Kevan Lannister P O V
The scouts came in at dusk, three of them together, and I could tell from the way they sat their horses that they had ridden hard to get back to us, and that all three had seen something of importance.
My brother received them in the command pavilion. Tywin did not react as he listened to the scouts' report, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes drawn to the map on the table, and when they were done he asked three questions, each shorter than the last.
"How many?"
"Thirty thousand, my lord. Perhaps a little more. All foot, near enough. We counted the banners twice." The eldest was a Lefford man with a burned face, and he was not given to exaggeration. "Karstark's sunburst. The Umber giant. Manderly, Glover, Hornwood, some we didn't know. And the towers of Frey. Three thousand of them, or near it."
"Horse?"
"A few hundred. Screening the flanks, and a few on the road ahead. No more than that."
"And the boy?"
The Lefford man hesitated. "His banner's there, my lord. The great direwolf, in the center of the column. And the beast is there."
Tywin's eyes lifted from the map.
"The mammoth," the scout said, as though the word embarrassed him. "It's true, my lord. What the Freys said. Big as a siege tower, red fur, a great barding hung over its back, grey and white, with the Stark wolf on it. It walks in the middle of the column with the banner in front of it. There's a railed box on its back, and a man in it in a grey cloak, with a red beard. We saw him plain. We all three saw him."
The other two nodded. One made the sign of the star, then looked as if he wished he had not.
I had heard the stories. Everyone in the host had, carried down from the Crossing by the handful of Frey riders who rode south the day the Starks were to cross, after old Walder choked and his son went over to them. They said it was their septon who urged them to warn the south of the approaching heathens — of giants, a mammoth, and a direwolf the size of a horse. Tywin had heard them too, and named them what they were: cowards who hoped to earn his help in taking the lordship and skipping the line of succession. Walder Frey's sons would swear there were dragons in the Neck if it got them a better chance at being lord of their bridge.
Tywin looked at the map a long moment.
"You're dismissed," he said, with a wave of his hand.
When they had gone, I came and stood beside him. The map showed the kingsroad running north along the east bank of the Green Fork, the wood beside it all the way up from the Ruby Ford, and the open fields between the wood and the river. A stream ran down out of the trees and cut across the fields at a slant. Our camp lay a day's march south. The Northmen, a day north.
"No horse," I said.
"No horse." Tywin put a finger on the wood's edge. "The North has never had a great many horse, and never good horse. Whatever the boy had, he's left it to hold the Neck, or it's eating grass outside Winterfell. Or it's with the Freys, and the Freys have been told to hold it back until they see which way the wind blows." His mouth moved, very slightly. "Stevron should be his father's son. He'll hold back."
"Thirty thousand foot is a great many foot."
"It's a great many Northmen who have never stood in a line against heavy horse." Tywin straightened. "They'll hold the edge of that wood. Anyone would. Their left and center will stand against the trees where horse can't get round them. And their right will be out here —" his finger moved onto the open fields, where the treeline fell back eastward "— in the open, with nothing on its flank. Because the boy has no horse to put there, and no one has told him what that means. Or if they have, he and his council have not arranged for it."
He said nothing else for a while, and I waited. I have waited on my brother's silences all my life. They are not empty. They are the sound of a man arranging his thoughts and his actions toward the outcome he has already decided on.
"Gregor takes the vanguard," Tywin said. "On our left, against their right. His own men, the free riders, and Lord Lydden's heavy horse behind to go through the breach. Two thousand. He is to break it."
"And after?"
"Then their right folds onto their center. Our center presses, and our right swings in to cut them off from the wood, so that when they break it is into the open, where our horse will be waiting, and all the while the Mountain's men are behind them. They run back up the kingsroad all the way to the Neck." Tywin looked at the wood on the map. "And the boy learns there is a price to marching south, and the North learns it with him. If he thinks I will be gentle with him because he holds my granddaughter and my son, he is wrong. I want it fast. And I want it hard. I want every lord in that army to go home knowing the Lannisters will not let them stain my legacy."
I nodded. It was sound. It was what Tywin had always done, and it had always worked.
I looked at the small mark where the scouts had set the mammoth, square in the middle of the Northern column.
"Tywin. Do you believe it? The beast?"
