Read 20+ Chapter's Ahead in Patreon
Brynden Tully, the last true pillar still holding up the crumbling House Tully, left Clay's tent with a face full of quiet frustration after having met with nothing but cold resistance.
In truth, the deadlock that had trapped House Tully could have been broken with a single word from this young commander who now held the armies of both the North and the Riverlands in his hands. If he were willing to declare his support for Edmure Tully, the tide would turn at once, and all would fall into place.
But as Clay Manderly had already told him, he bore the name Manderly, not Tully. That meant he carried no obligation to step forward and shield Edmure Tully… especially when Edmure had proven himself such a fool.
Brynden understood. If their positions were reversed, he would likely have done the same. And yet, that old, unyielding sense of duty toward his family still drove him here, making one last effort before walking away.
In the end, all he received was an empty promise: Clay Manderly would not make things more difficult for Edmure Tully. Whether that promise would ever be kept rested entirely on Clay's whim.
It was far from the assurance the Blackfish had hoped to win, but when Clay simply fell silent after that, refusing to say another word or even acknowledge him, Brynden could see clearly that he had reached the man's bottom line.
Even a mosquito, small as it is, is still meat. Best take what he could and be done with it.
With a long, weary sigh, Brynden Tully led the battered remnants of his house's strength. The three thousand six hundred soldiers who had marched alongside Clay in this campaign and somehow survived now drifted away from the main host encamped at Stone Hedge, setting their course south toward Stone Mill.
Clay made no move to stop him. If the man wanted to lead his own men to stand beside his dear nephew, there was no reason to interfere.
When the battle was over, Clay remained in the great encampment at Stone Hedge, sifting through the steady stream of reports flowing in from every corner, letting each new scrap of information feed into his reassessment of the war that now spanned all Seven Kingdoms.
In the west, ever since Jaime Lannister had begun to show the military talent long buried beneath his arrogance, he had turned his attention to the Ironborn and driven them back with humiliating ease. The rebellion in the Westerlands had been swiftly crushed.
Though the gold of the West had been squandered over the years, wasted away by generations of Lannisters and other greedy lords, the wealth that remained was still immense. The Westerlands, after all, stood alongside House Tyrell as one of the richest regions in all Westeros, and their foundations were deep and strong.
Even after Clay had crushed twelve thousand of his finest soldiers in Maidan Valley, Jaime Lannister returned west and wasted no time in raising yet another host, swelling his numbers to fifteen thousand.
Granted, the quality of this new force was dubious. Nearly eighty percent of its men were fresh recruits, their skill in battle still uncertain. Yet the hard fighting against the Ironborn, coupled with the lavish arms and armor afforded by the Westerlands' wealth, had nonetheless forged them into a force that could not be lightly dismissed.
Clay could not fathom why, once the Ironborn were driven off, they chose to remain in the Westerlands and refused to march out. Yet as the man tasked with overseeing the entire Riverlands front, he could never afford to leave such a force unwatched.
On paper, it seemed his own side now held more than thirty-five thousand men. But when he looked across the field, the armies of the Westerlands numbered almost exactly the same.
The difference lay in the ground they fought upon. Clay had the advantage of waging war on his own lines, his forces clustered together in the Riverlands, while the Westerland armies were split into two separate fronts; one in Harrenhal and the other back in their own lands.
If he did not first crush the Vale forces, that soft persimmon ripe for the taking, then he would soon have to face not only the men already before him but an additional ten thousand skilled cavalrymen from across the mountains. The pressure would become unbearable.
And beyond the movements of enemy armies, this latest turn of events had stirred unrest within the Riverlands itself. Voices of defiance were beginning to rise once more.
This was not a matter that could be solved by simply summoning Gaelithox and silencing all opposition with a single breath of dragonfire.
In truth, even if he were to sweep across all Seven Kingdoms tomorrow, flattening every last fortress and city, it would still be impossible to build a true empire in the fullest sense of the word.
His authority, vast as it seemed, only held firm among the upper echelons of the nobility. Once it reached the local level, power still lay firmly in the hands of the lords who ruled their own lands.
It was, by its very nature, a problem without an easy solution.
There is an old saying: where a man sits decides how he thinks. At this stage, it was impossible for him to betray the very class to which he belonged.
