AN: Sorry for the delay this week, I’ve had a very bad time irl. Think I’ll get the ToT chapter up by Tuesday and the other BIW chapter I’m behind on by Wednesday.

Chapter 37

Timett son of Timett

The grain cart rumbled and swayed down the road. And just ahead of it, Gulltown rose up to meet the sky. Timett had seen it once from a distance, days ago, a grey smudge on the horizon that Chella swore was the greatest city she had ever laid eyes on. It had not seemed so much, from far off. It seemed a great deal more now. The walls climbed and climbed, a mountain the lowlanders had raised up stone by stone with their own soft hands, until they towered over the little town sprawled at their feet.

And they meant to take it.

His hands trembled at his sides. A few moons past, he would have named the feeling by its right name. Fear. The old fear every clansman carried in his gut when he stood in the shadow of the lowlanders' works, the fear that made a man of the mountains feel small, feel like the savage the valley folk named him, feel that some things were simply too great to ever be pulled down.

No more.

It was not fear that set his hands shaking now. It was hunger. A fierce, singing eagerness that ran hot through his veins, and Timett could scarcely keep the grin off his ruined face in the back of the cart.

On the driver's bench, the villager cast another nervous glance back over his shoulder as he worked the donkeys' reins, then quickly fixed his eyes forward again. Timett was not alone amidst the hay. Across from him, resting easy among the golden stalks and the barrels of oil, Chella daughter of Cheyk sat biting into a stolen apple.

Without the string of dried ears knotted at her throat, and with the lowlander's long skirt she'd pulled on over her legs, she made a comelier sight than Timett would have ever believe, though he knew better than to say so, or to let his eyes linger. Chella would have his manhood off at the root before he got within a foot of her, and smile doing it. Still. A man could look.

It was only the two of them in this cart. But there had been many more, spread across the last several days, clan warriors trickling down out of the passes and into the great lowlander city one small group at a time, quiet as water seeping into cracked stone. On the long march down from Heart's Home the host had taken no village and no town, keeping always to the high passes, killing only the luckless valley folk who wandered across their path. All the while sending its infiltrators ahead in ones and twos and threes, dressed in stolen skirts and homespun, faces scrubbed, ears left behind, to be swallowed up by the crowds pouring into Gulltown.

In their cart, at least, they had no cause to fear the driver crying out. The man loved his family too dearly for that. They'd taken his little village only the day before, a small, soft place tucked away where the clans had never bothered to come raiding in a hundred years, for the clans had accepted long ago to strike only the villages and holdfasts near their own mountain strongholds, leaving the deep valley untouched. The fool of a driver believed, still, that if he did as he was told and brought these two savages quietly through the gates, he might yet see his wife and daughter alive again. He believed it because Gunthor had told him to believe it, and because a drowning man will believe anything at all if it looks enough like a rope.

That was the whole trick of it, Timett had come to understand. They had ridden past Redfort. Past Ironoaks, past a dozen strong castles and holdfasts and walled towns the clans had hurled themselves against a hundred times over the long bitter centuries and broken against every time. Places the lowlanders trusted to keep them safe. And so the lowlanders never once thought to look for the mountains coming at them from any other road.

As the cart drew nearer, Timett let his gaze wander past the little town straggling along the main road, out toward the sprawl of tents pitched under the western walls of the city. Some warning had reached Gulltown at some point along the way, the clans knew that much already. And there the warning sat: a few hundred men-at-arms, lazing about their cook-fires, passing skins of ale hand to hand, pawing at the whores who had come out from the town to ply their trade among the soldiers.

Good as that was for the work ahead, it kindled a slow anger in Timett all the same.

Look at them. These lowlanders thought themselves untouchable. A far-off threat, some other lord's trouble, sure to be dealt with long before it ever reached their high walls. For no clan had ever in a thousand years dared to raid the mighty Gulltown, with its towers and its ships and its stone piled up to the very clouds. So the men who were meant to guard it drank, and rutted, and slept, and gave the road no more than a lazy glance.

