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The Eyrie. The white castle at the top of the world.
It rose like a spear carved from a giant's bone, thrusting defiant and alone into the sky.
The most impregnable fortress in all of Westeros.
Clouds were its walls. The howling gale was its war horn.
Since the Age of Heroes, no army had ever taken it by frontal assault.
Yet now, within those unyielding walls, a madness had taken hold, something colder and more piercing than any mountain wind.
In the towering main hall, the sworn lords and nobles of the Vale had assembled. They wore their house armor. Their faces were grim.
Lysa Arryn.
The current mistress of the Vale. Her face, once considered handsome enough, had been warped by years of paranoia and grief. Eyes sunken deep. Lips cracked and dry. Her long brown hair hung as loose and ragged as dead straw.
Cradled in her arms was a boy who looked seven or eight but was as frail as a child of three or four.
Robert Arryn.
The future lord of the Vale.
At this moment, the future lord of the Vale looked like a hungry fledgling, greedily suckling at that withered,
"Mother... a little more..."
The boy's thin, sickly murmur wormed its way into every ear in the hall, slick and wrong as a maggot burrowing through rot.
"My sweet baby, of course. Drink as much as you want."
The smile that spread across Lysa Arryn's face was the kind that raised the hair on your neck.
She adjusted her posture so her son could feed more comfortably.
Silence. The hall had gone deathly still.
The sworn lords of the Vale, knights who prided themselves on ancient blood and hard-won honor, stood with their heads bowed, staring at the fine leather boots on their feet.
No one dared look up.
No one dared look at the throne.
"Enough, Lysa!"
A voice cracked through the suffocating quiet like a whip.
"Bronze Yohn" Royce.
Lord of Runestone.
A tall man, gone gray, his face carved deep by decades of war and weather.
Worth noting: Bronze Yohn's third son had been a Night's Watch Ranger. He died at the hands of White Walkers. In that sense, a brother in misfortune to Lynn, except he died, and "Lynn" had survived because he ran fast enough.
Bronze Yohn lifted his head. His gray eyes burned with undisguised fury and disgust.
"Put some trousers on your son and send him back to his own seat!"
"He is eight years old!"
"Not a mewling infant!"
"He is the heir of House Arryn — the future Warden of the Vale! Not a pet in your arms!"
The old lord's voice thundered across the hall.
Several young knights gripped their sword hilts without thinking, watching the scene with tight, nervous eyes.
Lysa Arryn raised her head slowly.
Those eyes, clouded by grief and obsession, settled on Bronze Yohn Royce.
She did not rage.
She smiled.
"Lord Royce," she said softly, "are you teaching me how to discipline my own son?"
A beat.
"Or do you believe you are better qualified than I am to sit in this chair?"
"You—!"
Lord Royce's face went scarlet.
"I have never harbored any such thought!"
"I was only—"
"You only think I have gone mad. Is that not right?"
Lysa cut him off, her voice suddenly sharp.
"You think that for the sake of a lowborn Petyr Baelish, I would drag the entire Vale to war against some Northern upstart with a dragon!"
"You think I am gambling House Arryn's legacy, all of your lives — on a madwoman's whim!"
Her words landed precisely where she aimed them.
Silence swallowed the hall again.
Because yes. That was exactly what they thought.
From the moment Lysa Arryn had issued her call to arms across the Vale, using Jon Arryn's name, declaring Lynn a traitor, swearing vengeance for Petyr Baelish, they had all privately agreed: this woman had lost her mind.
Who in the seven hells was Petyr Baelish?
A little finger who had clawed his way to power through nothing but schemes.
Lysa had locked down information in the Vale, but certain rumors had leaked through, and the picture they painted was clear enough. Baelish had murdered Lord Arryn. Most of them believed that now. Ten to one odds, easily.
But Lysa called it a propaganda war. She said no one could prove anything yet.
And with the Vale sealed and formally placed on a war footing, anyone who dug too deep risked being dragged out and executed for treason. So they tread carefully and said nothing.
The point was, Baelish's death was already riddled with questions. It wasn't worth a single drop of Vale blood.
And Lynn? Who was Lynn?
Lord of the Giftlands, personally titled by King Robert Baratheon himself. A sworn vassal of Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell.
The moment war started, Ned would march.
This would stop being a quarrel between the Vale and the Giftlands. It would become a war against the North, enemies both beyond and within the Wall, all at once.
And most importantly, Lynn had a dragon.
The nightmare the Targaryens left behind. The creature that had melted Harrenhal into glass.
Make an enemy of that?
How was that any different from walking off a cliff?
Lysa's grasp of politics was truly, catastrophically poor.
"My lady, none of us question your decision."
A Lady Waynwood, heavyset, hair thinning, spoke up with careful diplomacy.
"It is only... a dragon. It is a dragon, after all."
"Dragons have been gone for more than a hundred years. Everything we know about them comes from books."
"We simply do not know how to fight something like that."
"Monster?"
