The Great Hall had not been this full since the king and his party had come North, so I found that I wanted to remember all of it — the heat coming off the fires and the press of bodies, the smell of roasted mutton, onions, warm bread with meat and cheese stuffed inside, and the wet wool drying on a hundred backs, the din of around five hundred men and women. Lords of the North, selected captains, and regular men-at-arms. Some of them had spent the last fortnight training, drilling, and sleeping in tents in the cold, and tonight they were indoors with hot food in front of them and watered ale in their hands, which is a thing that will make any soldier loud in celebration.
I had the household set the trestle tables down the whole length of the hall, then set more crosswise near the doors to use all the space and fit as many people as possible inside. Men were eating standing up along the walls, plates and bowls balanced on the flat of their forearms, and nobody minded it. They all knew they would soon be riding at the head of a column or walking behind one, and they meant to make the most of tonight.
I sat at the head of the high table in my father's chair, which I had waited longer than most would to claim, to show my respect for him and to have that respect seen by all watching. I had only begun using it a week ago, because a hall full of lords — grown men, and a few women besides, most of them soldiers I would be taking South and commanding myself — does not take orders from an heir standing beside the seat that matters. I wanted to present the image I had been building of myself, and with so many eyes on me, I was not going to waste a chance at the sort of dramatic presentation I had come to enjoy.
Grey Wind lay along the dais at my right, stretched full out with his chin on his forepaws, and he took up rather more of the dais than a wolf ought to. He was now as tall at the shoulder as a Northern mare, and heavier through the chest than any mare I had ever put a saddle on. There was still growth in him, and Farlen, the Winterfell kennelmaster, and I had gone round and round about it, since nothing in his knowledge accounted for a direwolf that kept adding weight past two years. It left me to suspect that whatever had been done to me was being done, in some smaller measure, to him, through my bond or otherwise, though I did not know.
Lady lay curled on my left with her muzzle tucked under her tail, twice the size of any grey wolf to be found in the Wolfswood and half the size of her brother, and she had spent the whole meal ignoring the noise entirely. She had been mine to keep since Sansa rode south, which, thinking back on it, had cost me an afternoon of careful argument and one honest sentence — that King's Landing would have hated her, and she would have hated it back, and that a direwolf in that city would end badly for the wolf. Sansa had cried about it and agreed anyway, which was the first time I let myself think my sister would be a great deal harder to manage than the story had led me to expect, though her will seemed a great deal stronger too.
Hedwig had grown larger himself, and now looked more like a harpy eagle from my past life than a Northern snow owl, if not for his very owlish head. He sat atop the back of my chair, a little above my shoulder, taking in the room, and had been there since before I came down; I had used him to watch through his eyes as the hall filled before making my appearance. He had eaten a strip of mutton out of my fingers and then gone still, as owls do, and every so often a man down the hall would notice him for the first time and go quiet, or widen his eyes, or even elbow the man beside him to have a look as well.
Wylis and Torvin stood at the wall behind me in ring mail and grey, shields slung, axes on their belts, javelins across their backs. Both of them had taken well to the role of dutiful and quiet sworn shields, and neither had moved in an hour except to breathe. The extra training Torvin and I had given Wylis had paid off.
I was aware of the image I was creating. I put a lot of thought into how my presentation would appear to others. There is a specific kind of authority that a man can only earn by building his image consistently over years, in front of both those who serve him and the men who will follow him, much the way royalty adheres so strictly to certain mannerisms. I had done that work, and crafted an image of myself as a devout and blessed Northern heir and warrior, which I found amusingly easier than I had anticipated, considering that I was, as Change had put it, genuinely blessed.
There was another kind of authoritative presentation, though, that a man could simply arrange, much like setting up a room, and only a fool would leave it unorganized and fail to take advantage of that sort of soft power.
Rickon had abandoned his own seat entirely and was now sitting half on my knee, eagerly working his way through the somewhat new dish I had the kitchens prepare. It was essentially a giant medieval hot pocket, which they had started calling a "Warm Coffin," nearly the size of his head. The crust was made from coarse flour, water, and animal fat, while the filling was pork and mutton. Instead of cheese, I had them add a small amount of hot, meaty broth that turned into a rich gravy as it cooked, as the filling, on the hot kitchen stones. I had to admit it was very good, and it had quickly become the new household and family favorite, as evidenced by Rickon attempting to scarf his down like a little wolf.
