From the private journal of Maester Corren, attached to the northern host during Robert's Rebellion. This account was never included among the histories forwarded to the Citadel, and the final folios were found years later wrapped in waxed cloth with sprigs of burned rosemary and vinegar-soaked wool.
They have begun calling it the Ball of Death, though I cannot discover which witless soldier first gave the slaughter that name. Perhaps men need foolish words for terrible things; perhaps an army can speak more easily of a ball than of forty thousand men dying slowly enough to understand what was happening to them.
I have heard younger knights already laughing about the name beside their fires. They did not stand near enough to hear the Reachmen praying through mouths filled with roots, and I suspect that is why laughter still comes easily to them.
This was during Robert's Rebellion, when vows had become weapons and every lord in the Seven Kingdoms seemed to possess a different definition of loyalty. The North had marched for Robert Baratheon because Lord Eddard Stark loved him as a brother, and Prince Jinx Stark seemed to have accepted that bond as his own so completely that I never once heard him call Robert anything less than family when no ceremony required otherwise.
The reports from the Stormlands had been worsening for weeks.
Storm's End remained surrounded by the armies of the Reach, and Stannis Baratheon held it with his youngest brother Renly still trapped inside. Ravens spoke of horses disappearing from the castle yards, then dogs, then cats and rats. One message claimed leather was being boiled until it softened enough to chew, while another said children had begun fainting when the daily ration was divided because their bodies no longer possessed the strength to remain standing.
Jinx read every report.
He never raged over them. That would have been easier to understand.
Instead, he folded each parchment with maddening care and asked increasingly precise questions about the Reach supply lines.
Their army stood before us at nearly eighty thousand strong.
From the ridge their camp seemed almost a city laid upon the earth, stretching beneath banners of green, gold, red, and white. Tyrell roses fluttered among Hightower towers, Rowan trees, Fossoway apples, Oakheart leaves, and a hundred lesser devices I lacked the heraldic education to name at such distance. Thousands of cookfires burned between their tents, and behind their lines stood wagons laden with flour, grain, salted beef, fruit, wine, and enough fodder to feed a cavalry host through weeks of campaigning.
I remember looking upon that plenty and thinking of Storm's End.
Prince Jinx must have been thinking the same thing.
The night before the battle, he disappeared with fewer than twenty Hunters.
No alarm was raised within our camp, which told me more about those accustomed to serving beneath him than any explanation might have done. Shortly before dawn the Hunters returned through the northern lines without fanfare, some carrying blood upon their gloves and none looking particularly hurried.
Behind them rolled an iron cage.
Lord Mace Tyrell sat inside it.
He had been taken from his own pavilion while sleeping.
There had been no heroic charge through the Reach lines, no challenge shouted beneath the moon, and no duel worthy of a singer. The Hunters had entered an army of eighty thousand men, quietly killed the guards who stood between them and their purpose, wrapped Lord Mace in his own bedclothes, and carried the commander of the Reach away before his neighboring tents understood anything was wrong.
At sunrise, Mace Tyrell was still shouting.
He demanded release, threatened the destruction of House Stark, promised rewards to anyone willing to open the cage, and loudly assured us that his army would recover him before noon. The richness of his sleeping robe made the whole spectacle stranger, for he looked less like one of the most powerful lords in Westeros than a wealthy merchant who had awakened to discover his carriage travelling the wrong road.
Lord Jeor Mormont came to inspect him shortly after dawn.
This was years before the black cloak claimed Jeor from Bear Island, and he still carried the authority of his house upon broad shoulders beginning to grey with age. He walked around Mace's cage once, listening to the Reach lord's threats with the expression of a man examining an inconvenient animal, before finding Jinx upon the ridge above the camps.
Fortissax circled somewhere beyond the clouds.
Jinx stood with a steaming cup between his hands and one shoulder against a dead tree, looking far too comfortable for a commander who faced an army several times the size of his own. The silver beginning to thread his black hair stirred in the wind, though his attention remained fixed upon the distant Reach cookfires.
