Night lay deep.
In a riverside wood somewhere in the Riverlands, Robb and his thirty-three hundred northern cavalry lay quietly concealed.
All around them was silence, broken only by restrained breathing and the occasional faint clink of armor.
Not far away stood the ruined walls of an abandoned village. The long-dried bones of several soldiers, their allegiance unknown, still hung from charred wooden frames, swaying gently in the wind.
Desolation and deathly silence made perfect cover.
The scouts returned and murmured their reports before Robb.
There were no signs of large-scale Targaryen troop movements nearby, only scattered patrols still some distance away.
Robb listened, but his gaze seemed already fixed farther south.
Wendel Manderly should have been advancing toward Harrenhal along the River Road by now, making a conspicuous show of his march as planned.
That force of twenty-five hundred was the flame meant to draw the moth, the kindling destined to endure the dragon's first blast of fire.
The true killing blows, meanwhile, had already slipped silently into different parts of the Riverlands under cover of darkness, like branches of a dividing river.
Roose Bolton's nine thousand men headed toward Maidenpool, while Greatjon Umber's six thousand elite troops slipped into the densely wooded hills around Acorn Hall.
Since Wyman Manderly, Lord Eel, was too fat to take the field, his eldest son Wylis fought in his stead, leading nine thousand men on a flanking march east of the Gods Eye.
Four armies, like four daggers honed in darkness, waited only for the first light to tear through the night before striking simultaneously at the seemingly secure Targaryen-held territories.
One force in the open, four in hiding, all striking at once.
Robb was gambling on Aegon Targaryen's limited manpower and the fact that he had only one dragon.
Whether his