[ASOIAF SI] The Gilded Stag: A Ruthless Joffrey Uplift | Chapter 36: TYRION III (Public) (Patreon)

The draft in the Lord Commander’s solar carried the true, heavy breath of Castle Black—a thick soup of old woodsmoke, damp wool, and the sour tang of stale ale, all underlying the sharp, clean bite of the frost that bled from the stone. In the hearth, logs of green pine spat and hissed, fighting the damp peat that smoldered beneath them. A pair of cheap tallow candles sat in their pooling grease on the heavy oak table, sputtering as the tallow gave off the foul, heavy scent of rendered beef fat. The single window was but a narrow iron grate covered by a sheet of oiled parchment, stretched taut and rattling like a dying man’s teeth whenever the northern wind gusted across the yard.

Tyrion Lannister used his knife to turn over a slab of salt beef that had turned the slate-grey of an old gravestone in its brine cask. It was as tough as an old boot-heel, swimming in a congealed white skim. He let his short legs dangle from the high-backed seat of black oak, his mismatched eyes squinting through the dim, smoky air.

Across the table, Jeor Mormont sat buried in a shaggy coat of black bear-skin that made his great bald head look like a boulder rising from a hillside. The Old Bear picked up his scarred wooden tankard, drank a long swallow of the thin, sharp ale, and wiped his grey beard with the back of a calloused hand.

To the Lord Commander’s right, Bowen Marsh sat with three cracked slates and a goose-quill, his round face pinched by the cold, his fingers stained a deep, permanent black from the ink-horn at his belt. Ser Alliser Thorne remained by the hearth, his arms crossed tightly over a jerkin of boiled leather. Thorne’s dark eyes were fixed on Tyrion, glittering with an old, Crownlander malice that had survived every winter the Wall could throw at him.

In the shadowed corner, near the stack of dry peat, Maester Aemon sat so still his breathing made no sound at all, his blind, milky eyes turned toward the guttering tallow.

“This is the bounty that defends the realms of men, Lannister,” Mormont rumbled, his voice a gravelly rasp that seemed to vibrate within his shaggy furs. He gestured with his tankard toward the grey meat. “Beef salted when the Greyjoy wore his crown, and pease-bread that requires a mallet to break. While the lords of the Reach drink their arbor gold and your brother Jaime rides through the sun in his gilded plate, my brothers freeze on top of the ice.”

Tyrion did not offer the sharp jest that rose to his tongue. A turn of the moon ago, before he took ship from the Blackwater, he might have told the Lord Commander that a man who chose to live with crows should not complain when his meat tasted of carrion. But that Tyrion had been left behind in King’s Landing. He had spent his days auditing the hoarded silver Petyr Baelish had hidden in his false ledgers, watching his golden-haired nephew Joffrey reshape the capital with the heavy, unyielding hand of a master smith.

Joffrey had not given him a single scroll of signed edicts before he rode north. He had given him something heavier: an ironclad set of verbal parameters, spoken in the quiet of the Red Keep’s solar. “Give them what they need to hold the ice, Uncle,” the Prince had told him, his young voice already carrying the weight of a sovereign. “But make them buy every bushel.”

“The beef has a certain durable look to it, Lord Commander,” Tyrion said softly, setting his knife down against the dark grain of the oak. “A man might sole his boots with it, if the wildlings steal his leather.”

Ser Alliser Thorne let out a short, dry snort from the hearth. “The dwarf brings us riddles from the court. Small wonder. His lord father sent me to this ditch for keeping my oath to the king, while House Lannister crept through the gates of the city with drawn swords.”

“Ser Alliser,” Benjen Stark said from the doorway. He had entered without a sound, his long face grim beneath a hood of dark wool, the white crust of the snow still clinging to the shoulders of his black cloak. “The Lannisters did not salt the beef in the cellars. The Lord Commander speaks of our survival.”

Mormont slammed his heavy, knotty fist onto the table. The tankards jumped, and a splash of grease smeared across Bowen Marsh’s cleanest slate. “I speak of our graves, Benjen! From the Shadow Tower to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, we have three hundred miles of ice, and less than a thousand men to hold it. The winter tallies are done, and the Lord Steward has the reckoning.”

Bowen Marsh shifted on his bench, his ink-horn clinking against his belt. He looked at his slates with a hesitant, watery eye. “Seven hundred and ninety-nine, Lord Commander. We lost three to the flux at the Westwatch last week, and two more went over the ice during the night patrol.”

