Chapter 80: The Failed Raid
More than seventy knights in full armor had been waiting in the treeline between Red Lion Bridge and Iron Fist Keep for the better part of a day.
"I'm done, Loras." A young knight pulled his helmet off and knocked it against his thigh in frustration, the sound of steel on steel carrying through the trees. "My shoulder feels like it's been welded shut."
Of the men Loras had assembled, only a handful of the older knights had seen real fighting. None of them had ever commanded anything larger than a household guard. What they had was enthusiasm, good horses, and the particular certainty of young men who had talked themselves into something dangerous without having done the arithmetic on what dangerous actually cost.
Renly had given the order. Loras had given the plan. And now seventy knights in full plate sat in a summer wood swatting at mosquitoes while their horses stripped the undergrowth down to bare stems.
Someone had ridden back to King's Landing for food — the warhorses had been making do with whatever grass they could reach, which was not the diet of animals expected to charge.
"They'll come out," Loras said. "Hold a little longer."
He wasn't in his tournament armor today. The silver and sapphires had stayed behind. What he wore now was plain white plate — functional, anonymous, built for the work rather than the crowd.
"I want to go back and sleep in a real bed," another knight said. Several of the others made sounds of agreement. The initial fire had been burning down steadily since the first night, the way it always does when the moment of action keeps failing to arrive.
"Will everyone shut up." The knight who had gone back to the city for food straightened in his saddle. He had the tone of a man delivering news that had changed his assessment of the situation. "The King's Gate has been replaced. I saw it myself — Stark men, not Gold Cloaks. I recognized a few of them. One of them was big enough to give the Mountain pause and I am not mistaken about that."
His brother leaned in. "Same. We had to come back through the Mud Gate to avoid them. They were watching the roads in." He looked around at the assembled knights with the expression of someone who had arrived at a conclusion he didn't entirely like. "We are not walking back into that city until this is finished. There's no going back to King's Landing if we leave empty-handed."
That quieted the complaining, though it replaced it with something that wasn't much better — the tight, edgy silence of men who have realized the door behind them has closed.
Renly stepped forward. He had the advantage over the rest of them of wearing lighter armor — less protection, more decoration — and the further advantage of not having fully grasped that his plan had problems.
"When this is done," he said, with the easy confidence of a man who genuinely believed in his own momentum, "I will not forget what each of you has given today. House Baratheon remembers its own."
A scout came through the trees at a trot. "My lord. They've left the keep."
The young knight beside Loras had his lance up before the scout finished his sentence. "Let's —"
The older knight to his left drove an elbow into his ribs, hard. "Finish that sentence and I will personally see to it that you never finish another. They've just cleared the gates. We are still inside the Blackwater River Guard's patrol range, you absolute —"
"No arguments." Loras struck the shaft of his lance against the nearest tree, sharp and final. The sound cut through the muttering. "Quiet. All of you."
He turned to the scout. "Numbers."
"More than two hundred. Around twenty White Cloaks from Iron Fist Keep's garrison, twenty from the Bastard Guard." The scout hesitated, glancing at Loras. "Roughly forty from House Tyrell's escort. The remainder are nobles and their retainers — unarmored, no formation. They'll scatter on first contact."
"After Joffrey is taken," Loras said to Renly, keeping his voice level, "I'll ride to the Tyrell guard personally. They'll stand down."
Renly nodded. "Prepare to move."
There was the usual noise of men convincing themselves and their horses that they were ready for something neither had been fully prepared for. Then it settled, and seventy knights sat their warhorses in the shade of the trees and watched the road.
The procession from Iron Fist Keep was the procession of a wedding's second day — the kind that forms when guests have eaten well for two nights running and are now navigating the pleasant, slightly headachy transition back to ordinary life. Nobles rode in loose clusters, talking, comparing opinions on the feast. Servants walked alongside wagons piled with gifts and luggage. Somewhere in the middle of the column, the Tyrell wheelhouse rolled on, its curtains half-open to the morning air.
