AN: My apologies for the delay. I've been extremely sick all weak and this chapter fought me tooth and nail every time I opened my computer to try and write.

Chapter 28

The young lords and the older Tully knights and captains were already inside Edmure’s tent when Galad arrived, with Garlan at his shoulder and Ben following silently behind them both. 

Edmure himself had asked young Willem to attend as well, though he stood back near the tent's entrance with his arms crossed behind him and his eyes fixed on the ground. Some of the nobles had grumbled at that, but Galad thought Edmure had done so to reassure the young man that his lord was determined to act and save his love. He could not fault Edmure for this kindness.

Neither could Galad fault him for his ruthlessness.

After sending riders to take Lord Lymond Goodbrook’s body back to his home, Edmure had his men take the bandit far into the forest and get the answers they needed. And indeed, the man had broken during the night. He’d spoken with Garlan about that as the man was taken, just a quick word around the campfire. After seeing the results of their raids, the boy was quick to understand the harsh necessity of such things. 

What the bandit had given them was shown with small figurines upon a map spread over an upturned crate at the center of the tent. The main bandit camp, they learned, lay on a hill deep in the Riverlands to the west of the Gods Eye, only a couple days' ride from their current position. A tall lone rise on a stretch of flat country. High Heart. 

Ser Aeron, one of the older Tully household knights, was the first to speak of it. "Aye. I know the place, my lord. Went past it once a few times as a boy, riding messages between Riverrun and Harrenhal. My father would not let us stop within a mile of the base. Called it cursed ground and would not say more of it."

"Cursed how, ser?" Marq Piper asked, half-mocking already.

Ser Aeron seemed immune to the scoffing arrogance of young nobles. "Smallfolk say the hill is haunted. They say the ghost of a dead child lives there. Or a dozen children.” He shrugged. “Most who live nearby stay far ‘way as they can. Have done for generations, long before any bandits came to make their home there."

"Dead children on a hill," Marq said, looking around at his friends.

Ronald Vance chuckled. "Terrifying."

"There is more to it than that,” Edmure said. “They’re not supposed to be ghosts of normal children, if I recall Maester Vyman’s lesson correctly. High Heart is older than most castles in the realm." He tapped the mark on the map. "The children of the forest held it once, in the age before the Andals came. They raised forty weirwoods at its crown, planted in a great circle. The Andal king Erreg the Kinslayer slaughtered the children there and cut down the grove afterward. The stumps still stand, or so the old accounts say."

Marq Piper snorted. "Children of the forest, Edmure. Grumkins and snarks and singing turtles. Nursemaids' tales, all of them."

"Perhaps," Edmure said mildly.

"Cut down the weirwoods, did he?” Ser Karyl Vance scowled at the mark on the map. “Then Erreg did the Riverlands a mercy. Better a hill of clean stumps than a grove where savages sacrificed men to their tree-gods. Mayhaps we should torch the place whole after we’re done with the scum."

Edmure gave him a sharp sideways look. "You’d be wise not to say such things when we host my sister's husband in the years to come, ser. Lord Stark will not take kindly to hearing the old gods and their sacred trees insulted at Riverrun's table."

Some of the older men-at-arms nodded at that. Chastened, Ser Karyl grunted but did not press the point.

Galad said nothing. He already knew most in the south reviled the belief of those of the north. And if not revulsion, then they simply treated it as the foolish religion of barbarians who prayed to trees carved by fantastical creatures.

But he was not so quick to laugh at the mysteries of this world as some of these young lords seemed to be. Back in his old life, many had dismissed the tales of shadowspawn as mere stories too. Or the prophecies of the Dragon Reborn and the coming battle against the dark. Right up until the moment a trolloc came for their throat in the night and the world trembled at the shadow of the Dark One’s fingers. 

Here, he had stood beneath the three intertwined weirwoods in the godswood at Highgarden, the Three Singers, and he had felt eyes on him the whole time. Not human eyes. Not the eyes of anything he could name or point to. But something had watched him from within those trees, something ancient and vast and slumbering. Slumbering but very much alive.  

He was not here to change anyone’s mind, however. It was neither his place nor his wish. Perhaps the young lords were even right and he had imagined all of it. Either way, Galad hoped to find the truth for himself one day. It was one of the reasons he’d left for this journey in the first place.

Edmure looked around the tent. "Stories or not, that is the ground. Now the question is how to do it. Suggestions, sers?"

