Chapter Text
Forley Prester awoke on his horse. He had slumped so far forward that his cheek all-but pressed against the beast’s black neck. Leather reins hung loose in his fingers. He tightened them into fists, sat straight, and by habit suppressed a wince as he pulled to a halt. That the horse had ridden on was at least a mercy. If it had stopped to graze, and the front of my column had seen me asleep in the saddle, I’d have lost my remaining men before the day was done.
The river road was shrouded by a thin layer of earth which, without water, had paled to ash. Forley twisted in the saddle. Behind him lay the slightest wake of dust. It would disappear with a breath of wind.
At the road’s edge, where the rock beneath gave way to dirt, a rabbit-trail cut through the brush into the woods, where girdled trees stood dead and creaking. Deer had gouged nooses in their bark at summer’s end, which now shone pale as bone to mark territory for the coming rut. On the path itself, horseshit gathered in dry and flaking piles that reminded him of the burned-out crofts they’d passed so far.
“We don’t know where the Blackfish is,” Ser Jaime Lannister had told him as they rode out, “but if he can cut Edmure free, he will.”
Forley did not doubt it: he was familiar with Brynden Tully’s skill. But what was skill against one hundred men? Even before Lannister had doubled, then redoubled, the size of the column, the Blackfish’s attempts were doomed to fail. Forley himself was no green boy. He had proven that at the Battle of the Camps, where he’d chosen retreat over death for four thousand men. It won recognition from his lords, if not love from those he saved, some of whom muttered craven when they thought he could not hear. He sent many of his troops to augment Ser Stafford Lannister’s army at Oxcross. Perhaps they liked Ser Stafford better in the short time before they, and the rest of his unguarded host, had been slaughtered by the Young Wolf.
He had not risen to Lannister’s remarks. Instead he had nodded, acquiesced, and reassured as required. Yes, my lord, he might even have said, though Lannister was just some knight, same as him. He’s less than that. Forley could marry, if he wished it: Jaime Lannister was sworn to the Kingsguard until death, unless King Tommen proved as eager as his brother had to flout the laws of gods and men.
“Don’t take it personal,” Ser Kip Banefort had advised, as Lannister turned his horse about for Riverrun. “The Kingslayer was fool enough to get ambushed by them Starks, remember. Lost his hand and his nerve alongside.”
Forley had given him a quelling look but no reprimand. Kip had lost a brother at the Whispering Wood. His father, Lord Quenten, had been captured in the same battle, and held by the Brackens until the Red Wedding had broken their will. His words had the ring of truth to them, too. Without a swordhand, Lannister had become more serious and, some said, scared. Yes, there were wolves, as in any wood. Yes, there was a ragged band of outlaws, taking on small parties across the westerlands—and they may have found the scattered Tully garrison, or even Brynden Blackfish, to swell their ranks. I should like to find Brynden Blackfish myself, Forley thought, on that first foolish day. I should like to see if I can still take him unawares. Does he still favor the two-handed greatsword, or has his strength begun to fade?
Then, they’d been riding out with four hundred men on a day as bright as it was warm. They would thread the crimson column through the river road and deposit their hostages at Casterly Rock, where they would arrive in short order. From there, Lannister had given them leave to return home. They would gather what crops remained in the fields and enjoy the dregs of autumn, and from the warmth of their hearths Jaime Lannister’s worries would, like the war, lay far behind them.
Lannister had not long left when Whitesmile Wat struck up Iron Lances. His high, clear voice flowed through the column like water. Soon the song became a new Trident. We heard the iron lances, we heard the hue and cry, they sang, thundering down the river road. Beside him, Ser Kip beat his sword against his shield. Forley never sang, but under him even his horse began to march in time. Those lances charged like dragons, dancing in the sky. There was no blood and battle, there was no fire and war. There were not even dragons left to scream and flame and roar. They were but wooden lances, crowds raised the hue and cry. For this was but a tourney: in peace, no man need die.
Forley’s men had faced their share of dangers, but that share was surely done. The War of the Five Kings had ended with each claimant dead or lost. Renly Baratheon was first, killed by his crazed lady knight, or by Stannis, or by some red witch in his employ. Robb Stark, next, who still survived longer than he had the right. Forley had been with Lord Tywin when they heard of the rout at Oxcross: a boy of fourteen, slaying five for every man he lost.
The Young Wolf, the northmen called him. They said his wolf had shown him a trail through the hills to lay an ambush. Yet in the War of the Ninepenny Kings, Brynden Blackfish had led them—Forley, Steffon, even Aerys, before he became the Mad King—down a goat-trail on the cliffs of the Stepstones. The black goat of the Tullys, Hoster called me, he’d said, grinning back at them. His teeth and eyes gleamed in the dark like the wet rocks below. Black fish, I’d told him. Well, might be he had the right of it. Perhaps in the end Robb Stark had been more fish or goat than wolf. It had not saved him.
Joffrey followed after, barely mourned, then Balon Greyjoy, with Stannis reportedly abandoning his claim in favor of starving somewhere near the Wall. All that remained was King Tommen, perched upon his too-big throne. It had been years since Forley last saw the boy, but he remembered a soft, chubby thing. A raw-dough king, if the intervening years had not hardened him. The boy had seen his father die, or at least lose a hand. His brother, certainly, had died beside him, while the flames that raged in Blackwater Bay and the Sept of Baelor must surely have fired him into something sturdier.
While King Tommen baked, the column froze. The heat of that first warm day was now a pale memory. They had been riding near a week: for the last three days, he had woken to breath misting ahead of him and limbs tingling with cold. There were no weeks of autumn left to them, and no peace, either: his men would have scant time to spare before they must do war with winter. They must get a harvest in, if they could, and pay precious grain and salted meats to masons and glaziers and anyone else who could patch their keeps against the cold. It was a hard price to pay. It would be harder still to save the coin and lose your roof with the first fall of snow.
Forley turned farther in his seat. He had dozed for mere seconds; the column was not so far behind. His men were close enough to have seen him slide forward on his horse like a done old man, but not close enough to hear him hiss, now, when his horse began to whicker gently, impatient with the halt, and toss its head. The movement pulled at the reins and, with them, something small and vital near his spine. Am I truly such a simple instrument?
Forley’s father, the late Ser Morgon Prester, had brought a Myrish lute back to Feastfires after his long journey east. Where most lutes were round and gourd-like, his cinched in at the center as though trained by a corset. He had been ten when Ser Morgon returned, though small for his age and easily misplaced. Once, when stealing down the servant stairs to beg food from the kitchens, he heard someone call the lute Ser Morgon’s wife.
“Aye, if only,” a boy’s voice replied. “If his wife had the hips of that lute, she might still live.”
By voice, he suspected Denys Rivers, his father’s cupbearer. A pale sliver of a boy, with hair that fell in shining black waves, he looked far more a lord than Forley Prester ever had, though he was just the son of swarthy old Cook. He was quick-smiling, too, if not at Forley: Denys would laugh at his own jests instead to spur his audience to join. Yet his laugh stumbled and died as Forley stood hidden on the stairs, food forgotten.
He’s only your age, Forley had thought. He knew your mother as little as you did. Forley and Alia Prester had shared the world for only a moment, and no one would tell him anything about her. He had scoured the margins to find her—standing in shadowy corners, laying on bales in the stables, and huddling by the forge in hope that Aurio Mott might begin, perhaps, to reminisce as he tempered a sword. Forley had been a foolish child.
From the kitchens had come a sharp thwack. “Ow!”
