Chapter 182 A Warning Written in Blood

The arrow came out of the canopy with a shriek and took him through the throat.

The impatience froze on his face. He opened his mouth and produced a thin wheezing sound, hands going uselessly to his neck, and went over backward into the fire’s edge.

“Attack!” Another Vale man reacted fast, roaring it while he hauled his round shield off the ground. Before the word was finished, more shafts came in from three different angles, and every one of them was meant for a Vale soldier. Three went down in that breath. Two were badly hurt. One was dead before he landed.

“The trees! Archers in the trees!” the survivors shouted, pointing up.

And in the moment that every eye in the camp went to the canopy, the real blow arrived.

“For Grey Creek! Kill them!”

Old Weasel’s roar came from behind them like something the rock itself had said, and eight Battanian bannermen came out of the shadow at the camp’s back and went straight into it. They carried no long weapons at all. Hand axes, hunting knives, blowpipes, and hand crossbows loaded with paralytic, and they moved fast and together and with the economy of men who did this for a living.

A Vale soldier got his short spear up and had his shoulder opened by an axe that came from the side; he went down screaming. Another tried to form a line and was punched full of bolts from six feet away. The turned free folk came apart faster: they were not soldiers, and under a night ambush half of them wanted to fight and half wanted to run, and they collided with each other in the firelight and made the ruin worse.

Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye were savage men and they tried. Bone-Breaker swung his stone axe at a Battanian who simply was not there when it arrived, and took the man’s blade backhanded into his belly; his guts came out into his own hands and he went down shrieking loud enough to be heard on the ridge. Rat-Eye was quicker in the head, saw where it was going, and bolted for the dark, and a Fian in the tree put an arrow through his calf and dropped him twenty feet from the edge of the firelight.

The whole of it, if the word battle applies, was over very quickly.

All eight Vale soldiers were dead, three of them cut down or shot while trying to break out. Of the fifteen turned free folk, everyone was dead but Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye, who were badly wounded and taken. The hunting party had two men with cuts not worth the name.

The stink in the hollow was thick enough to close a throat. Firelight moved on bodies and on blood that had not finished running.

Old Weasel walked over to Bone-Breaker, who was dying and taking his time about it, squatted, and patted the man’s face with the flat of a bloody axe. “Bone-Breaker. What did the Vale give you, to turn on your own people and put a knife in Grey Creek’s back?”

Blood kept coming out of the wound in his belly. His face had gone the color of paper and his eyes held terror and hatred in roughly equal measure. He opened his mouth and produced a wet sound with foam in it and nothing else.

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“No? A shame.” Old Weasel gestured, and one of his men, who had been going through Rat-Eye, came over with what he had found: several small leather pouches and a crude iron badge stamped with a simplified mockingbird.

Inside the pouches were silver coins, salt, and a small packet of pungent black compound wrapped in oiled paper. Old Weasel opened the packet, sniffed it, and his expression changed slightly.

“Fire compound. And the Vale’s token.” He turned the badge over in his fingers. “So you were not only carrying messages and walking them through the hills. You were meant to start fires as well.”

He went to the Vale squad leader’s body and searched it properly. In the lining of the man’s leather he found a simplified map on paper treated with grease against water, and a small roll of paper written in cipher. The map marked several points: this hollow, the approximate bearing of Grey Creek Fort, and a dotted line running from the Frost Whisper Wood to somewhere near Knifebridge.

The cipher he could not break standing in a wood in the dark, but several symbols repeated often enough to guess at, and they seemed to mean White Harbor, and rendezvous, and next time.

“Keep the map and the note. They go back to Lord Torren with the badge and the compound.” He straightened and looked at what was left of Bone-Breaker, and at Rat-Eye shivering on the ground with an arrow through his leg.

“Boss. These two?”

Old Weasel let his gaze travel over the dead Vale soldiers, and then over the dead free folk, and then back down.

“Lord Torren said the bloodiest and most frightening method there is.” There was no feeling of any kind in his voice. “The Vale men go on the dead tree at the mouth of the hollow, where the track comes in. Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye liked guiding Vale men through this country. Cut the tendons and hang them beside their friends. And write on the rock underneath, in what comes to hand: Traitors and invaders end here. The Gift is a hunting ground. Trespassers die.”

It was done without hesitation and without discussion. Before full dark, eight heads were strung on a leather cord and hung from the jutting branch of a dead tree at the entrance to the hollow, turning slightly in the evening wind. Beneath them, what remained of Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye hung like two pieces of spoiled meat, making a faint sound that was no longer entirely human.

Then the hunting party swept its own tracks, took what it had seized, and went out of the Frost Whisper Wood into the thickening dusk as quietly as it had come, leaving behind a camp that smelled of blood and death and a warning on a tree that would raise the hair on the neck of the first man to come up that track.

The night wind keened and carried the smell of it into the depths of the Gift, toward the free folk camps, and toward everyone else still working in the dark out there, the Vale’s people and the men with their own reasons among them. The rules of the Gift’s hunting ground had been written into the ground in the most direct and barbarous hand available, and this was only the opening of Arthur’s answer, which would set off, in that already unsteady country, a chain of consequences no one had finished counting.

When Torren saw the map, the note, and the Vale badge that Old Weasel put on his table, his face went as dark as standing water.

The dotted line toward Knifebridge agreed, near enough, with the bearing the enemy had taken away from Grey Creek Fort. And the repeated symbols on the cipher, White Harbor and rendezvous, put a second nail through the same board.

“White Harbor,” Torren said, and closed his fist, and the cold in his eyes was of a particular kind. “So the fat whale of House Manderly does not intend to stay on the shore after all.”

He put the intelligence into cipher that same night and sent it by the fastest secure hand to Alfie at Moat Cailin and to Arthur at Casterly Rock. The hunt in the Gift had taken hold of the tail of the Vale’s infiltration network, and the tail was pointing at a rift in White Harbor.

What remained was to follow the bloody thread, trace the vine back to the melon, and find out where in that harbor the snake’s seven inches were hidden, and what the whole of it connected to in the Eyrie.

Winter’s last flame had lit its first genuinely meaningful fire in the frozen ground and the forests of the North, and the fuel of it was the blood of traitors and invaders.