Ser Stevron Frey's POV
The girl's scream woke the east keep in the hour of the wolf, and when it didn't stop, it got me out of bed.
I am sixty-three, and I do not wake as I once did. By the time I had found a robe and the stairs, there were already torches on the landing and a press of my kin in the passage outside my father's door, brothers and half-brothers and nephews in their nightshirts, all talking, none going in. They made way for me. They have had long practice at that, and none whatever at what came after.
Joyeuse was on the floor in the corner, knees drawn up and hands over her ears, still making the sound, though it had worn down to a kind of thin whistle. One of the maids was trying to put a blanket around her. My father was on the bed.
He had torn the bolsters apart. There were feathers over everything, on the boards, on the coverlet, stuck in the liniment on his feet. He lay half off the mattress, his head hanging back over the edge, his eyes open, his face the color of a plum. Both his hands were at his throat. He had clawed it raw and bloody red. There was skin and blood under his nails. His mouth was stretched as wide as a man's mouth will go and wider, as if he had been trying to shout something and it had stuck; his eyes were bloodshot and popping.
I have seen a great many dead men, and I had expected for forty years to see this one. I had imagined it often, gods forgive me, and I had always imagined it quiet — an old man who does not wake. But this. Seven hells, to die like this. I did the seven-pointed star as I walked further into the room.
"She says he began to choke," the maid said. "She says she woke and he was thrashing, and she thought it was one of his coughing fits, and she fetched the cup, and he struck it out of her hand. And then he — it went on a good while, ser. She says it went on a good while."
"Fetch Maester Brenett."
"He's sent for, ser."
Brenett came not long after with his bag and his sleep-creased face and did what maesters do. He closed his eyes, but they wouldn't stay closed. He felt the neck. He asked for more light, and had two of my nephews lift my father back onto the bed and hold the lamp; then he tilted his head back, looked at his bulging throat and into his mouth, and was still for a moment. He then reached into his bag for the long steel forceps he uses to draw arrowheads.
I watched the next part closely, and it stayed with me for the rest of my days. It took him three attempts. What he drew out at last and laid on a square of linen was small and grey and sodden, crushed nearly flat through the middle, with a naked tail.
Nobody in the room spoke, but the maid standing next to me fainted on the spot, her head almost landing on the stone floor if she had not fallen on top of poor Joyeuse. Out in the passage, someone who could not see was demanding to know what it was, what he had found, and someone who could see told him, and I heard the word go down the stair like a dropped coin. A mouse. A mouse. He choked on a mouse.
"It must have been in the bolsters," Brenett said. He did not sound as though he believed it. "Nesting, perhaps. He sleeps — he slept — with his mouth open. It is not... I have read of such things — a beetle in the ear, a spider. I have never read of —" He stopped. "It is lodged very deep, ser. Deeper than I would have thought it could go of its own accord. But a swallowing reflex, in a sleeping man, may perhaps..."
"Poison," hissed Black Walder from the door. He wore his sword belt over his nightshirt, as he always did. "Someone fed him something and stuffed that in after to make fools of us. The Stark boy was refused at dusk, and the old man's dead by midnight. I don't believe in mice."
"There is no poison I know that does this," Brenett said. "There is no sign of any. He choked, ser. His throat was stopped, and he died of it. And no one stuffed anything anywhere. Lady Joyeuse was beside him the whole while, and the door was barred on the inside, as he has always had it, and Ser Aenys's own men were outside it."
"The shutters were open."
"The shutters are sixty feet above the river," I said. "Go and look, if you like. Tell me what climbed it."
He went and looked. He stood at the sill a long time with the night air moving his hair. There was nothing to see but the water and the far bank, and, northward, the fires of the Stark camp spread across the dark like a second sky. Somewhere out over the river, an owl called, and another answered.