“If you only had the skin of a drum, that might have made a more pleasing noise,” said Cook. Before Forley could think to hide, Denys Rivers spilled from the door in front of him, fingers clutching a red mark on his otherwise pale and lordly arm.
“Sneak,” Denys said. His voice was poison. “Who do you think you are, swanning about like the Lord of Feastfires? That ain’t you, and it ain’t your father either. It’s little Lord Garrison that runs this place, and as soon as he’s out of swaddling you’ll be cast out, and your drunken sot father too. Maybe he’ll take you across the narrow sea with him, next time. Most like, he’ll find somewhere else to pawn you off.”
Forley stared at the mark on Denys’s arm. It was a red and ugly thing. Forley could be ugly too. His nose had come crooked out the womb, and it made him look, for all his smallness, as though he were no stranger to fights.
“Aye, I’m no Lord,” he said. “I don’t care so much about honor and decency as all them.”
He’d looked into Denys’s eyes, then, and had not been the one to break the stare.
Forley spat on the ground. He must be weary indeed, to dredge all that from a fleeting thought of instruments and overtight strings. He put toes to his courser and rode away from memory.
“Nothing,” he told the cluster of knights at the head of his column. “No tracks, either, far as I could see.”
“None of the horses going out, neither?”
Why would I say none, if I meant some? Do you think me so great a fool? Such a response would be unfair. Ser Erik Kenning, who’d asked, was a good man and better knight: they had ridden together to defend the Baratheon kings throughout this latest war, and together in the one before to defeat the Baratheon usurpers. Erik was simply tired, like the rest of his men. Without the return of outriders and scouts, watches became more frequent than they would like—but, after Oxcross, Forley would not skimp on sentries.
“Nothing,” he repeated. “Lured off-road, mayhaps, with their path brushed clean behind them. ‘Ignore distractions,’ I told them. ‘Return to the column, at speed, at the slightest provocation: a plea for alms; a plea for aid; a plea to find some poor girl’s long-lost pup. All should fall on suspicious ears.’ If they were lured, it was at swordpoint.”
He had given nearly the same instructions to the second group, and the scouts after them. The last of the scouts had left over a day ago. They had been instructed to ride out for only as long as it took the sun to shift a handspan, and then return. The sun was slung low now, well past that since last he looked. Well past twice that, and far too close to setting for this time of day. Unless I slept longer than I thought.
He knew better. He was not yet so weary as that. But why then were they careening toward dusk? Why were the trees that lined their path fringed with a thick glaze of Lannister gold?
He did not like the feel of this, but of late he did not like the feel of anything. Forley Prester was not unaccustomed to dread. But when Denys Rivers’s words had cut him, he took to the training yard to hone his blade, and by the end of the year was squiring for Tywin at the Rock. He had no place in Feastfires: very well, then. He found a place elsewhere. In the War of the Ninepenny Kings he read the Battle of the Stormy Shore quick enough to save a life. After, he had kneeled in the blood-damp ground and taken his reward, hard-won, and thereafter become Ser Forley. As a knight his good judgement put men under his command; he saved thousands of them at the Battle of the Camps by knowing when a day was lost. He defeated dread by action—but what action could he take now?
Not only would Lannister be less than pleased, but his men would not countenance a second retreat. To hear them tell it now, they had barely allowed the first. Yet in the heat of battle, with blood and death and screaming horses all around, Ser Rupert Brax had turned to flee before Forley had finished his first Fall back!
It was when Forley himself had turned that his horse stumbled on a dead northman and yanked something off-course near his spine. Why could Brax’s mount not have tripped instead? His back would not have troubled him long; he was slaughtered in his slumber not six weeks later at Oxcross. Forley’s sleep now depended on a measured sip of dreamwine every night.
“We have nothing to fear,” he said, “and nowhere to go but onward. What can we face, the mass of us, that we cannot defeat? No army awaits us along the river road.”
“Brynden Tully—” began Ser Kip.
Forley laughed. “At most, the Blackfish could have found the band of ragged outlaws that call themselves the Brotherhood, and joined them to the Tully garrison Lannister loosed, unarmed and unarmored. But that garrison was sorely depleted even before it was scattered to the winds, and it never mustered many to start. Our foes cannot number more than two hundred men, almost all of whom will be clad in ill-fitting armor, if at all.”
Brynden would be the best-equipped of all of them. He had escaped from Riverrun with ease, and by reports had swum under the portcullis of its Water Gate in full armor. Untrue, of course. Smarter to sneak it out with some stableboy, along with good weapons and a mount, and set them up to await him somewhere in the riverlands.
The battles of the Stepstones had birthed many rumors, one of which held that Brynden had surprised a band of Lyseni pirates by swimming at night, armed and armored, from one rocky outcrop to the next. That too had been only myth. If anyone could have done it, it would be Brynden—but why waste your energy before a battle sure to drain it?
“No more scouts,” Forley said, “and no more outriders, either. We have a straight shot along the river road to the Rock. We will press on in numbers, refuse to linger long, and we will not lose another man.”
Dreamwine only blunted the edges of the pain, which shot outward like the spines of a sea urchin. In time, though, it did bring him sleep, and, with it, dreams.
Ser Keffrey Hetherspoon was there. As Feastfires’ earnest steward it was his duty. It was he who kept the castle running long before Lord and Lady Prester, Garrison’s parents, had been wrecked off Crakehall in a freak summer storm. When Forley’s father had left him there with a wetnurse and struck east for Essos, it was Ser Keffrey who had taught him how to live. Forley’s earliest memories were coated in the dust of the training yard, where Ser Keffrey installed a bar around the walls that, for a man, would stand at knee height. For a toddling babe it was the perfect aid. He learned to walk there, and to draw his letters in the dirt, and later how to use a sword and mace and bow.
In the dream Forley was hiding. He peered through a crack into the room from within some piece of furniture, or behind a wooden door. No matter how he squinted or moved his head, he could see nothing but the knight’s hands, easily identifiable by their swollen joints, over which the skin stretched like that of too-ripe plums. Ser Keffrey was heating a small pot of sealing wax over a flame. He turned it smoothly, as though it did not pain him to do so.
“She died weeping and torn,” said a voice. Its rich tone could only belong to Maester Beqqo. “I forged sixteen links at the Citadel, but none of what I learned could have saved her. Alia spent herself on birthing young Forley. She had nothing left for his brother.”
Ser Keffrey Hetherspoon’s skin gleamed like opal in the light as he turned the bowl. The wax is liquid already. Stop, and save your aching bones.
“Before I went to Oldtown to forge my chain,” Maester Beqqo said, “I spent years assisting the whores of Braavos. I saw babes half-formed in the privy, their mothers pale and dying from the possets they had taken. It had been their only hope: though pregnant whores can oft command a higher price, most brothels have little patience for a nursing mother and a newborn. Many find themselves cast out from the birthing bed, sore and swollen with another mouth to feed. I saw babes born syphilitic and stunted, and others born over-cauled and blue, and still I found Alia’s birthing bed a hard one to behold. I should never have let Ser Morgon in the room. The blood alone—”
Ser Keffrey’s hands stilled. The flame licked up the edges of the pot and blackened his pale fingertips, which began to melt. Flesh sagged away like soft wax to reveal branch-like bone. Forley turned away, though he knew that beside him would hang the specter.