"March at once, my lord." Ser Karyl Vance had recovered his footing. "We know where they hide now. We know their numbers, and we have the strength to take them. There’s no reason to delay."

Ronald Vance nodded eagerly beside his distant cousin. "Aye. Ride straight for the hill and bring them to justice."

"I agree with Vance," Marq Piper said. "Straight at them. They'll not be expecting an armed column, and no small band of outlaws will stand against thirty armored men."

Several other men raised their voices in support. Galad watched Edmure's face as the young lord listened. There was no impatience in Edmure's expression, no eagerness to leap after the first bold suggestion. A few of his captains gave their own suggestions, and when they had finished, Edmure looked at him. 

"Ser Galad,” he said. “Your thoughts?"

Galad’s eyes shifted from the lord to the map. “If it were me holding that hill, my lord, I would keep lookouts on every road within a day's ride of it. A rider watching a crossroads. A boy with a horn in a tree. Simple posts, but enough to send word ahead the moment an armed column comes near. Did the prisoner say anything of that?"

Edmure looked to Ser Aeron.

The gruff knight shrugged. "He said sometimes, ser. Depending on the lord's humor."

"His humor?" Ser Patrek Mallister asked, frowning.

"Aye,” Ser Aeron said. "The Weepin’ Lord, he called him. Said he’s a strange fellow, that he sends his raiding parties out at random hours. Sometimes only a handful ride. Sometimes half the camp. Sometimes he sets lookouts on the roads, and sometimes he leaves the men to their drink and hides away for the night.” 

Edmure made a face. “Then if we ride on that hill tomorrow, we might be facing twelve men or forty. And whether they see us coming or not may depend on nothing better than what mood the man wakes in."

"A madman, then," Ser Karyl said.

Galad kept his face composed, but he had different ideas on what that word meant then most men. A madman he might be, but they had not caught this Weeping Lord or his raiders in nearly a full month of hunting. The line between madness and greatness was a thin one, he knew that well, and often only the winners drew it clearly afterward.

"More reason not to depend on his humor for our success," he said instead. "I say we move through the woods instead of the roads, with scouts spread wide ahead of us to screen our movement. We can close within a few miles of the hill by daylight without ever setting foot on open ground. Then we send some men ahead on foot to see what we truly face, their numbers and layout, and whether they have watchers posted or not. When we know what stands before us, we plan our approach."

Ser Karyl frowned. "Moving through the woods could cost us days, ser."

"That is why we brought the local men,” Galad said. “They can find us trails wide enough to ride. It will delay us a few hours perhaps. A day at most. But we should not go blind at a man whose plans we cannot predict, lest we walk into a trap even he does not know he set."

He got agreements from Mallister and Piper at that, as well as Ser Aeron and the Tully men.  

Edmure gave a last look around the tent to see if anyone else wished to speak before he nodded. 

"So be it. I wish nothing more than to ride these rabble out of my lands at once. For Lymond and for all the people they’ve killed and terrorized. My people. The honor of House Tully demands it.” 

For the first time since he met him, Galad saw steel behind the young lord’s eyes. 

“But I agree with Ser Galad,” Edmure continued. “We cannot rush into the enemy’s jaws and expect to come out unscathed. We’ll do as he says and avoid the roads. See to it that the hunters are ready, Ser Aeron. We break camp within the hour."

xxx

For two days they rode south through a long chain of woodland trails that the local men knew like the streets of their villages. Old trapper's paths, mostly, cutting through the deepest parts of the forest. Meck led the column with two of the younger local men while the rest of them followed in a loose line, keeping their voices low and their gear tied down against clinking. 

When they got to perhaps four miles from the base of High Heart, at a hollow in the forest among towering oaks looming above, Edmure ordered they stop and set up camp there. Galad noted the choice of the site with quiet approval. The place was well-shielded, and any cook-smoke would rise and disperse through the thick canopy long before it climbed high enough to be seen from any hilltop.

The scouts went out as the light began to lower. Meck sent four pairs of local hunters in four different directions, each pair to work a quarter of the country around the hill and be back before midnight. Galad asked to go himself, and Meck paired him with a man named Fedric.

Fedric turned out to be only a few years older than him, a broad-shouldered man with a close-cropped brown beard and hands calloused by rope and bowstring both. He carried a short bow across his back and a long knife at his belt, and when Galad offered him a nod, Fedric returned it with a long-suffering sigh he failed to hide. Choosing to make no mention of it, Galad simply followed him out across the woods. The reason for the man’s mood became clear soon enough.

