Robb Stark P O V
"You'll not lead it," the Blackfish said.
We were standing at the edge of the wood above the Tumblestone in the last of the light, with the horse forming up behind us in the trees. Eight thousand men trying to be quiet make a good deal of noise. Harness creaking, horses blowing, a sergeant hissing at some boy whose sword kept knocking his stirrup. Below us the fires of the north camp were coming up one by one, fewer than last night. They had spent the afternoon burying their dead from the valley, and they had no commander now, and nobody in that camp had told them what to do about either.
"I'll lead the first of it," I said. "Not the main camp. The small one, over the ford."
"With that hand."
I looked at it. Olyvar had bound it fresh an hour before, the little finger splinted to the one beside it so it wouldn't knock on anything. It beat under the wrapping with every pulse. It was my shield hand, and I had tried the grip, and I could close the other three fingers on it. It hurt. I could do it.
"It's the end of one finger, Uncle. I've had worse from Mikken's forge."
"It's not the finger I'm worried about." He did not raise his voice. "Every man in this wood knows what you took off the Kingslayer this morning. Half of them saw it. You've nothing to prove to any of them, and you're more use to these men and yourself alive on that ridge than drowned in the Tumblestone or slain by a stray bolt or arrow."
"I know it, and I thank you for saying it. But hear me out, because I planned this part a long while before I ever had a bad finger." I kept my voice low; there were men within ten feet of us. "The North has seen me fight. The Freys have, and the Vale men now. The river lords haven't. Jason Mallister hasn't. The men on those walls, who've been looking at Lannister fires for a month, haven't. And the ones who get away from us tonight are going to ride west to Tywin and tell him what they saw. I want them to say the Stark boy came over the river at the head of his own horse. Not that he sat on a ridge. It's the first rush and nothing more. I pull up at the horse lines, the rest go past me, and I sit on the bank with Wylis and Torvin and watch the rest of it while Grey Wind slays many more men for me. I shall not go into the main camp. I'll not go near the Red Fork. You have my word on it."
He looked at me a while out of that brown, lined face.
"Hm. Who rides beside you?"
"Wylis. Torvin. Tomm and Bennard. Jon and Theon. Lady Maege and Dacey with the Bear Island men, Lord Bolton and his, and Daryn Hornwood's riders. Two thousand, all told."
"Your mother would have my skin." He turned to go back to his Vale men, and then stopped. "My riders took two Lannister men on the Red Fork road this morning, before the valley. Coming west from the kingsroad, riding hard, with letters for Ser Jaime under his father's seal."
"What did they say?"
"That Lord Tywin met Lord Karstark on the Green Fork, and knows now where you are not, and is marching west with everything he has. He told his son to expect you, and to hold here and take no chances." He tapped his saddlebag. "His letters to his son will be a bit late, I'm afraid. I'd no time to tell you before the horn. They're yours to read when there's light." He went on into the trees.
I had told the lords the plan at midday, in the wood, while we were sitting our horses. I told it to them plainly. Ser Brynden would take the greater part of the horse down out of the wood onto the north camp, with Lord Mallister beside him, because it was Mallister's men who had been broken under these walls and it was his right to go first; the Vale men under Ser Andar, and Ser Ryman's Freys, and Daryn Hornwood's riders behind. My uncle Edmure was in that camp, in a tent near the Tumblestone, and Ser Brynden knew which tent. I would take two thousand over the Tumblestone ford above the wood, the one my uncle had corrected me on while looking at my map, and come down on the small camp west of the castle from behind, from the side they had never watched because that side was the road to the Golden Tooth. I wanted that camp to break. I did not want it caught. I wanted Tywin to hear about tonight from his own men.
"The third camp, across the Red Fork, can do nothing," I said. "There's no bridge and no ford they'd dare at night. If Brax tries the river he'll drown half his men to help men who are already running. Lord Blackwood is in the castle. When he sees the north camp burn he'll sortie, because that's what I would do, and that's what any river lord would do who's sat behind a wall for a month looking at them. Ser Brynden's men are to know the Blackwood banner, and the Bracken banner, and not to cut down anything that comes out of the castle gate. And no one, not one man, rides into the trees north of the camps. We will push and shepherd the fleeing men into those woods, and let them retreat into them alone. Any man who runs that way is theirs."