Clay Manderly was the heir of one of the great houses of the North, and at the root of all that he possessed lay the Manderly name. Replace him with any man of common birth, no matter how gifted, even if his abilities outshone Clay's tenfold. Such a man would never have stood where Clay stood now. Not even for the briefest moment.
This was the simple truth of Clay's path, a dependency carved into him by the very structure of the world. To shatter the so-called wheel of history, one thing was essential above all others: this continent, steeped in the traditions of nobility, would have to be scoured clean of nearly every last noble house.
Or else, nobility would have to remain in name alone, stripped of all real power, with both wealth and military command transferred wholly into the hands of a central authority. Without that, it was nothing but empty talk. To expect the nobility to awaken some sudden sense of virtue and willingly hand over their interests to the crown was a fantasy beyond imagining.
And for such a thing to happen, there was only one path: a calamity so bitter and all consuming that every last noble on the continent would feel it as disaster. Only then, perhaps, would there be the faintest and most fragile sliver of possibility.
Anything short of that, and it was not even worth dreaming about.
Clay understood this all too well. That was why, in his current position, he kept his ties with the nobles of the North at arm's length, and paid little attention to the lords of the Riverlands unless there was a pressing need.
His focus was fixed on one thing alone: keeping an unshakable grip on the army, and step by step expanding the Manderly family's own core influence. Everything else was beneath his concern.
If the Riverlands lords made a mess of things on the battlefield? Then let them be cut down.
If Robb Stark had been trapped at Harrenhal for so long, then he had only himself to blame. Clay would not be riding to his rescue.
In the end, it all came down to a single truth: he would only act in ways that served him, and served the interests of House Manderly.
And besides, as for Dorne, the day would inevitably come when their forces joined with his. If stability was to be maintained, it was impossible to simply turn on Dorne's entire ruling class at once.
Therefore, in order to preserve balance between the North and the South, rather than leaving the Riverlands fractured with every lord refusing to bow to another, and with the North's nobility already half-crippled, it would be far better to forge with his own hands a powerful, unshakable House Manderly.
That was why, with Christen Manderly, Clay had taken the time to guide him step by step until the man could stand on his own. It was a move born of that same long view.
As for what came after, that could be considered in time. For now, it was far from the moment to rest.
————————————————————
Snow was still drifting down in a soft, steady veil, though it was far gentler than the last fierce blizzard.
Since Edmure Tully had already done what he had done, Clay saw no reason to ride to Stone Mill to meet him again.
It would only be using the weight of his great victory to make an already ugly situation even worse.
Clay saw no reason to do such a thing. It was painfully dull, a waste of effort and breath. Even if he march there this very moment and crushed into the dirt the last scraps of pride and resources Edmure Tully still clung to, what would it change? What good would it do him in the end?
That would be nothing but acting on impulse, letting emotion dictate his hand. And besides, those two thousand sets of winter clothing they had just acquired were being given first to the soldiers of House Manderly, for it was they who had earned the greatest merit in this war.
So if the men of the Riverlands froze in their camps, that was Edmure's problem, not his. If Edmure wanted to mismanage his own troops and throw away their lives and comfort for nothing, Clay would not lift a finger to stop him. After all, when the shame came, it would not be Clay Manderly who looked the fool.
With that thought settled in his mind, he turned his force not directly south but southeast, leading the cavalry column ahead at a steady and determined pace.
The infantry remained behind. They would follow under the command of Lord Tytos Blackwood, keeping to Clay's path and trailing in his wake.
Since Yohn Royce had already fled, he would have to be chased down.
Some of Royce's men were foot soldiers who had lost their mounts, and there was no chance they could outrun Clay's full-speed riders on their four swift legs.
Even if they managed to reach the lands east of Harrenhal, that alone would serve Clay's purpose well enough.
These Vale soldiers, their fighting spirit already broken, need only be kept from joining in the coming battle between Clay and Tywin Lannister. If they slunk back to the Vale with their tails between their legs, so much the better.
And in fact, they could be put to good use. The veterans among them who knew firsthand how dangerous Clay Manderly could be would serve as living proof, walking word-of-mouth tales to sow doubt and fear. They would quietly chip away at the Vale lords' will to keep fighting him.
To Clay's mind, the best kind of Vale soldier was one who stayed east of the Mountains of the Moon, lying low and playing dead.
