28 The Fourth Great Raid

Late 276 Spring

The Oberyn Martell I met that morning was enough to convince me he had not poisoned Lord Yronwood. Somber and sullen, he hardly resembled the hotblooded and cocksure man of decades in the future. Instead he was very much a teenage boy forced from his home due to his own mistakes. He'd had time to come to terms with this since that long off day of the duel, Ibarra as slow to move as her son and heir Doran in that regard, but still the finality of this voyage weighed heavily on the young man.

As such the trip to Old Town was not the pain in my ass I'd expected, though I hope witnessing this exile in all but name helped my boys understand choice and consequence. I'd set myself up over the years as the overlord of the North Western Trade Federation, and that can make a man feel entitled to quite a lot, let alone a boy. Seeing that even the Martells - people who wield far more entrenched authority than I - pay for their indiscretion hopefully helped them understand that no one is above reprisal.

Piss the wrong man off and he'll dedicate his life to destroying your whole family, and you can never tell without hindsight who is competent enough to pull it off. No one would have thought Petyr 'Little Finger' Baelish capable of toppling the Stark Dynasty, but considering the male line in the books is down to a four year old and a tree boy and Petyr pimps Sansa out to whatever guy he think will get him the best support, I give the guy the W just for progress and effort.

The Salty Dornishman's swagger grew after we rounded the Three Towers, and low and behold a man can now see why people would think this smug prick poisoned a man in a duel to first blood. I was glad to kick Oberyn and his effects out at the port and get on my way back home.

The Great Sea Bear cut through the Sunset Sea smooth and swift and we arrived home in a fortnight, giving the men and I more than enough time to rally for the new year's great raid. I chose to raise the cap on volunteers for the year to a thousand per region, and each of the five members of the North Western Trade Federation ponied up the full buy in. With five thousand soldiers on call I had a full quarter of the fighting men Robb Stark fielded in the War of Five Kings, and a ninth of the estimated full muster of The North.

With that came the typical problems faced by any gathering of Northern Lords. We just can't get along. When it was just me, my kinsman, and the Mountain Chiefs who I could literally wrestle into submission, force cohesion moved like clockwork. When I landed the Ryswell and Flints forces on the Frozen Shore - deep into the richest Wildling territory in the natural harbor that cuts into the Frost Fangs - the problems started.

The Flints expected me to somehow blow a horn and assemble the Wildlings as an army to do battle with us, not at ready for the slow methodical slog they signed up for, and running about shouting 'Fight Us!' The Ryswell men, led by Roger Ryswell, a gods damned fourteen year old who his father sent to 'season his leadership on an easy campaign' wanted to ride his men out into the wilderness with no plan other than to 'ride down the savages'.

Somehow the two new partners in this venture completely ignored all the briefings and planning sessions that went into turning these raids into boring laborious work, rather than glorious and risky wars. Apparently the only people who didn't skip the briefings was the Wildlings who after failing a night attack, throwing numbers at it, and running, went tundra Viet Cong, choosing to grind us down with small unit tactics, hunting traps, and grizzly attrition rather than try to dislodge us outright.

The irresponsible and impatient among us quickly paid the price for this, and after pulling a traumatized Roger Ryswell off his pitfallen horse, people finally understood the hard way why I always demand a slow and steady approach to these events. The Wildlings may have chosen a wise strategy, but I'd evolved as a skinchanger over the years and my eagles and owls kept me well abreast of the roaming bands of warriors, their efforts, and more importantly where they kept their women and children.

Even more importantly, my eagles tracked down a massive pregnant Snow Bear, and I made the trip three days from the camp to bind her to me. It felt much as I imagine skinchanging a direwolf feels like for the Starks. Natural, right, and near effortless per pound of animal. Every skinchanger has a natural capacity for the number of animals they can bond with, each a strain on the mind of the practitioner. The Snow Bear mother caused me very little strain for the amount of animal under control, hardly more than the large dogs I breed at home using pups taken on these raids, and dogs are basic level skin changing no matter how large and fierce.

