Chapter 134 131

The Vale. The Eyrie. 299 AC.

Lord Axel Arryn.

Returning from another raid on the mountain men, I was in good spirits. After a little training in the finer points of rangecraft, the business of hunting those bastards had stopped being a tense affair. Lady Snow was without question a clever girl, but she had simply never learned how to track people with any professional rigor, and for the most part had been relying on instinct and luck.

My campaign against the mountain men was not the first in the last thousand years. Leafing through the Arryn chronicles, it becomes plain enough that every ambitious Arryn had mounted such raids, but for a number of reasons none had managed to finish the job. The bastards were simply too good at hiding. As an Essosi friend of mine once put it: "Killing is not the problem; finding them is." With Elena, we could wipe them out systematically.

A man always feels drawn to his home. Wherever he may live and however he may live, he carries an inner attachment to the place where he grew up and spent his childhood. The Eyrie is my home. The castle is bound up in my earliest memories, and in what were perhaps the best years of my life, before any of the additional burdens arrived. How I miss the days when I could play without a care and do as my heart pleased, without a thought for the future.

Home is not simply a castle or a building. It is memory, first and foremost. Mine, my father's, his father's, our family's. I love my home, but the closer winter draws the more it becomes clear to me that the Arryns need a new ancestral seat. Even setting aside the social, economic, and political reasons, it is unbecoming for a family of our standing to relocate to the Gates of the Moon every winter. A home ought to protect against everything, and if it cannot protect against the weather, it is a poor home and must be replaced.

I had already chosen the location and was working on the plans in my spare time, which winter would provide in abundance, designed in accordance with every principle of Númenórean construction. None of it would happen soon; two or three years after winter's end and then a decade of building. I intend to outdo every builder who came before me and raise a new jewel for the whole world to look upon.

"Lord Arryn." My raids had become frequent enough that only a small retinue came out to greet me, Morgan at its head. "We are glad to see you returned safe and whole."

The matter of Morgan had weighed on me for a long time. Morgan, afterall was only a Sand, a bastard from the deserts of Dorne. He had been with me for so long it was hard to imagine handling all these whispers and tales of secrets without Morgan. But for the men of the Vale, it would be outrageous for a Sand to be a lord of a castle of such a stature and as the Lord Paramount it was for me to see that all my subjects felt their lord dealt with only justice with them. After long deliberation I decided that Grey Glen would not be coming to Morgan. Instead he became the castellan of my ancestral seat and unofficial master of whispers. He performed both duties excellently, though political intuition was not among his gifts.

"Axel!" A small blond whirlwind collided with me. "I was worried."

"I know. Let go of me, I am filthy and I smell." That earned me a laugh and a wrinkled nose. A month in the field.

Myrcella had bloomed. The absence of Cersei and Joffrey had done her good. Those two had paid her little attention, and when they did it was never kind. After the betrothal was announced and the princess placed under my guardianship, the mistreatment had stopped, the little wretch was afraid of me, and so was Cersei. Now, at eleven years old, Myrcella was a warm, caring child, capable of showing real courage, strong will, and a sharp mind.

The little princess was not afraid to argue with me, especially where my health was concerned. In those moments she displayed a remarkable stubbornness and held her ground to the last. It irritated me, but I found her concern genuinely endearing.

"All right, lads, scatter and get ready for the evening banquet!" The response was a ragged chorus of approval.

They had worked hard and earned a proper table. A month of constant fighting, riding, and death does not leave men in good health.

"In two hours, in my solar," I told Morgan. There was a backlog of business to work through.