The Myrish fire-weed required time to fully mature before it could be harvested and dried. The Wolf Pack was contracted to hold the estate for no less than three months.
Standing atop the estate's high stone walls, Gendry stared out into the darkness. The night was vast and quiet, the sky dusted with glittering stars. He was taking the first watch alongside a handful of veterans. The two mercenaries beside him, Longspear and Morningstar, had become his impromptu drillmasters over the past few weeks. Both men wielded their weapons with a vicious, unpredictable grace that had left Gendry bruised and battered on more than one occasion. A man with a heavy hammer had to learn to close the distance against the terrible reach of a spear or a chained ball.
"Magister Calasso must be sweating bullets in his silk sheets," Longspear chuckled, leaning against the parapet. "It's a disastrous year for fire-weed everywhere else, which means the stock he's guarding here can command an obscene price. If only the estate wasn't so damned far south."
As a cash crop, fire-weed was subject to massive fluctuations in the market. Hearing that blight had ruined the harvests of his rivals, Calasso had prematurely liquidated his aging reserves, leaving this single, unharvested estate as his entire fortune.
"The man has no choice. The Magister elections in Myr are just an excuse to set mountains of gold on fire," Morningstar replied. "Calasso represents the Fire-Weed Guild. He has to run."
Gendry listened quietly. The political architecture of the Free Cities was entirely alien to Westeros. Here, bloodlines and ancient titles meant nothing; the merchants held absolute power, elevating themselves above the nobility. The Magisters were drawn directly from the ruling syndicates: the Carpet Weavers, the Glassmakers, the Vintners, and the Fire-Weed Guild.
"Listen," Longspear suddenly hissed, raising a hand.
A low, rumbling sound drifted through the dark, like the distant tremor of an earthquake. Then, pinpricks of light began to appear on the horizon, multiplying like fireflies. It was a massive column of torches.
"Blood and steel tonight," Longspear grinned, turning to Gendry. "Are you ready for a real fight, lad?"
Instead of answering, Gendry simply raised his cold iron warhammer, the spiked head gleaming faintly in the starlight.
Longspear laughed and sprinted for the alarm bell, hammering it wildly. The frantic, metallic clanging echoed across the estate, snapping the rest of the Wolf Pack awake.
Pretty Boy bounded up the stone stairs to the wall a moment later, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the approaching torchlight.
"Bandit-mercenaries and escaped slaves," Pretty Boy diagnosed instantly. The Disputed Lands were full of runaway slaves who banded together with rogue sellswords to plunder the isolated estates.
Gendry stared at the undulating sea of fire. The horde was coming to strip the estate to the foundation stones.
"Archers to the walls!" Pretty Boy roared.
Thirty men of the Wolf Pack swarmed the battlements, weapons drawn. Half of them cranked heavy Myrish crossbows, while the others strung recurved double-horn bows imported from the East. Only a handful carried the massive yew longbows favored by Westerosi. Down below, the estate's slaves scrambled frantically, boiling vats of oil and hauling heavy barrels of rocks to the walkways.
The bandit horde halted just beyond bowshot, the flames illuminating their ragged ranks.
"Listen to me, you dogs in the estate!" a voice boomed from the darkness. "Throw open the gates! Open them now!"
"Are you blind?" Longspear shouted back over the wall. "This is the private estate of a Myrish Magister!"
"Fuck your Myrish Magister! This estate belongs to us now!" the bandit roared back, entirely unfazed.
"Who leads this rabble?" Pretty Boy demanded, his eyes sweeping over the hundreds of men massing below.
"I do," the voice replied. A massive figure spurred his horse forward into the torchlight. He had a violently dyed purple beard and wore heavy steel plate that gleamed with an oily sheen. His shield bore the crude painting of a three-headed god, and the steel of his breastplate was etched with ornate swirls. He looked up at the wall, his pale eyes glinting with cruel cunning. "I am Purplebeard of the Crown Town. Open the gates, and we might leave you with your coin purses! Resist, and we slaughter every living soul inside!"
"I think we'll hold," Pretty Boy called back smoothly. "We aren't thieves. We are a free company."
"What is the Crown Town?" Gendry muttered.
