Deep Wells, Deep Deeds [aSoIaF OC]

[Paladin]

Chapter One: Bannermen

There was a charred, burnt piece of pig-skin pinned to the scrap of parchment from Winterfell, and three words: The North Remembers. Maester Gwayne's fingers still trembled as sleet beat against the shutters to the rookery. Matrim Wells ran his finger against the impression of House Stark's signet ring and clenched his free hand into a fist. "War." It had finally happened, then. A minor lord dreaming strange dreams wasn't enough to butterfly away the death of a Warden of the realm. Time for war, indeed.

Mat swallowed hard. Maester Gwayne placed a hand on his shoulder, and he looked back up to the maester's pale, drawn face. He patted the man's hand. "It will be well, Maester. I'll come home covered in glory and honors from Lord Stark and whoever winds up King."

"Will it though, Lord Mat? I fear for what could happen should things go badly, and perhaps worse, as well." Mat shrugged and didn't let the anger he felt show. He should have ridden South with Brandon and kept him from whatever ill fate befell him there. But he hadn't wanted to go to a Southron wedding, and so stayed at Queenswell. His hands tightened into fists once again, and he took a breath. Stalking through home infuriated at something he couldn't have prevented even if he'd been there, axe in hand and armored, would do no good. I need to speak with Cregan and Mother. Mat set off from the Maester's tower at a brisk walk, moving through halls that had sheltered generations of his family, from the first, nearly mythical Beron Wells.

Windows next to tapestries allowed natural light to illuminate them, detailing scenes from the glorious history of House Wells. Mat trailed his fingers along them as he passed by. One showed a Lord of the Well being flayed by a Bolton while a Stark army came on his rear. Another showed the founding of the family -- Beron, sheltering Queen in the North Arrana Stark in his farm's well from a truly monstrous looking Bolton, his tongue lolling out and knife held at the ready to flay Beron.

Mat grinned, looked at the amber eyes of his ancestor, done in minute stitching of precious gold-thread. The tapestry had been the work of a long, long winter by the women that had made it. Another showed a shield-wall, shields decorated with the sigil of the Wells on them, holding a hill against wildling invaders. It was a long, long history of service the Wells could boast claim to, and Mat was proud to be able to continue that tradition, even if it meant war in the South.

He found his mother walking into the lord's solar. "Mother, a moment." She stopped, looked at him. "I have bad news," he began. "The Stark calls us to war." There has half a heart-beat where her face wasn't the norm of cool and collected, where he could see a mother's fear for her sons, and then it was gone, and she was as cool as when she had executed a wildling raider after his father Alaric had died, and before Cregan was old enough to swing the sword himself.

He followed her in, and thus found his older brother sitting behind the ornate weirwood desk, woodland creatures frolicking and chasing each other carved into the front side of it, beneath the watchful gaze of a huge direwolf. The fireplace held a roaring flame, heating the room. Mat glanced past his older brother's head ducked over a thick tome, quill scratching busily. Their mother shot Mat a look, her gray eyes warm. Mat cleared his throat, and Cregan looked up.

"Mat!" He said, and pushed his chair back out from where he'd been sitting. He came around the desk, punched Mat in the arm. "And Mother! What brings the both of you here at the same time?"

Mat inclined his head to their mother, to let her go first. She gave a weary sigh, undid the hasty bun that her hair had been done up in. "Good news first, then? Well. Your chit of a wife has delivered a healthy babe, Cregan, and the succession is secure. You've a son. Congratulations. Your wife is well, too." Mat clapped his brother on the back, and the brothers grinned at each other.

"I must go see him, then. Let's all go! I want my son to meet his uncle and grandmother! By the gods. And he'll need a name, and clothing— and so much to do!"

"Time for the bad news, then, older brother," Mat started. "Lord Stark has called the banners." Cregan cursed heavily, and their mother sat. "I'll be leading our men South, of course. The Lord can't exactly leave with an infant to raise and teach the lessons of leading to, can he?"

"You smug little shit," Cregan said. "By the gods, I'll go South with Lord Stark and make you regent for the boy, and I'll thrash you to make sure you can't march, d'you hear me?"

Their mother cleared her throat, and stood. Mat stopped before he could respond in kind. She looked at Cregan, with his short brown hair so unlike Mat's own. "The solution, my sons, is simple. The Stark has called. House Wells has two sons, and they will both answer in their own ways. Cregan will remain here with his son, and write to the Hand of the King: tell him you forbade it, but Matrim has raised half the men and marched South in support of the Stark. You have remained in the North, to try to rally loyal men to the Targaryen banner and take Winterfell from the Starks."

Cregan began protesting, and Mat grinned. He thought he could see where this was headed, and his mother's cleverness was always a joy to learn from. "Hush, boy! You'll do no such damned thing, of course. Except keep half our forces here, should the worst happen in the South and the Stark needs more men." Then she turned her cool gray glare on him. "Matrim will do exactly as I just said, and for the love of the gods, Matrim: as the Starks protect us in this life and the next, so we do our best to protect them in this. Make sure you remember it in the South."

"Mother, that's wrong." Cregan wasn't angry, but Mat could hear that he clearly wasn't a believer in the idea that their mother had outlined.

"And burning your liegeman to death while his son strangles himself trying to rescue his father is so right? Letting your son kidnap and rape the daughter of that same lord is right?" There was no mere hint of displeasure in their mother's voice now. Mindful of the servants, she was hissing her words, but the hiss was furious. "The Targaryens have spat on the Starks too many times — they broke the Pact of Ice and Fire, and your lord Rickard Stark is dead, his heir Brandon dead, his daughter mayhaps raped to death by that silver Prince, and you protest to me of wrong?"

"Cregan," Mat broke in. "Deceit can be perfectly fine if it's to defeat your enemy after they've proven they're monsters, not men. Aerys is no man. What he did was ill-done, and proves he's a monster that needs unseated. I mean to back the Ned as far as he will go, to my last dying breath if need be. We serve. We serve the Starks, and we serve our people by protecting them. We can't protect them if the King of the Seven Kingdoms is a madman that delights in burning his liegemen."

"You know your duty, my sons," Mother told them. "Now give me a hug before you start seeing to mustering the men and arguing about who to take and who to leave from the villages."

They hugged her as she wished, and she went to see to Cregan's wife, while the two brothers settled into a pair chairs by the fireplace with a decanter of mead. Mat settled back, booted feet kicked out.

"I'll take the master-at-arms Theon," Mat told his brother.

"No, damn your eyes! You'll take Theon, and the best huskarl and archer, and leave me who, exactly to train the dregs if you take all the best men?" Cregan's protest was probably more than just for the sake of it, Mat decided, but he could still throw him a bone.

"Let me take the second best officers, then, and all the professionals with experience from the household troops. You'll still have Theon and the best officers."

 

[Jamie Roberts]

Oh Gods, I'm so glad you're here too! I look forwards to reading along as you bring this site up to speed with the other one. I love this story, and I can't tell you how glad I am to see it ona site I don't have any moral objections to!

 

[Paladin]

Oh Gods, I'm so glad you're here too! I look forwards to reading along as you bring this site up to speed with the other one. I love this story, and I can't tell you how glad I am to see it ona site I don't have any moral objections to!

Click to shrink...

Haha, thanks! I figured I'd go ahead and start posting here with my long disused account on the off-chance there were some eyes here I could get the story in front of that hadn't seen it before.

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~
In the end, Mat marched from Queenswell the third day after the summons arrived at the head of nearly seven hundred men. Over half the forces Queenswell could call, for all the last war had been over twenty years ago, and Mat not even born yet. Riders had been busy all the day after the raven, and Mat met the men that he'd be leading as they came in, shaking each man's hand and thanking him for coming. They came in from the farms and villages, holdfasts and manors, the leading men and the middling men. At the end of the day before they marched, Mat took a tally. He had one hundred fifty men with the heavy armor and weapons necessary to be counted as a huskarl or man-at-arms, one hundred fifty archers with weirwood bows carefully and ritually gathered and carved from downed weirwood trees, and four hundred men with long spears or pikes and small, round shields. Every eighth man had brought the horse or pony they used on their farms, and they had stakes with which to fortify their camps at night.

He sat his own horse, wearing a long plaid over his breeches and shirt, the Wells banner of a plain stone well built like a wall with crenelations in hand. His men were arrayed before him, and Matrim's heart leapt into his throat at the thought he'd be leading them south, to war. The last time he'd fought, it had been under command of his father Alaric and beside the household troops to put down a band of wildlings. He grinned. His officers sat beside him: Artos and Jon the Gray, from the huskarls. Torrhen and Iwan, from the archers. Edrick, Jon the Small, and Harlon, with the pikemen.

His father had said that the best speeches were the shortest speeches. "I'm going south, my friends, to see what service Lord Stark will have of my axe and sword, and I hope you will come with me. Perhaps we shall even find loot and plunder in service of vengeance against Aerys the Monstrous, Aerys the Madman, after we put him down like a rabid dog. Let us go."

He didn't look back to Queenswell. They passed the outlying farms that fed the castle and town beneath its sheltering walls, the stands of trees on ground too rough to be worth clearing and putting under the plow, and weirwoods with the faces of their gods carved into them. He stopped inclining his head to them after the tenth, but he marked them all the same. The sound of seven hundred marching men, and several dozen horses drawing extra arrows and foodstuffs on wagons was like no other on the earth, and it was all his. Mat couldn't stop smiling. He turned in the saddle to all his officers, and passed the Wells banner to the piper they'd brought with them, a young man named Hugo.

At first the men sang, because marching was boring and there wasn't much else they could do besides put one foot in front of the other. After the sun reached his zenith in the sky, and then began to descend, they stopped singing. Conversations were low and muted, but Mat felt that morale was good. After all, the last time a Northern force had ridden south, they wound up with a Lord Stark as Hand of the King for a brief time.

That first night, they camped beneath the ruins of a beacon tower that had once served to let Queenswell warn Winterfell of an oncoming Bolton force. With the coming of the Targaryens and the cessation of Bolton attempts to overthrow the Starks, the beacon towers had slowly been left to the ruin of time. Now it served to watch as his men slumbered beneath plaids, cloaks, and tunics after a dinner of whatever each man had brought to the muster.

Mat sat with his officers around a fire, his own plaid cast aside. "There'll be rain tomorrow," Jon the Gray said. Then he spat into the fire and took a swig from his mead horn.

"We need to get into the habit of setting watches and digging latrines and all the things that make real war work, not the glory stuff those Southrons go on about," Torrhen said. He was older, a veteran of the Ninepenny King war, and Mat knew that he'd either listen to Torrhen's suggestions, or wind up paying for it in the long run. His father had had good advice about that: listen to counsel wiser than his own, but at the end of the day, the command was his, and so the decisions, too.

"We'll work up a watch rotation tomorrow on the march," Mat said. "And include me. I'll sleep while I can, and deal with what my men do."

"Good," grunted Iwan of Weeping Weirwood. "'S important for the commander to be with his men. I served the last Lord Bolton as an archer for ten or so years. He was a cold one, him, and didn't care for us as made up his retinue."

"Aye, I'd heard tell about Bolton," Edrick Pike said. He grimaced, then took a deep draft from his ale. "Word had it his wife weren't so fond of him, so he had to take what most husbands are given free, if you take my meaning."

"Aye," Mat said as he stood. "I met him, once when I fostered at Winterfell. He didn't like Lord Stark or the Lordling Stark, near as I could tell. Or me, at that. Still, there's a reason we left half the men on their farms, and it isn't because I think the Targaryens will actually raise an army this far North." He clasped each man's hand and back, and left them to their reminiscing and drink.

 

[Paladin]

After this one, I'll probably be posting the chapters that are completed as full chapters, not the pieces as I wrote them like I did over on SB, at least until this thread is current.

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

An archer acting as a scout spotted the column at mid-day, two days from Winterfell by Mat's reckoning. It was behind them, bearing no banner. He wheeled his horse around to look, and tried to count their numbers. He lost the count twice before he took a breath and thought about Theon the master-at-arms' trick for it: draw imaginary squares around what he guessed to be a unit, and then scale it up to cover the entire force.

That gave him a count of around two thousand five hundred men. "Shite," he said. Then: "Stop the march!" It took too long for his men to stop, and put on their armor, and start forming in their units. Long enough that if the column behind them had been ready they could have fallen on Mat's men before they'd gone from marching column to battle line themselves. He cursed the long peace for degrading skills, and himself and his brother for not insisting more forcefully that the men that owed military service practice more often. But the enemy didn't appear ready either, and so he had precious time for his men to form their units, archers in front of the infantry and half his huskarls on each side of the pikemen, five men deep. Mat cursed the poverty of his family: huskarls on horses were men-at-arms not on foot and stiffening the spines of his pikemen and archers, even if he trusted the farmboys to stand, but huskarl on foot weren't cavalry.

They formed in front of the wagons and horses, guarded by the youngest boys, and Mat almost jumped out of his saddle to hurry and arm. "Hurry up! Come on, get in line!" He chivvied his men, aided by his officers, and finally everyone was in place and armored and he was wearing chainmail and his spectacled and plumed helmet, shield slung on his back and long axe in hand. Jon the Small glanced at Mat, and then he drove the butt-spike on the Wells family banner into the dirt in front of his pikemen.

"They'll have to come and take it, Lord Mat," he promised.

"I know it, Jon, and we'll make them pay dearly." Across the field, someone unfurled a flayed man banner, and Matrim grunted. This Wells shieldwall dying to defend Winterfell from this Bolton force wouldn't be the first time these hills had seen such a sight, he knew, and probably it wouldn't be the last. Mayhaps when the blood-letting was done and the crow-feeders finished their bloody work, the Stark might ride back this way to avenge the men fallen earliest in this conflict in his service.

A rider was coming from the other force, itself shaking out into line, and Mat swung himself back into his saddle. He let his long axe dangle low, ready for killing work. If it did come down to the killing, he promised himself that he'd die well, rather than under a flaying knife begging for mercy that wouldn't come. His opposite wore a pink cloak over black chainmail, a black great helm, rich fawnskin gloves, and crossed swordbelts. His pale gray courser was a fine horse, well formed and with a good gait, and Mat felt a sharp pang of jealousy for the wealth the Boltons enjoyed -- not nearly as much as the Manderlys, but still more than the Wells.

An undercurrent of fear and hate tinged it, and they stared at each other through helmet eye holes and slits, respectively. Wells men had been flayed by Boltons for centuries, until finally the Starks stamped on the Red Kings enough that they learned the lesson, and minded it. Matrim swallowed, glad for the face mask of his helmet and the high collar of his chainmail to hide his nervousness. Many truths of body language were hidden by cold iron armor. Mat would show this Bolton a hard truth of his own.

"Who remembers?" The words startled Mat out of him readying himself to attack the man and his horse, and die well. He almost clicked his tongue at his horse Rusher in his startlement, but he managed to still himself from the 'go forward' command Rusher had been trained to.

"The North Remembers," Matrim gave the traditional reply. The man took off his helmet and shook out his long black hair, smiling cheerfully. It looked out of place on the man's plain features, except for his eyes. His eyes, even with the smile, made Mat's knees want to knock together in fear. He mastered it, breathing in deep. He thought about the hate, and the times the Wells had helped sack the Dreadfort, and smiled to himself. Then he schooled his face back to blank expressionlessness, slid his axe into the loops for it to hang from his saddle, and removed his own helmet.

"Little lordling Wells. Riding to Winterfell, are we?" Bolton's voice was mild, a touch warm, and perhaps a bit wary. Mat told himself that Bolton was remembering the times that the Wells' fortifed well banner had topped the Dreadfort's walls, too, and gave his own smile. He hoped it cooled the man.

"I am," Mat said. "The Stark has called, and I go wherever he leads. I know my place." Unsaid was all that lay between their families: the generations of blood-letting to defend, or get at, the Starks. Personal violence. Duels. Raping of captured womenfolk and peasant girls, the Wells emptying their fields and farms to throw forces in the way of Bolton advances on Winterfell and buying bitter time for the rest of the Stark oath-men to muster.

"It is a new era, Matrim Wells. Perhaps it is time to let the past grudges go, and lay with the dead where they belong, and make our oaths to Eddard Stark as friends?" Fat chance, Mat wanted to say. Fat chance, and as soon as the war in the South finished, he'd be telling his brother to renovate and refortify the beacon towers, and Queenswell to boot. He wanted to say it, make it easy for the old grudges and hurts and angers to continue into this 'new era'. Instead, he forced himself to smile again.

"We can make our oath to Lord Stark beneath the same hearttree and old god, and let all men fear the vengeance of the North."

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Two: Oaths

Winterfell was grand, and huge, and all that it had been last Matrim had been there. It was also not entirely what he had expected, even with his memories of fostering there. But it seemed diminished, too, and he knew that with Rickard Stark gone, and Brandon perhaps dead, it likely would remain that way. His troops were split from Bolton's by the steward that met them outside wintertown and quartered there. The steward led him, Bolton, and their senior-most officers to the castle yard, where they were greeted personally by Eddard Stark. His face was as long as Mat remembered it, but the eyes held more sorrow and weight in them, and the hair was growing long from whatever southron style it had been cut to. Stark wore no armor, only a long plaid over his breeches, shirt, and gray doublet stitched with a wolf's head on the front.

The ringing of a hammer on metal punctuated their greetings to their Lord, as the castle's blacksmith went about his work, seemingly intent on letting even Moat Cailin know the Northmen were coming. Stark clasped hands with them both, welcoming them to Winterfell.

"It is not often that the men of the Well and Dreadfort make common cause," he added. "It pleases me that my bannermen set aside their feuds and anger when the need arises." Going unsaid was what that need precisely was, but they all knew it, and knew, to boot, that it was grim tidings that had brought them together and grim work they would be about.

"Maester Luwin has received ravens from the Houses of the North," Stark went on. "The Glovers have met with the forces of the clansmen in the mountains, and expect to arrive a sennight from now. The Lakes have mustered and will combine with the Umbers on their way, and the Umbers reported that they were perhaps a fortnight from arrival. The Karstarks picked up your trail, and will be here two or three days behind you. The Skagosi have promised to put ten hulls into the water, but I have my doubts about even that. The southern Houses will all add their forces to ours as we go south, the day after the Umbers arrive. The Manderlys will add forty hulls to the Skagosi, entirely separate from their force in the field."

"Sending the full muster for every house would be folly, but lightly rests the rule of Winterfell on Skagos," Mat said. "I'd expect nothing less from cannibals and worse."

"Skagos will wait if we must take ship east," Bolton said. "Cannibals aside, a strong showing for a land with no navy. I will send a raven home, with your permission, Lord Stark, and order Bethany to begin building a few ships myself. Still, I fear the worst should the Royal Fleet put troops on our shores with all our men in the South and at war."

"That's what the Skagosi and Manderlys are putting ships to sea for, Bolton," Matrim said. "Certainly the Northern fleet won't be strong enough to fight a battle at sea, but contest any kind of landing? Sure enough they'd be able to do that. Gods above know what the Skagosi are capable of, because I don't." Stark led them into the great hall from the yard, where some men were eating a mid afternoon meal.

"Winter is ending now, but it is always coming, my lords," Stark said. "Winter is coming, and there are but two Starks left in the North. I will set down a will and succession, to have it settled and done before all the rest of my bannermen arrive. It will confirm Benjen and then Lyanna as my heirs should the worst happen in the war we ride to. I will have you both, and Lord Cerwyn, set your signatures to it as witnesses, and send copies to White Harbor, the Dreadfort, Karhold, and the Last Hearth should enemy soldiers set foot in our beloved North."

"You honor us, Lord Eddard," Mat said. Speaking so directly with the Stark was... odd, he felt. Eddard had been gone for the Vale to foster with Jon Arryn when Mat had arrived to finish growing from boy to man at Winterfell, taken in by his father's lord Rickard. Had things been different, perhaps Mat would have been swearing to Brandon and holding a holdfast for him. But the wheel had turned as it did, and so his return to Winterfell came at the heels of a war, and a new Lord Stark. He watched Stark greet his men, some of them armored and some not, how they clasped hands and nodded. Eddard had to have been back in Winterfell only a short time before the ravens had been sent, but it seemed that it was long enough for the people of Winterfell to be comfortable with the new situation.

"Honor us indeed," Roose said. "Still, we must plan for after the war. What is to become of your sister?"

There was a pause for a heartbeat, and then it stretched out. Mat would've sworn that Stark's face grew even longer and more solemn."I will find her and bring her home," Stark promised. "She is a Stark, and a Stark's place is Winterfell."

"What's to become of her betrothal to Robert Baratheon, my lord?" Roose went on. Mat knew what happened when men stole women, and knew it was likely, too, that Lyanna was being raped into senselessness by Rhaegar, as horrible as that truth was.

"As Lord Stark I will annul it, and let Lyanna decide what she wishes to do when she's... home." He didn't say better or healed. Suspecting Roose's thrust of the conversation, Matrim wanted to beg off from further discussion, uneasy at the idea that Bolton would even now be trying to bargain for a betrothal to Eddard's sister. While still missing and perhaps being raped nightly, at that. Bloody flayed man is cold.

"If ever the Lady Lyanna should need shelter, Queenswell is always ready to protect the daughters of winter." The promise came easily to him, because Matrim remembered the debts his family owed the Starks, and he would see that debt through until his last dying breath. He didn't leave, though, and Stark sent a serving boy to find Lord Cerwyn to meet them in his solar.

Medger Cerwyn was waiting outside the solar for them, and greeted them with a murmured "Lord Stark," and nods to Mat and Bolton. He wore a thick chestnut brown beard to match his hair, and his blue eyes watched Bolton carefully. Medger remembered the tales of Stark and Bolton wars, and the costs they reaped..

The desk and hearth in the lord's solar were decorated with snarling wolves, running wolves, leaping wolves — in a word, wolves of all stripes and types. It was an old desk, had been there with Rickard Stark when he strapped Mat's arse for kissing one of the kitchen girls and making sure he understood what would happen if he put a babe in her. It had burned Mat then, to be strapped like a boy of eight or nine years instead of the man he thought himself at fifteen, but now, five years on, winter ending and war approaching, he understood. He hadn't lain with her, either, but she'd done well and married one of the Stark household archers.

Stark went to sit at the desk, and the next few moments were filled with the sound of quill scratching on parchment. Finally, he set the quill down and read it aloud. It was as he said; in the event of his death or crippling, Winterfell and the North went to Benjen, then Lyanna. As actual lords, Roose and Medger set their signatures and then signet rings to it first. Then Mat hurried his own Matrim Wells of Queenswell, and pressed his signet ring of two crenellated water wells against the hot wax.

Stark looked to them, and nodded. "It is done, my lords. The succession to the North is affirmed, and you have my thanks. My maester will see it dispatched. Your days are your own until we prepare to depart. I ask only that you keep the North's peace amongst yourselves, and see your men keep discipline in the winter town. Although room has begun to open up there, the winter wasn't as harsh as we feared, and thus not as many old men as might be expected went hunting in the middle or end."

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

The trappings of civilization seemed to fall away as he knelt beneath the heart tree in Winterfell's godswood, listening to the wind, the murmurings and whisperings of the oaks and beeches in the wood. The melancholic face seemed to stare back at him, whispering you don't belong here, you're not from here, we are not your gods. Matrim knew, as he knew once from half-remembered dreams and feelings, that he had lived in a world of logic and science, faith of any stripe diminished, but the lifetime he'd had to become accustomed to the old gods of his now-home helped.

Can you hear my prayers All-Father? Does Odinson the Thunderer help throw back the frost giants from this realm? Does Týr dispense justice? What should I even pray for? Victory in war, the safety of this Wells family and the Starks they owe allegiance and loyalty to? The old gods were the gods he had been raised with in this world, in the North of Westeros, but they had never made him feel welcome. Perhaps that was the secret, that they made no man feel welcome, for their worshippers had been the children of the forest. Or are they the children?

In the end, he decided, it didn't matter. He knelt before the sad face of this god, and prayed to his old gods, Odin the Allfather, thunderous and mighty Thor, protector of all the realms from the frost giants, and Týr of the single hand, mighty in war and wise in justice. It comforted him, to think of them on the other end of the heart tree listening, and so he asked not for glory for himself, but to preserve the last remnants of the Stark family, that they might know some peace at the end of the war.

No answer was forthcoming, but the imagined murmuring from the trees seemed to diminish. That was fine, Matrim Wells decided. Lack of affirmation or no, he thought he knew what was to come. The march south. Two battles, the whirling mess of Stoney Sept and the pitched grinder of the Trident. The carrion eaters would feast off the work of the spear and sword warriors of the Kingdoms, and so too would the men no better than the carrion eaters. He knew, too, his duty, and that was to serve and defend the Starks. Even from their own mistakes.

Lyanna, he thought, and knew what would have happened. But he was here, now, and perhaps things would be different. Mat thought about a dance stolen beneath this very same weirwood. The snow had been fresh and spotty beneath all the cover the godswood provided from the elements, but the weirwood had been weeping. He thought, and made a prayer to Lofn, and made an oath.

Benjen had laughed, made a jest about Mat going wildling. He'd flushed, he remembered, not entirely displeased at the thought, but then her betrothal to Robert had been announced, and the course for war set. Now the realm will bleed. Gods curse you both, Robert and Rhaegar.

Whether Lyanna loved Rhaegar or not, the realm would bleed. The trees stilled at the thought, their murmuring dying, and he knew it couldn't be the wind that had driven it. It was a windless day with snow still on the ground around Winterfell, and so there was no wind to have driven their previous susurrations.

Mat stood from where he'd been sitting, uneasy at the thought that he had been communing with his gods in this world. In the last, they never spoke, and when people claimed they did, innocents died for it. There were dragons, and there will be dragons. Perhaps the old gods do murmur at men through the trees and weirwoods. Either way, he'd come here for a moment of peace and quiet, a break from drilling with his men and officers: marching, counter-marching, shaking from marching column to battle line. Now his break was over, the Umbers had arrived, and tonight they would make their oaths to Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North.

Why should we fight to crown a Southerner, he asked himself. We bent the knee to dragonlords and dragons, and the dragonlords are weak and mad, and dragons are dead and gone for the nonce. No army could ever make it past the Neck. Moat Cailin was unbreakable from the south, and the crannogmen would ensure no force ever made it through the swamps and fens. The army was nearing fifteen thousand strong, and only grain convoys from White Harbor were keeping it fed —Stark's decision— rather than strip Winterfell and winter town's granaries before the end of winter.

He turned to leave after one last bow to the heart tree, and saw Benjen Stark watching him. Matrim inclined his head respectfully to the heir of Winter and the North, and Benjen grinned. "Matrim! I had to ride back from Last Hearth with the Umber forces; I was fostering there, with the Greatjon."

"It's good to see you, Benjen." Mat returned his grin, glad to see the now young man. He would be fifteen now, and Winterfell couldn't be without a Stark. Eddard would have ordered Ben's return home from Last Hearth with the same raven ordering the Umbers to march. Ben's sharp features grew solemn.

"I'm glad you're riding South with Ned, Mat. Harrenhal was a disaster. After Rhaegar crowned Lyanna queen of love and beauty, nothing's gone right." Mat embraced the younger man, patting him on the back.

"It'll be well, Ben. We will find your sister and put Rhaegar to the sword, and avenge the murders of your father and Brandon."

"Good," he said savagely. "I hope you kill Aerys and Rhaegar and the Kingsguard and everyone that's loyal to the Mad King." Mat patted Benjen's back again and then released him.

"I was just leaving if you've come to pray," Mat said. "We're taking the oaths tonight, and I'm here in Cregan's place." Ben nodded.

"I'll be at the feast and ceremony." Benjen said. "I'm glad you're my friend." Matrim didn't really have an answer for that, but accepted it nonetheless.


~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~



The torches planted around the godswood cast odd shadows across the snow. Eddard Stark stood in front of the weirwood, beside the pond with wisps of steam rising from it. Benjen stood next to him. The assembled lords of the North would make their oaths tonight, with the heartree of Winterfell as witness to affirm their loyalty to their chief for all time. Mat knew the lords that they met on the way south would make their oaths before whatever weirwoods were handy. But here, now, this rite would be done with all the ceremony and ritual it demanded, a tradition that stretched back to Brandon the Builder accepting the fealty of his lords following the raising of the Wall.

The weight of the years seemed to press against Mat's shoulders, the knowledge that in peace and in war he would be making his cause the Starks, no matter their fortunes in peace or in war. It was right.

Let the weight of the years sit heavy on my shoulders. This is a duty. Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather.

They were all dressed the same, Mat and these lords of the North, and the Stark brothers with long and solemn faces; they wore breeches and their boots, and that was it. They were shirtless, as the first man to swear to the Starks had been, and they would seal their oaths with blood beneath the weirwood in the center of Winterfell's godswood.

The words for this ceremony were old, older than Queenswell and the Wells, older than the Andals, older than the Stark wars with the Boltons. Ancient.

"Who comes before the heart tree?" Benjen, as his brother's heir and now right hand man, spoke the words first.

Medger Cerwyn, as the first and closest lord to arrive, stepped out from among the assembled lords, and would go first. "I, Medger of House Cerwyn and Castle Cerwyn come before the heart tree and the old gods, and the Stark of House Stark and Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, to affirm my oaths to House Stark, and to make my loyalty known, now and for all time. Let the gods bear witness." The Cerwyns were perhaps the first of the Stark bannermen, and so Medger made his oath first. He finished it by drawing blood from his palm with a stone dagger, letting it drip onto the ground before the heart tree, and then smearing the bark.

Roose went next, and then it was Matrim's turn.

"I, Matrim of House Wells and Queenswell come before the heart tree and the gods, and Eddard Stark, the Stark of House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, to affirm my oaths to House Stark." He shivered when the wind picked up, feeling his skin prickle and goose bumps rise. He did his best to ignore it, though, and tried not to think that the gods were watching them. He drew his dagger. "By the gods to which this iron is holy, I will to Eddard Stark be true as his man. I will love all that he loves, and hate that which he hates, according to the laws of the gods and the order of the world, by blood and by deed. My sword is yours." He drew the dagger across his palm, ignored the pain, and let the first drops hit the ground before the heart tree, and then smeared his palm's blood on the white bark, staining it red.

After that, the Karstarks, Glovers and clan chieftains from the mountains, Lakes, and Umbers made their oaths. The wind picked up, rushing and howling, and the heart tree dropped leaves. A leaf for every man that had made an oath. Mat shivered, and told himself it was only the wind. Then came Stark's oath.

"I will provide justice, mercy, and a place at my hearth for all that need them," the Stark's oath began, and when he finished, Eddard finished it by making a cut in his own palm, too. The blood stained the snow red, and stained the weirwood darker red.

They finished the ritual with the hand-clasping ceremony, where they knelt before Eddard and entreated him to provide them aid and succor should they need it, while vowing fidelity and loyalty to him, aid and shelter to him and his heirs from this day until the end of all days. Mat's goose bumps stayed, and he felt inexplicably warm, even with the wind howling and snow on the ground at the tail end of this winter.

No one wanted to break the seeming moment of the ceremony, but finally Lord Stark was first, his face drawn tight. The weight of the oaths that he had received seemed to bear down on him, and Mat thought about duty, a mountain, and a feather. It seemed there was a weight on his shoulders, as well. "There is food in the great hall, my lords. I must apologize that your men cannot all join us, but perhaps this might be best as a war council, for now." Slowly, with stiff knees, most of the assembled lords began making their way to their feet. For now, enmities and grudges of the past were allowed to lie as near half the lords of the North, or their chosen stand-ins, made their way from the godswood to the great hall of Winterfell.

The hearths in the great hall were roaring merrily, and serving girls were ladling hearty helpings of stew into trenchers of yesterday's bread. Mat gladly accepted his, and a horn of ale, strong and frothy and dark, everything ale should be to celebrate an oath taking ceremony. War in the North during lulls in the deepest depths of cruel winter was to be appreciated— it freed men to die in service of home and Stark, and ease the burden on the granaries of the north.

All the lords took seats at a single of the long tables below the dais, with Lord Stark and Benjen at the head of it. They had brought no daughters or wives, and Mat knew he had had a hard time getting his men to do the same. Women with the camp eased a man's burdens of the heart, loins, and doing the washing, but they also needed protecting from raids and strikes by enemy forces.

"I had the damndest time getting my brave lads to leave behind their sweethearts and wives," a Lake said.

"That's why I brought older men and left my sons at home," Greatjon Umber acknowledged after sucking down most of a chicken, booming voice loud enough for Moat Cailin to hear. "Two brave sons to carry on my legacy if I should fall in this winter war, and my oldest just married. No, my lords, though we've a lull in the winter now, our lord Stark's words are even truer: winter has come, winter has receded a touch, but winter will come again, even harsher and crueler."

"We will let the South know the truth of the words," Matrim added. And then, with relish: "We will show them why only two of the dragons ever came past the Neck, and what becomes a dragonlord without a dragon. Bran and Rickard Stark's shades demand justice done, and I mean to slide my dagger through Aerys Madking's ribs before a heart tree."

Umber, Karstark, and all the clan chiefs from the mountains agreed with that sentiment, and raised toasts to Matrim, his brother Cregan, and his new nephew who would remain nameless till summer came, though Cregan had promised him that the boy would become Rickard Wells, should he survive the winter.

Lord Stark brought an end to the toasting and wishes for plentiful sons and long lives by standing and raising a hand. "This is a meal and war council, my lords. We must discuss the line of march."

Rickard Karstark stood, smiling easily, flanked by his two sons, still sitting. "My lords, my Lord Stark, as a loyal bannerman to you, our liege, it is my honor to accept the position of vanguard, and leading the march, as surely these must go the Karstark forces as a cadet house of House Stark-" anything after that was cut off by jeers and shouts from the assembled men, led by Greatjon Umber. Mat took a note of who refrained from such shouting: himself, Bolton, the two Stark brothers, and the Flint of the Old Flints, a cousin to Lord Stark.

The shouts continued for perhaps thirty heartbeats, but Lord Stark's face stayed solemn. "I'll not march behind Karstarks!" Umber roared. "We were defending the North when the first Karstark was suckling at his mother's teat, by the gods! The honor belongs to us!"

Karstark took offense and opened his mouth to retort, but Eddard Stark stood again.

"I will have no quarrels among my bannermen about the van," he started slowly. He looked around the room, eyes lingering on Mat and Bolton, sitting next to each other, and then he paused.

"There will be no van. We are marching to war and must maintain good order. The army of the North will have a marching order. First, the light horsemen from the clans, to act as our scouts and eyes. We are safe enough in the North, true, but it will be three sennights before we reach the Neck and perhaps an army waiting to pounce. Then the lords Bolton and Wells. They didn't murder each other on their way to Winterfell. Perhaps they can repeat the feat on our way South." Is that a joke? From Eddard Stark? Perhaps it is! Mat grinned, to show there was no offense taken. That wasn't to say that he hadn't considered ways to shorten Roose's height by a head, of course. Just in case.

After the laughter from the joke finished, and all the plans for marching order and where and when to rest every fourth day, the feasting council broke up and left the great hall. Finally, Matrim was the only one left, the fires in the hearths dimming, as he stared at the spot where he'd asked Lyanna Stark to marry him. Winterfell's lords were buried with swords across the statues over their tombs, to keep their vengeful specters in the crypts where they belonged. But what did they do for girls too young to know the consequences, but old enough to think themselves wise enough to make drastic decisions? There was no answer that Mat could find.

 

[notbirdofprey]

This is one of the better ASOIAF stories around in my opinion.

 

[silentorphan]

This is the fic that, uh, made a cameo in one of Halt's ASOIAF stories? (I can't phrase this question any less awkwardly.)

 

[Paladin]

This is the fic that, uh, made a cameo in one of Halt's ASOIAF stories? (I can't phrase this question any less awkwardly.)

Click to shrink...

Not quite. I wrote a portion of one of the naval battles for him in Zero Requiem, and because I'm a hack I used the house for the point of view character, Ser Jon Wells.

Chapter Three: Southerly

It seemed that the gods were pleased with the oath-taking in Winterfell. The weather turned warmer, but not warm enough to melt the snow on the ground and flood the Kingsroad south with mud and mire the army. As a result, the army of the North made good progress. Mat was kept busy. His men marched at the head of the column, and he rode up and down the portion that was his, encouraging, joking, and letting them know he cared and was there. At nights, they camped beneath the stars, wrapped in cloaks and plaids, fires and bellies fed by the bread and meat and vegetables of the smallfolk of the North, who rejoiced to see their Lord, even if he rode to war after the deaths of his father and brother.

Eight days after having set out from Winterfell, after the Manderlys and the houses sworn to them had joined the march, after Dustin, Stout, and Ryswell forces were welcomed with open arms by the rest of the lords, and the Houses Flint not of the mountains had sent word they were camped with the forces of the crannogmen, there was another oath taking before a smiling weirwood. Red sap ran from the mouth, and afterwards Matrim sat, stared south and brooded.

Lightning cracked miles away, west of where they camped. The ruins of an ancient fortress loomed over them, remnants of one of the interminable wars between petty kings in the North before the Starks subjugated the others and rose to dominance. Mat had found a skull one day while taking a turn at plowing a field for rye, and there had been an arrowhead in the skull. They'd buried it, because chances were good that it was the skull of a man fallen in honorable service of the Wells. And if it had been a Bolton man, well, he wouldn't haunt the land that way.

He was sharing his campfire that night with Artos and Grayjon, the officers of his men-at-arms. Artos' beard was dripping with ale, a gift from the village of the sobbing weirwood, and he scrubbed at his hauberk of mail with handfuls of sand, brought by the Manderlys in barrels for that purpose. His archer and pike officers were with their men, taking the mood and feel of the formations and subunits, something Mat had done his best to drill into them, hard.

He wanted a unit that could rival the Golden Company for their discipline and endurance. What he had was not that.

"They say the Golden Company has never broken and run," Jon the Gray said. A veteran of the Ninepenny Kings war, he had started life as a free holding tenant of Mat's family, too poor to be anything but a pikeman. War had made him wealthy enough to become a man-at-arms, and now he was the headman of the village with the grimacing weirwood. He had feasted Alaric Wells before Mat's father died putting down a wildling band, and regretted bitterly that he hadn't ridden beside his lord as he felt he should have.

"They say so," Mat acknowledged. "But discipline and having never broken has never met Northern archers with weirwood bows, either. You're all freemen, tied to my family by choice and loyalty, not those serfs tied to the land and lords they have in the South. A free man fighting to defend home and hearth are worth five pressed peasants." He didn't mention that if some men had refused to answer Queenswell's summons, they'd be evicted and their homes burned by their neighbors and Cregan.

"Aye," Artos spat. "But 'tain't us and the men at arms I'm worrit about, laird, 'tis the archers and pikes." Mat was too, but not as much as Artos seemed to be.

"Why do you think we've been drilling the men every damn day?" And they had. After the march. On rest days in the mornings. In the afternoons on rest days, they competed: swordfights. Ball games. Archery contests. It felt more like a travelling festival than an army marching to war at times, but when the fighting came, and they created a feast for the carrion-eaters, they all would be grateful for the extra practice and drill. And because they were his men, and he loved them for following him south into war, Mat slept rough like they did and shared what they ate. Not for him, the big tents that Lord Manderly had brought, or the fine wines that Bolton and Manderly shared by a fire.

Mat drilled with them, too. Every time his men practiced different formations, whether a line, or a deadly pike schiltron of circular or rectangular shape, or a mixed formation, all his men in a jumble. He'd asked Manderly's knights for help, to give his men a cavalry troop to practice themselves against with no danger of being gored by a lance if a man was out of position or didn't have his shield up. In return, Mat's men gave Manderly's knights something to do that wasn't currying their horses or taking care of their gear.

"Golden Company on the mind, Jon?" Artos' voice wasn't mocking, but he knew the other man's history as well as Mat.

"Aye," the answer came. "They can attack with their pikes, laird," he addressed Mat. "We need to be able t'as well."

"You're right," Mat said. "Every pikeman has a hand axe or dirk and shield, aye?"

"That's a question better asked of the pike officers, but I think so, milord." Mat nodded at Artos' answer, then smiled.

"Tell the men. Next rest day, that will be a full day of drill. If the men at arms can hold off an attack from the pikes, a double ration of ale or mead for each man, and I'll pay. If the pikes break through them... the same to them. Oh, and Artos, Jon? I'll be taking part tomorrow with the pikes."

The meeting broke up, Artos and Jon to go tell the pike officers and then their men, Mat to brood alone. He stared southwest, where the thunder heads crackled and boomed miles away, and when he fell asleep beneath his plaid he dreamed of a war in a desert.

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

Mat stood next to Manderly and Cerwyn, across from the lords Ryswell and Bolton, and at the head of the table in the inn of the kingsroad south stood Lord Stark. His arms were crossed while he stared at a map, and most of the rest of the lords stared at Eddard Stark. Matrim was looking at the map. All of them save Manderly were painfully raw-boned and thin after the winter, where Mat's memories of the summer had them broad and powerful. Good lords sleep rough with their men, and eat what they're eating. If they're eating, his father had said. He wondered sometimes if his father had suspected, when Mat asked to be sent to Winterfell at twelve, suspected that his younger son wasn't quite from around the area, as it were.

