Chapter 145: Deep Roots

One year later.

The fires of Westeros still burned, but the heat had moved. The war of the dragon and the lion between King’s Landing and Dragonstone had entered its cruelest phase, a grinder of flesh in the plainest sense, fought in repeated surges and counter-surges around the mouth of the Blackwater Rush, through the river towns at its banks, and at times into the very outskirts of the capital. Cersei’s Golden Company and the Lannister remnants fought and died without stepping back; Daenerys’s Unsullied and her hired companies, the Second Sons among them, ground forward a street at a time on the frame of Tyrion’s stratagems and Varys’s whispers. Drogon and Rhaegal remained uncertain quantities, their wounds unhealed, but even an occasional pass of dragonflame was deterrence enough to shape a battlefield. The struggle for the Iron Throne drew the eyes and the wealth of most of the Seven Kingdoms toward it and, like a millstone, took its payment daily out of both sides and the whole of the Crownlands.

In the south, the friction between Highgarden and Dorne did not cool. It sharpened. Unsatisfied with its footing in the Stormlands, Dorne’s blades and agents began appearing in the disputed Marches, and small parties even slipped the passes of the Red Mountains to trouble the southern edge of the Riverlands. Lord Randyll Tarly held the border, and found, with a veteran’s grim amusement, that the Dornish arts of raid and vanish were close cousins to the Battanian harassment he had learned so expensively in the west. He had learned. Patrols thickened, intelligence webs spread, and on the Reach’s deep purse and his own knowledge of the ground he built firm lines and fast-response columns that turned back probe after probe and struck a few handsome counterblows besides. Highgarden and Dorne did not go to open war, and stationed armies at each other all the same, tension climbing, resources burning, neither hand leaving the hilt. Inside the Stormlands, risings against the Dornish occupation flickered like embers after a wildfire, lit and stamped out and lit again. Doran’s rule mixed conciliation with division and was not merely a boot, but the sun banners and the desert warriors made lords and smallfolk alike feel humiliated in their own halls, and the seeds of resistance passed from hand to hand in the dark, wanting only leadership and outside help to catch. Doran knew it perfectly well, and consolidated, and kept his better attention on Highgarden and the war in the east.

And amid all that clamor, the Westerlands and the Riverlands presented a strange, almost eerie calm.

For a year, the contest between Arthur and Littlefinger had run entirely below the waterline, a war of spies, hearts, trade, rumor, and patience. Petyr never stopped working the Trident. Vale merchants came with grain, fine goods, and friendship, hunting for proxies among river lords still shaken by the Maegor’s Hold purge or nursing losses from the integration, while gold moved silently, promises were traded in dim rooms, and rumors bred like mold in the shade: western exploitation, the Trident’s wealth flowing west, Lord Tully kept in courteous imprisonment at Casterly Rock. But Arthur had built for exactly this. Under Ser Rhaegar Spicer’s iron supervision as Eastern Inspector, and the watchfulness of the reorganized river garrisons, Battanian officers over Westerlands sergeants, chosen for loyalty and drilled for discipline, the infiltration was contained; and Diana’s and Alwin’s new river policies, restoring production, easing livelihoods, redistributing the spoils through the Warden’s Tax and trade preference, dried up the soil the rumors wanted. The few lordlings and merchants who gambled on the Vale’s coin anyway were found, and the finding was public: property confiscated, families exiled, and the lesson priced high enough that others did their arithmetic quietly and stayed home.

Arthur even paid the Vale back in its own currency. Through Grey Shadow and a handful of turned intermediaries, rumors flowed east instead: about the unexplained sources of Littlefinger’s wealth, about ambitions that threatened the old blood of the Vale, about a northern scheme that might drag the Eyrie into a pit with no bottom. And he opened a narrow, heavily taxed, heavily watched border trade, western ore and river grain for Vale goods and, more valuable than any of it, information, on the reasoning that perfect isolation was impossible, and a controlled channel beats a hundred secret ones.

