Edmure watched him go for a long while.
Who would have guessed they’d part on such terms?
Up until now, Robb had never stirred much warmth in him.
Nor, in fairness, much dislike either.
What he saw now was simply a young man carrying a weight far too heavy for his years.
He shouldn’t ask more of him than the boy could bear.
Robb had already given everything he had, and more besides.
But something had shifted, just now, and Edmure realized he genuinely didn’t want Robb Stark to die.
“Damned Westeros,” Edmure muttered, waiting until Maester Vyman had stepped out to fetch fresh papers before letting the curse slip.
It wasn’t that he feared the old man exactly.
It simply wouldn’t do to go cursing Westeros aloud in front of him.
That sort of talk bred strange suspicions.
A dark, close night settled over the Riverlands and over Riverrun itself.
Edmure sat in the castle archive, where documents and account books were kept.
Only three people had access to this room: Lord Tully, the maester, and the castellan, Utherydes Wayn.
Wayn himself, keeper of the room’s keys, dozed quietly in a far corner given the late hour, snoring softly like some drowsy old badger.
Maester Vyman, despite his years, hauled scrolls, maps, ledgers, and reports about with tireless energy.
A few thick candles crackled and smoked now and then.
The air smelled of dust and stale, closed spaces.
This wasn’t the first time Edmure had gone over the accounts of the lands and castle he now held, but it was the first time he’d done so in real depth, given real time.
With Robb Stark and every northern lord gone off toward the Twins, his hands were finally free.
“Here are the trade reports from Saltpans and Maidenpool, along with three years of sales and purchases at the mouth of the Trident,” Maester Vyman said, setting down several thick, tightly bound books and scrolls on the table.
“Good,” Edmure said, masking his weariness as he stretched with a crack and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Lately he’d found himself irritable more often than not, that irritation curdling easily into anguish, into anger.
He missed his old life, his family, his friends, badly.
Surrounded by servants and courtiers at every turn, he still felt utterly alone, as though the whole world had simply set him aside and moved on without him.
He ached for the familiar, for everything that had once simply belonged to him.
“Anything else, my lord?” the old man asked, folding his hands over his stomach and tucking them into his wide sleeves.
Edmure could see the maester approved of this new behavior.
At last, it seemed, the Lord of Riverrun had come to his senses and taken an interest in the business of running his lands.
The old Edmure had never troubled himself with such things.
Not because he was a bad man, or a careless one, but because youth, wrapped in comfort and an easy life, had simply never taught him the habits that mattered.
In truth, a good half the knights and lords of Westeros could claim the same kind of carelessness, especially in their younger years.
Given the chance, the old Edmure might well have grown fascinated by economics, farming, and the running of his own lands eventually.
He’d simply never had the chance.
“I recall you’ve spoken at length about the population of the Riverlands before.
Would you refresh my memory?” “Of course,” the maester said, smiling thinly, no doubt assuming Lord Tully had simply forgotten and needed reminding.
“The Riverlands hold a great many people, drawn from several different bloodlines mixed over the centuries.
In the north, near the Twins, you’ll find strong First Men blood: dark hair, sometimes near black, and a heavier build.
To the east, around Saltpans, Andal blood runs strong: fair haired, blue eyed.
At the center, everything blends together.
Three hundred years back, the Ironborn ruled here and took local wives.
And in the southern reaches, near the headwaters of the Blackwater and along its upper course, the traditions of the Reach hold sway.
There you’ll even find the occasional trace of Rhoynar blood, though rarely.” The old man had found his stride, galloping happily off through history and geography.
Edmure didn’t stop him.
A short break wouldn’t hurt anyone, and the numbers waiting ahead were sure to make his head spin soon enough.
Besides, the relationship with this old man needed careful tending, and letting him talk, listening with real attention, served that purpose well.
In truth, the Riverlands held a vast scattering of hamlets, villages, and small towns.
Before the war, the total population had likely reached something near a million souls, though that figure was only a rough guess; no one in Westeros conducted anything like a proper census, and the number of smallfolk was estimated indirectly, through tithes, taxes, and levies of every kind.
That had been the state of things before the war.
How many people remained now, in the lands hit hardest by the fighting, Edmure was almost afraid to consider.
But people meant coin, meant a working economy, meant prosperity, and, not least, meant the future soldiers, farmers, artisans, and fishermen who would eventually replace the ones already lost.
Edmure dug deeper and deeper into the true state of Riverrun and the lands beneath its banner.
Maester Vyman’s counsel and long, patient explanations helped bring the whole picture into focus.
Riverrun’s chief sources of income, it turned out, were fishing and salt.
Fish was salted, dried, smoked, fried, boiled, even rendered down into paste.
Caviar and crayfish added their own share.
Salt, too, stayed in steady, reliable demand.
Enormous numbers of waterfowl nested throughout the vast stretch of the Trident, along its three great forks and countless smaller channels.
Local lords loved hunting them with falcons and gyrfalcons, a pastime considered properly noble.
Herons, storks, swans, cranes, ducks, gulls, bitterns, cormorants, geese, all of it went to the table, while feathers and down traveled far across the continent.
