Brynden Tully P O V
The first of the Lannister scouts died on the second night out from the Twins, at a ford on a nameless stream that ran down into the Green Fork, where we caught them unaware.
There were three of them, westermen in crimson cloaks who had watered their horses and sat down on the bank to eat, because they had been riding since dawn and nobody had given them a reason to be careful. I came at them out of the dark with twenty Vale men. Two died where they sat. The third got to his horse and got halfway across before a Frey outrider on the far bank put a spear in his back, and then he was in the water, and the water had him.
"Get him out," I said. "I want the bodies. And the horses."
We got him out. We put all three in a gully a quarter mile off the road and pulled brush and stones over them, and led the horses back to the column. By dawn there was nothing at the ford but hoofprints, and by midday there was rain, and then there was nothing at all.
It was how I had done it on the Stepstones, near forty years ago, and against the mountain clans every year since Lysa's marriage took me to the Vale. There is no love in it for me, and even if I never enjoyed the killing, the act of blinding your enemies, controlling what they find, appealed to me. You find them before they find you. You kill all of them. You leave nothing a man could read. And you do it every night, over and over, until you leave your enemies chasing shadows. Morale can kill men before a blade does. Most captains know this. Most captains also like their sleep, and send boys to do it, and the boys come back and say the road was empty, and three days later there's a patrol or a detachment on the road that was empty. I have buried a great many men who were killed by an empty road, or who had no wish to fight after a few sleepless nights and wanted only to die to get some rest.
What was different about this time was who I was fighting for.
My nephew called me to his tent at dusk, every day. The horse had halted for the night by then and the camp was going up — but never with any fires, by his order, and the men ate cold, though they ate well enough that there weren't many who grumbled about it — and Robb Stark would make sure to eat with a few of the men before he sat in his own tent, on the ground with his back against the pole and his eyes shut, and the wolf lying across the door.
He had told me what he could do with the owl, the gift he had been blessed with by his northern gods and his Stark bloodline, but I was not a man of too much faith, so I had nodded. I had not thought of anything else to do. I had seen a good many strange things in near forty years of soldiering and most of them had turned out to be men lying, and the ones that weren't had turned out to be the type of religious men who would find the answer they wanted whether it rained or the sky was clear. This was neither of those men. This was my younger-than-he-looked nephew, the leader of a Northern army out to save his family: his father, my niece's husband, an honorable man in an unhonorable world. So I nodded, and went and did my work on my honor, and, more importantly, served my family.
But I will say that the first time I came into that tent and found him like that, I thought he was asleep.
It was only when he opened his eyes that I knew better. They were strange for a moment, very wide and very white, like the eyes of a man full of milk of the poppy. Then they were Tully blue again, and he reached for the charcoal.
"Two," he said. "At the mill on the Blue Beck, about eleven miles south and west. Crimson cloaks. They've been there since noon, they have a fire, they're in no hurry. There's a third further on, alone. On the ridge above the old holdfast by the lake, watching the road north. He's the careful one." He drew on the map as he talked, small, quick marks. "And six more to the east, on the river road, riding north in a body. They'll camp at the crossroads by the burned sept. They did last night."
I looked at the map. Then at him.
"You'll want the careful one first," he said. "If he sees the others taken, he'll ride back."
I gave him and the map a hard look before I left that tent and went out to do as I was ordered. I took the careful one first. He was exactly where the boy had said, on the ridge above the old holdfast by the lake. So were the two at the mill, and the six at the crossroads by the burned sept. Every one of them, every night, for eight nights. I have had scouts I trusted. I have never had one who was not wrong once.
The owl sat on the ridgepole of his tent in the daytime with his eyes shut, a great white thing the size of a small child, with a face like a carved mask and talons like a man's fingers. At dusk he went away. At dawn he came back.
The wolf was another matter.
I did not see it go out myself, the first time. A Redfort boy on the picket line did, and came back to camp white as curd at first light and told the whole mess fire before anyone could stop him. He had seen the wolf go past him in the dark, out of the camp and south, big as a horse and quiet as smoke. And in the morning, when I rode to the crossroads by the burned sept for the six on the river road, only three of them were there. The other three were in a wood half a mile off, where they had gone for firewood. What was left of them.
