Chương 38: The Lord from the Neck

The column took most of the afternoon to come in. Thirty-six thousand men do not arrive anywhere. They accumulate. The vanguard was through the gate and forming up on the new courtyard by the third hour past noon. The tail of the baggage train was still somewhere back on the causeway when the light started to go, and in between there was nothing to do but sit on Manny's back and watch my own army pour past me into a ruin that had been rebuilt more thoroughly than six months of letters had managed to convey.

Helman Tallhart and Galbart Glover met me at the gatehouse. Neither of them looked like a man who had slept properly since spring — Glover had gone gaunt around the eyes, and Tallhart's beard had grown out untended — but they stood the way men stand when they want you to look past them at the thing behind them. I came down Manny's side and let the boys take his lead.

"My lords. I rode past this place two years ago. There were three broken towers and a swamp."

"There's still a swamp," Glover said, with a proud smirk.

"There is. But the wall holds water out of the ditch now, and the causeway's crowned, and I counted four hundred feet of new curtain between the Gatehouse and the Drunkard's on the ride in." I turned to look up at it — the grey stone set into the old black was obvious proof of the work that had gone into it, and a welcome one.

"Whose idea was the packing at the base of the Drunkard's?"

"Mine," Tallhart said, and did not pretend otherwise.

"It's still leaning."

"It's been leaning for three thousand years. I'd have been more worried if you straightened it." That got a laugh out of Glover, who had been braced for an inspection and was still deciding whether he'd had one.

"The salvage was the clever part. Every stone you pulled out of a tower nobody could save went back into one somebody can."

"Wasn't all us," Tallhart said.

"No. It wasn't." I had known that since the ride down, from the way the ditches had been cut around the soft ground rather than through it, and from the line of the causeway itself, which followed no route a Northern builder would have picked without help.

"Where is he?"

"Went out into the marsh at first light with four of his men," Glover said.

"Said he'd be back by nightfall. He does that most mornings, and he hasn't proven himself wrong yet — he's always back before dark." He was not wrong that night either. It was some hours after dark before I got out of the command tent. There is a point in every evening when the ledgers stop meaning anything and a man moves his eyes across numbers to avoid admitting he is finished, and I have learned to recognize it.

I left Vayon's clerk to his tallies, whistled Grey Wind up off the floor, and went out to walk the inside of the eastern wall until my head cleared. I came around the base of the tower, and there was a man sitting on a stone with his back to the wall, entirely at his ease, watching the fires of my host spread out across the causeway country. Grey Wind stopped. He did not growl, which he does at strangers, and he did not go forward to be greeted, which he does at friends.

He stood at my knee with his ears forward and waited, and that was the first thing about Howland Reed that I had to revise. The second was his size. I had been told he was small. Small in Northern terms usually means a man of ordinary build standing next to Umbers, and I had come down the whole causeway half-expecting a figure out of a story.

What sat on that stone was a slight, greying man who would have disappeared into any gathering of lesser lords without one person recalling his face afterward — and who was dressed better than I was. His coat and boots were cut from lizard-lion hide, the good belly scale, tanned to a deep green-black and fitted by someone who knew exactly what they were doing with it. The Neck sends perhaps a dozen skins of that grade south in a good year, and the merchants in White Harbor fight over them like dogs.

He had been sitting in that heat and that wet all evening and there was not a bead of sweat on him, nor any sign that he had noticed either. He rose when he saw me, unhurried, and inclined his head.

"Lord Stark."

"Lord Reed."

"Your father stood in my hall once and called me his friend in front of men who thought he was mad to." He said it plainly.

"You'll not find me sitting when a Stark walks into the light. It isn't done, and I'd not do it to you in particular."

"Then let us sit, my lord, and we'll neither of us have to out-courtesy the other in a swamp at midnight." That drew a soft chuckle from him, with a smile. He sat. I sat on the next stone along, and Grey Wind put himself between us and lay down, which, though the bond I could see, was him showing loyalty to me and getting his opinion on lord reed. For a while neither of us said anything. The fires spread out below us, and somewhere down there a man was singing badly and being encouraged by other men who were worse.

"You've seventeen years of not leaving Greywater Watch behind you," I said.

"My father never once told me why. He only said you'd come if you were needed, and that I wasn't to ask you for it."