Honey did much the same; beekeeping had been a steady, profitable trade here for centuries.
Peat sold well too, likely more abundant here than almost anywhere else in Westeros, though it fetched barely a copper.
Charcoal followed the same pattern.
Before the war, the Riverlands had ranked among Westeros’s breadbaskets, though never on the scale of the Reach.
Turnips and rutabagas brought little coin, and most of the wheat, rye, and oats grown here stayed close to home, feeding the local castles.
A very fine ale was brewed along the Trident, though most of it never left the region.
There was enough timber in the Riverlands for local needs, houses and castles alike, but little of it suited proper shipbuilding.
An extraordinarily valuable stand of ancient trees grew on the Isle of Faces, at the center of the God’s Eye, the great lake on whose shore Harrenhal itself stood.
Weirwoods grew there, their pale wood prized for bows, crossbows, ships, castle gates, fine furniture.
But no one cut them.
Such an act would count as sacrilege in these lands, and the local folk took the possibility of the gods’ curse seriously indeed.
Wool and cloth, staples of any feudal economy, were produced in the Riverlands too, though in Edmure’s judgment on too small and inconsistent a scale.
That was an industry worth encouraging, worth building up by whatever means came to hand.
No gold or silver was mined here.
A few iron deposits lay near Atranta, worked by the younger branch of House Vance.
Copper and tin remained a genuine, ongoing problem.
Stone was quarried from the hills and low mountains along the border with the western lands, and near the Seven Streams.
It met most needs well enough, though anything requiring fine marble or granite had to be purchased from the Vale.
The lords of Riverrun drew a healthy income from tolls, on roads and bridges alike.
The Riverlands, much like the Reach, sat at the very heart of Westeros, linking the North, the Vale, the Iron Islands, the Westerlands, the Reach, and King’s Landing all together.
Travelers, artisans, singers, wanderers, vagabonds, soldiers, and merchants moved through in a steady stream, day after day, and every one of them, as in any kingdom, paid a toll along the way.
Traders paid the heaviest share of all.
And every one of these travelers slept and ate in local inns, from which Riverrun took its own fair cut.
All of that worked smoothly enough on paper, in theory.
In practice there were always those willing to slip past a toll unpaid.
The Riverlands had no formal customs system, no real border patrols, and now, in wartime, even the pretense of such things had largely fallen away.
It was a genuine misfortune that the Riverlands lacked proper ports and harbors of their own to connect directly with Braavos and Pentos, and, through Seagard, with the North, the Iron Islands, Lannisport, and Oldtown.
The Trident lagged behind the rest of the great kingdoms of Westeros in this regard, weaker in wealth, in influence, in raw standing, and nowhere near the top five regions by population either.
“Riverrun has lost some forty thousand gold dragons over these past six months,” Maester Vyman said.
“And the treasury holds fifteen thousand now, doesn’t it?” Edmure asked.
He’d worked out his own financial standing, such as it was, in his first days here, and the number in front of him now hardly impressed him.
“Fifteen thousand seven hundred and forty two dragons, precisely,” the maester answered, a note of regret in his voice.
“And don’t forget, my lord, the month is nearly out.
Wages will need paying soon.” “How could I forget,” Edmure said, gritting his teeth.
Money.
Always money.
As Gian Giacomo Trivulzio once put it, though the words are often, wrongly, credited to Napoleon: war requires three things.
Money, money, and money.
He needed it just as badly as anyone, and there was no such thing as having too much of it.
It was as necessary to a war as air itself.
As best he could recall, Stannis spent something like thirty thousand a month simply keeping his fleet afloat.
Edmure had no ships of his own, and a far smaller army, but if he meant to raise a proper campaign, gather a real force, what sat in his treasury now would barely cover it, and only for the first two months at that.
Beyond that, without new conquests or new income, the whole effort would come apart; an army needed feeding and drink just to hold itself together.
And time was the other problem.
Only two months remained before the year 299 since Aegon’s Conquest drew to a close, and every one of those days seemed to slip away faster than the last.
It felt, at moments, as if every plan he made only worsened his position rather than improving it.
Edmure knew that each hour that passed brought him that much closer to Joffrey’s death, to Tyrion’s trial, to Tywin’s death, and to the first cracks that would eventually split the Lannister-Tyrell alliance apart.
And somewhere out west, the Ironborn would hold their Kingsmoot, choose a new king, and turn their ships loose on the western coast once more.
It would be easy enough, on the surface, simply to wait for brighter days ahead.
But the cruel joke of it all was that life kept throwing up fresh troubles, one after another.
Robb Stark had ridden off to retake Moat Cailin.
Edmure neither could nor wanted to stop him.
The North needed retaking, true enough, but first Stark needed to survive it.
Would he manage that?
In theory, old Frey wouldn’t risk staging some smaller, quieter version of the Red Wedding this time.
Without the river lords present, without the very people whose deaths had once made him master of Riverrun in the original telling, the whole scheme lost most of its point.
The old man would need to move carefully now, true to his famous caution; they didn’t call him the late lord for nothing, a man who only ever backed the winning side once the outcome was already decided.
