POV- Eddard Stark
He had marched out of Riverrun at dawn with the tightness still under his ribs, and it had not eased once in all the hours since, not when the lines closed, not when the first arrows went up, not now, with his sword arm gone heavy and his horse lathered white beneath him and the field in front of him a churned, bloody thing that no longer resembled the green plain it had been at first light. He commanded the left wing, as Robb had asked of him, and across the trampled ground from his own banners flew the banner of stone white watchtower, with a fire on the top, on smoke grey shield, the Hightower's colors, drawn up in good order since the horns first sounded and holding that order with a discipline that had cost Ned loss on his three assaults and more men than he cared to count already.
"They fight like men saving their strength," Rickard Karstark said, wheeling his horse in beside Ned's during the lull that had opened between the third assault and what happened to come next. Blood ran from a cut on his arm, thinned pink by sweat, and he did not seem to notice it. "Men don't hold a line this tight unless their lord's told them that there's something worth holding for."
"Or simply he means to spend them all at once." Ned countered, he didn't want his inner rogue premonition to come true.
"Aye. That too." Karstark spat but he didn't look convinced with his words, and looked past Ned toward the Hightower line. "Your boy's holding the center well enough, from what I can see of it."
Ned had been trying not to look toward the center too often, because each time he did the tightness under his ribs pulled a little tighter, and he could not afford it, not here, not with a flank of his own still to hold. But as he looked now, and saw the press of too many men in too small a space to tell one banner from another, Stark grey among Tully, Bolton and other houses.
Then, from behind them, where the Mormont and Umber lines had anchored the right against the river, a sound reached him, men screaming when the flank had not even contacted with the enemy lines.
"That's the Frey position," Karstark said his voice low.
He watched in silence, because there was nothing else to do with the knowledge, as the grey-and-blue banners at the Mormont rear began to move, and a crimson-and-gold banner rose up among them where no Lannister banner had any business flying. He had heard Lord Walder Frey to be a cutthroat of a man his whole life, had heard Catelyn's own father curse the old man's name over supper more nights than he could count, and still some small, foolish part of him had not believed, until that banner went up, that the man would do it in the middle of an open field with the eyes of two kingdoms on him.
"By the gods," Karstark said breaths later, and there was no anger in it yet, only shock as the field broke apart among the allies. They watched for minutes as Frey pushed in deep from three sides. "The bear and the giant are caught between the Freys and soon the Lannister would press upon them. Maege Mormont's people will be cut to ribbons."
"Dacey's riding for them. I saw Robb send her." Ned did not know if it would be enough. He suspected, from the sound still rolling across the field, that it would not be.
There was no time to care about other now for Hightower's line chose that moment to press forward, a slow advance that moved in formation, shields interlocked, spears leveled, and Ned pulled his attention back to the only piece of the battle he could actually do anything about.
"Hold the shield wall," he called down the line, and heard it answered and passed on, northern voices and riverlands voices tangled together the way they had been tangling together for moons now, an alliance Ned believed would fall in few moments.
The Hightower vanguard hit their line with the violence, and Ned put his heels to his horse and rode into the worst of it. He took the first knight in the shoulder, a clean stroke that opened mail and the meat beneath it, and did not wait to see the man fall before turning to the next. There was a rhythm to it that his body remembered even when his mind was locked entirely on something different.
Somewhere in the press he saw Baelor Hightower himself, thirty yards off and closing, a big man on a big horse with the white tower stitched plain across his breastplate, cutting a path toward Ned's own position with the unhurried confidence and ease.
But they did not reach each other and he thanked the gods for the man reminded him Ser Gerold Hightower, the man's granduncle.
It was Karstark who made him turn his attention, his voice cracking up an octave. "My lord. My lord, look, the vanguard."
Ned looked, and understood at once why the word had come out of Karstark wrong. Something had changed in the vanguard, for the Stark men and Bolton men who had marched shoulder to shoulder for moons before and out of Riverrun that very morning now turned on each other, flayed man on pale pink spotted with red blood drops banners suddenly moving through the interior of the vanguard with purpose, spears finding backs of their comrades and not the Lannister.
