POV- Black Walder Frey
He had waited a long time for this morning. He watched the northern and Riverlands lines from the treeline at the rear, his horse still, his face still, his men bunched close around him and staying still as he had told them to be. The column had drawn up well, four thousand Frey spears dressed in proper order behind the Mormont and Umber positions, close enough to look like support, as were the orders made by King Robb Stark. No one had looked twice at them since the march out of Riverrun. The northmen trusted them enough, to turn their faces forward and think about the enemy they could see.
"Should we march now," said Ser Raymund, his youngest half-uncle, to his left. The man had been saying variations of this same sentence for the better part of an hour. Black Walder did not look at him.
"Not now, it isn't the right time."
"Only saying. If the Lannister thought we ar-"
"They will get their victory."
Raymund went quiet again. He was a competent enough soldier and an indifferent enough politician, which made him useful today in a better way, since today was a soldier's work rather than a politician's. After today there would be politics aplenty, and Black Walder would be doing most of it himself, because his uncles were either too old or too limited or too invested in the particular pleasures of holding a grudge to be trusted with the delicate kind of thinking that came next. What came next was the Riverlands. What came next was a seat of paramount lordship that Lord Walder had been promised and Black Walder intended to hold, and holding it would require the kind of careful navigation that a man like Raymund would only ever muddy.
He looked out over the field and let himself enjoy it a moment. Robb Stark's host was fully engaged now, the Lannister front holding and grinding, banners bent under the pressure of more than tens of thousands men pushing against each other with everything they had. He could see the northern positions straining from here, men leaning into their shields and calling on whatever reserves they had left. They were brave, he would say that much for them. But they were fools too for they have not yet realized they were fighting the wrong battle.
"There," said Ser Walton, on his right, and pointed.
Robb Stark had made his own cage, in the end. That was the beauty of it.
The Young Wolf had been clever enough, Black Walder thought, for a boy of ten and five however he was never meant to be a king, for the boy understood the shape of battles very well but the nature of men rather less. He had put the Freys in the rear because he feared Randyll Tarly's cavalry coming out of the Whispering Wood at his flanks, and the rear was precisely where a man needed his most loyal forces if he feared cavalry, because cavalry at the flank could shatter even a solid formation if the rear broke first. So he had put his most loyal men on the flanks themselves, the Mormonts on the right, their she-bear of a lady commander screaming orders and the Umber giants on the inside, the Greatjon himself leading them.
And the Freys at their backs, watching it all.
Foolish, Black Walder thought. Not stupid exactly, but kind of foolishness that came from trusting a man because you needed to trust him and had no time to check whether the trust was deserved. Robb Stark had needed the Freys.
Lord Walder had asked for Robb Stark's marriage to his daughter or granddaughter to open the gates of the Twins for them to march and made Stark owe him a debt. Lord Walder understood something his children and grandchildren only sometimes grasped clearly but he knew it the best. Debt was not obligation, it was simply a thing one party owed another, and what a man owed could be weighed against what a different man offered, and if the second man's offer outweighed the first debt, then the arithmetic was simple.
A Lannister always pays his debts.
The signal he had arranged was simple, a crimson Lannister banner raised among the Frey formations once the northern line had fully committed against the Lannister front and could not easily disengage. The banner was a risk, he knew it would be seen. He wanted it to be seen, eventually, once the damage was already done, because there was a message in the banner that went beyond this battlefield, a message for every lord in the North and the Riverlands watching this day's work, that the Lannisters had friends in places the Young Wolf had believed safe, and that no host, however loyal it seemed, was beyond reach.
He raised his right hand.
"The signal," he said, and the boy beside him lifted the pole and the crimson banner caught the morning wind.
For a moment nothing moved, or seemed to and then, in the rear of the Mormont and Umber positions, the first Frey spears turned.
POV- Maege Mormont
She heard it before she could understand what was happening around her. A sound that was, coming from the wrong direction. Not the crashing, grinding, all-consuming noise of the Lannister line ahead of them, which she had been in the middle of for what felt like an hour already, her shield arm screaming and her axe gone slick in her grip with other men's blood. That noise was coming from behind them, sound of men pushing and dying in a press so conjusted that dying men sometimes stayed upright for minutes because there was nowhere for them to fall.
"Hold the line," she shouted, from pure habit, at the cluster of her sworn men around her, and turned her head just far enough to see.
For a moment it did not make sense to her eyes. The grey-and-blue of Frey livery should have been standing hidden behind them, reserves waiting their call. Instead the Frey line was moving, not forward toward the Lannister press, but sideways, driving hard into the exposed right flank of her own Mormont men, spears already leveled and shields locked in a wall formation.
"Frey." The word came out of her flat and quiet. "FREY, FREY IN OUR REAR, TURN AROUND AND FACE THOSE COWARDS."
For a few terrible breaths, nothing happened. The men nearest her heard the words and could not reconcile them with anything that made sense, and in that gap of breaths the Frey spears hit the Mormont right flank like a stone wall falling on men.
