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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, and all rights for characters, plots and settings belong to G.R.R. Martin and FromSoftware. I have no ownership.
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Braavos, 301 AC
Arya Stark
What the sailors at the south docks knew was thin and old. Jon Snow had been killed at the Wall by his own men: that part was in every account, from men who had touched at Eastwatch or spoken to those who had. Knives in the night. Months ago. What came after was harder.
Some said he was dead and stayed dead.
Some said he had come back.
No one who told her the second thing had actually been north of the Neck since it happened.
On the sixth night she found a ship's master named Quellon at the third tavern she tried. Heavy-set, loud, on his second cup of something dark. He had been in White Harbor four months ago.
She bought him a third cup and let him talk.
White Harbor had been tense when he left. Lord Manderly was calling his banners. There was talk of the North moving, of old oaths and new ones, and of Jon Snow's name on men's lips in ways that were not quite grief and not quite hope. Some were saying he had not died after all or had died and something had happened that Quellon did not have words for.
"There was a maester in the inn," Quellon said. "Educated man. He said the boy was Rhaegar Targaryen's son. Said Lady Lyanna told Lord Eddard before she died, and Lord Eddard kept it quiet to keep the boy alive."
"Did you believe him?"
"I believed he believed it. " Quellon drank. "Whether it's true, I couldn't say."
Arya left him.
She walked back through the city by the long canal route, past the alley where she had followed her first mark three months into her training and lost him at the fourth turning, past the tavern on stilts where she had first been given a face to wear and sent out to test it. She knew every stone on this route. She would not walk it again.
Jon was dead or wasn't dead. The North was moving.
That was enough.
The House of Black and White was quiet when she returned.
The kindly man sat in the chair by the entrance hall door. He was looking at her the way he did when he already knew.
"You have decided," he said.
"Yes."
"Think carefully. What you have learned here does not leave when you do. The faces stay with you. The ability to become someone else stays."
"I know what I'm carrying."
"We could use you. You were close to something that very few people reach." He paused. "A girl who has trained as long as you have could do great work in service to the Many-Faced God."
"I'm sure she could," Arya said. "I'm not a girl. I'm Arya Stark. My brother died and he lived, and the North is moving because of it, and I'm going home."
"We do not give back what we have taken."
"I'm not asking you to. I'm leaving."
"The girl has no family."
"The girl is Arya Stark of Winterfell," she said. "And she's done here."
He did not try to stop her. He only said, "Your brother is surrounded and deeply bound by powers that even we want nothing to do with."
She went to her room and took Needle from under the loose stone beneath the bed. Three years in that room and she had never stopped hiding it there.
She took a change of clothes and her own coin and walked back out through the hall.
The Kindly Man was still in the chair.
"The gift of faces stays with you," he said, as she passed him. "Whether you want it or not."
She went out and started walking toward the harbor.
She spent an hour at the docks before she found a captain willing to take a single passenger to Gulltown, but not north. He wanted three times the usual fare. She paid it without argument, which he seemed to find suspicious, so she added a sob story about a sick mother. He accepted that with the practiced sympathy of a man who had heard many sob stories and believed none of them.
The ship left in two days. She had time.
She bought dried fish and a wool cloak and spent the rest of the evening watching the harbor from a dock post. Ships coming in from the east, ships going out toward the Narrow Sea. A galley with Westerosi colors she did not recognize. Two cogs from somewhere in the Summer Isles. A fishing boat with a torn sail that no one had bothered to repair.
Braavos had been her world for two years, and now it was just a harbor. She was already halfway gone.
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The Gates of the Moon, 301 AC
Sansa Stark
She had been Alayne Stone for long enough that she sometimes caught herself thinking in Alayne's voice. Alayne was practical. Alayne did not miss things. Alayne did not stand at windows looking north and wonder if any of the people she had left were still alive.
Sansa let herself look north for another few seconds, then turned away from the window.
The news came through Littlefinger, which meant it came with something wrapped around it.
He sat across from her at the small table by the window and looked at her the way he did when he was deciding how much to give her at once.
"There are developments in the North," he said. "Significant ones."
She kept her face as Alayne.
The Boltons were gone. Roose Bolton is dead, the Dreadfort taken, and the Northern lords united behind a new king. Jon Snow was revealed as Rhaegar Targaryen's son by Lyanna Stark. Eddard Stark's nephew, hidden as a bastard to keep him alive.
