The Riverlands. Darry. 299 AC.
Axel Arryn.
"What is happening?!" The knights driving the people along ignored the questions, and answered anyone too insistent with a blow.
"Take your hands off me, I am Lord Darry's personal attender!" A man of advanced years tried to object to such insolence and earned a mailed fist to the gut for his trouble. No one here would stand on ceremony with them.
"Mama, will everything be all right?" A child of perhaps seven tried to reach his mother, who trembled with fear. "Mama?!"
"It'll be all right, it'll be all right," the castle cook kept repeating, trying to calm herself as much as the child. Nothing about what was happening could be called a good omen, and the faces of the common folk showed nothing but dread.
Darry, the most important waypoint between the Vale and the Riverlands, was a small place. It could hardly pass for adequate even for some minor lord, let alone a house as old as Darry's. But the greatest disappointment of all was the castle's very heart, its Great Hall. That chamber had always been a measure of a castle's grandeur, and Darry's was a poor showing indeed. It could not even have held the household staff along with a dozen of my knights. A thorough disappointment. Fortunately the godswood, despite the plainly indifferent regard the locals held it in, was large enough to hold everyone I needed. My companion and I, meanwhile, sat in the lord's own chambers, whose window happened to look out over that same seat of the old gods.
"Lord Arryn, what is this outrage happening in my castle? Why are my people being herded into the godswood like curs?!" Raymun Darry demanded, trying to mask his nerves, but seeing that his words moved me not at all, the fox changed his approach. "We had an agreement. I accepted an honorable surrender. You gave me your word that my lands and my people would be kept safe. And what is happening now? Since when has Arryn honor become an empty thing?"
In fairness, Lord Darry was right to be indignant. Honorable surrender was one of the pillars of reason in the wars of Westeros, alongside guest right, the safety of envoys, and a handful of other traditions. His demands would have sounded just, had he not been tangled up in one unpleasant affair against me. I had suspected Raymun Darry of plotting some foolishness, and my little spy Elena Snow had confirmed my suspicion with solid proof. The old lord had been planning to help the river lords take the castle back into the Riverlands' fold.
"My honor is quite intact, which is more than I can say for your intentions, Lord Darry." All the castle's servants had been driven into the godswood; now came the interesting part.
"My intentions are clean. If something displeased you, you might have told me so, rather than staging this... spectacle." Raymun Darry made as if to go settle the matter himself, but who would let him?
"First you will watch this spectacle through to the end, Lord Darry." My tone brooked no argument, and the old lord understood that well enough.
In the godswood, interesting things were unfolding. Ser Laymon stepped forward and spoke of the traitors preparing a mutiny within the castle, and at the end invited them to come forward of their own accord. Naturally, no one did, and Ser Laymon stepped back with a flourish, handing the moment over to Elena Snow.
If there is one thing I respect about the northerners, it is their philosophy of execution: he who passes the sentence swings the sword himself. Simple, harsh, right. I hold to it myself, and see to executions personally now and again. Elena was just such a northerner, clever, cunning in her own moments, but a northerner all the same. She did not refuse to step forward herself and point out the destructive elements. Five jabs of a finger, and amid the crowd's shouting the guardsmen dragged out those who had been preparing the mutiny. Three men and two women. They were quickly subdued and bound to a wooden frame, five thin logs lashed together into something like the skeleton of a lean to shelter. Bound so, they could neither fall nor defend themselves.
I had long noticed a curious twist of the human mind: if the occupiers themselves carry out the punishments and executions, the people's anger turns toward them. Yes, that produces the necessary fear to suppress dangerous thoughts, but sooner or later that fear curdles into savage hatred. People stop caring for their own lives and fight back with more rigor. Everything has its limit of patience; that is only natural. But what happens when it is one of their own who carries out the punishment? He becomes despised, called traitor, worm, and any number of other names, in short, he becomes the focus of his kinsmen's hatred. And if the circumstances allow, that traitor gets a knife in some dark castle corridor before long. So I decided to try something more interesting.
"But do not worry, we understand that none of you are to blame! No punishment will fall on you!" Laymon's words did nothing to lessen the people's fear, but they did plant a small seed of hope. "Yet these people cared nothing for your safety! They meant to bring slaughter into your home! That cannot be forgiven!"
