It was too far to make out the banners clearly,
but even through the drifting fog she could see that they were
white, with a dark smudge in their center that could only be the
direwolf of Stark, grey upon its icy field. When she saw it with
her own eyes, Catelyn reined up her horse and bowed her head in
thanks. The gods were good. She was not too late.
“They await our coming, my lady,” Ser Wylis Manderly
said, “as my lord father swore they would.”
“Let us not keep them waiting any longer, ser.” Ser
Brynden Tully put the spurs to his horse and trotted briskly toward
the banners. Catelyn rode beside him.
Ser Wylis and his brother Ser Wendel followed, leading their
levies, near fifteen hundred men: some twenty-odd knights and as
many squires, two hundred mounted lances, swordsmen, and
freeriders, and the rest foot, armed with spears, pikes and
tridents. Lord Wyman had remained behind to see to the defenses of
White Harbor. A man of near sixty years, he had grown too stout to
sit a horse. “If I had thought to see war again in my
lifetime, I should have eaten a few less eels,” he’d
told Catelyn when he met her ship, slapping his massive belly with
both hands. His fingers were fat as sausages. “My boys will
see you safe to your son, though, have no fear.”
His “boys” were both older than Catelyn, and she
might have wished that they did not take after their father quite
so closely. Ser Wylis was only a few eels short of not being able
to mount his own horse; she pitied the poor animal. Ser Wendel, the
younger boy, would have been the fattest man she’d ever
known, had she only neglected to meet his father and brother. Wylis
was quiet and formal, Wendel loud and boisterous; both had
ostentatious walrus mustaches and heads as bare as a baby’s
bottom; neither seemed to own a single garment that was not spotted
with food stains. Yet she liked them well enough; they had gotten
her to Robb, as their father had vowed, and nothing else
mattered.
She was pleased to see that her son had sent eyes out, even to
the east. The Lannisters would come from the south when they came,
but it was good that Robb was being careful. My son is leading a
host to war, she thought, still only half believing it. She was
desperately afraid for him, and for Winterfell, yet she could not
deny feeling a certain pride as well. A year ago he had been a boy.
What was he now? she wondered.
Outriders spied the Manderly banners—the white merman with
trident in hand, rising from a blue-green sea—and hailed them
warmly. They were led to a spot of high ground dry enough for a
camp. Ser Wylis called a halt there, and remained behind with his
men to see the fires laid and the horses tended, while his brother
Wendel rode on with Catelyn and her uncle to present their
father’s respects to their liege lord.
The ground under their horses’ hooves was soft and wet. It
fell away slowly beneath them as they rode past smoky peat fires,
lines of horses, and wagons heavy-laden with hardbread and salt
beef. On a stony outcrop of land higher than the surrounding
country, they passed a lord’s pavilion with walls of heavy
sailcloth. Catelyn recognized the banner, the bull moose of the
Hornwoods, brown on its dark orange field.
Just beyond, through the mists, she glimpsed the walls and
towers of Moat Cailin . . . or what remained of them. Immense
blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter’s cottage,
lay scattered and tumbled like a child’s wooden blocks,
half-sunk in the soft boggy soil. Nothing else remained of a
curtain wall that had once stood as high as Winterfell’s. The
wooden keep was gone entirely, rotted away a thousand years past,
with not so much as a timber to mark where it had stood. All that
was left of the great stronghold of the First Men were three towers . . . three where there had once been twenty, if the taletellers
could be believed.
The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a few feet of standing wall to either side
of it. The Drunkard’s Tower, off in the bog where the south
and west walls had once met, leaned like a man about to spew a
bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the tall, slender
Children’s Tower, where legend said the children of the
forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer
of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great
beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower
top, and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were
green with moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the
north side of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with
ropy white blankets of ghostskin.
“Gods have mercy,” Ser Brynden exclaimed when he saw
what lay before them. “This is Moat Cailin? It’s no
more than a—”
“—death trap,” Catelyn finished. “I know how
it looks, Uncle. I thought the same the first time I saw it, but
Ned assured me that this ruin is more formidable than it seems. The
three surviving towers command the causeway from all sides, and any
enemy must pass between them. The bogs here are impenetrable, full
of quicksands and suckholes and teeming with snakes. To assault any
of the towers, an army would need to wade through waist-deep black
muck, cross a moat full of lizard-lions, and scale walls slimy with
moss, all the while exposing themselves to fire from archers in the
other towers.” She gave her uncle a grim smile. “And
when night falls, there are said to be ghosts, cold vengeful
spirits of the north who hunger for southron blood.”
Ser Brynden chuckled. “Remind me not to linger here. Last
I looked, I was southron myself.”
Standards had been raised atop all three towers. The Karstark
sunburst hung from the Drunkard’s Tower, beneath the
direwolf; on the Children’s Tower it was the Greatjon’s
giant in shattered chains. But on the Gatehouse Tower, the Stark
banner flew alone. That was where Robb had made his seat. Catelyn
made for it, with Ser Brynden and Ser Wendel behind her, their
horses stepping slowly down the log-and-plank road that had been
laid across the green-and-black fields of mud.
She found her son surrounded by his father’s lords
bannermen, in a drafty hall with a peat fire smoking in a black
hearth. He was seated at a massive stone table, a pile of maps and
papers in front of him, talking intently with Roose Bolton and the
Greatjon. At first he did not notice her . . . but his wolf did.
