POV- Ser Barristan Selmy
The tavern below had gone quiet by the time the moon rose high in the sky, but sleep would not come to Ser Barristan Selmy.
He sat on the edge of a narrow bed that creaked with every shift of his weight, still dressed but for his boots, a cup of soured red wine going warm on the table at his elbow. He had not touched it since the potboy brought it up hours past. He was never the one to hold such vices in high opinion unlike Robert who could drink himself to stupor even on funeral.
Through the shutters he could hear the camp settling in for the night, horses stamping and blowing in their temporary sheds, a dog barking somewhere near the stables, low laughter from men at dice around a dying fire.
Farther off, where the Unsullied had made their own camp apart from the rest, there was only silence, broken now and again by the soft, even tread of a sentry's feet on the frozen ground.
That silence still unsettled him, after years of marching with westerosi soldiers who sang on the road and cursed when they dug and quarreled over dice and women. The Unsullied did none of it. They did as they were bid, and did it well, and said nothing at all, and Barristan, who had spent sixty years among men who complained of everything from the weather to their wages, still found their quietness hard to comprehend.
He flexed the fingers of his sword hand, feeling the old ache settle into the knuckles, more than sixty years old, and every bone inside him sang tonight. Seven days it had been seven days since the King had flown south with Lord Beric to deal with Renly and Reach Lords marching on Stannis Baratheon and the Golden Company that had crossed the narrow sea for Gerold Dayne against Dorne, and in all that time there had been no word, save what Jojen Reed had gleaned from wherever it was that the boy gleaned such things. The boy never said anything of his source, not plainly. He would only go still a moment, his green eyes turning white while his body still, and then he would simply know. Barristan had seen many men in his life who fancied themselves masters of whisper and either Lord Varys with his little birds nor Lord Baelish with his whores and his ledgers had ever brought him word so quickly, or so precisely right when it came.
He smiled as he remembered how Shiera's mood had turned after knowing King's action in Dorne. Not with worry, though there had been worry buried under it somewhere, but it was fury she showed on her face. She had said nothing to Jojen for the better part of an hour, only stood at the mouth of her tent with her arms folded and her strange mismatched eyes fixed on the road, and when at last she spoke it was to ask, if he was safe. Jojen had tried to explain it, that the King was more than safe and in good condition. Shiera had looked at him as if she she already knew and had no wish to hear said again, and then she had gone into her tent and not come out until the following dawn. Barristan had not thought, before that hour, that he would ever live to see a sorceress out of legend made to look so much like any woman scorned.
Grey Worm had taken half of the Unsullied south three days past, on Jojen's word, to relieve House Blackwood, whose lands had become the next battlefield where Brackens and Lannister men and the sellswords, the Brave Companions had begun a seige. It was the mention of the Brave Companions that had put a stone in Barristan's belly, and had done the same, he did not doubt, and to Celtigar. He had heard the stories of those sellswords from Essos, and Jojen, in his flat quiet way, had confirmed the worst of them without seeming to notice he was doing it. Vargo Hoat's men did not fight for plunder alone, they were men who perfromed atrocities and cruelties upon the weak.
He, Lord Adrian Celtigar, and Lady Shiera Seastar had marched their own column to the inn, while Grey Worm went south towards Raventree Hall, near Darry and the men gathering to threaten it, and tonight they rested at the Inn at the crossroads, the very place where moons ago he had heard the whispered talk of the King, talk of Rhaegar's son himself. He had listened the man talking of his King, a tale of a lad no more than fifteen name day who brought justice to his mother Elia and his sibling, killed Mountain and Amory Lorch. He had left that same night to find the King. Now he sat in the same room, or one much like it, and walked the same road again towards Darry and whatever waited there.
The knock came sharp and sudden and Barristan was on his feet with a hand halfway to the sword propped against the bed before he had another thought. He crossed the room, worked the bolt, and opened the door to find an Unsullied standing in the low light of the hall, spear in hand, his face as empty of expression as all their faces were, trained from childhood not to show the world anything.
"Lord Jojen call you for a meet in his room, Ser Selmy."
"Which one are you?" Barristan asked, more from habit than need. He liked to know their names, something that Westerosi didn't like hearing, but they wore it with pride.
"This one is called Black Flea," the Unsullied said, without any flicker of feeling at the name, good or ill. "Grey Worm left this one and five thousand spears behind, to march the column under Princess Shiera's command."
"A fine name for a fine soldier," Barristan said, and meant it, and thought he saw something shift, very faintly, at the corner of the young man's mouth, not quite a smile but close enough. "Very well, wait for me."
