"Let us be clear..." Aegon said as he put one finger on the chart in front of him and traced the outline of Dragonstone. "This is not a border keep. This is not a motte and bailey we can burn out in an afternoon. Dragonstone was raised by the dragonlords of Valyria and the walls were shaped by dragonfire. The only ways in are the sea gate and the main gate, and both of them face approaches that were designed specifically to kill anyone who used them."
"How many men do they have inside," Jon Arryn asked.
"We estimate less than a thousand. They will not be fresh, they have been under blockade for eighteen months and their provisions must be running thin, but they will be rested and they will be prepared. They have had two years to fortify every approach and to stockpile every arrow and every stone. They know we are coming."
"Then we starve them," Luthor Tyrell said. "Continue the blockade for another year and they will be eating rats."
"Another year and the trade losses will have crippled the capital," Duncan replied. "We have discussed this at length, my lord. The blockade was always a holding measure, not a solution."
"Then we storm the gate," Rickard Stark said. "Straight up the causeway with shields locked and rams at the front. Take the losses and get inside."
"That causeway is four hundred yards long and eight men wide," Tywin said without looking up from the chart. "They have murder holes along its entire length and scorpions mounted on both flanking towers. You would lose two thousand men before the ram touched the gate, and then they would drop the portcullis behind whoever got through and butcher them in the killing yard."
Rickard's jaw set. "Then what would you suggest, Lannister."
"Landing parties at three points on the coast simultaneously. Split their garrison across multiple fronts. Force them to defend the whole keep rather than concentrating on the causeway." Tywin's finger moved across the chart as he spoke. "The eastern beaches here and here are shallow enough to land men in force. It would cost us, but it would cost them more, and it would open a window."
"How much would it cost us."
"Perhaps a thousand men in the first wave. Possibly more."
Lord Elmo Tully made a sound of disapproval. "A thousand men on beaches to open a window that may not stay open."
"It is better arithmetic than throwing two thousand at a causeway."
Prince Duncan leaned over the chart. "There is a third option. We build siege engines here, trebuchets large enough to throw against the gate itself. We do not need to breach the walls, we only need to break the gate. Sustained bombardment from beyond the range of their scorpions, four or five days of it, and we can bring that gate down without losing a single man to the causeway."
The room considered this as several heads nodded.
"That is the soundest plan yet offered," Aegon said.
"It is sound," Arthur said. "But it takes five days, and in five days a great many things can change."
Every head at the table turned toward him.
Arthur had not expected the silence to feel quite so heavy. He straightened and put both hands on the edge of the table.
"There is a faster way. While the main army makes an assault on the causeway, a small group goes over the walls on the northern face and opens the main gate from the inside."
Lord Luthor Tyrell laughed, not unkindly but not encouragingly either. "Over the walls of Dragonstone. Two hundred feet of stone with no handholds. And once your small group is inside, they simply walk across a fortress on full alert and open the gate while two thousand men watch?"
"We shall be wearing enemy colours."
"I am sorry, my lord, but who exactly are you." A lord Arthur did not recognise spoke up. "Forgive me, Your Grace, but I confess I do not understand why a lord of a fishing island is standing at this table telling the great houses of the realm how to conduct a siege."
The temperature in the room dropped.
Prince Duncan turned around slowly.
"His name," Duncan said, "is Lord Arthur Pendragon of Brightwater Isle and two years ago, when the enemy attacked King's Landing, he commanded the southern wall after I was injured. He led a sally of two hundred Gold Cloaks onto the beach against six hundred landed troops and drove them back into the sea. When they released a beast onto that beach that killed a hundred men in under a minute and sent trained soldiers running like children, he rode at it alone and put a sword through its skull."
The cabin was silent.
"Before that, he recovered three stolen dragon eggs from the men who stole them from the Red Keep, and rescued both daughters of Lord Velaryon from a slaver ship in the harbour by fighting through the entire crew alone." Duncan's eyes moved across the assembled lords. "So when he speaks at this table, my lords, you will listen. Is that clear enough for everyone."
Nobody spoke.
Arthur inclined his head to Duncan and continued.
"They will be on high alert. My lord Tyrell is right about that. That is precisely why the main army must give them something worth being alert about. A faux assault on the causeway. If they are distracted with that then they won't worry about a few men, especially if we wear their colours."