The great grey beast was lying near the fire, but when Catelyn
entered he lifted his head, and his golden eyes met hers. The lords
fell silent one by one, and Robb looked up at the sudden quiet and
saw her. “Mother?” he said, his voice thick with
emotion.
Catelyn wanted to run to him, to kiss his sweet brow, to wrap
him in her arms and hold him so tightly that he would never come to
harm . . . but here in front of his lords, she dared not. He was
playing a man’s part now, and she would not take that away
from him. So she held herself at the far end of the basalt slab
they were using for a table. The direwolf got to his feet and
padded across the room to where she stood. It seemed bigger than a
wolf ought to be. “You’ve grown a beard,” she
said to Robb, while Grey Wind sniffed her hand.
He rubbed his stubbled jaw, suddenly awkward. “Yes.”
His chin hairs were redder than the ones on his head.
“I like it.” Catelyn stroked the wolfs head, gently.
“It makes you look like my brother Edmure.” Grey Wind
nipped at her fingers, playful, and trotted back to his place by
the fire.
Ser Helman Tallhart was the first to follow the direwolf across
the room to pay his respects, kneeling before her and pressing his
brow to her hand. “Lady Catelyn,” he said, “you
are fair as ever, a welcome sight in troubled times.” The
Glovers followed, Galbart and Robett, and Greatjon Umber, and the
rest, one by one. Theon Greyjoy was the last. “I had not
looked to see you here, my lady,” he said as he knelt.
“I had not thought to be here,” Catelyn said,
“until I came ashore at White Harbor, and Lord Wyman told me
that Robb had called the banners. You know his son, Ser
Wendel.” Wendel Manderly stepped forward and bowed as low as
his girth would allow. “And my uncle, Ser Brynden Tully, who
has left my sister’s service for mine.”
“The Blackfish,” Robb said. “Thank you for
joining us, ser. We need men of your courage. And you, Ser Wendel,
I am glad to have you here. Is Ser Rodrik with you as well, Mother?
I’ve missed him.”
“Ser Rodrik is on his way north from White Harbor. I have
named him castellan and commanded him to hold Winterfell till our
return. Maester Luwin is a wise counsellor, but unskilled in the
arts of war.”
“Have no fear on that count, Lady Stark,” the
Greatjon told her in his bass rumble. “Winterfell is safe.
We’ll shove our swords up Tywin Lannister’s bunghole
soon enough, begging your pardons, and then it’s on to the
Red Keep to free Ned.”
“My lady, a question, as it please you.” Roose
Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort, had a small voice, yet when he spoke
larger men quieted to listen. His eyes were curiously pale, almost
without color, and his look disturbing. “It is said that you
hold Lord Tywin’s dwarf son as captive. Have you brought him
to us? I vow, we should make good use of such a hostage.”
“I did hold Tyrion Lannister, but no longer,”
Catelyn was forced to admit. A chorus of consternation greeted the
news. “I was no more pleased than you, my lords. The gods saw
fit to free him, with some help from my fool of a sister.”
She ought not to be so open in her contempt, she knew, but her
parting from the Eyrie had not been pleasant. She had offered to
take Lord Robert with her, to foster him at Winterfell for a few
years. The company of other boys would do him good, she had dared
to suggest. Lysa’s rage had been frightening to behold.
“Sister or no,” she had replied, “if you try to
steal my son, you will leave by the Moon Door.” After that
there was no more to be said.
The lords were anxious to question her further, but Catelyn
raised a hand. “No doubt we will have time for all this
later, but my journey has fatigued me. I would speak with my son
alone. I know you will forgive me, my lords.” She gave them
no choice; led by the ever-obliging Lord Hornwood, the bannermen
bowed and took their leave. “And you, Theon,” she added
when Greyjoy lingered. He smiled and left them.
There was ale and cheese on the table. Catelyn tilled a horn,
sat, sipped, and studied her son. He seemed taller than when
she’d left, and the wisps of beard did make him look older.
“Edmure was sixteen when he grew his first
whiskers.”
“I will be sixteen soon enough,” Robb said.
“And you are fifteen now. Fifteen, and leading a host to
battle. Can you understand why I might fear, Robb?”
His look grew stubborn. “There was no one else.”
“No one?” she said. “Pray, who were those men
I saw here a moment ago? Roose Bolton, Rickard Karstark, Galbart
and Robett Glover, the Greatjon, Helman Tallhart . . . you might
have given the command to any of them. Gods be good, you might even
have sent Theon, though he would not be my choice.”
“They are not Starks,” he said.
“They are men, Robb, seasoned in battle. You were fighting
with wooden swords less than a year past.”
She saw anger in his eyes at that, but it was gone as quick as
it came, and suddenly he was a boy again. “I know,” he
said, abashed. “Are you . . . are you sending me back to
Winterfell?”
Catelyn sighed. “I should. You ought never have left. Yet
I dare not, not now. You have come too far. Someday these lords
will look to you as their liege. If I pack you off now, like a
child being sent to bed without his supper, they will remember, and
laugh about it in their cups. The day will come when you need them
to respect you, even fear you a little. Laughter is poison to fear.
I will not do that to you, much as I might wish to keep you
safe.”
“You have my thanks, Mother,” he said, his relief
obvious beneath the formality.
She reached across his table and touched his hair. “You
are my firstborn, Robb. I have only to look at you to remember the
day you came into the world, red-faced and squalling.”
