Chapter 137: The Crown, the Rose, and the Storm

In the east, the scales of the war of the dragon and the lion were tipping.

The Golden Company, bought by Cersei in a gambler’s last reach across the table, proved in the landings on Dragonstone that its reputation had been earned. Their assaults came without regard for their own dead, broke through on more than one beach, and for a time threatened the inland lines of the island itself. The Unsullied bore the weight of it and bled for every yard they kept.

But Daenerys Targaryen, stormborn and mother of dragons, had come out of grief with something of Aegon the Conqueror burning in her blood. At the worst hour, with a key beachhead about to fall, Drogon ignored his wounds and every warning voiced around him and took to the sky at her raw-throated urging. The black dragon was slower than he had been, and his flame guttered where it had once poured, but a dragon over a beach remained what a dragon had always been to men without an answer for one. A single sweep of fire took dozens of Golden Company heavies armor and all. A single diving pass cleared the cliff-scalers with claw and tail. The defenders’ hearts rose with him, and the Company’s momentum broke on the sight.

At sea, the sudden entry of the Dornish fleet closed a pincer with the ships of Dragonstone, and Euron’s uncanny squadrons finally met men who wanted their destruction more than they feared it. Prince Oberyn’s loathing for the Crow’s Eye and his dark arts was written in how he spent his ships, pressing the Silence without counting losses until fire hulls and boarding parties left the ominous flagship a crippled ruin. Euron himself was said to be wounded, and to have withdrawn. Stripped of its strangest ally, the royal fleet sagged into the defensive under the joined weight of Dragonstone and Dorne.

Checked on land and beaten at sea, Cersei’s great offensive had failed at its hinge. The scales tipped toward Dragonstone, and Daenerys, her footing found, began to prepare an answer of her own.

In the south, Dorne was harvesting. The armies of the Stormlands, without a single strong hand over them and eating themselves with old quarrels, gave ground and kept giving it before the Dornish spears, the light horse, and the desert tribesmen. Castle after castle fell. The sun banners spread across country that had bred Storm Kings and House Baratheon both, and the pleas from Storm’s End found no ears, because King’s Landing could not spare a glance eastward. Prince Doran Martell, exactly as the patient expected of the patient, had become the great winner of the southern war so far, bleeding the crown at sea while his spears gathered land and leverage on the shore.

In the Vale, Littlefinger smiled. Petyr Baelish sat quietly in the Eyrie and sent not one soldier to anyone’s war, while his messengers and caravans worked every border of every power. He sold grain to the Westerlands at prices that made robbery look shy. He passed intelligence to the Reach, and the movements of the western reinforcements were worth wondering about in that regard. He even traded, discreetly, with Dorne, whose goods went north through the Vale as if the mountains had opinions of their own. He was a fowler watching beasts tear one another in a cage, gathering the feathers that drifted out, and measuring, at his leisure, when to set the snare and which of the wounded would be fattest when it closed. His silence unsettled the realm more than a declaration of war would have.

In the North there was only the long freeze. Winterfell was held together by Bran Stark, crippled and sunk ever deeper in a greenseer’s visions, and by Maester Luwin’s patience, and their authority ran little farther than the castle’s shadow. Umber, Karstark, and Mormont shut their gates and kept what strength they had for themselves. The settlement of the Free Folk rubbed new frictions into old wounds. The Night’s Watch on the Wall existed mostly as a name, and the watch beyond it had all but ceased. The whole North lay like a gut-wounded direwolf curled in the snow, licking itself, unable to look anywhere else. And in the depths of Casterly Rock, Jon Snow slept on, his life burning so low it seemed a winter had settled inside him, while Arya Stark’s wounds knitted and her silence deepened, her eyes carrying more and more of a wolf’s cold patience, and no one could say what she was thinking.

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Arthur pushed the distant reports to the back of his mind and brought his gaze back to the wall in front of him and the tide of the Reach beyond it, which did not seem to end so much as re-form. Olenna’s fury, worked through Randyll Tarly’s command, came on in waves that grew heavier as they learned. The Reach’s soldiers, driven by hard military law and by the cry of defending their homes against the barbarians, were finding a will to match their numbers.

The walls of Pheasant Hall burned and broke and were held together with flesh. Every day familiar faces went missing from the ramparts and new wounded came down them. Arthur’s armor collected fresh scars, and his voice wore down to gravel from shouting commands, but he stayed on the stone like a reef, taking the sea one wave at a time.

He knew the Reach was paying too. Golden Ear Valley had not been for nothing. It had gutted some of their finest and forced second-line men and levies into the front, troops with neither the craft nor the stubbornness of Tarly’s own. The western and river reinforcements arriving behind Pheasant Hall were uneven, but they plugged the line and spread the weight. Smith’s work in the hills was telling as well: the Reach’s supply columns strained, and the great offensive advanced with a stutter where it had once rolled.

It had become a contest of will, endurance, coin, and command, both sides bled pale and leaning on each other like exhausted wrestlers, waiting to see who buckled first, or who first received the one variable heavy enough to tilt the war. That variable might come from the southwestern field itself, from a counterstroke out of Pheasant Hall. It might come by sea, if Lord Jason could break the Arbor’s blockade and bring the supplies that mattered. It might come as a knife, if the Riverlands bred the rebellion the Reach was paying for. Or it might come from far away, from an upheaval in King’s Landing, a counteroffensive out of Dragonstone, Dorne’s next appetite, or whatever Littlefinger’s smile was hiding in the Vale.

Crown, rose, storm, viper, copper coin, ice. Every power in Westeros fought in its own fashion now, to survive or to feed, in a fire that had taken the whole continent for kindling. And Arthur Greyoak, standing on the cold stone of Pheasant Hall, kept his watch in every direction at once, listening for the next thunderclap that would decide all of them.

While the southwest, the southeast, and the south of Westeros drowned in war, the Vale kept an eerie quiet. Sheltered behind the Mountains of the Moon and the sky-piercing towers of the Eyrie, it moved no armies, declared no wars, and kept even its border quarrels small. The master of the Eyrie, Petyr Baelish, once Master of Coin and known in every hall of power as Littlefinger, seemed content to watch from his terraces, prune roses, and study the delicate chessboard in a study that overlooked a killing drop and wore the mockingbird on its walls.

But a true hunter looks hardest at the corner of the field everyone else has stopped watching, and Petyr Baelish had never in his life been content to watch. His ambition grew the way roots grow, unseen, crooked, and always toward the softest soil. And the softest soil in Westeros was not the burning south. It was the North: a land freshly gutted by the dead, emptied of its ruling blood, starved thin by the long winter, and too far from everyone’s wars to be defended by anyone’s armies.

“The North,” he said to himself on the highest terrace, wrapped in silver fox against the wind, his eyes going past the white mountains toward something farther. “The men of House Stark are all but spent. Eddard, beheaded by Joffrey. Robb, dead at the Red Wedding. Rickon, dead at Ramsay Bolton’s hands, by every account worth buying. Bran, crippled and half-dreaming in Winterfell, talking in his sleep, they say. Jon Snow, a bastard of the Night’s Watch, fate unknown. And the women. Catelyn is dead and walks anyway, if the Stoneheart rumors have any spine in them. Sansa is in my hands, my ward by the polite word, my piece by the true one. Arya has been missing for years; the latest whisper puts her in the Westerlands, badly hurt, and of no concern.”

He turned the little sapphire ring on his left hand, and the smile that touched his mouth had nothing warm in it.