Chapter 153: The Broken Play

Earlier that same day, at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, the remote castle on the Wall’s eastern shoulder sat wrapped in a wrong kind of quiet. The gates were shut fast, and only a few listless figures moved on the watchtowers. According to the plan, this was to be one of the stages: the place where the Vale’s costumed troops would break through the Wall and give the realm its picture of a great wildling invasion. Inside, a handful of Watch men who had been bought or bent, the desperate and the grudge-carriers, waited nervously for the signal, ready to offer token resistance and rout on cue, or simply to open the gates.

What came instead was a squad of fewer than a hundred riders at the gallop from the direction of Castle Black, and at their head, Jon Snow.

His face was still pale as paper, but he sat straight in the saddle with Longclaw at his hip, and when his grey direwolf’s eyes went along the battlements of Eastwatch, every man they touched found somewhere else to look. “By order of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch!” His voice was not loud, and it reached every stone. “Every castle on the Wall goes to full alert, now. All men to their posts. Any man who leaves his post, opens a gate without leave, or has contact with any force beyond the Wall without authorization dies where he stands.”

Behind him, his men spread through the castle at speed: brothers from before his long dark and the few he trusted with his life from after it, and among them dozens of sharp-eyed, silent Fians, sent north in secret through Grey Shadow and Alfie’s channels in the guise of rangers and hired swords. They took the gates, the towers, the armory, every key point, in minutes. The handful of traitor Watchmen never got as far as reacting; they were taken or cut down at their posts. The loophole at Eastwatch was welded shut, in silence, at the last possible hour.

Almost simultaneously, in a hidden mountain hollow twenty miles south of Queenscrown, nearly a thousand of the Vale’s mountain elite, stiffened with a handful of sellswords, waited for their cue. Petyr had dispatched them in secret after Ser Donnel’s disaster at Seagard; they had gone the long way by sea, landed on a desolate beach north of White Harbor, and crept overland to this ground. They were the true assault core of the false flag: well-armed, well-drilled, tasked to strike hand-in-glove with the wildlings, meaning Tormund’s incited bands, the moment the breach at Eastwatch was declared, then drive hard south for weakly held Winterfell and author a tragedy there, the sack of the castle, the death of the Starks, the stage dressed for the Vale’s intervention. Their commander, a seasoned Vale knight, waited anxiously for word of success from Eastwatch and for his wildling allies to appear.

What he got was wildling horns, shrieking suddenly from the forested slopes on every side, and then the free folk themselves pouring out of the trees like ghosts with genuinely red eyes.

Tormund led them in person, roaring “For the blood they lied to!”, straight into the men who had tried to wear his people as a costume. And on his heels, from the slopes behind, came a dense, falling rain of arrows and javelins: Karstark’s horse and the Battanian archers, striking on the count. Lord Alfie’s soldiers and Tormund’s free folk had become, for exactly this hour, the strangest brief alliance in the North, with one shared purpose: the annihilation of the Vale’s finest.

“It’s a trap! Back! Back to the coast!” the Vale commander screamed, and the order was already a eulogy. Their line of retreat had been cut long before, by another Battanian detachment of veteran skirmishers and riders that had circled unseen to their rear. The hollow became a slaughter-pen. Divided, surrounded, and struck from every quarter by the free folk’s fury and the cold precision of the Karstark-Battanian force, the carefully built core of the Vale’s operation came apart and was destroyed. A very few broke free into the forest in the chaos, their fates unwritten.

The next day, at the Eyrie, the reports arrived one after another like stones through a window: the Eastwatch plan dead and the inside men purged; the Shadow Vale wildlings turned, and riding with Karstark of all men; the elite force ambushed and wiped out in a nameless hollow below Queenscrown; and, folded in among the disasters, the reply of Lord Wyman Manderly of White Harbor, all diplomatic perfume over an exercise in delay and deflection. Petyr Baelish stood at his study window in the bright, cold sunlight of the Vale, and the calm that lived on his face by habit finally left it, and what replaced it was a gloom with an edge.

