Riverlands. Harrenhal.
Axel Arryn.
If Harren the Black had ever given his towers names of his own, those names had long since been forgotten. Nowadays they were known as the Tower of Dread, the Widow's Tower, the Wailing Tower, the Ghost Tower, and the Kingspyre. The names alone showed how little optimism the locals held for the castle, though it was hard to blame such superstitious people. They had good reason enough, after all.
Harrenhal reminded me strongly of Dol Guldur, the same vast, half ruined fortress wrapped in the same brooding air. Though the source of the dark energy in each place differed. Where the Hill of Sorcery had been forcibly cursed through dark rituals, Harrenhal was a mass grave for the entire Hoare line. I had long known that a powerful magic ran through the descendants of Planetos's great houses, and that the older and mightier the line, the stronger the sorcery tended to be. The Hoares had stood out even among their fellow kings, and Harrenhal was proof of it. Three hundred years had passed since the burning, and yet a thin film of dark energy still clung to the castle's walls: nothing serious, at most a faint mental pressure on the weak minded.
But it was not Harrenhal's magic that held my interest just then, but unwelcome news from the south of the realm. In the Kingspyre, the tallest and most imposing of the castle's towers, in a spacious chamber, two of us sat: myself and Ser Jasper Redfort.
"The Tyrells are a problem," Jasper said, studying the map.
"Tell me when they haven't been." Redfort opened his mouth to answer, then thought better of it and fell silent. War or peace, the Roses always managed to cause trouble. "But you're not wrong."
The river lords were whores, and that was simple fact. The moment those sheep lost their king, they wasted no time hunting for a new shepherd to save their lands from being plundered by all comers. Their choices, frankly, had been slim, so a month ago a delegation from the Riverlands had arrived at Renly's court and sworn him their fealty. Baratheon had received them warmly enough, but from what I understood, he kept them well clear of anything that actually mattered; everything of consequence had already been divided up between the Reach and the Stormlands.
The war in Westeros had struck no region harder than the Riverlands. Manpower, raw resources, food, reputation, whatever measure one chose, the lords of the rivers and lakes were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Frankly, aside from the Rock's gold, the central region had nothing left to boast of and precious little it could offer its new king in the way of real help. Given all that, I had expected the Riverlands to settle into the role of some unwanted, unloved appendage. The Dothraki were close, the Lannisters threatened the capital, the Greyjoys were raiding the coast, Renly's forces had no shortage of fires to put out, and yet it seemed the victory at Nightsong had gone to their heads.
"Do we attack?" A perfectly reasonable question followed.
"We need a month at the least to bring Harrenhal up to a proper standard." I don't know who devised this particular scheme, but for every move there's a countermove.
Once Harrenhal fell, the plan had called for moving straight into a large scale campaign to strip the river lords of their gold. The venture promised to be highly profitable; they had plenty of money and precious few professional soldiers to guard it. By rough estimate, my forces could besiege up to five middling castles or three large ones at once. At that pace, taking half the Riverlands would have been achievable in three to four months.
A good plan, but then an army of fifteen thousand swords under the Tyrell heir intervened. However one looked at it, fifteen thousand men was an enormous number. Willas Tyrell had made camp at the crossing point of the Reach, the Riverlands, and the Crownlands. Not long after, a letter arrived from Renly, in which he demanded, in no uncertain terms, that I refrain from attacking the king's subjects, join him instead, and "put an end to the madness in Westeros." The most amusing part, to my mind, was his promise of a royal marriage between our children. The sword swallower was promising a match between two people who did not yet exist...
Renly's actions made his intentions plain enough: he had no wish to let me take all that gold for myself. If I meant to see my plan through, I could not afford to lose Harrenhal, which made that southern army a fairly weighty argument indeed. With one simple move, he had created a threat meant to keep me from focusing entirely on the gold.
"If we march on the Tyrell boy, we win, but the cost will be steep." No one doubted the outcome of the battle itself; war, though, is only half the matter. Only those who keep their army intact after the slaughter get to dictate terms to everyone else.
"Somewhere around almost a half of our forces, depending on how well dug in they are." I was taking the most pessimistic estimate.
"Wait, then, until the threat of the Dothraki forces Tyrell to withdraw?"
"That will take time." Jasper's expression showed skepticism; he hadn't quite grasped the heart of the matter. "However hard we try, with every passing day the flow of gold scatters further in every direction, and at some point our whole enterprise stops being worth the effort."
"You're saying the longer we wait, the smaller our take becomes?"
"Yes." Jasper was no fool; give him a nudge and he'd work the rest out himself. "In another four or five months we'll start running into supply problems of our own."
The Vale's stores of resources were vast; if it came to it, we could keep fighting for two or three years. The real trouble lay in getting those resources into the Riverlands. And where everything tied to the war itself was more or less manageable, hard times with food were coming soon enough. An army of twenty thousand devoured a staggering amount of food, and I had no way of replenishing supplies at anyone else's expense. The trouble wasn't some newfound sense of charity on my part; my foragers were stripping the peasantry down to the last grain of wheat as thoroughly as ever. It was the state of the region itself. I held to the principle that an army ought to be fed off the enemy's land, but there was the rub: the Riverlands lay in ruins, and food was already scarce there. That was one of the reasons I had no wish to drag this campaign out.
"Wait until we've fortified Harrenhal?" If the castle held strong, we could spare more men for taking others. Jasper's face soured at the suggestion, and I understood why.
"Wars aren't won by armies on the battlefield alone. Sometimes one small scrap of paper accomplishes more than a thousand men." I drew out a blank sheet and ink, for effect.
"And that's meant to be such a scrap of paper?" A small nod. "What will it say, then?"
"The Vale finds itself in a rather interesting position on the board just now. We have no clear allies, and no clear enemies. We're free to bargain with everyone against everyone. Time to make use of that, especially where our interests line up." A moment later understanding crossed Jasper's face, followed by distaste.
"The Lannisters." Just as I'd thought, Jasper was no fool. He only needed the occasional nudge in the right direction.
"Precisely..."
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