"That sounds like Ned."

"So I won't ask what brought you out. But I'd be a fool to think it was only to help with repairs to Moat Cailin." Howland Reed smiled at that, briefly, and for the first time turned his head and looked directly at me. His eyes were the flat green-grey of standing water, and there was nothing in his face I could read at all, and I am very good at reading faces now.

"I came out because my son told me to." His son. I kept my face still. There is a particular effort involved in hearing a name you have only ever read on a page and behaving as though you are merely hearing it.

"Jojen," he said, the way a man says a word he has had cause to say carefully for years.

"He has dreams. Green dreams, the crannogmen call them. Mine were small — I dreamt of weather and of drownings, and once of your father, which is its own story. Jojen's are not small."

"He's dreamt of me."

"Not often. Not clearly. He says you're difficult to see — that when he dreams of you, something is standing in the way." He said it so nonchalantly that it was almost startling. Anywhere else in the North, talk of green dreams is a thing said low, at a hearth, by someone glancing at the door. He might have been telling me the water was up along the eastern track.

"I felt it myself when you came around that tower. I have only felt it twice in my life: once in the godswood at Greywater when my son was six years old and had just told his mother how her father was going to die. And now."

"And what is it you feel, my lord?"

"The gods in you." He shrugged, a small motion of the shoulders.

"That is not flattery, so don't take it as any. It's a description. There is more of the old gods in you than there ought to be in a man, and I would like to know how it got there, and I am not going to ask, because you would have to lie to me and I'd rather you didn't." Grey Wind's ear flicked. I have been called blessed by smallfolk, by guards, by lords in their cups and by a Magnar of the Thenns in the Old Tongue with a hundred and sixty giants behind him. I had grown comfortable with it.

This was the first time anyone had said it flatly, without wonder, the way a maester says this bone is broken.

"Your children," I said, because I wanted the ground back.

"They're not with you. I'd expected—" I stopped, because I couldn't say the end of that sentence out loud. Howland Reed watched me stop.

"You'd expected," he said.

"I'd expected a man who left his marsh for the first time in seventeen years to have brought his family with him."

"That's not what you were going to say." He said it mildly, and did not press it, and went on as though the whole exchange had not happened, which was somehow worse.

"No. They're not with me. That's the other reason I came." He turned back to the fires.

"A year ago, Jojen told his mother and me that he and Meera would be leaving. That he had a place to be. He was very certain of it — he's always very certain, it's the worst thing about him — and he said he was to go north to Winterfell, and then further north still, with a Stark who wished to walk." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The night had gone quite cold. I was aware of that in a distant way.

"I came to understand it to mean your brother," Howland said.

"Brandon. My son never told me who, and by now it hardly matters that he didn't. But a boy who could not walk, and a long road north, and my son's purpose was to see him to the end of it." He paused.

"My wife began sleeping less from that day. There were green dreamers in her family before there were any in mine, and she has never once needed convincing that they are real. She took what my son said more seriously than I did, and she was right to."

"And then Bran didn't fall," I said. Howland Reed looked at me for a long moment.

"No," he said.

"He didn't. He went to Karhold instead, and by all accounts he's been hawking and getting into trouble with boys his own age and writing letters to his brother. And four moons ago Jojen came to me and said his purpose had changed." Another pause.

"He said he was no longer to serve a Stark who wished to walk. He was to serve a Stark who wishes to fly." The singing had stopped down on the causeway. I could hear the wind coming across the standing water, and Grey Wind breathing, and my own blood. Bran was at Karhold with a hawk on his wrist. Bran could walk. Bran wished for nothing at all, being nine years old and happy, which is the rarest condition in this world. A Stark who wishes to fly. That means caged—caged and wanting out.

There was one Stark in a cage.

"Sansa," I said.

"He didn't name her." Howland kept his eyes on me.

"I'm told you are clever. I see that you are."

"Where are they?"

"South." He said it without apology.

"They left Greywater eleven weeks ago. Meera would not be talked out of going, and I'd not have got far trying. I sent eight of my own men with them — good men, quiet ones, the sort that can be in a room a while before anyone counts them. I trust my children. I do not trust the south any further than I can see into the water at Greywater." Eleven weeks. Eleven weeks put them somewhere past the God's Eye by now, perhaps further.