It was gone and done, now, and Alaric Wells buried beneath the Queenswell, sword above his tomb while he became food for worms. In the here and now, though, the inn they stood in had cast open all the shutters and dozens of candles burned merrily, the better for the lords of the North to speak their pieces. The map Eddard and Mat stared at was of the Riverlands, and a raven's parchment message lay atop it, dirk thrust through it, the map, and into the table below at the place where Robert Baratheon had perhaps been wounded.

"I have conjecture and scraps of news, but I believe the strategic picture in the South looks like this: Robert defeated three separate forces in a day-long engagement at Summerhall," Eddard started. "He has bent the Stormlands back to his will, and now the full muster of the Stormlords marches at his command. Robert has fallen back into the Stormlands, following a defeat at the hands of Randyll Tarly at the head of a force from the Reach. Jon Arryn has settled the Vale, and he and Hoster Tully are attempting to settle the lords of the Riverlands that feel their oaths to the Tullys aren't so pressing.

I have received a raven from King's Landing, signed by the Queen, her daughter the Princess Shaena, and Princess Elia. They beseech the North to return to the King's peace, and promise that if we help settle the other rebels, Aerys shall be dealt with by Rhaegar." Eddard's face was grimmer than even usual. Mat spat on the dirt floor beneath the table.

"Forgive me for speaking out of turn, my lord. He will settle his father like he settled your sister— out of reach and hidden away at best. Then he will demand we lend him our swords to finish with Baratheon, Arryn, and Tully — Houses bound to our Lord Stark's by oaths of brotherhood fostering and a betrothal, a fostering, and a betrothal. Let's show him the color of his guts with our steel."

"Little lordling Mat's not much wrong," Jon Umber rumbled. "There were sacred oaths undertaken by Lords Rickard and Arryn, Lords Rickard and Robert, Lords Rickard and Tully. Sworn in their septs, and before Winterfell's heart tree. I stood as witness," he said, tugging at his beard. "I stood as witness, I say, and I mean to stand as witness, for Lord Eddard Stark when he swings the sword and puts down Aerys and Rhaegar for the evil things they have done."

"But what about the innocents, if there is such a thing, in House Targaryen?" Rickard Karstark said. "I don't mean to see Aerys and his foul son disinherited, only for the babe Aegon or child Viserys to be just as monstrous as the King and Crown Prince."

"The princesses can be betrothed and then married off," Bolton broke in. "Preferably far from King's Landing and where no men will gather swords and lances to the cause of seeing themselves beside the girls as King in the Red Keep."

Medger Cerwyn sneered through his beard. "Aiming for a princess for yourself, Bolton?" Roose turned his pale, cool eyes on the man wearing a tabard with his family's battle axe on it over ringmail, and Cerwyn paled slightly. "If I were, I assure you, I wouldn't be so naive as to announce it before gods and men while still married to the Lady Bethany, who is, I pray, with child once more."

"Forgive me, lords, but is the Princess Shaena not betrothed to the Prince Viserys, as is the Targaryen way?" That came from Flint of Widow's Watch, a thicker set man with broad shoulders and a guarded face.

"We don't know," Howland Reed said. He wore armor of bronze scales over a dark green tunic and brown breeches, and carried a long three-pronged spear and a small, round leather shield. "We don't have any men in King's Landing to get us information about what Aerys is doing or thinking, and Rhaegar has dropped from view."

"Either way," Lord Stark interrupted. "We are men of the North. We do not slaughter babes in arms, or children innocent of the folly of their father's decisions. It would be worse than turning a child seeking shelter away during winter." His face never ceased being solemn, Mat knew. Not after they'd ridden south, leaving Benjen sniffling and trying manfully to not cry. "It is nearly mid-day. Our march was not nearly as difficult as it might have been, with the weather permitting. Now comes the hard marching, and harder fighting. Let us take a break, and then we shall discuss commands."

Mat made his way out of the inn and to the grove of weirwoods that this village tended. He was joined by Eddard Stark, and the two of them knelt before a long, grim face that could have passed for Stark's cousin. Matrim tried to pray to the gods in the trees, the spirits of the cold northern land he called home now, but after a moment ceased. It felt wrong, but it would probably feel wrong to pray to his old, his first gods, here, somewhere sacred to the gods in the trees.

But what if they're the same gods? Then it's moot, and your prayers will be heard, or not, all the same. Mat knew his place, and so once he had finished his loose prayer, he waited for Stark to break their silence. Finally, the man did.

"I did not want this war," he said. "But it has been forced upon me, upon the North. War is bad for the land and people." Mat waited. Stark would explain, or he wouldn't, and Mat pressing him would do nothing. "It...if a King may have no friends, for all in the realm look to him for protection and justice, a high Lord may have few."

Matrim shrugged. "I am the son of a lord, my lord. As the people that look to my family owe us duty and labor, loyalty and trust, so do I have a duty to the people that look to us. I must ride to their defense when they need it, whether it be in war or in a court of law. I carry the justice of the Starks at my hip, and as I carry your justice, so must you carry the justice of all the North at your hip and on your shoulders. Death is lighter than a feather, lord, but duty heavier than any mountain.

What you must ask yourself, Lord, is if this war is a duty or a personal affair?" Mat shrugged again, and Stark closed his eyes, shoulders slumped as they knelt before the heart tree.

"I would be a liar, Matrim Wells, if I said that I would not take pleasure in extracting vengeance for my father and brother. But this war is a duty. A North that appears weak is a weak North, for there will be men that whisper the Starks can't even avenge the deaths of a Lord and his son, let alone raiding or being taken advantage of."

"Then you know your duty, my lord. A weak North is a vulnerable North, and is winter not coming?"

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Four: Riverlands and Riverlords​

Riverrun lay at the confluence of the Tumblestone and Red Fork rivers, with a huge ditch on the west side that could be filled by a sluice gate. Matrim stared at it as Lord Stark rode out the castle beside Hoster and Brynden Tully, and Jon Arryn, who had led his forces out of the Vale. Its walls were built from reddish sandstone, quarried from the gods knew where. "They say Catelyn Tully is a fine lookin' woman, Mat," rumbled Torghen Flint of the mountain Flints, sitting a hardy dappled mountain pony, his braided beard reaching down to his chest from beneath a spectacled helmet like Mat's.

"You're married, uncle," Matrim replied idly. He patted his horse's neck, and then switched to rubbing the beast's coat, grimacing when the gates stayed open behind Stark, and men-at-arms and lords followed the Tullys.

"What your lovely aunt doesn't know won't hurt her, lad." The thick man grumbled, then took a swig from a canteen. "'Sides," Uncle Torghen continued: "I hear tell from Lord Fat Lamprey that the Ned is to marry the Tully girl in place of the Bran."

"It might be pleasing to the gods to see that oath honored," Mat said. He thought about a girl with dark hair and eyes, pale as the fresh snow, and then he thought about a promise made beneath Winterfell's heart tree to himself. "But I think it might please Lord Arryn to bring fifteen or twenty thousand men to the army, more. We'd best be about getting down to see what the word is."

"Gods or not, but I'd not refuse that kind of price for fifteen thousand men for the war," Torgen leered, and Mat was cheered by his uncle's easy, but harmless, lechery. They started down the cleared hill overlooking the reddish castle, and he could see Bolton and Manderly, the other mountain chieftains, all the other lords of the North moving to meet the three high Lords of the realm riding out.

"Show me the man that would, and I'll show you a ruddy septon, mad on his gods." The area around the drawbridge across the Tumblestone had been cleared of trees at some point in the past, to allow for a sally by cavalry or men-at-arms, and when Ned Stark slid from the back of his gray horse, long cloak brushing the ground, the Northern lords went to their knees. He motioned them to stand, and his eyes ran over all of them, before finally settling on Mat and his uncle.

"Lord Flint." Eddard Stark said, respectful but firm. Mat suspected that he was still trying on the mantle of Lord Stark, molding himself to the needs of the title. "You'll take your men, and the forces of the Wulls, the Norreys, your nephew's men, and Lord Tully's vassal, Lord Shawney. You're to act as a strong scouting force to the southeast, and start acquiring grain to feed the army. We must discover if the forces of the crownlands have mustered yet. Don't force a fight you can't win, but if you think the odds and circumstances favorable, by all means, don't shirk from killing them before they can join the Targaryen army." Matrim grinned while his uncle nodded. A fight meant ransoms, and ransoms meant he might make himself and his family wealthy, wealthy enough to attract smallfolk settlers from the South to cut back the huge forests that dominated so much of the North, to put more land under the plow.

His uncle stroked his beard, then dragged Mat aside. The Lords Shawney, Wull, and Norrey, followed. Brandon Norrey looked like a goateed fox, thin and clever-looking and half a head taller than Torghen, while Hugo Wull had a long beard hanging down to his large gut, barely contained by a shirt of mail. Shawney was the best armored of all of them, his breastplate and gorget and greaves putting the Northerners' shirts of mail to shame. His reddish brown hair was worn pulled back, and he had a blunt, open face. He scowled at them.

Torghen clapped Lord Shawney on the back, grinning. "Cheer up, riverlander. First to march means first to fight, and first to fight means first to kill! I'm Torghen, this is my sister's get Matrim Wells, and those're Hugo Wull and Brandon Norrey, ruddy half-wildling, they are, and always sharpening their daggers and looking at my back!" Torghen mentioned Mat with warmth in his eyes and a smile, softening the seemingly harsh words.

"Your mother was a bleating ewe, Flint," Norrey smiled coolly, "And I had her like you Flints have all your sheep, the back two legs held up in my boots —"

Wull interrupted him with a laugh, deep and booming, and punched a fist into an open hand. "All this talk of having mothers and sharpening daggers. We march to war, my brave lads, and the Stark demands our cooperation, no matter how much I'd like to see you both strung up like a chicken gizzard before the gods."

"Forgive me, my lords," the riverlander broke in, fish-crested helmet held under one hand. "But as indelible as your argument is, if we're to set out, needs must that it be soon. The Stauntons and Buckwells together can muster near three thousand men, and they're the closest lords of the crownlands to the riverlands. I'd not see them burning our people and castles."

Matrim shrugged. "Reasonable enough to me, uncle, lords. We're the first to march, and first to fight. Let's strike a blow against the Mad King's forces." Torghen ordered them all to collect their men and make ready to march immediately, to meet by the road that followed the Red Fork east. Mat left the clearing by the drawbridge of Riverrun. The riverlands were gorgeous — rolling hills, and streams and rivers, stands of trees between the farms, not much wilderness. Not like his home, not like the North, with its huge swathes of land untouched by man. He wanted to grin, but then he thought about Andal invasions, and drew his lips tight.

Artos and Jon met him by the Wells portion of the Northerner camp, beneath the fortified well that his family had as their sigil, their mail coats on and belted tight at the waist, helmets held under their arms. His heart beat faster in his chest, with pride at his family banner, and tried to keep from grinning.

"We're to march beside the Wulls, Norreys, Flints, and a riverlord named Shawney. We're going to scout southeast, see if and where the crownland lords are gathering their swords, and start collecting corn and livestock to help feed the main body of the army with." He thought about getting the chance to drive a sword through Aerys' heart, thought about sticking his sword in slowly, to delight in the man's pain and misery, and then stringing his entrails from a tree he might carve a face into and create a new old god for the South. Then he shook his head. The chances that he'd get to do that were poor to none, as delightful as the idea might be.

"We'll go tell the other officers to get their men ready, lord," Artos said. He and Jon left Mat, and Mat found young Hugo the piper running through some kind of exercise on his reeds and chanters.

"Up and at 'em, Hugo my lad! We're to scout the border between the Crownlands and riverlands, and mayhaps strike a blow against Aerys' loyal men before they've got their breeches pulled up."

Small Hugo packed away his pipes carefully, and the two of them set about lowering the Wells family banner from the spear where it fluttered in the wind, cloth flapping. The sounds of men packing their gear from where they'd been sleeping, falling into line for march— all the sounds of war, filling the air. Horses made all their assorted noises, whuffed and neighed and snorted. Men shouted commands and orders, and made ready to march.

~Deep Deeds~​

There was no clear border between the river and crownlands, even after two days' marching. The land gradually shifted from rollicking hills and trees and rivers to flatter land, but still just as many trees and streams. It was good, rich land, and Mat decided that he wouldn't mind plowing the ground here, if the chance offered itself for him to become a lord in his own right. Now, though, Lord Shawney's light cavalry and Uncle Torghen's clansmen on shaggy ponies were driving cattle back to the main army, while some of Wull and Norrey's clansmen cut grain out of a field and ransacked a village any stored food.

Torghen had ordered that there be no rape, because even though it was a war, they were going to be marching through here again in the near future and that would just be bad policy. To make his uncle's point clear, Mat had executed two of Shawney's men-at-arms and one of his own men-at-arms the previous evening. They'd kicked, after he'd taken their heads, their victims watching with blank eyes.

He could still feel the dead men's eyes, and their victims watching him as he swung the axe. He was startled when a hand descended on his shoulder. He turned to look, and it was Torghen. "Norrey told me what ye did, laddy." Mat nodded, and turned back to watch as some of his archers poked through a woodline, moving to cover the Riverlord's light cavalry while they robbed some poor farmer of his winter wheat, because now Shawney put them maybe three quarters of a day's march from Staunton's castle and Torghen wanted infantry covering the raiding cavalry. "It isn't easy the first time, is it?"

"No," Mat finally said. "It's not. It's different in a fight, or a battle. There, it's them or me, and I know which my mother would prefer I pick everytime. Last evening was..."

"Were ye sick? There's no shame in it. I was sick, my first time." Mat suspected that his gruff uncle was about to launch into the telling of it, but he was rescued from the man's attempt to comfort him, as appreciated as it was, by a sharp whistle from an officer in the archers in the woodline, below the hill from Mat and Torghen.

The archer officer sent a runner, and he made the two hundred yard sprint fairly fast. He arrived panting, but grinning, and had stripped down to shirt and breeches.

"Smallfolk, milords," he began after he'd caught his breath. "Got scythes and hatchets and sickles and ooooh but they look ready fer a fight, milords."

Torghen flipped the man a silver, and grinned when the man slipped it into a purse around his neck. The grin disappeared, though, when Mat's archers started streaming back across the field. Mat and his uncle spurred their horses forward. "Gods damned fools," he said. "Sheep turds for brains, little arselings, if I've given orders that rape's to be met with death why would they think we want to kill them? We're in a lull in the bloody godsdamned winter, they can just plant their fucking fields again when we leave."

"'Tis winter all the same, Uncle," Matrim said. "This might be the last of their seed corn, and their last hope."

"Bloody fucking fools," Torghen snarled. He turned his head to Mat. "Go get your bloody pikes and men-at-arms, and form on the field on the far side from the trees." Mat nodded, heart pounding, and turned his horse, trampling some poor peasant's work beneath his horse's iron shoes.

He galloped across the field, his horse's hooves sending clods of dirt flying, and the ride back to the rest of the force was fast, urgency lending weight to his spurs. He pulled his horse up short of trampling his men, and was out of the saddle in a heartbeat. "Artos, Jon, Jon, Edrick, Harlon," he panted. Matrim handed his horse's reins off to Hugo the piper, told him to get the horse with the others, and undid his sword belt from around his tunic.

"There's smallfolk massing to try to drive us off the land," he said, and a pikeman helped him pull on his mail hauberk, then belt it at the waist. Matrim gave the man his thanks before speaking again. "We're probably going to kill them," he added. "Pikes will split in two, the huskarls will march between the two formations of pikes, and we'll discuss the real formation once we reach the field." They set out, Mat at the head of his pikes with Edrick, who came from the village with the grim-faced weirwood. He left his shield, and had his long axe slung over one shoulder as they marched. Edrick wore a fine one-handed axe at his belt, engraved with ornate knotwork and lines, and carried a pike, his small round shield hanging from his shoulder.

"It'll be a good first fight, milord," Edrick said, beard bristling. "Give the lads a chance to get blooded, lick the blood of the foe from their axes and swords. I'd trust our northron lads against any southron pissant peasants any day." Mat turned his head to look at the rows and ranks of bearded, grim-faced northerners. Sunlight glinted and flashed off pike-heads, on metal helmets and the bosses of shields, and the clangor of all the panoply of men at war was a din and paean to the gods.

"Sing out," Mat roared, his lungs filled with fine late winter air, crisp and cool. "Sing out true, and let these southerners know that the men of the North march!" The first song, started by a fine young tenor, was a song of homesickness and duty, about a man going o'er the hills and far away. Four more songs carried them the mile or so, at a brisk jog, to where Mat's archers were exchanging desultory shots with crownland smallfolk with slings and javelins, and the first few ranks of pikemen broke out into laughter when a cloth-yard long shaft took a slinger in the throat, fell backwards, and hit another man on his way down.

"By the gods, if that's all we've got to fight while we're in the South, the women and plunder will be easy pickings!" Mat couldn't identify the voice, but he wanted to tell the man that nothing was truly easy, it only appeared so before luring one in. Instead, Edrick shouted for silence and his uncle Torghen rode up, axe drawn.

"Good," the mountain chieftain said. "Form your pikes in the center, and heavy infantry and archers on the flank and angling out, like the rune veh, yes?" Mat nodded, catching the basic plan. His men would form the three battles for the fight, and the formations would be filled out as the other northerners and the riverlanders arrived.

"It will be done, Uncle Torghen," Mat said. They formed across what had been a field of winter wheat, now trampled with the marching and counter-marching of men, and Mat swallowed. A fight, even if not a real fight between soldiers, still had the opportunity to leave him draining his life-water into the ground, to feast the wolves and ravens. His pikes slung their shields forward, to dangle from around their necks as they set pikes and braced. He stepped forward, jammed his helmet on his head, and gazed across the plowed field at their foe. Mat tried not to listen to the pounding of his own heart in his ears, amplified by the metal of his helmet.

They were a ragged, ill assorted mob, but he guessed their numbers at nearly thrice his own men, but no match for all the force Stark had dispatched to scout, a mailed fist probing or with a dagger held, should it prove necessary. He narrowed his eyes, trying to see. He beheld a few men in ragged bits of armor, perhaps inherited from fathers or grandfathers. They were trying to bully the smallfolk into forming a line, slow and fractious compared to his own men. Crows and ravens and eagles circled overhead, somehow sensing a fight approaching, and Matrim felt eyes on him. He turned to look, and saw two ravens sitting on a bare tree branch, staring at him silently. If he squinted hard through his eye holes, he could almost see a face in the tree's rough bark. Odin, he thought. Wanderer, if truly you are there, I hope you'll meet the good men we send to you in your corpse hall.

The ravens gave a synchronized croak and lifted off the branch at the same time, and Matrim wanted to reach for a hammer amulet that didn't hang around his neck. He swallowed, and turned to look back at the foe, now coming at them across the long field. He turned his head over his shoulder, saw his men with helmet straps tightened, set and ready to meet the foe. One archer was hurriedly trying to change his bowstring, berated by a grim officer as he did so, and Mat's heart raced at the thought that now, at last, he would be doing what he had been born for.

The thought came unbidden to him, perhaps whispered in his ear by some nameless god, that if he survived the war, he would need to see a great sacrifice given over on the Isle of Faces, a hundred cattle or sheep or even criminals, done in the darkest of night, their entrails left dangling over the tree limbs. That was how it had been done in the old days, when the religion of the First Men was still as hard and cruel as winter, not like the softer form practiced now. I will give you gods my beloved horse, he thought, and then went back to the ranks of his pikemen.

"We're going to kill them all," he told them. "The men-at-arms and archers will funnel them into us, because they'll not want to charge arrows and men with big shields and decent mail. They'll think we'll be easy pickings, if they can just get around your pikes. You'll learn them the error of their ways, because we're not going to wait for them to gut themselves on your blades."

He took in a deep breath, and then exhaled. Then he breathed in once more. "Pikes!" he roared. He risked a glance back. His formations were becoming bigger, the other men filling in behind his own. Mat looked forward, then called the next command: "Prepare to advance!" Braced pikes were hefted, the first five ranks of men levelling their weapons to point forward, a very angry hedgehog of Northmen.

"Advance!" he screamed the last word, stepping forward with the first rank of his men, axe hefted and wishing desperately he'd brought his shield as the group facing them sent stones and rough javelins their way. They advanced deliberately, going forward to crush the foe under the rolling inertia of a block of attacking pikes, eager to win the first battle of the war for their cause. There was no singing now, only the grunting of men as they fought to keep their twelve foot shafts under control, curses and mutters as spent rocks and javelins rattled against helmets or armor or shields after expending their energy on the rows of pikes waving in the air.

They clashed against the peasants with stolid dull thwunks, pikes penetrating flesh and guts, punching through rough wool clothing and makeshift wooden armor, and then Matrim was amongst the foe. He wanted to feel bad as the first strike of his axe split a man's head in two, that these people stood no chance, but he knew they'd have given his men no chance at surviving if they could have. The man's club fell from his lifeless hands to the furrowed dirt below. An eagle shrieked, and a man screamed as a pike's point went in.

The first two rows of smallfolk were stopped, and dropped in their tracks. His pikemen grunted, men working in unison to knock aside clubs and make-shift spears of scythes so another man could thrust his point into soft throats or eyes or groins. Mat blocked a blow from a wicked cudgel with nails jutting out of it, a makeshift morningstar, with the haft of his axe, and headbutted his attacker. The man staggered back, his brown eyes wide and unseeing, and Matrim took the heartbeat of breath it bought him to step back into the sheltering storm of steel and wood that were his men's pikes. The Northerners drove forward with grunts, battering at the bad armor and reaping a grim toll on the men with no armor. Mat waited, and when his men's formation started to stagger and break because now they were stepping over bodies, he stepped forward once more.

Someone drove forward with a dagger, and Mat knocked it away with the haft of his axe, crushing the man's fingers. Someone else came at him with a sickle, trying to cut him, and Mat let the blow bounce off his mail, and he punished the man for his courage by punching him with a mailed fist. He finished by hooking the man's rough wooden shield down, his own breath harsh and ragged in his ears, and then twisting the axe in his hands and driving it back up, into the man's jaw. The man fell back,his green eyes wide and fearful, hands reaching up to try to staunch the flow of blood, and a pikehead pistoned forward, taking the man in his throat. A miscast stone bounced off Mat's helmet, and he turned to look at where it had come from. He saw the end of the fight.

The smallfolk were taking steps backwards, glancing over their shoulders as they shuffled away from his men's bloody pike points, and the stench of burst guts and death hung over the impromptu battlefield. Mat spat, and turned his back to the peasants. He didn't look at the bodies, but now that the fighting, as quick as it had sprung up, was finished, some of his pikemen and archers were going through the bodies. He turned, and Harlon was there with a wineskin.

"We need to find a bloody septon or septa to help bury them." Matrim said. "Fucking fools!" A group of archers were exchanging wagers about who could hit a fleeing man. They were stopped by Iwan, who slashed the air in front of their bows with his own bowstave, distracting them.

"They wanted a fight, milord, and weren't willing to turn and run. 'Tis no fault but theirs, and only the gods know why they wanted it," Harlon said. Artos strolled up to stand with them, and he cast an eye about, stroking his beard.

"Probably the horse taking all their bloody grain," Mat said.

"Stupid shits," Artos said, and Mat thought it telling that he couldn't decide whether Artos was referring to the horsemen or the smallfolk. "And the men are even stupider for trying to loot them. Oi, you cunts! Cut it out! His lordship will see you get some coin when we sack someplace, quit trying to rob dead men poorer than wildlings!"
One archer made a rude gesture at the clump of men around Mat, and Artos rolled his shoulders back. To go thump him, presumably. Mat laid a hand on the wiry man's shoulder.

"Peace," he told him. "They did well. But I'll enforce a stricter discipline if we sack a village or castle." He had no need to describe his stricter discipline— they knew already, from yesterday. "See to the wounded and about prisoners," he ordered.

He looked away, away from the dead men being picked over by his men for whatever coin or valuables they might have had, the lifeblood of the men staining the field, men that had plowed and sown and harvested this field, weeded it, taken care of it so it would feed them. And now they watered and fed the field. He swallowed, trying to keep himself from being sick. This hadn't been a fight, it had been a slaughter, and worse, these people hadn't deserved it. Now their widows and children would likely starve, and Mat could claim their deaths as his fault, too.

We are at war, he told himself. I have marched south at my lord's orders, and they would have killed men entrusted to my command by their families and my brother. It was small comfort, and he knew that he would dream of dead men's eyes pleading with him silently that night. Torghen arrived on his shaggy pony, after a while, with Norrey and Shawney.

"Well done, Northman," the Riverlord said. Torghen and Norrey echoed the sentiment, Mat's uncle including a pat on the shoulder.

"They were just peasants, uncle. Just angry peasants scared of a lasting winter." Mat cast a glance to the sky, and thought of choosers of the dead, circling overhead as eagles and swans, taking the bravest of the dead men to All-Father's hall. There will be no harvest of souls for the corpse-maidens today, he thought bitterly, for all that the smallfolk had done their best to drive his men from their field and keep them from taking their grain. Odin, keep them from Niflheim. They deserve a seat in the corpse-hall.

"Not all fights will be as clear as we might wish," Norrey said. "Why, many's a time I've raided your sheep-plowing uncle's lands for a chance at his wife, and now here we are, fighting aside each other."

"Aye." Torghen growled. "At the Stark's command, and never ye forget, 'tis his forbearance as keeps me from holding a hall-burning for you and all your rat-faced kin." Mat ignored his uncle and Norrey as they fell to quarreling, turning and walking away. He knew, of course, that the army had to have grain and meat to feed its bellies, a twisting, sinuous snake made of thousands of men and horses, armored in iron with thousands of pikes and swords. But the reality of coming up with that grain and meat, that stuck in his throat and made him want to be sick. He couldn't, though. He could not appear weak before the other lords, even his uncle, and especially not men that would trust him with power over their lives and deaths.

He slipped into the treeline his archers had poked through what seemed like days ago, but was perhaps an hour. Though he had no heart tree before him, Matrim knelt. His mind went blank of whatever prayers he might have whispered or thought, and instead he tried not to weep. He stayed there for a long while, long enough that now he could hear men digging graves, and at peace for the moment, he stood and went back to his men, knees popping as he dusted off the knees of his breeches.

"Lord." One of his pikemen nodded. The man was leaning on a spade, his pike and five more propped against each other to form a rough cone against the now darkening sky.

"You men did well," Mat said. "You did well, and I shall see you all paid four silver wolves each for your courage today." Cheers erupted, and one man slapped him on the back. I don't deserve this, he thought. He forced a smile to thank their enthusiasm and made his withdrawal.

He could not seek solitude again, and he had no desire to wrestle with the bad mood threatening to overtake him. He left his men cleaning up the dead, and went and found a tree to sit under. Jon the Gray found him cleaning his axeblade with a scrap of linen cloth. The bearded soldier settled across from Mat, his own axe across his knees.

"'T'isnt like the songs they sing, laird," Jon said. "Especially not that kind of fight. Still, and you didn't lose your head or get us all killed, which is better than most with their first command. The next one, against real soldiers, that'll help. That gets your blood flowing, heart racing like a horse, all galloping and thumping. That's better than sex, it is."

Mat half-remembered a man from his dreams saying much the same thing. War is the greatest team sport on the face of the planet, boys. He didn't know if it was a dream or a memory, but Jon seemed to think the same sort of thing. He passed a wineskin to Mat, who took it gratefully and drank down the red, some rotgut stuff from a few miles away, perhaps.

"Wine, and women, and wine and women at the same time help with the bad ones." Jon accepted the scrap of linen from Mat, and set to cleaning his own axe. "Nothin' makes me harder'n a fight. I suggest you find a woman, because I've seen the wine take men and make them stupid, put an evil spirit in them."

Matrim knew the evil spirit that Jon spoke of. Men that went to war came home, and the war came back with them. Night terrors, reliving their battles, finding solace in beating those weaker than them or the bottle. Some, but not all. Mat knew his father had had them.

"Anyway, lord. I'll see to settling the men." The talk had helped, Matrim thought as Jon left, whistling a cheerful tune. It had helped, but he knew that there would be times he remembered it and hated himself for killing peasants simply looking to not starve.

They gambled and rolled the dice, against soldiers. They lost. Their widows should blame them, he told himself, and stood. He had work to do. Their shades would haunt him in time, but now there was work to be done. Perhaps their shades would haunt him less if he helped give them a decent burial.

~Deep Deeds~

The village headman was on his knees, wringing his hands, and a group of Wells archers were beside Matrim, with arrows on their strings, held and ready to draw back. This was the third such scene he had been in charge of, and it still sat ill with him just as much as the first.

"Please, milord, please, we need the grain, Lord Staunton took what we had set aside for tithes to the Faith and the Faith took from our seed corn to make it up. You'll be beggaring us, milord." He was a painfully thin man, flaps of skin hanging from his jowls, and Mat tried not to let the man's pleas sway him. The village was clumped together, all eighty or so of them huddled against a wall of the rough sept, trying not weep as pikemen ransacked their homes and barns for grain and livestock.

Mat was seated on a rough stool, axe held across his lap, helmet between his feet and shield propped against a stool leg. In the distance off to the southeast, there was rain, foretelling a dismal and gloomy afternoon and evening. He blinked, trying to clear some of the wool from his thoughts.

"I understand, master, I really do." Mat swallowed, and tried to keep his face schooled and stern, a copy of his father's lordly face when dealing with recalcitrant farmers squabbling about property lines or whose bull begat a calf on another man's cow.

"I understand," he repeated. "But I would rather my men take your grain peaceably, and leave you what we can, than sack the village and leave you dead."

"My gods, milord, we will starve! The women will weep and wail, and babes cry for want of milk from their mothers—" he was interrupted in his haranguing of Mat's stone heartedness by a girl of the village, about seventeen or eighteen. She had pretty, striking blue eyes that made Mat want to squirm in shame, long black hair and pretty, unscarred skin.

"You're a bastard and a son of a bitch and a cruel man," she shouted, and bent down to pick something up. She came back up, and threw whatever it was. A rock, flying true, hit Mat in the nose.

He took the blow silently, placed his axe on the ground, then stood. He reached a hand up, and his fingertips came away bloody. His pulse quickened, and he felt the want to fight, the urge to lash back out. It pounded in his chest, the desire to fight or run, and he mastered himself by counting to twenty.

"Bryory! By the gods, girl, be silent!" The headman crawled to Mat's feet, beseeching him to spare the foolish girl, she had been addled in the head ever since her father died, and Mat backhanded the man.

"You will both be silent," he said. The girl had been seized by a pair of archers, the both of them grinning. Perhaps evilly, if Mat stopped to consider it. He didn't. Instead he tightened his hand into a fist. The girl struggled against the archers.

"You think me evil, girl," he said. "Evil for condemning your village, your home, to starvation. Evil for taking all your grain, all your pigs and sheep and cattle? Yes," he said when she nodded. "Yet I have done this in three other villages, and only one offered my men pitched battle. We killed those people, like we will kill you if you attempt to kill us. I am not cruel, or evil, or even, as you said, 'a son of a bitch'. I am doing my duty to my men to see that they don't starve while we do our best to kill the King and his men. But those villages are still standing, their men alive and women unraped, because I ordered it so. Just like yours will be, unless we are attacked."

One of the archers forced the girl's hand to wave at him. "Shall we take her hand, milord?"

Mat shook his head, eyeing the girl. The sleeves of her dress were pushed up, as though she'd been doing washing, and he thought about Jon the Gray's words.

He stared at her, long enough she finally flushed and ducked her head away, and he grinned.

"Leave her," he said. In one hand, he took the hand she had used to cast the stone. His other he formed into a fist, and then slammed it into her stomach. She slumped over, gasping. At his nod the archers backed away, letting her fall. One of them leered at her, but the shorter one looked like he'd smelled something foul.

"Let this be a lesson," Mat said. He knelt in front of her and she cringed away. He undid the laces of a mail mitten and pulled it off to dangle from the sleeve of his hauberk. With his ungloved hand, he reached forward and tilted her chin up, so she was looking him in the eyes. She tried to jerk away, but he tightened his grip on her jaw and stilled her. After a moment, he released her. Then he slapped her. She cried out and drew back fearfully, and then spat at him, hand covering her cheek.

"Take all their food. If anyone resists, kill them." He stood and turned away from the girl. "Actions, even courageous ones, have consequences. Next time, think twice before throwing stones at armored men, even ones that restrict themselves to the 'pillage' part of 'rape and pillage.'"

His men set to with a will, happy to be stealing anything not nailed down or too heavy to carry. He sat back down on his stool, and watched, face schooled to impassiveness. His archers laughed about it, and he saw two of them covering the girl especially. Good. Let her know fear, and let them learn to keep a tighter eye on smallfolk.

Finally, the day over half done, and with a cool wind rising, the work was done. The food was loaded onto the horses of the men that had them, and his men began to reform. One man's stirrup strap broke, and ignoring the jeers from his friends, he set it to rights.

Once the men were mounted and on their way back to the army, nearly two hundred of them, the rest of Mat's force started marching to the next one. They stopped after what Mat judged to be a mile, and started making camp.

The weather was softer here in the South, and where men had huddled together under cloaks and plaids, as close to fires as they could get without singeing themselves, now they were content to merely sleep on them, looking up at the stars and whispering quietly.

Mat sat with his back against a tree, boots off, watching his men. At some point in the night, the group of men that had ridden to the army yesterday trickled their way back. One man swung off his horse, and hurried to a campfire. A whispered argument ensued, and then he picked his way with care to where Mat sat.

The man squatted in front of him, armor rustling against itself, and in the darkness Mat could see him grinning.

"Word from the army, milord." Mat recognized the voice. Torrhen, one of the professional men-at-arms from Queenswell, and a few years older than Mat. He'd helped Mat learn how to properly hold a shield, for the shieldwall. So few of his men, including himself, had yet to stand in that great killing test, where boys became men. Gods, see me stand when my time comes.

Mat nodded for the man to continue. Then, realizing his mistake, he whispered: "What news, Torrhen?"

"Lord Stark says we're to swing back towards the northwest and meet up with the army. He got word from Lord Baratheon, who is headed northwest to try to meet up with Stark, Arryn, and Tully in the southeast of the Riverlands. He wants us to avoid a fight if we can, but if we can't, to try to mask our movements so they can't see we're trying to meet up with his lordship. And keep sending grain, of course." Matrm nodded again. He cursed, and Torrhen laughed.

"I wanted the chance to kill crownlanders too, lord, but we'll still get it. Maybe just not tomorrow, aye?"

"Aye," Matrim affirmed. "We'll show them the color of their guts. Now go get to sleep, Torrhen. There'll be killing work, and soon." The man-at-arms, armor still rustling, left Mat to his own devices. He lay flat, back still to the tree, using his plaid as a pillow, and tried to sleep.

Armored corpses. The dead, piled high as far as the eye could see. Nothing but snow for miles. The end of the world, then.

A huge wolf stalked the land, stalking him. He had armor, a shield strapped to a handless arm, and a sword. He knew, as a blind man knows darkness, that his death was coming. A death it might be, but not the death, the final one that would send him to a doom.

He welcomed it, and grinned. The wolf came at him, as fast as lightning. He managed to strike it, but then it had his hand in its huge jaws, snarling, and he met his death with a song on his lips.

When Matrim Wells woke the next day, his weak hand was nothing but pain. When he examined it, he found a length of twine, as thin as a silk ribbon, wrapped tight around his hand, cutting off the blood flow to it. He must have gotten tangled in the night, and it affected his dreams. He undid the twine, and placed it in his belt pouch.

~Deep Deeds~

Swinging nearly twenty-five hundred men north and west, away from enemy forces they knew had been ahead of them, and now were behind, was hard. Men grumbled, and cast glances behind them. But Torghen trusted the other lords with him, even if some of them were Norrey and Wull, and they trusted the men that helped lead, the officers and under officers.

The last of their horsemen arrived a day into the new course of march, and Torghen deployed Shawney and his own light cavalry to act as a screening force to their rear, securing them from being smashed from behind by the enemy. They forced their way along small, old tracks that led from village to village, small out of the way places where the lord came by infrequently, if at all.

There were places in the North like that: tractless wilderness that made up so much of what the Starks, Karstarks, Flints and more, ruled. Mat was proud of the fact that he'd been to every village that looked to Queenswell for protection and justice, broken bread and shared mead with the leading men, dandled children upon his knee and kissed maids beneath weirwood trees.

"Come on, you hard sons of bitches," Iwan exhorted. "Do you want to live forever to grow old and die of the cold and endless shits and your prick won't keep stiff?"

"Gods no," Jon the Small exclaimed. He was leading the first of the pikemen, his own pike slung over his shoulder. His bushy eyebrows were wild with excitement, bristling at Mat from beneath the man's hat.

"I want to die at thirty-two," Artos bellowed. "I want to die with my axe buried in a thin-blooded southron's skull, and his friends running in terror at Artos of Weeping Weirwood! There's a winter coming, and I mean to be dead and buried before I have to suffer waking up with my cock soft and my wife seeking a younger man to bed her."

"She'll have no trouble with that, Artos! Just tell her Torrhen with the pikes is a'coming courting, and she'll go all weak-kneed, because you certainly haven't been servicing her!" A chorus of voices, nearly forty in all if Mat had to guess, claimed that their names were Torrhen, too, and they'd like to drop by. He grinned, but Artos' face drew taught, and Mat knew now was probably a good time to step in.

"A craven fears death in battle, lads, but even if the spears never find him in old age, the ailments of an old man will. I certainly don't want to live to be hoary and bedecked with frost and snow," Matrim said. "And what better way to go, than a hero's death with your sword-brothers beside you, and the foe dead at your feet?"

Some joker couldn't resist, and called out: "In bed with your wife, lord!" Mat took no offense, for he had no wife, and the good-natured joking helped ease the miles a man had to march on weary feet. When at last they came to a village large enough to be worth the trouble of stopping at, Mat stayed on his horse, and his men took a break while they let Shawney's foot soldiers take on the task of going through the village for livestock and stored seedcorn and vegetables.

He closed his eyes and breathed in deep of the air of the South, and was interrupted from trying to steal a nap in the saddle by a commotion in the village common. Stifling a yawn, Matrim prodded his horse forwards once more, and found the village headman on his knees, a sword at his throat. Anger quickened his heart, stoking fury and rage into preparedness to kill. His hand drifted to his axe.

Two men had the headman by his arms, forcing his neck out, and the man with the sword was toying with it, making slow motions along the villager's throat, heavily implying he was but a moment from sending the point straight in. The headman was blubbering, trying to plead for his life, and three of the soldiers were laughing, mocking his attempts at saving his own skin.

"By the gods," Mat said. "What are you men doing here? Take that sword away, we're here to take their food, not their lives."

"Fuck off, savage," one of the men-at-arms spat, and the four others drew their swords, too. Tristifer Shawney arrived, fish-plumed helmet held under his arm as his horse cantered up.

"Unhand your axe, northman," Shawney ordered. Mat found himself wanting to copy the soldier, spit, and start a fight. His grip tightened for a heartbeat, but then the numbers and circumstances exerted themselves. Bloody godsdamned Southron bastard, Mat thought uncharitably. Stupid prick. Self-righteous ass of a 'ser.' With his men outside of the village resting, and the mountain clansmen acting as security for this raid, Mat knew the fight would go badly for him. He complied, lifting his hand from where the axe dangled on his saddle.

"So why are you threatening a man of the smallfolk that can't hurt brave knights in armor?" He mocked them, going for their identity as knights and brave men.

"They hid their fucking grain," a second soldier spat, and Matrim kept himself from grinning. So the girl did something about us rather than lie in the dirt and whine. Brave. Stupid, so stupid, but brave, too.

"So move on," Mat suggested. "We don't have the time to sack the village entirely, hunting for hidden food, and any man that takes the opportunity to rape will lose his cock or his life."

"You savages are the ones most like to rape, and make human sacrifices to your foul tree gods." Mat drew his sword rather than his axe, because he was still on horseback and they weren't. He looked at them, the four men on the ground and Shawney.

The cool calculation of murder made itself easy. If he killed one of the ones being quiet first, and then the most belligerent one fast enough, he might knock the fight out of the group of them. His grip on the sword hilt tightened, and the situation reminded him of the similarity of when he had greeted Roose Bolton before arriving at Winterfell. He had made himself ready to die, but now he didn't want to. There were women to swive, a wife to eventually marry, children to father, and a Stark to serve.

Southrons aren't worth it, a part of him whispered, the insular Northman part. But they were just poor people trying to get along as best they could, and they hadn't asked for the war, or for their homes to be ransacked and their food stolen. Now, facing someone else doing it, it was all too easy to see how he would have appeared the villain. Matrim didn't like being confronted with a perspective where he was the monster, but he understood it.

