Chapter 184: The Wolfswood Hunt

Later that same day, north of Knifebridge, deep in the forest.

The wood covering that great stretch of the western North was gloomy and close even in spring. Old trees shut out the sun; the ground lay under years of rotting leaf, soft and silent to walk on; vines wound the trunks like snakes with ambitions. The air held damp and mould and something older than either, and the place saw almost no men but the bravest hunters and the least prudent smugglers.

Along a track nearly buried under scrub and deadfall, where the ruts of ancient carts could still just be read, some fifty men were working their way forward in mismatched clothing and with entirely matched discipline.

Most wore the coarse wool of northern commoners or small traders, under windproof cloaks, with packs on their backs, and passed at a glance for a lost caravan or a party of refugees. A second glance found the wrongness in it. However the ground threw off their footing, they held a loose and useful spacing and covered one another without being told. Their packs had a regularity that no honest goods produce. Under the cloaks were the outlines of leather armor and of weapons hung where a man can reach them. And the two at the head had the eyes of officers, and stopped from time to time to halt or turn the column with small professional gestures.

This was the next Vale party bound for the Gift by the forest road, to meet the men Old Weasel had already hung on a tree, and to begin a new piece of work. By the plan they had taken ship at White Harbor; in fact they had gone quietly ashore by night at a remote landing on the White Knife, been met by a guide, walked around the checkpoint at Knifebridge on a hunter’s path northeast of the town, and entered the forest to follow this all-but-forgotten smugglers’ route toward their assembly point at the Gift’s edge.

“Seven hells, this ghost country is worse walking than the Bloody Gate tracks.” In the middle of the column a bearded man with the look of a file-leader wiped moss and sweat off his face with his sleeve. “The Manderly men said this road was safe. Hidden it is. It is also going to kill somebody. Two days and no end to it.”

“Keep your voice down, Hawk.” The captain beside him was tall and thin with an unpleasant set to his eyes. “Hidden is safe. Grey Creek failed and Ser Donnel is not in a forgiving humor. We are to be careful. Establish the new contact point, map the outworks at Grey Creek, and lay the ground for what follows. We are not to be seen. Watch your feet and leave nothing worth reading.”

At the head of the line the scout’s fist came up. The whole column dropped into cover behind trunks and scrub without a sound.

“Captain.” The scout came back on his belly, and there was something new in his voice. “Ahead. Broken branches, fresh, and prints. They came across our flank on the diagonal. Not fewer than twenty men, walking light. Old hands. And the sign is not half a day old.”

The captain’s stomach dropped. “The Watch?”

“Not the Watch. They have not the men to come this deep for pleasure. A patrol out of Grey Creek should not be this far from its walls either.”

“Whoever it is, we go around.” He gave the orders quickly. “Off the track, east, put distance between us and that sign, and make time. We reach the first lying-up place before dark.”

The column moved again, tighter now, and left the old road for the denser ground on its flank. And as the leading men stepped into a clearing of weathered boulders and low scrub, a small bright sound of metal came out of the leaf litter.

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The scream followed it. A man in the middle of the line had put his ankle into a bear trap laid under the leaves, and the iron had gone through boot and flesh into the bone.

“Traps! Spread out!” the captain roared, and it was already far too late.

Arrows came out of the rocks and the tree crowns and the scrub, and they were not shot at whoever was nearest. They went into the officers, and into the men who had begun to shout orders, and into anyone who moved as though he intended to organize something. Five or six went down in the first breath.

“Ambush!” The Vale men got their packs open and their makeshift shields up and looked in every direction for an enemy who had no intention whatever of being seen. The shafts kept coming from angles that made cover useless. And as they moved, they found the rest of it: snares that took a man off his feet and hoisted him into the air, tripwires, pits with stakes in them, boards of nails under the leaves.

It was not a battle. It was a slaughter arranged in advance by men who did not want a fight and had come to spend a trapped enemy as cheaply as possible.

“Back! The way we came!” the captain shouted, and heard bowstrings behind him, and knew that road was shut as well.

“Karhold!” one of his men cried, having caught, through a gap in the branches, the white sunburst on black among the trees, and the accent of the war cries, and the particular way the eastern hill men hunt.

Alfie Karstark. Who should have been sitting at Moat Cailin.

The captain understood then that his detachment was finished, and that it had fallen into the hands of the northern lord least inclined toward mercy in the matter of traitors and invaders.

The hunt ran under half an hour. Fifty infiltrators were nothing at all to Karhold’s best in a forest they had shot over since childhood. Better than thirty died on the ground or in the traps. The dozen or so left were wounded and taken, the captain among them.

Alfie came out from behind a boulder with a few other men’s blood on his face and looked over the bodies without expression. He walked to the captain, and put his boot on the man’s ruined leg, and leaned on it.

“Who sent you. How did you pass Knifebridge. And what did the Manderlys take for it.”

The captain set his teeth and said nothing.

Alfie did not argue. He glanced at a hunter beside him; the hunter drew his knife, walked to a wounded prisoner, and cut his throat while the others watched. The blood went into the wet leaves and steamed there.

“One every ten breaths,” Alfie said, in a voice with nothing in it at all, “until you talk, or until there are none of you left to kill.”

After the second one, the captain came apart.

“Ser Donnel Waynwood. We took ship at White Harbor and went ashore near the old mill on the White Knife. There were men to meet us. They walked us around the checkpoint at Knifebridge and into the wood. They said the old road runs to the Gift. It was the Manderlys’ tax collector at Knifebridge, the one-eyed man, Morgan. He took money from Ser Donnel and sent two of his own people to guide us. That is all of it, I swear it, that is all.”

“One-Eyed Morgan.” Alfie turned the name over, and the thing in his eyes got worse. He spoke to his adjutant without looking away from the prisoner. “Clear the ground. Take the heads of the Vale men, and bring this one and his confession back with them. Bury the bodies here and tidy up; leave no more sign than you must.”

“My lord. And Knifebridge?”

Alfie looked south through the trees, and smiled, and it was not a good smile.

“Knifebridge. And a good tax collector who serves House Manderly.” He flexed the hand holding his knife. “Bring everyone who can still walk. We are going to have a conversation with him about the safety of trade roads, and about how the North settles the crime of treason.”

He paused. “And send riders. To Winterfell, to Jon Snow. To Oath Keep, to Torren Flint. And to Casterly Rock, to Lord Arthur. Tell them the Vale’s road through the Wolfswood is closed, that I have living prisoners, and that the evidence points straight at House Manderly of White Harbor. Tell them Alfie Karstark has gone to Knifebridge to clean house for the North. And tell them they may work out the rest for themselves.”

He did not look at the wreckage again. He went south with the Karhold men behind him, blooded and in high spirits, along that winding path with the Vale’s dead on it, toward the crack in the North and the truth of what had been walking through it.

The hunt in the Wolfswood had cut the corridor. It had also pushed House Manderly to the edge of the word treason, and drawn a northern blade that nobody now was going to be able to put back in its sheath.