"You'll be sick," I told him.
"I won't, and I can eat it fast like Shaggy Dog," he said, and took as big a bite as he could to prove it.
Arya, who was on my mother's far side, had eaten almost nothing and had been staring at me on and off for the better part of the meal, wearing the specific expression she wore when she was about to start an argument — one we had been having for the past few weeks now.
"I could ride with the baggage," she said, when she had it assembled. "I wouldn't be in the way, and Dacey's going with you, so why can't I?"
"Dacey is nineteen going on twenty name days, and her mother is a lord who is also going."
"That's not a reason; that's two reasons, and neither of them is a good one."
"It is two reasons," I agreed. "That's indeed more than one, and both are quite good."
She scowled at me, and I let the moment linger, because the honest answer was better than the clever one, and she had earned the honest answer.
"I need you here," I said. "And I'm not saying that the way people say it to children. Mother will be running this castle with half its men gone and a war starting in the south. Rickon is four, and he's going to be difficult enough about everything. There are two Lannisters under this roof who will be watched very carefully by a great many people, and one of them is a girl a bit older than you, but close enough to your age, who has done nothing to anyone and is about to have a bad and mostly lonely time of it. I need you here, Arya, to help Mother with the castle and Wintertown, and to keep Myrcella company, and that matters more than you think it does."
Arya's jaw tightened. "That's not fighting."
"No," I replied. "But most of what war is isn't fighting. That's the part nobody tells you — it's mostly waiting and marching just to wait again, and if you're lucky, only a few handfuls of skirmishes and a few big battles of sweaty men dying far from home." I finished in a whisper, leaning in so only she could hear me, hoping she would understand the truth of it.
She did not seem happy with me, but she stopped arguing and started picking at her food, which was more than I had expected.
My mother, on the other hand, said very little throughout the meal, and had lost a bit of weight — though nothing beyond what was normal for a wife and mother under that much strain. She sat straight-backed with her hands folded when they were not occupied, and she watched me and her other children the entire evening with worry. I let her, because there was nothing I could say to her at that table that would have helped. She had already asked me the only question that mattered, in the solar, seven weeks ago. I had answered it in a way that was true enough to keep her mind off it as much as was possible, and to give her a purpose with Rickon and Arya while she helped in her own way with the running of Winterfell.
Jon and Theon sat further down with Smalljon between them, and Domeric across from them, with Dacey and Wynafryd beyond that, and whatever they were arguing about had gone on long enough that Wynafryd had put her chin in her hand and stopped participating. Jon caught my eye once and lifted his cup half an inch, and I lifted mine back. His presence at our table, eating with us, was nothing to remark upon now; I had worn Mother down about that long ago. It was good to see Theon and Jon, who had become my closest friends and brothers even if neither of them truly was one by blood, sitting there in support of me, and to watch them grow into more mature men with goals of their own before my eyes. I turned back to my own plate to finish what I had piled there, letting myself enjoy the moment, the good food, and my family.
When the eating was mostly over, and most of the lords and men present were holding cups above empty plates, I gave a small order to the servants to begin clearing them, and after a few more minutes I stood. Grey Wind lifted his head, and Hedwig gave a high-pitched hoot and spread his wings to catch the hall's attention, and the hall came down to nothing in about the time it takes to draw two breaths. It still unsettled me a little, how quickly they went silent now, waiting on my words.
"My lords, my men of the North," I began, letting my voice carry through the hall without straining it; I had learned the best place to stand for the sound of it. "I summoned you to raise your men and your banners. Some of you have been doing so for some time, and others have only begun in the past few weeks. Regardless, all of you have answered honorably and dutifully, and raised a total of thirty-eight thousand Northmen."
The noise that came back at that was not a cheer. It was lower than a cheer, and it went on longer.
"More than I had asked for," I said, when it had settled. "I have been given rather more than eight parts in ten, and I know exactly which of you did that, and we will be discussing your zealous levies later." That got a laugh out of the middle of the hall, and the Greatjon's came over the top of all of them, entirely unrepentant. "Understand me — I am glad of every man. But I meant what I said to most of you at least once now over the weeks, and I mean it still. The North that we leave behind us has to eat, and has to hold its own coasts, and has to be here when we come back to it."
I put my hand flat on the table.
"So here is how it will be. At first light, the host marches for Moat Cailin and then further south, though two thousand of the thirty-eight thousand raised will stay."