"It's summer," Black Walder said at last, to no one, while shaking his head. "There are mice in every wall of this castle." He sounded angry about it. He came away from the window and did not mention poison again, then or afterward, and I have sometimes thought that was the only time in his life I saw him decide not to know something.
It was Septon Donnel who said the rest, because there is always someone. He had come up in his crystal and his bare feet, and he looked at what was on the linen and went white to the lips.
"They came in the night—black magic. TREE MAGIC CREATURES," he said. "You all saw what is camped on our bank. Demons and tree-worshippers, and giants out of the dark of the world, and he said he would let them cross holy stone for silver. He laughed. He laughed and laughed some more. And their gods sent a creeping thing to stop his mouth. Hahahahaha."
"Septon," I said.
"It is a judgment, Ser Stevron. Or it is a curse, and I do not know which is worse. I told him. I begged him — hahaha — the night they crawl, seven be — I told him; he mocked — ahahaha —"
"Septon. You will go down to the sept, and you will pray for my father's soul, quietly, and you will not touch that bell. If I hear the word curse from any man-at-arms in this castle before noon, I will know where he had it." I had not known I had that voice in me. Neither had he. He went, but I could still hear him laughing and praying at the same time.
It was too late, of course. It was already in the stairwell, the guardroom, and the kitchens. By the time the sky began to grey, it had crossed the bridge. The garrison of the west castle knew that the old gods of the North had come over the wall in the dark and killed Lord Walder in his bed with vermin, for refusing the Stark boy and for failing to answer the call of his mother's house, and no order of mine would ever dig it out again. Men were making the sign of the star at the arrow slits that looked north. Two of the crossbowmen had deserted their posts to sit in the sept. Standing there, I understood it didn't matter at all whether it was true. My father used to say that about most things.
———
The family was on me before he was cold.
We met in the hall because nowhere else could hold us. I counted nineteen trueborn sons of Walder Frey beneath that roof, and more than thirty grandsons, and bastards beyond counting along the walls, and every one of them had the same look — the look of a household in which one man has held every key for seventy years, and he is gone. My own son Ryman was drunk already, or still. It is hard to tell with Ryman. He is my heir. I looked at him across the hall, the black oak chair empty between us, and thought, as I have most days for thirty years, that House Frey had best hope I live as long as my father.
Aenys wanted the gates kept shut. "Father's terms stand. They were good terms. The boy still can't cross without us, nothing's changed —"
"Everything's changed," Lothar said. He alone among them had dressed properly. "Half the garrison believes the Starks can kill a man through a stone wall. Go and ask the east wall to loose on those giants this morning and see how many quarrels you get."
"Father would have made him wait a week."
"Father," I said, "is dead."
I had not sat in the chair. I stood beside it with one hand on the carved tower at its back, and they went quiet for me, even so. I had wondered for a long time whether they would.
"I'll say this once. Lord Robb told me at dusk that he'd come to the head of the bridge road at dawn to say what House Stark offers a friend. It is nearly dawn. Our father meant to leave him standing there for the pleasure of it. I do not mean to. We are sworn to Riverrun. We have been sworn to Riverrun for three hundred years, and we have been late my whole LIFE — LATE to the Trident, LATE to every call — because there was always some advantage in it, and I have never once seen the advantage arrive. I rode to the Trident with four thousand men the day after it mattered, and I have had sixteen years of the looks men gave us. The boy said he wanted to remember that we were late, not absent. I would like that as well."
"You'd give him the crossing for nothing," Aenys said.
"I would do our DUTY, something we have not done for some years now. And I would hear what he offers. He said it was more than Father expected, and I looked at him when he said it, and I believe him. If I'm wrong, the gates are still ours to shut." I looked round at them. "Our father is dead with a mouse in his throat, and the whole realm will be laughing at it by the next moon — the late Freys and the mice that kill them. That is what he's left us. I would have the second thing men say about House Frey this year be that it kept its OATH. Perwyn, Olyvar — you'll ride with me. Black Walder, you too, since you've met him. Lothar, have the household put in mourning, and find my horses."
