Not long ago his name had been Roman, and he had lived in a completely different place: on Earth, in the twenty first century.
How had he ended up in Westeros?
Why Edmure Tully, of all people?
Where had the original owner of this body gone?
And why now, at this particular moment?
Who, if anyone, had a hand in it?
Was it a curse, or was it, against all odds, an incredible opportunity, a chance that would never come again?
The questions were endless, and his mind turned them over again and again, hunting for some thread of an answer, some clue.
It never found one.
Not yet, anyway.
Underneath the questions sat a quieter ache, unhurried and unwilling to fade: grief for his old life, for his family.
What had happened to them?
How were they managing?
Was there any hope of ending this madness and finding his way back?
In those first days, such thoughts had very nearly swallowed him whole.
Strangely enough, it was Westeros itself, everything now pressing in around him, that kept him from losing his mind entirely.
Roman had known this world once.
He’d even thought of himself as something of an expert on it.
But living inside it proved far more complicated than reading about it ever had.
And the worst part was the timing.
Why hadn’t he landed in Westeros a month earlier, a year earlier?
Before the wheels of fate had already started turning?
So much could have been changed in that window.
Instead he found himself like a chess player whose clock was running out, staring down a board that had already gone badly wrong, forced to find some way through it.
Roman first became aware of himself inside the body of Lord Edmure Tully at Riverrun, in the company of his own family: his elder sister Catelyn Stark, her son Robb, newly proclaimed King in the North, Robb’s young wife, and their uncle Brynden Tully, called the Blackfish.
Robb had just returned from a victorious campaign through the Westerlands.
He’d torn through Lannister land, burned villages and holdfasts, taken a rich haul of plunder, and by any measure had done well for himself.
None of those victories carried much strategic weight, though.
Worse, somewhere along the way he had met a girl named Jeyne Westerling and married her.
Roman remembered that detail all too clearly: it was the spark that would eventually light the fuse leading to Walder Frey’s betrayal and the horror of the Red Wedding.
Robb and the Blackfish had ridden back into Riverrun only days before.
In front of the assembled river lords and northmen, they had praised Edmure to the skies.
Then, once the doors were closed and they were alone, they had torn into him without mercy.
“You were told to wait for Lord Tywin!” Robb shouted at him.
“No one gave you leave to fight him!” “And what was I supposed to do, stand at the walls and watch him burn his way across my lands?” Edmure, or rather the man now wearing Edmure’s face, tried to defend himself.
“Just let him march through?” “That was the plan, you utter fool!” the Blackfish snapped.
“We meant to draw him into a trap.
He was supposed to keep coming!” “I beat him at the Stone Mill,” Lord Edmure protested.
“In those skirmishes he lost near two thousand men, I lost a tenth of that.
And he pulled back!” “I wanted Lord Tywin and the Mountain drawn into a trap of our own making,” Robb said, pacing the room in fury.
“Tywin in our hands, the Mountain’s head on a spike.
We would have been dictating the terms of the peace ourselves.” “You’ve ruined it, Edmure,” the Blackfish growled.
“Ruined the whole plan, damn you.” Roman had never given much thought to the gods, one way or another.
He hadn’t seen proof of them and wasn’t in a hurry to grant them anything.
And yet, after a few weeks in this new world, he was almost ready to say a word of thanks that he hadn’t landed in Edmure’s skin any earlier than he had.
Whatever his shortcomings here, whatever his slowness to grasp local politics, whatever his tendency to think before he spoke, or fail to speak at all, the old Edmure would have simply stood there and taken it.
He wouldn’t have argued back.
Maybe he couldn’t have.
Back when Roman had only known the man through the pages of a book, he’d judged Edmure Tully as something of a fool: an errand boy, brave enough but not especially clever, a man who rarely defended his own position because he rarely seemed to have one, content instead to follow whoever in the room carried more authority than he did.
Edmure’s memories, though, sat there in his mind like an open book, and they told a different story.
Robb, the Blackfish, and a handful of lords had held their war council without him, said nothing to him about the larger strategy, and simply assumed he’d know to let Tywin Lannister pass west unchallenged.
They had, in their carelessness, simply forgotten to tell him.
Yet somehow they’d remembered to summon the loud, half drunk Greatjon Umber, who never needed an excuse to itch for a fight.
Tully had been ordered to hold Riverrun with everything he had.
Which he had done, and done brilliantly.
But no one had told him exactly how he was meant to do it: whether to sit tight behind the walls, or ride out and harry the enemy with sorties and ambushes.
And once Edmure had done his duty, blind to the finer points of the plan he’d never been told, and had done everything in his power to bleed Lord Tywin’s army, they turned on him and made him the scapegoat for a war that wasn’t unfolding the way they wanted.
And Edmure, spineless fool that he was, had simply taken it.
He hadn’t so much as tried to tell them he’d never known the plan in the first place.
