Chapter 63: The Jousting Champion
The noise from Henry's victory over Jaime had barely settled when the herald called the next bout, and the field reset itself for the second semifinal.
Loras Tyrell and Gregor Clegane.
When Loras rode in, the riverbank came alive in a different register than it had for Henry — higher, more breathless, the particular sound a crowd makes for someone who has given them something beautiful to look at in addition to something to cheer for.
The Knight of Flowers was everything a tourney crowd wanted from a champion: young, handsome, riding a grey mare with the ease of a man born in the saddle, his silver armor polished to a finish that caught the morning light and threw it back in pieces. Sapphires set into the plate formed patterns of forget-me-nots along the pauldrons and vambrace. His cloak was worked with fresh roses — red, pink, and white — sewn so densely that the fabric beneath was invisible, layers of petals moving with the horse's gait.
He made his circuit of the field at an easy canter, one hand occasionally raised to acknowledge the stands, his habitual half-smile in place. The noble ladies in the upper seats were not subtle about their interest. The commoners along the barrier were simply loud.
Then Gregor Clegane rode in, and the noise stopped.
He was the largest man most people in King's Landing had ever seen in one place — close to eight feet of him, broad through the chest and shoulders in a way that made his destrier look undersized despite the animal being a full hand taller than any other horse on the field. His armor was black and heavy and undecorated, built for function rather than display, and he wore it the way architecture wears stone. The lance in his grip looked like a branch a child had picked up on a walk.
There were things said about Gregor Clegane in the city's taverns and the court's corridors — the kind of things said quietly, with attention to who was within earshot. Two wives dead under circumstances no one had been able to explain. Servants who had left his keep at Clegane's Keep and not been seen after. A sister who had died strangely in childhood. A brother who wore burn scars from the same childhood. A father gone in a hunting accident that no one who knew Gregor Clegane spent too long thinking about.
At sixteen, Rhaegar Targaryen had knighted him. The following year he had ridden with Tywin into King's Landing, helped sack the city, and done things in the Red Keep that the official accounts of the war did not describe in detail because the official accounts of the war had been written by men who understood that some details serve no purpose.
No one cheered when he rode in.
As Gregor passed Henry at the rail, his eyes moved across Henry's face with the flat, assessing quality of a man looking at something he intends to deal with later.
Loras rode to the royal platform and drew a single red rose from somewhere about his person — the roses were woven into the cloak but he had apparently kept one separate for exactly this purpose — and presented it to Sansa Stark with a slight bow and the easy smile of a young man who has practiced this kind of gesture long enough that it looks entirely natural.
"Lady Stark. May this be worthy of your beauty."
In the moment of handing it over, his eyes moved briefly — involuntarily, quickly — to Renly Baratheon sitting further along the platform. Renly raised a hand to scratch his forehead and looked at the field.
Sansa's face went red. She looked at Joffrey beside her with something between pleasure and uncertainty. "Your Grace — I—"
"Accept it." Joffrey was watching the field with the distracted attention of someone whose mind is already on the next bout. "Loras has good taste. He knows who the real beauty of King's Landing is."
Sansa took the rose carefully, her fingers brushing the petals, and thanked Loras in a voice barely above a whisper. He was already turning his horse back toward the lists, his attention returned fully to the field, and she watched him go with the rose held against her chest.
"Your Grace." She leaned slightly toward Joffrey. "Which of them do you think will win?"
Joffrey considered it with the interest of a boy who has been watching the field all morning and has formed opinions. "The Mountain looks stronger. But it doesn't matter much either way." He glanced toward the far end of the platform where Henry sat. "Whoever wins still has to face him."
Gregor's destrier was making its displeasure known.
The animal had been difficult since it arrived in the lists — pawing, head-tossing, fighting the bit with the focused irritability of a horse that has spent too long standing near other horses it dislikes. Gregor worked the reins with the impatience of a man who finds the situation beneath him, and when the stallion reared suddenly at the salute, nearly unseating him, the boot that went into the animal's ribs was hard enough that people near the barrier heard it.
Loras had already finished his salute, ridden clear, put on his helmet, and lowered his lance into the rest by the time Gregor had hauled his horse back to the start line by main force.
The horn sounded.
The Mountain's destrier ran with power that was almost audible — each stride hitting the ground with the weight of horse and armor and enormous rider combined, the whole thing bearing down the lists like something that had decided forward was the only direction. Gregor worked the lance and shield with the adjustments of a man trying to ride straight on a horse that was doing its best to be somewhere else.
Loras came the other way on the grey mare, and the grey mare was fast — genuinely fast, moving with a lightness that made the distance collapse faster than it looked like it should.
Nobody who was watching quite agreed on what happened in the pass. The lance came down, there was an impact, and Gregor Clegane was no longer on his horse. The destrier, unbalanced by the sudden absence of half a ton of armored rider, went sideways and down, and the sound of man and horse and black plate hitting the ground together came a fraction of a second after the crowd had already started to react.
Loras pulled up at the far end. His lance was unbroken.
He flipped his visor up, turned the grey mare, and rode back down the lists with his expression composed and pleasant.
From somewhere along the far rail, Sandor Clegane's laugh rose above the crowd noise — the rough, too-loud laugh of a man enjoying something he would never admit to enjoying — his burned face twisted with it as he watched his brother lying in the dirt.
The cheers were still going when Gregor pushed himself upright.
He came up slowly, covered in churned earth, his armor scraped and dented. He looked at the grey mare's hindquarters as Loras rode away, and something moved through his face that was past anger in the way that flood water is past rain.
He ripped off his helmet and threw it. It hit the ground and bounced and lay there.