Maege said she would see her men knew the Blackwood raven. Roose Bolton nodded once. Lord Mallister said nothing at all, but he had been looking at the north camp while I talked, with a look of want that he meant to sate.
We went over the Tumblestone an hour after full dark, with no torches until the far bank.
The water came up to the horses' bellies, and it was cold for a summer river and pulled hard, and Grey Wind swam it beside me with his head up and came out shaking himself over Theon. Then the bank was coming up under my horse and he was scrambling at it, and we were up, and the lights of the west camp were half a mile in front of us across open pasture, and nobody between.
We walked the horses the first quarter mile. I wanted them together. Then I put the torch to the one Theon carried, and he put it to the next, and the fire went down the line both ways, and I put my heels in.
The first man we met was a picket, one man standing up out of the grass with his spear and his mouth open, and the whole line went past him before he had decided what we were. Theon threw his torch onto the first tent, and the canvas caught all at once with a sound like a sail filling and stood up yellow in the dark with men shouting inside it. A man came out of the next tent in his smallclothes with a sword in his hand, and I saw his face in my torchlight, and then I brought the axe down and his face was not there. Grey Wind went by my stirrup, low, and a man screamed ahead of us and stopped.
A spear came at my horse's chest and he reared, and I hacked down at the haft over his neck and felt it go, and the man who had held it ran, and Tomm rode him down. A second man came at my left, where the shield was, and I closed my hand on the grip, and the end of my finger went white-hot. But it was a pain so small compared to what I had been through, and I felt it go numb. I brought the axe across and down, and he went under the horse, and I felt the horse go over him. The third was a boy, running for the castle with no weapon at all, and I hit him with the flat of the axe across the back of the neck as I went by, and he went down on his face in the grass, and I did not look back to see if he got up.
My breath was loud inside the helm. The whole place smelled of pitch and canvas and wet horse. I was very aware of my hand.
I pulled up at the horse lines, where the camp ended in picket ropes and a long row of ash from the cookfires, and I turned my horse round and sat him, and put my axe up.
Wylis came up on one side of me with his mace dripping. Torvin on the other. Jon. Theon, wild-eyed and grinning. Tomm and Bennard. Grey Wind came back out of the dark and stood against my horse's forelegs with his muzzle a dark bluish red with blood.
And the rest of the horse went past us.
Maege Mormont went by with her axe up and Dacey beside her, and the Bear Island men after them, and the Hornwood moose, and then the Dreadfort men in a long quiet line, pale pink banners black in the firelight, and Roose Bolton at their head with his sword still in its sheath. He looked at me as he went by and nodded, once, and Domeric behind him raised his hand to me and was gone into the burning camp.
I sat and watched it. I had said I would. The camp went to pieces in front of me, east toward the castle moat and south toward the Red Fork and west up the Golden Tooth road, and the Northmen went through it and did not follow the ones going west. I saw Ser Forley Prester's own banner go up the road in a knot of horse, and I let it. Let him tell it.
North of us, across the Tumblestone, the big camp was burning from end to end. I could hear the horns from here, and under the horns the other sound, the one I had been waiting for. It came from the trees along the north bank, where the wood runs down to the river. A roar first, deeper than any throat I had ever heard, so deep I felt it in my teeth from half a mile away. Then the screaming. It went on a long time, and it moved along the wood, east, following the men who ran that way, and every man who was still fighting in the west camp stopped and turned his head to the north to listen to it, Northman and westerman both.
Jon had come up beside me. "Mag Mar," he said.
"Mag Mar."
"They'll not stop running till Lannisport."