Mace had the window fully down and was conducting an enthusiastic running commentary with every rider who came within earshot, collecting compliments about the wedding with the focused energy of a man engaged in important work.
At the front of the column, Elon — captain of the Iron Fist White Cloaks, a compact man with the unhurried watchfulness of someone who had been doing this long enough to trust his instincts — felt the road change beneath his horse's hooves.
He pulled up and held still.
Not vibration exactly. A quality of the ground — the particular way sound traveled through packed earth when a lot of weight was moving toward you from a distance.
"Defensive formation!" His voice cut through the road noise before he'd consciously finished the thought. "Cavalry — a large force — form up behind the wagons! My lords, back to the keep — ride now!"
The procession fractured. Nobles who had been half-asleep in their saddles wheeled their horses and dug in their heels. Servants grabbed children and pulled them off the road. Several wagons had already been turned sideways by the time the thunder of hooves became audible to everyone.
Elon requisitioned three of the nearest supply wagons with a gesture and a shout, getting them braced across the road as a rough barrier. His eyes went to the wheelhouse.
"Arm me." Joffrey's voice — sharp, no hesitation — came from the middle of the column. His household guard was already moving, four men working simultaneously to get his plate buckled into place.
Joffrey caught hold of Gendry's arm as the boy started to turn his horse. Gendry — black-haired, broad across the shoulders in a way that was going to become something considerable in a few more years — had a warhammer across his back and the uncertain expression of someone very young who has just been placed somewhere important.
"Gendry." Joffrey's voice was quieter now. "I should call you brother."
Gendry stared at him. "Your Highness — I'm a bastard —"
"You have Baratheon blood. That means Tommen and Myrcella are your brother and sister. Right now what I need from you is to ride back with them — get them to the keep, find Henry, tell him what's happening." Joffrey let go of his arm and turned to look at the road.
"Joffrey." Gendry's face had gone red. "Come with us. There's no shame in —"
"My name is Joffrey Baratheon." He pulled the antlered helm down over his face and drew his sword. "My father didn't run at the Trident. I'm not running here."
Gendry looked at him for one more second — at the helmet, at the sword, at the absolute refusal in the set of his shoulders. Then he reached back and took the warhammer off his horse.
"You said I'm your brother," Gendry said. "Then I stay."
From the wheelhouse came a sound that was half groan and half outrage, and Mace Tyrell's face appeared in the window, cycling rapidly through several colors.
"First someone tries to kill them at the wedding," he said, to no one in particular. "Now — this — in the middle of —"
"Mace." Lady Olenna's voice from inside the wheelhouse had the quality of a single word that contained a complete sentence. She was looking at her son with the particular expression of a woman who has been testing the material for seventy years and knows exactly where the weak points are.
Mace's mouth closed. His back straightened. He turned to look at the road, then at his knights, then at Joffrey, and something settled in his face that hadn't been there a moment before.
"Alerie." He turned to his wife. "Ride. Take the children."
Lady Alerie Tyrell stepped down from the wheelhouse and was on a horse before he finished the sentence, moving with the unhurried competence of a woman who had been the quiet backbone of Highgarden's household for twenty years. She brought her horse alongside Joffrey's.
"I can ride," she said simply. "I'll take them back."
Joffrey lifted Tommen and then Myrcella up without ceremony. Tommen grabbed Lady Alerie's cloak in both fists. Myrcella leaned back against him, silent, watching Joffrey.
"Keep hold," Joffrey told them. He stepped back. "Lady Alerie — I'm trusting you with them."
She rode.
Tommen was crying Joffrey's name by the time the horse reached a gallop, the sound thinning and fading into the noise of the road.
Renly's cavalry came out of the trees at two hundred yards and closing.
Mace Tyrell climbed to the top of the wheelhouse.
He was not fully armored. Someone had managed to get a breastplate onto him and nothing else, which gave him the look of a man who had found half a suit of armor and decided it was sufficient. He stood on the wheelhouse roof with his sword raised and his face flushed and his voice carrying further than anyone had expected it to.
