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"My lady has a thirst," Ser Lyn insisted. "Whenever she comes out to dance, she likes a drop of red."

(A Feast for Crows, Chapter 23, Alayne I)

Chapter 12

The stable boy had not stopped yammering since they had ridden away from Winterfell, Lyn thought, and cursed the day he'd trusted Littlefinger's plan.

It had all seemed so easy, that day in the Eyrie. Though perhaps there had been bad omens from the start. Lyn had met Baelish in the room with the bloody moon door, and the wind whistling through the cracks had almost sent him mad. The little lord had taken to his bed, complaining, as always, at the lack of his cousin Sansa, and the death of his mother, until he'd been sent to bed with a dose of sweetsleep to keep him quiet.

Now that he thought about it, Lyn realised that he hadn't actually seen little Lord Arryn for about a week before they left the Eyrie for the last time. Was the boy even alive? He wouldn't put anything past Baelish. He'd been a fool to trust him.

Baelish had said that it would be a simple matter to expose this bastard, the self-styled King in the North, for the incestuous deserter from the Night's Watch that he was. But Baelish had not known about foreign soldiers defending this so-called King, had he? Or were Lyn and the other Vale lords the only ones in the dark? Still, he brooded as he rode, Bronze Yohn Royce had known – there was no surprise on his face, not even when that bloody great dragon had appeared.

Damn the boy, would he never stop squirming and whining? That was it, he'd had enough – there was an overgrown hedgerow, covered in snow, by the side of the Kingsroad, and Lyn deposited the boy in it. He didn't really care whether the child was hurt or not, he told himself, and spurred his horse to catch up with Littlefinger. As he did so, he overtook the three knights of the Vale who had chosen to cast their lot with the so-called Lord Protector. Lyn would not trust them as far as he could throw them. He grimaced as he kicked his mount ever harder in the flanks, barely conscious that he did so. Of course that jumped-up brothel-keeper had secured for himself the fastest horse.

"Why did you let the boy go?" Baelish yelled to be heard, before his words were swept away by the wind of their passage. "He was a much needed hostage!"

"D'you really think that bastard, whosever bastard he be, gives a fuck about some stable boy? He would just have slowed us down," Lyn countered, thinking that the boy would only have slowed him down, which Baelish obviously cared not a whit about. "Where are we going?" he yelled into the wind.

"I have a ship waiting at White Harbor," Baelish shouted back, "it will take us to the Fingers – no-one will bother us there." He seemed to be finished, then turned back as though he'd heard Lyn's unspoken objection to this plan. "The maester at the New Castle is a Lannister of Lannisport!" The shouted words whipped by him, but Lyn still grasped their meaning. "He was not hard to bribe!"

Lyn understood: if a raven from Winterfell reached the castle, this maester would make sure the message was lost. If a message arrived at all. In the time Lyn had been at Winterfell, the ravens had diminished to a trickle, until none had arrived in the last few days. Either nothing had happened recently, or no messages were being allowed through. But by whom?

Lyn had been riding all his life, so he did not need to concentrate on the road, and just let the horse have its head. He wondered, though, how long the beasts would be able to ride at such a speed without foundering. Surely there would be an inn between Winterfell and White Harbor, where they could change horses. They had not ridden that way when they rode to Winterfell but had taken the road from the Vale, so he was unfamiliar with the terrain. Also, even though the night was clear, and moonlit, the silvery light gave the landscape a strange and eerie air.

As they rode, Lyn was surprised by a stinging sensation on his cheeks. Snowflakes? From where, though? There had been no clouds in the sky when they set out. A flurry was rising, out of nowhere, it seemed. Looking around him, wildly, it struck him that he could see neither the other Knights of the Vale, nor Petyr Baelish. Still, he did not slow down, and as his horse galloped on, he caught up with them. But they were not alone.

It was a picture out of the old stories, the ones from childhood. There was the tall white figure, with long white hair, blowing in the wind which had sprung up from nowhere. There were the wights, standing around, with glowing blue eyes, each carrying a makeshift weapon, each clearly dead. Finally, there was the snowstorm which Lyn's horse carried him towards, even as he tried to pull back on the reins.

