While Lord Celtigar's books weren't cooked, well not like Littlefinger's had proven to be, they were still a shiten mess. Unfortunately after a most of a morning of viewing, the new Master of Coin's sorry attempt at uncooked books had fried Sean's eyes and brain. "George, mate," he muttered, "the least you could've done was invented double entry book keeping and three column accounting for these fiscally blighted arses." The actor had never taken an accounting class at Brook Comprehensive or Rotherham C.A.T. in his long gone youth, but as a teen he'd spent more than a few Saturdays at his da's factory helping mum with the books, so he knew how to separate his liabilities from his assets in order to calculate his equity.

The actor didn't have the time for this crap load of figures, well maybe he did, Robb and his aides were still handling most of the routine barbarian management stuff – 'I'd have a few fucking things to tell whoever wrote "The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun"'; but he sure in seven hells didn't have the patience for going through all these sheets and sheets of poorly annotated financial shillyshally. Clearly another meeting was needed with the old fart to help clarify a few things. If he could've, Sean would have been glad to bring small round glasses, a green visor, and an adding machine to prop the coot up with. Regardless, it wouldn't help his other vast aggravation of the day, trying to write with his left hand was simply … Arrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

He threw the papers, ok parchments mostly, down with a sigh. Some of it felt and looked like papyrus. None of it bore a resemblance to any product real or otherwise sold by Werham Hogg from their branch in Slough. 'Note to self, hire some clever bloke; stick him in a room with wood pulp, hemp, torn linen, water, and something heavy to mush it all down with and don't let the bastard out till he's got something useful to show for it. Oh, and definitely don't hire that guy.' The image of Ricky Gervais' pudgy conceited clueless face floated before him, causing a snort of amusement. Martin Freeman's earnest, good natured face followed. 'Heard Peter'd hired him to play Bilbo.' "Shit!" he swore fiercely, realizing they should've already started shooting the "Hobbit" down in New Zealand. Ian's, Hugo's, Elijah's, and Ian's faces now swirled around him. Friendly faces, colleagues, peers he'd never see again.

Slowly Sean beat them back. 'Got a role of a lifetime here, mate,' he told himself. 'And a world full of material no one's ever heard. Lord de Vere, eat your heart out, some mummer's going to get a gift t'would even make Shakespeare blush.' The actor unclenched his recalcitrant hand and started poking about the table for a clean parchment. 'What do you feel like?' he pondered. 'Perhaps a little music, but what?' He pushed a diagram of a Brown Bess to the side. He paused. He chuckled. "Sharpie," he drawled in imitation of Pete Postlewaite's wonderful deep Lancashire drawl. A blank scrap found, he dipped the quill and began to write, 'Here's forty …' "Well can't be a bloody schilling now can it?" he asked himself. '… stags on the drum. To those who volunteer to come, To 'list and fight the … Rose today.' "Eh, that's a clever lad," he muttered approvingly of his word substitution. 'Over the Hills and far away.'

The quill continued scratching his barely legible script. 'O'er the hills and o'er the main …' 'Do they even have 'mains' here?' he wondered. He pondered changing it until he realized the next verse was the trickiest bit of the whole piece with 'Flanders, Portugal, and Spain.' 'Through Riverlands, Crownlands, and Reach. Lord Stark commands and we obey. Over the hills and far away.' The quill stopped as he contemplated his translation. "Bugger that," he spat. "Too many lands, they don't flow, and no fucking way 'Reach' rhymes with 'main.'" He ran a blotchy line through the location names. "Hhhhhhhmmmmmnnnnn." 'Past Green Fork, Harrenhal, and ….'

Time passed.

And passed.