This time it would be different. Gunthor had sworn it. And Timett believed him now, believed with a certainty that had nothing left of the old fear in it.

That night, once the villager had served his purpose, they opened his throat in the dark and left his body in a ditch. And then they struck.

xxx

Galad

The country south of Heart's Home was gentle enough, endless fields and low rolling hills, laced with roads and cart-tracks a man could follow even by half a moon. But seven hours of riding had brought the Mountains of the Moon looming up ahead of them, black against the stars like the spine of some vast sleeping beast, and the closer they drew to that spine the rougher the ground became. Loose scree and hidden roots and steep-sided gullies. Ripe country for a broken neck or a lamed horse, and in the state their small company was in, Galad did not mean to lose men and mounts to the dark before the clansmen ever came into it.

Glancing to his side, he found Garlan swaying in his saddle, the boy barely able to hold himself upright. Galad's eyes softened. In that moment, he felt a kind of pride he had not in a very long while, warm and protective as the pride he had once carried for a younger brother, in a world now closed to him forever.

He had thought, for a moment yesterday, of leaving Garlan behind at Heart's Home, but he had decided against it, in the end, and he was glad of the choice. He heard the tale of his squire's deeds during the battle, how the boy had thought to cart the wounded off the field and rallied the other squires to follow him out into the killing ground to do it. Lady Anya Waynwood herself had sought Galad out to speak of it, and there had been real approval in that stern old voice. And young Myranda Royce, who had pressed into his hands a hastily-sewn banner bearing his own tree-and-sunburst sigil before they rode out, had all but glowed as she told him of Garlan's gallantry. The boy insisted it had been a small thing, nothing worth the fuss. But a single life saved was no small thing. And it had been Garlan who thought of it, Garlan who seized the moment, Garlan who inspired the others to fall in behind him.

He was a boy still, in a great many ways. But yesterday, on that field, Garlan Tyrell had borne himself every inch a man.

And for all his youth, he was not the only one swaying in the saddle. All down the line of their small company, Galad could see how the exhaustion weighed on the men. Sixty riders, near enough, drawn from every house of the Vale at Heart’s Home, and every one of them worn to the bone. The horses too, the ones who survived the charge and the few they found around the castle, had rested only for the few short hours the company lingered at Heart's Home after the battle, and it had not been enough. Galad himself had slept no more than three hours before they set out. Coming as it did atop a night without any sleep at all before the battle, he knew he would not be in half this shape were it not for the void, which he kept wrapped tightly around himself to strip the fatigue from his limbs and clear the fog from his eyes.

It was a credit to the handful of men who had ridden with him to Strongsong and back in time for the battle that they could sit a horse at all. The Belmore men who had come that far had stayed behind at last, their mounts handed over to the lords and knights who insisted on making this ride. But Ser Brynden Tully, a man near three times Galad's age, rode at the very head of the column among the Vale lords, upright and grim despite it all. And just behind himself, Galad could hear, every so often, the sharp crack of Sandor Clegane slapping himself hard across the face to drive back sleep. The men nearest him would jolt awake in their saddles each time, grumbling under their breaths but too intimidated to speak up. It was a crude method, but an effective one. Much like the man himself.

Even Lord Horton Redfort had not stayed behind to bury his son. When they gathered after the battle to reckon their next course, and learned where the clansmen were bound, the old lord had been among the very first to urge they ride for Gulltown with all the haste their horses could bear. "My son has already died for the Vale," he had said in a hollow voice. "I mean to join him before too long."

But it could not last. And the mountain passes ahead held a good deal more danger than loose rock alone.

Galad nudged his mare over to ride beside Ben.

The sergeant looked as haggard as any man in the column, staring blearily ahead as though it took his whole will to keep his eyes from falling shut. He had acquitted himself in the fighting, holding the left flank under Lord Grafton until the cavalry crashed into the clansmen's backs with distinction. Galad had half a mind to knight the man on the spot for it, but Ben had insisted he was not yet ready.

"Ben," Galad called. It took three times before the sergeant marked him.

"Ser?"

