**Return to Riverrun**
Ten days on the road had worn deep grooves of exhaustion into both men, but Michel felt something ease in his chest the moment Riverrun's walls came into view, the castle rising grey and solid against the autumn sky, banners snapping bright along its battlements. Fish, wolf, and falcon flew together above the gatehouse, and beneath them, smaller sigils crowded the walls in a dense, hopeful patchwork—every house of the Riverlands that had found the courage, at last, to stand and be counted.
The fields beyond the castle told their own story, one Michel had labored to write himself in the weeks before his departure. Where siege and war had left the Riverlands scorched and starving only months before, the harvest now stood tall and golden in every direction, rows disciplined and dense in ways the old smallfolk methods had never managed. He had brought knowledge with him from somewhere he rarely let himself think too closely about—crop rotation, better plowing, seed spacing that coaxed twice the yield from the same stubborn soil—and the result stretched now in every direction he looked. Two years of grain, Edmure's stewards had calculated, enough to feed the combined host through whatever remained of this war and the hard winter that would follow it.
Robb and Edmure were waiting at the gate when Michel and Jon finally rode through, and something in Robb's grin, wide and unguarded, eased the last of the road's weariness from Michel's shoulders.
"Cousin." Robb clasped his forearm, the old warmth of it settling between them easily, the way it always did now. "You look like a man who's ridden through half the mountain passes in Westeros."
"Most of them, probably," Michel said, managing a tired smile of his own.
Edmure stepped in beside them, clapping Michel's shoulder with a fondness that had grown steadily since the siege's end. "Rest tonight. There's a council waiting, but it can wait a few hours more for you."
Michel shook his head slightly, though he appreciated the offer. "How do things stand? The Riverlands—Tywin's grip on it?"
"Rest first," Robb said, firm despite his grin. "You've earned that much, at least. We'll talk properly once you've slept."
Michel let himself be persuaded, if only because his body agreed with the suggestion more than his restless mind wanted to admit.
---
He came to the war council some hours later, bathed and fed and marginally more himself, and found the great hall crowded with lords from three regions, banners of every allied house draped along the walls behind them. A murmur of quiet conversation stilled as he entered, heads turning, and Robb rose from his place at the map table to greet him properly before the assembled council.
"Cousin. Good timing." Robb gestured him toward the table, where the familiar map lay spread once more, though its markers had shifted considerably since Michel had last studied it. "We've nearly finished what we set out to do. Every castle Tywin's men held in the Riverlands has been retaken—every one, save Harrenhal itself."
Michel's eyes moved across the map, tracing the cluster of markers now returned to Tully colors, the slow tightening noose that had, over these past ten days, closed around one final, stubborn holdout. "And Harrenhal."
"Sitting exactly where we left it," Yohn Royce said from further down the table, his voice edged with the particular frustration of a siege that refused to resolve itself. "Tywin's dug in with near thirty thousand men now—reinforcements found their way to him faster than we'd hoped. Those walls haven't gotten any weaker for the waiting."
Michel nodded slowly, absorbing the number, and felt the shape of the plan they'd built together at this same table ten days before settle back into focus. "Then we do exactly what we planned." He looked to Robb directly. "Fifteen thousand men, west into the Westerlands. Burn his fields the way his soldiers burned the Riverlands. Take his smallfolk, his granaries, his undefended holdings—give him a taste of exactly what he's inflicted on everyone else in this war." His jaw set, certainty hardening every word. "Let's see how long Tywin Lannister sits comfortable behind Harrenhal's walls once word reaches him that his own home is burning."
A grim murmur of approval passed down the table, old grievances finding fresh purpose in the plan's simple, brutal logic.
It was into this settling agreement that a messenger burst through the hall's doors, breathless, his hand trembling visibly as he crossed toward the table—not from exhaustion alone, Michel realized, watching him approach, but from something closer to fear.
"My lords." The messenger's voice shook. "A raven. King landing our spy send us "
He extended the letter toward Robb, and the hall fell silent as Robb took it, breaking the seal with fingers that had gone suddenly, uncharacteristically still.