They brought him out every morning to the gallows, before the sun had fully risen. Ryman Frey himself would make a big show of putting the noose around Edmure's neck, all the while shouting and hollering, his voice rising and rising.
"Yield! Yield the castle or your nephew dies!"
The Blackfish paid him no mind, and Ryman Frey's hands never actually tightened the noose. Edmure wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, but he kept them wide open. His people must not see him afraid.
But he was afraid. Forgive me, Father, for not being braver.
He had plenty of time to think, before they took him away from the gallows each evening. More time than he ever had in his life. More time than he ever wished for.
A better man would have wished for death, Edmure thought. After everything.
What should I do, Cat? Tell me. Please. I will listen to you now, as I never did before.
He could not say her name, even in his head, without wanting to scream. His sister was being butchered with her eldest son while he … while he …
Say it! It was his father's angry and disappointed voice Edmure heard in his head. While you were busy fucking the Frey girl. But it could not have been his father; Hoster Tully would not have used those words. And Hoster Tully never showed his disappointment with his only son with words, loud or otherwise. A look, a sigh, that was his way.
Cat said he called out my name at the end, but I was not with him. The shame and regret were still with Edmure. He had meant to make his father proud, yet he now had the dishonor of being the Tully who lost Riverrun.
"Roslin must have been quite something, if she could make you deaf to the sound of your sister screaming and losing her mind outside," one of the assorted Frey men had taunted Edmure the day before, while he stood at the gallows waiting for Ryman Frey's mummer's farce to end.
"Maybe Roslin was screaming too, at the sight of your pitiful and floppy manhood," another Frey had said, laughing rowdily.
"It can't have been that floppy. He put a baby in her," yet another Frey man replied.
A child. He was going to be a father. Would Walder Frey allow a Tully to keep growing in his daughter's belly? There were ways, Edmure knew. Moon tea. Or was it too late for that?
He prayed fervently that it was.
Our child, mine and Roslin's.
She had wept, even before the bedding. "I wept for joy, my lord," Roslin had said, and Edmure had believed her. Why should she not weep for joy? She was marrying the lord of Riverrun, the man Walder Frey had set his sight on from the day Edmure was born.
She had wept during the bedding too. A maiden, nervous of her first time, Edmure had thought. He had been just as nervous before his first time. It had not been a gratifying experience. Edmure had not wept, but he had done much worse than that.
"Forgive me," she had said repeatedly, during and after their coupling.
"There is nothing to forgive," he had reassured her, again and again. "We are husband and wife. Now and forever."
But that was before the men in chainmail had stormed into their room. Before he was Edmure the prisoner.
He no longer knew what they were. He still knew who he was, even so. Now and forever.