Dawn came soon enough after the feast and its lively nocturnal aftermath. I sat in the small but tolerably comfortable solar of Lord Darry, working through a cup of wine and my thoughts. Appointing Redfort as my second served several purposes at once: it would forge a new capable commander for the Vale and build him a reputation in the process; it would keep the Redforts content, since they had covered a substantial share of the costs for their stretch of the road; it would hold the position of second in command against the no less well-born fools who treat bloodline as a measure of competence; and it would leave Eyris, Robar, Desmond, and Morgan back in the Vale. Eyris would certainly keep the Eyrie running properly. Robar would see to the execution of the plan against the mountain clans. Desmond was needed to ensure the reorganization of Gulltown proceeded without friction from the port's old nobility. And dragging a spider far from his web was not the cleverest idea.
The cup was empty and showed no inclination to refill itself. I looked at my cupbearer. Sitting upright, motionless, eyes closed. Asleep.
"Snow!" The girl started awake, took one look at the empty vessel, and filled it immediately. "Thank you."
"May I go to sleep?" There was so much hope in her voice that the sadist within me was delighted.
"Of course not." I had not forgotten the attempt on my life, and had decided to make the girl suffer for it in a modest way.
Breaking people physically is possible, but it is an extraordinarily dull exercise. Psychological torment is something else entirely. From the available and permissible methods I had selected sleep deprivation. Without resorting to magic I need only three or four hours of rest to stay alert; Elena, in this respect, was an ordinary human being who required a full cycle. The punishment was carried out in a fairly mild form: I had simply made her my permanent attendant. In practice she could only sleep at the same time as me, which amounted to three hours at most, in an uncomfortable position. For the rest of the time Snow remained awake, kept so by an internal infusion of energy drawn from the ghost world, which strikes hard at the astral shell and artificially sustains a person's wakefulness. She would not become a ghost, and she would not catch the taint of the other side, but there is little pleasant about it, and after a week of this routine the girl's emotional state had visibly deteriorated.
"Though, you know... I have changed my mind." Her eyes blazed with hope. "If you answer a couple of questions." And went dark again. We both understood she was in no condition to construct a convincing lie at this moment.
"I agree, my lord."
"Splendid." Elena was a decent actress, but right now she could hardly invent a plausible falsehood. "Did you warn Robb Stark?"
"Ah, no! YES! I... I didn't tell him everything..." Clear enough. The questions needed to be simpler and more specific.
"Did you tell him about my hunt for the Lannister gold?" A brief hesitation, then a nod. "About the secret passage into Casterly Rock?" A shake of the head. The red priestess, then. "About the Vale-Dorne-Targaryen alliance?" Another shake of the head, and that was genuinely surprising. "Seriously, why not?"
"What would be the point? They need to take the fortress, and then there will be an alliance, but if there is no fortress, there is no alliance either. And I was afraid you would find out." There were clearly more reasons than she was giving, but the reasoning had a certain logic to it.
"Did you pass your brother some kind of proposal?" A nod. "What proposal?"
"Withdraw to the North, deal with your own problems, recover, and then form an alliance with you." Considering that she lacked any deep understanding of the continental situation, that was not bad reasoning at all.
The North had much to offer me, especially after a vast influx of lion gold into my beloved Vale, and the northern temperament would allow me to lower my general level of suspicion and give me more room to maneuver across Westeros. The North was a good ally. The Tyrells, the Lannisters, the Greyjoys, and the Martells I would never trust with anything of real importance, not by a hair. Waiting constantly for betrayal, for ugly backroom scheming, for poison in the wine cup: that is an underwhelming way to live, and no advantage could compensate for it. With allies of that kind one has no need of enemies. I understood the value of alliances, but at that level of trust I considered them more of an obstacle than any genuine help. If the Stark wished to be my friend, he was welcome to it. If not, I lost nothing.
"Elena?" Silence. Snow was asleep.
I was already reaching out of habit to push the bracing energy into her, and stopped myself. A sense of measure is one of the most essential skills of a competent torturer. Breaking a person physically requires no great intelligence, but a good executioner must feel his victim's limits. He must know when to stop, because if the craftsman overshoots even slightly, the toy breaks. With the body there is at least some common denominator. With the mind everything is individual. Elena had already drawn close to her limit, and if I denied her basic sleep she might lose her mind entirely, which would undermine the whole educational purpose of the exercise.
"Lucky girl," I said to no one in particular. If one has decided to show mercy, one ought to do it properly. The girl was laid on the bed and left to rest. I went to stretch my muscles. I could sustain my physical condition passively through magic, of course, but there is no heroism in training that way.
Two days later an army of fifteen thousand swords marched out to take Harrenhal.
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