He rose, clearly uncomfortable with her touch, and walked to the
hearth. Grey Wind rubbed his head against his leg. “You know . . . about Father?”
“Yes.” The reports of Robert’s sudden death
and Ned’s fall had frightened Catelyn more than she could
say, but she would not let her son see her fear. “Lord
Manderly told me when I landed at White Harbor. Have you had any
word of your sisters?”
“There was a letter,” Robb said, scratching his
direwolf under the jaw. “One for you as well, but it came to
Winterfell with mine.” He went to the table, rummaged among
some maps and papers, and returned with a crumpled parchment.
“This is the one she wrote me, I never thought to bring
yours.”
Something in Robb’s tone troubled her. She smoothed out
the paper and read. Concern gave way to disbelief, then to anger,
and lastly to fear. “This is Cersei’s letter, not your
sister’s,” she said when she was done. “The real
message is in what Sansa does not say. All this about how kindly
and gently the Lannisters are treating her . . . I know the sound
of a threat, even whispered. They have Sansa hostage, and they mean
to keep her.”
“There’s no mention of Arya,” Robb pointed
out, miserable.
“No.” Catelyn did not want to think what that might
mean, not now, not here.
“I had hoped . . . if you still held the Imp, a trade of
hostages . . . ” He took Sansa’s letter and crumpled it
in his fist, and she could tell from the way he did it that it was
not the first time. “Is there word from the Eyrie? I wrote to
Aunt Lysa, asking help. Has she called Lord Arryn’s banners,
do you know? Will the knights of the Vale come join us?”
“Only one,” she said, “the best of them, my
uncle . . . but Brynden Blackfish was a Tully first. My sister is
not about to stir beyond her Bloody Gate.”
Robb took it hard. “Mother, what are we going to do? I
brought this whole army together, eighteen thousand men, but I
don’t . . . I’m not certain . . . ” He looked to
her, his eyes shining, the proud young lord melted away in an
instant, and quick as that he was a child again, a fifteen-year-old
boy looking to his mother for answers.
It would not do.
“What are you so afraid of, Robb?” she asked
gently.
“I . . . ” He turned his head away, to hide the first
tear. “If we march . . . even if we win . . . the Lannisters hold
Sansa, and Father. They’ll kill them, won’t
they?”
“They want us to think so.”
“You mean they’re lying?”
“I do not know, Robb. What I do know is that you have no
choice. If you go to King’s Landing and swear fealty, you
will never be allowed to leave. If you turn your tail and retreat
to Winterfell, your lords will lose all respect for you. Some may
even go over to the Lannisters. Then the queen, with that much less
to fear, can do as she likes with her prisoners. Our best hope, our
only true hope, is that you can defeat the foe in the field. If you
should chance to take Lord Tywin or the Kingslayer captive, why
then a trade might very well be possible, but that is not the heart
of it. So long as you have power enough that they must fear you,
Ned and your sister should be safe. Cersei is wise enough to know
that she may need them to make her peace, should the fighting go
against her.”
“What if the fighting doesn’t go against her?”
Robb asked. “What if it goes against us?”
Catelyn took his hand. “Robb, I will not soften the truth
for you. If you lose, there is no hope for any of us. They say
there is naught but stone at the heart of Casterly Rock. Remember
the fate of Rhaegar’s children.”
She saw the fear in his young eyes then, but there was a
strength as well. “Then I will not lose,” he vowed.
“Tell me what you know of the fighting in the
riverlands,” she said. She had to learn if he was truly
ready.
“Less than a fortnight past, they fought a battle in the
hills below the Golden Tooth,” Robb said. “Uncle Edmure
had sent Lord Vance and Lord Piper to hold the pass, but the
Kingslayer descended on them and put them to flight. Lord Vance was
slain. The last word we had was that Lord Piper was falling back to
join your brother and his other bannermen at Riverrun, with Jaime
Lannister on his heels. That’s not the worst of it, though.
All the time they were battling in the pass, Lord Tywin was
bringing a second Lannister army around from the south. It’s
said to be even larger than Jaime’s host.
“Father must have known that, because he sent out some men
to oppose them, under the king’s own banner. He gave the
command to some southron lordling, Lord Erik or Derik or something
like that, but Ser Raymun Darry rode with him, and the letter said
there were other knights as well, and a force of Father’s own
guardsmen. Only it was a trap. Lord Derik had no sooner crossed the
Red Fork than the Lannisters fell upon him, the king’s banner
be damned, and Gregor Clegane took them in the rear as they tried
to pull back across the Mummer’s Ford. This Lord Derik and a
few others may have escaped, no one is certain, but Ser Raymun was
killed, and most of our men from Winterfell. Lord Tywin has closed
off the kingsroad, it’s said, and now he’s marching
north toward Harrenhal, burning as he goes.” Grim and grimmer, thought Catelyn. It was worse than she’d
imagined. “You mean to meet him here?” she asked.
“If he comes so far, but no one thinks he will,”
Robb said. “I’ve sent word to Howland Reed,
Father’s old friend at Greywater Watch. If the Lannisters
come up the Neck, the crannogmen will bleed them every step of the
way, but Galbart Glover says Lord Tywin is too smart for that, and
Roose Bolton agrees. He’ll stay close to the Trident, they
believe, taking the castles of the river lords one by one, until
Riverrun stands alone. We need to march south to meet
him.”
