[Four moons later]
The Gates of the Moon disappeared behind him before the sun had fully cleared the eastern peaks, and Edric did not look back.
There was no sentimentality in it. He had lived in the Eyrie for nearly a year, learned his craft under Morden's exacting eye, slept in the forge's warmth when the mountain cold pressed too hard against the walls. A year was long enough to call a place home. It was also long enough to know when it was time to leave.
The cart required his full attention for the first hour anyway.
The last thirty of the fifty he'd been contracted to make — thirty suits of plate armor loaded onto a wagon drawn by two massive draft horses that were large by any reasonable standard and still somehow insufficient for the gradient of the mountain road. The wheels found every stone. Every rut. Every patch of soft earth the recent rains had left behind. The horses leaned into their harnesses with the stoic suffering of animals who had accepted their lot and merely wished you to know they hadn't forgotten it.
Edric walked beside them. There were few horses in the Vale that would carry him comfortably, especially for long distances — a fact he'd made his peace with sometime ago. Seven feet and a thumb. More than four hundred and fifty pounds of bone and forge-hardened muscle. He had not grown so much as expanded, Morden had said once, watching him duck through a doorframe that hadn't needed much ducking the previous winter. *Like a castle that keeps adding walls.* The man had always had a way with words.
The road descended in long switchbacks through pine and pale stone. The air tasted of elevation and coming autumn, clean and sharp. He noticed it for perhaps an hour before the horses began producing a different kind of atmosphere entirely, and he sneezed hard enough to startle a crow from a nearby branch.
The crow looked at him.
"Apologies," he said. 'Though it's not my fault,' he thought, looking at the horses, shameless enough to meet his eye and neigh in mockery.
---
The first settlement appeared mid-morning — a cluster of stone houses around a well, built for survival and little else. A few chickens. A vegetable garden someone had worked hard on. A woman of perhaps fifty beating laundry against a stone with focused, wordless aggression.
Edric slowed the cart to a walk out of courtesy.
She didn't look up. But from an open window nearby came the voice of another woman, older, talking to someone inside: "he's gone to kill men, but he's gonna kill me by leavin' me all this work, I tell you, forty years I kept that farm and now I'm to do it alone because some lord decided to put a spear in my boy's hands —"
The words followed him down the road longer than the village did.
Pity their ignorance, he did. But one could not punish another due to their lack of knowledge, not in this time and age, where knowledge was scarce and the lack of it was not.
'Had the king not started this?' He still wondered, even hours later.
He passed three more small settlements before midday. Old men sitting in doorways watching the road with the quiet watchfulness of people waiting for bad news. Women moving between tasks with the efficiency of those doing two people's work. The children, chasing each other between houses, oblivious to it all. 'Good for them.'
Edric smiled, until he noticed:
Few men of fighting age. A mark — the Vale had called its levies — and he lost his smile once again, having been reminded of the war.
At the third village an old man with a white beard and a veteran's eyes looked towards the cart passing by and called out: "You're heading to the port?"
"..."
"Heard where you're going, it's crawling with the enemy."
"It is." Edric didn't pay him much mind, entertaining him out of courtesy.
The old man was quiet a moment. "Worse than any other war, this war is. Mark my words, boy." He said it plainly, with little drama, drinking ale from his mug, the way men say things they've thought about for a long time and don't enjoy being right about. "Damn that Iron Throne, sending you to your death." He cursed, throwing the mug to the ground.
Edric almost moved on. Confused, but in way touched. Then the man spoke again, his voice shifting into something older and quieter.
"You be careful out there." Edric nodded. "I've already lost so much to this war. I can't lose you too…" His voice, filled with elderly warmth, broke.
Edric had paid him little mind until that moment. He turned now, utterly confused and noticed the man was looking in a direction other than where Edric stood. It was only when he focused a little more that he understood — the man was blind.
"Come with me, father," a young boy said, appearing from the doorway.
The man kept crying softly as he was led inside.
A surprised Edric continued on his way, the pity of it sitting heavier than he'd expected. The yolk of conflict rested firmly upon his shoulders, weighing him down, forcing more thought into his conscience.
---
The mud found him on the afternoon of the third day.
The road dipped between two hills where a stream had jumped its banks sometime in the previous week, leaving behind a stretch of earth with the consistency of cold porridge. The horses felt it first — their pace shortening, their ears going flat. Then the left rear wheel found the soft patch and kept finding it, sinking with each rotation until the cart listed sideways and stopped. It had the look of something that had found where it wanted to be.
Edric stood beside it.
"Seven be damned, at the worst time too." he pinched the bridge of his nose.
He back handed the frame of the carriage, hard, and heard the wood crack beneath his fist.