Jeor asked the question most of us had already been thinking. With Mace Tyrell captured, why fight at all? Hostage terms could be offered, the Reach command thrown into confusion, perhaps even Storm's End relieved without another thousand men leaving blood in the mud.
Jinx listened without interrupting.
When Jeor finished, the prince took another drink and said there were men he trusted less than enemies. An enemy at least possessed the decency to stand across the field and admit what he wanted; more contemptible were those who changed allegiance the moment victory became inconvenient, or those who watched two sides bleed while waiting to discover which looked stronger before remembering that they had always secretly favored the winner.
Jeor's expression hardened at that, and he asked whether eighty thousand soldiers were to be punished because their lords had chosen a king Jinx disliked.
Jinx looked down toward the Reach camp.
Smoke from breakfast fires was beginning to rise in earnest by then. Men laughed around cooking pots while servants carried bread and meat between tents, and somewhere hundreds of leagues away Stannis Baratheon was measuring how much leather remained within his castle.
Jinx told Jeor he understood perfectly well why the Reach fought for Aerys.
House Tyrell owed much of its power to the Iron Throne. A lord who abandoned his king merely because rebellion became frightening would be worth very little to whoever won afterward, and if Jinx had found himself on the other side of the war with one of his own brothers holding a rebel castle, he admitted he might have surrounded it, starved it, and done every ugly thing required to force surrender.
There was no hypocrisy in his answer.
That made what followed worse.
Jinx said understanding a choice did not require forgiving it. The Reach had chosen Aerys, chosen to surround Storm's End, and chosen to feast outside while Robert Baratheon's brothers learned hunger from the inside of their own walls. Renly was little more than a child, Stannis had committed no crime beyond being Robert's brother, and Jinx could not call Robert family while pretending the slow death of Robert's blood was merely some distant political inconvenience.
He called Robert his brother in all but blood.
Then he said Stannis and Renly were Robert's blood, which made what the Reach was doing personal enough for him.
Jeor watched him for several long moments before asking one last time whether the Reach would be offered peace.
Jinx's eyes moved toward Mace Tyrell sitting inside the cage, then returned to the army below. He said that if the Reach wished to discover the value of mercy, it had chosen an unfortunate war in which to begin the lesson.
Lord Mormont did not ask again.
The battle began shortly after midday.
I had seen Fortissax three years earlier, when the dragon had already been enormous enough to empty stables simply by passing overhead. Dragons grow throughout their lives if provided enough food and space, but what descended through the clouds that afternoon should not have been possible after only three years.
Fortissax had become monstrous in scale.
His body was plated in dark gold drowned beneath black, while diseased crimson light gleamed between the scales as though fires burned somewhere inside his flesh. Black-red lightning crawled across the broad bones of his wings without any storm to birth it, vanishing into the air before appearing somewhere else along his body. Stranger still were the growths clustered around his neck and ribs, some closed like swollen scars and others opening slowly whenever he drew breath.
The Reachmen shouted when they saw him descend.
Some cheered.
That memory still sickens me.
Perhaps they believed numbers would matter. Perhaps some had never seen a living dragon and thought themselves fortunate to witness one, because men remain capable of wonder even moments before wonder kills them.
Fortissax swept low above the first ranks.
Jinx stood upon the ridge wearing a black mask of waxed leather and glass, and his officers had already begun distributing similar coverings to the northern forward companies. The order passed quickly: masks were to remain sealed once the dragon crossed the enemy lines, no matter what happened.
Lord Mace stopped shouting inside his cage.
I think he understood before I did.
Fortissax opened his jaws.
No flame appeared.
For an instant I believed the attack had failed.
Then the sunlight changed.
A dark vapor poured across the Reach host, thickest beneath the dragon but breaking apart into pale motes as the wind carried it outward. The particles glimmered beautifully as they drifted, like summer seeds carried across a meadow.
