AN: Ended up writing BIW first, so will drop ToT chapter on Sunday.

Chapter 30 - Interlude - The Men of the Vale

Petyr Baelish - Days After the Trial

The Custom House stood at the heart of the King's Landing docks, and from the window of his second-storey solar, Petyr Baelish could look down upon the whole churning mess of it.

The common room below was a hive of activity. Ship captains crowded the long counters, arguing their manifests in a dozen accents, Braavosi and Tyroshi, Lyseni and Pentoshi, the lilting vowels of the Reach and the familiar flat intonation of the Valemen. Customs officials collected their tariffs and stamped their seals. Bookkeepers bent over their ledgers with inky fingers, tallying columns that turned wine and silk and spice into coin for the crown. The noise of it rose up through the floorboards, a constant murmur of commerce and complaint.

As the King's Comptroller, this was his domain. Every barrel and bale that passed through the greatest port in Westeros was weighed and counted and taxed under his authority.

A pittance, to what Petyr had in mind.

Turning from the window, he held a letter loosely in one hand, and could not help the hunger that rose in him as he looked down at it again.

His network of eyes and ears was not yet so widespread as he would have liked yet. But he had enough friends who owed him favors—several of whom had been at the tourney in Lannisport—and so the news had reached him well ahead of the common rush. 

Soon it would be everywhere. It was likely already spilling through the court up on the Red Keep, passing from mouth to mouth in the way that only the most delicious sort of scandal could.

If ever he had the good fortune to meet the man, Petyr thought, he would have to thank this Ser Galad of Dunstonbury most profusely for such a gift. Perhaps grant him seven free nights with the freshest girls in the newest establishment he had lately acquired on the Street of Silk. Seven nights. One for every knight the Woodsman had cut down in his trial.

His sham of a trial, if the letter was to be believed. A man would have to be a blind fool not to read between the lines of what was written. The Queen's work, though his friend had been careful not to say it so clearly. 

From the little Petyr had gathered in his time in King’s Landing, Cersei Lannister had all her father's ambition and none of his patience, and this had the reckless flavor of her about it. Tywin Lannister was a far better player than his daughter. The Old Lion would not have been so blunt about it, or perhaps he was simply losing his touch.

Still. It mattered little whose brilliant scheme it had been. The result was the same either way.

House Lannister, humiliated. Their prestige and their reach in the court and the wider realm diminished at a stroke, and by their own hand. Petyr could almost laugh. All the careful work Lord Tywin had done to make his family the terror of Westeros, undone in a single morning in a Casterly Rock courtyard by a common-born hedge knight.

How convenient, he thought, smiling. 

The office of Master of Coin had stood vacant for some moons now. Old Lord Penrose had grown too ill to hold it, and the council, scattered and distracted by the Greyjoy Rebellion, had never managed to settle on a name to replace him. 

Petyr had not raised the matter with Lord Jon Arryn. He had wanted to— gods, how he had wanted to—but he knew he had to be careful for now. To reach so openly for a seat on the Small Council against whatever creature the Lannisters meant to install would draw the notice of Cersei, or worse, of her father, and a man in his lowly position could not yet survive such attentions.

He had hoped, in his more optimistic hours, that Lord Jon might come to him with the offer unprompted. He was his benefactor, after all, the man who had brought him to court in the first place. But even then Petyr thought he might have hesitated. He had no true sources inside the council chamber itself. Lord Jon confided in him from time to time, but never on the matters that counted, and Petyr could not have said with certainty whether the Lannisters were even now pressing some cousin or client of theirs for the office. 

He had tried Lysa, of course, but the woman was as dull as she was besotted with him, and whatever scraps of gossip she carried to him were as useful as a eunuch in a brothel.

In the end, he had judged himself too small. Too minor a player still, without the means to shield himself from a house so mighty as the lions should he provoke them.

But now.

Now he could move without fear of a Lannister answering him with a knife in the dark. Tywin would have his hands full for months to come, working to control the damage his daughter had done, mending the family's name in a hundred quiet ways. From such a weak position, the lion would not waste any effort contesting the falcon and the stag for a council seat.