He used to chase dreams, before. In slumber, his mother would lay a slick hand upon his brow and smile, wan and proud, as though he were worth the sacrifice. After his eavesdropping, he would dig his nails into the meat of his stomach rather than sleep and see her. He did not truly understand what torn meant, then, so his mother became a shifting mass of gore. Her spilling pile of flesh never had the same face or form, but it was always somehow rent to pieces. Here in the cupboard, her flesh floated in great slimy gouts that reminded him of kelp. Her mouth, or at least a void that could have been a mouth, opened wide in a sob. It opened wider. It advanced upon him as though to swallow him back up and take him with her into death.
I’m too big, he thought. I’m an old man, now, you cannot have me.
His brother, too, was hungry. No one spoke of him in his presence. If Forley had not listened at the door, it would have been as though he never had a twin. He appeared a dark and shriveled thing inside their mother, with twisted limbs like burned-up chicken feet. He was dried and rotten, a seed that would never grow. Only his eyes shone with life. Even in the whirl of blood and flesh that was his mother, it was his brother’s baleful eyes that always made Forley wake, gasping.
He could not wake up now. He was trapped there in the cupboard with the dead things—because it was a cupboard, he realized, as he turned to flee and found himself boxed in. When he shouted for Ser Keffrey something blocked the crack in the door. Forley plunged into sudden darkness, or would have, but for the light in his dead brother’s eyes. He scrabbled for them. He knew he had to gouge them out, that darkness would be better, but his mother howled around him and soon ribbons of flesh were beating at his body and reaching, wet and stinking, for his face.
He opened his mouth to scream. Instead a strip of skin and viscera landed, seeking, on his tongue. He choked on it. She howled louder. The inhuman sound echoed in the darkness and multiplied. It was as though a pack of wolves were passing the sound back and forth to whet their appetite. Suddenly the darkness lifted. His mother’s flesh fell away; unlike Ser Keffrey’s fingers, no bone lay beneath it.
Forley’s streaming eyes refocused. The howl remained, though now it rang from his father’s lute. Though the rest of the room had not yet formed around it, and existed in large soft shapes as though obscured by muslin, the lute had utmost detail. Careful wood inlay highlighted its sweeping curves, while dense strings crowded at its neck.
One of the eleven strings—the only one without a pair—was still ablur from being plucked.
“The king on his throne,” his father said, nodding to it. His face gathered features as Forley watched: a thin and crooked nose like his; a round face leathered and browned by years of travel; and eyes as warm as they were absent.
I know this evening. This was the first time they had met, the two of them alone, since his father had returned. Forley had arrived to find Ser Morgon Prester in his cups, and corresponding high spirits, while trays of roast parsnip and a whole fowl lay untouched atop the table. The food was rotten now, and crawling, as though it had been plated days before. Maggots spilled from plates and twisted frantic on the ground.
His father’s hands were fat and red, and even redder against the rich wood of the lute. In the dream, as he had in life, Ser Morgon seemed to animate as Forley came to sit at table. It was as though he had been waiting for him with some ceremony, though the rotting food and empty cups gave lie to that. Another father might use such a moment to give his son a betrothal, or advice, or some treasured heirgift—for the luckier houses, maybe even a Valyrian steel sword.
His father only plucked that final string again. “It sits alone,” he said, “and higher than all the rest, but without the others there is no music.”
Forley was the son of a second son, and all-but a trespasser in Feastfires’ dim halls. The lute was all Ser Morgon had to offer him, though he would not even do that. Instead, he dispensed trite and rehearsed wisdom. Without the others there is no music? Even at ten, Forley thought it stupid. It was just the sort of thing low lords and knights must tell themselves to feel at ease, as Ser Keffrey called him lucky during sword practice when a gull shat on his head.
Kings could not care for music, Forley thought. Kings care for power, and taxes, and all the things Ser Keffrey and Maester Beqqo fret over. If a king cared for music, he would give up the throne and be a bard instead.
Later, he would learn that such folly typified the westerlands under Aegon the Unlikely. If the king had not spent so long trying to wield his power for the smallfolk, he might have noticed sooner that Lord Tytos Lannister had let the lands grow flabby and frivolous. The Lannisters lent three thousand dragons to Lord and Lady Prester, then forgave it on their death. Until Tywin took control, the Rock had not even asked for recompense from the Tarbecks, who had thrown all their borrowed coin into the great pit of Tarbeck Hall. Lord Tytos had upjumped the Spicers from the ranks of petty merchants, and ignored insult and insubordination to his face. When Lord Stackspear doubled the taxes on his smallfolk, against Lord Tytos’s wishes, the Lannisters had not roared. They had not even mewled.
If the Presters had been bannermen to a stronger house, perhaps Ser Morgon would have been a different man. The smith makes the weapon, it was said: squiring for Tywin, and then serving him, had honed Forley into something useful. At ten, though, he’d only been a boy, and that boy had been eager to know his father.
He had nodded at Ser Morgon’s precept, taken his seat, and filled his plate.
In his dream he did the same, although he did not want to. His hands reached without his say-so, plunging into a slimy chicken carcass and grasping only juice and maggots. He scooped what remained of the roast parsnips bare-handed onto his plate, and watched from somewhere inside himself as a fly struggled there in sticky ferment.
“Eat,” his father told him. “Eat, you are only small.” A shadow passed over his face. “You were a small babe, too. You would not think—well, it is done. Eat, then we shall talk.”
Forley ate. He had choked on his mother’s torn flesh only seconds ago, but this was worse. The hard, rotten meat was far preferable to the maggots, which writhed down his gullet still alive. There was no point in preference: his mouth was on a forced march. It chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, and would not stop or even scream. As in memory, his father did not touch a morsel. He played and drank and fell asleep instead, and the moment he slumped forward in his chair Forley reached for the lute with fetid hands.
Tireless, their house words. So much for that. The words of Dorne, his dead wife’s home, would not suit him either: he was bent, bowed, and broken, to Forley’s eyes. Neither had family, duty, or honor compelled him to return to Feastfires. It had been coin, instead, as Ser Keffrey and Maester Beqqo had stoppered up the flow of dragons that Lord and Lady Prester had, in life, sent east toward him.
It was a tough thing, to tune the pairs to match: his greasy fingers pressed white against the tuning knobs as he ratcheted the strings into alignment. The lute creaked and seemed to swell, like Ser Keffrey’s joints, or a woman near birth. He pressed onwards. When his father woke, it was to empty plates and a lute that sat near-thrumming in Forley’s hands.
“I fixed it,” he said, bestowing it like an heirgift to his father, who roared. Ah, a Lannister, then?
Later, when talking of it to Ser Keffrey, Forley would confess only to fear. It was fear that caused him to flinch and drop the lute, and fear that caused him to cry out as it hit the ground, cracked, and then exploded.
“It was broken before you dropped it,” Ser Keffrey had told him. “Its body couldn’t take the force of so many strings pulling it back against itself. You did not know.”
Forley woke with that last shattered image in his mind: lacquered splinters on the floor, a thin line of blood on his arm where a whip of catgut had flayed it raw.
“Scouts are known to desert,” Sybell Spicer said, sternly, as though admonishing an unruly hound. “It is folly to fret over it so.”
“Do I fret?” asked her daughter.
Forley had not heard the start of their conversation. He was surprised it had begun at all. He had so far found them silent whenever he rode back from the vanguard to survey his captives. Sybell always greeted him with courtesy, but the rest would only look ahead all sullen. Silence suited Forley of late. He rode beside them more often than he should.
