POV: Tytos Blackwood
The ravens had gone quiet since three days ago. Not gone, they were still in the rookery, Tytos could see the black shapes of them against the window of the tower, if he looked hard enough but quiet. For past four days every raven sent was shot dead by the men besieging his castle.
he knew they have lost the favor of Old Gods a long time ago when the weirwood of their house turned to husk. His grandfather used to say they were at fault for that, his father believed it was Bracken's work, called his own father words an old woman's talk, but his father had also listened whenever the old man was too deep in sorrows.
He stood on the eastern battlements and watched the siege camp wake below, cookfires starting by the tents, men pissing at the edge of the treeline. Horses being walked in the grey before sunrise. The ordinary business of an army that had nowhere to be in a hurry.
The Bracken banners a red stallion on a golden shield over a brown field. He knew those banners the way he knew his own face. Thousand years of dispute, of border raids and petty wars and broken truces. Jonos Bracken and him had ridden with Robb Stark, now he was alone while Jonos had bent the knee to the Lannisters when bending gave him profit.
Now here he was on the walls of Raventree Hall with two thousand spears, which was the most men he could raise to this war. He knew there would be no help from the Stark's or Tully's, his words of truce with the Targaryen's did lay well with King Robb and his bannermen and now Raventree Hall will pay the price of that.
"We cannot hold them forever like this, Father."
He had heard Lucas come up the steps. His son moved quietly for a boy of seventeen, lighter on his feet than you expected from his size. He was going to be big, Lucas, he thought. Already broader and taller than he had been at that age, with the dark Blackwood hair and the dark eyes of his mother, who had been dead six years and whom Tytos still missed every day with a dull, familiar ache.
"I know that," Tytos said.
Lucas came to stand beside him. He said nothing for a moment, just looked out at the field, at the banners, at the second camp set slightly apart from the Bracken lines to the east. The second camp had a single banner flying at their front, a black goat with bloody horns. The second camp had fires but no formation, no order to the tents, men moving in and out of it at odd hours. The second camp was the Brave Companions, and Tytos had known their reputation long before they showed up outside his walls.
"How many do you think," Lucas asked.
"Bracken brought three thousand mixed in with the Lannisters. The Companions-" He stopped. "Hard to count. They move around. They're not soldiers, not really. They're.... they do things soldiers won't."
"What kind of things."
"Things." He looked at his son in grief and grimace. "You'll see, if we're here long enough but I pray to old gods that we don't."
Lucas was quiet. The sun was coming up behind the Red Fork, distance away, a smear of pale light shining in the river. It was going to be a grey day. Most days were grey in the Riverlands the day either turned wet and cold and the fields below the walls were churned to mud by more than two thousand pairs of boots and twice that many hooves.
"How long will we last." Lucas asked quite different from his usual, it was always Hoster, his youngest, who asked such questions.
"The grain is the answer, lad. Maester Norren says three weeks, maybe less if we're not careful with the stores." He looked at the eastern camp. "Three weeks is long enough. Long enough for a great many things."
"Long enough for help to come?" Lucas asked, his voice laced in hope.
He did not answer that. He did not want to lie to his son, and he did not want to say out loud what he actually believed, which was that no help was coming, not from any direction he could think of, and three weeks was going to feel very long indeed.
"Get some sleep," he said instead. "You were on the wall half the night."
Lucas looked at him. He had his mother's eyes, dark and direct, and they did not quite believe him, but he went. The stairwell swallowed him and Tytos was alone on the wall again, and the sun kept rising, grey and watery, over a field he was going to run out of ways to hold.
He had gone down to the yard to look at the horses, they were running short on fodder and the horses were the first thing to suffer for it, and you could tell a great deal about how long a siege would last by looking at the horses. He was talking to the stableman, a red-faced man called Otter who had been with the Blackwoods since before Tytos was born, when one of the wall guards shouted.
"My lord. East camp."
He climbed back up the ancient stone walls with moss climbing up them. The walk from the yard to the battlements was long enough that by the time he got there, it was already happening. Many people lay on their knees by the camp.
They must had taken a men, women and children from the village of Millford. He knew the village, a cluster of cottages half a mile down the river road, the place that had existed under the shadow of Raventree Hall for longer than anyone could remember, that paid its tithe and sent its boys to serve in the castle garrison and woman as servants. There were hundred people in Millford at most but they were his people.