"And how will you climb it," Tywin asked.
"There are seams. Not in the stone itself, but where the dragonlords fused the natural rock to the worked stone at the base of the northern face. The joins are shallow but they are there. Crossbow bolts driven into them will hold a man's weight if the man knows how to climb."
Brynden Tully pushed off the wall by the door. "How many men."
"Five. Six at most. Any more and we risk being seen before we can blend in."
"And once you are inside," Tywin said slowly, "you make for the gatehouse and the winch room. Which means you will need to hold the gatehouse long enough for the main force to cross four hundred yards of causeway after the gate opens." He looked up from the chart. "Once the gate opens the enemy will know within seconds. Five men holding a gatehouse against a counterattack for the time it takes an army to cross a causeway doesn't seem plausible."
"It would be if we had a cavalry charge ready," Brynden said. He had come to the table now and was leaning over the chart beside Tywin, which caused his father to make a small pained noise.
"Brynden," Lord Elmo said.
"Father, it is a better than losing thousands of men."
"It is," Tywin agreed, which appeared to surprise Brynden considerably. "But I would add one more thing. Two of the party should not go for the gatehouse at all. Put them somewhere high with crossbows to cover the approach to the winch room and courtyard."
Arthur nodded slowly. "That is good."
King Aegon had been silent throughout. Now he sat forward and put both palms on the chart.
"I like this plan," he said. "It is the only proposal I have heard today that does not begin by spending a thousand lives to purchase a chance." He looked down the table. "Lord Arthur. It is your plan. Are you willing to lead the men who go over that wall."
"I am, Your Grace."
"I will go with him," Brynden said immediately.
"Brynden—"
"Father, with respect, I have been climbing the walls of Riverrun since I was nine and I am a good shot with a crossbow."
"I am going too, no way I'm missing a bloody fight like this," Rickard Stark said.
Edwyle Stark's expression did not change but his hand tightened on the edge of the table.
"And I," Tywin said.
Kevan turned to stare at his brother. "Tywin."
"I helped shape the plan. I am not going to stand back and watch other men execute it." Tywin's voice was flat. "House Lannister will not be represented at this siege by a man who kept his boots dry."
Aegon looked at the young men in front of him for a moment then he nodded.
"Very well. But I will not send five men over that wall without one of my own. I want a Kingsguard with you."
There was a movement near the door.
"I will go, Your Grace."
Prince Llewyn Martell stepped forward into the light. He wore the white cloak now, had worn it for a year and a half. He met Arthur's eyes across the cabin and there was the ghost of a grin in them.
"You are certain, Ser Llewyn," Aegon said.
"I fought beside Lord Arthur on the beach at King's Landing, Your Grace. I would rather be at his side than anywhere else on that island."
"Then it is settled." Aegon straightened and looked around the room. "My lords. You have heard the plan. Does any man here object."
Several of them plainly wanted to. None of them did.
"Good. We attack at dawn. Get some sleep, all of you. Dismissed."
The lords began to file out.
A notification appeared at the edge of Arthur's vision.
────────────────────
[QUEST ACQUIRED]
────────────────────
THE DRAGON'S SEAT
────────────────────
Description:
Dragonstone has stood in enemy hands for two years. Its walls have never been breached by force. You have proposed a plan that will either take the fortress in a single night or leave you dead inside it.
────────────────────
Objectives:
• Infiltrate Dragonstone
• Open the main gate for the assault force
• Capture Dragonstone
────────────────────
Rewards:
• 5,000 XP
• Otherworld Token
• [Book] Valyrian Compendium of Draughts and Distillations
────────────────────
Failure:
• Death
• Dragonstone remains in enemy hands
────────────────────
A Valyrian book on potions.
'Nice...'
He was halfway to the cabin door when a hand caught his arm.
"Lord Pendragon."
Brynden Tully was grinning at him. "Or should I still call you Ser. I confess I lost track of your titles somewhere around the part where Prince Duncan was listing your accomplishments."
Arthur laughed and clasped his hand. "Arthur is fine. It is good to see you again, Brynden."
"And you. Though I will say it is considerably better to be standing on your side of a fight this time." Brynden's grip was firm. "The last time we met you knocked me into the dirt in front of about four thousand people and I have been hearing about it from my brother ever since."
"You very nearly had me."
"I very nearly did not, and we both know it."