“Scouts flee when an army marches toward war,” Jeyne said. Her voice was clearer than he would have expected from such a ruined child. She had a cut upon her head that would not heal—from a fight over her pretender’s crown, Lannister had said—and was wrapped in blankets and torn clothes like some kind of beggar girl.
“These men are going home,” she continued. “They have no reason to stray from their course, so they must be diverted from it against their will. You’re an expert at these diversions—moving your children this way and that. You leave them open to be plucked off the cyvasse board entirely. Raynald—”
“Enough,” Sybell’s face was stone. “Your brother may yet live.The Freys took hostages at the Twins, and he has value.”
Jeyne’s eyes flashed. “Raynald was shot through with arrows and butchered like the king. Bad enough that you killed him. At the least you should look at what you did.”
Gawen rode beside them, unhearing, his mouth fixed in a line. Lord Westerling had not been half so taciturn when Forley could claim to know him. A lifetime ago on sodden bedrolls, in a cave that stank of brine, he had kept them all awake with tales of the Crag. It sat so high upon the earth, he’d said, that no man felt taller than the Westerlings—excepting those freezing their cocks off at the Wall, of course, but were they men at all? No cocks, no wives, just a pack of eunuch crows. Cragmen were different.
Aye. Cragmen’s cocks led them to marry the likes of Sybell Spicer. Their marriage had been a rushed affair. Sybell, then dainty, had worn a gown of ocean-green samite chased with gold.The sleeves, again lined gold, were so dagged they nearly brushed the floor. Even so, the dress—too heavy in winter and absurd in the summer heat that swamped their wedding—failed to hide the swell of her belly. She had swept through the hall as though it were the seat of the Seven Kingdoms. To someone raised up from the cramped hovel of Maggy the Frog, it may well have seemed as grand.
“Did he have the truth of it?” Forley had asked Brynden. “Are we the tallest men in Westeros?”
Brynden snorted. “Not likely, shortarse.” He looked about them: they were ambushed on all sides by threadbare tapestries and cracked flagstones. “It has fallen some, I’d wager, since little Lord Tywin took the Rock in hand, and its gold with it. What do you think Lady Lannister promised him to chivvy him along to such a shameful match?”
In truth, Tywin was older than Brynden by two years, and taller, too. Neither was he Lord of Casterly Rock, at least in name. He sat on the high table in his father’s place, wearing a crimson doublet upon which the lion of his house was worked in fine gold thread. His green eyes from this distance were pale as ice. Tywin’s hair, as always, was tied back by a leather cord as though for battle.
Despite serving in King’s Landing as Hand to King Aerys, he had been west at the Rock for weeks before the wedding. By some reports his wife had taken ill there. If so, she was now recovered enough to draw every eye. Joanna Lannister wore a modest gown of dusky pink and gold that did nothing to dim her beauty; it was no wonder Queen Rhaelle had banished her from court. She danced with Tywin’s brothers in turn, laughing as Gerion leapt to match her steps.
“Lady Joanna loves to dance,” Forley said. “Perhaps she simply asked.”
Brynden looked at him sidelong. “Tywin, moved by a mere request? She must have been persuasive indeed.”
Forley’s mouth twitched, but down that path lay danger. The hall crawled with Lannisters; he would not jape.
He had no doubt Tywin’s journey west had less to do with his lady wife’s health than his father’s crumbling hold on the Rock. Since the Ninepenny Kings, the Lannister brothers had set the westerlands to rights at the edge of a blade, deaf to the protests of Lord Tytos. Forley had marched with them on Tarbeck Hall. Rumors swirled that the youngest Tarbeck survived the flames and butchery that first night. Small children were easily misplaced. He had hidden with the horses, perhaps, or inamongst the rubble, and waited for hours through the swords and screams until he judged it safe enough to move. Amory Lorch, who even then had small bright eyes and skin like spoiled milk, had been a ser by sunset on the day the Tarbeck child was found by Damon Marbrand, broken-limbed and cold at the bottom of a well.
“Three years old,” Damon had said, scrubbing the back of his hand across his mouth, “overnight a Lord, and then a corpse.”
At least the Reynes had company, sealed up together in their mines. The last Lord Tarbeck, however he had died, had died alone.
By the wedding Tywin was a mailed fist in the west and, thanks to King Aerys, an iron Hand in the east. His shadow stretched from the Sunset Sea to King’s Landing. Better, Forley thought, to stand with lions than die like a rat in a trap.
As the feast gave way to dancing the Ninepenny knights sifted together like iron to a lodestone. With Forley’s companions scattered so early in the evening, the Blackfish had taken pity and joined him even for dinner.
The rest followed soon after. Lord Steffon Baratheon was first, leading his son by the hand. Like his father, the child was overlarge and overloud: though the boy could not be more than five, he stood a head above the table and had a voice that rivaled some warhorns.
“Capon!” he cried, reaching for the plates that sat between Forley and Brynden, still mostly-full.
“Robert!” Steffon said, laughing as he pulled him backwards. He signaled for a cupbearer with his free hand. “My son,” he told them, “though I’d as well have called him Balerion. He doesn’t half roar.”
“He’s your spit,” Brynden told him, and shifted to face the boy. His feet nudged Forley’s ankles as he did. There was no need. The Crag was a ruin, yes, but a vast one. They were not in such close quarters as the caves and gullies of the Stepstones.
Brynden looked at Robert solemnly. “Well met.”
Robert Baratheon returned his seriousness in kind. His wild black hair tumbled over his eyes as he nodded, and suddenly they both were smiling as though from nowhere. Forley did not understand it. He had little affinity for children, his only experience being with his cousin Garrison, who had always known himself to be Lord of Feastfires and thus of Forley.
Yet there was no true excuse: Ser Keffrey had no children and no younger siblings, and still had raised Forley better than he deserved. Indeed, that night the steward of Feastfires sat with his fellow Hetherspoons to greet his new niece. Lord Tybolt’s daughter was a small pink bundle topped with light-brown hair, and Ser Keffrey held her as though he had always known how. Her tiny fist clutched one of his fingers. Keffrey could no longer write, so swollen were his joints, but he uttered no complaint. She was such a small thing, far smaller than the last Lord Tarbeck. It would be easy for her to vanish should she or her house ever displease the Lannisters.
“The next could be a dragon,” Brynden said. “Cassana’s time must be near. When you last wrote—”
“Stannis was born three weeks past, or my lady wife would have traveled with me. She was eager to meet you all, and is certain you will cut my tales of heroism down to size.” He drained his glass. “Balerion Baratheon. A jester’s name, sounds like.”
Forley shrugged. “If he’s anything like his father in battle, they’ll call him the Black Dread.”
Robert tugged on Steffon’s hand, and, laughing again, Lord Baratheon made his apologies and followed after. Robert led him stomping to a new conversation partner who had, Forley noticed, an equally full set of plates.
Steffon was one of the only Ninepenny lads to travel from so far: Aerys had not come, enthroned now in King’s Landing. Neither had Ser Barristan, his Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, nor Prince Luwin, who had also since donned a white cloak. The north was largely excused by distance: Lord Rickard Stark was absent, and so too were the Karstarks, the Umbers, and the Mormonts. The Greyjoys, though, were almost neighbors, yet had not stirred themselves—if they even merited an invitation. A shame. The Greyjoys had won the War of the Ninepenny Kings for Westeros, though few admitted it. The Redwyne fleet was neither built nor trained for such scrappy terrain, but the Iron Islands were filled with warriors who had cut their teeth reaving on the Stepstones. It had been one such, Dagmer Cleftjaw, who had slipped in the night through rocky outcrops and put the Nine’s tattered fleet to the torch.