Now there was a woman as staked on the flat ground in front of the eastern camp. She was alive. Tytos could see that but it was her voice that could be heard from the walls, though the distance blurred the wails in soft cry, he could not imagine the pain the woman must have been going through.
Around the woman at stake, stood six or seven men of the Brave Companions, and one of them was doing something with a blade to the woman's body, and Tytos watched for exactly long enough to retch from watching.
Then he turned from the wall.
"Ser Andryn," he said. His captain of guards was three paces away, already watching his lord's face. "How many men can we put on horses."
Ser Andryn was forty, a scarred careful man who had fought in Robert's Rebellion. "Sixty, perhaps, sixty-five if we take the grooms."
"Do that."
"My lord-"
"How long before they have the sally port open?"
A pause. "By the time sun rise by the gate, half, if—"
"By the time of the gate." Tytos turned and started for the stairs. "Tell men to be ready to move."
Lucas found him in the armoury pulling on his vambrace, the left one, the one with the worn buckle that he kept meaning to have replaced.
"What are you doing, father" Lucas said.
"Going out." Tytos said.
"Father." He said it with his mother's voice, which was unfair and probably not intentional. "There have thrice the number of our men out there."
"There are sixty of our men going out with me."
"Sixty against-"
"We're not fighting their whole army, we're going to the east camp. We're going to the Brave Companions. We're going out fast and hard and we're going to get that man off the ground and come back." He got the buckle and looked up. "And we are going to do it because they are doing what they are doing so that we can see it from the walls, and the reason they want us to see it from the walls is so that we know what happens to people who belong to us if we do not open the gates. And if we watch and do nothing, we have no one left in our lands."
Lucas stared at him.
"Get your sword," Tytos said.
"You're not leaving me here."
"I wasn't going to."
Ser Andryn had fifty-eight men in the yard by the time Tytos came down, which was not sixty as he promised but close enough. They were household men mostly, some of them old, one of them, Ser Harlan, a distant relative of Andryn by marriage, so old he had to be helped onto his horse by his squire. Tytos watched this without comment. A man who could ride could fight. He would not turn anyone away.
"North postern," he told Andryn. "We go out the north side and come along the treeline and we ride fast and hard. For if they see us before we reach them, there's no help for it, but fast is what matters."
"The Bracken horse will come when the alarm goes up."
"Then we need to be done before the Bracken horse arrives."
Andryn looked at him with strange look with wild thoughts running in his head that he did not like to think about. "My lord. What you are describing-"
"I know."
"We lost many knights and men when we rushed from RIverrun to Raventree Hall to the ambush of the Lannisters." He dropped his voice. "Ser Harlan can barely lift his shield arm because of his age."
"I know, Ser Andryn."
"And we have fifty-eight men."
"I know how many men we have, Andryn but those are my people." He looked at his captain and let the silence sit. "Are we going?"
Andryn was quiet. He blew a breath out through his nose. "We're going, my lord."
The north postern was small, a door meant for one horse at a time, and they went through it in twos while it was still early enough that the soft mist lay heavy in the low ground and gave them some cover in the treeline. Tytos led them along the tree line at a trot, north first and then sweeping east, and the mist held until they were nearly at the edge of the eastern camp, and then the mist did not hold, and a man at the edge of the Companion camp looked up and saw them and started shouting.
Tytos put his heels to his horse.
He had not charged this fast since the rebellion. His knee remembered, his lower back remembered.
The Brave Companions were fast when they wanted to be. Three of them had swords out before the horses reached them. One of them threw something, a hatchet, he thought that went wide and caught nothing. They were not soldiers but they were not nothing, they were men who had stayed alive in bad places for a long time.
He took the first one with the horse that did the work, the man went down and did not get up, and Tytos swept his sword left and caught a second man across the arm before the man's own sword came up to block. He kept going. Around him he could hear the shouts of his men and the sounds men made when steel swords found them and the specific sound of Lucas somewhere to his left shouting something that he could not make out over the rest of it.
"The prisoners," he roared. "Get to the prisoners and then rush to the gates."
