Chương 16

Ser Arys Oakheart On a bare hill above the valley, Grey Garden squatted like a fist pressed into the earth. It was not a large castle by any measure Arys had grown up with. Two squat towers rose at the corners of the curtain wall, broader at the base than they were tall, their crenellations worn and dark with weather.

The walls themselves were perhaps thirty feet high, built from the same black stone that seemed to compose most of Harlaw's miserable landscape, fitted tight and close without mortar gaps a climber could find purchase in. No great gatehouse, no barbican, no decorative stonework of any kind. Everything about it looked purely functional, built by men who had no interest in impressing visitors and a great deal of interest in killing them. Arys had grown up in Old Oak.

He had visited Highgarden and Oldtown and half a dozen other Reach castles besides. He had seen what stone and wealth and generations of pride could produce when put together. Grey Garden was nothing like any of that, and it would still cost them badly to take it by storm. Behind them on the slope below the hill, eight hundred men worked with the grim, unhurried energy of soldiers who knew they were going to be somewhere for a while. Trenches went in along the natural lines of the ground.

A party of men-at-arms was already stripping timber from the stands of wind-bent trees that survived in the lower valley, dragging the wood back up toward the siege line. The sound of axes carried up the hill in clean, flat cracks. Arys rode in the group of six, Ser Galad to his left, Ser Manfryd Rodden on the far side, Neral and two of the older men-at-arms filling out the line. Above them, a square of white cloth hung from a lance, turning slowly in the island wind.

Occasionally, his eyes would shift toward Ser Manfryd, narrowing at the man who had tried to take the army for himself. He shook his head, snorting. Only one knight left alive from the farmhouse fire, and the man had walked into the council circle they'd formed and simply announced his seniority as if that settled it. The older men-at-arms had looked at each other, eyebrows near their hairline.

Ser Manfryd Rodden had a less than stellar reputation as a fighter but a spotless one as a fool, and when Neral said something under his breath that Arys hadn't fully caught but whose meaning had been clear enough from the faces around him, it had nearly come to blows. Arys had not wanted the command for himself. He was eighteen and unknown, and for all that the Oakheart name meant in the Reach, it was not yet his name to spend.

He wanted to make one for himself before he could wear the Oakheart banner around him like armor. Instead, he had spoken Ser Galad's name, one the men had all already heard from the stories of when he was knighted as the Hero of the Flower Hearth. Neral had backed him on it, and the men who had been at the beach when he broke the Ironborn's charge needed no further argument. So Ser Galad led, despite never having asked for it and seemingly finding the whole development mildly inconvenient.

Arys had not yet worked out what to make of that. The valley ambush had been the man's doing entirely, though Ser Galad had spoken about it the way another man might describe checking a horse's hoof after a day's riding. As if the whole thing had not been a crafty, genius maneuver Arys would never think to employ. Then, the captured Ironborn boy had talked enough that Arys still wasn't sure whether to feel sorry for him or not, and within the hour Ser Galad had the vanguard moving.

Two hundred men at a hard pace toward the camp the boy had described, the main force following behind. Arys had ridden ahead with one of the few mounts they had, and for the second time since the beach he had watched Ser Galad do something with a sword that his eyes could follow but his mind struggled to account for. The camp had not been ready for them.

The sentries had grown comfortable in their hidden valley, certain the Reachmen were still licking wounds in the south, and comfortable sentries died like everyone else. Using the donkeys and mules to make it seem they were a larger force, Ser Galad's ruse in sending the riders around the camp had broken what resistance remained before it could properly form. The Ironborn poured out of their camp into what they thought was open ground, only to find infantry waiting. The cavalry swept through after. Clean.

Almost too clean. Arys had smiled about it afterward, and then felt slightly uneasy about the smiling after seeing Ser Galad's grim face as he went about the business of killing the Ironborn. He did not take pleasure in it, that much was clear. Later, once the reavers who surrendered were also questioned, Ser Galad had considered force marching the army at night to put Grey Garden to siege before Ser Harras could returned, but he decided to hold off in the end.

A night march in enemy territory could become a massacre, he had said, as if he'd led armies in such places many a times. Still, it was sensible, and it had proven so that same night, when their sentries skirmished with a force of Ironborn riders coming from the east, likely Ser Harras' men returning to camp to find it taken by the Reachmen.

They had marched off before dawn fully broke today, but by the time they saw Grey Garden's battlements appearing over the horizon, the quartered scythe and peacock banner of Ser Harras Harlaw already flew in the battlements. Ahead, the gates of the castle opened as they pulled up well short of bow range. Six riders came out in a loose file, one carrying the banner of House Harlaw, a silver scythe and a blue peacock quartered on black and cream, and stopped perhaps twenty yards in front of them.

Ser Harras Harlaw was easy to identify. He sat tall in the saddle, taller than the men around him, a long-faced man with dark hair cut close and dark eyes that held no particular warmth. His armor was plain and well-kept, no ornamentation, no colored enamel, not a rose or a flower emblem anywhere on his person. At his hip hung a sword in a plain scabbard, and Arys recognized it not by any marking but by the way the hilt caught the light differently than steel should. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road.

If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. Nightfall. He had heard the name. Ser Harras looked across the space between them without hurry, his gaze moving from face to face. Measuring. Dismissing. Moving on.

"To whom do I speak?" Harras asked, his voice like grinding shale. Ser Manfryd cleared his throat.

