POV- Ser Barristan Selmy
The light mist came up off the Blue Fork before the sun came up, and for a while it was the only thing moving on the whole of the plain below Darry's walls. Barristan Selmy stood at the northern rampart with his one hand over the pommel of his sword and other on the wall, and followed the mist as it slowly disappeared in the coming light. Beneath it, banner by banner, the host that had come to take this castle revealed itself.
Crimson and gold held the fronts, thick along the center where the ground was firmest, the lion of Lannister everywhere his eyes went. Behind them and to the left, a quartered banner, a green dragon on white and a white tower on black, House Vance of Atranta, one of the two great branches of House Vance in the riverlands.
Somewhere in that fold he knew there would be House Swyft of Cornfield too, though he could not yet pick them from the rest.
Off to the right, straggling and ill-formed in a way that no real lord's muster ever was, came a mass of men under no single banner at all. The Brave Companions did not need a banner. Everyone in the Seven Kingdoms already knew their work by the smoke and dead they left behind. Though their number was not what he had expected, Jojen had revealed to them that Grey Worm, the Royal Army Commander had his men hunt the escaping sellswords put to death.
"Four thousand," Lord Adrian Celtigar said beside him, his words relative soft in the morning. He had a way of angering every Lord and Knight with his words, though they were never out of petty behavior and more because of his discipline. "Four thousand Lannister spears, and whatever that obsequious fool Harys Swyft dragged out from Cornfield, and Vance's Atranta men besides, and Hoat's dogs or goats on top of it all. Eight, ten thousand men, would you say, Ser Barristan?"
"Near enough." Barristan had counted them twice already himself, using the old trick Ser Gerold Hightower had taught him years ago, counting banners and guessing the files under each one, and both times he had come to a number he liked less than he let his face show. "We have the ground, my lord. That will answer for a good deal of the difference, if the men hold it."
"If." Celtigar made a rough scoffing sound in his throat that was half agreement and half complaint, a sound Barristan had come to recognize over these last weeks of riding beside him, the noise he wanted very badly to be wrong about something and did not expect to be. He was dressed in the same way he had for since their march from Vale, his bulk wrapped in a chainmail, his breath already coming short in the cold. But his eyes on the field below were sharp enough, sharper than a man might expect from the wheeze and the color in his cheeks, and Barristan had learned not to mistake the one for the other.
Below them the enemy host was now forming the lines, knights and lords shouting men into position, and from here and there he heard the sound of horses screaming. Barristan watched a rider in a green cloak canter the length of the Vance formation and thought, not for the first time, that Jojen Reed had read the field correctly. They had come at Darry with all strength because House Darry was the only House of Riverland that had supported House Targaryen with all its strength in the rebellion and then paid the price of it under Tywin Lannister and Hoster Tully.
"Where is Princess Shiera?" Barristan asked. He had noticed her absence at first light, when the column formed on the rampart to take its positions, and had told himself there would be time to ask later. There was no later left now. "I did not see her in the hall, and she is usually the first person to wake up."
Celtigar's mouth twisted, somewhere between a grimace and something almost fond. "Gone before the rest of us woke, Ser Barristan. She said she had work to do, and left the camp early in the morning. Would not say what, would not say where, would not say when she meant to be back." He shrugged his heavy shoulders, an old man's shrug, the shrug of someone who had long since stopped expecting sense out of the sorceress of old stories. "I asked her twice. The first time she told me it was none of my concern. The second time she told me the same thing again, only slower, as though I had not understood the first."
"That does sounds like her." Barristan said with small smile gracing his face.
"Does it. I've known that woman for more than a moon now Ser Barristan, and in every one of them I learnt something new about her." There was no real heat in it, only the exasperation at the behavior of the oldest Targaryen, and Barristan, who had watched Shiera Seastar for almost the same time, understood the affection buried underneath the complaint well enough not to remark on it.
"The wolf had already left us a while ago," Celtigar added, after a moment, almost as an afterthought. "Ghost, he was gone the same night we stayed in Crossroad Inn."
