Chapter 150: Two Letters

When the grim-faced delegation had gone, Kator wrote his report and sent it by fast horse to Casterly Rock. The Vale’s reaction was the expected one; Petyr would never simply swallow Harrenhal, and this first probe would be followed by pressure, by small provocations, and in time by quieter forms of sabotage. Almost as the Vale party left, there was movement from the other compass point: a hundred or so horse under the Baratheon-Lannister royal banner appeared on the eastern road, watched from a distance without approaching or sending word, and turned back the way they had come. Cersei’s scouts, shocked like everyone else by an army at Harrenhal, and, with Daenerys hanging over Dragonstone and her own seat cracking, able to afford nothing more than looking.

Through the Riverlands and beyond, the news went into the water like a dropped boulder. The smallfolk nearby, long fed to bandits and war in turn, watched first with fear; then, finding the army disciplined and the bandit camps genuinely burning, with curiosity; and soon the bolder among them came to the camp’s edge to trade produce for salt and iron tools, or to report where the broken men slept. The river lords split along predictable seams, some reading it as the necessary consolidation of a strong hand, some fretting that it would provoke the Vale and the capital into answering, and a few whispering, behind good doors, about what larger designs the Warden might be feeding.

However men read it, banners of rule and strength flew again over Harrenhal. The fortifications were patchwork and the proclamations said bandits and outpost, and none of that muffled what the position itself announced, to Petyr in the Eyrie, to Cersei in King’s Landing, to Daenerys on Dragonstone, and to everyone else watching this land: the Warden of the West and the Riverlands had taken the crossroads. The move answered Dragonstone’s call for coordination in hard currency, corked the Vale’s road out, and served, besides, as a public stress test of Arthur’s authority over the Trident, all in one stroke. Harrenhal, the cursed place, had become a live piece on his board, loaded with risk and opportunity in equal weights, and the struggle around it was only opening.

At Casterly Rock, Arthur read Kator’s report, set it aside, and returned his eyes to the North on the map. The banners over Harrenhal were up. What remained was whether Breaking Dawn would tear through the night of conspiracy on schedule, and what Highgarden, Dorne, Dragonstone, and the rest would do about the stone he had just dropped in their lake. With Harrenhal risen from the dead, Westeros had acquired one more eye of storm, and every power’s gaze, and every power’s scheming, would bend a little further toward the old ruins on the Gods Eye.

White Harbor, the New Castle. Lord Wyman Manderly stood at the great arched window of his study, above the busy docks and the grey, icy sea, holding two letters at once. Firelight and cold daylight together made his vast frame look heavier still, a hill in a fur robe; and on the round face that the world knew as jovial and harmless there was, just now, no expression at all, only the small deep-set eyes moving with a sharpness that had never once matched the reputation.

His thick fingers worked the parchment without his noticing, fraying the edges. One letter came from the Vale, a personal missive from Petyr Baelish, Lord of the Eyrie, on the finest vellum, in an elegant flowing hand, its phrasing warm and weighted at once. The other came from the Riverlands, an official letter from Arthur Greyoak, Lord of Casterly Rock and Lord Paramount of the Trident, on coarser, thicker river paper, in a bold hand that did not invite discussion. Their contents seemed to concern entirely different things, and pointed, with great subtlety, at exactly the same one: the future of the North, and the choice of House Manderly.

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Petyr’s letter asked kindly after the venerable Lord Wyman and White Harbor’s prosperity, then turned, not without regret, to the worrisome state of the North: Winterfell’s weak rule, the insecurity and quarrels of the great houses, the potential threat of the wildling question, and above all the shadow of famine. The Vale, it happened, held surplus grain, which might flow to White Harbor through friendly channels at a friendship price far below the market, for the relief of the starving, especially those loyal subjects who remain faithful to the Starks and suffer for it. And at the end the tone shifted: recent unsettling rumors from the North, unusual gatherings of wildlings beyond the Wall, activities of unidentified armed men; the North might face a new threat from the true north; and should matters worsen, the Vale, as a friendly neighbor and an upholder of the order of the Seven Kingdoms, might have to consider certain measures to protect its interests and help restore the North’s stability, in which cause Lord Manderly’s more reliable information would be gratefully received. Temptation, warning, and probe, braided into one ribbon: grain for the hook, the northern threat for the goad, and the whole of it measuring what Wyman knew and where he stood.

Arthur’s letter was far more direct. In the name of the Lord of Casterly Rock, Lord Paramount of the Trident, and ally of the North, it praised House Manderly’s generations of loyalty to the Starks, its keeping of White Harbor, its binding of North to south. It then frankly disclosed certain recent military adjustments: the strengthened fleet patrols out of Seagard, for the security of the sea lanes between the Trident and the North, and the Riverlands Allied Force’s entry into Harrenhal, to suppress banditry, steady the eastern Trident, and guard against potential threats; and it stated plainly that none of this was aimed at, nor would ever threaten, White Harbor or the North, being meant instead to hold the whole region stable from the Neck to the narrow sea, and to lay ground for possible future cooperation against common threats. Then it asked. It asked Lord Manderly to use White Harbor’s singular position and its web of eyes to watch the Vale’s coast, the eastern reaches of the Bite and the waters of the Bay of Seals above all, and to watch for any abnormal military gathering or large movement of men north of Moat Cailin and around the Gift; there was reliable but unconfirmed intelligence, the letter hinted, that certain powers with ill intentions toward the North might attempt to strike its vulnerable rear from sea or land. And it closed by restating Arthur’s friendship and support for House Stark, for Jon Snow and Arya Stark by name, and his hope for deeper, more practical cooperation with House Manderly in trade, in intelligence, and, should it come to that, in common defense. Disclosure, request, and olive branch: facts volunteered to show good faith, help asked to test his leaning, and the Stark name set gently on the table between them.

Two letters, like two contracts drawn by different gods, lay before Wyman Manderly, and he was nobody’s muddled old man. The master of the North’s great port owned an intelligence network and a political nose that his body had been concealing for forty years. He had heard the year’s quiet war in pieces: grain moving where grain had no reason to move, strangers with soft accents and hard hands, the accidental clash near Queenscrown, the Watch’s vague reports of wildling strangeness beyond the Wall, and now an army raising banners over Harrenhal. He had heard all of it, and until this hour the pieces had not demanded assembly, and the day had not demanded a choice. These two letters were two lit fuses, and they burned toward the same scale, the one on which he must now weigh his house and, it was not too much to say, the North.