Chapter 183

Stone Hedge.

At first glance, the Bracken stronghold looked ancient. But that impression was only skin deep. To my eye, Stone Hedge was less "old" than "long-suffering." Across a considerable stretch of history, this castle had endured every conceivable indignity. There had been several rebellions against the Hoares, all crushed without mercy; a shameful episode during the Conquest when a band of deserters sacked it; early in the Dance of the Dragons a Targaryen prince had seized it outright; and during the First Blackfyre Rebellion, the bitter hatred between Aegor Rivers and Bloodraven had turned the region into a battleground—making Stone Hedge a target not for Daemon Blackfyre, but for the royal forces seeking to strike at the home that had raised his fiercest general. Those were the more notable chapters in the history of the Bracken seat. There may have been others, but none I could recall offhand.

The creak of a rising iron portcullis pulled me out of my thoughts. Unhurried footsteps echoed through the massive gate arch. Lord Jonos Bracken came out to parley with me himself. A sturdy man well past his prime, coarse chestnut hair, dark stubble, a grim set to his face, likely on my account more than anything else.

"Lord Arryn." A greeting with no fawning in it, which spoke well of the old lord already. "You've come a long way from home."

"Simple greed, Lord Bracken." Just the two of us here, no need to dress things up. "I'll make this offer once: surrender the castle, disarm your men, and I'll take your treasury and half your stores. In return, none of your people come to harm, and the castle stays standing."

The terms were extortionate, humiliating even. No lord in his right mind would agree to them. At the other minor castles, bloodless surrenders had cost their lords half their treasury and two weeks' provisions for the besieging force, which in those cases never numbered more than a thousand men. Those terms were considered relatively bearable, and most had accepted them without much fuss.

"Since your father's day, the Vale and the Riverlands have stood as allies. We fought together against the Mad King's tyranny, put down the Greyjoy rebellions side by side. Together we are strength. Don't let greed tear apart nearly twenty years of a friendship."

"Yes, the Vale, the North, and the Riverlands were good friends once, but that alliance broke the moment Lysa Tully raised rebellion against me, and when the river lords abandoned the young wolf to his fate." The hypocrisy of it turned my stomach, and I turned to leave. "We'll meet on the field, then."

"Wait!" He gave ground, and I found myself curious what the old lord had come up with. "A hundred thousand gold dragons, and three weeks' provisions for your army." Bracken forced the words out through gritted teeth.

Generous. Blackwood had paid a hundred and fifty thousand gold dragons, fifty as ransom, the rest to see his old enemy beaten bloody. The trouble was, I'd already been paid to see Bracken's lands ravaged. As my beloved Golden Company liked to say, our word is gold, and I try to hold to my end of a bargain once it's made.

"Good luck to you in the wars ahead."

...

Walls, towers, barbicans, twisting corridors built for killing, iron-bound gates, machicolations, parapets lined with palisades, moats, drawbridges, arrow loops, the list runs on forever, but the most fiercely guarded, most fiercely attacked point in any castle is always the gate. And rightly so. Lose some other part of the castle, and the situation can often still be salvaged. Lose the gate, and the attackers have all but won. The stronger, better, more cunningly defended the gate, the calmer the defenders can afford to be.

In this respect, the Bracken castle lagged badly behind its neighbors. At first glance everything looked sound enough, but a closer look revealed two serious problems: the wooden gates were old, and the iron portcullis behind them was forged from poor quality metal. The first flaw I could understand well enough. The second was sheer idiocy, but it was an opening I intended to use.

It took five days to finish preparations for the assault. Men positioned, siege ladders built, the ram brought up within range, and a small surprise waiting for its moment. At dawn on the sixth day, a long horn call sounded the start of the attack.

For some reason, when defenders see a great many ladders going up against their walls, they instinctively assume the real slaughter will happen there, never once considering it might be a feint. It's an amusing quirk of psychology, and I made shameless use of it, spreading Bracken's already thin garrison thinly along the entire perimeter of the walls.

My army struck from every side at once. Steady pressure, but nothing reckless, no wholesale, disorganized charges thrown at the walls. I meant to wear the defenders down instead, particularly through repeated feint attacks that forced the Brackens to keep shuttling their reserves from one stretch of wall to another. In the middle of all this, the properly built battering ram, wheeled and roofed, rolled up to the gate. They tried to destroy it and failed. Within ten minutes the gate itself had given way, leaving only the iron portcullis as a second obstacle. Aside from some token arrow fire and a couple of pots of hot pitch dropped down, nothing stopped my men from reaching it. The ram itself was too large to fit through the archway to repeat its work there. For that, I had another surprise prepared.

I have always respected dwarves as a people, more, honestly, than I respect elves. Great craftsmen, celebrated warriors, tough, strong, enduring, and yet not counted among the immortals. Dwarven ingenuity sometimes produced things that would make even the sages of Númenor's hair stand on end, but in this case, what interested me was something far simpler: a hook and latch. A very basic mechanism, useful across a dozen trades, war included. We fixed the hooks where the iron bars crossed, gave the signal, and thirty riders came up from camp with specially rigged saddles built to take rope. A quick tie off, and twenty eight horses were hauling in unison against bars that, while not especially thick, would have withstood any ordinary assault. But this was no ordinary assault, and the portcullis couldn't survive that kind of abuse.

A great slab of iron tore free. The way into the heart of Stone Hedge stood open, and the army of the Vale set at once to every soldier's favorite pastime: looting, and killing. The castle had fallen. What became of the people inside it was none of my concern, save for sending a detachment to secure whatever hostages might be worth keeping alive.