"Fuck Spain!" he swore with disgust, refusing to call in Cat or Olyvar or whoever was standing guard outside the door to see if they knew a word that rhymed with 'main.' "Maybe something will come to me some day. Sharpe was never one much for music. Probably should've just stayed with Zeppelin," he told himself a tad morosely. He suddenly smiled. He quickly dabbed the end of the quill in the pot of ink and began writing again in his left-handed chicken scratch, this time much more confidently. 'Hey lady, you got the love I need. Maybe more than enough. Ohhh darling, darling, darling … walk a while with me. Ohhh you've got so much … so much … so much' This 'Over the Hills and Far Away' didn't have a single word in it he needed to 'Westeros-ize.' His stump scratched against his beard as he wished for an electric guitar, yet another little important detail George forgot to put in the books. 'Many have I loved – Many times been bitten. Many times I've gazed along the open road.'

The insipid toad Symon Silver Tongue bowed his way out. Sean hid his amused smile until the door shut. He wasn't sure whether the singer feared him more, for from the beginning - and reiterated with icy Eddard Stark precision each meeting there after – he'd threatened his daughter's tutor with dismemberment amongst all the stew shops in Flea Bottom if tales were ever told of his time in the Maidenvault, or lusted after him more. Today the man had picked up the tune Sean hummed with his usual dexterity, but quickly complained first of its shortness and then of not Ned's insistence on a more metallic sound to the lyre playing. A small handful of silver and instructions to buy a lyre strung with six steel strings had mollified his tongue; that and a promise to bring him and these new masterpieces before the King and Queen. The actor could just imagine stiff necked Stannis' reaction to it, 'like a lead dragon,' he snickered.

There was still a bit of time before Edmure would arrive for a cozy Tully-Stark dinner and gool old fashioned family ambush, so he dug into his mound of personal project paperwork. 'Note to self,' he thought for the umpteen millionth time, 'invent fucking real paper.' Without it his efforts at a printing press would be fairly pointless. Someone was already working on movable type. "How hard can it be? Get Olyvar to check on that tomorrow," he muttered. The press itself would be trickier, but not all that much. 'Apply pressure, release, repeat, for gods' sake.' Besides, lots of merchants, craftsmen, guilds, and whatnot were more than willing to be accommodating to the new regime, no matter how odd some of the requests made of them were. A little extra silver helped keep a family's belly full when rations were stretched as far as they were in the capital. 'That's another thing to blast Edmure about, the Riverlands aren't pulling their share. But he'll just complain about roving Westerlanders and the damned Brotherhood without Banners again.' The hundred or more messages he'd had posted in villages from Darry to Riverrun to Pinkmaiden to Harrenhal for Beric Dondarrion and Thoros of wherever to report back to Eddard Stark in King's Landing had admittedly not done jack.

"Here're my babies," he whispered, laying two poorly sketched diagrams side by side. Industrialization needed cast iron and steel, lots and lots of it – for swords and muskets and artillery. And as any lad from the British industrial heartland of Sheffield should know, thanks to countless boring school field trips, the picture on the left is what a blast furnace looked like. A thick stone and brick tower with a narrow chute at the top for dropping in the fuel, ore, and limestone. The figure tried its best to show a cut out of the chute, that started narrow at the top, slowly widened as it dropped lower, then suddenly narrowed again right above where the pipes from the bellows merged in to feed the combustion process with air. A door sat at the bottom of the edifice for the removal of the iron and slag once the whole process was over, three days or so from beginning to end if the curators weren't part of a vast British historical conspiracy.

A water wheel would help with running the bellows, and while a sizeable enough branch of the White Knife ran by Winterfell, alas, as his inherited house's motto stated, "Winter is coming." The sucker would freeze tight and he doubted the hot spring the castle was built over likely couldn't supply enough throughput to keep a wheel running. Or at least he couldn't count on it. He envisioned the next figure his balky left hand would have to draw would be a building large enough to fit a giant circular wheel of sorts. Images of scenes from numerous cheesy movies filled his head, men and women walking in giant hamster wheels or pushing a bar like Conan the Barbarian. "Later," he whispered.