"It's the dark heart of the Disputed Lands," Morningstar whispered. "The ultimate haven for bandit-knights. Decades ago, nine outlaws, exiles, and pirate kings gathered beneath the Tree of Crowns there and swore an oath to conquer the world. They were the Band of Nine."
"It seems you have rejected my mercy!" Purplebeard shouted. "You could have joined us! We could have burned the Magisters together!"
Purplebeard flicked his wrist. Instantly, a volley of throwing spears hurtled out from the shadows behind him, arcing straight toward Pretty Boy.
The scarred commander possessed the reflexes of a cat, throwing himself flat against the stone just as the spears clattered over the parapet.
"Get down!" Pretty Boy roared. The veteran mercenaries immediately dropped behind the merlons. But two unfortunate slaves, paralyzed by terror, remained standing. The heavy iron spearheads punched cleanly through their throats, spraying hot blood across the stone as they collapsed.
"Take the walls! Slaughter them all, the estate is ours!" Purplebeard screamed.
A deafening roar erupted from the horde. The clash of swords on shields and the drumming of boots against the earth shook the night. Purplebeard and his armored veterans hung back, ruthlessly driving the poorly equipped, desperate runaway slaves forward as arrow fodder. Dozens of torches were hurled over the walls, threatening to set the outbuildings ablaze.
Steward Leff was already in motion, directing panic-stricken slaves to douse the flames with buckets of sand and water.
"Ladders! Get the slaves on the ladders!" Purplebeard commanded.
The estate's walls were built of rough-hewn stone, making them relatively easy to scale if one survived the climb. Fortunately, the Wolf Pack had dug deep trenches around the perimeter, slowing the horde's advance and forcing them into fatal bottlenecks.
Thwack! Thwack!
The sharp, deadly snap of the Wolf Pack's bowstrings filled the air. A rain of iron-tipped bolts and arrows tore into the vanguard. The runaway slaves, wearing nothing but boiled leather or ragged tunics, were slaughtered in droves, unable to raise shields against the plunging fire.
But the horde seemed endless. Ignoring the mounting pile of corpses in the trenches, they threw crude wooden ladders against the stone. Driven by desperation and the threat of Purplebeard's swords behind them, the slaves began to climb.
Gendry hoisted his warhammer. Every time a ragged head appeared over the parapet, he brought the heavy iron flat down, crushing skulls and sending bodies plummeting back into the darkness. But for every man he smashed, another scrambled up to take his place.
A particularly agile slave managed to vault over the merlon, drawing a rusted blade. Before Gendry could swing, Longspear lunged past him. The spear darted out like a striking viper, punching through the slave's ribs and tossing him back into the void.
Down below, a dozen slaves hurled themselves against the heavy wooden gates, trying to hack through the iron-banded timber with axes. They were swiftly turned into pincushions by the archers above.
The air was thick with the stench of burning pitch, sweat, iron, and voided bowels. Gendry glanced down at his boots. A slave who had made it over the wall lay dead at his feet, his face turned into a ruined pulp of meat and bone by Gendry's hammer.
"For the Pack!" Pretty Boy suddenly roared, assessing the battlefield. Purplebeard had brought no siege engines, no battering rams, and he had no heavy reinforcements waiting in the dark. The bandit-knight was relying purely on numbers and terror. "I need ten men! Heavy lancers, heavily armored! We ride out and break them!"
"Here!" Gendry shouted, his blood singing. He followed Pretty Boy as they sprinted down the stone stairs toward the stables, saddling their heavy warhorses in record time.
The massive iron-banded gates groaned open just wide enough, and the heavy cavalry of the Wolf Pack surged out into the night, crashing headlong into Purplebeard's vanguard.
Gendry rode near the front, his warhammer raised high. He looked like a demon forged in the fires of hell. He had finally donned the helm he crafted back in King's Landing, a massive, brutal iron casque shaped like the head of a bull, its great sweeping horns catching the flickering light of the torches.
CRUNCH.
Man and horse moved as one. Gendry became an unstoppable force of nature, his warhammer swinging in devastating arcs from the saddle. He didn't swing wildly; every strike was surgically placed, crushing throats, shattering unhelmed skulls, and caving in the joints of cheap armor.