Chương 11

Ser Arys Oakheart Hesitating, Arys looked toward the older man for orders, a lean veteran with a weathered face, the one who had called the charge against the archers. The older knight faltered too, and he did not look at the charging Ser Willam. For some reason, his eyes were on a younger man at his shoulder, dark-haired, taller than most, and with violet eyes that didn't belong on any face Arys had seen outside of paintings.

Odd, that an older knight would look to someone younger, but the violet-eyed knight simply drew a breath, said something about orders, and went after the banner. The men around him followed without being asked. So Arys went with them. Around and in front of him, the Reachmen ran, shouting names and oaths into the chilly wind, and he ran with them because standing still would have been worse. Charging after cavalry into unknown hills was the kind of order that got men killed. Arys knew it.

The violet-eyed knight and the veteran seemed to know it too. But standing still meant dishonor. Meant accusations of cowardice. And he could not have that. His lady mother would call this foolishness. She would be right, probably. She was usually right, which was the most irritating thing about her. Ahead, Ser Willam's squirrel banner caught the morning light, moving fast toward the mouth of the pass. The land narrowed there, the hills pressing in close on either side, the grass giving way to rougher ground.

Arys watched the last of the Ironborn cavalry disappear between the slopes and felt something cold settle into his chest. They were being pulled. He could feel it in the same way he sometimes felt a wrong step beneath him in the yard before his foot had fully landed. But stopping was its own kind of failure.

He had left Old Oak without his lady mother's blessing, without her men, without anything except his horse and his armor and a name that meant precisely nothing to Lord Mace Tyrell or anyone else for that matter. With Lady Arwyn Oakheart, disobedience had its price. He knew that better than most. She would do everything short of disowning him for this, and he needed something to show for it. xxx The pass opened into a shallow bowl between the hills, and the Ironborn were waiting at the far end of it.

They came out in an organized file from behind the rise. They walked out in close order and stopped, and by the time the Reachmen had spread themselves across the mouth of the bowl, there was a line of Ironborn infantry already formed up with the slope at their backs. Better armed than the archers at the beach, properly armored most of them, shields locked and weapons out. More of them than the Reachmen, though not overwhelmingly so. Perhaps half again their number. Ser Willam's trumpeter called the halt.

His banner planted itself in the center as the Reachmen formed up in a rough two-deep line, dressed across the width of the bowl. Something hot and immediate moved through Arys's chest. This. This was what he had come for, not the chaos of the beach or shivering inside a wet dinghy. An army facing an army. A line of men against a line of men, and room enough to do something worthy of note. His mother would hear of it eventually. They all would. He would bring honor to House Oakheart.

He would make himself a name that traveled, that climbed, that reached the ears of the right people at the right moments. King Robert filled his court with men he admired. Men who had done things. A knight who distinguished himself here, today, on an island no one had wanted to fight for, might find a white cloak waiting for him at the end of it. Maidens would weep when he donned it.

Bards would set the weeping to music, and his wastrel brothers would hear the songs and know exactly what he thought of their example. Arys grinned to himself as the line settled, men pressing shields together, finding their footing in the grass. He and the group he had attached himself to ended up in the second rank, left of center. Too far back.

He wanted to be in the front of it, where the fighting would be thickest, but pushing through men-at-arms and levies to claim a spot that wasn't his would make him look green and desperate rather than eager. He stayed where he was.

"This is folly," the violet-eyed knight said beside him. Arys looked at him. The man was watching the Ironborn line settle, jaw set, not afraid exactly, but not smiling either.

"Afraid of some Ironborn scum, ser?" The words came out more sharply than he intended, but he didn't soften them.

"A single Reachman is worth five of these rocks-and-salt savages."

"I fear only the obvious." The man's voice was even.

"Their cavalry wheeled off and disappeared. Infantry pins us here, then their riders come back and take our flank." Arys opened his mouth. Closed it again. He was glad he didn't have much time to think on it, as soon the Ironborn line came forward at a walk, then broke into a run over the last twenty yards. The sound of them hitting the Reachmen line was like timber coming down, a massive cracking impact that rolled all the way to the second rank.

He felt it through the man in front of him as the man's back pressed against his shield, weight coming through suddenly and hard. Arys planted his feet and shoved back. He got his sword up over the man's shoulder, angled in like a spear, searching for the gap between gorget and helmet, and found it. The Ironborn seized. Two more took the space before the body had fully dropped to the ground.

When he tried the same angle again, he caught the flat of the man-at-arms' own blade instead, the swords ringing hard against each other. The Ironborn in front of them nearly got his axe through the scramble.

"Watch it, fool!" The man-at-arms turned half around, face red, eyes wide. Mouth suddenly dry, Arys pulled his sword back, swallowing. He almost got the man killed. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. He watched the line after that rather than forcing his own openings, waiting, letting the rhythm of it come to him.

Further along, the Ironborn found a weak spot and began to push through, and Arys's heart lurched, but then Ser Willam came up from behind the center with his household knights and plugged it, and the line steadied. Then the horn came on the far side of the bowl. Three short notes.

"There," the violet-eyed man said, pointing. Arys turned and saw them. The Ironborn cavalry had come around from behind the western hill, and they were angling in a wide arc that would bring them down onto the left end of the Reachmen line. Thirty-odd riders moving at a gathered canter.

"They'll smash our left flank," Arys heard himself say. A hand closed on his surcoat and he was moving before he had decided to move, the violet-eyed knight pulling him and the men nearest to them out of the second rank and turning them toward the open ground to the left. Other men came, pulled or following, a ragged group of perhaps twelve pulling clear of the line and running at an angle toward the approaching horses. His body understood it before his mind did. Running.