He pulled on his boots, took up his sword belt out of the same old habit that had put sword on the belt, and followed Black Flea out into the hall.
Jojen's door stood two down from his own, a little ajar, firelight spilling into the corridor in a thin gold seam. Barristan pushed it open and stepped inside.
Jojen Reed sat in the room's one good chair, a boy still, though Barristan had stopped thinking of him as one months past. He looked younger than his years and older than any of them all at once, an odd trick Barristan had never worked out how he managed. There was a stillness to him that could unnerve men four times his age, a way of watching a room before he spoke in it, as though he already knew everything that would be said and only waited, out of some private courtesy, to hear it said aloud.
Shiera Seastar had claimed the floor before the hearth, her skirts pooled around her like spilled wine, her long fingers moving slow through the white fur of the direwolf sprawled beside her, Ghost. The beast was near as big as a pony now, silent as his name, red eyes catching the firelight and throwing it back like two coals. He did not lift his head at Barristan's entrance, though Barristan had the uncomfortable sense the wolf had marked him all the same. Shiera did not look up either. She rarely troubled herself to look up for anyone, and Barristan had long since stopped expecting her to make the exception for him.
Lord Adrian Celtigar had taken the room's second chair, and filled it entirely, his bulk settled into it, an old man who had spent the day on a horse and felt every year of it in his hips. His face was flushed from the ride and the wine both, and he breathed a little too loud for a man merely sitting still.
It was the fourth man in the room that stopped Barristan on the threshold. Lord Desmond Mooton sat near the window with his cloak still damp from the road and his face heavy. The last word he'd had of Mooton, the man was asked to be in the east of the Vale, dealing with the mountain clans on the King's own order. To find him here, at a rivercrossing inn miles away from there, put a chill through him that had nothing to do with the night air.
"Please, sit, Ser Barristan," Jojen said, and gestured to the remaining seat.
He sat. "My lord Mooton," he said, before Jojen could begin. "I had thought you dealt with the mountain clans."
Mooton's mouth twisted, not quite a smile. "Dealt with, aye. Shagga's sons and the rest of that motley lot took one look at the men marching at their caves and mountains with their kin on spikes and spears and they surrendered in heartbeat. I left Lord Royce's men to hold the passes and rode down myself. Thought my sword worth more here than sitting idle in the Vale, counting goats."
That would do, Barristan supposed, though something in the way Mooton said it, too quick, too smooth, told him there was more to the telling than the man cared to give tonight. He let it slide but he was sure there was more to it and he must have told Jojen about it. There would be time enough for the whole of it, or there would not, and either way it was not his place to press a lord on a matter the lord himself had chosen not to raise unbidden.
"We march to protect Darry come morning," Jojen said, and there was nothing of the boy left in his voice when he said it, no hesitation, no reaching after words. "Lord Norbert Vance has brought the strength of Atranta out of his hall. Ser Harys Swyft rides with him marching with the Swyft arms and Lannister men march under Daven Lannister's banner out of the west, near four thousand. And what remains of the Brave Companions has thrown in with them. Vargo Hoat's men go where the killing is easiest, and just now that is Darry."
Celtigar shifted heavily in his chair, and the wheeze that came with it was loud in the small room. "Four thousand Lannister spears alone, and Swyft besides, and whatever Vance can scrape together out of Atranta." He shook his heavy head.
"They will not fight as one host," Jojen said. "Vance wants to be Paramount of Riverlands as much as Frey want it while Swyft wants his own profit in here, and Daven Lannister trusts Vargo Hoat exactly as much as any sane man trusts a mad dog he has not yet had cause to whip. They all want to have Tywin's praise for themselves. Darry sits on a rise above the Blue Fork, the old keep at its back, marsh along the eastern approach. I mean to make them come at us there, not spread ourselves thin to meet them in the open."
"And if they do not come at us?" Mooton asked, leaning forward, his damp cloak forgotten. "If Vance is not fool enough, or Daven Lannister is not desperate enough, to simply ring the walls and starve us out instead?"
"Then we will have a different problem," Jojen admitted, "and we will speak of it then. But I do not think they mean to starve anyone, this war is close to its end my lords, before a new one starts and it would have dragons in it. But for this war we do not worry about it Vargo Hoat's men have no patience for a siege, and I do not think Lord Norbert would waste time to let Freys walk ahead of him. Old men in a hurry make mistakes young men would not."
Celtigar snorted at that, whether at the truth of it or the boy's presumption in saying so in a room with two old men sitting in it, Barristan could not have said, and did not ask.