Ser Barristan won high praise for slitting Maelys the Monstrous’s throats. Even two-headed, though, Maelys had been but one man. Defeating him in single combat was an act of supreme valor and skill, well-suited for songs and glory, but without Cleftjaw it would not have won the day. That eight of the Band of Nine had come for only plunder was plain enough. Maelys alone had fancied himself king. But plunder the eight would have taken, had they kept their ships.
No Ironborn here, nor likely either in the chronicles the maesters wrote at Oldtown. The riverlands and westerlands, though, were out in force. Quenten Banefort sat absorbed in his new wife, while the Stackspears and the Leffords each fielded men who sought to find one: Myden Stackspear was unbetrothed, while Ser Leo Lefford’s intended had died of a pox days before they were due to wed. Ser Leo was heir to the Tooth, and that night he neither sat out a song nor reused a partner; Myden, though well-formed and easy-smiling, was a second son, and unknighted, and danced but one in three. When little Larissa Estermont demurred, pointing to her ankle and claiming injury, Myden smiled and took a seat beside a throng of Freys. They took up half a bench, but there were even more Freys dancing. Lord Walder’s party is near so large it could take the Crag in conquest. At the table alone, Forley counted three Walders. There were surely more: the Freys were not known for creativity. Each shoveled food like they meant to claim the name ‘Fat Walder’ by sunrise.
All the Lannisters had come bar Tytos, who spent much time abed. Accounts varied as to whether mistresses or maladies kept him there. Tywin’s brother Ser Kevan was a broad, thick-chested man, though less so than his sister Genna, who wore a gown of dark blue silk with a neckline as deep as it was daring. Neither seemed to tire as they spun from one end of the hall to the next. Genna’s husband, a reedy, sour-looking Frey, watched from his seat, still chewing. Gerion and Tygett, the youngest siblings, looked much alike. Gerion was only ten, and a head smaller, but both had shining golden hair that fell over their shoulders. Tygett had been ten himself when he waged war against the Band of Nine. He had killed four men twice his size and fought like a ravening beast.
The only missing were the dead: Lord Roger Reyne, who led the westerlands host at the Stepstones and there knighted his squire Ser Kevan, had fled Tywin one year later with a bolt in his back. Two Lydden twins, who had fought valiantly on Bloodstone, had been taken days apart by the same pox that killed Ser Leo’s bride-to-be. Hundreds more had never left that ragged clutch of islands five years past.
“There are so many of us in this old hall,” Forley told Brynden. “I care little for music, but I expected you might whirl a few around the floor. The Kenning girl has been giving you eyes, for one.”
“I know you do. In truth, I’m as surprised to see you here as Tywin,” Brynden looked to the table closest to the wall opposite, where Hoster Tully sat with his Whent wife. He was the same curdle-faced man Forley remembered from the Stepstones, where he’d fought with steady skill but never the zeal of his brother. “A dance is half a promise, in my brother’s eyes at least. I will not be accused of giving him false hope.”
“It has been over a year since last I saw you, Tully. I would not have missed it,” Forley said. “Hoster can accuse you of many things, I’m sure, but falsity?”
“Family, Duty, Honor,” Brynden said. He took a long drink of Arbor gold. “Those are the Tully words. Every day I fail to marry, I betray my House.”
“Presters have it luckier. Tireless: that’s simple. All I need do is find some way to stay awake.”
Brynden laughed and held his gaze. Later, when the dancing became the bedding, and the guests spread themselves over the castle like lichen, they would explore Gawen’s fabled Crag. They would climb some long-forgotten tower, half-rubble, and together enjoy once more looking off the edge of the world.
But the room was still bright and full of music, so for a while longer they watched the happy melee and toasted any knights who came by their bench to reminisce. Gawen himself visited. He’d clapped Brynden’s shoulder and poured wine for Forley, all the while garrulous. He talked of the Crag, and his child to come, and dead and dying Blackfyres five years past.
Gawen sat in sober silence, now, riding back to their reward—their dead son and ruined daughter, their crumbling Crag with its weed-choked walls. Aye, and I am no longer tireless. All had seemed well before his horse had stumbled at the Battle of the Camps, but if he had not been so tensely-wound before then, perhaps…
No matter. It was done. Something in him had cracked under the strain, and it widened with every mile they rode. The river road was flat, but every step his horse took rang through Forley like a drumbeat. The sensation fought to consume him. Regardless of how straight he sat, or how rigidly he set his jaw against the pain, the world smudged around him like a dream. He could focus on nothing but the fissure in his back.
“What do you suppose befell your scouts, Prester?” asked Tully. Forley jerked upright and turned to answer. Edmure Tully’s brows were raised, his lips curved in a thin smile. He had been brought to the gallows to play at dying every day; perhaps it had inured him to whatever dangers lay ahead. More likely he expected to be whipped out of captivity by his uncle Brynden as Forley and his men were slain around him.
Forley could only scoff. “If the scouts were killed they’d garland the road ahead. They’d be hung up like butcher’s pigs. On the Stepstones your uncle watched the tide so as to roll dead scouts off cliffs and wash their bodies up on Blackfyre shores. He would not waste a corpse.”
Edmure shrugged. “Perhaps your scouts are taking shortcuts home. Perhaps they took wing and flew to Casterly Rock like ravens.”
“Perhaps. It matters not. We will make Wayfarer’s Rest by nightfall. After that—”
“Oh, we’re at the Rock already, to hear you tell it.” Edmure’s sudden laugh drew even the attention of somber Gawen Westerling. “Every day the Freys took me up for a mummer’s farce of execution, and every day they told me ‘This day, Tully. Today’s the day you’ll swing’. Brynden didn’t flinch or bend like they had hoped, but still they tried it. They looped the noose around my neck so often it rubbed away the skin—look.” Edmure pulled his high-necked doublet down to reveal a thick band of raw, pink flesh, the skin by turns angry and weeping. “By the third day, I thought they would not kill me, but I never truly knew. I acted, instead, straight-backed and unafraid, signaling to Brynden from the noose. Still, it took weeks before I became quite so good at mummery as you. ‘It matters not’. You go blind into the road as it narrows beneath the hills, and it matters not? The noose will tighten around us, and it matters not?”
Forley shrugged. The movement did not come so easily to him as it had Edmure.
They camped outside the walls of Wayfarer’s Rest, which stood squat and stout at the base of the hills. Its thick stone walls were pocked—old battlescars perhaps, or simply age—but it was unchanged since Forley had last ridden down the river road, and probably had since Rhaena Targaryen and her dragon stayed two hundred years before. A few smaller buildings, presumably for smaller folk, surrounded the high castle walls and were themselves ringed in stone. A tavern, perhaps, and a brothel for sure: places to sleep and drink and fuck and spend whatever coin Lord and Lady Vance had tossed their way.
Wayfarer’s Rest might have had beds enough for each of his knights, but Forley had no intention of finding out. The ink on the Vances’ pardon was as fresh and wet as the sores upon Edmure Tully’s neck. For generations they had served the Tullys as their liege lords, despite commanding a larger garrison than the one at Riverrun. Such loyalty flew in the face of sense. It would not be soon extinguished. For all he knew, Brynden and half the Tully garrison could be hidden inside those walls. Better for the health of the column, too, for him and his knights to sleep on bedrolls under canvas than claim featherbeds while footsoldiers shivered.
