Chapter 154: Echoes from the South

Tarly bowed with a fist to his chest. “My lady, the move is looting a burning house, plainly. He means to nail down the Riverlands and collect real coin while our strength is locked against Dorne. His demands are severe; accepting them whole would announce that the Reach has lost the southwest entirely, which would cost us prestige as well as substance.” He crossed to the great map and laid his hand along the Marches. “But the facts are these. Our main force is held by Prince Oberyn’s army, which knows the desert and the mountains, fights loose, and supplies itself over short roads, while we campaign far from home over long ones; a long stalemate runs against us. The west, for all its wounds, has been integrated with unpleasant efficiency; the new Bannermen Guard formations are genuinely formidable; and Harrenhal in his hands sits against our northern flank. If we reopen the western war now, I am fighting on two fronts, and I will tell you honestly which of them breaks first.”

Olenna was silent, wrinkled fingers moving slowly on the chair’s arm. It was exactly what she feared. Dorne was the wound that needed both hands; the western wolf was hateful and not, for the moment, fatal; and the letter, read coldly, was a negotiation rather than an ultimatum.

“So we talk,” she said at last.

“We talk, and we do not swallow it whole.” Tarly’s voice firmed. “Extend the truce; even concede, in writing, some suitably vague respect for the status quo of the Riverlands. But never an explicit, permanent renunciation of the claim; the law of that country may yet change hands, and we will not bind our own. The deposit and the tariffs are for bargaining: a symbolic gift of friendship far below his figure, and limited reductions on non-strategic goods. And in exchange, he pledges explicitly to give Dorne nothing for the duration, no supply, no intelligence, no transit, and to keep his river vassals out of any private dealings with Sunspear. Further: he reopens the trade roads through Pheasant Hall and Old Oak that the border war closed, and guarantees our caravans. That relieves the front’s supply and steadies our markets, and it tests whether he wants peace, or only wanted the money.”

Olenna thought for a long moment, and nodded slowly. “Sound. Dorne is the thorn in the eye; the western wolf can be thrown a bone to keep him lying down. Have the envoy negotiate on those lines. The floor is this: truce extended, the Riverlands’ status quo acknowledged by silence, the claim never renounced; some coin, some tariffs, and in return he cuts every thread to Dorne and keeps the roads open. And one thing more.” A point of light moved in her eyes. “Have the envoy let slip, in passing, the cruelty and cunning of the Dornish in the Marches, and their appetite in the Stormlands, and the observation that an over-mighty Dorne serves no one in the west or the Trident either. Let us see what the little wolf’s face does at the mention of the southern snake.”

“My lady.” Tarly took the order, hesitated, and added: “One matter further. His army at Harrenhal, and the repairs. It is aimed first at the Vale, but it stands against us as well. Do we raise it, demand limits on the garrison, a guarantee of non-aggression?”

Olenna waved it away, faintly impatient. “Harrenhal is far from us, with the whole Trident and half the west between. He mends it to cork the Bloody Gate, and to loom at King’s Landing, and only lastly to trouble us; dwelling on it now would only make us look afraid. Let him keep as many men in that cursed pile as he pleases, so long as the truce holds and the border sleeps. Once Dorne is settled...” She did not finish, and the cold in her eyes finished it adequately.

At Sunspear, in the Tower of the Sun, the air held everything Highgarden’s hall did not: heat, spice, and the faint pleasant laziness of the winning side. The fountains threw gold light in the courtyards; lemon trees and some particular spice perfumed the galleries. Prince Doran Martell sat in his rolling chair under a thin silk coverlet with the western letter on the low table before him, his expression calm to the point of provocation, as if the document that might bend the whole south were a granary report. Nearby lounged his brother, the Red Viper, turning a ruby-hilted Valyrian steel dagger through his fingers, wearing the mocking half-smile he had carried home from the Marches along with a fresh coat of the desert’s ferocity.