Fedric moved well. Better than most men Galad had traveled with in both lives. He barely made a sound, feet finding their way over loose sticks and dry leaves as if the ground itself were guiding them, all while weaving through the dense forest at a pace another man might have kept only on an open road.

No wonder he thought Galad would only slow him down. 

A few minutes in, when they paused behind a great fallen log to scan the woods ahead, Fedric shifted his weight and glanced across at him with grudging respect.

"You keep pace well, ser."

"You set a good pace."

Fedric's mouth pulled sideways, not quite a smile. "Most of your kind, they crash through my woods like drunken bears when they hunt. Break every branch between here and the road and wonder why nothing's biting come dawn.”

“I can imagine.”

“How’d you learn it?”

Galad kept his eyes on the trees ahead. "I lived in the woods for years before I came to be a knight."

"That so?" The hunter huffed a quiet laugh, barely a sound at all. "A woodsman knight, then. Can't say I've ever heard of such a thing before."

Glancing at Fedric, he saw no recognition in his words. That set Galad a little at ease. At least not all of Westeros had heard of him quite yet. It made for a good change of pace from his time in Lannisport and now with Edmure and his companions. Being unknown, he imagined, would be a rare relief going forward. 

After a second, they pushed on deeper into the forest, and this time they didn’t stop for a good hour of trekking. The trees thinned as they neared the edge of the woodland, and Fedric held up a hand. They crouched behind the last screen of hazel and crept forward until they could see out across the open country.

High Heart rose from the flat land ahead of them like a great sleeping giant.

The hill was steeper than Galad had imagined. It squatted alone on the plain, its slopes rising sharp and clean from the surrounding fields, its crown broad and flat and dark against the deepening blue of the sky. Not an easy climb for cavalry. If they tried to charge uphill, they’d lose all their momentum before they ever reached the bandits.

They could also go no further than the trees. Beyond the wood-line, the ground was open pasture for a mile and more, and even in the coming darkness there was moon enough that any lookout on the crown of the hill would see them the moment they stepped clear of cover.

Beside him, Fedric grunted low in his throat. Galad glanced at him. Fedric's eyes were on the top of the hill, and his jaw had set.

"Something wrong?"

"Don’t like the place, ser,” he said, almost with a shudder. “My mum, she… before she passed, she used to tell me tales of High Heart. Said the ghosts of the children of the forest still lived up there. That they can hear the voices of the tree gods and would tell you your own end if you asked them. But they’d trick you when they gave it. Twist the words so you'd walk right into the thing you were trying to avoid. Said folk who went up seeking answers came back mad, or came back never." Fedric spat quietly to the side. "Then again, she also used to tell me the ghosts took payment for her prophecies in the eyeballs of disobedient children. So maybe she was only trying to make me mind my chores."

Galad kept his face still. The children of the forest again. Ser Aeron had said much the same, though he hadn’t mentioned prophecies. Whether there truly were ghosts or not, it didn’t change what they had to do.

He turned his eyes back to the hill. 

Three campfires burned at the crown. Orange dots against the growing dark, spread evenly around the summit, telling him the men there sat at their ease. He counted the shapes of figures moving between the fires. Two here. Three there. One passing across the far side and disappearing. He could not see enough to put a full number to them.

Fedric tapped his shoulder and pointed off to the north side of the hill's base.

"More there too, ser."

Galad followed the pointing finger. At the northern foot of the hill, a small cluster of houses stood—an old hamlet, from the look of it, half-ruined but still lived in. A few points of firelight glowed there as well, and Galad thought he could make out perhaps three or four buildings still with roofs. A stable, most likely, and a hall, and one or two smaller houses. That would be where they kept the horses and where the men who guarded the animals slept. Where any bandit party returning from a raid would first arrive.

He shifted his gaze back and forth between the crown of the hill and the hamlet at its base. Movement in both places. The captured bandit had said thirty to forty men, coming and going as parties rode out and returned. What Galad could see of the fires and the figures matched that number well enough.

He looked at the flat land between the woods and the hill. Scanned it slowly.

He saw no lookouts. No movement where the wind did not stir the grass. No sentinels standing under lone trees or crouched behind the low ruined walls of what had once been sheepfolds.