Lysa let out a short, contemptuous laugh.
She finally pushed her son away from her. He shrieked in protest.
"A dragon is a winged beast. Nothing more."
Lysa rose from the throne and began to pace.
"It flies. It breathes fire. But it bleeds. And it dies."
"300 years ago, Rhaenys Targaryen, sister of Aegon the Conqueror — flew her dragon Meraxes into Dorne."
"And what happened?"
"From the battlements of Hellholt, a single scorpion bolt pierced that dragon clean through the eye."
"It fell from the sky and shattered on the ground."
"The rider with it. Flesh and bone, reduced to nothing."
Lysa's eyes gleamed with something feverish.
"A beast. Just a beast."
"And any beast, a hunter can kill."
"The Vale has the finest knights in the Seven Kingdoms. The strongest castles. The most treacherous terrain in all of Westeros."
"We build enough scorpions. We stockpile enough iron bolts."
"When that creature flies into our mountains, we bring it down with a thousand bolts, ten thousand bolts, and nail it into the earth before the Bloody Gate!"
The words were kindling, and Lysa knew exactly how to use them. She watched the fire catch in the eyes of the younger knights, the hunger for glory, for a name that would outlast their bones.
Kill a dragon.
What story could be greater than that? What bard would not sing that name for a thousand years?
"Preposterous!"
Bronze Yohn Royce's roar cut through it all.
"What do you think war is?"
"A hunt? A game?"
"Say we somehow kill the dragon. Then what?"
"You think the King will simply look away?"
"Lynn is his good-son! Have you considered what Robert will do when Lynn is dead?"
"The Vale takes no part in strife — that was Lord Arryn's precept!"
"And you are dragging every last one of us into the abyss!"
The old lord's words fell like hammer strikes.
The young knights who had been burning a moment ago went cold. The fire in their eyes flickered and dimmed.
Yes. What came after the dragon?
The wrath of the entire realm.
"Strife?"
Lysa stopped walking.
"My dear Lord Royce." Her voice dropped to something quieter, almost intimate. "Do you really believe we still have a choice?"
She walked toward him, one step at a time. Those eyes, wild and unblinking, never left his face.
"Think carefully. My husband. Your Jon Arryn, whom you all swore to serve with your lives. How did he die?"
"He died in King's Landing! He died drowning in someone else's schemes!"
"And what did that drunkard Robert Baratheon do about it?"
"Nothing."
"While my husband's bones were still warm, Robert was already planning to send my son to Casterly Rock as a hostage for Tywin Lannister!"
"He tried to hand the last blood of House Arryn over to the Lannisters, our enemies!"
"And you want to call that taking no part in strife?"
Lysa's voice climbed higher, cracking at the edges.
"You may choose to take no part in strife. Strife does not care. It will come for you anyway."
"I fled back to the Eyrie with little Robert. I thought we would be safe here."
"Then Lynn appeared. That Northern bastard."
"He killed Petyr. The man I trusted most."
"The only man willing to help me. The only man willing to seek justice for my husband."
"Why did he kill Petyr? Because Petyr knew too much."
"Because Petyr knew that the Lannisters had a hand in Jon Arryn's death!"
A complete lie.
Everyone in that hall knew it. Not one of them believed this story had more than the flimsiest basis in fact.
But not one of them could prove otherwise.
Because they knew nothing. The Vale's connection to the outside world had been severed for too long under Lysa's rule. The entire Vale had become, for all practical purposes, the private court of one madwoman.
"Now the King's raven has arrived at my desk."
Lysa pulled a roll of parchment from her sleeve and hurled it to the floor.
"That fool Robert personally named Lynn Lord of the Giftlands. And he gave him Princess Myrcella as a wife."
"He put a dragon in the hands of a Stark lapdog."
"Do you still not understand?"
She swept her gaze across the assembly. For a moment, through all the fury, what showed in her eyes looked almost like despair.
"We are surrounded."
"To the north, a madman with a dragon. To the south, a king who wants to steal my son."
"We have been at the center of this storm for a long time now. There is nowhere left to run."
"I declared war on Lynn not to avenge Petyr."
"I did it for us."
"For the Vale."
Her voice had gone hoarse, worn raw from the force of it.
"Robert has lost his mind! He suspects us. He watches us. With Jon Arryn dead, he could invent a reason to strip us of everything, and he could do it tomorrow."
"Our only road forward is to strike before he can."
"Lynn's foundations are not yet set. The Giftlands are vast and nearly empty. His army is a rabble of wildlings who have never seen a real battle."
"Cavalry against savages is not a war, it is a slaughter. I am certain of victory."
"We hit him before he can dig in. We take the Giftlands."
"Far from King's Landing. Far from all of it. A place where we build something new."
"A free kingdom — our own, belonging to the Vale and no one else."
"From there, the Wall is our shield. We can raid south or trade with Braavos. With our own territory as a buffer, neither dragon nor king will ever threaten us again."
