord. But they can be persuaded not to notice things."
"Like six hundred horse riding out of the Vale."
"Six hundred and forty. Younger sons, household knights, freeriders who owe me favors, and some who fought beside your father on the Trident and have not forgotten it. Yohn Royce sent his son Andar with forty of his own household, and more good horses than he had any business lending. None of them are here on Lysa's word." He looked at me. "I gave up the Gate. I could not keep it for her and do this too. So I am here as your mother's uncle, and yours, if you'll have me."
"I'll have you."
"Good." He sat back. "Now. I heard only yesterday that Lord Walder died in the night. Choking, very suddenly, at ninety, after refusing you. And then his heir, who hadn't been let to decide anything in forty years, decided inside a morning. Now the Freys are marching with you, and a thousand of their horse besides, and Roose Bolton is marrying a Frey girl, and the Crossing is open." He watched my face. "I've known Walder Frey since before your mother was born. If there was ever a man the gods owed a bad death, it was him. I don't much care how he got it. Rumors be damned."
He stopped, and looked at me for a few moments. He did not ask.
"Now. We've much to catch up on, and I've many questions for you. But first, tell me your plans for Riverrun."
"Gladly, Uncle, once your men have had a chance to rest. I'm grateful you were able to gather the Vale's finest and bring them this far, arms and all. Later this morning I'll put my plans to the other lords, and whatever you and I settle here goes in with them."
———
The lords came in at midmorning, and I had the map brought out.
It covered most of the long camp table, pinned at the corners with daggers. Charcoal and ink on stitched calfskin, begun on the march below the Moat, on the nights I sent Hedwig south ahead of the host, and finished these last nights at the Twins. The Green Fork down the middle. The Twins at the top. The kingsroad on the east bank, running south to the Ruby Ford and the Trident. The Red Fork and the Tumblestone coming together at Riverrun, with the castle in the wedge where they met. And around it, three Lannister camps, marked out to the hundred men, with every picket line I had been able to count.
Ser Brynden stood at the end of the table and looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then he put a finger on the northern camp, beyond the Tumblestone, and ran it along the river to the ford, and looked up at me.
"Who drew this?"
"I did."
"How?"
"With help."
The Greatjon laughed into his beard and his cup. The lords who knew said nothing. Brynden looked at me a while longer. Then he looked down again.
"I don't mean to correct you," he said, "but the ford is here. Not here." He moved my mark a hundred yards downstream with his thumb. "It moved in the spring floods two years ago. You can't see it from the hills. The water looks the same, but the bottom of it doesn't."
"Thank you."
"Hm."
Around the table, they were all watching. Ser Andar Royce, broad and fair and quiet, at the Blackfish's shoulder. The Greatjon, Rickard Karstark, with Harrion and Torrhen standing behind him. Maege Mormont with her boots up and Dacey at her shoulder. Wyman Manderly on the bench that traveled in his own wagon. Roose Bolton by the tent wall, with Domeric behind him. Stevron Frey, grey-faced still, with Perwyn at his side. Galbart Glover, who had left Tallhart to hold the Moat. Daryn Hornwood, who had asked to ride with the horse while his father stayed with the foot. Jon and Theon behind me. Olyvar with the jug.
I stepped forward and had Grey Wind take a few steps back to sit on his haunches at the edge of the ring, and started pointing at the map.
"Here is where we are," I said.
I gave it to them plain. Jaime Lannister had broken the river lords under the Golden Tooth, and again beneath Riverrun's walls, and taken my uncle Edmure in the second fight — Ser Brynden had it from a Mallister rider on the road, and I gave it to them as he had given it to me. He had fifteen thousand men around Riverrun now, split across three camps, because the castle sits between two rivers and there is no other way to close it. Without the castle itself, the camps could not reach each other quickly. Each had a river at its back. Lord Tywin was still on the Trident, about the Ruby Ford and the crossroads inn, with twenty-five thousand more, and he was coming north up the kingsroad to meet us.
"He's right to," Brynden said. "It's what I'd do."
"It's what anyone would do. It's what he expects me to do, too. March down the kingsroad with everything I have, and meet him, and win or lose, and go on to Riverrun after." I put my hand flat on the kingsroad. "So we'll give him an army on the kingsroad. And we'll take the rest of it somewhere else."
Nobody spoke.
