Chapter 6: The Huntsman's Lament and the Serpent's Smile
The great host of the rebellion coiled around Horn Hill like a python, its campfires a thousand glittering scales in the darkness. The castle itself was a formidable beast of grey stone, perched atop its eponymous hill, its towers clawing at the sky. The banner of the striding huntsman flew from the highest battlement, a proud and lonely symbol of defiance. For two weeks, the siege had been a stalemate. The rebel army was vast, but the walls of Horn Hill were strong, and the man who commanded them, Randyll Tarly, was stronger still.
In the war council, the atmosphere was thick with frustration. The victory at Manderford felt like a distant memory, its sweetness soured by the grinding, inglorious reality of siege warfare.
"We should storm the walls!" Lord Tarth, the Evenstar, declared, his voice booming with impatience. "Put up the ladders and the siege towers! We have the numbers. A single, decisive blow will end this."
Robert Baratheon, his face flushed with wine and boredom, slammed his fist on the table in agreement. "I'd rather die on my feet than rot in this mud! Let's give Tarly a taste of our steel!"
Kaelen, who had been standing silently in the corner, stepped forward. The other lords fell silent. In the weeks since the battle, his voice had become the most influential in the council, a fact that galled the older lords but was undeniable.
"A direct assault would be a massacre," Kaelen said, his voice calm and cold, cutting through the bluster. "Horn Hill has never fallen to storm. You would be sending thousands of men to their deaths against those walls. Lord Tarly would relish such a foolish display of brute force." He let his gaze drift over Robert, a subtle, almost imperceptible challenge. "He is counting on your impatience."
Robert's jaw tightened, but he said nothing.
"There are other ways to take a castle," Kaelen continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "A castle's greatest strength is its walls. But its greatest weakness is the minds of the men within them. We will not break Tarly's stones. We will break his spirit."
He laid out his plan for a psychological siege. It was a strategy born of the cold intellect of Ser Conrad and amplified by the alien, intuitive understanding of human nature he had stolen from Ser Alaric. It was a plan of insidious cruelty, designed to turn Horn Hill from a fortress into a pressure cooker of fear and doubt.
The first phase began with the Tarly prisoners. Kaelen had them brought from their stockade, not in chains, but as guests. They were given clean clothes, warm fires, and full bellies. Kaelen himself walked among them, his presence radiating a strange, calming authority. He spoke to them not as a conqueror, but as a fellow soldier. He used his newfound charisma like a master musician, playing on the strings of their hopes and fears.
"Lord Tarly is a proud man," he would say to a group of weary foot soldiers, his voice full of feigned sympathy. "He would see you all starve to break his own pride. But this is not your war. Lord Robert bears you no ill will. He only seeks to unseat the Mad King who burns men alive."
To a captured knight, he would speak of honor and duty. "Your lord's loyalty to a tyrant is a stain upon the honor of your house. Is it honorable to let your own family starve for the sake of a king who has lost his senses?"
He was a serpent whispering in their ears, planting seeds of doubt that he knew would grow into trees of treason. After a week of this gentle indoctrination, he chose a dozen of the most influential prisoners and released them. They were sent back to Horn Hill, ostensibly in an exchange for wounded rebel soldiers. They carried with them full bellies, new clothes, and minds poisoned with Kaelen's venom. They told tales of the vast, unending size of the rebel army, of the high morale of its soldiers, and of the charismatic Lord Vyrwel, who spoke of a swift end to the war and a just peace.
Next, Kaelen targeted Tarly's family. He learned from his spies that Tarly's wife, the Lady Melessa of House Florent, and his two young sons, the fat, timid Samwell and the infant Dickon, were within the castle. Kaelen had his best archers shoot messages over the walls, wrapped around blunt arrows. The messages were not threats. They were offers of safe passage for Lady Melessa and her children, addressed to the castle garrison.
To the brave soldiers of Horn Hill, one message read. Your lord's quarrel is with us, not with his own kin. We offer safe conduct to the Lady Melessa and her children. Do not let them suffer for Lord Tarly's pride. A true man protects his family first.
The messages were a masterstroke of psychological warfare. They painted Tarly not as a defiant hero, but as a cruel patriarch endangering his own family. They sowed dissent among his men and placed an immense, personal pressure on Tarly himself.
