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The Golden Tooth fell from the inside and the outside at once.
Bloodwind's frost rolled through the breach like winter given breath. Stormlands soldiers crowded behind shields, trying to block the broken wall, but the icy mist wrapped around their legs and rooted them in place. Men hacked at their own greaves and boots in panic. Some cut away frozen flesh just to fall backward screaming.
The men at the rear still shouted for the front to hold. The men in the front no longer had the luxury of listening. They could not advance because the breach was filled with wolves and northern steel; they could not retreat because their own comrades pressed them forward.
Robb rode through the breach on Bloodwind's back, Ice in his hand.
At that height, every swing took a head.
The Valyrian steel blade flashed pale in the dust. Helmets split. Throats opened. Men who had thought themselves safe behind shield rims found the sword descending from above, clean and cold and impossible to stop.
After a dozen strikes, Robb frowned.
Killing from Bloodwind's back looked magnificent, but it was not efficient enough.
From above, his sword could only reach heads and shoulders. The blood pact did not care for spectacle. It rewarded death, and Robb had learned to think of every battlefield as a terrible ledger.
He slid from the direwolf's shoulders and landed among the frozen Stormlanders.
The red mist within him surged. His body, strengthened again and again by the blood pact, moved faster than most men could follow. He had trained daily with the wood dancers since returning north, and that training had turned raw strength into something sharper.
In raw strength, he had already stepped beyond almost anyone in Westeros. In skill, he was no longer the young lord who had once relied on courage and a good sword. The children of the forest had given his body angles and timing Westerosi knights had never seen.
Ice cut low. A spear haft parted. The man holding it lost both hands, then his head.
Robb stepped through a thrust, drove his shoulder into another soldier's chest, and sent him stumbling backward into Bloodwind's jaws. The giant direwolf closed his mouth once, and the man's scream ended.
The northern soldiers behind them shouted and surged forward.
At the eastern gate, the second blow landed.
Lord Rickard led two thousand northern soldiers down from the hidden path above the Golden Tooth. Inside the castle, men bribed by Robb's spies had already gathered near the gatehouse. A captain who owed more gold than honor opened the inner mechanism at the promised signal.
The spies had not won the castle by themselves. They did something more useful: they made sure the castle had to fight in two directions at the moment it was least able to do so.
The gate rose.
Northern troops poured in from the east and struck the Stormlanders from behind.
The defenders broke.
Some threw down their weapons at once. Some tried to flee deeper into the castle and found ice direwolves waiting in the yards. By the time the fighting ended, the Golden Tooth belonged to Robb Stark.
Raynald Lefford was found alive, pale and shaking, beneath an overturned table in a side hall. Robb spared him for the moment. A living heir was useful. A dead one was only meat.
Raynald could barely speak when dragged out. Whether from fear, shame, or the memory of his own joke, no one bothered to ask.
While the direwolf banners rose above the Golden Tooth, another king played with fire in the Red Keep.
In the black cells below King's Landing, Sandor Clegane carried a hooded man over one shoulder and followed Ser Meryn Trant into a stone chamber that had been cleared for Joffrey's newest amusement.
The chamber was not a courtroom, but Joffrey had ordered it prepared like one. A stone frame stood at the center. Chains had been fixed to it. Torches burned along the walls, though the king had ordered several extinguished so the wildfire would shine brighter when it came.
The prisoner was a laborer from Flea Bottom, one of the men accused of dodging forced work on the city's repairs.
Joffrey Baratheon stood before a stone frame with a vial of wildfire in his hand. His crown glittered in the torchlight. His eyes were bright with a boy's excitement and a monster's hunger.
"Justice's Trial," he announced.
The words pleased him. They made cruelty sound like law, and Joffrey had always liked the shape of power more than the weight of it.
The laborer begged until his voice broke.
Joffrey smiled and had him bound to the stone.
When the wildfire touched, green flame climbed the man's body. His screams filled the chamber, high and tearing, while Sandor stood rigid at the door with sweat cold beneath his armor.
Fire.
He smelled burning flesh and heard his brother's laughter from years ago.
Joffrey clapped his hands. "Again tomorrow. Bring his children. And his old mother. I want to see whether blood makes people braver."
Ser Meryn bowed as if this were no different from being ordered to fetch a cloak.
Sandor stood very still. He had killed men for kings, for coin, and for survival. He had watched Joffrey do many things. This, somehow, felt different.
The next day, Sandor carried the old woman himself.
Ser Meryn dragged in three children, all crying. The oldest could not have been more than ten.
The old woman was thin enough that Sandor felt each bone through her clothes. She did not struggle. Her eyes moved only once, toward the children, and stayed there.
Joffrey looked disappointed when he saw the old woman had not been bound. Then a new thought pleased him.
"No chains," he said. "Tell her."
Ser Meryn bent close to the old woman. "Your son burned yesterday. His Grace says if you step into the fire yourself, he will spare the children."
The old woman did not scream. She looked at the children, then at the king.
"Will you swear it?" she asked.
Joffrey laughed. "I am the king."
That was answer enough for him.
It was not enough for Sandor.
The children cried harder. Joffrey's smile faded. "They are too loud. Ser Meryn, punish them."
Meryn turned with a bored expression and raised his gauntleted hand.
Sandor moved.
His sword punched through the back of Ser Meryn Trant's neck and came out below his mouth. The Kingsguard knight gave a wet sound, dropped his weapon, and collapsed.
The children stopped crying in shock.
For one heartbeat, everyone froze.
Then the old woman moved faster than anyone expected.
She seized Joffrey in both arms.
"Thank you," she whispered to Sandor.
The vial broke.
Green fire swallowed them both.
Joffrey screamed. He screamed that he was the king. He screamed for his mother. He screamed until the wildfire took his voice.
The old woman made no sound at all.
Sandor grabbed the children and ran. Behind him, green flame roared across the stone frame, across the king's gold, across old flesh and young cruelty alike. The ashes would mingle before anyone could separate them.
No Kingsguard stood between him and the passage. No guard in the black cells understood fast enough that the Hound had just killed a white cloak and left a king burning behind him.
'I promised to take them north.'
The thought beat inside Sandor's skull as he dragged the children into the dark.
Perhaps wildfire had given Joffrey his own Justice's Trial in the end.
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