POV- Randyll Tarly
The Freys were doing exactly what was planned to the minute detail.
That was the first thing Randyll Tarly noticed, as the satisfaction of it all settled on his face. He had watched a number of cavalry assaults in his life and he could point out any mistake with one look at the formation of army, and what he saw from his position at the treeline told him the Freys had committed their spears in three separate angles instead of one concentrated push, which was what he wanted, decimation of Northern and Riverland forces.
It told him something about Walder Frey that he had already suspected. The man was an opportunist by instinct and a loyal lord by necessity, and when given the chance to be the former he could not help reverting to it, even when the plan called for the latter. The Frey were one of the biggest vassals of House Tully of Riverland and their one action would change the course of this war. The men executing a strategy were not some men of unique intelligence, it was working solely, because the Mormont and Umber positions had not been prepared for it, they did not expect betrayal from their and now could not reform quickly enough to answer it.
The Mormont line had buckled first, the right flank curling inward like a hand closing against them. He could see the bear banners going sideways in the press, some of them vanishing as men began to fall, the formation losing its shape and becoming something more like a crowd than a battle line, which was the last thing any lord wanted to become in the middle of facing a cavalry assault.
The Umber positions were holding slightly better, the sheer bloody-mindedness of the northern mountain lords translated directly into the way their soldiers fought, refusing to move and could not be persuaded otherwise by any argument less compelling than death. But holding slightly better was not holding, and from where Randyll sat, the whole flank was a few minutes from collapse.
"About time." Mathias Rowan's voice came from his right, easy and unhurried.
Randyll turned to him. "I have been waiting for this for moons."
Rowan gave a half-smile. The man had a habit of half-smiles and he was younger than Randyll by a half-decade and wealthier by rather more than that, which were the two primary facts about him that Randyll had noted when they first met and that he had not found materially altered in the years since. He was also not stupid, which was rarer among wealthy lords than it should have been, and he had been willing to follow Randyll's lead when it mattered, which was rarer still.
"Not just you," Rowan said. "For me too, and for Ashford." His eyes stayed on the field, on the collapsing Mormont and Umber formation and the Frey's folding around it. "The day the king rode to Horn Hill and laid out his plan, I sat in your guest chair and thought, this is the one. This is the man who can do this. And I thought, if we ride with him and this day ever comes, I am going to be the first man through the enemy line and I am going to enjoy every single foot of it."
"Do not stop," Randyll said.
Rowan glanced at him. "What?"
"In the middle of the charge. Whatever is in front of us, do not stop. Freys, Mormonts, Umbers, Bolton men, Stark men, Tully men, Lannister men. It does not matter. We ride through everything standing between us and Robb Stark or Jaime Lannister, and we do not stop to negotiate, to take prisoners, to let men surrender, to breathe. We stop when we have one of them in front of us and not before. Do you understand me?"
Rowan looked at him for a moment. "And if we run through the Mormont and Umber remnants on the way?"
"They can surrender or they can not, that is their choice."
Another pause and then Rowan nodded, once. "I agree." He looked back at the field. "You think Ser Baelor will manage his side?"
Randyll had thought about Ser Baelor Hightower for approximately ten minutes during the planning stage and had come to a conclusion that had not changed since. "He will do what the situation requires or he will fail to do it," he said. "Either way it will have nothing to do with what we do here, and I am not going to manage a man at the other end of a battlefield while managing my own position. He either holds or he doesn't, and we'll know which by how the day falls. The King had given him a position of importance so I think he might do well."
He looked back at the field. The Freys had now fully encircled the Mormont positions on two sides, and a third Frey column was curling around the Umber right. Part of the Stark vanguard had broken off to deal with what was happening at the rear, which meant the vanguard's center was now softer than it had been, and that meant that the Lannister front was going to push harder into the softness within the next few minutes if the Lannister commander was worth his spurs, which Jaime Lannister certainly was.
The whole field was going to turn in the next quarter-hour, one direction or another, and there was one thing, one single thing, that could change the direction of the turning, and it was sitting in the treeline waiting on his word.
"It's time," Randyll said, more to himself than to Rowan.
He felt his horse shift under him, and filled his lungs, "Charge," he roared, and rode out of the trees.
