The Lion and the Rose: South

[badgate]

To The Lords and Ladies of the Vale, a matter of urgent import.

My fellow noblemen of the Vale, I write to you in shock at the discovery of my brave and skilled archers.

Just hours ago, I was brought by my men an intercepted raven sealed with the colors of Aurane Velaryon and stamped with the symbol of the disgraced maester Qyburn. The contents of this raven are disclosed thus:

To the being claiming to be the Night's King,

The Lord of the Waters hears your demand with interest, but wonders what offer you can possibly extend in return. He instructs me to specify that he will not be satisfied with mere proposals of clemency.

signed with a simple scribble, Qyburn

The Sidhe are the greatest threat the Vale has ever known, and the man claiming to be Protector of the Realm, who brought the savagery of his warfare to our shores, is now consorting with the Sidhe.

I implore you all to join me against this abhorrent man, who is not fit to lead the Vale or any part of the realm. I welcome anyone who wishes to inspect the legitimacy of this intercepted raven to find me and be welcomed by a lord who still honors the laws of hospitality.

So Signed and Sealed,
Lord Andar of House Royce, Lord of Runestone and Lord Paramount of the Vale

[Garlan Gunter]

RAVENS ACROSS THE VALE

Lord Royce claims to have intercepted a letter I sent to the Enemy Beyond. He tells the truth, and yet he lies.

Indeed I did sent the missive, and what general of spirit would not, to gain knowledge of an unknown foe?

But the letter was not intercepted. For the correspondence continued:

"Qyburn,

You'd do well to advise your Lord of Waters that he is not in a position to demand anything.  I do not need him to hold the North.  Don't need him at all, really.  If your Lord of Waters does not leave Bear Island immediately then I will crush him like an ant.  That is not a matter over which there will be any negotiation.  However, if he serves me loyally and aides me against my enemies then there is much and more that I can offer him.  Ask your Lord of Waters what it is he wants from life.  Gold?  The secret to immorality?  Land?  He need only execute Rickon Stark to prove his loyalty and all those things and more could be his.  And if you are able to broker a successful agreement, I shall reward you as well.  You will be free to conduct whatever experiments you desire on any humans you wish without any restriction.  Oh and one other thing, just this once, I would like both your and Lord Aurane's signatures on the reply.  It is important that the Lord of Waters acknowledge that you have full authority to negotiate terms on his behalf, not that I doubt you, but all the same you'll have to indulge me in this. 

The Night's King"

"To the Bastard of the North,

I have no relish for fool's gold, nor land held at another power's whim, nor for the immortal 'life' you offer.

You may enjoy the bare shores of Bear Island, but you will never gain the allegiance of

The Bastard of the South"

The only way Lord Royce could have received his information is thus if he himself is a traitor, not only to Lord Harrold Arryn, but to all humankind.

Men of the Vale, whom do you trust? Your natural lord and the admiral who saved the northfolk of White Harbor, who has fought the enemy?

Or this ambitious and crabbed lord who harbours tree worship and the Seven only know what further atrocities?

Your rightful Lord marches on the Eyrie, Valefolk. I leave the decision to you.

Signed and sealed, Aurane Velaryon, Protector of the Realm

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

"To all the so-called Lords, Ladies, and pretenders within the realm of men,

I can assure you that none were more shocked than I to learn that this raven had been shot down over the Vale.  Perhaps this so-called Lord Royce would be so kind as to explain to me why I received the raven he claims to have shot down before he did.  In fact, I even replied to it.  The Bastard of the South speaks true, he was indeed foolish enough to challenge me...for a time.  He later came crawling back begging for my help in the Vale, but that's a tale for another day.   Meanwhile, this so-called Lord Royce was all to eager too foresake the doomed lot of you for a mere taste of the scraps from my table.  But how could a raven I received have been shot down over the Vale?  Ah wait, now I remember!  This so-called Lord Royce tried to ally himself with me and I sent him a forged copy of the raven.  I have the original and my response to the Bastard of the South.

