POV- Ser Barristan Selmy
The dust came first, a long brown smear along the eastern sky that Barristan took for weather until it began to move against the wind.
He was on the gatehouse roof when the scouts came in, two of Tytos Blackwood's outriders on lathered horses with foam hanging from the bits, and he did not need to hear them to know. He had seen dust like that once before, on the Stepstones, when Maelys's sellswords came down the sand beaches in their thousands. That had been men on foot but this was something else.
"They had been rushing from the Rosby road," the first rider gasped, when they had him inside. "Six leagues off at midday, maybe five by now. They don't stop, ser. They don't stop to piss, they don't stop to water, they eat in the saddle. I never saw anything like it."
"How many?"
The man looked at him the way a man looks at someone asking him to count the sea. "Ten thousand by my estimate ser."
By afternoon the camps were burning. Randyll Tarly had ordered it himself, standing in the outer ward with his arms folded while his men carried torches out through the postern. Every tent and pavilion and brush shelter that had stood in the fields since the Great Council, every lordling's striped silk and every hedge knight's patched canvas, went up in long lines of smoke that leaned toward the lake.
"Leave them nothing to sleep under," Randyll said, when Barristan came to stand beside him. "Nothing to steal, nothing to burn that we haven't burned first. I want them looking at those walls with empty hands."
"There were lords who wanted to fetch their pavilions inside."
"There were." Randyll did not look at him. "But it would have wasted our time in unmounting them, and I know that the Dothraki would be glad to reside in them instead during seige."
Lord Celtigar had watched his own blue-and-red pavilion go up in flames. Now he came across the ward toward them with the smoke still in his beard. "Forty dragons that tent cost me, Tarly. Myrish silk. My late wife chose the color."
"Then your late wife has my apologies, my lord."
"She'd not have wanted them." Celtigar spat into the dust. "She'd have wanted you to burn the savages along with it."
By the time the sun hung red over the God's Eye, the Dothraki had come. Barristan had heard the stories all his life. Every knight in the Seven Kingdoms had heard them. Screamers. Horselords. Riders who braided their hair with bells and cut the braids off only when they lost. He had thought, as most knights thought, that the stories were larger than the thing itself. Stories generally were.
This time the stories had fallen short. They came over the low rise to the east in a single wave that did not stop at the crest, a flood of horses and men and noise spilling down across the burned fields. The sound reached the walls half a breath after the sight did, ten thousand men howling at once, each in his own voice, with the bells in their hair ringing under it like rain on tin. The horses were thin and fast, and the men on them rode as if they were born on it.
They did not slow at the walls. They split around them like water around a rock and kept riding, circling, a great loose ring of horsemen spinning around Harrenhal at a full gallop. And as they rode, they shot.
"Down!" Randyll roared along the wall.
The arrows came over the battlements in a hissing black curtain. Barristan heard them strike stone and wood and flesh. A Tarly bowman two merlons down took one through the cheek and sat down hard with a surprised look on his face, and did not get up. The rest crouched behind the stone, cursing, while the arrows kept coming, and coming, and coming.
"From horseback," Beric Dondarrion said beside him. He had his shield up and his one eye narrowed at the ring of riders below. "They're shooting from horseback at a full run, and hitting."
"Some of them," Barristan said.
"Enough of them."
On the far side of the gatehouse, Randyll Tarly stood in a gap between merlons with an arrow already nocked to his own great yew bow, as if he could not be bothered to crouch. He drew and loosed in one motion. Out on the burned field a rider flew backward off his horse as though a rope had yanked him.
"There," Randyll said. "They bleed like anyone else. Bows up men, lead with the width of a horse, and loose. I want every one of you to kill one before dark or answer to me."
The men on the wall answered the command with shouts. Tarly longbows and Blackwood bows and the short crossbows of Darry's men that they have collected when they brought ruin to the siege of Bracken and Vargo Hoat's sellswords upon Raventree Hall, all along the eastern face. Men and horses went down in the circling ring. The ring did not stop. The dead fell and the living rode over them.
It went on until the light failed. Then, all at once, the riding stopped. The Dothraki drew off to the fields beyond bowshot and sat their horses there in the dusk, thousand and thousands of them, a dark mass that stretched from the lakeshore to the edge of the western woods. Fires began to wink into life among them. Barristan could smell horse on the wind now, a great warm reek of dung and sweat and grass.
A single rider came toward the gate.
He came slowly, walking his horse, a big man in a painted vest with his chest bare beneath it and a braid that fell past his saddle, oiled so black it shone. Bells hung from it. They rang softly with every step his horse took. He stopped fifty yards from the gate and looked up at the walls, and then he shouted something, long and harsh and full of throat.
