Chapter 136: Where the Banner Stands

Last, Arthur looked at the two markers that mattered most, and his voice lost the last of its warmth. “Send to Diana and Smith: reinforcements are coming. They hold the line from Pheasant Hall to Cornhall at any cost, and Pheasant Hall above all does not fall. Tell Diana I trust her walls. Tell Smith his Bannermen Guard is about to show the Reach, once again, who does the hunting in this country. When the levies have gathered, I will come to Pheasant Hall myself and take command of the whole line.”

The orders went out, and Casterly Rock ran like a machine whose springs had been wound to the last tooth. Riders scattered to every horizon and the beacon fires climbed again. Ser Rhaegar took his column toward the Golden Tooth. Lord Gawen turned back into the hills. Alwin buried himself in wagons, levies, and lists.

And Arthur put on the worn dark leather he had fought his first war in, belted on his greatsword, and mounted among a guard of Battanian veterans. He did not look back at Casterly Rock, majestic and suddenly a little empty behind him. His eyes went northeast, to the country where the fires burned hottest and where the fate of the west and the Trident would be settled.

“Ride. To Pheasant Hall.”

Hooves struck the stone, and the young duke left the seat of his power to go where his soldiers were dying. This time he would not command the war from behind a map. He would stand in it. The Reach had bared its fangs. Now the world would learn how sharp the claws and teeth of this griffin of mingled bloods and sworn oaths truly were.

When Arthur led the last of the Westerlands reinforcements and his personal guard through country burned twice over and came at last within sight of Pheasant Hall, the front was worse than the reports and, in a way the reports could not carry, better. The walls stood like the bones of something a great beast had gnawed. Scorch marks blackened the stone, catapult craters pitted it, and the breaches had been stuffed with rough timber and packed earth by men too tired to make them pretty. Along the ramparts half the banners hung in ribbons, but the guardian banner of House Greyoak and the deep green war flags of the Battanian clans still snapped in the smoke, stubborn as everything else on that wall. The defenders’ faces were exhaustion, dried blood, and a resolve that had gone past fear into something almost numb. Under the shouting of their officers and Diana’s calm hand, they hauled rolling stones and logs, strung the ballistae, and carried the wounded down without a wasted word.

There was no grand welcome, which suited Arthur. Diana came down from the command room of the keep, gave him a soldier’s salute, and gave him the situation with it. The Reach’s offensive had crested over the past five days. Pheasant Hall had weathered at least three great assaults from multiple directions, and the walls had been in danger more than once, held by the desperation of the defenders and by the Bannermen Guard’s constant harassment beyond the lines. The cost was written everywhere: casualties heavy, arrows and fire oil nearly spent, morale close to its floor. The pressure toward Cornhall was just as bad, the line there breached in several places, where General Smith fought a brutal tug-of-war of strike and counterstrike, leaning on the Bannermen Guard’s fieldcraft and the broken ground.

“The Guard’s main strength is pinned in the hills around Cornhall by the main strength of the Reach,” Diana said. Her voice had gone raspy, but the order of her thoughts had not. “They cannot pull away to reinforce us. The Reach has changed its manner. They are no longer set on one place. They mean to crush the whole line at once. Reinforcements are gathering behind Pheasant Hall, but they need time to sort themselves and learn the ground. My lord, we need a victory. Even a small one. Something to lift the men and break their rhythm.”

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Arthur set a hand on her shoulder, which startled her more than the siege had, and offered no hollow comfort. “You have done well, Diana. Hand the defense of the city to me. Go and help Alwin with the reinforcements as they arrive, the sorting, the assignments, the supplies, and above all keep the grain roads and the paths for the wounded open. From this hour, Pheasant Hall is mine to hold.”

His gaze moved over the soldiers nearby, and backs straightened under it. He raised his voice until the wall could hear him.

“Soldiers. I know what you are. Tired, hurting, and short the brothers and friends you started with. The roses of the Reach believe numbers and fury will bury us. They have forgotten what the ground under their feet is called. It is called the Westerlands. The walls in front of them are made of the rock of Casterly Rock and the blood of Riverlands men. The war songs they hear are the oaths of Battania, a thousand years old and never once put out.”

“I, Arthur Greyoak, stand here with you. From this moment, where my sword points is the enemy. Where my banner stands is the line. There is no ground behind us to give. Behind us are our homes, our people, and the peace we bled to buy. The Reach wants a war to the end? Good. We will show them the end. Let them learn what wakes when the stubbornness of the Westerlands and the wealth of the Riverlands are bound to the unbroken spirit of Battania.”

“For the Westerlands. For the Riverlands. For everything we have sworn to keep. Fight to the death!”

“Fight to the death!” The roar that came back was raspy, and it was real. From an army scraping its own limit, it rose along the wall like something poured back into empty men. The duke had come to stand on their stone, and that was worth more than a convoy of arrows.

The days that followed were crueler than the days before, and steadier. Arthur did not sit behind the walls and endure. He knew wall work, whether from hard experience or from gifts he did not explain, and he had the bones of the system Diana had built to work with, so his changes were small, fast, and exact. He mixed the most seasoned Battanian veterans with Westerlands daredevils into mobile fire brigades and threw them at whichever stretch of wall was cracking. He stood on the worst of the towers himself, turned stray arrows with the great unsharpened sword that meant more as a banner than a blade, and called the counterattacks from where the men could see him do it. His presence became a pillar the defense leaned on, and the defense knew it.

At the same time, riders kept a thin, constant thread between Pheasant Hall and Smith’s running war outside Cornhall. Arthur did not order him back. He ordered him looser. Smith was to keep harassing, splitting, and cutting at the flanks and supply lines of the armies pressing Pheasant Hall, bolder and less predictable than before, and to aim where it hurt: the assembly yards where the Reach built its siege engines, and the officers who made its columns move. For the highest-risk work, the raids meant to decapitate or sabotage, Arthur authorized him to spend the best he had, the Fian champions and the veteran Night Raiders of the Bannermen Guard.

“Do not fear casualties. Make them hurt, break their deployments, and never let them give the siege their whole mind.” That was the only instruction Smith received, and the only one he needed.

So the wall held, and the hills bled, and the fate of the Westerlands and the Riverlands hung by its fingers from a corner of the southwest. It was there, on the scorched stone of Pheasant Hall, that the winds from every other quarter of the continent found Arthur, carrying blood and conspiracy in equal measure, and forced him to lift his eyes from his own wall to the larger board on which everyone’s life was being played.