Chapter 135: The Griffin’s Fangs

The failure at Golden Ear Valley did not teach the Queen of Thorns caution. It taught her arithmetic. Olenna Tyrell had spent a lifetime counting what things cost, and the sum she now read on her maps was simple enough to frighten her: if Arthur Greyoak finished digesting the Riverlands, the Westerlands and the Trident would become one body, with more people, more coin, more depth, and more soldiers than the Westerlands had ever fielded alone. Advancing, that body could threaten the north of the Reach, or close one jaw of a pincer with Dragonstone if Daenerys prevailed. Retreating, it could sit behind its rivers and mountains and let every Reach blockade rot at anchor. The Reach would wake one morning and find itself no longer the great power that pressed, but the worried neighbor that guarded. For a realm built on grain, trade, and the comfortable certainty of being richer than everyone else, that was not a setback. It was ruin arriving politely.

So Olenna stopped playing at border lessons. Her new goal was plain and expensive: strike while Arthur’s footing in the Riverlands was still wet, break the living strength of the Westerlands on the field, and, if the gods were feeling generous, claw back the border lands or force him to spit out part of the Trident and shrink back into something the Reach could tolerate. The war machine of Highgarden began to turn with an efficiency it had not shown in a generation. Vassal hosts were called up. Mercenaries were hired. Armories were opened and granaries emptied, wealth becoming spears at a rate only the Reach could afford.

Randyll Tarly’s name had lost some polish at Golden Ear Valley, but no one in the Reach questioned what he could do with an army, so overall command of the front stayed in his hands. It stayed there with company. Several supervisors from Highgarden and young scions of House Tyrell now rode at his side, sent to share the glory, divide the authority, and remind the old huntsman whose war he was fighting. Randyll endured them the way he endured weather.

The offensive, when it came, no longer battered a single gate. From Pheasant Hall the front stretched east along the border all the way to Cornhall, a line of hundreds of miles across the richest country the two realms shared. Taking it would gut the Westerlands’ economy and lay a blade against the flank of Casterly Rock, and Tarly massed his main strength there, more than sixty thousand men divided into several armies. He no longer insisted on storming Pheasant Hall head-on. His columns probed at many points along the long defensive line, hunting for the weak seam that would let them through, and his siege engines, horse, archers, and foot worked together with a practiced smoothness that had been absent in the spring. The attacks came in waves, and the waves did not stop.

The second axis ran between Silverhill and Deep Den, where the ground was rough, the castles steep, and the mines and smelters of the Westerlands did their quiet work. There the Reach sent small, elite bands skilled in mountain war, guided by remnants of the old nobility whose loyalty to the new order had never survived contact with their pride. They slipped through the hills to burn workshops, strike at mine heads and trade roads, and spread the kind of fear that makes a ruler scatter his soldiers into a hundred garrisons. Even deeper in the hinterland, in country that had been thought safe, raiders appeared, harassed, feinted, and vanished.

And at sea, the Arbor came back. Lord Redwyne had learned his lesson in the strait and did not offer the allied fleet a second great battle. Instead he spent his advantage in hulls the way a wise man spends interest instead of capital. Fast sails and galleys fell upon fishing villages, small towns, and undefended harbors along the western coast, burning boats and lifting stores, seeding panic along a hundred miles of shore. The main fleet stayed in open water and closed its hand around the mouth of Lannisport and the seaway from Seagard to the Riverlands, meaning to cut the grain and goods that moved along the coast and starve the new realm of its own bloodstream.

For a time the Westerlands and Riverlands seemed to burn at every edge at once. On land, the long border cried emergency from a dozen places. At sea, the lifeline was under a knife. In the rear, sparks of unrest glowed where old loyalties had only been covered, not killed.

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At Casterly Rock the reports flew into Arthur’s study like snow. Steward Alwin’s face had gone pale with the reading of them, and the dispatches from Diana at Pheasant Hall and from Smith of the Bannermen Guard grew harder in tone with every day. The scale of it, the breadth and the spending and the will behind it, exceeded what Arthur had judged the Reach ready to pay.

He did not panic. Fierce as it was, the offensive still obeyed the one law he had expected of it: the Reach had to interrupt the integration of the west, or accept a future in which it could not. What was being tested now was not his cleverness. It was the endurance of a realm stitched together in a single year, and the decisiveness of the man who had stitched it.

Arthur stood before the great map and let his eyes move like a hawk’s over every marker flagged under attack or in danger, weighing each place for what it would cost to hold and what it would cost to lose.

“I cannot stand on the defensive and feed men to every point,” he said at last, and his finger came down hard on the long line from Pheasant Hall to Cornhall. “This is where the Reach has put its strength and its intention. This is where the war is decided. Silverhill and Deep Den are feint and harassment. At sea, Lord Jason can hold for now, but he must be reinforced, enough at least to keep the water between Lannisport and the Riverlands open.”

He turned to the men who had been summoned in haste and stood waiting: Steward Alwin, and the commanders recalled from their posts, Lord Gawen Westerling come down from the Crag, Ser Rhaegar Spicer ridden in from the Golden Tooth.

“Ser Rhaegar Spicer.”

“Here, my lord.” Alianna’s uncle set his hand on his chest, an old knight whose loyalty had never needed decorating.

“You will return to the Golden Tooth at once and take full charge of its defense, and of every pass and road that leads into the Riverlands. I am reinforcing you with two thousand Westerlands soldiers and a thousand Battanian Volunteers from the recruit camps. Your task is not only to hold the Tooth. Watch every movement toward the Trident, in the east where the Vale touches the old Tully country, and in the south along the Blackwater Rush where the Reach will try to slip its fingers in. Any troop movement, any restless lord, any rumor with legs, I hear of it at the fastest speed a horse can die at. The Riverlands are our rear now. They will not be lost, and they will not become a knife in our back. If it comes to it, you have my authority to act first and explain after.”

“Understood, my lord. While the Golden Tooth stands, the road to the Riverlands stands. Any man with treachery in him steps over my corpse first.” The old knight’s eyes had the shine of a man handed a burden he had waited his whole life to carry.

“Lord Gawen Westerling.”

“At your command, my lord.” The lord of the Crag, whose house the Spicer marriage had tied to Arthur’s own, was known for steadiness and for holding walls, which were the two things now required of him.

“You will go to Deep Den and take charge of the line from Deep Den to Silverhill. The Reach means that country to bleed us into scattering. You will not oblige them. I give you three thousand men drawn from the local garrisons and authority to raise the militias. Do not chase their mountain bands through their own ground. Anchor on the strong castles, bind the line together, root out whoever is guiding them from inside, protect the mines and the workshops, and steady the smallfolk. Hold firm and clear your own ground. There is no need to annihilate anyone. If the mines and the towns still stand, their whole strategy in the hills comes to nothing. Remember it: steady defense is victory.”

“Understood, my lord. The line from the Crag to Silverhill will stand like stone.”

“Alwin.”

“At your command, my lord.”

“In my name, issue the highest conscription order to every lord of the Westerlands not yet under specific assignment. Beyond the least garrison their walls require, they will gather every soldier, knight, and hired sword they can raise, with arms and ten days of rations, and present themselves within five days at the assembly grounds between Pheasant Hall and Cornhall, under the command of Lady Diana and General Smith. Those who delay or hold back their strength will answer for it after the war, and they will not enjoy the answering. Issue the Emergency Mobilization Order as well. Move the smallfolk of the border country to the rear, and put every laborer we can pay or feed on the roads carrying grain, arrows, and siege stores to the front.”

“Yes, my lord. At once.” Alwin knew the hour for what it was and wasted no words on it.