I let that sit for a half-second.
"Lord Flint, with Mors Umber under him," I said, giving them both a nod to stand, "along with Jory Cassel over the continued training of them, and of any men they can raise and drill out of Stark lands and the mountains after we depart. They are not to be a garrison. I do not want a garrison. I want a second host standing where this one is standing now, better trained than the one that is leaving, even if it is smaller — and if it is never needed, then I will have only spent a few extra coins hosting and training good Northmen to fight, and I will call that a bargain. I am marching our host out of this kingdom and leaving my mother, my brother, my sister, and two Lannisters in this castle, and I will not put that in the hands of men who have never had to make a hard decision on their own. So I trust those two, with Jory, to serve the North and House Stark in such a way."
Mors was on his feet with his cup up before I finished, bellowing something about how he would hold the North so well that I would have nothing to come back to but complaints, and the Greatjon was pounding the table next to him.
"Winterfell itself," I went on, "will have a castellan to help my mother, the lady of this castle, with the whole of its accounting and the war logistics of the North besides, because there is going to be a very great deal of accounting." I found him down the table. "Ser Wylis Manderly has agreed to do me the honor of taking the post of castellan of Winterfell."
There was a stir at that, which I had expected, because a Manderly holding the keys to Winterfell was not a small matter, and every lord in that hall knew it. Ser Wylis stood, heavy and unhurried, and inclined his head to me, and then, more deeply, to my mother.
"White Harbor moves more grain and coin in a year than the rest of the North combined," I said over the murmur in the hall. "Ser Wylis has spent his life helping the North survive its winters with those resources. I won't hear anything about this post except assurances that he and House Manderly have more than earned it. This host will be fed out of this castle for as long as it is in the North, and I would rather have a man who has run the biggest port of the North managing our logistics — and one who knows how to eat well because of it." I patted my belly and looked toward Wyman. Wyman Manderly took the jab in stride, as the compliment I had meant it to be, laughing heartily as he set his cup down.
I went on, addressing the gathered lords and men plainly, as they deserved, because most men prefer straightforwardness to flowery language, and Northern men most of all. I briefed them on the order of march, house by house; the wagons would go in the center, and any man who broke rank to move further up the road out of order would answer to his lord. I said it pleasantly and meant it entirely. We would make between fifteen and seventeen miles a day, and I told them I expected the complaints to start by the fourth day and stop by the tenth, once they found they could do it. Every man was to be in his place in the column an hour after first light.
"One more thing, and then I will let you get back to your drinking." I paused for effect. "We have gathered the rest of this host in a fortnight. No Northern host has ever been assembled in so short a time. The last time this kingdom went to war it took nearly a year, and half the men who answered came with nothing but a spear or the woodsman's axe their family could not spare."
I scanned the tables with my gaze. "Whatever awaits us in the south, they will not be expecting what is coming down the kingsroad at them. They will have no idea how we arrived so quickly, and less still what it means to see giants marching with the North again. The North is stronger and more united now than it has ever been, and they are going to be in for a great surprise when I answer the crown's summons and ride south to King's Landing — with the old gods, and with every one of you at my back."
They took that better than anything else I said that night. I stepped back, took up a long ivory horn of ale, and drank deep from it. I let Grey Wind give a happy howl, and left the men to enjoy the hall and their drink for the rest of the night in good cheer. The noise came back into the hall in moments, the men howling along with Grey Wind and, taking my cue, beginning to drink again.
I stayed a while longer. I ate more than I needed and talked with any man who came up to me, but once Rickon fell asleep against my ribs, I stood, said my goodbyes to my family and to the gathered lords, and shook my head at Mother and at a servant when they offered to take him from me. I carried him up myself rather than handing him to anyone, and used it as my reason to leave the hall, because I wanted to find a pair of Lannisters before the day was done.
———
I found Tyrion and Myrcella in the library after putting Rickon down, which was where I had expected to find them, because it was where they had spent most of their evenings, and because I had asked Vayon to make sure they knew I would be coming.
They had the long table under the west windows, the good one, with three braziers going and a scatter of open books between them, and a jug of the Arbor red I had been quietly having sent up from the cellars since the day Tyrion arrived, because a man drinking good wine over interesting books is a man in a better mood.
