Chapter 79: The Escort
Anguy came back into the temporary camp on the north bank of the Green Fork with his bow slung over one shoulder and three rabbits dangling from each fist. The camp held better than fifty people now, sprawled along the riverbank in the loose, functional way of a group that hadn't planned to stop here and had made the best of it.
He found his way to the corner of camp that belonged to his own small outfit.
"Thoros." Anguy dropped onto a rock and looked at the rabbits in his hands, then at the treeline behind him. "Every time I go out hunting I get this feeling — heart going fast, watching every shadow. Do the followers of R'hllor have anything to say about that?"
Thoros was sitting on a fallen log with a whetstone in one hand and his sword across his knees, working the edge back to something useful. He glanced up. "Where I come from, we call that condition being alive. It means your body is paying attention. Try not to lose it."
Anguy settled onto the rock. "I know I'm new to this, and I know better than to question your calls. But weren't we supposed to be bringing Tyrion Lannister back? Alive and delivered to King's Landing, collect the gold, done?"
It was a fair question. After leading the group north along the Kingsroad, Thoros had found Tyrion — found him in a cage at the edge of the Neck, which had not been part of anyone's plan — in the custody of Lady Catelyn Stark and fifty northern riders, all of them armed, all of them watchful, none of them inclined toward negotiation.
Thoros had done the arithmetic quickly. The original plan — take Tyrion, ride south, collect from Kevan Lannister — had stopped making sense the moment he counted the escort. What had replaced it was this: Lady Catelyn, it turned out, had heard her husband mention Thoros of Myr by name, specifically in connection with the burning sword, and had decided that a man Robert Baratheon had trusted with a knighthood was a man she could use on the road south. The offer had been reasonable. The alternative had been considerably less reasonable.
So here they were. Riding south with Lady Catelyn's party instead of against it, Tyrion still in his cage, destination King's Landing by a longer route than anyone had originally intended.
Lady Catelyn had chosen to avoid the Twins. She didn't say why in so many words, but the way she said it made clear that her feelings about House Frey were not the kind that invited follow-up questions. They were taking the longer road south to cross at the Ruby Ford instead.
"The mission we were given," Thoros said, setting the whetstone down and reaching for his wineskin, "was to bring Tyrion Lannister back to King's Landing alive. Look over there." He tilted his head toward the cage in the middle of camp, where Tyrion was currently making his feelings about the wine situation loudly known to anyone within earshot. "He's alive. He's going to King's Landing. We escort him the rest of the way, we present ourselves to the Hand of the King, we collect what we're owed. Mission accomplished."
He took a long drink. They were already through half the eight wineskins, which was either ahead of schedule or exactly on schedule depending on how you counted.
"You — that's not —" Anguy looked around at the other three, searching for someone who would confirm that this was insane. "Lord Kevan didn't mean it that way. If we walk up to him and say we escorted the man his niece kidnapped back to the city that his niece kidnapped him from, he'll have us hanged before we finish the sentence."
The other three laughed. Bronn, who hadn't looked up from the rabbits he was skinning with his belt knife, was laughing hardest.
"He's pulling your leg," Bronn said. "We find the Hand of the King when we get to the city. Not Kevan. Eddard Stark is the one with actual authority, and he's the one whose wife we've been riding with for the past week. That's who pays us."
Anguy considered this. "The Hand of the King doesn't exactly have deep pockets. I heard his household guard gets paid about half what the Gold Cloaks do."
"Boy." Bronn finally looked up, the skinning knife still in his hand. "Since you're new, I'll explain this once. Gold dragons you can actually hold in your hand are real. Gold dragons someone might give you later, in theory, if you do something dangerous enough to maybe get yourself killed — those are a story." He nodded toward the center of camp, where Lady Catelyn's fifty northern riders sat in the easy, watchful way of men who'd been on campaign. "You want to lead the four of us against fifty of them? In Tully territory? They're veterans. We are — generously speaking — four people with good survival instincts."
