A Game of Thrones(103)

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55.CATELYN(1)

She reached across his table and touched his hair. “You are my firstborn, Robb. I have only to look at you to remember the day you came into the world, red-faced and squalling.”
   He rose, clearly uncomfortable with her touch, and walked to the hearth. Grey Wind rubbed his head against his leg. “You know?.?.?.?about Father?”
   “Yes.” The reports of Robert’s sudden death and Ned’s fall had frightened Catelyn more than she could say, but she would not let her son see her fear. “Lord Manderly told me when I landed at White Harbor. Have you had any word of your sisters?”
   “There was a letter,” Robb said, scratching his direwolf under the jaw. “One for you as well, but it came to Winterfell with mine.” He went to the table, rummaged among some maps and papers, and returned with a crumpled parchment. “This is the one she wrote me, I never thought to bring yours.”
   Something in Robb’s tone troubled her. She smoothed out the paper and read. Concern gave way to disbelief, then to anger, and lastly to fear. “This is Cersei’s letter, not your sister’s,” she said when she was done. “The real message is in what Sansa does not say. All this about how kindly and gently the Lannisters are treating her?.?.?.?I know the sound of a threat, even whispered. They have Sansa hostage, and they mean to keep her.”
   “There’s no mention of Arya,” Robb pointed out, miserable.
   “No.” Catelyn did not want to think what that might mean, not now, not here.
   “I had hoped?.?.?.?if you still held the Imp, a trade of hostages?.?.?.?” He took Sansa’s letter and crumpled it in his fist, and she could tell from the way he did it that it was not the first time. “Is there word from the Eyrie? I wrote to Aunt Lysa, asking help. Has she called Lord Arryn’s banners, do you know? Will the knights of the Vale come join us?”
   “Only one,” she said, “the best of them, my uncle?.?.?.?but Brynden Blackfish was a Tully first. My sister is not about to stir beyond her Bloody Gate.”
   Robb took it hard. “Mother, what are we going to do? I brought this whole army together, eighteen thousand men, but I don’t?.?.?.?I’m not certain?.?.?.?” He looked to her, his eyes shining, the proud young lord melted away in an instant, and quick as that he was a child again, a fifteen-year-old boy looking to his mother for answers.
   It would not do.
   “What are you so afraid of, Robb?” she asked gently.
   “I?.?.?.?” He turned his head away, to hide the first tear. “If we march?.?.?.?even if we win?.?.?.?the Lannisters hold Sansa, and Father. They’ll kill them, won’t they?”
   “They want us to think so.”
   “You mean they’re lying?”
   “I do not know, Robb. What I do know is that you have no choice. If you go to King’s Landing and swear fealty, you will never be allowed to leave. If you turn your tail and retreat to Winterfell, your lords will lose all respect for you. Some may even go over to the Lannisters. Then the queen, with that much less to fear, can do as she likes with her prisoners. Our best hope, our only true hope, is that you can defeat the foe in the field. If you should chance to take Lord Tywin or the Kingslayer captive, why then a trade might very well be possible, but that is not the heart of it. So long as you have power enough that they must fear you, Ned and your sister should be safe. Cersei is wise enough to know that she may need them to make her peace, should the fighting go against her.”
   “What if the fighting doesn’t go against her?” Robb asked. “What if it goes against us?”
   Catelyn took his hand. “Robb, I will not soften the truth for you. If you lose, there is no hope for any of us. They say there is naught but stone at the heart of Casterly Rock. Remember the fate of Rhaegar’s children.”
   She saw the fear in his young eyes then, but there was a strength as well. “Then I will not lose,” he vowed.
   “Tell me what you know of the fighting in the riverlands,” she said. She had to learn if he was truly ready.
   “Less than a fortnight past, they fought a battle in the hills below the Golden Tooth,” Robb said. “Uncle Edmure had sent Lord Vance and Lord Piper to hold the pass, but the Kingslayer descended on them and put them to flight. Lord Vance was slain. The last word we had was that Lord Piper was falling back to join your brother and his other bannermen at Riverrun, with Jaime Lannister on his heels. That’s not the worst of it, though. All the time they were battling in the pass, Lord Tywin was bringing a second Lannister army around from the south. It’s said to be even larger than Jaime’s host.
   “Father must have known that, because he sent out some men to oppose them, under the king’s own banner. He gave the command to some southron lordling, Lord Erik or Derik or something like that, but Ser Raymun Darry rode with him, and the letter said there were other knights as well, and a force of Father’s own guardsmen. Only it was a trap. Lord Derik had no sooner crossed the Red Fork than the Lannisters fell upon him, the king’s banner be damned, and Gregor Clegane took them in the rear as they tried to pull back across the Mummer’s Ford. This Lord Derik and a few others may have escaped, no one is certain, but Ser Raymun was killed, and most of our men from Winterfell. Lord Tywin has closed off the kingsroad, it’s said, and now he’s marching north toward Harrenhal, burning as he goes.”
   Grim and grimmer, thought Catelyn. It was worse than she’d imagined. “You mean to meet him here?” she asked.
   “If he comes so far, but no one thinks he will,” Robb said. “I’ve sent word to Howland Reed, Father’s old friend at Greywater Watch. If the Lannisters come up the Neck, the crannogmen will bleed them every step of the way, but Galbart Glover says Lord Tywin is too smart for that, and Roose Bolton agrees. He’ll stay close to the Trident, they believe, taking the castles of the river lords one by one, until Riverrun stands alone. We need to march south to meet him.”
