Chapter 185: One-Eyed Morgan

Knifebridge, on the west bank of the White Knife.

As the hinge between water and road on the way from White Harbor to the northern interior, Knifebridge should have been busy that afternoon. Boats working up and down the river, dockhands moving grain and cloth and ironware off the White Harbor barges and furs and timber and ore onto them; inns and taverns and a smithy and a chandler’s along the streets; merchants, carters, sailors, and pedlars in the crowd, and the air thick with river water, livestock, cooking, and sweat.

When Lord Alfie Karstark came out of the forest road at the southern edge of the town with a hundred and more men behind him, still carrying the cold of the wood and other men’s blood on their gear, the town’s prosperity went out like a fire under a bucket of meltwater, and what was left was silence and a very cold kind of fear.

The few Manderly soldiers at the entrance, in leather worked with the merman, had been leaning on the barrier in the sun. They saw Alfie’s bulk, and then the white sunburst on black, and then the Vale prisoners roped together and stumbling at the rear, and every one of them understood at the same moment that the afternoon had changed.

“Lord Karstark.” The guard captain made himself step out into the road. “This is House Manderly’s ground. What is your business here with armed men? Do you carry a warrant from Lord Manderly, or from Winterfell?”

Alfie did not slow down. He turned on the man a pair of bloodshot eyes with the temperature of open tundra in them, and pushed four words past his teeth.

“Move, or die there.”

The guard captain found that his voice had left him. He stood where he was and watched the Karhold men shoulder the barricade aside and pour up the street like iron poured into a mould.

Alfie’s object was the town house at the center: a solid building of log and stone that served as tax office, warehouse, and guard post together. The man he wanted was the chief collector House Manderly kept at Knifebridge, nominally to take the tolls, run the docks, and keep the peace, and in fact to be the family’s eyes, ears, and hand this far up the river.

Inside the building, One-Eyed Morgan was walking his office from wall to wall. He was near fifty, thin, with a black patch over the left eye and a right one that would not stay still. That morning a letter had come down from White Harbor warning him to be vigilant and careful in the present season, with particular attention to anything out of the direction of the forest, which had done nothing at all for his nerves. The men he had sent up the road to find out why his last contacts had gone silent had not come back. And the news of Alfie Karstark on the forest road had run through the town like plague and reached him a quarter of an hour ahead of the man himself.

This chapter was taken from the page where the author posts it without approval; the published version supports the person who created it.

“The Mad Bear. What in seven hells is he doing here? Unless something has happened in the wood—”

Sweat had come out on his forehead. His hand went to the short sword under the desk of its own accord. He looked out into the street at the armed men coming up it, and at the prisoners being driven along behind them like stock, and recognized, in one of those wrecked faces, a man he had personally arranged to have guided around his own checkpoint.

His sight greyed at the edges and he had to put a hand on the desk. The worst thing he had been able to imagine had arrived, and it had brought witnesses, and it had brought them alive.

The door came off its latch under a Karhold boot and swung in with a crack of splintering wood. Alfie filled the frame, cutting off the daylight, and his shadow went across the room and over the man behind the desk.

“Morgan.” The name landed in the room like a stone dropped on a table.

“Lord Karstark.” Morgan produced a smile that would have looked better as weeping and started to rise, and found his legs would not do it properly. “What wind brings you to Knifebridge? An honor. A great honor.”

Alfie walked past the pleasantries as though they were furniture, crossed to the desk, and dropped a bundle onto it, and it made a heavy wet sound. Vale armbands and Vale weapons out of the ambush in the wood, and with them a set of travel papers, forged and forged well, stamped with the tax seal of House Manderly.

“Do you know these, chief collector?”

Morgan looked at the blood-stained bundle, and then at that seal, which he knew as well as he knew his own hand, and his face went the color of paper. His lips moved. Nothing came out of them.

“No? Let me help you.” Alfie turned his head toward the door. “Bring them.”

Two Karhold men dragged in the Vale captain, who was three-quarters dead, and a second prisoner, a junior officer whose particular duty had been liaison with this office, and dropped them both on the boards.

“Say it again,” Alfie said. “In front of this one-eyed lord. How you came from White Harbor. How you made contact at Knifebridge. And who walked you around the inspection, into the wood, and pointed you at the old road to the Gift.”

The captain had been broken hours ago. He got his head up and pointed with a hand that shook.

“Him. Morgan. He took Ser Donnel’s money. He sent two of his own people to meet us at the old mill. He gave us the papers. He told us how to go around the town’s watch and into the forest, and he said the old road runs to the Gift, and to Grey Creek. All of it was him. He arranged all of it.”

The junior officer nodded, and kept nodding, and confirmed every word of it.

There was nothing left to establish. The evidence stood up on its own legs.

Morgan sat down as though something had been removed from inside him. His one eye went from Alfie to the window and back, and found no help in either direction. There were Karhold men all around the building now, and more of them at both ends of the street, and a party already at the dock turning back the two boats that had been loading when they came in. The town’s Manderly guards had been disarmed without a blow struck and stood together near the well with their hands where everyone could see them. Behind shutters up and down the road, people were watching and trying not to be seen watching, and word of what was in the street had already gone out along the river road in both directions, carried by whoever had been quick enough to leave.

“It is not,” Morgan said. “My lord, let me explain. I was forced to it. It was White Harbor, it came from White Harbor, I only—”