Tyrion leaned back into the leather of his seat, his eyes narrowing as he watched the three leaders of the Watch. “Seven hundred and ninety-nine,” he repeated. “And how many bushels of grain does a brother require to stand his watch through a turn of the moon, Lord Steward? How many yards of heavy wool? How many bars of iron for the forge?”

“More than we have,” Marsh muttered, his quill scratching a jagged mark across the stone. “The grain in the western silos is already turning green with the damp. The smith tells me the spades are so thin they split when they hit the frozen earth, and Ser Alliser’s boys are training with ash-staves because we cannot afford to blunt the steel blades we have left.”

Tyrion let the silence stretch. He listened to the wind clawing at the oiled parchment of the window, a long, low howl that seemed to come from the very heart of the Haunted Forest.

“Then let us speak of a trade,” Tyrion said, his voice dropping into the quiet, dry cadence of a merchant. “My nephew, the Prince, is currently building forty great war galleys in the shipyards of the Blackwater. The Crown requires straight pine for the oars and masts, and old oak for the hulls. The Haunted Forest has trees that have stood since the Dawn Age, and their roots sit right above the wharves of Eastwatch.”

Mormont’s grey brows drew together until they met above his broken nose. “You want my rangers to turn into wood-cutters? We are the shields that guard the realms of men, Lannister, not a guild of carpenters from the Free Cities.”

“The Prince has no need of carpenters,” Tyrion said. “He has built massive stone curing chambers along the banks of the Blackwater—great kilns that bake the green moisture out of pine in a matter of weeks. But the freezing air of the North creates a slow-growth timber, a wood so dense it will not split when the rams hit the hull. For every hundred cords of seasoned pine or straight oak your men bring down to the royal docks at Eastwatch, the Crown will credit the Watch with twenty bushels of Southern wheat, five barrels of salt pork, and three bars of forged steel from the Westerlands.”

Bowen Marsh looked up so fast his quill sprayed a line of black drops across the table. “Twenty bushels? My lord, twenty bushels for a hundred cords is... the labor alone would take twenty rangers away from the patrols. The gales along the coast are fierce, and if a ship is lost—”

“If a ship is lost, the Crown bears the loss of the cargo,” Tyrion said, his voice turning as cold as his father’s coin. “But twenty bushels is what the Prince authorized me to offer. The transport ships must brave the pirates and the autumn storms in the Narrow Sea, and the freight is twice the value of the wood while it sits rotting in your forest.”

“Twenty is a beggar’s pittance,” Mormont growled, his great hand tightening around his wooden tankard until the knuckles went white. “My men would spend their days swinging axes instead of swords, and for what? A few sacks of flour that will be sour before the winter turns? We need fifty bushels for every hundred cords, Lannister. And we need castle-forged steel, not iron from your scrap-heaps.”

Tyrion watched the Old Bear’s eyes. Joffrey had given him a ceiling—he could go as high as forty bushels if the timber included the dark, dense ironwood from the deep valleys—but the Prince had told him to make them sweat for every grain.

“Thirty,” Tyrion countered, after a long, calculated pause. “Thirty bushels of wheat, and the steel shall be forged blades from Lannisport, tempered for war, not hoes. But in return, the Watch must include ten cords of ironwood with every hundred of pine. My nephew requires the ironwood for the internal frames of his great rams, and he will have nothing less.”

Mormont looked at Benjen Stark, who gave a slow, measured nod. “The ironwood grows thick in the valleys behind the Long Barrow,” the First Ranger said. “It is hard work to fell it, but the Lannisport steel would keep the recruits from dying with cracked blades in their hands.”

“Forty,” Bowen Marsh muttered, his fingers working furiously over his slates. “If we give you the ironwood, we must have forty bushels, my lord. Otherwise, the ledger will not balance against the winter coat allocations.”

Tyrion sighed, a small, weary sound that made him look like he was giving away his own life’s blood. “Thirty-five bushels of wheat, seven barrels of pork, and the Lannisport steel. Not a grain more, Lord Steward, or I shall have to tell the Prince that his uncle is a fool who allows old crows to pluck his feathers.”

Mormont grunted, a sound that might have been agreement. “Thirty-five, then. But the steel must arrive with the first timber ship, or the axes will stay in the armory.”

“The Prince’s word is as heavy as his hammer,” Tyrion said smoothly. “The first convoy is already gathering at White Harbor. It will sail before the moon turns.”