   The very idea of it chilled Catelyn to the bone. What chance would a fifteen-year-old boy have against seasoned battle commanders like Jaime and Tywin Lannister? “Is that wise? You are strongly placed here. It’s said that the old Kings in the North could stand at Moat Cailin and throw back hosts ten times the size of their own.”
   “Yes, but our food and supplies are running low, and this is not land we can live off easily. We’ve been waiting for Lord Manderly, but now that his sons have joined us, we need to march.”
   She was hearing the lords bannermen speaking with her son’s voice, she realized. Over the years, she had hosted many of them at Winterfell, and been welcomed with Ned to their own hearths and tables. She knew what sorts of men they were, each one. She wondered if Robb did.
   And yet there was sense in what they said. This host her son had assembled was not a standing army such as the Free Cities were accustomed to maintain, nor a force of guardsmen paid in coin. Most of them were smallfolk: crofters, fieldhands, fishermen, sheepherders, the sons of innkeeps and traders and tanners, leavened with a smattering of sellswords and freeriders hungry for plunder. When their lords called, they came?.?.?.?but not forever. “Marching is all very well,” she said to her son, “but where, and to what purpose? What do you mean to do?”
   Robb hesitated. “The Greatjon thinks we should take the battle to Lord Tywin and surprise him,” he said, “but the Glovers and the Karstarks feel we’d be wiser to go around his army and join up with Uncle Ser Edmure against the Kingslayer.” He ran his fingers through his shaggy mane of auburn hair, looking unhappy. “Though by the time we reach Riverrun?.?.?.?I’m not certain?.?.?.?”
   “Be certain,” Catelyn told her son, “or go home and take up that wooden sword again. You cannot afford to seem indecisive in front of men like Roose Bolton and Rickard Karstark. Make no mistake, Robb, these are your bannermen, not your friends. You named yourself battle commander. Command.”
   Her son looked at her, startled, as if he could not credit what he was hearing. “As you say, Mother.”
   “I’ll ask you again. What do you mean to do?”
   Robb drew a map across the table, a ragged piece of old leather covered with lines of faded paint. One end curled up from being rolled; he weighed it down with his dagger. “Both plans have virtues, but?.?.?.?look, if we try to swing around Lord Tywin’s host, we take the risk of being caught between him and the Kingslayer, and if we attack him?.?.?.?by all reports, he has more men than I do, and a lot more armored horse. The Greatjon says that won’t matter if we catch him with his breeches down, but it seems to me that a man who has fought as many battles as Tywin Lannister won’t be so easily surprised.”
   “Good,” she said. She could hear echoes of Ned in his voice, as he sat there, puzzling over the map. “Tell me more.”
   “I’d leave a small force here to hold Moat Cailin, archers mostly, and march the rest down the causeway,” he said, “but once we’re below the Neck, I’d split our host in two. The foot can continue down the kingsroad, while our horsemen cross the Green Fork at the Twins.” He pointed. “When Lord Tywin gets word that we’ve come south, he’ll march north to engage our main host, leaving our riders free to hurry down the west bank to Riverrun.” Robb sat back, not quite daring to smile, but pleased with himself and hungry for her praise.
   Catelyn frowned down at the map. “You’d put a river between the two parts of your army.”
   “And between Jaime and Lord Tywin,” he said eagerly. The smile came at last. “There’s no crossing on the Green Fork above the ruby ford, where Robert won his crown. Not until the Twins, all the way up here, and Lord Frey controls that bridge. He’s your father’s bannerman, isn’t that so?”
   The Late Lord Frey, Catelyn thought. “He is,” she admitted, “but my father has never trusted him. Nor should you.”
   “I won’t,” Robb promised. “What do you think?”
   She was impressed despite herself. He looks like a Tully, she thought, yet he’s still his father’s son, and Ned taught him well. “Which force would you command?”
   “The horse,” he answered at once. Again like his father; Ned would always take the more dangerous task himself.
   “And the other?”
   “The Greatjon is always saying that we should smash Lord Tywin. I thought I’d give him the honor.”
   It was his first misstep, but how to make him see it without wounding his fledgling confidence? “Your father once told me that the Greatjon was as fearless as any man he had ever known.”
   Robb grinned. “Grey Wind ate two of his fingers, and he laughed about it. So you agree, then?”
   “Your father is not fearless,” Catelyn pointed out. “He is brave, but that is very different.”
   Her son considered that for a moment. “The eastern host will be all that stands between Lord Tywin and Winterfell,” he said thoughtfully. “Well, them and whatever few bowmen I leave here at the Moat. So I don’t want someone fearless, do I?”
   “No. You want cold cunning, I should think, not courage.”
   “Roose Bolton,” Robb said at once. “That man scares me.”
   “Then let us pray he will scare Tywin Lannister as well.”
   Robb nodded and rolled up the map. “I’ll give the commands, and assemble an escort to take you home to Winterfell.”
   Catelyn had fought to keep herself strong, for Ned’s sake and for this stubborn brave son of theirs. She had put despair and fear aside, as if they were garments she did not choose to wear?.?.?.?but now she saw that she had donned them after all.
   “I am not going to Winterfell,” she heard herself say, surprised at the sudden rush of tears that blurred her vision. “My father may be dying behind the walls of Riverrun. My brother is surrounded by foes. I must go to them.”