Chapter 6 — "Vices and Reputation"
The dice came up sixes.
Again.
The man across the table stared at them like they'd personally offended him. Merchant's guard, by the look of him — thick through the neck, road-worn, with the kind of face that had decided long ago that the world was probably cheating him and had been collecting evidence ever since.
He looked up at Alaric.
Alaric looked back and took a long drink.
The Falcon's Rest was not a place that deserved a name. It occupied the ground floor of a building that had been sagging since before Alaric arrived in the Vale and would likely be sagging long after he left, two streets back from the main road through Gateside in the particular pocket of town that existed to absorb the coin of men who'd earned it in unpleasant ways and wanted somewhere warm to lose it.
Alaric had been coming here since he was thirteen and Corwyn had looked the other way, which had always told him something useful about Corwyn.
Three tables. Two full of travelers with road dust still ground into their cloaks. One full of garrison soldiers off rotation who were drinking with the particular focused efficiency of men working against a deadline.
They'd acknowledged him when he came in. Nothing loud. A shift, a nod from the senior man. The kind of adjustment a room makes when it has registered that someone specific has walked through the door and filed the information accordingly.
He'd nodded back, found a table, and asked for the dice.
"You're cheating," the merchant's guard said.
Alaric set his cup down. Looked at the man with the same pleasant expression he'd been wearing for the last hour.
"I'm not," he said.
"Three sixes twice—"
"Is luck." He leaned back, unhurried. "Uncomfortable luck for you, I won't pretend otherwise. But luck." He turned one hand over on the table. "Check the dice. Stop playing. Ask anyone here whether I've touched something I shouldn't. Those are your options." A pause. "What isn't an option is calling me a cheat twice. I have a reputation to maintain here. So calling someone cheat isn't very nice is it."
The once had already been borderline.
The guard was a big man. Had the look of someone who found that useful in disagreements and hadn't yet had a disagreement that changed his mind on it. He looked at Alaric — the axe on his back, the way he was sitting, the absence of concern in his expression — and did the arithmetic.
He picked up the dice. Examined them slowly.
Put them down.
"Another round," he muttered.
"Thought so," Alaric said, and picked them up.
He was four cups deep and richer by a comfortable margin when the door opened and Harys came in.
Harys Stone moved like a man who had decided at some point that urgency was mostly theatre and had not revisited the decision since. He was nineteen, lean, Vale-born, with a bastard's name he wore the same way Alaric wore Snow — not loudly, not apologetically, just as a fact about the world that didn't require his feelings about it. His hair was always slightly too long. There was a scar along his jaw from a clansman's blade in the Whispering Pass eight months.
He pulled up the empty chair, poured himself a cup from Alaric's jug without asking — he never asked, and Alaric had stopped expecting it — and looked at the coin on the table.
"Nice morning?"
"Productive," Alaric said. "You want in? I think our friend here is just finding his rhythm."
The merchant's guard made a sound.
"Can't. They're asking for you up at the Gate."
"Tell them I'm busy."
"It's the Blackfish."
Alaric looked up from the dice.
Harys met his eyes. "Arrived three days ago from the Eyrie with a small party. Hasn't announced himself widely, which I find interesting. Summoned you specifically, which I find more interesting."
"The Blackfish always seems serious. That's his entire personality."
"This seemed different serious."
Alaric looked at the table. At the merchant's guard, who had brightened in the specific way of a man who has just been handed a dignified exit from a situation he had been losing steadily for two hours.
He swept his winnings into his purse, stood, drained his cup.
"Pleasure," he said to the guard.
The guard's face suggested the pleasure had been entirely one directional.
Gateside was busy at midday.
It always was, in the particular self-sufficient way of a town that existed because the Bloody Gate existed — the supply trains moving through, the garrison rotation, the merchants who paid the premium of a mountain posting because the Gate's traffic was reliable and reliability was worth paying for. Two years ago it had seemed like a rough, temporary sort of place to Alaric. Now it felt like what it was: a place that had been here a long time and intended to stay.
He'd had a hand in some of that, in the small ways that accumulate.
Harys fell in beside him, matching his pace.
"Was there trouble?" he asked. "Before I arrived."
"Not really. He called me a cheat."
"Were you?"
Alaric smiled. "Harys. That wounds me."
"Right." Harys glanced at the purse. "How much?"
"Enough."
"You're going to make me guess."
"Don't ask a man about his gold now."
Harys accepted this with the expression of a man who had learned which battles weren't worth having. They walked in comfortable silence for a moment, past the farrier's yard where two men were arguing about a horse with the exhausted commitment of an argument that had been going on since before Alaric arrived and would continue after he left.
"Tell me about the Blackfish," Alaric said.
"I told you."
"Tell me what you didn't tell me in there."
Harys was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was deciding how much was solid enough to say. "There's been movement in the passes. Not the usual kind. Three supply trains hit in the last moon — different passes, different approaches, but the timing and the withdrawal pattern are similar enough that it isn't coincidence."
"The clans don't coordinate."
"The clans haven't coordinated," Harys said. "Which is different."
Alaric turned that over.
He knew the mountain clans better than most men his age had any reason to. Two years of ranging in the passes did that — you learned the terrain, and then you learned the people who'd been living in that terrain since before the Vale was the Vale. Stone Crows, Milk Snakes, Moon Brothers, Painted Dogs. Each with their own territories, their own grudges, their own particular way of making the passes expensive for anyone moving through them. They fought each other nearly as readily as they fought the Vale.
Getting two clans to cooperate was like getting cats to march in formation. Three or four was something else entirely.
"Someone's talking to them," he said.
"That's what I'd guess."
"And two hundred men who know those mountains better than God made them, moving together—" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
They passed the garrison wall. A young soldier — barely sixteen, new posting, still learning which way to look when he was nervous — straightened when he saw Alaric. Not a salute. Something more instinctive.
Eight months ago, Alaric had brought his patrol back through the Whispering Pass saving thier lifes there, with two wounded and four men who could have dead stayed alive. They'd been ambushed on a track barely wide enough for two men abreast, no room to fall back, the high ground already taken. He'd gone forward instead. It was the only thing that had made sense to him at the time.
The garrison had a different version of the story. Longer, louder, with details he was fairly certain he hadn't done. He had stopped correcting it because he'd realized the story wasn't really about what happened — it was about what the garrison needed to believe about the men holding the Gate.
That was fine. He could live with that.
The road rose ahead of them. The mountain walls came in from both sides the way they always did — gradually and then suddenly, the sky narrowing to a grey ribbon overhead, the world compressing down to this single point that everything had to pass through. He had walked this approach more times than he could count in two years.
It still did something to him. He had stopped pretending it didn't.
He thought about the arrow loops in the rock above the gate. The angles. The way the road curved just before the timber and iron so that anything coming had to slow, had to bunch, had to present itself whether it wanted to or not. The clans knew this road the way they knew their own hands. If they were coordinating, if someone was directing that coordination toward something with an actual objective—
"You're thinking about the arrow loops again," Harys said.
"I'm thinking about how someone patient and clever could make them useless."
Harys looked at the Gate ahead. "Cheerful thought."
" What can I say It's a cheerful morning."
The guards had seen them from two hundred yards. Alaric watched the recognition happen — not his face, not yet, just his walk and the axe. The gate began to move.
It was open by the time he reached it.
He walked through without breaking stride, and Harys followed, and the mountain cold settled around them in the particular way it did inside the walls — less wind, more stone, the sound of the Gate closing behind them dropping into the silence like a lid.
Brynden Tully was waiting in the command room.
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