I had meant, once, to send twenty thousand foot down that road to beat him. That was before the Moat, and before the Twins.
"Lord Karstark."
Rickard straightened.
"You take the foot. All of it, ours and Lord Stevron's. Every man who walks. And five hundred horse, for scouting and to screen your flanks. No more than that. Lord Umber is your second. Lord Manderly goes with you, and his crossbowmen. You recross at the Twins tomorrow, and go down the kingsroad, and meet Tywin Lannister."
Karstark looked at the map. Then at me. "Meet him, my lord. Or beat him?"
"Meet him." I touched the right-hand end of the line I had sketched along the wood's edge above the Ruby Ford. "And when you draw up, put your five hundred horse on your left, against the trees, where he can see them. Leave your right bare. Not a horse on it. I want Tywin Lannister to look across that field and see a flank with nothing on it."
Karstark frowned. "A bare flank. Against Lannister horse."
"Yes. I'll tell you why before you march. Not here."
The Greatjon's face darkened. "Thirty thousand men, and you'd have us go shake his hand?"
"I'd have you go and let him look at you. Thirty thousand foot on the kingsroad, under my banner, with Manny marching in the middle of it in his barding. That is the whole North, as far as Tywin Lannister's scouts can tell. It's what he expects to see, and he'll see it. He'll know I'm there, because where else would the Stark boy be but on top of a mammoth under Stark banners? And every hour, every day, he spends looking at you is one he doesn't spend looking west."
"And while he looks at us," Karstark said slowly, "you take the horse to Riverrun."
"Yes."
Wyman Manderly folded his hands on his belly.
"Lord Tywin will fight," Maege said. "He'll not stand in a field and admire thirty thousand Northmen."
"No. He'll fight. And you'll fight him." I looked at Karstark. "On ground you choose, as far as you can manage it. Keep to the trees. There's good wood on the east bank all the way down to the Ruby Ford. Hold its edge. Put your line with the trees at your back and open ground in front, and make him come to you. When he comes, give him a hard morning. Then fall back into the wood in good order, and north toward the Twins, and let him have the field."
"Let him have it." Karstark's jaw worked.
"Tywin's horse is the best in the Seven Kingdoms, and ours is with me. Your men are foot, and most of them have never stood in a line against heavy horse. If you try to beat him in the open you might win. You'd bury eight or ten thousand men doing it. I've no need of Tywin Lannister beaten this week. I need him watching you. If he thinks he's won the field, better still. He'll stay where he is and write to his son about it."
"While his son is already in chains," Brynden said, very dry, but with a smirk building at his lips.
I looked at him. He looked back.
"Yes," I said, and felt my own grin answer it.
———
The rest of it took until midday.
The Blackfish ate nothing more. He stood at the end of the table with his arms folded and listened, and when he disagreed he said so, in two words or three, though he would explain when asked, and he was usually right. Once, about the Tumblestone ford, he was wrong, and I showed him why from the map, and he looked at it a long moment and nodded once and said "Hm" and did not argue further.
The horse would go with me. Six and a half thousand of ours, after Karstark's five hundred came out. The thousand Frey horse under Stevron's son Ser Ryman, with Perwyn beside him. The Blackfish's six hundred and forty. A little over eight thousand, all mounted, with remounts where we had them. We would go down the west bank of the Green Fork, then bend west, away from the river roads, through the hill country and the woods, where the villages were small and scattered and no Lannister outrider had any reason to look. Eight days, if the weather held. Nine if it did not. Hard riding, and remounts, and the giants would keep up; they had walked from beyond the Wall. Then south, down into the valley of the Tumblestone, into the long wood that ran along the river above Riverrun.
"The Whispering Wood," Brynden said. "It's what the smallfolk call it."
"I know."
He glanced at me.
The giants would come with the horse. Not Manny. Manny would go with the foot, and my great banner with him, the one the whole North had watched go out of Winterfell's gate. I would ride under a plain one.
"And the scouts." I looked at Brynden. "Jaime Lannister has outriders on every road between the Twins and Riverrun, and more in the woods. Every one of them is a man who can ride back and tell him eight thousand Northern horse are coming down on him. So none of them rides back."
"None of them."
"None. You'll have whatever you need. The Frey horse know the roads. My own outriders, and the Vale men. And my own eyes."
"And the ones who yield?" Jon said, behind me.
