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POV: Arthur Stark
[ The Dreadfort, the wood behind the fence, that night ]
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Fenrir and Hela were waiting beyond the last brazier. I followed them down the path into the wood, pushing aside a branch that caught my cloak at the shoulder. The temporary fence marked the ground that the castle's private wall would one day enclose. On the plan shown to the visitors, that area appeared as a reserved garden; the path between the pines and the placing of the weirwoods were not drawn. I passed the guards at the entrance and waited until the trees hid their torches before calling for Leaf.
She stood before the young weirwood whose face Coal had finished two weeks earlier. The cuts of the carving still showed around the mouth, pale at the edges. Narrow channels carried water between the roots, and the smaller saplings held places sheltered by stones. Coal sat on an exposed root, cleaning his obsidian knife with a piece of leather. Hela went over to him while Fenrir circled the trunk and nosed at the wet earth.
"The leaves move even when the wind stops," I said, halting near Leaf. The wood was quiet, and yet the red crown shivered now and again.
She set her hand on the bark, beside the newly carved face. "He has begun to touch what the other weirwoods remember, even the ones far from here. He still takes in many memories at once. When you come near, he tries to follow you." I waited for her to take her palm away before coming closer. The wood still held the scars left by Coal's blade.
"Last time, you said he was still learning. What changes for me if I try again?"
Leaf touched my wrist and guided my hand close to the trunk without letting it rest there. "You may see things that have already happened and things that still may. The first come from the trees. The others arrive by another road, and not even we know which. Do not choose one of them only because it looks clearer. If you lose your hold on the wood, take your hand away."
Coal folded the leather over his knife and put it away. "If the images stop, wait. Pushing until your strength is gone will not make the tree show you what you want."
I held my palm above the bark a moment longer. The talk from the feast still came back whenever I tried to listen to the trees: the questions about the forges, the sound of the Karstark chest closing, Greatjon dragging his bench. I set my fingers on the cold bark and waited. First I stopped hearing the water in the channel. Then Leaf's hand went out of the edge of my sight, though I still knew she stood beside me.
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The heat came before the image. It went up through the fingers still held to the frozen bark, crossed the arm and reached my face. For a moment the two things held the same place: the cold wood under my palm and air so hot that the hairs on my forearm drew back. I breathed, and the air came thick, with the taste of metal at the back of my tongue.
Something under the roots turned its attention to me. The presence arrived with no movement and no sound, only as weight, the way a man feels the weight of another man standing behind him in the dark. It was too great to fit inside that wood, and too old to have learned to speak with mouths. It came down through my hand, went up the arm and tasted the blood running inside it. Then it opened the way.
The long hall formed around that heat. There were bells somewhere above, feet running over stone, and the ceiling was lost at a height my eyes could not measure. Everything hung slightly to the left, and each time I tried to right myself the room leaned the other way. Thin hands gripped black arms of metal. The long, broken nails lifted towards someone I could not see. Tangled hair framed a wasted face, and the eyes inside that face moved far too fast, jumping from one point to another without settling on any.
The smell arrived before the rest of the scene. Burned hair, fat dripping into embers, piss steaming off hot stone. Beneath all of it lay green smoke, which did not rise the way woodsmoke rises and stayed low, crawling between the boots of the men standing along the walls.
A man hung from chains above the fire, inside his own armour. The metal glowed red at the shoulders and the thighs. He was screaming, and the scream came muffled through the grille of the helm, and the armour screamed with him, cracking as it swelled. The fat ran down the joints of the breastplate and fell into the flames, and every drop threw green light back at the ceiling. The men against the walls looked at their own feet.
Another man thrashed below him, a leather cord tightening at his throat by a device he himself fed with every movement. A sword stood driven into the stone, out of reach of his feet. He would stretch his arm towards the hilt, and the cord would rise, and he would stretch again. His tongue had come out of his mouth. His toenails scraped the floor in short strokes, and shorter, and the sound of it cut through everything else in that hall.
