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Walder Frey had collapsed into the high seat like a puppet with its strings cut.
His face, buried in wrinkles, was twisted into something barely recognizable. Pure terror had done that to him.
He'd lived long enough to read people. One look at those mysterious figures, and he knew. These weren't men you bargained with.
This time, he was finished.
The smugness was gone from his cloudy eyes. What was left was naked pleading and horror.
He wanted to beg. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
He knew, deep down, that begging wouldn't save him from what was coming.
"You... you demon from the seven hells..."
Lysa Arryn jabbed a finger at Lynn, her voice so shrill it felt like a blade dragged across glass.
She had finally clawed her way back from the shock of watching Lynn tear off his face. But what replaced the shock was something worse. A despair with no bottom to it.
She couldn't wrap her mind around it. That someone could wear a disguise that perfect. That someone could have known about her arrangement with Walder down to the last detail.
It was as if... as if Lynn had been lying right between them in the bed when they made their plans.
How was that even possible?
It was over.
The plan. All of it. Gone the moment that mask hit the floor.
She couldn't understand. She simply couldn't understand.
"Demon?"
Lynn smiled.
He walked toward the high seat, one step at a time. Unhurried. The Frey soldiers in his path took one look at him and scrambled out of the way like men fleeing a ghost, tripping over each other, clawing for space, until a clear path opened before him.
"Compared to me," Lynn said, his gaze settling on Lysa and Walder, "I'd say the two of you have a far stronger claim to that title."
"Walder Frey! Lysa Arryn!"
The roar came from below. Raw and furious.
Brynden Tully , the Blackfish , had hauled himself upright. The antidote had given him back just enough strength for this. He leaned on his longsword, swaying, but his bloodshot eyes were locked on the two figures at the high seat like he was trying to burn holes through them.
"You dare violate guest right!"
"You godforsaken bastards!"
"Worse than pigs and dogs!"
"You will burn in the seven hells for this!"
Guest right.
Those two words cut through the fog of shock still hanging over the Tully bannermen like a cold blade.
They looked at the black blood dried at the corners of their mouths. At the shattered wine cups scattered across the floor. At the Frey soldiers still gripping their blades all around them.
Something broke open in every chest in that hall. Belated terror, scalding humiliation, and a rage so vast it had nowhere to go but up.
They had almost died here. Every single one of them.
Cut down at a wedding feast. Murdered by poison and steel while they were guests under this roof.
"Kill them! Kill that treacherous pair!"
"Not one Frey walks out of here alive!"
"They've defiled the gods! They'll rot in hell!"
The hall erupted.
One moment it had been a silent slaughterhouse. The next, it was a tribunal, and every Tully bannerman was screaming his verdict at once, pouring every curse they knew onto Walder Frey and Lysa Arryn.
"Sister."
Edmure Tully rose to his feet.
He didn't roar like Brynden. His voice was quiet. But there was something in it that cut deeper than shouting , a grief so heavy it made the air around him feel different.
He looked at Lysa. And whatever had once lived behind his eyes when he looked at his sister was gone. What remained was something hollow. Stranger. Lost.
"For power, you poisoned your own husband."
"And now you would poison your own brother. Your own blood."
"What are you made of, Lysa? What is your heart made of?"
"Me?"
Something shifted in Lysa's face. The fear was draining out of it. The condemnation of hundreds of voices should have broken her. Instead, something else was rising to fill the space.
Madness. The reckless, cornered kind, where a person has nothing left to lose and stops pretending otherwise.
She laughed. High and sharp.
"My heart? My heart died years ago!"
"It died the day Father forced me to marry that old man, Jon Arryn!"
"It's all of you! All of you did this to me!"
"I only wanted what was mine! What was always mine! What exactly did I do wrong?!"
"You're not wrong?"
Lynn's voice came quietly. But it stopped Lysa's scream cold, like a hand around her throat.
"The moment you started this absurd, unjust war, you were already wrong."
"And you've done nothing since but walk further down that road."
"Everything that's happened today — you earned it, Lysa."
He turned from her then and walked to Edmure's side. He rested a hand briefly on the man's shoulder. His eyes, when they met Edmure's, held something that looked almost like pity.
"Lord Edmure."
"There are things that are hard to hear. But you have the right to know them."
"Your father. Lord Hoster Tully." A pause. "Do you truly believe he died of illness?"
The hall went quiet.
Edmure's head snapped up. He stared at Lynn like a man who had just felt the ground shift beneath his feet.
"What... what are you saying?"
"I'm saying," Lynn said, and his gaze moved to Lysa, those dark eyes of his settling on her like he could see straight through to whatever was left of her soul, "that your father did not agree with Lysa's plans. He wanted to stop her."
"And so, dear Lady Lysa, you used your own hands to smother Lord Hoster to death."
"The father who raised you. Who gave you everything."
The world came apart inside Edmure's head.
His body lurched. He nearly went down again.
Father.
Father didn't die of illness.
He was smothered. By his own daughter. By his own blood.
No wonder.