I did not turn around. "A man who yields doesn't ride back either, Jon. He rides with us, under guard, until Riverrun. I'd rather that than the other. But none of them ride back."
Jon said nothing more.
"They'll know something's wrong," Brynden said. "When the scouts don't come back."
"They'll know two days later. Or three. Jaime's camp is loud and bored and has been sitting in front of a castle for weeks. One missing patrol went drinking in a village. Two is bad luck. By the time it's three and someone thinks to worry about it, I mean to be in the wood, and baiting the Kingslayer into it." I tapped the Whispering Wood. "And I mean to be there a full day before I do anything about it. I want the giants in the trees before the first blow's struck. All along the north side of the camps, where the woods come down to the river. When the camps break, men will run into those woods, because it's the only cover there is. I want them to run into the giants."
Stevron Frey coughed. "A full day, my lord. That's enough time for Ser Jaime to learn you're there."
"It's a risk. But if he does learn of a group hunting his outriders, it'll be because we let him, and he'll see only what we want him to see. Their camp is bored, as I said. If Jaime thinks he can run down the riders who've been killing his scouts, he'll most likely come himself. I've met him. I've sparred with him. He's eager, and we can use that." I looked round the table. "Besides, Ser Brynden's riders watch the camps the whole time, and so do my own eyes. If they notice more than a raiding party — the moment we see them digging in, or moving men from one camp to another — we don't wait. We go in that hour, giants or no giants. But it's worth the risk, for what it will do to them. Men running from a broken camp into the trees, and finding Northern monsters waiting there. The ones who live through that will never want to fight us again."
That got some low chuckles and a few nods around the table.
———
Roslin Frey would ride with the horse, in the rear with the remounts, with her women and Perwyn, because she was for Riverrun. Stevron would go with his own foot under Karstark; he had said at the parley that he would lead them himself, and he had not changed his mind. Theon's new squire, a Frey boy of twelve named Walder like half his cousins, would ride with Olyvar and learn what a squire does by watching one.
"And Lord Stevron," I said. "The Twins' gate stays shut to anyone not wearing my colors or yours until I send word. And no raven leaves your rookery for ten days. Not to Riverrun. Not to anyone."
Stevron looked at me, and then at the map, and understood. "No raven, my lord."
Roose Bolton spoke once.
The talk had gone on to the order of march, who rode where, the few wagons the horse would take. Wyman had just finished telling Karstark, with every sign of enjoyment, that his crossbowmen were worth more than their weight in Umbers, when Roose said from the tent wall, "And the Dreadfort, my lord? With the foot?"
I had known he would ask. I had not known when.
"With me."
The tent went quiet. Everyone there knew why that was interesting, and nobody said so. The Dreadfort was the second house of the North, and Roose had brought more foot than any lord but Manderly and me. The command of the foot should have been his, by every custom the North had.
"Your horse is the best-trained in the North after mine — except, perhaps, for the Dustins'," I said, with a bit of heat in it. Most of the men in that tent knew Barrowton had sent less than it could have, and knew the tie between the Dustins and the Boltons besides. "I want it at Riverrun, and I want you there to see it." I held his eyes. "And I know that most of the southern houses can't tell one Northern banner from the next. Yours they know. The flayed man speaks for itself south of the Neck. When I stand in front of the Lannisters and ask them my questions, my lord, I'd have you standing beside me."
That was all true. It was not all of it, though.
His pale eyes rested on me. They went, very briefly, to Rickard Karstark. They came back.
"As you say, my lord."
He said nothing else for the rest of the council. When it broke, he went out with Domeric, and at the flap Domeric looked back and gave me a small, uncertain smile, and I gave him one back.
———
I kept Karstark and the Greatjon after the others had gone.
Wyman stayed, because the crossbowmen were his. The Blackfish stayed, because I had not asked him to go and he had not offered. Karstark's sons stayed with their father.
"There's something else," I said. "And I'd have it between us, and no one else."
Karstark nodded to Harrion, who went and tied the flap.
"Ser Brynden first," I said. "Because he'll be gone before the rest of this matters. My lord, when I said my own eyes, I meant it plainly. You'll have Hedwig over your scouts every night. And Grey Wind, on the ground, after dark." I did not explain it further. He had seen the map. "The lords in this tent know what that means. The ones who just left don't, and I'd keep it so."