"Have we sent word south?" Barristan put in. "To the King, of what threatens Darry?"
"Many of them," Jojen said. "I have kept him informed on all of the things whether it be Dorne or Ironborn attack on Seagard. The King is dealing with his own war, and it is close to finish."
A serving girl came in just then with a jug of watered wine and a plate of hard cheese, set them on the small table without a word, and left again, and for a moment the talk of armies gave way to the mundane business of cups being filled and passed, Celtigar drinking his down in one long pull as though the wine itself might settle him. Barristan let a silence sit a moment after, turning a different matter over in his mind before he gave it voice. It was not, strictly, his place to question how a council was arranged. But years of surrounding himself around the Iron Throne had taught him that the absence of a man from a room could matter every bit as much as anything said inside it.
"Where is Ser Brynden?" he asked. "I had thought the Blackfish would have a voice in any council touching the Riverlands, and I do not see him here."
The question landed harder than he had meant it to. Mooton's eyes turned to the room as he found this uncommon too. Celtigar's eyes turned to Jojen seeking answer of it. Even Shiera's fingers stilled in the wolf's fur, though she did not lift her eyes from the fire.
Jojen answered, and he did not soften it. "Ser Brynden is gone, hours past he and his men took took over the prison where we had kept Lady Sansa, Lady Lysa, and the boy Robert under guard. The Velaryon men set to hold that gate were found with their throats opened, one of them still on his knees against the gate where he'd fallen, as if he had tried to hold the door shut with his own body after the blade found him. Lady Sansa, Lady Lysa, and her son are gone."
For a moment no one in the room said anything at all. The fire popped and settled. Somewhere below, in the yard, a horse whickered and was answered by another.
Celtigar was the first to break it, heaving himself half out of his chair with a fury. "Dead men by hours, I should have been told the hour it happened, not left to hear it secondhand over cheese and watered wine." His face had gone a deep, unhealthy red. "I will take riders and comb every wood and farmstead between here and the Riverrun until I have Brynden Tully's and his kins head on a spear, see if I do not."
"You will not," Jojen said, quiet enough that it somehow cut through Celtigar's shouting more surely than shouting back would have. "We do not have riders to spare tonight, my lord, and we will not have them tomorrow either, not with Daven Lannister a day's march from Darry's walls. Ser Brynden knows every hollow and hidden ford between here and the Riverrun. He fought a Rebellion in this Kingdom, riders would find nothing in those woods but their own graves, and we would have lost men we cannot afford to lose, for the pleasure of losing them."
"The pleasure," Celtigar repeated, near spitting the word. "You speak as though I want blood for its own sweetness. Do you not understand what this means, boy? Every lord still weighing whether to bend the knee to our King will hear that we held Tully women under guard and let the last good Tully man alive walk out with them under our very noses. They will not call it misfortune. They will call it weakness, and weak kings do not gather banners, they lose the ones they have."
"I understand it," Jojen said, and for the first time that evening there was something in his voice that was not quite patience, something worn thinner than Barristan had heard from him before. "I understand it better than you credit me for, my lord. But there is no riding out tonight that mends it, and there is a battle tomorrow that will mend a good deal more, if we win it. Grieve the politics of it after, if you must. I would have every sword we own facing Darry when the sun comes up, not scattered through half of the riverlands chasing a man who does not want to be found."
Mooton spoke into the silence that followed, quieter, though the worry in it was no less plain for the quiet. "It will spread all the same, whatever we do tonight. Half the smallfolk in this camp will know it by breakfast, and by evensong every holdfast between here and Riverrun will have heard some version of it, each uglier than the last."
Barristan said nothing aloud through any of it, though his thoughts ran their own course all the while. He had known Brynden Tully with his actions in the War of Ninepenny Kings and the Rebellion, in latter of which they fought as enemies.
It was Shiera who spoke into the quiet that followed, and she said it with the same idle unconcern she might have used to remark on the weather. "We should worry less over three runaways and an old knight who has already lost, and more over the war we mean to fight tomorrow." Her fingers had begun to move again through Ghost's fur, slow, unhurried strokes. "I imagine Ghost would be more than enough to deal with all of them."
At the sound of his name the direwolf's ears came up sharp, swiveling toward her voice. He lifted his great head from his paws and looked at her, then around the room at each of them in turn, amber eyes moving slow and considering, before he rose in one fluid motion and padded out through the door that the serving had left open, silent as ghost, and was gone into the dark of the inn.
No one remarked on it. Barristan supposed, by now, none of them found it strange, the wolf had an uncanny way of understanding words more than any beast rightly should.