"Seven save us," said Desmond Mooton, somewhere to Barristan's left. "What is that, a language or a cough?"
Oberyn Martell laughed. He had come up the gatehouse stair, with a spear in one hand and a cup of wine in the other. "Dothraki, my lord." He leaned on the parapet and listened as the rider shouted again. His smile thinned.
"Well?" Randyll said.
"He says their khaleesi has given them every life inside these walls." Oberyn sipped his wine. "The men for killing, the women for mounting, the children for the slave markets of the east. He says we may open the gates now and die quickly, or keep them shut and die slowly. He is very generous about it. It is quite moving."
"Answer him," Randyll said.
Oberyn set down his cup. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted back in the same harsh tongue, a long flowing string of it, and whatever he said made the big rider sit up straight in his saddle. Down on the field, in the front ranks of the Dothraki mass, men began to laugh. Some began to scream. The big rider turned his horse without another word and rode back toward the fires.
"What did you tell him?" Barristan asked.
"That their khaleesi does not own a single life in this castle, because she can't even hold on to her own dragons." Oberyn picked up his wine again. "And a few things about his mother and her horse that don't translate as prettily."
"You've made them angry," Beric said.
"They crossed the poison water to kill us in our beds, my lord. They were angry already. Now they're angry and stupid." Oberyn drank. "Angry and stupid men attack walls."
Brienne found Barristan at the head of the gatehouse stair an hour after dark. She had her helm under her arm and her hair was dark with sweat, and she had been walking the inner ward since dusk, checking bars and braces with Yohn Royce and his bronze-armored household knights.
"They're in the woods," she said. "The western woods. You can hear them from the Wailing Tower. They have axes with them."
"A ram." Barristan asked with raised brow.
"Or ladders or both." She looked out at the scattered fires. "Ser, how many times has Harrenhal been taken?"
Barristan thought about it. "Every time anyone tried, more or less."
"That's not a comfort."
He found himself smiling, at her words. "It was taken because men inside let it be taken. Harren trusted his walls and forgot about dragons. Others trusted their lords and forgot about gold. We have no dragon to fear tonight, and I've spoken to every man on the gate myself. They'll hold."
"And if they don't?"
"Then you and I will."
She nodded slowly, and put her helm on.
The ram came an hour before midnight, the thud of many hooves moving slowly, the creak of rope, men chanting in that harsh tongue to keep the pull together. Then, into the light of the torches Randyll had set burning along the approach, came a great black oak trunk, stripped and sharpened at the end, dragged by twenty horses and flanked by hundreds of riders holding hide shields over their heads.
"Hold," Randyll said along the wall. "Hold. Let them come in close. Close."
The trunk came on. The riders cut the horses loose twenty yards from the gate, and a hundred Dothraki on foot took up the ropes and ran with it, screaming, the bells in their hair jangling.
"Now."
The archers stood and loosed straight down. Men fell under the trunk and were crushed by it and the rest kept running. It struck the outer gate with a sound Barristan felt in his teeth. The whole gatehouse shook. Dust sifted down from the stones above his head.
"Oil!" Randyll shouted.
Barristan had already gone down the stair. Brienne was at his heels. The gate passage below the gatehouse ran thirty yards through the thickness of the wall, outer gate to inner, with murder holes in the ceiling and arrow slits along both sides, and it was full of men; Royce's knights, Mooton's spearmen, Darry's crossbows, all packed shoulder to shoulder, all staring at the outer gate as it boomed and boomed again under the ram.
On the fourth blow, the bar cracked.
On the sixth, the right-hand leaf of the outer gate sagged inward on its hinges, and through the gap came a wash of torchlight and screaming and the smell of hot oil and burning flesh. Randyll's men were pouring it from the walls above. The screaming did not stop the Dothraki. They came through the gap anyway, over their own burned dead, with arakhs held high.
"Kill them in the gap!" Barristan shouted. "In the gap! Keep them in the passage!"
The first of them reached him. He was young, younger than Brienne, with oil smoking on his vest and his braid half burned away and his teeth bared. He came in with the curved blade high over his shoulder and Barristan stepped inside the arc and put his sword through the boy's belly and pushed him off it into the man behind. He took the next one's cut on his shield. It was heavier than he expected. The arakh was a strange weapon, all edge and no point, and it came at you from angles a knight's training had never prepared him for.
Beside him, Brienne was a wall. She had set her feet in the center of the passage and she did not move. Men broke on her. She took one screamer's arm off at the elbow and the backswing opened another's throat. A third leapt at her with his arakh in both hands and she caught it on her crossguard and drove her forehead into his face, helm and all, and he dropped.