And the others who might oppose Petyr, Lord Estermont and Stannis Baratheon, were men of a certain rigid honor. Cold, humorless, unbending men. Precisely the sort who would never stoop to murder a rival over a high office. Not like the Queen. The Queen would have done it laughing.

Crossing back to his desk, his mind ran ahead of him, thinking through his next move. His fingers found the edge of the wood and drummed against it, drummed and drummed until the answer came to him. And when it did, a smile spread across his face.

The Vale. That was the key to it. 

Petyr Baelish knew his histories well. A man in his position and his lack of martial talent could not afford otherwise. Long ago, in the reign of the third Aegon, the Lady Jeyne Arryn had served in King's Landing as one of the regents to the boy king, until word came that the mountain clans were pouring down out of the peaks to burn and raid, and she had been forced to abandon her seat on the council and return home to see to the defense of her domain.

He needed Lord Jon to do the same.

For all the friends Petyr had made in his years in the capital, he had made no small number of enemies as well, and before he reached for anything so lofty as a seat on the Small Council, he needed to broaden his base of influence and quietly to tie off certain loose threads. Men who knew too much of his early dealings, men who might speak against his rise at an inconvenient moment. And to do any of it, he needed the Hand of the King out of the city.

Not dead. Not yet. For despite everything, Jon Arryn remained a just and honorable man, and just as importantly, a competent one. He ruled King's Landing with an astuteness that gave Petyr no room to work such brazen games as he had in mind, not while the old rooster still strutted the henhouse. 

Had matters been otherwise, Petyr might simply have set Lysa to slipping something bitter into her husband's evening wine and been done with it. But he still needed Jon Arryn's support, his patronage, his signature on the appointment that would raise Petyr to the council in the first place.

So he needed the man gone. Only gone. Only for a time.

And Petyr knew precisely how to arrange it.

It seemed he had yet another reason to be grateful to Ser Galad of Dunstonbury.

Lyn Corbray's death, there in the melee at Lannisport, was a shame, in its way, for Lyn had his uses. But his death would serve Petyr just as neatly. He had known Lyn well. Lyn, who had spent long years in Gulltown, where Petyr had first begun to spread his fingers into the trade of the Vale, and the two of them had come to a certain understanding. Lyn, who was a man of extravagant appetites and unholy tastes, and a chronic shortage of the coin to indulge them. Lyn, who had been his brother's only heir.

Petyr pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from the drawer and uncapped his ink. He would send two letters. One to each of two lords of the Vale, men he had cultivated over the years the way a careful gardener cultivates the vines he means one day to prune. 

He wrote in a fine, small hand, choosing each phrase with care. A suggestion here, an old grievance recalled there, a mention of certain debts and certain favors and certain matters best not committed too plainly to paper. When one knew a man's hungers, one need not command him. One need only remind him what he wanted, and gesture toward the door.

When both letters were sealed with plain wax and no crest, Petyr set down his pen and called for Lothor Brune.

The man who answered was small and stocky, with a mat of woolly grey hair and a face that no one would look at twice in a crowd. He was a freerider Petyr had taken into his service not long after coming to King's Landing, and who had proven both useful and, rarer still, loyal in the time since. Unthreatening to look upon, yes, but Petyr knew the truth of the man's usefulness, and had seen what he could do with the sword and the long knife he wore at his belt.

"These go to the Vale," Petyr said, holding out the letters, alongside a heavy purse of silver. "Take ship from the docks. Coin enough to hire passage and more. See them into the right hands, and no others."

Brune took the letters and the purse without a word, tucked both away inside his plain brown jerkin, and nodded once. Before he left the solar, Petyr told Brune his real message to one of the lords. A message he’d never be foolish enough to write down. Then the man was gone, silent and dutiful as ever, the door closing softly behind him.

Sitting a while at his desk after Brune had gone, Petyr let himself imagine it.

The Vale would burn, and Jon Arryn—dutiful, honorable Jon Arryn—would have no choice but to leave his king and his council and ride home to set his own house in order.