The very idea of it chilled Catelyn to the bone. What chance
would a fifteen-year-old boy have against seasoned battle
commanders like Jaime and Tywin Lannister? “Is that wise? You
are strongly placed here. It’s said that the old Kings in the
North could stand at Moat Cailin and throw back hosts ten times the
size of their own.”
“Yes, but our food and supplies are running low, and this
is not land we can live off easily. We’ve been waiting for
Lord Manderly, but now that his sons have joined us, we need to
march.”
She was hearing the lords bannermen speaking with her
son’s voice, she realized. Over the years, she had hosted
many of them at Winterfell, and been welcomed with Ned to their own
hearths and tables. She knew what sorts of men they were, each one.
She wondered if Robb did.
And yet there was sense in what they said. This host her son had
assembled was not a standing army such as the Free Cities were
accustomed to maintain, nor a force of guardsmen paid in coin. Most
of them were smallfolk: crofters, fieldhands, fishermen,
sheepherders, the sons of innkeeps and traders and tanners,
leavened with a smattering of sellswords and freeriders hungry for
plunder. When their lords called, they came . . . but not forever.
“Marching is all very well,” she said to her son,
“but where, and to what purpose? What do you mean to
do?”
Robb hesitated. “The Greatjon thinks we should take the
battle to Lord Tywin and surprise him,” he said, “but
the Glovers and the Karstarks feel we’d be wiser to go around
his army and join up with Uncle Ser Edmure against the
Kingslayer.” He ran his fingers through his shaggy mane of
auburn hair, looking unhappy. “Though by the time we reach
Riverrun . . . I’m not certain . . . ”
“Be certain,” Catelyn told her son, “or go
home and take up that wooden sword again. You cannot afford to seem
indecisive in front of men like Roose Bolton and Rickard Karstark.
Make no mistake, Robb—these are your bannermen, not your friends.
You named yourself battle commander. Command.”
Her son looked at her, startled, as if he could not credit what
he was hearing. “As you say, Mother.”
“I’ll ask you again. What do you mean to
do?”
Robb drew a map across the table, a ragged piece of old leather
covered with lines of faded paint. One end curled up from being
rolled; he weighed it down with his dagger. “Both plans have
virtues, but . . . look, if we try to swing around Lord
Tywin’s host, we take the risk of being caught between him
and the Kingslayer, and if we attack him . . . by all reports, he
has more men than I do, and a lot more armored horse. The Greatjon
says that won’t matter if we catch him with his breeches
down, but it seems to me that a man who has fought as many battles
as Tywin Lannister won’t be so easily surprised.”
“Good,” she said. She could hear echoes of Ned in
his voice, as he sat there, puzzling over the map. “Tell me
more.”
“I’d leave a small force here to hold Moat Cailin,
archers mostly, and march the rest down the causeway,” he
said, “but once we’re below the Neck, I’d split
our host in two. The foot can continue down the kingsroad, while
our horsemen cross the Green Fork at the Twins.” He pointed.
“When Lord Tywin gets word that we’ve come south,
he’ll march north to engage our main host, leaving our riders
free to hurry down the west bank to Riverrun.” Robb sat back,
not quite daring to smile, but pleased with himself and hungry for
her praise.
Catelyn frowned down at the map. “You’d put a river
between the two parts of your army.”
“And between Jaime and Lord Tywin,” he said eagerly.
The smile came at last. “There’s no crossing on the
Green Fork above the ruby ford, where Robert won his crown. Not
until the Twins, all the way up here, and Lord Frey controls that
bridge. He’s your father’s bannerman, isn’t that
so?” The Late Lord Frey, Catelyn thought. “He is,” she
admitted, “but my father has never trusted him. Nor should
you.”
“I won’t,” Robb promised. “What do you
think?”
She was impressed despite herself. He looks like a Tully, she
thought, yet he’s still his father’s son, and Ned
taught him well. “Which force would you command?”
“The horse,” he answered at once. Again like his
father; Ned would always take the more dangerous task himself.
“And the other?”
“The Greatjon is always saying that we should smash Lord
Tywin. I thought I’d give him the honor.”
It was his first misstep, but how to make him see it without
wounding his fledgling confidence? “Your father once told me
that the Greatjon was as fearless as any man he had ever
known.”
Robb grinned. “Grey Wind ate two of his fingers, and he
laughed about it. So you agree, then?”
“Your father is not fearless,” Catelyn pointed out.
“He is brave, but that is very different.”
Her son considered that for a moment. “The eastern host
will be all that stands between Lord Tywin and Winterfell,”
he said thoughtfully. “Well, them and whatever few bowmen I
leave here at the Moat. So I don’t want someone fearless, do
I?”
“No. You want cold cunning, I should think, not
courage.”
“Roose Bolton,” Robb said at once. “That man
scares me.”
“Then let us pray he will scare Tywin Lannister as
well.”
Robb nodded and rolled up the map. “I’ll give the
commands, and assemble an escort to take you home to
Winterfell.”
Catelyn had fought to keep herself strong, for Ned’s sake
and for this stubborn brave son of theirs. She had put despair and
fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear . . . but now she saw that she had donned them after all.
“I am not going to Winterfell,” she heard herself
say, surprised at the sudden rush of tears that blurred her vision.
“My father may be dying behind the walls of Riverrun. My
brother is surrounded by foes. I must go to them.”