I did not sit in the chair until they had gone. It is a hard seat, and too high, and the carving digs into the back. He must have known that. He sat in it for seventy years and never once cushioned it.
———
Olyvar Frey's POV
I had never seen anything larger than an aurochs, and that was dead, on a wagon, at a fair.
We rode out through the east barbican as the sun came up behind the Stark camp, eight of us in black with Ser Stevron at the head, and this time our horses had been stabled overnight with sacking soaked in vinegar tied across their noses, which was Lothar's notion and mostly worked. Mine still walked as though the ground might open. I did not blame him. I could smell it myself from a quarter mile: a heavy smell, like wet wool and cut hay and something else under it, old and sweet. I kept thinking I ought to be frightened. What I felt was nearer to what I felt at nine years old when my brother Perwyn first took me up on the wall to see the river in flood.
Lord Robb was there already. He had said dawn, and he was standing at the head of the bridge road, on foot, with his lords about him, and a plain trestle set up in the grass with a cloth on it, bread, and a jug. No pavilion, no chair. I learned later that he had been standing there since a bit before dawn, even though everyone else had expected the Freys not to show.
The great beast was behind him, nearer than I had thought they would dare to bring it, and one of the giants stood beside it with a hand resting on its shoulder the way a man stands by a plow horse. The giant looked at me. I am almost sure of it. He had a face like a cliff with a beard, and small dark eyes set deep under a brow, and they were not a beast's eyes. They were bored. All I knew of giants was from travelers and the septon, who said they were abominations against man and the Seven. But this one stood in a meadow in the Riverlands at sunrise, and he was bored, as any spearman would be who'd been told to stand where the visitors could see him. Those were human eyes. They were big, but they were us. I have thought about that since, and about everything else the septons have told me.
Ser Stevron dismounted, and the rest of us after him. I saw Lord Robb take in the black we wore. He looked at it for a long moment before he spoke.
"Ser Stevron. You're in mourning."
"My lord father died in the night," Ser Stevron said. His voice was very steady. "I am Lord of the Crossing. I've come as he would not have, at the hour you named, to hear what you would say."
"I'm sorry for it." He said it at once, and quietly, and there was nothing in it of what I'd braced for. I have stood behind my father's chair for enough years to know what a man sounds like when he is pleased and saying otherwise. "Truly, my lord. Whatever stood between your father and me at dusk, I would not have wished that. How did he die?"
Black Walder answered before Ser Stevron could, so that the telling would be his. He did it deliberately, I think, and brutally, watching the Stark's face the entire time, with all of it in: the feathers, the clawed throat, the forceps, what came out on the linen. Behind Lord Robb, the huge lord in the stained shirt — the Greatjon, I knew him from the stories — let out a great bark of a laugh and turned it into a cough a bit too late.
"Lord Umber," said Lord Robb, without turning round. "A lord is dead, and his sons are standing in front of you."
"Aye. Your pardon, sers. It was — aye. Your pardons." Lord Robb gave him a look, and the big man took his leave with a nod to the Stark and the other lords, then went back toward the camp.
But I had been watching Lord Robb, because I could not seem to stop, and so I saw what it did to him. As Black Walder talked, I saw his throat work, and his hand found the ruff of the great wolf beside him. It closed slowly in the fur, a fistful of it, and tightened until the knuckles stood out white and the wolf turned its head to look up at him. He did not seem to know he was doing it. He didn't let go until Black Walder finished. When Black Walder came to the mouse, he shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, I could not tell for sure, but it seemed they were not on any of us.
"No man should go that way," he said. He sounded hoarse. He reached for the jug on the trestle, poured water, not wine, rinsed his mouth and spat it in the grass, and then drank. I had seen him do it more than once since we dismounted. "I'm sorry, ser. That is an ugly death, and I'm sorry you had to find it."