Tywin Lannister approached from the other side and inclined his head. "Lord Pendragon."
"Lord Tywin, I thank you for supporting my plan in there, I could tell there were a great many who wanted to dismiss me."
"Your plan is sound, though I admit having so many members of great houses be involved does seem rather dangerous." He paused. "But the plan does depends entirely on whether the men who go over that wall are good enough. Five poor swords in a fortress full of enemies is five corpses."
"That should not be a problem," Brynden said. "I watched this man handle a blade in front of the entire realm and I have not forgotten it. I assume you have not gotten worse in the years since." He looked Arthur up and down. "You have certainly gotten larger. What in the seven hells have they been feeding you. You were a big lad at the tourney but you are the size of Ser Duncan the Tall now."
"Fish and hard work."
"Perhaps you'll give me some of that fish."
Tywin's eyes had not left Arthur's face. "I also have not forgotten what you did for my family Lord Pendragon."
"Please think nothing of it," Arrhur replied and he really meant it. He had not meant to kill the Frey and honestly wouldn't have wanted to at a tourney.
"I have a long memory for debts," Tywin said. "In both directions."
"I thank you Lord Tywin and I am glad to have you both with me tomorrow," Arthur said. "Truly."
A hand landed on his shoulder hard enough to stagger a smaller man.
"So this is the beast-killer."
Rickard Stark was a big man, nearly as tall as Arthur and built like the trunk of a northern pine, with a dark beard and a broad open face that was currently split by an enormous grin.
"Rickard Stark," he announced, gripping Arthur's forearm. "I have heard about you all the way up in Winterfell. My father's maester read me the account of the beach at King's Landing and I told him it was nonsense. That is a thing that happens in songs, not in the world."
"It was less impressive than the songs make it sound."
"That is what every man who has done something impressive says." Rickard released his arm. "You and I are going to drink tonight and you are going to tell me the whole thing properly, beginning to end, and I am going to decide for myself whether it was impressive."
Arthur laughed. "I can do that. Though I warn you the ending involves me being carried off a beach by two princes because I could not walk, so it loses some of its grandeur at the finish."
"Better and better. Come on. Lannister, you as well, and do not tell me you do not drink because I have never met a man who does not drink the night before a battle."
They drank in the aft cabin until the small hours.
Rickard did most of the talking, which suited everyone. He told a long involved story about a hunt in the wolfswood that ended with three men, one bear, and a broken cart, and by the end of it even Tywin was making a sound that could charitably have been described as a laugh. Brynden told a story about a Riverlands lord's daughter that his father would have strangled him for repeating.
Eventually Llewyn joined them and he told the beach story from his own perspective, which was considerably more flattering to Arthur than the official version and considerably funnier.
Arthur told them about the wyvern though he left out the parts he could not explain.
And the Pale Man.
Tywin drank less than the others and spoke less than the others, but he stayed, and near the end of the night he said something quiet and dry about his father that made all four of them go silent for a moment and then laugh far harder than the remark deserved.
Eventually they went to their bunks and Arthur found himself alone at the stern rail with the black water sliding past below and the lanterns of three hundred ships spread out across the darkness behind them.
He took the folded letter out of his belt and turned it over in his hands.
It was nothing important. An account of the journey, the weather, the food, the people he had met. He had written that Jory had been sick over the side on the first day and had been mortified about it. He had written that he loved them, all three of them.
He whistled.
Horus dropped out of the darkness above the mainmast and landed on the rail beside him and lifted his left leg without being asked.
"Take it to Mira," Arthur said as he tied the letter in place.
Horus screeched, launched himself off the rail, and vanished into the night.
"That bird must be uncommonly clever, to carry messages for you."
Arthur turned.
King Aegon stood a few feet away in a plain woollen cloak with no crown on his head, looking for all the world like a tired old man who had wandered up from below decks and not like the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.
"He is, Your Grace. Cleverer than most men I have met. He also holds most of them in complete contempt, which may be related."
Aegon huffed a quiet laugh and came to stand at the rail beside him. "What is he called."
"Horus."
"Horus." The king turned the name over. "That is not a name I know though it is a good one."
They stood together in silence for a while.
"It is very late, Your Grace," Arthur said eventually. "Should you not be sleeping."
"I was sleeping." Aegon rested his forearms on the rail. "I woke from a dream and found I could not go back."
