Chapter 148: The Unnamed Patron
ULF
Corlys Velaryon had pledged the fleet standing, with his hand still on the back of his chair, and by supper it would be repeated on Driftmark word for word. Ulf caught him in the gallery outside, where the torches hadn't been lit yet and the cold came off the stone in a sheet.
"One more thing, and it's likely nothing." The old man didn't turn his head. "Grain. Somebody's been buying it along the Reach coast, out of the small ports under Oldtown, paying above the market and shipping it nowhere my factors can find. They only noticed because it moved the price at Hull." He shrugged with one shoulder. The other had never come right since the fighting. "Old men notice grain. It's the only thing that kills people in numbers."
Ulf gave it to Marsh that same night. It took the network nine days.
They came to him after the midnight bell, both of them, which told him enough before either man opened his mouth. Marsh smelled of the tallow he burned in his own rooms and carried three stacks of paper kept apart from each other under his thumb. Criston Cole came in behind him with a soldier's contempt for paper, though it was plain he'd read all of it twice already.
"Sit," Ulf said. "The wine's cold. It's also the last of it."
Marsh didn't sit. He set the first stack on the command table under the candle and turned it so the writing faced Ulf.
"Symons rode east in the spring," he said. "Nineteen holdfasts on the Ocean Road. At eleven of them, somebody bought grain inside the fortnight after he passed through. Not the holdfast. A factor out of a coastal house, paying in coin, paying over the price." He laid the second stack down and squared it to the first. "We had the letter off Peake's courier with the split tower drawn at the foot and no name under it. We had the ride. We couldn't hang them together until Lord Corlys said the word Hull."
"Eleven of nineteen isn't a pattern." Ulf pulled the candle closer. "It's a coincidence with ambition."
"It's a pattern when the coin comes out of the same four purses each time." Marsh's finger came down on a column of dates. "Four banking houses. Lannisport and Oldtown. Never the same order twice, never the same clerk, and never once a name that isn't a factor's."
"The gold is coming from Oldtown," Cole said, spreading intelligence reports across the command table. "A Hightower survivor, Margaery Hightower, Alicent's cousin, has been quietly rebuilding the family's network. She's been funding Fossoway and Tarly and half a dozen disgruntled lords through a chain of transactions so complex it took our analysts weeks to trace."
Ulf studied the documents. Rain had started against the shutters somewhere in the last hour and he hadn't noticed it begin. The oldest of the transfers was dated eleven months before Rhaenyra's court collapsed. Whoever had opened that account had done it while Aemond was still alive and everyone with sense was watching the sky.
"She's not the mastermind," he said. "Someone else is behind her. Someone using her name and her gold while staying hidden. The same man who's been coordinating lords across three kingdoms. The patron."
Cole nodded. "The identity is covered by a dead Westerlands lord's name. Someone who's been dead three years. It's a false face. The real patron has enough reach to coordinate across kingdoms and enough gold to buy loyalty from men who should know better. Daemon's network was about chaos. This is about control. Different methodology. Different goals." He paused. "Someone patient. Someone dangerous. Someone we're going to find."
Marsh left the third stack squared apart from the others, which was what he did when he intended to be difficult.
"Before anybody says the word Hightower in a room with a door," he said, "understand what you'd be saying. Oldtown feeds the Citadel and the Citadel writes the maesters who sit in every hall from here to the Wall. The Starry Sept is theirs in all but name. They've sent us four thousand men for the reconstruction levies and not one letter of complaint about the cost. If we name that house and we're wrong, we've made an enemy the crown can't fight this year, and every lord who's been quietly resentful gets a great house to gather behind. If we name it and we're right, and we can't prove it in front of the council, we've done the same thing and handed them a grievance besides."
"You want another pass."
"I want one more. Properly. The Lannisport ledgers copied, not summarized, and the endorsements read by a man who knows what an Oldtown clerk's hand looks like." Marsh took his hand off the stack. "I've been wrong once in four years. It cost me a boy in Duskendale. I'd rather be slow."
"And while you're slow he finishes what he's building." Cole hadn't taken the wine. "Does the peace hold together if he moves first?"
Nobody answered him. The candle guttered where the draught came under the door, and the rain kept on, and out past the shutters the city was as quiet as it had been all year.
"Do the pass," Ulf said. "Nothing formal. Nothing in a raven, nothing through the Citadel, nothing said to the council until it's a fact instead of an argument. Take whatever coin you need out of my accounts, not the crown's." He looked up. "Keep digging. Oldtown gold leaves a trail. Follow it."
Marsh gathered the first two stacks and left the third.
When they'd gone he read it alone, which was the only honest way to read a thing like that. The last page was a copy of an endorsement off a draft cashed in Oldtown fourteen months ago. Half of it had been scraped and written over by somebody in a hurry with a bad knife. Under the scraping the copyist had traced what he could still see, and what he could still see was the beginning of a name, three letters and the start of a fourth, and beneath them, small, in the corner where a household clerk marks a payment to his own master's account, a tower drawn split down its height.
Ulf sat with it a long while. He knew the house. He'd have known it from the mark alone, and he'd have known it from the gold, and knowing wasn't the same as being able to stand in front of a table of lords and say it.
He'd spent a year believing the dangers were finished. Daemon into the bay, Rhaenyra judged, the Riverlands rebuilding, and himself in a warm room with his son's name still a secret worth keeping. All that time somebody with a great deal of money and a great deal of patience had been buying stewards, buying grain, buying men who felt owed, and waiting for the peace to go soft enough to break. The war hadn't been the last of it. The war had been the noise under which this was assembled.
He didn't say the name. Saying it made it a thing other men could repeat, and he wasn't sure yet, and the difference between sure and nearly sure was a house with four thousand spears in it.
Rather than send it down to the council record, where four clerks and a maester would touch it before dawn, he folded the page into the report, carried it to the strongbox under the window, and turned the key on it himself. Then he took a clean sheet from the drawer, set it square, and began writing the order that would send Marsh's copyist south on the morning tide.