I had my men bury that too. I did not let the Redfort boy near it.
By the fourth day the story was all through the column. I heard it at every fire I passed. The wolf eats them. The wolf goes out at night and eats Lannisters, and the owl tells it where they are. The Vale men said it with their eyes wide. Though I noticed the way the Northmen said it was a bit too feverish. They said it as if it were a sign of the old gods, that Robb Stark was a scion of them, blessed to bring the age of the First Men back and show what the First Men were made of. The Freys said it and made the sign of the star, thinking of Robb as a darker character, though none would say it too openly. But Robb did a good job of appeasing the men, eating and drinking and checking on them while we made our way to Riverrun.
"You'll lose the Freys," I said to him, the fifth night.
We were alone in the tent — alone but for the wolf, which did not seem to count, and the Frey squire, Olyvar, who had gone to sleep in the corner on a pile of saddle blankets and did not seem to count either. He had the map out. He had redrawn it that afternoon, and the camps around Riverrun had changed a little since the last one: a picket line moved, a new stretch of ditch along the Tumblestone, a cluster of tents that had not been there before on the south bank of the Red Fork.
"I don't think I will," he said, without looking up. "But say why."
"They're frightened of you. Every man in the column is, and the Freys most. They've giants walking beside them and a wolf that eats scouts and an owl that sees everything, and they've a septon's worth of stories about what that means. Frightened men do foolish things. I've watched them do it since I was sixteen. It's the one thing about soldiers I'd stake my life on."
"They're frightened of me," he agreed. He put the charcoal down. "They're more frightened of what happens to men who aren't with me. They were at the Twins. They think they know what happened there, but their imagination will make it so much worse. They don't know how, and nobody's going to tell them how, but they know. And Stevron knows, and has never once asked. He's no fool, my lord, and he's not his father. He'll not throw away the best bargain his house has made in a hundred years because his men are frightened of a wolf and a bird."
I looked at him for a while.
I had come down out of the Vale with six hundred men and a great many doubts. I had heard the stories, like everyone. The scar from a wildling chieftain. The spar with the Kingslayer in the yard at Winterfell, which the men who told it could not agree whether he'd won or tied. Giants. Mammoths. The Old Tongue in the mouths of Northern lords again. It had sounded like a story out of the Age of Heroes, with a perfect lordling.
"I know a great many older men find it useful to flatter you," I said. "I have seen that often. Just make sure the respect is real. Though your Northmen seem to see you more as a holy figure. You would think you were the Warrior himself, if you believed in the Seven."
He nodded to me but looked back at his map, and it was a better map of the riverlands than any in Riverrun, and Riverrun has had maesters drawing them since before the Andals. He had the Tumblestone right, which is more than Hoster's maester ever managed. He had the camps to the tent. He had got one ford wrong — the one I'd corrected him on, in front of his lords, which I had done to see what he'd do — and he had thanked me and moved the mark and gone on, and I had not seen him sulk about it then or since. I have known men of sixty who could not take a correction in front of their bannermen without finding a way to make you pay for it later, but he took it well.
What troubled me was not the knowing. There are things in the North that the South has forgotten, and the old gods are among them, and I have never been fool enough to think the Seven were the only ones listening. I believe in results and what I can see, and I could definitely see Robb.
What troubled me was that he did not seem to enjoy any of it.
I have known a great many young commanders, and I never met one who didn't like being right. They like it more than wine. It goes to their heads like wine, and they get careless, and that is usually when I meet them, across a field. But Robb, he sat on the floor of his tent every night with his map and his charcoal and his wolf, and he was right, and it did nothing for him that I could see. He ate little. I had not once seen him laugh. When my riders came in reporting the enemy exactly where he had said, he nodded, and marked it, and went to the next thing.
And his hand shook, sometimes. In the evenings, when he thought no one was looking. I had seen it twice. He would put the charcoal down, and look at his hand, and press it flat on the map until it stopped.
"You have a question, my lord," he said.
I had been staring. I did not look away.
"I have a great many questions," I said. "Most of them aren't mine to ask. I'll ask one."
"Ask."
"What happened at the Twins?"
His face did not change. But the wolf, lying across the tent flap with its head on its paws, lifted its head and looked at me too, and for a moment none of the three of us moved.