Ned had fought beside Roose Bolton for in rebellion and had never once liked the man, had told Catelyn as much more than once in the privacy of the walls of Riverrun, but he had believed, as every northern lord believed of every other northern lord, in the weight of oaths and fealty given under the old gods. He understood now, watching Bolton spears plunging deep in the vanguard.
"Turncloaks," Karstark said, for this time the limit had been crossed. "Frey and Bolton both, in the same field. Old gods save us, my lord, what is left that we can trust?"
Ned did not answer him, because he did not have an answer, only his fear coming true one by one, and Hightower's men chose that moment to close the last of the distance.
He fought without counting, took a cut along his forearm that he did not feel, parried a spear thrust and put his sword through a man's collarbone, had it out and turned upon the next one. Around him the shield wall bent though it did not break, held together by the stubbornness of men who had marched too far and lost too much already to give the ground back now.
And then, through the noise, he heard Karstark shout again, and this time the shock in it was a different color entirely.
"My lord! The Freys, look at the Freys, they're breaking from the outside!"
Ned turned his head, and saw it. Not Dacey Mormont's counter, though he could see her rush too, further off, grinding through the borders of the Frey. But this was something else, cavalry breaking from the treeline where he had been told, days past, that Randyll Tarly's reserve waited, held back for exactly the moment Tywin Lannister judged it needed to break Robb's line entirely.
However they were not riding for Robb's line.
They tore into the Frey rear, and above them, for the first time, Ned saw the banner, that made him flinch the moment he saw. Black, and on it a three-headed red dragon.
"That is not Lannister," Karstark said, very quietly now, all the heat gone out of him at once and his voice filled with terror. "Lord Stark, that is not Lannister."
"No," Ned said. "It is not." He knew that Karstark know understood the deep game that had been played with both them and the Lannisters.
He himself had spent the whole of this war believing, that this was a fight between his son and the Lannisters, that Robb's crown and Aemon's claim were two separate matters that might, with luck and Ned's own careful handling, be kept from colliding until the lions were dealt with. He understood now, watching Tarly's cavalry cut through Frey, Lannister and his own without distinction, that he had been a fool to think it, that whatever this battle had been meant to look like from the outside, it had never once been a fight just between two sides. It had been three from the very start, and only one of the three had known it.
He looked toward Hightower's line, and found, in the space of that single look, the last confirmation he had not wanted.
The white tower banners were turning, with the same crisp discipline they had held all morning, only now that discipline was aimed at the crimson and gold too, rather than just at Ned's own men. He watched Reach men who had been trying to kill his soldiers a heartbeat before turn their spears on the Lannister formation at their own flank, and understood, that he had already lost this war before a single sword had crossed with his own son's crown at stake.
Karstark had gone silent beside him.
It was the sound that came next that told Ned the day had truly ended, men too deep in the killing to notice the shape of a thing flying above them. Then it roared and every horse on that field, his own included, went half mad at once.
He fought his mount down from a rear, and looked up, and there it was, a shape too large for any living thing, gliding through the air, scales that had the color of fresh blood. It came down over the Lannister rear, where they had held their formation tightest, and then it opened its jaws.
Scarlet fire poured down like rain, and men who had stood shoulder to shoulder a breath before simply were not there anymore, and the ones who were little far way, screamed in a way Ned would carry with him for whatever years the old gods saw fit to leave him.
He saw the rider between the beast's spines only once it banked low enough, a small shape against all that vastness, hair gone white as bone where it streamed back from a face too far away yet to read, but he read the face despite the distance after years of watching a boy grow up under his own roof.
"Gods," Karstark said, "is that-"
"Aemon," Ned said, and the name came out of him rough, half a prayer and half something closer to grief, because the boy he had raised as Jon Snow had hair like him, but the man on that dragon had hair of snow, the last of the boy that Ned remembered burned away along with everything else that had once made him easy to look at.
The battle did not end all at once. It ended the way a fever broke, in patches, here a knot of men throwing down their swords, there a group still fighting.
Then the word came down the line, mouth to mouth, faster than any herald could have carried it, but the substance of it reached Ned clearly enough within a few minutes of the dragon's first breath of fire.
