Roose Bolton sat at the high table, his movements precise and quiet. He used a small, sharp knife to pare a piece of hard, white cheese. He did not eat the rind. He did not drink the wine. The vintage was a thick, syrupy Arbor gold that Walder Frey had pulled from his deepest cellars to celebrate the slaughter, but Roose preferred his senses sharp. He watched the flies. They were thick in the Great Hall, fat and iridescent, buzzing in lazy circles over the stains that the servants were still scrubbing from the floorboards.
Across the table, Lord Walder was laughing. It was a sound like dry parchment tearing.
"A wolf's head!" the old man cackled, a spray of spittle landing on the tablecloth. "On a king's body! Did you see it, Bolton? My grandsons are poets. They sowed it on themselves. A needle and thread for the Young Wolf. He'll be the best-dressed carcass in the Trident."
Roose looked at the Lord of the Crossing. Walder Frey was ninety-one, his skin a translucent map of age spots and broken veins. He looked like a vulture that had lived too long on a diet of bitterness. "I saw it," Roose said, his voice a soft, rhythmic whisper that forced the others at the table to lean in. "A grotesque display. It pleased the men."
"It should please everyone!" Walder slapped the table with a withered hand. "The North is broken. The boy is dead. His mother is fish-food. The Tully girl is in the dungeon. I have my apology, and the Lannisters have their peace."
"The North is not broken, Lord Walder. It is merely bleeding." Roose popped a sliver of cheese into his mouth. It was salty and bit at his tongue. "And the boy's body has not been found."
The laughter died in Walder's throat, replaced by a wet, rattling cough. "What do you mean, not found? Black Walder said they threw him in the river. He said he saw the blood. He said the wolf was dead in the pen."
"The wolf is certainly dead. Its head is currently mounted on a torso that may or may not belong to Robb Stark." Roose turned his pale, colorless eyes toward Ryman Frey, who was slumped in his chair, half-drunk and smelling of sour wine. "You supervised the disposal of the highborn dead, Ser Ryman. Tell your grandfather what the river-men found this morning."
Ryman flinched, his watery eyes darting around the hall. "The current... it was strong, grandfather. The Green Fork was high. We threw a hundred men over the battlements. Starks, Umbers, Mallisters. They all look the same when they're bloated and stripped of their plate. Black Walder said he saw the King go down. He was gut-shot. No man survives that water with a hole in his belly."
"And yet," Roose said, "when the net was pulled at the weir three miles down, we found the knight, Raynald Westerling. He was pinned to a branch by four bolts. He was cold, but he was there. There was no Stark boy beside him."
Walder Frey's face turned a mottled, angry purple. "He's in the silt! The mud has him! You think he swam away? With three bolts in his chest and half his army's blood on his boots?"
"I think the Northmen are a superstitious lot," Roose replied calmly. He felt the familiar, dull ache in his joints—the dampness of the Riverlands was a poison to his blood. "They speak of the Starks as if they are part of the earth itself. Give them a body, and you give them a funeral. You give them an ending. Without a body, you give them a ghost. And a ghost is harder to kill than a boy."
He looked around the hall. The Frey sons were a varied lot, most of them possessing the same narrow faces and suspicious eyes as their sire. They were currently bickering over the spoils—the horses, the armor, the ransoms of the few lords they hadn't butchered. They were carrion feeders, picking at the bones of a fallen lion, unaware that the scent of the kill would draw other predators.
"The Smalljon is dead," Walder muttered, clutching his wine cup. "Dacey Mormont. Wendel Manderly. We have their heads. We have their names."
"You have the names," Roose agreed. "But you do not have the loyalty of their houses. Wyman Manderly sits in White Harbor with a fleet and a belly full of grief. The Umbers are a prideful, violent people. They will not forget that you broke guest right. In the North, the laws of the hearth are older than the laws of the King. You have given them a wound that will never scar over. It will only fester."
"I have the Lannisters!" Walder shouted, his voice cracking. "Tywin Lannister promised me the Riverlands! He promised me protection!"
Tywin Lannister is a thousand leagues away, Roose thought, and he is not a man who loves a clumsy tool. The Lord of the Dreadfort stood up. His pale pink cloak, embroidered with droplets of blood, swished against his calves. He felt the weight of the task ahead. He was the Warden of the North now, by decree of a King in King's Landing who had never seen the Wall, but the title was a heavy thing to carry through a foot of snow.
"I leave for the North at dawn," Roose said. "I have fifteen hundred of my own men, and the remnants of the Karstark foot. I must reach the Moat before the winter gales make the Neck impassable."
"The Crannogmen," Walder spit. "They've been picking off my patrols. Poisoned arrows in the dark. Nasty little mud-dwellers."
Roose didn't respond to the complaint. He walked toward the doors of the hall, his boots clicking on the stone. He stopped beside a tall, grim-faced man standing guard by the egress. Walton, called Steelshanks for the way he used his greaves in a fight. He was a man of few words and absolute obedience.
"Walton," Roose whispered.
"My lord."
"Take twenty men. Good trackers. Men who don't mind the smell of the river. Scour the banks from here to the Fever River. If you find a body in a grey surcoat, bring me the head. If you find a living boy..." Roose paused. He thought of the way Robb Stark had looked at the parley—tired, young, but with a jaw like iron. "If you find him living, do not bring him to me. Kill him where he stands. Burn the body. Scatter the ashes in the water."
"And the wolf-head, my lord? The one in the yard?"
"Leave it," Roose said. "Let the crows have it. It has served its purpose."
He stepped out onto the battlements. The rain had turned to a fine, grey mist that hung over the Green Fork like a shroud. Below, the river was a dark, churning mass, carrying the debris of the massacre toward the sea. He saw a broken wagon wheel snagged on a rock, and a bit of blue silk—perhaps a Mallister banner—twisting in the current.
Roose Bolton did not feel regret. Regret was for men like Ned Stark, men who believed that honor was a shield. Roose knew that honor was merely the paint on the shield; it chipped and faded when the blows fell hard enough. He had traded his king for his house's survival, and he would do it again without a second thought.
Yet, as he looked at the dark water, he felt a flicker of something he had not felt in many years. It wasn't fear—he had drained himself of that long ago with the leeches—but a cold, clinical unease.
He remembered the way the Stark boy's direwolf had looked at him before the wedding. The beast had known. It had sensed the betrayal in the air like the scent of an approaching storm. And now the wolf was dead, but the boy was missing.
He turned away from the river and began the walk back to his quarters. The Twins was a fortress of stone and wood, but tonight it felt like a cage. He could hear the Freys laughing in the hall behind him, the sound of their triumph echoing through the corridors. They thought they had won. They thought the game was over.
Roose Bolton knew better. In the North, the seasons were long, and the winters were cruel. A man could survive a summer fever, but no one survived the long dark if they didn't have a roof over their head and a fire in the hearth. The Starks were the fire. Without them, the North would grow cold. And in the cold, things woke up that were better left sleeping.
He reached his solar and closed the door, shutting out the smell of the dead. He sat at his desk and began to write a letter to his son, Ramsay. It was time for the Bastard of Bolton to prove his worth. If the Young Wolf was a ghost, then Roose would need a monster to hunt him.
The quill scratched against the parchment, a sharp, rhythmic sound in the silence of the room. Outside, the wind picked up, whistling through the arrow slits of the tower. It was a lonely sound, the cry of a world that had lost its way, but Roose Bolton did not listen to the wind. He listened only to the scratching of his own hand, carving out the future of a kingdom in the ink of a dead man's blood.