"Walder Frey died, but I still had a toll to pay, one I did not think would cost me as much as it did," he said.
"That isn't what I asked."
"No, you're right, Uncle." His eyes went back down to the map. "It's what I'm answering."
I held his eyes a moment longer. Then I nodded, once.
I had known Walder Frey most of my life. I had not wept for him. I did not intend to start.
"Good night, nephew," I said, and went out.
On the sixth day Jason Mallister came down out of Seagard with four hundred horse.
He had heard through some channel of his own that Robb Stark had crossed at the Twins, and he had come looking for him, and he had not been able to find eight thousand horse and six giants in two days of trying, which put him in a temper I enjoyed more than I ought to have. Jason is a hard man and a proud one and a good one to have on your left in a fight, and he has never in his life admitted to being lost. He said he had been "making certain of the ground." I said I was glad someone had been, since we'd come through it without once seeing a Mallister rider, and he gave me a look that would have soured milk. Jaime Lannister had bested him once already this war, under Riverrun's walls. He wanted it back. He did not have to say so.
He was less sharp about it after he saw the giants. I would guess most men of the South, and even those of the North, would be, for it was something straight out of a book. I knew they existed north of the Wall, but most people thought they were already extinct, like the dragons.
On the seventh day we came into the hills above the Tumblestone. On the eighth, in the evening, we came down into the wood.
It was old wood, oak and ash and great grey beeches with their roots coming up out of the ground like knuckles. The leaves were mostly still on the trees, but the ones underfoot were brown and thick and whispered when the wind moved them, and that, the smallfolk say, is why it has its name. I think it is the other thing. You can hear a great deal in that wood if you keep still. The river a long way off, going over stones. Birds. Men talking a mile away, as clear as if they were on the next hill. Hoster and I hunted it as boys, when our father could not stop us, and I had not been in it since before the war.
Jaime Lannister's camp was on the far side of it.
I went up the last ridge on foot that evening with the boy and the wolf and the Mormont woman, and we lay in the bracken at the top and looked down.
There it was. The nearest of the three camps, spread out along the land north of the Tumblestone, sprawling, loud, full of cookfires. I could smell the meat from where I lay. Beyond it the river, and the second camp on the far bank, west of the castle across the moat, and east of that, in the wedge where the Tumblestone ran into the Red Fork, the towers of Riverrun, red stone, with the leaping trout still flying over them. My brother's castle. Hoster was in there somewhere, dying in a bed in the great keep, if he was not already dead, and his son was chained up in that camp a quarter mile from his window.
I looked at the towers until I noticed I was doing it. Then I looked at the camp.
"They don't know," Maege Mormont said. Softly, with a kind of wonder.
"No," the boy said. "Not yet."
"One day," I said.
"One day."
I had told him at the Twins what I thought of that day, and I told him again on the ridge, since the ridge was a better place to think it from. A day is a long time to sit eight thousand horse in a wood within smell of an enemy's cookfires. Horses whinny. Men wander off to piss and meet other men wandering off to piss. Somebody's remount gets loose and walks into the wrong camp. I had seen a whole war turn on a loose horse.
"Hm," he said. Which I understood to mean he had heard all this before, from me, and his lords, and himself, and the answer was still the giants. "If they find us, Uncle, we go in that hour. I'd sooner they didn't. But we go."
The ninth day was the longest I have spent since the Stepstones.
The horse lay up in the wood under the trees, by companies, with the saddles on and the girths loose, and nobody lit anything, and nobody spoke above a murmur, and the wood whispered round them. My riders watched the camps from the ridge in pairs and came back every hour. The owl was gone all day. The boy sat on the ridge with his back against a beech and his eyes shut, and the wolf beside him, and I did not disturb him, and when I came up at midday he opened his eyes and told me there were nine riders out of the north camp on the river road, asking after a patrol that had not come in. They would find nothing. There was nothing to find. We had seen to that.
"They've started to wonder," I said.
"Yes." He shut his eyes again. "Good."
In the afternoon he sent the Greyjoy down out of the trees with sixty horse.
