“Well, you filthy wretch, did you enjoy that?” Ser John Licester, called Talon, rested the point of his sword against the throat of a gray haired, weeping peasant, his hair matted, his beard unkempt.
The man had no trousers on and seemed to be attempting three things at once: begging for mercy, trying to cover himself, and looking for some way to run.
None of it was working out especially well for him.
Lord Karyl Vance’s small company of two dozen riders was making its way toward King’s Landing.
The Lord of Wayfarer’s Rest had judged that following the eastern shore of the God’s Eye wouldn’t be the wisest course.
Harrenhal had been retaken by Ser Gregor Clegane.
They seemed to have Lord Tywin’s blessing for this meeting, but that hardly guaranteed safety along the road.
Gregor could easily throw enough men at them to make any number feel insufficient.
So Vance had chosen a safer route instead, past High Heart, past Acorn Hall, planning to skirt the God’s Eye not from the east, near Harrenhal where the Mountain had settled in, but from the west.
In a stretch of woodland known locally as the Raven’s Span, not far past Acorn Hall, they’d stumbled onto a troubling scene.
The man now feeling Talon’s sword at his throat had been in the middle of raping a young girl.
He’d laughed, sniffled, and paid no mind at all to her screams or her weak attempts to fight him off.
The story was plain enough.
The man had caught the girl out gathering mushrooms in the woods.
Her basket, a scattering of fallen boletus and chanterelles spilling from it, had rolled a little way off to one side.
Since the war had begun, scenes like this had become depressingly common across what had once been a peaceful stretch of the Trident.
The man had been so lost in what he was doing that he hadn’t heard a thing.
Only when, at a nod from Licester, one of the guardsmen strode up and struck him across the back with a whip, asking, almost politely, whether he needed any help, did the man finally cry out in shock and roll off the girl.
She crawled back away from him, yanked her skirt down, and froze, looking from one armed man to another.
The rapist went limp almost instantly, turned soft, whimpering, thoroughly cowed.
What manhood he’d shown moments earlier shriveled away, disappearing into the thick, unwashed hair between his legs.
“Don’t kill me.
Please, my lord, don’t kill me.
I can be useful to you,” he pleaded, swallowing back snot, smearing tears across his face with a dirty hand.
“Finish him,” Lord Vance said.
Conversation with men like this one, and there was never any shortage of them these days, tended to be short.
Here, on Smallwood land, his own bannermen’s territory, he had every right to dispense justice himself.
And without that right, he’d have done exactly the same thing regardless.
“Quick about it, lads, the road’s waiting,” Ser Licester said, hurrying the guardsmen along.
Tom Sturdy tossed a rope with practiced ease over a low branch, the noose already knotted.
“Oh!
Oh, please!” the man shouted, crawling forward as though he meant to kiss the lord’s boot.
Karyl drew his leg back with obvious distaste, though he didn’t otherwise shift in the saddle, still hunched forward beneath his hooded cloak, leaning on the bow.
They bound the man’s hands behind his back and hauled him up quick and short.
He wheezed, kicked at empty air, managed a final curse at his own miserable life, and finally lost control of his bowels entirely.
A heavy stench settled over the clearing.
Vance turned away, plainly disgusted, tossed the girl a coin, and told her to be on her way.
Half out of her senses, the peasant girl ran headlong back toward whatever village she called home.
His horse snorted and shifted its footing, moving off again.
Within a hundred yards, Karyl had already put the man, the girl, and everything else behind him, out of mind entirely.
His thoughts circled back instead to Edmure Tully, and to the task ahead of him.
Vance had always had a knack for noticing small details, things that slipped past most other people entirely.
And he could say, with real confidence, exactly when his friend and liege lord Edmure had changed.
Not down to the exact day, perhaps, but the week, certainly; that much he remembered clearly.
His first real unease had settled in when Robb Stark returned to Riverrun from his campaign in the west.
Tully had seemed like an entirely different man from that point on.
There’d been plenty of talk around the castle about how Edmure had refused to bow to Stark, or to the Blackfish.
Even now, the gossip hadn’t fully died down.
Edmure had always struck him as a decent, easygoing sort.
Pleasant company for a walk, a hunt, an evening at some tavern.
But he’d never once shown any real spine around powerful, strong willed men before.
That had changed entirely.
And in truth, this new Edmure felt easier to understand, in some ways simpler to read.
Until this past week, anyway.
What had actually happened to his friend?
Edmure claimed he’d begun having prophetic dreams.
That his whole life had flashed before him somehow, hundreds of deaths, pain, blood, and that he simply couldn’t have stayed the same man after seeing all that.
Karyl rubbed thoughtfully at his chin.
Maesters couldn’t explain everything in this world, and they had little patience for talk of prophetic dreams besides.
He’d had something like it happen to him once, if he was honest.
He’d dreamed of his future wife one night, seen the two of them wed in a sept.
Six months later, it had all come to pass exactly as he’d seen it.
But the truth was, he’d already known Ilya, as he liked to call her, well before that dream, and she’d already worked her way deep into his heart by then.
Had he never met her before dreaming of her, he’d have been far more inclined to believe in true prophecy.
As it stood, the whole thing had felt rather ordinary in hindsight.
Could a dream truly reshape a man’s whole character?
Karyl didn’t believe it could, not really.
And yet Edmure had changed all the same.
He’d become harder, more calculating, craftier, more forceful.