The sound of it was the first thing, the sound of thousands of horses rampaging from stillness to fill in the space of a few hundred yards away.
He kept his lance level. The Frey rear guard saw them first and he could tell by the way the outermost Frey positions began to shift, heads turning, the disturbance that moved through a body of men when they saw their allies not slowing down. The allies had become a threat and they came from the very direction that they had taken advantage of from Mormonts and the Umbers.
Someone was shouting, the shout carried no words he could make out at this distance, only volume and urgency. He hit the Frey rear at full gallop and the lance took a man in the gorget and the man went back over his horse and the lance snapped and Randyll let the ruined shaft fall and had his sword, The Heartsbane, clear of its scabbard before the Frey formation around him had registered their surrounding.
To his left Rowan was through the line already, his own lance still whole, driving it into the back of a Frey position that had been advancing inward on the Mormont remnants. To his right his own cavalry poured through the gap he had punched and spread out, filling every space the Frey line had left unwatched.
The screaming started, not the disciplined war cry of men, but the ragged, disorganized screaming of men caught between two things pressing from two directions, men who had been an attacking force thirty seconds ago and were now getting minced by men coming from two directions. Randyll could smell fear spreading through the broken formation of men, he had three extreme campaigns to know of it and more engagements than he could count without effort. The smell of men who had been sweating in the anticipation of easy killing and found instead that the killing was not going to be easy, the particular sour edge that fear added to all the other battlefield smells, blood and bowel and horse and trampled earth. He rode through it and ignored it.
A Frey man came at his horse from the left, on foot, a spear leveled at the animal's chest with more courage than sense. Randyll put his horse straight at the spear, watched the man's nerve break at the last moment, the spear tip dropping fractionally as the man flinched, and rode him down, breaking the man's spine.
He cut right, then left, clearing his path forward into the Frey interior, Heartsbane cutting flesh, leather and armor alike with ease, and the men behind him followed through the openings his horse made, without thought and without hesitation.
The screaming changed pitch around him as the Tarly and Rowan cavalry pressed deeper. Randyll caught the nearest Frey banner carrier with a slash that took the pole and the man's hand together, and the banner went down, and he felt rather than saw the shudder that moves through troops when their colors fall, the animal-pack response to losing a rallying point, the hesitation that was sometimes recoverable and sometimes was not.
He heard Frey voices around him, soldiers shouting to each other in panicked words, who were being pushed apart faster than they could push themselves back together. He rode through three of them without stopping and came out the other side into a slightly less crowded stretch of the field, horses around him, the Tarly and Rowan banners pressing steadily through the Frey line, and then a voice rose above everything else, loud enough to cut through it cleanly.
"What are you doing?"
Randyll turned.
Black Walder Frey was on horseback, he rode toward the voice and found the man twenty yards off, his face tight with anger and fear.
"What are you doing?" Black Walder said again, and there was primal fear in that voice, fear of losing his life, the fear of a man who had been certain of a thing and found the certainty broken. "We allied with the crown, with the Lannisters. We had an arrangement."
Randyll brought his horse to a stop three yards from him. He looked at Black Walder Frey and felt a mild contempt he felt for men who confused the present balance of power with a permanent arrangement of the world. "The Lannisters do not hold the crown any longer, Ser Frey," he said.
Black Walder's mouth stopped moving. His eyes shifted, very fast, from Randyll's face to the banner behind him, the banner that had come out of the trees with the cavalry and was now flying over the Tarly and Rowan positions spreading through the field. The banner was black and with a red dragon on it. He looked at it for a long moment, as realization dawned on his face.
"You betrayed them," his eyes shook with the betrayal.
He did not get further than that. Mathias Rowan came through from the left at an angle, lance still in his right hand, and drove the point of it through Black Walder Frey's chest with precision. The lance went in and Black Walder went back over his horse's saddle and the horse, freed of its rider and startled by the noise of the fall, bolted south through a gap in the press. Black Walder Frey lay in the mud with the lance still in him and did not move.
Rowan pulled up beside Randyll and looked down at what he had done. "For the King," he said, quietly, and rode on.
Randyll rode on too.