My brother looked at the mark too.
"I believe the boy has found something large and hairy. Perhaps he found it past the Wall, and perhaps he put a flag on it," he said. "And frightening Freys is no hard task." He turned from the table. "Though we shall see if it frightens Gregor."
———
Polliver P O V
The village had a name. I didn't know it. We never asked the names.
That was a month back, on the upper Red Fork, and what I remember best about it is the smell. Wet thatch doesn't burn the way dry does. It smolders, thick and yellow, and the smoke gets down in your throat and stays, so that for a week after everything you eat tastes of it. This one had wet thatch. It had rained the night before.
We came in at dawn, forty of us, with Ser Gregor at the front on that great black horse. There was a sept, a little wooden one with a painted star over the door, and a mill on the stream with its wheel still going round. Creak and splash. Creak and splash. The wheel kept going the whole time. I remember that. The wheel going round, and the screaming, and the wheel going round.
We put the men in the sept and barred the door and set it going. The Tickler took the miller into the mill-house to ask him where he kept his coin. I didn't go in. I stood by the wheel and listened to the Tickler asking, very patient, the same question over and over. Is there gold in the village. Is there silver. Is there gold. And the miller answering. And then, after a while, not answering in words. Raff caught a girl running for the stream and dragged her back by the hair. I got a good pair of boots off a dead man by the well. Too small. I wore them anyway, for a while.
Ser Gregor didn't do much there. He sat his horse in front of the sept with a slow smile on his face while his men ransacked the village, the cries and pleading of the people inside the burning sept adding to his good mood. When the door gave at the end, and the men and women inside came staggering out burning, he rode them down two at a time. Slow. Like a man walking a field looking for stones. Children and women along with the men.
That's the thing about following Ser Gregor. You don't love him. Nobody loves him. You don't even like him. But you've seen him, and once you've seen him you know. There isn't a man in the Seven Kingdoms who can stand in front of him. Knights have tried. Lords have tried. A great hairy smith in Sherrer came at him with a forge-hammer, screaming, and Ser Gregor took the hammer out of his hands and killed him with it. He's near eight feet of iron. Whatever god made him, it wasn't one of the Seven. He came up out of one of the hells, is what I think, and they sent him back up with a sword and told him to get on with it. No mortal man is going to take him. Why the Warrior gifted him that, I don't know. The Maiden surely weeps every week for what the Mountain That Rides has done.
So when Ser Gregor told us we were to be the vanguard, riding down the line in the grey before dawn, and laughed — which you never want to hear from him — I laughed with him, and believed that there was truly no man, knight, nor lord that could kill him.
The field I found myself on was wet. It had rained again in the night, the grass long and heavy, and the horses' legs were soaked to the hock before we'd gone a hundred yards. I rode on Ser Gregor's left, near the front, with Raff and Chiswyck and the Tickler somewhere behind, and the whole vanguard spread behind us in a great wedge. Two thousand horse, near enough. Every man of Ser Gregor's own, and every free rider and hedge knight and sellsword Lord Tywin could put behind us, and Lord Lydden's heavy horse coming on at a trot behind that. The ground shook with it. I felt it through my saddle, through my thighs, through my teeth.
And across the long wet field stood the Northmen's right. Just as Lord Tywin had said. Out in the open where the wood fell back, a long thin grey line of spears, no horse on its flank, nothing at all. Off to the left, where the line ran into the trees, the big banners, and in the middle of them the mammoth. I hadn't believed that. I believed it now. It stood behind the Northern center like a hill with a flag in front of it, a figure sitting small in the box on its back, and it didn't move.
The wind was in our faces. It came down off the Northern line and across the field into the wedge, wet and cold, and a hundred yards out my horse threw its head up and snorted and tried to turn. So did the one beside me. So did Raff's, somewhere behind, swearing. There was a smell on the wind. Not horse. Not men. Something heavy and rank and old that I'd never smelled in my life, and every horse in the vanguard had smelled it at once and wanted no part of it. Men were sawing at reins all around me. Ser Gregor's black went straight on as though the wind were nothing, and the rest followed because it did.
