Chapter 186: The Blood at Knifebridge

“Forced.” Alfie came around the desk, one step at a time. “Taking money is being forced? Sending your own men to meet them is being forced? Papers, a guide, a road, and a foreign army walking into the North to kill people at Grey Creek — is that being forced?”

He bent until his face was close to Morgan’s, and the one eye had gone wide and fixed.

“Morgan. You are a collector of House Manderly, fed by White Harbor and set here to hold a piece of the North. You did not serve your lord and you did not protect this country. You dealt with a foreign enemy and you gave him the road. Do you deny it?”

“I—” Morgan was shaking hard enough for the chair to move under him, and the sweat had gone through his shirt.

Alfie straightened and stopped looking at him. He turned to the door and to the street beyond it, where his men had by now invited a considerable number of the townsfolk to come and stand, and when he spoke his voice carried the length of the road.

“The chief collector of Knifebridge, One-Eyed Morgan. There are witnesses and there is physical evidence, and he has confessed in front of both. The charges are these. First, taking bribes from a hostile power. Second, forging official papers to move enemy soldiers. Third, aiding an enemy in arms against the North. Fourth, causing the deaths of soldiers and settlers at Grey Creek and doing his best to wreck the recovery of this country.”

He let his gaze travel over the crowd, over the frightened and the confused and the few who were silently and visibly angry, and brought it back down to the man in the chair.

“By the old laws of the North, a man who takes an enemy’s coin and opens a road for him dies for it. I, Alfie Karstark, sworn to House Stark, holding the east and commanding at Moat Cailin, pass that sentence here. It is carried out now.”

“No — my lord — mercy, I was following orders, it was White Harbor, it was—” Morgan came out of the chair and onto the floor and tried to crawl.

Alfie did not look down. He lifted a hand to the two men waiting at the door.

They took him under the arms and carried him out into the open ground in front of the building the way one carries a sack, and put him on his knees in it. One of them drew a greatsword and set himself.

A sound went through the crowd, and a number of women turned children’s faces away.

“In the sight of the old gods, and by the honor of the North,” Alfie said.

The sword came down. The head with the black patch went into the dirt and rolled, and the body dropped after it and lay twitching while the ground drank.

Nobody in that street made a sound. There was only the wind, and, behind everything, the noise of the White Knife going south.

Alfie walked over to the head, and looked at the one eye still open in it, and turned it over with his boot. Then he looked up at the townsfolk and at the disarmed Manderly guards standing in a huddle with their hands where everyone could see them.

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“You have all seen it. That is what comes to a man who takes the Vale’s coin and sells the North.” His voice went out over them again, and there was no arguing with it. “Knifebridge is the North’s town, under Winterfell’s law, and not a nest for treason. From today the defense of this town, its tolls, and its business are held by Karhold until further notice. Every Manderly guard here lays down his arms and goes home to await inquiry. Any merchant or official in this town who had dealings with the Vale, or with Morgan, has one day to come to me and say so of his own accord, and I will remember that he came. Anyone who hides, or shelters another, or is caught trying to get a message out — you have just watched what that looks like.”

He paused, and swept the crowd once more.

“And draft letters in my name, at once, to Winterfell, to White Harbor, and to every great house of the North. Set out Morgan’s crimes and the evidence for them, and state plainly that I have executed him and taken this town in hand. And put a question to Lord Wyman Manderly of White Harbor. Did he know what his own officer was doing? What is his account of it? And what does he intend to do about it? He has three days to answer, to me, to Lord Jon Snow, and to the people of the North. If the answer does not come, nobody need be surprised when I go to White Harbor and collect it myself.”

The orders went out one after another, cold and quick. Karhold men took the key points of Knifebridge inside the hour, sealed the tax office and the warehouse, and started sorting the town’s population into those who would be spoken to today and those who could wait. The place passed entirely under military control, and under fear. And Alfie’s declaration, and the ultimatum riding on the end of it, went out toward White Harbor and Winterfell and the whole of the North with every terrified townsman and dismissed guard who left by the road.

The blood at Knifebridge was not merely the execution of a traitor and the seizure of a small river town. It was a knife driven into an abscess in the North’s own body, and it tore House Manderly’s neutrality and its loyalty off in one motion and nailed the suspicion of collusion to Lord Wyman’s door. And it was a catalyst thrown into a situation that had already been unstable, which would now force Jon Snow, Wyman Manderly, and everyone connected to either of them into making the most direct and dangerous choices available, and making them fast.

Alfie stood in the doorway looking at the blood congealing in the dirt, and there was no pity anywhere in him, and no doubt either. He knew what this stroke had done. It had taken Morgan’s head, and it had also taken away House Manderly’s last comfortable fiction, and it had put Karhold squarely in front of White Harbor and whatever stood behind White Harbor, which might be the Vale, and might in the end be King’s Landing.

He found that he did not care. House Stark was withered to almost nothing, the North was in mortal danger, traitors were thick on the ground, and enemies were on every side of it. Somebody had to break the deadlock and light the powder, and nobody with a title worth protecting was going to volunteer. Very well. Let the Mad Bear of the east be the villain of the piece. If winter’s last flame was going to burn regardless, let it burn hot enough to take every betrayal and every conspiracy in the country with it, and let whatever loyalty and courage was left in the North come out of those ashes tempered.

He turned to his adjutant.

“Send a man to Casterly Rock at the best speed a horse can manage. Everything that happened here, the prisoners’ confessions, and copies of every piece of evidence, into Lord Arthur’s hand. Tell him Alfie Karstark has cleaned house for him and for the North, and that I have hold of the tail of this thing. What is done with it now is for him and for Jon Snow to decide. Whether they join hands and scuttle the leaking wreck that is White Harbor, or whether every man swims for himself in this cold northern sea.”

The rider took the packet and was gone within the quarter hour.

Alfie looked south, toward Casterly Rock. Then west, toward White Harbor. Then north, toward Winterfell. What was on his face by then was a complicated arrangement of exhaustion, resolve, and something not far from glee.

The storm had shifted on the strength of one afternoon’s work, and it was moving now toward White Harbor and toward the heart of the North. And he was standing in the middle of it, with nothing behind him to go back to.