"Your left, ser!"
Barristan turned. A Dothraki had come in low under Mooton's spears, and his blade was already moving. Barristan felt the wind of it pass his ear. He killed the man with a cut he had first learned on a practice yard half a century ago and had never once had to think about since.
Above them, through the murder holes, Randyll's men dropped the rest of the oil.
It came down in a pouring gold sheet across the gap in the outer gate, and a Darry crossbowman leaned out an arrow slit and threw a torch after it. The gap went up. For a moment the whole passage was lit orange and white, bright as noon, and the heat of it rolled down thirty yards of stone and scorched Barristan's face through his open visor. The screaming on the far side of that fire went on for a long time.
When it stopped, no one else came through.
"Brace it," Barristan said. His voice came out rough. "Timbers, carts, stones, anything. Brace the outer gate before the fire goes out."
Men ran. Brienne stood in the passage with her sword hanging from her hand, breathing hard. Her surcoat was black with blood that was not hers. She looked at Barristan, and he saw her face, the child was no older than seventeen.
It was nearly the hour of the wolf when the other sound began.
Barristan was back on the gatehouse roof by then, sitting against the parapet with a cup of watered wine Oberyn had pressed on him. The Dothraki fires were thicker along the edge of the western woods than anywhere else. That was where they had taken their horses, into the trees, for shelter and for the water at the lakeshore.
The first scream was a horse's. Barristan knew that sound. Every knight did.
Then another. Then a dozen. Then the whole western edge of the Dothraki camp erupted in noise, horses screaming, men shouting, the bells in their braids jangling wildly as they ran. Fires scattered and torches went bobbing through the trees in every direction. And under all of it, high and long and cold, came the howls that made the hair rise on Barristan's arms.
Wolves. Dozens of them, the howl went up from the woods and was answered from further off, and from further still, until it seemed the whole lakeshore was full of it.
Beric had come to stand beside him. So had Oberyn, and Randyll, and half the men on the wall. No one spoke. Out in the moonlight beyond the woods, loose horses were running across the burned fields in terrified herds, dozens, hundreds of them, with Dothraki riders chasing after on the few they'd managed to mount.
"The she-wolf," Beric said quietly. "The grey one. They say she has a pack out there."
"They say the king's wolf runs with her at night," said Oberyn.
Barristan looked along the wall. Near the Widow's Tower, a small figure stood alone at an arrow slit with her hands pressed flat to the stone. She had not been there an hour ago. He did not know how long she'd been standing there. She was looking at the woods, and she did not move, not even when another wave of screaming rose from the trees and fell again.
He thought about going to her. He did not. Some things a man could not help with, and it was better not to pretend otherwise.
By dawn, the Dothraki had moved their whole camp out of the woods and into the open fields to the east, as far from the trees as they could get. They left dead horses behind them in the woods, a great many. From the gatehouse roof Barristan could see the crows already at them.
And at the treeline, for just a moment, before the sun cleared the eastern hills, he saw two shapes standing side by side among the trunks, watching the castle.
One was white another was grey. Then they were gone.
*****
POV- Genna Lannister
The rider came in at the hour of the owl with his horse near dead under him, and Genna, who had not been able to sleep, was in the yard to see it.
She had been walking the inner ward of Hayford for an hour with her shawl pulled tight and her feet aching in her footwear, because Emmon snored like a bellows with a hole in it and because a woman of her years and girth was entitled, she felt, to walk wherever she liked when she could not sleep. The yard smelled of wet straw and the river. Somewhere a dog was barking and would not stop.
The rider nearly fell getting down. He was young, salt-crusted, with a bandage around his head gone brown and a satchel held against his chest in both arms like a babe.
"Lord Tywin," he said to the nearest guard. "I need Lord Tywin. Now."
"Lord Tywin is abed," Genna said, before the guard could answer. She walked toward him, into the torchlight, so that he could see her face and her gown and the lion worked in gold thread at her breast. "You may give it to me."
The boy looked at her. He did not know who she was, she could see that. She had grown used to that from young men in the last twenty years.
"Lady Genna Lannister," she said. "Lord Tywin's sister. Where have you come from, lad?"
"The Gullet, my lady." He swallowed. His throat was raw. "From Lord Paxter. I'm to put it in Lord Tywin's hand. Only his hand."
"And you shall. Through mine." She held out her hand. "Do you suppose my brother would thank you for waking him at this hour for a letter his sister could carry? I will take it to him myself."
