A short, stocky knight of House Hightower swallowed a piece of roast lamb. He had not quite finished chewing it, and it seemed to lodge in his throat, making his speech sound muffled.
Yet his voice was no quieter for it. To Viserys, it sounded particularly clear amid the clinking cups and noisy conversations at the feast.
He turned to the men beside him and said, "Winter snow in the North can reach a horse's belly. If a man walks into it, he can barely move on his own two legs."
"And without someone who knows the North to guide you, you might not even know where to put your feet. Just getting through the Neck, that first step into the North, would give you enough misery to last a lifetime."
Someone nodded along, as though taking up his share of the worry, and began speaking of the North's famous ironwood. The trees were extraordinarily tough, harder to cut than a stone wall. Ordinary axes often left only shallow marks, and fire was needed to help work the wood into anything useful.
As for provisions, in the North they were an even greater headache than ironwood. Supplies were hardest to transport there, for apart from the Kingsroad, which was reasonably passable, most routes were narrow, winding paths that vanished without a trace beneath the snow.
And if they intended to take troops there, they could not camp as they were accustomed to doing in the South. They would have to follow northern methods, pitching their tents in sheltered places and guarding against the cold throughout the night.
Otherwise, by the following morning, many men might have frozen to death inside their own tents.
The stocky knight did not stop there. Instead, he kept piling weight onto the subject of the