Over the past week, Edmure had found himself circling back, again and again, to a genuinely unpleasant thought: despite a string of real successes, the overall situation kept quietly worsening underneath them all.
There was a certain feeling to it, the sense of not being able to draw a full breath before something terrible happened.
The river lords had smashed Daven Lannister’s army to pieces.
But the man himself had survived and slipped free of capture.
And the Golden Tooth had never fallen.
It would have been far better to walk away with both prizes, Lannister himself and the fortress, but that hadn’t happened.
Which meant the danger from the west hadn’t truly passed, only receded for a while along one stretch of border.
Raising a fresh army out of Casterly Rock remained, for Tywin, simply a matter of time.
The Westerlands had money and manpower to spare.
A raven arrived from Robb with word that he’d retaken Moat Cailin.
In truth, faithful Karyl Vance had already managed to recruit riders from among the northmen, and Edmure had sent a handful of border knights along with them, so Riverrun already knew most of it well before the bird arrived.
But Stark had taken the trouble to write all the same, and so they learned, officially, that he’d never set foot in the Twins, that the Red Wedding had never happened, and that Moat Cailin had fallen.
In the course of events Edmure remembered, Victarion Greyjoy had taken the Moat, then abandoned it, sailing back to Pyke to help choose a new king in place of the dead Balon.
To bolster his claim there, he’d taken nearly every fighting man with him, leaving only a token force behind to hold the Moat.
Now Robb drove his army forward at a punishing pace, and the Ironborn left behind at the Moat found themselves badly outnumbered, unable even to sail away in time.
Several bloody assaults had followed.
Mountain clansmen came down from the north to join the fight, along with the Flints of Flint’s Finger, and Manderly’s men of White Harbor hadn’t held back either.
With support from the Reeds of the Neck, they’d retaken the Moat, and now a furious Robb was marching hard on Winterfell, intent on making Theon Greyjoy pay for what he’d done.
Arya rode with him.
It seemed the Hound had managed to reach the Twins after all and hand her safely over to her brother and mother.
For that service, he’d been paid generously in gold, and had apparently decided to stay on with Stark’s company.
Catelyn traveled with them too.
And Robb still had his young wife at his side.
What would happen, Edmure wondered, if, or rather when, she finally gave him an heir?
All of them, like a good many other northmen, had turned out very much alive, and in decent health.
Frey had kept his head down, unwilling to risk open conflict now that circumstances had shifted so badly against him.
Edmure still hadn’t worked out exactly how Roose Bolton had managed to talk his way back into Stark’s good graces.
Maybe he hadn’t, not really.
Maybe Robb had simply decided to act as though nothing had happened at all.
Either way, the master of the Dreadfort remained with the army.
It seemed the Freys and Boltons had both settled on patience, waiting quietly for their next real opportunity.
Edmure had, without question, managed to head off the Red Wedding and everything that would have followed it.
That felt good, and it was useful besides.
But a new problem was starting to take shape.
He’d changed the course of things now, reshaped the present, and reality itself had begun following an entirely new script.
One he knew nothing about.
He had no idea anymore how things would unfold, or where any of it might lead.
In his effort to survive, Edmure had reshaped the very world he’d once known so well.
And in doing so, he’d quietly stripped himself of his greatest advantage: knowledge of what was coming.
King Joffrey had died, and Tommen now sat in his place.
The Kingslayer had made it safely back to King’s Landing.
The Red Viper now led the Dornish delegation there as well.
Stannis Baratheon remained at Dragonstone.
All of it still fit, more or less, into a familiar sequence.
But what came next?
What would Stannis do now?
With Robb and Arya both alive, there was little reason for him to sail north and lend the Wall’s defenders a hand.
In the story Edmure remembered, Stannis had banked everything on the belief that every Stark was dead, that the northern lords would rally to his own claim on the Iron Throne, the same way Ned Stark had once meant to support his.
Now everything had changed.
So what would Stannis do instead?
After the Blackwater, he’d been beaten, badly, but not broken.
His ships still held a good number of islands, and controlled a considerable stretch of the Narrow Sea.
On top of all that, a raven had arrived from Mallister in Dorne.
Edmure noted, with real satisfaction, that he’d chosen the right man for that particular mission.
