Book 1: The Darkness of Silver

„Never forget who you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it and it will never be used to hurt you."

Tyrion Lannister, „A Game of Thrones"

Introduction: Tamwood

Without haste the small host of men lead their horses down the muddy path towards Crickley's Moat. They had travelled for almost the whole night, their clothes being damp from the neverending thin rain and the cold, their limbs sore from the journey. Beneath them, the village and castle lay still sleeping. Only few pillars of smoke rose from a handful of chimneys like wisps of the morning mist. The flames in most of the huts and longhouses' fireplaces had long since burnt down. A layer of fog covered the lake in the middle of the valley and marshy meadows besides it like a great, white blanket. Ploughed fields and groups of stunted apple and cherry trees filled the riders' sights for maybe a good mile before abruptely ending in front of a wall of grey oaks, large sentinel trees, dark fir-trees and thick underbrush.

Tamwood's horse's hooves threw mud up in the air when he had to pull back the reins of his Dornish coldblood. Not for the first time did the former pickpocket curse his damn mount. He swore, the horse had a soul as black as the deepest of the seven hells and had spared all its malice for him. Hence he had named it „Beast".

The grey horse snapped its yellow teeth at him, snorted, then fell back into the slow trod he had commanded. A couple of his companions commented this further episode of his struggle with mild, tired laughter. They had ridden for most of the night and the day before it, and there sore backs outweighed their amusement, especially as it's novelty had worn out rather fast. Tamwood had been fighting constantly with his mount ever since they had left Lord Harroway's Town. Still, the former thief ha to admit that a bad-tempered horse was still to be preferred to no horse at all.

With „Beast" again under his most - likely temporary - control he directed his attention back to the village ahead. Crickley's Moat dominated the sight. The lakeside holdfast was half in ruins. An old grey stone wall full of smaller and greater breeches stood a good twenty feet high, encompassing the stables and newer wooden buildings of the Ogre's seat. A muddy way across a brooding moat full of reeds and swamp grass lead to a square gate. On the grassy hill were the original wooden moat – Crickley's Moat – must have stood in times long since past, a square, three-story stronghouse built of massive grey stone throned.

Tamwood counted forty houses in the village, most of them low huts made of thick logs, and the longhouses which were so common for the northern lands of the Vale, made of stone, sunken a step deep into the ground, covered by thatched roofs. Twenty yards away from the two passage leading across the moat stood the only taller building of the place: a two-storied brick house with glass windows and a roof covered by akwardly red shindles.

„An inn," he heard himself mutter. „Thank the Gods."

Not that he had any illusions about its quality, he thought sourly, 'cause that had sunken remarkably since they left the Kingsroad around the height of the Twins almost a fortnight ago and turned east. The last real tavern, one with good wine and nice, willing wenches who knew their trade they had left a month ago. In Lord Harroway's Town, on the shores of the Trident, he remembered ruefully.

That had been „before".

During the past weeks he had come to divide the time into „Before" and „After". The „Before", that was when he was pickpocketing his way through the Neck, always faster than the city guards, a wench in every inn, a song on his lips and always enough coin to buy a warm bed and a meal with plenty of wine and meat. „After", well, „after" was now. He had thanked the gods the day this fate was brought upon him, as the alternatives had been so much more unpeasant: to loose a hand, to rot away incarcerated, or to be brought to the Wall in chains. Now, after three weeks on horseback and the feeling in his cheeks bringing a whole new meaning to the word sore, he was no longer so certain. He glanced again at the inn as they rode into the borough, twenty saddled horses and two hands full of packed mules trampling through the dark mud. A happy-faced clay digger was depicted on a wooden sign above the entrance. Tamwood had no idea why of all people a bloody clay digger should be so happy.

Not that he'd see any clay diggers anytime soon, he thought drily. Or the tavern's inside, for that matter. What the common folk had told him about the „Ogre of the Vale" in the taverns they had rested for the nights still sent shivers down his spine. If only half of the stories were true, Tamwood would be lucky to survive within the walls of Crickley's Moat.