"I am Ser Manfryd Rodden, the seniormost knight of the army that surrounds your keep, ser. You may offer your terms of surrender to me, if it pleases you." Arys felt heat rise in his throat. He drew breath to answer it, already turning in the saddle, but a hand moving at the corner of his eye stopped him. Ser Galad, barely a gesture, two fingers lifting from the pommel of his saddle. Arys closed his mouth. He wasn't entirely sure why. The motion had been almost nothing.

Scoffs moved through the Ironborn riders like a small wind through grass. Ser Harras gave Ser Manfryd a look of the particular coldness reserved for things beneath serious attention, then let his gaze slide away.

"There will be no surrender, ser. My lord has commanded I hold this castle, and so I shall, until he commands otherwise." His eyes moved across the line again, slower this time.

"Now. Which of you broke my men in the field?"

"I was clear that I am the—""Enough, old man." Ser Manfryd's mouth kept moving for a moment without producing sound. Harras's gaze had settled on Ser Galad. The violet-eyed knight met it without expression.

"Ser Harras," he said.

"If you are here, it means Ser Owen Inchfield has taken Harlaw Hall." He left a brief pause.

"No?" Something shifted in Harras's face. Not much. A slight tightening around the eyes.

"Even now, Lord Mace closes around Ten Towers," Ser Galad continued.

"Every other castle on this island will fall, by siege or storm. The seas are closed to you. No one is coming." He held the man's gaze without challenge in it, simply stating facts as they were.

"Spare your men the suffering that is to come. Lay down your arms and surrender with honor. I swear no harm will come to anyone inside your keep or on your lands." Harras was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had shifted slightly, some of the formality worn off it.

"It was you, then." He tilted his head.

"Maron was a good man. One of the best I've had. I would know the name of the man who bested him."

"I am called Galadedrid." Arys coughed into his fist.

"This is Ser Galad of Dustonbury, ser. The Hero of the Flower Hearth." Harras nodded slowly.

"Well met, Ser Galad." His expression did not change.

"But know that there will be no surrender from me. No trickery will save you the blood it takes to storm these walls. Until Lord Rodrik sends word, my banner flies above Grey Garden." He gathered his reins and turned his horse.

"If you want it down, come take it yourself." Galad's voice stopped him.

"Ser Harras." The Ironman looked back over his shoulder.

"Let us spare our men and settle this cleanly," Galad proposed.

"Single combat between us. Armored or unarmored, you may choose." The Ironborn retinue went still. Arys himself felt his breath catch. One of the riders behind Harras shifted his weight, leather creaking. Harras did not move for a long moment. His right hand drifted down, almost without his seeming to notice it, until his fingers rested against Nightfall's hilt. He looked at Ser Galad. Arys had seen men take the measure of an opponent before.

It was a thing you learned quickly in the yard, the way a man held himself, what his hands were doing, how his eyes moved. He had done it himself a hundred times. He watched Harras do it now, watched the man's gaze settle on Ser Galad's face and stay there, and then watched whatever conclusion the man reached register in some small and private way. Harras's hand moved away from the sword. He turned his horse and rode back through the gates without a word, his men filing in after him.

Once the Ironborn were safely inside, the Reachmen turned their own horses back toward the camp.

"How dare he," Manfryd spat, his anger boiling over.

"This upjumped barbarian with his foreign gods and—""Ser Manfryd." Ser Galad did not raise his voice, but the rant stopped as if the word was a blade at his throat. He looked at the man with an expression that was not angry exactly, but had no warmth in it at all.

"I did not ask for this command. Yet in the end you agreed to it all the same." A pause.

"Are you a liar, ser?" Ser Manfryd's mouth opened. Closed.

"The next time you put your name where it does not belong," Ser Galad said, "I will ask you to put your steel behind it. Are we understood?" The old knight's face had gone the deep red of a man experiencing several emotions at once and handling none of them well. He managed a nod, barely, and then put his heels to his horse and rode back toward the camp without looking at anyone. Neral made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh.

"Old fucker was starting to annoy me worse than an itch," he said. He looked at Ser Galad.

"So. What now, Captain?" Arys turned in his saddle.

"Do we storm it? Today, or at dawn tomorrow?" Ser Galad exhaled slowly through his nose.

"We don't storm it at all." Arys blinked, confused.

"What?"

"Why spend our men's lives taking it?" He nodded back toward the castle.

"Ser Harras told us himself. When Ten Towers falls, he dips his banner. There is no strategic value in rushing." He looked out across the siege line below, the men digging, the timber coming in.

"We set our lines, hold the perimeter, and wait. With supplies flowing from Harlaw Hall, we can sit here as long as we need."

"I'll drink to that," Neral said, and the men-at-arms around him made sounds of agreement. Arys nodded slowly, pushing down the flutter of disappointment that came with it. It was the right answer, he knew. Probably. The Ironborn had nowhere to go and no relief coming, and Grey Garden's black walls would not come down cheaply. How many men would die for a bare hill on a miserable island with nothing on it worth taking? He looked back at the castle anyway.

At the banner flying from the battlements, dark against the pale sky. It would have been something, though. xxx The column from Harlaw Hall arrived the following morning. They brought grain and dried meat and two dozen casks of mead, which the men greeted with more enthusiasm than the food. They also brought Ser Owen Inchfield.

With his own coterie of knights, he rode in looking as polished as he had in the yard at Highgarden, his armor clean, his horse a fine animal that had clearly never waded through an ambush in a rocky valley. Before all the present men, he read from a letter with the seal of the Lord of Highgarden. With Ser Willam dead and the port taken, Ser Owen had been given command of the entire eastern half of the island, and he had no intention of waiting.

Before the sun was fully up, the orders had spread through the camp like a fever. They were to storm Grey Garden at once.