"He died at the Wall," Littlefinger said. "He came back. Changed, apparently. He has a magic power and has used it. Or at least that's what they say. Whatever the truth may be, the facts are that the Boltons are gone; the Twins are gone. They're calling him Aerion now. Aerion Targaryen, King in the North."
She looked at the table. Not too long. Alayne would not need long.
"That changes the balance considerably," she said.
"It does." He was watching her face. He was always watching her face. A strong king in the North will eventually look south. For revenge. When he does, the Vale will need to have made its choices carefully. And you? How do you think your bastard brother will treat you? You and your siblings are a problem for his claim."
"What choices do we have?"
"Several." He leaned forward slightly. "The Vale could align with the new king before he comes looking. That would give us a position. Alternatively, we align with King's Landing, which is currently in considerable disorder, and hope the Targaryen overreaches."
"And what do you think he will do?"
"I think a man who came back from death and destroyed the Boltons and the Freys in two moons is not a man who overreaches. " He let that sit. "Which makes him considerably more dangerous."
She waited. He was still watching her.
"There is also the matter of what this king means for House Stark specifically," he said. "If Ned Stark's daughters were to surface, they would have a powerful family connection to the new king. That could be very useful. Or very dangerous." He said it lightly.
"That seems like something for those daughters to think about," Alayne said. "Not us."
He smiled. "Of course."
She thanked him for telling her and said she would think about it. He left.
She sat at the table for a long time after he was gone.
Jon. She had been a stupid girl in Winterfell who had cared about the wrong things, and Jon had been the bastard she liked least, which she was not proud of now. She had been unkind to him in ways she could not undo. He had stood slightly apart from the warmth of the great hall, and she had not tried to understand why.
He was alive. He was king. He was a Targaryen.
She did not know how he would look at her. She had been in the Vale for over a year under Littlefinger's protection, going by a false name. Some of what she had done in that time could not be explained cleanly. But Jon had been a bastard at Winterfell.
She would try. First she needed to get out of the Vale, which meant allies that were not Petyr Baelish.
Lord Yohn Royce was in the corridor when she opened her door.
Not waiting. Walking, with the purpose of a man going somewhere specific. He stopped when he saw her.
"My lady, Alayne."
"Lord Royce." She stepped into the corridor. "I wonder if I might speak with you. About the news from the North."
He looked at her with the attention of a man who had survived decades of Vale politics. "My chambers are more private than a corridor."
She followed him.
She did not tell him who she was. Not yet. She asked what he thought of the Vale's obligations to its allies, should a strong king in the North wish to treat with the Vale directly, without going through its Lord Protector.
"Lord Baelish has been Lord Protector for two years," he said after a moment. "In that time he has made himself very useful to certain lords and very inconvenient to others."
"Which are you?"
He looked at her steadily. "I am a man who swore his sword to Jon Arryn and remembers what the Vale was before he died. I am a man who finds that Lord Baelish's interests and the Vale's rarely align. " He paused. "And I have been wondering, for some moons, whether my lady Alayne Stone is quite what she appears to be."
She held his gaze and said nothing.
The silence held.
"The North has a king," he said. "When he marches south, it would be useful to know what position the Vale intends to hold."
"It would," she agreed. "And it would be useful to know which lords of the Vale would consider that question without first consulting Lord Baelish."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once.
"There are six lords in the Vale who owe their loyalty to Lord Arryn rather than to Lord Baelish," he said. "I can arrange a private supper. Quiet. Nothing formal." He looked at her. "Assuming, of course, that my lady Alayne intends to attend as herself."
She met his gaze. "I'll think about it."
"Think quickly," Royce said. "The North will not wait for the Vale to decide."
She left his chambers an hour later with nothing agreed upon and everything begun.
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Harrenhal, 301 AC
Jaime Lannister
The supply problem had been getting worse for two weeks.
The villages along God's Eye had been emptied before his men arrived. Not unusual after a year of war, but the speed of it was. Farmers did not pack their grain and vanish overnight without reason.
He went over the accounts with Ser Addam in the morning.
"Three weeks," Ser Addam said. "Perhaps four if we reduce rations."
"And after four weeks?"
He had done the numbers himself the night before. Ser Addam's count was optimistic.
"We buy from Maidenpool or we march."
Maidenpool was Lord Mooton's seat. Lord Mooton had been polite in his letters and sent none of the grain he had been asked to send. Marching meant abandoning Harrenhal, which meant no crown presence between King's Landing and the Neck.