And then, only then, Petyr would strike.

By the time the Hand of the King returned to King's Landing, Petyr Baelish would hold the lower city in the palm of his hand. The wharves, the warehouses, the brothels, the moneylenders, the whole tangled underworld of debt and vice and whispered secrets that a man like Jon Arryn never deigned to notice until it was already wrapped around his throat.

And after that.

Rising, he went again to the window, this time to look out across the crowded roofs of the city and up the slope of Aegon's High Hill, to where the Red Keep caught the afternoon sun and glimmered the deep wet red of fresh-spilled blood.

Petyr Baelish smiled.

xxx

Jon Arryn - Weeks After the Trial

As he had done for the better part of seven years, Jon Arryn bent over the ledgers of the realm spread across his great oak writing desk.

Morning light fell grey through the high windows of the Tower of the Hand, catching the dust that drifted in the still air. The city stirred below, carts on the cobbles, the distant cries of gulls, the ceaseless murmur of half a million souls waking to another day. Jon paid it no mind. His whole attention was on the columns before him, on the accounting of coin and grain and the slow steady bleed of a crown that spent rather more freely than it earned. The Greyjoy Rebellion had emptied purses that were not full to begin with, and the sums did not improve for his staring at them.

A knock came at the door. His steward stepped in and bowed.

"My lord Hand. Lord Stannis Baratheon is without. He asks to see you."

Jon sighed and pressed two fingers to his temple, as if the pressure might drive back the weariness that had settled behind his eyes. It did not.

He had known he was coming. Young Petyr had sent a runner up from the docks the moment the Lord of Dragonstone's ships were sighted in the bay, and Stannis Baratheon was not a man to shirk his duty for so much as an hour, though he came straight from a rebellion and a moon and more at sea. Then again, neither was Jon. He had been at his desk since before the dawn broke red over King's Landing, and he suspected he would be at it long after the sun had set again.

Letting out another tired breath, he nodded to the steward. "Send him in."

The man bowed and withdrew.

A heartbeat later, Robert's younger brother came through the door, and he looked no different than Jon remembered him. Like Robert, Stannis was a large man, tall and broad through the shoulders, with piercing blue eyes and a heavy jaw. But there the likeness ended. Where Robert was loud and warm and quick to make a friend of any stranger, Stannis carried a tightness in him that ran through everything—his sinewy face, his clipped way with words, the cold distance he kept from other men. Beyond that one lowborn knight who trailed him about like a shadow, Jon could not recall ever having seen Stannis with a man he might have called a friend.

"Lord Hand," Stannis said. It was greeting enough. He did not look to be in a favorable humor, though with Stannis one could rarely tell the difference.

Jon rose from his chair and offered a smile. "Welcome back, Lord Stannis." He gestured to the seat across the desk. "You must be weary after such a journey. Please, sit. I'll have my steward bring you food and drink, if you wish it. I've not broken my own fast yet this morning."

Stannis's jaw tightened. "I shall eat later. Standing suits me well enough."

Jon sighed inwardly. Of course it did. He settled back into his own chair, since one of them might as well be comfortable.

"Where is my brother?" Stannis went on, not waiting to be asked. "I did not see his banner above the keep as we came up from the docks."

"At the Stoney Sept, I believe,” Jon told him. “When the royal party stopped at Deep Den on the road home, he sent me word that he meant to visit the town before returning to King's Landing. He said he wished to right old wrongs."

"Old wrongs." Stannis's eyes narrowed. He made a sound that might charitably have been called a snort. "Old lovers, more like. He wishes to cavort with the same whores who warmed his bed during the Rebellion, when his host lay holed up in that town." He shook his head, and Jon could hear the grinding of his teeth. "After the war—after what we found, or failed to find, of the Targaryens—I had thought he might change. I saw a glimpse of it in the Islands. As though he meant, at last, to treat his kingship the way a king ought to." A pause. "But that has never truly been Robert, has it? So be it. Better the whoring Robert than the withered husk he became once he set that crown upon his head."