They were stopped from the violence inching closer by a clansman with a stalk of wheat in his mouth cantering up on a shaggy mountain pony. "The Flint says and sure you're sure that there's na grain t'be found, laird Shawney, and 'tis time t'be movin' on, aye, goin' ta try t'steal a march on the wee cunt what's been warnin' the villages 'n'if we find 'em to be hangin' 'em like a coney, aye?"

"I- what?" Mat wanted to grin at the look of puzzlement on the Riverlord's face, but provided a translation for the man. He nodded, short and sharp, and his brown eyes watched Mat watch his men leave the village, but they didn't say anything to each other, and once the men were marching out, Mat spurred his horse into a gallop.
He raced ahead of the column of marching men, horse throwing up dirt behind them, and as they moved ahead the men began to fall behind, until finally it was just Matrim and his horse on the dirt track. He slowed to a trot, something his horse could keep up for miles and miles, and he stopped only to piss against a tree.

He finally caught up to her after probably six miles, and circling around two villages. His horse caught up to her own fast, and by the time she realized that there was a chase to run, she had already lost. Mat caught the reins of her own horse, an older, smaller pony, and she looked frightened at his appearance. Her blue eyes widened in fear, and he felt a tinge of guilt. He crushed it, ruthlessly.

"So, Bryory," he said. "Thought you'd do a little good deed, follow us while we swung back to meet up with the main army, and warn any villages you met that we were going to take their food, did you?"

"No, milord," she lied, and her defiance and anger lit her face up. Mat wanted her, then, but he settled for forcing the reins of her horse from her hands and tying them to his own horse. He swung out of his saddle, and walked close to her. Even with the height disadvantage, he could see she was scared of him, no doubt remembering the punch and slap, the humiliation. He laid a hand on her thigh, and she tried to flinch back.

"Gods, but you're fucking brave," he said. "Brave, but stupid. You're lucky it was me," he said. He picked her up out of the saddle, grunted, and settled her on the ground. From his saddlebag he drew a knife. He used it to eat with, but he pressed it into her hand. He took a gold dragon from his purse on his belt, and pressed that into her hand, too. She looked startled.

"What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"

"Because courage deserves a reward, even if it's stupid, misguided courage as likely to get you murdered as do any good. Take the knife, keep it hidden unless you need to use it. Take the dragon, keep it hidden unless you need to use it. Now go home, and stay there. There's armies all across the Southron kingdoms," Matrim said. "And quite a few of them won't be as stupidly decent as I. Mention this to no one, do you hear?"

He swung back into the saddle and left her standing there, staring after him as he rode back to his men, and hoped she would make her way alright.

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Five: The Shieldwall

Mat sat his horse on the side of the rough dirt road, sipping from a canteen beneath an old beech. Three weeks of war had scarred the land, and now his marching men sent folks running whenever they saw his men coming. A sow snuffled a few feet from his horse's hooves, trying to find early beechmast.

His men were marching hard, trying to surprise Lord Staunton's forces from the north, cutting between where Buckwell's men were supposed to be approaching from and where Torghen Flint had offered battle to the first of the crownland lords. Matrim had a day to slip north, and flank the enemy. The smallfolk watched his men, warily, and he saw two or three men fingering knives and reaping hooks. He whistled, and they looked up at him. He grinned, slowly, and loosened his sword in its sheath at his hip. A group of his pikemen turned, looked, and then laughed derisively, and Matrim's grin widened.

One of the men spat, and herded his wife and grubby children away from the rough road. Another, a man that hadn't fingered a weapon, makeshift or true, pulled a woolen cap off his head, wrung it in both hands, and then approached Mat. A brave man, even if he's near petrified with fear, Matrim thought.

"All me pardons, milord," the man said, bowing and scraping and trying not to let his fear of Mat show. "All me pardons, but, beggin' your pardon, milord, are you a lord?"
Mat shrugged. "I am the son of a lord, yes," he said. He corked the canteen and hung it back on his saddle.

"Milord, well, seeing as you're a lord, and our lord has gone off for the wars, milord, the septon, lord— it's my little girl, lord, she's naught but eight or nine and 'is holiness is doing things with her, things what ain't proper, lord, things for married men and women."

Matrim blinked. He thought about what the man had said for a heart-beat, then slid out of his saddle. He could feel his pulse roaring at the thought, the wrongness, the evil that would have to dwell in a man's heart to be capable of such a thing. His hand dropped to his sword hilt, and he squeezed, imagining his hands around this septon's neck.

"Where is the septon?" The crownlands were good land, good land like the riverlands, rich and fertile, and Mat wondered if the richness of the land helped create the evil in some of the men that lived in such rich lands, but the logic of it seemed incorrect. Rather than worry at it like a dog with a bone, he let it drop. He had bigger issues than what drove men to evil, at the moment. The man's eyes widened at the movement, and he swallowed audibly.

"This way, milord," he said, and pointed towards a small house next to the seven-sided wood building that served as the sept. Mat's armor clinked against itself, and as they drew closer to the house, footsteps muffled by the dirt, he could hear a grunting. I know what he said, he thought, but I did not think the septon would be so blatant. Mat kicked the door off its rough hinges, and barged in.

The home was dark, ill-lit and with no windows to provide sun when there were no clouds. The girl's father darted around Matrim before he could reach the bed and dragged the grunting septon with his robes rucked up to his arse off of the cowering girl. The man hit the priest once, twice, then a third time, breaking his nose. The septon spluttered, and enraged, Matrim seized him from the angry father and punched the septon in the face. He fell back on the bed. Mat shoved the father out of the house, and now he filled the one room home, nearly scraping the thatching that formed the roof with his head.

"You filthy pig," Matrim said, and drew his dirk.

"I am a holy man, a man of the gods! Who are you, to lay hands on me?" The septon stood, and tried to back away from Mat, only to fall backwards onto the bed. The girl's father came back into the hut behind Mat, and the girl scrambled off the bed and away from the septon.

"See to your daughter," he told the father, and then kicked the priest off of the bed. The anger and rage coursed through him, and he was ready for a fight. He grabbed the man by the front of his robe and dragged him into the weak early spring sunlight. "Do you think the gods would like you in their heavens, priest? A rutting, cowardly piece of scum that has to take his pleasure from a girl not yet flowered or ready for marriage because no woman will have him? Or do you prefer boys, but don't want hung for your unnaturalness?" The septon blinked several times in rapid succession, trying to clear his eyes. In the light, Matrim got a good look at his face, pox-scarred and pimply. The man, aside from his fat belly, had a pinched and weaselly face, and Matrim spat.

"I am a man of the gods," he said again. Mat nodded, his face blank.

"Clearly you are an educated man, too. Tell me, what is the King's punishment for rape?" The hate and anger in him were wanting to make their way out, have him beat the man to death, but Mat tightened his grip on his dirk, reigned himself in.

"There is — my rights — I demand a trial!" the septon shrieked.

"It's gelding!" Mat roared, cutting through the man's further demands for a trial. "The punishment for rape is gelding or the Wall, and they don't need fat useless septons at the Wall that eat and whore the Night's Watch into more poverty. On your knees, priest, or I will take your legs."

The man refused, and Mat grinned. He drove a boot into the man's knee, and the man collapsed, howling. "Your gods have abandoned you, priest, and I am your judge and executioner. You have done wicked, evil things, septon. But you will not beg me for mercy, bastard. You will beg the smallfolk who you have harmed and done ill to."

"No," he gasped through tears and the pain. "No," he said again. "I refuse! The gods will see me a martyr to your heathen, pagan ways, and I will be transported to the heavens!"

"Your gods are not here, and if I knew of a heart tree close by I'd dangle your guts from the branches as an offering to the true gods." Someone jeered, taunting him, and Mat stepped away. "Who else dares accuse this man of misdeeds? Tell me, tell me what he's done, what evil he's caused."


For a moment, there was mostly silence, broken only by his still-marching men and the septon's sobs of pain. And then the dam burst: "He raped my girl!" "He stole our seed corn as a tithe, even though we already gave 'im 'is due!" "He had my son hung by the lord fer thievin', milord, but my boy weren't no thief!" On they went, the litany of venal and petty sins a septon charged with the shepherding of people's souls could get away with.

Mat let every person speak their piece, every man and woman, and at last he turned back to the septon. "The lord's duty to his people is to protect them, give them shelter and succor when they need. I am not the lord here, but I know justice, septon. The Wall, or your life?"


"The Wall is not for the likes of me, filthy heathen," the man spat, spittle dribbling down his chin. His eyes rolled madly, and he stained the front of his robes with fear urine, the stench harsh on the otherwise beautiful spring day. "The gods will strike you down in your wickedness, afflict you with the pox and bloody mare and you will die shitting your guts out, screaming for your mother!"

"I was so hoping you'd say that," Matrim told him. The man's eyes widened for a heartbeat, and in that heartbeat Mat stepped back close to him, close enough to smell his breath and the fear, see the hate in his eyes. He drove his dirk deep, between two ribs and into the man's heart, and he grasped at Matrim, clawed at him, trying to stay on his knees. Odin, bar him from your corpse-hall for eternity. He let the septon stay against him for a moment, perhaps forty slow heartbeats— long enough to hear the man's last breath, his death rattle, and then let the man fall backwards, lifelessly.

"Do you say justice is done, people? That you accused this man, saw him condemned and executed in accordance with the laws of gods and man?"

"Aye," said a man broader than most, his face grim. "You gave us justice, lord, and we thankee. Please don't burn our home."

"I'm done here," Matrim promised. "And my men will leave your homes alone. You might see about sending word to your lord, though, and ask if he'll send a new septon." He cleaned the dirk on the dead man's robes, and left the body in the dirt, for the smallfolk to bury or leave to rot as they'd please. He swung back into his horse's saddle, clicked his tongue, and set off after his men.


~Deep Deeds~

The woods were thinning where they'd been cut back for firewood around yet another interminable open field. Mat debated with himself if it would be worth trying to keep his men under control as they filtered through the trees, to take advantage of the cover the trees offered from any enemy skirmishers. He could hear the clash of metal on metal, men's screams as their life-water drained into the ground.

Mat made his decision. He swung out of his saddle. He left his axe in the leather loop on the saddle, and hefted his shield.

"Pikes to form on either side of the men-at-arms, archers ahead of us. You'll shoot into the side of the enemy while we cross the field, and then pull back once we're close enough to charge them," Mat ordered. One of the men-at-arms yelled for the rest to form the boar's tusk, a wedge of heavily armored men with shields, and Mat bullied his way through his men to the front rank.

"Milord, you can't take the tip, you're commanding," someone said, and Mat drew the aventail of mail up to his helmet and another man helped him secure it.

"I can and I will," Matrim Wells said. "I am your lord's brother, I have been trusted with the command, and I will not ask men to perform the most dangerous task while I shirk and hide behind their shields. Form on me." They complied with more, but muted, grumbling, and his heart swelled when Artos and the Gray Jon pressed their shields tight against his back. With these men I will deliver Lord Stark a victory they will sing of for ages to come. He drew his dirk. The dirk is for oath-taking and the shield-wall, where you're close enough to smell a man's fear and hate and what he had for breakfast, or his woman's quim from the night before, his father had said the last time they had ridden beside each other.

"Hurh!" The shout signalled that each man was in position, ready to go.

"Forward!" He led them, left foot first, shield up high covering him, and the shields of his men stayed tight against his back, swords, spears and axes pointed forward. Ahead of them, the banner with the black wings of House Staunton dipped, and horns blew their low notes. Gods, see me.
Through the eyeholes in his helmet, Mat could see men trying to turn to address his men and himself. His men were going forward with all the inexorable force of a rock rolling down hill, and then the first shots from his archers started landing. The range was too close, almost too close, and men went down with arrows having penetrated their mail and even some helmets.

Mat grinned inside his helmet as his archers started taunting the enemy. He wiped the grin off when Staunton got his men turned, faster than Mat had expected. He swallowed, opened his mouth. He tried to shout, but it came out too low. He forced himself to take a deeper breath, and then lifted his sword to point into the air.

"At the curs! For Winterfell and the Starks! Hurh!" His men responded, calls of 'Queenswell and the Wells,' 'Matrim!' ringing in his ears, and his men's pikes hit an instant before Mat was at the enemy line himself. He had time to see one man with a nasal helmet scowl back at him from beneath the man's huge red beard, and then a spear glanced off his helmet, driving his head back. He stumbled, bounced off his men's shields, and then they pushed him forward. An axe tried to hook his shield, but Mat drove it forward, fouling the man's attempt, and slashed his dirk at the man's throat. It bounced off the man's gorget. His heart thundered in his chest, loud enough that surely everyone could hear him, and his balls were tight against his body as he tried to reset his shield in front of him.

"Thrust, you yellow excuse for a lordling! Your father fucking taught you better than that!" In his fear, Mat had forgotten one of the first lessons he'd learned as a boy, trying to hold a full-sized man's shield up to build strength. The dirk was for oath-taking and the shield-wall, and for stabbing. He grinned and shoved his shield forward. It caught on one man's kite shield, shield bosses clanging against each other, and Mat thrust his dirk at the man. It caught in his throat, because his shield was out of position, and blood spurted up and into the man's beard. He fell backwards.

You'll never know if you're a killer of men until you stand in the wall, shield to shield, near crushed between your shield, and that of the man behind you, and take another man's life in the wall. The shield wall is... different, from an open fight, and from executing a man. There is nothing like it, and I fear it. Alaric Wells had died when Mat was seventeen, and even though it had been the wildling axe that caused the mortal wound, Mat had released the bandages and allowed his father to bleed to death beneath the open sky rather than be in pain on the slow and torturous ride back to the castle. That was different from this. The fight against the smallfolk, and the fight he had been in against the wildlings, those were all different from this.

Matrim Wells discovered he was a killer of men. The battle-rage overtook him, coursed through his veins, and he felt his body was afire. He blocked a sword thrust with his shield, watched one of his men's pikes down the line smash through a man's ill-repaired helmet, leveled his shield and punched it into a man's face.
There was a hole in the enemy line, now, and none of them seemed eager to fill it. Matrim stepped into it. Out of the diminished corner of his eye Matrim watched as one of the Staunton men tried to turn to stab him in the side, and was cut down in turn by one of Mat's men. He stepped forward, shoving against an enemy shield, and lost himself to the fighting.


When Matrim came to his senses, he was straddling the chest of a man in good plate harness, struggling to drive his dirk into the eye slits in the man's bascinet. "Please, ser, please for the love of the gods, I yield!" One hand wrapped around the dirk handle, the other on the moonstone in the pommel trying to thrust downwards. Two of his men, archers both, were fighting to keep him from killing the pleading man beneath him. Disgusted, Mat curled his lip and let the dirk drop to the ground.

"You can let go of me now," he said, and tried to blink through the crust of blood on one eye. He rolled off the man he had been inches from murdering, and tried to ignore the man's gasps of thanks. Someone pressed his dirk back into his hand, and Mat's grip tightened around it involuntarily. He sat up, his movements stiff and sore. There was a gash in his thigh where his mail had been broken, and several on his shield arm where his shield had first splintered and then broken.

"Did we win?" He looked around. Broken bodies were strewn across the field and the stench of blood and innards hung heavy over the plowed but unseeded ground. Men were picking over them, searching for coin or valuables to loot. One man shrugged. He helped the man in plate harness that Mat had been trying to kill to a sitting position.

"Who can say, lord? We didn't run from the field, they seemed to. Gods, you reaped them like wheat! You stepped into the hole you made in their shieldwall, lord, and then you killed your way through four or five ranks of them." Mat shivered, suddenly cold, and wanted to puke his guts out. His stomach churned, and he tried to stand. The gash in his thigh pained him, and he sat back down before he fell back down. Four or five. And then gods alone know how many in the ruin of their shieldwall. Did you see, o gods? I have harvested a new table for your corpse hall, Odin. Let them greet me as friends when my time comes!

A man-at-arms came staggering up, a gash in the sleeve of his mail. He stopped, then bowed. "You need to come, and fast, lord," he said. He carried his helmet under his arm, a spear in the other hand. "It's Jon the Gray, lord. He's... he's badly, and asking for you." One of his men needed him. Mat forced himself to stand, and a man handed him a spear. He used it to help him walk, and they started down the field, picking their way carefully over the dead.

"Is there any word from my uncle?" Mat wanted a drink of water. The thirst burned in his throat, hot and prickling.

The man-at-arms leading the way shook his head without turning to look back, and Matrim feared the worst. He dry-swallowed, and then grimaced at the sight of an archer wearing a crenellated well on his tunic laying face up, eyes unseeing and a second smile stretching bloody and red below a pair of thin lips. I hope the sword-girls and shield maidens took you. "What was his name?" The man-at-arms shrugged, and Mat frowned. He turned to the two archers that were following, the man in plate following them. One of them shrugged, as well. The other's mouth was drawn tight.

"He was Ronnel, lord, from the same village as Artos." Matrim nodded, and marked the name.

Men, all of them his own, started picking their way from where they had been looting the corpses, and now a fair few of his archers stood in mail coats, all of them still decorated with the blood of their previous owners. Mat pressed his lips tight together and tightened his grip on the spear's stolid, reassuring ash haft. He could see gaps where men had died, and he tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

When they arrived at Jon the Gray, there was a cluster of men around him. Mat knelt, pain blackening his thoughts, and Jon opened his eyes. There was fresh blood in his beard, and a rough bandage made from a tunic across his middle, where a huge gash had been rent in his mail, and everything stained with blood.

"L-lord." Jon coughed weakly.

"Shhh," Matrim said. "Save your strength, man, we'll find you a maester and then you'll live long enough to see me carried home to Queenswell on a shield." He took Jon's hand and squeezed, as hard as he could.

"I- It hurts, my lord," he whispered. Mat leaned in close, to hear better, and Jon's beard brushed his ear, painting it with blood. He seemed to gather strength from Mat's closeness. "Do it, lord. Fast and peacefully, like you did for your da, and you'd want me to do for you. You know where to thrust." Mat sat back up, shocked, and Jon's eyes seemed to dim. He whispered something, and then Mat caught " -- Alaric, your lads are braw—" and then it faded to inaudibility. Mat's hand drifted to his hip, where the dirk sat, and he swallowed heavily.

"Leave us," he said. One man made to protest, and Matrim cut it off with a savage gesture. "I said leave us!" Jon's grip on his hand was fading, and he was starting to whimper now. He placed the spear in Jon's other hand, closing the fingers around the haft as close as he could. Mat kept his eyes on Jon's, even unseeing as they were, and he drew the dirk as he heard the shuffle of footsteps turning and leaving. Mat swallowed again.

"Are you sure?" he whispered. There was no answer, save for an almost imperceptible squeeze of his hand, and Mat nodded. "Go with the gods, Jon." Til valhalla. He drove the dirk home, into the man's heart.

Then he wept. His tears left runnels in the dried blood and gore on his face. Jon had been there, with a calm word or wink whenever Mat had thought he'd lost the thread of leading his men, and so had helped bind them tighter to each other. Mat knelt there, dirk discarded to the side, hand clutching Jon's lifeless one, and finally he was shaken out of his weeping by Iwan, the second man in charge of the archers.

"Lord. We have a rider from the rest of the force. They've been pushed in the flank by Buckwell's men, and the enemy are pressing them hard." It never ends. Gods, but I am ready to sleep. Instead, he placed Jon's limp hand across his chest, and turned to the archer.

"Tell... Tell Beron, of Queenswell's men-at-arms, that he's to take Jon's place as an officer. Find the other officers, tell them we're marching." Standing was painful, but it had to be done. The wound in his leg throbbed, and Matrim wondered how he had taken it. He shook his head. I cannot grieve now. It must wait until later.

As best Mat could guess, his men had fallen on the flank of Staunton's forces, shattering them, while the fighting between the rest of his uncle's men and Buckwell's continued, perhaps a mile distant. He groaned as he stood, and someone passed him a spear to lean on.

"Form the archers up front, pikes behind, and men-at-arms last," he decided. "I'll march with the pikes." Matrim stooped and picked up a long kite-shaped shield, unsplintered or broken by the clash of iron and steel. He wanted to see Jon's body home, to the north, to be buried near the weirwood grove by the village the man had come from. Instead, there was his duty to be seen to, duty to his still-living men, his uncle, Lord Stark. Heavier than a mountain.

The first steps were pain, and face locked into a silent snarl, Matrim forced himself through it. Once the muscles around his wound were loosened, the following steps weren't as bad. They would come back for the bodies to bury them properly, and raise a cairn so that forever after, men would know of the steadfastness of his men. I swear it, by the gods, old, new, and mine. That was his duty as their warlord. As their warlord, too, he'd have a duty to see to their wives and children.

I can't worry about that now. He had another fight to win, and he considered only victory, because defeat would be ruinous for him and the force his uncle commanded. Ruinous for both of them. It was less than a mile to the fighting. His fight must have only taken a few moments, if the forces of Torghen, Wull and Norrey, and the Riverlord were still fighting Buckwell's men, and that meant that his men would help ease some of the pressure his uncle's forces were surely feeling.

The paean of the spear and sword-storm rose to the skies, and Matrim felt his heart quicken again. He wasn't sure if it was fear or anger. His knees wanted to knock together, and the roaring in his ears of his own pulse started a throbbing ache in his head. Gods, he thought, and drew his sword.

The killing work had been going on for a while now, and the field was stained with blood as they emerged to the right of his uncle's forces. A runner approached them, carrying only a sword hitched high around his chest, and when he stopped in front of Mat, he was out of breath.

"Laird," he said in the thicker accent of the more rural areas of the North and the mountain clansmen. "Yer uncle's gone down, aye, wi' an arrow in his cheek. He is no dead, but 'tis a close thing, and t'other lairds are near to blows aboot the command." Blood and bloody ashes, and the corpses of the gods, Mat thought.

He turned to his officers, the men that would help distribute orders and keep discipline. "Form up to threaten the enemy flank," he said. "And make sure the pikes 'ware cavalry. Bloody Southrons have an abundance of horses, and gods willing we'll capture some after this fight." They nodded, the men that trusted him, and in turn were trusted by the lowliest of pikemen, and Matrim turned back to the runner. "Take me to the bloody lords," he said. "We'll cut through this knot."

The man muttered something under his breath, but Mat pretended not to have noticed, and followed the man. There was a lull in the fighting, it seemed, those organic moments where both sides paused to take a step back, breathe in deep, perhaps steal a sip from a canteen or flask, and so the killing paean to the gods had ceased momentarily. Mat did much the same, and stole a drink of water from a bloodied man, panting amd holding a small circular shield and a small hand-axe.

"You're doing the North's work, and Lord Stark's work aside, man." The man nodded at Mat's words, and kept trying to draw in huge gasping breaths. He said something in the old tongue that Mat didn't catch before he and the runner were gone again, hurrying towards a clump of men at the rear of the solid block of men that made up the fighting formation.

They arrived, and found Mat's uncle bleeding profusely from a wound in his cheek, arrow shaft still partially sticking out from where it'd been cut down. "Goo'," Torghen said. "'Ma' i' here. 'E 'a' th' co'and."

"What was that? Speak up, Flint," Norrey complained. "We can't understand a word you're saying."

"He said," Mat interrupted, eyes narrowed and face barely masking his anger. "I have the command. So I have the command. Get back to your men, my lords. We're going to finish this fight."

"You? Gods above, but you're barely a stripling out of his infant dresses," the Riverlord complained. Mat started to draw the sword he'd sheathed at some point, anger pounding loud and hot in his chest at the man's continued rudeness. He was beaten to it by one of his uncle's underofficers, a huge bear of a man with long brown hair and braided beard. The man-bear grunted, and drew his huge two-handed sword from where he'd been holding it in the scabbard.

"T' laird named 'is nephew the Mat as commander," he said, nodding at Mat. "There is blood of our foes ta be spilled, and ye cunts're busy quarreling about wha weel prance aboot as t' commander? Once we're done with yon Southrons, we shall finish ye for them, and decorate our laird's banner with yer skulls."

"I really don't think that's necessary," Wull began.


Mat interrupted him, trying to force himself to come up with a plan, some stratagem, to rescue the day on the fly. He thought he could see a glimmer of it laid out before him, what he would do and what the foe would do. "Then see to your men, lords. Shawney," he turned to the man. "You've got a force of heavy cavalry?"

The man nodded once, short and sharp and unwilling. Let him be unwilling, Mat thought. So long as he obeys, or I will have the reason why out of him at spear-point if I must. "Good. You will take them, and wait until the foe commits their own. I'm going to take my men, my men-at-arms and archers and pikes and then... My pikes are going to pretend to rout. If we're lucky, that will bait Buckwell into sending his cavalry at my men. Once they're committed, my pikes will try to reform. If they're not... Ignore my men. You must smash the enemy flank, you hear me? Smash their flank!" Mat pounded his fist into his open hand for emphasis, snarling.

The gods will judge me. The gods, and if they are true, my men will await me in the corpse-hall and greet me as friends. If not, then I shall deal with it as it comes. The die will roll. He turned to the man-bear that'd spoken up for him. "See to my uncle's men," he ordered.

The man nodded, grinning. "Sure, and 'tis been a rare fight, laird." That was the lords settled, the cavalry with their orders... What else was there to do but stand, and perhaps, die with his men? He took his leave, made his way back to his soldiers.

"Edrick, Harlon, Jon," he said when he got there, and they came to stand before him, wearing new coats of mail with rents and gaps where their previous owners had died, proudly exchanging silvers and a few bobs of gold, and Harlon wearing a gold arm ring with glee. He outlined the plan to them, and swallowed hard when he got to the part where it would be their men, men that trusted them to keep them alive, men that believed Mat and his officers all knew what they were doing, might very well die in an attempt to play bait. "-so Shawney's men will come from the flank. Start rolling them, and Artos and Beron will finish it." he ended, and the guilt gnawed at him that there would be widows tomorrow morning, widows that wouldn't know for months they were widows, widows he had made by using his men as bait.

"I'll stand with you," he promised. "Give me a pike-" whatever else Matrim had been going to say was cut off by a huge cheer from across the way, where Buckwell's banners dipped and began moving towards the rebel force once again. Edrick shook his head.

"Gods, but you're thick, aren't you, lord? It's our job to fight, and your job to come up with a victory. Give us the signal, and we'll have the men running like hares. I'll judge when's best for us to turn on the Southrons, and then they'll be in for a fight."

Mat nodded, throat thick and unable to speak. The courage of his men was touching, and he would do his best to make sure as many of them as possible made it home. This I swear. He heard the wind, and felt he needed to find a spear. He turned, and there was one, sticking out of a corpse wearing Buckwell colors. He seized the spear, drew it out of the body, and stepped forward, between the two armies. Mat felt driven, and he marveled at the strength that had returned to him. He twirled the spear in his hand so that now he could throw it. He looked across the field, and saw Buckwell's infantry coming at them, and the remnants of Staunton's forces.

We will win. The inner voice sounded different from his own. Matrim disregarded it, and cast the spear. As it flew, he whispered: "Odin, all of them belong to you now." It arced over the infantry, and he grinned as it disappeared behind the foe. Now the meeting of swords begins. He turned and raced back to the line of his own men, wounds forgotten, and planted the kite-shaped shield in the bloody mud and dirt.

"Here they come," he called. "Here they come, and here they shall die against our steel!" His men responded with clattering their swords and axes against their shields and chanting the name of Matrim's home. "Lyanna and Bran," he whispered, and drew the mail aventail across his face.

Now his world was the metal of his helmet and his hauberk, his sword and a new shield someone passed him. He smacked the side of his shield against the shield of the man to his right, ensuring that their formation was tight. He crouched low and leaned forward, and as a spear-point clattered off the rim of his shield, Matrim's world became blood and killing again.

Matrim awoke to himself when someone prodded at the cut on his arm. He twitched, trying to grasp his sword with a hand that didn't seem to want to work, and pain shot up his arm. He stopped moving his right hand, his sword hand, and began grasping blindly with his left. He seemed to still be in possession of all of his limbs and extremities, and a silent thanks went to the gods. He tried to sit up, but was pressed back by a firm hand against the rings of his mail coat.
Next he tried to open his eyes. That succeeded, and then he was looking at the lower rim of his helmet, and beyond it a head of dark hair. He reached his left hand up, to try and undo the aventail of mail.

"Water," he croaked. A canteen was pressed gently to his lips, and he sucked at it greedily. The hands helped him remove his helmet, and he blinked into the sudden light at the person helping him. It was the girl from before. Bridget. Brida. Berry. No, he remembered. "Bryory," he croaked again. She frowned down at him.

"It's a bit different when you're laying on your back without a weapon to hand, isn't it?" He closed his eyes, remembered the knife he'd given her, the blade a smaller sibling of his dirk with the weirwood handle and moonstone in the pommel. So this is how I will die. A strip of a girl with a grudge. All-father, welcome me to your corpse hall where we will feast and fight until the end of all days.

He wanted to tell her to get it over with, and slide a dagger or sword into his hand so he would go to the gods. Instead: "Aye," he rasped. "'Tis." He sucked at the canteen again when she offered it, and then she took it away, still staring at his face. He wondered if there was a cut or wound he could not see, but put that out of his mind when she brought the knife, that black steel with white hilt, out from somewhere beneath her short kirtle. He could see her ankles, where the material bunched as she knelt beside him.

"I didn't understand why you gave me this, at first," she said. "And then there was a man, on the road home— " she cut herself off, and closed her eyes. The hand resting on his arm was shaking. He reached up with his other hand, still wearing the mail gauntlet, and rested it atop her own. She let him drink again.

"It's well," he said once he had finished. Then: "I understand, ye ken? You do not want to, but your hand is forced, and it happens so fast— it seems like there is no other choice, and sometimes there is not."

"It's a terrible choice," she said. "I do not ever want to have to make it again. But it kept me alive, when maybe I wouldn't be otherwise, so here. Take your knife, and keep it." She dropped it onto his chest, and Matrim nodded.

"Then the knife has served its purpose for you, and I welcome it back." His voice was returning now, but still hoarse. Did I yell, during the fight? "But tell me, what are you doing here?"

"My lord fought here. I came to tend to the men from my village, but they all seem to have lived. Your men have pressed me and those like me into helping search for wounded men."

"Lucky," Matrim said. "And I'm sure you'll be able to return home soon. But I'm awake now, and I need to find my men." She smiled, at that.

"You're in a tent, milord, and one of the men that watched you hit me told me to sit with you until you woke. He didn't know you'd given me the knife," she said. She turned away to fuss with something, and Mat took the opportunity to force himself to a sitting position. It hurt, and made him dizzy. He closed his eyes.

"Call me Mat," he said. "Lord Wells is my brother, Bryory. Can you help me with my armor?" Bryory nodded. He opened his eyes, and she was untying the leather thongs that kept his mail mittens attached to his mail sleeve.

Once she had helped him out of his armor, she made to stand— most likely to leave. He placed a hand on her arm, and she stilled. "Will you sit with me?" He bit his lip, suddenly unsure of what he'd asked.

She looked at him, glanced at something— presumably the tent entrance— and then leaned all the way over and placed her lips on his own. He stiffened for a moment, and she drew back. He blinked, and she was trying to school her face to keep it from showing— something. He swallowed.

"If you don't wish to," he began. No. Gods, that's bad. "if you think that I'm expecting it of you or demanding it, or, or anything like that—"

"Not at all," she said. "I want to." Mat smiled, and leaned forward.

 

[Paladin]

A/N: Haha, you can tell what parts I've written on my phone in the google document based off the different indentation of the paragraphs, and where I finally said "fuck this" and quit trying to make it all match before posting. Sorry if it's too jarring, just say something and I'll (probably) go through and make it all neat later on.

Chapter Six: Back to the Riverlands

Bryory sat beneath an ancient oak with her knees tucked under her chin, and watched Mat work beside his men. All of them were stripped to bare chests and breeches, ignoring the chill in the air that had her wrapped in Mat's plaid cloak. Their ribs were visible beneath their skin, and they all had the same whip cord thinness to them, even the men that had had some extra around their middles and now had flaps of skin hanging loose.

All of them bore scars, too, mostly on the arms or forearms. Mat did as well. Some of them came from the daily work of living, scars on the fingers from sewing or punching holes in leather, or hammering nails into wood, scars on forearms where they had made bad cuts with hatchets or knives. Bryory knew those scars well— nearly every man in her village had had them, too. What they hadn't had were the scars on the face, from where helmet and mail didn't cover everything, or on their chests where spear-tips had gone through mail. The scars only added to the general air of lean, dangerous, predatory animals.

The men were going through the dead of the previous battle, stripping them of armor and laying them with respect in a huge hole in the ground. Each man dead had a few words said over him by a friend or his commander or even Mat himself, face set in a blankness that she didn't like the look of. Then they moved on to the next. Bryory frowned when a raven croaked at her from a tree-limb, and seemed to stare at Mat. She looked back at him, and her frown deepened when she realized that there was a bloody hole in his breeches. All of them have holes in breeches or shirts. After I fix his, I shall start on the rest for him. I can do that much, at least.

Mat looked up, caught her gazing at him with a frown, and he frowned in turn. The raven croaked again, and his eyes moved to watch it. She watched his lips whisper something no one else heard, and a brief incline of his head followed. I thought Northmen worshipped trees, not ravens? The raven lit off with another cry, and a rustle of falling elm leaves. Eerie, Bryory thought. Mat turned back to her, and smiled. It softened his flinty features, if not the force of his amber eyes, and she shivered. The air wasn't the only thing that could be chilly. He looked at her for a few heart-beats longer, but then turned back to his work.

Then she noticed that they were only laying Northmen in the shared grave, and she shot to her feet. Her natural impulse was to march over to him and demand they treat her fellow Crownlanders with just as much respect as their own dead, and Bryory was tempted. She stilled herself, though, and tried to think about Mat's reaction. He would probably agree— he'd been nothing but respectful of the dead so far, even if he was the reason that most of the dead were Crownlanders. Thanks to the Mother, none of the men from my home have been found dead. And Mother, please give me the patience to help curb my temper.

She swallowed her inclination to demand when it had served so well at home. The scene before her was all too real a reminder that Mat wasn't just Mat, he was Matrim Wells, a lord of war, garbed in bright armor with a flashing sword, and he was the one most responsible for this butchery. Heart pounding, she tried not to let her fear of Matrim show as she approached. He's Mat, she told herself. He is Mat, right now.

"Mat," she started. He turned to look at her again, and his eyes were unreadable as he took in her wearing his cloak. "Would it be possible, d'you think— I know you'd wanted to build a cairn for your men, with some of the shields worked in... Would you add the Crownlanders? It ain't their fault they fought you, they was just doing as they had to, and all..." she trailed off, unsure of the look on his face.

He smiled at her, perhaps to try to reassure her, and then he turned to one of his men. The man had a long beard, but was shorter and older than Mat. They spoke swiftly, in the tongue that the Northmen still used amongst themselves. The man grimaced at something Mat said, but then laughed when Mat followed it up with something else and an elbow to the ribs.

Mat turned back to her, and nodded. "We'll add them. They died well, as men should, standing against their foes. They deserve to be honored." The shorter and older man nodded, added something in the Northman tongue, and then turned and began issuing orders. The soldiers began laying their former foes in the mass grave, and Bryory smiled at Mat's back. He and another man lifted a body, laid it in the grave, and straightened the arms over the dead man's chest.

~*~

Mat thought he was dreaming. He thought this because when he had gone to sleep, he had been sheltered under the branches of a sturdy old ash tree. Now he stood on a long plain, unmarred by visible hills or mountains. He turned, and all around him the same featureless grass. He swallowed, and his hand went to the sword hilt at his belt. If this is a dream, 'tis like none I've ever experienced before. Not even the dreams of the other-me. He thought he heard a dog howl. He turned again, and there was a line of men standing before him. A huge dog, with blood-stains all over, paced with giant, loping strides behind the men.

He felt he should step near the men, a gut feeling that made him clench his hand around his sword's hilt, too. He stepped to the men, and as they drew near each other, the bloody dog the size of a large croft or small hall maintained the same amount of distance between itself and Mat, pacing behind the men always, but further now.
Their faces became clear, and Alaric Wells watched his son with eyeless sockets in a rotting face, holding a sword.

Jon the Gray watched his friend's son with worms wiggling beneath his cheeks, and Mat knew the faces of the rest of the men. There the two wildings that had been his first kills. A murderer he'd taken the head of in the name of Lord Stark while his brother had been visiting one of the villages. Two of his men-at-arms, grinning with eyeless and decomposing faces, standing with a riverman knight between them. On they went, stretching out to nearly thirty men, and Mat was secretly glad that it appeared only to be men he'd slain himself, and not men he had sown the seeds of their deaths, too.

"Oh Matrim," his father said without a tongue, teeth clacking. "And here you are, a killer of men and a lord of war." He tsk'd at his son, and suddenly Mat felt all of six again, standing in the castle's hall before his father's seat, all the eyes on him for some boyhood mischief.

"But not that good," Alaric Wells went on. "Only half the men brought to war, to be pissed away in skirmishes that mean nothing against the weakest of the Crownland lords. I should have drowned you like the runt you are, or better yet, sent you to be flayed and made into a pair of gloves and underthings by Rogar Bolton. But here you are, flying the banner of your father and our forefathers, and disgracing it."

Mat shook his head, trying to deny that he'd piddled away the men that swore to the Wells, but no words came out.

"What's the matter, little lordling Mat?" The question from Jon was mocking, cruel like the man hadn't been in life. "Bolton got yer tongue?"

"I think I'll do what I should have done," Alaric said, and handed his sword to Jon. "You'll be with me soon, little Matrim, and I shall drown you like the runt of a litter again and again, and hang you, and all the deaths that you have given other men you shall feel a hundredfold."

A surge of fury rose in Mat then, and he brought his hand and stump up to wrap around his father's neck. "No," he said. Strength and rage filled him, and he snapped the neck of his father's shade with a resounding crack. It echoed across the endless field, and the huge dog sat back onto its haunches and watched him toss aside the pile of bones that no longer wore his father's face. The dog grinned a doggy grin, and it was nothing like the softly adoring grins that the hounds at home wore. It was rather nastier, much more teeth than smile, and Matrim drew his sword with his one hand.

"I will not go tonight to the long death, to roll upon the wheel again," he said to himself or the dog or the men or all of them, and he stepped forward, stump going up to ward off a blow as Jon drew a dagger from his belt.

He woke with a start, and pulled Bryory towards him.

After they finished making love atop his cloak in the gray pre-dawn light, Matrim kissed Bryory. She smiled against his lips, and then wriggled out from underneath him. He rolled to let her, and then pushed himself to standing. He went to the remnants of their fire, stoked it back to life, and added more wood. Around him, the sounds of a camp of soldiers waking began— men speaking quietly so as to not wake their fire-partners, grunts and curses as men were stepped on in the dark by other men. Latrines in use. The clatter of cookpots and pans as men began heating mead or wine to help them face the day.

Mat tucked his shirt back into his breeches and tied the closing off. He could hear Bryory getting back into her kirtle, and he did not smile. The dream still shadowed him, and he swallowed. His heart still pounded, but whether that was the hate he had felt or the lovemaking with Bryory he could not tell. He turned away from her, so she could not see the disquiet he felt.

I must set my mind to work, he told himself. So be at the thing, he thought, and turned his mind to coming days. The force, his force, now, was headed back Northwest, their path ahead and behind clear of royalist forces after the battle four days ago, and Mat was hoping to be received well by Lord Stark. And why shouldn't he, he asked himself. He had led a successful flank attack against Staunton, and rescued the fight against Buckwell after his uncle had been injured. Thoughts of glory did not ease his spirit.

He turned to the east, where the sun began to rise, where the site of the battle was a mile distant. Though he could not see the cairn without the full strength of day's light, he knew it was there. It brooded heavy over the field where they'd built it, pulled down the stone fences that farmers constructed when their fields threw up rocks to help pile it high. Farmers would be turning up a rich harvest from that field for the next few years, if the war did not kill them all first. Blood and corpses made a field rich, richer perhaps than even the Riverlands. Well had the swords of his men drunk deep of the blood of the Crownland soldiers.

They'd counted the bodies while they laid them in the common grave. Two hundred dead Northerners and Riverlanders, slain with their swords in hand and shields high against the enemy, and near fifteen hundred Crownlanders dead, most cut down after their shieldwall had been broken and they'd tossed down their spears. I do not like butchery of men without weapons, Matrim thought, and it sits ill with me. I need to find a way to prevent such from happening again.

They'd taken prisoners, though. Sixty knights, sworn to Staunton and Buckwell between them, and two of Staunton's sons. Buckwell had died, his antlered helmet crushed beneath a Northerner's huge two-handed sword, and the men that Mad had detailed to try to find his sons hadn't done so. The first day after the fight, his men had drunk themselves silly and celebrated still living. The second day, they'd done the grim work of seeing to the dead. The third day they'd moved a mile away from the battle's site, and now, on the fourth day, Mat would see about turning his force back to the Riverlands to meet with Lord Stark's main army.

