A Feast For Crows (69 page)

“You are welcome to try, my lord, but I doubt that words will win the day. We need to storm the castle.”

There had been a time, not so long ago, when Jaime would doubtless have urged the same course. He knew he could not sit here for two years to starve the Blackfish out. “Whatever we do needs to be done quickly,” he told Ser Daven. “My place is back at King’s Landing, with the king.”

“Aye,” his cousin said. “I don’t doubt your sister needs you. Why did she send off Kevan? I thought she’d make him Hand.”

“He would not take it.”
He was not as blind as I was.

“Kevan should be the Warden of the West. Or you. It’s not that I’m not grateful for the honor, mind you, but our uncle’s twice my age and has more experience of command. I hope he knows I never asked for this.”

“He knows.”

“How is Cersei? As beautiful as ever?”

“Radiant.”
Fickle.
“Golden.”
False as fool’s gold.
Last night he dreamed he’d found her fucking Moon Boy. He’d killed the fool and smashed his sister’s teeth to splinters with his golden hand, just as Gregor Clegane had done to poor Pia. In his dreams Jaime always had two hands; one was made of gold, but it worked just like the other. “The sooner we are done with Riverrun, the sooner I’ll be back at Cersei’s side.” What Jaime would do then he did not know.

He talked with his cousin for another hour before the Warden of the West finally took his leave. When he was gone, Jaime donned his gold hand and brown cloak to walk amongst the tents.

If truth be told, he liked this life. He felt more comfortable amongst soldiers in the field than he ever had at court. And his men seemed comfortable with him as well. At one cookfire three crossbowmen offered him a share of a hare they’d caught. At another a young knight asked his counsel on the best way to defend against a warhammer. Down beside the river, he watched two washerwomen jousting in the shallows, mounted on the shoulders of a pair of men-at-arms. The girls were half-drunk and half-naked, laughing and snapping rolled-up cloaks at one another as a dozen other men urged them on. Jaime bet a copper star on the blond girl riding Raff the Sweetling, and lost it when the two of them went down splashing amongst the reeds.

Across the river wolves were howling, and the wind was gusting through a stand of willows, making their branches writhe and whisper. Jaime found Ser Ilyn Payne alone outside his tent, honing his greatsword with a whetstone. “Come,” he said, and the silent knight rose, smiling thinly.
He enjoys this,
he realized.
It pleases him to humiliate me nightly. It might please him even more to kill me.
He liked to believe that he was getting better, but the improvement was slow and not without cost. Underneath his steel and wool and boiled leather Jaime Lannister was a tapestry of cuts and scabs and bruises.

A sentry challenged them as they led their horses from the camp. Jaime clapped the man’s shoulder with his golden hand. “Stay vigilant. There are wolves about.” They rode back along the Red Fork to the ruins of a burned village they had passed that afternoon. It was there they danced their midnight dance, amongst blackened stones and old cold cinders. For a little while Jaime had the better of it. Perhaps his old skill
was
coming back, he allowed himself to think. Perhaps tonight it would be Payne who went to sleep bruised and bloody.

It was as if Ser Ilyn heard his thoughts. He parried Jaime’s last cut lazily and launched a counterattack that drove Jaime back into the river, where his boot slipped out from under him in the mud. He ended on his knees, with the silent knight’s sword at his throat and his own lost in the reeds. In the moonlight the pockmarks on Payne’s face were large as craters. He made that clacking sound that might have been a laugh and drew his sword up Jaime’s throat till the point came to rest between his lips. Only then did he step back and sheathe his steel.

I would have done better to challenge Raff the Sweetling, with a whore upon my back,
Jaime thought as he shook mud off his gilded hand. Part of him wanted to tear the thing off and fling it in the river. It was good for nothing, and the left was not much better. Ser Ilyn had gone back to the horses, leaving him to find his own feet.
At least I still have two of those.

The last day of their journey was cold and gusty. The wind rattled amongst the branches in the bare brown woods and made the river reeds bow low along the Red Fork. Even mantled in the winter wool of the Kingsguard, Jaime could feel the iron teeth of that wind as he rode beside his cousin Daven. It was late afternoon when they sighted Riverrun, rising from the narrow point where the Tumblestone joined the Red Fork. The Tully castle looked like a great stone ship with its prow pointed downriver. Its sandstone walls were drenched in red-gold light, and seemed higher and thicker than Jaime had remembered.
This nut will not crack easily,
he thought gloomily. If the Blackfish would not listen, he would have no choice but to break the vow he’d made to Catelyn Stark. The vow he’d sworn his king came first.