The crowd nodded and voiced hollow agreement with the knight's words, though their eyes told quite another story. My man lacked the oratory skill and talent to turn people who were not strangers to each other against one another with a few words, and his attempts to rouse the crowd came off rather middling.
"They put you all in danger, so you shall be the ones to punish them! By Lord Arryn's order, every rebel here earns one stroke of the switch from each person present." At that the crowd fell silent, for Westeros knew no such thing as a "people's execution."
"Step forward!" But no one wished to. "YOU, step forward!" A young man, quite young, walked stiff legged toward Laymon.
"Strike." The boy did not want to, trembling with fear, trying to force himself to commit the strike or a folly as the boy might call it.
"STRIKE, OR YOU'LL STAND BESIDE HIM!"
A choked sound, and the threat did its work: the first blow landed.
"Harder!" A second blow. "Harder still!" And the last split part of the rebel's back open. "Enough, next."
It took a couple more volunteers, and some pressure on their conscience, before the punishment began moving along more briskly. People wept, cursed the northern witch, begged the gods, the people, their kin for forgiveness, but none of them tried to hold back once their turn came. Watching the first ones, they had understood quickly enough that the blows would keep coming until they struck with their full strength. Five, ten, twenty, forty, seventy people. The first condemned was still alive, but had become little more than a mass of torn flesh; without a healer's care he would not survive. Whatever the outcome, none of the mutineers would live to see morning. The remaining four watched all of it in utter horror. Lord Darry tried to protest such a method of execution, but a single look from me silenced whatever he meant to say. Seeing no reason to think the remaining four executions would differ much from the first, I withdrew with Lord Darry to his chambers.
"And why stage all of that?" he asked wearily.
"I have no love for traitors, and even less love for conspiracies aimed at harming me." Seeing him draw breath to deny the accusations, I cut him off before he could begin. "At this very moment my men are killing a force of six hundred swords to the northwest, and three more bands of a hundred to two hundred men each are next on the list. You hid an armory from me capable of arming more than a hundred men and waited for me to march my whole army on Harrenhal, leaving behind only a token garrison. So spare me the talk of your innocence."
"Ahh..." The old man sighed sadly. "I take no pride in it, but it was necessary. You came onto my land to plunder and kill my people. We had little room to maneuver, and this plan was the most workable one..."
"Yes, the Riverlands' situation is dire." I saw no reason to dress up my enemies' misfortune.
"How will it be done? Beheading, clubbed to death, or simply hanged? Though, having seen what you're capable of, I imagine you have far more interesting ways of killing a man."
"I do. But defending one's homeland is a righteous cause, and I am willing to forgive your transgression for a small favor." I held out a quill, an inkpot, and a sheet of parchment.
"For what?"
"I want the names of the houses that chose to take part in your little scheme." Elena and her birds were a fine thing, but they were not all seeing, and if Darry gave up his allies, I could simply pick them off one by one at my leisure, permanently.
"Ha! Betrayal, how predictable..." Darry rasped. "Do you imagine my life is so precious to me that I'd trade my honor for it? For what, a few more years? I had already made my peace with death when you set your wretched feet in this place."
"Either way I will get what I need. I'm only afraid you won't care for how."
"Torture me all you like, this body won't last long under it." Darry was right about that; he was a middle aged man and old age made the most inconvenient subjects for torture, liable to die from the smallest strain.
"I wasn't speaking of physical torture." A pity his heir was in Riverrun; that would have made fine leverage against the stubborn old man. "You are free to go, Lord Darry. Ser Laymon will see you to your place of confinement."
Raymun Darry would be taken down to a small cell in the lower levels, there to wait while I made my preparations. I had noticed the castle's servants held the man in some regard; I was sure a couple dozen severed heads would loosen his tongue soon enough. All that remained was to wait for word from Jasper and Luceon; Harrenhal, after all, was an important step in my plan to reclaim the wealth of the Rock.
Only the very next day did those plans need a small correction. Lord Darry, confined to a bare cell no more than two meters across, had somehow managed to take poison and died quietly in his sleep. Those who had checked on the lord and his cell were questioned, then flogged for their carelessness. It was an irritating slap in the face, a reminder that things do not always go as we wish. But beyond a flicker of irritation, the matter troubled me no further.
Ten days later, word came from Jasper: Harrenhal had fallen. And another ten days after that, interesting news reached me from the Reach. The war, it seemed, had just grown a little more interesting.
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