Scene 1: The Charge
Dawn arrived in a shroud of grey mist, damp and clinging.
To the south, the sound of trumpets shattered the morning silence. The Tyrell Vanguard was awake.
Robert lay prone on a ridge line three hundred yards back into the treeline. He was covered in a blanket of moss and dead leaves. Next to him, Kye and the fifty hunters were statues of wood and leather, their heavy bows unstrung to keep the moisture out until the last second.
Below them lay the Stormlands encampment.
It was a masterpiece of theater.
Five hundred tents stood in neat rows. Two hundred campfires burned brightly, fed by piles of slow-burning wet oak that Robert's men had stacked before departing. The thick white smoke drifted through the camp, obscuring the streets and creating ghostly silhouettes.
From a distance, it looked like an army waking up to cook breakfast.
There were even sentries—straw dummies dressed in spare tabards, propped up against the perimeter stakes, their spears tied to the wood.
"Here they come," Kye whispered.
The ground began to tremble.
Out of the southern mist emerged the pride of the Reach. Two thousand heavy cavalry—the vanguard of the vanguard. They rode destriers draped in silk and chainmail. Their armor shone even in the dull light.
Leading them was a knight in armor of polished green enamel, his helm topped with a golden centaur. Lord Caswell, Lord of Bitterbridge. A man who loved tourneys more than tactics.
Caswell halted his line at the edge of the clearing. He raised his visor, staring at the smoky camp.
He saw the fires. He saw the "sentries." He saw the banner of the Crowned Stag flapping lazily above the command tent.
He did not see movement.
"They sleep!" Caswell shouted, his voice carrying over the field. "The traitors sleep in their beds!"
He turned to his knights.
"For Highgarden! For the King! The Stag is ours!"
It wasn't a military maneuver. It was a race. Every knight spurred his horse at once, desperate to be the first to capture Robert Baratheon.
The earth screamed under eight thousand hooves. The charge was magnificent and terrifying—a wall of steel thundering toward the silent camp.
Robert watched, his hand tightening on his dragonbone bow.
"Wait for it," he breathed.
The Tyrell knights crashed through the perimeter fence. They didn't slow down. They lowered their lances and skewered the "sentries," sending straw and sawdust exploding into the air.
Caswell rode straight for the command tent. He smashed through the canvas, his sword swinging to decapitate the rebel lord.
Slash.
The canvas collapsed. Inside, there was no Robert. There was only a table and a pile of firewood.
All around the camp, the sounds of confusion began to replace the roar of the charge.
Knights were hacking at empty tents. Horses were tripping over tent lines. Lances were impaled in the dirt.
"Empty!" a squire screamed. "The tents are empty!"
Lord Caswell spun his horse around in the ruins of the command tent. His face, visible through his open visor, twisted from triumph to confusion, and then to a cold, dawning horror.
He realized he wasn't a hero. He was a fool standing in a ghost town.
"Reform!" Caswell screamed, panic entering his voice. "Form ranks! It's a tr—"
Up on the ridge, Robert Baratheon rose from the moss like a bear waking from hibernation. He stood fully upright, his massive frame silhouetted against the dark woods.
He strung the dragonbone bow in one smooth, violent motion.
"Now," Robert said.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 12: The Hunter's Retreat
Scene 2: The Shot
"—ap!"
The word never left Lord Caswell's mouth.
THRUM.
The sound of Robert's bow releasing was like a whip crack that echoed off the valley walls.
The black-fletched arrow crossed the two hundred yards of morning mist faster than a thought. It didn't arc. Driven by one hundred and eighty pounds of dragonbone tension, it flew flat and straight.
It took Lord Caswell directly in the open visor.
There was a wet, heavy crunch that sickened the knights nearest to him. The heavy bodkin point shattered his teeth, punched through the back of his throat, severed the spine, and punched a hole through the back of the golden centaur helm.
Caswell went rigid. His sword slipped from his fingers. He didn't scream; he simply ceased to be. He toppled sideways off his white destrier, hitting the mud with the heavy, final clatter of dead weight.
But he did not fall alone.
"NOW!" Robert's command had already been given.
Fifty heavy bows sang in unison from the ridge. A cloud of black death hissed down into the confused mass of the vanguard.
These were not random shots fired into the crowd. These were hunter's shots.