She saw Lew Bearfast go down first, one of her best, her daughter Lyra's husband, a Mormont by marriage if not by blood, with a Frey spear through his side before he had even turned fully around. He did not have time to scream. She saw two of her household men try to form up back to back and get overwhelmed from three directions at once, more Freys than she had eyes to count pouring around the flank where the line had already buckled.
She could not stop moving. Her father and brother had taught her that a man who stopped in the middle of a battle died in it, and she had four daughters still living who would never forgive her for dying stupidly.
"SHIELDS," she bellowed again, slamming her own shield into the face of a Frey man who had not expected her to come at him rather than away, and felt her shoulder grind with the impact. She hit him again with the axe while he was still reeling and did not look at what happened after. "SHIELDS. HOLD THEM TOGETHER, HOLD TOGETHER."
Her man-at-arms, Harwick, a grizzled man who had been with House Mormont since Robert's Rebellion, found his way to her left side and locked shields without being asked. "They're all along the flank, my lady," he said. "Can't see where they stop."
"How many."
"More than us." He shook his head in resignation.
All around her the shock was spreading through her men like cold water poured into a closed space. She watched it happen, watched the moment reach each face in turn. Old Qort, her most experienced spearman, who had held a shield wall at Pyke with arrows falling like rain and had never once flinched, turned and saw grey-and-blue Frey livery coming at his back and his mouth simply fell open, nothing came out of it, not a curse and neither a prayer.
There was no order to how the Frey line hit them and that was the worst of it, after the shock of the thing itself. The Freys came from three angles at once, some hitting the flank straight on, some curling around the rear, and a small formed group, a thousand men at least, driving hard toward the Umber banner at the center where the Greatjon's massive frame was still visible above the heads of everyone else, a deliberate targeting that told her whoever had planned this knew exactly which men mattered.
"SHIELDS," she bellowed again, for there was nothing else could do now.
The Frey push had hit the Mormont line and the Umber positions simultaneously. The plan of their King had failed and she knew it now. Her and Greatjon were meant to be the anvils who ere tasked to work in flanks to surround the Lannisters and march to their back and Robb's force were meant to be the hammer. But now it mattered not.
Above it all, riding the wind, a crimson-and-gold banner rose among the Frey ranks.
Lannister, she stared at it for one half second that felt much longer. Not Frey colors but the Lannister. As though the Freys had simply stopped pretending what they were.
"My lady." Harwick again, his voice tinged with worry. "My lady, the Greatjon."
She heard the arrow before she found Greatjon, for the giant of a man was now not visible amongst the crowd. She heard the sound of Frey bows cutting loose from behind the line, a ragged volley that was not aimed at anything particularly, just loosed into the mass of men where the Mormont and Umber lines had been locked together.
She found him by the noise he made afterward. The Greatjon made a noise when the arrow took him that she had never once heard from him in all the years she had known him. Note even when Grey Wind had bit off two of his finger did he had made such sound. She found him through three rows of struggling men, and she could see he was still on his feet bend slightly. The arrow had taken him in the right shoulder, just above where his mail ended and the gorget had ridden up in the fighting. He still had his greatsword in his left hand and he was still swinging it, wildly, one-armed, at anyone near enough to reach. There was blood all down his right side, dark enough to look black against the grey of his armor.
"Hold him up," she heard Smalljon shout, somewhere close, the young man's voice cracking in a way it rarely did, the edge of something underneath the brave front that the boy usually carried. Fear, but the fear that finds a man when the person he loves most in the world has just been hurt and he cannot yet tell how badly. "Hold him, hold him, get on his right side-"
Smalljon was already at his father's left, one arm around the old man's back, trying to keep the giant upright without getting in the way of the sword still moving in his father's hand. Maege pushed through the last of the men between her and them, took Greatjon's right arm as gently as she could manage, and felt him sag into her more than she would have liked.
"You bloody fool," she said, which was not what she had meant to say, but it was the only thing that came.
"Still standing," Greatjon ground out, between his teeth. His face was the color of old ash. "Tell me I'm still standing, woman."
"You're still standing. Don't make a liar of me."
"It's just an arrow," he said, as if she had not noticed.
"I can see it."
"Fucking Freys." He said, like a man spitting out something he had bitten into by mistake and wanted out of his mouth as fast as possible. "Walder fucking Frey betrayed us all, he betrayed his king for Lannisters."
"I know." Maege was thinking miles ahead.
"They're going to regret that." He said it so plainly, so utterly without heat, that it was more frightening than shouting would have been. He shifted his grip on his sword and Maege felt him try to straighten, but the loss of blood from arrow had done its work.
Smalljon pressed close against his father's shoulder, his own sword out and turned to face the Frey line. He had extra on his father's height if not yet his breadth. He was going to have the breadth too, given years.
"How many do we have left?" she asked Harwick over her shoulder.
"On their feet? Less than two thousand, my lady."