Ser Andryn had four men breaking left toward the staked woman and the prisoners. The rest drove forward deep into the Companion camp, and the Companions broke inward rather than outward, which was the right response for the villagers escaping and was also bad for Tytos's soldiers because it brought them into the narrower space between the tents where the horses lost their advantage.
He dismounted, it was not the right choice but he made it anyway, dropping to the mud while his horse screamed and wheeled and kicked at the man who had come at it from behind with a pike. The pike caught nothing but the horse kicked the man in the chest and the man sat down hard.
On his feet now in the mud and the press of it, which was entirely different from being on horseback, the world shrunk to the ten feet around him and the men in that ten feet. He killed one, the man was half-turned and he put the sword in the man's back and that was that. He drove off a second with three hard strokes that the man blocked and then the man slipped in the mud and went down and Tytos killed him then.
He found her, finally, Ser Andryn crouched over a woman on the ground cutting at ropes while two of their men kept three Companions from closing. Tytos put himself in the gap, one swing, two and the man backed off. Many of his men had run off with the prisoners to the castle gates.
"Get her up," he said.
"She's is-" Andryn looked at the woman on the ground. "She's breathing."
"Get her up."
Behind him he heard the call, Bracken's call rushing from other side of their camp.
"Now, Andryn."
They lost nine men getting back to the postern.
Nine men, three he knew by name. Ser Harlan, who had been too old to be here and had come regardless and had formed a wall to let the prisoners escape; Corm, who was Otter the stableman's nephew and who had been riding with the household guard for two years; and a boy whose name he was almost certain was Willem, who had been of same age as his youngest son and had asked six months ago to join the garrison and Tytos had let him.
He sat in the yard after, his horse given off, his sword still in his hand because he had not yet thought to sheath it, and Lucas was beside him with a cut across the back of his left hand.
"Give me that," Tytos said, and tore a strip from the hem of his tunic and wrapped Lucas's hand without much ceremony.
Lucas held still for it. He was breathing in the long breaths of men coming down from a fight, and his face was the face of a boy who had just killed someone for the first time, which Tytos recognized because he had seen it in a mirror once, at Lucas's age, after a border skirmish with the Brackens.
He didn't say anything about it. What was there to say. It had happened and it would keep having happened in his son's memory and there was no word that helped.
"Is she alive," Lucas said. "The woman."
"Maester Norren has her." Tytos tied off the bandage. "She was breathing when we got her off the ground."
"What was her name."
Tytos stopped. "I'll find out." Lucas was very much perfect heir he could have wished for.
"Her name is Penny," said one of the guards nearby. "She's from Millford, my lord. She lost her husband couple year ago to disease. Her daughter, Danna, works in the kitchen my lord."
"Thank you." Tytos stood. His knee was going to be bad tomorrow. It was already making its intentions clear. "Ser Andryn."
Andryn was across the yard, one arm in an roughly styled sling, grey-faced but standing. "My lord."
"When you're rested. Set watches for the night, double on the east wall."
"Aye." A pause. "We lost nine."
"I know how many we lost."
He went inside. He did not want the men to see his face just then.
He found the woman's daughter in the kitchen passage. She was a petite girl, maybe five and ten, flour still on her hands from whatever she'd been doing before they brought her the news. She was sitting on a barrel and not crying, which surprised him, and then he thought that perhaps she had already used the crying before he got there.
"Danna," he said.
She looked up. Her eyes were red. "My lord."
"Maester Norren says she'll keep the hand. The other-" He stopped. "She's going to be some time healing. But she'll live."
She looked at the ground for a long time. He couldn't read what was in her head, relief, or anger, or something between the two. She had a right to either. Her father was already dead and now her mother though still alive though disabled.
"Why did you go out," she said.
"Because she's mine to look after," Tytos said. "All of you are."
She looked at her hands. At the flour on them.
"Thank you, my lord," she said.
He went to find his supper but could not eat it.
The raven arrived on the second morning, before dawn. It brought news he could not believe and so he asked Andryn to send a rider to check. The man returned by dusk through the mill road that bypassed the siege lines, the rider either very lucky or he knew the land well, and when they brought him into the great hall and Tytos looked at him. The lad was young and had ridden hard looking at his fatigued face, mud to the elbows. The lad, Pate, a boy who had grown up in the castle and had spent three years carrying messages along the Kings Road road for one lord or another.