Arthur went still. "A dragon dream...?"
"Perhaps."
"What did you see."
Aegon did not answer immediately.
"I stood on the causeway of Dragonstone. Not this causeway, the one in the dream was longer and it went out over black water that had no bottom. The gate at the far end was open and there was light coming through it, but the light was the wrong colour. It was green. And the whole fortress was burning, but the fire did not consume anything. It just burned while the stone stayed stone, and the flames poured up the walls and into the sky and did not stop."
He was quiet for a moment.
"There were people on the causeway with me. All of them. Betha and Duncan and Jaehaerys and Shaera and Aerys and Rhaella and my great-grandchildren, all of them standing in a line on that causeway with their backs to the gate, looking at me. And behind me, over the water, something was flying. I could not see it. I could only see the shadow it made, and the shadow covered everything from one horizon to the other."
Aegon's hands had tightened on the rail.
"And then a voice said the gate is open, and the fire has been let in, and now you must choose which of them burns, after that I woke."
Arthur did not speak for a while.
"It could mean victory," he said finally.
"It could. Dreams are cruel that way. They give you the same image and let you decide whether it is a promise or a warning, and you do not learn which until the thing has already happened." Aegon exhaled. "I have not been able to shake the feeling, Arthur, that I am walking my whole family toward a fire. That I have been walking them toward it for years and I only just noticed."
"The battle will go our way, Your Grace."
"You cannot know that."
"I can."
Aegon turned his head and looked at him. "How."
"Because I promised I would go home."
The king said nothing and just looked at Arthur for a while.
Then he laughed.
"There is nothing stronger than a man's will to return home to those he loves." He straightened and pulled his cloak tighter. "I have watched a great many men march to war in my life, Arthur, and the ones who came back were never the strongest or the most skilled. They were the ones who had something waiting for them and refused to be parted from it."
"No castle and no army will stop me from seeing them again," Arthur said.
Aegon nodded slowly.
"Then I shall stop worrying about the battle," he said, "and get some sleep."
_____________________________________
At the northern face of the keep five men crouched in the broken rocks at the base of the wall, above them the fortress rose two hundred feet of fused stone into a sky that was just beginning to grey at the eastern edge.
They wore the enemy's armour. Dark mail over black gambesons, plain helms, no house sigils and no colours anywhere on them. Arthur had produced the sets from a chest aboard the flagship and had told anyone who asked that they had been stripped from prisoners taken during the blockade.
Rickard Stark tugged at the front of his hauberk and made a satisfied noise.
"I will say this for our enemies. They know how to make a coat of mail. This is the most comfortable armour I have worn in my life. It fits like it was made for me. My own smith has been fitting me for fifteen years and he has never managed anything half this good."
"Be quiet," Tywin said.
"I am speaking quietly."
"You are speaking and we are close enough to the wall that a patrol on the walk above could hear a man."
"We have been sitting in these rocks for two hours, Lannister. If a patrol were going to hear us they would have heard us by now."
"That is the reasoning of a man who has never been caught, which only holds right up until the moment it does not."
"Do you enjoy anything," Rickard asked. "Genuinely. Is there a single thing in this world that brings you pleasure. I have been trying to work it out since last night and I have not managed it."
"I enjoy silence."
"That is the saddest thing I have ever heard a man say."
"All of you are talking too much," Llewyn said flatly. "Every one of you. Including me, now, which is your fault."
Arthur raised a hand.
They stopped.
He tilted his head and listened. [Sharp Ears] pulled the sounds out of the dark and separated them, the wash of the sea against the rocks below, the wind over the stone, and above all of that the crunch of boots on the wall walk two hundred feet up, moving away to the west. Then, faintly, a second set of boots coming to meet them, and the murmur of men exchanging a few words.
"Guard change," Arthur said quietly. "That is our window. Brynden. Llewyn. Bolts."
The two men brought their crossbows up.
Arthur had made the bolts himself, shorter and heavier than standard, with square-shouldered heads designed to bite and hold. He pointed at the base of the wall where the worked stone met the natural volcanic rock, and at the faint irregular line that ran up from it at an angle.
Brynden loosed first. The bolt struck the wall and stopped dead, buried three inches into the stone with four inches protruding. Llewyn's followed a second later, higher and to the left, and it held.