Not even close to the numbers with what Frey's had rushed in with. "Form square," she said.
"My lady." Harwick asked.
"Whatever we have left. Form square around the Greatjon. Spears out on all sides. We hold here until reinforcements from King Robb Stark arrive."
"And if no one comes?"
She looked at him and he looked back at her. "Then we hold here anyway," she said.
He nodded once, and went to work but then the ground began to shake.
It started as a tremor, felt through the soles of her feet. It was the sound of more horses than she could count, moving at full gallop, and getting closer. She turned her head toward the treeline to the east, where the Whispering Wood began, where the King had said Tarly's cavalry waited, where no relief was supposed to come from and none was supposed to come from in time.
No banner had yet broken from the trees but the rumble grew.
Greatjon lifted his head. His eyes, still sharp despite the ash-grey of his face, moved toward the same treeline she was watching.
"More of them," he said, and it was not a question.
"Don't know yet."
"More of them," he said again, not afraid and not resigned, only certain. The man had seen enough wars to learn of disasters before they arrive.
The first horsemen broke from the treeline. She watched them come but could not yet read the banner at that distance.
Then she set her teeth and made herself start counting for what was coming, and around them the Frey and Lannister men were still pressing and her her men continued to fall and she continued to count.
POV- Robb Stark
He had turned his head at Dacey's shout and saw the crimson-and-gold banner rising above the Frey positions and for one breath that he would carry with him for the rest of his life however long or short it was, he had not believed it.
Edmure was at his shoulder, had been at his shoulder the whole morning, and he heard his uncle's voice cut through the battle noise. "Is it the Targaryen? Did that bastard make Frey turn their side?"
Robb opened his mouth and could not answer. The word bastard stuck in his chest like something swallowed wrong. Not because Edmure was wrong to use it, precisely, because Aemon was not a bastard in the legal sense, but the words itself was wrong, the whole logic of it was wrong, and Robb had spent days trying to unknot that particular knot and had only made it worse each time.
"No." Dacey Mormont was on his other side, her mace in her hand, her eyes fixed on the Frey positions. "No, my lord. It's the Lannister." She lifted her weapon and pointed to a side, and he followed the point, and there it was. No subtlety in it, no attempt at disguise. A Lannister banner flying above men wearing Frey colors, as if Walder Frey had decided to stop pretending he had ever been anything else.
"Gods," Edmure said, under his breath.
Robb did not say anything. He looked at the Frey position to the rear, at the roiling mess where they had hit his flank and were grinding through it, at what was still left of the Mormont and Umber formations trying to hold together against the pressure from all sides that the men attacked from. He looked at the Lannister line in front of him, which had not slackened, but had in fact sharpened when the Frey signal went up.
He looked at Dacey.
"Ride back," he said. "Take men, all of them, hit the Freys on the outside of their own flank. They'll be watching the Mormont line, not their own. Hit them before they can regroup."
"Your Grace-"
"Go. Now, before the angle closes."
She went, without another word, pulling men behind her like a tide, and Robb turned back to the Lannister line in front of him.
He thought of his father. He thought of the tightness he had seen in Ned Stark's face since the morning, a look he recognized now, looking back, as the look of a man who had already known something was wrong and could not find the fault. He thought of Aemon, the ways he had hurt him. He thought of Arya's face, at the gates of Riverrun that morning, watching him from the walls with an expression he had not had time to name correctly.
Then he stopped thinking about all of it and raised his sword and rode at the Lannister line, because that was what was left to do right now, and everything else would have to wait.
POV- Tywin Lannister
The harbor smelled of salt and he stood on the dock at the edge of Blackwater Bay. His brother Kevan stood beside him on the dock.
"Letting the Frey's and Brackens join our fold was the best course of action." Kevan started.
Tywin nodded, hearing his words and thought of Stark boy's army that would be broken or near enough to it by nightfall. The North would be headless, its best commanders dead, scattered or captured, its supply lines in the Riverlands cut by men who now answered to the Rock rather than Winterfell. Randyll Tarly had his orders, Jaime had his and other lords would have their own.
The Targaryen question was the one that remained. The boy with the silver hair and the dragon at his side. Tywin had not, in the entirety of his long strategic life, been comfortable fighting on two fronts at once, and the Targaryen was a second front whether anyone in the Riverlands army admitted it or not. He had plans for the Targaryen too. Plans that did not require battles, or not yet. Lions were patient hunters when the patience served them.
"My lord." One of his guards, from behind him spoke that made Tywin turn.
The man was looking up and not at him. Not at the harbor or the ships or the Lannister banners dressed along the waterfront. At the sky.
Tywin turned and looked up, and there were three of them. Then, without hurry, without any particular expression on his face, Tywin Lannister turned back to the harbor and said, to Kevan, quietly, "Send ravens, all of them to every worthy House, every lord in Westeros."
"And the message." Kevan asked.
"Tell them to kneel to true Targaryen," he said. "House Lannister had allied itself to House Targaryen and they wait for fealty."
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