The Witch-King of the Vale [GoT x LotR]

The Vale. The Eyrie. 299 AC.

Lord Axel Arryn.

Fifteen thousand fully equipped swords. A serious force, though only against the backdrop of a weakened Westeros. In better times the Vale could field up to forty thousand men and sustain a campaign for a long stretch. I could raise such an army, but it would take time and lie heavy on the region. We settled on twenty-five thousand: fifteen in the first fortnight, the remainder after another three weeks.

To prevent my lords from tearing each other apart over the gold, a system of proportional contribution was adopted. The principle was simple: the greater the contribution, the greater the share. But how to determine the degree of contribution, given that every man would consider himself personally responsible for taking each fortress? That would be the commander's job. That is to say, mine.

The work might seem thankless and even fraught, but we high lords had agreed in advance on who would receive what, measured against the precise number of soldiers each brought. We also discussed certain monetary reserves for the contingency of hiring sellswords and hedge knights, and settled a few smaller matters besides.

Tomorrow I would meet separately with Robar, Eyris, Jasper Redfort, Gilwood Hunter, and Symond Templeton to work out a more detailed plan, but that was no obstacle to standing over the map now with a glass of wine and sketching our opening moves. After a full bottle, it became rather necessary to abandon the exercise.

"The wine is dreadful tonight," I said, without looking up from the map, addressing the only other person in the room. "Perhaps the owl's weakness has spoiled the taste?"

What followed was entirely predictable. Elena Snow tried to knife me. I caught her right hand with the blade a few inches from my chest and deflected her weak left hook. I was already moving to neutralize the impulsive girl when my ears caught the sound of beating wings. Pure reflex was all that let me snatch the suicidal raven out of the air. One brief look at Snow told me everything: she had entered the bird and meant to drive its beak through my throat. Clever. Elena was learning. She had even mastered multi-stage plans.

One motion snapped the raven's neck. Snow took the mental recoil of its death. Marking a lady's face is unworthy of any lord who respects himself, so I drove a knee into her stomach instead. Not hard, but sobering. Between the mental shock and the physical blow, Snow crumpled to the floor in a daze. To her credit, she did not lose consciousness, and even tried to get back up.

"Well now." I examined the knife and could not help but feel a certain admiration. "Seriously? You even coated it in poison."

Honestly, I was impressed. The owl's weakness was a liquid sedative, colorless and odorless, which should have blunted my reaction speed. After that she would have used her talent to send the raven at me, and finished with the poisoned blade. I could not identify the poison on the knife, the possibilities were too numerous, but it was plainly not harmless. This had been a well-planned assassination attempt, and quite good for a girl of sixteen.

"Tell me the reasons behind such recklessness, I might even say desperate, actions." The answer was only a scorching look. "No, I understand the general direction of your thinking, but I would like to hear your version of events."

"...Traitor... Father trusted you... Called you a friend, as you called him..." Elena forced the words out.

"Unlike Ned, I did not betray him. I did not support a man who sought to overthrow me."

"Then why did you call my father your friend?"

Pff. Snow does have a gift for questions. Despite the surface resemblances, the Númenórean mind differs profoundly from the Westerosi one. What the people of this world regard as taboo and betrayal a Númenórean takes as the natural order of things. The island of Númenor had twenty-two rulers: twenty-two kings and three queens. We were all kinsmen, yet that had never stopped us from cutting each other's throats for the right to hold the Sceptre of Númenor, the symbol of royal power over all the Dúnedain. Enemies became friends, loyal companions became implacable enemies, alliances were built and shattered, open and secret struggle never stopped for a moment. Even the fragments of my first life as a king after the destruction of Númenor showed me that I had personally separated at least a dozen relatives from their heads. I therefore carried no particular reverence for killing kin, or for marriage alliances.

Ned, for all his choices, had never moved openly against me. He had taken a neutral position, even with blood relations on the other side of the scales. Of course I would have preferred Stark to stand with me, but the fact that a man who placed enormous weight on family had declined to stand with his own family pointed in a certain direction. The way I read it: Ned had placed our awkward friendship roughly level with his kinsmen, and so had been unable to choose a side. That, at least, was how I understood it.

All of this I tried to explain to the now subdued Elena, and received in return a look I could not entirely decode. Fifteen minutes later we were seated at the table with wine moving slowly between us. Snow was thinking hard about something. I returned to my original business and went on laying out the plan for the coming campaign.

"You want to seize tons of gold from the river lords, whom you dislike. That part I can follow. But what about my brother? I doubt he will simply watch while you plunder his mother's lands," Snow reasoned.

"You are clever, rather more clever than you think," I offered her a deserved compliment. Over the course of our acquaintance I had noticed that Elena was self-conscious about her bastard status and had a habit of diminishing herself without realizing it. "Let me put it this way: I doubt I will meet the northerners on the field of battle."

The reasoning was straightforward enough, but one needed the full picture of what was happening across the continent. The river lords had wanted no part of this war under any terms, yet because Ned had backed Stannis, the Tullys had followed. Tywin had reasoned soundly that if the lords of the Riverlands had sworn to the elder Baratheon, then they were enemies to be destroyed quickly, and the Old Lion had set about doing exactly that. The river lords had watched the havoc the lions were wreaking and united against the common enemy. A little over a year of fighting, and the Riverlands were clear, while Stannis's forces had pushed into a counteroffensive in the Westerlands. But the lords had not forgotten who had drawn them into the war, and preferred to guard their own borders rather than march west.

It also bore remembering that in every age they had been the most reliably aggrieved faction on the continent when it came to picking sides in any conflict. So the question was: what would those aggrieved lords, who had never wanted this war to begin with, do when a shattered northern army arrived at their doorstep carrying millions in gold dragons? My calculation was that at minimum they would help themselves to a large share of the total, and at maximum they would drive matters to bloodshed in the attempt to take all of it. And to the northerners' misfortune, Edmure Tully did not possess the qualities needed to rein in vassals who had grown bold. The river lords' motivation was simple: take their reward, swear to Renly, finish off the lions, and live comfortably.

It would be satisfying to spoil their perfect little plan.

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