The hall had mostly emptied by the time Michel caught up with Robb near the outer doors, lords still trickling out in twos and threes, their voices low with the particular energy that followed a plan finally settled after hours of argument.
"Robb." Michel fell into step beside his cousin, keeping his voice pitched for the two of them alone. "How many men are left in Winterfell?"
Robb barely glanced back, already half-distracted by something one of his bannermen had said in passing. "Fifty, thereabouts."
Michel stopped walking.
"Fifty." He said the word flat, disbelieving, and something cold began uncoiling low in his stomach even as he fought to keep his face composed. "You marched south with your entire strength and left *fifty men* guarding your home?"
Robb turned back now, brow furrowing at the sharpness in his cousin's voice. "Winterfell's never been under threat, Michel. Not truly. Who would attack it? We're a thousand leagues from any enemy who—"
"Theon Greyjoy." The name left Michel's mouth before he could stop it, and he had to bite down hard against the urge to shake some sense into his cousin right there in the corridor. He knew—knew with a certainty that came from somewhere he couldn't fully explain even to himself—exactly what was coming for Winterfell, exactly whose hand would light the fire that burned it. But Theon rode with Robb's own army even now, camped not two hundred yards from where they stood, and the treachery hadn't happened yet. Couldn't be proven, couldn't even be spoken aloud without sounding like madness.
Robb's face had gone still, something wary creeping into his expression. "Theon's here. With us. He's been at my side since Winterfell, Michel—he's practically my brother. You think he'd sail home and turn on his own family? On *my* family?"
Michel forced his jaw to unclench, forced the words that wanted to spill out back down his throat. *You don't know him the way I fear I do.* He couldn't say that. Not without proof, not without sounding like a man grasping at shadows and old grudges that had never happened in this telling of events.
"I don't think anything," Michel said instead, more carefully now. "I only think fifty men isn't enough to hold the North's own seat, whatever threat you believe exists or doesn't. You have a war to fight here, cousin, but Winterfell is still your home. Send more. A thousand, if you can spare them—five hundred to garrison Winterfell proper, five hundred out to Bear Island and the western shore. That's where the ironborn strike, when they strike at all. Better prepared and wrong than sorry and burned."
Something in Michel's tone must have carried more weight than the words alone deserved, because Robb studied him a long moment before nodding slowly. "You've a strange sense for these things sometimes, cousin. Alright. I'll send the order tonight—a thousand men north, split as you say." He managed a faint, wry smile, some of the tension breaking. "You'll make an old woman of me yet, worrying over ghosts."
*Gods, I hope so,* Michel thought, and said nothing more of it.
"Rest a few days here in the Riverlands," Michel said instead, steering the conversation back toward safer ground. "Help Edmure return what castles you can to the lords who hold them. I'm riding for the Eyrie myself—taking Jon and two hundred men. There's something that needs my attention."
Robb's brow lifted. "What's so urgent it pulls you away from your own war council the day after we've planned the whole campaign? We're at war, Michel. This is about as important as anything gets."
"My spies sent word. Something crucial." Michel kept his voice even, offering nothing more, and something in his expression must have told Robb the subject was closed before he'd finished speaking. "I'll move fast. I'll be back before the westward host even reaches the Golden Tooth."
Robb studied him a moment longer, clearly unsatisfied, but he let it go with the easy trust of a man who had learned, in the short time since the Whispering Wood, that his cousin's instincts were rarely wrong. "Go, then. Just don't keep us waiting."
---
Michel found Jon in the small chamber he'd claimed near the castle's eastern wall, already checking over his sword belt with the quiet, methodical care that had become second nature to him these past months.
"Jon." Michel stepped through the doorway. "Ready two hundred men. We ride for the Eyrie."
Jon looked up, and there was no question in his face—only the steady readiness of a man who had long since learned that when Michel Arryn said something mattered, it mattered, whether or not the reasons were given in full. He simply nodded, set down the belt, and rose to see it done.
He was halfway across the yard, calling names and gathering riders, when Robb intercepted him, clapping a hand warm against his shoulder.
"Brother." Robb's grin was easy, genuine, the particular warmth reserved for men who had grown up half-raised together in the same northern halls. "How are you keeping through all this?"
"Very good," Jon said, and for once there was no hesitation in the words, no careful weighing of how much of himself he was allowed to show. Something in the past weeks had loosened whatever had once sat heavy and uncertain in his chest.
Robb's grin widened, something like pride breaking through. "I heard what you did in the Whispering Wood. That you were the one who took the Kingslayer himself."
Jon's mouth curved, quiet and unassuming, though the memory of that night—the ringing of steel, Michel's voice cutting through the chaos, the moment Jaime Lannister's sword finally fell from his hand—remained sharp and vivid behind his eyes. "I was there. Michel's plan did the rest."
"Don't sell yourself short, Jon." Robb's hand tightened briefly on his shoulder, and something in his voice turned warmer still, softer than the noise of the yard around them deserved. "Father will be proud of you. More proud than you know, when word of this reaches him."
Something flickered across Jon's face at that—a brief, complicated tangle of hope and old, familiar doubt, the kind that had followed him his whole life at Winterfell's edges, never quite inside, never quite out. But he only nodded, and said nothing more, because there was nothing more that needed saying, and because two hundred men were waiting on him in the yard, and the road to the Eyrie would not wait forever.