"Some of them. The rest will never want to see a tree again." I got down off my horse, which took longer than it should have, and sat on a picket post, and let Olyvar see to the hand. Grey Wind lay down across my boots. We watched the castle. On the walls, men shouted, and torches ran along the wallwalk toward the west gate; then the gate opened, and horsemen came out, bearing a banner I could not read in the dark but did not need to. The river lords had been inside that castle for a month. They came out of it like water out of a broken dam.
Jon handed me the water skin without my asking. I rinsed my mouth and drank. It was the first time in the whole day I had wanted to.
They found Edmure before dawn.
My uncle Brynden brought him to me himself, across the ford, in the grey light, with the north camp still burning behind them and the smoke lying along the river. Edmure was on a captured horse with a cloak over his shoulders that was not his, and his wrists were raw where the irons had been, and he had a month's beard and a cut over his ear, and he was thinner than any man in my family has a right to be.
I knew him at once. I had not seen him since I was small and could not have said what I remembered of him, but his hair is my mother's, and he sat a horse the way she does, and when he saw me he tried to straighten and couldn't quite.
"Nephew," he said. "By the gods. Cat's boy."
"Uncle." I came and took his horse's bridle myself, and then I took his hand, and then I didn't let go of it. "You're free. The camp's ours. Riverrun's gate is open and Lord Blackwood's out in the field with his horse. Your father's alive. We'll have you to him within the hour."
He looked at me, and at Grey Wind, and at the wood behind me where the screaming had been, and at Brynden.
"The Blackfish told me," he said. "On the way over. He told me and I thought he was having a joke at my expense, because he does that. Giants. He said giants."
"Six of them. There's more with the foot."
"And Jaime Lannister."
"Is in a wagon under guard with your uncle's own men around him, with one hand, and he's going into your father's cells as soon as we're across the moat. Alive. I'll want to talk to you about him, Uncle, but not today."
Edmure Tully shut his eyes a moment. Then he opened them and laughed, which turned into a cough, and Brynden thumped him on the back harder than was kind, but his eyes told me he did care.
Jason Mallister came across after them with his face black with smoke and a Lannister banner over his saddle, and for once had nothing sharp to say about anything. Ser Andar Royce came with him. The north camp was ours, every tent of it. The river lords had come out of the castle gate and taken the stragglers between the moat and the fires, and Lord Tytos Blackwood had met Ser Brynden in the field and the two of them had sat their horses and shouted at each other for some time about which of them had taken more Lannisters, which my uncle told me with more pleasure than I had yet seen in him. Across the Red Fork, Brax's camp had tried the river in the dark to come to the others, and the river had taken Lord Andros Brax and a good part of his horse, and the rest were sitting on the far bank watching us. Ser Forley Prester had gone west up the Golden Tooth road with perhaps half his men, in good order, and I had let him go, and Brynden's riders were out to make sure he kept going.
Mallister's men had watched the plain wolf banner go over the ford first, and so had the men on the walls; Ser Desmond Grell told me later that the whole west wall had seen it and that the cheering had started before anyone knew whose banner it was. I counted it up with Jory while Edmure ate. We had lost under three hundred men in the valley and the camps together. We had taken near two thousand prisoners, counting the ones who had yielded to Brynden in the valley and ridden with us, and three times as many had run, west and south and into the trees. The giants could not tell me how many had come out of the trees, and I did not ask Mag Mar to try.
Then we went into Riverrun.
I had seen it from the air a dozen times, and from the ridge, and it was still bigger than I had let myself think. Red stone, three sides of it water, the Tumblestone and the Red Fork meeting at the point like the prow of a ship, and the moat on the third side cut so that when the sluice gates were open the whole castle sat in the river like an island. They had the gates open for us. The river lords and the garrison lined the wallwalk and the yard, and they were thin and grey and tired, and they cheered Edmure first, as they should have, and then they cheered my uncle, and then they looked at Grey Wind and were quiet, and then they looked at the giants standing on the far bank of the moat, and some of them cheered again and some of them did not know what to do.