Three Weeks Earlier: Harlan

With a journey worth a day's time after them, the two mounted men looked down from the slopes of the northern hill lands of the Trident, and for the first time saw the mighty river in all its tremendous size. Originating from three different arms, the Blue, the Green and the Red Fork, the Trident was the largest stream in all of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, or so Harlan had been told. It was the largest one he had ever seen, that much was certain.

Harlan and his fellow traveller, a rough man in his late fourties named Jarvis „Blackeye" for the scarred dark hollow where once his left eye had been, looked down the winding road towards the shores of the river. This was not the Kingsroad, but it was still wide enough for three oxcarts to move side by side, and it was full of people. Common folk, singers, sellswords on horseback and on foot, fishermen, beggars, merchants with their carts full of goods, they all ventured towards the river, towards the great flat-bottomed oared ferry that went back and forth across the Trident.

„Gods," Blackeye snarled, „you could almost think there was a tourney about to take place 'ere." Stroking his beard he leaned back in the saddle and rested his hand on the hilt of his short sword. His face was weathered, his hair a fierce red with strains of grey. His light skin made the burnmark in his face stand out even more. Beneath an old and scarred suit of armour made of boiled leather and copper rivets he wore a soft green tunic and linnen pants. A large battleaxe with a long blade and a dangerous spike on its backside rested on the man's back, sheathed in oiled leather.

„Aye, now that'd be a coincidence," Harlan replied with the same sarcastic tone in his deep baritone voice. Of course, there was a tourney in Lord Harroway's Town. That was the whole purpose of their journey. He turned in his saddle, looking at his mule and the road behind them, where a group of monks came marching, chanting praises to the seven faces of God. Harlan's own mount was a fox, a fine red coldblooded warhorse from good stables in Fairmarket. It was considerably larger than Blackeye's greyish mare, but that was not the reason Harlan Stone towered above him and literally everybody else on the Ferry Road. Standing just two inches short of seven foot, the huge warhorse just seemed to fit to him as smaller horses did fit to men of a more common size. Even without armour, the young man weighed almost twentytwo stone. With armour, maybe sixty pounds more.

Harlan Stone felt the views of those passing by, and could almost sense them turning their gaze away when they feared he was looking at them. At the age of twentyfive, Harlan looked like the gods had tried one of their stranger jokes and created a man that seemed to have features of both the wretched Cleganes, Sandor – who they called the „Hound" - and Gregor, the „Mountain that Rides". While still a good part smaller than the latter, a man of Harlan's build was not a common sight in the Seven Kingdoms, and his face had enough to equal the features of the former. His head and face were clean shaven. A long scar, shining in an angry red in the midday's sun, ran from his left cheek over his throat to his right side, ending just beneath the ears on both sides. Three small polished steel rings pierced every ear, blinking in the bright light. Harlan wore a knee-long shirt of mail. The rest of his armour clanged and banged in an unsteady rythm with every step of the mule that was bound to Blackeye's mare. As weapons Harlan carried both, a worn broadsword and a bastard sword with a blade almost four feet long.

He stood up in his stirrups and gazed down the slopes at the small borough where the ferry over the Trident docked, a good mile away from where they stood now.

„C'mon, old crow," he spat out, patting his horse on the sides while adressing Blackeye.

„We better move on. I want a decent bed for the night, and I don't want to be late so that I'll have to barter with 'ome bloody merchant over it."

He pulled at the reins and pushed his heels into his mount's sides, sending the horse into a well-paced trot, rushing past the marching folk. Jarvis Blackeye followed Ser Harlan Stone down, towards the river's shore and the ferry.

Blackeye

It was already way past the third afternoon hour when they had finally reached Lord Harroway's Town. The ferry past the Trident had been cramped to the edges with folk and animals. They had waited almost an hour amidst peasants, merchants, sellswords, hedge knights and noble lords and ladies with their entourage. When their turn had come, the flat-bottomed ferry had almost capsized - twice. A knight had been thrown off his mount and nearly drowned in his armour before strong hands pulled him back onboard where he promised each and every of his rescuers a silver coin – when he had won the tourney.

