Chapter 192: The Season of Harvest

The pen did not stop. He wrote in the small, even hand of a man who had spent his youth keeping other men’s accounts, and who had never entirely lost the habit of writing as though the page might one day be read aloud in court against him.

“Second, White Harbor and the western garrison. Wake the deepest nails we have buried there — not the merchants, who talk, but the quiet ones who have been doing nothing at all for two years and drawing a small allowance for it. They are to watch that garrison in every particular: its strength, its equipment, its officers, the shape of its patrols, and the true state of its relations with House Manderly. And where a clean opportunity offers, small accidents. A fire on a pier at the wrong hour of the night. A theft from a warehouse under guard. Something bad in a water butt. Anything that sets the westermen against the townsfolk, or against the Manderly guards. And with it, rumor: that the west means to swallow White Harbor whole, that the Manderlys are puppets now, that Lord Wyman’s eldest son sits in Casterly Rock as a hostage and not a student. The purpose is simple. The westermen are not to be permitted one comfortable night in that city. Let them feel obstructed and watched at every hour, and let the thin cooperation between them and the Manderlys wear through.”

“Third, diplomacy, and what the singers are given to sing. Draft several letters, earnest ones, full of concern. To Queen Daenerys and to her Hand at King’s Landing. To Jon Snow at Winterfell. To Lady Olenna in the Reach and to Prince Doran of Dorne, each with copies to the others, so that all of them know the others have been told. The substance: that the west and the Trident have taken a northern port and interfered in northern affairs under the pretext of assisting with defense; that this ambition threatens the balance of the Seven Kingdoms and the true autonomy of the North; that the Vale has always stood for the unity of the realm and the safety of the northern march; that we view the west’s expansion with the gravest concern, and call upon Her Grace and upon every party to attend to this dangerous trend before the North becomes a western vassal, or a western battlefield. And in King’s Landing, in Oldtown, in Lannisport, let our poets and our storytellers begin to circulate the other kind of letter: tales of the western army in the North playing the tyrant, bullying small lords, dealing with wildlings. I want Arthur Greyoak’s name tarnished wherever men gather to drink, and in the Reach above all.”

“Fourth, our friends in the east. Press the messengers of the Shadow Moon Court. Whatever special assistance they have promised, in material, in men, or in knowledge, it is to come sooner and larger. Tell them the west has made critical progress in the North and that our time is not what it was, and that if they still intend a share of Westeros they must produce something substantial enough to move the scales now, not next year. And you may hint, delicately, that under the right conditions the Vale might see its way to granting them special trading rights in the new order. Perhaps even settlements, on the eastern shore of the Bite, or in one of the northern harbors that does not freeze.”

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“Fifth, our own house. The Bloody Gate garrison goes to full readiness, and provokes nothing across the border. Strengthen every pass and fortress on the line from the Gate down to Gulltown, stockpile, and call up the reserves. The posture I want is that of a man guarding very carefully against an attack out of Harrenhal. And meanwhile, quietly, draw off our best mountain companies and horse and assemble them in the hills north of the Gate and east of the Gift. They wait. When the eastern North is disordered enough by our own work, or when the main strength of the west is pinned somewhere else, they move fast, in the name of answering the pleas of oppressed northern lords and restoring order against foreign invaders, and they drive straight into the rear of Moat Cailin or Grey Creek and finish it. That last part does not leave this room. Myself, Ser Donnel, and three commanders. No one else, at any time, for any reason.”

The orders meshed together as he spoke them, like the gears of something built to run a long while without attention. He had not raged over the loss of White Harbor, and he had not sulked over the failed infiltration. He had simply put down one instrument and picked up several others: terror, rumor, isolation, provocation, and a knife held ready for the one moment when it would matter, while the eastern allies were leaned on for something heavy enough to change the arithmetic.

“Arthur Greyoak has taken White Harbor, and to look at the map he has the better of it,” Petyr said at last, walking back to the window and the far mountains, his voice low enough to be talking to himself. “He has also pushed himself out from behind the curtain and into the light, where a great many more eyes can find him. Taking a port is easy work. Digesting a hostile North full of its own quarrels, with every power in Westeros watching him do it, is not. He will learn that the ice up there does more than freeze an enemy’s hands. It slows the man standing on it. Our part is to go on making trouble for him, magnifying every weakness he has, and spending his strength a little at a time. And then to wait for the single opening that ends it.”

He turned to the raven-speaker and the guard.

“Go. Execute the orders. And remember that patience and secrecy are the sharpest things we own just now. Let the little wolf of the west enjoy his hard-won victory on the northern ice a while longer. When he is exhausted, and buried to the knee in mud and snow and arrows from nowhere, that will be our season of harvest.”

The two of them bowed and went out without a sound, and the door closed behind them, and the sound of their boots faded down the long stair that no man had ever climbed uninvited and lived to describe.

Petyr stayed at the window alone, and the unreadable smile came back to his face by degrees. The light through the frame laid its pattern of brightness and shadow across him, so that he seemed to be standing in both at once, and to have long since decided which he preferred.

The Eyrie kept its place atop the mountains, looking down on the Vale and on the distance beyond it. And its master, after a brief and expensive reverse, had already begun to weave something newer and considerably more dangerous. The war in the North had entered a different phase with the changing of the flags at White Harbor, and Petyr Baelish’s answer to it would make that phase darker still.