"Burn them!" the man on the throne was shouting, stretching his arm out until his whole hand shook. "Burn them all!"
He laughed between one order and the next. The laugh came out thin, with no breath to hold the end of it, and began again.
The voice did not come through my ears. It came in behind my eyes and spread, and the rest came with it: a steady pressure behind my forehead, a hum of sounds laid over each other that never became words, the urge to watch the corners of the hall for things moving there. It was looking for a place inside me. I opened my mouth to breathe and smelled the fat as though it were on my own clothes.
The hall folded in on itself. The screams went on sounding after the place had stopped existing, and went on sounding beneath what came next, like water running behind a wall.
· · ·
Green fire came down a corridor under the earth. The light struck the wet stone of the walls and set the whole of it shining. The heat that came with it was damp and heavy, and carried no smell of smoke at all. The flames turned a corner without losing speed. The glare took everything and broke off before a fair-haired man wrapped in white cloth, a bloodied sword in his hand. I looked for his face. The image stayed unfinished, showing only the cloth, the blade and the blood running towards the point.
· · ·
The same castle came back, with another age laid over it. The torches sat in brackets I had not seen in the throne room, and the clothes of the men asleep in the corners came from a time that was not that one. The thing under the roots did not keep the nights apart. It stacked them on each other and pushed me into the stack.
Two men were walking inside the wall. There was a narrow passage between the stones, high enough for one of them and tight for the other, and the dust in there smelled of nests, of dry rat droppings and old lamp grease. The small man went first with the light, and a bunch of tied rat tails swung at his belt with every step. He touched the wall now and then, the way a blind man checks a corridor he knows well.
On the other side of the stone, the castle went on living. Footsteps, a door, a woman laughing in some far-off chamber, a dog. None of it crossed to the inside, and nothing from inside crossed out.
The passage ended behind a wooden panel. The small man put his ear to it and stayed that way a long while. Then he raised two fingers to the other, who had already drawn his cleaver and held it low, against his thigh, so it would not knock the stone.
A sleeping guard snored on the other side. The snoring stopped halfway through, with the sound of a badly greased hinge.
There was a short corridor, a child's room, and a woman standing in the dark with her hands open in front of her. She spoke quickly, offering things, and the words reached me without shape, like a voice under water. The big man sat on the edge of the bed with the cleaver resting on his knee and waited for her to finish.
"Choose," he said.
The lamplight went down. I stayed in that room long enough to hear the woman repeat one same word over and over, and the thing under the roots held me there until she stopped repeating it.
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Then came steps. A door gave inward with the crack of wood breaking at the height of the lock.
The man who came in first did not fit the door and had to turn his shoulders to pass. His armour came in dirty with the road and with worse, and dried blood darkened the joints of his gauntlet's fingers. A woman screamed. The scream was someone calling a name, and the name was lost before it reached me.
A child's cry began near the floor and ended against the wall. The sound was short. What stayed after it was the wet noise of something small sliding down whitewashed stone, and the woman's hand held still in the air where the child had been a moment before.
She went at the big man. He took her by the hair with the gauntlet still dirty and used the wall. The stone gave the sound back three times. Then the man opened the buckle of his own belt, and I tried to get out of that room, and the thing under the roots held my head in place the way a man holds a dog's head so it will see what it has done.
Under a bed, in another room, there was dust and a pair of open eyes. Boots came in. A spear came down. It came down again, and again, and went on coming down long past any need, and the man driving it counted the blows under his breath, the way a woodcutter counts axe strokes.
The blood reached my nose before I understood that it was mine.
· · ·
When I tried to follow what ran off the edge of the bed, the heat went out all at once. I heard running water and found a hammer in motion.
