Arthur didn't know how long he had been fighting for, all he knew was that the moment he slaughtered one enemy he had to move on to the next. Never stopping. Never giving them a moment to breathe. He pushed though the door of the Dragonstone keep with so much strength it flew off the handle and cracked the skull of the unfortunate soldier who happened to be behind it.
Rickard came through the door behind Arthur and immediately engaged two men who had been standing further down the corridor with swords drawn. The northerner fought the way he looked, each swing of his longsword carrying enough force behind it that the men he was fighting had to choose between blocking and keeping their arms.
The first one chose to block and the impact drove his own blade back into his face hard enough to split his cheek open to the bone. The second tried to duck the follow-up cut and caught it across the top of his helm instead, the steel caving inward and the man crumpling to the flagstones with a noise like a dropped sack of grain.
Tywin slid past both of them and thrust his sword into the stomach of a man who had been charging them while they were distracted. He then moved further ahead where the corridor split and looked in both directions.
"If we go left we should be able to meet up with the others, down the right path they seem to have set up some sort of barricade," he called out.
"We go right," Arthur said.
Tywin looked back and frowned beneath his helm. "It would be wiser—"
"RIGHT!!!" Rickard roared a battle cry as he rushed past Tywin causing the man to breathe loudly.
Arthur chuckled and clapped Tywin on his shoulder before following.
The barricade was a crude thing, a heavy oak table turned on its side and reinforced with barrels and a section of iron grating that had been torn from somewhere, and the men behind it were crouching with their spears jutting out through the gaps like the spines of a hedgehog. It filled the corridor from wall to wall and there was no way around it.
Arthur did not go around it.
He charged it.
He had created his armour himself so he knew those spears would snap like twigs against it.
He hit the barricade at full speed with his shoulder lowered and the entire structure, table and barrels and iron grating and the men behind all of it, exploded backward down the corridor in a shower of splintered wood and rolling barrels. Two of the men were crushed beneath the table as it slammed into the wall behind them. A third was thrown sideways into a doorframe hard enough that the frame cracked. The remaining two scrambled to their feet and Arthur killed one with a downward cut that split him from the collarbone to the sternum and Rickard killed the other with a thrust through the belly that pinned the man to the wall behind him until Rickard pulled the blade free and let the body slide down the stone.
They pressed forward.
The keep of Dragonstone was a labyrinth of corridors and chambers and stairways that had been carved into the volcanic rock of the island by the dragonlords who built it, and the fighting that filled it now was the worst kind of fighting there was. Close quarters. Tight corridors. Bad light. Every corner was a potential ambush and every doorway was a potential death.
The enemy had fallen back from the outer walls and the courtyard and had concentrated in the keep itself, and they fought desperately as they knew this was their last stand.
Arrhur came around a corner and found six men blocking a stairway. The first thrust came at his face before he had finished turning and he batted it aside with the flat of Sunset and stepped inside the spearman's reach and grabbed the shaft with his left hand and snapped it in half with a single squeeze. The broken end went through the man's throat before he could let go of the stub, Arthur driving it forward with his palm.
The five remaining men closed on him and Arthur fought them all like a man possessed. Easily carving through them as easily as he would a piece of cheese.
Rickard was a step behind him and the northerner filled the corridor behind Arthur like a wall of his own, his longsword rising and falling in heavy two-handed strokes that caved in helms and shattered shields and opened men from hip to shoulder.
A soldier tried to slip past Arthur on the right side but Rickard caught him by the back of the neck with his free hand and threw him into the wall with enough force to knock him out.
Tywin fought differently from both of them as while he was a tall man he did not share their bulk. He appeared at the edges of engagements, at the flanks of enemies who were focused on Arthur or Rickard and took advantage of the situation.
They cleared the stairway and went up.
The second level was worse. The corridors were narrower and the ceilings were lower and the enemy had barricaded every junction with furniture and barrels and sections of iron that turned each intersection into its own small fortress. Arthur's men, the Targaryen soldiers who had come through the gate and had finally caught up with them, fanned out behind them and began the brutal room-by-room work of clearing each chamber while Arthur and his companions pushed forward toward the centre of the keep.
Arthur kicked open a door and found three men waiting on the other side with axes raised. The first axe came down at his head and he sidestepped it and the blade buried itself in the wooden doorframe beside him. He grabbed the axeman by the front of his mail with one hand and hurled him backward into the other two, all three of them going down in a tangle of limbs, and he was on top of them before they could separate.