The old, easygoing, good natured man had simply vanished, like morning dew burning off under a rising sun.
Was he the only one who’d noticed that the Lord of Riverrun was, in some fundamental way, an entirely different man now?
Karyl had heard the old tales of the Faceless Men, that order of assassins out of Braavos, said to change their very faces at will.
The thought sent a genuine chill down his spine.
No, better not to entertain that particular idea.
Ed wasn’t some Faceless Man wearing a stolen face.
He remembered everything, after all, every detail of their shared past, perfectly.
Trying to make sense of it all, Karyl had gently probed at Tully more than once, bringing up old memories as though by chance, things that had happened a year or two back, moments from their shared childhood.
Tully remembered every one of them.
And yet, strangely, instead of putting his suspicions to rest, those answers only left the mystery exactly where it had been.
Some instinct told Vance that something wasn’t quite right here, though he could never point to any real proof of it.
Tully had become someone else, in some sense.
However he’d changed, that change had proven remarkably good for Riverrun, and for the whole of the Riverlands besides.
Look how neatly Ed had put the Blackfish back in his place, a man who’d very nearly crowned himself lord in all but name!
Or how he’d talked Mallister into that voyage to Dorne.
The campaign against the Golden Tooth had shown him to be a man people could genuinely follow, unshaken by doubt.
And every cunning, farsighted scheme he’d set in motion since inspired real confidence that they might actually succeed at more than a few of them.
Tully had become something like a gambler, willing to take real risks, unwilling to overthink his own moves.
Though it seemed, too, that circumstances had left precious little room for careful thought, and precious little safety in caution either.
Karyl decided, in the end, to hold his tongue and simply watch how things unfolded.
If Tully kept working for the good of the Trident, he could forgive a great deal.
But should the man ever throw some truly unusual number, whatever exactly that might turn out to mean, Vance wouldn’t simply stand aside and let it happen.
He made himself a private vow, right then, to swear it properly before the Seven in a sept at the first opportunity.
If Edmure remained, at heart, a good man, Vance would stand behind him in everything.
And if not, if this really was someone else entirely wearing his friend’s face, he’d kill the man himself.
Grieving, in his own way, for the friend he’d lost.
Having settled on that much, Karyl felt something ease inside him.
Whatever weight had pressed down on his shoulders these past weeks seemed to lighten.
With the decision finally made, everything else seemed to settle into place around it.
The small company continued southeast.
Some nights they slept within the walls of some lesser river lord’s castle; more often, they made camp under open sky.
Since the war had begun, working inns had become a genuine rarity.
Death walked these roads freely now, scattering suffering and ruin in its wake.
Scorched villages, drifting ash, packs of feral dogs, the hanged, starving old men and cripples, trampled fields, endless streams of vagrants, all of it, and a hundred other signs of war besides, rose before them nearly every day.
Between the God’s Eye and the Blackwater, across a wide stretch of land that had once been thickly settled and carefully farmed, only scattered patrols from both sides now moved, along with the occasional band from the Brotherhood without Banners.
They never crossed paths with the Brotherhood directly, though marauders and stragglers were common enough.
On one occasion they’d had to flee outright from a suspicious force numbering well over a hundred men.
Their own well fed, well bred horses hadn’t let them down.
“Enemy patrol,” Talon said one day, pulling Vance out of his thoughts.
“Elb, your eyes are sharper than a hawk’s.
What’s on their banner?” Elb, a tall, rangy soldier, shielded his eyes and studied the distant company for a long moment.
Vance didn’t even bother trying to compete; to him, they were little more than vague, distant shapes.
“Two crossed halberds, it looks like, and some squares, unless I’m mistaken,” Elb finally reported.
“What color, the squares?” “Red, my lord.” “Those would be Lord Jarvik’s men, then.
And they’re rhombuses, not squares,” Vance added, for the sake of accuracy.
“You’d know better than I would, my lord,” Elb said.
“What sort of men are they, Lord Vance?” Talon asked.
“Perhaps it’s best we avoid them altogether?
Let them go wherever they’re bound?” “People like any others.
Their Lord Jarvik’s no worse than most.
Sound the peace signal, John,” Vance ordered.
“As you say,” the captain of the guard said, waving a hand.
The bugler raised his horn and blew a long, drawn out note that sent a flock of birds scattering from a nearby stand of birches.
Someone out there had surely heard it.
“They’ve noticed us,” Elb confirmed.
“They’re riding this way.” Whoever commanded the enemy patrol, at least, hadn’t done anything foolish.
Only two riders came forward to meet them; the rest of the company held back, ready for any trick that might be waiting.
Karyl told his men to stay calm.
The wary riders asked their names, whom they represented, and their business on this road.
Once they’d learned what they needed and read over the party’s travel papers, they rode back to report.
Sometime later, once the two groups had properly met, Lord Karyl showed Ser Edwin, who led the other party, Lord Tywin’s own invitation to the capital, delivered to Riverrun by raven not long before.
“We’ll see you the rest of the way,” the knight said firmly, brushing aside any objection.
Karyl didn’t mind in the least; an honored escort only added to their safety and standing.
Ser Edwin rode with them for several days after that.
A small stronghold along the Golden Road passed them off to another company, which carried them further still.
And finally, far ahead, Vance caught his first sight of the proud walls of the Red Keep, rising above the sprawl of King’s Landing spread out beneath it.
com/Hezzario