The King in the North had surrendered.
Ned found Robb's position with his eyes before the words had fully settled, some hundred yards off across a field gone quiet in the dragon's wake. His son stood beside a horse that was no longer his own, the crown still on his brow, his sword laid down in the mud at his feet. His face was tipped back, turned up toward the sky the way every other face on that field was turned, watching the thing that had just unmade everything he had spent moons upon.
Then Ned began to walk and he was not alone in it. All around him, other men were doing the same, letting swords hang loose in slack hands, drifting toward the king, without quite deciding to, only knowing that there was nowhere else left standing. He walked together with Rickard Karstark, passed a Manderly banner planted crooked in the mud with no one left alive to hold it upright, passed men he had marched beside out of Riverrun that very morning who would not be marching back.
By the time he reached the loose ring of lords and knights gathering near Robb, the dragon had settled somewhere behind the Lannister lines and could still hear the sound of it.
Jaime Lannister stood twenty feet from Robb, dismounted, his golden hair dark with sweat and blood that was mostly not his own.
And there, between them and the ring of Tarly and Rowan and Hightower men already forming a wide, careful circle in the mud, stood the boy Ned had raised, grown into a stranger with white hair and a red gaze that found Ned's own face across the gathering crowd and did not linger there, moving instead to Jaime Lannister. Beside Aemon, close enough to be at his shoulder but with a hand loose and ready on her own sword hilt, stood a woman taller than any Ned had ever seen, dull-faced and armored in something too fine for a woman of no house Ned recognized
"A fight," Jaime was saying, his voice carrying with the easy, arrogant clarity of a man who had never once doubted a crowd would listen when he spoke. "One to one. You and I, dragon king, and an end to it that men might actually remember. If I win, I take your head. If you win, you may have mine, and welcome to it."
Ned saw Aemon incline his head, in something agreement, and felt the old, fatherly urge to step up in close and put himself bodily between his nephew and Jaime Lannister's sword, whatever the boy's own claim to a crown might now be.
He took one step toward them but could go no farther than that. Tarly men and Rowan men and Hightower men were already moving, closing the ring tighter, pressing the gathered lords and knights back with wordless authority. Ned found himself held at the edge of that circle with a dozen other men just as unwilling to be held there.
He opened his mouth to call out anyway, some plea or protest he had not fully formed even in his own head.
A shout tore across the field before he could give it voice, high and raw and entirely unexpected, a single word that struck him harder than any blow he had taken all that long, terrible day.
"Father!"
POV- Arya Stark
Nothing had gone the way it was meant to, and Arya had known it long before the dragon came, watching it happen in her mother's face and her grandfather's, the two of them side by side at the wall with their hands gripping the stone as though the stone itself might be the only thing keeping either of them upright.
The Freys had turned. She had been the first to see it, had heard her mother's voice crack on the word what are they doing before the sentence was even finished. After that the whole battle below had come apart, banners she could not follow, men she could not tell apart at this distance, only the terrible slow churn of it, and her mother's hand growing tighter and tighter on her shoulder with every passing minute.
Lord Hoster Tully had stopped speaking with his grim expression some while ago. He sat very still now in his heavy chair, his lips moving without sound, and Arya could not tell if it was prayer or simply his fear took when there was no longer breath enough behind it to make words.
Then the sky changed.
She heard it before she understood what she was hearing, a sound too large to place, and around her every man on the wall turned his face upward at once, and there it was, red as her mother's ruby against the grey sky, wings wide enough to blot out whatever light the day had left to give.
She had heard the word a hundred times in the last few weeks, in council rooms and halls and her mother's furious, frightened arguments with her father, and none of it had prepared her for the size of the true it. It banked low over the Lannister lines, and Arya saw, sitting between its spines with a hand pressed flat against its scales, a rider she had once called brother, though nothing about him from this distance looked like the boy who had gone to Mikken to have a sword made small enough for her hands, and called her little sister with a laugh in his voice.
Fire came down after that, sweeping across the Lannister rear in a long red arc, and something ugly and honest rose up in Arya's chest at the sight of it, a fierce, satisfied warmth.
They deserved it, she thought. Every man who ever wore that lion deserved worse than fire.