"Take hold of Garlan’s rein, if you can, and make certain he doesn't slide off his saddle and break his neck in the dark. We'll be making camp soon."

Ben blinked heavily. "You're sure, ser? Lord Grafton was set on riding through the night."

"I'm sure," he said, then rode on toward the front.

He passed a good many knights and lordlings along the way, all of them men who had insisted on coming. The ones who had survived, that was. A great deal of noble blood had been spilled on the grass outside Heart's Home, and a great deal more, like Lord Nestor Royce, Ser Symond Templeton, and others, had taken wounds grave enough to keep them behind. What remained was a thin and battered line of weary men.

At the very head of the column, riding beside the Blackfish, were the four great lords whose names could still command what little force they had. Lord Horton Redfort. Lord Gerold Grafton. Lord Lyonel Corbray. And Lord Yohn Royce.

Even before he reached them, Galad could hear Bronze Yohn's voice raised in heat.

"—foolishness," Royce was saying. "Seven-damned, hard-headed foolishness, and you know it, Grafton."

Galad lifted a hand to Ser Brynden as he came up. The old knight returned a shallow nod, his face tired but thoughtful, and his eyes rested on Galad for a long moment before he turned to stare fixedly ahead, plainly done with the shouting on either side of him.

Galad's eyes narrowed. He had thought he'd heard the last of the Vale lords squabbling like children. It seemed the habit would not be so easily broken.

"My lords." His voice cut clean through their argument. They turned, half-startled, as if they'd forgotten the rest of the column existed. "The men can go no further. Neither can the horses. We must stop, and rest."

"Not you as well, Woodsman." 

Even by moonlight, Galad could see that Gerold Grafton was unwell. His face was pale and clammy, dark rings around eyes gone wide and frantic. One arm was bound close to his body in a splint, wrapped in bandages that ran up under his surcoat and around his chest. He had been badly hurt in the battle, that much Galad had heard, but the man had refused all urging to remain behind. 

"We ride a few hours more, then we stop," the lord of Gulltown said.

"You said as much two hours past," Yohn Royce growled. "I've been patient enough, Gerold, but this is too much."

"Is it?" Grafton bit out through clenched teeth. "Easy enough for you to preach caution when it isn't Runestone like to be burning at this very moment, is it, Royce?" He looked round to Corbray and Redfort. "And you were outvoted, my lord. So stop, if you wish it so badly. But I ride on, and so do the men."

"We must keep going," Lyonel Corbray muttered. "We must." The man was set upon recovering the honor he felt his house had lost to Lynderly's treachery, so much so he had agreed to fight the battle outside his own walls, in the front rank, with no command of his own. That fight, it seemed, had not been enough to quiet the need in him.

Beside him, Horton Redfort only nodded. The old lord had scarcely spoken a word since announcing his wish for a glorious death after his son’s passing. Galad could understand such grief. But he would not permit it to drag the rest of these men into the grave with him.

"No," Galad said.

The Gulltown lord blinked at him.

Galad urged his mare forward, past the four of them, and drew rein squarely in the middle of the narrow road.

The lords were forced to check their mounts. All down the line behind them, horses came stumbling to a halt, snorting and blowing, and the men who had been half-asleep in their saddles jerked awake at the sudden stop.

Gerold Grafton glared. "What in the hells are you doing, ser?"

"We are stopping for the night, my lord." Galad's voice was flat and cold in the dark.

"Are you mad?" Grafton flushed dark red. "You would presume to give orders to three lords of the Vale?"

Horton Redfort frowned at him. Lyonel Corbray only said, quietly, "Step aside, Ser Galad."

"I shall not."

Steel sang in the night as Grafton wrenched his sword free with his one good arm. The motion cost him. Galad saw the pain flash across his face, but he leveled the blade all the same, his voice shaking with fury. "I could have your head for this, ser!"

"You may try, once this ordeal is done and over with, my lord." Galad did not move. "But tonight, here, on this road, in this dark, who shall try it? The men at your back are not all your men, Lord Grafton. If you commanded them to ride me down where I sit... would they?" Resting a hand on Nightfall's pommel, he held the man's fevered gaze. "Could they?"

