Petyr Baelish finished off the last sentence of the order he was drafting, placed his pen in its inkwell, and carefully stretched the incipient cramp out of his hand as he sanded the ink with his other hand. Long hours of writing had given him almost as much strength and control in that hand as a swordsman, but four twelve-hour days would take a toll on anyone.
Not that he had expected royal service to be a cushy job. A kingdom on the make needed every wheel to be turning at full speed with a minimum of squeaking. He had found this out for himself when Lord Stark had found him a clerkship in a Port warehouse; Lord Captain of the Port Franlan tolerated no sluggards in his workforce, be they watchman, clerk, or stevedore. Even the slowdown in trade caused by the war hadn't lightened the workload. On the contrary, Franlan had taken the names of those clerks who found themselves idled by lack of business and given the list to Ser Gerion with the offer to loan them out to him until trade picked back up.
Which was how Petyr had come to be a supply clerk in the Royal Army of Myr, which in layman's terms meant that his world had turned into a side room that held eight tables each eight feet square, a rack of cubbyholes each stuffed with papers, and a supply of ink and spare quills. In any given hour, Petyr might have to report how many feet of half-inch rope lay in Myr city's warehouses, grade a request by a village militia commander for extra crossbows and recommend to his superior whether to approve or deny the request, and draft an order to ship five hundredweight of wheat to Campora to top up its siege stores. And whenever something was sent out or received, it had to be signed for by the person disbursing it, the person transporting it, the person receiving it, and the clerk who had written up the order for transport, which generated even more papers.
That was one reason that Petyr hadn't tried to give his salary a little covert augmentation. If, for instance, he arranged for a few military crossbows to fall off the back of a wagon, then he would have to bring at least two other people into the scheme, which was two too many for comfort. As the saying went, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. And even if his cohorts kept their silence, all it took was one royal inspector noticing a discrepancy between what someone said they had and what they actually had to break the scheme open; the trail of signed papers would lead right to Petyr and his conspirators.
That was the other reason Petyr hadn't dipped his fingers into the till. The royal inspectors didn't just inspect the state of the town garrisons and the fitness of the Legion companies; they inspected every branch of royal government from top to bottom. And when they found something out of order, correction followed with the speed and finality of a thrown axe. The day before Petyr had transferred to War House, the sprawling manse that Ser Brynden Tully had made the great brain of the Royal Army, a master clerk in the Palace of Justice had been caught embezzling and every scribbler who wore the livery and took the pay of the Kingdom of Myr had been ordered to attend his execution.
At first, Petyr had thought that it was a show, that the unfortunate would be taken up to the scaffold and the noose placed on his neck before a messenger came hotfoot from the Palace of Justice with a grant of clemency, or at least a stay of execution. But the noose had been tightened, the red priest had recited the death prayer, and Petyr and almost four hundred other clerks watched in shock as the lever was pulled and the embezzler dropped. But not far enough to break his neck, oh no, the headsman had given the embezzler the short drop, so that instead of having his neck broken he had slowly strangled. It had taken the poor sod almost ten minutes to die, with his face slowly turning blue and his eyes bulging as he fought for air. Eventually he had gone limp, and the headsman had made sure of his demise by grabbing onto his ankles and yanking down hard.
Petyr prided himself on being a fast learner and the lesson had been tolerably clear: Keep your sticky fingers to yourself, if you know what's good for you. And at that, the man had apparently been lucky to be hanged. Ducking out to the local bakery for lunch one day, Petyr had overheard a pair of Legion spearmen discussing the embezzler and what they would have done to him if he'd been handed over to them as they had requested. He had lost his appetite entirely after only a few sentences.
So he kept his hands to himself and his head down; there was plenty of time still to make his fortune and something would turn up. He had already made a fair bit investing in a few cargoes of glassware that had gone to Braavos and King's Landing; it wasn't strictly forbidden for royal employees to invest and speculate on trade so long as they only did so with their own money and didn't abuse their position in the process. The war had put a stop to that for now, but he had an investment lined up with the Weaver's Guild as soon as trade resumed its normal flow. He might wear plain clothes and eat plain food for now, but time and a continuance of his newfound luck would change that, among other things.
He gently set the order into the tray designated for outgoing papers and reached for the next paper in the tray designated for incomers. There were several hours left to go before the office closed and the stack in his incoming tray was still two inches thick.