Lord Tytos Blackwood met us in the yard. He is a tall, hawk-faced man with a raven-feather cloak, and he had held this castle for my grandfather for a month with four hundred men, and he knelt to Edmure and then stood and looked at me. Beside him stood Lord Jonos Bracken with his arm in a sling, who had been his enemy for a thousand years and had held the other wall for a month, and the two of them had not killed each other. Ser Desmond Grell, the master-at-arms. Utherydes Wayn, the steward. Maester Vyman, grey and small, who looked at my hand before he looked at my face.
"Lord Stark," said Tytos Blackwood. "I've a great many questions."
"You'll have the answers, my lord, and the asking of them. Tonight, at table, with all your lords present, because they've earned the hearing. But first I need to see my grandfather, and so does my uncle, and I'd ask the castle's patience for an hour."
He gave it. They all did.
Hoster Tully's chamber is high in the keep with windows on the river, and the river came in through them, the sound of it and the smell, and under the river the other smell, the one a sickroom has. He lay in a great bed under a Tully banner, very small in it. His hair had been red once and was white now and mostly gone. His hands lay on the coverlet and did not move.
Edmure went to him first. I let him; it was his father. He knelt at the bedside and took one of those hands and said "Father, it's Edmure, I'm home," and Hoster's eyes opened and found him, and found him again, and his mouth worked.
"Edmure." Barely a sound. "They had you."
"They did. They don't now. Robb came. Cat's son came, Father, with the whole of the North behind him, and your brother the Blackfish with him."
The eyes came past Edmure then, to me, and I came forward into the light so he could see what there was to see.
"Catelyn's boy," he said. He looked at me a long while. "You've the look of her. And of him. The Stark." The hand moved on the coverlet and I took it. It had no grip in it at all. "They said you'd come. Vyman said. I said a boy of seventeen won't get past Walder Frey, I said it to Vyman, he'll sit at the Twins till the old weasel bleeds him white. Did he bleed you?"
"No, my lord. Lord Walder died. His son Stevron is Lord of the Crossing now and he opened the bridge to me the same morning, and four thousand Freys are marching to your castle under his banner."
Hoster Tully looked at me, and something moved in his face that was almost a smile.
"Died," he said. "Walder Frey. Died." A sound in his chest. "Late, even for that. It seems I outlived that rotten weasel."
Then he saw who was standing behind me, in the doorway, and his face changed.
Brynden had not come further in than the door. He stood there with his helm under his arm, and the river light on him, and he did not say anything. He had told me on the march, once, in a few words, what lay between him and his brother. Lysa, and the Redwyne match, and the Blackfish name taken in spite and kept in pride, and fifteen years of not speaking that neither of them had known how to end.
"Brynden," Hoster said.
"Hoster."
"Come where I can see you, you stubborn —" He coughed, and Edmure held him. When it passed he said, "Come here."
My uncle came. He came to the other side of the bed and knelt, which I had not seen him do for anything, and put his hand on his brother's chest.
"You came," Hoster said. "Out of the Vale. For the boy."
"For the boy. For Edmure. For you, you old fool. For Cat's son, who sent to Lysa and got his men put in sky cells for it, and came down the kingsroad anyway." Brynden's voice was not steady. "I'm here, Hoster. I'm not going anywhere. I'll sit in this chair until you tell me to get out of it."
"Hm," said Hoster Tully, which I understood then was a family thing, and he shut his eyes. He did not take his hand off his brother's.
I went out and left them, and Edmure came out after a while, and we stood in the passage with our backs to the wall and neither of us said anything for a time.
"How long?" I asked at last.
"Vyman says days. He's been saying days for two months. He's a hard man to kill, my father." Edmure rubbed his face with both hands. "Robb. I don't know how to say it. The castle. Me. I was a fool under these walls and I'd have been a dead one, and you —"
"You held the river lords together after the Golden Tooth, and you got them inside these walls, and they held for a month. That's not a fool. That's a man who lost a fight. Mine went the way I planned them, and I had more men." I put my good hand on his shoulder. "Get some sleep, Uncle. You've a month of it owed. Tonight you'll sit at the head of your own table and I'll tell your lords what I've done and what I mean to do, and you'll want your wits for it. And I've something else to bring you, after. Someone. It can wait until you've slept."