Two Reed children and eight marsh men who move like fog, walking into a city with a golden-haired boy on its throne and my sister in it, and not one soul in that city would look at any of them twice, because nobody looks at crannogmen. Something in my chest had come loose and was moving around. I had spent seven weeks not letting myself think properly about Sansa.

I had allowed myself exactly one line of it, and then I had put it down and picked up a ledger, because there was not one thing in the world I could do for my sister from Winterfell except march faster, and grief that cannot act becomes rot. I had a plan for King's Landing. The plan was to win the war and negotiate afterward from the top of a mountain of dead Lannisters, and the plan had a hole in it the size of a fourteen-year-old girl, and I had known that, and I had been carrying it.

And now two Reed children were going towards her, who had no reason in this world to be there, except that something older than either of us had told a boy where to go.

"You're pleased," Howland said, watching me.

"I'm hopeful. It's a habit I've been trying to break."

"Then I'll do you the kindness of helping." He stood, and nodded toward the dark line of the outer wall.

"Walk with me a way. What I've got to say isn't for a sentry's ears, and there are three of them within twenty paces who are pretending very hard not to listen." We went out through the postern and along the base of the outer wall, where the ground was firm, and the fires were only a glow behind us, and Grey Wind padded along at the water's edge.

"I've watched what you've done in the North," Howland said.

"More than you'd think. Crannogmen go where they like, and nobody counts them. Bigger roads and better ones. A town at Winterfell that's over three thousand souls now, with earthworks and drainage and houses that would make half the peasants in the Reach sick with envy. Giants sworn to your father. Wagons that come apart and go back together." He glanced sideways at me.

"Your father would be proud of you, and I say that as a man who knew exactly how hard it is to make Ned Stark proud of anything, because he never once managed it about himself. There is greatness in you. I don't think there's a man left in the North who'd argue it."

"But," I said.

"But I knew another." We walked five or six paces.

"Gifted," Howland said.

"Blessed, if you like the word — and he did. Better read than his maesters. Better with a sword than most who'd trained their whole lives at it, and he didn't much care for swords. He had a way of making men love him inside a single conversation; I watched him do it to a courtyard full of people who had every reason to hate his family. Everyone who met him came away thinking he was the best hope anyone had had in a hundred years, and they were most likely right." He did not say the name. I did not need him to.

"And somewhere in all that reading, he found something," Howland went on.

"A prophecy. Out of some old book, or some older one behind it — I never learned which, and I've stopped wanting to. What matters is what it said, or what he took it to say: that he was blessed. That his blood was. That his line had been marked out for something and he was the one standing at the end of it." He stopped walking.

"Whether it went to his head or he only carried it further than any man should have — I can't tell you. I've had seventeen years to decide, and I haven't. But I know how it finished. The blessing turned into a curse. It turned into one for everyone who stood near him, too." The wind came across the water.

"I was at the tower," he said.

"In Dorne. I went up with your father and five others, and two of us came down. I carried your aunt her water at the end, and I've never told a living soul what she said, and I'm not going to tell you." He said it without weight, which is what made it land.

"But I'll give you the shape of it. She believed him. At the start she believed him entirely — she wasn't stolen, and she wasn't a fool, whatever the songs need her to be. By the end, she hated him for it. She hated what it had cost, and she hated herself worse, because she had helped it happen and there was no undoing a single part of it. A brother. A father. A prince. Two houses burned down to the foundations. She died knowing every bit of that."

"My lord—""I haven't finished, and I'm old, and I'll not get this out twice." I closed my mouth.

"You've had two years of decisions that turned out well." He turned to face me on the path, lifted one hand, and tapped two fingers against his cheek along the line where my scar sits.

"Mostly well."

"Mostly," I agreed.

"But I'd wager everything I own that not one of them has cost you anything you couldn't bear. Every road went where you said it would. Every lord came round. Every fight, you won." He tilted his head.

"Am I wrong?" I made myself actually think about it, all the way back — Styr, the Thenns, Robert's visit, the melee, the solar, the muster — turning each one over and looking for the cost.

"No," I said.

"You're not wrong."