XXX
Roryn Pyke laboriously scratched out his signature on the report to Ser Gerion on the probe that had been fended off two days ago; he had been learning to read and write since being named castellan of Ironhold, but he still relied on a scribe for anything longer or more complicated than a short message. After he finished writing he handed the report back to his scribe to be sealed and sent off by dispatch rider and turned to glower out the window at the sea.
By all rights the Sea of Myrth should be a Myrish sea in truth, but the fact remained that the Royal Navy could do no more than protect the littoral and the coastal shelf and make occasional forays out into the open sea. The slaver fleets were simply too numerous and, if Roryn was being entirely honest, too competent to challenge for a fleet that still numbered less than seventy galleys; longships made excellent patrol and raiding craft, but they couldn't fight galleys on even terms and expect to win. The Ironmaker's victory had been won by surprise, and those actions where a Myrish longship had beaten a slaver galley had almost uniformly been won by a boarding action after an error in maneuvering had allowed the longship to get alongside the galley. There were ways to force such errors in maneuvering, if you had the numbers to threaten each galley from multiple angles, but Roryn, Victarion, and Dagmer Cleftjaw had worked out that the most reliable method of doing so required a lone galley to be opposed by three longships.
The slavers, the god curse them, had taken to sailing in squadrons of three or four galleys, and operating in close concert as they did so. That made things infinitely more difficult; not that it was impossible to force the kind of errors you needed to win, but you needed to have four or five times the number of longships in order to do so, and you needed all the skill you could muster and all the special favor you could cadge out of the god in order to do so. And even under the best of circumstances the Drowned God was stingy with his favor. Only those who had already done all that mortal might and craft could accomplish could reasonably expect him to take a hand.
So Lord Captain Franlan was building new galleys as fast as he could, while off the shore the Royal Navy did the best they could to keep the coastal villages from being attacked as they had been in the first war. But for all the valor the Navy showed in protecting the coast, they couldn't reopen the Sea of Myrth to trade. The slavers had announced the Sea of Myrth to be closed to trade on pain of attack, and proved it by sinking a slew of merchant vessels in the opening days of the war. Dispatch riders had already been sent north to Pentos requesting the aid of the Braavosi fleet on the grounds that the Peace of Pentos had guaranteed freedom of navigation, but it would take some time for that aid to come, if it came at all. In the meantime, the merchants of Ironhold and Myr city were being forced to tighten their belts and explore other means of making a living. More than a few merchant's sons had joined the Royal Navy in order to contribute a sailor's wages towards the maintenance of their families, while their mothers and sisters took in sewing and embroidery and their fathers turned their gazes inland.
At least Ironhold was more or less immune to attack. The harbor defenses were essentially a copy of those protecting the port of Myr, augmented by the fact that the town castle, a stoutly constructed citadel in the fashion of the holdfasts of the Iron Isles, was placed on the shore at the western end of the harbor. Moreover, the town's buildings were strongly built, whether of stone or wood, and each household, shop, and place of business was required to maintain at least one water barrel and four buckets per floor against fire. The probe he was reporting to Ser Gerion had been a pair of Tyroshi galleys that had flirted with the extreme range of the springalds on the harbor mole towers. A few desultory bolts back and forth, and a hand of longships putting out from the docks, had convinced the slavers to try their luck elsewhere.
Roryn's lip curled into a snarl; he hated feeling unable to protect the livelihood of his people, and if he knew Victarion it would be eating at the young lord's soul like rats in a granary. At least Victarion was out at sea where he could do something about it. Roryn, by contrast, was stuck in Ironhold listening to his scribe read out reports and petitions and taking out his frustrations on the pell and those of the town garrison who would brave his increasingly foul mood in order to spar with him.
XXX
A properly brought-up Lyseni aristocrat didn't show strong emotion in public. Not that they couldn't show emotion at all, even grief was acceptable if you were in mourning. But it had to understated; a discreet sniffle and a lone tear was perfectly within the bounds of civilized behavior, wailing and floods of tears not so much. Such extravagant displays of unbridled emotion were for barbarians, not the well-bred scions of Lys the Lovely.
But on finding that his path was blocked by yet another fortified village, Cladio Pyrrius couldn't help himself. He thumped his fist on the pommel of his saddle and spat a caustic string of oaths that made his lieutenants edge backward as they traded nervous glances. Cladio snarled a final imprecation that he had heard on one of his uncle's ships, which cursed its target, its progeny, and its ancestors unto the fourth generation, and finally subsided, forcing himself to review the situation dispassionately as he deliberately slowed his breathing.