He turned his mind to the second boundary Joffrey had drawn for him. The timber was for the fleet, but the Wall needed flesh to hold the steel.

“The Prince has also given me leave to discuss your empty castles,” Tyrion continued, looking around the table. “The dungeons of King’s Landing are full to bursting since the Crown’s new Master of Whisperers took his seat in the black cells. A thorough man, that one. He leaves no stone unturned in the city's underbelly. We have three hundred men—thieves, poachers, and ruined sellswords—waiting in irons at the Mud Gate.”

Mormont’s eyes lit with a sudden, sharp hunger. “Three hundred? Send them. We will put them in black before the frost gets their toes.”

“They are yours,” Tyrion said. “But they are common stock. Cutpurses from the Street of Silver and drunks from the stews. If you want the skilled hands—the master masons who can rebuild the walls of your ruined keeps, the blacksmiths who know how to temper a horse-shoe, the seasoned poachers from the Kingswood who can find meat in a blizzard—the price is different.”

Ser Alliser Thorne stepped out of the shadows, his voice dripping with venom. “A Lannister always names a price. You would sell us the very scum of your dungeons, dwarf? We are the Night’s Watch, not a market in Tyrosh.”

“The master masons chose the black over the headsman’s axe because they were caught laundering coin for Petyr Baelish,” Tyrion said, his voice dropping into a cold, hard register that silenced the knight. “They are convicts, Ser Alliser, but they are valuable labor. The Crown does not gift them for free. If you want twenty master builders and five blacksmiths from the cells, they will take the vows and join your Order of Builders. But the Watch must add a tribute to every timber shipment. Twenty premium shadowcat pelts and fifty bear hides, delivered to Eastwatch for the Essosi trade.”

Bowen Marsh groaned. “Shadowcats? My lord, the rangers must risk their lives in the high passes to take them.”

“Then they will be very careful,” Tyrion said with a small, crooked smile. “A master mason can repair a curtain wall that keeps out ten thousand wildlings. A shadowcat pelt only keeps one ranger warm. Decide which you value more.”

Mormont growled, but he nodded. “The hides will be delivered, Lannister. But if the masons do not know how to lay stone in the frost, I will hang them from the top of the Wall myself.”

“They will lay the stone as they are told, Lord Commander,” Tyrion said. “Now, let us speak of the Gift. The New Gift, specifically. Fifty leagues of the most fertile land in the North, and it sits as empty as a tavern at dawn.”

Benjen Stark’s eyes narrowed. “The smallfolk fled south forty years ago, my lord. The wildling raiders scaled the ice where the castles were empty and burned every roof from here to the Last Hearth. No man will plow a field when he knows his throat will be cut before the harvest.”

“Then we must give them a plow that can kill,” Tyrion said. He leaned forward, his hands flat on the oak table, his eyes wide and serious in the candlelight. “The Prince wishes to grant charters. Not to criminals, and not to men who take your vows. We will offer fifty acres of the New Gift to second and third sons of minor nobility—from the North and the South alike—and to landless hedge knights who have nothing but a horse and a rusted mail shirt. We will give them a stone roof, a plowshare, and five years of tax-free harvest.”

The room went dead silent. Even Maester Aemon seemed to tilt his head closer, his blind eyes straining toward Tyrion’s voice.

“A charter?” Mormont said, his voice rising in disbelief. “You want to build towns in our lands? The Gift belongs to the Night’s Watch, Lannister! It was given by the Old Kings and Queen Alysanne to feed the black brothers, not to provide lordships for Southern adventurers.”

“They will have no lordships,” Tyrion said sharply. “They will hold the land on a strict condition: every man under the charter must serve five years as a trained militia for the Wall. They will wear no black, they may take wives, and they may raise sons to inherit their plows. But when the wildlings come, they will ride as your vanguard. They will defend their own crops, Lord Commander, and because they have wives and children behind them, they will fight like demons to keep the wildlings from crossing their fields.”

Thorne sneered, his hand dropping to his pommel. “Green boys. Soft summer knights who think a sword is for winning ribbons from highborn maids. They will freeze before the autumn turns, and we will be left to bury their pampered bones while the wildlings take their horses.”

“A man who has nothing but his sword is never soft, Ser Alliser,” Tyrion countered, his eyes locking onto the knight's. “He is desperate. And a desperate knight with fifty acres of black soil is a more reliable shield than a thief you forced to take the black at the point of a spear. The thief dreams of running south the moment the sun goes down. The settler knows that if he runs, he loses everything he owns.”