"Lannister!" Somebody screamed it. Everybody screamed it. I screamed it. Ser Gregor didn't. Ser Gregor never did. He put his heels in and the black went from a trot to a gallop, and the wedge went with him.
The Northern line got bigger. Faces now. Beards. Round shields, grey and black. And the spear points coming down, all at once, in a long row, like a fence falling over.
I took my lance off its rest.
The first rank of spears hit us. A horse went down on my right, screaming, and its rider went over its head onto the points. My lance took a Northman in the face and broke, and I let it go and had my sword out and was hacking. Ser Gregor was already through the first rank. He'd hit it like a boulder going through a hedge, and the black was trampling men, and the greatsword was going up and down, up and down, and every time it came down something that had been a man wasn't.
"They'll run!" Raff was shrieking somewhere. "They'll run!"
And the line gave.
Not all at once. It bent. The right end went back, and back, the Northmen stepping backward with their spears still out, still stabbing at the horses' faces, and a drum going somewhere, slow, thump — thump — thump, and every time it went they all stepped back together. The whole line swinging, like a gate. I shoved my horse into the gap after Ser Gregor. We were driving them now. The field was opening out in front of us, and behind me I could hear Lydden's heavy horse coming up to follow through the breach.
Then the bolts came.
I didn't know what they were at first. Something hit the man beside me with a sound like a hammer on a door, and he went back over his horse's rump with his arms flung out and a stubby black thing standing out of his breastplate, right through the steel. Then another. Then a horse screamed and reared with one in its neck and another in its chest, and went over sideways and crushed its rider.
Crossbows. My mind stuck on the word. They'd hidden crossbows. The thought came with something close to panic.
They were behind the spears, down where the ground dipped. I could see them now over the Northmen's heads, a row of tall shields planted in the grass and men kneeling behind them, and every few breaths the shields sprouted heads and arms and there was a flat hard thock-thock-thock down the row, and men around me went down.
The Northmen weren't going back anymore. The drum had stopped. The line had stopped, and curled, and somehow there were spears on my right now as well as in front, and the ground fell away behind me into something I'd ridden along the lip of without seeing, a ditch full of brush, and I was in the middle of a great bowl of Northmen with the bolts coming in from two sides.
Ser Gregor's horse went down.
I saw it. Three bolts, four, into the chest and neck, so close together they looked like one wound. The black screamed like a woman and went down on its knees and rolled. Ser Gregor went over with it. For one heartbeat I thought, no. Not him—
The Mountain got up.
He came up out of the mud and the blood with his greatsword still in his hand and his horse kicking beside him. There was a bolt standing out of the side of his helm and another in his shoulder, stuck through the plate like a thorn, and he didn't look at either. He turned around, and there was a Northman there with a spear, and Ser Gregor took the spear in his free hand and pulled it and the Northman with it, and cut him through the middle. He went into the spears. Into them. Six feet of greatsword going round his head like the sails of a mill, and men came apart in front of him. I saw an arm go spinning. I saw a Northman try to run and Ser Gregor catch him by the back of the neck and break it one-handed and throw him at the men behind.
The bolts hit him. I saw them hit. They skipped off his helm. They stuck in his breastplate and quivered there and he didn't stop. He was roaring now, a sound out of the bottom of his chest with no words in it.
See, I thought, as the rest of the Mountain's men and I fought on against the Northmen. This was going to be another slaughter, and I was grinning, I could feel it on my face. See. Out of the hells, him. No man alive. No man alive.
Somewhere off to the left, a horn blew.
One blast. Long and deep, so low I felt it in my breastbone before I heard it, and it went on, and on, and did not stop.
The ground behind Ser Gregor moved.
The ditch we'd all ridden past, the little stream-cut full of bramble — it got up. The brush went flying. Hides, great heavy hides, sloughed off in a heap. And something rose out of it, and kept rising, and did not stop rising when it should have.
My horse screamed and tried to bolt. I hauled it round without thinking and it wouldn't go, and I was looking up.
I was looking up.
It was a man. That was the worst of it. It had a man's shape, two arms and two legs and a head. But the head was up where a castle's battlements would be, and the shoulders were as broad as a wagon is long, and there was brown hair all over it, matted and thick, and a great flat face, bearded, under a heavy brow. It had a staff. A tree. A whole young tree, stripped and worked smooth. And it was looking down.