The boom across the river and the three great camps of the besieging army were just as his cousin had described. Ser Ryman Frey’s encampment north of the Tumblestone was the largest, and the most disorderly. A great grey gallows loomed above the tents, as tall as any trebuchet. On it stood a solitary figure with a rope about his neck.
Edmure Tully.
Jaime felt a stab of pity.
To keep him standing there day after day, with that noose around his neck . . . better to have his head off and be done with it.

Behind the gallows, tents and cookfires spread out in ragged disarray. The Frey lordlings and their knights had raised their pavilions comfortably upstream of the latrine trenches; downstream were muddy hovels, wayns, and oxcarts. “Ser Ryman don’t want his boys getting bored, so he gives them whores and cockfights and boar baiting,” Ser Daven said. “He’s even got himself a bloody
singer.
Our aunt brought Whitesmile Wat from Lannisport, if you can believe it, so Ryman had to have a singer too. Couldn’t we just dam the river and drown the whole lot of them, coz?”

Jaime could see archers moving behind the merlons on the castle ramparts. Above them streamed the banners of House Tully, the silver trout defiant on its striped field of red and blue. But the highest tower flew a different flag; a long white standard emblazoned with the direwolf of Stark. “The first time I saw Riverrun, I was a squire green as summer grass,” Jaime told his cousin. “Old Sumner Crakehall sent me to deliver a message, one he swore could not be entrusted to a raven. Lord Hoster kept me for a fortnight whilst mulling his reply, and sat me beside his daughter Lysa at every meal.”

“Small wonder you took the white. I’d have done the same.”

“Oh, Lysa was not so fearsome as all that.” She had been a pretty girl, in truth; dimpled and delicate, with long auburn hair.
Timid, though. Prone to tongue-tied silences and fits of giggles, with none of Cersei’s fire.
Her older sister had seemed more interesting, though Catelyn was promised to some northern boy, the heir of Winterfell . . . but at that age, no girl interested Jaime half so much as Hoster’s famous brother, who had won renown fighting the Ninepenny Kings upon the Stepstones. At table he had ignored poor Lysa, whilst pressing Brynden Tully for tales of Maelys the Monstrous and the Ebon Prince.
Ser Brynden was younger then than I am now,
Jaime reflected,
and I was younger than Peck.

The nearest ford across the Red Fork was upstream of the castle. To reach Ser Daven’s camp they had to ride through Emmon Frey’s, past the pavilions of the river lords who had bent their knees and been accepted back into the king’s peace. Jaime noted the banners of Lychester and Vance, of Roote and Goodbrook, the acorns of House Smallford and Lord Piper’s dancing maiden, but the banners he did
not
see gave him pause. The silver eagle of Mallister was nowhere in evidence; nor the red horse of Bracken, the willow of the Rygers, the twining snakes of Paege. Though all had renewed their fealty to the Iron Throne, none had come to join the siege. The Brackens were fighting the Blackwoods, Jaime knew, which accounted for their absence, but as for the rest . . .

Our new friends are no friends at all. Their loyalty goes no deeper than their skins.
Riverrun had to be taken, and soon. The longer the siege dragged on, the more it would hearten other recalcitrants, like Tytos Blackwood.

At the ford, Ser Kennos of Kayce blew the Horn of Herrock.
That should bring the Blackfish to the battlements.
Ser Hugo and Ser Dermot led Jaime’s way across the river, splashing through the muddy red-brown waters with the white standard of the Kingsguard and Tommen’s stag and lion streaming in the wind. The rest of the column followed hard behind them.

The Lannister camp rang to the sound of wooden hammers where a new siege tower was rising. Two other towers stood completed, half-covered with raw horsehide. Between them sat a rolling ram; a tree trunk with a fire-hardened point suspended on chains beneath a wooden roof.
My coz has not been idle, it would seem.

“My lord,” Peck asked, “where do you want your tent?”

“There, upon that rise.” He pointed with his golden hand, though it was not well suited to that task. “Baggage there, horse lines there. We’ll use the latrines my cousin has so kindly dug for us. Ser Addam, inspect our perimeter with an eye for any weaknesses.” Jaime did not anticipate an attack, but he had not anticipated the Whispering Wood either.

“Shall I summon the stoats for a war council?” Daven asked.