Kaelen's methods, while brutally effective, did not sit well with everyone. Eddard Stark, the Lord of Winterfell, watched these proceedings with a growing sense of horror. His northern soul, forged in a land of harsh truths and rigid honor, recoiled from the serpent-like cunning of Kaelen's tactics. The use of a man's wife and children as weapons in a war of nerves was, to him, a profound violation of every code he held dear.
He confronted Kaelen one evening, finding him alone by a fire, calmly reading a book of ancient history he had plundered from a local septry.
"Lord Vyrwel," Ned began, his voice tight with controlled fury. "I must speak with you."
Kaelen looked up, his face a placid, unreadable mask. "Lord Stark. To what do I owe the honor?"
"Honor?" Ned spat, the word tasting like ash in his mouth. "You know nothing of the word. What you are doing is vile. To use a man's family against him, to spread lies and deceit… this is not warfare. It is poison."
Kaelen closed his book, his movements slow and deliberate. "Poison is a weapon, Lord Stark. A very effective one. It is also far less costly than steel."
"There is a right way to fight a war," Ned insisted, his hand clenched into a fist. "With courage and valor. Not with whispers and lies."
Kaelen stood up, his height almost matching Ned's. He looked the Lord of Winterfell in the eye, and Ned felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. He was looking into an abyss, a place devoid of light or warmth.
"Courage and valor are luxuries, my lord," Kaelen said, his voice soft and reasonable, yet carrying a chilling weight. "They are the playthings of highborn lords who send common men to die for their ideals. You speak of honor. Tell me, Lord Stark, how much honor will the widows of the thousand men who will die storming that wall feel? Will it keep them warm at night? Will it feed their children?"
He took a step closer, his voice dropping even lower. "I will take this castle without losing a single one of your precious Northmen. I will do it with whispers and lies, yes. Because my goal is not to have songs sung about my valor. My goal is to win. To win completely, and with as little cost to our own side as possible. Now tell me, Lord Stark. Is your sense of honor worth more than the lives of the men who follow you?"
Ned was speechless. Kaelen's cold, brutal logic had disarmed him. He had no answer. He could only stare at the man before him, a man who seemed to operate on a plane of existence where morality was just another variable in a cold, unforgiving equation. He saw now that the gulf between them was unbridgeable. It was the gulf between a man and a monster.
"May the gods forgive you, Vyrwel," Ned finally said, his voice a hoarse whisper. "Because I am not sure that I can." He turned and walked away, his heart heavy with a dread he had never known before.
Kaelen watched him go, a flicker of contempt in his eyes. Eddard Stark was a good man. A predictable man. A man who could be broken.
His psychological warfare was working. His spies reported that the atmosphere inside Horn Hill was becoming toxic. Fights were breaking out among the garrison. Men were whispering in the corridors, their loyalty to their lord wavering. Randyll Tarly had become a paranoid tyrant, trusting no one, seeing spies and traitors in every shadow. He had even confined his own wife to her chambers, fearing she might be swayed by Kaelen's offers.
But to complete his victory, Kaelen needed one final piece of information. He needed a way into the castle, a weakness he could exploit to avoid even a limited assault. He knew that knowledge would not be held by any common soldier. It would be locked in the mind of someone at the very top of the castle's hierarchy. He decided, with a chilling arrogance born of his ever-growing power, that this was a task he must undertake himself.
He planned his infiltration with the meticulous care of a surgeon preparing for a complex operation. He chose a moonless night, when a thick fog rolled in from the Mander, muffling all sound and shrouding the castle in a ghostly veil. Using the scouting skills he had absorbed, he identified a potential route: a narrow, treacherous goat path that wound its way up the sheer cliff face on the western side of the castle, a side deemed too steep to be properly guarded.
He stripped off his armor, dressing in simple, dark leather. He was a shadow moving through the night, his senses preternaturally sharp, his movements silent and fluid. The climb was perilous, a dance with death on the slippery, fog-slicked rocks. But Kaelen felt no fear. He was a creature of the darkness now, completely in his element.
He reached the top of the cliff, slipping over the parapet into a deserted corner of the castle's outer bailey. The air inside the walls was thick with fear and despair. He could feel it, a palpable thing, thanks to the strange, empathetic senses of Ser Alaric.
His target was the rookery, the tower where the castle's maester, an old man named Lomys, resided. Maesters knew all the secrets of a castle: its history, its architecture, its hidden passages, its structural flaws.
As he crept through the darkened, silent courtyard, a sound made him freeze. It was the sound of a child crying. He peered around the corner of a buttress and saw him. A fat, round-faced boy, sitting on the steps of the sept, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs. It was Samwell Tarly, the lord's eldest son.