"Knights of Highgarden! Charge!"
Garlan Tyrell was already moving — leading the forty Tyrell knights in as clean a line as men on feast horses could manage. They weren't on warhorses. They were on riding horses pressed into cavalry work, and the fact that the charge covered fifty yards at any meaningful speed was a testament to Garlan's horsemanship and the discipline his father had somehow instilled without anyone noticing.
Renly's men came the other way on proper warhorses that had spent a day eating grass in the woods.
At fifty yards both lines leveled lances and committed. At twenty the horses could no longer be turned. The lines hit each other with the sound of a wave breaking against stone — lances shattering, horses screaming, men going down on both sides — more than twenty from each line unhorsed in the first exchange, the ones who could still stand drawing swords before they'd finished falling.
"Long live King Renly!" The cry went up from one side.
"Long live Highgarden!" from the other.
Both sides had substantially less to show for the charge than either had planned.
Then the crossbows fired.
Twenty bolts came from behind the wagon barrier in a single volley, flat and fast, the sound of Myr steel on a taut string. Another twenty of Renly's men went down. What had been a weakened cavalry force became a scattered one — men pulling horses around, breaking formation, looking for a direction that didn't have a crossbow pointed at it.
Renly wheeled his horse. "He equipped the White Cloaks with Myr crossbows?" He looked around, genuinely surprised. "Henry equipped all of them?"
No one answered him.
Loras was not beside him. The white armor was not visible anywhere in the immediate vicinity.
"Shoot them down!" Mace, still on top of the wheelhouse, was brandishing his sword at the retreating cavalry with the energy of a man who has discovered a talent for battlefield commentary. His breastplate was on crooked. He did not appear to notice or care.
The Crown Prince's Guard — twenty men in formation, Joffrey at their head and Gendry half a length behind — came around the wagon barrier and drove into the remaining raiders before they could regroup. It was not a long fight. The raiders had lost cohesion, their horses were tired, and the men who had spent a day waiting in the woods in full armor and come out the other side of a failed charge were not men with much left to give.
"Long live Prince Joffrey! Ours is the Fury!"
The loudest voice belonged to a broad-shouldered young man in a horned helmet, warhammer rising and falling with the particular efficiency of someone who had figured out what he was doing.
Six riders escaped. They formed up around a knight in gilded armor with an antlered helm and rode hard down the road toward King's Landing, and the tired horses in the pursuit couldn't close the gap.
The survivors were disarmed by the Tyrell knights and the Bastard Guard working together, prisoners moved to the roadside, weapons collected.
Mace was helped down from the wheelhouse roof by two servants who had been watching with visible anxiety and were relieved to have something useful to do. He walked to Joffrey still glowing with the particular satisfaction of a man who has been in proximity to a victory and is processing it as personal achievement.
"A decisive action, Your Highness," Mace said warmly. He began describing his own role in the engagement — the order to charge, the timing of it, the overall command decisions — with the fluency of a man whose account of events had already been fully formed before the fighting stopped.
Joffrey listened with the patient attention of a young man who has been taught how to receive people and what it costs.
He was still listening when a prisoner was brought forward — a knight in white plate, an arrow through his left leg, the shoulder dented badly from a hammer blow. The man's head was down. His sword had already been taken.
He looked up when they stopped him in front of Mace.
"Father," Loras said. The word came out quietly, with the particular weight of a man who has arrived at the destination his choices were always going to bring him to and finds it exactly as unpleasant as it was always going to be.
Mace Tyrell's face went through several expressions in quick succession, and settled on something that was not quite any of them.
The road was quiet except for the horses and the distant sounds of the prisoners being organized further down the column.
Joffrey looked at Loras. Then at Mace. Then back at Loras.
He said nothing. He waited.
[Reader Support Milestones]
500 Power Stones → +1 Chapter
10 Reviews → +1 Chapter
Enjoyed the read? Leave a review.
20+advanced chapters on P1treon Soulforger