The blow struck a black breastplate. The sound arrived late, after the impact, and my head throbbed along with it. Rubies came loose from the warrior's chest and leapt over wet stones, scattering into the shallow current. One of them caught between two rocks before it was carried off. I tried to fix the place, to find the bank or hear a voice, and all I could do was follow the red glint fading under the water.
· · ·
The cold of the river became a dry heat that split the lips. There was dust in the air, flies stuck to the sweat on men's backs and a smell of old dung baking on white stone. An enormous square opened out, ringed with steps, and on those steps stood people with dyed hair and clothes too costly for that place.
Below, standing in the sun, were the soldiers. Thousands of them, in ranks that did not end inside what I could see. Spiked helms, short shields, spears. I knew that way of standing. I had seen the same stillness in my own yard, in the two men who eat at my table and still sleep with their backs to the wall.
A woman walked along the front of the first rank. She was small against all of it, and her hair took the light in a way that hurt the eyes. She spoke loudly, in a tongue that reached me torn, never leaving the words whole. The soldiers struck the butts of their spears on the stone at the same moment, and the sound came out as a single hammer blow across the whole square.
The woman spoke again, one word, short.
What happened after that began on the steps, among the people with dyed hair. A winged shadow crossed the stones of the square, wide enough to take the sun off the ranks for an instant, and the heat that came with it dried my eyes from inside the vision. The soldiers did not move while the screaming rose behind them. Not one of them turned his face.
· · ·
The thing under the roots followed the ruby to the bottom with the same interest it had given the child on the wall. That was when I understood the size of what stood on the other side of the bark, and how much it cared about the names of those who died inside it.
The arm with the hammer had already gone when I felt fingers closing on my wrist.
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I heard the channel in the wood again. My hand was still pressed to the bark, and the tips of my fingers ached. Leaf held my wrist; I let my hand go slack and only then managed to take it from the trunk. Fenrir stood near me, the hair raised along his back, his muzzle turned towards the weirwood. Hela growled low without leaving her place. I passed my fist under my nose and found blood on the sleeve.
Leaf led me to a low stone. I sat before she had to insist, holding the cloth against my nose. The cold of the night reached my face and hands all at once, and it was a while before I felt the steam of my own breath going past the cloth. The trees stayed still. The water ran in the channels, the wolves did not move off, and for a time that was all I could follow. Coal waited until my shoulders came down before he moved.
"I saw a man on a throne order people burned. There was a man cooking inside his armour and another hanging himself to reach a sword. Then came fire under the ground, a man in a white cloak with a dirty sword, two men walking inside a wall with a lamp, a room where they told a woman to choose, another room where they killed a child against the stone and one more under a bed, a warrior struck down in a river, and a square full of sun where a woman commanded thousands of Unsullied. How do I find out whether they were memories?"
Coal went to the trunk, looked over the marks my fingers had left in the bark and turned back to me. "You do not find that out from the order you saw them in. The images can come from different places and different times."
"So you cannot tell me whether any of it will happen." I pulled the sleeve away to check the bleeding and had to press it again.
Leaf crouched in front of me, one hand on the edge of the stone. "We know that some things can change. We also know you still take in too little to tell a memory from a possibility. Tell what you saw without adding what you imagine. When you look again, compare. That is enough for today."
I had recognised Aerys. I had stood before him in King's Landing; for all the thinness and the tangled hair, I could put that face and that voice to the king, and I knew the hall he was laughing in. The two men dying below the throne were still nameless to me, and so were the women, the children, the man too large for the door, the one who carried rat tails at his belt and the fair-haired woman who spoke to the spears. Of her I had one thing more: I would ask Belzakar and Morghaz how many Unsullied fit in a square that size, and who in the world would have the gold to buy them all at once. The torches set one way in the corridors and another in the hall told me only that those nights were separated by more time than a life. The pressure behind my forehead had not entirely passed. I tried to recall a sigil on the white cloak or on the banks of the river and found nothing beyond what I had already described. The drops of blood on my sleeve had begun to darken. Fenrir lay down at the foot of the stone without taking his eyes off the tree.
