“Uncle, what do you think you’re doing?” Robb Stark stormed back and forth across Riverrun’s upper solar, enraged, looking for all the world like an angry tiger.
Or a direwolf, more fittingly, given his house and his temperament both.
The king favored dark colors in his dress.
Even now he wore a brown, laced doublet, dark breeches, and polished black boots.
A short cloak was pinned at the shoulders with two silver clasps shaped like wolves’ heads.
A dagger with a richly worked hilt hung at his belt.
“I am within my rights.
The Freys are my vassals, and they need reminding whose hand rules them.” Edmure sat in his chair, watching the young man closely.
It was fortunate they’d finally managed to speak alone.
Though luck had little to do with it; it was careful calculation.
Edmure had guessed that once Robb learned of Lothar the Lame’s polite captivity, along with his bastard brother Ser Rivers, he wouldn’t sit quietly behind walls.
He’d come storming into the castle to get to the bottom of it, letting his royal temper spill out along the way.
So Edmure had feigned illness, allowing only the king himself into his small chamber.
And now, without his mother at his side or the Blackfish looming behind him, Robb wouldn’t find this quite so easy.
Edmure hoped, at least, that this conversation wouldn’t follow the same old track the poor, browbeaten Edmure had always walked, simply being told what to do and how to live.
“We need to stand united now more than ever.
The danger has never been greater,” Robb clenched his fists, visibly fighting the urge to shout.
“And you go and pull a stunt like this!” “I couldn’t agree with that wise thought more, Your Grace,” Edmure said, letting a thread of irony slip into his voice.
He rarely acknowledged his nephew’s royal title so directly in private conversation.
Robb, caught off guard, stopped his pacing and simply stared at him.
For a man born in the twenty first century, someone with no inherited reverence for nobility, someone who’d never so much as glimpsed a king before all this, dealing with royalty came far more easily than it did for people raised in Westeros from the cradle.
In the beginning, while he was still learning the customs and etiquette the locals had absorbed since birth, Edmure had stumbled more than once.
But it was starting to pay off now.
More than that, when he looked at the young man in front of him, he saw a hot tempered, largely inexperienced boy rather than a king, and that shifted the whole conversation onto different footing.
The trick lay in psychology, in the deference people carried inside themselves without even noticing it.
A king!
A monarch!
How could anyone not bow before such a will!
That was exactly how the locals reasoned.
But often enough, a grand title and a golden circlet hid a simple, uncomfortable truth: your sovereign might be a genuine fool.
Or the product of one too many marriages between close kin.
Robb, to be fair, was neither.
But Edmure had never been inclined to respect a man simply for wearing a crown.
Stark still hadn’t grasped how much had truly changed.
In his worst nightmares he likely couldn’t have imagined that instead of the narrow, predictable Uncle Edmure, someone else entirely now stood in his place.
And not understanding that put him at a real disadvantage: he kept underestimating a man who had once been his vassal and kinsman both.
“What exactly do you agree with, Lord Edmure?” The young man recovered himself somewhat.
His voice had turned cold, haughty, edged now with suspicion.
“With the idea that we need to show real strength, real resolve, if we’re to survive this war.
That everyone will be asked to give everything they’re capable of giving.” “And what does that have to do with taking the Freys prisoner?” “You’re going to find what I’m about to tell you hard to believe.” Edmure shifted in his seat, and the chair creaked loudly beneath him.
“I keep scouts.
Spies.
And troubling rumors have reached Riverrun.
That some mean to betray us, to slaughter us like sheep.
The Freys and the Boltons are plotting treason.” “What?” Robb was so startled that he skipped straight past questioning the existence of these spies or who might have reported such a thing, and went directly to the claim itself.
“That can’t be true.” “It can, and it is.
Old Frey has nursed a grudge ever since you refused to marry his daughter.
You broke your word to him.
A solemn oath, shattered.
He isn’t the forgiving sort.” “That’s nonsense.
A far fetched excuse,” Robb said, though he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself more than argue the point.
“Don’t be so quick to dismiss it.
Hear me out.
By taking Karstark’s head, you weakened your own position and made yourself new enemies.” “Don’t speak to me about Karstark.
That’s northern business.
You don’t understand the first thing about it, sitting here on the Trident.
And he betrayed me first, killing Willem Lannister and Tion Frey.” “Perhaps so.
But it was certainly unwise to lop off his head like a cabbage.
Easy enough to cut it free.
Rather harder to put it back where it belongs.
Wouldn’t you say?” Robb had enough conscience left to color at that.
It was plain the subject stung.
Beneath his still patchy beard, his jaw tightened.
He exhaled loudly, clenched his fists, and turned away to face the window, his whole posture radiating irritation.
And still, he held himself in check.
Edmure felt an unexpected surge of sympathy for the boy, naive and honorable, just and foolish all at once, who by nothing more than fate and a string of circumstances had found himself King in the North at fifteen.
He had real gifts, this young man, but he lacked worldly experience, lacked the particular kind of cunning that mattered in rooms like this one, the sort that had nothing to do with winning battles and everything to do with reading people.
Perhaps it wasn’t too late to help him, to teach him a few things he badly needed to learn.
Robb stayed silent for a long moment, staring pointedly out the window.
Finally he stirred and bit out a single sharp word.
“Go on.” “You let Theon Greyjoy go, offering his father a military alliance, mutual recognition as kings.
And in Theon, something old stirred, blood that had lived for a thousand years on raiding, violence, and murder.
He couldn’t talk his father out of it.
