The midday sun baked the stone walls of Willowbrook, warming every brick to the touch.
Behind the battlements, a young guard let out a heavy yawn. The glare of the sun forced his eyes into a squint, squeezing out a few tired tears.
He leaned his back against the stone, complaining to the veteran beside him. "Have you noticed how erratic the weather's been lately? Freezing one minute, boiling the next."
"And I still can't fathom why Ser Gyles is making us stand double watches."
The veteran sneered, spitting over the wall as if Solomon himself were standing below. "It's all because of that 'Black Lion' nonsense. He beat back a few thousand wildlings, and now he's the talk of every tavern in the Riverlands. Bragging that he's going to march on us."
"I hear he lives in a literal cave. I bet he doesn't even have the stones to step outside."
"Exactly! He got his lordship by wiping some lord's arse! You couldn't pay me to take a title like that!" The younger guard laughed. Looking down at the peaceful scene below, his jealousy spilled out into lazy mockery. "Black Lion? More like Black Rat!"
"It's ridiculous! Standing on high alert every day when there hasn't been a single scout report! Even if he did attack, there's no way he could march straight to our walls without being seen!"
Below them, the main gate was thrown wide open. A chaotic throng of smallfolk milled about the entrance.
Farmers carrying hoes were trying to bring their spring vegetables into the keep to sell. Merchants with packhorses stood waiting for the guards to inspect their goods. Villagers embroiled in petty disputes crowded the entrance, clamoring for the lord's justice.
It was loud, disorganized, and entirely routine. It was a picture of absolute, mundane peace.
Within the crowd, a sharp-eyed farmer suddenly stopped complaining about the heat. He turned his head, rubbed his eyes, and stared upstream, toward the rushing waters descending from the Mountains of the Moon. He rubbed his eyes again, harder this time.
The surface of the river was glaring with sunlight, making it difficult to see. But behind the blinding reflection, there seemed to be a massive cluster of dark shapes.
The farmer lowered his hand and took a few steps toward the bank, squinting.
"Hey, look at that. What is that?" he asked, elbowing the man next to him.
"What?" The man followed his gaze, seeing only the distant, dark blobs on the water. "Logs, probably. Timber cut from the mountains drifting downstream."
The farmer opened his mouth to reply, but the dark shapes were already moving closer. And faster.
A strange, choking gurgle caught in the farmer's throat. He tried to scream, but pure terror paralyzed his vocal cords.
The annoyance on the other man's face froze, melting instantly into absolute, unadulterated horror.
"AHHHHHH!!!!!!"
A bloodcurdling shriek finally tore through the mundane chatter of the gate.
The young guard on the wall jolted, leaning over the battlement with an irritated scowl. "What are you idiots screaming about down there?!"
"You fools looking for the whip?!!!"
He had only recently become a man-at-arms for the lord, and he was already sick of the weak-kneed Ser Gyles making them stand watch for an impossible threat.
But when his gaze finally drifted toward the river, the blood vanished from his face as if sucked out by a leech.
He saw the army rising from the water.
The spear slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the stone beneath his feet.
The young guard's jaw dropped so wide it looked unhinged. His legs began to shake violently, knocking against the stone like a sieve.
Why were there no reports? This is impossible! How is this possible?!
"ENEMY ATTACK!!!!" His voice cracked, twisting into the shrill, desperate pitch of a slaughtered chicken. "ATTACK!!!"
"THE ENEMY IS HERE!!!!!"
The sluggish alarm bells finally began to ring, their frantic, arrhythmic clanging echoing over the rooftops of Willowbrook. Soldiers scrambled across the walls, shouting in panic.
At the gates, the smallfolk exploded into sheer pandemonium.
"AN ARMY!!! IT'S AN ARMY!!"
"THEY CAME FROM THE WATER!!"
"RUN!! GET INSIDE!!"
Wailing and screaming blurred into a single, terrifying roar. Driven by the primal instinct to survive, the crowd surged toward the only place they believed was safe: the open gates.
The mob became a stampede of frightened sheep, shoving and trampling one another, instantly jamming the narrow tunnel of the gatehouse with a solid wall of bodies.