They worked up the wall in alternating shots, Brynden and Llewyn spanning and loosing and within two minutes there was a staggered line of iron protrusions climbing the northern face.
Arthur went first.
He climbed with [Acrobatics] and [Hyper Mobility] carrying him through the reaches that would've been difficult for a man his size, his fingers finding the bolt shafts and his boots finding purchase on the shallow seam itself. Twice he had to hang from one hand while he stretched for the next bolt. Once his foot slipped and he took his entire weight on three fingers and simply held there until he could get it back.
He reached the top and hooked one arm over the parapet and hauled himself onto the wall walk.
He crouched, checked both directions, and dropped a knotted rope over the edge and the rest of them started climbing up the wall.
Brynden was halfway up when Arthur heard the boots and two men turned around the corner.
[The World]
Time stopped.
The two guards hung frozen mid-stride, one of them with his mouth open around a word he had not finished saying, the other with his spear tilted back over his shoulder.
Arthur ran.
He crossed the distance in the silence, feeling the drag of the frozen air against his body, and reached the pair with time still stopped. He set himself in front of the first man, drew back his fist, and clamped his left hand over the second man's mouth and jaw.
Time resumed.
The hidden blade shot out of his forearm and went up under the first guard's chin and into the brain, and the man died before his expression could change. In the same motion Arthur's left hand closed around the second guard's face and lifted him off the walkway entirely, one-handed, the man's boots kicking at empty air, and Arthur turned and drove the back of his skull into the stone wall beside them with the full force of his arm and shoulder behind it.
The man's head came apart and there was a wet heavy crack and then the sound of something bursting.
Rickard arrived at a run and stopped short.
"Seven hells." He stared at the two bodies and then at Arthur. "I looked at the guards and I looked back and you were on top of them. For a man of your size I did not see you move at all. How does a man that big move like that."
"Practice."
"Practice! Ha!"
"Quiet," Tywin said, arriving behind them. He was already crouching over the first body and checking the walkway in both directions. "Both of you. Get them over the edge before someone comes to relieve them and finds a puddle."
They rolled the corpses over the seaward wall. There was a long silence and then two faint splashes far below.
Brynden came over the top of the wall and took in the scene with a raised eyebrow.
"Brynden. Llewyn." Arthur pointed east along the wall to where a round tower rose above the walk. "Reload and get up there. That tower overlooks the gatehouse and the whole northern approach. Anyone who comes to retake the winch room has to come along this walk to do it, and I want them dying before they arrive."
Brynden nodded. "How long do we hold."
"Until the gate is open and the army is through it. Then come down."
"And if you do not reach the winch room."
"Then shoot anyone you want and come rescue us."
Llewyn snorted and clapped Arthur on the shoulder as he went past. The two of them moved off east at a crouch with crossbows in hand.
Arthur turned to Tywin and Rickard.
"With me. We walk from here. Do not creep, do not skulk, do not put your hand on your sword. We are three men in their uniforms walking their walls in a normal patrol."
They set off along the wall walk toward the gatehouse.
"There is a flaw in your plan," Rickard murmured after twenty paces.
"What is that."
"You are seven feet tall and I am also a large man. If a single one of these guards has ever met a fellow of your dimensions before, he will remember it."
The first horn sounded from the south.
It was faint at that distance and it was followed almost immediately by a second and a third and then by the deep rolling thunder of thousands of men beating their shields in unison.
Along the southern walls of Dragonstone, torches began to move.
Arthur kept walking.
"The army is making their distraction," he said. "In about two minutes there will not be a single man on this island who is thinking about anything except the causeway. The garrison is not going to be wondering how big I am."
Rickard opened his mouth. "What exactly is the dist—"
The first boulder hit the southern wall of Dragonstone with a sound like the world cracking open.
The impact shook the walkway beneath their feet hard enough that all three of them staggered, and Arthur grabbed the wall beside him with one hand to keep from going down while a shower of stone chips and dust cascaded from the battlements above.
Then the arrows came.
They came in a continuous downpour that turned the sky above the southern walls into a ceiling of feathered shafts. Arrows struck the walkway around them in clusters, the steel heads sparking off the stone and the shafts shattering on impact, and one of them hit the wall six inches from Arthur's hand and almost impales it.
"DOWN," Arthur roared, and he grabbed Tywin by the back of the neck and shoved him flat against the walkway while Rickard threw himself behind the nearest cover without needing to be told.