That, Barristan thought, was worth more than knowing where Princess Shiera herself might have gone to. Ghost did not go where there was no purpose in going, not since his grace had left him in her keeping, and the great wolf's absence sat wrong in Barristan's chest. He had lived through enough council rooms and battlefields both to know that when the strangest people in a war went quiet and vanished before dawn, it rarely meant nothing.
"She'll come back when she means to," Celtigar said, as if he had heard his thought and wanted to answer it before it could take root. "Whatever else the woman is, she is not a fool, and she is not careless with herself, and she knows sword well too." He turned from the rail. "Come. Reed wants us at the gate before the horns sound."
They found Jojen Reed at the base of the gatehouse stair, standing very still with his hands still beside him the way he so often stood, watching the field outside through the iron gate with an attention that made most men uneasy. Black Flea stood a few paces off, spear grounded, Unsullied drawn up in their silent ranks behind him across the width of the bailey and out along the wall's inner face, a forest of identical spears that did not so much as sway in the wind that moved every other banner on the field.
"Ser Barristan, Lord Celtigar." Jojen's eyes came to them without hurry, the strange stillness in them that Barristan had stopped trying to name months ago. "They'll come from the north road within the hour, Lord Norbert means to send his column of men through the marsh at the same time, to turn our eastern flank while the main body holds our attention here at the gate."
"How do you know this," Celtigar said, "have you seen it."
"I heard their words, Ser Daven was quite loud and proud with his plans." A faint, almost apologetic quirk touched the corner of Jojen's mouth. The boy had at least learnt to express his emotions after spending day with Ser Desmond Mooton. "It hardly matters which, my lord. The marsh will not bear a column the size he thinks it will. Half his men will be to their knees in mud before they've gone a hundred yards, and the other half will be marching at Sandor Clegane and forty archers I've had waiting in the reeds since before first light."
"Sandor volunteered for that." Barristan asked.
"He asked for it," Jojen said.
Barristan looked out through the gate at the mass of men still dressing their lines, at the crimson and gold thickening at the center of the field, at Vance's black fist banners beginning, even now, to peel away toward the marshland to the east in a long column that would take the better part of an hour to disappear into the reeds. "And the center?"
"Holds," Jojen said, simply. "Five thousand spearmen of Royal Army would not break easily, Ser Barristan, and Daven Lannister knows it, which is why he'll try to grind us rather than break us all at once. Vargo Hoat's men will go though the fold and flank wherever the fighting looks the easiest, which the moment they think we're tiring, will be there."
"You left yourself off that list," Celtigar observed.
"I did," Jojen agreed, and said nothing further on the matter.
Horns sounded from the enemy line then, three long notes rolling out across the wet ground, and answering horns went up along the wall a moment later, Darry's own, the notes thinner and fewer. Below the gatehouse, in the yard, Barristan saw Raymun Darry swing up onto his horse at the head of perhaps five hundred household men, men in the black and brown of Darry's colors, men who had watched their Lord's land and power taken away after their loss in Rebellion. The young knight's face, when he turned it up toward the gatehouse for a moment, was set with tight jaw and entirely without a doubt in it, and Barristan thought, watching him, that whatever else this war had cost House Darry, it had not cost the boy his nerve, he had been working for the King's cause from the very beginning.
"To your positions," Jojen said, quietly, and the word passed down the wall from mouth to mouth faster than Barristan would have believed possible. Celtigar men and Velaryon men and Lord Mooton's riders and Darry's own household troops found their places outside the wall of the castle and the low earthen line. Along all of it, five thousand identical spears caught the first true light of the morning.
*******
POV- Ser Daven Lannister
Daven had inherited many things from his family that he had never asked for, a name that had opened doors to many achievements, and now, apparently, Vargo Hoat, which felt less like an inheritance than a punishment for some sin he could not remember committing.
He watched the tall and gaunt Qohorik ride down the line toward him, and reflected, again, that his liege lord Tywin Lannister had a gift for handing a man exactly the tool that would cause the most trouble while doing the least amount of the actual work.
"Ser Daven." Hoat's Westerosi came out mangled the way it always did, lisped and slobbered, half his consonants dropped somewhere by that abnormal big tongue of his. "My men, dey are ready. Dey want de castle, dey want it now, not later, not when de sun is high and dere is no killing left for us."
"Your men will get their killing when I tell them to," Daven said. "Not before."