I stayed there until the taste of metal left my mouth. Leaf stood between me and the trunk the whole of that time, and Coal went back to sitting on the exposed root. No one spoke. When I rose, I had to put a hand on the stone to steady my legs, and the wood turned a little before it settled.
Eldric called my name from the outer path. His voice came from beyond the bend where the pines hid the inside of the wood. I answered that I was coming and waited for Leaf to withdraw with Coal. Fenrir walked ahead of me; Hela stayed close to my legs until we reached Eldric. He carried a folded sheet inside his coat and kept his hand over it when he saw the stain on my sleeve.
"Have you brought something that could not wait until morning?" I asked, taking the cloth from my nose.
Eldric searched my face in the weak light off the path and drew out the paper. "Ser Oswell Whent left King's Landing and visited his brother at Harrenhal. After the visit, purchases of horses began, along with bookings of lodging and orders of food in the Whents' name. There are men tied to the prince among those who passed the coin to the suppliers."
I opened the sheet. Eldric had set apart the names of the middlemen, the services contracted and the stretches where his informers lost the course of the payments. "Rhaegar is paying for a tourney," I said, going over an order placed with armourers. "With food and lodging in that quantity, Walter Whent means to fill his fields with men coming from a long way off. Do you know what Oswell discussed with him?" Eldric brought the paper nearer the light and pointed out a gap between two names.
"I did not hear the conversation, and I have no one who was inside the room. The visit came before the contracts. The prince's agents appear afterwards, paying for services that will be used at Harrenhal." He kept his nail on the gap. "Here, the money passes through a middleman we have not yet identified. I will not claim we followed every coin from King's Landing to the Whents."
I went back to the first name on the list. "How much of this do you take for coincidence? A visit between brothers would explain Oswell. It does not explain why Rhaegar's men turn up in the purchases."
Eldric took the sheet when I had finished reading and folded it along the old creases. "The payments were split. Some of those hired were paid by different people for the same service. The care in it looks like what we found when the prince sent money to you. It is a link worth following. What he means to get at Harrenhal is still missing."
I set my back against a pine and looked again for the image of the king. The voice came easily; the hall around it stayed unfinished. "A tourney would let a man gather lords without summoning them to a council," I said. "Rhaegar could speak with men whose presence in King's Landing would draw attention."
Eldric settled the paper into his coat and fastened the button. "And Walter Whent provides the ground to receive them. The prizes the suppliers are talking about also look large for the coffers he usually shows."
A torch moved further on, where the guards were changing places. I waited for the man to cross the passage before asking about Varys. "If your informers found part of the trail, how long before he does the same nearer the prince?"
Eldric lowered his voice. "He may have found it already. I need to know what will reach the king, and by whose hand. Until then, I would rather these names stayed away from the common messages."
A weight came down on the branch above us and shook old snow onto the path. Muninn dropped to Eldric's outstretched arm, the white patch on his breast showing as he turned his body towards the distant torchlight. Eldric tied the folded paper to the raven's leg without having to look at the knot. I agreed, and asked him to go on checking the payments. We went back in by the side door; Eldric closed it behind us while I climbed to wash the blood off my face.
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POV: Arthur Stark
[ The Dreadfort, the next morning ]
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Maester Hollan brought the invitation before the morning change of guard. I had come back to the map room to go over one of the previous night's sheets with Eldric when he knocked at the door. The tube had been taken off a raven out of Harrenhal. Eldric put his papers away in his coat and studied the cap before I broke the Whent seal. Hollan stayed near the table, ready to prepare the answer.
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To Arthur of House Stark, Lord of the Dreadfort,
My daughter will keep her name day in the coming year, and in her honour I have ordered the fields of Harrenhal opened, by the waters of the God's Eye, for ten days of feasting and trials of arms.
