Chương 17

The screaming carried clearly across the open ground between the camp and the castle walls. Galad stood at the edge of the camp and watched it, trying to keep his hands still at his sides. The first ladder had gone up crooked and fallen before a man reached the third rung, taking two soldiers down with it into the men below. The second had found the parapet, briefly, and two men had made it onto the battlements before the Ironborn pushed them back over the edge.

A third one had been hacked down with axes, and the soldiers half-way up to it had to scramble down under a hail of arrows and rocks. Below the walls, the battering ram crew had been at the portcullis for several minutes. From this distance Galad could hear the dull, rhythmic impact of it, and each impact told him the same thing. The gate was not moving. The portcullis was iron and the ram was wood and the formula was not in the ram's favor. Overhead, the vultures had noticed.

There were not many yet, just a few circling above the hill in long, patient arcs, but they had a way of finding each other quickly. There would be more soon. He had offered to lead the first wave himself. He had not wanted to, he had not wanted there to be a first wave at all, but if men were going to be sent at those walls, he had thought he might at least bring some of them back. Ser Manfryd had spoken before he could finish the offer. Glory, the man had said.

The privilege of being the knight to take the castle. He had straightened his back when he said it, puffing out his chest like a cocksure bird showing off. Ser Owen had not wished to give Galad the honor, so Ser Manfryd Rodden took command. Now he watched like the vultures, counting their numbers as they gathered above, and kept his hands still. Another ladder went up. Another man made the parapet, got one leg over, and then an axe came down and he didn't get the other leg over.

From the walls, a rock the size of a small child was heaved over the crenellations and dropped into the men clustered below with their ram. The screaming that followed was different from the screaming that had been going on before. Wetter. He was already walking by the time Neral spoke behind him.

"Where are you going?" He didn't answer. The grass was short and dry underfoot, the ground uneven with the earthworks the men had dug the previous day. He heard Neral follow, and then heard Mors a few steps behind him, and kept walking.

"Ser Galad." Mors caught up to his shoulder.

"Ser Galad, don't do something—""Stay here," Galad said, and kept walking. He found Ser Owen Inchfield on a low wooden platform that had been knocked together from siege timber, raised just enough to see over the heads of the men between him and the castle, or so that he could be seen instead. He stood with his arms crossed and his expression composed, watching the assault with the mild attention of a man watching a training exercise that wasn't going quite as he'd hoped.

Two men of his retinue moved to intercept as Galad came up. He walked past them. Owen's eyes flicked to him, but he did not turn around when he spoke.

"Ser Galad."

"There is still time to stop this." Galad stopped beside the platform and looked up at the man. He kept his voice level. They had already had this conversation once today as the men gathered to storm the castle, and Galad did not expect a different answer, but he would not stand at the edge of camp and watch in silence while men died against a wall for no reason.

"Order the retreat. Let us set a proper siege, or at the least request engines from the ships." Ser Owen turned to look at him. His expression was pleasant as if he was enjoying himself. The thrill of command suited him well, perhaps, or the thought of the glory to come, a castle to sack, a story with his name at the front of it to tell back in the Reach.

"This is Lord Tyrell's will, Ser Woodsman." He glanced back at the castle walls.

"Are you a traitor to your lord now?" Beneath the walls, someone was screaming a name. Calling for someone who wasn't answering.

"How many men must die before you see the folly in this?" Galad asked. He heard the edge in his own voice and did not bother smoothing it. Ser Owen unfolded his arms and swept one of them out across the camp in a broad, generous gesture, as if offering Galad a view of something fine.

"We are Reachmen, are we not? We have no shortage of men." A pause, deliberate.

"Leal men. Some more than others." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Galad looked at him for a moment. Then he turned back to the castle and said nothing. There was nothing to say. He had known men like Ser Owen before, in another life and in this one as well, men who wore their smallness like armor, more prideful than any true great man. Nothing Galad could offer would reach through that.

He had spoken, twice now, and it had not mattered, and the only thing left was to stand here and watch or go back to the camp and wait. So he stood and watched. Fifteen minutes later, as the number of men dwindled along with their spirit, and not a breach was had, Ser Owen raised a hand to someone in his retinue. A trumpet sounded, two short notes, and the men below the walls began to pull back, to the cheering of the defenders above them.