Brynden looked at me a moment. "Hm," he said. "I wondered why that owl was over us on the road."
"And one more thing for this tent only. Harrion rides in the box on Manny's back, in a grey cloak, with my banner in front of him. From a mile off, one tall young man with a red-brown beard looks much like another."
Harrion opened his mouth, looked at his father, and shut it again. Karstark nodded once.
Then I pulled a second skin across the table, over the first. Smaller. A stretch of the kingsroad above the Ruby Ford, the wood on the east bank, the fields in front of it, and a stream-cut running down through the fields at a slant from the trees to the river. I had drawn it on the march, from sixty feet up, on the nights Hedwig went south.
"If I were Tywin Lannister," I said, "and I were looking at thirty thousand Northmen standing along the edge of a wood, what would I see?"
The Greatjon rumbled. "More Northmen than he'd like."
"More foot than he's got. And a green boy commanding them. Seventeen, and never yet fought a real battle in his life." I put my finger on the right of the line. "And here, a flank with no horse on it. Because I've taken all the horse away, and he doesn't know that, and he thinks the green boy has made a mistake."
"He'll go for it," Brynden said.
"He'll go for it. He'll want to break us early and send us running back up the kingsroad, and teach the North what it costs to march south. He'll want it fast and he'll want it ugly. Even if he gives me some credit and thinks it might be a trap, he'll still send the ugliest thing he has." I looked at Karstark. "Gregor Clegane leads Tywin's vanguard whenever Tywin wants something broken. He'll have his own men with him and whatever heavy horse Tywin can spare, and he'll come at your right, where there's no horse to meet him."
"The Mountain," Harrion Karstark said. He was a big young man, and he said it like a name out of a story.
"The Mountain." Every man in that tent knew what Gregor Clegane had done in King's Landing, and what he had been doing in the Riverlands these last months with fire and rope. We had passed the people it was done to, on the road. "He'll come at the weak flank. We're not going to take the notion away from him. We're going to encourage it."
I laid it out for them.
The right would be two thousand of Karstark's own Karhold men, and no more. Thin enough to look it from a hill a mile off. Four hundred yards of front, five ranks deep. Shallow for a flank in open ground. Any captain who had ever stood on a field would look at it and think the same thing: too long, too thin, no horse.
Spears in the front two ranks, butts grounded, points low at the height of a horse's chest. The third rank with spears too, carried high, to reach over the first two. Behind them the ground fell away into a long shallow dip, four feet at its deepest, and in that dip, where a man on horseback across the field would see nothing but five ranks of spears, the crossbowmen. Two hundred and sixty of them, Stark and Manderly both, with White Harbor's sergeants over them, in two staggered rows behind mantlets — the big standing shields they use on the harbor walls at home, each one propped and wide enough for two men to kneel behind. One man shoots while the other winds. Forty yards behind the front rank. At that range a White Harbor bolt goes through the side of a destrier and out the far side, and through most breastplates that are not very, very good.
Nobody south of the Neck thought Northmen used crossbows. Nobody north of it had either, outside White Harbor's walls, until this spring.
I drew it for them as I went. The spears as a line of short strokes. The mantlets as a row of small squares behind. The dip as a shaded band.
"When Clegane comes," I said, "the line doesn't hold."
Karstark's head came up.
"It bends. It's hinged here —" I touched the left of the two thousand, where they met the rest of the line at the corner of the wood "— on Lord Umber's men, who stand and do not move. Everything to the right of that corner swings back like a door. The far end goes back furthest, a hundred and fifty yards perhaps. The end by the hinge hardly moves. Slowly. Ranks facing front the whole way, stepping back together on the drum, fighting as they go. You give him ground. When the door has swung, he's no longer facing a straight line. He's got spears on two sides of him and the crossbows shooting into both. He'll think it's breaking, and he'll keep coming, because that is all he'll be able to do, and all he'll think to do. The crossbows shoot the whole time. At him. At the men around him. At his horse."
"You mean for them to kill him with bolts," Wyman said.
