“You must not do this, my lord,” Galbart Glover pleaded with Robb. “Lord Walder is not to be trusted.”
Roose Bolton nodded. “Go in there alone and you’re his. He can sell you to the Lannisters, throw you in a dungeon, or slit your throat, as he likes.”
“If he wants to talk to us, let him open his gates, and we will all share his meat and mead,” declared Ser Wendel Manderly.
“Or let him come out and treat with Robb here, in plain sight of his men and ours,” suggested his brother, Ser Wylis.
Catelyn Stark shared all their doubts, but she had only to glance at Ser Stevron to see that he was not pleased by what he was hearing. A few more words and the chance would be lost. She had to act, and quickly. “I will go,” she said loudly.
“You, my lady?” The Greatjon furrowed his brow.
“Mother, are you certain?” Clearly, Robb was not.
“Never more,” Catelyn lied glibly. “Lord Walder is my father’s bannerman. I have known him since I was a girl. He would never offer me any harm.” Unless he saw some profit in it, she added silently, but some truths did not bear saying, and some lies were necessary.
“I am certain my lord father would be pleased to speak to the Lady Catelyn,” Ser Stevron said. “To vouchsafe for our good intentions, my brother Ser Perwyn will remain here until she is safely returned to you.”
“He shall be our honored guest,” said Robb. Ser Perwyn, the youngest of the four Freys in the party, dismounted and handed the reins of his horse to a brother. “I require my lady mother’s return by evenfall, Ser Stevron,” Robb went on. “It is not my intent to linger here long.”
Ser Stevron Frey gave a polite nod. “As you say, my lord.” Catelyn spurred her horse forward and did not look back. Lord Walder’s sons and envoys fell in around her.
Her father had once said of Walder Frey that he was the only lord in the Seven Kingdoms who could field an army out of his breeches. When the Lord of the Crossing welcomed Catelyn in the great hall of the east castle, surrounded by twenty living sons (minus Ser Perwyn, who would have made twenty-one), thirty-six grandsons, nineteen great-grandsons, and numerous daughters, granddaughters, bastards, and grandbastards, she understood just what he had meant.
Lord Walder was ninety, a wizened pink weasel with a bald spotted head, too gouty to stand unassisted. His newest wife, a pale frail girl of sixteen years, walked beside his litter when they carried him in. She was the eighth Lady Frey.
“It is a great pleasure to see you again after so many years, my lord,” Catelyn said.
The old man squinted at her suspiciously. “Is it? I doubt that. Spare me your sweet words, Lady Catelyn, I am too old. Why are you here? Is your boy too proud to come before me himself? What am I to do with you?”
Catelyn had been a girl the last time she had visited the Twins, but even then Lord Walder had been irascible, sharp of tongue, and blunt of manner. Age had made him worse than ever, it would seem. She would need to choose her words with care, and do her best to take no offense from his.
“Father,” Ser Stevron said, reproachfully, “you forget yourself. Lady Stark is here at your invitation.”
“Did I ask you? You are not Lord Frey yet, not until I die. Do I look dead? I’ll hear no instructions from you.”
“This is no way to speak in front of our noble guest, Father,” one of his younger sons said.
“Now my bastards presume to teach me courtesy,” Lord Walder complained. “I’ll speak any way I like, damn you. I’ve had three kings to guest in my life, and queens as well, do you think I require lessons from the likes of you, Ryger? Your mother was milking goats the first time I gave her my seed.” He dismissed the red-faced youth with a flick of his fingers and gestured to two of his other sons. “Danwell, Whalen, help me to my chair.”
They shifted Lord Walder from his litter and carried him to the high seat of the Freys, a tall chair of black oak whose back was carved in the shape of two towers linked by a bridge. His young wife crept up timidly and covered his legs with a blanket. When he was settled, the old man beckoned Catelyn forward and planted a papery dry kiss on her hand. “There,” he announced. “Now that I have observed the courtesies, my lady, perhaps my sons will do me the honor of shutting their mouths. Why are you here?”
“To ask you to open your gates, my lord,” Catelyn replied politely. “My son and his lords bannermen are most anxious to cross the river and be on their way.”
“To Riverrun?” He sniggered. “Oh, no need to tell me, no need. I’m not blind yet. The old man can still read a map.”
“To Riverrun,” Catelyn confirmed. She saw no reason to deny it. “Where I might have expected to find you, my lord. You are still my father’s bannerman, are you not?”
“Heh,” said Lord Walder, a noise halfway between a laugh and a grunt. “I called my swords, yes I did, here they are, you saw them on the walls. It was my intent to march as soon as all my strength was assembled. Well, to send my sons. I am well past marching myself, Lady Catelyn.” He looked around for likely confirmation and pointed to a tall, stooped man of fifty years. “Tell her, Jared. Tell her that was my intent.”
“It was, my lady,” said Ser Jared Frey, one of his sons by his second wife. “On my honor.”
“Is it my fault that your fool brother lost his battle before we could march?” He leaned back against his cushions and scowled at her, as if challenging her to dispute his version of events. “I am told the Kingslayer went through him like an axe through ripe cheese. Why should my boys hurry south to die? All those who did go south are running north again.”
Catelyn would gladly have spitted the querulous old man and roasted him over a fire, but she had only till evenfall to open the bridge. Calmly, she said, “All the more reason that we must reach Riverrun, and soon. Where can we go to talk, my lord?”
“We’re talking now,” Lord Frey complained. The spotted pink head snapped around. “What are you all looking at?” he shouted at his kin. “Get out of here. Lady Stark wants to speak to me in private. Might be she has designs on my fidelity, heh. Go, all of you, find something useful to do. Yes, you too, woman. Out, out, out.” As his sons and grandsons and daughters and bastards and nieces and nephews streamed from the hall, he leaned close to Catelyn and confessed, “They’re all waiting for me to die. Stevron’s been waiting for forty years, but I keep disappointing him. Heh. Why should I die just so he can be a lord? I ask you. I won’t do it.”
“I have every hope that you will live to be a hundred.”
“That would boil them, to be sure. Oh, to be sure. Now, what do you want to say?”
“We want to cross,” Catelyn told him.
“Oh, do you? That’s blunt. Why should I let you?”
For a moment her anger flared. “If you were strong enough to climb your own battlements, Lord Frey, you would see that my son has twenty thousand men outside your walls.”
“They’ll be twenty thousand fresh corpses when Lord Tywin gets here,” the old man shot back. “Don’t you try to frighten me, my lady. Your husband’s in some traitor’s cell under the Red Keep, your father’s sick, might be dying, and Jaime Lannister’s got your brother in chains. What do you have that I should fear? That son of yours? I’ll match you son for son, and I’ll still have eighteen when yours are all dead.”
“You swore an oath to my father,” Catelyn reminded him.
He bobbed his head side to side, smiling. “Oh, yes, I said some words, but I swore oaths to the crown too, it seems to me. Joffrey’s the king now, and that makes you