At Ser Gregor.
"Seven hells," someone was screaming. "Seven bloody hells, what is that, what in the seven hells is that—"
The Mountain turned around.
For the first time in twelve years, I saw Gregor Clegane look up at something.
He didn't run. You have to give him that. He was a mad dog, the Mountain, but he never once in his life ran. He roared and swung the greatsword up two-handed and went at it.
The giant stepped forward. One step. It covered more ground in one step than a horse does at a trot. It swung the staff low and sideways, like a man swiping at a dog, and it caught Ser Gregor across the hip, and he went flying. Flying. Near eight feet of man in full plate, the biggest man in the Seven Kingdoms, and he went through the air like a straw doll and came down in a crash of steel twenty feet off in the mud, among his own men. And yet, even then —
He got up.
Bleeding from the mouth, his helm staved in on one side, the greatsword gone somewhere in the grass — and he got up, and drew his dagger, and went at it again.
The giant dropped its staff.
It bent down, slow, and took him in its two hands. One round his chest. The other round his head, helm and all. Ser Gregor stabbed at its wrist with the dagger, again and again, and blood ran down the giant's forearm, and it didn't seem to notice. It lifted him. All the way up, over its head, till he was kicking at the air twenty feet over the field.
Then it brought him down.
I heard it. Over the screaming and the horses and the horn, over everything. A great flat crack, like an oak going over in a storm. It brought him down across its knee, and Gregor Clegane folded in a way that a man doesn't fold. And the giant dropped him in the mud.
And then it put its foot on him, and let out a guttural roar that was one word.
STAAARK.
———
Kevan Lannister P O V
From the rise where Tywin kept his banner, it was very small.
Half a mile off, across the wet fields, it looked like a thing out of a mummer's show, a toy knight and a shaggy puppet. I saw it all. I saw the thing stand up out of the ground. I saw Gregor fly. I saw it lift him over its head.
Then the crack. I saw it, at that distance, and I would have sworn I heard it.
Then I was not looking at the field anymore. I was looking at my brother.
Tywin had not moved. He sat his horse as he had sat it all morning, very straight, the reins gathered in one gloved hand and the other resting on his thigh. His face did not change. I have known that face for fifty years, and I watched it now with my heart hammering, and it did not change at all.
Only the hand.
The hand on the reins had closed. Slowly. I watched the fingers tighten in the leather, one after another, until the knuckles stood up white through the fine kid of the glove, and only then did I begin to hear the grinding of my brother's teeth. The big grey under him felt it and threw its head and sidled, and Tywin did not seem to notice the horse.
Around us, on the rise, men were shouting. Lefford was shouting. Someone was praying, high and fast, to the Mother. A trumpeter had his horn halfway to his mouth and was staring at the field and had forgotten what it was for.
"Sound the recall on the left," Tywin said.
He did not raise his voice. The trumpeter heard him anyway, and jumped, and blew.
Out on the field the vanguard was already coming apart. I could see it from the rise like a wave going back down a beach. First the men nearest the bowl, turning. Then the men behind them seeing them turn. Then all of it at once, horses wheeling, men throwing down lances, the whole wedge that had gone out so bright an hour ago breaking into a thousand pieces and running. Lydden's heavy horse, coming up behind, took the full weight of it and lost its order. And the bolts kept coming out of the Northern line, into the backs of the men who ran.
The Northmen did not follow.
That was what I saw next, and it was worse, somehow, than the giant. The Northern right did not charge. It did not chase. It stood in its curled-up line with its spears out and let the vanguard run. And while I watched, the whole of it began to go backward, slowly, in order, company by company, still facing front, into the trees. The crossbowmen went with it, dragging their great shields. The giant went with it too. It picked its staff up out of the grass and put it over its shoulder and walked into the wood, and it was so tall that I could see its head moving along above the lower branches for a long time before the leaves took it.
Tywin watched it go.
He said nothing. His hand on the reins did not open.
———
We held the field by midday.
It was ours, by every measure a maester would write down. The Northern center had given our center a hard morning at the wood's edge, and held, and bled, and then gone back into the trees company by company when their horns called. The Northern left had done the same, and our right had never got round them in time to stop it. By the time my own men pushed up to the wood, there was nothing there but broken spears and dead men, and the sound of a great many feet moving away through the trees to the north.
