# The Whispering Wood
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Ten days.
Ten days of hard marching through the Riverlands — through country that received them with the specific, exhausted wariness of land that has already been visited by an army and has learned what armies mean. The villages they passed were quiet. The smallfolk watched from doorways and from behind the shuttered windows of low stone houses, the particular watching of people who had stopped trusting that men carrying swords were moving toward anything good.
Michel's army did not slow to explain itself.
It moved. Fast and silent and systematic — the discipline holding in a way that armies did not always hold on the march, the captains maintaining the orders that had been given at the Bloody Gate because the orders had been given by a man they trusted and the trust had been earned.
No fires at night that weren't necessary.
No noise that wasn't required.
No announcements.
The Riverlands did not know they were there.
The Lannister scouts did not have the opportunity to rectify this.
---
**Brynden Tully's** three hundred scouts moved ahead of the column like water moving through stone — finding every gap, occupying every shadow, ranging miles out in every direction with the specific, practiced invisibility of men who had spent years learning this particular landscape.
Every Lannister scout that came toward the column found them first.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Simply — found them.
And did not come back to report what they had found.
Brynden rode back to Michel at the column's head on the tenth morning with the economical, slightly grim satisfaction of a man who has done what he said he would do.
*"My lord."*
Michel looked at him.
*"The Whispering Wood is half a day's ride,"* Brynden said.
Michel looked at the road ahead — at the Riverlands spread before them in the grey morning light, the fields and the hedgerows and the distant treeline that darkened the horizon.
*"No Lannister eyes have seen us?"*
*"None that went home to say so,"* Brynden said.
Michel nodded.
He turned to the column.
He raised his hand.
The march stopped.
---
*"Cavalry forward,"* he said.
He looked at Yohn Royce.
The older man — who had been riding at his right hand since the Bloody Gate, who had said almost nothing for ten days and had needed to say almost nothing, his presence itself a statement of commitment — looked back with the steady, impassive attention of someone who has been waiting for the moment to arrive and is ready for it.
*"Lord Royce."*
*"My lord."*
*"The infantry waits here. Under your command."* Michel held his eyes. *"I want them rested and ready. When you hear it begin — you move."*
Yohn Royce looked at him for a moment.
*"Don't get killed,"* he said.
The words of an older man to a younger one — gruff, direct, carrying in them the compressed concern of someone who had watched this boy become a lord and was not prepared to watch him become a dead one.
*"I intend to come back,"* Michel said.
He turned his horse south.
*"Cavalry — with me."*
Twelve thousand horsemen moved.
---
They moved at pace through the morning — the cavalry column fast and efficient, eating the distance between the Riverlands' open country and the darker country ahead. Brynden rode beside Michel. Jon rode three positions back, Ghost ranging the column's edge in the silent, slightly unnerving way of the white wolf, the animal too large now and too purposeful-looking for anyone in the column to be entirely comfortable about.
Nobody said anything to Ghost.
Ghost did not appear to notice.
---
They found the Whispering Wood before noon.
It announced itself gradually — the treeline ahead thickening from suggestion to certainty, the light changing as they approached, the open sky giving way to the interleaved canopy of a forest old enough that the trees at its edge had been standing before any of the men riding toward them had been born.
The wood whispered.
This was not metaphor. This was the thing that gave it its name — the specific quality of sound that the forest produced, the leaves and the wind and the peculiar acoustic effect of the terrain creating something that was not quite wind and not quite voice but existed in the ambiguous, slightly unnerving space between them.
Twenty riders passed into silence before the van had reached the trees.
The forest swallowed sound the way forests did — incompletely, but enough.
Michel held up his fist.
The column halted.
---
He looked at the terrain.
The valley was better than he had hoped.
Both sides rising sharply — not cliffs, not the dramatic topography of the Vale's mountains, but the solid, dependable elevation of ground that had accumulated its height gradually and held it without apology. A narrow path ran through the center, wide enough for a column of horse to pass, narrow enough that the column would have to compress itself, narrow enough that a man riding fast and not thinking carefully about what was on either side of him might not think carefully about what was on either side of him.
The trees on both slopes were dense enough.
He looked at Brynden.
*"Five thousand on each side,"* he said. *"In the trees. Every man on foot — horses back behind the ridge. Not a sound until I give it."*
Brynden looked at the slopes.
He looked at the path.
He looked at Michel.