The Frey center was breaking. Some of them were throwing down weapons already, the fight went out of Frey men faster than most once the numbers stopped working in their favor.
A voice called out from his left and he turned to find the source.
"I am Raymund Frey, son of Lord Walder Frey." The man was older than the last Frey and still mounted and his sword was sheathed. He had his hands raised at roughly shoulder height, not fully raised but in the compromise position, man who wanted to surrender without looking like he was surrendering in case the surrender was refused and he needed to fight again. His horse was a good one and his armor was better quality than most of the Frey men around him.
And then Randyll remembered the person, he was the eleventh son of Lord Frey. He had his father's nose but none of his father's cheerful viciousness currently on the face.
"My men will lay down their arms," Raymund said, speaking carefully, spacing the words out, "If you accept our surrender and give us your word of safety, your king will have Lord Frey's allegiance before the day is out, I can promise you that. I can ride to the Twins myself and bring it in writing on my father's seal."
Rowan had come up beside Randyll again and was looking at Raymund Frey with mild interest and the remnant of a smile. "There would be no swearing in the middle of a battle, my lord Frey," he said, not unkindly, as if correcting a social error rather than turning down a political offer.
Raymund Frey's careful expression wavered. "Lord Rowan, I am offering you-"
"I heard what you were offering," Rowan said. Rowan looked at him and he gave him nothing, which was answer enough.
"Lord Tarly." Raymund turned to him directly, the politician's instinct for finding the man who actually held a decision and addressing him rather than the man beside him. "My father is old, he was given promises by men who are losing their grip on this war. He made the best decision available to him at the time. That is all this was, a bad decision, nothing more. Men have changed allegiance for less cause than this and been forgiven by kings less wise than-"
"Bind him," Randyll said, to the two men nearest him.
They did and Raymund Frey stopped talking when the rope came out, not because he had run out of things to say but because he had the good sense to recognize when death is being delayed, he must have seen dead of Black Walder Frey, he thought.
Raymund watched Randyll with his hands being tied behind him and his horse being taken by a Tarly man-at-arms, and his eyes were very clear and very cold and not as frightened as most men's eyes were in his position, which told Randyll he was going to be a problem for someone, eventually, when the battle was settled and the politics began.
That was problem for some other time now he had a field to finish.
Randyll's men closed in around the remaining Frey position and Randyll rode toward the interior of the field.
He could see the Mormont remnants clearly now, fifty yards ahead, through the thinning wreckage of the Frey formation. They had formed into something roughly circular, shields out on all sides, for they had no other good options of defense left. It was not a large circle, perhaps five hundred to thousand men inside, it was hard to count in the press.
Some of the Umber banners had joined them, big Umber shields overlapping with smaller Mormont bucklers in a line that had held together through everything the Freys had thrown at it and the dead men by their feet were visibly showing the cost of the holding.
He pushed his horse through the last of the Frey resistance, which was less of a obstacle at this point and more a collection of frightened men who had not yet found a direction to run that seemed safe, and they parted for him readily enough when he came with Tarly banners at his back.
The space between the Frey remnants and the Mormont circle opened as he rode through it, and the first faces he saw were northern faces watching him come, and they watched with an expression of hope.
He slowed his horse and his men spread out behind him and pushed the last of the Frey rearguard away from the Mormont positions, and for a moment, a brief moment, the immediate pressure on the circle lifted and the northern and Mormont soldiers looked at each other and looked at the Tarly and Rowan banners and looked at each other again. Randyll did not give them long to make whatever they were going to make of it.
He drove his horse forward through the dead men of North, Rowan men sweeping behind him to clear what was left, and ahead the circle was already opening, shields dropping from the defensive angle as the men inside it realized the Frey pressure had stopped, and he pushed through the opening with his men behind him and came into the interior where the surviving Mormont and Umber soldiers stood and did not stop.
Neither did the men behind him.
POV- Maege Mormont
She heard the hooves first, before she could see the banner clearly, before she could see anything clearly, because there was blood in her left eye from a cut above the brow she had not noticed taking and everything on that side had taken on the reddish haze of a world seen through blood. She wiped at it with the back of her sword hand and got only a smear for the effort.