It was too far to make out the banners clearly,
but even through the drifting fog she could see that they were
white, with a dark smudge in their center that could only be the
direwolf of Stark, grey upon its icy field. When she saw it with
her own eyes, Catelyn reined up her horse and bowed her head in
thanks. The gods were good. She was not too late.
“They await our coming, my lady,” Ser Wylis Manderly
said, “as my lord father swore they would.”
“Let us not keep them waiting any longer, ser.” Ser
Brynden Tully put the spurs to his horse and trotted briskly toward
the banners. Catelyn rode beside him.
Ser Wylis and his brother Ser Wendel followed, leading their
levies, near fifteen hundred men: some twenty-odd knights and as
many squires, two hundred mounted lances, swordsmen, and
freeriders, and the rest foot, armed with spears, pikes and
tridents. Lord Wyman had remained behind to see to the defenses of
White Harbor. A man of near sixty years, he had grown too stout to
sit a horse. “If I had thought to see war again in my
lifetime, I should have eaten a few less eels,” he’d
told Catelyn when he met her ship, slapping his massive belly with
both hands. His fingers were fat as sausages. “My boys will
see you safe to your son, though, have no fear.”
His “boys” were both older than Catelyn, and she
might have wished that they did not take after their father quite
so closely. Ser Wylis was only a few eels short of not being able
to mount his own horse; she pitied the poor animal. Ser Wendel, the
younger boy, would have been the fattest man she’d ever
known, had she only neglected to meet his father and brother. Wylis
was quiet and formal, Wendel loud and boisterous; both had
ostentatious walrus mustaches and heads as bare as a baby’s
bottom; neither seemed to own a single garment that was not spotted
with food stains. Yet she liked them well enough; they had gotten
her to Robb, as their father had vowed, and nothing else
mattered.
She was pleased to see that her son had sent eyes out, even to
the east. The Lannisters would come from the south when they came,
but it was good that Robb was being careful. My son is leading a
host to war, she thought, still only half believing it. She was
desperately afraid for him, and for Winterfell, yet she could not
deny feeling a certain pride as well. A year ago he had been a boy.
What was he now? she wondered.
Outriders spied the Manderly banners—the white merman with
trident in hand, rising from a blue-green sea—and hailed them
warmly. They were led to a spot of high ground dry enough for a
camp. Ser Wylis called a halt there, and remained behind with his
men to see the fires laid and the horses tended, while his brother
Wendel rode on with Catelyn and her uncle to present their
father’s respects to their liege lord.
The ground under their horses’ hooves was soft and wet. It
fell away slowly beneath them as they rode past smoky peat fires,
lines of horses, and wagons heavy-laden with hardbread and salt
beef. On a stony outcrop of land higher than the surrounding
country, they passed a lord’s pavilion with walls of heavy
sailcloth. Catelyn recognized the banner, the bull moose of the
Hornwoods, brown on its dark orange field.
Just beyond, through the mists, she glimpsed the walls and
towers of Moat Cailin . . . or what remained of them. Immense
blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter’s cottage,
lay scattered and tumbled like a child’s wooden blocks,
half-sunk in the soft boggy soil. Nothing else remained of a
curtain wall that had once stood as high as Winterfell’s. The
wooden keep was gone entirely, rotted away a thousand years past,
with not so much as a timber to mark where it had stood. All that
was left of the great stronghold of the First Men were three towers . . . three where there had once been twenty, if the taletellers
could be believed.
The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a few feet of standing wall to either side
of it. The Drunkard’s Tower, off in the bog where the south
and west walls had once met, leaned like a man about to spew a
bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the tall, slender
Children’s Tower, where legend said the children of the
forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer
of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great
beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower
top, and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were
green with moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the
north side of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with
ropy white blankets of ghostskin.
“Gods have mercy,” Ser Brynden exclaimed when he saw
what lay before them. “This is Moat Cailin? It’s no
more than a—”
“—death trap,” Catelyn finished. “I know how
it looks, Uncle. I thought the same the first time I saw it, but
Ned assured me that this ruin is more formidable than it seems. The
three surviving towers command the causeway from all sides, and any
enemy must pass between them. The bogs here are impenetrable, full
of quicksands and suckholes and teeming with snakes. To assault any
of the towers, an army would need to wade through waist-deep black
muck, cross a moat full of lizard-lions, and scale walls slimy with
moss, all the while exposing themselves to fire from archers in the
other towers.” She gave her uncle a grim smile. “And
when night falls, there are said to be ghosts, cold vengeful
spirits of the north who hunger for southron blood.”
Ser Brynden chuckled. “Remind me not to linger here. Last
I looked, I was southron myself.”
Standards had been raised atop all three towers. The Karstark
sunburst hung from the Drunkard’s Tower, beneath the
direwolf; on the Children’s Tower it was the Greatjon’s
giant in shattered chains. But on the Gatehouse Tower, the Stark
banner flew alone. That was where Robb had made his seat. Catelyn
made for it, with Ser Brynden and Ser Wendel behind her, their
horses stepping slowly down the log-and-plank road that had been
laid across the green-and-black fields of mud.
She found her son surrounded by his father’s lords
bannermen, in a drafty hall with a peat fire smoking in a black
hearth. He was seated at a massive stone table, a pile of maps and
papers in front of him, talking intently with Roose Bolton and the
Greatjon. At first he did not notice her . . . but his wolf did.