He stared at the damage a moment, the headache of it not coming from his hand but from the realisation of what he'd just done to a cart carrying thirty suits of armor. He breathed, held his temper, and decided to think rationally.
He unloaded seven suits from the rear of the cart, stacked them on drier ground, rolled up his sleeves, and put his shoulder against the frame. The horses pulled. He pushed. The mud made a sound like an argument being lost. The wheel found purchase. The cart lurched forward onto solid road, and the horses resumed their pace with the dignified relief of animals whose professional opinion had finally been validated.
He reloaded the suits. Washed his hands in the stream.
---
He thought of Ned, as he sometimes did on long stretches of nothing.
The morning they'd parted had been grey and cold, the kind of cold that sits in the lungs. Robert had made noise about it, as Robert made noise about most things — *the Fingers, in this weather, on foot, you're mad, Ned* — and Ned had listened to all of it with that particular stillness of his, the way he listened to everything, as though noise were a weather pattern he had learned to wait out.
Then Ned had hugged him. Brief and tight and without warning, which was somehow more affecting for it. He did the same to Edric, and Edric, who had a good foot and a half on him, had felt the grip of it anyway.
"We'll see each other on the other side of this," Ned had said. Not a question.
"You'll be slower getting there," Robert answered.
Ned had almost smiled. Then he'd taken the mountain path north toward the Fingers, where a fisherman was reportedly waiting, and the grey had swallowed him in a few dozen steps.
Edric had watched him go longer than was necessary.
---
A merchant found him on the eighth day, arriving on a good horse from a well-maintained train of goods visible from the road. He fell into pace alongside the cart easily, the way men do when they're used to conducting business on the move.
He was perhaps forty-five, well-dressed without being too showy, and he'd clearly come to verify something he'd both heard and seen.
"The famed black steel," he said, without introduction. "You're the smith from Harrenhal — Mountain's Bane, are you not. Word reached me about you. And you are carrying quite the goods," he mentioned." I'll take some off your hands for buyers — serious men — who would pay considerably more than whatever venture has moved you."
"No need. They're spoken for."
"Good Ser, everything has a price."
Edric looked at him. Not unkindly. "Not when they are owed to a lord."
"A future commission, mayhaps then? Name your terms."
"I have no terms. I'm going to war."
The merchant absorbed this. He rode alongside for another hundred yards, apparently recalibrating. "The Rebellion? Very well. Then… when you return?" He proposed instead.
"If I return." he was corrected
A pause. "When," the merchant said again, his tone unchanged but a newly found smile on his face, and wheeled his horse back toward from whence he came.
Edric almost sneezed again but managed to hold it, just long enough for the merchant to be out of earshot. He could almost feel the horses grumbling, with light irritation. They kept praying for him to sneeze it seemed, but he had been in quite the good run lately.
"Not today, my friends," he told them. He smiled.
---
Gulltown appeared on the morning of the three and tenth day.
He smelled it before he saw it — salt and fish and something underneath that was not quite smoke and not quite rot and was both. The road broadened as it approached the walls, joining tracks from north and east, and the gates stood open under a sky that had decided on grey and committed to it.
The Arryn falcon danced upon a banner overhead, under the music of the wind. A signal — the city had fallen to its rightful masters.
Two guards watched him approach. One said something to the other. Then, louder: "That's him. That's the Mountain's Bane."
The name had followed him since his infamous victory against the mountain clans at Stonehaven, and had been further cemented at Harrenhal, where he'd beaten Ser Gregor Clegane in the melee and the crowd had needed something to call it. He had never asked for it. He'd also never entirely minded it — which was perhaps a flaw he'd examine another time.
He nodded to the guards and passed through.
Gulltown bore its recent history the way a man bears a wound — visibly, without complaint. Fresh timber showed pale against old stone where a gate had been repaired. A building near the harbor stood empty, door sealed. Broken shutters, patched walls, the quiet evidence of violence that had concluded and left its marks behind.
The streets weren't empty. Commerce had reasserted itself with the stubborn pragmatism of a port city — people moved, goods moved, the harbor smell told you trade had resumed. But there was a quality to the movement, a slight excess of attention paid to one's own business, that told the rest of the story.
At a crossroads near the merchant quarter a body hung from a makeshift gibbet. Not a townsman or noble. A soldier, or at least a levy, heavyset, his face wearing the expression of a man surprised by consequence.
Edric stopped.
"What was his crime?" he asked a nearby guard.
The guard glanced up. "Chose the wrong time to have fun. Took a merchant's wife. The merchant took it to Lord Arryn personally — had some courage, that one." He paused. "Lord Arryn agreed it was a matter for the merchant."