The Frey men had stopped, that much she knew with absolute certainty, because she was still alive to know it, and she would not have been alive for much longer if the Freys had kept pressing. She had four shields left in her personal guard, four men from Bear Island who had stood with her since the line first buckled and had not broken faith with her or with each other since this battle reigned, and she had known since the first Frey lance had hit them that four shields were not going to be enough to hold indefinitely.
Now the Freys were running, or lying down, or being ridden through by horsemen with a banner she was still trying to see clearly with one good eye and one bad one.
"What banner is that?" she called, to no one in particular.
"Tarly and Rowan" someone answered from behind her. A man's voice, young in tone that she did not recognize it. "That's the Huntsman's banner and Golden tree on silver field, my lady. Tarly and Rowan."
Tarly and Rowan, she wondered on the two Houses and came with only a cautious neutrality that her years had taught her was the right response to unexpected cavalry on a battlefield, whatever colors they wore. By old gods, I wish they are on King Robb's side, mayhaps Lord Tarly would want his daughter as bride for the King, she thought and sincerely hoped.
"Shields up," she said.
"My lady, the Freys are-"
"Shields up," she said again, and the four men around her heard something in her voice that settled any discussion and did as they were told.
Ser Harwick appeared at her side, limping badly on his left leg, a cut across his cheek still seeping. He looked at the incoming riders and looked at her raised shield and looked at the incoming riders again.
"They're still coming," he said.
"I can see that."
"They've broken through the Frey line, my lady, but they're... they're not slowing down." The Tarly and Rowan cavalry came through the collapsed Frey positions at a pace that was full gallop.
"They are not stopping," she shouted and it was not a question.
Somewhere to her right, big enough to be heard over everything else even in his current state, Greatjon Umber answered.
"Let them come." His voice had the hoarseness of a man who had been shouting for hours and had taken a wound that would have laid anyone else dead, but there was still enough of it left to carry. "I'll show them what a giant does to southern horse, woman, see if I don't."
She wanted to argue. She had the argument ready, the practical, tactical argument, because hundreds exhausted men who had just spent an hours fighting off a Frey betrayal were not in any condition to receive fresh cavalry without a wall, and the fact that the cavalry coming at them wore Tarly green rather than Lannister crimson did not change the entirety of the situation.
She did not have time to make the argument.
The first Tarly horsemen hit the outer edge of the surviving Umber position, and the men on the horses shouted something as they came through, three word, repeated, rising over the crash of the contact.
For King Aemon.
She heard it clearly, they were shouting the Targaryen King's name instead of Lannisters. The Targaryen King who had northern mother.
"SHIELDS," she bellowed, and drove herself into the press.
She heard Greatjon's voice again, close, from the direction of the Umber banner. Not a battle cry, not the war roar that had characterized him from the moment the Frey betrayal had begun and that had been, for all the horror of what it announced, it was a father's cry.
She turned her head toward it, the one clear eye finding the Umber banner through the press, and she saw Smalljon first. He was mounted, sword out, horse turned to face a Tarly lancer coming in from his left at an angle that Smalljon had either not seen or not had time to answer. He was a big young man, broad across the shoulders more than his father was, and he had fought well through everything the Freys had thrown at this position, she had seen it with her own eyes, the wild, stubborn, entirely Umber quality of not yielding ground.
The lance took him in the side, between the straps of his breastplate. She saw him rock in the saddle. She saw him try to straighten but then his sword arm dropped to his side and the sword went with it, and he slid sideways off his horse in the slow, awful way.
He hit the ground. He did not rise. "For King Aemon," she heard, from somewhere close, the same words she had been hearing since the charge began, and then the voice moved on with the horse and the field moved on around the boy's body.
The silence from Greatjon's direction lasted perhaps three seconds.
Then something hit him from behind, a Tarly horseman swinging the flat of a blade with enough force to drop a small man outright, and Greatjon Umber, who was not a smaller man, stumbled forward two steps and went to one knee and stayed there, and the third step that should have brought him back upright did not come, and he went unconscious.
The sun had come out from behind the clouds, and she stood in it with blood on her face and a tired axe arm and men left who had not gone anywhere.
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