Myrcella stood when I came in. She still did that. I had told her more than twice that she did not need to, and to treat me normally, but she kept doing it, so I had stopped reminding her. She had grown to resemble the actress who had played her in the later seasons of the show, while her brother Joffrey looked just as he had been described in the books. It still struck me that the Lannister children were all a good deal older here than their book or show counterparts had been.
"My lord," she said.
"Princess." I nodded to Tyrion. "My lord."
"That's twice you've called me that, though my father and I would both assure you that I am no lord." He gestured at the jug. "Sit. You have the look of someone who has come to say something he's rehearsed — perhaps to explain to us why there is an army gathered outside."
I sat. Grey Wind and Lady came in behind me, Grey Wind lying down across the doorway, which was a habit I had trained into him and had never wanted to break, since it meant that I decided who came and went from a room while I was in it. Lady went ahead and sat herself beside Myrcella, and she and even Tyrion watched the pair of them the way they always did, with an entirely unabashed wonder and delight that I was glad of.
"You're right. I've come to tell you what's happening," I said, "before you hear it from a guard, or from rumor."
"Ah." Tyrion set down his cup. "The march."
"The march. We leave at first light."
"Thirty-odd thousand men leave at first light," he said mildly. "I have been counting tents from the tower for a week, and I have been counting badly, and I have been enjoying it a great deal less each day." He turned his cup by the stem. "Where?"
"Moat Cailin first."
"And after Moat Cailin?"
"That depends on what my father's next letter says."
Tyrion looked at me for a long moment with those mismatched eyes of his, the only thing about his looks kept from the books, and I let him look, because there was nothing on my face for him to find that I had not put there on purpose.
"There has also been a summons from the crown," I said. "And there is some trouble in the capital that I don't yet have the whole of. What I do have is my father's word that he wants the North's strength at his back, and a summons that names me, and I am not going to answer either of those things by riding south with fifty men and hoping for the best."
That was all true. Every piece of it was true. The letter had come in my sister's hand, and someone else had dictated it to her. It had told me that Robert Baratheon was dead, and that my father had been named traitor, and it had commanded me to come to King's Landing and swear my faith to Joffrey Baratheon, and there was not one word of any of that leaving this room tonight. Tyrion Lannister was a great deal cleverer than his family had ever given him credit for. He was going to work most of it out from the shape of what I would not say, and that was acceptable to me, because working it out on his own three weeks from now in a castle he could not leave was a very different thing from being handed it tonight with a raven still in the rookery.
"A summons that names you," Tyrion repeated slowly.
"It does."
"And you are answering it with thirty-six thousand men."
"I'm answering it," I said, "the way the crown has asked, and the way my father has asked."
He laughed, once, without much in it. "Gods. You'd have done well at court with an answer like that. It's a compliment, and you shouldn't want it to be."
"I know," I said, with a small smirk, taking a sip of wine and letting myself look relaxed. "I'll take it as one anyway."
Myrcella had gone very still. She was fifteen, and getting closer to sixteen. She was clever — a great deal more clever than anyone in her family had ever bothered to notice, save perhaps Tyrion, which was the whole of her tragedy in the story I remembered, and most of it here too — and she had been listening to every word of that exchange with her hands flat on the table.
"Is my father angry with Lord Stark?" she asked.
There it was.
I had known she would ask questions, and I had turned over ways to answer honestly and still keep the answer in some arrangement of words that would leave her calm and not make me a liar to her for the rest of her life. Give her something small and true, and let her keep it.
In the end I did the thing I do too rarely, and told her a smaller truth instead of a larger lie.
"I don't know exactly what has happened in King's Landing," I said. "That's the truth. I know something has, and I also know that you haven't done anything wrong. Nothing that happens because of this will be laid at your feet, or at Tyrion's — not by me, and not by anyone under this roof."
"Everyone always says that," she replied. "And then they send you away."
"Nobody is sending you anywhere." I leaned forward. "Listen to me, because I want you to remember this. You are safe under this roof. Guest right is one of the oldest laws in the North, older than my house and older than the Wall. I said in front of every lord in this kingdom, seven weeks ago, that no man breaks it under my father's roof for any news that ever comes out of the south. That was not a courtesy. Whatever happens down there — whatever happens — you are safe here, and so is your uncle. I will hold that on my own honor and on my house's. And my mother and Arya would never let anything happen to you either."
She nodded, and then nodded again, and said, "Thank you, my betrothed," in a small, extremely polished voice. I understood that she was reminding me that, technically, we were still meant to marry in a few years, though she had no way of knowing that whatever we became to one another, it would not be that. I felt the full weight of what I was doing to her settle across my shoulders and stay there.