Had it been any other man in the Seven Kingdoms who spoke so of the king, Jon would have named it treason and had them marched to the black cells before the words had finished leaving their mouth. But he would not do that to Robert's own brother. And certainly not when Stannis had done no more than give plain voice to thoughts Jon himself had turned over in the long dark hours of too many nights.

He chose to let it pass.

"Tell me of the Targaryens, my lord. What did you find?"

"Nothing." Stannis spat the word like something foul. 

Then he told the whole of it, how he had scoured the seas from Lys to Tyrosh and back again, chasing rumors and shadows both. How he had sent ships to every rock and reef and spit of sand on the Stepstones large enough to hide a galley behind. How he had even dispatched his Onion Knight to Planky Town and Sunspear under a false flag, to be certain the Martells were not sheltering the dragonspawn behind their high red walls and their prince's silence. 

"And yet, nothing," Stannis finished, his brows drawn tight and hard. "It is as if they are ghosts. As if they sailed past King's Landing to spit in our faces and then vanished into the sea foam."

Jon nodded slowly. "I have sent my own men to the Free Cities of the Narrow Sea. From Lorath and Braavos in the north down to Pentos and Myr in the south, and even so far as Volantis." He spread his weathered hands. "For anything further east than that, we must rely upon Lord Varys and his little birds. And the eunuch has had nothing to bring me. No whisper from Norvos or Qohor, nothing out of Slaver's Bay. If the Targaryens are gathering strength in the east, they are doing it in a silence I cannot pierce."

"The Spider's words are worth as much as mud, my lord," Stannis said flatly.

"Perhaps. But he is skilled at his craft, whatever else may be said of him. And in all the years of Robert's reign he has never once shown himself disloyal."

Stannis was quiet a moment. Then: "And what of the Queen's loyalties?"

Jon paused. "What of them, my lord?"

"Ser Davos heard strange rumors when he put in at Dorne. Rumors of a Lannister trial. A trial of seven, of all mad things."

For a moment, Jon nearly laughed aloud, and had to school the impulse from his face. Stannis had been at sea a full turn of the moon and more, he reminded himself. It was entirely possible that the Lord of Dragonstone and his sailors were the only men left in all of Westeros who had not heard the tale of Ser Galad of Dunstonbury and the seven knights he had faced alone. The Queen's seven, some had taken to whispering, though never quite loud enough to be called to account for it.

So Jon told him.

He told it plainly, as the letters and the men who’d already returned ahead of Robert had told it to him. How a common-born knight named Ser Galad of Dunstonbury—the Woodsman Knight, famed already for his deeds at Harlaw and Grey Garden during the rebellion—had come to the tourney at Lannisport and refused to sell his Valyrian steel blade to Lord Tywin Lannister himself. How he had gone on to sweep the archery contest, to triumph in the grand melee against the finest knights of the realm and the king besides, and to unhorse Ser Jaime Lannister in the lists before the eyes of all. And how, in the aftermath of all this, Ser Amory Lorch, a Lannister knight, had risen to accuse the man of monstrous crimes, murder and slavery both, with Ser Meryn Trant and Ser Mandon Moore lending their white cloaks to swear to the truth of it.

Jon did not name the Queen as the architect of the scheme. He did not have to. Stannis knew well enough whose creatures Trant and Lorch had always been.

Then he spoke of the trial itself. Of how Ser Boros Blount and three others had joined the accusers to make up the sacred number of seven, and of how the accused knight, offered his choice of champions from half the lords of the realm, all of whom had rushed to stand for him, had chosen instead to fight the trial alone. One man against seven. And of how that one man had won, cutting down all seven in what every letter that reached Jon's desk described as the most spectacular display of swordsmanship the Seven Kingdoms had witnessed in living memory.

It was, Jon reflected with a flicker of dark amusement, a rare thing indeed to see Stannis Baratheon slack-jawed. But slack-jawed the man was, by the time Jon had finished.

