Chapter 142: Fire on the Shore

Midnight, outside Seagard.

The Vale camp sat against a low, wind-sheltered rise along the coast, fenced and ditched with real competence. The fires were burning down to coals, a few lamps glowed on the watchtowers, and the sea kept its flat, patient rhythm against the shingle. After days of fruitless probing at Seagard’s walls, and with word arrived of the truce at Pheasant Hall and of western cavalry riding north, this vanguard, commanded by Ser Donnel Waynwood, a distant cousin of Petyr Baelish, had settled into a wary in-between: its orders were to apply pressure and wait for an opening, not to storm anything. Most of the camp slept. Only the boots of the watch broke the quiet.

What came for them was not the sortie from Seagard they had half-expected. It was thunder out of the southern dark.

“Attack! Westerlands cavalry!”

The cry lived for a heartbeat before the world drowned it: iron hooves in their thousands, and beneath them the low, hungry war-cries of Battania. Eight thousand mixed riders of the west and the clans came out of the night like a steel flood, without pause and without formation, and struck the weaker southern and eastern fences in the most brutal way cavalry can be used, which is all at once.

Arthur led the breaching wedge himself, Battanian riders and western heavy horse at its bone. They rode the fences down, hacked with axes, drove with spears, and the crude timber opened like a scab. Warhorses screamed over the ditches and came down among the tents, hooves through canvas, blades falling on men still fighting their way out of their blankets with their armor half-laced. Close behind poured the Battanian Rangers and the noble youths with hunting bows, javelins, and hand axes, widening every tear the horse had made, dropping with clean arrows and thrown steel any officer or knot of men that tried to become resistance, and spreading along the breach instead of driving for the center, torches flying from their hands into tents, grain wagons, and haystacks.

“Fire! Burn their fodder and their grain!”

“Leave the runners! Break the body!”

“For the duke! Kill!”

Arthur was at the front of it, greatsword going in long strokes, and a Vale knight who had managed to reach his saddle went down horse and all beneath one of them. He was not sorting his opponents. There was only burning canvas and running shapes, and the purpose held cold and clear beneath the roar: chaos, not annihilation; the camp’s will and its supplies, not its last man.

The camp became a sea of fire and blood in the time it takes to tell it. Ser Donnel came out of the command tent into a scene from the last day of the world, his force stunned past organizing, men rushing like headless things, cut down or ridden down before their hands found weapons. He gathered what guards he could for a counterstroke and was marked at once by a pack of Battanian riders and ringed before it began.

“Back! Back to the sea! To the ships!” he roared, and it was despair with a voice. The battle was lost; what remained was the arithmetic of how much of himself and his men he could carry off the beach.

The remnant threw down shield and helm and stumbled crying through the surf toward the transports and small warships in the shallows, and found the night had one more author. Several ships trying to win their anchors were already burning, struck by scorpion bolts and fire arrows from a handful of fast hulls that had ghosted in from the open water: Lord Jason’s squadron, arrived exactly where the map said it should be. Caught between land and sea with fire on both, the Vale vanguard came entirely apart.

The battle, if the word fits, lasted less than an hour. When the first grey light cut the smoke on the horizon, the camp outside Seagard was a charred ruin stinking of scorched flesh and the sweetness of blood. Fifteen hundred Vale men at the least lay dead in the wreck of it or along the tideline. The rest had clawed aboard whatever floated and fled for open water, leaving behind nearly all their stores, their grain, and their engines. Ser Donnel Waynwood himself was taken, badly wounded.

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The gates of Seagard swung open and the defenders came out shouting with the joy of men who had expected to die, and Arthur had no time for any of it, and did not even enter the walls.

“Count the losses, treat the wounded, put out the fires, and mend Seagard’s defenses,” he told the port’s commander, Lord Jason’s nephew, as fast as the man could take it in. “Every prisoner inside under close guard. Word to Lord Jason at once: the landing is broken. He keeps his patrols, and he doubles his watch along the Vale’s own coast. Baelish may answer this.”

“My lord, you and the men, surely some rest—” the commander began, looking at the blood-stiffened riders swaying in their saddles.

