Chapter 138: The Fowler’s Snare

Winterfell held a crippled boy and an old maester keeping the roof on by habit. Umber, Karstark, and Mormont had bled themselves against the dead and the Boltons and could barely guard their own gates. The free folk packed into the Gift ground against the Night’s Watch and the local lords like ice against a hull, and the Watch itself was a name on the Wall and little more. The whole North was a frozen boulder full of cracks. It wanted only the right pressure, in the right place, at the right hour, a gentle push. And whoever filled that vacancy would hold a territory poor in coin but rich in iron and silver, in hardy men, and in something worth more than all of it: the northern gate of the continent, a weight laid on the scales of the Vale, the Riverlands, and any power that ever again reached for the Iron Throne.

Conquest was for fools. The knights of the Vale were fine steel and entirely the wrong tool, unsuited to northern cold and northern ground, ruinous to supply, and guaranteed to do the one thing nothing else could: unite the Northmen. What Petyr wanted was not an occupation soaked in blood. It was an annexation without any. Control, wearing the face of rescue.

The plan was subtle and poisonous, and it spent only what he already owned.

The first piece was Sansa Stark. Eldest daughter of Eddard Stark, and with Bran broken, Rickon dead, and Jon’s very name uncertain, standing high in any line of succession a maester could draw. For years he had shaped her with a craftsman’s patience: courtesy and courtcraft taught by day, and by night the cruelty of power shown to her raw, until the last of the girl who dreamed of princes was extinguished. What remained was beautiful, intelligent, and enduring, with a bone-deep hatred of the Lannisters, the Boltons, and every hand that had touched her family, and beneath it a single lesson he had set like a keel: only power protects, and only power avenges. A thorned ice rose, blooming in the dark, with every thread that moved her running back to his fingers.

At the right moment she would go north. Not as a refugee, not as a hostage, but as the last surviving trueborn daughter of the Wardens of the North, returning to raise her House from the snow, escorted by knights of the Vale and by “Stark loyalist” exiles he had gathered and salted away for exactly this purpose. The story would be tragic and stirring in the correct proportions, hardship endured, strength gathered in the Vale, the homecoming at last, and with her would come the Vale’s generosity: grain, cloth, even arms, extended as loans, or as friendship, which was the same thing with better manners. A lone, lovely daughter of Winterfell, returning strong out of sorrow, to a land starving for exactly that shape of hope. The North would open for her. Especially while the boy in Winterfell could not do a lord’s work and every great house was too busy surviving to object.

The second piece was grain. The winter after the dead was the cruelest in living memory, and famine stood in the doorway of every northern village, while the Vale sat fat on full granaries. Petyr had already begun moving grain north through quiet channels, under the names of friendly northern lords he had bought and merchants sympathetic to the Starks he had invented. None of it was given. It was lent at interest that would have embarrassed a Braavosi, or traded against furs, timber, mining rights, and the small print of future concessions. In a famine, grain is power, and the hand that holds it can make hungry men kneel and call it gratitude. Alongside the grain, in ones and tens rather than columns, went knights and hired swords, guarding trade routes, helping against the bandits the war had seeded everywhere, assisting with the settlement of the free folk, taking up useful residence at White Harbor, Moat Cailin, Last Hearth. Sansa’s future escort. His present fingers.

The third piece was division. He would not challenge Umber, Karstark, or Mormont openly; he would court them separately, in Sansa’s name and with the Vale’s goods, and feed the cracks between them. Back Umber’s claim in a land dispute against Karstark. Trade iron and grain to threadbare Mormont for a benevolent neutrality. Warm the old grudge between Glover of Deepwood Motte and Tallhart of Torrhen’s Square until it smoked. And all the while his whisperers would swell the tale of the wildling threat, water every rumor of unrest, and teach the North to feel a need it had never voted on: the need for strong help from outside. He wanted every northern lord to arrive, each by his own reasoning, at the same helpless and sensible conclusion, that accepting the goodwill of Sansa Stark, and of the Vale that stood behind her, was the wisest of a bad set of choices. Better, at the least, than being swallowed by Arthur Greyoak of the Westerlands, who already held the Riverlands and cast a long shadow across the Neck, or by whatever other hungry power the south coughed up next.

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The fourth piece was the darkest, and the hinge of all of it. Bran Stark. So long as the crippled boy lived in Winterfell, he was its rightful lord and Warden of the North, and Sansa’s return could only ever be a homecoming, never a succession. Petyr would not touch him; that was work for fools. But there were so many ways for a frail boy lost in visions to meet a natural misfortune. A fire. A winter chill, common to everyone and fatal only to the weak. The anger of some mob or wildling-hater “dissatisfied with the state of things.” He would give no order. He would only arrange conditions, and let a small possibility and a small convenience become visible to certain men who already had motives of their own, a minor lord who coveted Winterfell, a zealot the wildling question had driven past reason, and the task would complete itself, the way water finds a crack. And then Sansa Stark would stand as the sole adult trueborn heir of her House, lifted by Vale steel and Vale bread, endorsed by loyal lords, and looked to by every cold and hungry commoner in the land, the new Warden of the North, with her true master smiling in the Eyrie, a man who would never once set foot on northern snow.

The fifth piece was simply the harvest. With Sansa secured at Winterfell, the alliance of Vale and North would tighten from courtesy into structure. The broken northern host would be rebuilt and integrated, the mines opened, the trade roads collared. And Petyr Baelish would hold the Vale as his keep, the North as his granary of land and men, and through Sansa’s Tully blood a lever into every discontented hall of the Riverlands, the unchallenged master of the northeast, free to eye the Iron Throne if the south finished devouring itself, or to close his gates and watch the world change if it did not.

“Wolves need a leader,” he murmured to the grey northern sky. “And a tamed direwolf, one that is grateful, and knows whose hand fills its bowl, guards a sheepfold better than any wild pack. It may even learn to bite what the hunter points at.”

He left the cold of the terrace for the warmth of his study. On the desk lay a sealed letter newly arrived from a friend in the Riverlands. It spoke of the savagery of the fighting at Pheasant Hall, and of the swelling complaint among certain river lords that Arthur Greyoak’s warmongering had dragged the Trident into flames that were never its own. Petyr read it carefully, and the smile deepened. The hotter the southwest burned, the blinder the Westerlands and Riverlands became to everything else, and the safer his northern work grew. He might even help the fire along at the proper hour. A well-timed rebellion somewhere along the Trident. A grain road to the west, quietly cut.

“Let the lions, the roses, the dragons, and the vipers tear at one another in the south.” He held the letter to the candle and watched it curl into ash. “The eagle strikes from the high cliffs, when the prey is spent and careless. And that snowfield in the north will soon be meeting its new mistress. And its new rules.”

The Eyrie stayed quiet. But under the quiet, a conquest of the North had begun, one without smoke, and deadlier for it. The most patient player in Westeros was setting his pieces on a board covered in winter and forgetting, and the game he had opened there would bend the shape of the continent for years to come.

While Littlefinger sat by his warm fire planning how to take the frozen fertile land of the North without spending a drop of blood, the other eyes of the storm across Westeros were reshaping the war with a violence that asked no one’s permission.