He hesitated. She watched him weigh it, the lion on her breast, the voice that brooked no argument, the long road in his legs. In the end, he was only a boy, and tired, and she had been bending men and boys to her will for years. He gave her the satchel.
The seal was Redwyne's grapes pressed in blue wax. Paxter's own hand. She broke it there in the torchlight, with the boy watching her, and read it once but first few sentences stopped her from continuing.
She folded it very small and held it against her breast. The dog was still barking. The boy was still standing there, swaying, waiting to be told where he could sleep.
"Did you read this?" she asked him.
"No, my lady. It was sealed."
"But you were there. At the Gullet."
His face moved. "Yes, my lady."
"Who else have you told?"
"No one, my lady. Lord Paxter said no one but Lord Tywin." He frowned. "My lady, I'm to take an answer back..."
Genna looked past him, to the two men who had come out of the shadows by the stable arch as soon as she had crossed the yard. Her own men. Lannister-born, from some bastard branch generations back, sworn to her and not to her brothers, and paid from her own purse since the day she married into the Twins.
"See this lad has somewhere to rest," she said. "Somewhere quiet."
Lymond, the older one, met her eyes and nodded once. She did not watch. She had seen men die before. She walked away across the yard and heard behind her a scuffle, short, and a sound like a sack of grain dropped on stone, and then only the dog barking but she kept walking.
She did not climb the stair to Tywin's solar. She went the other way, across the ward, into the east tower, and up.
Olenna Tyrell was awake. Of course she was. Genna had never known the woman to sleep, in all the weeks since Harrenhal; she sat up nights in her rooms with a cup of hippocras and a cyvasse board she never seemed to finish a game on. She was sitting by the fire in a chamber robe the color of green and gold, with her white hair down in a braid, and she looked up when Genna came in without knocking.
"Lady Genna. How delightful. I was just thinking to myself that what this night lacked was a Lannister." She waved a hand at the person sitting opposite to her, who rose and went out. "Sit, you look like a pudding someone dropped. What is it?"
Genna did not sit. "Dead, our dear boy king. The dragon-bastard jumped from one dragon's back to the other in the middle of the sky and cut him down like a practice dummy." She held out the letter. "And the girl is in Stannis Baratheon's keeping. Stannis. Can you imagine anything more tiresome than being a prisoner of Stannis Baratheon?"
Olenna took it. She held it very close to her eyes, then far away, then close again, muttering, and read it through. Genna watched her face. She had known Olenna Redwyne, as she had been, through forty years of feasts and weddings and funerals, and in all those years she had never once seen the woman at a loss.
She saw it now.
Olenna lowered the letter to her lap. She did not say anything. She looked at the fire. Her lips moved a little, as an old woman's do when she is counting, and then stopped.
"How?" Genna said. Her voice came out louder than she meant. "How could both of them lose to him? Two dragons, two. He had one."
"Two," Olenna said. "Paxter says there were two on his side. The pale one. The one that ran off from the girl in King's Landing, remember." She tapped the letter. "Didn't take part. The red one wouldn't let it. It burned my son-in-law's fleet instead, while the red one killed the others. Killed them. Tore the black one's throat out and ate it, Paxter says. I did think Paxter was a man who drank too much. I'm beginning to hope so."
Genna sat down then. The chair creaked under her.
Olenna was quiet a long time. The fire popped. Somewhere below, in the yard, the dog had finally stopped barking.
"My grandson is already in his clutches," Olenna said at last. Her voice was different now. Flatter. "And so are your sons, Genna. My house now carries the stigma of supporting usurpers, not once, but twice. Once behind a your grandnephew, and now behind a boy who almost all of the Seven Kingdom declared to not be even Rhaegar's. And your sons are not only Lannisters, they're Freys too." She turned her head and looked at Genna directly. "You think this Aemon will give us a pardon? Forget your sons for the moment. Think about yourself. Think about me. I'm too old and too ugly to take the veil gracefully."
"Give me a remedy, Lady Tyrell," Genna snapped. "I know what that man will do. Every man in that hall at Harrenhal knows it. He burned House Tully out of the world with a sentence. He sent Eddard Stark to the Wall, and Eddard Stark raised him. What do you suppose he'll do with the Lannisters who sacked King's Landing?"
"Oh, I know exactly what he'll do with them." Olenna set the letter on the arm of her chair. "And that is your remedy."
Genna waited.
"Give Tywin to Aemon," Olenna said. "Give him Kevan. Give him Cersei and the dwarf, by the seven hells give him all Joffrey, Tommen and Myrcella. Let them bear the brunt of it all, and then perhaps the rest of us will be allowed to live."