*"And you?"*
*"Two thousand with me,"* Michel said. *"On the road. To bring him in."*
The old knight looked at him with the eyes of a man who has done this before and is calculating the variables with the speed of experience.
*"Two thousand to lure fifteen,"* he said.
*"He won't bring fifteen thousand,"* Michel said. *"He'll bring what he needs to answer an insult. Enough to be certain. Not so many that it takes time to organize."*
He looked at Brynden.
*"He holds a grudge against me. He has held it since the tourney. When he sees my colors and my numbers he will see an opportunity."* He held the old knight's eyes. *"Jaime Lannister will come."*
Brynden Tully looked at him for a long moment.
Then the short, decisive nod.
*"He'll come,"* he agreed.
He turned his horse.
He began organizing the ambush.
---
*Outside Riverrun.*
---
The siege was the specific, tedious variety of siege that Jaime Lannister found least interesting.
There was no assault — he had decided against an assault, the castle walls being what they were and the garrison being stubborn in the specifically annoying way that Tully garrisons tended to be, as though loyalty to their house was a physical characteristic rather than a choice. There was no negotiation — Edmure Tully had nothing to negotiate with and Jaime had nothing to offer that Edmure would accept and both of them knew this.
There was simply — the siege.
The gradual, grinding pressure of a castle running short on supplies while an army outside it did not.
Boring.
He sat outside the walls on a fine horse and looked at the castle and thought that he had done everything correctly and the campaign would end in the correct way and it was simply a matter of time.
He did not like time.
Time was what happened when nothing was happening.
---
His men were in good spirits.
This was one of the few advantages of the siege's tedium — the soldiers had enough ease and enough food and enough of the comfortable superiority of men who are winning slowly but are definitely winning. They talked. They drank — in moderation, because Jaime maintained that much discipline regardless of circumstances. They laughed.
One of them — a broad man whose name Jaime had never bothered to learn, which was true of most of them — was holding forth near the fire with the authority of someone who has discovered an audience and intends to use it.
*"I want one real fight,"* the man was saying. *"Just one. These Riverlands people —"* he made a gesture of dismissal that encompassed the castle, the river, the fields, the entirety of everything the Tullys had built over generations *"— they run like they've seen a ghost. Hit them once and they scatter."*
Laughter from the surrounding men.
*"My lord,"* another voice — younger, the voice of someone who had been waiting for an opening *"— why not just assault Riverrun directly? Full force. End it quickly."*
Jaime looked at the young man.
*"Because a full assault on a prepared castle garrison bleeds soldiers I would rather keep,"* he said. *"Patience wins this siege. We have food. They do not."*
The young man absorbed this with the slightly deflated expression of someone who had hoped for a more exciting answer.
*"Whatever you say, my lord."*
Jaime turned his horse.
*"I say we wait,"* he said, over his shoulder. *"And we win."*
---
He went to his war tent.
Inside it was what he preferred — the map, the intelligence reports, the clear geometric reality of a campaign that was going according to plan. He crouched over the Riverlands map and looked at the two positions — Riverrun and Harrenhal, his father's force and his own, the two prongs of an operation that had been conceived and executed with the precision that Tywin Lannister brought to everything he bothered to do properly.
He traced the river with his finger.
He thought about the north.
About the young wolf — Robb Stark, who was marching south with whatever the North could field, who would arrive eventually to find his grandfather's castle under siege and his uncle Brynden somewhere and the whole Riverlands picture not what he had hoped.
He thought about the Vale.
He dismissed the Vale.
Michel Arryn was — capable, certainly. The tourney had established that with more clarity than Jaime had preferred at the time. The blood still present on his face in the moments after the fall, the lance fragment lodged in his hand, the very specific and deliberate quality of what had been done to him in front of the entire court —
*Accidents happen,* the young lord had said.
The same words. Thrown back.
Jaime's jaw tightened fractionally.
He had not liked it.
He did not like thinking about it now.
He would not like the rematch, when it came — because a man like Michel Arryn did not make a statement of that magnitude without intending to follow it with something — but the rematch was not today.
Today was Riverrun.
Today was patience.
Today was the slow, grinding, correct approach that his father had taught him and that he found less satisfying than the faster alternatives but could not argue with on the merits.
He looked at the map.
*"When we have Riverrun,"* he said aloud, to the empty tent, *"and when Father has Harrenhal — the Riverlands are ours. And then the young wolf and the young falcon can come and find there is nothing left to come for."*
He straightened.
He looked at the map for one more moment.