The war had dragged on this long, and all the while Clay had made a point of turning a blind eye to the suffering of the great northern lords trapped inside Harrenhal, along with that unlucky soul, Robb Stark.
There was, of course, a personal motive behind that choice.
Even with the Vale's sudden ambush around Harrenhal, no word had yet reached him that Robb Stark had been slain. That meant the man still lived, and he still had at his side a host of powerful northern lords who held real authority.
Clay could ignore the nobles of the Riverlands, whether they came to flatter him or to curse him, and he could meet their gestures with cold indifference.
But a living King in the North, flanked by houses like the Umbers and others of that weight, still held a certain pressure over him… especially now, when Clay had yet to commit his family's full strength to the field.
It was fortunate, then, that when Robb Stark had found himself encircled at Harrenhal, the order he had sent Clay was to hold his position. Had Robb loosed ravens in every direction, crying for aid, Clay might have been placed in a far more difficult spot.
In truth, from the bottom of his heart, Clay wished Stark and Lannister would bleed each other a little more beneath the looming walls of Harrenhal. Ideally, he wanted to see a few more of those weighty highborn names cut down, lords whose deaths might leave the North and parts of the Westerlands in decline or, better yet, caught in a vacuum of power. A fractured landscape, stripped of strong and unified leadership, was the most favorable outcome he could hope for.
But reality, as always, had its own designs. The Vale's soldiers had proven far too brittle, shattering after only a few hard blows, and Winterfell, had thrown itself into his cause with a kind of reckless desperation, pouring out the very last of its reserves to keep him standing.
Westeros, of course, had little history of commanders hoarding armies for themselves. In truth, under this lordly system, there simply wasn't fertile ground for commanders to grow into long-term masters of great forces. Every army was a patchwork stitched together from the levies of countless lords, and no one — not king, not lord paramount — could truly claim those men as their own forever.
For Clay, to be standing here as merely the heir to a noble lord, yet holding command over more than thirty thousand soldiers drawn from two entire regions, was an aberration among aberrations.
Still, even the most stubborn reality bends under the weight of time. The longer this dragged on, the more eyes would open, and the more people would begin to wonder, perhaps aloud, why he had yet to ride to the aid of Robb Stark trapped within Harrenhal's walls. That would be… inconvenient.
The lords of Westeros might spit on their own codes of loyalty in private, might trample their so-called noble principles into the dirt when no one was watching, but in public, none of them would ever openly tolerate a man turning his back on his liege lord.
Lenient with themselves, ruthless with others; these lords had mastered that art to perfection.
So, no matter how little he wanted to, Clay still had to rein in his impatience, slow his march, and push his army steadily toward the direction of Harrenhal.
He would not, however, call upon his own Northern forces. That much he could still hold back. Using the excuse of cutting off the Vale's retreat, he allowed himself to pause for rest and reorganization beneath the walls of Stone Hedge. That, he knew, was the furthest he could stretch this game without snapping it entirely.
There could be no more delay.
And so, accepting that, Clay let hesitation fall away. He summoned the full strength of his host, and with the deep, rolling thunder of tens of thousands of boots and hooves, he drove them southeast.
As for what the Old Lion, Tywin Lannister, might choose to do in response… well, that was his concern. Perhaps he would turn his columns and meet Clay head-on, gambling on victory to win control over the River Road and speed his return to the Westerlands. Or perhaps he would sit tight, setting his defenses in place, waiting for news from King's Landing before making a move. Or maybe, just maybe, he would bare the lion's fangs and strike instead at Edmure Tully's force of over ten thousand men marching along another path.
Whatever choice he made, it no longer mattered. Clay had played his hand. Now it was simply a matter of waiting to see how the others would respond.
As for what was happening inside Harrenhal itself, whether there were still a handful of survivors left breathing… Clay couldn't bring himself to care overmuch.
Living lords were worth far more than dead ones. Clay understood that truth. Tywin Lannister, he knew, understood it even better.
Two disgraced liege lords, stripped of honor and abandoned by their vassals, that would be the outcome most advantageous to Clay Manderly.
Wouldn't it?
**
**
[IMAGE]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Chapter End's]
🖤 Night_FrOst/ Patreon 🤍
Visit my Patreon for Early Chapter:
Extra Content Already Available