"Keep reducing rations," Jaime said. "Send another letter to Mooton. Remind him that we are between him and whatever comes out of the North, and that if we march, the road to Maidenpool becomes considerably less safe."
"And if he ignores it?"
"Then we go to Maidenpool and discuss it in person."
In the afternoons he held court in the great hall. Men with grievances about horses requisitioned and not returned. A blacksmith whose forge had been taken over without compensation. Two lords from minor Riverlands houses wanted assurances that their lands would not be burned again and had been waiting three weeks because Jaime had not been certain he could give those assurances truthfully.
He gave them. He was not certain they believed him.
The Riverlands had been fought over since the beginning of the war. The lords who remained were men who had survived by being careful about which side they stood on and when. They watched him with the look of men calculating whether his word was worth anything.
"Your men burned Ser Desmond's mill," one of them said. Lord Piper. Young, guarded. "In the autumn. His family had been milling grain for that village for sixty years."
"I know," Jaime said. "I will not insult you by explaining why it was done. I will say that it will not be done again."
"And if I asked for compensation?"
"Ask. I'll tell you what I can offer, and you can decide if it's worth your cooperation."
Lord Piper named a figure. Not unreasonable. Jaime had Adam write it down.
A second lord lingered after the others left. Ser Henryk of some small keep east of Harrenhal. Old enough to remember the last Targaryen king. He waited until the hall was empty and then said, "My lord, if the North truly has a dragon, what does that mean for men who are not Lannister and not Stark?"
"It means," Jaime said, "that the men who pick their alliances carefully will outlast the men who pick them quickly."
Ser Henryk nodded slowly. "And what is your alliance, my lord?"
"I'm working on it," Jaime said.
The old knight left. Jaime sat in the empty hall for a little while after that.
Two days before the first raven arrived, three of his men were caught taking grain from a farmstead east of the castle.
The farmstead had been empty for a month. The family was gone. The grain was in a sealed cellar. None of it mattered.
He had them flogged in the yard in front of the garrison. Nobody said anything while it was happening. Afterward, Ser Addam came to him and said that the men felt the punishment was hard given that the family was gone and the grain would have spoiled.
"The family will come back," Jaime said. "They always do when the fighting moves on. If they find their cellar empty, they will remember who did it. I am trying to hold something together here that does not collapse the moment I stop looking at it."
Ser Addam was quiet. "Three thousand men, my lord. Men get hungry."
"Then we eat what we've requisitioned and paid for. Not what we've found." He looked at the yard. The three men were being helped back to their feet. "Let them stand duty tonight. Full kit."
"That's hard."
"Yes."
He had not expected to care about this kind of thing. He had been Kingsguard; armies were other men's problems. But this was his army, in his castle, in a part of the country that would need to function after the war ended. The Lannisters had not treated the Riverlands gently on the way in. The least he could do was treat them right on the way out.
He wrote a letter to his father about the supply situation and did not send it. He wrote it again and sent the second version, shorter, with less of what he actually thought.
He wrote a letter to Cersei. He wrote three versions of that one and sent none of them. The first was too honest. The second sounded like a man asking for permission, which he was not. The third he read over twice and burned because it said things about what the North might mean for their children that he was not yet ready to put in writing.
Three weeks before the first raven arrived, Brienne had come to him at night with a story that finally had enough of a shape to act on.
Sansa Stark was alive. She was near the Trident, hiding, and the Hound had found her. Brienne had a source she would not name. She needed Jaime, just him, no soldiers, that night.
He had believed her. He had put on his cloak and gone.
They were two hours south of the castle, in the dark, when a rider caught up with them. One of Jaime's scouts, out of breath. He had been to the western shore of the God's Eye with four men to investigate reports from local fishermen: lights on the Isle of Faces, sounds they could not describe, and something in the water. Three of the four scouts had not returned. The rider did not know what had happened to them.
Jaime had stood on the road and looked at Brienne and said nothing for a moment.
"Go back," he said.
"Sansa Stark's life."
"Go back, Brienne."
She had gone back. He had gone back. He had not sent anyone else to the Isle of Faces.
She was still at Harrenhal. She came to him every few days with variations on the same story, different details, always the girl in danger, always the request to come alone and trust her. He listened each time. He had not gone again.
He owed her his life. She forced him to fight for his future when all he wanted to do was give up, lie down somewhere, and die.. That was not a debt you settled by telling a woman to her face that you thought she was leading you into a trap.