Theon betrayed you and took Winterfell for himself.
Your mother was right to speak against that plan.
It was a costly mistake, and your vassals have marked it down, one more notch against you.” “You never explained how you learned any of this.” Robb turned to face him again.
“My mother couldn’t have told you.
Only Theon and I knew the whole plan.
So how does my uncle know everything?” “Every man keeps a few secrets of his own,” Edmure said, allowing himself the faintest smile.
The longer Robb turned that mystery over in his mind, the better, as far as Edmure was concerned.
“And then, at the end of it all, Catelyn set the Kingslayer free.
After that, plenty of people started to believe this war couldn’t be won at all.
The Lannisters can field forty thousand men.
The Tyrells sixty, and together they’ll grind us down.
Jaime Lannister was the last real hope for any kind of peace.
That hope’s gone now.” “And what does any of that have to do with the Freys and Bolton?” “The first wants Riverrun, wants to become a river lord in his own right.
The second dreams of the title Warden of the North.” Edmure was telling the truth, though it must have sounded too wild to believe.
“Both of them have been writing to Lord Tywin.
I’d wager he’s promised to make their dreams come true, generously.
They swear to Joffrey, deliver your head, simple as that, and rather elegant, in its way.
I’ll give Tywin Lannister this much: the man’s mind works very well indeed.” “Even if I believed you, and I don’t think I can, no one would agree to a betrayal like that.
And how would they even manage it?
I have more men under arms than Bolton and Frey combined.” “Bolton has the Ryswells and the Dustins behind him.
And the Karstarks, whom you yourself drove away.” “The Karstarks.” Robb flinched.
He’d caught the meaning well enough.
Vengeance was a tradition old as the realm itself, one nobody in Westeros ever truly forgot.
Grudges here lasted centuries.
“And then there are the Westerlings.
If I were you, I’d keep a close watch on them.” Edmure realized, even before he’d finished the sentence, that he’d let himself get carried away and said far too much.
Damn it.
He’d spilled the whole thing like a careless child.
Robb had been listening so closely, thinking so hard, that Edmure had let his guard down.
It looked as though he’d convinced the boy, or at least planted a seed of doubt.
But he shouldn’t have mentioned the Westerlings.
Not that.
The king was utterly devoted to his wife.
“I’ve never seen you spin such tales before, uncle,” Robb’s voice cut sharp as a blade.
“My wife’s family swore every oath there is to swear, and I believe them.” “It isn’t really about them,” Edmure said, raising his voice in frustration, wanting badly to strike himself for the slip.
“Can’t you see the circle closing in around you?
I’m not asking you to execute anyone, to kill anyone.
Only to be careful.
To watch the Freys and Bolton closely.” “So you took the Freys prisoner at Riverrun on nothing more than vague rumor?
And what of the wedding?” “I’m waiting for the old weasel to send three of his daughters here so I can see them for myself.
I won’t be traveling to the Twins.
Don’t even suggest it.” “I could simply order you to.” “No.
You couldn’t.
We’ve already settled where we stand with each other.” Anger flared in Stark’s eyes.
The fall of the Riverlands from Northern authority clearly stung him deeply.
He very likely believed, in earnest, that he’d been betrayed, deceived.
And he wasn’t the sort to forget his uncle’s behavior easily.
Edmure was certain that if Robb survived what was coming, he’d revisit this conversation someday.
But here, in Riverrun, surrounded by river lords who’d sooner side with their own lord, that wasn’t a fight Robb could afford to start.
“And how exactly do you imagine they’d pull this off?” Stark asked.
“Don’t push me for more than I can give you,” Edmure said, rising and crossing to stand before the king.
It was time to rein this in.
Better, in truth, if he’d done so a little sooner.
Keep showing this much insight, and it would start to look less like foresight and more like an elaborate fiction.
“But if you’re looking for a way to stay safe, you’ll find one.
They might kill us both on the march, or in a tent at camp.
Or during the assault on Moat Cailin.
Or perhaps at my own supposed wedding at the Twins, since you’d be standing in someone else’s walls there.
And don’t forget the old standby: a cup of poisoned wine.
There’s no shortage of ways to manage it.” A heavy, unpleasant silence settled over the solar.
Stark was no fool, and Edmure could see his words had landed.
Robb stood thinking for a long moment.
What could a young man really conjure up, standing on the edge of events this fateful?
“What will you do, Robb?” Edmure asked, softening his voice, affecting warmth.
“All right.
Don’t think I’ll forget what you’ve said here.
I don’t believe all of it, but I’ll remember it.” Robb sat down and drank deeply from his goblet, his voice bitter, exhausted beyond his years.
“I am the king who lost the North.
And I mean to win it back.
The path ahead is clear enough to me: the Twins, Moat Cailin, Winterfell.
Only there, within my own walls, will I earn back any respect worth having.” “I like the sound of that,” Edmure said, stepping forward and, somewhat to his own surprise, gripping the young man by the shoulders.
Robb’s eyes, blue like every Tully’s, widened in surprise.
“Do what you must, and let the rest fall where it will.
I don’t intend to sit idle here at Riverrun either, believe me.
Just be careful.
Trust neither the Freys nor Bolton, and don’t accept hospitality inside the Twins.
Don’t quarter your men within the castle walls.
Pitch your tents outside them instead.” “Understood,” Robb said, shaking his head, as though he could hardly believe how this conversation had gone or where it had ended up.
He rose easily, straightened the dagger at his belt, nodded once, and left.
com/Hezzario