Sunset punched down through the first man's breastplate and into his chest. The hidden blade opened the second man's throat in a spray that covered the floor. The third man tried to crawl away and Rickard's boot caught him in the side of the head and his neck twisted at an angle and he went still.
"How many levels does this bloody keep have," Arthur panted.
"Three more," Tywin answered without panting at all.
"HAHAHA Wonderful!" Rickard shouted.
They fought up through those three levels.
Each one was harder than the last because the enemy had had more time to prepare their defences on the upper floors and the men who held them were not the poorly armed garrison troops who had been manning the walls. These were the core of the Blackfyre force, trained soldiers and sellswords who had lilely seen lots of battle in Essos.
He lost count of the men he killed. Somewhere past thirty the number stopped meaning anything and became simply the thing that happened between one doorway and the next. His armour was slick with other men's blood. Sunset's blade ran red from point to crossguard. The hidden blade had jammed twice in the eye socket of a man who had refused to die until Arthur had shoved it deeper, and while the mechanism still worked but the action was stiffer than before.
He gave orders as they moved.
"Secure that junction. Two men on the door. No one gets behind us!
"Clear that room!"
"Shields up on the left side!"
The men obeyed without hesitation.
They reached the upper gallery that ran along the eastern side of the keep and found it empty. The sounds of fighting from below had faded to isolated pockets, the garrison's resistance collapsing floor by floor as the Targaryen army pushed deeper into the fortress.
A set of heavy oak doors stood at the end of the gallery.
The throne room of Dragonstone.
Arthur was ten feet from the doors when he heard voices from the other side of a connecting corridor to his left, he raised Sunset and turned to face whatever was coming, and then lowered it when Prince Duncan came around the corner at the head of a column of Targaryen soldiers.
The prince was in full armour and his face was streaked with dust and blood and his dark hair had come loose from its tie and was hanging in sweat-damp strands around his face. Behind him came Prince Aerys, Wildfyre drawn yet still spotless, the young prince showing none of the fatigue that everyone else was carrying. Llewyn followed at Duncan's shoulder in his white cloak, the fabric torn in two places and splashed with blood that was not his own, and Brynden was beside him with his crossbow still in his hands and a quiver that was nearly empty. Ser Duncan the Tall brought up the rear, his great height filling the corridor behind the column, his white armour dented byt otherwise okay.
Two more Kingsguard followed Ser Duncan, their white cloaks stained and their swords drawn.
"Arthur." Duncan's face broke into something that was too tired to be a grin but was trying. "Status on your side."
"All enemies captured or killed from the gate to this floor, Your Grace. This is the last holdout." Arthur nodded at the oak doors.
"Same on my side. We came up the western stairway and cleared everything from the sea gate to the upper gallery. All resistance has collapsed except whatever is behind those doors."
Duncan walked past Arthur and stopped in front of the oak doors. He raised his fist and slammed it against the wood three times, the impacts booming through the gallery.
"Open these doors and lay down your arms. Dragonstone has fallen. Your men are dead or in chains. There is nothing left to fight for."
Silence from the other side.
Duncan turned to the nearest soldier. "We may need a ram. Go and find one. That door was built to hold against a siege and I doubt we are going to simply push it open."
"Yes, Your Grace." The man saluted and turned to go.
Duncan looked at Arthur. "Unless you have something up your sleeve."
Arthur considered the doors. They were heavy and iron-banded and set in a stone frame that had been fused by dragonfire, and a battering ram would take the better part of an hour to haul up through the corridors of the keep.
He looked at Rickard and Ser Duncan the Tall.
Both men looked back at him.
A slow grin spread across Rickard's face and Ser Duncan raised one enormous eyebrow.
But they understood.
The three of them lined up in front of the doors. Arthur in the centre, Rickard on his left, Ser Duncan on his right. The three largest men in the Seven Kingdoms, standing shoulder to shoulder.
"On three," Arthur said.
"One."
"Two."
"THREE."
Six hundred and fifty pounds of armoured muscle hit the oak doors simultaneously.
The entire frame shook and stone dust cascaded from the ceiling above and a crack ran up the left door from bottom to top. The iron bands groaned and one of the hinges popped loose from its mounting.
"Again," Arthur said.
They stepped back and hit it again.