“There is no time.” Arthur’s eyes were already northeast, toward the heart of the Trident and Maegor’s Hold. “When the rebels hear what happened here they will either fold or do something desperate. We break their spirit and take the ringleaders before they finish deciding which.” He turned to Kator and the officers, as spent as he was and as fierce. “Every man who can still ride, with me. Maegor’s Hold. Let us go and ask these loyal subjects who raised the trout exactly whose castle their duke is a guest in.”

The answer was a hoarse roar, and no hesitation. Without a proper drink or a bite of hard bread, the column that had just gutted a camp swung back into the saddle, thinner than it had started, from casualties and from men and horses simply emptied along the road, and higher-hearted than ever, because nothing feeds tired soldiers like a clean, decisive win. Like a pack of wolves that had forgotten what rest was, they turned along the tributaries of the Trident and ran for the heart of the rebellion.

At Maegor’s Hold in the eastern Riverlands, the news arrived like plague: the Vale army broken in a night outside Seagard, and the duke’s cavalry descending on the east like soldiers out of the sky. What it bred among the rebel lords was not resolve. It was panic, and then division.

The rising’s core was a handful of minor eastern nobles: Ser Reymond Vance of Maegor’s Hold, who styled himself its lord and traced a distant line to the Vances of Wayfarer’s Rest, and Ser Harris Harroway of Lord Harroway’s Town, with a few lesser names around them. They had risen in haste, some because Arthur’s consolidation of the Trident had cost them, some out of old sentiment for House Tully, some seduced outright by Vale messengers murmuring about restored glory, and all of them emboldened by the sails off Seagard. Between them they mustered no more than three or four thousand, mostly levied peasants stiffened by a few knights, in gear and training that would not have flattered a garrison. The plan had been simple: let the Vale pin Seagard and the western strength, raise noise in the east, draw in the fence-sitters, and squeeze concessions from a distracted duke, with the sweeter dream behind it of restoring Tully rule, since with Edmure kept at Casterly Rock a puppet could always be found, or a regency claimed. Arthur’s speed, and his appetite for finishing things, had not been in the plan.

“What do we do? His cavalry could be here within the hour! How do a few thousand of ours stop that?” Ser Harris paced the council chamber of Maegor’s Hold, and nothing of the fire he had worn at the rising’s start survived on his face.

“Calm yourself.” Reymond Vance forced steadiness into his voice while his eyes betrayed him. “The walls are strong and cavalry carries no engines. What can he do to me? We hold, we wait for the Vale to come again, or for the other risings—”

“The Vale has been driven into the sea! And the others?” Harris laughed, and it was ugly. “Listen to the roads! Rhaegar Spicer is mustering at the Golden Tooth, Gawen Westerling is moving from the Crag, and every lord who flirted with us a fortnight ago is suddenly shouting about suppressing the rebellion. We have been sold.”

The argument never reached its end. From beyond the walls came the thunder of hooves and the cries of the men on the ramparts.

Arthur’s cavalry had come, and they did not assault. They paraded, slow and deliberate, around Maegor’s Hold, displaying captured Vale banners and armor to the walls, and shot their letters over them demanding surrender, weighted with bloody fragments of Ser Donnel Waynwood’s harness. At the same time a picked detachment under Kator peeled away and struck straight for Lord Harroway’s Town, the weaker of the rebellion’s two pivots.

From the battlements Ser Harris watched the smoke rise over his own lands where Kator was setting his fires, then looked at the silent, terrible horsemen below, then at the allies beside him gone the same color as the stone, and whatever remained of his luck and his ambition drowned together in cold fear. That afternoon Lord Harroway’s Town yielded without a blow, and by evening Kator delivered Ser Harris Harroway and his chief accomplices, bound, to the camp outside Maegor’s Hold.

“Reymond Vance!” Arthur sat his warhorse before the walls, and his voice was not loud and carried to every man on them. “Look who this is. Remember what the Vale found outside Seagard. One last chance: open your gates and hand over every soul who made this rebellion, and I may spare your family and the fools you dragged into it. Refuse, and on the day these walls come down there will not be a dog left alive in Maegor’s Hold that answered to the name of Vance.”