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Patrek Mallister and Thormad rode with four horses between them, changing mounts whenever the animals began to foam.
Their target was the Golden Tooth.
If Robb Stark had taken it, they would find him there. If he had not, then the whole Riverlands might already be lost.
They avoided villages, kept to broken ground when they could, and stopped only long enough to water the horses. Every sound behind them seemed like pursuit. Every smoke column ahead might have been a campfire, a burned farm, or another army.
For a long while, neither man spoke.
At last, Thormad broke the silence. "You and Ser Marq were close?"
Patrek's hands tightened on the reins.
"Edmure, Marq, and I grew up crossing paths at feasts, hunts, and tourneys. Close enough to call one another friends."
Thormad looked ahead. "Mael was my friend. A true friend. If he had lived, he would never have pointed a sword at me for another man's promise."
Patrek did not answer.
He had no answer that did not taste bitter.
Marq's betrayal did more than endanger Riverrun. It reached backward through memory and dirtied years that Patrek had thought were his own.
The betrayal had begun in the dark after Stone Hedge.
The camp had been exhausted. Men had ridden too far, seen too much ruin, and gone to sleep believing the worst thing behind them was the charred yard of Stone Hedge.
Patrek had been asleep when the first muffled sounds reached him: a choked gasp, a heavy step, the dull scrape of a body dragged across earth. He opened his eyes and saw two Riverlands soldiers with red cloth tied around their arms strangling the guards outside his tent.
He killed one before the man could shout. The second got out a cry, and the camp erupted.
"Red cloth!" Patrek shouted. "Traitors in the camp!"
Loyal soldiers stumbled from tents half armed. They clashed with men who wore the same colors and spoke with the same accents, men who had tied red cloth to their arms so they could recognize one another in the night.
At first, Patrek believed the rebels meant to seize supplies.
Then he saw where they were going.
Edmure's command tent.
That made no sense. Bandits struck wagons. Deserters ran for horses. Men striking at the command tent were not merely hungry or frightened. They had a purpose.
Edmure's household retainers formed a tight ring around their lord. They were good men, and they held. The red-cloth soldiers could not break them quickly.
Then cavalry returned to the camp.
Patrek saw Ser Marq Piper at their head and felt relief so sharp it hurt.
"Marq!" he shouted. "Red cloth on the arm marks the rebels!"
Marq looked at him.
His eyes were cold.
Only then did Patrek understand.
The cavalry charged the loyalists.
Men who had been fighting back-to-back with Patrek a moment earlier were ridden down from behind. Spears punched through Riverlands armor. Horses trampled men who had shouted Edmure's name only breaths before.
The red cloth made the betrayal efficient. In torchlight and smoke, a man had less than a heartbeat to decide whether the soldier before him was friend or traitor. Marq's men always knew first.
Edmure saw his retainers dying and raised his sword.
"Stop!" he shouted. "Enough. I surrender."
The fighting slowed.
Ser Marq rode to him. "Submit to Lord Tywin, Edmure."
Edmure's face was white with fury. "Why?"
"Because asking why will not save anyone."
Marq dismounted, took Edmure's left hand, and laid it on a chopping block dragged from the supply wagons.
The retainers still standing around Edmure strained against the spears holding them back. Patrek remembered one of them sobbing with rage, not fear.
"Hands are sensitive," Marq said. "Pain is honest. It convinces men faster than speeches."
He cut off Edmure's little finger.
Edmure screamed, but he did not bend.
Marq asked again.
Edmure spat blood at him.
The ring finger came next.
Then the middle finger.
By then Edmure had fainted.
Marq had asked after each cut. The answer had not changed. That was the only dignity Edmure had left in the tent.
Tywin Lannister arrived before Marq could do more.
"Enough," Tywin said.
The word carried no mercy. It was merely accounting.
Marq stepped back at once.
Tywin looked at Edmure's bloody hand, then at Marq. "Your loyalty is recognized. You need not prove it by wasting useful blood."
He ordered Edmure treated.
Then he asked for Lord Lymond Lydden.
The Lord of Deep Den was dragged forward and forced to his knees. "Lord Tywin, House Lydden can still serve. I beg you, spare my house."
Tywin regarded him as if he were already dead.
"Behead him," he said. "Pack the head in lime. Collect every Lydden head you can find and display them in Lannisport."
Lymond tried to speak again. The sword fell before he managed a word.
Tywin then turned to Marq. "Do not force Edmure to betray Riverrun. Noble blood has value because others recognize it. Ask the soldiers instead. Submit, or die. Those who submit will each stab one of Edmure's retainers. That will bind them more tightly than any oath."
Some soldiers accepted at once. Some refused and died. Some stared at the blades offered to them as if the steel were alive. By dawn, men who had marched as Edmure's army had become men who could no longer return to him even if they wanted to.
Marq bowed.
"After that," Tywin continued, "you will stage the battle at Riverrun with Lord Swyft. Make it believable."
He left as if he had merely arranged a harvest.
By dawn, the camp had changed hands.
Marq gave the remaining soldiers one night to choose. Patrek, as a noble, was imprisoned separately. Thormad had survived by hiding among the corpses until the traitors stopped searching.
Before sunrise, Thormad cut his way into Patrek's tent.
"Can you ride?" he whispered.
"Yes."
They took red cloth from dead traitors, tied it around their own arms, and walked through the edge of the camp as if they belonged there. After taking four horses, they were gone.
More than once, someone called out to them. Thormad answered with a curse and kept walking. Patrek did not breathe until the campfires had fallen behind them.
Now, near noon on the second day, the Golden Tooth came into view.
So did the battlefield below it.
Kevan Lannister's army was already fighting Robb Stark.
From a distance, Patrek could see that the northern infantry were only a fraction of the force arrayed before them. Yet light cavalry moved along the flanks like knives, slicing at the edges of the Lannister formation. Heavy cavalry hammered the left wing, and direwolves tore through gaps men had not known existed until they were dying in them.
It was not the kind of battle Patrek had grown up hearing songs about. There was no clean meeting of glorious lines, no single heroic charge deciding all. Robb's army moved as if each part had a different task, and together those tasks strangled a larger host.
Then a great howl rolled across the field.
Bloodwind.
Patrek and Thormad looked at one another.
For the first time since Stone Hedge, Patrek felt something other than bitterness.
"We found him," he said.
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