Your Lordship, your kin, your knights, your sworn men and those of your household you may wish to bring will be welcome and received at my table with bread and salt.
For seven of the ten days there will be contests. Five shall be given to the jousting. There shall also be a seven-sided melee in the ancient style, a contest among archers, axe-throwing and a horse race along the shores of the God's Eye. Singers may likewise prove their art before the assembled lords, and mummers shall close the nights of the feast.
Let the men of the North come mounted or afoot, bearing lance, sword, bow or axe according to their liking and the custom of their lands.
The purses shall be three times greater than those offered by Lord Tywin Lannister at the games of Lannisport, and the worth of each shall be proclaimed before its contest begins.
Walter of House Whent
Lord of Harrenhal
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I read the line about the purses again, then went back to the start to check how long the games would run. The prizes at Lannisport had been talked of even in the North; three times that would be enough to bring men a long way to the God's Eye. The list of guests named kin, knights and sworn men, the same form he must have used for every House in the realm. The paragraph after it had been written for the North. Someone at Harrenhal knew I would have no knights to bring and had thought it better to say so without my having to explain.
Eldric came closer when I left the letter open. "The orders match the size of the feast," he said, pointing at the contests. "Walter Whent will be able to receive his guests without explaining every man he sent for." I reached for the map of the south, and stopped before I could open it over the message. The blood from the night before had left a mark at the edge of my nail. I rubbed it with my thumb and heard again, for an instant, the order shouted in the hall.
I opened the map and pinned the edge under the empty tube. "Which Houses received the same invitation?" I asked.
Eldric took the message by the margins, without touching the broken wax. "I do not have the names yet. By the scale of it, I expect the great Houses and many of their bannermen. We can check as word of the parties comes in. If the prince is after particular men, the other guests will give them company enough to pass unnoticed."
Hollan asked for room to set down the sheet he would write the answer on. I signalled for him to wait and went back to the letter. "The payments support that Rhaegar's men are helping the Whents. They do not prove what he will discuss with the guests."
Eldric returned the message to the table. "I will separate what we can confirm from what rests on a single report. You will have all of it before we ride." He moved to the other side of the map and left Harrenhal in front of me.
I checked the date. There were moons until then, and the journey would keep me from the Fort far longer than ten days of games. I measured with my fingers the distance from the Neck to the God's Eye, then worked it again by the river road. Rested horses, provisions, men able to leave their duties for many moons. The departure would fall in the best laying season of the year, with the foundations of the eastern wing open and the second converter waiting on its lining. The marks I had been cutting into the footing stones needed my own hand before the masonry covered them, and no mason in the yard could do that work in my place.
I passed my palm over the line of the south and went back to the drawing of the Fort. If I left before the last course of the foundations was closed, Hullen's men would stand idle in front of a stretch no one was permitted to lay. If I stayed to the end, I would lose the margin of days the road demanded. Outside, I heard the first recruits crossing the yard. Greatjon had two opponents waiting for him that morning as well. I kept my finger on Harrenhal until Hollan brought the inkpot closer and asked again about the answer.
"Tell Lord Whent that I accept and will attend with men of my house," I ordered, handing him the invitation. "Use the same words he used. Invent no titles for any of mine." The maester noted the form of address and asked whether I wished to send the details to Winterfell. "My father will have whatever invitation the Whents choose to send him. Send no copy of this one. What Eldric has gathered stays off the ravens." Hollan raised his eyes from the sheet and waited for the rest. "Whatever has to reach Winterfell on account of it goes with Hugin, and passes from my hand to Rickard's without touching anyone else's."
Hollan gathered the message and left with the answer begun. I pulled a blank sheet to the middle of the table and asked Eldric for the council's duties. I needed to settle who would hold the workshops, the stores and the guard while we were away, and how much of the building would stop without me. I wet the quill and wrote Perseu at the top. Eldric opened the ledger beside the sheet, holding the page while I looked for the next name.