Tywin did not follow them in.
He sat his horse at the wood's edge with his captains around him and looked into it for a long time. I knew what he was thinking, because I was thinking it myself. The wood was deep and dark and full of Northmen who had not run. And somewhere in it, a thing that had killed Gregor Clegane with its hands.
"My lord," said Lord Lefford. His voice was not steady. "Do we pursue?"
"No."
The vanguard had lost near seven hundred men, most of them in that bowl on the left, under the bolts. Three hundred more when it broke and fled back into Lydden's horse. The Northmen had lost men too, more than a few, but fewer than we had, and it seemed to me they had never meant to win at all. Only to spring the trap on their right. The prisoners said Lord Karstark commanded there. The prisoners said Lord Umber held the corner. The prisoners said a great many things about giants, and would not stop saying them, and one of them had laughed, and said the old gods stand with the young Stark, and that we would all pay.
I had gone to look for Gregor. I made myself do it. I did not stay long, because there was nothing to look at. The Northmen had taken the Mountain's body with them.
Now I rode up beside my brother at the wood's edge.
"We have the field," I said.
"We have the field." Tywin was not looking at the wood anymore. He was looking back across the field, north, toward the kingsroad, where the last of the Northern rearguard was moving away in good order.
In the middle of it, the mammoth walked.
It walked slowly, with the great direwolf banner carried before it. It had not moved all morning. Through the whole of the fighting it had stood in the Northern center like a red hill with the barding hanging down its sides, and it had not charged, and it had not run, and it had not done anything at all. Only now, when the horns called, had it turned with the men around it and walked away.
The man in the box on its back sat very still, in his grey cloak, and had sat so all day.
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I looked at the rearguard. I counted the banners I could see, and counted them again, and did the sum a third time, and it came out the same.
Karstark. Umber. Manderly. Glover. Hornwood. The towers of Frey.
No Dreadfort. No Mormont. And not a single horse, save the few hundred on the flanks.
And the man in the box had not given one order all day. Not a hand raised. Not a rider sent. Not from a boy commanding an army for his father. Thirty thousand men had fought a morning's battle and fallen back in good order on their horns, and the figure under the great banner had sat through all of it like a thing carved.
"Tywin," I said.
My brother had seen it. I knew it the moment I looked at him. His jaw had set. I saw the muscle move under the skin in front of his ear, working, working. His teeth were grinding again. The grey shifted under him and shifted again, stamping, and Tywin's knees closed on it hard and it stood, trembling.
"Where is their horse," Tywin said, under his breath. "And where is their Stark lordling."
Nobody answered. Nobody on that rise was fool enough to.
He stared at the mammoth walking away from us, swaying, the direwolf on its barding going up and down, and the still grey figure in the box.
"Where is the damned boy?"
I watched my brother's face, and I could see it happening. The map Tywin always carries in his head. The Twins. The Green Fork. The kingsroad, and thirty thousand foot on it under a banner and a beast to tell anyone who looked that the Stark boy was here. And no horse. The North has never had a great many horse. He had said it himself, two days ago, in the pavilion. I watched him remember saying it.
And then west. West across the Green Fork from the Twins, west and south through the hills where nobody had been watching, toward the Tumblestone. Toward the Red Fork.
Toward Jaime.
Tywin's face went grey. I had never seen it do that. Not once in all my life, save when our father made fools of us all.
"Riverrun," Tywin said.
He turned the grey. It came round too fast and he checked it hard, harder than he ever handles a horse, and it threw its head and snorted.
"Break camp. All of it. We march west tonight. Lefford, I want riders, your fastest, on every road to the Red Fork, gone within the hour. To my son. To Ser Forley. To anyone who will listen." His voice had not risen. It never does. "He is not here. He was never here. He sent me his foot and his beast and a giant, and I sat on a hill and watched them." His hand closed on the reins again. "He has gone for Jaime."
I was already turning to shout for the trumpeters. Behind me, very quietly, my brother said one thing more, and I do not think it was meant for anyone at all.
"He is just seventeen. Seventeen, and green."