Because I did know, I knew almost exactly what was coming, and I had known it for years. I had been sitting across a table from this girl for months, letting her tell me about the books she had been reading, and about the pranks she and Arya had played on the household and on her uncle.
She did not know that the man she thought was her father was already dead, and she did not know that her brother was going to sit a throne he had no right to and do a great deal of evil with it before someone took it from him, and I intended to be involved in the taking. Her uncle Jaime I could probably send to the Wall, if I won and could hold my own lords to it, which would be its own long argument with men who would want his head on a spike. Tommen I meant to keep alive by whatever means the war left me, and to send to the Wall as well, if I could, as a steward serving under his uncle — his true father. Her mother and her grandfather, though, and most of the rest of that golden family, were going to have to die. I had made that calculation long ago in a godswood with nobody watching but the trees, and I hadn't changed it since, and I wasn't going to.
And she was most likely going to grow up here in Winterfell until the war was done, eating my bread, learning alongside my sister, cared for by my mother — and one day she was going to understand exactly what I had chosen. I would have to sit across a table from her then, too.
I would not be marrying her. I decided that day, when the betrothal was announced, in the same breath I smiled at Robert Baratheon and thanked him for the honor. A marriage to Myrcella Baratheon was a rope tying House Stark to a house I intended to break. I had taken it because it was a chance to keep my sisters out of Joffrey's reach in King's Landing and to put a Lannister child in my hall, and both of those were worth having, and the marriage itself had never once been part of it.
She deserved better than every part of that. She was going to get whatever I could manage instead: safety, kindness, the run of the best library north of Oldtown, and her uncle close by as family.
"You've full leave of the library while I'm gone," I said. "That doesn't change. Nothing about how you're kept changes. Ser Wylis has it in writing from me, and my mother has it from me twice, and if anyone in this castle treats either of you differently after tomorrow, you tell anyone in the household, and it will be dealt with the same day."
"And our ravens?" Tyrion asked, and there was an edge under the lightness of it.
"Read," I said. "As they have been. I'm not going to insult you by pretending otherwise."
"No," he said. "You wouldn't." He refilled his cup and looked at it rather than at me. "You know, I have spent nearly a year in this castle trying to decide what you are, Robb Stark. I've had theories. Some of them were quite good." He drank. "Tonight I find I'd rather not know."
"That's probably wise."
"It is never wise," he said. "It's only comfortable." He raised the cup an inch. "Go carefully. That's a strange thing for me to say to you, and a stranger one for you to hear, but there it is."
I said goodnight to them both. At the door, leaving Lady behind but taking Grey Wind with me, Myrcella said my name, and I turned, and she was standing with her hands knotted in front of her.
"Will you write?" she said. "Not — I know you'll write to Lady Stark. I meant. To say you're alive."
"I'll write," I said.
I made it three corridors before I had to stop and stand in a window alcove for a while with my hand against the cold stone, and Grey Wind pushed his head under my arm and stayed there until I was done. It would be another sleepless night.
———
Vayon Poole found me at the wagon park an hour before dawn the next day, which meant he had correctly guessed where I would be — a talent he had developed over the years.
The lines stretched out past the east gate and down along the Wintertown road, farther than a man could see in that light. The whole of it was already awake: teamsters guiding their oxen, a farrier hammering away somewhere in the dark, and a hundred small fires with pots set atop them. The familiar smell of an army in the early morning hung over all of it — woodsmoke, dung, porridge, and wet leather. It was a scent I had not known in twenty years, and now, with sharpened senses, I took it as a reminder that it was finally time to march.
Vayon held his ledger under his arm, his breath steaming in the cold, and wore the expression he adopted when the numbers came out well and he did not want to appear pleased.
"You'll want the tally, my lord," he said.
"I want the tally," I replied, with a smile and a nod at his good mood.
He opened the ledger against his forearm and glanced down at entries he did not need to look at, but looked at anyway, because Vayon Poole believed that a number spoken without an open ledger was only a guess.
"Sixteen hundred men-at-arms fully outfitted," he began. "New round shields, iron-rimmed. Short axes with forge-welded edges, made off the Wintertown jigs. Boiled leather coats with sewn plates through the chest and shoulders, and kettle helms. Nine hundred of them are Winterfell's own men, and seven hundred are divided among the other houses." He turned a page. "Beyond that, two thousand two hundred spears rehafted and reheaded, four hundred and ten mail coats mended and reissued, and two thousand round and heater shields of the older pattern that were sound enough to keep, all re-rimmed and repainted."