His eyes narrowed. He did not take that for reassurance. The Weeping Lord had put no watchers out this evening that he could see, that was all he could say for certain. Whether the same would hold tomorrow at dawn, or two hours from now, or at whatever moment they finally moved to strike, was another question entirely. A man who set his sentries on a whim might change his mind on a whim. He might feel a chill on the wind tonight and decide to put ten men on every road within an hour's ride tomorrow and see them coming from further off than they wished to be seen.

In the end, if they were to move on the hill at all, they could not make plans that depended on an enemy who might look one way or another on a whim. They needed to force their attention to a place of their choosing instead. 

He and Fedric watched a while longer to be certain of the numbers, then withdrew.

xxx

By the time they made it back to the camp, the moon had risen high. As they’d gone around farthest, most other scouting pairs had returned before them, and the young lords had gathered again around Edmure's map by the light of a shielded lantern. Ben and Garlan were both present. Willem stood a little apart, doing his best to listen in without being noticed.

Meck reported first, then Galad and Fedric, then the others in turn. Each pair had approached from a different vantage point, and each brought back the same story. High Heart could be seen from every side, and there was no wood or ridge that let a man come within half a mile of its base unobserved. In darkness there was moonlight enough to catch a moving column. On any night short of total cloud, the crown of the hill commanded every approach.

"So we cannot come at them unseen," Edmure said slowly, looking around the ring of faces.

"Not by any road or field we've found today," Meck said. "Sorry, my lord."

A silence fell. The lantern hissed quietly on its hook.

Marq Piper cleared his throat. "Then we wait for a moonless night. When the sky is black enough, we make our approach."

"How long, ser?" The voice was Garlan's. 

Galad turned his head. His squire had spoken from behind him, quiet at first, but the boy squared his shoulders when the older men looked at him.

"Sorry, ser,” Garlan glanced at Galad and then back at Marq. “But we could end up waiting a week for the right night. Or two. And the bandits will still be raiding while we sit here. That’s if they don’t find us first."

Marq Piper opened his mouth, closed it, and gave the boy a small, wry nod. "You have the right of that, Tyrell."

Galad allowed himself a small smile and rested a hand briefly on Garlan's shoulder.

Ser Karyl Vance took his moment. "Then we do not wait. We ride at them at dawn. Thirty knights and men-at-arms in one column, straight up the hill's road at first light. They will scatter before the weight of a proper charge."

"They will not, ser," Ser Patrek Mallister said from where he leaned against a tent pole. "By all accounts, that hill is too steep. Any charge that reaches the top will be so blown by the climb that a child with a spear could unhorse the leaders. Cavalry works on flat ground or a gentle rise. Not up a slope like that."

Ronald Vance flushed. "Then we go on foot. Same principle. Straight up. Overwhelming numbers."

Edmure was shaking his head slowly.

"An open advance in daylight is worse still. They will see us coming for an hour before we reach the base. They will have time to do anything they wish before we get to the summit, including killing every captive they hold out of spite, or dragging them down the far slope and away. Whatever we do, it must not give them time to harm those they hold."

More discussion followed. Someone proposed sending only a small force by stealth to open a way for a larger group. Someone else pointed out that a small force spotted early would only ensure the entire camp was ready when the main body arrived. Ser Aeron suggested waiting for a mist to rise off the low ground at dawn, but Fedric quietly noted that this was the wrong season for mist in that country, and no one could count on it.

The voices grew more heated. Edmure listened with his hands flat on the map and his jaw set. Galad stood in silence a moment longer, then he raised a hand.

Edmure saw the movement and lifted his own for the rest. "Peace, sers. Let Ser Galad speak."

Galad thanked him with a small nod. 

"I have a plan, my lord,” he said. “One that should let us save the captives and end the bandits both. It will split our forces, and it will ask trust from each part of us. But I believe it will serve." He looked around the men there. "If you will hear it."

They all leaned in.

xxx

Edmure Tully

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

For what felt like the thousandth time since they arrived at the edge of the woods, his fingernail dragged at the leather of his sword hilt. Edmure knew he should not do it lest it damaged the grip, but he could not stop.

They’d been laying in wait for nearly an hour now, at the place where the woods crept closest to the bandit’s hill, perhaps a mile to its west. Thirty men crouched among the trees around him in the twilight before dawn, silent and still, and the silence was the worst of it. Every small sound carried. The creak of a boot, the breath of the man beside him, the far-off cry of some night bird.  And beneath it all, nothing. No orders to give. No movement to make. Only the waiting.