That was the whole of it, and I had watched him lay it out at the Twins and still could not quite credit how small it was. Sixty men. They came down out of the wood two miles upriver, where the forage parties went for hay, and they hit a party of Lannister foragers at their wagons, killed a dozen men and burned the fodder and ran off the mules, and then they rode north along the Tumblestone in plain sight of the camp's pickets, slowly, the way men ride who are not afraid of being followed, and went into the trees a mile below where we lay.
I watched the camp from the ridge while they did it. I watched the pickets see them. I watched a rider go in at the gallop, and the stir go through the tents like wind through barley, and a knot of men gather by the big pavilion with the lion on it. And I watched a patrol of two hundred come out, an hour before dark, and ride up the river road to where the wagons were still smoking, and look at the trees, and come back.
"Not him," the boy said beside me, without opening his eyes.
"No. He's sent a knight to look. He'll have told him what he thought of him for losing the fodder."
"Tomorrow, then."
"If he's the man you think he is."
"I've met him, Uncle." He said it quite calmly. "I've sparred with him. He's bored, and he's the best sword in the Seven Kingdoms, and a boy has been killing his scouts for a week and now burning his hay under his nose. He'll come himself. He'd not forgive himself if he sent a man and the man got the kill."
I said nothing to that, for Robb was right. I had watched Jaime Lannister at a dozen tourneys since he was fifteen, and I had seen him lose a joust to a hedge knight nobody had heard of, and I had seen his face after. The next joust he did not lose, nor did he go easy on the lesser riders. The boy was not wrong. I did not like how he knew it. I have known old men who read other men that well, but he was still a young boy, though he was more a man than even my brother's heir. He was what I would have wanted my brother's son to grow up into.
The giants went into the wood that night.
I had not meant to watch. I was walking the picket line, which I do before I sleep and will do until they put me in the ground, and there they were: six of them, moving off through the trees in the dark, in file, with their staves and their great bows.
I had thought, without thinking about it, that they would be clumsy in a wood. I had thought there would be crashing, branches breaking, the noise of great bodies shoving through undergrowth. There was nothing. They went into the trees like deer. One moment they were there, grey shapes as tall as the lower branches, stooping under the oaks. Then they were not. I stood and listened a long time, and I heard the wind in the leaves, and the river, and the far noise of the camp. Nothing else. I have had Vale men under me for fifteen years who could not cross a yard without waking the house.
When I turned round, the boy was standing a little way off, watching too.
"Where are you sending them?"
"All along the north side of the camps." He did not look away from the trees. "Where the wood comes down to the Tumblestone. And on the east, by the ford. Wherever a man running from a camp in the dark would look for cover." He paused. "Mag Mar has the ground. I took him up the ridge this afternoon and showed him."
"A giant can read a map?"
"No. He can read a place. I showed him where the camps were and where the trees were, and that was all he needed." He turned his head. "They're not animals, my lord. They're old. They know things about woods and rivers that we've forgotten we ever knew."
I did not know what to say to that, so I did not say anything.
"Lord Karstark will have met Tywin Lannister by now," he said after a moment. "Or will soon. I've no way of knowing how it went, though I feel as if he succeeded."
"Hm."
He looked at me, and I think he nearly smiled. Then he went back toward his tent, and I stood in the dark a while longer, looking at the place where the giants had gone. Then I went to see about my scouts.
Jaime came out in the morning.
He came out because he had taken the bait, and I had watched every piece of it being laid in this road, and still, when the horn blew in the camp and the ditch gate opened and he came out at the head of the column, I felt something turn over in my chest that I had not felt in years.
He came himself. Of course he did. Gilded armor, the lion on his helm, the white cloak of the Kingsguard streaming out behind him, and two hundred horse at his back, strung out along the river road with their lances up and the morning on them. Nothing like all of his strength. Enough to run down sixty raiders and their friends, and be back to camp before nightfall.
"There," said Maege Mormont, lying in the bracken beside me, very soft. "There, there, there. Oh, look at him come."
He came. Up the Tumblestone to where the wagons had burned, and the boy had put a hundred of the Greyjoy's men there, in sight, pretending to be a rearguard pretending not to have seen him. They let him get close enough to count them. Then they ran. North, up the valley road and into the wood, with Jaime's van a quarter mile behind them and gaining.