The great grey beast was lying near the fire, but when Catelyn
entered he lifted his head, and his golden eyes met hers. The lords
fell silent one by one, and Robb looked up at the sudden quiet and
saw her. “Mother?” he said, his voice thick with
emotion.
Catelyn wanted to run to him, to kiss his sweet brow, to wrap
him in her arms and hold him so tightly that he would never come to
harm . . . but here in front of his lords, she dared not. He was
playing a man’s part now, and she would not take that away
from him. So she held herself at the far end of the basalt slab
they were using for a table. The direwolf got to his feet and
padded across the room to where she stood. It seemed bigger than a
wolf ought to be. “You’ve grown a beard,” she
said to Robb, while Grey Wind sniffed her hand.
He rubbed his stubbled jaw, suddenly awkward. “Yes.”
His chin hairs were redder than the ones on his head.
“I like it.” Catelyn stroked the wolfs head, gently.
“It makes you look like my brother Edmure.” Grey Wind
nipped at her fingers, playful, and trotted back to his place by
the fire.
Ser Helman Tallhart was the first to follow the direwolf across
the room to pay his respects, kneeling before her and pressing his
brow to her hand. “Lady Catelyn,” he said, “you
are fair as ever, a welcome sight in troubled times.” The
Glovers followed, Galbart and Robett, and Greatjon Umber, and the
rest, one by one. Theon Greyjoy was the last. “I had not
looked to see you here, my lady,” he said as he knelt.
“I had not thought to be here,” Catelyn said,
“until I came ashore at White Harbor, and Lord Wyman told me
that Robb had called the banners. You know his son, Ser
Wendel.” Wendel Manderly stepped forward and bowed as low as
his girth would allow. “And my uncle, Ser Brynden Tully, who
has left my sister’s service for mine.”
“The Blackfish,” Robb said. “Thank you for
joining us, ser. We need men of your courage. And you, Ser Wendel,
I am glad to have you here. Is Ser Rodrik with you as well, Mother?
I’ve missed him.”
“Ser Rodrik is on his way north from White Harbor. I have
named him castellan and commanded him to hold Winterfell till our
return. Maester Luwin is a wise counsellor, but unskilled in the
arts of war.”
“Have no fear on that count, Lady Stark,” the
Greatjon told her in his bass rumble. “Winterfell is safe.
We’ll shove our swords up Tywin Lannister’s bunghole
soon enough, begging your pardons, and then it’s on to the
Red Keep to free Ned.”
“My lady, a question, as it please you.” Roose
Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort, had a small voice, yet when he spoke
larger men quieted to listen. His eyes were curiously pale, almost
without color, and his look disturbing. “It is said that you
hold Lord Tywin’s dwarf son as captive. Have you brought him
to us? I vow, we should make good use of such a hostage.”
“I did hold Tyrion Lannister, but no longer,”
Catelyn was forced to admit. A chorus of consternation greeted the
news. “I was no more pleased than you, my lords. The gods saw
fit to free him, with some help from my fool of a sister.”
She ought not to be so open in her contempt, she knew, but her
parting from the Eyrie had not been pleasant. She had offered to
take Lord Robert with her, to foster him at Winterfell for a few
years. The company of other boys would do him good, she had dared
to suggest. Lysa’s rage had been frightening to behold.
“Sister or no,” she had replied, “if you try to
steal my son, you will leave by the Moon Door.” After that
there was no more to be said.
The lords were anxious to question her further, but Catelyn
raised a hand. “No doubt we will have time for all this
later, but my journey has fatigued me. I would speak with my son
alone. I know you will forgive me, my lords.” She gave them
no choice; led by the ever-obliging Lord Hornwood, the bannermen
bowed and took their leave. “And you, Theon,” she added
when Greyjoy lingered. He smiled and left them.
There was ale and cheese on the table. Catelyn tilled a horn,
sat, sipped, and studied her son. He seemed taller than when
she’d left, and the wisps of beard did make him look older.
“Edmure was sixteen when he grew his first
whiskers.”
“I will be sixteen soon enough,” Robb said.
“And you are fifteen now. Fifteen, and leading a host to
battle. Can you understand why I might fear, Robb?”
His look grew stubborn. “There was no one else.”
“No one?” she said. “Pray, who were those men
I saw here a moment ago? Roose Bolton, Rickard Karstark, Galbart
and Robett Glover, the Greatjon, Helman Tallhart . . . you might
have given the command to any of them. Gods be good, you might even
have sent Theon, though he would not be my choice.”
“They are not Starks,” he said.
“They are men, Robb, seasoned in battle. You were fighting
with wooden swords less than a year past.”
She saw anger in his eyes at that, but it was gone as quick as
it came, and suddenly he was a boy again. “I know,” he
said, abashed. “Are you . . . are you sending me back to
Winterfell?”
Catelyn sighed. “I should. You ought never have left. Yet
I dare not, not now. You have come too far. Someday these lords
will look to you as their liege. If I pack you off now, like a
child being sent to bed without his supper, they will remember, and
laugh about it in their cups. The day will come when you need them
to respect you, even fear you a little. Laughter is poison to fear.
I will not do that to you, much as I might wish to keep you
safe.”
“You have my thanks, Mother,” he said, his relief
obvious beneath the formality.
She reached across his table and touched his hair. “You
are my firstborn, Robb. I have only to look at you to remember the
day you came into the world, red-faced and squalling.”