Rosy tendrils of the sun's early light began marking clouds in the sky, and Matrim knew he'd brooded enough. He greeted the sun with a smile and closed eyes, letting the warmth of an early spring day wash against his face. He pretended surprise when Bryory pressed herself against him, shivering.

"Give me your cloak for the day," she said. "'Tis bloody cold out here, and you standing in shirt sleeves alone." Matrim shrugged, then wrapped his arm around her shoulders. She pressed tight against him, and he savored the moment. It ended too soon, when a cry went up. He turned, and his hand dropped to the dirk hanging at his right hip.

There was a rider bearing Stark livery, and he carried only a sword, the better to ride fast. He leaned over his horse's neck, spoke with a man, and then descended from the horse to approach Mat.

"Lord Wells?" The man was lean, but so were near all of the Northmen that had come South. His beard was squared off and neat, and his brown hair was pulled back in a tail. "I've come from Lord Stark," he began. The man patted his horse's neck, calming it. "You're to come with all haste," he went on, "Lord Stark says, all the haste, and try to meet the army at Pinkmaiden."

Matrim nodded, and set his chin atop Bryory's head, arms wrapped around her. He pulled her tight against him, to ward away the chill for her, or the dream for him, he would not admit.

"We'll leave today," Mat said. "Will you rest with us, or accept a fresh horse?"

"A fresh horse," the man said. "I've two more groups like yours to find before the sennight is out, but I won't turn down a wineskin of good mead or ale, and a hot meal."
Mat gave the orders, and they were joined by the officers of his men, as well as Norrey, Wull, and Tristifer Shawny. Torghen stayed in the tent erected for him, burning with fever where they'd cut the arrow out of his cheek and no one knew whether he would live or die. I pray he lives. The messenger shared his news, after the urging of the men surrounding him.

"It's confirmed that Robert Baratheon won three battles in a day at Summerhall." Cheers erupted, but Mat schooled himself and did his best not to sneer.

"But he was defeated at Ashford," Stark's man said around a mouthful of hot porridge with salt and butter. He took a huge quaff from his weak ale, and then went on. "Last as Lord Stark had heard, Bobby Baratheon was riding hell for leather with most of what's left of his horse, heading for our army, see, and his surviving foot have given fat Mace Tyrell the slip with a forced march and are ensconced safely back in Storm's End."

"Gods above," Shawney swore. "What the bloody hells are we to do if Tyrell catches us once Baratheon passes us up?" The messenger shrugged, and Mat wanted to punch the Riverlord's teeth out. Instead, mindful of his men watching, laid a hand on the man's arm. He led the man away, and Norrey and Wull started reassuring the other men.
"Don't be a fucking fool." Mat put as much pleasantness into his voice as he could, and Shawney turned to look at him, startled by the derision in Mat's voice.

"Why would the might of the Reach chase the remnants of an army, even if Baratheon is with it, when they could invest his home and seat and trumpet his weakness to all the Kingdoms? No, if I were the man in charge of hunting Robert, I'd be doing it with men-at-arms and mounted crossbowmen, tracking him like a hound tracks a hart, or a pack of wolves track and kill an elk. Surround him, weaken him, bring him down."

Shawney nodded— that was how men hunted boar, too, and it made sense. Mat chewed the inside of his cheek, suddenly nervous. "But if the man that thrashed Robert at Ashford is in charge, we might very well be in trouble." He ignored the Riverlord, turned his head to the skies. He still wanted to thrash the Riverlord, but the specter of being hunted by ten thousand Reachmen suddenly made Mat nervous, too. Eyes closed, he tried to think of what the situation and dispersion of forces across the South of Westeros might possibly be. It was in him, the spirit and desire to fight, and he clenched his hand into a fist, tried to master himself and think on the pressing issue.

He made his decision and turned to Shawney. "Your light horse and the clansmen's ponies will scout behind us each day, searching for a trailing force while we march to meet Lord Stark. You're not to engage," Mat said, and the irony of repeating orders that Stark had given them and they'd promptly skirted the edge of disobeying was not lost on him. "And if you see horses that we haven't taken already, steal them. I want to start getting the men-at-arms and archers all mounted."

Shawney muttered something, and Matrim ignored it. He left the Riverlander standing, and bade farewell to Stark's messenger before the man departed, and wished him luck. He went to wrap his arms around Bryory, and pressed her close against him.

"I hope you brought your riding arse," he said. "We're headed to the Riverlands."


~Deep Deeds~

Eddard Stark sat his charger, a reassuring solidness between his thighs, and watched as the archers of the North sent their first arrows into the line of approaching infantrymen armed with pikes and spears. The battle on the enemy's left and Eddard's right were foot soldiers of the loyalist Riverlords who had slipped away from Hoster Tully's pacification of his lands. The center and right were men of the Crownlands, weaker than they might have been. Eddard was pleased that he had a force in the Crownlands, forcing those lords to leave some troops behind to hunt Torghen Flint and his soldiers.

The day was crisp, clear, and the Southrons were attacking up a rise outside the walls of Stoney Sept. I hope that Robert is well. They'd had no word from him since a raven had reached Pinkmaiden with word of the victories at Summerhall, and Ned had silently wondered why his friend was heading towards the Reach. This was Ned's first large scale battle, and he tried not to let his nervousness and fear show. He went to pat his horse's neck, then stopped when he remembered the barding protecting the horse.
It was new-fangled, the barding, and protected the horse from pikes or lances in a charge. Not all of Ned's mounted men-at-arms had it for their horses, but some did, and he had returned to Winterfell from the Vale, and found it in the stables of Winterfell. Home, he thought, and his thoughts turned to clear, cold streams and fast running rivers, huge lakes reflecting towering pines and snow-covered fir trees. He'd loved riding the glens and straths with his siblings, but now Lyanna was gone, Brandon dead, and Ben the Stark in Winterfell if he should fall.

Deep in his heart, part of him hoped he would. Eddard choked back a curse at his own reminder of the facts. Brandon dead, and now Eddard was in boots he should never have filled. Lord of Winterfell and the North, the Stark betrothal to the Tullys in the air. He'd begged off marrying Catelyn Tully, but the question remained, and Hoster Tully was a prickly sort with his honor, and Eddard didn't know what he'd do.

The smart thing would be to marry a daughter of one of his minor bannermen, like the Wells, or a mountain chieftain's daughter, or a bannerman to one of the more powerful houses, like both his grandfathers had done. The Starks had been doing it mostly for centuries, after all, and it kept uncles and grandfathers from thinking they could exert undue influence on Winterfell. And once the Boltons had finally been subjugated, and taken the lesson to heart, it had seemed to work, too. They have never married a Stark. Perhaps that should change, once I have a child or two of my own.

Next to him, Wyman Manderly's girth made the man's armor clink against itself as he shifted on his horse. Willam Dustin smiled a grim sort of smile, small axe with a long haft laid across his thighs.

"Quit moving, Manderly," Willam snarled. Theo Wull frowned, and then shoved his helmet onto his head. Wyman said nothing.

"The Flint was supposed to prevent this from happening," Wull said about the gathered Crownland men. "Otherwise, why did you give him my father's men, and the Wull, and his second nephew the Wells?"

Eddard opened the snarling wolf-visor on his helmet, and turned to the large man. "It was strategy," he said. "I hoped, but did not believe, they would be able to prevent a general muster from forming. It took us too long to march south, though, and I suspect they were too little, too late."

"Ah," Wull said, as though Eddard had confirmed something he'd suspected. "You placed men to prevent the enemy from gathering all their men. Like in a raid of the sheep-fucking Liddles or Flints, and having men placed to stop their response."

"Yes," Eddard nodded. "Like that. I learned it hunting clansmen in the Mountains of the Moon in the Vale with Jon Arryn."

Wull snorted. "Had you come to foster with us, Lord Stark, you'd have learned it too. And more, like swiving, and drinking, and all the best things in life."

"It was not my decision," Eddard said. He left it there, and Willam Dustin and Wyman Manderly continued to bicker. He let them, because it was the meaningless sort of thing he'd heard several times before fights. He cast a glance at Mark Ryswell, silent, and suspected the man was thinking about his sister Barbrey. Siblings brought to mind his own for Eddard, and he tried instead to think about the battle.

His infantry were arrayed against the Crownlords, and the huge banner of the Targaryens showed it was a royal force, but there were no personal banners for either Aerys or Rhaegar. Instead, two griffins rampant faced off against each other, and if Eddard would not have the satisfaction of taking off Rhaegar's head with Ice, then Jon Connington would serve to quench the bloodlust of the men of the North. For now, he added. Wells had said it best: "Bran and Rickard Stark's shades demand justice done, and I mean to slide my dagger through Aerys Madking's ribs before a heart tree."

That wasn't the sort of lust for blood or vengeance that went away easily. His archers were shooting again, and they were chanting as they did. "Lyanna! Rickard! Brandon!" He turned to watch, and the flight of arrows slammed home with a vengeance. Enemy soldiers went down screaming, arrows pincushioning them, and Eddard did not smile. To his sides, though, the men around him did. That will serve.

He watched as the lines of Southerners began wavering, first pausing in their advance. Then they stopped. Then one man began edging backwards, and then another, and as the final volley of arrows rattled home, they began to run. A shout went up from the Southern knights and mounted men-at-arms, and then their own longbowmen began trotting forward. Now Eddard smiled.

"I don't understand why the knights aren't covering the foot soldiers," Manderly said to Eddard.

"They're fuckin' fools, the lot of them," Ryswell said. Eddard agreed, but didn't voice it.

"We charge now, aye?" Wull sounded ready to bathe his sword in the blood of Southern men, and Eddard nodded.

"Now we charge." He spurred his big bay charger into a walk, and near two thousand Northern cavalry went with him. They came from below the crest of the hill to the west of where Eddard's infantry were drawn up, good flat ground for a charge, and Eddard hefted his lance. Guiding his charger with his knees, he slapped the visor of his helmet down but left it loose.

They went in three lines, knees pressed against those of the men next to them, all tight and solid. Three solid lines of horse-flesh and armor, armed with lances and steel swords and axes and maces. Then came the trot, and then came the charge. Hooves pounded the dirt, throwing up clods of soil, and the thunderous sound it made was like nothing else in the world. Behind his visor, Eddard Stark smiled, and thought this is for Brandon.

The first line of Southron archers tried to turn to run, but the Northern warhorses had been bred in the Rills and Barrowlands of the North, and they were strong and swift. The impact of his lance jarred Eddard's arm, and it buried itself into the gut of a man wearing mail. Eddard left it, and drew Ice from the sword's scabbard, hanging off the side of his destrier. The deadly steel flashed in the light, and his cavalry drove deep into the ranks of the Southron infantry. He split a man's head in two with the first slash, and his armor blocked the thrust of an arrow at him.

One of his men-at-arms laughed, loud and deep, and Eddard's charger pranced to the left, dodging a spear thrust aimed for its neck. It bit the man, and lashed out with a hoof. Eddard blocked a cut with Ice, and then thrust his sword through a neck. Blood spurted, and Eddard Stark was glad for the battle.

Someone sounded the recall on a horn, two sharp blasts, and Eddard turned his horse around and put the spurs to him, sending the horse leaping forward.

~Deep Deeds~

Mat stood with the reins of his horse in his hands to the side of a now well-trod path, waiting for Bryory to finish her necessary break. So much of the land South of the Neck blended together, with only castles or towns to serve as easily identifiable landmarks. But there seemed to be any number of interminable villages or hamlets, supporting a few farming families. Tristifer Shawney cantered up, breastplate shining, tip of his lance gleaming. Mat sneered. Shawney scowled back, and sat watching Mat for a few heart-beats. Mat ignored him for a few heartbeats. Finally, he turned to look at Mat. "You didn't need to execute my men-at-arms." Mat turned to look back at him, eyebrow lifted. Then he remembered: The rapers.

"Ah," Mat said. "If you'll recall, I took the head of one of my own, too." He took a mild tone, hoping that Shawney would let the incident of Mat calling him a fool lie. He had no such luck, of course.

"And then you called me a fucking fool. I won't let such an insult slide," the Riverlord said. His scowl hadn't gone away. Instead, it seemed permanent now. Mat changed his own sneer to a blank look of puzzlement.

"You must forgive me," he said. "I was— angry, and trying to head off any disruption the men might feel."

"Disruption? Listen to yourself, you savage. They're soldiers, not thinkers," Shawney snarled. "They don't get disrupted!" Mat lifted an eyebrow again.

"Are you sure? Soldiers are men. Men think. Men thinking that their commanders are scared and don't know what's going on mutiny and dangle those commanders from pikes."

A new voice broke in, cheerful and with the same accent of the Crownlands as Bryory. "He's right you know, milord," the voice said. Mat turned to see a septon wearing a simple brown robe, carrying a long staff. Shawney's face twisted with anger, but he cut off whatever he was going to say and stayed silent in the face of a man wearing the crystal of his faith.

"Septon," he choked out instead. Matrim stayed silent, and the septon nodded at him.

The septon turned to look at Matrim, and he got a good look at the man's face. A blunt, open and cheerful face held warm brown eyes beneath tonsured brown hair, and a crooked nose clearly broken in a fight belied the man's smile. He carried the plain brown staff in one hand, and wagged a finger at Mat with the other.

"I heard you killed a man, milord," the septon started. Mat guarded his face and slid his left foot back, hand dropping to the sword hilt at his hip. "These aren't your lands, I believe, and there's a process to be followed! It says so in the Seven Pointed Star, you know— well, you wouldn't, but the Riverlord here would, and he should have stopped you if he was with you."

"I was not," Tristifer Shawney said, sneering.

"Well that settles it then, Lord, I'll just have to ask you to refrain from killing anyone out of hand— you can't just kill House Buckwell smallfolk or the priests that attend to their immortal souls even if they are the scum of the earth, bless their little hearts. I shall I have to pretend I did not hear he was a septon!"

"And you are?" Mat asked, relaxing slightly. The man clearly didn't care that Mat had put an evil man in the ground, even if the spawn of a rotting goat had been a septon.
"Septon Humfrey, bless the gods, and I am as the Seven made me, a man. It's my understanding that you have a collection of Riverlander soldiers with you?"

"They're mine," Shawney said.

"Excellent, excellent, I'm here to help provide services for the souls of your men, lord." He turned to Mat and grinned. "Not yours, though, milord, bless your little heathen heart, there ain't much I can do for you unless you decide that the Seven will be your gods now."

"I can't say that I've given them much thought," Matrim said truthfully. His gods were... not gods this man would like.

"That's alright," Humfrey patted his arm. "The gods work in mysterious ways, lord, and if you find yourself called to repent your heathenry, they shall welcome you with open arms!"

"Reassuring," Matrim said with a twitch of his lips, trying not to smile. He did smile when Bryory returned, smoothing her skirts. When she arrived, she curtsied first to Shawney and then the septon.

"Lord, Septon," she greeted with a warm smile. She cast a glance at Mat. In response, he lifted his eyebrows.

"Marvelous! Simply marvelous," Humfrey exclaimed. "A messenger of the gods sent to cure the ills of the world! I am delighted, charmed, absolutely enthralled, wonderful lady, and exquisitely at your service!" Bryory giggled, and Shawney snorted. Mat reckoned that he and the Riverlord would have to have it out soon, and the right way, or else he and his men might leave to appease wounded pride. That would leave Mat's uncle in a tough bind, and with fewer men for a fight if it came to it. Blood and bloody ashes, Matrim thought. Well, Father never did say that command was easy.

Bryory came to stand next to Mat after letting Humfrey kiss her hand, and Shawney made the introductions between the septon and Bryory.

"So what brings you around, good Septon?" Humfrey smiled, and Mat listened with half an ear as he tried to decide what to do about the riverlord. "I came to minister to the souls of men and women alike, fair one, for we are all the children of the gods even when at war. Perhaps even more then, for the soul needs some comfort in such trying times." Old Jon would have killed him. Father would have tried to reason with him, then killed him if needed. Cregan would take his lead from what our father would've done, but I'm none of them.

"Tristifer," Mat interrupted. All eyes swung to him. "We've gotten off on the wrong foot, I feel, Riverlord, and I regret that it fell that way. We're in the Crownlands still, and we must gang together, or assuredly we'll hang together."

"Not the lovely lady, though? Perhaps she might charm her way out of having travelled with a veritable army of dangerous warriors." I am a soldier, Matrim thought. Not a warrior. Then he smiled.

"Oh no," Bryory said. "I don't think you'll lose," she went on. "The North's soldiers are fierce."

"Fierce or not," Tristifer spat. "They die just as easy as other men, when you stick them in the gut with a sword or spear."

"As do all men," Humfrey spoke before Mat could take offense. "Surely all those on the sidelines of a war say that their men are most fierce, and their prayers to the gods most fervent. By your leave, lords, lady Bryory, I shall go begin meeting the men."

The group broke up as Tristifer went to go speak with his knights and Bryory followed Humfrey to introduce some of the Rivermen she'd become acquainted with. Mat pulled himself into his saddle with a grunt, shifted his sword belt so that the hilt wouldn't grind into his side, and turned the horse's head so he could go check on the rearmost men, some of the mountain clansmen on their tough ponies.

~Deep Deeds~

The clink of mail startled Mat. He stepped away from the noise, drew his dirk, and turned fast, blade held low and ready to cover his torso. Humfrey appeared, a cheerful smile on his face.

"Peace, my lord," he said, holding one hand up. Mat's eyes raked over him, fast. He didn't see any mail, but the septon was wearing that brown robe. A new addition was a second belt, with a dagger hanging at one hip and a military mace with spikes at the other.

"Looking for a fight, Septon?" Mat settled his dirk back into its sheathe, and knelt back down, for the repair he was making to the leather harness of his helmet and mail aventail. He was working on replacing the fraying straps, and a new liner. Septon Humfrey sat across from the plank sitting on two stools Mat was using as a work space, smile gone.

"Well, Lord Matrim," he began. "I was speaking with a few of the men—"

"Not mine, I hope?" Mat interrupted. "We've no truck with your foreign, Andal gods, and I won't have you rousing the Riverlanders against us as heathens in need of swords in our bellies at night, either, I tell you that now."

"Of course not, my lord," Humfrey laughed. "You heathens hold too closely to your trees with faces in them. Nor was I preaching holy war against half of the army! No, I was speaking with some of the Riverlander bowmen, and they were concerned."

Mat grimaced. Blood and guts, he thought. Just what I need. Rivermen concerned and coming to me instead of their lord.

"What are they saying?" He asked, instead. Humfrey cast his eyes to the clear sky, where the sun was just reaching the mid-afternoon position and men slumbered their way through the hottest part of the day.

"A few things, here and there, lord," Humfrey dissembled. Mat's temper flared, and he looked up, fast, to catch Humfrey looking away.

"Out with it, then," Mat demanded. "I've not got all day to go around solving problems for my men, and Tristifer's men. If you won't tell me, it's not a problem or concern then, is it?"

"I suppose not," Humfrey heaved a sigh. "Gods preserve me, but... One of the crossbowmen found a corpse in the riverbank where they draw water."

"And? Corpses are a star a dozen, Septon. What's different about this one?"

"It's wearing Stark livery." Matrim swore, and his mouth turned downwards in disapproval.

"I'll come see the man, and then we'll bury him. But I need to finish this, or I'm like to lose my brains in our next fight."

Mat suited words to action and took his time, ensuring his work was even and done well. He tested the new strap by tugging hard, once, and then twice. He nodded in satisfaction, then stood and placed the helmet under his arm, and the Septon nodded as well.

"'Tis a good thing, to care for men with no claim on you," the septon said. Matrim frowned, and kept his face forward as he made his way through bedrolls and piles of gear. The day had dawned crisp and cool, but as the sun had risen and the world turned away from the false spring of last year, the heat and humidity had increased. Suffering the sweat in silence, Matrim was at least grateful he wasn't fighting and had had the chance to scrub his mail free of rust with handfuls of sand from the banks of the eponymous rivers that made these lands the Riverlands.

He exchanged greetings with the men of his or his uncle's that they passed, and tried to think about after the war. Lord Eddard might be free with land holdings, or Baratheon, if he was crowned as King, and leal service in war typically meant boon favors and prizes afterward. Cert, I shall have to be my own advocate for any kind of advancement or benefice. Gods know Shawney will like to say nothing in my favor. Thoughts of after the war led to thoughts of Bryory, and what she'd do after the war. She probably wouldn't be able to return home, he realized, and then felt a flash of guilt that he'd pulled her away from her home and family with no thought about her future. Trying to shove a purse of coin at her would only lead to bad feeling, and he grimaced.

"Trouble, Lord?" Humfrey was poking his already broken nose where it didn't belong, and Matrim was tempted to break it for him again. He forced down the flash of anger, turning his thoughts instead to home. Home was between the Lonely Hills and the White Knife, where the tributaries of the headwater that became the White Knife flowed west, fast and clear. Home, Matrim thought, and thought of Queenswell, strong and resilient, unbroken by the years of war with the Red Kings from the Dreadfort.

"No," Matrim said, and hoped his tone would be enough to warn Humfrey away. Apparently it wasn't, because the man smiled.

"A woman is a large commitment, Lord, and one we are sometimes unprepared to take." The tone was gently chiding, and as much as Mat wanted to snarl at the septon to leave alone, he knew it would be uncourteous of him to do so. Instead, he grunted.

Taking it for permission to continue, Humfrey went on. "I am married, you know. Not in any formal fashion, of course, but when the path of the small villages and hamlets gets too burdensome, and I find myself longing for home, I turn my feet that way, and return to my wife for a few days or weeks. Until I get tired of her, at least. More importantly, until she gets tired of me!"

"Ha," Matrim said. "Funny. So what are you saying, priest?" Their walk carried them out of the camp and down to one of numerous riverbanks, where a line of men waited to fill helmets, waterskins, canteens, and wineskins.

"My wife has children to feed, and I earn no income. Instead they survive on the generosity of the lord whose land we live on. He sees my wife and children fed, and I see the smallfolk have their concerns kept abreast of. Certainly you could provide for a wife and small ones with the strength of your sword arm, if your lordly brother did not find it in him to enfeoff you with land and a fortified home. But what kind of life would that be for a woman not raised to it, and far from any of her friends or family?" Humfrey spoke sense, Mat knew. But the words felt like an attack, so he turned his mouth in a soundless snarl and whirled to face the septon, a bunch of the septon's robe in his clenched fist.

"Shut up, damn you, or I'll shut you up." Humfrey looked uncomfortable, eyes shifting to the sides and looking behind Mat. Mat turned, and saw Bryory watching him with something unreadable in her eyes. He shoved the septon away with a jerk, tried to school his face, and turned to speak with her. She opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it and turned away.

Mat thought he saw tears in her eyes, but he couldn't be sure, and a cough by one of the soldiers to his left caught his attention. Damn, he thought. The infantry led him to the body, and he knelt. The corpse had caught on a log in the river, been halted in its flow downstream, and then washed onto the river bank. He knelt next to it, glanced at the undyed wool tunic the man wore, waterlogged and heavy, and fingered the hole in the stitched direwolf on the chest.

"He was moving light," Mat thought aloud. "No armor, and that's a crossbow bolt hole in his chest. No sword, either, so someone took that, too, but left him his scabbard. A quick and dirty job, d'ye think?"

"Aye," Torghen said from over him. "And you'll be needful to apologize to the buggering septon, later, too, y'ken?"

"Yes, uncle," Matrim said. "Who do you think it was?"

"There's na tellin'," Torghen said. "Could be disaffected Rivermen, could be soldiers from th' dragons, could be bandits. I'll have some of my riders cast around to see if they can find tracks or traces and such, but if they can't, we'll have to bury the man and be on our way. We can't exactly linger, Lord Stark is waiting for our return."

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Seven: At Stoney Sept

As much as it galled Matrim to admit, Humfrey was right. He'd be doing Bryory no favors taking her back to the North and expecting her to fit into his family, and nor would he be doing her any favors handing her coin and expecting her to make her way back home to her village across a war-torn Crownlands. He sat a horse with her back against his chest, and she'd been silent for the previous three miles, where before they had chatted inconsequentially about childhoods, passing beneath the wide shelter of tree branches, ancient and witnesses to gods knew how many armies marching back and forth. The road was old enough to have been worn into a trail sunk deep into the dirt, so that the banks of the road-sides came up to Mat's chest.

Bryory leaned her head back against his chest, and he fought back the guilt he felt at the thought they'd have to part ways, soon. He wasn't sure how best it'd be done, but she'd been a soldier's woman and a farmer's daughter. She'd be alright, if she had half a chance. I hope. He silenced that line of thought with a grimace, and tried to distract himself by admiring the feel of her backside pressed against him.

His reverie was broken when they emerged from the woods onto an open field, and in the distance he could see a walled city. Over the city, huge flocks of dark birds whirled and wheeled, circling over something. The corpse-eaters are going to be glutted, he thought. Men moved among piles of bodies, stripping them of armor and weapons, searching for hidden valuables. Some of the bodies wore golden surcoats with black embroidery he couldn't quite make out, and he wondered if Baratheon men had been caught and slaughtered before they could reach the walls of the town.

The songs always spoke of battles as neat affairs, with men in lines smiting and being smote, cleaving through breasts and helms and horse necks with great abandon. It was, Matrim reflected, wholly inaccurate. The surrounding death reminded Mat of how close his uncle had come to dying, and how close he could still come. Death came for all, eventually, no matter their wealth or renown. He swallowed, suddenly very aware of the still-healing wound in his thigh and where they'd dug splinters from his shield out of his mail and arm, and his foot twitched.

The horse, picking up on his sudden case of nerves, snorted and tossed his head. Mat gripped the horse's sides tighter with his knees and kept the reins tight, unwilling to be thrown. More, unwilling to let Bryory be thrown. Once had been enough for the both of them, he thought. The horse picked their way through the corpses along the road to the walled town, and Matrim tried to place the name of it. It's not Pinkmaiden, we're too far south for that and I know we skirted the Gods' Eye.

"Blood and ashes," Mat said. "Bryory, I need you to get off the horse for a moment." Her face blank, she complied. He did his best not to wince or sigh. Gods rid me of turbulent priests. Once she was safely slid off the horse, he spurred the beast to a trot and rode up to one party of nine men, checking bodies for valuables. Gratifyingly, they wore Manderly livery over their mail, sea-green and a glaring merman with a bronze trident embroidered on their tunics.

"G'day, milord," one man said. He wore a gold arm ring above his elbow, and seemed a little older than the others. He raised a hand in greeting, then took off his helm and grinned. "You look like you've seen some hard fighting, eh, milord." It was good to switch to the North's smallfolk language, Mat reflected, especially after the priest had been chattering with Bryory for a while the day before.

"G'day," Mat returned. "Aye, we have. Yourselves, too. Tell me about it?" Mat motioned for the column behind him to keep moving, and then he leaned forward over the horse's neck to listen. In the distance, near the tail of Mat's men, one was singing Red is the Rose.

"We came out of Riverrun headed for Pinkmaiden, oh, ten days ago?" One man chimed in in agreement, that yes, it was ten days ago. "'Twas slow going, on account o' a bitter storm, delayed us three days out o' Riverrun, spooked damn near all th' horses, so o' course the southrons bitched and moaned about the delay. But we got word back from your uncle that ye'd managed to beat a couple o' the Crown's lords in a straight fight, so that's as well, aye? Then we get word that Lord Stark's friend Baratheon's been beat at Ashford by the Reachers," the man sneered. There was no love lost between the Manderly family, their leal men, and anyone from the Reach. It made Mat want to grin. Instead he nodded.

The man went on: "So Lord Robert comes fleeing t' us wit' his tail betwixt his legs, ye ken, and leads Jon Connington's army, a few thousand men less thanks to ye lads, straight to us. Well, the lords sit and palaver for twa days, armies camped across from each other and restless like the dickens, and then finally Arryn and Connington have agreed that we're gonna have a fight. 'Finally,' says I, and then Lord Stark pulls the wool o'er the eyes of the Southrons and we gut Connington's army."
Matrim grinned. "So we've won, here? Where the bloody ashes is here, anywhere?"

"Stoney Sept, the villagers called it. There's a fine brothel near the center o' town, too, if ye're so inclined, milord." Matrim slipped the man a silver wolf for his trouble, and then merged back into the column.

So Lord Stark was here, and he'd won a victory, too. Mat nodded, and somewhat settled with the news, went back to thinking about Bryory and Humfrey and the future. He could marry her, of course. Elope, be married by a septon somewhere out of the way, and return with the deed done and his brother unable to gainsay him. Then what? Bryory'd never lived in a castle, or overseen the dozens of people that would wind up in her charge with Mat as the heir's regent if his brother died, or Mat as the lord if both Cregan and his still unnamed son died. More, she might be unwilling to marry. She might not want to go North. She might not want to go North with him. There were any number of things that could go wrong, Matrim fretted, and only a few that could go right.

"But fretting never solved anything," he told himself. "Ask her what she wants to do, and then let that be it, aye? Blood and ashes, Mat, you're no stripling of fourteen years." Mat shook his head to try to recenter himself, and thought about the weirwood at home, ancient and mighty. It helped him, and he settled back in the saddle as he rode beneath the walls of Stoney Sept and into the town.

The buildings were timber and brick and stone, in the style he'd come to associate with the Riverlands and Crownlands, buildings meant to be impermanent and expandable as families and businesses grew. Some, like guildhalls, were all stone masonry and solid, and those Mat admired. Nothing seemed built to withstand a snow-thunder, though, and he grinned at the reminder that his people were hardier and tougher than the Southrons.

His left hand twinged, and he reached over with the reins still in his right to rub at his wrist.

Matrim's attention was diverted when a Ryswell heavy cavalryman in good mail harness waved him down. Mat turned his horse and slipped out of the now-stopped mass of soldiers that were making their way to the nearest bars and public houses to get a drink of ale in them.

"You're Lord Wells?" At Mat's nod, the man-at-arms nodded in turn. "Lord Stark wants you. They're at the Peach, where Lord Baratheon insists on holding the strategy meetings." The man added directions and what to look for, and Matrim gave him his thanks. So. Time to meet Lord Robert.


~Deep Deeds~

The Peach was, as the soldier had put it, a brothel. A good one, doing well financially, if the good thatching job and sturdy brick and timber construction was anything to go by. A stream of men wearing Arryn, Stark, Tully, and Baratheon livery went in and out bearing messages, busy at work. Mat slid off his horse and hitched it to a post. He settled in to wait in the entrance to an alley, leaning against a building across from the Peach. He was interrupted a few moments later when a thin waif no older than fifteen, her green eyes clear and quick, with long brown hair, came up to him.

"Give you a suck for a crust o'bread, milord?" Her voice was thin, too. Mat glanced down at her to properly take her appearance in, and his face turned down in a frown. He glanced at the Peach, saw no break in the stream, and looked back at the girl.

He slipped a silver wolf out of the purse hung from his neck beneath his mail, and wiggled it at her. "You get this, but I need you to do something for me. Find Septon Humfrey, with men wearing tunics like mine," he gestured at the fortified well he wore, and grinned. "Tell him Mat sent you, and he needs him to take care of it. Can you do that?" Her eyes went wide at the sight of unclipped silver, and she nodded hugely. Humfrey might be a gods bothering Southron, but he'd see the girl fed and given a place to sleep away from soldiers, at least. She reached out to take it, but at the last inch she glanced to her side, and hesitated.

Mat followed the glance, and felt the anger in him, quick and pooling in his gut at the misjustice of men. He was angry and his face hardened when his eyes settled on a man with a cudgel in his belt watching their exchange. Noticing that he'd been noticed, the man sauntered up, all confident bravado and swagger.

"Problem, your lordship?" Matrim wanted to grin. The man sounded as annoying as he looked, but he dropped a hand to the cudgel. Mat looked him over, fast, and judged he'd not need a blade.

"No," he said, instead of the things he wanted to tell the son of a bitch. "I was just paying—"

"Jenny, milord," the girl said, and sidled closer to Mat.

"Jenny," he resumed. "To find my septon and deliver him a message."

"My girls don't get paid to run messages, milord," the pimp— for surely that was what he was— sneered. "More, you're a Northern soldier, ain'tcha? What use do you have for a septon?"

"Whatever use I please," Mat said coolly. "And if I choose to pay a messenger in my employ, I will. I don't think any misbegotten bastard son of a Riverlands whore that spread her legs for any passing barge crew will be able to stop me." The man got angry, as Mat had known he would, and Mat smiled when he pulled the cudgel from his belt.

"Jenny," he said. "Step back." A shuffling behind him indicated she had done as ordered, and Mat thought about cruel men with quick fists and anger using them on girls that didn't deserve such. This fight would be a match of anger against anger and that pleased Mat. It pooled in his guts, and there was no fear this time to match it, no fear of a sword or spear thrust he could not see, only anger and savage confidence.

"You have one swing, whoreson bastard," Mat told the pimp. The man tried for a savage and vicious swing to the side of Mat's head, surely a killing blow, but Mat saw it as though it were slowed and he stepped back enough to make the man miss. The man tried to correct his blow, but Mat caught the man's arm with his hands, snapped the elbow, and then stepped forward to drive an iron-tipped boot into the man's groin.

The pimp doubled over, retching, and tried to roll away. Mat followed with a boot to a knee, sending a sharp crack ringing out, and once he was supporting the man's weight with a fisted hand in his tunic, drove the other mailed fist into the man's nose.

"I don't let pimps talk to me like an equal," Mat said. The patter of bare feet on cobbled stone indicated Jenny had run off. The pimp whimpered. A head poked out from the brothel, saw Mat, and waved at him.

"Lord Matrim," the Stark soldier called. "His lordship's ready to see you now." Mat nodded, and gestured for the soldier to approach. He came over, took in the scene, then smiled. "He took offense to you talking to one of his girls, Lord Matrim?"

"Aye," Mat said. "Small lass named Jenny, brown hair, green eyes. Y'know her?"

The soldier shook his head. "Naw, lord. I'm married, and my wife works at Winterfell. She'd have my guts for garters if I took to whorin' while at war with his lordship."

"Fair enough." Mat nodded. "I'll sleep ye a silver if you keep this gobshite pinned here 'till I'm done."

"Sounds good t'me, lord. Listen up, cunt," the man started. "His lordship's gon'ta fuck off t'see Lord Stark, and when he's back he wants you still here. Now with that knee I don't think you're going to be running off anywhere very soon, but you need t'ken that 'tis a bad idea to try and scarper, aye?" The man nodded, still bleeding from his nose, and Mat dusted blood from his mail with a handkerchief pulled from the pouch on his belt. He crossed the street, entered the brothel, and was greeted by another man in Stark colors.

"Lord Stark's up on the second floor, in the first room on the right. There's meat pasties and ale, if you're hungry or thirsty. You Wells dinna like the Boltons, right?" At Mat's nod, the soldier sighed. "Tch," he sounded. "Well, Bolton's in there, too, clamoring for a command for hisself."

Mat made to spit, glanced up at the ceiling, and decided against it. Instead he muttered: "Bastard." Then, to the soldier: "Thanks, mate." He made his way through the main room of the brothel, ignored the fleshly delights on display, and waved off one of the girls trying to twine herself through his legs. The stairs had been built for someone with a shorter stride, so Mat had to duck his head halfway up to avoid whacking it on the low ceiling over the steps.

"Bloody ashes," he said. At the top of the stairs, turned to the right and knocked. Lord Stark's voice bade him enter, and so Matrim did. "Lord Stark," he said, and went to one knee, head bowed.

"Get up, Matrim, up, I say," Eddard said. They clasped hands after Mat stood, and Eddard smiled. It was taut and grim, but still a smile. "Your uncle was in to see me first thing he made it through the gates, and near talked my ear off with praise for everyone that went with him but you. I asked, and he said that it wasn't his place to speak well of his least favorite nephew, but if I asked, which I did, he finally allowed that you'd done well, and taken command after he went down to an arrow."

"Lord Flint spoke well of you, once Lord Stark got him to," Bolton said. Matrim grinned, and exchanged handclasps and greetings with the assembled lords of the North. His uncle's report to Lord Stark made, Torghen Flint was probably regaling some of the girls in the Peach with tales of his derring-do and cunning. At Lord Stark's asking, he ran over what he had been up, and covered everything except Bryory and killing a septon. What Lord Stark didn't know couldn't hurt him, after all.

After Mat had finished his recounting, Lord Stark nodded. Then he gestured to the meat pies and ale, and Matrim helped himself. He had stuffed half a pasty into his mouth and was chewing furiously when Lord Stark turned to Roose Bolton.

"When we march for King's Landing, I'm giving you the van," he told Roose. Mat nearly choked to death when his brain caught up to his ears, but by then Stark had moved on and was issuing orders for the march to the capital. Mat spluttered, tried not to choke, downed half a tankard of rich, brown ale. He tried not to grimace when he realized what an ass he must look.

Mat's error went unnoticed at the clamor from the surrounding Northmen at a Bolton preceding any of them in the line of march, but Stark turned to the map unfurled on the table in the center of the room.

"The greatest part of the Reach's strength has laid siege to Storm's End. Stannis Baratheon's final letter out to Robert indicated that he would hold until he died of starvation himself, or the castle fell through assault. Robert thinks his brother has enough grit to see it through, but I will be dividing the forces of the North." More clamor and outcry— the North had always marched to war as a unified force. Save when we marched against ourselves in civil war, Matrim thought grimly. He didn't mention that, and neither did any of the other bearded lords.

"Robert has asked me to see that we do something to assist the siege of Storm's End. I cannot send troops directly, not through the Crownlands and past King's Landing, but I can send troops to skirt the Westerlands and into the Reach. With this kind of command comes great danger." Stark turned to Matrim, "Burn the Reach. Set the fields and villages afire. Drive the smallfolk into their lords' castles, where they become useless and hungry mouths to feed. Burn the Reach, and burn it well. You'll be getting..." Stark paused, turned to consult a list next to the map, and then nodded his head. At Stark's pause, Karstark broke in.

"He's a stripling of nineteen, with no victories worth mentioning in the same breath as the likes of his father. You canna mean to give him half the strength of the North, Lord Eddard?"

Stark turned his gray eyes, very cool, onto Karstark. "We are fighting a different kind of war, with the very existence of our kingdom in the balance. Matrim Wells has proven himself capable of following orders, following orders at an extended distance from myself and other high commanders, and adapting as the field changes if there is a gap in what he has been ordered to do. Most importantly, he is not a Lord or lord's heir. Should he fall, House Wells will still have its Lord."

Stark turned back to Mat, his face unreadable. "Two thousand men. Not enough if one of the larger lords of the Reach has dallied in his mustering, not enough if two of the middling lords have dallied, but enough, perhaps, to stay mobile and do what I am requiring you do. We will discuss the lords that will answer to you later, alone."

"My thanks, my lord," Mat said. He wanted to burst with pride and exultation that he'd been granted an independent command, and with it the chance to help win the war for the North. Instead, his stomach suddenly felt very queer and he wanted to puke. Two thousand men, looking to him for direction. He very much wanted to be sick all over Lord Stark's boots. He took a moment to collect himself, and then smiled. Stark's dismissal had been clear, and so Mat left so that his lord could discuss things with his lords banner.

A quick trip through the brothel later, and Mat was flagged down by a tall, black-haired man with piercing blue eyes, wearing a fine golden tunic with black embroidery, and holding a huge oxhorn of ale or mead in one hand.

"You're a Northman, aren't you?" The man's voice matched his figure— huge and booming. Mat judged from the stag embroidered in black on the man's tunic that he was a Baratheon, and from the whore in one arm and oxhorn of drink in the other, Robert Baratheon.

"I am, my lord, and have the privilege of being Matrim Wells of Queenswell. If I judge aright from your tunic and the stag thereof, you're a Baratheon. Robert?"
"Ha! A smart one, too! You're one of Ned's Lord's?" Mat wanted to dislike Baratheon, he really did, but the man had a presence about him, and Mat couldn't help but smile.
"Merely a second son, my lord." Mat said. Baratheon grinned.

"It seems half you damn Northerners are in love with my betrothed! I told Ned I'd duel you all, if I had to, but he said Northmen know the value of oaths." He stuck out the hand that had been pawing the whore, and Mat, obligated by social custom and duty, shook it.

"I know well the value of oaths, my lord. Fealty, service... Betrothal oaths. Wedding oaths." Baratheon's eyebrow shot up, and the smile slid from his face. Mat let his own smile turn cold. Lyanna, he thought, and did his best not to remember the godswood of Winterfell with fresh fallen snow, earth and water, bronze and iron, ice and fire.

"What are you saying, you upstart?" There was anger in the other man's voice. Good, Mat thought. Let him be angry, and let him be better, for his betrothed.

"You must be aware, Lord Baratheon, that it is not only Lyanna you will be marrying. It is the whole North, for she is a Stark of Winterfell, and there are some as say the Stark's fortunes are the North's fortunes."

