Chapter 187: The Whale’s Reckoning

“Filth! Traitor! Idiot!”

Lord Wyman Manderly’s roar came close to lifting the dome off the great hall of the New Castle.

His enormous frame shook with it, the flesh of his face trembling, and the small eyes that spent their lives narrowed and calculating were wide open now, bloodshot and full of a rage that looked ready to come out of him bodily.

In his fist he had the parchment that had come down from Knifebridge by hard-ridden horse, dust-stained and carrying its own weather. In it Alfie Karstark, in a tone that stopped just short of a declaration, set out the treason of One-Eyed Morgan, stated that he had executed him, stated that he had taken Knifebridge in hand, and demanded to know whether White Harbor had known, and what its explanation might be.

Folded in with it were copies of the confessions taken from the captured Vale officers, and fragments of a list, recovered from Morgan’s own strongbox, of the gifts that had gone back and forth between that office and the Eyrie.

Every line of it went into Lord Wyman like a brand.

Fear, fury, the particular shame of having been betrayed from underneath, and the sense of something enormous arriving, all of it braided together until he could hardly breathe. The balance he had spent his life maintaining, that patient work of standing between powers so that his family and his city could go on being rich and unconquered, had come apart in a single afternoon because a tax collector had been greedy and stupid, and it had dropped him into a place from which there was no climbing back.

Morgan. That damned one-eyed pig.

He had dealt with the Vale behind his lord’s back, had helped an enemy army walk into the North and kill people at Grey Creek, and had done it while leaving enough evidence lying about to be picked up by the one man in the North least likely to be reasonable about it.

And the thing that had put the deepest cold in Wyman was the plain reading of Alfie’s last lines. Did you know? What is your account? Three days. Otherwise I will come to White Harbor and collect it myself.

That was not a question. That was a man announcing where he intended to be on the fourth day.

And who was Alfie Karstark? The brute of the eastern North, a butcher by reputation, and merciless in exact proportion to how close the offense came to treason. A man who would publicly behead a Manderly officer in a Manderly town and then take the town was not doing it to clear his liege’s name. His next object was very probably White Harbor itself. Under the excellent banner of purging traitors and investigating accomplices, he would bring his men to the gates and force Wyman to submit, or he would simply act, and hand the richest port in the North to the lord of Casterly Rock he had evidently decided to serve.

“Father. Being angry will not help us now.”

Ser Wendel Manderly’s face was no better colored than his father’s, but he had hold of himself. He came forward quickly and took the old man’s arm, because the old man had begun to sway. “We have to decide, and we have three days to do it in. And he has already sent this to Winterfell. And to Casterly Rock.”

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At the last two words Wyman’s whole body flinched.

He thought of that quiet letter from Arthur Greyoak with its warnings folded into courtesy. He thought of Captain Fancourt’s report and the phrase comprehensive investigation. Alfie’s work at Knifebridge had just handed the west the strongest evidence and the finest excuse it could possibly have wanted.

Would that young, cold lord in the west let this chance go by? A chance to take control of White Harbor entirely, to open the North’s sea road for himself, and to grind House Manderly into the dust while every witness applauded? He would not. No one in his position would.

So it was not only Alfie’s knife, unsheathed and already wet, coming at him overland from the east. It was also a longer and sharper blade hanging out over the water, and the hand on that one had been waiting for a reason.

And Jon Snow, the Warden of the North to whom Wyman owed his oath, could no longer trust him at all. Set Alfie’s bloody proof in front of that grave young man and he would see one thing: a great house that had let an enemy through its own back door, and that had become, in a season when the North could afford nothing of the kind, a danger to everyone standing near it.

Surrounded, from every direction at once.

Every calculation he had made, all that careful sitting on the fence, all that playing of one hand against another, had turned in a single day into the most ridiculous and lethal stupidity available to a man of his intelligence. Morgan’s betrayal had kicked away the last piece of ice under his feet, and he was in the water now, in the open, with nothing to climb onto.

“Decide.” Wyman went down into his chair, and looked, in that moment, ten years older than he had that morning, and his voice came out of him like something dragged. “What is there to decide? Alfie wants my explanation. The lord of Casterly Rock wants my port. Jon Snow wants my loyalty. And the Vale — that snake is praying I die tomorrow so it can hang the whole thing on my corpse. What explanation is there left for me to give? Which of them am I supposed to choose?”

“Father, we are not out of choices.”

There was something hard in Wendel’s eyes now. He lowered his voice and spoke fast.

“Alfie is fierce and Karhold is small. He has to hold Moat Cailin, and now he has to hold Knifebridge as well. In the time we are talking about, he cannot seriously threaten the walls of this city. The danger that can actually reach us in three days comes off the water. It is the Seagard fleet, and it is the Flint ships at Widow’s Watch. Let those two close the mouth of this harbor, or worse, come into it, and the port, the merchantmen, the warehouses, everything this family has, is finished inside a month.”

He paused, and looked at his father directly.

“Which means there is exactly one man who can stop any of it, because there is exactly one man who is deciding all of it. Alfie did not do what he did without knowing it would be welcome. Lord Arthur is the only man alive with the strength and the interest to keep White Harbor from being torn apart, and the only one who can call Alfie off. But he will not do it for our beautiful eyes. We would have to show him something he cannot refuse. We would have to come down off the fence entirely, in the open, on his side, and tie this city’s future to whatever it is he is building in the North.”

“His side.” The struggle in Wyman’s face was terrible to watch. “That is the outright betrayal of Jon Stark. It is a thousand years of Manderly oaths to Winterfell, thrown into the harbor. It is handing the freedom of this city to an outsider, a westerman. And will he even take us, after everything? Or will he use us for the scapegoat, and swallow White Harbor while everyone is looking at Alfie?”

“Father, this is not the hour for oaths, or for our dignity. This is the hour for staying alive.”