"The Giftlands are cold and hard. But they are our only way to survive."
That was the truth of it.
To survive Robert's anger, she was willing to throw the Vale into the fire. She would stake everything, every life in that hall, every house, every ancient name, on one mad gamble, and buy herself and her son a future with the winnings.
Everyone knew the North was brutal. But bitter cold was nothing compared to being dead.
The nobles looked at one another. In each other's eyes they saw it, the flicker of wavering, the hairline crack in their conviction.
Lysa Arryn's plan was insane.
And it was seductive in the way only truly desperate plans can be.
An independent kingdom.
Bronze Yohn Royce opened his mouth to argue.
He found he had nothing to say.
Because Lysa was right about one thing.
They had no retreat.
The moment she had declared war on Lynn in the Vale's name, she had bound them all to the same chariot. Even surrender was not a clean exit. First, could they survive Lysa's blade long enough to reach Robert's mercy? Always assume the worst. And even if Lysa left the surrender faction alone, Robert would still brand them all as accomplices.
So the options were three, and only three.
Follow Lysa into the madness and gamble for that sliver of survival.
Wait to be purged as traitors by the King.
Or drag their feet, do as little as possible, and pray Robert's mercy outweighed his fury.
Nothing else.
There was one more knot in all of this. The Vale, the North, and the Riverlands had been allies since Robert's rebellion, natural partners forged in the same war. The ruling house of the Riverlands was House Tully. Lysa's family by birth. One of the great houses of Westeros, granted lordship of the Riverlands by Aegon the Conqueror himself, in reward for betraying Harren and opening their gates.
House Tully built their power through marriage.
Lord Hoster Tully had given his eldest daughter Catelyn to Eddard Stark of the North. His youngest daughter Lysa to Jon Arryn of the Vale. Three great houses, bound by blood.
The Riverlands were manageable. Lysa's position would not damage that friendship, and might even strengthen it, she was still the ruling lady of the Vale, after all.
But the Starks were different.
The bond between the North and the Vale rested mostly on the fellowship of shared war, and partly on the connection between Catelyn and Lysa. And Lynn was sworn to the North. He was Ned's vassal. Ned Stark did not abandon his men.
A vassal swore loyalty to his liege lord in exchange for land and protection. If the liege lord could not provide that protection, his word was worth nothing, and in the North, a man's word was everything.
Lynn had sworn to the Starks.
By honor. By the ancient tradition that had made the Stark name mean something for 8,000 years. By Ned's own character, which was as inflexible as the Wall and twice as cold. The Starks would protect Lynn. There was no world in which they did not.
Once war began, every bond between the North and the Vale would be ash.
If only Ned Stark would stay out of it.
But who in all of Westeros had ever talked that old stubborn fool into anything?
In the suffocating silence, Lysa walked slowly back to her throne.
She picked up the still-wailing boy and lifted him high, high enough for every lord in that hall to see him clearly.
"Look at him."
"The blood of House Arryn. Your future lord."
"Do you want him to spend his life as a puppet, kept in fear, kept in suspicion, controlled by men who see him as useful?"
"Or do you want him to be a king?"
She held him there, arms trembling with the effort, eyes blazing.
"For Arryn! For the Vale!"
"WAR!"
The young knights broke.
Swords sang from their scabbards. Blades went up. And the sound that came out of them was raw and full and real, the roar of men who had been afraid and had found something to believe in instead.
"FOR THE VALE!"
One voice became ten. Ten became fifty.
The sound built and built until it shook the stone walls and rolled out through the high windows into the mountain air, a wave of noise powerful enough to wake the mountain itself.
Even Bronze Yohn Royce, after a long moment of stillness, reached down and drew the ancient sword at his hip. The sword that had been in his family for generations. The symbol of everything his house stood for.
He knew what it meant.
He knew he had no other choice.
Lysa Arryn watched it all. Her twisted face relaxed, just barely, into something that looked like satisfaction.
She let her gaze travel to the far corner of the hall, where a plain-looking man in a gray robe stood very quietly, waiting.
The Eyrie's chief craftsman.
"Tobho Mott."
Her voice cut through the noise.
"Gather every craftsman in the Vale. Work them day and night. I want scorpions, the largest you can build."
"The bolts will be thicker than a man's arm and longer than a knight's lance."
"The draw strong enough to punch through dragon scale."
The craftsman flinched. The distress on his face was immediate and obvious.
"My lady... this will take considerable time, and... we have no designs, no plans to work from, "
"I don't care."
Lysa's voice went flat and cold.
"1 month. That is all you have."
"In that month I will stockpile food and supplies. The moment I am ready, the war begins."
"I want 100 scorpions standing before the Bloody Gate. A hundred."
"That Northern bastard and his dragon are going to fly into our mountains."
"They will not fly out."
She held his gaze, and her smile returned, slow, certain, and entirely without warmth.
"If you miss the deadline, you will find out what happens next."
➤ Next: Lysa Thwarted
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