They lay there for ten seconds while the arrows hammered the wall around them.
Arthur lifted his head.
The southern wall was now in chaos.
Every defender in the keep was moving in the same direction toward the causeway where the main army was making its assault, the walkways and stairs and courtyards of Dragonstone had become a river of bodies flowing toward the point of attack.
Nobody was looking at them.
Arthur grabbed both men by the shoulders and hauled them upright.
"I think that's the distraction."
The walkway curved east toward the gatehouse and they took it at a sprint, three men in enemy armour moving in the same direction as the rest of the garrison, and in the chaos of the bombardment and the arrows and the shouting nobody gave them a second glance. Arthur kept his head down and when a sergeant running south nearly collided with Rickard the big northerner simply shouldered him aside without breaking stride.
The gatehouse loomed ahead, two heavy towers flanking the main gate with a covered bridge connecting them above the archway. The portcullis was down, a thick iron grate that sat in its grooves at the mouth of the passage, and beyond it the causeway stretched south toward the army that was even now hurling stones and arrows at the walls.
Arthur stopped at the corner where the walkway met the eastern tower and pressed himself against the stone. "Tywin. Rickard. Get inside, kill whoever is in there, and get that portcullis up."
Tywin looked at him. "When you open the gate you will have every man who can hold a sword coming down on you."
"Brynden and Llewyn should be able to help cover me long enough that I can get it open."
Rickard drew his sword and the grin was back on his face, the wild hungry grin of a man who had been born for exactly this kind of work, and he and Tywin disappeared through the door of the eastern tower at a run.
Arthur turned and took the stairs down from the walkway to the courtyard.
The courtyard was hell.
Arrows were still coming over the walls in sheets, punching into the earth and the flagstones and the bodies of men who had not found cover quickly enough.
Arthur scooped a shield off the ground as he ran, a large round thing with a black dragon painted on its face, and he held it up over his head as another cluster of arrows came hissing down into the courtyard.
He reached the base of the gatehouse and pressed himself into the alcove beside the great iron-banded doors of the main gate.
The portcullis was still down.
So he did the only thing he could and waited.
A hand grabbed his shoulder from behind.
"You! Soldier! What are you doing standing here like a bloody statue, get to the wall, they are coming up the causeway and we need every man on the—"
Arthur shrugged the hand off without turning around.
The hand came back, harder this time, the fingers digging into the mail at his shoulder and yanking him around. A sergeant, red-faced and sweating with a short sword in his other hand, glared up at him.
"Are you deaf, man? I said get to the wall. Move your arse before I—"
Arthur's hand closed around the man's throat.
He lifted him off the ground one-handed, the sergeant's boots kicking at empty air. Arthur held him there for a single heartbeat and then he twisted his wrist and felt the neck snap beneath his fingers with a clean dry pop and let the body drop.
Three soldiers near a burning cart saw it happen.
For a moment they simply stared. The courtyard was so loud and so chaotic that the death of a single sergeant should not have registered, but the sight of a man in their own uniform lifting another man by the throat and snapping his neck like a twig was the kind of thing that cut through the noise.
"What the fuck are you doing," one of them shouted. He took a step forward. "What the fuck did you just—"
Arthur drew Sunset.
The meteoric steel caught the firelight from the burning cart and the orange rippled surface blazed like a flame. The three soldiers took one look at the blade and the size of the man holding it and understood in the same instant that something had gone very wrong.
"Enemy at the gate," the nearest one screamed over his shoulder. "ENEMY AT THE GATE. INTRUDERS. TO THE GATE."
The first man came at Arthur with a spear.
Arthur sidestepped the thrust and brought Sunset down on the shaft in a cut that sheared through the wood and left the man holding a stick. Before the soldier could react Arthur stepped inside his reach and drove the hidden blade up through the gap between his helm and his gorget. The point went in under the jaw and through the roof of the mouth and the man was dead before his knees hit the ground.
The second soldier swung a sword at Arthur's head. Arthur caught the blade on Sunset's crossguard, turned it aside, and kicked the man in the centre of his breastplate with his full strength behind it. The kick launched the soldier backward through the air for a good eight feet and he hit the courtyard wall with a crack that left a dent in his armour and a red smear on the flagstone beneath him when he slid down.
The third man turned to run.