The first men began coughing before Fortissax finished his pass.
The Citadel will eventually insist upon a proper classification. Maesters require names before horror can be filed into histories. I have called it the Breath of the Plague in these pages, although the soldiers prefer Plaguefire.
Neither name is right.
It was death made small enough to inhale.
Men breathed spores into themselves without knowing it.
Those struck hardest tore off their helmets because they thought armor had become the reason they could not breathe, only to suck more of the plague into bare mouths. Horses screamed beneath riders and collapsed in tangled heaps. Archers dropped bows and dug bloody fingernails into their own throats, while commanders continued shouting orders for several precious moments because they had not yet understood that there was no formation capable of fighting what had entered their lungs.
Then the roots appeared.
I saw one begin beneath the skin of a Reach spearman's neck. A black line swelled like a vein, thickened, climbed beneath his jaw, and split across his cheek. The man clawed at it until his own nails tore flesh away, but the first root broke through from inside him and kept growing even after blood covered his hand.
Fungus came afterward.
White caps pushed between teeth.
Grey-black growth spread across tongues and gums.
Pale stalks emerged from wounds that no sword had opened, while fibrous threads crawled through spilled blood and immediately rooted themselves into the mud beneath fallen men.
Fortissax made another pass.
Then another.
By the time the Reach understood enough to run, flight had already become another means of spreading the plague. Sick men collided with healthy ranks. Horses carried spores between companies. Officers ordered lines closed around infected soldiers only to discover the men beside them had already begun coughing.
The army did not break.
It dissolved.
The begging began once the pain overcame whatever pride remained.
At first men called for healers and septons. They promised gold, horses, offices, marriages, forgiveness, anything they possessed and much they did not. Some screamed toward our line as though northern medicine might contain a cure unavailable to their own people.
Then they understood there would be no cure.
Their prayers changed.
They began asking for arrows.
A young knight wearing green-and-gold crawled close enough that I saw his face clearly. He could not have been much more than sixteen, and the breastplate over his chest had begun bending outward where roots pressed beneath it. When no northern archer answered his first plea for help, the boy promised everything his father owned to whoever would put an arrow through his eye.
No one loosed.
More than half of the Reach army had inhaled the plague by then.
The count will never be exact. Forty thousand is the number most often repeated, though I suspect the true figure was considerably higher.
There is no sound in this world like tens of thousands of men discovering that death has become desirable while remaining frustratingly slow.
They called for mothers.
They called for the Seven.
Some called Robert Baratheon a demon. Others cursed Mace Tyrell, Aerys, Jinx Stark, or whatever god had permitted such a weapon to exist. Many lost the ability to form words when growths filled their mouths, leaving only wet choking sounds beneath the greater chorus.
Lord Mace watched from the cage.
Jinx had deliberately positioned him where most of the field could be seen.
One afflicted knight recognized the Tyrell banners near the ridge and began dragging himself toward them. Roots had fused his legs together beneath armor, forcing him to pull his body through mud with both hands while crying Mace's name.
The Lord of Highgarden backed away from the bars.
There was nowhere inside the cage far enough to escape.
Jinx watched.
When the worst of the cloud finally drifted away from our line, he tightened his mask and raised one hand.
The northern soldiers advanced.
His command was plain. Every mask remained sealed, no afflicted man was to be taken prisoner, no infected animal touched without necessity, and anything still alive inside the poisoned portion of the field was to be killed.
One captain asked whether some might survive.
Jinx turned toward him.
The black glass of his mask reflected the dying field so perfectly that, for a moment, I could not see his eyes behind it. He told the captain that if he believed recovery remained possible, he was free to remove his own mask and carry one of the afflicted back personally.
No one asked again.
At first the northern soldiers attempted mercy.
Swords entered beneath jaws, between breastplates and gorgets, through eye slits where a death could be made quick. Spears were used when roots had thickened around necks or limbs enough that getting closer seemed dangerous.