"Repainted," I said.
"Repainted, my lord." He said it entirely evenly. "A man carries a shield differently when it isn't somebody's grandfather's. And it matches the lord he serves."
He was not wrong, and he had been telling me so for six months, and I had eventually given him leave to procure the natural pigments and tempera for the paint.
"Mikken?"
"Mikken and his Wintertown boys have not slept properly since the melee, and neither have the smiths that Lord Manderly, Lord Karstark, and the other lords sent up, nor the eleven Wintertown men working under them. They have three fires going in the castle forge and nine more in the town, and they have been turning out somewhere near forty axe heads in a good day." A pause. "There was a stretch in the second moon where they were doing sixty, and the quality went off, and your Mikken stopped it himself before anyone said a word to him. I thought you would want to know that."
"I did want to know that."
"Yes, my lord," said Vayon, who had known I would.
We walked the lines together while it got light, with Jory joining us. Two hundred and six wagons built to the road pattern, sides folded flat and pinned, looking like nothing at all, which was the point of them. Salt beef, hard bread, oats, dried peas, barrels of salt fish out of White Harbor, and four wagons of nothing but spare wheels and axles and iron, because the whole design was worthless if a broken hub could still stop a column for half a day. Two hundred and sixty Stark and Manderly crossbowmen with their arms in wraps, standing about beside their assigned wagons.
"Twenty-eight thousand foot and seven thousand five hundred horse, counting every rider and every remount, and not counting the five hundred or so already at Moat Cailin," Vayon said. "Lord Flint's two thousand stay behind out of the thirty-eight thousand raised. The rest of the number is teamsters, smiths, fletchers, drovers, and a few of our household cooks that you had apprenticed over the last few months."
Good, I thought. In the story I remembered, Robb had raised somewhere near five thousand horses, perhaps a bit less, before the split at the Twins. Now I had a great deal more than the books had described — enough that when I split my army at the Twins, I would be able to take on both Lannister armies if I planned it strategically.
Sending twenty thousand infantry and a thousand horse down the Kingsroad meant that whoever I put at the head of them could do more than distract and pin Tywin; they could actually engage him, and perhaps beat him. That did not even account for the possibility of flanking him in the field, screening carefully with the mammoths and the giants and using them as shock troops — the hammer to crush his forces. At the same time, my infantry came up the kingsroad as the anvil.
The apprenticed cooks would matter more than most men would credit, too. They would keep the common fare prepared properly while we camped, and keep the food clean to my standards, and an army that eats well is an army that complains about the right things.
Vayon hesitated then, and I knew what was coming before he said it. "No word from Tomm and Bernard."
"No." Seven weeks and some, for a ride to the Bloody Gate and down to Riverrun and back, and I had told myself a dozen times that it was well within what that road ought to take with ten men and remounts. I had gone on telling myself that well past the day I stopped believing it. "If they come in behind us, they're to be sent down the kingsroad with an escort, and not one man fewer than twenty. If they come in with anyone from the Vale, Ser Wylis is to house them properly and send me a raven the same hour."
"It's written down, my lord."
"I know it is. Say it back to me anyway."
He said it back to me.
He shut the ledger. "You are taking thirty-six thousand men south. The last host that went out of this castle went to avenge your grandfather and your uncle, and I was a boy, and I remember the yard, and it was not —" He stopped, and started again, more carefully. "Well. It did not look like this."
I did not ask him what it had looked like. I knew what it had looked like. The North's host had gone south to fight a mad king, under an heir who had been raised mostly in the Vale.
"My mother," I said instead. "She'll try to do all of it herself, and she will be very gracious about refusing help. While I'm gone, take extra care for her."
"I have been looking after Lady Stark for almost seventeen years, my lord," Vayon said, with the very faintest injury in it. "I am aware."
———
Manny had been brought up from the Wolfswood pens in the night and was waiting for me at the head of the column, and the whole first quarter mile of that column had rearranged itself slightly so that everyone could see him without appearing to be looking.