He rose, clearly uncomfortable with her touch, and walked to the
hearth. Grey Wind rubbed his head against his leg. “You know . . . about Father?”
“Yes.” The reports of Robert’s sudden death
and Ned’s fall had frightened Catelyn more than she could
say, but she would not let her son see her fear. “Lord
Manderly told me when I landed at White Harbor. Have you had any
word of your sisters?”
“There was a letter,” Robb said, scratching his
direwolf under the jaw. “One for you as well, but it came to
Winterfell with mine.” He went to the table, rummaged among
some maps and papers, and returned with a crumpled parchment.
“This is the one she wrote me, I never thought to bring
yours.”
Something in Robb’s tone troubled her. She smoothed out
the paper and read. Concern gave way to disbelief, then to anger,
and lastly to fear. “This is Cersei’s letter, not your
sister’s,” she said when she was done. “The real
message is in what Sansa does not say. All this about how kindly
and gently the Lannisters are treating her . . . I know the sound
of a threat, even whispered. They have Sansa hostage, and they mean
to keep her.”
“There’s no mention of Arya,” Robb pointed
out, miserable.
“No.” Catelyn did not want to think what that might
mean, not now, not here.
“I had hoped . . . if you still held the Imp, a trade of
hostages . . . ” He took Sansa’s letter and crumpled it
in his fist, and she could tell from the way he did it that it was
not the first time. “Is there word from the Eyrie? I wrote to
Aunt Lysa, asking help. Has she called Lord Arryn’s banners,
do you know? Will the knights of the Vale come join us?”
“Only one,” she said, “the best of them, my
uncle . . . but Brynden Blackfish was a Tully first. My sister is
not about to stir beyond her Bloody Gate.”
Robb took it hard. “Mother, what are we going to do? I
brought this whole army together, eighteen thousand men, but I
don’t . . . I’m not certain . . . ” He looked to
her, his eyes shining, the proud young lord melted away in an
instant, and quick as that he was a child again, a fifteen-year-old
boy looking to his mother for answers.
It would not do.
“What are you so afraid of, Robb?” she asked
gently.
“I . . . ” He turned his head away, to hide the first
tear. “If we march . . . even if we win . . . the Lannisters hold
Sansa, and Father. They’ll kill them, won’t
they?”
“They want us to think so.”
“You mean they’re lying?”
“I do not know, Robb. What I do know is that you have no
choice. If you go to King’s Landing and swear fealty, you
will never be allowed to leave. If you turn your tail and retreat
to Winterfell, your lords will lose all respect for you. Some may
even go over to the Lannisters. Then the queen, with that much less
to fear, can do as she likes with her prisoners. Our best hope, our
only true hope, is that you can defeat the foe in the field. If you
should chance to take Lord Tywin or the Kingslayer captive, why
then a trade might very well be possible, but that is not the heart
of it. So long as you have power enough that they must fear you,
Ned and your sister should be safe. Cersei is wise enough to know
that she may need them to make her peace, should the fighting go
against her.”
“What if the fighting doesn’t go against her?”
Robb asked. “What if it goes against us?”
Catelyn took his hand. “Robb, I will not soften the truth
for you. If you lose, there is no hope for any of us. They say
there is naught but stone at the heart of Casterly Rock. Remember
the fate of Rhaegar’s children.”
She saw the fear in his young eyes then, but there was a
strength as well. “Then I will not lose,” he vowed.
“Tell me what you know of the fighting in the
riverlands,” she said. She had to learn if he was truly
ready.
“Less than a fortnight past, they fought a battle in the
hills below the Golden Tooth,” Robb said. “Uncle Edmure
had sent Lord Vance and Lord Piper to hold the pass, but the
Kingslayer descended on them and put them to flight. Lord Vance was
slain. The last word we had was that Lord Piper was falling back to
join your brother and his other bannermen at Riverrun, with Jaime
Lannister on his heels. That’s not the worst of it, though.
All the time they were battling in the pass, Lord Tywin was
bringing a second Lannister army around from the south. It’s
said to be even larger than Jaime’s host.
“Father must have known that, because he sent out some men
to oppose them, under the king’s own banner. He gave the
command to some southron lordling, Lord Erik or Derik or something
like that, but Ser Raymun Darry rode with him, and the letter said
there were other knights as well, and a force of Father’s own
guardsmen. Only it was a trap. Lord Derik had no sooner crossed the
Red Fork than the Lannisters fell upon him, the king’s banner
be damned, and Gregor Clegane took them in the rear as they tried
to pull back across the Mummer’s Ford. This Lord Derik and a
few others may have escaped, no one is certain, but Ser Raymun was
killed, and most of our men from Winterfell. Lord Tywin has closed
off the kingsroad, it’s said, and now he’s marching
north toward Harrenhal, burning as he goes.” Grim and grimmer, thought Catelyn. It was worse than she’d
imagined. “You mean to meet him here?” she asked.
“If he comes so far, but no one thinks he will,”
Robb said. “I’ve sent word to Howland Reed,
Father’s old friend at Greywater Watch. If the Lannisters
come up the Neck, the crannogmen will bleed them every step of the
way, but Galbart Glover says Lord Tywin is too smart for that, and
Roose Bolton agrees. He’ll stay close to the Trident, they
believe, taking the castles of the river lords one by one, until
Riverrun stands alone. We need to march south to meet
him.”