"Sword." He held his hand out toward his squire without looking at him.
The squire — a young man who had been watching the last thirty seconds with the expression of someone doing rapid calculations about the consequences of various courses of action — scrambled to comply, holding out the longsword with both hands and stepping back immediately.
Gregor took it.
His destrier had recovered its footing and was still moving erratically, stamping and blowing, too agitated to stand still. Gregor looked at it. Something settled in his expression — a decision made quickly and without apparent difficulty.
He swung the sword in a single horizontal stroke.
The horse's head hit the ground. Blood came up in a sheet that drenched him from chest to boot.
The screaming from the stands started before the body had finished falling — women pulling children back from the barrier, commoners scrambling away from the rail, the kind of crowd noise that isn't excitement or enthusiasm but raw, unprocessed shock. Children were crying. People were pushing each other to get back.
Gregor walked forward through the blood, the longsword in his hand, toward where Loras's back was turned.
"Jon." Henry was already at the rail. "Red Rain."
Jon Snow had it out and moving before Henry finished the sentence.
Loras had heard the crowd change. He turned his horse to find Gregor twenty feet away and closing, sword raised, the blood of his own horse still running off his armor. The grey mare smelled it. Whatever the mare had been before this moment — well-trained, responsive, the best horse in the lists — she was now a horse that had smelled blood and made a decision. She backed and backed, trembling, legs locked, every cue from her rider ignored completely.
Loras had his shield up when Gregor reached him.
The blow hit the shield with the full weight of Gregor Clegane's arms and shoulders and rage behind it. Loras went off the mare like a stone off a wall, shield and all, and hit the ground hard. Blood at the corner of his mouth. He didn't get up immediately.
Henry came over the barrier.
He drew Red Rain as he landed and put himself between Gregor and Loras in the same motion.
"Back away from him."
Gregor swung at him instead.
Henry took the blade on Red Rain — felt the impact travel up through the hilt and into his arm — and gave ground just enough to redirect the force sideways, keeping his feet. They traded exchanges in the open field — not tournament fencing, not careful — Gregor swinging with the kind of force that ends things if it connects, Henry moving around it rather than into it, keeping contact, keeping himself between Gregor and the man on the ground behind him.
On the royal platform, Robert had come to his feet.
"In the King's name!" His voice went across the entire field and off the city wall behind the crowd and came back. "Stand down! Both of you! NOW!"
Gregor didn't stop.
Henry ducked inside the arc of a two-handed swing — felt the blade go past his ear close enough to hear — came up with his left hand already moving, and drove the edge of his gauntlet into Gregor's face. The steel connected with the orbit of his right eye. Gregor stopped moving.
The sound he made was not a human sound in any ordinary sense. He stumbled back, his left hand coming up to cover his face, his right arm still swinging the sword on instinct even as blood ran freely through his fingers. His vision on the right side was gone. His movements had become the movements of an animal — not directed, just violent, the sword sweeping in arcs that cleared space rather than aimed at anything.
The City Watch came through the barriers from three sides — twenty men, then more, spears leveled, forming a ring around him at a distance that acknowledged what he was while still making the point clearly.
Henry stepped back out of the ring, went to one knee, and turned toward Robert on the platform with Red Rain pointed down.
Court knights were in the field now as well, swords drawn, the ring around Gregor pulling tight enough that the options available to him were visible even to Gregor.
He stood in the center of it, blood running between his fingers, breathing in pulls. Slowly, the blind fury wound down into something that could function. He looked at his blood-covered hand. He threw the longsword down — it rang off the packed earth and lay still. He pressed his hand back over his eye and walked out of the ring without being escorted, the gold cloaks opening a path and not getting close.
Robert watched him go. He looked at Henry for a long moment — Henry still on one knee, Red Rain down, waiting — and said nothing about the disobedience. He looked back at the field.
"Let the final begin."
Henry was remounting when Loras rode up on a fresh horse, without his helmet, his face still showing the aftermath of the fall. He stopped in front of the royal platform and looked up at Robert.
"Your Grace." His voice was level and clear. "Henry Reyne saved my life today. I yield the final." He paused. "The championship is his by right, and by more than right."
The Tyrell contingent in the stands rose to their feet. The rest followed in sections until the whole riverbank was standing, and the sound was the biggest of the day — bigger than the bout with Jaime, bigger than the opening morning, the accumulated noise of four days coming together in one place.
Robert sat with it for a moment. He had the expression of a man who had been looking forward to one more bout and has been robbed of it by something he cannot reasonably object to.
"Very well." He rose. His voice carried without effort across the suddenly quieter field. "The champion of the joust is Henry Reyne, Lord of the Bay of Crabs, Defender of the Blackwater Rush."
A herald stepped forward with the crown — a wreath woven from red and white roses, built for exactly this purpose.
In a tourney, the champion names the Queen of Love and Beauty. The host may designate a woman in advance, but the final choice belongs to the man who wins. Robert had named no one at the outset — an omission that had been noted and discussed in the stands for three days.
Henry took the crown on the tip of his lance, rode to the royal platform, and lifted the lance toward the Tyrell seats.
Margaery stood. She leaned forward over the railing and held still while he lowered the crown onto her head, her hands folded in front of her, her expression carrying the composed pleasure of a woman who is genuinely happy rather than performing happiness.
The stands came back to life around her.
She settled the crown with both hands, looked down at Henry, and smiled.
[Power Stone Goal: 500 = +1 Chapter]
[Review Goal: 10 = +1 Chapter]
If you liked it, feel free to leave a review.
20+chapters ahead on P1treon Soulforger