He swallowed and found his throat dry. His heart pounded so hard against his ribs he half feared the men around him could hear it. If the waiting was this trying, how bad would the fighting be? He tried to push the thought away and found it would not go.

Finally, as if to end his torment, someone hissed, "There!"

Edmure's eyes snapped to the north. On the main road coming down toward the hamlet at the base of the hill, riders had appeared. Tiny dots in the grey distance, moving at a steady patrol's pace. He knew there should be ten of them. Ser Aeron and nine others, some of his father's own household knights and men-at-arms, all wearing Tully colors and bearing Tully banners like a proper patrol out of Riverrun who suddenly stumbled across something interesting.

It should not take long now.

"Get ready," Ser Galad said quietly.

Thirty-odd men nodded at that. Some eager. Some grim. Blades loosened in scabbards. Straps checked one final time.

Edmure meant to say something too, some manner of speech before battle, the kind he imagined his father or his uncle would have given, but his throat had knotted as tight as a septa's skirts, and nothing came out at all.

He made it as if he was busy checking his own sword instead, as if he had not done so already a dozen times. And he couldn’t help the slight tremble in his fingers as he did so. 

This would be his first proper fight. His first true one, beyond sparring in the yard at Riverrun with blunted steel and Ser Desmond calling corrections from the fence. His companions all seemed eager enough. Ser Karyl Vance checked the buckles of his vambraces with steady hands. Patrek Mallister rolled his shoulders and breathed slow through his nose. Ronald Vance grinned at some jape Marq Piper whispered. Though Edmure knew Marq well enough to know that Marq had never fought before either, whatever face he wore now.

None of them wore heavy armor, not even the knights among them. Mail and leather and light helms only. Speed was their main concern tonight, Ser Galad had said, and every man had stripped his kit down accordingly.

Edmure had just turned his eyes back to the road, where Ser Aeron's column rode steadily onward, when a loud whistle echoed through the night from the direction of the hill.

"They see them," Patrek murmured.

Edmure nodded, his jaw tight. Hopefully they did. That was the plan. Ten men made a tempting number. Enough they couldn’t be ignored, yet few enough that the bandits might fancy their odds against them. Ten men would draw them to the north. Ten men would hold every eye on the hill while twenty came up its western slope out of the dying dark.

Then again, with a madman at their helm, who knew what the bandits would do?

Edmure felt his resolve harden all the same. Whatever came, they had to bring an end to this Weeping Lord and all his ilk, once and for all. The man had terrorized his father's lands long enough. Burned crofts, hanged farmers, stolen daughters. It fell to House Tully to answer for the Riverlands, and with his father abed, it fell to him.

It was his duty to see it done.

Duty. He kept repeating the word in his mind as they waited, like a septon telling beads. Duty. Duty. Duty. It was all that kept him going.

At the crown of the hill, movement. Frantic movement, with figures darting between the fires, small dark shapes running along the rim, all of them flowing toward the northern edge. Down at the hamlet by the hill's base it was the same, men spilling from the buildings and hurrying between them.

Ser Galad, crouched close by, gave Edmure a single nod.

It was time. By now, all their focus should be on the column of riders.

"Now," Edmure breathed, and the word carried down the line, and thirty men rose out of the underbrush and ran.

xxx

The open ground was a mile of terror.

Edmure ran with his sword in his hand and his breath loud in his own ears, waiting the whole way for a cry from the hilltop, for the sound of alarm, for the whole plan to come apart around them. It never came. The bandits' attention was fixed north. The western slope rose ahead, grey and silent, and then the ground was tilting up beneath his boots and they were climbing.

The incline was steeper than it had looked from the trees. Steep enough that he had to lean into it, one hand grasping at grass and earth, his thighs burning before he was a third of the way up. Around him the others labored too. He could hear Marq gasping somewhere to his left, could hear the muffled clatter of a man slipping and catching himself. Ser Galad climbed ahead of them all, moving up the hillside with an ease that seemed unfair, Nightfall already bare in his hand.

Halfway up, a shout from above.

Then another. Then a chorus of them.

"They've seen us!" someone cried.

"To the top!" Ser Galad's voice rang down the slope, unflinching. "Come on! To the top! Take them before they form!"

Edmure climbed. His lungs screamed. His legs screamed. He fixed his eyes on the rim above and climbed, and all around him thirty men scrambled upward through the greying twilight as the shouting above grew louder and nearer, until finally the ground leveled beneath him and he was over the rim, standing on the crown of High Heart with his sword up and men trying to kill him.