"Is it for true," Tytos asked.
Pate was eating. He paused with a piece of bread halfway to his mouth. "It is my lord. The man called himself Grey Worm, my lord. Commander of the Unsullied."
"Unsullied." There was a soft whisper in the hall hearing the words. His youngest son's eye widened hearing the arrival of Essos's famed men.
"Where."
"A days south on the river road, maybe less. They move fast." He said it with genuine surprise, the way people said things about the Unsullied who had not seen them before.
"How many."
"Five thousand, my lord with the banner of dragon flag high in the air."
Lucas looked up from across the table. Tytos looked at his son and then back at the rider.
"You're certain it was the dragon flag."
"Three red dragon heads on black field. I know it, my lord." He set the bread down. "It's the same flag as Ser Andryn asked me check."
Tytos sat with the news received. Five thousand Unsullied and a dragon flag was not nothing. It was not three thousand Bracken spears and whatever the Brave Companions numbered, but five thousand Unsullied were not ordinary men. Every noble lord of decent study have learnt of Three Thousand of Qohor.
"Is there more of what they conveyed," he said.
Pate pulled a piece of parchment from inside his jerkin. It was damp from the ride and with no seal on it, it was without one when he got it, he explained quickly when asked about it. The writing inside was in a careful, deliberate hand.
Lord Blackwood. Hold your walls one day more. What comes down the river road comes for you.
No name, just a title to address and two sentences.
"What do you think," Lucas said.
"I think," Tytos said, "that we would continue to hold the walls one day more, rather than try to rush to death in Bracken camp."
He did not sleep that night. He had not slept well since the Bracken had breached into his territory, and his body was telling him about it in swellings and pain that a man of forties had to take his rest seriously.
Ser Andryn walked with him for a stretch, his arm in the sling.
"If they come," Andryn said, meaning the Unsullied.
"When they come."
"When they come, Bracken's not going to just step aside."
"No."
"And if there's fighting-"
"We go out," Tytos said. "When there's fighting outside the walls, we go out and we hit Bracken from behind, that's the only chance and we won't get another."
Andryn was quiet for a few steps. "We lost nine men yesterday."
"I know."
"What we have left-"
"I know what we have left, Ser Andryn." He stopped walking. The night was cold and clear and the stars were out above the weirwood tree, the pale branches black against them. "I am not asking anyone to do anything I won't do first. If you think I should stay on the walls, say so."
Andryn looked at him. He was a careful man, not a flattering one. He thought about it honestly. "No," he said at last. "I don't think that."
"Then get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to need you rested."
Andryn went and Tytos stayed on the walls and watched the stars move.
They came at dawn, like the message had said. From the south, down the river road, and the first sign was the sound, no shouting, no sound of hooves, just the tramp of feet in perfect unison, the kind that made everyone understand viscerally why men were afraid of them.
Five thousand marched in formation. Spears up, shields locked, moving at a march that did not waver or bunch or accordion the way ordinary men's columns did. The dragon flag flew at the front, bright even in the grey early light. At their head was a lean man with leather armor and a helm on his face, and he was looking at the siege camp with the attentive patience.
The Brave Companions saw them first, again. They had that instinct.
What happened next happened fast. The Companion camp erupted, men shouting, men running, a horse breaking loose and galloping south for no reason anyone could see. It was fear, the Brave Companions never thought of facing the Unsullied on Westerosi soil.
You didn't need to see their faces to know it. The Unsullied had a reputation and the Brave Companions knew it better than anyone, because the Brave Companions were also from across the narrow sea and they knew what the Unsullied were, from the sort of knowing you got from facing them across a field.
The Bracken men held better. They were Riverlords, local men, and the Unsullied were something they'd only heard of.
Tytos was in the yard when the shouts went up on the wall.
"Now," he said to Andryn. "The gate."
He did not wait for the answer. He was already going for his horse.
The gate opened and forty-one men rode out, which was everyone who could sit a saddle after yesterday's losses, and they came around the southern wall at a gallop and hit the Bracken rear before the Bracken officers had finished realising that the fight was now coming from two directions.
What happened to an army when it was struck from two sides at once depended entirely on the army. Many time Tytos had seen such thing.