The left door came off its hinges entirely and crashed inward onto the flagstones of the throne room with a boom that shook the floor. The right door held for a fraction of a second longer before it too buckled and fell, and the three men stumbled through the opening in a cloud of dust and splinters.
Llewyn's laugh echoed down the gallery behind them. "Gods above and here I thought giants were only a thing of legend."
Several soldiers stared with their mouths open. One of the Kingsguard made the sign of the Seven.
The throne room of Dragonstone opened before them.
It was a vast dark chamber carved from the volcanic rock of the island itself. At the far end of the room, on a raised platform reached by seven steps of carved stone, sat the throne itself, a great stone chair shaped in the likeness of a dragon with outstretched wings that formed the armrests and a snarling head that rose above the backrest.
Perhaps forty men stood between the doors and the throne. They were the last of the garrison, the final holdouts, standing in a defensive formation with their weapons drawn and their faces carrying the hollow-eyed look of men who knew they were about to die.
A man sat on the throne.
He was tall, though not as tall as Arthur, and lean in the way that trained fighters were lean, with the hard corded muscles of a man who had spent his life swinging a sword rather than lifting stones. His hair was silver-gold and his eyes were violet and his features were unmistakably Valyrian. He wore black armour chased with silver and a black cloak clasped at the throat with a brooch in the shape of a three-headed dragon, and across his lap rested a bastard sword with a plain crossguard and a hilt wrapped in dark leather.
Prince Duncan walked into the throne room with his sword at his side and stopped ten paces from the defensive line.
"It's over your men are dead or in chains. Lay down your weapons and surrender and I will grant quarter to every man in this room. You have my word as a prince of the blood."
Aerys stepped up beside his uncle. "Why even ask. Kill them all and be done with it. They are traitors and usurpers and they deserve a traitor's death."
The man on the throne did not move.
He looked at Duncan for a moment and then at the soldiers who had followed the prince into the room and then at the Kingsguard in their white cloaks and then back at Duncan. Then he rose from the stone chair and descended the seven steps of the platform and came to a halt in front of his own men with his sword resting on his shoulder.
"I am Baelon Blackfyre. Son of Maelys. Who is the true Blood of the dragon and rightful heir to the Iron Throne through a line that stretches unbroken to Daemon Blackfyre the First of His Name." He almost hissed. "And I do not surrender to cowards who would rather starve their enemies rather than face them."
"I demand trial by combat."
Duncan laughed. "Trial by combat. Your garrison is shattered, your fortress is taken, you are outnumbered forty to one in your own throne room, and you demand trial by combat." He shook his head. "You are in no position to demand anything at all, Blackfyre."
"Then you are a coward, as I said."
Aerys's face flushed dark and his hand tightened on Wildfyre's hilt. "Let me fight him, uncle. Let me shut his mouth."
"No."
"I will fight him."
Arthur's voice cut through the chamber.
Every head in the room turned.
Arthur reached up and began to unbuckle his breastplate. The catches came loose one by one under his blood-slicked fingers and he pulled the dented steel away from his body and set it on the floor beside him. He unstrapped the pauldrons and the gorget and the vambraces, pulling each piece of armour off and dropping it onto the growing pile, until he stood in nothing but his gambeson and his boots with Sunset in his right hand.
"Arthur," Duncan said. "We do not need to do this. We can subdue them right now."
"This will be simpler. And it might stop more of our men from dying today." Arthur looked at the forty defenders standing in their formation with their weapons drawn.
He walked toward the throne.
The Blackfyre men parted for him as he approached, stepping aside to let him pass.
Baelon Blackfyre watched him come.
The Blackfyre was perhaps twenty-five, a few years older than Arthur, and up close the resemblance to the Targaryen bloodline was striking and uncomfortable. He had the same bones and the same eyes and the same hair, and if you stripped away the black armour and the enemy's colours he could have passed for a member of the royal family without anyone looking twice.
He looked Arthur up and down and his mouth curved into a sneer.
"And who are you. Some hedge knight they sent to do their dying for them." He lifted his sword off his shoulder and pointed it at Arthur's chest. "The Targaryens are even more pathetic than I was told."
Arthur said nothing.
"Are you mute as well as large. I have killed men twice your skill in the fighting pits of Volantis. I have cut sellsword captains in half with this blade. I am the blood of the dragon and you are the blood of nothing."
Arthur said nothing.