"That," Stannis said at last, "is a hard story to believe." He worked his mouth for a moment, teeth still grinding. "Though I confess it does not surprise me that men of Robert's Kingsguard would stoop so low. Trant and Blount especially. I never understood how such creatures came to wear the white at all." He shook his head slowly. "Nor does it take me aback that the Lannisters would have a hand in it."

"It is a tall tale," Jon agreed. "But one that half the lords of the realm witnessed with their own eyes, and no small number of them have seen fit to describe to me in the most exhaustive detail."

"Three of the Kingsguard." Stannis said it slowly, as though the number itself offended him. He shook his head again.

Jon could hardly blame him for it. He scarcely believed it himself, even now, a month gone and a dozen accounts later.

"We shall need to find replacements," Jon said. "The sooner the better. Three white cloaks cannot sit empty for long, not with dragons stirring across the sea."

"Ones loyal to the king," Stannis said. "Truly loyal."

"Indeed." Jon met the younger man's hard blue eyes. "And there are still other appointments to be made besides. The office of Master of Coin has stood vacant these past moons."

He watched the understanding sharpen in Stannis's face. Neither of them wanted to see another creature of Casterly Rock wearing white, much less installed at the council table. On that much, at least, the Lord of Dragonstone and the Hand of the King were of one mind.

"So there are," Stannis said.

They spoke pleasantries a while longer, though with Stannis Baratheon a pleasantries meant only a handful of grunts and a curt promise to work in common cause on the matters before them. Then the man took his leave, as stiff and unbending on his way out as he had been coming in, and the door closed behind him.

Jon sank back into his chair with another sigh, feeling the full weight of his years settle over him.

Whether to right old wrongs or to revisit old whores, he hoped Robert would not linger long at the Stoney Sept. There was work to be done, and precious little time in which to do it. Whatever course they set in the months to come, House Lannister would have scant say in the making of it—not with the shame of Lannisport still fresh, not with Tywin's whole attention bent to mending his family's name. The iron was hot. They would be fools not to strike it.

Stannis would not stand with him on the matter of the Master of Coin, Jon knew. The man would throw his weight behind Lord Estermont's candidate, or someone else of the Stormlands. But a Stormlander was better by far than a Lannister crony, and Jon could live with that outcome should it come to it.

Though in truth, he had someone else in mind entirely.

Before he could return to his ledgers, another knock sounded at the door, and his steward entered bearing a letter. Jon broke the seal and read it through quickly, then set it aside on the desk with a small shake of his head.

Two of his Vale lords, seeking his blessing to join their houses in marriage. A trifling thing, and a hasty one—the arrangement had clearly been struck in some rush—but he could well enough imagine the reasons behind it, and he would give his blessing gladly. It was the sort of small ordinary matter that reminded a man there was still a realm of living people beneath all his columns of coin. 

As the Lord of the Eyrie, he would have liked to attend, of course. But there was no time for such journeys now, not with all that already pressed upon him, and so he would send a letter of well-wishes in his stead and trust it to serve.

That done, Jon Arryn turned back to his desk. To the work he had been doing every day for seven long years, of ruling the Seven Kingdoms in all but name, while the man who wore the crown chased ghosts and old lovers across the width of Westeros.

Stannis's words drifted back to him. I had thought he might change. I saw a glimpse of it in the Islands.

If only it were true, Jon thought, dipping his pen. If only Robert could come back from this war a king in more than name. Then perhaps Jon Arryn might have set down these ledgers at last, and rested, and let a younger man drown himself in the endless sums of a kingdom's keeping.

If only.

xxx

Timett son of Timett - Months After the Trial

It was the hour of the wolf, and they were singing.

Somewhere out in the dense black wood that ringed the clearing, one raised its voice to the moon, long and mournful, and half a dozen others answered from the dark hollows of the foothills. The sound rolled down from the roots of the mother mountains and filled the night.

Once, when Timett was still a boy, that song might have set his heart to pounding. He would have run to his mother's side and burrowed beneath the piled pelts until the howling stopped and the grey light of morning crept into their cave. But Timett was a boy no longer. He stood among warriors now. His face held the same hard scowl as the men who flanked him, and he did not so much as glance toward the trees.