No wonder Lysa's face had been so wrong that day. He'd noticed. He'd told himself he was imagining it.
He hadn't been imagining it.
Everything fit now. Every piece of it.
"No — no, you're lying! You're lying about me!"
Lysa's shriek tore through the hall. She sounded like a cornered animal.
This was the secret. The one that lived deeper and darker than even the poison she'd put in Jon Arryn's cup. The one that only she and Walder knew. The one she hadn't dared breathe even to Edmure when he was her prisoner , not a word, not a hint, not even when she'd had every advantage.
How did Lynn know?
She could not admit this. She would not.
They would burn her alive.
"Whether I'm lying," Lynn said, not looking at her, "you know better than anyone."
He was watching Edmure. The man who was coming apart in front of him.
"She told you that if you showed even a moment of defiance, Walder Frey's soldiers would slaughter everyone who stood against her. Didn't she."
"She held the lives of your entire family over your head to make you comply. Didn't she."
Each question landed like a hammer blow.
All of it true.
Edmure's lips were shaking. He looked at Lysa's face , that face twisted by madness , and the memory surfaced on its own. The secret room. A few days ago. Her voice.
"Brother, you will marry a Frey girl. It's your only way out."
"Never. I will never make alliance with the Freys."
"Then start preparing to bury your family. Every last one of them. Walder's men have no use for honor."
She had planned all of it from the beginning. His father's death included. It wasn't a consequence. It was a step.
He had felt something was wrong. He had pushed it down. And now Lynn had confirmed what he hadn't let himself believe.
His father hadn't been worn down and died.
His father had been murdered. Held down and smothered by the hands of his own daughter.
He couldn't imagine it. He didn't want to imagine it. What his father must have felt in those last moments. The confusion. The betrayal. The despair.
How dare she.
"Ahhh—!"
The sound that came out of Edmure wasn't human.
He couldn't hold it anymore. The grief and the rage tore through every wall he had left, and he moved like a wounded animal, straight at Lysa.
"You beast! You killed him! You killed Father!"
His eyes were red. He wasn't thinking. He only wanted to get his hands on her and not stop.
Two Frey guards stepped forward to block him.
They never touched him.
Two flashes of blue light. Two soft, wet sounds.
Two heads hit the floor.
The White Walkers behind Lynn had moved.
Edmure reached Lysa. His hands found her throat and locked.
"I'll kill you! For Father!"
Lysa clawed at his arms. Her face went red, then darker. Her eyes went wide with terror.
"Enough."
One word from Lynn.
Edmure froze.
He turned. His face was soaked with tears.
"Let her live," Lynn said. "Death is too easy for her."
"Once she's stood before proper judgment, I'll hand her over to the Tullys. All of them. Together."
Edmure's hands opened.
Lysa crumpled to the floor, gasping, dragging in air in ragged heaves like a fish thrown onto dry land.
The bannermen of House Tully looked down at her. The rage was gone from their faces now. What had replaced it was colder and quieter. Bone-deep contempt. Revulsion.
She had killed her husband. She had killed her father. She had tried to kill her brother and everyone who shared her name.
There was no word for what she was. Not a human one.
"Lord Lynn."
Brynden Tully — the Blackfish — stepped forward and bowed. Deep, and without hesitation.
"If not for you today, House Tully would have ceased to exist."
"Give the order. Tell us how to deal with these faithless animals."
Every Tully bannerman in the hall turned to look at Lynn. Waiting.
In that moment, Lynn , a man with no blood claim to the Riverlands, no seat, no name here , was the undisputed master of everything in this room.
He didn't speak yet.
He walked to the high seat. To the old man sitting in it, who had gone so rigid with fear that he'd soiled himself where he sat.
Lynn looked down at him.
"Lord Walder Frey."
He smiled. Warm. Brilliant. The kind of smile that had no business being on a face doing what his face was doing.
"It's time to see you out."
The ice formed in his hand before the words had finished. A dagger, conjured from nothing, pure and cold and sharp.
He gave Walder no time to speak. His left hand seized the sparse white hair and wrenched the old man's head back. His right hand moved.
One stroke.
A thin red line opened across Walder Frey's wrinkled throat and bloomed wide.
The old man's eyes went huge. His body shuddered, once, twice.
Then nothing.
Walder Frey died exactly as he deserved , small, and soiled, and silent.
Lynn shoved the body aside without looking at it. It tumbled down the steps of the high seat and came to rest on the floor below.
He raised the ice dagger, still dripping, and let his gaze move slowly across the hundreds of Frey soldiers packed into the hall. Every face he passed went pale.
"His head goes on the walls of Riverrun."
"I want every man who ever sets foot in the Riverlands to know what happens to those who betray their liege lord."
"I want Walder cursed and spat upon long after his bones are dust."
"House Frey will not fade from memory. They will be remembered. I will make certain that the name Frey is synonymous with treachery for a thousand years."
He paused.
His eyes dropped to the Frey sons and grandsons clustered in the hall. Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.
"As for the rest of you."
"The entertainment is just getting started."
➤ Next: A Temporary Conclusion