But the warmth did not last long, because right behind it came the colder thought, the one she could not quite push away. If Jon could do that to them, he could do it to anyone.
"Seven save us," her mother whispered, and her hand on Arya's shoulder had gone from tight to trembling. "Seven save us all."
"He would not," Lord Hoster said, though his voice had none of its earlier iron in it, only a thin, papery hope. "He would not dare it, not against Riverrun's own walls, I am the lord Paramo-"
"He is Aerys's grandson, Father." Catelyn's voice came in tremble. "He has already burned an Eyrie, what makes you think our walls are worth more to him than theirs were?"
Arya wanted to tell them both they were wrong, that Jon would never do such a thing to them, not to her mother, not even to a grandfather who had spent the whole of this war calling him abomination and usurper in the same breath.
She knew Jon, had known him her whole life in a way none of the rest of them had ever bothered to, had seen him play with her in the yard when the older boys had no patience for a girl who wanted to hold a sword rather than a needle. Whatever he had become, dragon he may be, she did not believe that boy had gone anywhere. She did not believe he could hurt them. She would not let herself believe it.
She opened her mouth to say some small piece of that, and a shout came up from below the wall that took the words clean out of her.
"Father!"
Arya knew that voice before she had even turned to find it, and she spun toward the field with her heart suddenly hammering somewhere up near her throat.
Sansa.
Her sister came riding hard up the last stretch of road toward Riverrun's gate, hair come loose from its plait and streaming behind her, and behind Sansa rode more people Arya recognized even at this distance, Aunt Lysa, and behind them both, steady in the saddle, Ser Brynden Tully, the Blackfish himself, home at last.
"Sansa." Her mother's voice cracked entirely on the name. "My daughter, my sister, my uncle-" She was already turning, already reaching for the stair, words spilling out of her too fast to properly form.
Arya felt her own face break into a smile, relief flooding up through her so fast it left her half dizzy with it, and she turned to share it with her mother.
Her mother was not smiling anymore.
Catelyn's face had gone pale, her eyes fixed on something past Arya's shoulder, out on the road where Sansa and Lysa and Brynden Tully still rode, and whatever she was seeing had turned every trace of joy in her utterly to horror in the space of a single breath.
Arya turned to look.
They came out of the trees along the road, two shapes larger than any wolf and a ragged tide of smaller ones behind them, more wolves than Arya could count in the first instant of seeing them, streaming down toward the road where Sansa's party rode with an escort of a dozen mounted men.
One of the great shapes was white as snow, and Arya knew who that was. Ghost.
The other was grey, and leaner, and Arya's breath went out of her all at once because she knew it in her ugly memory, a place that had never quite stopped aching in all the time since that muddy road and her own hands throwing stones to drive her away.
"Nymeria," she breathed.
"Fire," her mother screamed, whirling toward the men along the wall, her composure gone entirely now, shredded into something desperate. "Fire, loose your arrows, kill the beasts, KILL THEM-"
No one fired.
Arya understood why even as the command went unanswered, watching the Tarly and Rowan and Hightower men positioned below turn their own weapons not toward the wolves but toward any Riverlands man who so much as reached for a bow, and above it all, unmistakable even from here, the vast red shape of the dragon banking slow over the field, watching all of them.
No one on that wall was fool enough to loose an arrow with that thing still in the sky.
She heard Sansa scream, a high, ragged, pleading sound that carried even over the wolves' snarling and the sudden chaos of the escort trying and failing to form any kind of defense. "Forgive me," Sansa was shrieking, over and over, the words tearing raw out of her, "I never meant it to- I only wanted- please, Your Grace, I beg you, forgive me, I know what I did, I know it was foulest of sins, but please-"
No answer came from anywhere, the silence was the only answer.
Ghost reached Brynden Tully first. The old knight had time only to turn his horse, sword half-drawn, before the direwolf hit the animal broadside and sent both horse and rider crashing down into the mud of the road. Brynden was still trying to find his feet, one hand braced against the ground, when Ghost's jaws closed on his throat, and it was over before her granduncle could so much as cry out, only a terrible wet sound and then nothing at all.