The very idea of it chilled Catelyn to the bone. What chance
would a fifteen-year-old boy have against seasoned battle
commanders like Jaime and Tywin Lannister? “Is that wise? You
are strongly placed here. It’s said that the old Kings in the
North could stand at Moat Cailin and throw back hosts ten times the
size of their own.”
“Yes, but our food and supplies are running low, and this
is not land we can live off easily. We’ve been waiting for
Lord Manderly, but now that his sons have joined us, we need to
march.”
She was hearing the lords bannermen speaking with her
son’s voice, she realized. Over the years, she had hosted
many of them at Winterfell, and been welcomed with Ned to their own
hearths and tables. She knew what sorts of men they were, each one.
She wondered if Robb did.
And yet there was sense in what they said. This host her son had
assembled was not a standing army such as the Free Cities were
accustomed to maintain, nor a force of guardsmen paid in coin. Most
of them were smallfolk: crofters, fieldhands, fishermen,
sheepherders, the sons of innkeeps and traders and tanners,
leavened with a smattering of sellswords and freeriders hungry for
plunder. When their lords called, they came . . . but not forever.
“Marching is all very well,” she said to her son,
“but where, and to what purpose? What do you mean to
do?”
Robb hesitated. “The Greatjon thinks we should take the
battle to Lord Tywin and surprise him,” he said, “but
the Glovers and the Karstarks feel we’d be wiser to go around
his army and join up with Uncle Ser Edmure against the
Kingslayer.” He ran his fingers through his shaggy mane of
auburn hair, looking unhappy. “Though by the time we reach
Riverrun . . . I’m not certain . . . ”
“Be certain,” Catelyn told her son, “or go
home and take up that wooden sword again. You cannot afford to seem
indecisive in front of men like Roose Bolton and Rickard Karstark.
Make no mistake, Robb—these are your bannermen, not your friends.
You named yourself battle commander. Command.”
Her son looked at her, startled, as if he could not credit what
he was hearing. “As you say, Mother.”
“I’ll ask you again. What do you mean to
do?”
Robb drew a map across the table, a ragged piece of old leather
covered with lines of faded paint. One end curled up from being
rolled; he weighed it down with his dagger. “Both plans have
virtues, but . . . look, if we try to swing around Lord
Tywin’s host, we take the risk of being caught between him
and the Kingslayer, and if we attack him . . . by all reports, he
has more men than I do, and a lot more armored horse. The Greatjon
says that won’t matter if we catch him with his breeches
down, but it seems to me that a man who has fought as many battles
as Tywin Lannister won’t be so easily surprised.”
“Good,” she said. She could hear echoes of Ned in
his voice, as he sat there, puzzling over the map. “Tell me
more.”
“I’d leave a small force here to hold Moat Cailin,
archers mostly, and march the rest down the causeway,” he
said, “but once we’re below the Neck, I’d split
our host in two. The foot can continue down the kingsroad, while
our horsemen cross the Green Fork at the Twins.” He pointed.
“When Lord Tywin gets word that we’ve come south,
he’ll march north to engage our main host, leaving our riders
free to hurry down the west bank to Riverrun.” Robb sat back,
not quite daring to smile, but pleased with himself and hungry for
her praise.
Catelyn frowned down at the map. “You’d put a river
between the two parts of your army.”
“And between Jaime and Lord Tywin,” he said eagerly.
The smile came at last. “There’s no crossing on the
Green Fork above the ruby ford, where Robert won his crown. Not
until the Twins, all the way up here, and Lord Frey controls that
bridge. He’s your father’s bannerman, isn’t that
so?” The Late Lord Frey, Catelyn thought. “He is,” she
admitted, “but my father has never trusted him. Nor should
you.”
“I won’t,” Robb promised. “What do you
think?”
She was impressed despite herself. He looks like a Tully, she
thought, yet he’s still his father’s son, and Ned
taught him well. “Which force would you command?”
“The horse,” he answered at once. Again like his
father; Ned would always take the more dangerous task himself.
“And the other?”
“The Greatjon is always saying that we should smash Lord
Tywin. I thought I’d give him the honor.”
It was his first misstep, but how to make him see it without
wounding his fledgling confidence? “Your father once told me
that the Greatjon was as fearless as any man he had ever
known.”
Robb grinned. “Grey Wind ate two of his fingers, and he
laughed about it. So you agree, then?”
“Your father is not fearless,” Catelyn pointed out.
“He is brave, but that is very different.”
Her son considered that for a moment. “The eastern host
will be all that stands between Lord Tywin and Winterfell,”
he said thoughtfully. “Well, them and whatever few bowmen I
leave here at the Moat. So I don’t want someone fearless, do
I?”
“No. You want cold cunning, I should think, not
courage.”
“Roose Bolton,” Robb said at once. “That man
scares me.”
“Then let us pray he will scare Tywin Lannister as
well.”
Robb nodded and rolled up the map. “I’ll give the
commands, and assemble an escort to take you home to
Winterfell.”
Catelyn had fought to keep herself strong, for Ned’s sake
and for this stubborn brave son of theirs. She had put despair and
fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear . . . but now she saw that she had donned them after all.
“I am not going to Winterfell,” she heard herself
say, surprised at the sudden rush of tears that blurred her vision.
“My father may be dying behind the walls of Riverrun. My
brother is surrounded by foes. I must go to them.”