Three of them had come down from the heights. All red hands of the Burned Men. The two beside him—Makkor son of Makkor and Jogor son of Tor—were older than Timett by ten years and more, seasoned raiders with a dozen burned villages and a hundred lowlander throats behind them. Grim men, scarred men, each of them missing an ear or the fingers of a hand, given willingly to the fire as the customs of their clan demanded.

But, for all his three-and-ten years, Timett knew himself no lesser than either of them.

The elders had made it so. They had named him a red hand only a few moons past—the youngest the Burned Men had ever raised to that rank in all the long history of the tribe—after he had knelt before them at his rite of manhood and pressed the glowing edge of a heated knife to his own eye until the sight of it burst and ran and the socket was left a black and ruined pit. 

He had not screamed. He had not wept. The elders had looked upon what he had done to himself and named him a man and a red hand both, there and then, and Timett had carried the pride of it in his chest like a hot coal ever since.

Across the clearing, three men of the Stone Crows stood beneath the spreading black limbs of an old oak. One of them had his eyes on the Burned Men, and had for some while.

Makkor glared back at him. "I'm gettin' tired o' this shit. The fuck you been starin' at me for, eh?"

The Stone Crow did not so much as flinch. He shrugged, slow and easy. "Not your ugly face, burned cunt."

Makkor's growl came from deep in his chest. His hand dropped toward the flanged mace hanging at his waist. But Jogor, the oldest of the three of them and the coolest of head, stepped in front of him before the mace could clear its ring.

"Enough, Makkor." Then he raised his voice toward the men beneath the oak. "But he's right, Gunthor. Where is your lowlander friend? We did not climb down out of the mountains to stand about in the cold and trade insults with Crows."

Gunthor son of Gurn did not stir from where he sat upon a thick knuckle of exposed root. His horned helmet rested on the ground beside him, the moonlight running silver along its curves. And across his lap, as they hung from the waists of the two Stone Crows who stood at his flanks, lay the very reason the elders of Timett’s clan had sent their red hands down to this clearing to meet with a lowland lordling's man.

Swords.

Good swords of lowlander castle-steel, straight and keen and worth more than a warrior's whole life of raiding small, undefended villages. And the hauberks the Crows wore under their furs were of the same make, fine ringmail, shining pale when it showed under the moon. Timett had never in his life seen so much good steel in one place. Neither, he thought, had any warrior of the Burned Men in living memory.

"You ever stalked game, Makkor son of Makkor?" Gunthor asked. His voice was flat, incurious.

Makkor spat into the leaves. "Better than any Crow."

"I doubt it." Gunthor shook his head slowly. "Sometimes, when you're stalking the big game, you have to sit. And wait. And do nothing at all while the animal walks to you on its own legs." He let the words settle. "This is that. And it will be the biggest game these mountains have ever brought down."

Makkor had no answer to give. His jaw worked, but nothing came of it. After a moment, Jogor gave the Stone Crow leader a slow nod.

Something twisted in Timett's belly at that, a hot, coiling thing that was half terror and half a fierce and rising joy. He did not fully understand what these older men spoke of, not yet. But he understood enough to know that it was vast. That it was more than a raid, more than a few burned huts and a handful of stolen women and a night's worth of lowlander blood. 

Puffing out his chest, he drew himself up to his full height, which was greater than most grown men's already, and set his one good eye hard against the dark. He would not have these warriors think the boy among them was frightened. He would not have them think the youngest red hand in the tribe's history was any less a man than they.

It was another half-hour before the footsteps came.

They heard him before they saw him, a soft, deliberate tread crossing the clearing from the far treeline before he stepped into the moonlight, and Timett saw him plain.

He was clad in the clothes and mail of a lowland warrior, but he was no towering knight of the sort the songs of the valley folk boasted. He was stocky and short. Shorter by a half foot, even, than Timett himself. A rustle of grey hair sat above an unimpressive face. 