The Lord of Seagard had put real thought and imagination into how he’d written up his progress.
All told, the news looked genuinely encouraging.
That evening, Edmure sat through a long council in the upper solar with Vance, the younger Mallister, Piper, and Gray, freshly returned from the Reach.
They turned the situation over from every angle, weighing what to do next.
And that night, well into the early morning, he had an unusual dream.
Edmure knew that dreams touched with something like prophecy weren’t unheard of in Westeros.
He’d simply never imagined such a thing might happen to him.
He found himself in a spacious room, half of it flooded with bright light, the other half swallowed in deep shadow.
Golden motes of dust drifted through the air.
He watched himself from outside his own body, still wearing Edmure Tully’s face.
He was dressed strangely, in a knight’s bascinet, a jester’s checkered hose, a maester’s chain, an inkwell tied at his belt, and the odd, soft shoes of a rope walker.
All around him, hidden in both light and shadow, an audience waited.
Silent, then laughing, then whistling.
They judged him entirely by his clothes.
That was how they saw him, each according to their own eye: a knight, a fool, a scholar, a scribe, a magician.
He was juggling daggers.
They’d been laid out in a row across a brocade covered table, dozens of them, each honed to a razor’s edge.
And still he kept reaching for more, more daggers rising into the air, glittering, dangerous, forcing him to throw them higher and higher just to keep his hands quick enough to catch them all in time.
A rising panic told him such a thing could only end one way.
Sooner or later he’d lose track of one.
It would fall, and someone would be hurt, or killed.
Somewhere beneath the dream’s surface, he understood that a fallen dagger meant something larger: some serious failure, some real and lasting loss.
That understanding chilled him straight through.
Edmure woke with his heart pounding, his throat parched, his face damp with sweat.
Nothing in the dream had been especially horrifying to look at, and yet it had turned something over inside him, left him tense, edged with a rising unease he couldn’t quite shake.
Gray light filtered in through loosely drawn curtains.
Morning was beginning.
Fat, scattered raindrops tapped sadly against the roof tiles.
Somewhere below, by the smell of it, bread was baking, and eggs were frying.
A dog barked.
Everything felt ordinary enough, the same familiar sounds he’d grown used to at Riverrun.
The dream left him thinking.
It seemed he might have overreached, just slightly, in his efforts to survive all this.
And now, with the letter from Dorne freshly in hand, it was plain he’d worked himself into a genuinely delicate position.
In his search for powerful allies, he’d secured preliminary agreements from both the Tyrells and the Martells.
And those two houses stood almost entirely opposed to one another.
Trying to yoke Dorne and the Reach together under one harness looked close to impossible.
Sooner or later, it seemed, he’d have to betray one side or the other.
Break his word.
Deceive someone who trusted him.
Edmure leaned over to the small table beside his bed, lifted the jug, and poured wine into his goblet, feeling the cool weight of the silver settle in his palm.
Who could have guessed that sending envoys to both Highgarden and Sunspear at once would win him agreement from both?
He’d genuinely believed one side would refuse outright, that fate itself would make the choice for him.
Instead, both houses had shown real interest.
Two houses divided by old hatred, old enmity, competing designs of their own.
Edmure laughed once, short and utterly without humor.
For a moment he pictured what might happen if he sent yet another envoy to Stannis Baratheon, and Stannis actually accepted the offer.
Now that would be something.
Hadn’t he simply outsmarted himself, in trying to claw his way out of this mess?
Had he gotten carried away?
Placed too many bets at once?
His mind turned at once to Lord Randyll Tarly, dug in at Maidenpool, and to Gregor Clegane, who’d reoccupied Harrenhal.
The situation with the Freys and Boltons remained unresolved, suspended in midair.
Tywin Lannister remained, stubbornly, among the living.
Littlefinger kept weaving his particular brand of quiet treachery.
Varys fed his little birds and listened to whatever they whispered back.
Not even the devil himself could say for certain what the eunuch actually wanted.
The Vale sat sealed off and watchful, while foolish Lysa Arryn kept right on ignoring every plea for help that reached her.
There’s an old saying that morning brings wiser counsel than evening ever does.
It wasn’t holding true today.
Edmure paced his bedchamber and turned up nothing new.
He and his friends had already worked through the next move a week earlier, and again just yesterday, in council.
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