What he could not work out was whether she knew it was a trap. She might not. Someone could have put her between Jaime and something that wanted him dead, and she could believe every word she was telling him. Brienne did not lie. But people lied to Brienne, and she was the kind of person who believed what she was told when the person telling her seemed to believe it themselves.
He had not confronted her. He had not told her about the scouts. He watched her when she was not watching him and tried to read what was underneath, and he could not.
"There's still time," she said, finding him in the yard the evening before the first raven. "Whatever is happening in the North, Sansa Stark is a living Stark girl. She matters."
"I know she matters."
"Then come with me. Tonight. The same way as before, no soldiers."
He looked at her. Torchlight. The yard. Two hours south on the road and three scouts who had not come back.
"Not tonight," he said.
She left without pushing further, which was new. He watched her go and thought about what it meant that she had stopped pushing.
The news came two days later, brought by an exhausted, frozen rider.
Bolton is dead. Dreadfort taken. Jon Snow was revealed as Rhaegar Targaryen's son and raised on shields by the Northern lords.
Jaime read it twice.
Then he went looking for Brienne, because he wanted to see her face.
She was in the stables.
"Did you know?" he said.
"No."
"About any of it."
"No."
He believed her on both counts.
He went back to the yard and told Ser Addam to put the men on full readiness. Not an alarm. Just readiness.
"What are we preparing for?" Ser Addam asked.
"I don't know yet. That's why I want us ready."
He spent the afternoon on the walls.
Harrenhal was too large for three thousand men to hold. Five towers, each the size of a small castle, connected by walls wide enough for four men to walk abreast. The garrison was spread too thin. Any serious assault would find gaps.
Ser Lyle found him on the east wall as the sun went down.
"The men are asking questions," he said. "About the news."
"What kind of questions?"
"Whether we're staying or whether there's a plan," Ser Lyle paused. "Harrenhal has a reputation."
"It's a castle."
"It's a cursed castle, by most accounts. Men who hold it tend not to hold it long. A Targaryen king with a dragon took the Boltons. The Twins are probably next if they haven't fallen already. The men want to know what that means for us."
Jaime looked out over the god's eye. Flat and dark in the fading light, the Isle of Faces is invisible somewhere in the middle of it.
"Tell them I am still working on that."
"That's not much to tell them."
"No. But it's honest." He turned from the wall. "Tell them also that any man who wants to leave is free to go, and any man who stays has my word that I will not spend his life on something stupid."
Ser Lyle considered this. "That's better."
"Good. Now leave me to think."
The raven came fourteen days after that.
The Twins had fallen. Walder Frey was dead. The crossing was gone.
Jaime sat with it in the great hall for a long time. Three thousand men. No crossing south. Supply lines that depended on Riverlords already dragging their feet. A Targaryen with a dragon somewhere to the north.
He had known when he rode into Harrenhal that it was a trap dressed as an advantage. He had stayed because he needed the position, and he had told himself the position was worth it, and now the Freys were ash, the crossing was gone, and he was sitting here alone with a raven that he could not make say something other than what it said.
Ser Addam came to him before he had finished reading it.
"Three knights have asked to leave," he said. "Ser Titos, Ser Brus, and Ser Wyll. They have family near Twins."
Jaime thought about it. Three knights. Three fewer swords. Three fewer mouths.
"Let them go. Give them travel letters and enough coin for the road."
Ser Addam looked at him. "If you let three go, others will follow."
"I know. Let them follow. I told Ser Lyle that any man who wants to leave can go. That was not something I said to sound generous. I meant it."
Ser Addam was quiet. Then he nodded and went to arrange it.
He sent for Lord Piper.
"The agreement we reached about Ser Desmond's mill," he said. "I want it honored before the end of the week."
Lord Piper looked at him carefully. "Is something happening, my lord?"
"Something is always happening," Jaime said. "I want the men in this area to know that agreements made under my name are kept. Whatever else changes, that stays."
Piper left. Jaime went back to the accounts.
The supply column was not going to balance. He had known that for a week. He kept running the numbers anyway, because it was something to do with his hands while his mind worked on the other problem, the one that did not have a column or a total. A Targaryen king with a dragon, moving south. Three thousand men who had agreed to fight for the Lannisters in a war that looked increasingly like it was ending badly for the Lannisters.
He was still at the accounts when the bells began to ring.
He got up. The sound was coming from the outer towers. The eastern wall.
He buckled his sword on and went to find out why.
Behind him, on the table, the accounts sat unsolved.