Some Reachmen thanked them.
That is what I remember when sleep will not come.
They thanked us.
One dying man caught a northern spearman by the wrist after steel entered his throat. The Stark soldier panicked, thinking he meant to drag him down into the spores, but the Reachman simply held on.
He did not want to die alone.
The soldier stayed until the hand loosened.
Farther into the field, mercy became work.
There were simply too many.
Men stopped asking names because names made the next killing slower. They learned which gaps in armor accepted a sword most easily, scraped fungus and flesh from their blades against abandoned cloaks, and reached for axes whenever roots hardened enough to catch spearheads.
The northern army became an execution line.
Fortissax landed behind Jinx while the slaughter continued.
The earth shook beneath the dragon's weight. His wings folded along his enormous back, crimson-black lightning crawling lazily beneath his scales while pale motes escaped between his teeth with every breath.
Lord Jeor stood nearby.
He had asked that morning why peace could not be offered.
He did not ask anymore.
By late afternoon, Mace Tyrell had stopped shouting entirely.
He sat against the iron bars of his cage with both hands wrapped around his knees, watching whatever remained of the army that had belonged to him that morning. Men were still dying below, but enough had gone silent that individual voices could once again be distinguished.
That was when Mace finally asked Jinx what he wanted.
The question scarcely sounded like the same man who had spent dawn promising northern extinction. His voice was cracked and thin, every trace of confidence stripped away until there remained only a father, lord, and prisoner desperate to discover whether the horror had a price.
Jinx took off his mask only after testing the wind.
Fortissax lowered his enormous head behind him.
For several moments Jinx did not answer.
Then he told Mace that he understood him.
The Lord of Highgarden stared as though he had misheard.
Jinx explained that he understood why House Tyrell had remained loyal to Aerys and understood why Storm's End had been starved. In Mace's place, faced with a rebellion threatening the king his house had sworn to serve, Jinx admitted he might have done precisely the same thing. War was not a place where enemies owed one another kindness merely because children or brothers happened to stand behind the walls.
What Jinx would not accept was pretending the choice disappeared once it became inconvenient.
He told Mace that Robert Baratheon would be king.
There was no if in his voice.
I remember that with certainty.
Jinx spoke as though the rebellion had already ended and the rest of us simply had not yet caught up with whatever future he had seen. He said that when Robert finally took the throne, the Reach would come kneeling like every great house that discovered its chosen king had lost.
There would be excuses.
They would claim Aerys had deceived them, or duty had compelled them, or bad counselors had poisoned their judgment. Perhaps they would insist they had secretly wished Robert well while surrounding his brothers and starving them.
Jinx called all of it bullshit.
The vulgar word shocked me less than how tired he sounded when he said it.
He believed Robert might forgive them anyway. The Robert he remembered before the rebellion, before whatever years and Valyria had done to him, possessed the sort of generosity that victory made even larger. Give Robert a throne, a feast, enough wine, and yesterday's enemy might become tomorrow's drinking companion if the man knelt convincingly enough.
Eddard would be worse.
Jinx smiled faintly when he spoke his brother's name, and there was so much affection inside that small expression that what followed became almost cruel by contrast. Eddard would see surrender, the ending of bloodshed, frightened families, and some path through which both sides might live with what had happened.
Eddard had honor.
Jinx said he did not.
Not enough to matter here.
He told Mace he believed deeply in owning a choice once it had been made. A man did not get to become someone else merely because consequences finally reached him. A house did not spend months starving children because victory seemed likely and then discover compassion the moment defeat became unavoidable.
Mace tried to answer.
Jinx let him.
The Lord of Highgarden spoke about vows to Aerys, obligations inherited from fathers, duties owed by Highgarden, and choices made when no one could have known where the rebellion would end. Jinx listened without interrupting until Mace had exhausted himself.
Then Jinx told him that reasons explained choices.
They did not erase them.
Mace looked through the bars toward the field.
