Here we go. I know this didn't come out last week, but it took longer than I anticipated. That's why I was unsure about when the next chapter would be released. I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think!
While I sat in the solar with a table full of food and wine, waiting on the last of the lords to arrive, I took the chance to look over the ones that already had.
Lord Bolton had been first through the door and seated, with Domeric at his side. Lord Manderly came in next and claimed the most reinforced chair in the room, his son standing beside him, and had already found the wine. Lord Umber came after with Smalljon behind his chair, and Mors settled in beside him, Mors's one good eye moving over the table of food and the other lords. Maege Mormont followed with Dacey at her shoulder, and Lords Tallhart and Glover not far behind, arriving together and talking about something in the easy way of men who had been friends a long time. Lord Rickard Karstark and his son Harrion came in last, paired with Lord Flint, taking the last of the seats.
Once they were all seated, I stood and raised a hand toward the wall behind me, and Wylis and Torvin stepped away from it.
Both of them were well past seven feet, though neither quite reached the eight that had described the Mountain in my other life. Still — standing beside any ordinary man in that room, they might as well have been giants themselves, taller even than the Greatjon. I had them properly outfitted now: ring mail, round shields, war axes at the belt, javelins slung across their backs, all in the colors of Winterfell's men-at-arms. They crossed the room without hurry, every lord at that table watching them the whole way, and pulled the doors shut behind them as they went out.
That settled the rumors about my new sworn shields and their size well enough for the gathered lords.
"Thank you for your patience, my lords." I let my gaze move down the table, meeting each pair of eyes in turn. "I know most of you have been wondering why I asked you to stay on a week past the celebration. And why the tourney grounds have not been taken down, but expanded. Some of you have noticed other things as well — that the smithies in Wintertown, and Mikken with Winterfell's own forge, have been working well into the night for months. That they have stockpiled more short axes and round shields than any castle in the North would ever need for a melee."
I let that sit a moment.
"So I mean to tell you why. All of it — what my father has written me, what has already been done, and what I intend to do next."
I took one last breath before I began, and told them the truth. Or near enough to it.
"You all know my father rode south to serve as Hand of the King. That much is true — Robert asked him, and my father would not refuse his oldest friend, and neither his honor nor his duty would let him say no." I paused. "But it is not the whole of it. He went south to find the truth of Jon Arryn's death. Because he does not believe it was a natural one. Because we have reason to believe the Lannisters had a hand in it."
The gasps came from several places at once — Wyman's sharp intake of breath, a rough cough and a thump on the table from further down that I was fairly sure belonged to Lord Flint. Harrion Karstark half slipped from where he leaned on his father's chair before his father's hand found his arm. I let the reactions run their course, then raised my hand again.
"I would not ask you to take my word alone. Not on a matter this size."
I stepped back and to my left, giving my mother the room to come forward.
She rose and set a small carved box on the table, and the letter that had come inside it. She told them plainly whose it was: her sister's, sent some months past — before the king's party ever rode north, and the very reason they had. She explained the box itself, the trick of it that she and Lysa had shared as girls, and how the words had come north hidden where no maester's eye would find them.
Then I passed the letter down the table so every lord could see it with his own eyes.
The Lannisters have killed him.
Five words. I watched them work their way around that table and change every face they touched — curiosity going to something harder, lords glancing at one another and then back at the parchment as if it might read differently the second time. Maege Mormont read it twice and passed it on with her jaw set. Wyman read it with no change of expression at all, which from Wyman was the loudest reaction in the room.
"My father knew that before Robert ever reached Winterfell," I said, when the letter had made its way back into my hand. "He rode south for the truth of it. And for justice for the man who raised him."
I set the letter down and took a breath.
"I trust every man at this table to keep what follows in this room. My father has been writing to me since he reached King's Landing. And with each raven, his letters have grown more pointed, with more warnings and more instructions."
I reached into the folds of my cloak and drew out three letters, the parchment gone soft from being carried against me all morning. They were written in the Old Tongue, in my father's hand, under my father's seal.
Though I had written all three of them myself.