Baratheon's face grew stormy, and Mat remembered too late his history and the Laughing Storm that nearly threw the realm into civil war. The die are cast, he told himself, and was glad he was wearing his mail and Baratheon had only a dagger at his hip. Then Baratheon took a moment, in the heartbeat before his outburst started, and glanced at the rents in Mat's mail that he had not been able to have repaired, the blood dusting his knuckles from the pimp outside the brothel, and Mat's casual, unconcerned stance.

"Northmen don't fight in tourneys." It was a statement, not a question, but Mat nodded.

"So no one that we fight knows what we can or can't do," Mat grinned in response. "I'll be around, Lord Baratheon. We're allies, after all." Really, Mat thought, he can't even complain to my lord. What have I said that's worth rebuke? Nothing, he concluded.

Mat left the brothel before his distaste of Robert Baratheon overcame the man's natural charisma, and when he emerged into the sunlight he blinked. The Stark soldier he'd asked to keep the pimp pinned had done so, but there was a crowd gathered. Wells shouldered his way through it, to where Septon Humfrey, Jenny, the soldier, and the pimp all stood clustered. A glance among the crowd, and Mat noticed a few girls that looked to be whores, clustered in twos or threes and holding hands, perhaps for support. He grimaced.

"Ah," the soldier. "Lord Mat! How'd your meeting with Lord Stark go?" The question was cheerful, and Mat couldn't help but smile.

"Well. My thanks. I see you've kept this pissant here. My thanks, again."

"'Twas no problem, lord. He didn't seem too eager to disappear after that whalloping you gave him." Mat nodded. Humfrey was there, mace at his hip and staff in hand, and he nodded at Matrim.

"I was not aware I am your septon, my lord? It was news to me, when the delightful young Jenny approached as I was set to take my leave of the Rivermen soldiers marching beneath Lord Shawney's banners, bearing a tale of a gruff Northern lord willing to admonish her pimp in a most physical fashion."

"Admonish him in a physical fashion, eh? He's lucky that's all I've done so far. You saw to feeding her and helping her friends?" Mat rounded on the man before Humfrey could speak, and shoved a finger in the man's face. "And don't think I've forgotten about you, whoreson. I needs must make a sacrifice to my tree gods, for seeing my men and I through our fights, and if my Lord Stark will let me, I think I can find someone who won't be needing their entrails." The threat went unstated, but the man's eyes went big, and he started trying to plead with Mat.

Septon Humfrey smiled. "The Faith cannot abide whoremongers," he said. "Often times a woman has no choice, but a man that has a strong back, and two arms and two legs? Such a man is low, in the eyes of the gods, and must be punished for his crimes." The Septon drew his dagger, and stepped forward to stand next to Mat.
Mat might not like the man much when he spoke the truth, but was it the Septon's fault the truth was what it was? He could not change the facts, only how he reacted to them.

"But yes, lord, to answer your question. The rapturous Jenny has seven... 'sisters,' and a few more she could not find. They're with Bryory, in a room rented with coin generously supplied by your uncle's delightful... squire? Valet? Either way, two of your men with wives volunteered to keep them safe, while you conducted your business."

"Serving lad, aye," Matrim answered. "I'd wager that uncle Torghen wants me to pay him back, too, the skinflint. Let's be along, then. Septon, if you care to witness a sacrifice, you're welcome to observe, but you must be silent."

"Perhaps I shall write a book," Septon Humfrey said. He smiled, seemingly delighted at the prospect. "At War with the Wolves of the North, I might call it."

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

Matrim's private meeting the next day with Lord Stark ended when Robert Baratheon stormed into the room, drink in hand. Mat showed himself out, while Lord Stark saw to his foster brother's demands. They had been close to finishing, anyway. He would be leading two thousand Northmen southwest, into the Reach. Every man he took would be mounted; Matrim's war would be highly mobile, and being pinned for a fight would mean the deaths of his men, and especially himself. I will not live to be ransomed, he promised himself and his gods. I will die fighting beside my men.

Nightfall found him standing in his breeches and shirt only, having spent the day hard at work three miles outside Stoney Sept, digging a hole beneath an ash tree. It was deep enough that he could not climb out of it, save for the ramp he had built into the hole. The bottom was pooling with water, ever so slowly, but it would make no difference. Mat needed this hole once.

Nightfall came, and so did the men that would witness his sacrifice: his soldiers, Septon Humfrey, and the pimp whose name Matrim hadn't cared to learn. Humfrey asked why no one's wives or campaign-women were present. He took a drink from a wineskin before he answered.

"Women have their own ways of speaking to our gods, Septon," Matrim told him. "Ways I do not know, and care not to learn. Now you must be silent." The moon began rising in the east, dim and weak. But as the world turned, the moon would grow stronger. As the world turned. Hugo the piper led forward Matrim's horse, his trusty stallion, the horse Matrim called Biter, and the horse whuffed when he realized that Mat was there. Matrim patted his nose, whispered to him to calm him. He took the lead from Hugo, hand still on Biter's nose, and led him down, down into the earth.

Biter whickered, unsure, but Mat's reassuring noises and the feel of his hand on the horse's nose quieted him. Biter had been a good horse, but sacrifice was, well, sacrifice. The pimp had been gagged, and this was a ritual for men, not women or cravens. Humfrey watched, silent, as Mat accepted both his dirk and a deep bowl carved of wood. I am lucky, he thought, that so much of these rituals are similar to old rites of the North. Then he drove the dagger deep into Biter's neck, at the huge artery that carried the horse's lifeblood through his body. The horse whimpered, sunk to his knees, and tried to press his head against Mat's chest.

Mat let Biter rest his head against his chest, and weeping silently, Mat caught the horse's life water in the bowl. They stayed that for how long Mat did not know, until the horse let out his last breath. Tears mixed with blood, as Mat dipped his fingers into the liquid, dark brown in the light of the moon. He first painted a line across his own forehead, then the cheeks, and as his men stepped forward one at a time he did the same for them. Still, no one spoke. When at last his men had been painted, and the blood mostly exhausted, Mat set the bowl next to Biter and painted a line along the horse's about, dark brown against gray. Receive him well, Odin, for he was a mighty steed.

Then came the mead. Mat shared a drink with every one of his men in turn, and by the time that was finished he was swaying slightly. Rosy tendrils of pre-dawn light made their way across the sky, and he nodded and spoke. "Rest today, and tonight. Tomorrow we prepare for the march."

He washed in the river outside the city, and when he'd scrubbed himself clean with sand from the riverbed, Bryory was there. "Hello, Matrim," she said. Uh-oh, he thought. She handed him a towel, and he used it. She'd also brought him a change of clothing. Then, after he'd clothed himself and piled the towel and bloody shirt and breeches together, they sat on the riverbank in silence.

For how long they sat in silence, Matrim could not say. Instead of looking at her, because he was scared of what she might say, and what he needed to say, he watched the river. A pike as long as Matrim was tall let the river current carry it downstream, towards the Crownlands and then eventually perhaps Blackwater Rush outside King's Landing. Dappled brown and green, it played dead for a long while, luring an unsuspecting trout closer. The trout met its death when the pike's head flicked to the side and caught it, and Mat thought that was symbolic of something in his life, but what, he did not want to say.

"I think maybe we can't be together anymore, Matrim," Bryory started. He grimaced, and pulled his knees up to below his chin. He nodded.

"Alright," he said, instead of asking why. It eased the thought that he'd have to tell her himself, but she was beautiful and he tried not to be hurt. He swallowed, but tried to himself that it was for the better. After all, hadn't he been going to tell her that they couldn't be together any longer? Matrim wasn't sure if this was the right way to be doing this, but she'd taken most of the burden from him, and so he had to be grateful for that.

Eventually, after he'd said nothing for a while and kept staring at the river, she left, and he let her walk away.

When Matrim returned to the town, bloody clothing in hand, he avoided the inn that his men had rousted a group of Vale soldiers from and taken over, avoided the septs, and made his way to the brothel still serving as Lord Stark and Baratheon's headquarters. A woman might be just what he needed to get his mind off Bryory and ready for the war ahead. And they'd launder his shirt and breeches, without question. That, at least, would be worth paying for.

When he walked through the door, the soldier from the day before grinned at him. "Come to sample some of the wares, milord?"

Mat gave a shrug. "I at least need my shirt washed, and there's a hole at the knee of my breeches what needs to be mended. I could do it myself, or pay and then drink ale with some of the other lords of the North." The soldier gave a knowing nod and wink, and went back to standing at the door as Mat made his way into the brothel.

A lissom redhead caught his eye, but he decided that he needed to see to his washing before anything like that, so he went through the main room and into the staff area.

"G'day," he said. "I've got a shirt and breeches that need washed and mended, and I know there's washing that's done here. I haven't been to a whorehouse that didn't do their own washing." A busy, older woman with her sleeves rolled up past her elbows took his bundled clothing.

"'At'll be two coppers, milord, plus anything extra you run up with the girls, and your washing'll be done this afternoon. Now out, we've work to be doing!"

Matrim was shoved unceremoniously back out the door, and into a wide man in front of him. The man wore a sea green tabard with a merman on it, marking him as a Manderly or Manderly soldier, and the man grinned.

"Matrim Wells!," he said delightedly. "I'm Marlon Manderly, and my cousin Wyman has given me leave to ask you take me, and four hundred of our horse with you, when you attack the Reach."

Mat smiled at the man's open grin, and he nodded. "Lord Stark wanted me to take some real Northern cavalry with me, anyway. I understand the blood feud, myself, friend. Come southwest with me, and be welcome." The offer of four hundred real cavalry, big men in good armor on large horses wasn't something to be sneezed at, and so Matrim welcomed it. His thoughts turned to the war in the Reach he'd soon be conducting, and the realization that he'd have four hundred heavy cavalrymen, men able to go toe to toe with the best chivalry the Reach had to offer, and come out on top if he used them wisely, made his stomach turn.

After assuring Manderly that he'd be more than welcome with Matrim when they headed for the Reach and Manderly had taken his leave to detail his troops, Mat turned to the redhead that had caught his eye. She smiled, and stood.


~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~
The day dawned, sending pink and orange tendrils across the sky. Matrim knelt, bare chested, and faced the rising sun. He'd slipped out of the Peach and the town, driven by a thought or feeling he could not name. The Riverlands smelled like rivers and clean water, but it was not the crisp Northern air, tinged with hints of pine and spruce and heather, sheep and shaggy-furred cattle in the distance. He longed to taste that air, ride the hills and glens that the Wells called theirs. Their blood was in that land, blood and sweat and effort, but the blood of the Wells was in the Riverlands now, shed where he had bled fighting for his lord. Mat stayed like that in silent contemplation of the gods and blood and the world for a long time.

Robert Baratheon found him like that after the sun had risen, but before it had burned away all the early morning mist. Mat stayed where he was, not rising to greet the man, or even speaking to him. It was petty, he knew, because the power imbalance between the two of them was huge, and Matrim was treating Baratheon like he might treat a tenant that had broken the law.

Finally, though, Baratheon spoke from behind him. "I looked for you at the Peach." His voice was rough with rising from slumber, and perhaps a cup of wine already. Mat smiled to himself.

"I left before dawn, to greet the sun."

"I thought you blokes worshipped the trees, not the sun." It wasn't phrased as a question, nor was it really, but Matrim answered it like one.

"Does the sun not give the trees and plants life? Do the trees and plants not worship the rising sun?"

Baratheon seemingly took it for an insult. "You're a right cunt, Wells, and I think I don't like you."

Matrim shrugged. "Fair," he said. "I think you are an arrogant child not yet grown to emotional maturity and prone to thinking with your cock rather than your brain. I think we are at war because you could not stay loyal to your betrothed, and drove her away from you." To Rhaegar Targaryen's mad lusts went unstated, but Matrim felt that the other man read it from the way the statement hung in the air between them.

"I heard that tell you gave your horse and a man to the trees night before last." Another question posed as a statement.

"My horse, aye. I won victories, and the gods saw near all of my men safely through the fighting. Biter was a good horse— smart, loyal, and capable. My favorite hound is not here, and so I gave to the gods the horse that helped me achieve those victories."

"Human sacrifice was outlawed by Aegon the Conqueror, Wells." Mat's smile turned to a grin, though Robert couldn't see it.

"I can promise you this, Stormlord: if you dig the pit where Biter lies, you will find no man, woman, or child."

In the distance, a raven gave a gurgling croak that hung in the silence.

"I don't think you like me, overmuch," Baratheon finally said.

Matrim waited a moment, turning over in his mind what he would say. Then he stood, and turned to Baratheon.

"I don't," he said, mouth tilting downward in a sneer. "You think with your prick, you're arrogant, and you won at Summerhall by defeating the Reachlords in detail, only because they marched before combining their strengths and so handed you your victory. Were she my daughter, and I Rickard Stark, Lyanna would never have been betrothed to you."

Mat thought of Brandon Stark, instead, and how alike he and Baratheon would have been had Bran not been murdered by his liege. Either the greatest of friends or the fiercest of foes, he decided. But his friend Brandon was dead, and his lord Eddard, with Southron concepts of honor. It wasn't for nothing that Andal men still feared Northern ships out of the mists with entrails on their prows. Mat liked to think of himself as a classical Northman, in the tradition of Theon Stark or Torrhen Stark — men who did what was necessary. Bran learned the hardest lesson of all. Baratheon has learned no lessons, it seems.

"Let's have it out like men, then, Wells." Baratheon tilted his chin up, and then sneered.

"Fists, then, and we shall be quits." Matrim promised. A head taller, more powerfully built, with raw strength on his side— Baratheon would be a terrible foe to try to kill. Mat was thankful it was only fists, and none of his men here to see him. He rolled his shoulders, and Baratheon's blue eyes bore into him. Both raised their fists, tapped them once, and then settled into their stances. Mat lashed out with a jab to the face that Baratheon didn't bother to block. His head rocked back from the force of the blow, and then Baratheon brought it back forward. The man's face was stone, unreadable. His fist caught Mat in the face faster than Mat would've thought he could move it, and he fell backwards, limp.


In a field beneath the moon — full, bright, and smiling down — was a girl standing with her back to him, dressed in pale blue and girdled at the waist. She turned, her hair a crown of swaying silk and silver. Where moonlight and her hair began, Mat couldn't rightly say. Her eyes were round and large and lilac with a touch of winter in them — and in her arms a bundle of rowan flowers.

She was beautiful. Terrible, but beautiful to behold.

She took a step forward, and Mat wanted to run, hands trembling. But the grass clung to his feet, rooting him in place. With every step she took closer, the rowan flowers fell away, scattering, fleeing. He took a breath, to try to master himself from the fear threatening to turn him craven. When she reached him, her hands were empty. It felt wrong, incomplete, so he forced himself and placed his hands in hers. She smiled, and the fear melted away. She rubbed a thumb over the calluses on his hands from hours gripping shield and sword hilt. She opened her mouth, and —

"Who are you?" Her voice was light and pleasant, but for all that he was compelled to answer.
"Matrim Wells," he said, and she shook her head.

"Who are you?" This time her tone was firm and insistent, and the desire to tell her overwhelmed him.

He opened his mouth, to answer, to answer truthfully, just so the need to tell that burned in his blood would be over, and —

Matrim woke up, the taste of blood in his mouth and a sense of longing choking his heart.



~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

The inn, stable, and storage building Mat's men had taken over and crammed into were well constructed, with sturdy stone and timber, and the innkeep's wife changed the rushes weekly, on Seventhday. A pious man, he had cleared out when Mat was dragged into the inn by a fistful of his soldiers, half-carrying, half-dragging their commander. A passel of girls giggled as they shoved his soldiers away, and peered down at Mat.

"Gods," said one of his officers from a distance. "He looks like he lost a fight to a bear."

"'Tain't too far from t'truth, if laird Baratheon's to be accounted truthful. Says they faced up as men, seeing as how they didna like each other, and he's never been hit so hard in his life." Another man's voice, and Mat tried to blink blearily. The wine poured into his eye made him splutter.

"'Twas time my nephew learned that there's consequences to shooting his mouth off, aye, and he's lucky he learned it at the end of a fist."

Alaric Wells had been a tall, powerful man in life. His two sons seemingly had inherited all his physical traits, but it delighted him that they had inherited his wife's brains, which he had made no complaints about. In death, as Mat remembered him, he had been small and withdrawn in on himself, mumbling and whispering as the shades of their fathers drew nearer to welcome him. Alaric Wells had had enough fire left in his spirit before he died to demand of Mat that he make it fast and merciful.

Torn between obeying his father as a good son should, or being accursed by the gods for kinslaying, he had finally followed his father's last order to him— "Make it fast, lad, and protect your brother."

Alone, in the godswood at Queenswell, before the heart tree that seemed to stare into his soul, Mat had sat silently for a day and a night, not thinking, not praying, just... existing. Finally, he had realized that he was not truly a patricide — that would have required forethought or even anger. Alaric Wells had been the man to wrap Matrim Wells' fingers around a sword hilt, one day when Mat had been six or seven years of age, in the depths of a winter and his mother laboring in the birthing bed.

"I carry a sword at my hip, and you will in the future, because the sword is the symbol of our authority, as nobility. It is a symbol of our burdens to bear: protection and justice for our folk. We have been blessed to be above other men in life, but that does not mean we can abuse them," Alaric Wells said to Mat as their fingers curled around the hilt of the sword. A man's blade, it had been too big for Mat to properly hold or carry, but Alaric's strength kept it from dipping to the snow beneath father and son.

There was a tale, Matrim had heard once, of a petty king before the Starks had brought all the North to heel, name lost to history and time. His smallfolk had been driven from their homes, their crops and fields burnt, their livestock slaughtered and the women despoiled. They had gone to plead with their lord to ride forth with his men to protect them, and he had ridden out as they asked. Rather than give battle to his foe, though, he had simply turned and retreated to his fortified tower. Then he'd been lynched by his vengeful folk after one of the servants had let her kin into the tower.


He'd asked his father about it. "The smallfolk work the fields, create the clothing we wear, fell the timber we burn for fuel, feed us, repair our home— they labor endlessly,"

Alaric had said. "In exchange, they ask simple things. We give them justice, and we protect them. If we cannot, then we must die trying."


Mat woke from the dream when he felt a body curling up next to his. He opened his eyes, and the one on the side of his face that Baratheon had hammered hurt. It was dark, but the bed he was in was passably comfortable, and so he stayed still. The need to relieve himself was strong, and he lay there for a moment hoping he'd fall back asleep.

He had no such luck. He rose, ignoring muffled protests of complaint from whoever else had been in the bed, and picked his way through the room, then hall, then a large room where men lay snoring and farting. Chamber pots had their uses, but if the inn or manor he was in had an outhouse, he'd prefer that. Pissing under the clean sky and stars was nice, and it gave him a chance to poke and prod at his face. The eye could open, which he accounted as good, and there was only slight swelling on his face and the bone wasn't painful to the touch. Rosy dawn was threatening to breach the sky, and he wondered how long he had been out of it.

It wasn't often Mat dreamed of his father, and he felt he much preferred the dreams that were his boyhood, before Alaric Wells had ridden his last, to put down a band of wildlings that by rights should have been stopped by the Umbers, Karstarks, or even Boltons. His mother had penned a complaint to Rickard Stark, and it had not gone unanswered.

A scraping reached his ears from near him, and he smiled.

"I fucking hate dreams," he said to the night sky.


"The gods send them as messages or reminders, perhaps, milord." Humfrey sounded hoarse. "I have been praying for you," he went on. "Head injuries are dangerous, and Lord Baratheon is a mighty man. You have slept three days, and if you did not recover, your uncle was going to send your mindless body back North to your mother."

"Well I'm awake now. Have they baked bread and made cheese for my men to march Southwest with?" Matrim buttoned the flap to his breeches, then turned to face the priest.

"Yes, milord. Will you permit me to join you again?" In the dark, Humfrey's face appeared shadowed and thinner than it was.

"I have no Southrons marching with me," Matrim said. The priest sighed. Matrim smiled. "But I will be marching with a force of Manderly knights, and they follow the old gods and the new, too. You must ask their commander. If he's agreeable, I have no issue with it. You will perchance not like this sort of war, though."

"All war is ugly, lord. That is the nature of war." Matrim couldn't argue with that, and so he didn't bother. Instead, he looked back up at the sky, the whorls and dappling of the stars bright against the blackness of the night. He thought for a moment of the brief weeks he had shared with Bryory, and his heart did not ache that she had moved beyond him. What life could he have offered her? His mistress in a castle ruled by a lady wife from the mountain clans or perhaps a Manderly cousin or Cerwyn daughter?
No, he shook his head. Better that she'd left him, perhaps for one of his soldiers. He wondered then if she'd kindled, if she carried his child within her.

"War is ugly, yes," Humfrey said into Matrim's silence, and he wondered if the priest had known what he was thinking. "But life is beautiful, and to find life during and after... The gods test us in many ways," the septon said. "But never in ways we are not strong enough to bear. I do not know much of your old gods, only the common whisperings, but I do know the strength of your character, lord. There are not many that would stop the business of war to listen to the pleadings of a villager not his own, and then give that man the justice he sought."

Mat said nothing, but the priest's calm was like a balm to his troubled soul. Finally, he laughed.


"Keep speaking like that, and your Seven that Are One might start seeming attractive to me," Matrim said.

"Good gods above forbid that happen," Humfrey said cheerfully. "You're such a heathen, they wouldn't know what to do with you in the seven heavens or the seven hells!"

They laughed, and the two of them returned to the inn building where Mat's soldiers and the women he'd seemingly saved had tried to poke and pester him back to wakefulness and health. Mat lifted a hand to his face. Gently he touched the place where Baratheon had driven him into the dirt. He withdrew his hand fast and with a hiss of pain.

"Bloody tree," Matrim swore. "Baratheon doesn't feck about, does he?"

"No, lord," Humfrey said, and Matrim heard the grin in his voice. He drove an elbow into the priest's side, laughing.

"He doesn't fuck about, either," Mat said. "At least he's not a quivering prude." He didn't add something snide, like he'd been inclined to needle the septon with, either.
The septon was quiet for a moment, before they parted ways. Then he asked Mat a question. "You are going to war in the Reach? Your men say that they have the best knights in Westeros, lord."

Mat thought about a Crownland knight dying under his dagger, eyes pleading as his lifeblood bubbled out of his mouth.

"Knights die all the same," he finally said.

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Eight: Away Again

The next day dawned foggy and cool, not unlike a morning from the previous autumn. Mat had risen early after troubled sleep, and early morning after the dawn found him standing ensconced with Eddard Stark, and the men that would take their command from Matrim. The lords of the mountain clans, dour and grim after a night of too much drinking; Marlon Manderly standing with two knights banner, his own subofficers. Manderly and Mat's uncle had seen to the baking of bread and collection of cheese and beef and pork jerky, the reissuing of arrows and repair of hauberks and helmets, chausses and breastplates. Swords and spears had been sharpened while Mat slept, and his own gear lovingly taken care of by Torghen Flint.

"I will not let my sister's son go to war with the chivalry of the Reach in ill-repaired mail and a dent in his helm," the man had said as explanation when Mat asked.
Now they stood assembled before their ultimate lord, the final arbiter of their justice, and for most of them, even a distant relative. Eddard Stark was most closely related to Mat's uncle by way of his Flint grandmother, making Lord Stark a second cousin to Torghen and a third cousin to Matrim himself. The Wells could claim a Stark bride of their own, though— Serra, or was it Sansa? Snow, bastard of the Lord of Winterfell had married Mat's great-great grandfather, another Matrim, after that Matrim had saved the Stark's life fighting wildlings.

The soldiers were gathered, Matrim had his orders— all that waited was to mount up and ride off. Mat grinned ruefully at the thought he'd be riding double with someone, because he'd given Biter to the gods. He became serious when Stark stood from his wood chair to stare at all of them, his eyes cool as ice.

"The ultimate disposition of your men, what you choose to do once you arrive in the Reach— those decisions are yours, Wells. I will not command you in close detail, because this is your command. But you have one over-riding order: if you must spend men, make their lives worth something. The free men of the North are our most valuable resource; don't throw them away carelessly."

Matrim nodded, face solemn. "I'll die before I waste the lives of my men, Lord Stark."

Ned gave a sharp nod, unsmiling. "I'd rather you didn't," he said. "Your brother has a son, yes? Boy lords can be the death of houses." So too can lords too willing to meddle outside their fiefs, Matrim thought but did not give voice. Some might take it for treason— but to a Wells man, death in service of Winterfell was the finest death of all.

"The North remembers, Lord Eddard," Matrim said. "Gods willing, I'll write you with a raven from a castle or town I take."

"If you can achieve it, Matrim," Eddard said. Then: "The North remembers." They clasped forearms, and then Matrim took his leave, his officers following. They clattered down the stairs of the Peach, armor ringing and clanking, boot heels thumping, and Marlon was near out of breath by the time they reached the town's walls
.
He held up a hand, panting, and tried to speak. "Cat got your tongue, merman?" It didn't take, and Mat patted him on the back and grinned.

Marlon smiled back through his pale beard. "Nay, lord," he finally managed. He shifted the surcoat of sea-green beneath the breastplate and over his mail, trying to make it more comfortable.

"I was going to say— your uncle Torghen told me that you lost your horse before Baratheon knocked your block off, and I prevailed upon my cousin Wyman to buy a horse from the Ryswell contingent with Lord Stark. Now I gift him to you, for with you Manderly knights will ride to war in the Reach once again, after a thousand years of exile. Now we will visit steel and fire upon the Peakes." He said, and the bloodthirst in his voice was evident.

"You shouldn't have," Matrim said, and meant it. Marlon called for his squire, and the teenage boy came leading a solid riding mare, golden in color with white socks and a black mane and tail. She was, Matrim thought, an exceedingly well colored and formed horse. He stepped nearer to her, holding out his hand palm up so she could sniff at him and smell who and what he was. She nickered, and he smiled.

"The squire I bought her from said she was his master's, but the master is dead and the squire has no need of a second riding horse. I'm only sorry she's not a stallion, for our coming battles."

Matrim shrugged. "I prefer mares. They're less likely to lose their head in a fight, aye? What's her name?"

"Exceedingly unimaginative, my friend," Marlon said. "Goldie, if you believe it."

"Ha! Certainly not original," Mat said. "But it'll do, and I prefer to do most of my fighting on foot."

He called, and small Hugo, his own piper and sometimes squire, helped him saddle Goldie up. Mat tested the tightness of the girth strap. Putting one boot into a stirrup, he swung his other leg up and over, and felt the tightness in his thighs as he settled onto the saddle. He nodded approvingly, then grinned at Marlon.

"Pipe us out, Hugo," Matrim ordered. To Manderly, he leaned his head in closer so they could speak over the beginning of the wailing of the pipes. "She's a fine horse," he said. "You have my thanks, and I shall do my best to repay you."

"Gifts given between friends have no need for repayment, my lord of Wells. We are friends, are we not?"

"Friends are always a thing to be grateful for, come the howling winter and cold winds," Matrim responded. But he had to harden his heart, because Bryory was outside the city watching his column march out, and he tried not to let his gaze linger on her. She seemed to be watching one of the men-at-arms from the farms around the Queenswell, and he stamped down on the pang of jealousy that shot through him. She was neither his lady wife nor his lady mistress, and he had no claim on her beyond the time they'd spent together, and perhaps if his seed had kindled a life inside her.

I pray that it did not take, he thought, and tried to force his thoughts to the Reach. They'd need guides, and he'd need to issue marching objectives for each day, and where they would assemble at the end of every night— the list was near endless.

Later, fourteen miles from Stoney Sept and after they had passed a squadron of Stark cavalrymen, their direwolf banners fluttering gaily in the twilight, Mat and his column made camp. The cavalry had given them the all clear, and so he and his men began unsaddling horses and currying them in Tully-loyal Riverlands. Tomorrow or the day after they would cross into that nebulous borderland between Westerlands and Riverlands, where before the Targaryens had come with their dragons it had been the strength of a King's sword arm that extended his rule as far as it could go.

In the glow of the campfires, the smells of salt meat and hard bread being worked into stews lingered in the air, and Mat sat with Marlon and the Septon. Mountain clansmen gathered and circled, and Mat grinned.

"Neither of you have seen a sword dance, have you?"

Marlon shook his head, mustache quivering, and Septon Humfrey looked positively delighted.
"How barbaric sounding," he said. Mat nodded to the cluster of clansmen.

"It's an old tradition," he explained to the two. "Before a clan goes to war or battle, they'll have the youngest and most nimble lad do the dance. They lay two swords crosswise, and the boy must dance the swords without touching the blades or hilt. If he does, then 'tis said that the force will have victory in the coming battles."
Mat didn't think about the sole time he had danced the swords.

"Is this part of an offering to your old gods?" Humfrey seemed taken with the concept, and had stood to get a better view of young Hugo starting with his pipes and younger Lew, in breeches and shirt only.

"Nay," Marlon said. He twirled one side of his bristling mustache around a finger. "No one knows how far back the sword dance goes, but it isn't religious in nature."
"How wonderfully barbaric," Humfrey said. Mat hid a frown in his meadskin, and wished he had a map of the Reach. They would have to find a local guide— more accurately several, if he was going to divide his force like he intended.

"Lew was his father's squire," Marlon explained to Humfrey as Mat drank. "His father was a knight for my cousin Wyman, and took a lance in the neck at Stoney Sept. Manderlys remember their debts, and so Lew has come to be my squire. Now he dances the swords, so we might have victory in the fights to come."

Matrim stood. "You must forgive me, my friends," he said. "I feel unwell, and would like to retire for the night."

They both made the appropriate sounds, and then Mat left them watching Lew dance, seeming to float through the air as he made the leaps and twirls necessary to keep from cutting himself on a blade.

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Nine: War in the Reach

Underneath the shade of an old ash tree, Matrim met with all the men who looked to him as master and commander, away from the Stark. The mountain clans' lords or lordlings, Marlon Manderly and his own officers from home: Edrick, Iwan, Artos, Torrhen. The days of marching and days of fighting had left them all with new scars and repaired rents in their mail. Every man had a horse, courtesy of the army's foraging and Stark's promises for payment after the war in the Riverlands, and Matrim's own thieving in the Crownlands.

"We're headed for the richest land in Westeros," he told his officers. "Fertile and lovely as a girl in the dew waiting for you.

"Burn every field, burn every village, kill all the cattle and sheep, and every man of fighting age that attempts to resist. We ride in groups, and groups of men must be no smaller than fifty men, and no larger than two hundred. We must move fast, for to be caught by Reach knights is to invite slaughter. Groups must be a quarter's day ride from each other, so that we spread across the land like the wolves of winter and blight the Reach's crops and villages with our teeth." There he showed his own, and all of the mountain clansmen and his own officers grinned with bloodthirsty smiles. Manderly looked slightly ill, but Matrim ignored him.

"If a group becomes engaged in a fight, they must send riders to their neighbors on the march, who will send riders, and so on, so that we all converge with speed on the foemen."

They were three days' ride away from Stoney Sept, and on the hill across the field where his force camped, a group of horsemen sat. The horsemen were watching his own men, and bore a banner with the proud lion of Lannister rampant. A mummer's war, Matrim thought. I pray Tywin Lannister does not join the real war by pouncing on and slaughtering us. Last he had heard, before they left Stoney Sept, the Lannisters had yet to declare for either King or rebels, and Tywin bided his time.

Matrim raised a hand in greeting, watching. It was returned, perhaps a heartbeat later, and he smiled. He spurred Goldie into a canter down the hill, and was met midway between the two hills by a small group of the armored knights, five men in total. The leader bore a shield with a golden hill standing against a blue sky, with the golden sun to the left of the hill.

Mat racked his brains, trying to think of who the lord or lordling could be, came up empty, and finally settled for raising his hand in greeting again, other holding his helmet beneath his arm and keeping a grip on Goldie's reins.

"Well well well," the lord said. He removed his own helmet, and grimaced when he saw Mat. "Look what the war dragged in," he said to his men, and they laughed. The man's face turned sour.

"Shut up, damn you," he snarled. "I didn't tell you to laugh, did I? So why are you laughing?" He turned back to Mat, and grimaced.

"Bloody Northmen," he went on. "'Defend the entry to the Westerlands from the east,"' Tywin tells me, so I bloody am, and what shows up beneath my castle but a pack of raggedy Northern wolves? Tell me, Northman, are you lot beneath Stark's banner because you're hunting lions?"

"Nay," Matrim said. "We've a hankering for rosewine, and I mean to leave the lion well enough alone. I'm not a wolf of Winterfell, to prowl about. I do serve the Starks, though, and proudly so."

"Well enough then," the man said. "The name's Leo Lefford, and if you lot haven't cleared off in two days I'll see you gone from Lord Tywin's lands with the flat of my blade."

"No need for threats. I'm Matrim Wells, of Queenswell" Matrim smiled. "Lord Stark, and so I, have no quarrel with Lord Lannister, save Lord Lannister calls his banners for the Mad King."

"Lord Tywin ain't shared his plans with me," Leo said. "I do as I'm bade, and bide as I'm bade. You'll have no guestright from me, Wells, but no steel till you outstay your two days, 'pon my word."

"Fair enough," Mat said. "We'll pay coin if your smallfolk have fresh bread or ale to sell, but I'll not risk Tywin Lannister's ire by taking from them what I could buy."
"I'll let the closest village know," Leo said. "Ride back to your men, and you'll find out if my folk have wares."

Mat inclined his head in respectful leave-taking, turned Goldie and spurred her up the way he'd come, leaving the Westlander lord and his knights to themselves. He inclined his head to the old, old ash tree that offered its shade to his officers. One of them lifted a hand in greeting as Mat rode back up the hill, and he smiled.

"Lord Lefford offers no guest right, but has drawn no steel, either. We have two days to make it out of his portion of the Westerlands, and I don't intend to cut through the Crownlands and run into friends of the soldiers we've killed." Or friends of Staunton and Buckwell, seeking to avenge deaths and nullify the ransoms that Lord Stark had purchased from Matrim.

"Not quite hospitable, is he?" Wull stroked his beard, and Norrey ribbed Torghen Flint in the side.

"Could be a cunt," Mat allowed. "He said he won't be riding at us in the night. Still, though, we'll need to set guards from here on out every night. I have no wish to be met waking up by Reachman or Crownlander steel in my gut." They spurred their horses forward to match pace with the column of mounted infantry riding south, ever southwards, and went back to discussing the business of war.

"When we fight," Torghen opined, "we must use shock and awe. But being hit by Reach cavalry would be shockingly awful." The other clan lords groaned, but Mat grinned.
"Uncle's joke was terrible, but essentially he's correct. Getting hit by Reach knights on an open field will spell death for us, and I mean to live long enough to gut Rhaegar." There was no laughter. Gods, Mat thought. Let me lead my men well, and to victory. He pulled Goldie up, stopping the horse. The others stopped on their own, and he stared ahead, at the unseen and distant point where the frontier of the West became the Reach.



Six days later, three spent in the Reach proper, and thirty villages and hamlets were naught but ash. Their crops were burned in the fields, livestock slaughtered and pitched into wells, springs, streams. They were destroying the wealth of the Reach for a generation to come. Women went unraped, only because Matrim would not abide the same kind of crime that was most likely being perpetrated against Lyanna Stark daily. Near everything else went allowed. Men, if they resisted, were killed where they stood. Children were ripped from their mothers' arms and tossed between his men, laughing and grinning like beasts, before finally being turned free to stumble away, dizzy and confused. The smallfolk were left to dangle on the whims and winds of fate, and if they died, he had said, then they died. They were not his folk to be concerned with.

Mat remained at the center of the wide line his men formed, burning everything they came across, feasting themselves on whatever stored food they found. That line stretched four miles long— Mat had paced it off himself, the day they'd ridden into true enemy controlled land, and now he thumbed his nose and farted at all the assembled might of the Reach. Because they weren't home, home to defend their people and the land that made the Reach so wealthy.

Sweat streaked through soot on nearly every man's face, and their teeth were garishly white against the darkness of it as they set more buildings ablaze and spit men with pikes and swords, took heads and did it all grinning. Mat smiled too. Living in the Reach was easy. All they had to do was reach up from their horses and pluck apples and pears, peaches and plums from the trees already heavy with fruit after a short month and a half of spring.

The smallfolk had learned to flee before the ever increasing columns of smoke from ruined villages and farms spiralling towards the sky, a silent plea to the gods that went unanswered. The pleas from the smallfolk didn't, though. Those his men took pleasure in spitting at. The septs, though, such as they were, went untorched and undefiled. Humfrey had asked Matrim why, after the tenth or eleventh sept went ignored.

"We're blood of the First Men," Matrim had said. "We remember how you Andals removed our cousins in the South from power, root and stem. Where war didn't do the trick, willing and biddable daughters as wives from the warlords of Andalos did. They came, preaching the Light of the Seven, and their sons were raised as Seveners. Their sons weren't taught the sacred rites of carving a god's face, their daughters went ignorant of the lore of our women. Two, three generations later, the lords were fully Seven worshippers, and the smallfolk went ignored as our gods were hewn and then burnt as offerings to your own. It's not a new, or even an old grudge I bear on behalf of my ancestors and their cousins."

Mat turned to look at Humfrey now, the septon's eyes tear-filled as he watched two of Mat's own household men-at-arms lynch a man that had tried to cut the throat of an archer.

"It's not a grudge," Matrim repeated. "It is an ancient hate, cherished and carried forward from the mists of legend, so that we might always guard ourselves against any encroachment of the Seven. We're leaving the septs untouched because we're not you Andals. We can respect the place a man worships, even if we're doing our best to gut him."

Humfrey said nothing, locked in his own thoughts, and Mat watched as the would-be knifer dangled the gallows jig from an ash tree. He finally smiled.

"Take heart, priest. This is the war you wanted to see."

"Will you object if I perform the last rites, Lord Matrim?" Humfrey frowned, and slid off the mule that they had found for him.

Mat waved his hand. "Go ahead," he said. "Like I said— we're not Andals." The priest stepped forward, presumably trusting Mat to hold his horse, and Matrim did so. I'm not a monster, he told himself. This is brutal, but it is war and I am just in our cause. Gods of my fathers, keep Lyanna healthy.

The nature of war forced Mat from his thoughts, as the hedge knights from the Reach that had attached themselves to his force made their presence known with a throat-clearing from one. A few had expressed outrage at the Targaryen crimes, but Mat suspected the rest were merely looking for easy loot and plunder.

"Ser John, sers" Matrim greeted them. Ten knights with an assortment of mail and plate armor, nine squires with mail, and a couple of younger boys serving as pages sat an assortment of motley horses. Ser John had been elected their leader by virtue of his more advanced age— near five-and-thirty years, and his more even temperament.

"I must say, Lord Wells," John started. He shifted uneasily on his horse, grimaced, and then sighed.

"I must say," he repeated. "This is— I did not think you would be conducting your war here, in this manner. I must protest your treatment of the smallfolk, ser, for they are innocent in this war."

"They are not my folk." Mat shrugged. "If you marched with a Tarly or Tyrell or Florent in the North, would you be so opposed then? I doubt so. We're not raping the women, not killing the children, and only killing the men that resist." He paused for a heartbeat, glanced up to the sky, and thought about a girl with dark hair.
"We're driving them to the castles and walled towns," Matrim went on. "Not killing them wholesale. You know that, yes?"

John nodded, worn face grim and tired. "That is why I am not protesting more vigorously. I understand that this is a war, my lord, that these things sometimes must be done. But surely these folk had nothing to do with the Lady Stark's seizure and captivity, or Lord Starks' deaths in the capital."

"It doesn't matter," Mat said. "I am in command here, and so long as no Reachlord is here to stop me, my word is absolute and law. For all Aerys can do, for all Rhaegar or Mace Tyrell can do, I might as well be King here. If it were my folk, my people, I would be as angry— more so, perhaps. But they're not, and I have hardened my heart and deafened my ears to their pleas. Brandon Stark was my friend, and he died choking to death trying to rescue his father, my foster father. If I had the men to burn the entire Reach, take and sack every castle in this kingdom, deliver to Aerys Targaryen a mountain of skulls and flood King's Landing with them? I'd do so," Mat snarled.

Humfrey stepped forward from where he had been kneeling by a dead man, and shook his head. "Now is not the time, gentle sers," he said. "Perhaps you ought to return to the men you've been guiding."

They left, murmuring and talking between themselves in low voices, and Mat watched, uncaring, as Humfrey went from body to body. The smallfolk had been driven from this village, and now his men began to set it alight.

"Lew! Hugo! Attend me, if you please." The two young men came forward on their horses, looking green and sickly. They waited for him to speak.

"Do you understand why we're making war like this?" The two were silent for a moment, and then Lew glanced at Hugo.

Hugo went first. "So that the folk know their lords can't protect them?'

Lew went next, trying not to shake. "And so that they flood the castles and towns, eating up stocks and planting no crops to harvest, or they're kept out by the castles and towns to starve and grow rebellious?"