Others were not so lucky and had to make it back to the shores. Those who could not swim drowned fast, while the people on the ferry gasped and yelled. Those who could swim had to fight hard against the muddy brown floods of the Trident while the „Two-headed water horse of Old King Andahar" continued to the southern shore and the nearby town. Jarvis had been glad to leave the boat, and he had sensed his horse feeling the same.

They had left the river harbour then, his master's massive and grim features carving a path through the crowd for them, and had passed through a gatehouse whose purpose seemed to be ceremonial at best: Harroway's Town had no city walls.

A banner high above, showing a two-headed horse on a ground of green and wavy green, fluttered in the mild breeze that went down with the Trident. Lord Cutberth Roote of Harroway's Town was a sworn bannerman to the Tullys of Riverun, and even though its line was a small one, House Roote had grown rich by the same way the Freys at the Twins had done: by the Trident.

The town itself, just like the road, was bursting with people from all over the Seven Kingdoms. Merchants and riders from the Dornish Marches, their skin darkended by the sun, passed by artists and firespitters from the Riverlands. Bannermen and common folk from the Reaches made way for fierce sellswords from the Stormlands. Ironmen, looking as if they had just jumped off their longboat, drank and laughed with a maester and his acolythes from the North. It had taken Jarvis some time to find an inn, but it had only needed his master's appearance and a few bellowed phrases to convince a travelling merchant to give up his room.

Harlan Stone stayed in his room. He would be working on his blades with whetstone and oil. Sometimes, that was all he ever seemed to do, Blackeye thought.

Leaving the tavern again to buy some provisions and to get a look at the tourney fields, his grim and rough features opened him the way through the town's crowded streets often enough.

Lord Harroway's Town was a fair sized settlement that did not show its wealth to everyone at the first glance.

Jarvis „Blackeye" had been here before, half a life ago. Or, in another life. Both were right, in some way, he thought. The faces had changed, naturally, the town had grown a bit, but not much. Many shops were still at the same place. In the town's center, past the busy and crammed marketplace, a seven-sided sept stood high and shining, its dome mirroring the afternoon sunlight, coloured windows reflecting the rays of sunshine in all the aspects of the rainbow. The air was full of birds. Crows, waiting to steal from the others, pidgeons cramping the roofs above the marketplace, seagulls circling above the river harbour, waiting the catch the spoils of the fishermen. The place was just bursting with life. Two hundred neat houses with white walls and red brick roofs, some thousand inhabitants of Harroway's Town and maybe thrice that number in travellers made the place resemble and ant hill.

Above it all, on the southernmost flank of the soft hill the town was built upon, stood the keep of the House of Roote, a strong square house made of granite, three stories high that melded into a high roundtower, another twenty or so yards in height, all surrounded by a large round bailey of red and yellow stone, decorated with marble statures on granite pillars. Blackeye had no interest in the Roote's keep, only in the gold that his master hoped the tourney at the Leafy Meadows would flush into his pockets.

The Meadows had gotten their name from the red and chestnut coloured leaves the wind had carried there from the crescent shaped weirwood forest the first lords of Harroway's Town had planted, back in the time of the First Men. Today, there were few weirwood trees left, if any. Farmland, ripe with corn and vegetables, had cut away the old woods for centuries, and today small towns and lively boroughs ranged as far as the eye could see. Only the name had prevailed: the Leafy Meadows.

Jarvis Blackeye marched past the town's tower keep, past the houses of merchants and artisans, until he suddenly found himself on the edge of the Meadows. A sea of colours, coming from all the shapes of the rainbow, almost took him aback. This was not the first tourney Blackeye would witness, the gods knew that much. Still, the long summer seemed to have made these events grow bigger than he could remember. There were literally hundreds of banners, but after he had coped with the first surprise, he no longer gave them any attention. The bannerman of Harlan Stone was here for but one reason. It took his good eye not long to find his destination. A small man of his age, with a hooked nose, thinning gray hair and a boney face, clad in fine green and bronze linnen and accompagnied by two guards in the colours of the town's lord, sat behind a table on the edge of the Meadows, quills and ink and a thick book in front of him. By the look of it, the two men-at-arms seemed to be just as bored as the horses in the pen behind them.