For the furnaces to work, and his mind's eye saw dozens popping up, all of them hopefully around Winterfell, he'd need fuel; tons and tons and tons of it. The Wolfswood wasn't far, and all those SIMT geezers at Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet had claimed charcoal was the original fuel for making iron, but it was coke that had made the Industrial Revolution possible. This was the purpose of the other poor excuse for a sketch, a beehive, or more accurately, a beehive oven. 'In 1802 a battery of beehives was set up north of Sheffield in Cawthorne to coke the Silkstone seam for use in crucible steel melting,' the codger repeated by rote to a gaggle of bored fifteen and sixteen year olds from Brook Comprehensive in 1975. The beehive building was tall enough to stack coal three feet deep and ignite in a partially, or what it wholely(?), enclosed space in order to carbonize the stuff and burn off the impurities leaving … coke. The process took three … 'Shit, didn't the furnaces take three days to run a batch of iron. Does coke take three days too, or am I fucking something up?' The fingers of his missing hand suddenly started to invisibly drum the table top with frustration, as he struggled to remember what he'd half listened to thirty five years ago. Hopeless. He searched his memory for any relevant documentary he might have caught once on the BBC.

Knock. Knock.

"My lord, Ser Edmure is arriving."

"Thank you. Tell my lady wife I will join her in five minutes," he answered with minimal grace. 'Well maybe George didn't 'invent' coal either, so I'm screwed regardless. Then I won't have to worry about mining and shipping the bloody stuff.'

It was definitely time for a drink. Britain's industrial might wasn't built in a day, so clearly Westeros' wasn't going to either. It just felt like it needed to be.

Sean heard the door open and he turned from the sideboard where he'd been pouring himself a glass to watch a servant, Jarmen he thought, dressed in Winterfell's grey and white livery step in to announce, "Ser Edmure, milord, milady." His not goodbrother, 'really, where did George ever come up with some of these altered wordings,' strode in forcefully, looking quite dapper in a medieval fashion sense. He usually appeared happily ragged in his attire, oh always good looking for sure – thanks mostly to his handsome features, but with the aura of someone running late who only had time to throw on what odds and ends were at hand. Not tonight, though; he wore a stylish velvet doublet, close-fitting to above the hips and buttoned all the way up to his bearded neck. In the main, it was a muted blue, except for sleeves which were a dull crimson – giving the short jacket traditional Tully colors. The bottom hem of a white silk tunic tucked out beneath the blue and covered the tops of muddy red breeches. A black cape swirled behind him to complete the ensemble.

"Uncle," Robb called cheerily, the first to greet their guest.

"Ser Edmure," Roslin said more demurely, bobbing him a quick curtsy.

The blue eyes Edmure shared with Cat, along with the same shade of reddish-brown hair, crinkled at the greeting. "Are we to be joined by any of your illustrious family tonight, fair Roslin?" the heir of Riverrun asked with a tone to his voice.

"Why no, nuncle," the sweet girl answered a tad surprised.

"No doubt busy," he muttered. "Ser Stevron in particular, I don't doubt."

'What's with him?' Sean wondered. The 'late' Freys were far from a Tully family favorite, the actor himself would be happy to be first in line to pull the plug on that ancient weasel Walder, but they'd done yeoman work aiding not Ned so far, and though they'd gained much for it, he much preferred that regrettable outcome than another Red Wedding. 'Or is that the Red Wedding? A Red Wedding?'

"Arya, are you staying out of trouble?" he asked with a sly smile.

"No …" the girl paused, eyes widening, then giggled. "Yes, I mean yes, uncle."

"Good, good," he replied sounding a bit distracted. "Where's Sansa tonight?"

"At the Holdfast, waiting on the Queen," Catelyn responded before Arya could inevitably blurt out some biting criticism of her sister.

Sean really didn't understand those two. Lorna and Molly were about the same ages apart as Sansa and Arya and he never remembered them going at that hard. If only the pair of them could know how narrowly they'd avoided the horrible fates George had had planned for them, they'd be a little more grateful of spirit. 'The family's back together, isn't it? Why the hostility? I'm the fucking bastard stressed out keeping Westeros together with duct tape, blood, and Shakespeare.'

"Cat," the auburn haired knight acknowledged, stepping over and taking both his sister's hands in his.

"Brother," she replied suspiciously.