Something inside him understood.
The negotiation that followed frightened me more than the threats preceding it, because Jinx did not sound angry.
He sounded practical.
He told Mace that he was not above killing children.
I saw Jeor Mormont turn his head sharply when those words were spoken.
Jinx did not soften them.
Children were people, he said, and people could become banners, heirs, hostages, avengers, kings, and reasons for wars that had not yet begun. If killing one child were the only certain way to ensure his own family survived, Jinx said he would do it and accept whatever name men gave him afterward.
Then he looked toward the dying Reachmen and added that killing children merely because one possessed the power to do so was wasteful.
Waste, Jinx said, was something he despised and would not become.
A living child could become a bridge.
A living heir could turn enemies into kin.
Dead children could do little except make parents hungry for vengeance.
He assured Mace that his newborn daughter Margaery would not be harmed simply to satisfy anger. If the day ever came when her death became necessary to protect Jinx's blood or make a point the realm refused to understand by gentler means, he would not pretend some sacred rule would stop his hand.
Mace went white.
Jinx allowed him several breaths to imagine it.
Then he explained what he actually intended for her.
When the rebellion ended, Margaery Tyrell would be promised to Jinx's soon-to-be-born nephew, the boy Jinx expected would one day inherit Winterfell and become Lord of the North. Neither child would be taken from their home before marriage, and the union would wait until they were of proper age, but the betrothal itself would be sworn as part of Highgarden's submission.
Mace gripped the bars.
The meaning travelled across the ridge almost instantly.
A Tyrell daughter would become Lady of Winterfell.
The next generation of Highgarden would call the next generation of Starks family.
Jinx was not merely taking a marriage.
He was making certain House Tyrell could never again look toward northern suffering with complete indifference.
Mace protested that Margaery had barely entered the world and no father should have his infant daughter's life arranged under threat.
Jinx's gaze travelled toward the field below.
There were boys scarcely older than children lying among the roots.
Mace saw where he looked.
His argument weakened before Jinx needed to answer.
The second demand concerned food.
Jinx told Lord Mace that the Reach had just demonstrated, rather magnificently, how much abundance it possessed. Eighty thousand men had been fed while surrounding Storm's End. Wagons overflowed with grain while Robert's brothers starved behind stone.
If the Reach possessed enough food for war, it possessed enough for trade.
For years following the rebellion, food moving from Reach-controlled markets into the North would be sold at half the ordinary price.
Mace reacted to that more violently than he had to the marriage.
He began talking about harvests, merchants, transport, bannermen, agreements with guilds, losses to Highgarden's revenues, and the impossibility of commanding every grower in the Reach to sell so cheaply.
Jinx heard him out.
Then he said Highgarden had organized food efficiently enough when eighty thousand armed men required it.
Surely peace deserved half the effort.
The Reach would lose coin.
That was deliberate.
Its merchants would complain. Its lords would resent the North. House Tyrell would be less wealthy than it otherwise might have been, but the people of the North would face winter with fuller granaries.
Jinx considered that an acceptable exchange.
Then his terms became colder.
He told Mace that, truthfully, most lands south of the Neck and north of the Stormlands and Dorne meant very little to him. He possessed affection for Dorne because Oberyn and Elia had become family to him, and the Stormlands mattered because Robert's blood lived there. The lands between could be beautiful, ancient, prosperous, filled with songs, castles, septs, vineyards, and families who believed themselves important.
Jinx said none of that made him love them.
If Robert, Eddard, or the survival of Jinx's family ever truly required it, Jinx said he could turn those lands into places governed only by death.
The words were not shouted.
I wish they had been.
Anger might have made them easier to dismiss.
Instead, Jinx spoke as a man considering the cost of timber.
He said he could send Fortissax over farms rather than armies, plague wells, burn granaries, break roads, and leave lordships where the only thing ruling the fields was whatever fed upon the dead.
Jeor stared at him.
Mace stopped breathing for a moment.