The valley was long and narrow, with the road running up the bottom of it along a stream, and steep wooded slopes on either hand. It was the only road a column could take into the wood at any speed, and the boy had known that from his map before he ever saw it, and I had known it since I was nine. The Greyjoy's hundred went up it at a gallop and were gone round the far bend.
Jaime's column followed them into it.
Maege had the horn. She lay on her belly in the bracken with her chin almost in the dirt and the horn held up before her, and she was watching the boy, and the boy was watching the road.
I watched the road too. I watched the head of the column go past the great split oak that marks the bend. I watched the middle go past. I watched the rear come up behind it, into the narrows, where the slopes come down steepest and the road runs along the stream with the water on one side and the hill on the other, and I thought, now, now, you young fool, now, and he did not move.
He let the rear come all the way in.
Then he nodded.
Maege blew.
The whole valley came down on them at once.
The Northern horse came off the slopes on both sides through the trees, with the wolf banners in front, and the Vale men under the Royce bronze with Ser Andar at their head, and the Mallister eagles, and the Freys. They came down so steeply that some of the horses went down on their haunches and slid, and their riders went on anyway. They hit the column in the side all along its length, from the bend to the narrows, so that there was no front and no rear and no place to form, only men in crimson being driven into the stream on one side and against the hill on the other.
I went in with the Vale men at the narrows, to shut the mouth. That had been my part: shut the door behind them, and don't open it for anyone. I shut it. I had a hundred good men and we went in with lances and then with swords, and the Lannister rearguard turned to run back the way it had come and found me standing in the road.
Some of them tried to go through me. Some of them died. The rest threw down their swords, and I had my men herd them up the slope and sit them down with their hands on their heads, because the boy had said that any man who yielded would ride with us to Riverrun and no further, and I had told my men so, and a Blackfish's word is worth something or it is worth nothing.
I had time to look up the valley then. It was a slaughter. They had been caught strung out in the narrow bottom with no room to turn and no room to charge, and the Northmen were in among them from both sides. The stream was running red. There were horses screaming in the water. I saw a man in Westerling colors pulled off his horse by three Mormont men on foot. I saw a Banefort knight cut down a Frey and go down himself under two more.
And I saw the gold.
Jaime Lannister was not running. He was fighting his way up the valley — not toward the mouth, where the way out was, but away from it, into the thick of it, toward the head. Toward the grey banner there, the plain one, and the great grey shape beneath it.
He's seen the wolf, I thought. He's seen the wolf, and he knows who'll be standing next to it.
I cursed and put my horse up the road.
I saw Daryn Hornwood almost die.
The Hornwood boy had put himself in Jaime's road with a knot of his own men around him, and he had a good sword and knew how to use it, and Jaime went through his men like a scythe through barley. Three strokes. I saw them all. The boy's men were dispatched as one man's sword went one way and his arm went the other, and then the gold blade came back across and opened throats, and they went off their horses into the stream.
Until Robb stepped in to block a blow. But on the return, Jaime killed two more. A Mallister squire. A Stark man-at-arms. He was magnificent. I had never liked him and I had never once denied him that. He was the finest swordsman in the Seven Kingdoms and he was fighting for his life, and there is nothing in the world like watching it. There were ten men round him, with Robb on the outside with his wolf, and then the wolf took his horse.
It came in low and fast from the side, faster than any animal that size had a right to move, and it went for the throat, and the horse screamed and went down. Jaime came out of the saddle as it fell. He rolled. He came up on his feet in the mud with his sword still in his hand and his helm gone, and his hair plastered to his skull with sweat and blood. The wolf crouched in front of him with its lips peeled back off teeth as long as my fingers.
"Grey Wind."
Robb said it once. Not loud. The wolf stopped. It did not look back at him. But it stopped, and stood where it was, four feet from Jaime Lannister, with its hackles up and a sound coming out of it like a millstone, and it did not go in.
Robb Stark got down off his horse.
I was close by then, near enough to hear. I had my sword out and a dozen of my men at my back, and there were Northmen coming up all round: the big Flint, and the one they called Wylis with a mace in his hand the size of a man's leg, and the two brothers who had been in Lysa's sky cells, Tomm and Bennard, who had put themselves between the boy and everything in sight since the Twins and did it now. There were a great many swords within a few yards of Jaime Lannister. But Robb had put his hand up, flat.