At first glance, it certainly looked as though the Lannisters held the advantage, and in truth, they did.
But if Frey chose outright betrayal all the same, the Tullys could still muster an army and punish him before the westermen’s forces ever arrived.
That possibility alone should give the old man real pause.
There was more to it besides.
Robb had taken Jeyne with him, along with the Westerlings and their handful of soldiers.
Edmure remembered clearly enough that, in the story he’d known, the King in the North had left his young wife safely at Riverrun, under the Blackfish’s protection.
But everything had shifted since then.
Edmure himself had changed the course of things too sharply, and Robb no longer dared take that particular risk.
As it stood, Robb meant to send her, along with her mother, to Seagard, under Mallister protection, and once the North was won back, send a ship, or perhaps march them north overland through the Neck.
The changes kept piling up, and Edmure genuinely couldn’t say anymore whether they were leading somewhere better, or somewhere worse.
And every day brought some fresh difficulty.
Wages for the garrison.
Lords eager to disperse back to their own castles.
Shortages of armor and weapons.
Sickness moving through the camp.
Angry letters arriving from the Twins.
And everywhere Edmure turned, there was old Frey again.
Right now the man had plenty to be indignant about: his son lingering at Riverrun far too long, in no hurry to send his daughters for inspection.
How could Edmure force his hand?
He had no intention of releasing Lothar the Lame, and Frey clearly had no intention of sending his daughters.
The whole thing had settled into something like a stalemate, and there was no obvious way out of it yet.
On top of everything, the Blackfish grew more openly displeased by the day with how his nephew now conducted himself.
Catelyn Stark had ridden off with her son, but not before making her feelings about her brother’s shortsighted behavior thoroughly known.
Their relationship had soured badly.
Edmure could only hope that Arya and the Hound made it safely to the Twins, that Catelyn would embrace her daughter again and find some measure of peace.
“Any way to find more coin?” Edmure asked, likely for the hundredth time by now.
“Precious few options, my lord,” Vyman said, with a shrug.
“I doubt the Iron Bank will want anything to do with us.” “And Winterfell’s in no position to help either.” “None at all.” “King’s Landing, Storm’s End, Lannisport, Highgarden, all closed to us.
Enemies, every one.” “Your sister, Lady Lysa, rules the Vale.
And she’s remarkably wealthy.” It wasn’t the first time the maester had raised that particular idea.
He seemed to genuinely believe Lysa Arryn remained the same warm, generous woman who’d never forget her roots, still fixed in his memory as a bright, cheerful young girl always ready to help her family.
“I’ll write to her,” Edmure decided.
Though he knew perfectly well he’d receive neither soldiers nor coin from the Vale for his trouble.
Still, let the maester see he was making the effort.
“What about Dorne, or the Hightowers?” “Dorne, yes, Dorne and Prince Martell hold no love for the Lannisters,” Vyman said, chewing his lip.
“But will they risk open conflict over it?
Especially now, with Dorne’s own embassy already at the capital, led by Prince Oberyn himself.
No, I doubt they’ll part with any coin.” “Not openly, certainly,” Edmure agreed.
But this wasn’t really a conversation worth pursuing with the maester; better saved for Vance.
“And the Hightowers?
They’re said to be fabulously wealthy.” “That’s true enough.
Oldtown’s income is beyond counting, and the family is proud and powerful.
But they remain, officially, vassals and bannermen of Highgarden.
Why would they risk quarreling with their own overlord, for your sake, my lord?
You’re no relation of theirs.
No brother, no marriage tie.” “Thank you for the reminder,” Edmure said, and meant it without irritation.
He’d always believed a hard truth served a man better than a comfortable lie.
“That’s precisely what I’m here for,” the maester replied, modest but not without a certain quiet dignity.
“It’s the whole purpose of our order.” “And yet there’s coin to be found,” Edmure said, tapping out a rhythm on the table.
He’d spent the last several days turning over one particular idea, one that struck him as genuinely promising: a raid into the western lands.
For now, the fighting had settled into an uneasy lull.
Tywin still expected the Freys and Boltons to do their dirty work, to finish off the Stark boy and enough of his lords to end things cleanly.
But near the Golden Tooth, Daven Lannister was already raising a fresh army, just in case.
And in the capital, the Lannisters and Tyrells were still tying off the last threads of their dynastic alliance.
Under conditions like these, a swift, unexpected strike west could yield real rewards.
Gold, above all.
Plenty of it still remained there even after Robb Stark’s earlier campaigns had passed through.
And his enemies needed dealing with one at a time, before they could unite against him.
Edmure pictured, with a certain dread, what the combined might of his enemies would look like.
The Tyrells alone could field sixty thousand men.
Add the Lannisters and the Freys to that, and they’d sweep through the Riverlands like a millstone, leaving nothing standing.
And Lord Tarly, with a substantial army of his own, already sat at Maidenpool to the east.
But Edmure had no intention of simply waiting for his enemies to arrive at Riverrun’s gates in their own good time.
Handing the initiative to an enemy that easily had never been his way, whether the enemy in question stood in Westeros or back on Earth.
They needed to go all in.
There was, quite simply, no other path forward.
com/Hezzario