Some hold while others fracture. The Brackens fractured, partly because the Companion camp was already dissolving on their right flank and the chaos of that was spreading, and partly because the Unsullied moved as a single thing. They marched together and attacked together leaving none of the gap for the money-grubbing sellsword to benefit.
Tytos rode through the gap that opened in the Bracken line and he did not stop until he was through to the other side, and by then the gap had widened behind him into thing that was not a gap anymore but a break.
He wheeled and around him men were fighting and men were running and the Unsullied were advancing through the Companion and now the Bracken camp with the steady inexorability of a tide going in, and the noise of it was enormous shouts and steel and the screaming of horses and above all of it, he heard a roar.
He looked up.
She came out of the south, lower than he expected, very red, very large. She moved faster than any thing of its size should. She circled once above the field, unhurried, and the color that shined from her was the color of old blood, and every man on that field who was not already running started to run.
Lord Jonos Bracken was the first of them to throw down his sword.
Tytos watched it happen, the short man standing in the mud surrounded by his own men, looking up at the dragon, then looking at the Unsullied with spear pointed towards him, then looking at his own men, many of whom had already dropped their weapons. He dropped his sword though it made no sound in the mud and the rest of his men followed.
The Brave Companions were dead, or most of them were. A few were caught at the river and dealt with by his riders, and a few more surrendered because they had no road left to run on.
He found the man called Grey Worm in the center of the old Bracken camp.
Not what he'd expected. He had been expecting someone older, or bigger, or somehow more clearly marked as the sort of man who commanded a force like this. Grey Worm had absolutely no facial hair, though the hair atop his head is short and brown. He was stocky, of medium height and square face. He had a serious looking face, on the edge of solemn. His Common Tongue was heavily accented, the way foreign men spoke it when they had learned it properly rather than growing up in it.
"Lord Blackwood," he said.
"Commander." Tytos looked at the camp around them. The disarmed Bracken men were being organised into groups by Unsullied soldiers who moved through the work without shouting and without hurry. It seemed efficient than anything he had ever seen. "You cut it close."
"We moved as fast as we could, my lord."
"How come you arrives to help me without my fealty, Commander."
Something in Grey Worm's face, it was close to a smile. "We do as our King command."
"I see," Tytos said. He looked at the Bracken men. "What happens to Jonos."
"He gave up his sword but he denied King's terms." Grey Worm looked at him steadily. "The king's terms are the same for all men who defy his offer."
"And the Brave Companions."
"Those we find." Again that not-quite-smile, briefer this time, gone before it properly arrived. "Will find no place to live."
Tytos believed him. He looked north, where the dragon flew away. "You'll want my fealty," he said.
"I will want you to come with me," Grey Worm said. "My king takes oaths from lords in person. He does not receive them by raven."
"Does he make lords travel to him as a point of pride, or because he wants to look at them."
"Because he wants to look at them," Grey Worm said. There was no apology in it. "He finds ravens tell him very little about a man."
Tytos thought about that. "He's young for that kind of caution," he said.
"He is young for many things, but he has strength for such regardless." Grey Worm looked at him. "Say your wishes to your family, lord Tytos, we do not have time."
"I'll see." He turned back toward the walls of Raventree Hall, toward the pale weirwood visible above the battlements. "Give me an hour. There are things to arrange before I leave."
He found Lucas in the great hall.
His son was sitting at the long table with his younger sister asleep on his lap. He looked up when Tytos came in.
"It's over," Lucas said and it was not a question.
"For now." He sat down across from him. The fire was going and the hall was warm and it smelled of woodsmoke and old stone. It smelled like home as always. He had always liked that smell. "I'm going with the Unsullied. To swear my fealty."
Lucas face set in a frown. "How long will you be gone father."
"I don't know maybe weeks." He looked at his son. "The castle is yours while I'm gone."
"You said that last time."
"Last time I had gone to meet a boy king who believed himself to be King with no power at his back to empower it."
Lucas almost smiled. He did not quite manage it, but it was close. "You should see if this one is any different."
Grey Worm was waiting at the south gate with a raven on his shoulder and a parchment on his hand.
Grey Worm pushed the parchment into his jerkins when he heard him coming and then turned to his men and ordered them in his tongue.
"Is there a problem." He asked.
Grey Worm turned to him, "There is none, come we have to prepare."
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