A crossbow bolt took him through the back of the neck and he pitched forward onto the flagstones.
Arthur looked up at the round tower to the north, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away, Brynden Tully was already spanning his crossbow for the next shot. Beside him Llewyn held his own crossbow at his shoulder, scanning the courtyard below.
More men were coming.
They poured out of the barracks door on the western side of the courtyard, half-armed and confused but armed enough, eight of them and then twelve and then more behind those, drawn by the shout of "enemy at the gate" like flies to blood.
Arthur set his feet and raised Sunset.
The first four reached him at a run, spread out in a line with their swords and axes raised. Arthur went to meet them because standing still against a group that size was a death sentence.
He took the nearest man's sword arm off at the elbow with a cut that sprayed blood across the stones and followed through into a thrust that punched Sunset's point through the second man's mail and into his chest. The man choked and grabbed at the blade with both hands and Arthur ripped it free and spun to his right as an axe came whistling at his ribs from the third attacker.
The axe head hit the shield he was still carrying on his left arm and the impact drove him back a half-step but the shield held. Arthur slammed the rim of the shield into the axeman's face and felt the nose break beneath the iron edge, then brought Sunset around in a horizontal slash that opened the man's belly from hip to hip. Intestines spilled out of the wound in a wet grey-pink tangle and the man went down screaming.
The fourth soldier hesitated.
Arthur did not.
He lunged forward and the hidden blade shot from his forearm and punched through the man's eye socket and into the brain behind it.
A crossbow bolt from Brynden's tower hit a fifth man in the throat as he emerged from the barracks door. A second bolt from Llewyn took a sixth man through the chest. Both men fell without reaching Arthur.
Eight more came through the door in a rush.
[The World]
Time froze.
The eight men hung in the air mid-stride, their faces caught in various expressions of rage, their weapons raised at angles that told Arthur exactly where each blow was aimed. An arrow fired from the southern wall hung motionless three feet from Arthur's head.
Four and a half seconds.
Arthur moved.
He sidestepped the arrow, pivoted past the first man in the group, and drove Sunset through the gap between his helm and his shoulder plate. He withdrew the blade and stepped to the second man and laid the edge against his throat. He moved to the third and positioned the hidden blade at the base of his skull. He could not kill all eight in four and a half seconds but he could set himself up for the moment time resumed.
Time snapped forward.
Three men dropped simultaneously. The first from Sunset's blade buried in his shoulder, the second with his throat opened in a spray of crimson, the third with the hidden blade punched through his brainstem. The remaining five staggered as the men around them collapsed and Arthur was already moving, already inside their formation, Sunset rising and falling in arcs that turned armoured men into dead men like a butcher breaking down a carcass.
A thrust through a mail shirt into the gut. A slash across the inner thigh where the femoral artery ran close to the surface. A pommel strike to a jaw hard enough to shatter the bone and send teeth spraying across the flagstones. The hidden blade in the eye. Sunset through the gap between the breastplate and the backplate.
Five more dead.
Arthur panted as he took a moment to breathe. The World was always tiring to use, even with his higher magic stat.
More men were coming faster now, in larger groups, the garrison beginning to realise that whatever was happening at the gate was not a minor incursion. A dozen of them ran down the main stairs from the wall walk with shields up and spears levelled, forming into a crude shield wall as they advanced across the courtyard.
[The World]
Time stopped again.
Arthur moved through the frozen shield wall, finding the gaps, positioning his blade, setting up the kills. The exhaustion doubled when time resumed and the grey haze crept in at the edges of his vision but six of the twelve were dead or dying and the formation had collapsed into a disorganised knot of shocked survivors.
He killed two more with Sunset before the rest broke and ran. Brynden's crossbow took one of the runners through the back. Llewyn's bolt caught another in the leg and he went down thrashing.
Twenty dead in the courtyard now.
Twenty-five.
Arthur began to lose count.
A group tried to flank him from the left, coming around the base of the eastern tower, Arthur caught the movement in his peripheral vision and turned to meet them.
[The World]
The exhaustion hit him so hard his knees buckled for a heartbeat before he forced them straight. Time held for four and a half seconds, just long enough for him to cross the distance and cut the throat of the lead man and position himself behind the second. When time resumed the second man died with the hidden blade in his kidney and the third took Sunset through the chest and looked down at the blade protruding from his breastplate with an expression of mild surprise before his legs gave out.