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“The lion of the west. No, what is it now, a griffin?” Oberyn sneered pleasantly, the dagger walking across his knuckles. “Our little neighbor wins one game of hide-and-seek with the Vale and decides he is entitled to hold his hand out. Brother. What do you make of this Lord Paramount of the Trident?”

Doran lifted his eyelids slowly, the eyes beneath clouded by years of illness and clarified by years of scheming, and his voice came peaceful and unhurried. “Arthur Greyoak. A very particular young man. He integrated the west, took the Trident in hand, fought the dead in the North; a strong hand, and a deep one. A letter now is less extortion than measurement. Or the laying of a wire. He writes that he shares no border with us and has no wish to enter our quarrel with the Reach, which is half true. The true half: his strength is committed, north, east, and inward, and he genuinely cannot afford a southern war. The false half: he is not ignoring the south at all. The Reach is his old enemy; our rise reorders his neighborhood; he needs to take our measure, and he needs a channel kept open. The gift he asks, trade preference, port calls, looks like favor-seeking and is actually infrastructure: the groundwork for commerce, and for other kinds of traffic, under circumstances not yet arrived. He is clever. He wants no land and no alliance, only conveniences, flexible, deniable, and real.”

Oberyn’s smile folded away and his gaze sharpened. “So he is preparing for the day he might work with us against the Reach. Or against variables not yet named.”

“Perhaps. Or merely collecting benefits and insuring that our southern business does not brush his interests, his roads to the narrow sea, for instance.” Doran remained serenely noncommittal. “Either way, the signal is legible: Dorne’s sun may shine on the south, and had best cast no shadow into the west’s courtyard; and if the price is right, he does not mind doing business with the sun. So we give it to him. Why not? A few trade preferences cost nothing; we have just acquired the Stormlands’ ports and need hulls in them; a little sweetness steadies an unpredictable neighbor, keeps him tangled with the Reach and the Vale, and buys us a clear view of his intentions and his capacities. And, Oberyn,” his voice dropped a register, “our war in the Marches succeeds and is not cheap. Tarly is a hard nut. We need both hands for the rose’s thorns, and it profits us if the western lion keeps to his den meanwhile. Ally or enemy later, as the board then stands. For now: candy, and let him go on playing with the direwolf and the snake of the Vale. When the Reach is finished, and the Stormlands digested...”

He did not finish either; his brother understood him perfectly. Dorne’s ambition would not be stopping at the Stormlands, and on Doran’s tranquil board, the west was presently a piece to be kept quiet while larger pieces were taken.

“Reply to him,” Doran instructed the waiting clerk at last. “Grant western and river merchantmen limited docking, resupply, and trading rights in the Stormlands ports under our control, Storm’s End, the Rain House, and the rest, details to be worked at the working level. Grant a measure of tax relief on their purchases of Dornish goods, the wines, the lemons, certain ores, as a gesture of friendship. And let the letter remind him, delicately, that Dorne treasures friendship, and expects in return a certain respect for Dorne’s efforts and achievements in southern affairs, and a certain understanding of the necessary measures Dorne takes for the security of the region and of its own interests.” Agreement, and warning, in one envelope: here are your benefits, and keep your nose out of my garden.

Oberyn grinned, showing his white teeth. “Big brother remains big brother. A few candies to stop a mouth before it learns to bark. The roses must have such headaches now. The wolf watching from the north, the lion perched in the east, the snake striking from the south. Tsk. The good days of House Tyrell are running out.”

Doran did not answer. He closed his eyes slowly, as if savoring the sunlight, or as if silently working a larger and deeper arithmetic. And so, on the strength of two letters, the echoes of the south shifted by degrees: the Reach chose endurance and trade, inside its anger; Dorne dispensed lazy reassurance, inside its designs; and the west and the Trident, courted and guarded against by all sides at once, had drawn itself a temporary line of safety through the southern fires, and sown, in passing, seeds whose season had not yet come.