The room had not settled back into its former order before another Unsullied appeared in the doorway, a stranger to Barristan, young by the look of him, though it was hard to judge age in men made all in the same mold and stripped of the same things. He inclined his head, not quite a bow.
"A man called Hound wishes to meet with you, Ser Selmy. He waits below."
The name landed strangely in a room already full of stolen prisoners, strangely enough that Barristan felt every eye in the room turn toward him at once, waiting on an explanation he did not yet have himself to give. He stood, more out of old reflex than any decision he was aware of making.
"Send him up," he said, and then, to Jojen, "with your leave, my lord."
Jojen only nodded, watching him with that same still patience he watched everything with, and Barristan had the distinct sense, not for the first time, that the boy already knew why that person awaited him, and had simply chosen, as he so often did, to let the moment come in its own time rather than spoil it with an answer given too soon.
It was not long before heavy footsteps sounded on the stair, uneven with the weight of a man who had spent more hours in the saddle than out of it these last days, and then Sandor Clegane filled the doorway.
Barristan had not laid eyes on the Hound since leaving the King's Landing. His face was as it had always been on the one side, and on the other a ruin of old scarring that the firelight made worse rather than better. He was travel-filthy, his mail rusted at the joints, no cloak on his back, no colors anywhere on him to say what house he served, if he served any house at all anymore while his hand rested easy at his sword hilt.
"What are you doing here, Sandor?" Barristan asked, and heard the surprise plain in his own voice, unable to keep it fully out.
Sandor's mouth settled into a thin hard line. His eyes moved once around the room, slow, cataloguing each face in it before he answered. "I want to meet the King."
"Why," Celtigar demanded, in no mood, it seemed, to let a second intrusion pass without account, having already spent most of his patience on the first.
"He stole my revenge."
The words meant nothing to most of the room, and Barristan watched the confusion pass over Mooton's face, over Celtigar's, saw them glance at one another for some sense to be made of it. It was Jojen who understood, Jojen who always understood these things a beat before anyone else in any room ever did.
"Against your brother," Jojen said.
Something moved in Sandor's ruined face at that, something ugly and old that he mastered before it could fully surface, though not quickly enough to hide that it had been there at all. He said nothing and only gave a single short nod.
"How did you come to find us?" Barristan asked, more to give the man a moment to steady himself than out of any real doubt of the answer.
"I was told that the King was in Vale so I had planned to travel there." Sandor said.
"You served House Lannister," Celtigar said, and there was no warmth in it, only the flat accusation. "Lannisters dog, they called you, in King's Landing. Now you come sniffing round our fires the night before a battle against Lannister spears. Forgive me if I want more than a story about someone' telling you the direction."
Sandor's lip curled into sneer. "I served the them because I was their bannerman."
"And now you come to fight for a king you've never sworn to," Mooton said, not unkindly, more curious than accusing.
"I don't fight for kings," Sandor said. "Never have. I fight because there's was man out there I wanted to see dead before I died, but it happens that your king stole my revenge."
Jojen let a moment pass before he spoke again, and when he did his voice had gone gentler than Barristan had heard it go all night, though there was nothing soft in the words themselves. "The revenge is dealt with, Sandor. Your brother is dead, and died badly, and there is nothing left of him now for you to hate any better than you already have. But the man who set him loose on the Riverlands, who gave the order, that man still draws breath. You could have that revenge in the battles we mean to fight."
Sandor went very still. The fire cracked in the grate. Outside, faint through the shutters, a dog began barking somewhere down near the stables and was hushed.
"Wine?" Barristan asked, mostly to break it, and reached for the jug the serving girl had left.
"No," Sandor said, then, after a beat, in a voice gone rougher than before, "aye. Why not." He took the cup Barristan poured and drank half of it in one long pull, the way Celtigar had drunk his earlier, though for entirely different reasons, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Count me in," he said finally, and turned and went back down the stair without waiting to be dismissed, without so much as a glance for the rest of them, his boots loud and uneven on the old wood until the sound of him faded into the noise of the inn below.
For a long moment after he had gone, no one in the room spoke. Celtigar lowered himself back into his chair at last, some of the color gone out of his face, whatever fight had been left in him spent on Brynden Tully with nothing over for a burned stranger who wanted to kill a man now sitting in the Kings Landing. Mooton stared at the door as though the Hound might yet reappear in it. Shiera alone seemed entirely unmoved, gazing into the fire.
"We should all sleep," Jojen said at last, breaking the silence. "Tomorrow will want all of us at our best, and none of us are, tonight."
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