Chapter 34: The Price of Miracles
The return to Harrenhal was a grim and surreal triumph. At the head of the victorious army marched Eddard Stark, his face a mask of stone. Behind him, Thor walked with a heavy, deliberate tread, Stormbreaker resting on his shoulder. And between them, dragged in a hastily constructed cage on a cart, was the spoils of their impossible victory: Ser Gregor Clegane.
He was no longer the Mountain That Rides. He was a naked, shivering, gibbering giant, his mind shattered by a power it could not comprehend. His eyes were wide with a permanent, unseeing terror, and he would flinch and whimper at the slightest sound. The men of the Protector's Guard and the allied Riverlords looked at him not with hatred, but with a kind of horrified awe. The monster had been unmade.
As they passed through the great gates of Harrenhal, a roar went up from the freed prisoners and the smallfolk who had taken refuge there. They cheered for Lord Stark, their liberator. They fell to their knees at the sight of Thor, their god-protector. And they jeered and threw stones at the caged, broken man who had been the source of all their suffering. Victory had a taste, and for the people of the Riverlands, it tasted of long-overdue vengeance.
That evening, the Hall of a Hundred Hearths was filled to capacity. The Riverlords, their numbers swelling as more houses rallied to the Stark banner, were clamoring for blood.
"Hang him!" Lord Blackwood demanded, his face purple with rage. "No, hanging is too good for him. I want him drawn and quartered! I want to feed his entrails to the dogs he kept!"
"He burned my fields and put the people of my village to the sword!" cried a lesser lord. "I want his head on a spike above the gates of my castle!"
The calls for vengeance were a tidal wave of hatred, and Ned Stark let it wash over him. He stood before them, a figure of calm authority, and waited for the fury to subside. Thor stood behind him, a silent shadow, his presence a tangible weight that slowly brought order to the chaos.
When the hall had quieted, Ned spoke. "I understand your anger," he said, his voice resonating with a quiet power. "Every man in this room has lost someone to the butchery of this man. And justice will be done. But it will be the King's Justice. Not the revenge of a mob."
"He is a monster, not a man!" Lord Piper shouted. "He deserves a monster's death!"
"He is a knight, sworn to House Lannister," Ned corrected him, his voice cold as iron. "And he will be judged as one. He will be given a trial. We will not answer his lawless savagery with our own. We will show the realm that here, in the heart of a war, the law still has meaning."
The decision was not universally popular, but Ned's authority, backed by the undeniable power of Thor, was absolute. The trial of Ser Gregor Clegane was set for the following day. It would be a demonstration, not just of justice, but of the legitimacy of Ned's rule as Protector of the Realm.
The news of the Mountain's defeat and capture spread faster than any raven could fly. It was a story that defied belief, and so it was believed all the more readily in a land that had grown desperate for miracles.
In the Lannister Camp
Tywin Lannister received the news in his command tent. He listened without expression as a terrified, trembling scout recounted the impossible tale: the sky turning black, the lightning bolt that harmed no one but melted a knight's armor from his body, the great Ser Gregor fleeing like a naked child.
When the scout was finished, Tywin calmly dismissed him. He then turned to his brother, Ser Kevan Lannister, and the other commanders assembled around his campaign map. They stared at him, their faces pale, waiting for the explosion of rage. It never came.
Tywin Lannister did not rage. He calculated. He stared at his map, at the neat lines of his planned conquest of the Riverlands, and he saw, with a cold, terrifying clarity, that it was all meaningless. His strategy was based on a world that no longer existed. He was playing cyvasse, and his opponent was moving pieces he couldn't see, following rules he didn't know.
"He has an army in our rear," Tywin said, his voice a low, dangerous whisper. "He took Harrenhal without a siege. He defeated Gregor without a battle. This… Thor… is not a man. He is a weapon. A weapon against which we have no defense."
"What are your orders, my lord?" Kevan asked, his voice trembling slightly.
Tywin's pale green eyes, so like his daughter's, were chips of ice. "The strategy has changed," he said. "The scorched-earth campaign ends. We are no longer the hunters. We are the prey." He tapped a finger on the map, far to the south. "Pull back our forces. All of them. We will consolidate our strength here, at the Golden Tooth. We will fortify the pass into the westerlands. We will let Stark have the Riverlands. For now."
It was an order that stunned his commanders into silence. Tywin Lannister, the Old Lion, the man who had never taken a single backwards step in his entire military career, was ordering a retreat.
"We will let him build his kingdom of mud and hope," Tywin continued, his voice a venomous hiss. "We will let him deal with the other kings, with Stannis and Renly. We will let them bleed each other dry. And we will wait. We will learn the nature of this weapon he wields. And then, when he is weak, when he is overextended… the lion will strike. But not until we have forged a weapon of our own."
He knew he could not defeat Thor with steel. So he would have to find another way. Poison, treachery, assassination… all the dark arts of politics were now on the table. The war had changed from a clash of armies to a shadow war against a single, impossible foe.
On Dragonstone
Stannis Baratheon read the report from the Riverlands with a grim, tight-lipped expression. He stood in the Chamber of the Painted Table, the salty wind rattling the windows of his grim fortress.
