Chapter 135 132

Lord Axel Arryn.

Reading through yet another petition regarding a land dispute, I found myself in a state of mild irritation. I had studied my father's mistakes, and the very first thing I did upon becoming Lord Paramount was attempt to settle most of the property disputes between my vassals. Every landholder, regardless of rank, will try to get his hands on his neighbor's assets by any pretext available, and such quarrels had a habit of growing into small wars. I had no patience for that kind of thing, and simply required all lords of a certain level to produce an inventory of their holdings. They were given a generous deadline of two years. Then came a general assembly where every lord's landholdings were clearly documented. There were discrepancies, of course, lies and competing claims from two or more houses over some wretched little village. Those were sorted out quickly enough.

The work was difficult and frankly thankless. But afterward my administrative burden shrank by nearly a third.

"...How I am sick of Lord Svorn, digging up his papers only now. Too late. The village stays with House Geord."

"But the documents are genuine and barely twenty years old," Morgan said, trying to reason with me, and managing it.

"Fine. As I recall, Lord Geord's heir died recently and now it falls to the younger son, who is unmarried. Svorn has five daughters of marriageable age. Let Svorn give a daughter to Geord's heir, and that village goes as her dowry. And hint gently at my displeasure."

"Consider it done." Morgan made a note in his little book. He would pass it to someone in the administrative apparatus, who would write it all up and put it in order. "Next: the rangers. The treasury is struggling."

"What do you mean? Everything balanced."

"War does not encourage trade." He glanced at his book and continued. "Desmond also wrote that tax revenue from Gulltown will fall significantly."

"Reasons?" We could not afford that; Gulltown contributed substantially to the region's prosperity.

"Pentos. Khal Drogo has finished his campaigns and, through our mutual acquaintance the magister, has acquired a fleet. I learned of it by chance. Officially it is a Pentoshi fleet sailing on a trade mission, but in practice it will be used to transport the horselords."

So the beggar king had finally crawled out of his cave, and the Dothraki locusts with him. I was still astonished that steppe savages had agreed to cross the Narrow Sea. The central question now was where the Dothraki would land. The North, the Westerlands, the Reach: ruled out immediately, too far and impractical. Dorne? Given the serpentine games being played within House Martell, they were unlikely to allow Dothraki onto their soil, and one would have to be an idiot to let them wander across your own land. That left the Crownlands, the Stormlands, and my region. They would not come for the Vale for a number of reasons, starting with the distances and ending with my fresh army and my knowledge of how to fight cavalry raiders. Two options remained. Viserys might be tempted by Dragonstone, or he might decide to make an example of the region that had led the rebellion against his house.

As for their numbers, no one could give me anything reliable. I was not troubled by that; I understood the difficulty of the problem. Khal Drogo had been at war continuously, losing riders and absorbing other khalasars. His horde had also been divided into several parts to cover more territory, which made counting them a futile exercise, but my spies were confident there were at least twenty thousand. A serious force, capable of sweeping aside everything in its path.

Though if I was entirely honest with myself, I cared very little what slaughter unfolded in the south. Rhaenys and the Martells were not meeting my expectations; taking that long to hammer at Nightsong took real effort. How could anyone aspire to conquer the Seven Kingdoms while failing to get past a single castle? Every week they stalled, their credibility eroded further.

Without knocking, a frowning Lady Snow walked into the study.

"Lord Arryn, I have brought new information on the mountain men's positions." Without any deference or observance of protocol, she simply placed a marked map and several pages of notes on the desk. "Good day."

"What was that?" Morgan was bewildered, not yet having fully processed such brazen behavior.

My friend was stunned. As the most knowledgeable and trusted person in my circle, he had been teaching Elena the finer points of the intelligence trade and knew two simple facts: that Snow was deeply afraid of me, and that I had very little tolerance for impertinence. What had just occurred before him lay outside all familiar parameters. Elena had found the nerve, and I had not reacted.

"Whatever her fine qualities in other respects, Elena is still Ned Stark's daughter," I explained, deciding to enlighten him. "A Northerner may leave the North, but in his soul he remains a Northerner to the end. She and I did not agree on the matter of what to do with the mountain children."

To understand the scale of the problem, one has to look briefly at the demographics of the Vale. Through calculations that were not particularly difficult for me, the population of my region came to approximately three million, give or take a few hundred thousand. Since I had no desire to watch my vassals starve to death in winter, I had taken the matter of provisions very seriously. The region had accumulated a solid surplus, which would evaporate quickly in any future campaign. That, in turn, would not be critical. We would have to tighten our belts somewhat, but the region would come through winter without lasting damage.

Then there was the other problem. Having noted that the mountain men of Rhudaur and those of the Vale were not especially different from one another, I had estimated the wild population at roughly one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand. Given the effective equality of the sexes among them, with women fighting alongside men, the mountain clans had something in the region of fifteen thousand warriors by any useful measure, though that figure was somewhat beside the point. They were fragmented, which gave me an enormous advantage in eliminating them. By the latest count, twenty-seven thousand mountain men had been removed to date. Those who resisted were killed; the rest became laborers in conditions that carried a high likelihood of death. My own people were precious to me, but such work was necessary.

The question of what to do with the mountain children was another matter. That meant at minimum twenty thousand unplanned mouths under twelve years old, wanted by no one and of no practical use to anyone. With a few more years in hand, something might perhaps have been arranged; as things stood, I saw no reason to take on the obligation of feeding such a horde. Most people reasoned the same way, but there were dissenting opinions.

Some idealists remained in the Vale, people who did not want to kill women and children. Lady Snow was among them. She was a kind-souled person and urged me to reconsider, to find another path, one that did not lead to thousands of children's deaths. What she did not grasp was the depth of the Vale's hatred for the mountain men. Neither I nor anyone with any real say in the matter saw reason to spend enormous resources on people who were no one's concern, when our own people were barely being provided for.

Then came the silent treatment. Elena was clever, but she wanted no part in a genocide. I offered her a wager: if she could devise a workable plan for integrating the mountain children into the population, I would carry it out; until then, she would continue to perform her duties.

To her credit, she came up with a reasonable plan. Elena was clever, but inexperienced. Distributing the children among peasant families with a settling allowance was not the worst idea. But she underestimated, again, the depth of the Vale's hatred for the mountain people. Half would be dead before winter; the other half during it. I explained where her reasoning had gone wrong and made clear in plain terms why such a plan could not work. Since then our relations had cooled, though it had not come to outright sabotage.

"Let us leave it there," I said. The feast was soon and I needed to change.

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