They set a camp in a broad meadow on the far side of the hills, as close to the river as they could before the ground softened below them. They picketed the horses at the camp’s outer edge. Forley inspected some as he walked the perimeter, though it soon grew too dark for duties. He continued walking until all but the sentries were settled and the sounds of the camp had died to a low murmur of sleep-breath and fire.
Forley ducked inside his tent and stared at the dim orange glow of the fires beyond its canvas. He pulled the skin of dreamwine from his saddlebag. It was too light in his hand already, but he could as well stop his long swallow as he could the sigh as its sweetness spread through his body. He would not take a watch tonight.
You go blind into the road as it narrows beneath the hills, and it matters not? The noose will tighten around us, and it matters not? Tomorrow’s ride would bring the hills up around them like a pair of anxious shoulders. They would be funneled down the river road for over a day’s ride, little of it in sunlight, three abreast at most and easy targets for any archer that might lurk above them in the goat trails Robb Stark once used to bypass the Golden Tooth.
Black goat, Brynden had said once, grinning in the dark.
Forley sat on his bedroll and stared unblinking at the fires through his tent. Even muffled by dreamwine, there was no true freedom from the creak of his bones or the heaviness of his head. His heart beat in his ears. It squeezed his head with every beat.
He closed his eyes. The fire danced blue and green behind his lids, pulsing to the same rhythm as his heart. Tireless, he thought. You are a tireless old bull. You are Prester to the core.
There were disputes, Ser Keffrey had taught him, over the Prester crest. Some say you bear a bull, others an aurochs. Whatever beast he wore upon his shield, it was a stolid thing—a beast of burden, not of conquest; a thing that moved unthinking where it was bid by whip and yoke. There was no way but onward. Like Edmure, he could not control the noose. But if Edmure Tully could stand tall and unafraid as his uncle Brynden watched, Forley would do the same.
He ate rot and ruin again that night, gorging on animal carcasses and slime. There, by his father, was the head of the horse they’d seen butchered by the roadside near Riverrun. Its skin had dried to the bone, though its lips had drawn back as though in terror, and its open eyes had been pecked out. Beside it sat a rotten apple. It had been cut in one long scratch along its flesh, and was rotting from the scar inward. Nearby lay a plate of black char. It was little more than a pile of splinters and a bent and blackened nail. It had been salvaged from one of the houses they passed along the way, Forley guessed, though burned-out ruins looked much alike. The plate might have come from any house, or any war. It could even be scooped from the smoldering remains of Tarbeck Hall. Forley reached for the closest platter first. Upon it lay a child’s chubby hand. It curled around his finger as he dragged it to the plate.
Forley rose well before the sun, his dreams once again all splintered wood and gore. His head pounded, so much so that he squinted at the hill’s blocky shadows as though they were sun-bright.
Brynden Tully might stare back from some perilous cliff-edge. His eyes might once again glint like wet stone. Forley set his shoulders and stood tall. He ignored the burning in his back, though it felt like a slaver’s brand inside his flesh.
Jeyne Westerling was the first captive to wake. She had been draped in so many blankets that she rose like a mole emerging from a great hill, digging herself into the light with small hands. She blinked at Forley with a blank expression.
“I wonder if Whitesmile Wat knows Wolf in the Night,” she said. “I do. My favorite verse is the one where King Robb carves out Stafford Lannister’s heart and feeds it to Grey Wind.”
“Keep your mouth shut,” Forley told her. “It will be a long, hard ride today, and you and your mother will tire. You are not soldiers; even your boy husband knew enough to keep you at Riverrun lest you slow him down. Though you must travel with us, I will not permit you to cause delay. If we have to tie you to your horses, either of you, we will. Arse up, face bouncing into the beast’s belly with every step: it is not dignified, especially for a child who claims to be a queen. So save your energy for the ride, girl, and do not let me hear you sing.”
She smiled as though his straight back and firm words were as sheer as silk. Still smiling, Jeyne reached to the cut upon her head and, carefully, broke the scab with the pad of her thumb. Red glistened at the edge of the wound and did not fall. She’s mad, Forley thought. She’s mad, to mark herself so.
“The Young Wolf would have torn out your throat as you quailed,” she said, “if you are scared of a mere song.”
Behind them, someone coughed a laugh. Forley turned stiffly to find Edmure cross-legged on his bedroll.
“A fine morning,” he said, voice bright. “I saw a fire in the hills overnight. Ready for the noose, Prester?”
Forley had seen Robert Baratheon as a child, and later known him as king. Jaime Lannister left boyhood to become Kingsguard, then Kingslayer. Even Garrison, his baby cousin, was a man more than grown, and near as bald as Forley himself. The fire in Edmure’s auburn hair was fading to gray, and still Forley could not see him as more than an impudent boy.
They had first met when Edmure was four, and whining loudly to Brynden about a knee grazed falling from a dining bench. A boy like that might enjoy being led to the gallows so long as it forced others to watch.
“Why not appeal to his own father?” Forley asked, when Edmure was dispatched to his seat clutching a lemon cake. Once more, Hoster had sat on the other side of some great hall, though this time less a wife, and less his hair.
“I am the soft touch,” Brynden said. “It’s not so awful. I am not like to have my own.”
Catelyn and Lysa Tully had been there too. Catelyn, a girl of thirteen, shared her uncle’s striking hair. It shone like copper in the torchlight as she bent her head to her sister’s. Together they wove a cocoon of whispers and giggles, and might as well have spoken their own language for all they cared for their neighbors.
Forley decided he preferred the sisters to the brother, and said so. “They demand less of your attention.”
Brynden laughed. He poked Forley’s shin with his toes. “Don’t let their table manners fool you, Prester. Come the dancing I will indeed be whirling them around the room. Unless you want to sit it out with Emmon Frey and my grieving brother, you should—”
“I shan’t,” Forley had said. He heard himself sound like a child in turn and frowned. Brynden laughed again.
By the Seven, his head ached even more now than it had that night. A large and rowdy band played in his skull, dragging bows over sinew and beating rhythms out of bone. Perhaps they knew Wolf in the Night.
“If your captives are an inconvenience,” he told the bowmen, turning from Edmure without another word, “use whatever measures you see fit to quell it. We are charged with their transport to the Rock—not with escorting them in high honor, or even good health. Sybell Spicer has earned the Westerlings a pardon, but little more.”
“Lady Westerling,” said a voice to his left. “Use my name, ser, I implore you.”
Forley rode instead for the vanguard, where he would set the men to march, but not join them. For today’s ride, he must pick a place in the column and stay there. The path would be too narrow to ride back and forth along the red ribbon of his host and, though he would prefer to lead from the front, his duty lay with the hostages.
Almost as soon as he broke for the vanguard, the shout went up ahead of him. He found his best knights clotted around a tree. Ser Kip had dismounted, and as Forley drew to a halt Ser Erik Kenning swung off his horse, kneeled in the dirt, and vomited.
The scout was only recognizable as such by his shredded leather doublet. A scrap of dark hair lay near his shoulder: Jason, then, or Jerrick; not Tion, who was or had been blond. There were other scouts and outriders whose names and faces Forley did not know. It could have been any of them, as his face was now no face at all. It was a pulverized mass of bone and meat and brain, and looked as though a mace had come down upon it from on high.
Forley ordered one man to sacrifice a blanket, and had others gather rocks and sticks from the woods nearby. Weighed down, their makeshift shroud would not be lifted to reveal the torn flesh below. Ribbons of it, Forley thought. Great stinking ribbons, reaching for us in the road. For half a heartbeat he saw the thing that was once a man spread over his father’s table; he saw himself plunge hands into the gore and bring it dripping to his mouth. Could Brynden have served him such a dish?