Arys would've called it cowardice to run from a battle had they not been running straight toward the enemy cavalry. They stopped on the leftmost edge of the line, spreading themselves in a thin curve to cover the flank, and Arys looked at the horses coming and felt the weight of his own body as he had never quite felt it before. The ground through the soles of his boots. The inside of his throat. The particular heaviness of his sword arm.

"You want to stop a cavalry charge with no pikes?" an older man-at-arms said.

"Not even spears?"

"We hold, or the line collapses," the violet-eyed knight said. The lean veteran gave a single nod.

"Hold or die." Beside him, the younger man-at-arms, the one with the red eyes from the beach, said nothing. Just set his feet. Arys had trained the charge a hundred times at Old Oak, always on horseback, always the one coming forward. He had imagined what it might feel like to be on the other side of it in the abstract way boys imagine things they haven't experienced. The abstract and the real were nothing alike.

The horses were already large and growing larger, the sound of them building through the ground beneath him, and his legs felt strange, joints slightly wrong. He kept his feet planted. He would not be the one who ran. Reaching down, the violet-eyed knight drew his blade across the grass in a clean line.

"They shall not pass this mark." Something moved through the group, straightening spines, tightening jaws. Arys felt it in his own chest, a sudden clarity that came up under the fear like a hand lifting a drowning man. He gripped his sword. Raised his shield. Watched the horses come. Fifty yards.

"Hold," the man said. Thirty." Hold." They hit. Faster than he expected. Not all of them, though. Several riders saw the line hold and veered at the last moment, splitting off toward the beach, the Harlaw quartered banners moving with them. But most came on, and the ones who came on found that horses, for all their size and speed, did not willingly run into a wall of men who didn't move.

The front riders hauled at their reins and the animals reared or stumbled, and the men coming behind piled into them, and suddenly there were horses going down and men being thrown and the whole front of the charge was a mess of screaming animals and cursing riders. Only one man in their line broke, scrambling back on the grass in hands and knees, but the rest held. The riders who kept their seats came at them from horseback, hacking down. Steel rang and rang.

One horseman angled straight at Arys, sword coming around in a flat arc, and he ducked under it and cut at the leg below the stirrup as the animal stepped past. The man swore and twisted, and his horse shifted under him, and when he tried to recover Arys was already inside his guard. The animal rode away with a dead man atop its saddle. The Ironborn behind the front lines, the ones that managed to stop in time, chose to dismount and came at them on foot. Two of them found Arys at the same moment.

The first came with an axe, short-hafted and quick, and Arys caught it on his shield and felt the impact travel up through his shoulder. The second was circling to his right, looking for an angle. He couldn't watch both of them properly. As he turned to keep the circling man in front of him, the axeman immediately swung again, catching him across the back of the shield, and the force of it staggered him sideways.

He cut at the circling man's sword arm to buy himself space, didn't connect cleanly, and then the axe was coming again and he had to get the shield back up. His breath came quick and sharp as he fought, and he stopped thinking in words. His body took over, parrying, shifting his feet, getting the shield where it needed to be, cutting whenever a gap opened.

He scored a slice above a vambrace, but then an axe blade skidded off the edge of his shield and caught him at the hip, finding the gap between the lower plate and the tasset. The pain came sharp and sudden and his leg buckled under him for a half-step. In that half-step, the second man's mace was already moving. In an instant, the violet-eyed knight's sword came across from the side and caught the mace's head with a crack, deflecting it past Arys's ear close enough that he felt the displaced air.

Arys' leg wobbled and his knee hit the grass. From that angle, low and looking up, he saw it clearly. The violet-eyed knight let his shield drop. Both hands found the grip of his longsword, and suddenly the man stepped into the press of Ironborn around him. His blade began to move. Not wildly. Never wildly.

Each cut found its mark and transitioned into the next without pause, his feet carrying him through the gaps between men the way water finds its way between stones, spinning and shifting between them, weaving a tapestry of red in their midst. An Ironborn raised his axe and was dead before it fell. Another tried to close and found the point of a sword already waiting where his neck would be.

A third got his shield up in time and took the blade across his sword arm instead, and the sword was already past him and moving on. Six men. Perhaps more. Arys lost count. He watched mesmerized, the way a child looked at a knight for the first time. By the time he got back to his feet, most of them were down, and the horn was sounding again from somewhere near the hills. The riders who could gather horses wheeled and fled, and the ones who couldn't ran after them.

Turning, his leg still unstable beneath him, he saw the Ironborn infantry further up the bowl as it began to pull back. This time, Ser Wyllam did not order a charge after them, though Arys thought this might've been the one time such a call would be in the right. Still, the cheering came up all across the bowl and back along the beach. Men shouting and shoving weapons into the air. Arys allowed himself a breath of relief.

The cut on his hip was making itself known now, not just a weakness in the leg, but a thin hot line of pain that pulsed with his heartbeat. He had not felt it properly until just now. With some effort, he pushed to his feet, turning toward the men who held the flanks with him. He wished to share the glory with them, perhaps even thank the violet-eyed knight that saved him. He found the man was standing still a few feet away, looking down at the ground. Arys hobbled over and stopped.

The older knight lay in the grass. His neck was wrong, the angle of it, and his eyes were open and looking at nothing. Took a hoof to the head, likely. Beside him, the young man-at-arms who had been at his side all morning was kneeling with his hands in his lap and his face empty in the particular way of someone who had not yet made sense of all that had happened.

"What was his name?" Arys asked. The violet-eyed knight looked up at him. He seemed to study him in a way that made Arys feel briefly transparent.

"Lorne," he said.

"Ser Lorne of Highgarden."