"Then hear the only useful thing I have for you, and I'll go to my bed and stop being tiresome. There will come a day when no decision is good. Not a hard one. Not a costly one — you've had costly, and you've paid and walked on. I mean a day when every road in front of you is bad, and you must take one anyway, and afterward you'll not be able to tell yourself you chose well, because you won't have." He let that sit.

"Men who have never had that day make one particular mistake when it comes. They assume they've misread it. They go looking for the good road that isn't there, and they look too long. That's what killed him. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't mad. He could not accept that the future had stopped agreeing with him — that the prophecy he'd thought was his own had written him out of it somewhere along the way, and he was the last man in Westeros to notice."

Somewhere behind us a picket called the hour and another answered it.

"My son's purpose changed," Howland Reed said.

"Four moons ago a boy who does not get things wrong got something wrong, because the world moved out from under his dream. Do you understand what I'm telling you?" My mouth was dry.

"If fate can change once, it can change again." He looked up at me.

"Even for you, Robb Stark." I went back to my tent some time after that, though I could not say how long I had stood on that path, halted by that last conversation. I am used to handling a conversation like that. I take what's useful, set the rest aside, and do the next thing on the list — and the next thing on the list was a supply count with Vayon's clerk and a meeting with Tallhart about the garrison.

I sat down at the camp table with the ledger open and Grey Wind's head on my foot, and I did not read a single line of it. If fate can change once, it can change again, even for you. I had built everything on one thing. Not the giants. Not the roads, the wagons, the muster, two years of gathering the North into my hand — those are tools, and tools can be replaced. I had built it on knowing what happens next. Every road I laid, I laid because I knew where the war was going.

Every man I armed, I armed against an enemy whose opening moves I could recite. I had sat in my father's solar and forged three letters in the Old Tongue and been entirely comfortable doing it, because I knew what was coming down the kingsroad at us. And Jojen Reed was never meant to dream of me at all, only of my crippled brother — but since I stopped my brother from being crippled, his dream went somewhere else instead. That is not a new fact. I caused it.

I have spent two years causing exactly that, on purpose, with a great deal of satisfaction — and I had never once followed the line all the way to its end and asked what it meant for the rest of what I think I know. And Howland Reed was wrong about the cost, but not in a way I could have said out loud to him. There was a boy I killed before he had ever done anything to me. Ramsay Snow was a bastard and a cruel one, and what he was would have come out of his father's land sooner or later — that much I am sure of.

But he had done nothing to me—nothing to mine. His crimes were already real enough, but they were his father's land's to answer for, not mine. Not yet, and perhaps not ever, not in a world I had already begun to bend. I put him in the ground anyway, for crimes he had already committed in a book I read in another life. There was a girl who also died with him on that day, but slower and by dogs.

A miller's daughter — she had a name, and I made myself learn it afterward, and she died because my men did not want to risk a mission I had sent them on, and there is no gentler way to write that down. I have not thought about her in over a year. I did not decide to stop. I stopped. And beyond the Wall there are tens of thousands of free folk who will die in the snow, and I took only one clan. One.

Out of hundreds — the Thenns, because they were the most useful, the most organized, the easiest to explain to my father and to the lords and to the Watch, because taking ten clans would have cost me a year of politics I had decided I could not spare. I told myself I would go back for the rest after the war in the south. But who knows how many hundreds — if not thousands — will be dead by the time I do. I have told myself that so often it has stopped sounding like a promise and started sounding like a receipt.

So no, my lord — nothing has cost me anything I could not bear. That is precisely the trouble. I have been paying in people I had already written off before I ever met them, and even though it could be the truth, I comforted myself by saying it was for the greater good, and it has worked so well and so consistently that I stopped counting. Sansa in King's Landing with two Reed children and eight marsh men walking toward her is a change I can be hopeful for. Fine. Good. I will take it and be glad of it.

But the same thing that moved Jojen Reed has been moving everything else, and it does not care whether I like where it lands. Somewhere between here and the Twins and King's Landing, something is coming that is in no book I have ever read, because I pushed it out of shape myself, and I will not see it until it is standing in front of me. I blew the last candle out.

I sat in a cold tent inside a rebuilt ruin with thirty-six thousand men sleeping around me, and for the first time since I woke up in this body, I truly did not know what fate would change next.