"Back."
The big Flint looked at him.
"Back. Me and Jaime never had a proper second spar back at Winterfell."
They went back. I did not. I sat my horse where I was, twenty feet off, and I thought, you damned young fool. You damned fool. I rode six hundred miles for this.
He walked forward until he was ten feet from Jaime. He had an axe in his right hand, a long-hafted Northern thing with a bearded blade, and a round shield on his left arm, iron-rimmed, with the direwolf on it. Mail and plate, plain and good, and an open-faced helm, and blood on him that did not look like his own.
Jaime looked at him. He was breathing hard. He was bleeding from a cut over his eye and it was running into the eye, and he kept blinking it away. But he was smiling.
"Stark pup," he said.
"Cub, Jaime."
"We never did finish, you and I."
"We finished." The boy's voice was quite level. "You yielded."
"We both yielded." Jaime wiped the blood from his eye with the back of his wrist. He lifted the sword. "This isn't a spar, pup. There's no dull edge on this one. And I will kill you."
"You might," the boy said. "Your brother would be heartbroken. He's grown fond of Winterfell. And your daughter —"
He stopped. Just for a moment. As if he had tripped on something.
" — your niece," he said. "Forgive me. Your niece. She'd be heartbroken too."
It went very quiet in that part of the valley. There were my men, and the Northmen, and the Lannister prisoners who had moments ago laid down their arms and were being herded up the road behind me. The quiet of the moment, in anticipation, let almost all who were near hear what was said. Not even the sounds of the dying were to be heard, and everyone near heard it clearly.
I heard it too. And I heard something in it that I do not think another man in that valley heard, because I had been listening to the boy talk for nine days, and I had watched him take a correction in front of his lords without a flicker, and I had watched him say one day to my face on a ridge without a flicker. There had been no stumble. He did not stumble. He had put the word daughter down in the middle of that silent place in front of forty men as a misstep, and with the Kingslayer's reaction, he would have to have another title now, that's for sure.
Jaime Lannister's face went white, and then red, and then something happened: his smirk went away completely. Everything went. There was only the man, and he came across those ten feet of mud like something let off a chain.
He was fast. Gods, he was fast. The first cut came so quick I did not see it begin, only the shield coming up to meet it and the crack of steel on the iron rim. Then the second, low, at the knee. The boy took a half step back and it missed by a finger. Then a thrust at the face, and the shield again, and Jaime was already past it and coming back the other way.
The boy did not attack. Not at first. He gave ground. He kept the shield up and his feet under him and let Jaime come, and come, and come. I have seen men fight like that. Men who were stronger than the other and knew they were slower, and knew that if they tried to match him they'd be dead. They take the blows. They wait. The shield gets chewed to kindling and the man behind it waits.
Jaime was not waiting. He was not thinking. I could see it in his face. Every cut was a killing cut. Not one of them was careful.
The shield split.
It went on the fifth or sixth blow at the rim, a great overhand cut with all Jaime's weight behind it. The rim held but the boards went, and a crack opened from the rim to the boss. The boy felt it go. I saw him feel it. On the next blow he did not try to take it on the shield. He let the shield go — flung it at Jaime's face — and stepped inside the blow.
It was a mad thing to do. Stepping inside a swordsman's cut with nothing in your left hand. My heart stopped.
Jaime's blade came down. The boy caught his wrist.
Caught it. His left hand closed round Jaime's sword wrist, above the hilt, and held. For a moment they were chest to chest, the way the men who told it said they had been in that yard at Winterfell, faces a hand's width apart. I saw Jaime's teeth. I saw the boy's scar, white against the flush of his face.
Jaime twisted.
He was quick and he was clever, and he did not try to pull free. He turned the blade in his hand — turned the edge down and across, along the back of the boy's gripping fingers — and drew it.
I saw the blood come.
The boy did not let go. Something small flew off and went into the mud. The boy did not let go. His face did not even change. He held Jaime Lannister's wrist in his bleeding left hand and brought the axe round with his right.
It was not a clever blow. It did not need to be. It came down across Jaime's forearm, a hand above the wrist, just above the boy's own grip, with the whole weight of a Northern axe and the whole strength of the boy behind it.