More importantly her cubs, much like the young of my dogs, eagles, and owls, would know the touch of my mind from their first day to their last. Animals born of my bonded stock, that know only the bond create a deeper more powerful connection to me, one light as a feather on my mind yet capable of issuing commands with just a thought to creatures far more mentally adroit than their wild kin.

I took three more like her for this reason, netting me anywhere between four and sixteen such possible cubs. Apex predators raised, trained, and outfitted for war. Thinking about it brings me an almost sexual pleasure.

The presence of four massive snow bears unnerved many of the camps horses and a fair few of the men, but my place as the only leader in the camp with excellent effectiveness cut the whinging and gum smacking down to tolerable levels. We did not enjoy the rampant success of the third great raid, we did not cover nearly half the distance, but the overall richness of the area in trees and animal life made up for some of that shortfall. Per capita we fell far short of the splendor of the third rage, but far better than the sparse first raid and near disastrous second.

During this time the best Wildling groups were led by skinchangers, using the same methods as me to scout, but only a single owl and sea hawk were among the avian foes and mine tore them to pieces. I cracked down hard early on the groups with animal scouts and before the end of our ninety day venture I'd seen the fight die out in the hearts of the Men of the Frozen Shore. They gave up and fled into the mountains for many miles, and unless they come back with reinforcements I doubt we'll encounter many humans next year.

It'll take us three trips working five thousand men for ninety days to strip this region, and in a hundred years new growth would have overcome our work, but I only need thirty. If I can throw the Others off their game for the next thirty years I will have accomplished more for the species than the combined masses above and below the Wall have for the last eight thousand years.

Maybe my fixation on this icy apocalypse is pointless. There is more than enough eldritch nightmare in this world for me to just be pissing on a forest fire, but I can't let that stop me. I'll get rid of the Wildlings, get the horn buried at the Fist of the First Men, and kill Euron Greyjoy. Then I can spend the rest of my days winning tourneys, feasting, and fornicating. Hopefully I'll be dead long before R'hllor or the Deep Ones or whatever the people of Asshai sacrificed all their children to kill us all.

And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

To keep from thinking about all that I shifted my brain blood down into my boner. An easy prospect considering my pick for this year's salt wives, an identical pair of red heads with four of the finest teats I've encountered between them. Taking them made the tedious process of shipping my men and all our haul back south not just bearable, but pleasurable.

I spent my days working and scouting out the future regions of our invasions, and my nights as the Mayor of Titty City. The chests on the Twins are some of my finest acreage, but not even their massive mammaries could distract me from the Statue of Liberty green rocks streaking through the stoney hills and mountains of the Frostfangs.

Copper. And of course my enemies were just sitting atop one of my biggest imports, the Frost Fangs are so rich in readily available copper that even the worthless Wildlings have managed to develop a culture around it. Every one of these peaks is probably Casterly Rock levels of rich in the strategic resource and I've been spending my hard earned gold down in the Westerlands to get it.

Now I just need to figure out every step in mining and refining copper ore and get the right people to come and work in an extreme environment in a dangerous industry. Now who can I put to work doing that? Oh yeah. All the thralls I've been capturing.

I really love it when things line up like that.

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I always planned for there to be copper in the Frostfangs along the Frozen Shore, Jorah finding it after he finished the copper plated hull technology on his tech tree was just how the details lined up. The Thenns obviously mine copper and tin out of the Frostfangs, and now Jorah will too. I already established that thralls can be rented out for labor purposes, and now all those guys who don't want male thralls on their lands will have somewhere productive to send them.

Also, if you don't know why killing Euron Greyjoy is in Jorah's plans to avert the apocalypse, GRRM has read a number of teaser chapters from Winds of Winter, and it is very likely that Euron will blow the Horn of Winter and bring the Wall down as a part of his plan to sacrificed mankind and ascend to godhood. He's more of a big bad in the books than the Others. The show did him very dirty, but who didn't they by the end?

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