He looked at me. "Someone."
"After you've slept."
I had Olyvar bring Roslin Frey to the godswood the next morning, because I wanted her to see it, and I wanted Edmure to see her in it, and because no one would overhear us there.
It is a strange godswood, Riverrun's. The trees are redwoods, not weirwoods, and the heart tree is a weirwood that stands alone in the middle of them like a guest, slender and pale, with a carved face that is sadder than the one at Winterfell. My mother played here as a girl and prayed in the sept, and told me once that the tree's face had frightened her. I knelt to it when I came in, and said my few words in the Old Tongue, and Grey Wind lay down at the foot of it as if he had been doing it all his life.
Edmure came in from the castle side with his beard trimmed and clean clothes on him and the cut over his ear bound, looking ten years younger and still a little grey. Roslin came in from the river side on Perwyn's arm, with her two women behind her, in a grey gown, with a black ribbon at her throat for her father.
She is a small girl, Roslin, with brown hair and brown eyes and a pretty, quiet face. She had been frightened of me on the road and had got over it, I think, around the time Olyvar told her I had sent him away from the fire to sleep when he was nodding. She was not frightened now. She was white as the tree.
"Uncle," I said. "Lady Roslin Frey, Lord Stevron's sister, who rode south with my host as my guest and under her brothers' guard, so that I could present her to you. My lady, my uncle, Ser Edmure Tully, heir to Riverrun." Then I said the rest, because I had planned it and it needed saying in front of her. "I made no promise about this to anyone, Uncle, and I'll make none now. Not to Lord Stevron. Not to the lady. I said I would bring her and speak for the match, and I'm speaking for it, and that's the whole of what I said. If you've no mind to it, you'll say so, and she goes home with gifts and honor and the Freys and the Tullys stay friends. If she looks at you and has no mind to it, she'll say so, and the same. I've sisters, and I told her brother that." Though I did feel bad for using his captivity against him, as I knew he was lonely and without care, and now would be a great time to introduce him to the best of Walder's brood, or I suppose Stevron's, now.
Edmure Tully, who had fought under the Golden Tooth and sat a month in irons, looked at Roslin Frey and went red to the ears.
"My lady," he said. "I — you're welcome in Riverrun. More than welcome. I'm sorry for the state of it. We've been under siege."
"I know, my lord," Roslin said. Her voice was small and clear. "I'm sorry for it. And for your father."
They looked at each other.
I had meant to stay. I found I did not need to. I made some excuse about the hand, and took Grey Wind, and Perwyn stayed where he was, as her brother should, and I left my uncle and the Lady Roslin standing in the godswood with the sound of the river and nothing else, and I did not look back.
Three days.
The castle filled up in them. The river lords who had been scattered since the Golden Tooth came in by every road once the word went out, Pipers and Vances and Mootons and Lord Darry's men, with what they had left, which was not much, and I sat with every one of them and heard them, and gave them seats at Edmure's table, and let them look at the giants. Hedwig went east each night and came back each dawn. On the first morning he had Tywin Lannister for me: twenty-five thousand men on the river road west of the Ruby Ford, moving slowly, with their wagons behind them. On the second morning they had stopped, and a rider came in from Lord Karstark the same day, a Karhold man who had ridden four horses to death, to tell me that Tywin had turned west onto the river road the night after the Green Fork and that Lord Karstark had turned the foot round and was coming down the kingsroad behind him, a day and a half back, with Manny in the middle of it and the Umber banner beside him. On the third morning Tywin's fires had not moved. He was sitting on the Trident with a Northern army on either side of him, and I let him sit. I told Edmure's steward to make ready for thirty thousand more men, and sat with him an hour over the granary tallies so he would believe it could be done. The Kingslayer lay in a cell under the keep with Vyman's poultice on his arm and a fever that came and went, and Ser Desmond's men at the door, and I did not go down to him. Not yet. I had my own wants to mend: planning my next move, what had changed, and the next steps, like clearing the riverlands of the Lannister mercenaries and raiders. I also had Vyman take the splint off my hand, put a better one on, and tell me it would heal clean, that I would hardly notice the loss of it, and that I had been a fool to fight with it, which was true, and I thanked him for both.
