Chapter 182

The Riverlands. 299 AC.

Axel Arryn.

The Alivants, bannermen to the Harltons, weren't anything remarkable, just another minor house in the Riverlands with a modest little castle. Not an especially old line either, young by Riverlands standards, really; it had risen right after the First Blackfyre Rebellion. What service earned them their lands, I couldn't say, and there was no particular reason to find out. I'd come here myself out of pure boredom at Harrenhal. The plan had been simple enough: ride in, accept the surrender, take a share of the treasury, and move on. That was not what happened. The fool insulted me publicly, quite literally pissing himself the moment I offered him terms of surrender. I have no idea what he thought that would accomplish, but a short assault followed, and it ended, predictably, in my favor.

"I curse you, Arryn!" Nathan Alivant thrashed against his captors. "You and your whole family, may the gods strike you down!!!"

"The block, or the black?"

"Pthoo," he tried to spit at me. Fortunately for me, I was already braced for it and stepped aside.

"The stump, then." A moment later the lord was on his knees, his head arranged neatly for the sword. "Any last words?"

"Damn you!" He frothed at the mouth like some rabid animal. No dignity left in him at all, not even facing death.

One quick stroke, and the insolent lord's head parted company with his body. It isn't customary in Westeros to execute men of high birth, not without extreme cause, but in this case Lord Alivant had earned his fate fair and square, and no one could hold that against me. I lifted the ugly, dripping thing and showed it to the fifty men who had surrendered. Smarter than their lord, evidently; once it became clear they couldn't win, they'd chosen to lay down arms instead.

"You have a choice," I told them, and watched the surprise flicker across their faces; smallfolk aren't often offered one. "You can pay a ransom, stay here, and try to rebuild what's been broken. Or you can march with me against the Erenfords and go home rich men. The choice is yours."

House Alivant hated House Erenford with a passion, generations of bad blood between them, quarrel after quarrel until whatever civility had once existed between the two houses had rotted away completely. Their smallfolk shared the sentiment down to the last man, which meant that for the Alivants' people, putting a knife into a Erenford or two was practically a pleasure, and getting paid for it made the offer irresistible. In the end, forty of them fell in behind me, and they were the ones sent in with the first wave when the next assault came. By the time the fighting ended, only ten of the forty remained. I paid them what I'd promised, generously, I should note, and sent them home.

It might look like a drop in the ocean, taken on its own, but the same pattern was playing out in half a dozen places at once. My men offered the illusion of choice and let riverlanders do the killing of other riverlanders, which kept my own losses down considerably. By rough count, the Vale had lost perhaps five hundred fewer men than it should have through this approach alone, while the Riverlands' overall strength had been ground down twice as badly as anyone would have predicted. Now that the riverlanders had started cutting each other's throats in earnest, it would take a commander of real charisma, someone with enormous personal authority, to gather all that bad blood back under one banner. Which suited me perfectly. A fractured Riverlands is a defenseless Riverlands.

...

"My lord," Jasper greeted me.

"Ser Jasper." Redfort had wrapped things up faster than expected, which was a pleasant surprise. "You've disarmed me with how efficient you were against Deddings and Wodes."

"I simply made use of the opportunity that presented itself." I decided to indulge in a bit of modesty. "The gold's already been shipped to Harrenhal, from there Ser Melcolm will see it on to the Vale." And then the conversation drifted into the usual pleasantries, damned etiquette and all.

Good to hear. After the last engagement with the Tyrells and the retreat that followed, we'd ended up with an inconveniently large number of wounded. Broadly, they fell into three categories: those who needed only a brief rest, those who needed a much longer one, and those who would never fight again at all, roughly in a ratio of three to two to one. Unfortunate as it was, while Westerosi medicine was... adequate, it fell well short of Númenórean standards. Which meant serious wounds too often ended in death.

"Leave us." A small command, and our retinues stepped back far enough to let us talk properly. It always grated on me, having to keep up appearances with people I wasn't particularly close to.

By rights, we should have waited for the lightly wounded to return to fighting shape, but time was short. Instead we split into several smaller companies and swept through every reasonably wealthy castle in reach, raking in a decent haul. Not enough to cover the cost of the war, nothing close, but far better than sitting idle.