Benjen Stark leaned his back against the timber door, his arms crossed over his chest. “The idea has the look of a Southern court about it, Tyrion. But the North is old, and our neighbors have long memories. If you place a settlement on the upper forks of the Last River, Greatjon Umber will see it from his towers. The Umbers have used those lands for grazing since the Long Night, whatever the old treaties say. The Greatjon will not sit idly by while Southern craftsmen build mills on a river he considers his own. You will start a border feud before the first seed is in the earth.”

Tyrion smiled, a tiny, sharp expression that didn't reach his eyes. “Then we shall not touch the Last River, First Ranger. My nephew has no desire to anger the Lord of Last Hearth. Look further west.” He pointed his short, stubby finger at the center of the oak table as if a map were carved into the grain. “Queenscrown.”

Mormont grunted. “The old tower in the lake? It’s a ghost town. The smallfolk left it before I was born.”

“The land is excellent,” Tyrion said. “The old queen’s apple orchards still bear fruit, even after decades of neglect. The soil is rich enough for barley and winter cabbage. And more importantly, it is safe.”

“Safe?” Thorne mocked. “Safe from what? The frost?”

“Safe from a wildling raid,” Tyrion said, his voice dropping into the deliberate, measured tone of a commander explaining a siege lines. “A band of raiders does not carry ladders or siege engines, Ser Alliser. They do not build fleets of ships. They rely on speed, stealth, and soft targets. Queenscrown has a stout stone tower sitting in the middle of a deep, cold lake. The only way onto that island is a hidden, zigzagging causeway that sits two inches beneath the water. If a man does not know the path, he falls into the deep, and in your Northern waters, a wet man is a dead man in five minutes.”

He looked back to Mormont. “We will limit the trial to fifty families. We will send masons to rebuild the village walls on the shore, and if the crows cry alarm, the settlers do not flee south. They walk across the water into a three-story stone keep, pull up the draw-plank, and rain crossbow bolts from the battlements until your rangers arrive from Castle Black. If they hold Queenscrown for five years, we populate the rest of the Gift. If they freeze or flee, the Watch keeps the stone walls and the cleared fields, and the Crown drops the charter.”

Mormont sat in silence, his massive fingers drumming a slow, heavy rhythm against his wooden tankard. The old man was weighing the pride of his ancient order against the cold, hard reality of his empty larder and his crumbling walls.

“And what of their law?” Benjen Stark asked, his grey eyes fixed on Tyrion’s face. “If a Southern knight kills a brother of the Watch at Queenscrown, who holds the high justice? If your settlers steal from our granaries, who tries them? The Lord Commander’s word is the only law within the Gift, Lannister. We will not have a royal magistrate setting up a bench under the shadow of the Wall.”

Tyrion knew this was the bridge that could break under them. Joffrey had told him to protect the Crown’s right to govern its subjects, but he had also told him that a law that cannot be enforced is nothing but ink on sheepskin.

“We divide the book, First Ranger,” Tyrion said, his voice steady. “For any crime committed against a black brother, or for any man who attempts to desert the Wall through the settlement, the Lord Commander’s word remains the absolute law of the land. You may hang them from your timbers or throw them in your ice cells as you see fit. But for civil arguments—for a dispute over a fence line between two farmers, for a broken contract between a shoemaker and a weaver, or for a theft committed by one settler against another—the Crown's appointed bailiff will hold the keys and administer the judgment. The Watch has enough to do guarding the ice without spending its days settling arguments over stolen chickens.”

Mormont looked toward the corner where Maester Aemon sat. The old, blind man had not spoken a word since the meal began, but now he leaned his head forward, his white hair gleaming like frost in the shadows.

“The boy speaks with his father’s tongue, Jeor,” Aemon said, his voice a soft, dry rasp that seemed to quiet the wind outside. “But he carries a hard truth in his hand. The Watch is dying. We are an old tree whose roots are rotting in the earth, and if we do not allow new soil to be packed around us, the first great gale of winter will tip us into the mud. Let them have their tower, Jeor. Let us see if the Southern seed can grow in our frost.”

Mormont let out a long, ragged breath that sounded like a heavy bellows. He looked at Tyrion, his face a mask of grim, defensive pride.

“Fifty families,” the Old Bear growled. “No more. And if one of your Southern lords brings a priest who tries to chop down a heart tree in the Gift, I will put his head on a spike at the gate, Lannister, royal bailiff or no.”

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