Arthur yanked the sword free and staggered.
A horn blast echoed from the courtyard behind him.
Reinforcements from further inside the fortress were coming. Arthur could hear them, boots on stone, fifty men at least, maybe more.
He looked up at the portcullis.
It was moving.
The great iron grate was rising, slowly, inch by grinding inch, the chains that held it groaning as the winch in the tower above drew them taut. Tywin and Rickard had reached the winch room and were finally lifting the gate.
Arthur sheathed Sunset and threw his weight against the iron-banded doors.
The doors were not designed to be opened by a single man. They were fifteen feet tall and made of oak reinforced with iron, and each one weighed more than a horse, and the bar that held them shut was a beam of solid timber as thick as Arthur's thigh.
He grabbed the bar in both hands and Hamon surged through his arms in a golden wave that lit up his muscles from shoulder to fingertip. He lifted the bar out of its cradle and hurled it aside and it hit the courtyard flagstones with a crash that shook the ground. Then he set his shoulder against the left door and pushed.
[Demon Back]
The muscles across his back and shoulders locked and for a brief moment his strength exceeded the limits of what his body should have been capable of producing. The door ground open, the hinges shrieking in protest, and the morning light of the causeway beyond poured through the widening gap.
He turned to the right door and did the same, driving it open with his shoulder and his legs and the last of his strength, and the gate of Dragonstone stood open for the first time in two years.
Behind him the sound of the reinforcements was louder now. Fifty men, maybe sixty, rounding the corner of the inner wall and pouring into the courtyard.
Arthur turned to face them and drew Sunset.
He was exhausted and now he had to fight sixty men.
He set his feet and raised Sunset.
The first rank of the reinforcements was thirty yards away and closing.
'I promise I'll come home...'
Thud
Thud
Thud
Thud
Arthur smiled as he heard the sound. It seem s he wouldn't need to fight on his own after all. Arthur had just enough time to flatten himself against the inside of the door frame before the cavalry came through.
They poured through the open gate in a torrent, riders in Targaryen red and Stark grey and Lannister gold, spears lowered and swords drawn and the lead horses' hooves striking sparks off the stones as they exploded into the courtyard. The first spear took the lead man of the enemy reinforcements through the centre of his chest and kept going, the rider blowing past the impaled body without slowing, and behind him the cavalry fanned out across the courtyard and hit the enemy column from the front at full gallop.
The column shattered.
Men flew backward under the weight of the charge. Spears punched through shields and armour and bodies, and the men who were not hit by weapons were hit by horses, a thousand pounds of galloping warhorse slamming into a man on foot with the same result as a cart running over a beetle.
Arthur pressed his back against the stone of the gatehouse wall and watched the cavalry sweep through the courtyard and fought the urge to sit down on the ground and close his eyes.
He pushed himself off the wall and stumbled through the nearest door and up the stairs that led to the winch room.
The stairwell was narrow and littered with bodies. Two guards lay on the first landing with their throats cut and a third lay halfway up the second flight with a sword wound through his chest. A fourth was slumped against the wall at the top of the stairs with an expression of considerable surprise and a dagger buried to the hilt in his forehead.
Arthur stepped over the last body and pushed through the door at the top.
The winch room was a square chamber dominated by the massive wooden drum of the portcullis winch. Tywin stood on one side of the drum with blood on his hands and a calm expression on his face.
Rickard stood on the other side with blood on his face and his hands and his forearms and most of his chest, grinning so widely that it looked physically painful.
"IT WORKED," Rickard bellowed the moment he saw Arthur in the doorway. "Gods above, Pendragon, it actually worked. Did you hear them. Did you hear the cavalry go through. The whole bloody army is in the courtyard, they came through like a river through a broken dam, I have never heard anything like it in my—"
"The battle is not over," Tywin said.
Rickard stopped mid-sentence and looked at him.
"The defenders will likely retreat further into the keep and try and barricade themselves.
Rickard's grin faded slightly. "You are right, Lannister. You are absolutely right."
He drew his sword.
Arthur looked at both of them. "Let's finish it then," he said.
All three of them charged out the door.
(AN: So Part 1 is done and basically went as well as could be expected. Anyway if you're wondering why Tywin and the others would volunteer for such a mission and why the others accepted it. It's a part of the Pendragon passive trait. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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