Black Walder said nothing. I think he wanted to see something in that face, and he did, but it wasn't what he'd been looking for. It is hard to go on suspecting a man of a murder that plainly turns his stomach at the thought.
I remember thinking then that the songs had him wrong. The peddlers said the young Stark was hard as the Wall, that he'd taken that scar from a wildling king and cut the man's head off for it. But he looked, that morning, like someone who had not slept and could not eat and was grieving a little for a stranger, an old man who had insulted him or perhaps his family in the south. I thought: he is kind. I had not met many kind men, and I was very sure of it.
———
He gave his terms standing, as he'd given his refusal, and he began with the hard part.
"I'll say to you what I said at dusk, my lord, because it's still true and I'll not soften it for the sake of the morning. House Frey is sworn to Riverrun. Riverrun is besieged. I am here because my mother's house called for help, and I do not pay a toll to answer it. I'll not buy this crossing. I want that understood between us before I say anything else, so that you know the rest is not a price."
"It's understood," said Ser Stevron. "I said something of the same in my own hall an hour ago."
Something eased in Lord Robb's shoulders. "Then we'll do well together. Here's what House Stark offers House Frey, freely, as one friend of Riverrun to another. My lords have heard it. They've agreed to it, each for his own part."
And he laid it out — two of our house to foster at Karhold, a boy and a girl. A huge bearded lord with a sunburst on his chest nodded at that and said his daughter wanted company. Two to White Harbor, a boy and a girl; and the fattest man I have ever seen in my life, who had come to the parley seated on a sort of cart, spread his hands and said that the New Castle would be honored, and that he hoped the children liked lamprey. Two to Winterfell itself, to be raised in Lady Stark's household beside his own brother and sister. Six children of House Frey, placed in three of the North's greatest halls. I tried to think when six of us had last been placed anywhere without a fight.
"I'll take a squire," he went on, "from among Lord Walder's sons or grandsons. My own squire, in my own service. If he serves well, I'll see him knighted, or whatever honor he'd rather have, where men can see it. Theon Greyjoy, heir to the Iron Islands, will take a second squire of your house on the same terms.
"Lord Bolton of the Dreadfort has been some years a widower. He has agreed to take a bride of House Frey, of his own choosing and with the lady's consent." The pale lord at the end of the line inclined his head a finger's width. He had eyes like chips of dirty ice, and I hoped very much, in that moment, that he would not choose any sister I was fond of. "That is a marriage now, not a promise of one, to the first of my father's bannermen.
"And there's a daughter of your house named Roslin."
Perwyn went still beside me, and so did I. Our full sister, our mother's last child, and the only gentle thing to come out of that castle in my lifetime.
"My uncle Edmure is unwed, and heir to Riverrun. I can't promise you his hand. It's not mine, and I'd be lying to you if I dealt in it. What I can promise is that the Lady Roslin will ride south with us as my guest, attended by her own women and guarded by her own brothers if they'll come, and when Riverrun is relieved she'll be presented to my uncle, and I'll speak for the match. If he's fool enough to say no, or if she looks at him and would rather not, she comes home with honor and gifts and no harm done. She'll have her say. I'll not drag a girl across the Riverlands to be wed against her will. I've sisters."
Perwyn let out his breath. Ser Stevron was silent a long moment.
"My father asked for more than this," he said slowly, "and you would have been right to refuse."
"Your father asked for my sister and myself. He asked for it as a toll, from a man on his way to fight for him. If he'd opened his gate at dusk and said, 'What does my liege's grandson need,' I'd have offered him all of this before the bread was broken." Lord Robb drank water again. His hand, when he set the cup down, was not quite steady, and he put it behind his back. "In return I'll have the crossing today. And I'll have your levies. Leave what you need to hold your own walls — a few hundred, I would say — and the rest march with me under your own banner, to Riverrun, where they were sworn to be."
"You'll have them," said Ser Stevron. "I'll lead them myself."