Still, if the larger picture ahead promised nothing but trouble, there was at least a narrow opening to rewrite the smaller, personal stuff.
Or so Roman told himself.
The lords gathered at Riverrun spent their days drinking, hunting the nearby woods, mulling over the next stage of the campaign, and letting their men rest and heal.
Soldiers filled the castle and the ground around it.
Everyone was eating well and nursing their wounds.
Roman used the ten days fate had handed him as well as he could.
He doubted he had ever, in either of his lives, studied people so closely or learned so much about them in so short a time.
Not that he strictly needed to get acquainted with anyone.
The old Edmure had known these people intimately.
But Roman had to relearn them for himself: watch them, talk to them, weigh them, and form his own judgments.
It turned out Edmure had been fairly shortsighted in his reading of both people and circumstances.
He pored over his predecessor’s memories, read what books he could find, studied maps, and did his best to move through the world naturally.
A few people noticed something had shifted in him.
But with a war on, nobody had much attention left over for such small things.
Edmure’s father, Lord Hoster Tully, had died recently, his body burned on a boat sent down the Red Fork.
His mother, Lady Minisa Whent, had died in childbirth some twenty years before, delivering a son who did not survive her.
Lysa Arryn had no intention of leaving the Vale.
Catelyn was consumed with worry over getting her daughters back from King’s Landing.
Robb and the Blackfish were absorbed in their schemes for winning the war.
The northern lords paid Edmure almost no attention at all.
Only his old friends made any effort to reach him, offering their condolences for his father and a few words of support.
Edmure did have one real gift: he made friends easily and kept them without much effort.
But the circle of men he actually trusted, not merely liked, men he’d shared real history with, numbered only four.
Their names were Patrek Mallister, Marq Piper, Karyl Vance, and Raymun Darry.
Mallister had ridden off with Theon Greyjoy to Seagard some months back.
The castle stood on the coast and guarded the region from Ironborn raiders; it belonged to House Mallister.
From there Theon had taken ship for Pyke while Patrek stayed behind.
As Roman recalled, he was fated to march with the armies of the North and the Trident, and to be at the Twins on the night of the Red Wedding.
Marq Piper, heir to the castle of Pinkmaiden, a tall blond man with broad shoulders and an easy smile, was still at Riverrun.
Roman had gotten to know him a little.
Marq turned out to be good natured, a touch reckless, and utterly loyal.
“Whatever you decide, Ed, you’ll have me at your back,” he liked to say.
Roman was genuinely glad to have such a man in his corner.
Karyl Vance, melancholy and watchful, held the title Lord of Wayfarer’s Rest.
At thirty he was the oldest of the group, and also the shrewdest and most observant.
He would have been fairly handsome if not for the large wine colored birthmark that covered part of his neck and crept up one cheek.
He had come to Riverrun for Hoster Tully’s funeral and had stayed on since.
The last of the four, Raymun Darry, had died at the Battle of the Mummer’s Ford, cut down by a single, terrible blow from Gregor Clegane.
These were the men, friends and drinking companions of the old Edmure, that Roman now had to navigate.
There were plenty of other lords scattered across the Riverlands, and no shortage of ordinary knights besides.
Edmure had gotten along well enough with many of them.
But these three survivors carried the most weight and influence, and it was on them Roman leaned hardest.
Among the household staff, the ones worth knowing were Ser Robin Ryger, captain of the guard, Ser Desmond Grell, master at arms, Maester Vyman, who was privy to no small number of secrets, and Utherydes Wayn, the castle’s steward.
All four had served Riverrun and its lords their whole lives and had grown old in that service.
Good, loyal men, but the kind of business now at hand called for fresh energy, and Roman was keenly aware of that.
Still, both his friends and the old guard respected Edmure.
They considered him the rightful Lord of Riverrun now that his father was gone, and stood ready to carry out whatever he asked of them.
The whole time, Roman kept watching for the chance to show a new side of himself.
If fate had dropped him into this world, into this man’s life, then he needed to find some way to adapt and to change how others saw him.
He knew the opportunity would come soon enough.
For now, patience and careful thought about the situation he’d landed in.
Two enormous problems demanded solving, and both were urgent.
First, the war was still grinding on, and the Lannisters were squeezing every last drop of the Riverlands.
Second, the once proud, outspoken Lord of the Trident, and his lords after him, had bent the knee to Robb Stark as King in the North, making themselves his sworn vassals.
That was how the proud Tullys had lost their independence: by choosing their own overlord and now taking orders from him.
There were moments when Roman was simply astonished by the shape Edmure Tully’s life had taken.
It felt, at times, as if the man had woken up one morning to discover he was at war with the Lannisters, that he now answered to a king named Robb Stark, and that he was expected to marry one of Walder Frey’s daughters.
That last part was an exaggeration, of course, but it captured the general drift of things well enough.