It was a small deceit, and I had made my peace with it before I ever set my quill to the parchment. My father's letters said everything these said — only carefully, in pieces, in the space between the lines of a man too honorable to write down an accusation he could not yet prove. Lords do not muster on an heir's reading between lines. They only muster on their liege lord's word. So I had given them his word, in his hand.
One of the letters carried an instruction I had not invented at all, but one that had come from my father in a different life — orders for Lord Tallhart and Lord Glover to repair and garrison Moat Cailin with archers. My father would have given that order to my mother months from now, in that other life, when it was already far too late to matter. I simply saw no reason to wait for it.
The other two letters conveyed the same message in simpler terms: gather the banners discreetly, name the men you trust, be prepared to move. The last of them ended with a warning that was stark on more levels than one — that something was seriously amiss in the capital, that the Lannisters were acting unusually, and that there were far more Tyrells and Hightowers at court than one would typically expect.
As I spoke, I passed the letters down the table.
"He wants the banners gathered quietly. Prepared, not called — nothing that would be noticed between here and King's Landing in time to matter. And no man outside this room learns that any of this has begun."
Every lord at that table could read the Old Tongue well enough now to follow it, which was its own small victory and one I had spent years pushing for. Watching the old words move around a table of Northern lords as easily as the common tongue — a court language of the North again, and not a curiosity kept alive in the mountains — felt earned. None of them could tell the hand was not my father's. They passed the letters one to the next and read them carefully, and I watched man after man nod slowly as the words settled into place beside everything they already knew of Eddard Stark.
Then Roose Bolton set the letters down, squared them to the edge of the table with two pale fingers, and spoke into the quiet.
"Forgive me, Robb." He used my name deliberately, and slowly, and his voice came over the room and made me feel as though a bucket of the most frigid northern water had been dumped over me. "All these letters. All these preparations. From a frightened, grieving woman, newly widowed, writing to her sister." A pause, precisely weighted. "It seems a great deal to build on that. Is it truly reason enough for all of this?"
I had expected the question — maybe not from Roose exactly, but I had wanted it asked here, where I could answer it in front of everyone, rather than at some hall or meal table where the rest would not hear it and would be left to wonder on their own.
"Yes, Lord Bolton. It is precisely one of the reasons." I looked straight at him and kept my voice level. "And it is why my father accepted the office of Hand of the King, even though he never wanted it. He did not sit in Winterfell and act on one letter from a grieving woman who happens to be his wife's sister. He rode south into the snake pit called King's Landing — the city that killed his own father and his brother — to stand in the place where Jon Arryn died and learn the truth of it himself. What you hold in your hand is what he has found there. No man at this table has ever had cause to question my father's honor, or his duty."
Roose inclined his head the exact degree owed, and said nothing further.
I turned from him to the rest of the room, and found most of them already nodding. There was nothing more that needed saying. Defending my father any further would only have insulted him, and given the room something to wonder at besides.
"I trust him," I said instead. "And I know you do as well. What I mean to do is make certain that his trust in me is not misplaced — that when his word comes, the North is ready for whatever comes with it."
That got me nods all down the table. Men who had known Ned Stark their whole lives did not need to be talked into preparing for something he had warned them of.
I signaled Luwin forward, and he came with the ledger and laid it flat on the table before me.
"Then I will ask a number of each of you," I said. "With perhaps a month and a half. Two, if you need it. How many men can you raise, feed, and have standing at Winterfell, ready to march?"
The room came alive at that. It went house by house, and it went slowly, because these were Northern lords and not one of them was going to be out-counted by the man across the table from him. The Greatjon opened high enough that Maege Mormont told him flatly that boasting was not mustering, which set half the table laughing and the Greatjon revising his own figure upward out of pure stubbornness. Lord Wyman's number was the largest and the most carefully hedged, White Harbor's wealth showing in every qualification he attached to it. Rickard Karstark gave his without embellishment and did not change it. Lord Flint spoke for the mountain clans in the Old Tongue first and then in the common, and the second number was smaller than the first, which I suspected was closer to the truth of what those valleys could spare and still eat through winter.
Luwin's quill was busy the whole time, and I kept my own mind busy doing the sums alongside him.
