Catelyn does think about it, but she never quite puts the pieces together:

“He has,” Edmure said stubbornly. “The Freys fought bravely in the Whispering Wood, and old Ser Stevron died at Oxcross, we hear. Ser Ryman and Black Walder and the rest are with Robb in the west, Martyn has been of great service scouting, and Ser Perwyn helped see you safe to Renly. Gods be good, how much more can we ask of them? Robb’s betrothed to one of Lord Walder’s daughters, and Roose Bolton wed another, I hear. And haven’t you taken two of his grandsons to be fostered at Winterfell?”

“A ward can easily become a hostage, if need be.” She had not known that Ser Stevron was dead, nor of Bolton’s marriage. (ACOK)

“Everyone thought my lord would choose Fair Walda,” Lady Walda Bolton told Ser Wendel, shouting to be heard above the music. Fat Walda was a round pink butterball of a girl with watery blue eyes, limp yellow hair, and a huge bosom, yet her voice was a fluttering squeak. It was hard to picture her in the Dreadfort in her pink lace and cape of vair. “My lord grandfather offered Roose his bride’s weight in silver as a dowry, though, so my lord of Bolton picked me.” The girl’s chins jiggled when she laughed. “I weigh six stone more than Fair Walda, but that was the first time I was glad of it. I’m Lady Bolton now and my cousin’s still a maid, and she’ll be nineteen soon, poor thing.”

The Lord of the Dreadfort paid the chatter no mind, Catelyn saw. Sometimes he tasted a bite of this, a spoon of that, tearing bread from the loaf with short strong fingers, but the meal could not distract him. Bolton had made a toast to Lord Walder’s grandsons when the wedding feast began, pointedly mentioning that Walder and Walder were in the care of his bastard son. From the way the old man had squinted at him, his mouth sucking at the air, Catelyn knew he had heard the unspoken threat. (ASOS)

That last bit is really amazing, that Roose is warning Walder not to double-cross him when the knives come out, right in front of everyone. 

The Freys have absolutely no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into, no. 

opinions-about-tiaras:

racefortheironthrone:

1. It was part of Roose’s conditions for agreeing to go along with the Red Wedding. He knew he’d need military help to subdue the North.
2. Roose’s married to Fat Walda, his son with her will be Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North one day, which makes the North the richest prize the Freys got for the Red Wedding. They want to protect their property to be.

?

Roose’s son on Walda will be heir to precisely nothing unless Ramsay dies, yes? Being as how Ramsay is the older son who has just been legitimated? It is Ramsay who will inherit the Dreadfort, Winterfell, and the Wardenship. (In theory.) The Freys don’t get a taste of that pie.

And even if Ramsay died, Roose and Walda’s hypothetical kids would not be the heirs to Winterfell; that line would go through Ramsay and “Arya’s” children.

I’m pretty damn sure the Freys were intending to kill Ramsay so that Walda’s kid would inherit. Not that they would have succeeded, but that was the plan. 

I wonder if anyone will catch the refence….

I mean, it weakened plenty of kings, when you think about Barbarossa drowning in the Saleph river, or Richard the Lionheart bleeding land and gold while held captive by Leopold of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, or sainted Louis IX of France losing his army, his liberty, and a third of his annual income at Al Mansurah, and then following up that disaster by dying of dysentery at Tunis. So it was something of a mixed bag.  

I would argue that the Crusades had profound effects on the people at home: the People’s Crusade and the Children’s Crusades saw thousands of people on the march, there were massacres of Jews in the Rhineland and widespread banditry on the march to Constantinople, the Italian city-states boomed as they replaced the Byzantines in the Eastern Mediterranean, Western European culture was profoundly shaped by their contact with both the Eastern Roman Empire and the Muslim world’s preservation of Greek and Roman philosophy, contributing immensely to the Renaissance. 

1. It was part of Roose’s conditions for agreeing to go along with the Red Wedding. He knew he’d need military help to subdue the North.
2. Roose’s married to Fat Walda, his son with her will be Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North one day, which makes the North the richest prize the Freys got for the Red Wedding. They want to protect their property to be.

This is more of a thematic issue than a cryptozoological one. As GRRM puts it, “a dragon never stops growing, Your Grace, so long as he has food and freedom.“

See here.