Her mother's scream and her grandfather's, from somewhere behind her on the wall, tangled together into a single unbroken note of grief that Arya felt in her teeth.
Nymeria took Lysa Arryn a heartbeat later, dragging her shrieking from the saddle before the escort could even turn their horses to help, and it was mercifully fast, or it seemed so from this distance, though Arya could her body twitch as Nymeria ripped her open.
Then Nymeria turned, red around the muzzle, toward Sansa.
"No." Her mother's voice had gone to nothing, a whisper with no strength left behind it at all. "No, no, please, not her too, not my girl-"
Arya felt her mother's arms close around her before she understood what was happening, pulling her hard into an embrace that pressed Arya's face into Catelyn's shoulder, blocking whatever came next from her sight entirely. She felt her mother's whole body shaking, heard her own name said over and over in a broken whisper that had stopped meaning anything as words and become only sound of cries.
She could not see. She could only hear, her mother's screaming and Sansa's screaming tangled together until Arya could no longer tell one voice from the other. Something wet and hot landed on her own shoulder where her mother's face was pressed. Her mother was crying, she understood, distantly. She then felt her eyes watering.
POV- Aemon
He could see the field turn horror-stricken, a expression moving through the gathered lords and soldiers alike, heads turning toward the screams coming from the fields and the Riverrun's distant wall, voices dying mid-word. No one needed to explain it to him. He knew precisely what that horror meant, and precisely who had caused it.
He did not look toward the walls himself. There was nothing there he needed to see to know it had been done, and done better than he would have done it himself.
"We should begin, Ser Jaime," he said, into the silence the horror had left behind.
Jaime Lannister turned his head back from what he had seen from the field, and his face resettled itself in the same easy arrogant composure. He smirked, an expression that did not reach the green of his eyes at all.
"Eager to die, dragon king?"
"Eager to finish," Aemon said.
Brienne shifted her weight at his shoulder, close enough that he felt rather than heard the small motion of it, her hand not quite leaving her sword hilt though she made no move to draw it. He did not need to look at her to know what her face would be doing. She had argued against this the moment Jaime proposed it, low and urgent in her ears. Your grace, you have already won, there is no cause to risk it, she had said and he had let her finish before telling her, gently enough, that some things a king owed to the men watching him even when many would call the risk foolish. He had learned this much from Mance Rayder.
"Before we begin," Aemon said, and watched Jaime's brows lift a fraction at the words, the first flicker of impatience in that carefully bored expression, "I find I no longer care for the terms you offered."
"You agreed to them not few moments ago."
"I did. And I have thought better of it now." Aemon let the pause sit a moment, watching it work on Jaime's face. "You have already lost, Ser Jaime. Your army is broken, your rear is ash, and your king, whichever king you mean to claim these days, is not here to save you. I have no true need of your head. It would cost me nothing to take it and it would win me nothing worth having." He let his gaze move, deliberate, unhurried, from Jaime's face to the ring of watching men around, the way he had learned, in this life and the one before it, that an audience mattered as much as an opponent. "So I will offer new terms, and you may take them or refuse them as you please. If you win, you may have my head, and welcome to it, as you said yourself. But if I win, I will not take yours alone. I will take your brother's head, and your sons', and your daughter's, and your sister's, and your father's besides, every person that bears the Lannister name."
The smirk went out of Jaime Lannister's face then.
For one long moment he said nothing at all, and something moved behind his eyes that Aemon recognized well enough, discovering that the person across from him already knew the one truth he had spent years protecting with his life and his honor both.
"You know, then," Jaime said, very quietly.
"Eddard Stark told the truth to Westeros already, Ser Jaime. I would have been a poor sort of king to doubt a man like him." Aemon drew Blackfyre, the Valyrian Steel catching the light. "Your kin will get to live or die depend on your skill tonight. I thought you deserved to know again the true weight of what you're fighting for, before you make a muck of it."
Jaime's hand had gone white-knuckled on his own hilt. When he spoke again his voice had lost every trace of its earlier lazy amusement. "Then I suppose we've nothing left to discuss."