Edric looked at the hanged man a moment longer than necessary. Then he looked away and continued toward the harbor.
He died from something simple, Edric realised. Lack of discipline — a quality he would remind himself to instill in his retinue, if he ever had any. He'd died for a moment of animal impulse. In a war like this, discipline wasn't just a virtue—it was the difference between a successful rebellion and a mass execution. Arryn knew that. Robert, hopefully, did too.
---
Jon Arryn received him in a grand chamber that had been converted, with minimal ceremony, into something resembling a command post. He was older than Edric remembered from their last meeting — a grey, careful man whose authority came not from presence but from an absence of wasted motion. He walked the row of suits slowly, saying nothing, touching a pauldron here and a gorget there with the hands of a man who understood quality without being able to produce it. Edric suspected it was largely for show, a man like Arryn knew superior craftsmanship from a single glance, and he would have known from Edric's reputation that nothing less would be delivered to him.
"You worked faster than I expected," he said finally. "Even for you."
"People say that."
"I imagine they'll stop soon enough." He settled and ordered another pouch be given to Edric, which Edric hadn't expected, and looked at him with the direct assessment of a man filing something away. "House Arryn is in your debt. Here are another hundred and fifty gold dragons, as reward for your speed and dedication."
Edric thanked him as a retainer fetched the gold and gave it to him. There was little to do other than show gratitude anyway, before retreating from his presence.
His over three pounds (1.5kg) of pure gold haul jingled in his hand, and he left the room unburdened, as free as he was naked when he was born.
He found Robert in the harbor without difficulty. Robert Baratheon was not a man who occurred quietly in spaces. He stood on the longest dock with that broad, easy confidence of his — the bearing of someone for whom the world had generally arranged itself at the right height — thought tainted, deep in a conversation with his captain that involved considerable pointing at rigging. But there was a different air about him now. That of a killer, Edric realised. It seemed Robert had finally taken his first life, a noble mayhaps, or a common city defender. A small but fresh bruise paraded itself upon his jaw, and he looked entirely unbothered by it.
He saw Edric and his face opened into something unguarded.
"There he is." He crossed the dock in long strides and gripped his arm. "I wasn't sure you'd make it before we sailed." The captain slipped away leaving them to their reunion.
"I said I would, did I not?"
"You did." Robert grinned. "Jon told me thirty suits. Thirty, and you still managed. You get faster by the day it seems, slow some, let Morden work or he'll become a lazy fool like your former master Torman! " He shook his head. "Come. Walk with me."
They walked to the end of the dock. The harbor spread out before them, grey-green and restless. Three ships rode at anchor.
Robert was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that Edric paid attention to it. Edric looked at the waves during this time. 'This city had the advantage of water and still fell shortly,' he pondered. He gave a side glance to the smaller Robert at his side. 'They took so little time?" He wondered, amazed. 'He's good.'
"I need men around me who'll tell me when I'm wrong, these days," Robert said. "Or failing that, before I've already done it. I have old men and proud lords waiting for me in the Stormlands, but I want my young friend to tell me as well." He looked at him sidelong. "You've never been afraid to tell me something I didn't want to hear."
"I was forced to do so, at Harrenhal." he chuckled.
"Then, I'll force you again! I still remember what that friend knight of yours told me! That you instructed the villagers, and helped them hold with nought but iron will and bloody determination against all these wild clansmen. Even despite being outnumbered."
"He said that, so late as well? Why now?" Edric inquired.
Robert laughed, not answering the question.
Then, more seriously, Robert uttered — not a question, but an irrefutable order: "Come with me to Storm's End. When the banners are called I want your counsel, and the company of a friend, you'll tell me how you did it on the way. Though I'll warn you, prepare to hide well, we're being smuggled!"
Edric looked at the merchant ships. At the sails moving in the harbor wind. He thought about what the blind old man had said on the road. The empty villages. The women doing two people's work. The man hanging at the crossroads. He thought about what came after — the questions he'd been turning over for two weeks of road dust, horse smell and mud. Something was waiting for him in the Stormlands and beyond. He could feel the shape of it without yet knowing what it was.
He had been a history student in his past life, having been passionate about all sorts of wars and empires. Was this what he had studied for?
"When do we sail?" he asked, determined.
"Tomorrow. With a good wind."
Edric nodded, and watched the water, and said nothing more about it.
And then grinned, he would put that knowledge to good use.
---
Hi, this chapter is almost 3k words, I hope it will help you forgive for the long wait. But I finally managed to transition from early life plots to the rebellion. I hope you enjoyed. And please leave a comment 🙏 to tell me what you thought when reading the chapter of incase you had something to note.