"Are you two asking me, or telling me?" Mat asked.

"Telling, milord Wells," Hugo ventured. "This is naught but a big raid, and when a force tries to stop us, we'll leave if they're too big to fight." Lew nodded his agreement eagerly.

"Lew. You're the commander for the Reach's forces here, trying to stop us. How do you go about it?"

Lew looked at him for a moment, and Mat smiled. The boy thought for another, then grinned.

"They have more men than we do, milord, that's just facts, because the North doesn't have as many people. So they have more men, but more men move slower on the march. Split their force up into two or three smaller ones?" The young man paused for a breath, Hugo ribbed him in the side, and they grinned.

"So once they've split up into groups smaller than us, they can move as fast or faster, and pin us to where they want to fight us." Mat nodded.

"Well reasoned, young man. Hugo, how would you keep us from being penned in and brought to battle?" Mat knew the answer; he'd reasoned this all out ahead of time, and he also knew what he would do to prevent being penned and trapped and destroyed so far from the main war effort. But Lew was serving as a knight's squire, and Hugo fulfilled largely the same function for him, if not in name, and so Mat had a duty to help educate them in the business and manner of war.

Hugo swallowed, then snapped his fingers. "It's like fighting bullies, milord," he said. Mat cocked an eyebrow, and the piper went on: "I can't fight two or three of them at the same time, but if I ambush them one at a time leaving the privy or coming back to their da's farms from chopping firewood, then I can beat them all on their own."

"Well said," Matrim smiled. "So we know the enemy's issue: we are a small force, meant for raiding and burning. They have more men than we do, and we must assume they'll be able to reason out how to pen us and kill us. So how do we keep them from being able to pen us and bring more men to bear and slaughter us?" Lew and Hugo thought, and after a moment it became clear they didn't know or couldn't think it out.

"Find out where they are, pounce on each force smaller than ours one at a time, like Hugo said, and then move to hit the next one. We cannot afford long, drawn out battles, and so we will have to rely on the killing power of Manderly's heavy cavalry. How do we do that?"

Lew grinned, and broke in before Hugo could speak. "Draw them into attacking our pikemen and men-at-arms on foot, while the merman's horse stay hidden and then smash a flank."

"It seems simple," Mat nodded. "But it's a damned fine thing, keeping control of far flung groups of men and bringing them to concentrate when we need them for a battle. We have banners for all the clans of the mountains, Manderly, and my own Wells. How can we use these to communicate?"

"Work out and explain some sort of code with the banners," Hugo said. "I had a code of taps on the floor of our house with my brother, before he passed of a fever." Matrim smiled.

"Now you boys are thinking. The two of you are to come up with the code we'll use, using only the flags we have. Ts!" He held up a hand. "Don't tell me. Work it out between each other, and make sure it's not bloody well complicated. Miscommunicated orders get soldiers killed." He wagged a finger to ensure they understood, and they walked their horses off, heads dipped towards each other and hands gesturing wildly.

 

[Paladin]

You thought I was dead, but hey demons, it's me, ya boy.

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

After a fortnight of Matrim's men riding roughshod over the countryside, the lords of the Reach had seemingly had enough. The first whiff of an assembling enemy force came from a village headman that two of Mat's men were lynching for cutting a horse's throat rather than letting them steal it.

The headman spat as the noose was going around his neck. "Lord Peake'll see the end of you cunts," he declared.

Mat held up a hand to stop his man from throwing the noose over a tree branch in the rain. His men complied, and the Reach knight that was his guide shifted nervously in his saddle.

"What do you mean, Lord Peake will see the end of us?" Hugo asked. Mat drew his mouth tight, and Hugo seemed to realize that he had spoken before his lord. The village chief was defiant, and jammed his mouth shut.

Mat let Hugo's interruption go, turned to the Reachman, and drew his dirk. Mat repeated Hugo's question. The threat was implicit, but Mat would not resort to torture. He grimaced behind his aventail. Having Hugo beat him will serve no purpose save harden the lad, and life's hard enough as it is.

"Hang him," he finally said. The two archers who had tied the noose and found the tree dragged him to the sturdy oak.

"Wait, lord, wait!" Mat was silent at the man's pleas, and as the other end of the rope went over the tree branch and the shorter archer began to shuck his armor to climb the tree and tie off the rope, the village chief's pleading for his life intensified.

Finally, Mat nodded to Hugo. "What did you mean, Lord Peake will see to the end of us?" the squire asked. The rain came down, making everyone miserable, and if there were tears on the villager's face, the rain hid them. His hands reached up to the loop around his neck.

"He's raised a levy from his own lands, and those of other lords, including ours. They mustered at Starpike, and they'll be coming to try to destroy you," he sobbed. Mat smiled.

"Thank you." He turned away, and clicked his tongue at Goldie to get her moving.

It had started raining two days ago, and now it seemed that the gods had seen fit to bless Matrim and his men before they even knew they'd need it. The rain flattened crops in their fields, turned empty fields to mud and manure, and turned roads into slush, holding up movement. If the Reach's forces were as miserable as his own, and as delayed... Mat dared not dwell on ifs. He had to know.

It was reasonable to suspect that the rain was hindering the Reachmen as much as his own, but he would not gamble with his men's lives so cheaply. He watched a clump of archers struggle to make progress, leading their horses through the mud so that the animals wouldn't go lame and so be rendered useless. He finally sighed.

"Hugo," he said. "Go let everyone know to cease their raids. We'll make camp in this village until the rain stops." They'd need another day after the rain ended for the mud to turn semi-passable, if they were lucky. But so would the Reachlords, and if it came to a fight between his pikes and cavalry in mud... On the fate of such gambles were empires decided. The rain has to stop.

Hugo cantered off, and Mat turned to Ser John. "There's been no rape," he said without preamble. "I mean to keep it that way. Keep your hedge knights under control or I will. Especially the one that nearly had his breeches down far enough for it two days ago. I hang rapists," Matrim said.

Ser John nodded. "I don't hold with it myself, but you understand men have urges—"

Mat cut him off with a glare. "I have urges. I contain them, because I'm not a fucking beast," he said. The conversation ended there, with Ser Jon offended, and Mat felt no desire to call him back and apologize.

Instead he settled for watching as the man who would have been lynched struggled his way through mud up to his thighs as fast as he could, away from Mat. Away from Mat's men. Mat turned his back deliberately to the man, and watched out of the corner of his eye as the two archers that had been trying to hang the fellow grinned and nocked arrows to bows. He was about to stop them, but Edrick, their officer, cut one of their bowstrings with his dirk.

"Cut that shit out, you bastards," he snarled. "His lordship let the cunt go, and he didn't say as to we could go killing him, now did he?"

"No, Edrick," the taller one said. The shorter one spat to show his displeasure.

"'e knifed a good horse, 'e did," the short one protested. Mat thought they were from the same village on his family's land, two days' ride from Queenswell, and tried to place their names. Jon and... Eric? No. Jon and Elric.

Mat's thought that the rain eventually had to stop proved true, the day after his men ate the last of the village's stored food. They set out, all his force gathered, and headed further south, further into the Reach. Everything was soaked and wet: men and horses struggled, but the clansmen on their lighter mountain horses did better. Mat gave the word, and then their lords ordered them out, and they took the hedge knights with them as guides.

Command is the loneliest duty of all, Mat told himself.

Ser John had begun leaving him alone, Humfrey was off— doing something. The septon had ridden off a few days ago without any word as to where he was headed. Mat tried to pretend he wasn't slighted, but then even his uncle was spending more time with the men. Mat decided no, he was offended, and lifted his lips.

The mud meant packing up and getting moving was even more of a chore than it had been, and Mat cursed the three days they had lost even as he cursed the mud more. But men would have slipped away if he had asked them to March through such miserable rain.

Now their race began. Mat, and Lord Peake. Perhaps he would have to defeat two thousand men. Perhaps he would have to defeat ten thousand. Only the gods could know, at least until his clansmen started returning on their shaggy ponies, and the gods didn't seem inclined to share with Mat the secrets of his foe.

So leave the gods aside. My foe is a man, neither god nor demon; I can and will outthink him. He put his spurs into Goldie's sides and the mare leapt forward willingly. Mat urged his men forward, encouraging them. Inside, though, Mat hoped with all his heart that they would give the slip to the Reachmen and avoid having to do battle. They had done what they had come south to do, brought the war to Mace Tyrell's fertile lands and shown his people the terror of that same war, and for miles on their southerly route of march the land reflected that reality: fields burnt, villages torched, men put to the sword.

Where his force hadn't burned it, the land was fat and rich, and people fled before them carrying all they could. His men slogged through the grim muck, faces set with determination.
Mat slid from Goldie, helped a squire struggling to help his knight shove the knight's huge destrier out of the mud. The squire moaned about having to brush the mud out of the horse's feathered fetlocks. Mat clapped the young man on the back.

"Buck up," he told the squire. "You'll have a story to tell your squire when you have one, about the time you marched South to make war against the Targaryen kings and had to shove your knight's horse for miles, uphill both ways in the rain."

The squire smiled, which was a sight better than the grumbling Mat had been hearing a moment ago.

A shout brought Mat's head around, and he pulled himself back into Goldie's saddle fast, then spurred her into a trot to meet the clansman on his shaggy pony. Marlon met him on the muddy road, and together they met the scout.

The scout's dour face was made worse by a frown when he learned that Mat had learned of Peake's marching before him, but he did have word of the numbers Peake The bare two thousand Mat had, mostly infantry, would now be cast against that and half again. Three thousand angry Reachmen, looking to avenge the slight to their honor that Mat's raising and pillaging represented.

Mat smiled, and Manderly looked askance at it. If the scout was accurate, Mat revised to himself. If the man was correct. If he was shorting the enemy's numbers, or had seen only one marching column...

The thought didn't bear consideration. Marlon questioned the clansman, and it came out that he had circled and waited and looked, and yes, there was only one column of men. I am going to gamble, and risk hugely, Mat thought.

"Marlon," he said. "Be ready with your heavy cavalry. Torrhen, take a moment to rest. Have a drink of wine, and then find the rest of the light horse. We're going to find a battlefield." Mat wheeled Goldie around and then spurred her into a hard gallop, heading back to the column to let his subofficers know they had a fight coming, and his plan for it.


Matrim found his place for the fight where a stream had flooded with all the spring rains, and turned the field beneath a gently sloping hill into nothing but mire. The center of his line was thin; all his archers there so that they could shoot straight into the foemen, with all the pikes on the flanks of his archers. Mat's right flank was secured by the stream that had flooded the field, and his left flank loose in the wind. Behind the archers, the solid core of what little heavy foot he commanded— the household regulars he had brought, and whatever men-at-arms the clan chiefs counted among their troops. Atop the sloping hill, Mat sat Goldie, his helmet dangling from a strap on his saddle, shading his eyes with a hand over his brow.

"Howl, damn your eyes!" Mat shouted from where he sat, with the thirty-five Manderly knights that formed his only reserve of troops. "Let Lord Stark know his winter wolves kill his enemies!" His brave infantry responded willingly, letting loose howls and screeches that rose to the heavens, even as Mat prayed his men would hold in the face of a concerted charge by the very best chivalry Westeros had to offer, Reach knights astride their huge chargers, bred for this: to take infantry, caught out and alone with no cavalry support. To send the infantry running, scattered, broken. Gods, he thought, he prayed. Let them hold long enough for Manderly to come. Let Manderly not be lost. More, he prayed. Let him be on time. The time for prayer ended, as the Reachmen made their opening moves in the most deadly of dances: war.

They sent forward a screen of archers. The resulting archery duel was conclusively one-sided: his own drove them off with three volleys of wicked ell-length shafts of good ash, driven by weirwood staves. Arrows thudded into a few of his men, but far more of his own men's shafts drove home, deadly at the closer range the shortbow armed Reach smallfolk had to close in to, in order to engage his archers. The battle paused, then, as the Peake in charge of the force opposite Mat's own took stock of the situation. The man's three-castled banner dipped once, twice.

The enemy spears and pikes came forward; spearmen with shields first, to try and absorb some of the arrows from Mat's archers. The temptation to take a glove off and bite his knuckle was strong, but— command is as much about appearance and confidence as actually leading from the front. Settle down, lad, and let your commanders do their jobs, aye?

Thank you, father, Mat thought. The words of wisdom his father had imparted those years back proved as useful now as they had then. He took a breath, and placed his hands in his lap, settling for clenching them into fists where they'd be unseen by the knights with him. Their leader, a big man atop a huge destrier and carrying his own personal arms on a pennon beneath his lancehead, turned to Mat.

He was silent a moment, and then turned his head back to the fighting. Mat's own pikes had advanced to engage the Reachmen, and that fight was anything but conclusive. The long shafts of sturdy wood drove hardened steel into gaps in armor, searching for faces, thighs, throats— anything to kill a man, or at least bleed him enough to fall down and so cease fighting. His men took up howling again, once that first pikehead was wetted with blood. He wanted to be down there among them, shield high and dirk low for the killing-work of the shieldwall and push of the pike.

Even though all his pieces had been set into their motions, and there was little commanding that remained for Matrim to do, he wanted to wet his sword with the blood of his Lord's foes. It burned him, that desire for the fight, a quickening in his pulse and a tension in his arms. Instead he watched his pikemen fight; he watched his pikemen kill, and he watched his pikemen die.

But ferocity was a currency the Northmen had more of than sense, perhaps. First they took the Reach offensive on the nose, then they blunted the attack through sheer stubbornness. How long the pikemen stabbed back and forth at each other, with how many men dead— Mat could not say.

And then Beron, who had taken charge of the Queenswell men-at-arms as a result of Jon the Gray's death, launched his counterpunch. The men-at-arms, in their heavy mail and armed with wicked broadswords and cruel long axes like Mat's own, drove deep into the heart of the enemy pikemen from where they'd been hidden behind the archers, steel rising and falling, alternating chanting a war-cry Mat couldn't hear with howling like the wolf that decorated the Stark pennon driven into the mud next to him.

He grimaced, because it was early yet in the day's killing to be spending the strength of the men-at-arms. But Beron was down there in the mud and blood, and Matrim was not, and so he would trust Beron's judgement.

If we lose here, Mat promised himself and his gods, I will fall on this field with my soldiers. It would be the least he could do after leading them to ruin. What was it his mother had said? With his shield or upon it? Matrim blew a long breath out of his nose, then closed his eyes for a heartbeat.

When he opened them again, the sun had passed behind a cloud, darkening the day. The Reach pikemen slumped back in the face of the angry onslaught of the Northern heavy infantry. Then Peake revealed his killing thrust, waiting for just such a moment: his knights, divided in two wings, began crossing the field. They were aimed for the heart of Mat's formation, three lines of cavalrymen, headed straight for where his men were trying to regain some semblance of order.

He turned to Lew and Hugo, the two he'd kept in reserve as his messengers, and weighed the decision in his heart.

"Hugo," he said. "Ride down to the fighting and tell Beron of Queenswell there's Reach cavalry riding for him. Repeat my orders back to me."

It took Hugo until the third try, but once the words came out clear and unjumbled, Matrim nodded.

"Ride," he told the lad. "Ride like you've wings at your back. And come back alive." Hugo nodded, grinning widely, blue eyes clear and full of light and warmth. He spurred his horse into a fast gallop, headed for the broiling melee in front of them. Mat raised his eyes to the sky. Keep him from your hall for a few years more, Allfather.

Mat brought his attention back to the fighting before him, took up his helmet between his hands. He rolled it between his palms, then traced a thumb over the decorative knotwork beneath the eyeholes. He placed his helm on the horn of his saddle, and turned to the knight banneret in charge of the Manderly heavy horse that formed his reserve.

"Be ready. We'll go after Manderly's charge commits," he said. The knights responded by tightening their grips on lances, taking drinks of wine or water, slamming visors shut and adjusting the seats on their horses. Mat lifted his own spear from where he'd driven its point down into the earth, left his axe in its loop on his saddle. He gripped the wooden haft of the spear, and swallowed. Someone handed him a wooden canteen filled with water, and Mat took a drink. Then he drained it off, because he did not know if the rest of the day would allow for a break.

"My thanks," he said. He placed his helmet on his head and drew his mail aventail up to cover his neck, where the facemask of his helmet ended. He turned towards the fight. Hoofbeats didn't sound quite the same against mud and muck and blood and bodies, as the horses of the Reachmen crossed where the archers had fought their deadly duel, and one or two mounts went down to Mat's archers, another here and another there stumbled over bodies and fell.

He feared that their charge would be too inexorable, have too much momentum, be too much for his thin line of pikemen to hold against and defeat. But the White Knife had been crossed, the die were cast.

Mat lifted his lips in a silent snarl. His archers would be bringing more down, save for the armor that the chargers of the Reach knights wore, protecting them from the arrows. But they were bringing some down. Not enough, perhaps, but the weirwood bows were stronger than those of elm or yew, and where the deadly shower of arrows could not get through the good plate harness the Reach knights wore, the arrows were finding gaps in the armor, killing horses with lucky shots straight through nostrils or killing men with lucky shots through visors.

Men and steed went down, and the charge that would have ridden his men down and gutted them was losing momentum. Mat whispered a prayer, and he nearly vibrated with the tension filling him, the need to let Goldie have her head of steam and crash into the midst of a pushing, shoving fight, and reap men with a spear. In the sky, miles away, rain clouds built, more spring rains, promising a glum afterwards to the battle, no matter who won or lost. He placed his round shield, painted with the Wells' well, on his shield arm.

The Reach charge crashed home, and Mat's men fought bitterly. They fought with determination, courage, and skill. Their axes and swords rose, and fell. Pikes and long spears stabbed, they reaped a bloody toll from the cavalry that would have seen the Northmen broken and scattered. But weight of charge, and weight of numbers began to tell. Mat's Northmen had already fought off the Reach infantry, who had been beaten back into formation by the flats of their leaders' swords, and were now advancing at the intermingled melee his men and the Reach chivalry presented.

Master of himself no more, Matrim Wells cursed. "Gods above and below," he snarled, fury and bitterness coursing through him. "Manderly is delayed, and my men are dying. We go!" He spurred Goldie into her stride with a savage kick to her sides and a blow of the back end of his spear to her flank. She went willingly, eager to finally be doing something from all the previous standing around.

"Lew!" Mat roared above the sound of thirty-six horses at a trot working towards a gallop. "Break off to the infantry and tell my uncle Flint to withdraw the infantry in good order! I'll cover him, and you go with him! Don't try to find me!" Goldie's mane bannered in the wind she created as she increased speed from trot to canter, and Mat prayed she would survive this fight, unarmored and a mare as she was. Some knights, he knew, liked to use stallions— big, mean bastards more inclined to bite and kick a mare to death than to mount one, trained to use their teeth and hooves for war as easily as a man trained to couch a lance or fight with swords.

He led his pitiful reserve down and to the side of the fighting, to both build up speed and to angle their charge into the side of what remained of the Reach cavalry's lines. Goldie's powerful muscles surged between his thighs, and her eyes were wide, but somehow Mat knew not with fear. She was as eager as he, ready for the fight.

He turned her, back towards the fighting, and leaned low in the saddle to let her gain one final bit of speed. He twisted the spear in his writing and fighting hand, judged the distance, then stood in the stirrups and threw.

The spear flew true, and slammed into the skull of a Reach knight with a lifted visor that had turned to look at his charge's rising howls. The man toppled backwards, out of his saddle, and Mat drew his axe from its loop on his saddle. He choked up on the haft, holding it near the head, and braced himself.

Goldie slammed herself chest first into another Reach knight's horse, this man wearing a surcoat of black-and-gold, and his horse staggered sideways, disrupting his blow meant for the skull of one of Mat's footbound men-at-arms. "Deep Deeds!" Mat roared at the man's bascinet, and drove his axe underneath the man's lifted sword arm deep into his armpit, where the armor was thin or nonexistent. Blood spurted out, coating Goldie and Mat both, and Mat's brave horse dodged a bite from the man's stallion meant for her ear, and while the knight was trying to hold onto his saddle, Mat took his axe in both hands and with a strength he didn't know he had, beheaded the man's horse. It went down, and the soldier that Mat had saved drove his sword through the visor of the knight's bascinet.

"Come on!" Mat bellowed. He did not know how the charge behind him had fared, but he saw a Reach knight fresh off killing a pikeman, and he spurred Goldie towards the foe. One of Mat's archers stood up from behind the shield of a man-at-arms where he'd been sheltering, arrow already drawn back. The archer left fly, and it slammed home into the knight's breast-plate.

The knight turned, to ride down the archer, but Mat and Goldie were there, and he did his best to crush Mat's skull beneath his helmet with an overhead blow from a mace. Mat caught it on his shield, turned it aside, and tried to batter through the man's helmet with his axe. The blade broke with a ringing sound, and the knight laughed. It was loud, and clear, and Mat swore because now he only had a shield. He turned his arm, punched the rim at the knight's barbute, and used the heartbeat it bought him to draw his sword.

"Surrender, northman, and I'll see you paroled honorably," the knight tried to offer. Mat caught a hugely powerful blow from the mace on his shield, full on, and wood splintered.

"I piss on your parole," Mat snarled, and then it was his turn to laugh. The archer had loosed again, and this shot took the knight in the eye. He slumped forward over his horse's neck, dead.

A blow from a sword blade bounced off the back of Mat's hauberk, turned aside by the mail, and he tried to turn Goldie. Hemmed in as she was by the press of bodies and horses, it was slow going. His mail, and the doublet he wore beneath it, kept him from being spitted on a sword like a boar, but he knew that his luck would turn, run out, eventually. Perhaps even— now, he decided, and ducked.

The enemy longsword whiffed by over his head; the enemy overextended. The melee drew them apart from each other. A cry went up, from his Northmen, and Mat risked his neck and his life for a look: Lew had gotten through to Uncle Torghen; the archers had pulled away with the men-at-arms, and now were shooting into the oncoming Reach infantry, to buy time for his pikes to back away from the engagement.

Deciding that yes, that would have to be good enough, Mat spurred Goldie away from the fight. He roared his family's words once more, and the Manderly knights that had followed him and survived came with him now. The Reach cavalry broke off, to try to go at his pikes and archers, but Mat drove Goldie forward with a kick, and his own cavalry followed.

He interposed himself and the knights following him between the remains of his infantry and the remains of the Reach cavalry, and he judged that his pikes had reaped a terrible toll before the enemy horse had gotten to them.

He slumped in his saddle, suddenly tired and sore, and lifted his waterskin from the saddle. It sloshed once, and then Mat watched disbelievingly as the last of it poured from a hole in the bottom half of the skin.

"Bugger," he said, and replaced it. He undid one strap of his aventail, letting it dangle from a side of his helmet. He turned to the knight banneret, face drawn tight with anger.

"Where's rat-fucking Marlon? Where's your fucking commander? There was a Peake, on the fucking field! If he had been on time we could have shattered the entirety of their cavalry contingent there and then! We had them held in the palm of our fucking hand, all the Reach soldiers between us and even greener pastures for pillaging and burning!"

The knight, too, was slumped in his saddle, taking careful sips from a skin of his own. "I don't know, lord. You gave him his orders, asked for a mounted reserve. He left early this morning, didn't say where he was going to try to flank them from. Perhaps they got lost. Seven-that-are-One forbid, they may have been pounced on in turn by a stronger force of Reachmen and destroyed. Until we find out, and we may never, only the gods know. They're not telling me." Then he shrugged, and took another sip.

"Take a breath, lord, and have a sip of my watered wine. We're not through with this day's fighting, not by a long shot. Look—" He handed Mat the skin, then gestured.

The Reach cavalry, having withdrawn, were now forming a line once more. Mat's infantry had pulled back further up the hill, leaving a little space between the water and field. He knew that those knights would be trying to angle for that gap, exploit it and destroy his men from front and back. It would be something he would try, were he the Peake in command across the way.

But he wasn't, and he could only guess. "This isn't how this was supposed to go at all," Mat complained. "I wanted to be able to destroy them piecemeal, but that fucking rain!"

The knight shrugged. "The Seven-as-One have a plan, lord. We've not been beaten yet, and they've the truth of our steel, now. Steel, and those fucking archers of yours and the clans. Gods bless weirwood bows, and the men drawing them."

Mat wondered if his own gods, gods that were pleased with human sacrifice to culminate a night of feasting, and drinking, and animal sacrifice, had their own plans. If they do, the Nornir will twine as they will. He took the offered sip of watered wine, swished it in his mouth, then swallowed. Something warm trickling down the back of his calf. He felt, and his mailed glove came up with blood at the finger tips.

"Ah," he said. "Someone got my calf. I don't feel crippled." Shame and fear flooded him. If he was crippled, then he would be a useless mouth to feed, come the next winter. He'd never again stand in the shieldwall, protecting the man to his left, or help bring in a harvest, or—

Or anything, he decided. If I am crippled, I will die here, in the South. But for now Mat had more pressing matters, like withdrawing his men in good order and preventing a general rout. More, even: victory. This was a true passage of arms, entirely different from bullying Crownland peasants out of their grain, and burning Reach villages to drive the smallfolk into the castles of their lords.

One brave Reach knight walked his horse forward, lance held on high, seeking a joust. The knight to Mat's side— he still didn't know the man's name— made to ride forward to meet him. Mat caught him on the arm.

"I'll do it," he told the knight.

"You, lord? You don't... forgive me, but you don't strike me as the type to know how to ride a course."

"I do," Matrim said. "It's not something I've ever done in a tourney, but my father's master-at-arms made certain I learned. How I wish I had ridden at Harrenhal, where that ill-begotten bastard Rhaegar crowned Lyanna— had I but been there to unhorse him..." He let the thought trail off, face turned down in a scowl. The knight passed him his lance, and Mat lifted it. The wicked sharp point had no crossguard beneath it; this lance was designed to go into someone, and stay in them, not be pulled out.

The Reach boasted some of the best knights in Westeros. Matrim wondered, as Goldie went around in a circle, how he would do on a horse he'd never ridden in a passage of lances, against a knight of the Reach. Bugger honor, he thought, and drew the aventail across the lower half of his face once more. The fatigue and soreness seemed distant, with another fight right here in front of him, but he knew they would return with a vengeance.

He didn't bother waiting for the Reachman to indicate his readiness or lack thereof: once his aventail was drawn across his face, Mat spurred Goldie hard, concentrating on the target.

He let the lance fall into the couched position, the knight banneret's arms snapping gaily on the pennon beneath the lancehead. All-Father, Mat prayed. Thunderer, and Tyr One-Hand; guide my lance true, and grant I ride fast enough to make it away from this place.

The two horses' hooves thundered against the mud, spattering their flanks and withers with the stuff. Mat gently eased his lance-tip lower— lower, then even lower, almost like he'd fumbled the hold and only just saved himself from being catapulted out of the saddle by a lance-tip into the dirt.

Then Mat flicked the lance up, and speared the Reachman's horse through the chest with it. The horse died with a huge sucking breath, eyes shocked and betrayed, and Mat felt a twinge of guilt. The enemy knight's lance crashed into Mat's shield, driving it back into his chest. He tumbled out of Goldie's saddle, landed badly, with his sword tucked under him.
The breath was knocked out of him, and Mat lay there for a moment trying to catch it back. The jingle jangle of spurs caught his attention, and through the eyes of his helmet he saw the sabatons of the knight coming at him.

Fuck, he thought, and pulled his arm free of his shield. He tried to stand, slipped badly on the muddy grass, then made it on the second attempt. The knight was on him then, sword drawn.

Mat drew his dirk fast, and caught the knight's sweeping over-head cut on his mail sleeve.

The knight had no words for Mat about the killing of his horse, and Mat preferred it that way. Less talking meant more breath for fighting. He parried a thrust at his face, and stepped forward, dagger held in front of him. The knight tried to back away, to gain room to thrust with his longsword once again.

Mat caught it between his sleeve and chest, trapping the knight and forcing a decision on him. If he let go and went for his dagger— Mat would have the longsword, and could turn it on the knight. If the knight kept it, Mat would be inside his reach with a drawn dagger.

The knight let go of his longsword, going for his rondel. He fumbled the draw and dropped it. Mat let the sword fall, and caught the knight's helmet with his free hand.

"No, milord, plea-" Mat's dirk fell once, cutting off the plea. He cleaned it on the knight's orange-and-black surcoat, embroidered with three castles. Goldie came trotting to him when he called her, and Mat stole the jewel-encrusted plaque belt that held the knight's scabbard. He sheathed the longsword and his dirk, and grunting, swung himself into the saddle.
He rode back to his men with the longsword held high, if nothing else a tangible trophy of their fighting, and for a moment Mat felt buoyed by a spirit he could not explain— the Reach was at his fingertips, ripe for the plucking, if he could just— Just what? His men had fought the Reach infantry to a standstill, but with Marlon Manderly off in the wind with the greatest part of his force of knights....

The hedge knights that had acted as guides for Mat's men had sat the battle out, but they approached him now, jostling with knights wearing the green surcoat of the Manderlys, trying to shake his hand and congratulate him.

"I got lucky," Mat brushed aside their praise. "He wasn't expecting me to kill his horse, and then he made a mistake getting close enough for me to trap his sword. Bloody fool," he said without anger. Still, though. The recognition of fellow soldiers felt good. He didn't let himself smile, but he wanted to.

He turned his head, looked at where the Reachmen had launched their attack from. Five thousand men contesting for a muddy field in the ass-end of the Reach wasn't the many, many thousands that had taken the battlefields during the Dance or Blackfyre Rebellions or War of the Ninepenny Kings, Mat knew, but it also wasn't insignificant. Outnumbered, brought to heel by the rains choking his march into a village, Mat hadn't wanted an open field fight— his plan all along had been to bring to battle the individual marching columns of the Reach with the full strength of his force, and so chip away at their strength. Instead, the gods had given him rain.

And the rain had given him an open fight. His men had driven off superior numbers and superior cavalry once, but he didn't know if they could do it again. Men leaned on pikes and axes, drawing in huge breaths, sharing drinks and smiles. They had survived. The question is... can they do it again? Mat scowled across the field, where the knights of the Reach were redressing their lines, preparing another charge.

"I don't think they'll let the foot go first this time," the Manderly oath-sworn said. He spat to the side, and glanced at the sky. "Be rain, soon, though, thank the Seven-as-One."

Mat looked up, gauged the dark clouds gathering to the west, then nodded his agreement. "Like as not, it'll be a afternoon storm off the Sunset Sea," he said.

"There are squalls as spring up in the Narrow Sea, out of nowhere. I did three years as a marine for one of Lord Manderly's war galleys, and 'tisn't a service I'd like to repeat."

Mat wanted to ask about that, about fighting at sea, about sailing. He didn't. He pulled the aventail back up. He wanted to pull the hauberk off, stretch himself loose from the stiff muscles and fatigue.

The gods didn't care what he wanted, because his officers were shouting their men back into position. Some clever man had seized a dead Reach knight's lance and placed it deep into the mud; others followed suit, until there was a bristling hedge of lances and spears in front of his archers, protected on their sides by his pikemen.

And behind the archers, leaning on axes and heavy, two-handed swords, the men-at-arms, in good helmets and mail. My horse for five hundred more pikes and the men to hold them, Mat thought. But pikemen were only as good as their leadership and training, and the infantrymen he had now had proven they were willing to throw down and go toe to with the chivalry of the Reach. He spurred Goldie to take him in front of his men, and he took off his helmet. He shook his head, letting his warrior's braid bounce free.

"What can I say?" he asked. "What is there to say? You've proven yourselves courageous, hearts and spirits full of strength and bravery. But those are cold comfort for a widow, 'ere the cruel winter winds come howling and there's no grain in the cellar or fuel for the fire.

"I won't promise that every man will survive. I cannot promise it. But I promise you this: no man still living who swears for the Stark in Winterfell will leave this field after me. We will fight, and triumph here, and I will leave the field last. Or I will die among you, as a leader and warlord should!" No cheers greeted his speech, for it was a grim one. Mat glanced once more to the sky, prayed for rain to churn the field to mud and allow him to slip his men away from that deadly Reach cavalry, and then he swung himself out of Goldie's saddle.

He drew his long-hafted axe from its loop on his saddle, and strode his way to where his archers stood, some laying in the mud, others sitting; all exhausted after their part in the day's work.

"I'm not a Mormont or a bear," he said to them. "But here I stand, and here I'll die if I must. Not one step back, lads. For the Starks, and Winterfell." He put his helmet back on, and drew the aventail up one last time.

He'd said all he needed to say, save perhaps to Lyanna Stark and Bryory, but only the gods and Rhaegar Targaryen knew where she was, and as for Bryory, well— Gods above, but I don't want to die, Mat thought. The thought of his impending doom, speared on the end of a Reach knight's war-lance, or head split in twain by an axe, or, or, or—

Dwelling on it does no good, a voice seemed to whisper to him. Mat wondered if it was his father, or grandfather, but they were dead and in the ground beneath the weirwood where he'd first held a sword, and his fingers clenched in his grip on the axe's haft. Father or grandfather or mother, or Rickard or Brandon Stark, or my gods. The thought of his death scared him.

He tried to master his breathing, in, then out, slow and steady. He'd be panting like a bellows soon enough. In, then out. He thought of two dark-haired girls, one with eyes so gray they hurt to remember, and another with blue. A hand reached up to try to touch an amulet around his neck that was not and had never been there, and then the Reach charge was on its way.

Bastards, he thought. Stupid bloody bastards. He would have spat if it wouldn't rust his aventail. Being on the ground, and facing a Reach cavalry charge heading towards him was entirely different than watching it bear down on his men from hundreds of feet away. He tried to swallow, mouth suddenly dry with fear.

His knees would be shaking soon. Mat stared at the knight bearing down to do his best to kill him, heard the thrum of the archer's arrows filling the air, watched an arrow sink through a man's breastplate and winced. The man toppled over, his lance fouled a horse's legs.

Break, Matrim thought and prayed both. Break them, before we must fight it out once more. He had no such luck, of course. The Reach knights rode on, unheeding of casualties, of their friends being brought low beside them, by his archers. The Reach's left had ridden faster or better, and so he heard their huge crash into his line of pikes, and then his archers were scrambling back to hide behind his men-at-arms. Mat ducked a lance, where it passed harmlessly over his head, and then he seized it in his hand and tugged. The knight stayed on his horse, but let the lance go. One of his men-at-arms thrust forward with a spear, caught the knight's helmet with the tip.

The knight didn't go down. Mat killed his horse with a quick blow to the skull, poleaxing it dead. Then the knight went down, and Mat followed up the death of the horse with a huge blow driven into the knight's breastplate. He gasped something Mat could not hear through the paean to the gods of war, the din of spear and sword on armor and shields.

A spear or lance slammed itself into the crown of Mat's helmet and his head was driven low by the blow. He came up swinging, mouth twisted in a wordless snarl. His first cut with the axe was parried by a Reach knight in a muddy yellow surcoat, and his axe's haft was splintered by a slash from another knight's sword. Mat tossed aside the shortened weapon and drew his sword. His world retreated from a land of wide open spaces and fields, of men and horses and oxen to—

To the killing. Mat wanted to lose himself in the violence and anger, the bitter fight to the death. Parry; thrust and kill through eye slits. Make a cover, grab and hold a knight's arms so that one of his men could rip the knight's helmet off and cut his throat.

Mat missed a parry, took a scoring cut down the side of his arm. The work of killing the knights was grim business, and Mat did not let himself think of how wrecked, how ruined, his force might be afterwards. There was only the fighting and dying. Gradually the work of it leadened his arms and legs. Fatigue bore down on him, pressing him with a weight greater than any mountain he'd climbed with his uncle Torghen.


After— after how long, Mat could not tell and did not want to, though more like it was only half an hour or an hour, the rain began falling. He scrabbled against the knight he was trying to kill, ignored the man's attempts to yield, and drove his dirk into a gap in the armor, beneath the man's armpit.

There was no savagery or hate in Mat's going through the motions: that was all it was to him, just pure business. And like any business, a fight had to come to an end eventually. This fight's end came when the rain intensified, and the Reach knights still horsed began drawing back, unwilling to risk their valuable steeds breaking a leg or dying beneath them in the mud and blood.

Mat stood, drawing in huge breaths through the mail and helmet protecting his face. He turned and looked, and saw none of his own men on horses to pursue the Reachmen from the field and make it a complete victory. Is this a victory? He couldn't tell. It felt more like defeat, though, and he turned in a circle, looking for—

He searched for his uncle, or the knight banneret who he had charged the Reach knights with, anyone at all. Faces covered in blood and mud stared back at him. Where is my uncle? He stepped forward, leaning over and turning over bodies. A sound drew his attention and he turned and walked towards it, but stopped short.

It was a man, gray-haired and bearded, cradling another man in his arms. The living man was sobbing, huge things that wracked his body, and the keening he made near ripped Mat's heart in two.

"My son," the man sobbed. "My brave little lad-" Mat turned away, to leave the man to grieve in private. Is this my future? Will I one day hold my son, strong and handsome but dead before his prime because he went to war?

Gods, but he hoped not.

 

[Knack]

Man this is so good I'd like it twice. This hits all the gritty notes of the original series without being over the top.

 

[Jamie Roberts]

"You are going to war in the Reach? Your men say that they have the best knights in Westeros, lord."

Mat thought about a Crownland knight dying under his dagger, eyes pleading as his lifeblood bubbled out of his mouth.

"Knights die all the same," he finally said.

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Send War-Father some quality recruits, eh!

"We're blood of the First Men," Matrim had said. "We remember how you Andals removed our cousins in the South from power, root and stem. Where war didn't do the trick, willing and biddable daughters as wives from the warlords of Andalos did. They came, preaching the Light of the Seven, and their sons were raised as Seveners. Their sons weren't taught the sacred rites of carving a god's face, their daughters went ignorant of the lore of our women. Two, three generations later, the lords were fully Seven worshippers, and the smallfolk went ignored as our gods were hewn and then burnt as offerings to your own. It's not a new, or even an old grudge I bear on behalf of my ancestors and their cousins."

Mat turned to look at Humfrey now, the septon's eyes tear-filled as he watched two of Mat's own household men-at-arms lynch a man that had tried to cut the throat of an archer.

"It's not a grudge," Matrim repeated. "It is an ancient hate, cherished and carried forward from the mists of legend, so that we might always guard ourselves against any encroachment of the Seven. We're leaving the septs untouched because we're not you Andals. We can respect the place a man worships, even if we're doing our best to gut him."

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I love this guy! The writing is fantastic; you really get the feelings of the colonized religion towards the homogenistic invaders. That resentment towards those who benefit from what was done to yours. The longing for a home untouched by this suffering, long lost and perhaps never to return.

That feeling of "why should I care" when the fortunes of the homogenizers turn ill.

"They've done worse to me and mine with a smile on their faces before, and after this is over they will most certainly do so again. Why should I care if they've briefly tasted their own medicine? We're not colonizing them, we are torturing none into conversion, we are making no attempt to eradicate their culture. On what basis do they call this an outrage, whilest they still call their cruelties kindness?"

I'm not a monster, he told himself. This is brutal, but it is war and I am just in our cause. Gods of my fathers, keep Lyanna healthy.

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I love how you keep up with the psichological effects this scale of violence is doing. You're not just senselessly glorifying war, you're showing it in all its horror.

"Do you understand why we're making war like this?" The two were silent for a moment, and then Lew glanced at Hugo.

Hugo went first. "So that the folk know their lords can't protect them?'

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This whole scene was an unexpected delight. Its so rare that we actually get to see these teaching moments written into the story, and its such an insight into how our characters feel about their situation!

Ser John nodded. "I don't hold with it myself, but you understand men have urges—"

Mat cut him off with a glare. "I have urges. I contain them, because I'm not a fucking beast," he said. The conversation ended there, with Ser Jon offended, and Mat felt no desire to call him back and apologize.

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Well said! We neuter dogs that won't stop humping things! If men can't hold to the same standard, then they should hardly expect more leniency!

"Cut that shit out, you bastards," he snarled. "His lordship let the cunt go, and he didn't say as to we could go killing him, now did he?"

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I like that he lets the guy go. These days, you see a lot of protagonists who'd hang him anyway, because writers think that what makes a character morally complicated is having them kill people at random.

"He's a hard man, he makes hard decisions!" No, f&^% off with that shit.

Even though all his pieces had been set into their motions, and there was little commanding that remained for Matrim to do, he wanted to wet his sword with the blood of his Lord's foes. It burned him, that desire for the fight, a quickening in his pulse and a tension in his arms.

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Getting a bit attached that adrenaline high, eh Mat?

If we lose here, Mat promised himself and his gods, I will fall on this field with my soldiers.

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Til Valhol!

Mat hadn't wanted an open field fight— his plan all along had been to bring to battle the individual marching columns of the Reach with the full strength of his force, and so chip away at their strength. Instead, the gods had given him rain.

And the rain had given him an open fight.

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No surprise that The Thunderer has been uncooperative; this sort of war fighting is Greybeard's work.