He held out his hand. After a moment, Lord Robb took it. The lords of the North behind him nodded, each in turn, the sunburst and the merman and the bear and the flayed man, like men hearing the last line of a song they already knew.
I noticed that. I noticed, too, that every part of what he'd offered had been ready in advance, each lord's piece agreed beforehand, as if he'd expected to make it this morning to someone who would listen, and had not expected to make it to my great-grandfather at all. But that thought came and went like a bird across a window. It was a good many years before it came back.
"The squire," Ser Stevron said. "Had you a name in mind, my lord?"
"I'd thought to leave it to you. You know them. Someone with a good seat, a better temper, and no great love of the sound of his own voice."
Ser Stevron turned and looked at me. So did Lord Robb.
"My brother Olyvar," Ser Stevron said. "He's Roslin's brother also. He'll want to see her safe to Riverrun, and I've never heard him say a cruel thing."
I do not remember what I said. I know I knelt, because dew ran through the knees of my hose for the rest of the day. I remember that he raised me himself, and that his hand was cold as a stone in a stream, and that close I could see the sweat standing on his forehead though the morning was cool. He smiled at me. It was a good smile, and it cost him something.
"Your first duty, Olyvar. Find my captain of guards, Jory Cassel, and tell him the crossing begins within the hour, and I want the horses over the bridge before the mammoth, and well ahead. We've frightened your family's stables enough," he said it with a smirk, but his face was still a bit pale.
———
It took two days to put the Northern host across the Green Fork.
I watched most of it from beside him, which is where a squire stands. The horse went first, seven thousand, hooves drumming on the span from dawn to past noon. Then the foot, company after company, under banners I spent the day learning. Then the wagons, which did something I had never seen wagons do: when one of them cracked a wheel at the foot of the Water Tower and the whole line ought to have stopped for an hour, four men ran up with a new wheel from a cart that carried nothing else, and it fit, and the line was moving again before the sergeant had finished swearing.
The giants crossed on the second morning, and the whole of the Twins came out to watch. They filled the wallwalks, the roofs, the windows. The giants had to stoop under the gate of the Water Tower, and the third of them trailed his fingers along the stone of the parapet as he went, idly, the way I used to as a boy. Last of all came the beast, with Lord Robb in the railed box on its back. They had doubted the span would bear it. It bore it. I felt the bridge speak under my boots as it passed, one deep note, and that was all.
Septon Donnel stood on the steps of the sept with his crystal held up in front of him in both hands, his lips moving from the first giant to the last. Lord Robb saw him. He looked at him for some while as the beast carried him by. He did not smile or make any sign. Then he faced forward again.
That night in the new camp on the west bank I brought him his supper, as a squire does. It was good food, better than we ate at the Twins. They have a thing in his army like a pasty, a hard crust with meat and gravy sealed inside, that the men call a warm coffin, and the cooks had made his and mine fresh. I had eaten three of my own that day; they were that good. I set his on the camp table beside the one I had brought him at noon, which he had not touched, and the breakfast, which he had not touched either.
"My lord, should you not eat something?"
"Thank you, Olyvar. Leave it." He sat on the edge of the cot with the wolf's great head across his knees and a cup of water in his hand. "Is your sister settled?"
"Yes, my lord. She's frightened, but Perwyn's with her. She asked me if you were as terrible as they say."
"What did you tell her?"
"That you were the first man I'd ever seen tell a Frey no about a toll my father wanted for a crossing, and then still give our house more than it deserved. She didn't know what to make of it." I hesitated. "Nor do I, my lord. But I'm glad of it. Whatever the septons say of the North, I'd rather be out of the Twins and in the service of a kind and proper lord."
He looked at me then for longer than the remark deserved.
"You're a good lad," he said. "Go to bed."
I went. At the flap I looked back. He picked up the warm coffin and held it, looking at the place where the crust was sealed, then put it down again and reached for the water.