Hoat's smile did not wavered so much as it rearranged itself, showing his teeth. "Lord Tywin, he say cooperate wit you. He say nothing about waiting all de morn for an old man to march men through a swamp."
"Lord Norbert Vance," Daven said, with the particular patience he had cultivated for exactly this kind of conversation, "is a lord of the Riverlands who has thrown in his lot with House Lannister at considerable risk to his name and his neck, and you will refer to him with the respect his rank commands, or you will find yourself explaining to my liege lord why the arrangement he made with you has stopped working to his satisfaction." He let that sit a moment, watching it land, or fail to. "Your men will have their turn when the center is fully engaged and not one moment before."
Something moved behind Hoat's eyes that might, on a more honest face, have been resentment. He said nothing more, only wheeled his zhorse and rode back toward the small ragged mass of his Brave Companions, and Daven watched him go and thought, not for the first time, that trusting Vargo Hoat was rather like trusting a dog that had already bitten three of its previous masters.
Ser Harys Swyft came up on his other side a moment later, his own men, several thousand of them, drawn up neatly enough behind him though with none of the crisp discipline Daven's own Lannister spears carried.
"A fine host," Swyft said, by way of greeting, gesturing at the field with a gauntleted hand. "Lord Tywin will remember who stood with him today, I should think, when the accounting is finally made."
"I should think he will," Daven agreed, because there was no profit in saying anything else to a man like Swyft, whose loyalty to any cause began and ended at the mention of profits and benefits. A shameless lickspittle whose greatest accomplishment was marrying his daughter to Ser Kevan Lannister, brother of Lord Tywin, and thereby attaching himself to the Lannisters, he thought.
"And the sellswords." Swyft's mouth pursed. "Reliable, are they? I have heard stories."
"Everyone has heard stories." Daven watched Vance's column disappearing, banner by banner, into the mist toward the eastern marsh, and felt the same unease he had been carrying since the council night past, when Norbert Vance had insisted, over every objection Daven could raise, on taking the flanking route himself rather than delegating it to a men-at-arms who could be spared more easily. Pride, Daven suspected, more than tactics. A man who wanted to be Paramount of the Riverlands needed a victory with his own name attached to it, not his subordinates. "Keep your own men close to mine, Ser Harys. Whatever else happens today, I'd rather not explain to Lord Tywin how I lost Lord Swyft's household to a scattered field."
Swyft did not seem to know whether that was flattery or warning, and settled, in the end, by taking it as a nod with no words spoken, which Daven privately thought showed more sense than the man usually managed.
The horns went up along his own line, and Daven Lannister put his heels to his horse and rode to the front of four thousand men in crimson and gold, and did not look back to see that Vargo Hoat had put the order aside and marched to Lord Vance's side.
*******
POV- Ser Barristan Selmy
The Lannister center came on at a steady march, which told Barristan about the man leading it, a commander with much better sense than his father.
"Hold," Black Flea said, from somewhere along the earthen line, his voice pitched to carry without rising, and the word passed down through the ranks, no fear in it anywhere that Barristan could see.
The first arrows went up from the wall when the Lannister line came within range, a hissing arc that fell among the front ranks and found gaps in shields and helms, and men went down, and the line did not slow. Barristan had seen it a hundred times and it never failed to impress him, the sheer bloody-minded discipline it took to keep walking into a wall of steel while men beside you fell and did not rise.
"They'll hit the ditch in a moment," Celtigar said, close at his shoulder, his voice gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with age.
"They will."
The ditch had been Lord Darry's doing, dug in the days before the enemy arrived. Not deep enough to stop the march, but deep enough to slow him, to break their stride at the exact moment. Barristan watched the Lannister front rank hit it and stumble, watched shields dip and spears waver for the first time since the advance began. Then came the first true roar of a battle beginning in earnest, the Unsullied stepping forward to meet them at the ditch's far side with a wall of spears.
It was, Barristan thought, watching it, the strangest thing he had ever seen a battle become. No war cries from the Unsullied line, no cursing, no names shouted for wives or gods or home. Only the sound of spears finding flesh, over and over, in perfect unbroken rhythm, men falling in numbers that would have broken the nerve of any army line twice as large, and the ranks behind simply stepping forward into the space the fallen left, closing the gap before an enemy could exploit it, silent as the grave the whole while.