He had not stopped growing either. He came to a little over eleven feet at the shoulder now, which put him somewhere near a full-grown bull elephant out of my other life, and the giants insisted he had years of it left in him yet. His coat had come in thick and rust-red, hanging nearly to his knees. He was enormous in a way I had learned to find comforting, and when he caught the bond and knew it was me coming, he made the low sound in his chest that I had never once managed to describe in words and that Grey Wind still did not like.
The select artisans I had chosen for the work had done well by him. The platform sat behind his shoulders on a bed of doubled fur — a square frame of ash, planked, railed at the sides to the height of a man's knee, floored and walled with layered hide and heavy fur, roped and cinched under his belly and cross-strapped fore and aft so that the whole of it moved with him instead of against him. Three men could ride in it without crowding. In another life it would have had a proper name; here it did not have one yet, and the giants called it "the sitting," which I liked better anyway. I meant to ride in it on the march more than in battle, and had told Jory as much.
The armor was the part I had not expected to feel anything about. Fur and layered hide, made the way the giants made it, draped down over the soft belly and the joints of the forelegs where any sensible man with a spear would go, and worked across the whole of the near flank in dye and stitched leather: the direwolf of my house, running, and behind it and around it a stand of weirwoods, white on grey, the leaves picked out in a red that had taken somebody a very long time.
Mag Mar had overseen it himself, to keep Manny calm while they worked and fitted him. He stood at the head of the column now with three others of House Vernth around him, staffs grounded and great weirwood bows across their backs, and he thumped the butt of his staff into the road when he saw me looking at the flank.
"Wolf banner, and old gods' trees," he said, in the Old Tongue. "So the ones who watch know whose beast walks."
"It's the finest and the biggest thing anyone has ever given me," I said with a laugh, patting his leg, since I could not reach his back, and I meant it. He seemed to think that was a reasonable thing for me to say, and went back to watching the road.
Four giants at the head of the column on my left, and the vanguard of my lords to my right, and behind them thirty-six thousand men on a road I had built.
———
Once I had finally said my goodbyes to the remaining household, and embraced Arya, Rickon, and Mother, I turned with Jory, Jon, and Theon at my back, and we went out through Wintertown at a walk. The town was awake for it, all of it, standing along both sides of the new road in the half-dark — the whole of Wintertown, grown from eight hundred souls to something near three thousand in a little over two years, with its pit houses and their insulated roofs, its drainage trenches, its bathhouse, and its wells that did not foul, most of it built by the people standing there for wages I had paid out of Winterfell's coffers over the objections of nearly everyone. They did not cheer, mostly. They stood and watched, and a good many of them were watching their own sons go past, and here and there a woman would call a name out and a head would turn in the column, and that was all.
I did not look back at the castle. I had decided the night before that I was not going to, and I did not, and I am not entirely sure why it mattered to me to keep that particular promise to myself.
———
We made seventeen miles the first day, and I heard about it that night from four separate lords.
We made seventeen the second, and sixteen the third, and by the fifth day the complaining had shifted from the distance to the wagons, which men said were slowing us and which were in fact the only reason we were moving at that pace at all. I had the Greatjon ride Manny with me for an afternoon so that we could watch the wagon line work — the ruts holding, the standard axles running in each other's tracks so that the road packed harder under the column instead of churning to soup, the two broken wheels of that day changed out and rolling again in less than a quarter of an hour with a spare that fit — and he was quiet for a while afterward, which for the Greatjon is an event that ought to be recorded.
"You built a road," he said eventually, "and then you built wagons for the road."
"Yes," I said. "It made sense to me."
"Nobody's ever done it." He shook his head. "My father used to say the North was too big to hold."
"Your father was right," I said. "That's why I'm fixing the size of it by bringing us all closer."
_______
I had made a personal rule before we left: every other day, a lord or two would ride Manny with me, accompanied by Jon or Theon, and we would do it in front of the entire column.
It worked better than I had any right to expect. There is something about being eleven feet up on a moving animal the size of a cottage, level with a giant, with an army stretched out behind you to the horizon, that unsettles a man a little. Rickard Karstark did not stop smiling and laughing while we talked about his family and about Bran's letters to me. Maege Mormont wanted to know whether she could have two. Galbart Glover was sick over the side after ten minutes, and took it well, and Theon promised faithfully not to tell anyone. Wyman Manderly would not go near the ladder and had to be got up off the side of a wagon on makeshift steps, and once he was up he declared that his grandfather's grandfather would call him a liar if he did not want an animal that could more easily carry him and the standing that came with it, and then said nothing else for the rest of the ride.