It would have been best to move the body, though it would have cost time they could ill-afford. Even covered, every rider would see the danger that befell those who had gone ahead. Yet no man could have lifted what was left and dragged it to the trees: the entrails were half-unraveled already; any organs that remained would spatter out like Ser Erik’s vomit.
The column passed before him pale-faced and slower than they ought. By the time the bowmen and their clutch of hostages arrived, Forley was staring unfocused at the stream of men. He knew of their arrival only by Sybell Spicer’s sharp, horrified gasp.
“The Blackfish would not waste a corpse, you said,” Edmure reminded him. “Do you think he has lined them up ahead as the road narrows? It would make you easy prey. You could not help but stumble over them.”
For all Edmure’s jabs, his knuckles were white upon the reins. Even Gawen Westerling’s blank expression had curdled into dread. Sybell made a better effort to compose herself—though that effort showed in her too-rigid pose and tight mouth. Yet their daughter had cast aside her cloaks and blankets and rode tall in torn clothes. Her eyes were trained unblinking on the road ahead, even when she passed through a gap in the trees and the dawn sun caught her in its grasp. She looks almost a queen.
Twice as dangerous as Edmure if she were ever to escape us, Ser Jaime Lannister had told him. The longbowmen which surrounded the hostages were under orders—his orders—to kill her if she moved to escape. And what of it? A girl she may be, but she was also a queen, a pretender, and a threat. Aegon and Rhaenys Targaryen, little Lord Tarbeck, and many more children had been killed for much less.
The Northmen had killed their share. Tion Frey and Willem Lannister had been slain in their beds in the name of vengeance, while the two youngest Starks had been murdered by some Ironborn turncloak. If it allowed for peace, what was one more dead child? You killed your brother in the womb, Forley. Don’t balk at your birthright.
No more bodies followed as they rode hard into the maw of hills and cliffs. This was the sort of terrain upon which Brynden had made his name as a young knight, and the sort he’d later defended for decades at the Vale. Forley could not stop, not for food or drink or rest. Any man who needed a piss must do it as the column continued on without him.
It would be a long ride, but Forley had studied the maps. The vice-grip of the hills above them would last for well over a day, and he meant to press through it in one relentless push. If they rode hard today and into the night, they would come to a clearing which they could more easily defend. After that the slopes would gentle, the road would widen, and the landscape would unclench its fist.
“We might scarce notice a difference in the night,” one of the bowmen said as the sun began to sink. They had ridden for hours in near-silence, though at times Forley had noticed this bowman—a Lydden, could be—tapping long fingers on his horse’s flank. His thin face had eyes that bulged as though mid-cough. “The skies are clear, and the moon is nearly full.”
Sybell agreed. Together they began to loudly reassure each other that the coming hours would be easy. It did little to lift the mood of the men around them, who maintained their silence—all but Edmure, who chuckled but made no other comment.
Whatever the night ride brought would be preferable to a stop. Even if the sky clouded over and forced them to light torches at intervals, even if it began to snow and howl, they were better to continue. Even if they did not wake to arrows, any rest would allow the fearful among them to flee back east to the taverns and brothels of Wayfarer’s Rest.
The clouds that gathered were a formless wash of gray that darkened sooner than the setting sun would warrant. Soon it was snowing. Forley had seen his share of winters, though not much snowfall. He remembered skies full of small fat feathers which fell so slowly you could pick a flake and watch it meander to the ground. This snowfall was a frenzied attack that stabbed everywhere it could reach.
A shout went up, and a halt rippled through the column from ahead. Another body? Forley thought, but it was only a stop to add layers, light torches, and fortify on food and wine, which he would have realized if it hadn’t hurt to think.
It helped some to remove his helm. He ate some dried meat, twinged as he reached for his waterskin, and stared instead at the remaining dreamwine. He could not drink it. If he did, he would fall off his horse and be done. At best, his men would ride on without him. At worst, they’d use it as an excuse to call a further halt, and be attacked. Yet those were only possibilities: that the dreamwine would stifle the ache in his back and skull was a certainty. A cure today is not a cure tomorrow. Drink that dreamwine, and even if you stay on your horse, you will regret that empty wineskin when tomorrow’s sun sets.
But already there was not enough to last him. Surely he could—
“Message from Ser Kip Banefort, ser,” said the thin-faced bowman. “Passed back all the way from the front. Should we call a halt for the night, given the snow?”
A short, simple message, so as not to be mangled as it traveled down the column. Forley’s response was shorter and simpler: “No.”
He wanted dreamwine. He wanted to rest. But what were wants when faced with duty? Wants fit in the margins like the drawings the maesters made in their great tomes. Everything else was rote, as unthinking as reaching for one’s food at table. His only concession to the pain could be shoving his helm inside the saddlebag.
“If people are watching us, they’re already watching,” Edmure said. “And if they aren’t, the torches will make us even more obvious. Better to rest through the dark then carry on.”
“We press on,” Forley said. He swung back on his horse with a grunt. “Don’t whine to me about a march you spoke so excitedly of this morning. I am no soft touch, Tully. We will reach open ground tonight, and then we are nearly—”
Oh, we’re at the Rock already, to hear you tell it, Edmure japed, somewhere amongst the band in Forley’s head.
“Very well,” said Edmure. In the driving snow it sounded half a murmur.
The torches were useless in the storm. They lent detail only to the flakes nearest the flames. Forley could barely see the horse in front of him, and for all his exhaustion did not think his neighbors fared much better. With snow pelting hundreds of suits of armor at once, it sounded as though a waterfall thundered around them.
Forley would not be the one to break momentum, let alone to finish the wineskin and leave himself in worse pain later. Yet he could not keep from thinking of it. His mind conjured it the way it conjured his mother in every childhood dream; that of late it conjured broken lutes and putrefied feasts. He imagined its milky taste upon his tongue. He needn’t finish it, after all. Even the slightest drop might soothe—
No. He did not bargain or beg, even with himself. It would have been weak to beg for a place at Feastfires as a child when he had none. He never begged for his reward after battle with the Band of Nine, and he never begged for knighthood either. He had been so foolish to think all battles would end as that one did, with such elation.
“You fought well,” Brynden had told him. “Better than me: that apple bastard caught me under my left arm, look. I’ll be hard-pressed to remove my armor without borrowing a squire.”
Forley had leaned closer to inspect it—but it had been dark for that first battle, had it not? Perhaps he had reached to feel the damage for himself. There was little. Ser Derrick Fossoway had left a long and vicious scratch along the plate, but a scratch was all it was. Forley should have called him lazy, laughed, and left the Blackfish to find Tygett or some other squire. He was no such creature any more; by the time this war was won he would be a knight. Instead—
“I squired for Tywin at the Rock,” he said. “I could—”
The colors ahead of Forley jerked and slid away. Asleep, again. His arms flailed to break a fall that never came: Forley only thudded forward onto his horse’s neck. The cry the impact forced from him was lost in sudden uproar.
They had ridden more than a day into this funnel; whatever happened, he could not retreat a second time. Ser Forley the Fearless, Brynden had called him once, helping him to his feet. No one else had. No one would. If he were in any maester’s tome, it would be as a footnote, but better that than go down as Two-Forfeits Forley. Forley the Fearful.