"If they can, well and good. I'd be glad of it." I moved my finger down to the stream-cut. It ran at a slant through the field behind the right, from the trees down toward the river, a hundred and twenty yards back from where the line would stand at the start. A gully cut by spring floods, deep as a man is tall in the worst of it, and choked along both lips with bramble and alder. When the door swung back, it would swing along the near side of the cut, never across it. Clegane, pushing after the line, would come up the field with the cut running along behind him and never see it under the brush. Horsemen look forward. "If they can't — and they may not; he wears more steel than any man alive, and his armor's the best his lord's gold can buy — then he's in the pocket, here, with the stream-cut at his back. And Dar Weg will be lying in it."
The Greatjon stared at me. Then, slowly, he began to grin.
"A giant."
"One giant. Lying flat under brush and hides, since before first light. I spoke to Mag Mar at dawn, in the Old Tongue. He said Dar Weg once lay two days in a snowbank to take a bear, and that a ditch in the sun would be a holiday." Wyman snorted. "He'll not move until he's told." I looked at Karstark. "You'll tell him. One long blast on your own horn, the one at your hip, and no other horn on that field sounds it. Sound it for him twice a day on the march, so he knows it like his own name. He'll get up behind Clegane, and Clegane will turn around."
Nobody said anything for a while.
Brynden broke it. "And then?"
"And then the first thing Tywin Lannister's army ever sees of a giant is the Mountain That Rides dying in front of them." I sat back. "One more thing, and it matters. Their horses have never smelled a giant. You saw what the Freys' did from a wall away. If the ground gives you any choice, my lord, take it with the wind at your back, so the smell of Manny in your center and Dar Weg in his ditch goes to them and not to you. If the wind's wrong, Clegane's horse will know Dar Weg is there before Clegane does. Hides over him. Wet brush. The stream under him. And still — if the wind's wrong, hold the horn until he's past the cut, not before."
I looked round the table at them.
"He's sending his pet monster to kill us. We'll kill his pet monster with a real one."
The Greatjon laughed. It started low and got louder, and he slapped the table hard enough to jump the daggers pinning the map, and he went on until Wyman started too, the great belly shaking. Karstark did not laugh. He was looking at the stream-cut on the skin, and his lips were moving, as if he were counting paces.
"And when it's done," he said, "we fall back."
"When it's done, the right will have lost a great many fewer men than it would have standing still and holding. Tywin's vanguard will be running. Fall back into the trees, and let them run. Tywin won't follow you into a wood with giants in it. Not blind." I looked at him. "Don't let anyone chase. Not your sons. Not the Greatjon."
"I don't chase," the Greatjon said, wounded.
"You chase everything, Jon."
He grinned again. "Aye. Well. Maybe."
Karstark looked up from the map. "You're very sure of what Tywin Lannister will do."
It was not a question. The tent was quiet. The Blackfish had not moved at all.
"He's done it before," I said. "The Sack. The Reynes. And he's doing it now. Every village Clegane has burned along the Red Fork this summer is Tywin Lannister telling the Riverlands to be afraid of him. He sends Clegane when he wants men afraid. He won't change a thing that works. Not for a green boy."
Karstark held my eyes. I had told him what I was, on the road. I had told him about Hedwig and the old blood, and he had told me about his grandfather. I had not told him the rest.
"Aye," he said finally. "Aye. I think he won't." He straightened. "One blast. And we don't chase."
"You don't chase. And when he realizes he's been played, it'll hurt all the more when the news reaches him from Riverrun — that even an old lion can have his tail pulled."
———
That evening I walked out to the horse lines, where Manny was.
The boys who tended him had staked out a ring of rope around him, more for the horses' comfort than his, and he stood inside it with his trunk curled, pulling up grass and eating it a whole mouthful at a time. His barding was off. His coat was coming in thicker, the long red-brown hair darkening on his shoulders. When I came up to the rope, he turned his head and made the low sound in his chest that I felt through my boots.
I ducked under the rope and put my hand on his trunk. Warm and heavy, moving under my palm.
I had been in him many times. It is not like Hedwig. It is not like Grey Wind. There is a vast, slow calm inside a mammoth, a patience like weather, and a memory that goes back and back and has smells in it I have no names for. Snow. Moss under snow. His mother's belly. The other mammoths, far north, and the giants who walked with them, which is the smell of home.
I reached out to him. Enough to share my thoughts, not to take his skin.
Stay with them. Go where they go. When the horns blow, stand still. Not words. He had no words. I gave him the feel of it instead: the middle of the herd with the herd all around, nothing to fear, nothing to run from. And the smell of Karstark's men, and the Greatjon's, and the boys who tended him, so he would know them.