"When I kill you I am going to take your head and mount it on the walls of this fortress as a warning to every other peasant who thinks he can stand before a Blackfyre and—"
"Are you going to fight," Arthur said, "or talk."
Baelon's eyes narrowed before he attacked, the bastard sword whipping around in a horizontal cut aimed at Arthur's ribs that had good form behind it and genuine speed.
Arthur did not block it.
He sidestepped the cut by two inches, the blade passing so close to his body that it cut the fabric of his gambeson without touching the skin beneath, and in the same movement he brought Sunset up in a rising arc that began at his hip and ended at the level of Baelon's extended right wrist.
Sunset passed through the wrist joint without slowing.
Baelon's sword hand came away from his arm and hit the floor with the sword still gripped in its fingers, and the stump where the hand had been spurted a thick jet of arterial blood that sprayed across the stone of the throne room floor. Baelon staggered, his mouth opening, his eyes going wide, and the scream that started in his throat had not quite formed when Sunset came back the other way and took the right arm off at the elbow.
The forearm hit the flagstones with a wet heavy thud.
Baelon stumbled backward. He lifted his remaining hand, his left, palm outward in a gesture that might have been defence and might have been pleading, but Sunset flashed twice more in quick succession, two cuts so fast that they blurred together, and the left arm fell away from the shoulder in two pieces, the upper arm and the forearm separating from the body at the elbow and the shoulder a fraction of a second apart.
Three limbs on the floor. Blood pooling fast in a spreading lake around the Blackfyre's boots.
Arthur stepped forward and brought Sunset down in a low sweeping cut that took both of Baelon's legs out from under him at the knees just above the joint on each leg. Both lower legs stayed standing in their boots for a suspended moment before they toppled sideways and the rest of Baelon Blackfyre, what was left of him, fell to the flagstones of his stolen throne room with nothing left below the knees and nothing left of either arm beyond the stumps at the shoulder.
He was still alive.
He lay on the dark stone in the spreading pool of his own blood and he stared up at the ceiling with an expression that had gone beyond pain and beyond fear and beyond anything at all, his mouth working silently, his eyes empty, his body twitching in the small involuntary spasms of a system that had not yet received the message that it was finished.
Arthur stood over him.
The throne room was utterly silent.
Forty men with drawn weapons stared at the thing on the floor that had been their commander and none of them moved and none of them spoke and most of them had stopped breathing.
Arthur looked up from the body and swept his gaze across every one of them.
"Drop your weapons. Now."
Steel clattered against stone.
Forty swords and axes and spears hit the floor of the throne room in a rush as every man in the Blackfyre formation threw down his weapon and stepped back and raised his hands. Not one of them hesitated. Not one of them argued.
Arthur wiped Sunset on the dead man's cloak and sheathed it.
His companions crossed the throne room.
Rickard reached him first and the northerner was staring at the body on the floor with an expression that was caught somewhere between awe and something that Arthur would have called disturbed if Rickard had been the kind of man who admitted to being disturbed.
"Four cuts," Rickard said. "The whole thing lasted less than three seconds. I have never seen anything like that in my life."
"The man was all brawn and no brain," Arthur said. "He telegraphed the first swing from the moment he lifted his blade. A good fighter does not tell you where the stroke is going before it arrives."
Brynden was grinning. "I think you undersell yourself, Lord Pendragon. I have fought men who telegraph and I have never dismembered them in three seconds."
Tywin looked at the body and then at Arthur and said nothing at all.
Llewyn punched Arthur's shoulder. "You lunatic. You beautiful lunatic."
The celebration was short.
Targaryen soldiers were already moving through the throne room, binding the wrists of the surrendered garrison, hauling the dead and dying out of the way, securing the doors and the stairs and the approaches. The keep was falling into the ordered routine of a conquered fortress, the machinery of occupation grinding into motion.
A soldier burst through the main doors of the throne room at a dead sprint.
He was young, perhaps eighteen, and his face was the colour of curdled milk and his chest was heaving so hard that his first attempt at speech produced nothing but a wheeze.
"Your Grace." He was looking at Prince Duncan. "Your Grace, ships. Enemy ships. Hundreds of them, coming from the east. The lookouts on the tower spotted them five minutes ago and they are closing fast."
Duncan's face changed.
The satisfaction that had been settling into his features drained away and was replaced by worry. He turned and moved toward the doors at a pace that was not quite running but was considerably faster than walking, and Arthur and the others followed him through the corridors and up the stairs to the highest balcony on the eastern face of the keep.