They came in slowly at first, then more quickly, those who could walk helping those who couldn't. Most of the shields that came back had arrows in them. Some of the men had arrows in them too, the shafts bobbing as they walked, one man with two in his left arm moving with the fixed, silent concentration of someone refusing to acknowledge his own body. Others wept without seeming to know they were doing it, faces blank, tears cutting clean lines through the grime.

A few cursed the gods, or the Ironborn, or the Ironborn's mothers. Galad counted them as they crossed back through the earthworks. He counted until it was clear no more were coming. Of the two hundred men sent out to 'soften the defenders', as Ser Owen had put it, some seventy men had not come back. He could see a few of them from here, shapes in the grass below the walls, one still moving faintly, too far for anyone to reach without going back into bow range. The vultures were lower now.

He could hear their grunting calls, like hungry pigs or dogs barking in the distance. After speaking with someone close to him, a runner went out with Ser Owen's orders, and returned a few minutes with a heavyset man-at-arms with a cut above his eye and his surcoat half torn away at the shoulder. He stopped in front of Owen and pulled off his helmet, breathing hard.

"Where is Ser Manfryd?" Owen asked. The man wiped the blood from his eye with the back of his hand and looked at Owen without much expression.

"Somewhere beneath the walls, ser." He shrugged.

"Took a stone to the head, he did." A ripple moved through the men on the platform, a quick exchange of glances, a slight shift of weight. Owen was still for a moment. Then he turned to look at Galad, and the pleasantness in his expression had become something else, sharper, a gleam showing in his blue-grey eyes.

"It seems you'll have your chance after all, Ser Galad of Dustonbury." He spoke loudly enough for the men around him to hear it.

"Indeed. I would expect the hero of the Flower Hearth to be the first man over the walls. Wouldn't that be an honor?" He made no effort to sound genuine. Galad wasn't certain the man knew how. Holding Owen's gaze for a moment, he could read what was there without difficulty.

Owen wanted another assault because he needed the castle taken, and Owen wanted Galad in the front of it because the front of it was where the dying happened, and for some inane reason, Ser Owen Inchfield had decided some time ago that the world would suit him better with Galad of Dustonbury absent from it. It was not a complicated calculation. And if Galad refused, or failed to take the castle at once, Owen would keep sending men at those walls in waves until the numbers solved the problem for him.

Seventy men had died this time. Seventy more might next time. And the time after that.

"As you say, ser," Galad said simply before he left. Neral and Mors fell in beside him before he had gone twenty yards.

"Is it to be a siege, then?" Neral asked. Galad shook his head.

"Second wave in one hour," he said.

"I will lead the attack myself."

"Then we'll follow you, ser" Mors said. Stopping, Galad turned on the boy, looking into his fierce, impassioned eyes. In reality, Mors was the same age as he was now, and yet he was a boy still, with a boy's heart, full of anger and grief that had been sitting in him since Mycah and Lorne went down on the beach. Galad had seen that look before, where all those emotions churning inside were begging to be released into the world in as violent a manner as possible.

He had worn it himself once, a long time ago in another world, when he was younger and rasher and learned that the only woman who had ever been a mother to him had been taken. Mors met his eyes without flinching, chin lifted slightly.

"I will be in the thick of the fighting," Galad said. He held Mors's gaze.

"The very thick of it. I want that understood." Mors nodded, looking, if anything, more eager.

"Good," Neral said.

"If you're there, it'll be the safest spot on the field. Easy choice."

"The safest—" Galad exhaled slowly through his nose. Shaking his head, he looked at them both for a moment, these two men who had no particular reason to follow him and had done so anyway, and felt something in his chest tighten in a way he did not entirely have words for.

"I did not wish to bury any more friends in this war," he said.

"But I will not stop you." They started walking again.

"You have a plan?" Neral asked. Mors elbowed the older man in the side.

"Course he has a plan. Don't be an idiot." He glanced at Galad.

"You do have a plan, aye, Ser Galad?" A simple one, but sometimes those worked best.

"Yes." Mors nodded as if this confirmed his entire worldview. Neral seemed satisfied.

"Mors," Galad said.

"Find Ser Arys Oakheart and bring him to me." The boy peeled off without another word, already moving at a jog between the tents. Galad watched him go, then turned to Neral.

"Gather forty men to you," he said.

"Men with guts, Neral. They're going to need it." Neral cracked his knuckles.

"Aye," he said.

"Shouldn't take long."