Anguy shifted on his rock. This wasn't exactly the sellsword life he'd had in mind when he spent his tournament winnings on drinks instead of thinking carefully about his next six months. "I always thought it was more — you know. Living on the edge. Fortune in danger and all that."
"Can you count?" Chiggen asked, without particular interest. He'd unbuckled his saddlebags and was rooting through them with the focused attention of someone looking for something they'd misplaced. "Fifty veterans. Count them. Then tell me how many men it takes to guarantee a fight like that goes your way."
Anguy thought about it honestly. "A hundred? Maybe a hundred and fifty to be safe?"
Chiggen didn't bother answering. He found what he was looking for in the saddlebag and ignored Anguy completely.
"People die in fights," Bronn said, filling in the gap. "Too few on our side, we die. Too many on our side, the payout from the Lannisters doesn't stretch far enough to matter. This particular fortune isn't worth the particular danger." He finished the second rabbit and started on the third. "The forty gold dragons Lady Stark is paying us, on the other hand — that's real money for a job that mostly involves riding and watching."
Anguy picked at the hem of his cloak. "Won't the Lannisters come for us when they find out? Someone's going to tell them what we did."
"Someone already has," Bronn said. "Whoever it was had a faster horse than ours and left two days ago. Happens every time." He didn't seem concerned about it. "If they send a small force after us, we fight and then Lady Stark pays us extra for our trouble. If they send a large force, we make ourselves scarce and count it a learning experience."
"That's — I mean, it works out, I can see that." Anguy frowned. "It's not exactly honorable though."
"Honor is for lords," Chiggen said, from the depths of his saddlebag. "It doesn't translate to our income bracket."
Bronn wiped his knife on the grass and looked across the camp at Tyrion's cage. The Imp was currently attempting to negotiate with a passing camp servant for wine, using a combination of charm, philosophical argument, and what appeared to be a small coin he'd somehow retained. "I'll say this for him — he doesn't scare easy."
"Hard to scare a man who knows what's waiting for him," Thoros said. "His brother is in King's Landing. Once he gets there, he calls for trial by combat. The Imp knows the rules better than most people know their own names."
Chiggen watched Tyrion succeed in the wine negotiation and take a long drink directly from the skin, looking satisfied with himself. "He seems cheerful for a man who's been in a cage for weeks."
"He was in a cage in Winterfell before this one," Bronn said. "He's had time to make his peace with the situation."
"He might want to revise that peace," Thoros said, his voice dropping slightly, "when he finds out his brother took a tournament sword to the face from the Red Commander."
Bronn glanced at him. "How bad?"
"Jaime lost the bout. Badly. In front of the entire city." Thoros swirled the wineskin. "I don't think he'll lose any fingers over it, but his pride's going to need longer to recover than his shoulder."
"The Imp won't care about that," Bronn said. "He'll laugh."
"Probably," Thoros agreed. "The other thing he won't be laughing about is the charges Lady Stark is bringing. Attempted murder of a child. Conspiracy to kill the Hand. That's not a list that makes a king generous about trial by combat." He looked at Tyrion across the camp — still working on the wine, apparently in good spirits. "Robert might have let it go to a fight. Robert's dead."
The camp went a little quieter around that.
"Joffrey's a boy," Anguy said carefully.
"Joffrey's the king," Thoros said. "And the people around him will decide what kind of king he is before he's old enough to decide for himself." He stood, stretching, and reached for the rabbits Anguy had dropped. "Get a fire going. We ride at first light and I'd rather do it on a full stomach."
Anguy got up to find dry wood, moving through the camp with the slightly dazed expression of a man who had come south from the Dornish Marches with a bow and ten thousand gold dragons and had somehow ended up in the middle of something considerably larger than a tournament.
The Green Fork moved past the bank in the darkness, cold and indifferent, carrying whatever the north had shed into it down toward the sea.
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