There was a sound. I have heard it on a great many fields. I have never got used to it.
Jaime Lannister's sword fell into the mud, and his hand was still holding it.
For a moment nobody moved.
Jaime stood where he was. He looked down at the end of his arm. He looked at it a long time, as if it belonged to another man. His mouth was a little open. Then his legs went, and he went down on his knees in the mud.
The boy stood over him. His left hand was clenched in a fist and pressed hard against his chest, and the blood came out between the fingers and ran down his mail. He was breathing fast through his nose. His face was white, whiter than Jaime's.
"Yield," he said.
He said it quite softly. Jaime looked up at him. His face was wet. Sweat, and blood, and the other thing.
"You bloody," he said. "You bloody —"
Jaime Lannister looked at him for a moment longer, then he laughed. It was a terrible sound. It went on too long and broke in the middle when he finally passed out.
The boy did not sit down until Jaime had been bound.
He saw to it himself. He had Wylis bind the stump with a belt, hard, and sent a man riding for the maester who had come with Lady Roslin, and had Jaime lifted onto a horse with two men holding him on and sent back up the valley under guard. Alive, he said. I want him alive. If he dies, I'll know why. He sent men down the valley to count the prisoners and the dead. He sent riders north through the wood to the giants, to tell them the day was not done. He did all of it standing, with his left hand clenched against his chest and the blood still coming.
Then Theon Greyjoy came up the valley road at a canter, all grins, with his hundred behind him and a Westerling banner over his saddlebow, and saw the boy's face, and stopped grinning.
"Robb —"
"Help me sit."
Theon got him off to the side of the road and sat him down on a root. And then the boy opened his hand.
The tip of the little finger was gone. Only the last joint of it — the nail and the pad and the small bone under them, sheared off as clean as a candle end. There was a shallow cut along the backs of the other fingers too, where the gold sword had skidded over the knuckles before it found the smallest one and took the end. It was bleeding the way the ends of fingers do, far more than the size of it deserved.
I got down and knelt by him and took the hand. I have seen a great many wounds. As wounds go it was hardly one at all. I have known men lose more to a slipped knife at supper. It would heal clean if we kept it clean.
"Hot wine," I said over my shoulder. "And linen. And find his squire."
"It's nothing," the boy said.
"It's a piece of one."
"It's the smallest piece of the smallest one. I've a great deal of finger left." His voice was quite steady. His hand in mine was shaking so hard I had to hold it by the wrist to keep it still. "Did you see where it went?"
"Into the mud."
"Somebody find it." He shut his eyes. "I'll not have it sold at a fair in Lannisport."
That was when I laughed. I did not mean to. It came out of me all at once, and he opened his eyes and looked at me, surprised. Then he smiled too. It was the first time I had seen him do it since the road below the Twins.
The Frey squire came running, white as milk, with a skin and a rag. I poured the wine over the raw end and the boy did not make a sound. He only shut his eyes again and put his head back against the tree, and the wolf came and pushed its head into his lap, and he put his good hand in its fur and held on.
I bound the hand. I bound it tight and I bound it well, and when I was done I sat back on my heels and looked at my brother's grandson for a while.
"Your niece," I said quietly.
He did not open his eyes.
"You'll have forty men in this valley saying it by nightfall," I said. "Four hundred by morning. The whole of the riverlands in a fortnight, and King's Landing in a month, and there's not a thing Tywin Lannister can do about it but hang the men who say it, which will make the rest of them say it louder."
"Yes, just like they will with the letter sent by Lord Stannis and the words of my father," he said.
I looked at him a moment longer. Then I nodded, the way I had nodded to the map the first day. And I got up.
"I'll see to the prisoners," I said. "And then the scouts. There'll be men out of that camp tonight looking for their commander. I'd sooner they didn't find him."
"They won't." He opened his eyes. They were very clear. "Tonight is Riverrun, Uncle."
I looked at him, and at the wolf with its head in his lap, and at the long valley behind us full of the dead and the dying and men in crimson cloaks kneeling in the stream with their hands on their heads. Then I looked south, over the trees, toward the rivers and the red towers of my brother's castle.
"Tonight," I said.