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His false flag, the operation he had planned to the stitch, funded without stinting, and loaded with his hopes, had been torn up by the roots at the very moment of ignition, by a hand he had never once seen move. He had lost his cultivated imposters and his planted men; the scheme to frame the free folk and take the heart of the North without spending a drop of Vale blood lay exposed; and he had bought, at full price, the deadly enmity of the wildlings, of Karstark, and of whichever other northern powers had caught the scent of the truth. And the Lord of Casterly Rock, who had appeared nowhere in any of it, was implicated by all of it: the grey-green strangers at Karstark’s side, the sudden iron in Jon Snow’s hand at Castle Black, the artful fence-sitting of Manderly at White Harbor. Every thread ran southwest.

“Arthur Greyoak,” Petyr murmured, fingertips tapping the cold window frame.

This time he had lost, and lost badly. The opponent had read the play early, and then conducted the North’s own frictions like an orchestra: Karstark’s ambition, the free folk’s fury at being used, the Watch’s despair at what it had become, and the one variable nobody had priced, Jon Snow awake, all of it landed as a single beautiful combination.

But Petyr Baelish had never been the sort of gambler who leaves the table because a hand goes bad. The northern plan was wrecked; the northern ledger was not empty. He knew, at least, where more of the pieces truly stood; he had measured the reach of Arthur’s hidden influence in the North, and the speed of his reflexes. And there were other cards in the deck still: the Reach’s war with Dorne, the agony of King’s Landing, the ambitions gathered on Dragonstone.

“The game is far from over.” He turned from the window slowly, and the calculating smile came back to his face, and deep inside it, this time, there was the glint of something genuinely provoked and genuinely dangerous. “The northern ice fields are wide, and very cold. But one setback has never yet frozen a hunter to death. We have time. Oceans of it.”

He went to his desk and began to write new letters, in the fine, flowing hand that had started so many fires: to the pieces still usable inside the Vale; to certain lords in King’s Landing grown quietly sick of their queen; to certain friends across the narrow sea; and even, after a moment’s pleasant consideration, to Prince Doran of Dorne, fresh from his great southern victory and perhaps, just now, feeling expansive.

So the thunder of Breaking Dawn rolled through the North and died away, leaving the Vale’s plan in complete ruin, and leaving something else as well: the end of every pretense of calm. The quiet war had shown its knives, and from the Eyrie’s high window, a beaten and newly serious player began, with great patience, to deal himself the next hand.

In the Reach, in a warm hall of Highgarden, the winter sun fell through great stained-glass windows and laid cold colors across polished marble and deep carpets. Lady Olenna Tyrell sat in a high-backed chair cushioned in velvet, holding a letter from Casterly Rock under the joint seal of the west and the Lord Paramount of the Trident, her old, sharp eyes walking slowly down every bold stroke of it, her mouth settled into its customary hard curve. Beside her stood Lord Randyll Tarly, recalled in haste from the Cider Hall–Blackhaven front with the smoke of it still faintly on him, straight-backed and stern, and carrying deep in his eyes the particular tiredness of a man whose opponent was Oberyn Martell. The Reach had checked Dorne’s offensive in the Marches, and paid honestly for it, and stood pinned to its southern border for the foreseeable future.

“The little wolf cub of the west. His appetite has certainly grown.” Olenna set the letter down with a laugh like dry leaves. “He waits until the Dornish viper has our arms full, then comes to talk terms. Extend the truce? Fine. Renounce our claim to the Riverlands? Hmph. Since when did the Trident become the private property of Arthur Greyoak? The Reach has never once formally recognized this Lord Paramount of the Trident of his.”

Her finger tapped the clauses on deposits and tariffs. “A security deposit. Tariff reductions. Does he take the Reach for a defeated power suing for peace, or simply for a fat sheep? Tarly. Your view.”