Chapter 8: Planning to Cross the Sea
Henry didn't rest after they'd been shown to their quarters. He set his men to work the same evening and didn't stop pushing until the raid was ready.
The first order of business was the captured ironborn equipment. He had everything hauled to the smiths' shops in Barrowton — blades, axes, armor, shields, the lot of it. Most of it was in poor condition. The ironborn weren't known for maintaining their gear between raids, and the fight on the beach hadn't improved things.
But Barrowton's smiths were practical men, and practical men can do a great deal with damaged metal if you give them time and a clear purpose. They broke down what couldn't be salvaged and used the sound pieces to patch what could. Two full days of work produced fifty serviceable sets of arms and armor — nothing a knight would look twice at, but enough to put a fisherman in the field without him dying in the first exchange.
Riders went out to the villages along the coast. The response surprised Henry, though perhaps it shouldn't have. Word traveled fast in the North, and the men who came into Barrowton over the following day hadn't come for Lady Dustin's tax exemptions, generous as those terms were — three years for service, twelve for a family that lost someone. They'd come because they had people to answer for. Fishermen who'd pulled their neighbors out of the ruins. Hunters who'd found what the ironborn left behind in the villages they'd burned on the way to wherever they were going next.
The North remembers. Henry had heard the phrase before. Standing in Barrowton's yard watching fifty fishermen strap on salvaged ironborn armor for the first time, he understood it differently than he had.
Sixty-two hunters arrived with their own bows — proper hunters, not men who'd picked up a bow once, but men who spent their lives in the forests north of Barrowton and knew how to put an arrow where they aimed it. Henry folded them into the force immediately.
Notably, Lady Dustin had sent approximately seventy men south when Eddard Stark called his banners. Henry did the arithmetic and said nothing about it.
Training began the morning after the smiths finished their work. Henry had his cavalry teach the fishermen the basics — how to move in armor without fighting it, how to swing an axe properly from the shoulder rather than the elbow, how to hold a line when the man beside you is doing something alarming. The hunters worked separately, running drills on volley timing and how to coordinate arrow cover with an infantry advance without shooting their own men. Maewyn moved through both groups, watching, correcting, explaining the same things in different words until they landed.
The training ground was loud and clumsy and occasionally embarrassing, and the fishermen improved faster than Henry had expected. Grief and anger, it turned out, were reasonable substitutes for years of practice when the goal was simply to hit something hard enough.
While the recruits drilled, Corlen Sasman spent his time aboard the captured longship with the focused contentment of a man who has found something worth caring for.
The vessel was a fine piece of work, whatever you thought of the people who'd built her. A hundred feet of brown hull, low and streamlined, shaped to cut through rough coastal water with minimum resistance. One mast amidships, the sail painted in green and red checks — the Blacktyde arms. Fifty oars to a side. The deck was wide and flat, with room enough for a hundred men to stand without crowding. The ram at the prow was worked into the shape of a goat's head with hollow eyes; Corlen explained, with evident appreciation for the engineering, that you could pour fish oil inside and light it when you needed to navigate in darkness.
Corlen went over every rope, every oarlock, every plank seam, making notes on what needed attention and fixing what he could himself. Henry watched him at it once and decided the man was genuinely happy, which was more than most people could say.
Henry had been working on a siege plan — simple enough in concept. Fell timber nearby, build a rough battering ram, approach under arrow cover, break the gate. Blacktyde Keep wasn't Pyke. The ironborn had never needed serious fortifications at home because nobody had ever seriously threatened them at home. Their castles were status symbols more than defensive works, built by thralls captured in raids, which didn't speak well for the construction quality. A blind priest, an eleven-year-old boy, and a handful of sailors too broken-down to make the voyage south were not a garrison that required elaborate reduction.
Corlen came to him on the second evening with a better idea.
"Leave the horses in Barrowton," he said, without preamble. "No use on a ship and less use in a keep. Cover the red armor — a cloak will do. We load everyone onto the longship, sailors on the oars, the fishermen in the middle dressed in the ironborn gear we took, round shields lining the gunwales." He paused to let that picture form. "To anyone watching from Blacktyde Keep, it looks like one of their own ships coming home with a hold full of loot."
Henry looked at him.
"Ironborn raiding parties don't fly house banners when they go out," Corlen continued. "Just the sigil on the sail and the shields. We're already flying Blacktyde colors. If we row in slow and easy, looking like men who've had a good run and want their supper, there's a reasonable chance they open the water gate before they get a good look at anyone's face."
Henry was quiet for a moment. "That's a very specific kind of knowledge to have, Corlen."
Corlen's expression shifted into something between a smile and the look of a man selecting his words carefully. "I worked on a ship called Shayala's Dance for several years. Lord Wyman requisitioned her. She was a legitimate trading vessel."
"Belonging to?"
A brief pause. "Lord Salladhor Saan."
"Who is a pirate."
"A privateer," Corlen said, with some dignity. "There's a meaningful distinction, my lord. We never burned anyone's ship. We never killed anyone who cooperated. We'd pull alongside, conduct an inspection of the cargo manifest, collect a reasonable percentage, and send them on their way. It's entirely different from what the ironborn do."
"You collected taxes on the open water from ships that hadn't agreed to be taxed," Henry said.
Corlen considered this. "When you put it that way it sounds worse than it was."
Henry almost smiled. "Why did you sign on with me instead of finding another berth with Saan?"
Something shifted in Corlen's expression — the practiced deflection dropped away and something more genuine came through. He glanced at the longship, then back at Henry. "If we take more ironborn ships on this campaign — even one more — could one of them be mine? I'll swear to your house. I'll serve as long as you want me. I just—" He stopped and started again, more simply. "I want to be a captain. A real one. Not running cargo for someone else's house."
Henry looked at him for a long moment. Corlen Sasman — former merchant sailor, former privateer, current cavalry mercenary, self-appointed ship's inspector — watching him with the expression of a man who is trying very hard not to look like he's hoping.
Henry put a hand on his shoulder. "If I ever get Castamere back, I'll need men I can trust. Castamere could have a fleet someday." He paused. "Bring us through this raid without getting anyone killed unnecessarily, and we'll talk about what comes after."
Corlen's face did something complicated that ended up looking a lot like relief.
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