Gods, I can't begin to say enough about how good the battle was! It was intense, the pacing was incredible, it felt like I was right there with Mat!

I admit that I very much hope that Mat does not die this day. But if the story does end here then it will be a Glorious End indeed!

 

[Paladin]

Rumors of my disappearance? They have been greatly exaggerated. To whom it will concern:

~Deep Wells, Deep Deeds~

Cleaning up after a battle was miserable. Cleaning up a close-run battle, where it had hung in the balance and could have gone either way, in the rain— Mat wasn't sure he wanted to taste defeat. After they had hacked a mass grave into the mud the day previous, his men set to the task of burying the Northern corpses with their arms and armor. After that, they'd set to stripping the Reachmen of anything valuable. A group of archers, laughing, had decked one of their own out entirely in plate looted from the corpses of Reach knights, finer and more protective than what most of their dead countrymen had been buried in.
The knight banneret had limped up while Mat was helping carry one of his men to the grave where they would all lie for eternity. Or until a farmer turned them up, something more cynical inside him said. But his force would need to travel fast, and carrying all hundred twenty of their dead with them back northwards, to even Stoney Sept, wouldn't be possible. As it was, they would still wind up trailing injured that couldn't keep up behind them, and the thought galled Mat.

No one had bothered counting the dead Reachmen, except the knights. The Northmen had killed three hundred fifty knights, and collected every set of those golden spurs. Those he would present to Lord Stark as proof of his men's valor, and used in petition that they receive fallow lands for to be settled and held in their own names, after the war.

"Found Ser Manderly," the knight said. He helped Mat with the next corpse.

"He got lost, did he?" Mat asked. The knight nodded. Mat laid his soldier into the grave, then wrapped the man's only whole hand around a sword's hilt.
"Fuck," the knight said. "We're done in the Reach, ain't we?"

Mat nodded. "Too many of the men are dead or injured, and no castles or cities taken to show for it. But then, we were never meant to be strong enough to do that. We were a retort to Mace Tyrell, to show his lords that he couldn't protect them while feasting and making merry in the Stormlands, and we did just that. But it cost us."

The knight said nothing, leaving Mat with his thoughts after the fighting. He'd looked for the soldier that Bryory seemed to have attached herself to, to see if that man still lived. Matrim could not find him, though the man had marched south with Matrim under Wells banners.

Mat had been left with his thoughts, a solitude that he did not care for. The old soldier who had lost his son had said nothing bitter or angry to Mat, just sobbed and pleaded for his boy to wake up, even as they were burying the lad. There was neither mother nor his sister to see him and the rest of the Northmen dead piled deep into the dirt, only Mat Wells and all those still living.

Mat Wells, who'd led them to their deaths. Mat Wells, who had marched into the Reach and left a swathe of widows and orphans in his own wake. He turned his face down to the ground, so his men would not see him doubt.
Gods, but commanding was a lonely duty.

A cough from Marlon Manderly interrupted his thoughts, as the portly fellow came up ahorse with his troop behind him. Mat glanced up, to look at the commander of his cavalry and demand some sort of explanation, but Manderly's own force was similarly diminished, with roughly thirty men gone, and a trail of horses with empty saddles following. The cavalry had clearly seen hard, bitter fighting: men wore rough linen bandages around arms, heads. There were splits and rents in their mail, and dents in breastplates and helms. None of them carried the war lances they'd departed with.
Mat said nothing, and instead he embraced Manderly. Their armor clanked where arms wrapped around shoulders. Mat banked his anger, to save it for later, when it might see him through another fight. Marlon embraced him back, and then they held each other at arm's length.

"I must cry for your pardon, and I will beg a pardon from every man you will leave on this field," Marlon said. His mustache drooped, because his face was drooping. "We got lost. We came across a fortified tower, a half day's ride away, and we weren't expecting to see it when we came across it. Their gates were open, so we seized it hard and fast. We slighted it, after driving everyone out." Marlon explained.

"How did you slight it?"

"We lit everything on fire that we could, and then made sure to burn the gates. The interior will be uninhabitable for a while, at least. If I'd had more time, we'd have pulled walls down, but we tried to find you. Our guide proved recalcitrant, and so I hung him."

Mat nodded. "Good," he said savagely, voice jagged. "If you hadn't, I would have. We're burying good men here, because he delayed you. How did you come to lose the men you did?"

"A force of Seven-forsaken Dornish light cavalry caught us unawares. After we rallied and got our armor on, we cut them apart, but it was a close run thing, Matrim."

"Bastards," Mat said once, then again in weariness: "Bastards."

Marlon nodded, and then he stepped aside. "We found your septon, too, Matrim. Wouldn't tell us where he'd been, only that you'd want to hear what he has to say."

Matrim made a noise in the back of his throat, indicating— what? He didn't know whether he wanted to see Humfrey or not, not after the man had just disappeared, and some of his men that followed the Seven had gone into the ground unshriven, and the ground unconsecrated.

Mat knew he could have driven his men forward, hot on the heels of the Reach foe, and crush the remnants of their force. But the souls of his dead would have been unquiet, unrested and uneasy. They'd have haunted him in this war and long afterwards, perhaps until he was as old as the greybeard who had lost his son. But into the dirt they went, to feed the trees and generations of worms to come.

But Humfrey was here, now, and his advice about Bryory had been sound, even if Mat hadn't liked it, or liked letting her go. His fingers tightened into a fist, involuntarily, but he eased up. He'd been remiss in his duties, he decided. He'd see that a-right, once they returned to the main army.

"Send him to me, at his earliest convenience," Matrim finally said. He could hide behind the onerous task of burying his dead no longer. They would finish here, he decided, and then cut northeast, heading towards the Stormlands or King's Landing. Truthfully, other than "in the Reach," Matrim had no clue where he was, and the Reach hedge knights they'd taken on as guides weren't very clear, either. The Reach was large, and when you were deliberately avoiding the landmarks of castles and larger towns in favor of burning the hamlets and villages....

I have bitten off a fatter and tougher piece of meat than I can chew through, Mat thought, and prayed it was not so. Cutting east-by-northeast would see them at the eastern coast of Westeros eventually...
Eventually.

But men would start deserting before then, or worse yet, mutiny, and down those paths led his own death. He'd already collected his own share of cuts and bruises earned in the fighting, and he had no desire to add a noose around his neck before them. Either way, Matrim thought, he'd done what his lord had ordered him to do, and now would be the time to turn back north. He turned back to laying his men into the cold ground, their cold graves, and said a quick and silent prayer over each man as they went into the dirt.

Septon Humfrey returned out of the mist of the morning, hood pulled tight about his face. He made a sign over the stripped bodies of the Reacher knights, likely something Sevener in nature, and then he hurried to Mat's side. When finally Mat saw his face, it was drawn tight with stress and worry, and he was haggard in breath.

"Lord," Humfrey said. "I have word... We must speak alone," he said. Then he swallowed. Mat narrowed his eyes, turned from the priest to watch wood being laid around and on top of the pile of dead Reach knights to make a pyre.

"Gods damn their eyes," Mat said. "I would have been content to not fight, for all there'd have been no glory in it. But I find glory will be a poor balm for the widows and orphans I have left wanting back home. You'll have your word, septon."

Mat grabbed his arm and led him away, away from where the ashes of dead Reach knights would linger with the bones of his men. He led him away, away from clusters of tired, wounded men. Finally Mat reached the woodbine, where they sheltered against the morning mist and away from carrion birds seeking an easy meal.

"Speak, Humfrey," Mat said. "You wanted your word, you shall bloody well have it."

The septon was silent for a long heartbeat, two, and it seemed to stretch interminably.

"Speak, damn your eyes!" Mat commanded, frustration bleeding into his voice. "What is your news, your word?"

"Your raids in these lands have not gone unnoticed, and despite their foul results may yet bear sweeter fruit for your cause and that of your lords. Word has already spread as far south as the Dornish Marches of Northmen raiders so far away from their snow drifts, and from the main fighting in the Riverlands. While I was in the company of begging brothers several days' ride east of Horn Hill, I had the fortune to meet a troop of Dornish horsemen."

"Your fortune, but the misfortune of mine and Ser Marlon Manderly. Our cavalry were set upon by Dornishmen and are left fewer for it."


"A tragedy, I assure you, but one of silver lining. But these men, these riders, they bore emblems and sigils of House Dayne of Starfall. They said that they had come at the behest of a lady of their great house, who sought to send word to the commander of the Northmen. Word my lord, of the location of Lyanna Stark." Humfrey stopped, shame choking his voice and clear in his eyes. Matrim stepped closer, and then wrapped Humfrey in a crushing embrace.

"Tell me everything," Mat ordered.

"She spoke with great detail my lord," Humfrey started. "Details of a marriage, forced, with a Kingsguard giving her away in place of her father. And of a tower, in a pass in the northeastern marches Dorne. A forced marriage is a sin against all the gods, lord Wells. A forced bigamist marriage is doubly so. I thought instantly of your affection for the lady, of your loathing of the prince. I was given a hard location, the exact pass and was given a horse to make my way to you, for I knew you must have this word."

Mat eyed the septon in front of him, thought about his potential revelations. Did Mat dare to gamble the lives of his men on it, on what could be a trap? The set and weave of the war stretched in front of him if he dared not turn his men further south, if he dared not pit himself against wily Dornishmen on fast horses, if he dared not commit: the war would stretch on if the Targaryen prince returned to lead his father's armies against the rebel cause. The rebel cause might suffer a blow, two, a setback— and Lyanna, stuck trapped in Dorne with a madman for a husband and a madman for a father-by-law—

"We go to Dorne," he told Humfrey, taking the priest by the shoulder. "And you will go north."

"My lord Wells?"

"You will go north, with the injured. You will help mask them as if begging brothers, refugees from our depredations. You will take them north, find Northern banners, and send word to Eddard Stark and only Eddard Stark of where I have diverted our campaign. You will speak of this to no one but him, septon. Do you understand?"

"I-"

"Do you understand me, septon? Will you do this for me?"

"I- yes. I will carry your missive to the Starks."

"Good. May your Gods keep you close to their bosom and safe by their designs. I will pray for you, Humfrey. I will not forget this kindness."

After that, Matrim turned his back, and went back to his men.

Questions greeted him when he returned, of course—how could they not? Men had seen the septon walk up to him, seen them walk off together, and now Mat returned alone. What news did the priest bear? Would Humfrey be leaving them again? Where were they to go next?

And so he spoke. "The priest will be returning to the Riverlands carrying a message for my lord Winterfell," Matrim explained. "He will take with him those injured among us in the guise of begging brothers and refugees, and see them returned home to the North. The rest of us will remain here, to undertake a new mission." It would be dangerous, to travel into Dorne. But if Lyanna was truly there, then all that had happened would be worth it. She had to be, he told himself.

"We have achieved a victory that no one expected of us," Mat went on. "We came to the Reach to bring the war to lords of grain and flower, to show them that the anger and fury of the North is the ice cold anger of winter, that there is not escape or hiding, and we have done that. Will you follow me further?"

Murmurs greeted his question, the men around him listening—listening, and liking what they heard, but not committed, not yet. Mat had them on the line, but he needed them to bite. A spirit seemed to have alighted on his shoulder, whispering brilliance into his ear and letting it flow to his tongue.

"I dare," he said. "I dare. Dorne thinks themselves safe from winter! They think themselves secure in a desert, from the depths of ice and cold, when the blizzard howls to freeze the very breath in a throat, but we can show them how wrong they are. Come with me, and we will write a bloody and glorious song that will be sung for ages."

They would follow him. They had followed him this far already, and the lure of glory, of riches—but all there would be would be death. Matrim Wells felt it in his bones, the knowledge that he would order these men to their deaths. Worse, that he would do it again with no questions asked. For Lyanna. For Lyanna Stark, he would ride to his death in Dorne, as surely as Rickon Stark had in the Conquest of Dorne.

 

[A Nation's Virtue]

Good stuff, very poignant so far. Definitely enjoying what we're seeing so far with Mat and the human cost of war.

 

[Droman]

Nice to see this updated after so long! Was really enjoying your descriptive writing, very Cornwall-Gemell.

 

[Paladin]

Man this is so good I'd like it twice. This hits all the gritty notes of the original series without being over the top.

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I aim to please. If you want more you should check out Oath. It'll be in my sig soon, along with my discord.

Snip

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You always say the nicest things. You'll make a man blush, that praise will. In short, story's not dead, I'm not dead (despite nature trying twice in the span of a calendar year), and in fact I am staring at a successful career. I don't know how the fuck we got here.

Good stuff, very poignant so far. Definitely enjoying what we're seeing so far with Mat and the human cost of war.

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Thanks! Everybody always asks "what war crimes will we do?"

Nobody ever asks "how will the war crimes we do negatively affect our mental health and self image?"

Nice to see this updated after so long! Was really enjoying your descriptive writing, very Cornwall-Gemell.

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I lived, bitch. More words soon.

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Ten: South, Then.


Mat guided his horse out of the line of march, and watched the pitiful pillar of red dirt kick up as horse hooves clopped by. He lifted his waterskin up to his lips, and then frowned when it turned up empty. No wonder our forefathers couldn't help the Young Dragon keep bloody Dorne. He fingered a flat pebble in his pouch, and was going to withdraw it. The herder he had paid to guide them had cackled and grinned evilly when he eyed their waterskins. Then he had disappeared into the night, taking one of the spare horses and leaving not even tracks.

I should have hung him, Mat glanced at the mountain peaks that seemed to surround them. They loomed, huge and imposing, dry as a sept on a holy day. I should have hung him, he thought again. But wishing to a hang a man long gone and likely laughing with his friends and companions around their fire at night didn't serve to solve any of Wells' looming troubles, and he frowned. We'll need to fill our skins when we next find water, and keep the horses from drinking so as they don't foul it before we can. He turned to look back, behind his column, and thought he saw a glint through the drifting dirt driven up by plodding horse hooves. He left the pebble in his pouch.

"'Nother hot day, milord," one man commented as his horse walked slowly by Mat's own. He touched his forelock, lacking a hat and having chosen to forgo trying to endure the boiling heat of his pot-helmet.

"Yes," he said slowly. "Yes it is. You've still got water?" The man nodded, and then touched his hand to his forehead again. He clucked his tongue at his horse, and Mat was left there. He turned his horse around, patted its neck.

"Good girl," he murmured, low enough for her to ear. "You're such a brave girl. Soon we'll be done. Soon." She whuffed at his words, and then whickered. He slid out of his saddle, and pulled his spare waterskin from the rigging of his saddle and saddlebag. Matrim unstoppered it, took one, two careful sips. Then he turned to the horse, and smelling water, she crowded close to him.

"Yes," he said. "This is for you, brave one. Here." He held it up and her nose followed. She tried to lick at the mouth of the skin, and he tipped it over enough to pour for her. She drank greedily, the stupid thing, and Mat was sore in his heart at the knowledge she might not survive this excursion. She was an excellent horse, and he wanted to see if he could convince the Ryswells to have one of their stallions stand her to stud. That's for after the war, stupid, he told himself. You must survive the gods-blighted thing first, and then live to see your home, to boot. Where are the Kingsguard? Why have three of that number disappeared? Have they died, defending their Prince? Matrim swallowed, and tilted the skin back from the horse's mouth so that there might be some water left for later in the day, if they would not or could not find more. She neighed piteously.

"I'm sorry, girl," he said. "We'll need that for later."

He had prickers out, thin men from his own family's lands on just-as-scrawny horses he'd bought or ordered stolen as they crossed from the Reach into Dorne. They were trying to probe the passes ahead, riding a relay, searching. Searching. One man would ride hard, seeking their prize or a well or spring to replenish their water at, and if the pass ended in a dead end he'd come back, blowing a whistle made to sound like a Northern osprey. They had gone from spring to mountain spring that way, once out of the more arid Dornish lowlands, and now the water was running low. Not out, not yet, thank the gods and landvættir, but he knew it would happen. Soon. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next.

But we will come to it when we come to it, he thought. He leaned his forehead against his horse's neck, patted the other side of it. Gods, but command is lonely. Next war, let me worry about only swinging a sword for the Starks or my brother. Would that I had not made myself an option for this command. But if not him, a small part of his mind whispered, then who? Roose Bolton? He had professed wanting to turn a new page in the book of the North's feuds and grudges, but Mat would sooner drown himself and all his kin than be taken in by a farce.

"Gods," he told his horse. "I wish I had let my brother come south instead of me." But the siren song of glory, and more importantly riches, had been too loud, and so south he had come. If we could take my men home, their bodies would feed the heart trees of the godswoods for years to come. They wouldn't be coming home. He'd known it, secretly and in his heart, that as soon as he sent them out in packets of one or two hundred men and kept all the best of the light cavalry with himself, none of them would see their homes again. And it was right, he felt, that there was every chance he'd lay dying with his red blood staining the same meadows of the Red Mountains of Dorne his forefathers had died to help Daeron take. He would rot, far from home, so that he would never greet his ancestors beneath the heart tree in the godswood at home himself. He wondered if those forefathers would greet him, to wander the passes of Dorne with them, ghosts a-haunting. He patted his horse's neck once more.

"You're a good girl," he told her. She whuffed contentedly, happy to have been watered and have his weight off of her for a short break, and unknowing of his own inner thoughts or doubts.. He replaced the waterskin back in the leather rigging. The sun beat hard, hateful and cruel and hot.

Mat groaned at the thought of swinging himself back into the saddle and facing another seven or eight hours of riding; by his estimation, they'd been riding for nine already. He could smell nothing but sweat-soaked leather and wool, rusting mail, and horse. If Mat never smelled another horse after the war, he'd die a happy man. But it was an idle wish, and worse, he knew it. Horses would be in his life 'till the day he died.

Fucking horses.

Matrim swung himself back into his saddle, and once he'd settled his weight, he made clicking noises with his tongue and gave her the spur. Not hard, just enough to get her plodding along again. He wasn't far enough from the rear of the column to be caught out alone by those wily Dornish mountaineers. Although he wasn't quite sure they existed— but they had to have, for who else could the guide he'd tried to hire have been a member of?

Fucking Dornishmen.

He wasn't quite sure they existed, but they had to know he was here, in their mountains, casting back and forth like a hunting hound for the scent of a bear or elk stag. If it were his home being trampled through by foreigners, let alone foreigners he was at war with, he'd be giving them fire and the sword.

So where are the fucking Dornish?

He hadn't felt the hair on the back of his neck or arms stand up from being watched, hadn't seen the men stalking his force, but—

They had to be there, on the cliffs and bluffs above him, tracking his Northern cavalry, following them, hunting them.

Mat heard the scrabble of rocks falling against other rocks, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. This is it! Let them come! He whipped his head around to look, reached for his axe, and he saw—

A shaggy mountain goat staring at him, sitting a bluff located on the steep side of the mountain that Matrim was closest to. "Baah," the goat bleated.

The tension bled from him with a breath, and Mat tried to swallow it away. He'd been ready for a fight, a hard one, and now, to see it was just a goat—

"Gods," he told the goat. "You scared the bloody ashes out of me." War has to be getting to you, Matrim thought. You're talking to bloody goats, now. What would Lord Stark say? Lord Rickard? He'd thrash you for such foolishness, and worse, you'd deserve it. Mat gave the goat one last, lingering look— did the Dornish use their goats as spies, as scouts? Surely not. He frowned. But what if?

His men had gotten further along than he thought, Mat saw after he chanced a glance. He didn't trust the goat. The goat was only a goat, he told himself. But the lingering feeling of unease stayed with him as he directed the horse to catch up to his men. He let her have her nose, and she chomped happily at the grass of the Red Mountain's valley floors as he caught up to his men.

Fucking horses.

Fucking Dornish.

Fucking goats.

---

The fucking goat wasn't a spy, Matrim realized. He swallowed. Cut off from his men as easily as a shepherd cuts an ewe out of his herd.... It galled him, and stuck in his throat. He eyed the goat. Bastard, he thought at the thing. Then he laughed, because he would not sob.

The thing wasn't a spy, but it did belong to the string of Dornishmen that had somehow, someway, appeared ahead of himin the line of march. They were, one and a man, thin, lean and wiry, with carefully groomed mustaches or goatees, wearing loose flowing robes. They were armed, to a man, with javelins for throwing from horseback, maces, axes with intricately detailed engraving work in the steel heads, and small, circular wooden shields. Their well-formed horses were on the small side, but looked like they could walk for days without tiring, and there were a string of goats and sheep behind one younger Dornishman, probably a boy riding to war for the first time with his uncle or father or older brother.

"Hello, outlander," one man toward the middle of the line of Dornish said. Matrim thought he smiled behind the clothing covering all his face except his eyes, but he could not be sure.

"Hello, Dornish," Mat said.

"Who are you, that rides through my Prince's passes? Who are you, carrying the banner of a rebel whose arms are raised in rebellion against the rightful King? What bade you come to the Red Mountains of Dorne?" Will you fight, and die like your dog of an ancestor? The question was not asked, but Matrim heard it clearly all the same.

If I die, Mat thought. If I die, let me die well, with wounds only to my front.

"I am Matrim Wells, captain of the force you have so graciously blocked me from, and I search for—"

"Do not tell me pretty lies, outlander," the Dornishman said. "You bear a wolf's head." He lifted a hand, slowly, and let the gray cloth wrapped around his head and covering his face drop, so that Mat was able to see bronzed skin, sharp features, and a neat goatee.
You bear a wolf's head. Mat knew what it meant. Hated by all the realms, an enemy of all men.

"Tell me why you came."

Mat wanted to sneer, wanted to scowl. Instead he breathed in deep, and laid both hands on his horse's neck, where the assembled Dornishmen could see them.

"I have come, abandoning my mission—to burn the Reach—because I have had word that my Lord's sister is in Dorne."

A smaller man, on one of the finest horses Mat had ever seen, pushed his way to the front of the line of Dornish, their face hidden as well. From the distance they were at, their eyes appeared dark, hooded. Mat wondered if this, then, was the men's knight or lord. He shot a glance behind him, at his men. Someone had cast a glance back and seen that he had been cut off, and now they were coming for him. But there was only so fast they could drive exhausted horses and exhausted selves. If he were to die here... Lyanna.

The man that come between the line of men and Matrim lifted a hand, and dropped the scarf from in front of their face. He was a she, with long black hair and pretty dark eyes that Mat couldn't tell the exact color of. She was dressed noticeably finer than the other men, too, wearing a robe of orange-and-blue. She tilted her head imperiously at him.

"Who is your lord?"

"I am oath-bound to Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell, Lord of the First Men, Defender of the Neck, Defender of the Wall, Master of the Wolfwood. I am his man, through-and-through. That which he holds dear, I hold dear. That which he abhors, I abhor." Mat tilted his own chin, refused to be cowed.

But his words had an effect on the woman: at Lord Stark's name, her face lit up, and at his declaration that he loved that which Stark loved, she looked relieved. She had her horse walk forward, and when they were at a decent range for a conversation, Matrim bowed from the waist, leaning over his horse's neck.

"If you are Lord Stark's man," she began. "Do you know who I am? And more, do you know who I am to your liege?"

Mat tried desperately to wrack his skull for what he knew about Dorne. Lord Stark danced with a girl from Dorne at Harrenhal, if I remember Benjen's tale right. Maybe—? Finally, he gave up and shook his head.

"I cannot in good conscience say yes to either of your questions, lady, though I had heard that Lord Stark's heart is possessed by a woman from Dorne of unsurpassed beauty. Might you be—?"

"I am Ashara Dayne of Starfall, lord Matrim."

Matrim smiled, though it was thin and felt as stretched as he did after so long in the saddle. He had no need to ask for further explanation: Benjen had explained what transpired at Harrenhal, and so Matrim had heard of Brandon, always bold Brandon, asking Ashara Dayne to dance— but with his brother.

"I must beg a favor of you," he said.

"Speak, Matrim Wells," Dayne said. Her smile had not diminished, and Matrim could see all too easily why men might have been too shy to ask her to dance. "Whatever favor you ask, whatever boon you beg, if it is in my power—"

"Give me a man that may guide my men and I to the tower where lady Lyanna is kept captive, and that then may guide us to fast, secret paths you must have through the Mountains." If he'd had a hat on, Matrim would have removed it, the better to beg a favor from the prospective Lady of Winterfell.

"I will do you better than a man," Ashara said. "If Ned trusts you, then I must surely trust you, and know that you will see Lyanna to him safely. So you will have better than a man, to guide you, Matrim. I will guide you to the Tower, to Lyanna." Dayne tossed a fold of the robe over her shoulder, revealing a white linen belt, with a long, slightly curved dagger dangling from two silvered chains.

Mat inclined his head.

"Will your men be joining us, lady?"

"No," Ashara said. She turned to look at them, lingered for a brief moment, and then turned her face back to Mat. "For some unfathomable reason, there's several bands of soldiers making bloody nuisances of themselves all up and down the border between Dorne and the Reach."

Mat kept his face carefully blank. "How wretched," he said, perfectly aware that they were his men, and Dayne's own men would be riding to hunt his men down while they trusted her safety to him, in order to find Lyanna Stark. What a strange fucking war, he thought.

"Wretched, I say," he said. "Whatever are the realms coming to, when men are mustered for defense of their lord's ancient rights or claims, and they merely go off merrily to cause chaos and wreak havoc?"

Ashara kept her own face neutral, but there was a tug to her mouth that Matrim suspected meant she wanted to smile, likely at the absurdity of the situation. But absurdity or not, he had his duty.

Dayne turned her horse back towards her men, spoke in a flowing, liquid tongue that went so fast Mat had no time at all to try to pick a word, let alone three or four, from the mass of sounds made. The men erupted into a discussion, complete with much gesturing and waving of arms, but Dayne went silent and crossed her arms, perhaps staring or glaring. Finally the leader of the men—the man that had spoken to Mat first—nodded, his face brutally unhappy.


The man clicked his tongue and his horse turned, mane rippling, and the man kept his eyes on Mat's face. "If the lady Ashara dies, outlander.... If the lady dies, then I will tear your guts from your belly and leave you atop a cairn for vulture's feed.."

Mat stared back, unimpressed.

"If my lord's lady dies," he finally said. "It will be because I am dead and have no say in the matter. On that you have my word."

"What good is a wolfshead's word?" The man cried, his face dark as a sullen night with anger behind his goatee. "Your people have given your word to not invade, to let our shepherds pass down from the mountain valleys in peace, but someone always breaks it and seeks to wet his sword with the blood of Dorne. Go, then, hound! Rescue your wayward pup and see her away safe."

Matrim felt the anger in him, but he quashed it down ruthlessly, refused to allow himself to be baited. He had his mission, and he had his duty. Letting himself be drawn into a stupid argument with a Dornishman who was only out trying to defend his home and people—

Fucking Dornish, Mat thought. He scowled, and deliberately turned his horse so that he would ride around the line of Dornishmen back to his men, instead of riding through them. Dayne followed, and he did not try to see if she was amused or angry.

"The Stranger has had a plentiful harvest these past many months," Dayne said into Mat's angry silence. "Can you tell me, my lord, any news of Eddard Stark?"

"It's only going to get worse," he said. "The last that I heard, and this is three weeks or a month out of date—at best, mind you—is that the armies were playing a game of hounds and fox in the Riverlands, with those opposed to the Targaryens seeking to force a crossing of the Trident and enter into the Crownlands proper. I was told that there are fords as far north as Saltpans and as far south as the Blackwater Rush that could be traversed if not flooded from spring rains. But where they truly intend to cross, I would not know."

He was silent for a heartbeat, then two, and then they stretched out. He caught her face falling, from hope to something worse, something akin to sorrow drowning her eyes in tears.

"When last I spoke with Lord Stark, he was well in body. Unhappy about something, but then it would be a strange thing, if he were not unhappy, or sad, given the state of the realms and his own family," Matrim finally said. He closed his eyes, and then gambled.

"Tell me true, my lady," he said. "I had heard that there was affection 'twixt the two of you at Harrenhal—"

"Yes," she interrupted. "If a wolf to my bed I could take, as husband and lord both, it would be Eddard. And Matrim—may I call you Matrim?—fear not of the words my father's man said to you, about bearing a wolf's head: your coming south is not so different from the usual way of war between the Reach and us in Dorne, and in that you are an enemy to all men whose path you cross."

Mat turned to look at Dayne, full in the face. "Of course you can call me Matrim, lady Dayne. Anyone who holds affection for my lord has my affection." Then he smiled, thin and coldly.

"And besides, the North knows that there are monsters worse than wolves in our lands, my lady. Eddard Stark need only ask it of me, and I would make a monster of my name for all the realms to fear."

"So if your duty to Lord Stark demanded it—?" The question hung there, in the air. If he asked you to...?

"He will not, though. I have the measure of the man and the lord, and Eddard Stark would not countenance it. Which is why I would go so far for him, if it were so needed. I pray that the war might end and we might have peace in our time, peace for a long span of years, so perhaps my sons and yours need only know war through stories and songs and practicing in the yard. But that is not the nature of men, and war will come again, for good reasons or ill. War always comes again."

Saying it aloud confirmed something that Mat had suspected, turned over in his thoughts, chewed on as a hound worries a piece of rawhide or bone. How far would I go for Lord Stark? Whether it was Rickard or Brandon, now Eddard?

I have created orphans, forced starvation upon hundreds or perhaps thousands, burnt hundreds of homes. They will remember me in the Reach and Crownlands like children in the North remember wildlings, Matrim thought. Good. If they fear me, then let them fear war with all the North even more. Let them think of me as a hound, leashed to my lord's bidding and called to heel when peace comes. And if they fear me, they will fear another war.

The coldness stayed in Matrim's heart the rest of that day's ride.

 

[Droman]

That's a pretty nice twist, to be incorporating Ashara Dayne and the Tower of Joy. I figured you'd stick in the Reach a little while longer, but changing up canon like this is a nice change of pace.

 

[Paladin]

Eleven: Tower of Joy? I Hardly Know'er

She suffered in the heat. She suffered in the cold, even but it was a different cold from home, one that sunk into her bones deeper than the chills that had been warded off by well-tended fireplaces and smoke pits. She suffered. Sometimes, when she withdrew into herself and remembered the happier times, she remembered sword fighting with wasters with the boys beneath the heart tree of her home, wearing breeches. She remembered racing horses with the boys and her hair unbound and flowing, and she remembered delighting in defeating them at the races, with the wasters, in running. Running, wild. Wild and free. Then she would awaken from the daydream when one of the men came into the room, face carefully blank, and offer her a plain meal of salt meat, hard bread, and thin vegetables.

She had tried starving herself.

But two of them held her down, and the third would force a thin gruel into her. And the weight of them on her had been too much, so instead she ate. She also prayed, perhaps more often and more sincerely than she had ever before the heart tree. It felt like her every waking moment was spent in prayer, and her nights in fear and dread.

Gods of my fathers, she wept silently. He had beaten the loud sobs out of her the second month. Gods of my fathers, let someone come to kill me. Anyone. Please.

Then she heard it, from below. A muffled conversation. A man's voice she hadn't heard here before. She thought perhaps he sounded angry. Gods, make him angry enough to come and kill me, she prayed. Let it end.

Then there came a joyous and terrible clattering, spiriting away her breath. The clash of steel rang out, sword against sword. Yes, she thought. Kill them and then kill me. Then there came the sound of men dying, keening screams begging for mercy or their mothers. And she felt a jolt of trepidation. A man had just died with a scream cut off, midway through the word for mother. The old, Northman word.

---

The sun seethed, soaring over a scorching day. Mat had had to break up two fights with his fists, fast and hard and mercilessly, unwilling to see those fights erupt into something worse. He rubbed mindlessly at bruised knuckles, stripped to shirt and breeches, suffering from the scalding day. He was laying on his belly, staring at the red stones of an ancient fastness, some long and mostly forgotten fort of an old people. There's three of them, he thought. He turned his head and looked at his men, only his best fighters, men who he knew the heart of, men whose measure he knew, men with steel in their spines. Thirty-five of us, he counted again. Thirty-five men, against the best knights in the realms, men whose spines were steel, who knew no fear and felt no dread. Men with a tower door to hold, and Mat with no way to pull the fucking thing down. Mat, with no way to seize Lyanna away without endangering her.

Matrim Wells swallowed, and laid his forehead against a sweaty forearm. Gods, he thought. It took no magic or weird-sight or great wisdom to know that he would be going into a slaughtering pit of his own making, and worse, leading men who trusted him into it. Can the three Kingsguard kill thirty-five men?

He'd heard stories. Every man in Westeros had heard stories.

Fuck the stories, Mat thought, with a heat that chapped his soul. He had his duty. To his men, true. But he was Stark's man, would be nothing without the Starks raising his family up, would not have been half the commander or soldier he was without Rickard Stark overseeing his late boyhood, his early adulthood.

Fuck the stories. I know my duty. If I cannot kill the King, then I will see the Kingsguard dead and Lyanna safe. May my heart's blood make crimson these mountains if I do otherwise.

It was a heat that chapped his soul, but he knew that he would best be served by the cold anger, icy tendrils in his veins, those moments where time seemed to linger and stretch and he could think in the space between an axe stroke or a sword parry. Somehow he knew the tempest of his troubled thoughts would spell his death. He did not pause to linger on it, merely slithered back from the crest of the hill he had laid on for the best part of the day.

Lady Ashara lay with her back to a rock, reading a small book while sheltering beneath an outer layer of her robe stretched out and staked with sticks to create a shadow. Mat wiped sweat from his brow, and then inclined his head.

"I am going to speak with my men," he told her. "Then, I will pray. And before the sun sinks beneath the rim of the world, but after your strange Dornish moon has risen, I beg you to speak with your brother's sworn-brothers so that we may not come to blows."

Dayne looked up from her small little book, her purple eyes full of emotion. Concern. Fear. Fear of the deaths that soon she would hear? Mat bore no doubt. He could not afford it.

His men had their duty to him.

He had his duty to the Starks.

And the Kingsguard had their duty to Rhaegar Targaryen.

Would that I could have met them in peace time, he thought. He would have liked to cross swords in practice, in a meeting between men loyal to the same cause and the rightful king, a cause and king worth serving. But it was not so.

"I will, Matrim," lady Dayne said. He closed his eyes. Soon. Soon you will be done killing. At least for a little while.

"I thank you, my lady," he said, and then bowed. She stayed quiet, and after a moment he straightened. He gave his lord's love a thin smile, and then turned his back to her. His men were waiting for him, drinking water and sharpening blades. He looked every man in his eyes, because he owed it to them.

Artos, with a cruel scar across his cheek from the fighting in the Riverlands before they'd come even further South. Young Theon the miller's son, his face blank from all the killing— Mat felt bad about not being able to send him home, felt bad about not being able to send them all home. Neglected plows want for laboring hands. But it could not be. There was Jon, Torrhen, Edrick. His men.

"You know why we're here," he said simply. "The bastards have Lady Lyanna. We swore oaths, sacred oaths witnessed by the gods, by the spirits of the lands we call home. Accursed is the kinslayer, the oathbreaker, the coward. Well, no man down there is my kin. And I would die before any man could put truth to it and call me an oathbreaker or coward. Drink some more water, give your steel one last pass, and then see to your armor. I will return Lyanna Stark to her brother or I will molder in Dorne until the end of days. This I swear to you, as your war chief and as your captain."

There were nods, murmurs of agreement, growls of anger at the treachery of princes and dragons and knights. Good. Let them be angry. Mat went on his way, off to the side, where a little dip in the land hid him from sight, and if he knelt and closed his eyes he could pretend he was utterly alone in the world. A raven landed on the crest of the fold in the land, eyed him warily. Hail to you, little brother, he thought, and closed his eyes. A prayer, a plea to the gods and spirits did not come to him.

So he sat, in silence, feeling the raven watching him.

The heat from the sun drew back, reduced just a little, and he knew that at last it was time. This will not be my final fight. The thought came to him, as though he knew it as surely as he knew his name was Matrim, easily knew the names of his brother and parents and forefathers for the past six generations. His fathers would be watching. Who was it that rode with Daeron and that Lord Stark and died for it, he tried to recall. Not Beric Wells, or Roose, or Theon. Perhaps it was—Eddard?

Not him, Mat finally decided. Whoever it was, it doesn't matter. He opened his eyes. The raven was still there, preening carefully. "Go with the gods, little brother," he told the bird. At the sound of his voice, it took a step back and watched him, but made no move to fly off. A sign, he thought. But a sign of what?

Slaughter. Surely it would be slaughter.

Matrim Wells walked back to their small make-shift camp, had one of the already armored men help him into his mail shirt. He tugged the thongs at the neck tight, closing it. He checked every man's own mail, leather-and-wool linings on their helmets. He checked his own, checked the leather ties of his helmet. He belted on his sword-belt. Then his helmet, and he pulled his mail-face covering up high, almost hiding his eyes. Then his gloves, and at last he hefted his axe. Lady Dayne had pulled her own scarf up, the better to hide her face, and she led them over the crest of the hill.

Whoever was on watch duty raised the alarm, and when Mat and his men arrived a short stone's throw from the tower, three men stood outside it, armored in fine steel harness, wearing gilded and jewelled plaque belts, with swords and daggers at their hips.

Mat couldn't tell who was who, for all three wore visored helmets. He spoke through his mail aventail.

"Good sirs," he said. "Surrender the lady Lyanna into my custody and you will not find your graves today."

One plated figure shook his head, an exaggerated motion so that Mat would see it and know it for what it was.

"We have our duty," the one in the middle said. Mat watched where his eyes would be. The man seemed to be staring at Lady Dayne.

"Fuck your duty," Mat said. He wasn't even enjoying his anger. "Fuck your duty," he repeated.

"Your prince stole a woman that he had no right to, and has kept her here—"

"What if she came willingly?" The question interrupted Mat from what was going to be a truly righteous diatribe, and he stopped short.

What?

"What?" He asked.

The man repeated the question.

Matrim shook his head. "That doesn't matter. Even if she did—which I fucking doubt—the Prince should have fucking known better. He's the godsdamned Prince, for the love of your Seven and our Many. This whole bloody war is his fault. You know it, I know it, and if he's not dead already, he knows it."

"Prince Rhaegar will triumph," the shortest man said angrily. "You don't know anything. You're just a fucking Northern savage. We've all heard the stories, about the entrails and the heart trees—"

"They're just stories, you bastard," Mat said, his voice jagged and brutal. He could see it all too clearly: instead of coming to terms, he and the knights would continue until finally someone drew fucking steel— I have to head it off here, he thought desperately.

"Lady Dayne, please, for the gods' love, speak with your brother's brothers. Make them see sense!"

To her credit, Lady Dayne tried. She really did.

"Please, sirs," she began. The shortest knight tossed his visor up with violence, revealing a bronzed face, a neat mustache, and purple eyes like Ashara Dayne's own.

"Ashara," the knight said. His voice was suddenly thinner than it had been, weaker. "Please, Ashara, what are you doing here? You were supposed to stay in Starfall—"

"Your Prince's folly has brought war, Arthur," Ashara said. "Let the Northman take his lord's sister home. Please. The war continues, but it doesn't have to, here. Let reason and peace have their chance."

Matrim bit his tongue. Gods, let her sway them. He knew his plea would be laughed at with scorn when two large ravens lit on the balcony of the tower above them, and began croaking their laughter at his plea.

"I have sworn oaths, Ashara," Arthur Dayne said. "I have my duty. We have our duty. If the Northman wants Prince Rhaegar's lady, he must come through us. We will not let him have her."

"You will try," Matrim said. Curse my luck. He tightened his grip on the axe, stepped forward. His men stepped with him, a line of steel and anger. Then, to his surprise, the Kingsguard turned their backs on his force, and hurried into the tower. There they slammed the door shut, and he heard a bar thudding down across it.

"Go, Lady Dayne," Mat told her. "You do not want to be here for what comes next. Stay away, until you hear the fighting has stopped."

He looked at his axe, good, decent steel, and wanted to spit in anger. He had his duty. And his axe had its purpose to serve.

Mat walked across the grass, kicked aside the chair that one of the knights had been lounging in before he showed up to ruin their day. He took the axe in a two-handed grip, and began swinging at the door.

---

The fighting was coming up the tower stairs now. She could hear it through the door. She looked down, at her ankle, at the cruel iron shackle binding her to the wall. She'd counted out the paces on one of her better days. Six paces to the balcony window, but no farther. Eight paces to either curved side of the room. She'd considered throwing herself from the tower, once. A knight had found her and stopped her. Gods, let them kill me swiftly.

---

The once glittering, once-sharp axe-blade was ruined by the time Mat was finished with the door and it. It had served him well, though. He tossed it aside, and drew his sword. Time to roll the dice.

As he drew the blade, his men charged past, pushing in through the remnants of the door, eager for the blood of Kingsguard on their blades, before he could lead the way. Their bravery saved his life, as they made for a fresh pile of corpses in the doorway. Wish I had a fucking tower shield, Mat thought bitterly, thinking of all he had cast aside to race down into Dorne. Then he tightened the grip on his blade, brought it low and held it halfway up the blade with his other hand. If wishes were fishes I'd have a fucking barrelful.