He was quiet under my hand a long time. Then he pressed his trunk against my chest and pushed, gently, and I went back a step. Then he went back to his grass.
I stood there with my hand on him until full dark.
———
Tomm and Bennard came to me late, as I'd asked.
I made them sit, which they did not want to do, and had Olyvar bring wine, which they wanted more. Then Tomm told it, and Bennard put in a word here and there, and I listened.
The road east had been good as far as the Trident, and then worse. The Vale road up from the Crossroads had been bad from the start. Clansmen on the heights over the road like crows, never close enough to fight. Twenty-two days to the Bloody Gate. Three more waiting outside it. Then the sky cells.
"You can see forever from them, my lord," Bennard said. "That's the worst of it. There's no wall. There's the floor, and then the sky, and the wind comes in and pushes at you all night."
"She had a singer," Tomm said. "Up in the hall. He sang about the Stark lords all night long. Not kind songs."
The Blackfish had come on the fourth night, alone, with a lantern and a key, and said nothing at all except get up.
And then the high road down. And on the high road, the clansmen came close at last.
"Harlon took an arrow in the neck," Tomm said. "Just — there. We never saw where from. And Ander went back for his horse. He was a good boy. He went back because his horse was screaming, and they came down off the rocks." He stopped. "Ser Brynden's men got there. They put the clansmen off the road. But it was too late for him."
I did not say anything. I thought of Ander in the yard last summer, and of Harlon laughing.
I had sent them. I had sent them on a road I knew was bad, to a woman I knew was mad, because I needed my mother's uncle, and I needed him to come.
He had come.
"You'll have your places back," I said. "At my side, with Wylis and Torvin." I looked at them. So much thinner than when they left. "After you've eaten. And slept. You look like two crows that lost a fight with a third."
Bennard laughed. Tomm did not, quite. But his shoulders came down.
When they had gone, I sat at the table a while longer. The map was still out. My finger found the Whispering Wood, and the three camps around Riverrun, and then the kingsroad on the far side of the river, and the stream-cut in the field, and the small charcoal mark I had made for Dar Weg.
Grey Wind got up from his place by the tent wall and came and put his head on my knee. I put my hand in his fur and held on.
———
The foot went back over the bridge in the morning.
It took them most of the day. I stood at the western end of the span and watched it go, with Stevron Frey beside me until it was his turn. Company after company of spears. Karstark's sunburst and the Umber giant. The Manderly merman and Glover's fist. Stevron's own blue towers, men who had been in the Twins' garrison two weeks ago and were going back over the span they had watched us cross, to take the kingsroad south. The crossbowmen went over together with their weapons wrapped against the damp, and the wagons behind them.
My banner went over near the middle, carried high by an Umber standard-bearer who looked as if he might burst with it. Manny went just behind, and Dar Weg walked at his shoulder with his stave, stooping under the Water Tower's gate the way the others had. The bridge took him the same way it had before, with a deep note that I felt through my boots, and all along the walls of the Twins, men leaned out to watch him go and made the sign of the star.
The Greatjon went by on his big horse and raised a hand and shouted something the wind took. Karstark did not shout. He rode past at the head of his household with his sons behind him, and looked at me once, a long, level look, and nodded.
I nodded back.
Stevron went over last with his household, grey and upright in the saddle, and did not look back. Then the far bank took them, and the kingsroad south was only dust.
I turned around.
Behind me, eight thousand horse stood in the fields along the west bank, the long lines of them stretching back almost to the trees. Ser Brynden sat his grey at the head of them with his Vale men around him. The giants stood a little apart, six of them, their staves grounded, looking at nothing. Hedwig was on the top of the Water Tower. Grey Wind was at my side.
Jory brought my horse. A tall bay, the best I had, and not a mammoth, and I felt the lack of it the moment I was up. The world was close. Theon swung up beside me. Jon on the other side. Tomm and Bennard, Wylis and Torvin behind.
"Well," Theon said. "Here we are."
I looked south, down the west bank. Somewhere down there, past the hills and the woods, a man in gilded armor was sitting in front of my grandfather's castle, bored, drinking, waiting for his father to come and tell him the war was won.
"Here we are," I said. "Ser Brynden. Take your scouts."
He was already turning his horse.