He may have been a knight, but that didn't mean he was any less of a fool for it. He wasn't cruel like Ser Harys or Ser Maleor, but he was still dumb.
Dumb as an ox, his father always used to say.
He was young and he was thick, so he didn't truly know what men did in the shivering hours before a battle. His father had always spoken of the charge, though Vilon wondered now if he'd been riding Chestnut then, or if there had been other horses before the old beast.
He spoke of the ponderous, terrible weight of a cavalry strike, of how the earth would tremble as if it wanted to swallow everything above it. He described the blood boiling in your ears as the wind whistled past, and the jarring, holy feeling of release when a lance shattered against a man's chest, claiming a life just as it claimed your wood.
An uneven exchange, to be sure. Or maybe not? A lance might cost a silverii or so, but how much was a human life worth when the crows were the ones doing the counting?