The fire snapped. Genna did not say anything. She found that she could not.
"You'll say he's your brother," Olenna went on. "Of course he is. Most of the monsters in this world are someone's brother. Kevan too, poor dutiful Kevan, who never did a cruel thing in his life that Tywin didn't tell him to do first. He'll die for his obedience. Most men do, in the end." She leaned forward. The firelight cut deep lines in her face. "Trust me, Genna. This Aemon is not like anyone I have ever seen, and I have outlived more kings than I care to count. He doesn't want gold. He doesn't want our daughters. He doesn't want anything we know how to give him. We both know the anger that shimmers inside him. It's for Tywin, and for the Lannisters, and for what they did in the Rebellion. Elia Martell's children. Rhaegar's children. His brother and his sister, butchered in their nursery by Gregor Clegane and Amory Lorch while your brother sat his horse in the Great Hall and waited for Robert to thank him. Martell stands at that boy's right hand, and the Martells have been waiting since the Sack."
"And Tyrion? What did Tyrion ever do?"
"He was born Tywin's son." Olenna shrugged. "And he is the only one of them clever enough to talk his way out of a noose. I would rather not leave him the rope."
Genna looked at the fire.
She thought of Tywin at ten years old, at her betrothal feast in the great hall at Casterly Rock. She had been seven. They had promised her to Emmon Frey, a second son of a house of toll-keepers, and every lord at the high table had smiled and toasted it, and their father had laughed his nervous little laugh, and only Tywin, ten years old, thin and pale and furious, had stood up in the middle of the feast and said, loud enough for every man to hear, that it was an insult to their house. Their father had sent him from the hall. He had gone without a word. He had never once, in all the years since, said a word to her about it. But she had never forgotten who had stood up.
"There's more," Olenna said, more quietly. "Tywin sent ten thousand horse-lords to Harrenhal to cut throats in the dark. Did he tell you that? Leyton Hightower is at Harrenhal. So is his son. Leyton is Alerie's father, Genna. My grandchildren's grandfather. Tywin sent savages to murder my family's family while they slept under guest right, and he didn't think to mention it to me." She picked up her hippocras and found it empty and put it down again. "I have forgiven Tywin Lannister a great many things over the years. I find I'm too old to forgive that one."
"Mace won't agree to this."
"Mace will do as he's told. He generally does, when I tell him slowly." Olenna rose, with some difficulty, one hand on the arm of her chair. "My son's household knights are in the south barracks. There are two hundred of them, and another thousand Reach men camped in the town. Your brother keeps his host camped on the river road and forty men in this castle, because he trusts us to hold the town. That was his first mistake in years, and it's rather a large one."
Genna stood too. Her knees ached. Her eyes burned. She had not cried since her mother died and she did not intend to begin now.
"Give me a quarter hour," she said.
"Whatever for?"
"I want to look at him."
Olenna studied her for a long moment. Then she nodded. "A quarter hour. Then my men come up the stair whether you're finished looking or not."
Tywin's solar was at the top of the west tower. Genna climbed the stairs slowly, one hand on the cold stone. Her heart was pounding. She had climbed stairs to her brother's rooms ten thousand times in her life, and she could not remember one of them feeling this long.
The guard at the door let her in without a word.
Tywin was not abed. She should have known he would not be. He sat at a table by the window with a single candle burning, and papers spread before him, and Kevan sat across from him with a cup of wine untouched at his elbow. They both looked up when she came in. Kevan started to smile, the tired, fond smile he'd given her since they were children. Tywin did not smile.
"A rider came," Tywin said. "From the coast. The guard saw you take something from him in the yard."
Genna said nothing.
"Where is the parchment, Genna?" His voice was the same voice it always was, cool and level and very patient. The candle put little points of gold in his eyes. His scalp was shaved bare as it had been for years, but his whiskers had more white in them than gold now, and his hands on the papers were an old man's hands, spotted and thin. She had not noticed when all that had happened.
"Genna," Kevan said, and half rose from his chair. "What is it? What's wrong?"
She felt the tears come, and could do nothing to stop them. They gathered hot at the corners of her eyes and spilled over and ran down into the lines of her face, and she let them.
"I'm sorry, brother," she said.
Tywin's face did not change. But she saw him understand. She saw it go through him, just once, as it goes through all men at the end, and then he was only looking at her, the way he had looked at her across the hall at Casterly Rock when he was ten years old and the only one who had stood up.
Below them, in the yard, a horn sounded. Then boots on the stair, many boots, and steel sliding from scabbards, and a man's voice shouting in the accent of the Reach.
The Tyrell guards had come into Hayford.
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