The landscape changed north of Old Oak.
Alex noticed it gradually at first, the fields a little less lush, the green a slightly different shade, the hills rising more steeply on the eastern side of the road.
Then more obviously.
The rich flat farmland of the Reach gave way to something harder and more angular, the soil thinner, the rock showing through at the ridgelines.
“Westerlands,” Mikal said, when Alex mentioned it.
“Already?” “Borderlands.
The road runs through both for a stretch.” He nodded at the hills.
“Gold in those hills somewhere.
That’s what it’s always been about up here.” The Ocean Road was well-travelled, more so the closer they got to Lannisport.
The merchant caravan they’d attached themselves to moved at the pace of loaded wagons, which was slower than Alex would have chosen, but Borys the cloth merchant had proven useful in other ways.
He knew every waystation between Highgarden and Lannisport, every ford, every stretch of road that was worse than it looked on a map.
“You’ve done this road often?” Alex asked him, riding alongside one afternoon when the pace had slowed to accommodate a rut in the road that was threatening one of the wagon wheels.
“Twice a year for twelve years,” Borys said, with the tone of a man who had stopped finding it interesting some years ago.
“Spring and autumn.
Same road, same stops, same faces mostly.” “Is it always this busy near the tourney?” “Gods, no.” Borys nodded at the road ahead, where two other groups of riders were visible in the middle distance.
“Triple the usual traffic.
Lannisport’s going to be a nightmare for lodging.
You have somewhere arranged?” “Not yet,” Alex admitted.
Borys looked at him with what appeared to be professional sympathy.
“Find somewhere the first day.
Don’t wait.
The decent places fill before the tourney opens.” Alex filed that away and made a mental note to tell Mikal as soon as the road smoothed out enough for a proper conversation.
The bandit attack came on the eighth day, in a stretch of road where the hills pressed close on both sides and the tree cover was thick enough to provide easy concealment.
Alex heard them before he saw them, a sound that was wrong, a stillness in the trees that wasn’t the stillness of an empty forest.
He said nothing because he didn’t trust his read of it and he wasn’t going to call an alarm on a feeling.
He moved his horse slightly closer to Mikal’s.
Mikal noticed.
He always noticed.
He glanced at Alex and then at the tree line and his hand moved to his sword hilt in a motion that looked almost casual.
They came from both sides.
Alex counted nine before he stopped counting and focused on staying on his horse and not being in anyone’s way.
Not nine total, nine visible, which meant more he couldn’t see.
What happened next was fast and loud and not particularly clean.
Borys’s guards were professionals, not knights, but men paid specifically for this situation, who had drilled for it often enough to react without needing to think.
They formed up around the wagons immediately.
Mikal and Edwyn moved forward toward the lead attackers without discussion, the way men moved when they’d fought alongside each other before, or when both of them simply knew what needed doing.
Alex pulled his horse to the inside of the caravan and stayed there.
He watched.
Mikal fought the way he did everything, without waste.
No dramatic swings, no unnecessary movement.
A man came at him from the left and was on the ground before Alex fully processed what had happened.
Edwyn was louder about it, which seemed to be his preference in most things, but no less effective.
The whole thing lasted perhaps four minutes.
Two bandits were down and not getting up.
The rest had gone back into the trees with the specific speed of men who had just recalculated their odds.
Borys was already inspecting his wagons.
One of his guards had a cut on his arm that was bleeding freely but not dangerously.
Everyone else was intact.
“This stretch,” Borys said, to nobody in particular, with the resigned tone of a man who had been through this before on this exact road.
“Every time.” Mikal wiped his sword and sheathed it.
He looked at Alex.
“You all right?” “Yes.” Alex paused.
“I stayed out of the way.” “Good.” He said it without irony.
“That’s exactly what you should have done.” Edwyn rode up beside them, slightly flushed, looking entirely cheerful.
“Eight against nine.
Better odds than some tourneys I’ve ridden.” “There were more in the trees,” Alex said.
Both men looked at him.
“I heard them before they came out.
The ones that attacked were the ones they were willing to lose.
The others stayed back to see what happened.” Mikal was quiet for a moment.
“How many more?” “I don’t know.
But the attack stopped too quickly.
If they’d committed everything they had it would have gone longer.” Edwyn looked at Mikal.
Mikal looked at the tree line.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“We keep moving,” Mikal said.
“Close formation until the road opens up.” They kept moving.
They encountered two smaller groups in the days that followed, three men watching a ford from the wrong position, and a pair of riders who fell in behind the caravan for half a morning before apparently deciding the numbers weren’t worth it and peeling off onto a side track.
Mikal pointed both out to Alex before Alex spotted them.
Then after the second one he waited.
“Did you see them?” he asked.
“The ford ones, yes.
The riders took me longer.” “What gave away the ford ones?” Alex thought about it.
“Their horses weren’t loaded.
Everyone crossing a ford on a trading road has loaded horses.
They didn’t.” Mikal nodded.
“And the riders?” “They weren’t talking to each other.
Travellers talk.
People with something else on their mind don’t.” Another nod.
Not praise exactly, Mikal wasn’t generous with direct praise, but the particular quality of attention he gave when something had met his standard.
Casterly Rock appeared on the horizon late on the ninth day.
Alex had been expecting it and it still stopped him.
It rose from the headland above the sea like something that had grown there rather than been built, the rock itself enormous, the castle on top of it almost secondary to the sheer mass of the thing.
The late afternoon light caught the stone and turned it a colour that was almost gold, which Alex suspected was not an accident of geology so much as a story the Lannisters had been telling about themselves for a thousand years.
“Gods,” Edwyn said, with genuine feeling.
Even Mikal was quiet for a moment.
Alex looked at it and thought about who lived there.
What he knew about that family.
The gap between knowing it as a name in a story and seeing the physical reality of what 7000 years of accumulated wealth and power actually looked like from a road below.
It was considerably more convincing in person.
They didn’t stop.
The road curved west along the coast and Lannisport came into view an hour later, spread along the waterfront, larger than anything Alex had seen, ships in the harbour so numerous they looked from a distance like a second city floating on the water.
The gate was busy.
Travellers backed up along the road, guards checking everyone through with the practised speed of men who’d been doing it for hours and would be doing it for hours more.
Alex sat his horse in the queue and looked at the city walls and the harbour beyond them and the ships and the people and the sheer accumulated noise of it all.
“Well,” Edwyn said, beside him.
“We made it.” “We made it,” Mikal agreed.
Alex said nothing.
He was already watching the guards at the gate, how they worked, what they checked, who they waved through faster than others and why.
Old habits.
The queue moved forward.
The gate got closer.