Chapter 188: The Flag Changes

Wendel’s voice had risen almost to a shout, and he brought it down again with an effort.

“Jon Snow can barely hold Winterfell. It will be a small miracle if that title of his survives the year. What is he going to protect White Harbor with? The Vale are jackals. King’s Landing is a world away and busy with the south. Lord Arthur is the only power with the strength, the ambition, and the intention to put an order back into this country. If we go to him of our own accord, offer the port, hand over every scrap of evidence and every man involved in the business with the Vale, put the whole of it on Morgan and on the Eyrie, and promise to work with his northern strategy without reservation, then perhaps we buy some part of his forgiveness, and a place for this house in whatever comes next. At the very least we keep our blood and some of our money, which is a great deal better than being butchered by Alfie, or spent as fodder by the Vale and swept away when the fighting is over.”

Lord Wyman said nothing for a long time.

The analysis was brutal and it was correct in every particular. Against real force and a closed road, every reservation a man might hold is decoration. House Manderly had not survived this long on loyalty and honor alone, whatever the family histories said. It had survived by reading a situation exactly and moving before the others had finished thinking.

And the reading was this: the only opening left ran through the young lord in the west he had spent a year being careful about.

He thought of that secret letter, which had been a warning and had also, quite deliberately, left a door standing open. He thought of the Albatross Merchant Guild, and of Fancourt, and of the fact that a channel had existed all along between himself and Casterly Rock that neither end had ever described aloud. If he bowed now, of his own will, and offered the port and the evidence and something like total cooperation, there might still be a road.

“How do we make him believe it?” His voice had almost nothing left in it. “And what do I do about Alfie?”

“We make him believe it by giving him a pledge he cannot refuse.” The cold light came back into Wendel’s eyes. “Tonight we arrest every merchant, captain, and harbor officer in this city with a suspicious line to the Vale, all of them, and above all anyone who may have had a hand in moving those men through. We question them properly and we take their confessions. We put that together with everything of Morgan’s, and with what we hold ourselves on the Vale’s hidden stores north of the Bloody Gate and their channels to that Shadow Moon Court in the east, and we bind it into one volume. And I take it myself, on the fastest ship we own, to Casterly Rock, and I put it into Lord Arthur’s hands in person. I confess all of it — with the blame where it belongs, on Morgan and on the Vale’s conspiracy — I express this family’s remorse, and I ask him to accept White Harbor’s submission and give House Manderly the chance to make amends and serve the new order of the North.

“And at the same time, in your name, we publish a proclamation. In the city, and to every great house in the North. It condemns the monstrous crimes of One-Eyed Morgan and the handful of wretches who deceived their lord, dealt with the Vale, and betrayed the North; it strikes their names from the rolls and confiscates everything they owned. It restates House Manderly’s eternal loyalty to Stark and to the North, and it accepts, with deep shame, our own responsibility for having failed to see what was happening under our own seal. And to show that remorse has hands as well as a voice, House Manderly announces that it has invited the Lord of Casterly Rock and Lord Paramount of the Trident to take up, for a time, the direction of White Harbor’s defense and administration — on behalf of Lord Jon Snow, Warden of the North — to restore order, secure the port, and coordinate every force available against the Vale’s aggression and the crisis in this country. And House Manderly will cooperate in full, to atone.

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“That is our explanation to Lord Alfie Karstark. And to everyone else.”

It was, Wyman thought, the kind of move a man finds only when he is drowning: a way of dying that turns out to be a way of living. Handing the direction of the city to Arthur satisfied the west’s need to hold it. Dressing it as acting on behalf of the Warden of the North left Jon Snow his face and the world its fiction. And it took away, at a stroke, every reason Alfie Karstark had to march on White Harbor, because a city that has already submitted and accepted reorganization cannot be stormed for refusing to. Meanwhile every crime went onto a dead man, and the evidence and the intelligence went to Casterly Rock as an offering, which was the strongest possible way of saying we have cut the Vale off entirely, now protect us.

The last unwillingness went out of Lord Wyman’s face and was replaced by the plain animal wish to survive, and by fear for his grandchildren.

“Good. Do it as you have said.” The voice was hoarse and thin. “Wendel. Prepare tonight. Take the most reliable men we have and the most complete gifts, and go at the best speed a ship can make. Remember your manner: humble, and sincere, and take the whole failure of supervision onto this family. And make him understand that we were also deceived, that Morgan and the Vale used us, and that having found the road back we intend to walk all the way down it and pledge to him against the outsiders.

“And write to Alfie Karstark tonight, over my name. Tell him House Manderly knew nothing of Morgan’s treason and is sick at heart over it. Tell him we understand and support what he did, and that it was rightly done. Tell him that to prove our remorse White Harbor has invited the Lord of Casterly Rock to come and assist in setting the city in order, and that the evidence and the men are already on their way to him. And ask him — courteously, Wendel — to let his thunder rest, to look at the larger picture, and to face the crisis of the North together with us, under Lord Arthur and Lord Jon.”

“Yes, Father.”

There was relief in Wendel’s eyes, and under it something graver, and he went out at once to begin the work that his family’s continued existence now depended on.

Lord Wyman sat alone in the empty hall and watched, through the tall windows, the harbor going about its business in the last of the light: the derricks working, the boats crossing, the noise of it coming up through the glass exactly as it had for forty years.

He knew that from tonight it was no longer his.

It would be a piece on another man’s board, a stepping stone, a forward base for fighting the Vale and pulling the North together. And he, Wyman Manderly, once the richest and most courted man north of the Neck, would bow his head to a young outsider to buy his family a little more time in the world.

“So it goes, and so it was always going to go,” he said aloud, to nobody, and let out a breath that seemed to take a good deal of him with it.

White Harbor, the brightest pearl in the North, under Alfie Karstark’s butcher’s knife and the long shadow off the western sea, and in the desperate arithmetic of one very tired old man, changed hands quietly, in an empty room, before anyone outside had heard a thing.

The news of that temporary transfer went off like a second charge under the North, and the shock of it would run further and harder than the blood at Knifebridge had, and would remake the shape of the country and, in time, of a good deal more than the country. Whether the change of hands could actually be completed now depended on the volume of evidence going aboard a fast ship in the harbor below, and on how a young lord in Casterly Rock chose to receive it.

Winter’s last flame was no longer burning only in the hills and the forests. It had reached the wharves, and the halls of old families, and the game of power, washed in blood and betrayal, had entered a nakedly cruel new stage.