It came to more than I had told Jory or Luwin to expect. Given the time — real time, a moon and a half of it, and roads that would carry them — the North could put something near forty thousand men in the field. Near what the Vale could raise, and more than this kingdom had gathered since the Hungry Wolf. Luwin and I had gone over the old musters before this meeting, and I had known the number was there on parchment. It was a different thing to hear it counted out in the voices of the men who would raise it for me.
But I had never intended to take all of what the North could muster. Even thirty thousand Northmen, prepared and ready, would already be better than the story I knew.
"My thanks, my lords. I have no doubt you will each raise what you have promised." I let the ledger stay open where they could see it. "But hear me plainly. If war comes, or anything near it, I do not mean to strip the North bare. Something closer to eight parts in ten of what you have named — no more. The rest stay in your own halls and on your own lands, where they belong, and I will raise a second levy slower out of Stark lands and Winterfell besides. Whatever happens south, the North behind us will not be a kingdom left with only women, boys, and greybeard elders to struggle through winter."
That last part landed well, and I saw why in the faces of the men from the coasts and the far holds — Mormont, Flint, Glover, Tallhart. Every one of them had been quietly doing the arithmetic of what a southern war would leave standing in their own lands to watch the coast and the wildling raids.
Lord Wyman cleared his throat, and I gave him a nod to go on.
"White Harbor keeps more crossbowmen than the rest of the North put together," he said comfortably. "They man the walls and keep the peace in the harbor, and they take a fortnight to train where a bowman can take years. If Winterfell is willing to part with a bit of coin, my lord, I can spare the rest and send crossbows enough to raise a detachment or two here inside a moon."
"Winterfell will pay for every one of them, my lord. Buy them quietly and buy them small — a trading city buying arms is nothing worth a raven to anyone."
His face brightened considerably, and he gave his mustache a twirl and announced he would write home before the day was out.
It was Galbart Glover who brought up the other thing, halfway through a leg of chicken off the table.
"And the wagons, Lord Robb?" He gestured vaguely toward the western wall with the bone. "I walked past your wainwright sheds twice this week. There are more wagons behind Winterfell than I have seen in one place in my life, and they are still building them. No harvest in the history of the North needed a tenth of that."
I was glad he had caught it, so that I would not have to raise it myself.
"Maester Luwin can tell it better than I can," I said, waving a hand toward him. "He was quite inspired with the project."
Luwin rose, and if he was surprised to have it handed to him, he gave the lords no sign of it, and took them through it the way we had gone over it. Every wagon built to one pattern, so that a wheel off any wagon we had made would fit another's axle in the rain at midnight, when normally there would be no way to mend it quickly. Axles matched to within a finger's width, so the Stark wagons rolled in the same pair of ruts, and the ruts themselves became part of the road. Iron tires shrunk hot onto the wheels so they bound tighter as they cooled. Iron bushings in the hubs, so the wagon outlasted the oxen instead of the other way round. And the sides — doubled oak plank, hinged, folded flat and pinned for the road, so that to any onlooker or scout in the realm it was a common load wagon and nothing else. Yet raised at a halt and roped fast to the iron brackets inside, it became a wall thick enough to stop a bolt or an arrow, with slits cut to shoot back through.
Luwin spread his drawings over the clear part of the table, and the practical men bent over them with their lips moving. More than one lord gave him a long, appraising look — Winterfell's maester having plainly been a great deal busier these months than anyone had realized, and every one of them thinking it his idea in full.
I did not correct them. The man the design truly belonged to had been dead for centuries in a world none of them would ever hear of, and he could spare the credit.
"Most days of most winters they will haul grain," I said. "That is the whole beauty of it. Even the lie is useful."
Then I stepped back and let Theon come forward from where he had been standing near the hearth.
We had gone over what he meant to say twice the night before, so I knew every word of it already. It let me watch the lords instead.
"Most of you know how I came to be sent to Winterfell in the first place," he began, and there was no bitterness in it at all — only a plain honesty that told the room he had made his peace with it a long time ago. "A hostage. A deterrent against my father doing something foolish a second time." He spoke without emotion. "But I grew up here, alongside Robb and Jon and the rest of this family. Ned Stark has been more a father to me than my own, who does not even write to his sent-away son and heir. So I will say it plainly, my lords: I stand with Robb and with the North, until the day comes that I take my place as Lord of the Iron Islands."