As he caught up, Baelish's horse reared and screamed in fear, as did its owner, even as he fell off. All the horses went insane when the White Walker grinned, and Lyn slid off his before he was thrown. One of the Knights was not so lucky and hit the ground hard. It struck him that perhaps the man had been the luckiest of them all.

Baelish held his hands out in front of him while the White Walker advanced. "No! You're not real! You can't be real!"

The White Walker's grin grew even wider, even as the wights attacked the other knights.

"I demand to treat with your leader!" Baelish shrieked, changing tack, and Lyn shook his head.

Lyn could have laughed and cried at the same time, as he drew his sword, his Lady Forlorn, for what he was sure would be the last time.

The creature did not bandy words with Baelish. Lyn wondered whether it could speak. Mute or no, it still seemed to be laughing in Littlefinger's face as it unceremoniously ran him through with a broadsword which seemed to be made of ice. Still, Baelish clung to life, even as the blood gushed from his mouth, and he clung to the creature which had killed him. The White Walker pulled its sword out of Baelish's body and did not even bother to push it away, only turned to Lyn.

So dies the man who would have been King of all of Westeros, Lyn thought, distantly. He was aware that he should be attending to the matter at hand, but found it hard to focus on anything besides Petyr Baelish, earlier the most powerful man in the Seven Kingdoms, now dead in a hedgerow.

The White Walker advanced on him. It wasn't fast, Lyn thought, with a feeling akin to madness. It did not need to be fast. It advanced towards him at a certain inexorable pace, and he noted that its sword was covered in Baelish's blood, already frozen on its blade.

Lyn raised his own sword and kissed it. One last time, he thought, you and I. Then he met the White Walker's swing with Lady Forlorn and was shocked when his sword resisted, with a loud ringing. Was this the answer, he thought, Valyrian steel? He started to think, nay, to hope that he might survive this fight after all. In the next few minutes, or they could have been hours, he wavered between hope and despair. He was a good swordsman, but his previous opponents had needed to breathe, had become tired, had felt the air turn sour in their lungs, just as he did. His new adversary needed no such thing.

Lyn felt like he had been battling for hours when, wonder of wonders, he saw an opening on the creature's side. He slashed quickly and backed away, to be able to dart in again and deliver the killing blow, but in the end, he did not need to. As soon as his sword touched the creature, it turned to ice and fell to pieces. The wights turned to him and he backed away. He wasn't sure if the sword would have the same effect on them. Had they not spoken of dragonglass, at Winterfell? Why hadn't he listened?

Lyn kept moving back, and they followed, until, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Petyr Baelish lying a few yards away, face up. Lyn knew he had seen the man die, but still – was it a trick of the moonlight, or were his fingers moving? He owed the man, and never let it be said that a Corbray did not pay his debts. He brandished his sword at the wights, and backed away to look closely at Baelish, whose cold blue eyes were staring up at him.

To be sure, Littlefinger's eyes had always been blue – but now they seemed to glow. With a speed Lyn hadn't expected, Baelish sprang up and ran at him, the look of contempt he'd become familiar with transformed into a mindless hatred, and something else . . . a hunger.

Lyn backed away, stumbling, and slashed at Baelish, hitting him with a desperate, blind swing. The creature Baelish had become barely slowed down, even as his arm came away from his body, and dropped to the ground, twitching. Lyn felt his gorge rise and backed away further, remembering too late that there were wights to the rear as well as the front.

They brought him down, the dead men, and held him, while the thing that had once been Petyr Baelish was on him, its teeth in his throat. The others were not long behind, stabbing, slashing, and yes . . . biting.

The last thing his dying eyes saw was a white dragon gliding down towards him, its mouth opening – no. No. The last thing he saw was fire.

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Note:

As you can tell, this is more of an interlude - like the prologues/epilogues GRRM likes to write, in which the POV character dies. Poor Lyn!