"Come on then, dog," one knight taunted Mat. Matrim knew how he would have to win: wear them down through attrition, with his men rotating in and out of the fighting. There would be no glorious master-stroke to win it all, no lovely turning of a blade into a man's heart. This would be stroke and counter-stroke, hammer and tongs, fury and hate until one side lay dead entirely. Fine, then, Matrim thought. He went forward.

Good old Artos was there with him, though, and Artos took the taller knight's first blow on the flat of his blade. Matrim thrust at the man's armpit, but had to turn half-way through to keep his own neck, batting aside what would have been a wicked cut by the Sword of the Morning. Arthur Dayne moved with a speed Matrim had never seen before in a sparring yard, and Mat had to throw himself into parrying, blocking, turning aside a blow with his mailed arm instead of letting it land on his head.

That first bout, Mat never got the chance to strike a blow at either knight.

Artos pinked his man, though, and died for it. He overextended a thrust, aimed at a gap in the plate on the taller knight's leg armor, and received a swordpoint into his throat from Ser Dayne.

"Bastard!" The cry sounded like it came from Torrhen or Theon, and whoever it was rushed forward. He was carrying a round shield, thank the gods, and he thrust it in front of Matrim before a sword's thrust could kill his lord.

The knights surrendered a step.

One of his men knocked his fist into the back of Mat's helmet, wanting a turn, and Mat let the man step forward.

The knights drove them back a step.

He was filtered to the back of the now-formed line, and one of the other men handed him a waterskin. Mat dropped his aventail, drank greedily from it. And he braced himself for a grinding fight.

---

She didn't know how long the fighting lasted. The sun had disappeared beneath the rim of the earth, and the moon had risen high in the dark night sky by the time the fighting ceased. All that filtered up to her were the sounds of men dying. Men dying, and the spurs of a man walking up stairs slowly. Heavily. Let him kill me fast, she prayed.

---

Each time it came Mat's turn to fight again, it was always sooner than the last, and he was beginning to slow down. If he was beginning to slow down, though, the knights of the Kingsguard were dying from a thousand cuts, a hundred thrusts. They just hadn't died yet, and were determined to send his men to the afterlife before them. As the fight had continued, longer and longer, each man tiring, each man giving every speck of effort that he could, every fighter's motions had become slowed, almost slurred, almost drunken. Matrim marveled at their stamina, and grew ever more determined.

Ser Whent was the first of the knights of the Kingsguard to die, some way up the stairs, spitted on gray-bearded Berick's sword through his groin, but he killed Berick and the next man for his death. Their screams rang in his ears.

Hightower fell next, as Mat charged shield first to push him against the wall. He dropped the shield, forcing Hightower's swordarm between the wall and his chest, and the man behind Mat drove up into the gap between Mat and the man to his left, shielding him against Dayne, to sink a shortened spear through Hightower's throat. As the spear went through and back out, Dayne hamstrung the man shielding Mat for his temerity. With his dying breath Hightower he cut a wicked blow across Mat's side, through an already made cut in his mail.

It was a fight to the death, and Matrim hated them for it. Both sides' armor was dented and where one side wore mail, it had huge rends in them, tears where the strength and steel of the Kingsguard had proven superior to the mail of the North. But Dayne himself also had huge dents in his armor, from the anger and grief-driven blows of dying or wounded men.

Sers Whent and Hightower's blood had mingled with that of a dozen and a half Northmen, pools of crimson staining already red stones a dark ugly brown. Another half dozen of Mat's men lay mortally wounded, dying slowly, their cries echoing in his ears. More lay outside the broken doors of the tower, being tended to as best the men who had had the fight beaten out of them but were not horridly wounded could manage

As Hightower's corpse cooled, Mat parried a thrust from Dayne, and retreated a step down the stairs to the safety of numbers. The tower had grown dark, almost pitch black, with little light filtering in from the door at the base of the thing.

"Fucking... die, you...bastard," Mat grit out from clenched jaws.

"Not—" Arthur Dayne panted. "Not— not before you." He spat blood-flecked spittle through his visor, and then he leapt down on top of Mat and his men, sending several of them clattering and rolling down the stairs. Mat landed hard, and badly, on one shoulder, and then a weight settled onto him, a huge weight, a crushing weight. He felt it before he saw it, the dagger that took his eye. He screamed, and managed to get a hand around Dayne's wrist before the dagger drove into his brain and killed him.

His scream was the wordless cry of an animal, but beneath Mat was thinking, mind racing desperately. This is it, then, he thought bitterly. I refuse! I will send him to the hells before me! His free hand scrabbled, searching, trying to seize anything and everything that might save his life. Dayne brought his other arm down to bear on the pommel of his dagger, driving back towards Mat's ruined eye and his brain. But behind his good eye, his fury and hate were urging him onwards.

His gloved fingers found a blade, wrapped around it, mindless of the sharp sides cutting through the blood-and-sweat soaked leather. He tightened his grip on blade and wrist both, and smiled thinly behind his aventail of mail.

"Stark had your sister," he hissed through the blood and anger and hate and pain.

"What?" Dayne said dumbly, and the strength he was using to try to kill Matrim slackened just a touch.

"Did I say Stark? I mean Starks," Mat said. He saw Dayne's eyes blink in the near-black, and he smiled.

He brought the tip of his found blade up, jammed it into the gap that he'd watched appear between Dayne's breast and his gorget.

The dagger came down for his brain. Mat drove his own blade further up, ensuring it was tight into the vein that carried Dayne's lifeblood in the throat. Hot blood poured out, and Dayne's hands went to the mortal wound. He collapsed off of Mat, to the side, and Mat lay there, panting.

"T-tell— please.... Please tell.... Ash..... 'm'sorry," the dying man whispered into the darkness and the murder and the blood, drowning on it, choking on it.

"'S'alright, Ser," Matrim murmured. His throat was raw from screaming, and he wished he were anywhere else in the world. The knight's fingers reached out, found Mat's hand. Mat wrapped his fingers around the man's hand, and let him squeeze. Mat squeezed back.

"'S'alright," he murmured again. "I'll— I'll tell her," he said. The fingers squeezed, almost a feather touch of gentility to them. Then they slackened, and he know the Sword of the Morning was dead.

You have to get up, a voice told him. Your duty is not done.

"'Tired," Matrim said. Only the dead may rest. Get up. Get up. Get up! Get up! GET UP. GET UP!

The voice drove him, cruel and senseless to his wounds or his pain. So he rolled, to get his arms beneath him. Then he climbed to his feet, every inch a battle itself, even going so far as to use Dayne's corpse as a tool to give him just that much more height to get his feet under him.

"Right," he said. "Stairs. You've been going up stairs since you were small, Mat," he told himself. Stairs had never hurt like those did before, and he almost wept at the thought of having to go back down them.

His spurs made ignorantly cheerful jingle-jangle noises as he went up each stair, pausing to lean against the curved wall of the tower on every step.

Everything hurt. It hurt.

Drag leg up. Ensure footing was certain. Shift weight to it. Drag next leg up. Shift weight. Drag. Shift. Drag. Shift. Pain.

It was lightning, the cuts and thrusts of what had been the best knights in Westeros, but were now worm-food. This was the only way, Matrim, he told himself. The butcher's bill would have had to have been paid, whether he stormed them or starved them out, and if he had tried to starve them out, they might have let Lyanna starve first. The only way.

He wept, because he had lost good men and good men had been ruined. And because he had killed what once were good men, but now he did not know. He paused, half up the stairs that had seen every step fought and bled over, and wept again because he did not want to face that climb. But if Lyanna was up there, and how bitterly those knights had died to hold the very stairs he now stood on....

If the worst has happened, and she was forcibly abducted, then something of home might ease her spirit. Do your duty, Wells.

He turned, and began to go down the stairs. The dryness of his throat choked at him, and when at last he stumbled into the moon-lit night, the cool night air of the mountains was like a balm for his soul. He sucked in huge breaths, panted hard, and wept again at all the horses that would not, could not carry their riders home, for he would have to move fast. Do your duty. He walked, in pain and bleeding, to his horse. She shied away from the scents of his fear and his hate and his blood, but a continuous stream of low, murmured words meant to calm had her walking back to him.

"Good girl," he whispered. "Good girl." He didn't know if Lady Ashara was waiting to see if it was merely a lull in the fighting or the true end, but he put her from his mind and tried to open the saddlebag containing his plaid. His gloved fingers, bloody and weak, fumbled it. Mat heaved a sigh, and went for his belt knife. He didn't fumble that, and set to carefully cutting the soaked gloves from his hands. He knelt, wiped the blood-and-sweat staining his hands onto the grass, and then used the saddle's cinching to haul himself back to his feet.

She whuffed low in his ear, and then whickered. He patted her neck.

"Good girl," Mat repeated. He dug into the saddle bag, came out with the plaid, and made his way back to the tower.

"Fuck," he sighed. He climbed, spurs jingling and jangling like he hadn't just been party to one of the worst fights he would remember for the rest of his life. That he felt in his bones, knew it like he knew his name and his oaths. This fight, this night, would return to him in nightmares as long as he lived. He shivered. The ghosts of his men walked with him, up those stairs.

When at last he came to the top of the tower, the moon had begun sinking low. He knocked on the door once, twice.

No voice entreated him to enter.

No voice bade him go.

He tried the latch, and the door swung open. No candles lit the room, only silvered moonlight streaming in from the window. He glanced at the room, took in the open trunk with crumpled dresses, the broken mirror on the wall above a chest of drawers.

"Lyanna?" He asked into the silence and the night. A snuffling noise made him swing his head, and there, behind the bed, a dark blur lay against the wall.

"Lyanna," he said again.

"Please, ser," a thin, high whisper came. He was shocked at how weak she sounded, how frail. He tightened his fist on the wool held in his hand, and bit his tongue, hard, so he would not swear.

"Please kill me."

"Lyanna," Mat said, shocked. "Lyanna, it's Mat— Matrim Wells, d'you remember?" The blur turned to face him a little bit better, although he still couldn't see much. "When I grew my hair long, wanting a wolf's tail like the statue of your grandfather, you laughed and made me sit while you and lady Karstark took turns braiding it. Please, Lyanna. I'm only here to see you safe to Eddard."

"Ned?" It was another whisper, and Mat felt his heart breaking. He swallowed, forced down his pain. Do your duty, Matrim Wells. The pain was there, a friend, a dull roar in the back of his head, and he welcomed it because being in pain meant he would not be angry in front of Lyanna. Something in him, some dim, quiet part, sickened at what he suspected had gone on in this room, something told him that anger would be the wrong emotion. Instead he tried to dredge up long drowned sympathy and empathy, drowned in the necessity of having to fight the war.

"Yes," he said quietly. Then, slowly so that he would not startle her, he crossed the room and knelt beside her. "Ned is well," he said. "I have given him my oath as a man and as a Wells. Do you know—?"

"Bran," Lyanna sobbed, and buried her face in Mat's shoulder. She wept, high and keening, and snotted nastily into his mail and the shirt underneath. He brought the wool plaid up, wrapped it badly around her shoulders, and let her cry herself out against his shoulder and neck. She knows.

Fuck.

"Can you walk, my lady?" He asked, after the sobs had quieted and been replaced by only an ugly sniffling. She shook her head against his neck, and then jerked a leg into his side. He hissed in pain, for she had kneed one of the cuts, but said nothing. When she had jerked her leg— there had been a rattling. Mat grimaced, and then extracted himself from her embrace. He saw what had clinked. Chains. Chains, shackling Lyanna Stark to a wall like a common fucking criminal. He went to one knee, and then picked the chain up in one hand. He followed it to the wall, and then probed where it had been spiked into the red stone with his fingers.

Good, he thought.

"My lady," he murmured. "I'm going to pick you up and place you on the bed, if I may?" A nod was his answer, and he tucked his arms beneath her legs and around her shoulder, then tried to stand. It took him three tries, but finally he made it, gritting his teeth, and deposited her there. She curled her legs underneath her, and shrunk back from him.

Bastards, he thought. In that moment he would have sold his soul to whatever devils or demons existed, for the chance to kill the Kingsguard again. He turned back to the wall, and wrapped both hands around the spike in the stone. It hadn't been driven as deep as it could have been, or should have been, if they'd wanted Lyanna to molder here as bones after she died.

Bastards, he thought again, and let the hate and anger flood him, filled his veins with raragege, burning, burning away his very soul. He ripped, and the spike came out the wall, slammed into his chest.

"Fuck," Mat wheezed, and sat down on the floor heavily. He glanced beside him, at Lyanna watching him like—like an animal, abused and maltreated. He watched her, watching him, and tightened his grip on the spike. If she tries to throw herself from the tower...

Thankfully, she did no such thing, merely watched him, snuffled and snotted into his plaid. What would you do with a horse that's been beaten badly, Mat? The answer was easy. Speak low, and quietly, and with love and warmth and affection in his voice.

So he did.

"Alright, my lady," he said. "I have men downstairs that must be seen too, as well. There is a lady with us, Ashara Dayne—do you remember her, from the tourney?"

"'Liked 'shara," Lyanna whispered into the night. "'Shara was nice."

He nodded. "Good," he said. "That's good. She's downstairs. When I stand, I'll carry you down, or can help you walk if you want—but you must keep your eyes closed and not smell anything. Promise me, Lyanna," Mat said. "Promise me you'll keep your eyes closed and breathe through your mouth." There was not much he could do to protect her now. But he could keep that from her, that charnelhouse of butchery and madness that the tower had become.

"I promise," she said, and he nodded again. He used the bed to help himself stand, and tears came unbidden to his eyes when something in his knee grinded against the stone floor. Do your duty, he told himself angrily. He could weep when Lyanna was safe, could swear off violence and disappear into the forests of the North if he wanted to. But until Lyanna was safe—

Again, he picked her up with care, as though she were a delicate piece of pottery or glasswork. She tucked her head into his neck, and he wondered if he wanted to know what she was thinking.

Not likely.

Instead Mat settled, settled for whispering. He whispered stupid, inane things— the last winter's wheat harvest. The first clutch of eggs his brother's falcon had laid. The birth of his nephew. Then things from the larger realm of the North— of Bolton, and his distrust for the man and the family. The Karstark lord's passing, and the new Lord Karstark marrying a daughter of the Wulls. Of the elk-herders, driving their herds to market at Winterfell for the last of the winter meat.

Each step was worse than the last, and by the end of them, Mat thought he felt a bone in his shoulder grinding, grinding, against another bone.

Dayne was there, waiting at the door, with a couple of more women she had rounded up from somewhere. She made him follow, and they went around a fold in the land to the side of the tower, where a fire had been built and there was a small pot bubbling and a short-haired hound lay panting. A pallet had been made of blankets, and Ashara indicated for Matrim to place Lyanna there. The chain still shackled to her ankle rattled, and he drew his belt knife, with his back turned to her, so she wouldn't see the blade.

He jammed it into the lock, then twisted and jerked until the lock broke and his blade snapped. But the chains were off Lyanna Stark, and Matrim stood. That was the worst part. Now for the sad part.

 

[Paladin]

Chapter Twelve: An Eye for a Lady

The sound of a man walking heavily up stairs, spurs and armor clinking, came through the door that had trapped her for months. She slid off the sole chair in the room, huddled against the wall with the bed, that horrid bed between her and the door. A knock sounded. She shrank back, tried to press herself as flat to the wall as she could. Another knock. A moment's pause, and then—

The door swung open slowly, a gentle creaking to it that filled her with trepidation and fear. Please let it not be him come back. Please. Please, let it be someone here to kill me.

And then she heard it: a man's voice, deep in timbre, but hoarse and scratchy.

"Lyanna?" She snuffled once and then pressed a hand to her face, heart pounding. He had heard her. His head swung to face her, and she saw blood glinting in the moonlight. Kill me, she wanted to plead. Instead she stayed silent, prayed that he would not see her.

"Lyanna," he said again, and that time she caught his accent: it sounded utterly different to those of the men keeping her captor. She stared at his blood-drenched face, saw trails of skin where tears had made tracks from his eyes.

"Please, ser," she whispered, and hated her voice. The only thing it had been used for for weeks now had been screaming and crying, and she had almost forgotten how to speak. He was holding something, some bundle, in his hand.

"Please kill me," she pleaded. She did not think she could bear to face another day, not with an end so near at hand. She could even see the hilts of his sword and dagger at his hips, knew he could give her the swift death she did not deserve but sought. Please. Please. Please.

"Lyanna," he said again, and there was something in his voice. "Lyanna, it's Mat— Matrim Wells, d'you remember?" She closed her eyes, and tried to think about before. Before the tournament. Before coming South. Before. When all she had had to dread was the likelihood of marrying Ned's loud friend, had not yet learned to fear the heavy tread of boot-clad men on stone floor. She could not picture his face. But she could bring to mind gray eyes, at times warm or at times cold, but never angry with her, willing to swagger wood swords with her beneath Winterfell's heart tree and the gods.

"When I grew my hair long, wanting a wolf's tail like the statue of your grandfather, you laughed and made me sit still while you and Lady Karstark braided my hair." She tried to remember. She hadn't laughed in months.

"Please, Lyanna," Mat said— and it sounded like him now, she remembered. Calling out to her about a dip in the land they had raced horses across once, or drilling with the men in the practice yard.

"I'm only here to see you safe to Eddard."

That broke something in her. Something not already broken.

"Ned?" She asked, another whisper.

Mat— if it truly was him, and not his ghost come to haunt her after dying in the war— was quiet for a heartbeat. Then: "Yes."

He stepped forward, and went to one knee in front of her.

"Ned is well," he said gently, quietly. "I have given him my oath as a Wells and as a man. Do you know—?" Do you know? Do you know? Do you know? The question mocked her, taunted her, and the tears came, rocking her whole body with the force of her sobbing. Of course she knew. After she had wanted to leave, wanted to ride home to Winterfell, he had told her. He hadn't taken any pleasure in telling her, of course, but oh it was so sad—and a sign the realm needed him as king.

"Bran," she whimpered, and buried her face in Mat's—if it truly was Mat's—neck. She didn't know how long her tears lasted, but at some point Mat shifted so that he was holding her off the floor and letting her cry against him, and she hated him for not passing judgement on her, and for letting her cry instead of calling her a stupid girl and telling her to shut up, didn't she understand the gravity of the situation—

And she knew he would have died trying to save her, for she could feel the sticky wetness and warmth of blood soaking into her ragged dress, warm against her skin, and could feel how his wounds pained him whenever he shifted minutely. He would have died for me, she realized, and that brought on another round of sobbing and snotting into his neck, for Bran and Father had died for her.

When at last she could muster no more tears, and felt drained of a huge weight, she slumped against Matrim and sniffled.

"Can you walk, my lady?" He asked, stiffly formal. She shook her head, and jerked her leg. There was a rattle, and she lifted the skirt of her dress, showing the shackle around her ankle. Matrim hissed, and then she realized she'd kneed him in his side. She drew a hand up to her mouth, flinched away.

The blow never came. Instead Matrim extracted himself from supporting her, and very formally, asked if he had her permission to place her on the bed.

She nodded.

He tucked his arms underneath her, and tried to stand. He collapsed hard, on one knee. He tried to stand again. He fell to his knee, again. On the third attempt Matrim lifted her, very gently, and placed her on the bed. She shied away from the smell of him in the bed still, and went very quiet. Matrim turned his back to her, crossed to the wall where the iron spike had been driven into the stone, and he did something she couldn't see. He grunted in exertion, and then he sat down heavily.

"Fuck," he wheezed, almost so low she didn't catch it. She watched him glance back at her. She snuffled into his wool plaid, glad at least that the tears and snot were gone. When next he spoke, it was low in tone, quiet, and she could hear the affection he held for her in his voice.

"Alright, my lady," he said to her. "I have men downstairs that must be seen to, as well. There is a lady with us; Ashara Dayne—do you remember her, from Harrenhal?"

She nodded. "'Liked 'shara," she whispered. "'Shara was nice." Ashara had been to her, was the bad part about being seeing Ashara Dayne again. Ashara had been so kind and gentle, and had laughed so happily after finishing her dance with Ned, and then—

"Good," Mat's voice interrupted her thought. "That's good. She's downstairs. When I stand, I'll carry you down, or can help you walk if you want—but you must keep your eyes closed and not smell anything. Promise me, Lyanna," Mat said. "Promise me you'll keep your eyes closed and breathe through your mouth." It seems important to him, she thought, and nodded again.

"I promise," she said. Then he used the bed to help himself stand, and took a carefully exaggerated step to stand next to the bed. He reached for her, and it took all the remnants of her shattered self-control to keep from starting to weep again when she saw a man's hands reaching out to grasp her, covered in dried blood. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and legs again, and she pressed her face against his neck. Then, to make him carrying her easier for him, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

The first thing she smelled on Mat was... him. Only Mat, Mat and Mat's sweat. Then she smelled the blood, and nearly gagged at the thick, unpleasant coppery-tang on her tongue. Beneath the scent of Mat, of sweat and blood, there were more pleasant things, though. He also smelled of home, of the trees she had not seen since riding south of the Neck, and she wept again. While he carried her, slowly down a set of stairs that he must have fought for every step of, Lyanna Stark wept into Matrim Wells' shoulder. While she wept silently, Matrim talked to her, of the last winter's wheat harvest, of falcons and marriages, and one of the only things she felt she could now rely on: the grudge a Wells bore the Boltons. She half-laughed, half-cried at his dark mutterings about Boltons and shadowcats changing spots, and it turned into a fit of hiccups that left her breathless.

Above her, Matrim smiled, though it was a thin thing. When at last, for the first time in months Lyanna emerged from the tower, it was in the arms of a man. It could not have contrasted more from the heart-beat in time when she was taken into the tower, and the night's crisp air on her face, the wind tugging at her hair—

"Lady Ashara," Mat's voice rumbled from within the armor-clad chest next to her. "Please, my lady, will you see to Lyanna's comfort? My men—I must—" Lyanna thought her heart would break at the anguish in Mat's voice, but he had freed her. He had ridden across the realms, ridden through a war—

"I'll take her, Matrim," Ashara said. "Bring her over here, away from the tower, and then see to your men."

"My thanks, lady," Matrim murmured from above her. "And— Ashara?" Mat's voice was quiet, and tender, even more tender than he'd been with her—

"Your brother, my lady. I am sorry."

Ashara was silent for a long moment, and Lyanna heard a quiet sniffle. Then: "I know, Matrim. You did only as you thought your duty bade you. So did Arthur. Will you—?"

"I will bury them all, my lady. There is no sword like Dawn, and there was no knight like the Sword of the Morning. The realms grow dimmer for his passing, though justly it came. I am sorry," Matrim repeated, and then Ashara stayed quiet. Mat carried Lyanna, away from the tower, and she wanted to weep to share Ashara's grief. No tears came.

After another long heartbeat of silence, Ashara led them away from the tower, away. When Mat finally set her down, it was next to a fire, and Lyanna huddled next to the warmth gratefully. He knelt next to her shackled ankle, and carefully turned his back towards her. She watched the tension and set in his shoulders, and then he exerted force. She heard a metallic snapping, and the weight around her ankle, that had been there so, so long—

Gone. She was free. She curled up closer to the fire, and Matrim was silent for a long time after he freed her, staring at the fire. His eyes were shadowed, hidden by the rim of his helmet and the night.

"I am sorry, my lady," Matrim murmured. She had no indication what he was apologizing for. Being so late to her rescue? He'd come for her, had ridden through fire and death and what had to be rivers of blood to see her safe.

Was he apologizing for having held her in such a close fashion?

"I must see to the disposition of my men," he said, his voice low and quiet, by way of explanation. He made to stand, and her hand snapped out and caught his wrist. He stopped, stayed kneeling next to her.

"Yes, my lady?" He asked. He never once stopped using warmth or affection in his tone of voice with her, and the kindness was a spike of pain in her heart.

"Give me... Give me a weapon, Mat," she whispered. "A weapon." She did not know if she could command him as she once had, if she still owned any of the loyalty or affection that he had once felt for her—

"What's it for, Lyanna?" He asked. Gone was the 'milady,' and she didn't know if she could tell him. I want it to feel safe. I want to use it in case he comes back. I will never submit to him again. Her thoughts shied away from the wretched, horrid, wicked truth: that she wanted to use it to cut the life growing in her out of her belly, and then turn it on her own wrists. She had asked him, asked him to kill her before she knew it was Mat, loyal Matrim, brave Matrim.

If she asked him—if she begged—

"Lyanna," he whispered, low, urgent. "What's it for?"

"If you're going to be busy," she lied, "I want it to feel safe. Please, Matrim," she begged, and felt wretched for lying to him. He knelt again, close to her, close enough for her to smell the blood on him over the woodsmoke of the fire. He drew his long-knife, his fighting dirk, the blade she knew that clansmen would swear their oaths on. She flinched away, and he stopped. Then, very carefully, so slowly that she could have withdrawn at any moment, he reached out and took her hand in his. The warmth from his touch was marred by sticky, drying blood-and-sweat, but she let him hold her hand, palm up, in his own grip.

"Promise me," he said. "Promise me, Lyanna, that you won't use it on yourself. I could not—" he stopped. He swallowed, drew in a breath and perhaps his courage—

"I could not bear to lose you, Lyanna," he whispered. "Gods forgive me, but I would never be able to forgive myself if you were to—"

He did not finish the thought, but she knew what he was alluding to. How could she not, when she had tried to throw herself from the tower? She'd been shackled for a reason, after all.

"I promise, Matty," she said, and did not know if it were the truth

"Thank you, Lyanna," he said. He curled her fingers around the hilt of his dirk, and stayed next to her. Warmth radiated from him, despite the bulwark of his armor, and she didn't want him to let go of her hand. His touch was so gentle, so different—

He stood, turned his back to her, turned his back on her, and left her there by the fire, wrapped in his plaid and with Ashara Dayne and a pair of women who she'd never seen before. Ashara turned and knelt beside her, unmindful of the dirt getting on her dress.

"Lyanna," Ashara said. "You are strong. You will see the end of the war. My companions are a midwife and a local healer. May we examine you?" Lyanna nodded, and then watched as Matrim took his helmet off, laid it on the ground, and then walked slowly into the tower.

She watched, as he carried out bodies. So many bodies, she thought, and retreated from her body into her mind. Ashara and the women poked and prodded at her, made low murmuring noises, and spoke in a flowing language she didn't understand.

---

The sun had risen by the time Mat had finished with his men and the Kingsguard, though Ashara and her companions had finished with Lyanna fairly soon after they'd begun. She watched Mat pick his helmet back up and put it on before coming over to speak with them, and she knew they thought she could not hear their conversation.

"I am sorry, Lady Ashara," Mat repeated again. He truly did sound mournful, and she wondered why he was so sorry. Be sorry for me, Matty, she wanted to tell him.

"I know, Matrim," Dayne said. "I know. Do you know—?"

The question trailed off, hung in the air, and she watched from the corner of her eye as he nodded.

"I would have had to be blind and exceedingly ignorant to not be able to tell," he said, voice full of loathing. Self-loathing? Loathing for him? She couldn't tell.

"I worry," Ashara said. "I worry that she may want it cut out of her—"

"It's too late for that," the midwife interrupted. "She has to carry it to birth. Anything else will kill her, unfortunately—"

"She's got old bruises," the healer's scratchy voice said.

"Of course she does," Mat said. "That fucking monster—"

There was heat, anger, and all the worst parts of Matrim that she remembered from when he was younger, looking for a reason to fight with anyone over anything. She flinched away, expecting a blow.

It never came.

Instead, Ashara's voice: "Matrim, being angry now won't fix anything. You know it. I know it. Lyanna trusts you, and Lyanna needs you. We need you. I certainly can't command Northmen troops—not yet, at least."

"You're right," he said. Lyanna watched him turn from the conversation, faced the tower. He brought a hand up to his side, and she watched him pull it away slowly. His finger-tips glistened in the moonlight.

"And your eye—that needs to be seen to," Ashara continued. "We can't take care of that here."

"I know," Mat said. His voice was jagged, brittle. "I fear I may not be good for getting us somewhere with a maester—but I know my duty. Hale or hurt, my duty to the Starks comes first."

"You stupid—bloody fool men," Ashara said. "Gods save women from men too in love with their duty to stay alive long enough to help us. We're going to make for Starfall."

"Starfall? But—"

"Dorne's spears have marched north under Lewyn Martell, to fight for Princess Elia. Among them ride my father and brother, and the best of our muster. In their absence—I am the Lady of Starfall. Our hospitality is mine to grant as I please, and I will allow you to stay long enough for you and your men to recover from your wounds."

"If that's what Lyanna wishes—"

"I don't think the lady is in any shape to be making decisions, and what kind of damn fool idea was it of yours to give her a dagger?"

"She asked me," Matrim said simply. "How far of a ride is it to Starfall?"

"Three days, over the trails. Faster, if I can find us a barge to take down the Torentine. I don't know if your eye—"

The sun was starting to come up. He stepped away from the other women, came close to look at the fire or Lyanna or both. He was silent, his eyes hidden by the angle of his head.

She could see Mat in better detail now, his shirt of mail ruined, blood crusting the cuts. He said something low, something she didn't catch. Then his face swung, to look at Lyanna, and she recoiled in horror. His eye was oozing, deflated, ruined, dripping blood and jelly and—

She fainted.

---

When Lyanna woke, she had not dreamed— or had not dreamed of anything she remembered.

But she awoke in a bed, cradled in comfort and warmth, with the smell of smoke from a well-tended fireplace that lingered in the air. She sat up and opened her eyes, and then realized it hadn't been a dream, it was all true, she remembered everything—

She shifted in her blankets, and the weight of her midsection was a horrible reminder of the truth. There it was, the life growing within her, and she felt her skin crawl. A knocking came at the door, but whoever it was did not wait for her to beckon them enter. It was Ashara Dayne, her pretty purple eyes weary with bags under them from lack of sleep, her dark hair wild and wayward. Her shoulder-less dress was a stunning shade of dark green with gold stitching on the arms and bosom, and a girdle sat around her waist.

"I know you've been sleeping, and truthfully you needed it, but Lyanna—I need to speak with you."

"Do you?" Lyanna mumbled. Her thoughts were still all a jumble, a tumbling mess made worse by the dry, cottony feel of her mouth. She tossed the blankets off of her and sat up, and looked around the room. She was dressed in a thin silk shift of yellowish color. Her bed had an elegant headboard of dark wood, carved with images of falling stars and swords. Two small tables sat on either side of the bed, one of them with an hour-candle in a holder meant for walking, and a pitcher and cup of finely carved horn. She lifted it and sniffed, and the pitcher turned out to contain water. She poured into the cup and then drank greedily from it, water spilling out the sides of her mouth and down her front.

"Yes," Ashara said after Lyanna had poured herself another cup and drank it down. "It's, well— it's important."

Lyanna stayed sitting on the bed, where Ashara joined her. She took Lyanna's hands in her own, and squeezed tight.

"I don't think lying to you will do any of us any good at this juncture," Ashara said. "We are confronted with a particular set of facts, facts that have influenced the situation, and we must face the situation as it is, not as we wish it to be."

"You've been through a great deal, dear Lyanna," the Dayne noblewoman started. "So much so that I find myself on unsure footing in even broaching this, for you know the truth of matters, perhaps even more than I do. I find myself having to draw up the courage to broach this, given my family's involvement on both sides of events. But I can only say that I truly wish the best for you, and hope you can hear the truth in my voice."

Ashara took a breath, and squeezed Lyanna's hands again.

"There's no... there is no safe way to be rid of the child that's kindled within you. The child—to be rid of it safely, you would have to carry it to birth. If you were to try the usual methods; tansy, moon tea, or some other concoction—the odds that you would die are too great."

I had thought something of the sort— she thought, and felt her mood darkening. Ashara must have picked up on it, for she brought Lyanna's hands to her lips and kissed her hands.

"For the sake of your health, Lyanna—I can only ask of you, beg of you, that you do your best to carry the babe within you to birth." She continued on, the words coming out in a tumble, now, almost rushed. "Afterwards—whatever you wish to do with it, I will see it done, and no doubt that Northman of yours will too. If you wish to never see it, any septry that attests to House Dayne as patrons will accept the child. If you have feelings for it, we can take it to Winterfell as a foundling, an orphan of the war. If you fear the rumors that might follow us, fear that shame— I will take the babe as my own, take on that shame and cleanse your own—"

Lyanna felt walls closing in around her, as Ashara went on. Her breath shortened, her hands began trembling, and she suddenly felt very scared, though of what she could not say.

"Ashara, what are you thinking?" Lyanna cried. She felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and pressed her face into Ashara's shoulder. Ashara kissed the top of Lyanna's head, and Lyanna felt wetness in her hair.

"I am ashamed," Ashara wept too. "Ashamed of the wrong that my brother helped commit against you, scared that even now our brothers face each other in open battle, and fearful that Mat might die under the maester's knife. My fondness for you came fast, at Harrenhal, and even then I thought myself lucky if I were to call you a second sister. But your Ned begged we might keep our affections quiet until his father had approached mine and secured—I still wish to call you sister," Ashara confessed through her tears, and pressed a kiss to the top of Lyanna's head.

"I would like that," Lyanna admitted. "But your brother—"

"If Arthur had not died in the fighting," Ashara said fiercely, her breath warm against the top of Lyanna's head, and a comfort, "then I would have had Mat's men arrest him and then him in confinement at Starfall. By death or in life, you were owed your justice."

Ashara sighed. "Arthur—was my brother. My brave, darling brother, the pride of our family. To be the Sword of the Morning was a calling to him, one of bravery, faithfulness and loyalty. To stand where others would not, to hold when men would falter. But there was nothing to stand for, I think, only that he merely stand. And so when caught between his honor and his good sense he made the fool's choice," she finished, her tears running into Lyanna's hair.

Both women's tears overswept them, but this cry felt better than the one in the tower had, and Lyanna felt the words coming up before she could stop them.

"I didn't want— I never wanted any of this to happen, Ashara, I beg you to believe me—"

"Of course, dear one," Ashara murmured into the top of Lyanna's head. "How could you have known, how wicked, how wretched, how foul the Prince would be? If there is any blame to be laid at feet, anyone who must be determined to be at fault, it must be Rhaegar's."

"When first we spoke, I thought it could be my little romance before I married Ned's boorish friend," Lyanna confessed. "I just wanted to see what it was like, the courting of a dashing prince, like Jenny of Oldstones. Now I am shamed forever, and worse, must see the child of a wretched, horrible father be born from my womb."

"I know, my lamb," Ashara said. "I had thought that Ned and I would have that kind of romance, and be married, too, with your father settling us in Moat Cailin, but the folly of men has led us to be on opposite sides of a war none of us wanted."

Lyanna sniffled back a wet, weepy laugh. "The Moat is a wreck, unfit and unsuited for any purpose," she told Ashara's neck. "You'd have spent more time fighting back the swamp than being a lady."

"I just—I didn't want this," Lyanna said again. She snotted nastily into Ashara's dress, and received a pat on the back in return.

"I know," Ashara said. "I know. But this is what we are faced with, and we will meet it with all our courage and bravery. We must, if not for ourselves, then for the damn fool men in our lives, yes?"

Lyanna thought of Mat, sweet, stupid Mat, Mat who had pitted himself against two kingdoms and had come for her, thrown himself against whatever he might have found guarding her—and he'd given her his blade, when she asked. Matrim, who even now might be dying—she had felt the blood oozing out of his wounds, when he'd carried her—Mat, who surely would have refused to rest until he knew she was safe with Ashara.

She thought of the crannogman, Howland Reed, quiet and loyal, who had helped her arm for her fight with those stupid squires—

"If I come home with a child, then surely everyone will know the truth," Lyanna said after her sobs had slackened off.

"But if I come to Winterfell with a bastard, or even a foundling, they will whisper, but the truth will be whatever we say it is, brave heart," Ashara said. "Besides—if you asked Mat to stay in Winterfell, to claim the child as his—"

"Mat's fooli enough he would do it, and brave—or stupid—enough to fight a hundred duels for my soiled honor, or yours, if it came to it," Lyanna hiccuped and smiled softly into Ashara's shoulder.

She had to decide, she knew. At least one thing, if not the other, if only so that Ned would not have to bury his sister as well as their father and brother.

"I will see it born, at least, Ashara," Lyanna whispered. "It will be a bastard, and I will take what small comfort I can in that it will be neither Stark nor Targaryen.."

"Then there was no—?"

"No," Lyanna said. "There was a farce of a wedding, with a septon roused from slumber held at swordpoint, but I have never professed a faith in the Seven before, and I do not still. Even if Rhaegar was unwed, surely a wedding seen by gods that are not mine holds no validity?"

"Whether it does or not, the swords of the North will insist that it does not, and so it will not," Ashara reassured her.

---

(YOU CAN IGNORE EVERYTHING BELOW HERE)


Mat wanted to see her. Mat, who had ridden across a war to come for her, to pit himself against whatever he might have found guarding her—and he'd given her his blade, when she asked. Mat, who even now might be dying because she'd felt the blood oozing from out of his wounds when he'd carried her out that tower, who must have refused to rest until he knew her at least safe enough with Ashara—

I cannot refuse him this, she thought, and made her decision. She turned so that she was sitting on the side of the bed with her feet under her, and stood. Ashara crossed to help her steady herself, and Lyanna swallowed.

"I know Mat," Lyanna murmured. Then she corrected herself: "I knew Mat, before—before the war. Before."

She was silent for a long moment, and then she sighed. If he died, from whatever was wrong with him—the least she could do would be to see the man.

"Whatever is wrong, I'll see him. And my word should still hold some meaning to him—I am a Stark of Winterfell, and his family have always been loyal and obedient. If I tell him to rest, perhaps he will listen."

"Thank you," Ashara said. Her words, perhaps more than anything, helped solidify Lyanna's decision. She helped Lyanna dress in a dark gray, almost black silk dress with a shawl around her shoulders.





They walked, Lyanna's hand in Ashara's, out the solid oaken doors of the room Lyanna had been placed in and down a hall filled with light from windows high in the stonework and torches, with a riotous display of tapestries hanging from the ceiling.

They went through a door at the very end of the hall, and found two men in Dayne livery and three Northmen, their own wounds bandaged, holding Matrim down on a plain wooden table with leather straps on it. He was struggling, fighting to try to stand. His teeth were bared in anger, his face wretched with the ruin of his eye.

"-ust give you milk of the poppy, my lord," the maester was saying. Lyanna's hand went to her mouth. "You have to have the remnants of the eye out, before the wound turns poisonous and kills you."

"Not till I see Lyanna safe," Mat snarled, and wrenched an arm free from one of his men. He tried to punch one of the servants, but the man who'd lost his arm managed to catch it. The maester shoved something into Mat's face. He began coughing, eyes welling with tears, and the fight drained from him.

"You will need to hold him, masters," the maester said to the men helping him with Mat. His beard was tucked into his robes, and he had his sleeves pushed up back above his elbows. "Surgery on the head is a frightful thing. He will bleed, but if the gods are kind—yes, I believe we may save him from a wretched death."

Mat's head turned, caught sight of Lyanna and Ashara standing in the door. His eye widened, and he tried to sit up, tried to stand. The maester grabbed Mat's nose and held it shut until his mouth opened, and then poured something into his mouth. One of the Dayne servants jammed Mat's jaw closed, and Lyanna heard the clack of teeth hitting teeth.

"Don't go anywhere till I'm back," he said, after he'd swallowed whatever had been poured down his throat.

"I will not die on a maester's operating table like a Bolton's plaything," Mat snarled, still trying to fight. Lyanna crossed the room, grasped his hand in both of her own.

"Stupid Mat," she said. "I won't go anywhere. You have to rest. I command you to rest." His eye, his good eye, turned on her, fixed on her. The gray of it seemed to hold the promise of Winterfell, of a warm hearth and bed, of more snowball fights than she could stand, and she wanted to weep. But it was also ice, ice gray and treacherous on a lake after a deceptive thaw and refreeze, the ice that killed skaters and ice fishers alike, the cruel ice of the northern seas in winter.

His eye was for her alone.

"Promise me," he murmured. "Promise me to keep it," he said, and she knew what he referred to. She had felt it kicking, before he had come in his glory of blood and violence, come to save her. His eye rolled in his head, sending a glancing look of disgust and distrust towards the master, before he fixed his gaze back on her.

"If you don't want it, after it's born—I'll take the thing," he slurred. She could tell he was struggling, fighting to stay awake, to keep talking to her. "I'll find a good home where it will be loved, even if you cannot or will not. I swear, Lyanna: I will protect you." She tightened her grasp on his hand, and she nodded.

"I won't do anything rash," she told him. His fingers squeezed her hand back, and then he was gone, drifted off to whatever dreams the milk of the poppy gave.

"You must go, my ladies," the maester said. "This will not be pleasant."