The King of Winters

Chapter 61

Andrew

They had stayed in a high ground dry enough for a camp. It was too far to make out the outriders clearly, but even through the drifting fog he could see their white banners, with the direwolf of Stark, grey upon its icy field.

"Empty, your grace," said the knight with the Merman of House Manderly stitched upon his doublet. "The castle seems to be deserted."

Andrew nodded. "Let's get the castle back to life then." He turned back to look at the Greatjon. "Get the men ready to move."

Greatjon Umber left, bowing. He mounted his own white stallion when it was brought to him and behind him the lords bannermen fell in. Ghost bounded past before him crossing the muddy path with the ease of a direwolf.

The ground under their horses' hooves was soft and wet. It fell away slowly beneath them as they rode past bushels of reeds, patches of mud and sand, and here and there a small pond filled with mud brown water. He might want to place most of the wagons and horses around here. Even a fortress as big as Moat Cailin would not be able to hold all his men and supplies inside.

"Order the men to camp here with the supplies," Andrew told to Lord Beric Dondarrion. "Lord Halys, you have the command of our supply line."

"Aye, Your Grace," Lord Hornwood said. He wheeled his mount and rode towards the supply line trailing them with all the wagons heavy-laden with hardbread and salt beef pulled by horses.

Just beyond, through the mists, he glimpsed the walls and towers of Moat Cailin . . . or what remained of them. Immense blocks of black basalt, each as large as a crofter's cottage, lay scattered and tumbled like a child's wooden blocks, half-sunk in the soft boggy soil. Nothing else remained of a curtain wall that had once stood as high as Winterfell's. The wooden keep was gone entirely, burnt away in dragonflames, with not so much as a timber to mark where it had stood. All that was left of the great stronghold of the First Men were three towers . . . there had been five of them when his father ruled the north and in the tales of Old Nan it had twenty. Rhaegar Targaryen had left the stronghold to ruin and he could not fault him, the north needs no protection from the south when your son rules in in your stead. Moat Cailin was useless to him.

The Gatehouse Tower looked sound enough, and even boasted a few feet of standing wall to either side of it. The Drunkard's Tower, off in the bog where the south and west walls had once met, leaned like a man about to spew a bellyful of wine into the gutter. And the tall, slender Children's Tower, where legend said the children of the forest had once called upon their nameless gods to send the hammer of the waters, had lost half its crown. It looked as if some great beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top, and spit the rubble across the bog. All three towers were green with moss. A tree was growing out between the stones on the north side of the Gatehouse Tower, its gnarled limbs festooned with ropy white blankets of ghostskin.

It looked no more than a ruin now. The last he had seen Moat Cailin, it had hundreds of men holding the castle in his father's name and the banners of House Stark flew from all the five towers. Even in such state Andrew knew that the ruin was more formidable than it seemed. The three surviving towers commanded a causeway from all sides, and any enemy must pass between them. The bogs surrounding the castle were impenetrable, full of quicksands and suckholes and teeming with snakes. To assault any of the towers, an army would need to wade through waist-deep black muck, cross a moat full of lizard-lions, and scale walls slimy with moss, all the while exposing themselves to fire from archers in the other towers. Even an assassin like him won't dare to face all that. And when night falls, there are said to be ghosts, cold vengeful spirits of the north who hunger for southron blood.

He should take command of one of the towers while the others should be given to his lords. Andrew looked at the three towers once again and saw that the Gatehouse Tower was in the best place to oversee everything happening around him. He moved his horse slowly across the green-and-black fields of mud to the yard.