The view from the balcony looked out over the dark water of the Narrow Sea.
Arthur saw them.
The horizon was full of ships.
They came out of the east in a line that stretched from one edge of the visible sea to the other, hundreds of them.
The Blackfyre digit on every single one.
Duncan's hands closed around the stone railing of the balcony.
"It was a trap." He practically growled. "They wanted us to come here. They wanted us to commit the fleet to this island. They wanted every ship we had packed into this harbour with their backs to the shore." He looked down at the royal fleet, three hundred ships anchored in the waters around Dragonstone, their crews ashore or resting, their sails furled, pressed close together in the sheltered water between the island and the mainland. "They can surround us. Pin us against the coast. Our ships cannot manoeuvre, they are too close together and the water is too shallow. They will come around both sides of the island and crush us against the rocks."
"Can we not use the keep's defences," Arthur said. "The Blackfyres built siege weapons to defend against our siege. Scorpions and catapults on every wall. We can turn them around and use them against the incoming fleet."
Duncan stared at him for a moment then his eyes lit up.
"Yes!" He straightened. "Yes. Man the walls. Every scorpion, every catapult, every ballista, everything they built. Turn them east. I want crews on every weapon within ten minutes." He turned to the soldiers behind him. "MOVE. Man the defences. Eastern and northern walls. Every siege weapon on this fortress pointed at that fleet. GO."
Ser Duncan the Tall had not moved from the balcony railing. The Lord Commander's eyes were fixed on the approaching fleet with an expression that Arthur had never seen on the big knight's face before, and when he spoke his voice was very quiet.
"This is not good, Duncan."
"We have the walls and we have the weapons. We can hold them off until—"
"If this fleet is here," Ser Duncan said slowly, "then it came through the blockade. The Velaryon ships were stationed between here and the mainland." He paused. "If this fleet is here then it's likely the Velaryons were defeated."
"I am going down there," Arthur said.
Duncan turned. "Arthur—"
"Jory and Lunk are on those ships. I am going down there."
Duncan looked at him for a long moment and then nodded once and gripped his shoulder hard.
Rickard drew his sword. "I am coming with you."
They turned and ran for the stairs.
They had made it down two flights and were crossing the main corridor of the keep at a sprint when the sound hit them.
**SCREEEEEEEEEEECH**
The shriek tore through the air with a force that rattled the stones of the keep and made every torch in the corridor gutter and flare.
Arthur skidded to a halt.
Rickard stopped beside him.
They looked at each other.
The clouds above Dragonstone parted.
Something came through them.
It was black and enormous. It was so large that its shadow, even at the height it was flying, darkened the harbour below and turned the grey water dark. Its wings stretched out on either side of its body, each beat sending a downdraft that rippled the surface of the sea. Its body was long and covered in scales that were the colour of midnight and caught no light at all, absorbing it instead, swallowing the morning sun the way a hole in the ground swallowed rain.
Its neck was long and serpentine and ended in a head that was wedge-shaped and crested with horns, and its jaws were closed but the teeth that jutted from between the lips were visible even at this distance, each one the length of a man's arm.
It was a dragon.
"Seven save us," Rickard breathed.
The dragon tucked its wings and dove.
It came down out of the sky in a dive that carried it over the harbour at a height of perhaps two hundred feet, and as it passed over the first cluster of royal warships its head dipped and its jaws opened and the fire came.
It was not like any fire Arthur had ever seen.
It was orange at the edges and white at the centre and it poured from the dragon's throat in a concentrated stream that hit the first warship amidships and punched straight through the hull.
The dragon banked and came around for a second pass.
More fire.
Three ships this time.
The stream raked across them in a horizontal line that turned a sixty-yard stretch of the harbour into an inferno, masts toppling and hulls splitting and men jumping from the rails into water that was already burning from the oil that had spread across its surface.
Arthur stood on the battlement and watched the fleet die.
"By the gods," he said.
Rickard was gripping the battlement wall with both hands, his face was pale as he looked at the scene before him. "We are fucked," the northerner said quietly. "Arthur. We are well and truly fucked."
(AN: Well and truly fucked. Anyway arrhur managed to pretty much annihilate the blackfyre. While he isn't the best fighter in Westeros yet it's not that far off from happening especially with royal swordsmanship or whatever I called it. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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