He came in without further warning, which Aemon had rather expected of him, the first cut came high and fast, testing, and Aemon turned it aside with a motion so small it barely qualified as a parry, more a redirection of Jaime's own momentum than a true block, and stepped inside the reach of the follow-up before Jaime had fully recovered his line.
Jaime was good. Aemon had known that already, from reputation but knowing a thing and feeling it were different matters entirely, and he felt it now in the speed of the second combination, three strikes flowing into each other without a seam between them, high, low, high again, each one forcing Aemon back a half step to answer it properly. This was not Gerold Dayne's wild, showman's fury, all speed and no foundation. This was decades of sword in a man's hand from the time he was old enough to lift one, refined down to something very precise and very nearly beautiful to watch, if a man had the leisure to watch it rather than answer it.
Aemon did not have that leisure, and did not want it. He caught the third strike on Blackfyre's flat and turned his wrist, redirecting rather than opposing force, a trick of the hand his body seemed to know better than his mind did, and drove a return cut in under Jaime's guard that would have opened his ribs had Jaime not read it half a heartbeat before it landed and twisted clear.
"There," Jaime said, breathing harder now, some of the old humor trying to surface again despite everything. "I did wonder if the stories had grown in the telling."
"You may judge for yourself, Ser Jaime. There's rather more story left to tell."
They traded a dozen exchanges after that with barely a word between them, the crowd around the circle gone utterly silent, no sound on that whole ruined field but steel on steel and the scrape of boots. Jaime was fast, faster than most men Aemon had crossed blades with across two lifetimes now. He fought with his whole body rather than his arm alone, using footwork to close angles Aemon would otherwise have kept open. Twice he came close enough that Aemon felt the wind of the blade rather than merely seeing it, once across his shoulder where a half-inch less distance would have opened him to the bone.
But Aemon was faster still, and had known it within the first three exchanges. Where Jaime committed fully to each strike, trusting speed and strength to carry him through whatever answer came back, Aemon held something in reserve on every motion, never fully extended, never without an answer already half-formed for whatever came next. It was not effortless, he would not insult either of them by pretending it was effortless. But it was, increasingly, controlled, the fight itself had stopped being for Jaime some several exchanges back.
"You fight," Jaime said, circling, his chest heaving now in a way it had not been at the start, "like a man who has already won this spar a hundred times before, in a hundred other yards."
"Something very like that," Aemon said, and did not explain further, because there was no explaining two lifetimes of war to a man about to die by the sum of them, no way to make Jaime Lannister understand that some part of what was killing him tonight had first been forged in battles fought and half-forgotten long before this one.
Jaime came at him again, and this time there was nothing testing left in it, only the last, full commitment, somewhere under the pride, that this was the whole of what remained to him. He drove a combination that would have ended most men Aemon had ever fought, high cut turning into a low sweep turning into a thrust aimed with brutal precision at the gap beneath Aemon's ribs where his own guard had, for one deliberate half-second, invited it.
Aemon let the thrust come closer than it needed to, close enough that he felt the point catch and part the leather at his side, a shallow cut that would sting later and meant nothing now, and in the space that opening bought him, he turned Blackfyre in a short, brutal arc that Jaime had no time left to answer.
The blade took Jaime Lannister's sword arm cleanly at the elbow.
Jaime made a noise then that Aemon suspected he had not made ever, high and raw and went down hard into the mud with his own severed arm still gripping the fallen sword a few feet away, fingers twitching once, twice, before they finally stilled.
Aemon stood over him, Blackfyre red to the crossguard, and did not feel the triumph he had half expected to feel, and behind him he heard Brienne let out a breath she had plainly been holding since the fight began.
"Yield," Aemon said, to the man writhing in the mud below him, "and I will see the wound tended before you bleed out."
Jaime Lannister, white-faced and shaking, blood pumping from the ruin of his arm, looked up at him with half hatred and half gratitude and might, in the end, have simply been recognition, one soldier to another.
"I yield," he said, through gritted teeth.
Somewhere beyond the ring of watching men, Aemon heard his uncle's voice raised over the crowd, and behind it, unmistakable even torn thin with grief, a woman's ragged sobbing that did not belong to this field at all, with Sansa dead who had paid for her crime.
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