Chapter 183 The Corridor

Moat Cailin, the northern camp. Lord Alfie Karstark stood on the watchtower of the main keep with his gaze fixed gloomily on the blurred mass of woodland to the north. The spring cold had not let go, and the damp wind coming off the Neck carried the swamp’s smell of rot through his heavy beard. In his fist he held the urgent dispatch Torren Flint had sent overnight from Oath Keep, and beside it on the parapet lay what had come with it: Vale badges, a cipher note, a simplified map, and the written account of Old Weasel’s hunting party.

The dead men in the hollow. The trail pointing at Knifebridge and at White Harbor. And that dotted line on the captured map, running from the Frost Whisper Wood down to a place near Knifebridge. All of it worked in Alfie’s mind like a cold key going into a rusted lock, a suspicion he had carried for months without the evidence to say it aloud: that there was a hole in the North’s defenses wide enough to march through.

“Knifebridge,” he said, chewing the word.

The town sat on the west bank of the White Knife, upriver, at the edge of the deep woods, and it was one of the great transit points between White Harbor and the northern interior, which was to say between the port and everything above Moat Cailin and below the Gift. Goods out of White Harbor could ride the White Knife and its tributaries a good distance, come off the boats at Knifebridge, go onto wagons and pack trains, and travel by any of several old trade roads through the forest, toward Winterfell, toward Moat Cailin, and toward the edge of the Gift.

If Vale soldiers could truly reach the country around Grey Creek Fort unseen, strike it, and then vanish in the direction of Knifebridge on the way out, then the likeliest answer was that they had used exactly that corridor: White Harbor, the White Knife, Knifebridge, the forest track, the Gift. It bypassed the blockade at Moat Cailin entirely. It went around Oath Keep’s watch on the eastern edge of the Gift. And because it began at a legitimate port and used the river for half its length, it was quieter and faster than anything that had to be carried over the mountains from the Bloody Gate.

“Manderly.” Alfie’s face had gone the color of old meat, and his eyes held the particular rage a man feels at betrayal rather than at enmity. “What a loyal House Manderly.”

Karhold lay in the east of the North and had traded with White Harbor for generations. Alfie knew the Manderly style and Lord Wyman’s cleverness the way he knew the smell of his own hall. He had disliked the port’s careful silence after the attack on Grey Creek, and he had disliked those two lukewarm letters more. Now he could say with something close to certainty that Wyman Manderly, whether or not he had put a single hand to the attack, had known about it, and had permitted it, and had very likely made it convenient. That forest path could not have been used so smoothly without help from men who knew the ground and held weight around Knifebridge, which meant minor lords or old families who had sat by that river for generations and did business with White Harbor every month of their lives.

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“To me!” Alfie turned and shouted at the adjutant standing quietly behind him.

“My lord.”

“Call out my household guard, and pick me a hundred of the best mountain men and hunters we have, the ones who know that forest. Light order, three days’ rations, bows, short steel, climbing gear, and every snare and bear trap in the stores.” The light in his eyes had gone wolfish. “We are going to pay a visit to Knifebridge, and have a look at this secret path that certain people have been treating as their own back garden.”

“My lord, Knifebridge lies within House Manderly’s reach. If we take soldiers in without warning, it may cause—”

“Cause what? A protest from the Manderlys? A frown out of King’s Landing?” Alfie’s laugh had no humor in it at all. “The Battanians at Grey Creek found these clues with their own blood. Is House Karstark to stand here and watch while the Vale’s bastards and the Manderlys’ rats work their way around to the back of Moat Cailin and put a knife against its throat? Pass the word: my son Cregan takes the defense of Moat Cailin while I am gone. He holds the pass. Nobody leaves his post without my written order, and no civilian traffic comes south through the Neck without a full search, above all anything out of the direction of White Harbor.

“As for me, I am going to Knifebridge to inspect the border and clear out whatever remnants may be wandering in the woods. And while I am there, I mean to call upon our old friends’ tax collector and their captain of guards, and ask them exactly how they manage a trade road so well that unidentified armed men walk down it in daylight.”

He paused, and the cold in his voice went down another degree.

“And if I find Vale men in Knifebridge, or on that path, or anything solid that shows House Manderly holding hands with the Eyrie, then nobody is to be surprised when this old bone cleans house for the Starks, and for the North. See it done.”

“My lord.” The adjutant, who had been in Alfie’s service long enough to know exactly what he had just heard, did not attempt another word, and went.

Alfie stayed on the tower a while longer, looking north into the grey.

He knew what he was about to do. He was a vassal of Winterfell taking armed men into another great house’s ground without a warrant from anyone, which in a settled realm would have been the beginning of a private war. But the realm was not settled. Winterfell held a Warden of the North who was watched by a royal envoy in his own hall and who had to weigh every step against what King’s Landing might read into it. Jon Snow could not do this. Arthur Greyoak, whatever he might wish, was an outsider in the North, and if the west’s soldiers appeared at a river town in the heart of it, the story would write itself in every hall from Bear Island to the Dreadfort, and the story would be invasion.

But Alfie Karstark was a northman, and Karhold’s grievances against everyone were ancient and well documented, and no one anywhere would find it surprising that he had gone somewhere in a temper. Some work has to be done by a man whose reputation can absorb it.

He came down off the tower to the sound of his household arming in the yard, and the smell of oiled leather and cold iron, and men calling to each other in the accent of the eastern hills. Within the hour a hundred and some odd of them went north out of Moat Cailin at a hard pace, in a loose column, carrying traps.