A woman holding a child was shoved to the dirt. The child's cries were instantly swallowed beneath the crush of a hundred frantic boots.
Standing at the prow of the lead raft, Solomon saw the gates wide open. A surge of fierce joy hit him, though his face remained a mask of iron. This was beyond his wildest hopes; he had assumed they would arrive to shut gates and be forced into a prolonged siege.
He saw the chaos at the entrance. He saw the mob of bodies wedged so tightly that the heavy iron portcullis could not be lowered.
"Motherfucker," Solomon growled.
This was an opportunity handed down by the gods.
He ripped the Myr-style longsword from its scabbard, pointing the cold steel directly at the paralyzed, jammed gate. "SEIZE THE GATE!!!"
"SEIZE THE GATE!!!"
"SEIZE THE GATE!!!!!"
"SEIZE THE GATE!!!!!!!"
Solomon poured every ounce of breath in his lungs into the roar. His voice pitched higher and faster, tearing through the air like the shriek of a diving eagle, drowning out the chaos of the city.
"SEIZE THE GATE!!"
"SEIZE THE GATE!!!"
The soldiers on the rafts erupted into a unified, thunderous roar, their voices merging into an unstoppable flood.
Just as the city was about to be entirely consumed by the panic, the heavy thud of hooves rang out from within the walls.
A knight clad in full plate armor, wielding a master-forged longsword atop a massive destrier, forced his way out of the keep.
Behind him charged thirty heavy infantrymen in ringmail. They didn't shout for the crowd to part; they simply began hacking their way through their own panicking smallfolk, carving a literal path of blood and severed limbs to reach the entrance.
It was Ser Gyles Lege, the younger brother of Lord Roger. His face was a mask of ash and iron, his eyes burning with desperate fury.
"HOLD THE GATE!!" he roared with the voice of a thunderclap. "NOT ONE STEP BACK!!"
He knew the grim truth: if the gate fell, Willowbrook fell with it.
"ARCHERS!" Gyles screamed toward the battlements. "FIRE! KILL THOSE BASTARDS IN THE WATER!"
The archers on the walls finally snapped out of their daze. They drew their bows and released. The arrows rained down, finding easy marks among Solomon's unarmored farmers. Men screamed, tumbling from the rafts into the rushing river.
But Solomon didn't blink. This was a once-in-a-lifetime breach. If they missed this window, they would be bogged down in a siege while House Lege's vassals mobilized to crush them against the walls.
"IGNORE THEM!!!" Solomon roared, swinging his sword to deflect an arrow aimed at his chest. He saw men on his raft dropping to their knees, desperately trying to haul their drowning comrades out of the water.
"LEAVE THEM!! EVERYONE!!! SEIZE THE GATE!!!"
Stopping to save one life now would cost a hundred later. Solomon grabbed a soldier who was leaning over the edge of the raft, hauled him to his feet, and delivered a vicious backhand across his face. He bared his teeth, roaring over the din of battle.
"SEIZE THE GODDAMN GATE!!!!"
The soldiers leapt from the timber rafts, the freezing river water surging over their knees.
They churned through the thick, sucking mud of the shallows, launching a frantic charge toward the bank.
"HOLD THE LINE!" Ser Gyles spurred his warhorse forward, the first to meet the charge.
The knight's longsword swept down in a blinding arc of white steel. The farmer leading the charge didn't even have time to scream before his severed head was launched into the air.
The thirty heavily armed Lege veterans crashed into the shallows, forming a thin but unyielding wall of steel and shields. Their blades fell in merciless, disciplined rhythms, reaping the lives of the poorly armed farmers like wheat.
Solomon's men were, in the end, only mobilized peasants. Against professional soldiers armored in steel, their pitchforks and hoes were useless. They were hacked down, mutilated, and slaughtered in the surf.
The fanatical courage born of the promise of land began to waver in the face of brutal, professional butchery.
The momentum of the charge shuddered and stalled.
From above, the rain of arrows grew denser. The unarmored farmers fell one after another, their bodies thrashing agonizingly in the bloody, shallow waters of the riverbank.