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A year of that shadow war ended level. The Riverlands did not relapse into chaos as Petyr had hoped; the murmuring against Petyr inside the Vale did not shake his seat. Both sides paid for the draw. The west’s spending on intelligence and counter-intelligence swelled, and the tightened watch cost some efficiency and bred some resentment; the Vale burned rivers of gold on bribes and operations, and the northern plan moved slower than its author’s patience had budgeted, hindered by western vigilance at sea and by changes inside the North itself.

For in the North, the year had turned in ways Petyr had not ordered. Famine’s shadow still lay over the land, but the Vale grain seeping in through secret channels did not convert into control of the great houses at the promised rate, partly because the west’s watch on the sea lanes, White Harbor above all, made every shipment riskier and dearer, and partly because the North produced variables of its own. At Winterfell, Maester Luwin held the bare machinery together on old prestige and older wisdom, and Bran remained sunk in his green dreams, indifferent to the world and indispensable to it, a symbol merely by breathing. And more than a symbol: Jon Snow, carried home to Winterfell by sea during the year under the quiet escort and quiet physicians Arthur had promised in his letter to Luwin, woke at last from his long dark, months ago now. He rose weak as water, with holes in his memory, and it did not matter; the man who had been Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, the man who had wounded the Night King, was awake under Winterfell’s roof, and the fact of it ran through northern soldiers and smallfolk like a shot of strong spirit, handing the loyal remnant of Stark feeling its first thin hope in a year.

At Karhold, Alfie Karstark, the lord who had nursed his grudge since Robb took his father’s head, and had bent to Arthur after the fall of the Boltons for a guarantee of Karstark land and Karstark weight in the eastern North, proved unexpectedly steady. He answered the Vale’s overtures with nothing warmer than trade, and gave his real cooperation elsewhere: lending Karhold’s remoteness and his family’s old influence to steady the east, breaking the small bandit companies the hunger bred, quietly assisting Luwin and Winterfell, and lending his name and his roads to certain operations that did not appear in anyone’s ledgers.

Because at the far northeastern edge of the map, in the wild country of mountain and coast between Winterfell and Karhold, a corner the world had agreed to forget, Oath Keep had spent the year changing out of all recognition, and telling no one. The fortress that had been the Dreadfort, rebuilt and renamed at Arthur’s order after the Boltons’ extinction, had been granted to the Flints, the mountain blood that had been Ena’s, and the debt in that grant was one Arthur never spoke of. On the surface it was a poor border hold, thin of resources, watching for wildling trouble and pirates, taking in refugees, breaking stony ground, keeping to itself; and every intelligence service on the continent rated it at almost exactly nothing, as they rated the whole west: gravely weakened, war potential overdrawn, a lord licking his wounds and lucky to keep what he held.

The truth lived under the surface. Through the year of grace bought by the Highgarden truce, the Reach-Dorne standoff, the eastern stalemate, and the Vale’s divided attention, Arthur ran a plan in absolute secrecy, and its codename was Deep Roots. Under the cover of Alfie Karstark’s loyalty and the Flints’ quiet stewardship, resources moved north in a steady, staggering stream, grain, weapons, equipment, craftsmen, and, in small disguised drafts, elite soldiers, the backbone and veterans of the Bannermen Guard among them, carried by sea under Jason Mallister’s unadvertised escort and overland through Karhold’s territory. Behind Oath Keep’s cold, defensible walls and in the hidden valleys and woods around it rose new barracks, workshops, training grounds, and stores. Recruits, drawn from refugees, the northern poor, free folk who came of their own will, and hand-picked loyalists of the west and the Trident, were trained there harder and more systematically than anywhere in Westeros, by Battanian veterans of the Wall and Pheasant Hall, in the conventional trades of foot, bow, and horse and in the special ones, mountain war, snow survival, the long raid, small-party infiltration, a doctrine woven from Battanian hunting craft, western discipline, and everything the dead and the living had taught. Oath Keep’s iron, poor ore but honest, and the forests around it fed small furnaces and weapon shops that worked day and night, no rival to Lannisport and no need to be, enough to arm and maintain an army; grain came from Flint land, from Karhold’s quiet support, and most of all by sea. Every man in and out was controlled; every message moved in tokens and code known to a handful; and to the world, and to all but a few souls even inside the North, Luwin and Alfie Karstark among the few, Oath Keep remained poor, closed, and beneath notice.