Ser Moryn Tyrell, who had just opened his mouth to scream a warning, took a shaft through his throat gorget. The Standard Bearer of House Florent, struggling to keep the great fox banner upright in the wind, took an arrow in the eye. The banner collapsed into the mud, signaling a rout to the troops behind. Lord Meadows, distinguishable by his three-foot blue ostrich plume, took an arrow through his horse's neck. As the beast collapsed, a second arrow pinned his thigh to the saddle, trapping him under the crushing weight of his mount.
It was a massacre of the elite.
In the span of a single heartbeat, the Tyrell Vanguard lost its Commander, its Standard Bearer, and four of its senior captains.
For a second, there was silence. The charging knights reined in, staring at the corpse of their lord, an arrow the size of a spear jutting from his face.
Then, the panic broke.
"ARCHERS!" a squire screamed, his voice cracking with terror. "THE RIDGE! THEY ARE ON THE RIDGE!"
"Ambush!" another knight yelled, trying to wheel his horse around. "Fall back!"
Panic, cold and sharp, cut through the army. A leaderless army is a mob. A mob under invisible fire is a stampede.
Knights tried to turn their horses, but they collided with the ranks behind them. Squires dropped their lances to cover their heads with shields. The discipline of the Reach shattered under the weight of sudden, precise decapitation.
Up on the ridge, Robert lowered the massive bow. He watched the chaos below—the "Peacocks" dead in the dirt, the "Sheep" running in circles, trampling each other in their haste to escape the ghost camp.
He didn't fire a second arrow. He didn't need to. The command structure was broken. It would take them an hour to restore order—an hour Robert had just bought with a single piece of wood.
"Bows down," Robert ordered, his voice low and satisfied. "Fade."
The Hunters turned and vanished into the deep woods, melting away like smoke, leaving the Tyrells to fight their own fear.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 12: The Hunter's Retreat
Scene 3: The Phantom
Robert did not stay to watch the panic. He did not cheer.
As soon as the arrows were loosed, he turned his back on the slaughter.
"Move," he signaled.
The fifty hunters didn't run like frightened deer. They moved like wolves—a loping, silent trot that covered ground fast without breaking wind. They knew the terrain. They knew which ravines cut too deep for horses to follow and which creek beds hid their scent.
They slipped into the dense, ancient canopy of the deep woods. They carried only their bows and their water. They had no heavy mail to weigh them down, no wagons to protect.
Behind them, the screams of the dying Tyrell vanguard faded into the distance, replaced by the sound of wind in the leaves.
The Ridge - Twenty Minutes Later
Randyll Tarly rode his horse up the steep incline of the ridge, his face a mask of cold fury.
It had taken him twenty minutes to restore order to the chaotic mob below. He had forced the knights to stop tramping over Caswell's body and organized a skirmish line to storm the high ground.
He expected to find a rearguard. He expected to find a desperate knot of Stormlands rebels selling their lives to buy time for their King.
He crested the ridge with sword drawn.
"Die, trai—"
He stopped.
The ridge was empty.
There were no rebels. There were no bodies. There was only the matted moss where fifty men had knelt, and a single, heavy boot print deeply indented in the mud where a giant had drawn a bow.
Tarly dismounted. He walked to the edge of the ridge and looked down at the Stormlands camp.
From this height, the deception was insulting in its simplicity.
The "army" was gone. The "sentries" were straw. The "cookfires" were just piles of wet wood designed to make smoke.
But it was what was missing that chilled Tarly to the bone.
He looked at the mud tracks leading out of the camp towards the river.
There were no cart ruts. No broken wheels. No discarded pots or pans. No dropped spears.
Usually, when an army retreats, it bleeds equipment. Men throw away their shields to run faster. Wagons break axles and are abandoned. The road becomes a river of debris.
But this trail was clean.
"Where are they?" a young knight asked, breathless from the climb. "Did they rout into the swamps?"
Tarly knelt, touching the deep, orderly boot prints that vanished into the northern tree line.
"A rout is a panic," Tarly said quietly. "Men running for their lives drop their swords. They scatter."
He stood up, looking at the dark, impenetrable wall of the forest. The Stormlanders hadn't scattered. They had dissolved. They had stripped themselves of every ounce of fat, killed the Tyrell commander to freeze the pursuit, and then walked away into terrain where heavy horse could not follow.
"They didn't rout," Tarly said, sheathing his sword with a sharp click. "And they didn't run."
He looked at the empty woods, realizing for the first time that the "Rebel" Robert Baratheon was not a brute with a hammer, but a hunter who had just lured a bear into a pit.
"They simply left."
[End of Chapter 12]