And yet Timett did not feel the contempt he expected to feel. There was a sharpness to the little man's eyes, a hard glint that caught the moon as he stood there alone before six of them, and that glint gave Timett pause. A man who walked unhurried into a gathering of six mountain warriors as though he strolled through his own hall was not prey that had wandered lost into the wood.

Rising from his root, Gunthor took up his horned helm, settled it on his head, and nodded to them. The clansmen walked out together then, and the two parties came together in the middle of the clearing.

Gunthor wasted no words now that the man had come. "When will it be, lowlander?"

"Not long," the little man said. His voice was quiet and flat. "A moon's turn, perhaps."

"The steel?"

"You'll have another half a hundred swords and axeblades, and twice that number of hauberks, before the day comes. The rest you’ll have to take yourselves."

Gunthor nodded slowly. "And the castle?"

"If you take it, it's yours." The man gave a small shrug, as though giving away a castle were a matter of no consequence to him at all.

He stepped closer then, drawing from within his coat a folded square of cloth which he flicked through the air toward the Stone Crow. Gunthor's hand snapped up and caught it before it could fall.

With his one eye, Timett caught only a glimpse of some sigil stitched into it as Gunthor turned it in the moonlight to inspect it, before he thrust the cloth away into his furs and it was gone.

"This will be him?" Gunthor asked.

The little man nodded. "There'll be plenty of others gathered for the wedding. Lords and ladies and their households, come to see the match made. You can do with them what you like, once it's done."

Timett knew well enough what that meant. The women would be taken up the mountains and made into wives, to bear strong sons for the clans. The men would be put to the knife, as was right and proper. That was the way of things. That was how the Burned Men had always dealt with the soft folk of the valleys, when they could catch them.

Without another word, the little grey man turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come. They watched in silence until the dark of the wood swallowed him whole.

Just as unhurried, Gunthor made to leave as well, and his two Crows fell in at his sides.

Makkor caught him by the arm.

His face had been growing darker and darker through all of it, and now the words burst out of him. "The fuck was that?"

Gunthor frowned down at the hand on his arm. "It's done. What else d’you want?"

"You fuckin' stupid cunt." Makkor's voice was a low snarl. "You think these lowlanders keep their word? You think, once we've spilled our blood taking their castle for them, they'll just stand aside and let us keep it? Far as I can see, you're bein' played for a fool, Crow. Played, and sendin' us all up to the slaughter with you."

Fast as a striking shadow cat, Gunthor's free hand shot out and closed around Makkor's throat.

The Burned Man gasped, both his hands flying up to claw at the iron grip crushing his windpipe. Jogor stepped back and dropped a hand to the axe at his belt, and before Timett could so much as reach for his own knife, two lengths of bright lowlander steel were leveled at his chest and Jogor's, the swords of the two other Stone Crows coming up quick and silent from beneath their furs.

Timett froze, his heart hammering against his ribs, his single eye wide.

"You're the only fool standing in this clearing, Makkor son of Makkor," Gunthor said. His voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper, and somehow that was more terrible than any shout. "Who told you I was trusting these lowlanders? Who told you it would be us bleeding for them, and not them bleeding for us?" His fingers tightened, and Makkor's face went dark. "Who says we won't be the ones to put the knife in their backs, when the day's work is done and the blood is up?"

Then he opened his hand and shoved. Makkor stumbled backward and sat down hard in the leaf-litter, coughing and gasping and clutching at his bruised throat.

Gunthor looked down at him, and past him, at Jogor, and at last at Timett. He met the man’s eyes with his single one and did not look away, though his heart still hammered and his knife was still half-drawn and forgotten in his fist. He made himself hold the gaze. He would not be the one to flinch.

"Mark my words, all of you." The Stone Crow's voice carried low across the clearing, and as though they too had stopped to listen, the wolves had gone silent in the wood. "When this thing is done, the mothers of every tribe in these mountains will never go hungry again. Never again will the clans hide in their caves and tremble at the sound of a lowlander knight's horse upon the stone. And it will not be one castle we keep in the end."

His eyes glittered in the shadow of his horned helm.

"It will be the whole of the Vale in our fist."