He didn’t have time to catch his breath before a bandit came out of the half-dark swinging a woodsman's axe.

Edmure's body answered faster than his mind could. Ser Desmond's drills, a thousand mornings in the yard. He stepped inside the swing the way he had been taught, and his sword took the man through the belly. The man folded over the blade with a sound Edmure would remember the rest of his life. He wrenched the sword free with a twist and the man dropped like a puppet.

His first. He had no time to think on it.

A second bandit rushed him with a spear. Edmure knocked the point aside on instinct, stepped through, and cut him down with two strokes. Easier than the first. Gods forgive him, it was easier.

He snatched a breath, the sound loud as a horn in his ears, and looked about.

The crown of the hill was chaos in the dawn light. Campfires burned low between scattered tents, and around them men fought and died in no order at all. He saw the pale stumps of the weirwoods standing in their great ring about the whole of the summit, blind witnesses. He saw Ser Karyl Vance take a bandit's head half off with a single stroke. He saw Patrek fighting beside two Tully men-at-arms, driving four bandits backward toward the fires.

And he saw Ser Galad of Dunstonbury.

The Woodsman Knight moved through the enemy like something out of the old songs. No, like something the songs had only ever tried to describe. Nightfall traced arcs through the grey air, and where it passed, men fell. Ser Galad did not seem to hurry. He did not seem to strain. He flowed from one dying man to the next with a terrible unhurried grace, and Edmure understood, watching him for those two heartbeats, that everything he had heard of the trial at Casterly Rock had been true, and less than true. The singers had not done him justice. A god of war walked the crown of High Heart, and it wore the shape of a young knight from the Reach.

"Stay together!" Ser Galad was shouting. "Hold the line! Stay together!"

But then Edmure saw Marq Piper break from the line, chasing a fleeing bandit between the tents.

"Marq!" Patrek cursed and went after him.

And then it all came apart.

Chaos took the crown whole. The line, such as it was, considering some of their men were still struggling uphill, dissolved into knots of grappling men. Bandits fled and rallied and fled again. Tully men chased them between the tents and were set upon in turn. Smoke from a scattered fire drifted grey across everything, stinging at his eyes. 

Edmure fought a man, lost him in the smoke, found another. Somewhere Ser Karyl was bellowing his cousin's name. Somewhere a horn was blowing too. Ser Aeron's men, come round to the base of the hill. They’d be fighting their own battle with the men below.

Edmure turned and turned again and suddenly could not have said which way west was, which slope they had climbed, which direction the enemy lay. There was no direction. There were tents all around him and bodies underfoot and men screaming in the smoke, and the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at all.

A weight crashed into him from the side.

He went down hard, his sword spinning from his hand, and then a snarling face was above him and hands were at his throat. A bandit. Young, wild-eyed, stinking of sour wine. They rolled together through the mud and ash. Edmure got a forearm under the man's chin and shoved, groping at his own belt with his free hand, and his fingers found the hilt of his dagger. He did not think. He drove it up under the man's ribs, and again, and again, until the hands at his throat fell slack and the weight on him went still.

Gasping, he shoved the body off him with a grunt then just laid there for a second, struggling to breathe. 

When he turned his head to his other side, Ronald Vance was lying beside him.

Ronald was on his back an arm's length away, and his eyes were open, glassy, fixed on the paling sky. A pitchfork's tines had gone through his mail below the breast. His face held no pain at all. Only a faint surprise, as if death was but a maester who had asked a question he had not studied for.

Edmure could not turn away. They had been boys together. He’d spent three moons with him in Atranta when he was just ten, stealing plums, swimming the Red Fork on a dare while Ronald's younger brothers kept watch. Ronald had the funniest laugh of anyone Edmure knew. He had grinned at Marq's whisper not an hour past, down in the dark of the trees.

Bile surged up Edmure's throat. He clamped it down, barely.

And in that moment, lying in the mud with his friend's empty eyes beside him and the battle roaring on unseen past the smoke, a thought came to Edmure that shamed him even as it came. He could simply lie here. Lie still among the bodies and let the fighting wash past, and afterward say he had been struck down, been dazed, remembered nothing. No one would know. No one blame him for it.

He was already moving before he finished the thought. Pushing up out of the mud. Onto his knees.

He could not do it. Could not lie there while his men bled.

Family. Duty. Honor.

This was his duty to bear.