A horse reared in torchlit silhouette ahead of them. When it crashed to the ground, the beast’s shriek pierced through the veils of snow and pain and brought the world back into view.
Aside from that terrible wail, he heard only shouts ahead. There were no clashes of steel on steel. They were but wooden lances, Forley thought. A sudden grin flared on his face, though he could not guess why.
Arrows, then, not swords. Their foes would be well-placed to pick them off from above. He had not heard the quarrels, whose swish always reminded Forley of gowns whipping through the air in dance. He peered up at the rocks above but saw nothing: no bowmen, no Brynden, not even a stray bird upon a crag.
He shouted over snow to his own bowmen. “If the hostages run, they die!”
Forley the Faithful. Forley who Followed. Each preferable to Forley Forsworn.
“There!” cried Edmure, pointing.
Two wolves were tearing at the downed horse, which continued to die noisily. Forley thought he saw another two behind. The torches afforded little certainty.
“Ride on!” he shouted, but the men in front of the attack must have halted when they heard the crash and howl. There was nowhere to go. “Pass the order forward! Ride on, so we can kill the beasts and move before others attack.”
Wolves would run from a single traveler, let alone a column four hundred strong. One lucky strike on a horse was all they’d win: a pack starving enough to attack such a force as theirs would be easy to kill.
“Grey Wind,” Jeyne Westerling said somewhere behind him. Her voice was reverent.
Forley turned to the girl and found a monster.
With three others half its size, a huge wolf had stalked between them and the back of the column. It was near-enough the height of Forley’s horse, and more than half its width. It looked as though it had never skipped a meal. By the way its grey jaws slavered it did not intend to begin tonight.
Gawen spoke at last. “A wolf. It’s a mere wolf, damn you. The North does not remember. The North is dead. Do you want to join it? Forley, set your bowmen to feather them, not us—“
“I remember,” Jeyne said. “I remember. I gave myself to the North with mother’s blessing. She sold me gladly in hopes of being parent to a queen—and if that looked unlikely, all she need do was betray Robb and pretend it never happened. It did happen, though. It did. If the North is dead, she killed it.“
“I was held hostage,” her father replied. “I had no knowledge—”
Jeyne laughed. “You would have done otherwise? No. You would have wrung your hands at the Crag rather than Seagard: that is all.”
It was Sybell’s turn for silence. All the while Forley met the wolf’s flame-yellow eyes. The growl that emanated from its throat was so loud that it rumbled deep in Forley’s own chest. Gawen was wrong. This was surely a direwolf, though Grey Wind was as dead as his master.
“Prester!” Gawen said. “Have your men kill it, and if they’re too craven then let me have a fucking sword so I can do it myself.”
How strange, the way the battle sense descends. Gawen had found his voice; Forley felt no pain.
Yet, even clear-headed, he had no time to consider. Two more wolves leapt from the darkness, their fur covered in a thick crust of snow that cracked as they jumped.The direwolf moved almost as soon as they did. Its haunches propelled it high enough in the air to rip Sybell Spicer’s throat out as the others knocked her horse from under her.
“Fire!” Forley shouted, but only one arrow soared from behind him, and far off course.
He turned and met the bulging eyes of the thin-faced man, who shook his head in mute apology. Mute despair, more likely. Their path onwards was now cut off by wolves as well. Some were occupied with ravaging the horse, now silent, but most stood motionless around them, tongues lolling, ears pricked forward like hounds awaiting a command. Forley’s one loyal bowman could not now follow the cowards who had long since ridden on. As you ordered. You gave them the excuse to leave you in the dirt.
On the other side of the column, past the corpse of Sybell Spicer, past the direwolf and half its pack, the closest men were armed with sword and shield. Wolves are fearful of men by nature, and even a beast such as this can be slain by three half-competent soldiers. But here, among the ambushed, there is one sword and one bow between us—and the other men seem less than eager to assist.
Who was back there? What good men could he call upon? His best knights were at the vanguard, riding on oblivious, hearing only that he had commanded them to ride. Some knights were at the rear with a group of bowmen, well-placed for ranged attacks on any host that tried to pick them off, and useless here.
“I wasn’t part of it,” Jeyne said. Her eyes were fixed on the direwolf’s bloody jaws. “I didn’t know. Grey Wind, Robb, I never—I’m sorry, I don’t—”
An arrow punched into the ground between Jeyne and the wolf. It swept down by Forley’s ear, far too high to be loosed by his thin-faced bowman. Edmure really did see fire in the hills. He dare not turn and expose his face to whoever shot at them, not with his helm nestled useless in his bag. Forley the fool.
Another wolf made to lunge at their party, but the direwolf snapped at it, once, and it curved into a cower and retreated.
“That’s not Grey Wind,” Edmure said, but Jeyne was already dismounting from her horse. Gawen called for her to stop, but she paid as little heed to him as she had her mother’s death.
“If it’s not Grey Wind, then why does he know me?” she asked. “I was scared of him before. I used to send him away—but it’s apt, isn’t it? Grey Wind, come to take me to the grave with him and Robb.”
The girl is mad, Forley thought again. Jeyne smiled widely, though through her smile she made sobbing sounds like a cat trying to vomit. The direwolf was not deterred. It ceased its growling, padded toward Jeyne, and sniffed at her torn dress. The girl held out her hand as though to pet it.
“Jeyne!” shouted Edmure. “Get back!”
The direwolf looked to Forley and began to growl once more. The others took up the sound. Even the ones tearing at Sybell Spicer and her horse joined the menacing thrum, which seemed to coalesce to the same tone, tuning together as they prepared to snap.
The noose, too, is tight around us. Edmure seemed to sense his gaze, and turned to give Forley a speaking look—though what it said, he was not sure. He was not sure of much, and had not been for days. Years, even. His mind was a vast table filled with a feast for which he had no appetite. Why shouldn’t the whole damn thing explode?
His spine wrenching, Forley sat as tall as he could. He turned to look at the hills from which the arrow had come. Defiance, he thought, imagining himself seen from above, but it might have looked like supplication.
Before he could be torn to ribbons like the second scout, or like his mother, an arrow landed in his throat. He choked around it, as grateful now as he had been then: Forley the Fearless. This time, when the colors around him shifted, it truly was from sliding insensate off his horse. He landed in a heap, near-kneeling. Beneath his armor the ground was surely as damp now as it had been then, back at the Stepstones—the pinnacle of his knighthood, over before it yet began.
Some pale smear swung off their horse and stood above him, gesturing. Their hands flapped like huge battlefield crows above him. I am not dead yet, he thought. Fly away!
He soon would be. Though his armor protected him from the damp ground, he was bitter cold. The ground would be damp, Forley knew, damp like—something. He could not recall. Memories shied away from him like opponents in the training yard, like the tide receding from an island, like Brynden Tully goading him to play at swords. If this is the closest you will ever get to dancing, Forley, then dance with me.
Hands landed on his neck, searing in the midst of all else freezing. Tommen, he thought stupidly. Tommen, the fired-dough king.
Another arrow flew forward. He did not see it land; he had slumped to the ground in a jumble like a newborn deer and could not move his head. You are no deer, Forley. Deer are born at the start of summer. The rut has barely begun.
Another arrow, and another. Somewhere near him came an angry snarl, and a series of long gray pillars moved through his line of sight and vanished. Forley trembled, or felt like he did. From above he must look like a drop of spilled mercury. So much for standing tall at the gallows. But there was no comparison. Amidst the blurs of color, the smoke and shouts, he was already twitching on the rope. Soon he could rest.