"I don't see Lord Jonos or homely Ser Horas or love-struck Lancel," he said snidely, purposefully looking about the room. "Are there any other guests expected tonight for our 'family' dinner?"

"No, Edmure, just you," Cat responded tersely.

"Oh," he exclaimed with exaggerated innocence. "Lord Roose must have been wrong. He said I should not be surprised to share my fare with the father or brother or uncle of some eligible maiden."

'Shit, fucking Bolton' Sean swore to himself. The planned ambush had been ambushed itself. "Arya, go to your room," he snapped in his command voice. If there was one thing he'd learned the hard way going through four divorces, when the adults get into a knock down drag down, you don't want the kids in the room absorbing collateral damage.

"What?!" the girl said, both startled and suddenly afraid.

"Go to your room, young lady," he ordered her with intensely than he should have.

"Ned …" his 'good' brother started.

"Not a word Edmure, not another blessed word," he said with a voice cold enough to freeze water. He took a breath. "Arya, dear?"

Big, teary saucer eyes looked at him as she nodded her head in agreement and promptly fled the room.

Satisfied, he stalked over to his would have been victim. Edmure, though bigger than he, retreated a step in concern. Sean thrust out his hand. "Drink this," he commanded. Reluctantly Edmure accepted the glass and warily took a sip of the Dornish Red, always keeping his eyes high enough above the rim to watch. "I wanted you relaxed and cheerful before Cat and I broached the options to you." He sighed. "Dinner will have to wait," he concluded. "Come on, drink up."

Edmure refused. "The word of the marriage alliances you've been brokering has spread like wildfire over all Aegon's hill. It was bad enough when your Mormonts sank their claws into Casterly Rock, and my banners demanded I keep spare Lannisters back for them. Now they are demanding I marry or they'll arrange an acceptable Riverlands match with your Bran and Rickon to ensure some Tully blood keeps hold of Riverrun. Well Father couldn't make Uncle Brynden marry, and neither you nor my banners can force me to either," he proclaimed with utmost vigor.

"Don't be a child Edmure," Cat replied scornfully. "This isn't Robert's Rebellion we're fighting and you're no longer ten years old; stop whining, you're almost thirty years old and by the Seven you've a duty to perform for the good of both the Riverlands and the realm."

"I won't marry some bitch or nag. I won't do it," he insisted.

"I don't think they want you to marry a dog or a horse, uncle," Robb cut in with a soft chuckle. "Besides, you might enjoy it." He held out his hand to Roslin and she came over to him. "I know I did."

"Though you waited longer than you were supposed to, my lord," the sweet gap toothed faced teenager teased.

"I did, I did. I was afraid, more fool me, my sweetling."

'If Edmure doesn't vomit, I might,' Sean thought at the overly love sick pair's display of affection. Though he had to give the couple the professional credit due them, the scene was being played out during the wrong act, but they were gamely sticking as best they could to the hurried script he'd only just provided them that morning. He cleared his throat. "Lord Bolton is unusually well informed as always, Jayne or Catelyn Bracken and Desmera Redwyne were some of whom I was going to suggest you think upon." He cleared his throat again. "Cat, my love, some wine?" he asked with an endearing smile.

She barely hesitated. "Of course, Ned," she said pleasantly.

'Vomit on that too Ed.' "Can we all sit? I'm still too tired to bicker while standing up, a pity I can't tell his Grace that," he said breezily.

Soon enough they were all seated, or at least perched, none of them looked particularly relaxed; and thankfully those who wanted wine had goblet in hand, Sean would have taken two if he could.

"Edmure, I swear on our mother's grave, none of your words here will be repeated by any of us." Team Stark promptly nodded their heads or raised a hand to pledge eternal silence. "Is there a young maiden you would marry if only father would approve of her?"

Cat's brother grimaced. "Weeeelllll, nooooo," he admitted sheepishly.

'Is there a burly knight or strapping stable boy then?' Sean wondered, though he was fairly certain from what he'd both read and seen of Edmure in person that the Ser was what passed for a medieval 'player.'

"Anyone you're particularly sweet on Uncle?" Robb probed.