A hand caught him under the arm and helped haul him upright. Edmure came up expecting an enemy and found instead a young familiar boy looking up at him. Garlan Tyrell, mud-streaked, an arming sword in his small fist. Behind the boy stood Ben, the Tyrell sergeant, longsword red to the hilt, and Willem, the farm lad, wide-eyed, gripping his borrowed blade in both hands.

"My lord! Are you hurt?" Garlan shouted over the din.

"No. No, I—" Edmure found his sword in the mud and took it up. His hand was shaking. He made it stop. "The captives. We need to find the captives."

"Aye," Ben said grimly. "Stay close, my lord. All of you, stay close."

They moved together through the smoke and ruin of the camp, the four of them, checking each tent as they came to it. Twice bandits came at them out of the haze; twice Ben and Edmure cut them down between them. One tent held nothing but plundered goods heaped in the dark,  candlesticks, bolts of cloth, a child's doll. Another held bedding and empty jugs. In a third they found a woman bound and gagged, half-naked and half-dead of thirst. They cut her loose and bid her lie low.

At each tent, Willem called out, his voice cracking. "Sarie! Sarie!"

"Sarie."

The voice came from ahead of them, rough and amused.

A knot of three bandits stood between the tents. Two were common cutthroats, blades out. The third was a burly, scarred brute of forty-odd years, big through the shoulders, wearing proper mail and an old bevor at his throat beaten out of some knight's cast-offs. He carried a heavy longsword loosely in one fist, and he was grinning at Willem with gapped teeth.

"Aye, I remember her." The scarred man's grin widened. "Sarie. Sweet name. She was ours for four nights. All of ours. And she stopped screaming somewhere around the third."

The sound Willem made was not human. It was the sound of something inside a boy breaking all at once.

Without hesitating for even a second, he charged, sword above his head, screaming.

"Willem, no—!" Edmure lunged after him, and the two other bandits came to meet him and Ben, and the world narrowed to steel. Edmure caught a blade on his own and gave ground, dimly aware of Ben fighting beside him, dimly aware past his opponent's shoulder of Willem's wild swing being swatted aside, of the scarred brute catching the boy's tunic in one fist and driving a knee into his belly, of Willem folding, of the longsword going up…

A small shape darted in from the side.

Garlan Tyrell, with all of his twelve years old, came at the brute low and fast and opened a red line across the back of the man's leg with his arming sword. The bandit roared and staggered. Garlan grabbed the crumpled Willem by the collar and hauled him backward, stumbling, dragging the bigger boy bodily out of the killing arc.

"Run, lad!" Ben bellowed. "Run!"

The brute turned after Garlan, limping, cursing, sword raised. 

And then Ser Galad was there.

Edmure never saw where he came from. One heartbeat the boy was alone before the scarred man's blade, and the next there was Valyrian steel in the way, and a single ringing exchange, and then Nightfall went through the bandit's eye and out the back of his skull. The brute died standing, surprise still forming on his ruined face when he toppled sideways into a tent.

Edmure's own opponent faltered at the sight. Edmure did not. Knocking the man's blade wide, he swung hard, catching him on the side of the neck.

The last bandit turned to flee. He made it three steps before Ser Galad cut him down.

For a moment none of them moved. Willem knelt in the mud where Garlan had dragged him, hands over his face, weeping without sound. Standing over him with chest heaving, Garlan’s small sword was bloodied for the first time. Ben put a hand on the boy's shoulder.

Ser Galad took one look to assess his squire before he flicked the blood from Nightfall and turned, scanning the smoke.

"We need to regroup," he said. "Find the Weeping Lord before he slips away in this—"

"Look no further, ser."

The voice came from behind a tent, soft and cultured. He stepped out into the open with the dawn light on his fair hair, and Edmure's breath stopped in his throat.

The Weeping Lord was handsome. That was the first thing. The wrong thing. The thing Edmure would never manage to forget—that the monster of the Riverlands had the face of a hero from the songs, strong-jawed and fair, with sad pale eyes. He wore good mail too, well-kept, and a knight's sword rode in his hand as though it had grown there.

In his other hand, he held two ropes that ran to the bound wrists of two girls. One perhaps fourteen, dark-haired, standing very still with her chin high and her whole body shaking. The other no more than twelve, pressed against her sister's side, eyes squeezed shut.

Edmure’s eyes went wide. The old woman's granddaughters. Alive. It must be them.

