Chapter 49: The Antlers
ULF
Rain had been falling since we left the Kingsroad, and by the second afternoon the hill track was brown soup that pulled at the horses to the fetlock. Cole rode ahead of me the whole way. His white cloak had gone the grey of dishwater and he hadn't spoken since the last village.
"You told the Hand we were riding to Rosby," he said finally.
"I told him we were riding east."
"That's a lie with better manners."
I didn't answer that. Ahead, the trees thinned, and the hall of the Antlers stood up out of the wet: a long fortified house of dark stone on a shoulder of hill, a curtain wall barely twice a man's height, a gate of oak banded in iron. Smoke from four chimneys. Forty men, by what the grain receipts said the kitchens fed.
Silverwing came over the treeline behind us, low, and every crow in the valley went up screaming.
She wanted the hall. It came through as a pull under the breastbone, a rope going taut, and I held her back to a circle. Wide. High enough that the men on the wall could count her wingbeats, low enough that they could see the pale of her belly through the rain. She hated it. She turned once and looked at me across half a mile of grey air, and I have never in my life been looked at like that by a horse or a dog or a person.
*Not today. Circle.*
She circled.
"They'll open the gate," Cole said. He was watching the wall. "No lord alive lets a dragon settle on his roof to make a point."
"I want him alive, ser."
"You've said."
"I want him alive and talking in front of Aemond. A corpse tells the King's Hand nothing except that we were here."
Cole shifted his reins to his left hand. "A confession travels lighter than a prisoner."
I had come out here half-expecting a coward. Men who sell both ways usually are. In my head Jon Buckwell had already been sweating in his own hall, offering me his steward's neck and his brother's, weeping about his daughters.
The gate came open before we reached it.
He rode out himself, bareheaded in the rain, six mounted men behind him and his hands empty on the pommel. Fifty-odd, thick through the chest, a grey beard cut square. He looked up at Silverwing for a long moment and nothing in his face moved. A farmer watching hail come down on a field he has already lost wears that same expression. Then he looked at Cole's cloak.
"Ser Criston," he said. "You've come a wet road for me."
"Lord Buckwell. You're wanted in King's Landing."
"I know what I'm wanted for." Buckwell turned his head and spat, and wiped his mouth. "My wife's in the hall. My daughters are in the hall. Your dragon stays where she is and my men keep their hands where you can see them, and we'll all still be breathing at supper. Is that a bargain?"
That was when I smelled the smoke, and it wasn't chimney smoke. It was parchment.
I put my heels in and went past him through his own gate with his own men gaping at me, and that took no dragon, only a horse and a lack of manners. Across the yard. Off the saddle before it stopped. Under the arch at the north end of the house a stair went down, and over the stairhead, nailed into the stone, hung a rack of stag antlers older than the man who owned them.
*An antlered thing at the bottom of a stair.* She had dreamed that and been laughed at for it by her own maids.
Heat came up the steps at me. The muniment room was already going, and going well, with lamp oil under it: shelves of leaf and ledger and letter, forty years of a house's paper, all of it curling black. I got my sleeve over my mouth and went in low and took what my hands found on the near table before the beams began to talk. A tally board. A leather roll. Then out, coughing, with the doorframe dropping sparks down my collar.
The tally board was a raven schedule. Days, hours, a column of destinations in a steward's neat hand. The leather roll held nothing but a strip of cut parchment the width of two fingers, dense with letter-groups that meant nothing at all until you had the stick to wind it round.
Behind me, out in the wet yard, Buckwell was climbing down off his horse without being told to.
"You were quick," he said. "I thought I had until dark."
CRISTON COLE
They put him in his own high seat because there was nowhere else in the hall to put a man with his hands tied.
Cole had cleared the room himself. The wife and the three girls went up the stair under guard, the eldest looking back twice, and the household men gave up their swords into a heap by the hearth without much argument once the shadow crossed the smoke-hole for the third time. That part had gone well. Cole did not care for the dragon. He cared that it had cost nothing.
What it had bought them was a burned room and a tally board.
"Name Daemon's man at Harrenhal," Cole said.
"I have never seen Harrenhal."
"Name him."
"My lord, I would give you a name if I had one. I'd give you nine. Would that content you?"
Cole set his gauntlet on the table, took the lord's left hand in both of his, and bent the smallest finger back against the wood until it went.
Buckwell screamed. It was an old man's scream, high and undignified, and under it Cole heard the exact thing he had ridden two days to hear beginning to form: a name, any name, whichever name would make it stop.
Then the bastard's hand closed on his wrist.
Cole had trained since he was nine. He had put down knights of forty years' service in the yard at Blackhaven. He pulled, and his arm did not move. No strain came back at him through the grip. A gate held shut against a child gives that much.
"Let go of me."
"He'll say Harrenhal," Ulf said. "He'll say whatever word you leave lying in front of him. Then we ride two days back and hand the King's Hand a lie we made ourselves."
"He is a traitor."
"He is the only thread we have, and you're burning it."
Cole looked at the grip on his wrist, and then at the face above it. Four months of holding his judgement open ended there. Not a drunkard. Not a lucky bastard on a borrowed dragon. Here was a man who had come to take a traitor whole, who had let the muniment room burn rather than send anyone into it, and who laid hands on a Kingsguard in a traitor's hall to keep that traitor's tongue his own.
Cole had seen men protect the guilty before. There was always a reason underneath, and the reason was never mercy.
"Take your hand off me, ser," he said. "You'll want to remember that I asked once."
ULF
We tied him belly-down across a garron because he couldn't hold reins with that hand, and I splinted the finger against a bit of shingle with a strip off my own shirt, which he thanked me for, which was worse than if he'd cursed me.
Cole rode ahead again. He'd said his piece an hour out from the gate, in front of six men, in that flat parade voice: that he would tell the Hand what he had seen, which was the King's own dragonrider bargaining with a traitor in the traitor's own hall, and that a man who protects one has usually been paid by one.
I let him have it. Every word was going to reach Otto anyway, and better it reach him as Cole's honest report than as somebody's whisper up a back stair.
Silverwing broke off at the treeline and went north and wouldn't come when I reached for her. That pull under the breastbone had gone cold and sullen, like a hand let go of.
Rain thinned toward evening. Buckwell talked once the pain settled into something he could ride with, and most of it was justification. He had four hundred acres and two hundred swords and a hall on the road between two armies, and no man had ever come to the Antlers and asked him which side was right; they came and asked which side he would feed. He fed both. He had daughters. Aegon burns those who kneel late and Rhaenyra hangs those who knelt early, and a man in the middle keeps his roof on by making certain that neither of them has finished counting him.
"You'd have done it," he said, to the mud going past his face. "Any man with children does it."
"I have children," I said.
"Then you know it isn't wickedness. It's arithmetic."
That was the trouble with him. It wasn't wickedness. It was arithmetic, and it had put a knife inside twenty feet of Jaehaera's bed.
"The letters," I said. "To Harrenhal. Who carried them?"
"I never wrote to Harrenhal." He said it easily, without weighing it, a man too tired to sell anything further. "I don't know where the prince keeps his birds and I never wanted to. My steward carried mine as far as the Red Keep and no further. There's a man there who takes them on."
"A name."
"I was never given one. Only how to know him." Buckwell coughed against the horse's flank. "He wears seven stars."
My hands stopped on the reins.
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