He had come over the border ten days ago with three thousand mounted light infantry and light horse under his command; it was well short of the commitment promised by the mutual defense treaty with Tyrosh, but it was what could be spared from the defenses while the army was being restructured. In any case, he had been ordered to do all the damage he could to the Myrish countryside in order to draw troops away from the invasion of Tyrosh, or at least render the Myrish southeastern frontier incapable of supporting an army. A sound enough strategy, but the cracks had appeared almost immediately.
To name only one, the damned Andals hadn't been caught with their pants down, as some of the more optimistic members of the conclave had theorized. On his first day over the border he had seen no less than six signal fires, and the purpose of them had become apparent only two days later, when his army came across their first fortified village. It hadn't been anything special, simply a ditch-and-rampart affair with a palisade along the rampart and short, but no less significant towers at each corner bastion. But it had contained the inhabitants of every nearby farm, down to the livestock; Cladio's scouts had found nothing greater than a chicken in any of the farmhouses within a day's ride of the fortified villages, and no valuables either. The farms had been burned, of course, but with the crops only recently planted the only things that could be burned were the buildings, fruit trees, and vineyards that couldn't be brought within the villages.
He had stormed the first of those villages, of course; he would not have it said that he was afraid to try conclusions against slaves and peasants. But it had been far more difficult than he was expecting. The first storming party had been shot apart by crossbow volleys without getting within fifty feet of the wall. The second storming party, better supported with missile fire and employing improvised mantlets, had gotten to the walls but had been forced to retreat after a short but vicious contest atop the palisade. At that point Cladio had lost his temper and ordered the gates to be burned. This had been accomplished, and a substantial section of the palisade on either side of the gatehouse burned down as well before the bucket brigade overwhelmed the flames, but the villagers had dug a shallow ditch and assembled a barricade from the excavated earth and other materials that allowed them to cover the new gap in the walls with crossbowmen in cover supported by spearmen. It hadn't saved them in the end, but for the privilege of reducing the village to a corpse-strewn ruin Cladio's force had paid a heavy price. A hundred and thirty-six men had either been killed outright or died of their wounds, while another two hundred had been too badly wounded to continue with the raid and three hundred more were lightly wounded.
Cladio, for his part, had been more aghast that none of the defenders of the village appeared to be regular soldiers. They had all been peasants, albeit peasants wielding military weapons. His patrician soul rebelled at the idea of an armed peasantry trained and willing to fight, but he could not deny the evidence before his eyes. The fact that of the three villages they had encountered since every one of them had been fortified and defended provided even more evidence. The Kingdom of Myr simply couldn't have enough trained soldiers to invade Tyrosh, garrison Myr city and their principal towns, and protect every village; the numbers required would bankrupt them. Instead, it appeared, the Myrish had armed and trained their peasants to defend themselves, and built those ungodly fortified villages to further help them do so, in order to allow them to concentrate their soldiers in the major towns, Myr city, and their field army.
Confirmation of that theory would have to wait on further information however, and while Cladio was willing to try and find out the hard way, that was no longer an option. After losing just over a tenth of his strength at that nameless, never-to-be-sufficiently-damned village, he didn't have the numbers to storm more villages and protect himself against a counter-stroke. Especially since the companies stationed at Campora had sallied out to take the field against him. He did outnumber them by about half their numbers again and was far more mobile than the heavy infantry and heavy cavalry of the Iron Legion, but their commander was mirroring his movements on the inner of two concentric arcs, which meant that he had fundamentally less ground to cover in order to keep Cladio from penetrating further. And Cladio knew better than to fight head-on against heavy foot and armored lancers with light foot and light horse.
Cladio shrugged. He had been told to do all the damage to the Myrish frontier that he could, and he had done so. Along his whole line of march there was not a farmhouse that remained unburnt or an orchard that had not been cut down. He had also been ordered to preserve his force insofar as he was able within the confines of his other orders and so far, he had lost only two hundred and fifty men killed and wounded. His family's rivals in the conclave couldn't argue with successfully completed orders. Especially since he had made sure that each of his entries in the running log that detailed the travails of his command had been countersigned by two of his subordinates. It was one thing to accuse a commander of cowardice or inability, but quite another to extend that accusation to the full roster of his subordinate officers.
He turned and started giving orders. They would inflict what devastation they could on the lands around the village, and then begin the withdrawal. It galled him to withdraw without at least spying the towers of Campora, but that was the fault of the men who'd given him a raiding force instead of a proper army. If the conclave had any sense and read his reports, they wouldn't try an invasion again without a larger force, a proper supply train, and siege engines.