"I know that sword," the Weeping Lord said, his eyes on Nightfall. Tears stood in them, bright in the growing light, and began to spill down his cheeks even as he smiled. "You are the Woodsman Knight. Ser Galad of Dunstonbury. The Hero of Grey Garden.” He tilted his head. "I fought on the Iron Islands too, did you know that? Perhaps we stood on the same beach and never met."

"Which house?" Edmure heard himself demand. His voice came out harder than he expected. "Which house do you serve, Ironborn scum?"

The Weeping Lord laughed. It was a soft, awful sound, wet with his tears.

"Ironborn? Oh, no. No, no." He shook his head slowly. "I am a knight of the Riverlands, born and raised and anointed with the seven oils. I fought for your king at Pyke."

The sickness that rolled through Edmure then was worse than the bile he had swallowed over Ronald's body. A Riverman. One of their own. Every burned farmhouse, every woman defiled. The work of a knight of the Trident, raiding across the very lands he had been sworn to protect.

"A false knight," Edmure spat.

The Weeping Lord turned his tear-streaked face toward him, and his gaze found the leaping trout on Edmure's mud-fouled surcoat. "A Tully man.” A too-wide smile spread across his face. “Oh, I'm indeed a knight, good ser. I'm the truest knight you've ever seen. I am what’s left when you strip us bare!"

"Then be a good knight," Ser Galad said quietly, "and let the girls go without harm."

Fresh tears rolled down the man's face. Something almost wounded crossed it. 

"Hurt them? I would never hurt them." He looked down at the two girls at the end of his ropes, and his voice went soft as a father's at a cradle. "Never. Never my darlings."

And just like that he opened his hand. The ropes fell, and the girls ran, stumbling over the mud, the older dragging the younger, and Edmure dropped his sword to catch them both as they crashed into him, gathering them behind him with one arm, feeling the small violent shudder of their bodies against his side. 

The Weeping Lord watched them go with wet, shining eyes. Then he looked back at Ser Galad, and rolled his shoulders, and brought his sword up into a guard so clean that any master-at-arms in the realm would have wept to see it.

"I'm glad you are here, Woodsman," he said. "I'm glad this ends tonight." The tears kept coming, though his voice never wavered. "And I'm glad it will be you."

Then he charged.

Ben started forward, but Ser Galad lifted his free hand without looking and moved.

Steel met steel in the space between the tents, and Edmure held the two shaking girls close and watched the finest swordsman in Westeros meet the broken knight of High Heart in the grey light of dawn.

It was nothing like the fight in the hamlet, when Ser Galad had carved the raider captain apart like a man dressing game. The Weeping Lord could fight. His blade came in combinations Edmure could barely follow, high and low and high again, and his footwork never faltered, and for ten heartbeats, twenty, the two of them traded strokes so fast the ringing of it became almost a single sound. Around the circle of tents, men of both sides were stopping, turning, drawn by that sound.

But it was like watching a river throw itself against a standing stone.

Ser Galad gave no ground. Nightfall was always there—turning each cut away, sliding each thrust harmlessly wide—and slowly, stroke by stroke, the standing stone began to move forward. The Weeping Lord's combinations grew more furious and found less. His breath went ragged. His tears ran freely down into his beard, and still he attacked, harder and wilder, like a man not fighting to win at all.

Like a man fighting to be finished.

The end came all at once. The Weeping Lord overreached on a thrust, and Ser Galad turned it, rolled his wrist, and drove Nightfall up through the gap where gorget met aventail. A single clean stroke.

The Weeping Lord's sword fell from his fingers, but the man himself did not fall. Not at once. He swayed there with his hands rising toward his throat, blood sheeting between his fingers, all the while his eyes never left Ser Galad's face. And then—Edmure saw it, would swear all his life he saw it—the dying man leaned forward, close, as Ser Galad caught him and lowered him down. His lips moved against the knight's ear. Whispering something, some dying words, then a breath, no more.

Edmure could not hear it. No one could have heard it but Ser Galad.

Whatever it was, Ser Galad did not outwardly react, even as the Weeping Lord slid from his grasp to fall upon the crown of High Heart, with his fair hair on the mud and his tears still wet upon his face. 

Around them, what remained of his men broke and ran, and the men of Riverrun ran them down, and somewhere behind him a girl of twelve began, very quietly, to cry.

Edmure looked down at the dead man's face for a long moment. Peaceful now. Handsome still. The truest knight you've ever seen, he had said, and the words kept hammering at Edmure's mind even as he turned away, tightening his arm around the two girls.