Chapter 177: An Eye for an Eye

It was a warning, and a hand of cards laid face up, and an attempt to bind the west and the Trident more tightly to Jon than either had yet been bound. With White Harbor possibly leaning toward the Vale, or at best hedging, Arthur could not let his Warden of the North collapse; and if the man was to lean on anything, better it be the Moat Cailin and Grey Creek lifeline than a harbor whose loyalty had a price list.

Arthur let the letter lie where it was and turned his gaze back across the map to the Vale, and to the mountains behind it. “Petyr dares to infiltrate on this scale, which means he believes we cannot answer, or that our answer will not matter to him. He is going to learn what the price is.”

He began to give the orders, and Alwin’s pen went with them.

“To Torren at Oath Keep. While he consolidates the defense of Grey Creek and cleans out the unstable elements inside it, he is to draw off the best he has, the veteran Battanian skirmishers, the riders, and the Fian champions, and form them into hunting parties. Their task is simple, and it is an eye for an eye. They go deep into the Gift and into the mountain country along the Vale’s border, and they search out and destroy every Vale infiltrator, scout, and supply party they can find. And the wildling chiefs who have gone into business with the Vale, Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye first among them, are on the same list. The work is covert, it is vicious, and it leaves no one standing to describe it. Let the heads of Vale soldiers and of traitors build a new wall in the snow of the Gift, and let every man who passes it read what it says. And where they can take a senior Vale officer or an envoy alive, they take him: I want hard evidence of the infiltration network, and of whatever thread ties it to White Harbor.”

“To Alfie at Moat Cailin. He tightens the blockade, and at the same time he sends picked scouts the other way, dressed as merchants and refugees, into the country the Vale controls south of the Bloody Gate. I want their assembly areas, their supply stockpiles, and above all their secret channels of communication with White Harbor. Small acts of sabotage and harassment are permitted where the opportunity is clean, but caution comes first: I would rather have the map than the noise.”

“To Kator at Harrenhal. He raises the military pressure on the Bloody Gate. Frequent, large, visible exercises with live steel, in the posture of a force that could march south into the Vale on any morning it chooses. And he sends envoys to pester the Vale’s border officers continually, negotiating trade disputes, protesting cross-border attacks, whatever pretext will keep a man arguing at a gate for a full day. I want their attention nailed to their southern door so that they cannot give the North their whole face.”

“And finally,” and the cold light came back into his eyes, “an addition to Lord Jason’s orders. While he goes on intercepting suspicious hulls out of the east, he detaches a few of his fastest ships, dressed as traders or as pirates, to work the open water off White Harbor and the coast nearby. Every ship in and out is recorded, above all the ones that come or go at hours no honest cargo keeps. If it is established that ships leaving White Harbor are steering for the Vale’s coast, or for any of the private harbors we know of, Lord Jason is authorized to stop them, to search them, or to sink them, on the open sea and well out of sight of White Harbor’s towers. Dressed, as before, as a pirate’s work, or as bad luck.”

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The orders came down one after another like a surgeon’s instruments laid out in order: plug the fissure, punish the provocation, apply pressure, and take the evidence. Arthur meant to answer the Vale’s infiltration in the hardest and most direct way available to him, to knock hard on White Harbor’s door while he did it, and to push the war in the North further into the shape it had been taking for a year now, a war of proxies and disguises where the uniforms told you nothing. He wanted Petyr to understand that provocation would be paid for in blood, and paid for again, and again. And he wanted Lord Wyman Manderly, and every other power watching from the shadows, to see clearly what it might cost to choose the wrong side, or to try to stand on both of them, in the last flames of winter.

Alwin wrote furiously, setting down each murderous instruction in its turn. He could feel the change under them. With this one possible fissure at White Harbor, the lord’s strategy had shifted from the relatively conservative work of defending and holding to something else: counterattack, and deterrence, and the deliberate manufacture of fear. The ice fields of the North were going to take on more blood. And the storm across the whole continent would grow more violent for it, and less predictable.

When the last order was down, Arthur looked once more at the vast, troubled North on the map, and his gaze stayed there a long moment.

The fissure had opened, and the storm was closer. But the sword was already out of the sheath. What remained was to see whether the Vale’s fangs would close on the North’s throat first, or whether he, the griffin out of the southwest, could find the snake’s seven inches in the frozen ground and tear them open, and cut for that faint fire of rebirth a narrow road to live on.

He turned to the window and the leaden sky beyond it, and it seemed to him that he could hear, mixed into the wind and the coming snow, the ring of steel and the sound of men whispering plans in rooms very far to the north.

“The last flames of winter,” he said to himself. “Since they are going to burn regardless, let them start by consuming betrayal and conspiracy.”

Far to the north, in the New Soil country, the orders would arrive within the week, and the hunting parties would go out into the Gift under a sky the color of old iron, and the wall of heads Arthur had described would begin, one at a time, to be built. Farther north still, at Winterfell, a letter carried overland through Moat Cailin would be read twice by a man with a great deal to lose and very little to lose it with, and then burned. And at White Harbor, in a warm room above a cold sea, an old man who had spent forty years being underestimated would continue, for a while yet, to be very careful about which of his visitors were shown to which door.

The board had not changed its pieces. It had only stopped pretending that any of them were still where they appeared to be, or that the men moving them were the men whose banners flew above the moves.