"Seven save us," Celtigar muttered, watching it with awe. "I have fought in three wars, Ser Barristan, and I have never seen men die so quietly."
"Nor have I ever seen men kill so quietly," Barristan said. "I think that unsettles the Lannister line rather more than the dying does."
It did. He could see it in the way the crimson-and-gold ranks began to hesitate before closing the final few feet. Fear was a weapon like any other, and the Unsullied wielded a version of it that Westeros had no answer for.
But numbers were also a weapon, and Daven Lannister had numbers enough to spend.
*******
POV- Sandor Clegane
He'd taken position with the archers Jojen had set among the reeds, men from Celtigar's household hidden along a spit of drier ground that ran, invisible from any distance, straight through the heart of the marsh's softest stretch, and he'd spent the better part of the morning half-submerged behind a fallen willow watching Vance's column come apart from the inside without a single arrow having yet been loosed.
Mud did the work well enough on its own. He watched men go in to their shins, then their knees, then, in a few unlucky cases, deeper still. Shields and packs came off in the muck, men drowning in it cared rather less about his weapon and shield than about breathing, and the whole long column slowed to something barely faster than a crawl.
"Now," said the archer captain beside him, a lean Celtigar man named Wat who had spent his whole life on Claw Isle, and strings loosed together, and the column, already half-drowned in its own mud, began to die in earnest.
Sandor did not use a bow. He had never had the patience for one. He came up out of the reeds with his greatsword already in his hand and went into the column from the flank while it was still trying to understand what direction the arrows had come from, and the first man he killed had been so deep in the mud he could not properly raise his shield, and the second barely had time to turn.
It was not glorious work. He had never much cared for glory. He waded through men too mired to run and cut them down where they stood, and somewhere in the noise of it, over the screaming and the wet, sucking sound the marsh made every time a body went down into it.
He found Vargo Hoat forty yards further in, on slightly firmer ground, at the head of perhaps two hundred of his Brave Companions who had apparently decided the marsh flank looked better place to win than the gate after all, whatever Daven Lannister's orders had said about waiting.
Hoat saw him and, for one unguarded moment, looked almost pleased.
"De Hound," Hoat said, the man seems to know him for some reason. "I heard you was wit de dragon king now. I t'ought maybe we would meet, eh. I have collected many hands in my time, Clegane. Yours would fetch a fine price wit some lord who remembers your brudder fondly."
"My brother's dead, cunt." Sandor said. "Man who set him loose is still walking. You're not him but you'll do for now."
He came at Hoat without further words, no speech in him worth making, and the fight that followed was short and ugly, the way Sandor preferred his fights to be, no elegance to it, no dueling-yard flourish, only strength and steel. Hoat was quick for a man his size, quicker than Sandor had expected, and got a cut in along Sandor's forearm early that would sting for a week if he lived to feel it sting. But quick was not the same as strong and Sandor had strength in a measure Hoat's mercenaries had never seen turned on their captain before.
He took Hoat's sword hand at the wrist in one clean stroke, the same courtesy Hoat had shown so many better men than himself over the years, and stood over him while the goat-faced man screamed and clutched the ruin of his arm.
"Should thank me," Sandor said. "Quick end, more than you gave most men." And cut his head off.
*******
POV- Ser Barristan Selmy
By the time the sun stood near its highest, Barristan's arm had begun to ache that told reminded him of his age. The gate had still not fallen, though it had come closer than he liked twice already.
The center held mostly because the Unsullied simply refused to give in. Men died in that silent, dreadful rhythm and other men stepped into the space they left, and the earthen rampart before the gate remained a wall of spears no Lannister rank had yet managed to push through, though the gods knew they had tried, wave after wave of crimson and gold breaking against it and pulling back bloodied to reform and try again.
But numbers told, eventually, they always did. Celtigar was with him fighting, waddling more than striding but swinging his sword with a fury that surprised every man who underestimated him, and it during this time that Barristan, cutting Lannisters along the way with men of Royal Army, felt rather than saw the blade coming for his unguarded back.