To the being claiming to be the Night's King,

The Lord of the Waters hears your demand with interest, but wonders what offer you can possibly extend in return. He instructs me to specify that he will not be satisfied with mere proposals of clemency.

signed with a simple scribble, Qyburn

"Qyburn,

You'd do well to advise your Lord of Waters that he is not in a position to demand anything.  I do not need him to hold the North.  Don't need him at all, really.  If your Lord of Waters does not leave Bear Island immediately then I will crush him like an ant.  That is not a matter over which there will be any negotiation.  However, if he serves me loyally and aides me against my enemies then there is much and more that I can offer him.  Ask your Lord of Waters what it is he wants from life.  Gold?  The secret to immorality?  Land?  He need only execute Rickon Stark to prove his loyalty and all those things and more could be his.  And if you are able to broker a successful agreement, I shall reward you as well.  You will be free to conduct whatever experiments you desire on any humans you wish without any restriction.  Oh and one other thing, just this once, I would like both your and Lord Aurane's signatures on the reply.  It is important that the Lord of Waters acknowledge that you have full authority to negotiate terms on his behalf, not that I doubt you, but all the same you'll have to indulge me in this.  

The Night's King"

As you can see, what the so-called Lord Royce claims is simply impossible.  Had he indeed shot down the raven, I couldn't have very well responded to it.  Oh and one other thing, I suppose it may interest you all to know that he offered to prove his loyalty to me by convincing House Tyrell to sack Riverrun in order to force the Blackfish to withdraw from the Twins when I attacked so long as I promised to make him King of the Vale and let him rule that pathetic mountain ridge as a human vassal.  I've been meaning to ask whether the Tyrells did anything noteworthy in the Riverlands lately.  I'd very much like to know whether or not he made good on his promise.

The Night's King" (signed with human blood)

[Garlan Gunter]

ACT OF ATTAINDER AND DENUNCIATION

To Andar Royce, felon,

Thou art summoned to the Eyrie to answer for the crimes of rebellion, treason, breach of guest right, plotted usurpation, and alliance proven with the Enemy Beyond.

I, Harrold Arryn, Lord of the Vale, sentence thee to die.

Runestone I award to a true and faithful servant of the realm, Ser Davos Seaworth.

This I do proclaim, by the counsel and accord of Aurane Velaryon, Prince of Dragonstone and Protector of the Realm.

Signed in the sight of old gods and new, and the Lord of Light besides

Harrold Arryn.

[Garlan Gunter]

PYLOS



“Where is the boy?”

“Lord Monterys, my lord protector?”

“Monty? Seven, no,” the onetime Bastard of Driftmark almost yelped. They were of an age, Pylos reflected, though they had first met when Aurane Waters was a bold but callow sellsail, Pylos an unsure replacement for a Maester of legend. Waters had come a long way. Waters, Pylos reflected as he beheld the writhing of the waves, beyond the casement and the buttress and the monstrous gargoyles, tended so to do.

“The boy Hardyng,” the Protector insisted now. That tell-tale silvery hair was lank and wild grown know, and a heavy set gold cup of gold wine seemed ever to sprout in Aurane’s sword-hand.

“The Lord of the Vale is at the Gates of the Moon with his banners thus far gathered, my lord,” Pylos responded with careful formality. He had always known, disconcertingly, that he owed a part of his rapid preferment at the Citadel not to his talent, nor his learning, but merely to the fact that he ever knew how to behave, no matter how flailing the situation might seem. How to be a maester, even as a young man; how to cow the temper, guard the tongue, still the heart, steady the hand.

“Send him this. Now.” Aurane flung the command in the form of a paper dart, as was his wont. Yet when unfolded, it showed a neat enough hand, one that puzzled Pylos in his idle hours, of which this was far from being one. Aurane often enough cared to scribble his own dispatches, yet he had led most of his life at sea. Where had he learnt the knack? Sometimes it is the pettiest mysteries, Pylos mused, which are yet the least soluble. It was on this paradox he kept pondering as he unloosed the raven, not on the latest grandiloquent proclamation to which poor, up-jumped, frightened young Hardyng was to set his lordly new name.

“Ser Lyn growns fractious and crapulous,” Aurane complained, justifying in full Pylos’s suspicion that, wherever he had garnered his learning, he enjoyed altogether too much showing it off. “I must begone to…reassure him. Then I shall be asail. An admiral should ever be asail.”