"Sorcery," he ground out, crumpling the parchment in his fist. "Stark has allied himself with a demon, and now he performs profane miracles on the battlefield."
Melisandre, who stood beside him, her red robes a slash of color in the grey room, smiled. "It is as I told you, my king. The darkness rises. The Lord of Light's champion must face not only the pretenders to the throne, but the servants of the Great Other as well."
She placed a hand on his arm, her touch surprisingly warm. "This is a gift, my lord. The demon has crippled the lion. It has weakened your greatest foe. When you sail for King's Landing, you will face a fractured, terrified city. Let the wolf and his shadow fight your battles for you. And when the time comes, we will cleanse them all with the holy fire of R'hllor."
Stannis did not like it. He was a man of law and order. This chaos, this magic, it was an offense to his very being. But he could not deny its effectiveness. The path to his throne was being cleared by a force he despised. He would use it, just as he would use the Red Priestess and her strange, fiery god. And then, he would deal with them all.
In the Red Keep
The news of Gregor's defeat was the final, breaking wave that swamped the Lannisters' sinking ship. When Tyrion brought the news to Cersei, she did not scream or rage. She simply sat by the window, staring out at the city she no longer controlled, a single, silent tear tracking a path down her beautiful face. Her father's army, her final hope, was in retreat. Her brother was a captive. Her other brother, the monster she despised, was the only one left with a clear head. And her son, the King, was a whimpering fool who hid in his chambers. She was utterly, completely alone.
"What happens now?" she whispered, her voice a hollow shell.
"Now," Tyrion said, pouring himself a large glass of wine, "we learn to be very, very good prisoners. We smile, we nod, and we pray that Eddard Stark's famous honor prevents him from putting all our heads on spikes before my new, terrifyingly effective brother-in-law, Stannis, arrives." He took a long drink. "And we pray that this Thunder God of his doesn't get bored. I, for one, have no desire to see what he does for entertainment."
The Trial at Harrenhal
The Hall of a Hundred Hearths was transformed into a court of justice. Ned Stark sat upon the high seat of the castle, not a throne, but a simple, carved wooden chair. The lords of the Riverlands were arrayed on benches to his side, a jury of the wronged. At the center of the hall, in his cage, sat the gibbering ruin of Gregor Clegane.
The trial was a grim necessity. One by one, witnesses came forward. A woman whose children had been used for sport by the Mountain's men. A farmer whose wife had been savaged and whose fields had been burned. A freed prisoner from Harrenhal's own dungeons who showed the stumps where his fingers had been before Ser Gregor had personally removed them with a pair of pliers. It was a litany of horrors, a testament to the depths of one man's depravity.
Thor stood at the back of the hall, a silent observer. He listened to the stories, his face a mask of stone. He had seen entire worlds consumed by fire, had fought beings whose cruelty was cosmic in scale. But there was something about the small, intimate, and utterly pointless sadism of this one mortal that he found profoundly sickening. This was not the evil of a grand, cosmic plan. It was the simple, ugly evil of a man who enjoyed hurting things smaller than himself.
When the last witness had spoken, a heavy silence fell over the hall. Ned Stark stood.
"Ser Gregor Clegane," he said, his voice ringing with the authority of the law. "You have been accused of murder, of treason against the realm, of rape, and of crimes against the gods and men. The evidence against you is the testimony of a hundred broken lives and a river of blood. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"
The Mountain just rocked back and forth in his cage, drool trickling from his lips, his eyes wide and unseeing. His mind was gone, shattered on the field of his own humiliation.
"Then I, Eddard Stark, Hand of the King and Lord Protector of the Realm, do find you guilty of all charges," Ned declared. "The sentence is death."
He descended from the high seat, and one of his men brought him his greatsword, Ice. The vast Valyrian steel blade was a thing of dark, somber beauty.
"In the North," Ned said, his voice quiet but carrying through the silent hall, "we hold that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. I will not delegate this grim task. I will see justice done myself."
He walked to the cage, the guards opening the door and dragging the unresisting Gregor out, forcing him to his knees and pressing his head down onto a simple wooden block that had been brought into the hall.
Ned stood over him, raising the greatsword. He looked at the once-fearsome monster, now reduced to a pathetic, broken creature. There was no triumph in this, no glory. Only a grim, necessary duty. He thought of the honorable man he had been, the man who had believed in a world of clean lines and simple truths. That man was gone, burned away in the fires of King's Landing.
He looked up and his eyes met Thor's across the hall. The god gave a single, slow nod. This is your justice. Your way.
Ned took a deep breath, the words of his house echoing in his mind. Winter is Coming. He thought of his family, of the war that was still to come, of the terrible choices he had yet to make. He was no longer just a lord. He was a general, a judge, and an executioner. He was the leader of a rebellion that had a god on its side. He was the most powerful man in Westeros.
He swung the sword.
The great hall was silent as the head of the Mountain That Rides rolled across the stone floor. Justice had been done. But as Ned Stark looked at the blood on his hands and the grim, approving faces of his new allies, he felt a chilling premonition. This was only the first execution. The war for the soul of the Seven Kingdoms had just begun, and it would demand a price in blood that he was only beginning to comprehend.