Somebody down the table grunted approval. Theon did not stop for it.
"And I have made use of my father's silence. I have written to both my uncles in these past years — my mother's brother, Lord Rodrik Harlaw, whom some of you will know better as the Reader, who holds the second largest seat of the isles and thinks my father's dreams are madness that will drown another generation of ironborn for nothing. And my father's brother Victarion, who commands the Iron Fleet, and who shares no love with him either." He shrugged. "Neither of them thinks as my father thinks. Both of them have more sense. If the worst comes and the North marches south, I would wager we can at least keep the ironborn from doing something stupid while its back is turned — and if they mean to try it anyway, we will hear of it long before they sail."
"And after?" Rickard Karstark asked. Not hostile. Just a hard man asking a hard question.
"After, my lord, I mean to change them." Theon's chin came up. "With Robb's help, when the time comes. They may call me half a greenlander for it, and I have stopped caring. I will show them my grandfather's way — the way of building — so that the isles can grow strong without needing the whole of Westeros to hate them for it. So that paying the Iron Price does not have to mean raiding the coasts of our neighbors, but fighting pirates and slavers, and taking from the rich coasts of Essos instead."
He gave me a final nod and stepped back. A few of the lords nodded to him as he went, and Lord Wyman lifted his cup an inch off the table, which for a Manderly toward a Greyjoy was very close to an embrace.
"Then we come to what leaves this room," I said. "And what does not."
I put both hands flat on the table.
"When you walk out of this solar, this meeting was about grain stores, winter preparation, and the rumors of a king rising beyond the Wall. That is all it was. Every man of yours will believe it because every word of it is something we did in fact discuss, and because it is exactly what a harvest council with every high lord in the North sitting in it ought to be about."
I gave that a breath to settle, and moved on to the part that might interest them the most.
"You will also see work parties on your own roads before the snows. I am sending men, with giants, and a mammoth with each, back to your keeps to widen and mend the roads running to and from Winterfell and Wintertown. Most of you have ridden the stretch out of Wintertown by now — stone and sawdust packed down, drainage trenches cut to either side, crowned so the melt runs off instead of pooling. It holds through rain and summer snow where the old road would turn to slush." I nodded down the table. "We will start with White Harbor, Bear Island, Last Hearth, Karhold, and Barrowton besides, though Lady Dustin is not here; the settlement is important enough, and every smaller house along that route will have the good of it, as they will along the others. And a larger party goes down the Kingsroad to Moat Cailin with Lord Tallhart and Lord Glover, where the giants and the mammoths will do in a few moons what would take five hundred men a year, especially through the wet ground nearest Lord Reed's marshes."
I looked around the table. "But hear the other half of it, because I mean this one as much as the first. This work belongs to every house in the North, not only to those sworn directly to Winterfell. Better roads mean faster trade, fuller markets, and men who can reach one another before winter closes the gaps. Whatever comes or does not come of the situation in the south, that is worth building. A North tied closer together is what the old gods would want of us, if they would have anything of us at all."
"So raise your levies," I went on. "Bring your men here as they come. And if you can spare craftsmen — smiths, fletchers, leatherworkers — send them with the men. Winterfell will arm and outfit as many as we can get our hands on, and I mean your household men-at-arms as much as my own. Whatever coin House Stark spends putting an axe and a shield and a decent coat of boiled leather on your men is yours to keep, whether anything comes of the south or not." I let the corner of my mouth go up. "Consider it House Stark returning the trust you have shown my father and me."
That got the good-natured smiles and the cheers I wanted, and I let it run before I finished.
"But if something does come — I do not intend for us to be caught scrambling when my father's word arrives." The room quieted again. "I would rather not have my father be the second Stark Hand whose time in the South ended after a few short months."
Nobody laughed at that one. Nobody was meant to.
"Which brings me to the last of it, and then I will let you at the food before it cools any further. If a raven ever brings you a letter in the Old Tongue, under my seal, that opens with the old greeting — Fungr, which no letter of mine will ever carry idly — then you will know without reading another word of it. Something has happened, and the time has come."
"He's had my son reciting that at me across my own table ever since he came back," the Greatjon said while scratching his beard.