"Not now, not for over a year. She was a widow with a holdfast of her own on the edge of the Smallwood's land. She said she couldn't wait for me any longer. Heard the Lannisters burned the keep down," he ended in a low, grim voice.

'Wow, this is going to be as uncomfortable as I feared. At least with Harrion, Halys, Wylis, Medger, and Stevron it was strictly business, even with Perwyn being near a decade younger than Jonelle Cerwyn. None of this coaxing, get in touch with your feelings shite.' It was time to cut the mood, change the dynamic. "Well I can't blame you for not wanting one of the many Brackens, who'd want him as a good father. The Old Gods know he wouldn't shut up about making a match with my House."

Several faces jumped in surprise at his bluntness.

"And while a Redwyne match would help the king mightily, we've other bait to troll the Arbor with. Besides, you got a look at Horror and Slobber, I'm scared to think how atrocious 'fair' Desmera appears."

Roslin looked shocked. Robb snorted in amusement. Edmure laughed outright. And Cat let out with a sharp, "Ned."

He shrugged. "Is there a Riverlands' house the Tully's need?"

"No," Edmure said curtly.

"Is there a Riverlands' house you'd like to become closer to?" Cat inquired.

Edmure paused.

'The Vances have no sisters, mate.'

Then a terse, "No."

"Is there a Riverland's maiden you think you could become sweet on?" Roslin queried shyly.

Now Edmure shrugged.

"Any beautiful lady you've heard about from the Reach?"

'Please say yes, please say yes.'

"Uhm, Lady Oakheart is reputed to have several lovely granddaughters," Edmure suggested.

'Damn.'

Cat frowned. "I see … It's just …" His wife sighed sadly.

"We've sent a message with Brynden offering the Oakhearts Arya," Sean said with as little emotion as he could muster.

Roslin gasped. Robb looked stunned. Unfortunately that bit of information hadn't yet been shared with the rest of their little acting troop. There would undoubtedly be problems later.

"Of course," Edmure barked bitterly. "And what of the Hightowers?!"

"A raven has gone to Lord Leyton offering Theon Greyjoy," Cat replied softly.

Edmure ground his teeth and shook his head from side to side. "So of the Tyrell's major allies, you'll leave me that Rowan slut?!" he yelled.

"Tyrek Lannister," Sean admitted.

"A rabbit eared Florent perhaps?"

"They are too close to his Grace. Such would only …"

"I know that," Edmure roared with frustration. "I'm not utterly stupid despite not being blessed with visions from the Old Gods!"

'The Old Gods.'

"Randyll Tarly's daughter Talla is fourteen," Catelyn said calmly.

'The Old Gods?'

"Jug eared from her Florent mother no doubt and I'd rather have Jonos Bracken as my good father than Tarly

"The Old Gods!" Sean suddenly shouted, the wine glass fell from his hand as he rose unsteadily from his seat. He hoped he seemed a man receiving a vision. 'The symmetry, so obvious.'

The room instantly went quiet, every one staring intently at him.

"Edmure, goodbrother, would you care for a girl as sweet and pretty as our fair Roslin here?"

What could he say without offering insult, but "Yes."

"With brown hair, brown eyes, and a shy temperament?"

"Who, Ned?" Cat asked, confused, for he was roaming off script now.

Edmure now looked at Roslin. Looked hard at her, uncomfortably so, for a longer time than was proper, even under such odd circumstances as this. "Yes," he at last blurted out with a jealous sigh.

"Her house is poor, but very noble through her father's blood. In fact he's been your guest at Riverrun since the Whispering Woods. So he daren't say no to your proposal, can he?"

"A Westerlander," his goodbrother growled.

"The Old Gods have shown me she's worth her weight in gold for the happiness she'll bring you, Edmure; and you alone." 'Since Robb can't have her now.'

Resentment and desperate want raged in battle across poor Edmure Tully's face. Each time he cast a quick, envious glance over at Roslin, want gained another square inch of room. "Alright, tell me who," he finally gasped.

"Jeyne Westerling," Sean answered triumphantly.