Even several Hunters nearby shifted uneasily.
Then Jinx said he would prefer not to.
Not because he loved the people who lived there.
Because it would be wasteful.
The North required grain. Armies required horses. Cities produced craftsmen, ships, metal, coin, cloth, medicine, and a thousand other things a dead kingdom could no longer provide. Jinx told Mace that destroying prosperous lands simply because he could would be as stupid as burning one's own winter stores to prove the fire was hot.
His people could not eat ash.
That was why Mace was still alive.
It was why Margaery would live.
It was why Highgarden would remain standing.
Jinx did not need the Reach dead.
He needed it useful.
Lord Mace finally found enough voice to ask whether that meant the slaughter below had merely been a negotiation.
Something changed in Jinx's expression then.
For the first time during the conversation, anger showed.
Not much.
Only enough to remind me it had been there all along.
He told Mace not to cheapen the dead by pretending this was all some game staged to lower the price of grain. The men below had made choices too. Some followed fathers, some followed lords, some came for glory or coin, and many undoubtedly had no better choice at all.
Jinx knew that.
He also knew Storm's End was still starving.
He said he had wanted the Reach to understand that the suffering it was willing to impose could travel in both directions.
Mace asked what would happen if he refused the marriage, the food agreement, or whatever other demands followed.
Jinx crouched before the cage.
They were almost eye to eye.
Fortissax's enormous head hovered beyond his shoulder, crimson-black light moving beneath its scales while the dragon's breathing sent faint currents of air across Jinx's hair.
Jinx told Mace that refusal was always allowed.
He meant it.
Highgarden could continue the war. Another commander could gather whatever remained of the Reach host. Mace could gamble that Robert would die, Aerys would recover, or some other lord would turn the rebellion back before the rebels reached King's Landing.
Jinx would not take away his right to choose.
Then he reminded Mace what Jinx believed choices deserved.
Consequences.
He said killing the people of the Reach remained an option until Mace gave him a better one.
There was no pleasure in the statement.
That made it more frightening.
Mace looked past him toward the plagued field.
The northern execution lines were still moving through the last afflicted clusters. Fortissax watched from above. Mace's army had begun the morning as one of the greatest concentrations of military strength in Westeros.
By evening it had become an example.
Lord Jeor Mormont stood near enough that I could see disappointment, anger, and reluctant understanding competing across his face. He had asked why peace could not be offered once Mace was captured.
Perhaps this was Jinx's answer.
Peace, according to Prince Jinx Stark, was not forgiveness.
It was the arrangement that followed once everyone understood the price of choosing war again.
The official histories will not record the conversation as I have.
They will write that Lord Mace Tyrell was captured during the rebellion and compelled to negotiate after the destruction of a large portion of his army. If wiser men write the book, perhaps they will say Prince Jinx used his dragon to break the Reach and later extracted concessions favorable to the North.
They will not write that Jinx admitted he would kill children.
They will not write that he considered entire kingdoms expendable if his family's survival demanded it.
They will certainly not write that what restrained him was not morality but his hatred of waste.
Yet I must record one thing the singers will misunderstand if they ever learn of it.
Prince Jinx Stark is not without love.
I have seen him carry wounded soldiers himself when servants were available. I have watched him divide his food among starving camp followers and then lie when asked whether he had eaten. I have seen him asleep with his head against Lord Eddard's shoulder, and I have watched the frightening gentleness with which he handles letters concerning Robert Baratheon.
Perhaps that is the problem.
His mercy does not belong to everyone.
His love has borders.
Inside those borders stand his family, his North, certain friends who have somehow become blood in his mind, and people he has decided are his responsibility.
Outside them lies the rest of the world.
I fear he could watch that world burn if the flames kept those within his borders warm.
By sunset, Lord Mace Tyrell had ceased asking whether Prince Jinx possessed the right to demand his terms.
He had begun asking how long the half-price grain agreement was expected to last.