“Quite so, my lord,” Pylos rejoined carefully, “though an admiral who serves as a Protector might be forgiven for lingering on the shore for a time.”

“Forgiveness,” Aurane spat suddenly in the vague direction of the nearest hearth. “You’re wrong, boy maester.” Pylos shrugged off the retort with quiet dignity, listening on to his now at least half-drunk present master. What was Waters drinking for? For what preparing? And yet, the realm being as it was, even Pylos scarcely blamed him.

“You’re wrong, boy maester,” the Protector pressed on now, and Pylos realised Aurane's scorn had long lost the power to sting him even mildly, as the Protector, himself scarce a man grown, rambled on. “For forgiveness in Westeros is dead and gone. Did the Starks get it? The Tullys? Has the Queen once forgiven in her pretty life? Do dragons forgive? Do Others? Do bloody Valemen?” Aurane hawked again, and he swigged, his pallor almost green tinged by the candlelight reflecting from the obsidian. The light in the Dragonmont’s strange, ancient solar hardly improved the sudden materialisation of Qyburn, Master of Whisperers.

“It is done, my lord,” the older man began at once to insinuate. “The repulsive charges have been quite…”

“Spare me,” Aurane rasped. “Go and attend on the little queen instead. Ponder your duty, there, while I go and ponder Ser Lyn’s.”

It was not just because Pylos scarce liked the sound of that that made him now determine, unasked, to follow Qyburn. The man was depraved, any perspicacious glance could tell quick enough, but Pylos could not help feeling his fascination…remembering the praises of Marwyn, as well as the fulminations of…

…as if on cue, a third Maester adhered to them now on the way to the Ravenry, all of him ajangle with cheap base metal, the nearest equivalent to the Grand Maester’s regalia that could be hammered up. “Perestan,” Qyburn was already mocking silkily, “a pleasure.” The Vale scholar seemed too demoralised even to sharply correct the unchained maester’s presumptuous address to ‘Grand Maester.’

“No word from Goldengrove as yet,” Perestan chattered indiscrimately to them both, a maester far his younger and a criminal disgraced. Pylos had rarely seen a man so diminished by power. “None from Sunspear. None even from the Riverlords…”

“But from Winterfell, certain letters,” Qyburn joked in what was, even for him, exceptionally poor taste. He managed to spark thus just a single ember of the broken-seeming Grand Maester’s wrath. “Certain birds…”

“You’re damn lucky to be alive, you…minion of the bloody fiends,” Perestan muttered darkly. “Don’t get too jolly, my lord. If the true enemy enters the Vale, your laughter will cease on a certain.”

“I always had but limited use for laughter,” Qyburn answered absently. “Why, behold. Here lies the Queen.”

“Surely she’s not dead already?” Pylos quipped uncharacteristically, before feeling inescapably guilty for letting slip that most inauspicious of quips. The look of the baby girl still astonished him on a sudden, frowning through her black brows, making him feel small, mean, even stupid.

Perestan’s old eyes goggled, and he murmured under his breath something that by way of a cough emerged as “Long may she reign.” Pylos seconded him with a respectful grunt of approval to which he did not for a moment trust.

“Her health is certainly good, Grand Maester,” Qyburn agreed, acting the physician, a role which for all his skill, for all his wizened kindliness of feature, in the end became him but vilely, “yet there is something else…something that swiftly reduces her...considerable looks…” His shrug was quietly, almost warmingly despairing.

And then, not for the first time and certainly not the last, an unknown rook ricocheted into the falcons’ enclosure. It was scarcely a matter of eggs, as the maesters at once, in their various ways, perceived. Amidst the chaos of the squall, Winter had somehow returned to the North.

It was not black, nor white, but a ghastly, deathly grey. Quickly Pylos struck it on the side of the head, with the silver, sharpened hammer all these maesters, even Qyburn, once of their order, had grown used to using lately upon the birds from Winterfell, ere they were set alight. At that moment, from somewhere above the ravenry, in some deeper chamber of the dragonglass, there cut in a scream more lamentable and abandoned even than the bird of illest omen.