His observation was abruptely stopped when something big and heavy bumped into his back. Whirling around he faced a huge man with long auburn hair and a beard of the same colour covering most of his face. Barefoot and clad only in a dirty linnen tunic, the giant knelt down to pick up a ball of hay again.

„Beg me pardon, m'lord, Tall Epps slipped," and with that he was already up again and on his way. Before Jarvis could react, the man was gone. There was something familiar with him, Blackeye thought. Like the dirt and the stench of peasants? a voice in his head sang sarcastically, and he had to grin involuntarily.

When he stepped forward, the clerk glance up at him and snorted.

„Begone, this is no beggars' and brigants' gathering! Noble lords from all the Seven Kingdoms have come here to combat for honour, this is no place for sellswords."

Blackeye glanced over the man's head, looking at all the banners there, wondering how many of them might even have a House of which they called themselves „Lord". There may have been some to ride here to fight for glory and for the honour to be remembered in songs, yet Jarvis Blackeye had carried a blade of his own long enough to know that even those so noble men were as much attracted by the honour as the were by the prospect of winning two and a half thousand golden Dragons.

„I am neither beggar nor brigant," Blackeye responded stifly, his voice as hard as steel. „I come here to enter the man I serve into the lists."

The clerk looked at him with a mixed of boredom and disgust.

„Another Hedge Knight?" he rose an eyebrow ande yawned.

Jarvis drew his breath.

„My master is a knight, sworn to Lord Robert Arryn of the Vale. He has come here on the word of his noble father, Ser Damian Coldwater. And trust me, he does not take it lightly to be called Hedge Knight or beggar," he declared sharply, clear and plain to hear for everybody in the vicinity.

„He goes by the name of Harlan Stone."

„A bastard name, like many another," the clerk replied with a scolding voice, shrugging.

Blackeye kept his temper. Other men might have demanded such an insult to be payed for with blood. He knew the hot-blooded Dornish for certain would have. But Harlan Stone was a bastard, and confessed so quite openly. There was no insult in something his master was, indeed, proud of.

„Oh, is it? Some also call him the „Ogre of the Vale", you know," he continued with the hint of a cold smile.

If the clerk had recognize him by that name, he showed it not. But Jarvis Blackeye saw the guards jumping back to attention, the younger one of them, a boy of maybe seventeen, paling. It seemed some of the stories had gotten around after all. He could not hide a half-smile.

It had all gone smooth then. The boy had muttered something into the clerk's ear, the man had subsequently paled as well, and Jarvis had his master's name inscribed on the list and even got a friendly farewell. The sun was already starting to sink behind the horizon when he started to make his way back to the inn. Laden with black bread, salted sausages and hard cheese, as well as with oil and needle and flints and half a dozen other things that might be useful on their way back home to the Moat, Blackeye turned around another corner of one of Harroway's Town's narrow streets – and almost bumped into three men with yellow cloaks showing twining red-and-green snakes.

Paege men, the gods be cursed!

„I'll be damned if that's not the bastard's weasel!" the one in the middle, a stocky man with a red, pockmarked face and teeth as yellow as horsepiss yelled, crossing his arms before his chest.

„All leatherfaced and shit. Shame the leather's got a burnmark."

„Look boys, shitface 'ere's become his house maid," the one to the right roared with laughter, an older man with a fat belly, carrying a broadsword.

„Where's yer skirt then, ya old pissbucket?" the one on the left, a tall boy of maybe sixteen leaning on a spear cackle in a high-pitched voice. They all burst in laughter.

All three wore shirts of mail over boiled leather and iron skull caps with nose guards.

