Afternoon came through the window and laid itself on the desk.
A squirrel ran the length of a dark-wood shelf that had already outlived most of the men in the hall, stopped at the end, sniffed, and took a finger daubed with honey into its mouth.
The finger was Domeric’s.
For once he had let the chair have him.
Across the long table Horas Redwyne sat with a cup he was not tasting.
“A tea from the Reach,” Domeric said.
“Quiet.
It makes a man remember rooms he has already left.” “Ser Domeric.
There is no other door?” “You have eyes.
House Manderly will take the iron at three parts in ten over the market.
I have no clean reason to put a partner of three years out in the road.” Horas’s face had gone the color of paper.
Domeric had nothing kind to put on it.
The raven had come from White Harbor half a day past.
Wynafryd’s letter.
The Manderlys had taken the rise without a haggle.
Not even the courtesy of a counter.
He did not know what game the old fat lord was playing, and he did not have the hour to find out.
At the foot of the page she asked him to her eighteenth nameday, three months on.
He had already said yes.
Jorah came in at a near run.
“My lord.
Your chief sword is hurt.” “Wendel?
How bad?” “A light wound.
It missed the things that kill a man.” The castellan’s face did not match the mercy in that.
“We have a larger problem.” “Name it.” Jorah did not often come apart in a doorway.
“The hill clans have risen.
Together.” A rising.
The clans.
“They got tired of waiting,” Domeric said.
The hill clans were First Men, as the rest of the North was First Men.
They kept the old gods.
Forty-odd bands lived in the mountains of the North; more than ten of them sat these hills and had sat them for thousands of years.
They named the Boltons their lords and then lived as if the naming were a joke.
The Dreadfort had never ruled them clean.
More than once the house had sent steel into the stones to pull two clans off each other, or called the quarrel down to the Dreadfort and made a judgment of it.
Hard country.
Old blood-feuds.
The men it made were hard with it.
The best of them fought with greatswords in both hands.
The rest threw stone or swung clubs of ash.
They had been a stone in Domeric’s boot since he opened the hills.
He had needed hands for the mines.
He had leaned on the clans to get them.
Lean long enough and the thing you lean on stands up.
“They have Greatwood.” Greatwood sat on a small flat at the foot of the Lonely Hills, two streams around it.
Three years of iron had made a town of it: a little more than three thousand souls, most of them living on the cut and the burn, sending charcoal up to the forges.
It had begun as a place to drop trees.
Two days past, men from Greatwood had come in with a complaint.
The clans had been lifting what they wanted.
Ser Wendel had taken the insult personally, ridden in with a hundred men, and gone looking for law in country that did not sell it.
The clans were harder than he had paid for.
He went in light.
They met him heavy.
More than half the hundred stayed on the slope.
A thick arrow found Wendel.
The men who still had legs fought him back to Greatwood.
That night the rest of it arrived.
The larger bands had already made a single rising of their quarrel.
The Liddles led it.
They closed on the hall where Wendel was licking his wound.
A man inside opened the gate.
What was left of the hundred died in the yard.
Wendel got a horse under him in time and came out of it alive.
The win put a shine on the Liddle name.
Clans that had been nursing a grievance started walking toward Greatwood to spend it.
“How many?” Domeric kept his face still.
That was the only number that mattered.
“The outriders say three thousand in the town already.
More on the roads.” “My lord, we have to put it down now.
Every day they sit there they get heavier.” Jorah was not wrong.
The hills were still emptying into Greatwood.
“When do you ride?” “Tomorrow.” He did not need a longer think.
“They live in holes.
I will give them a stage and let them climb onto it.
Easier to take them when they are all in one place.” Jorah nodded, and the nod had praise in it.
“Shall I send to Lord Roose?” “Not for this.
I will take a thousand.
That will be enough.” “There are three thousand in that palisade.
Four, if the roads keep feeding them.
Take more.
Accidents happen.” Domeric knew the fear.
He also knew the clans.
Their gift was the slope: hit, vanish, hit again.
It was not a gift that loved a wall.
“Rabble.
If they had stayed in the stones I would have had a proper problem.
They left the stones to hold a timber town against me.
I will take that gift.” At first light he rode with six hundred foot, a hundred and fifty bows, and two hundred and fifty horse.
Greatwood was already starting to look outward.
The numbers had given the chiefs ideas.
The same numbers had given them a fight over who stood in front.
They spent days on that fight and spent the hour they should have used to come down the road.
Domeric’s column moved, halted, moved.
At dusk they put the camp ten miles short of the town.
Jorah had seen enough fields to lay a camp that did not leak.
A night attack had been in the plan since the first peg went in.
No lights.
The tents sat dark.
The moon climbed.
The quiet tore.
Men screamed.
Lonehill steel kept a hard rule.
No horn, no order, and a soldier stayed on his pallet.
They knew their lord’s way with a camp.
They saved their pity for the men coming in.
The noise did not last.
When it died it left a hundred bodies and nothing else.
The camp went still again.
It was the still that sits on water before the weather turns.