"What's the plan?" Jasper dropped straight into his ordinary manner of speech, skipping the social dance and getting right to business.

"The new lord of Raventree Hall turned out to be a hot-headed young man, and he's agreed to our terms."

"Stone Hedge." Jasper worked out our next target immediately. "A tough nut to crack."

"Yes, but not now." What good is a pile of stones if there's no one left to hold it?

However badly the riverlanders wanted each other's throats slit, ravaging one's own neighbor outright, in the middle of a civil war no less, was simply not a wise move. Only a genuine fool would try it, and there weren't many of those, none above the lowest rungs of the feudal ladder anyway. Which was why my negotiations for what amounted to hired protection and quiet extortion were conducted in secret. Honor is honor, but plenty of lords were more than willing to see a neighbor ruined.

You'd think no lord would be foolish enough to willingly hand his enemy such damning material against himself, but no, plenty were. I simply swore on the honor of House Arryn that nothing would ever pass my lips. They believed it, and combined with everything else on offer, they came around quickly enough. I fully intended to honor my end of these arrangements, faithfully; it would be an unpleasant thing indeed to see a thousand years of the house's reputation squandered. So I made sure to keep the details as contained as possible within my own army. In truth, only the highest ranks of my command know the real shape of it, men who've earned a certain measure of trust. To everyone else, we're simply engaged in ordinary, unstructured plunder, robbery, and extortion.

After old Tytos Blackwood's death, his eldest son Brynden had taken his place. Lacking his late father's experience, he agreed to pay for my "services" almost immediately. A small army was dispatched to his castle, where the young lord would hand over his ransom money. That the sum came to a hundred thousand gold dragons more than the going rate said quite a lot about his sincere intentions toward House Arryn.

By the time I and several smaller companies had finished working through the minor castles, most of the wounded had recovered. The old houses tend to hold serious fortifications, castles capable of standing against armies numbering in the thousands. Small companies can't take those, but now that a substantial portion of our strength had returned to the ranks, we could move on to something more ambitious: Stone Hedge, seat of the old House Bracken.

Eight thousand swords was more than enough to take Stone Hedge in short order. A second army, Seven thousand strong, would march on Castlewood, the Harlton stronghold. I couldn't say what the Harltons had done to displease old Walder Frey, but the miserly old man had put up a startlingly large sum for that particular job. Command of that army would go to Ser Luceon Templeton. A man with a temper, granted, but he knows his business, and more importantly, I trust him. Two armies, two strong but wealthy castles, and after that we'd see how things stood.

We were hardly the only players in this game, and the situation in the south of the realm bore heavily on my own next moves. Mathis Rowan had regrouped, joined forces with the Hightowers, and now sat not far from the capital waiting on something, though what exactly, I couldn't say. A genuinely stupid decision, given that Tywin Lannister's death and the ruin of his army had struck a heavy blow against the position of that boy king Joffrey. The capital was in chaos and could fall at the slightest push, and yet Rowan simply sat and waited. Though considering Renly's movements, and his considerable fondness for meaningless spectacle laced with a touch of sentimentality, it seemed the peacock wanted to seize the city himself and settle beautifully onto the Iron Throne. Foolish, but what else can you expect from a fool.

And where Renly's movements interested me only in passing, Viserys and the Dothraki were an entirely different matter, the horselovers especially. Unlike every other party in this conflict, the Targaryen and their allies had no fixed sphere of operation, no territory to speak of; crudely put, they could land wherever the whim struck them, and whoever happened to be their neighbor at that moment would find life turning very bad, very fast. Dothraki screamers might as well be compared to plague, or wildfire, it hardly matters which. What matters is that wherever the bastards went, nothing was left behind but blood and ash. And it worried me considerably that it might occur to the Targaryen to let the plague loose somewhere near my own spheres of interest, the Vale or the Riverlands. Either outcome would be thoroughly unwelcome. Elena and Morgan were both deeply invested in that particular concern, keeping a closer watch on the Targaryen, if anything, than on everything else combined.

But however erratic these various claimants to hegemony over Westeros might be, they were all reaching for the same prize in the end: holding, or seizing, the Iron Throne. They say all roads lead to King's Landing, and it's true enough. That is where the fate of these houses will finally be decided. In the game of thrones, there is only winning, or dying. There is no middle ground.