"The North took the better part of a year to gather the last time it marched to war. When that word goes out, I mean for it to take a fortnight."
"And the Imp?" Mors Umber asked, from down the table, and every head turned. "You've a Lannister sitting in this castle drinking your wine while we sit here counting spears and talking about what happens if the worst comes for your father in the south, Robb," he said, with respect.
"I do, and he will be staying here a good while longer." I did not soften it. "Lord Tyrion and the princess are our guests, and they will be treated as guests — honored, comfortable, and harmed by no man under this roof, whatever news ever comes north. That word is iron, my lords. Guest right is the oldest law we have, and the day the North starts bending it for convenience is the day the old gods leave us." I paused. "But no raven the Imp writes goes south unread. And nothing said in this room ever reaches him."
"Then somebody ought to be watching the little man," Mors said.
"I was rather hoping you might, my lord. You have an eye for it."
"An eye, yes," Mors said with a grin, and Flint and Glover laughed with him while the Greatjon pounded the table hard enough to jump the cups.
"Then enough talk, my lords. Eat, before it all goes cold. And try the new dish at the center of the table — I call it a calzone. Fresh bread baked round a filling of meat, tomatoes, and melted cheese. My siblings have very nearly eaten Winterfell out of cheese over it, and I would like at least one of you to tell me it was worth the loss."
It was, by every account, worth the loss, as Lord Wyman had four of them himself.
The rest of the afternoon went fast, and I did enjoy it. We stayed at the table a few hours more. The talk turned to the melee, and from the melee to older war stories and tales about my father — the Greatjon telling about Ned Stark's battle fervor at the Trident, with Rickard Karstark correcting him on the details in a voice that suggested he had been correcting him on the same details for years. Soon after, most of the lords began making their way out of the solar.
By the time the last of them had gone down to the yard, only Mother, Luwin, Theon, Jon, and I were left with the guttering candles and the wreckage of the food.
Mother looked at me for a long moment before she said anything.
"Is all of this truly necessary, Robb?"
There was no accusation in it — only worry, which was worse.
"Is it truly your father's word?"
"It is what Father and I have been working toward since his first letters came." Which was true, in the way I needed it to be true. "I will not answer him with half measures. If nothing comes of it, then nothing comes of it, and we have only lost coin and a winter's work. But if we are needed, the North goes south prepared. Not scrambling to throw a host together in a fortnight because we would not look at what was coming with the urgency your own sister's letter warrants."
I picked up the little carved box, and the letter with it.
"Which is why your sister's letter is going to the Vale, Mother. This one, and the ones Father wrote me, and one of my own besides. Tom and Bernard ride tonight with ten men, bound for the Bloody Gate. I want your uncle to hear it from men who can answer his questions, and to carry it up to Lysa and the Vale lords himself — they may need to stand with us before this is finished. On the way home they will turn for Riverrun and put the same words to your father and your brother."
She was quiet, and I could see her assembling the next question, so I crossed the room and pulled her into a hug before she could find more reason to doubt.
I told her I hoped none of it would be needed. I even meant it. But we both heard how the words came out, and Mother had never in her life been fooled by a tone.
Winter is coming is our house's word, and every Stark child learns it before they can do much of anything. If Westeros itself had a motto, it would be war is coming — and it always has been, and it always will be, and every generation is astonished by it as though it were news.
This time, it would not go the same. I would not lose this family, and I would not lose this chance to be great.
She held on a little tighter for a moment before she let go.
I gave Theon and Luwin each a nod and left them to their own work for the evening, said goodnight to Jon at the door, and collected Wylis and Torvin from the corridor on my way down to the training yard to burn off what was left of the day. There was always something left over when I pushed a plan through to its next step — a restlessness that would not sit still.
And walking down through the halls with those two giant shadows behind me, I found myself getting more restless thinking about the raven that had not yet come, but I knew would be coming shortly, and when it did — when it brought word of the king's death, or my father's arrest, or worse — I would not be scrambling. I knew the opening moves of this game better than any man alive. And when the pieces finally started moving, I would make sure I moved my pieces correctly to reap the most benefit with these starting moves before the game I knew changed; I would be the best player in this game of kings, and the rest of the kingdoms would not know what hit them.