“Not until I’ve spoken to the Blackfish.” Jaime beckoned to Beardless Jon Bettley. “Shake out a peace banner and bear a message to the castle. Inform Ser Brynden Tully that I would have words with him, at first light on the morrow. I will come to the edge of the moat and meet him on his drawbridge.”

Peck looked alarmed. “My lord, the bowmen could . . .”

“They won’t.” Jaime dismounted. “Raise my tent and plant my standards.”
And we’ll see who comes running, and how quickly.

It did not require long. Pia was fussing at a brazier, trying to light the coals. Peck went to help her. Of late, Jaime oft went to sleep to the sound of them fucking in a corner of the tent. As Garrett was undoing the clasps on Jaime’s greaves, the tent flapped open. “Here at last, are you?” boomed his aunt. She filled the door, with her Frey husband peering out from behind her. “Past time. Have you no hug for your old fat aunt?” She held out her arms and left him no choice but to embrace her.

Genna Lannister had been a shapely woman in her youth, always threatening to overflow her bodice. Now the only shape she had was square. Her face was broad and smooth, her neck a thick pink pillar, her bosom enormous. She carried enough flesh to make two of her husband. Jaime hugged her dutifully and waited for her to pinch his ear. She had been pinching his ear for as long as he could remember, but today she forbore. Instead, she planted soft and sloppy kisses on his cheeks. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“I had a new hand made, of gold.” He showed her.

“Very nice. Will they make you a gold father too?” Lady Genna’s voice was sharp. “Tywin was the loss I meant.”

“A man such as Tywin Lannister comes but once in a thousand years,” declared her husband. Emmon Frey was a fretful man with nervous hands. He might have weighed ten stone . . . but only wet, and clad in mail. He was a weed in wool, with no chin to speak of, a flaw that the prominence of the apple in his throat made even more absurd. Half his hair had been gone before he turned thirty. Now he was sixty and only a few white wisps remained.

“Some queer tales have been reaching us of late,” Lady Genna said, after Jaime dismissed Pia and his squires. “A woman hardly knows what to believe. Can it be true that Tyrion slew Tywin? Or is that some calumny your sister put about?”

“It’s true enough.” The weight of his golden hand had grown irksome. He fumbled at the straps that secured it to his wrist.

“For a son to raise his hand against a father,” Ser Emmon said. “Monstrous. These are dark days in Westeros. I fear for us all with Lord Tywin gone.”

“You feared for us all when he was here.” Genna settled her ample rump upon a camp stool, which creaked alarmingly beneath her weight. “Nephew, speak to us of our son Cleos and the manner of his death.”

Jaime undid the last fastening and set his hand aside. “We were set upon by outlaws. Ser Cleos scattered them, but it cost his life.” The lie came easy; he could see that it pleased them.

“The boy had courage, I always said so. It was in his blood.” A pinkish froth glistened on Ser Emmon’s lips when he spoke, courtesy of the sourleaf he liked to chew.

“His bones should be interred beneath the Rock, in the Hall of Heroes,” Lady Genna declared. “Where was he laid to rest?”

Nowhere. The Bloody Mummers stripped his corpse and left his flesh to feast the carrion crows.
“Beside a stream,” he lied. “When this war is done, I will find the place and send him home.” Bones were bones; these days, nothing was easier to come by.

“This war . . .” Lord Emmon cleared his throat, the apple in his throat moving up and down. “You will have seen the siege machines. Rams, trebuchets, towers. It will not serve, Jaime. Daven means to break my walls, smash in my gates. He talks of burning pitch, of setting the castle afire.
My
castle.” He reached up one sleeve, brought out a parchment, and thrust it at Jaime’s face. “I have the decree. Signed by the king, by Tommen, see, the royal seal, the stag and lion. I am the lawful lord of Riverrun, and I will not have it reduced to a smoking ruin.”

“Oh, put that fool thing away,” his wife snapped. “So long as the Blackfish sits inside Riverrun you can wipe your arse with that paper for all the good it does us.” Though she had been a Frey for fifty years, Lady Genna remained very much a Lannister.
Quite a lot of Lannister.
“Jaime will deliver you the castle.”

“To be sure,” Lord Emmon said. “Ser Jaime, your lord father’s faith in me was well placed, you shall see. I mean to be firm but fair with my new vassals. Blackwood and Bracken, Jason Mallister, Vance and Piper, they shall learn that they have a just overlord in Emmon Frey. My father as well, yes. He is the Lord of the Crossing, but
I
am the Lord of Riverrun. A son has a duty to obey his father, true, but a bannerman must obey his overlord.”