He had time only to half-turn, not time enough to properly meet it, and would have taken it clean between the shoulder blades if Adrian Celtigar had not put the whole of his considerable weight behind the sword swing that took the Lannister on his chest.
"Watch your back, Ser Barristan," Celtigar said, breathing like a bellows, red-faced and utterly unrepentant about it. "I did not march moons across the Vale and Riverlands to watch you die to a man not even quater of your skill because you were too busy admiring my swordsmanship elsewhere."
"My thanks, my lord." Barristan said in respect.
"Thank me by not needing thanking again."
Barristan would have laughed, in another moment. He did not have the breath to spare for it here. He turned back to the line instead, sword raised, and found the Lannister, Swyft and other men of minor Houses pressing, thickening rather than thinning, more men flooding into the gap where the last assault had briefly opened.
"Ser Selmy, Lord Claw." Black Flea voice, close by, quieter than the noise of the field, and yet Barristan heard it clean through everything else. The Unsullied had come from his position at some point without Barristan noticing, which unsettled him. The man was not looking at the enemy line, he was looking at the sky.
"What is it soldier." Celtigar said, sharp with sudden alarm.
"Words from Lord Reed, she is not far away now." The man said.
Barristan did not understand him, not at first, not with a Lannister pointed things coming for his ribs that took the whole of his attention to turn aside, and by the time he had cleared the space in front of him enough to breathe, the sound had already begun.
It came from the east, low at first, beneath the noise of the battle, a deep pulse that Barristan felt through the ground under his boots before his ears fully caught it, and around him he watched horses on both sides of the field lose whatever discipline had been beaten into them, rearing and screaming and bolting through their own ranks with a terror. Men stopped fighting, and turned to sky.
Barristan turned his own face up with the rest of them.
She came out of the eastern sky low and fast, wings beating loud, and for one long moment Barristan's mind, trained by months beside Meleys to expect scarlet, simply refused the color it was seeing. Not red but cream, pale as snow, scales that caught the midday light and threw it back gone soft and gold at the edges. This one was smaller than Meleys, he thought distantly.
"Gods," Celtigar said, beside him, and it was not blasphemy, it was closer to prayer, as they both watched the dragon zooming in on the Lannisters. "We have another one."
"Princess Shiera." he said, and the word came out of him half laughter, for all the fear he had not let himself feel until this exact moment released itself out of him at once.
The fire that came down was not scarlet either. It came in a long, rolling sheet of pale gold shot through, and it fell across the thickest press of the Lannister line. Men did not so much burn as simply cease, the fire moving through their ranks faster than any of them could think to run from it, and the smell that rolled back up a heartbeat later was one Barristan already knew from the Vale, from the Eyrie's white walls running like wax, and would not, he thought, ever fully stop smelling in the years he had left.
The Lannister center broke all at once. Men threw down spears and shields and ran in every direction that was not toward the dragon, trampling their own wounded in the scramble. Discipline that had held through hours of Unsullied spears dissolved in the space of one long breath under fire from the sky.
Somewhere below and to the east, near where the marsh met firmer ground, Barristan saw the pale dragon bank again and sweep low over the retreating Brave Companions, and the second breath she loosed took them all, and afterward there was only a long black scar across the reeds where the marsh had been, and no more shouting from that direction at all.
"For King Aemon!" someone shouted, from along the lines, and the cry went up and down the line in ragged, disbelieving voices, Celtigar men and Velaryon men and the household of House Darry all finding, at the same moment, breath enough left in them to cheer.
Celtigar watched, standing beside him, as the pale dragon climbed, wide and unhurried now, over the field. "Seven hells, seven bloody hells. Where in every hell did she find a dragon?"
"I don't know."
"We, Ser Barristan, we." Celtigar said. "Moons Barristan. Moons riding beside that woman, and she tells me she has work to do, and rides off before dawn, and comes back with that."
Barristan watched the dragon circle once more, lower now, wings cupping air as she began her descent toward the open ground before Darry's gate.
"She did say she had work to do," he said.
Adrian Celtigar looked at him and laughed and as Barristan looked at his surrounding to see men of Celtigar household look at their lord in shock, he understood it was first of the time they have watched their fiery lord laugh.
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