„The dirty swamp man, he is," the fat one laughed, poking a finger at Blackeye's chest.

„Nah, Belkar. He's no swamp man. He's a swamp rat. A scrawny rat among slimy frogs." The boy raised his horseface high, sniffing as if there was some foul smell in the air.

Jarvis dubbed them Pockface, Fatbeard and Longshanks.

„Eh, not saying anything? Got the words stuck in ya throat, or what?" Pockface lashed out and threw half the things Jarvis had carried to the dusty ground.

„Don't forget, he thinks he's better than us three simple lads. After all, he's Jarvis „Fastblade"." Fatbeard drew out the name mockingly, crossing his arms over his fat belly.

„Oh wait, I'm wrong. Yer no longer „Fastblade", I forgot. Beg me pardons, m'lord," the fat one imitated a bow, laughing hard.

„Tell us, what happened to ya eye again, 'eh?" Longshanks squieked, leaning on his spear.

„I heard it had something to do with his whore and her piss," Pockface said. „No wonder she burned that well."

„Your lord must love that swamp so much then, considering how eager he is to take away my master's keep from him," Jarvis repeated flatly with a mocking half-smile, but inside his rage was burning. The King's peace must not be broken, he reminded himself. „The frog-lord and his frogmen. Or should I call ya lot the swamp bitches instead?"

Pockface's face darkened, and he spat out.

„Oh, look boys, old shitface 'ere's trying to insult our dear lord. Whuddaya think, 'eh? How about we give the old rat something to think about, eh?"

„Maybe a second black eye," Longshanks chimed in, cackling.

Jarvis stiffened, his left foot reaching back to find a more solid stance.

A gloved fist shot forward. The punch came not unexpected, but the Paege's man-at-arms was a good twenty years younger than Jarvis, and heavier built. Blackeye stumbled back, bumping into the wall behind. His jaws ached, and he could feel something warm dropping from his mouth. He pulled himself forward again, stubborn as he had always been.

Laughing, Pockface took another swing at him, but this time Jarvis yanked back, grabbed the ugly man's stretched arm – and pulled as hard as he could. He heard the shoulder joint cracking free, heard the man's muffled squeal and heard the dull „gong" it made as the soldier's head met the lower wall of the half-timbered house behind Jarvis. Fatbeard tried to yank his blade from his sheath. Blackeye rushed forward, his knee striking up right between the man's legs. The man's fist came up even though his face turned red from pain. Blackeye ducked instinctively. The wooden end of Longshanks' iron-tipped spear hammered over his head, and the blow hit the other man instead, sending him into the dust with his arms swirling like a windmill.

Longshanks was surprised, and he was clearly the youngest of the lot, but the boy took no chances. He fiercely pulled his spear back into position, grabbed it with both hands and went after Jarvis Blackeye, and this time with the pointy end.

This time, Blackeye drew his blade, moving swift and agile like a cat.

With a slick, almost effortless blow the old man's short sword, an old blade glimmering dangerously of oil and hours of care with a whetstone, raced upwards and hacked of the iron head of the spear. The teardrop-shaped blade dropped to the ground with a 'clang'. Longshanks drove the spear at him again, trying to knock the older man out by a direct hit on the head, but the boy's blows seemed more and more clumsy to Jarvis, now that he was rattling off the rust from his limbs.

Jarvis danced aside, first left, then right, then left again. He ducked, grabbed a stone in his left fist, shot up again and brought his own blade up as well. When the next attack came, he parried it, pushing the staff aside, leaping forward along its side. In the brink of a moment, he had closed in on the young man. His left glove smashed into the Paege's man's face with a 'crack', shattering the man's nose and knocking out some teeth. He spat blood and some white pieces before he went down on his knees. Blackeye felt like hitting him again, but thought the better of it. Rage seldomly gave good advice. Without so much as a word he sheathed his sword, picked up his things from the dusty road and headed for the inn, the frightened and admiring looks of the townsfolk following him.