Roose Bolton declined, courteously and without giving a reason, and did not look up at Manny again for the rest of that day. Domeric, though, accepted the same afternoon, climbed the ladder without hesitating, and asked whether he might bring his harp. He played the whole way, high above the column, and the men in earshot went quiet to listen to it, particularly the giants.
Thinking on it afterward, I wondered how much coin I might make, with the giants' permission, in breeding the mammoths and selling them to the lords of the North. But letting every lord feel the thrill of riding a beast none of them had ever seen, with giants at our side, Hedwig flying overhead, and Grey Wind keeping pace below, made them feel powerful, and brought the magic of the North alive around us as we marched.
That was the whole purpose of it, and none of them missed that it had a purpose, and it worked anyway. A man who has ridden beside you and been sick over the side of your mammoth is not going to sit in a tent nine months from now and wonder whether he really knows you. That bond does not survive everything. But it survives a great deal more than a formal oath sworn in a hall does, and I had watched, in a story that no longer existed, exactly how much weight formal oaths sworn in halls could take.
Jon came up on the seventh day and stayed most of it, and we talked about very little, just enjoying the Northern countryside. I had told Jon that before Father left he had spoken to me about Jon's mother, and had made me promise to say nothing of it unless something happened to him, and Jon had not pushed it since. We enjoyed that day, and when Theon joined us later with some wine, it became the best day of the march for me.
———
Twenty-three days out of Winterfell, holding the same pace the whole way, we came down the last of the causeway country into the Neck. It opened green and grey and wet in front of us, the ground going soft on either side of the road, the smell changing to standing water and cold vegetation, and the corduroy stretches thumping hollow under the wagons.
And Moat Cailin came up out of the marsh, and it was not what it had been.
I had ridden past the ruins twice in the last two years. Each time I had seen three broken towers in a swamp: the Gatehouse Tower with its top sheared off; the Drunkard's Tower, leaning at an angle that made your stomach turn; and the Children's Tower, crowned with trees growing out of its crumbled peak. Around them lay a scatter of rubble, the remnants of what had once been twenty towers, now only humps in the mud claimed by moss.
Now the Gatehouse Tower had a roof — a steep-pitched wooden roof, black with pitch, with a fighting platform beneath it. The Drunkard's Tower had been buttressed and packed at its base with cut stone salvaged from the fallen towers, which had been a clever idea of Tallhart's, and it was still leaning, and it was not going anywhere. The curtain wall had been patched in two long stretches, an ugly and obvious contrast of new grey against old black. The ugliness did not matter at all, because though it enclosed less ground than it once had, it was a working wall again.
A palisade ran out from the western tower across the dry ground, with a ditch in front of it. A new causeway approach had been raised, crowned, and metalled, running not quite a quarter mile out from the gate, and that did not matter either, because it ended in a proper hardstanding where a column could form up out of the mud.
Over six months of work had gone into this. Giants, mammoths, Glover woodsmen, and Tallhart's builders had all had a hand in it — though I could see it in the way the ditches had been cut around the soft ground rather than through it, with earthworks built along the soft edges by the road, and in the way the causeway followed a line only a Northern engineer who knew this country would ever have chosen: there had to be crannogmen involved.
That was confirmed a few minutes later, when the wind came around and lifted the banners over the gatehouse. There were three of them: Tallhart's three sentinel trees, Glover's mailed fist, and, on the left, smaller than the others and no less significant for it, a black lizard-lion on a field of grey-green.
I sat eleven feet above the road, staring at that banner for a long moment while thirty-six thousand men came down the causeway behind me.
Howland Reed had not left Greywater Watch in seventeen years — not for a summons, not for a wedding, not even for the king. He had sent men when men were asked for, and nothing else. My father had respected his wishes and had never explained the reason to me. But now his banner was flying. He was here.
He was the only living man besides my father who had gone up to the Tower of Joy and come back down again. He was also the only man alive besides me who knew that Jon Snow was a Targaryen. And now he had come out of his marsh at the start of a war that had not officially begun, to meet my host at Moat Cailin.
"Torvin," I said, "once we reach the gate, find out where they've put the Reed camp, and then find out where Lord Reed himself is."
Manny's stride went on under me, slow and steady, carrying me toward the gate. I turned over what Lord Reed might want to discuss. He had never once met with Robb in the original timeline, and I could only think that this would be an important conversation.