And every one of the three days, in the afternoon, my uncle Edmure found a reason to be in the godswood.
He did not tell me. Olyvar told me, and Perwyn would not, and Brynden, when I asked him, said "Hm," and then said, "He's a Tully. We know what we want. We're only slow about saying it," and went back to his brother's chamber.
On the evening of the third day Edmure came to me in the solar that had been his father's, where I was sitting with the map, and shut the door, and stood there a moment as if he had forgotten what he came for.
"Yes," he said.
I waited.
"Yes, Robb. If she'll have me. I've asked her, and she says she will, and her brother says he'll write to Lord Stevron tonight if I ask it, and I'm asking it. I'd have it done here, in my father's sept, as soon as her brother answers. I'd have my father see it, if he can be got to a chair." He sat down across the table from me, heavily, as if he had set something down. "You'll say I'm quick."
"I'll say you're a Tully. Your uncle says you know what you want." I came round the table and took his hand with my good one. "I'm glad, Uncle. I mean that plainly. She's a kind girl out of a hard house and she's had less kindness than she deserves, and you're a better man than you've been told you are this month. Lord Stevron will say yes. His father wanted a Tully match before my mother was born, and Stevron will not haggle for what his father would have taken as a toll. Write him tonight. I'll put my seal beside yours."
He laughed, and it was the first real one I had heard from him, and we drank a cup to it, and he went down to tell Roslin, and I went up to see my grandfather, because I had got into the habit of it at the end of the day.
Brynden was in the chair. He had been in the chair three days. Hoster was asleep, and his breathing had changed since the morning, slower and with a catch in it, and I knew what that was because I had sat with men dying at Winterfell, and so did my uncle.
"Edmure's to wed the Frey girl," I said, quietly.
"I heard. He told his father an hour ago. He told him twice. I think the second time he heard it." Brynden did not look up from the bed. "He said 'good.' That was all. Good."
I sat on the other side. We did not talk. The river went by under the window. After a while, Edmure came up with Roslin, and Roslin knelt at the foot of the bed and said a prayer to the Seven in a voice I could barely hear, and Hoster did not wake, and she went out again, and Edmure stayed.
He died a little after midnight, with his brother's hand on his chest and his son's hand in his, and his grandson at the foot of the bed with a direwolf lying across his feet, and the sound of the river coming in the window. He did not wake for it. His breath went slower, and then there was a long space, and then there was another, longer, and then the Blackfish put his head down on the coverlet beside his brother's hand and did not lift it for some time, and Edmure Tully, who had been heir to Riverrun all his life, sat and looked at his father's face.
I went and stood at the window. Below me the moat was black and the fires of my own camp were spread along the far bank, and beyond them the dark line of the wood, and the giants were somewhere in it, and Hedwig was somewhere over the kingsroad looking for Karstark's fires, and the river went on under me, going to the sea.
Vyman came, and did what maesters do, and went to wake the septon.
"He wanted the river," Brynden said behind me. His voice was rough. "The Tully way. He told me so three days ago, when he could still tell me things. A boat, and the fire arrow, and the river takes him. Edmure's to shoot it. He said so."
"Then Edmure will shoot it. We shall practice a bit tonight before bed, in the privacy of the godswood," I said. "But tomorrow every lord in this castle will stand on the walls to see it, and then we'll feed them, and the day after, Uncle, we'll talk about what comes next. There's a great deal of it. But not tonight."
"No," said the Blackfish. "Not tonight."
I put my good hand on my uncle Edmure's shoulder, and he reached up and held it, and the three of us stayed where we were until the window went grey.