Chapter 191: Echoes from the Eyrie

The Eyrie, in the Vale.

The spring afternoon rarely cut through the mists that hung all year about the Mountains of the Moon, and what light reached the white towers came pale and thin. In the study at the castle’s highest point the air had nothing to do with that brightness. It was the air of a cellar.

Petyr Baelish stood at the great arched window that looked down the valley and out toward the far peaks. In his hand were the newest secret reports: from an insider at White Harbor, and with them a sheaf of briefings on the blood at Knifebridge, on House Manderly’s public repentance, and on the invitation the Manderlys had extended to the west and the Trident to assist with the defense of their port.

The unreadable half-smile he wore the way other men wear a coat had gone. His face was calm, and the calm was the worst thing about it. Only far back in the grey eyes did something turn over: a cold light moving like a current under still water.

“Cousin Donnel has lost two elite squads. Near eighty men, hunted down like dogs on the edge of the Wolfswood and the Gift.” His voice was not loud, and it carried a flatness that made the words sound like another man’s business entirely. “And that fool One-Eyed Morgan managed not only to get his head taken off by Alfie Karstark, but to expose the whole secret road we spent a year building through White Harbor, and to hand it to our friend in the west as a stepping stone, so that he could put his boot on the neck of the Fat Whale of the Manderlys.”

He laid the reports gently on the great mahogany desk. Beside the day’s correspondence lay a map of the North and the Vale marches, thick with thin lines and small flags in half a dozen colors: the movements of every power, the infiltration routes, the supply points, and a scatter of locations marked with symbols that had nothing military about them at all.

“Wyman Manderly.” He said the name quietly, and one corner of his mouth turned up in something cold and very nearly amused. “A clever man. He knows to seize the thickest straw within reach before the butcher’s blade comes down on him. Hand the port to Arthur Greyoak in exchange for protection, and throw the dirty water over a dead man and over us, who are conveniently far away. It is beautifully played, this business of atoning through service. I only wonder whether the collar the little wolf of the west has fastened on him is set with gems, or is a wet rope drying in the sun.”

Two men stood with him: his own guard, silent and shaped like a shadow, and a raven-speaker whose face lived inside the shade of a hood and whose charge was the North.

“My lord,” the raven-speaker said, in a voice like a rasp drawn over wood, “the Manderlys going over to Greyoak means our plan to work through White Harbor, to disorder the North’s rear and tie up the strength of the west and the Trident, has essentially collapsed. And with western troops inside the port under the name of assisting with defense, they now hold the most important harbor in the North outright. Their fleet will fall into line with Moat Cailin and Grey Creek Fort, and our room in the eastern North is squeezed to almost nothing. Ser Donnel asks whether to suspend the infiltration or turn it in some other direction.”

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“Suspend? Turn?” Petyr shook his head and walked to the map. His finger came down on White Harbor, moved west across the Wolfswood and the Gift, and stopped at Moat Cailin and Grey Creek Fort. “Neither. The opposite. The infiltration does not stop and the direction hardly changes at all. Manderly’s defection has blocked the most convenient road. It has also shown us a great deal more than the road.”

He looked up at the hooded man.

“Our hold on the Manderlys rested on bribery and on Wyman’s own cleverness, which is to say on nothing that bears weight. Morgan’s exposure tells us that the west, or rather Arthur Greyoak, had gone into White Harbor deeper and far earlier than we allowed for. And that he turned the Knifebridge business into Manderly’s surrender inside a fortnight tells us the contingency was written and waiting, and that he may well have let Alfie Karstark off the leash to reach exactly this result. That is a failure of our intelligence, and a failure to take the measure of the man.”

He tapped Moat Cailin twice.

“But it also shows us where the heart of his design in the North actually lies. Here, and at Grey Creek Fort. Moat Cailin locks the Neck, which is the land throat between north and south. Grey Creek reaches into the Gift, which is his root in the northern heartland. Taking White Harbor secures the sea lane and the flank, and it exists to serve those two points. His object is plain enough once you stop looking at the banners. He does not mean to annex the North. He means to build a corridor out of the west and the Trident, through Moat Cailin and Grey Creek, radiating across the whole eastern North, with a hand on its windpipe at every hour of the day. He wants control. He has no use whatever for titles.”

“Then how do we answer it, my lord?” the guard asked.

“Answer it?” Petyr smiled, and there was nothing warm anywhere in it. “Arthur Greyoak wishes to play the game of proxies. Grain, swords, and a control that never signs its name. Very well. We shall play it with him. And we shall play it rather better.”

He went back to the desk, took up a pen, and began to write on a blank sheet while he spoke.

“First, new orders for Cousin Donnel. The infiltration changes shape: quieter, smaller, and a great deal more destructive. No more moving bodies of troops. Special squads instead, under ten men apiece, chosen for disguise, for lying still, for sabotage, and for killing. The object is no longer to take ground or to harass a strongpoint. The object is a continuous, low, untraceable terror. Where: the settlements around Grey Creek Fort, the supply lines north of Moat Cailin, and the lands of any northern lord under Jon Snow who resents the west’s presence. How: kill the men who make things work, the settlement managers, the caravan masters, the minor nobles who have chosen the western side. Burn granaries, foul wells, and put those little gifts we carried from the east into the water where it will spread. Set the old tribal blood feuds alight, and keep them burning. And dress every scene with care, so that suspicion falls on a wildling rising, or on the remnant of the Night’s Watch, or on some roving band, or best of all on the west itself, on the garrison at Grey Creek or the men at Moat Cailin. I want the eastern North turned into a swamp of suspicion and fear and knives in the dark, where Arthur Greyoak’s new order cannot advance a single foot, and where Jon Snow is too busy to look anywhere else.”