Chapter 163: The Scholar’s Venom

Torren’s eyes narrowed. The envoy with his professionals was expected: open, aboveboard supervision. But a hundred Vale hands aimed precisely at the Gift’s edge and the eastern hills, exactly where New Soil’s coverage ran thinnest, where free folk bands and scattered villages tangled together, and along the rim of Alfie’s own traditional influence: that was no accident of geography.

“Reply to Lord Alfie,” he said quickly. “Thanks for the word. Ask him to give the Vale party the routine inspection under the Winterfell agreement, contraband and weapons, and a friendly reminder to take care, since wildlings do occasionally roam the Gift’s edge. We strengthen patrols west of Grey Creek, along the Frost Whisper Wood to Howling Mountain line. And in the name of the Grey Creek reclamation point, send out a small mutual aid team of our own, with our herbs, spare tools, and extra winter clothing, into the country where the Vale party means to work: friendly exchange, shared reclamation experience, help where help is wanted.” Which was to say: observation, contact, and the quiet offsetting of influence. “Choose men who are clever, steady, know the ground, and can talk with the free folk. No conflict, under any provocation. And pass word to our liaison men in those parts,” the absorbed villagers, the small free folk headmen, “to watch everything: whom the Vale people seek out, what they say, and anything that does not smell of medicine.”

“At once!” The soldier went.

Torren stood before the map again, finger resting on the vague country between the Gift and the eastern mountains. The Vale’s sword of charity had come down exactly on New Soil’s softest flank; King’s Landing’s inspecting gaze was about to settle formally on the land; and Jon at Winterfell would face, in the same season, the crown’s accounting, the Vale’s tenderness, his own lords’ arithmetic, and the quiet support and quiet pressure of the settlement experiment growing out here in the waste. The powers turned on the wounded North like millstones, grinding out new cracks, new ice, new soil. Grey Creek’s cook-smoke, Winterfell’s royal banner, the Vale’s good deeds, King’s Landing’s decrees, Moat Cailin’s garrison, Oath Keep’s shadow: all the lines crossing on one chaotic, dangerous, teeming picture.

“The game on the ice has only started,” he said to the map, with the calm this country taught. “The seed is in the ground. Now we learn whether the Vale’s poison vines cover it first, or King’s Landing’s hand pulls it up, or whether we truly root in the permafrost, and flower, and bear.”

He walked out of the longhouse into the cold early-spring sun, and watched the distant figures bent to the fields, and listened to the work-chants and the talk in mingled accents drifting on the wind. There was no majesty of thrones here, no glory of great houses; only the oldest hunger, to survive, and the small stubborn hope of living better; and on that, more than on any decree, the future of the North was quietly being built.

At the edge of the Gift, north of the Howling Mountains, in a nameless valley, the Vale’s hundred-strong Medical and Agricultural Task Force settled into its work. Past the rather perfunctory inspection at Moat Cailin, they had pushed into that thin-peopled, hard country under the moon-and-falcon of House Arryn and a green-and-white flag that stood for charity: knights, squires, grey-robed scholars, medics with herb kits, and a large number of sturdy, close-mouthed men listed as laborers who moved a great deal too well for laborers. At their head rode Merriman, an obscure old Vale scholar said to be deeply versed in herbs and husbandry, with two young knights of Lord Petyr’s household.

Their method was tidy. They raised temporary clinics and supply stations wherever free folk camps or poor northern villages clustered, treated frostbite, chills, and small wounds without charge, and handed out modest amounts of seed grain announced as high-yield and cold-hardy from the Vale’s fat granaries, with coarse cloth and salt besides. Scholar Merriman and his medics were kind and patient, asked after every ailment, explained the advanced farming of the Vale, and dressed every sentence in deep sympathy for northern suffering and the noble sentiment of selfless aid. And the locals, long acquainted with hunger, cold, and sickness, came gratefully and curiously to the tents, and listened.

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Merriman paid particular attention to the free folk sub-chiefs and village elders who carried local weight. He would sit with them, ask in detail after their hardships and their hopes, and their views of Winterfell and the southern lords; and from time to time he would mention, worriedly, the threat of the free folk beyond the Wall, the instability inside the North, and the malicious infiltration of certain southern powers, left carefully unnamed. “We of the Vale truly wish to help our northern friends,” he told a circle of free folk hunters, earnest as a septon. “Look at this land. It could feed many more than it does. Why does everyone still live so hard? For want of good seed and good method, yes. And because some people do not want you living well. They bind you to their cart with small favors, or mean to turn your land into their manor.”

The hunters traded glances, and one asked, muffled: “Who do you mean, old scholar? The grey-green cloaks breaking ground at Grey Creek? They hand out grain too. They taught us to build houses.”

“Grey Creek.” Merriman’s face produced exactly the right measure of surprise and concern. “Ah. The westermen. It is not my place to say much. But think: how far is the west from here? Why cross half a world and spend a fortune to plow this ground? Kindness? Or something here they value more. Land. People. Or a position that threatens Winterfell from the north, and sits on the Vale’s throat.” He lowered his voice. “And I hear their rules are harsh. Punishments at every turn. Rent, in time. Not like us, who help and ask nothing. My friends, you are free folk. You were born to live free, not to be fitted with a new set of southern rules, farming another man’s field and watching another man’s face.”

The hunters went quiet, and the doubt in their eyes was new. Word by word, like venom working, the little trust Grey Creek had earned was being eaten. And meanwhile the two knights were not idle: with some of their attendants, under the name of surveying ground for permanent aid stations, they scouted, and their survey drifted, as if by accident, along the rim of the Grey Creek reclamation, marking roads, water, high ground, the outposts and the rhythm of the patrols. They even sought quiet words with a few settlers sore at Grey Creek’s strict management, hinting that useful information, or convenience at the right moment, would buy better treatment from the Vale, and true freedom.

None of it went unobserved. In the dense wood on the slope opposite Merriman’s clinic, figures in cloaks that matched the country to a fault had lain patient for days: the mutual aid team out of Grey Creek, led by a veteran Battanian skirmisher whom everyone called Old Weasel, with two northern hunters who could track a shadow, and Old Hake, the half-free-folk elder with the fluent tongue.

“See the one with the lenses, always scribbling?” Old Weasel breathed to the young hunter beside him. “He’s drawing a map. Not just ground. Three days I’ve watched him, and he’s marked three of our water points, the timing of two patrol routes, and the new Malt Slope settlement in the east.”

The young hunter spat softly. “So he is a scout. And the old man’s no better. Uncle Hake went in yesterday with his bad leg and heard him telling the Howling Rock folk that Grey Creek is the westermen’s vanguard come to grab land, and they’ll all be slaves under heavy tax before the year turns.”

Hake’s clouded eyes glinted. “And they went quietly to One-Eyed Pock and Skinny Dog Griff, the two Lord Torren set to ditch-digging for hiding game. A little bag of salt and an iron dagger, to keep an eye on who comes and goes, especially the grey-green leaders.”

Old Weasel’s smile had no warmth in it. “Small tricks. Note the names. When the Vale’s gone, Lord Torren can invite Pock and Griff to mend wall for half a month and have a talk about hearts. As for the mapmaker, and the two knights riding everywhere,” his eyes narrowed, “they need to get lost by accident. Or have a fall. And lose their notebooks.”

“Do it ourselves? That’s a fight,” the young hunter worried.

“Ourselves? No.” Cunning moved across the old skirmisher’s face. “This is the Gift’s edge. Wolves happen. Ground gives way. You remember the fresh wolf sign and that old beast-pit we found on Bone-Crusher Path.”