Kaelen felt a surge of pure, undiluted contempt. The boy was a pathetic creature, a quivering ball of fear and self-pity. He was everything Kaelen despised. He started to move on, but then a thought occurred to him. An experiment.
He stepped out of the shadows. The boy looked up, his eyes wide with terror, a small squeak of fear escaping his lips.
Kaelen knelt down, his movements slow and non-threatening. He summoned the warm, empathetic power he had stolen from Ser Alaric, letting it flow into his voice, his eyes, his posture. "There is no need to be afraid, little one," he said, his voice a soft, soothing murmur. "What troubles you so?"
The boy, who had probably never heard a kind word from his own father, stared at him, his tears momentarily forgotten. He saw no threat in Kaelen's face, only a strange, gentle warmth.
"My… my father," the boy stammered. "He… he was angry with me. He said I was a disgrace. A fat, cowardly pig."
Kaelen reached out and, with a gesture that felt utterly profane to him, gently wiped a tear from the boy's cheek. "Your father is a great lord, and he is under a great deal of stress. Sometimes, men say things they do not mean when they are afraid. But you are not a disgrace. You have a good heart. And a good heart is a braver thing than any sword."
The boy's lower lip trembled, and he threw his arms around Kaelen's neck, sobbing into his shoulder. Kaelen stiffened, a wave of revulsion washing over him. The physical contact, the raw, unfiltered emotion of the boy, was like a disease. But he held the boy for a moment, patting his back with a mechanical, detached motion. The power of this emotional manipulation was astonishing. It was a key that could unlock any heart. And it was the most disgusting thing he had ever felt.
He gently disentangled himself from the boy's grasp. "Go back to your bed, Samwell," he whispered. "Things will be better in the morning."
The boy nodded, gave him a small, watery smile, and scurried off into the darkness, his heart captured by the kindness of a monster.
Kaelen continued on his mission, his soul feeling slimed by the encounter. He found the maester's tower and, using a grappling hook he had hidden in his clothes, climbed to the top, slipping through the window of the old man's chambers like a wraith.
Maester Lomys was asleep at his desk, his head resting on a massive, leather-bound book. Kaelen woke him gently. The old man, seeing the dark, shadowy figure in his chambers, opened his mouth to scream. Kaelen's hand clamped over it before a sound could escape.
"I mean you no harm, Maester," Kaelen whispered, his voice a chilling paradox of reassurance and menace. "I only want information. And you are going to give it to me."
He spent the next hour interrogating the terrified old man. He did not need to resort to crude torture. He used a combination of psychological pressure, his intimate knowledge of the maester's fears, and the precise, terrifying application of pain, a single finger pressed against a nerve cluster, a whispered threat against the pigeons the old man so clearly loved.
He learned everything. The castle's defenses, the number of men, the state of their supplies. And finally, the great secret. A weakness in the foundation of the old, abandoned sept, a place where the wall was thinner, where a determined effort could bring it down.
Once he had the information he needed, he knew he could not leave the maester alive. He offered the old man a cup of wine, a cup he had laced with a fast-acting, painless poison he had learned to concoct from one of Ser Conrad's old books. "A drink to ease your troubled mind, Maester," he said, his voice soft and soothing.
The old man, broken and terrified, drank it without question. He died a few moments later, his head slumping onto his desk, a perfect imitation of a man who had succumbed to the stress and despair of the siege. Kaelen felt the cold, silent infusion of the maester's life, a trove of knowledge about the history of the Reach, the lineage of its noble houses, and the medicinal properties of a hundred different herbs.
He slipped out of the castle as he had come, a ghost in the fog, leaving behind a dead maester and a broken boy.
He returned to his tent as the first, faint rays of dawn were painting the eastern sky grey. He held the final piece of the puzzle, the key that would unlock Horn Hill and deliver Randyll Tarly into his hands.
He looked towards the silent, sleeping castle, a cold, triumphant smile spreading across his face. The Huntsman was still in his castle, believing he was locked in a battle of wills, a test of endurance. He did not know that the game was already over. He did not know that the serpent was no longer at the gates, but had already been inside, had tasted the fruit of the garden, and had left his poison in its heart. The lament of the Huntsman was about to begin, and Kaelen Vyrwel, the composer of his downfall, was ready to conduct the final, brutal symphony.