The sword wavered in Gerold Grafton's grip. His teeth ground together. Beside him, Lyonel Corbray swallowed, and whatever bravado had been in him a moment before seemed to drain away.

"I stand with the Woodsman."

Ser Brynden Tully was suddenly at Galad's side, his own hand near his hilt. "Would you have my head as well, my lord?"

"And I." Yohn Royce put his horse between Galad and the three lords. "I want the Vale rid of the clan-filth no less than you do, Grafton. But this is madness, and you know it. Put down your blade before you shame yourself past mending."

The silent between them stretched until Horton Redfort broke the standoff. He let out a long, weary breath. "We'll stop," he said. "It's for the best. He has the right of it."

Grafton still had his sword out and pointed when he grunted.

The blade slipped from his fingers and clattered to the stones of the road. And then he gasped, a wet, gargled sound, before he folded forward over his own chest, curling around his splinted arm.

"My lord!" Lyonel Corbray reached across as Grafton pitched sideways out of his saddle, and with his own horse pressed close alongside, caught him before he could fall. 

Ser Brynden was off his mount in an instant, and Galad, and then all of them were lowering Gerold Grafton to a blanket spread on the grass at the roadside.

That was when they saw it.

A great dark stain of red, spreading out from beneath the bandages across his chest, half-hidden where his splinted arm had been held tight against it.

Yohn Royce's eyes went wide. "You thrice-damned fool," he breathed, kneeling.

Galad let out a slow, disbelieving breath. The man had taken a killing wound in the battle, it seemed, concealed it, and in the fever and madness of it had truly believed he might ride the whole length of the Vale before it finished him.

"Damn you, Woodsman." Gerold's eyes were already losing their focus as he looked up from the grass. "I could've kept riding, if you hadn't—" He broke off into a violent, wet cough.

"Save your breath, my lord," Galad said gently.

"No." Grafton's hand groped up and caught at Galad's wrist. "No you must listen. My city." Each word came dragged up out of him, gasping. "Gulltown. Save it. Save its people. Save the Vale."

His grip loosened. A long gurgling breath rattled out of him, and did not draw back in.

And Gerold Grafton, Lord of Gulltown, was no more.

In the silence that followed, Galad closed the man's staring eyes with two fingers.

"We shall," he said quietly. "We shall."

xxx

The next day Ser Brynden led the scouts through the mountain passes to screen their movement, and to Galad's surprise, they found no clansmen to bar their way, only the churned and trampled trail of thousands of them gone before. The clans must have reckoned Heart's Home and the men penned within it out of the war entirely. It was a mistake Galad meant to make them pay for, and dearly.

The captives put to the question back at Heart's Home had spoken of the new-crowned High King, a man named Gunthor, and of his design to gather the whole strength of all the clans behind him. The Vale lords had guessed they could raise perhaps fifteen hundred men between them, scattered as the clans always were. But by the sign left in the passes over those two days of crossing, the breadth of the trampled ground and the number of the cold cook-fires, Galad judged it nearer three thousand, and the Blackfish agreed with his reckoning.

It only made them ride the harder. They stopped no more than four hours a night, until at last the mountains fell away behind them and they came down toward the first great castle on the road to Gulltown—Ironoaks, the seat of House Waynwood.

They knew something was wrong long before they reached it, when they first saw the dark smoke smudging the sky.

Even before the battle, when Galad had reached Strongsong, they had arranged for ravens to fly to every house in the Vale, telling of Heart's Home and warning of the coming storm. It had not been enough.

Ironoaks stood on a tall hill above a river, a small town grown along its banks below. The broken wheel of Waynwood still flew above its towers and its strong battlements, but smoke still rose in thin grey fingers from burned houses and barns and storesheds throughout the town. As they rode in, Galad noticed that there were fewer bodies scattered among the ruin than such destruction ought to have left. That told him something, though he was not yet certain what.

They crossed the single bridge over the river, ash thick in the air and clinging to the insides of their noses, and rode up to the castle, where an old knight came out to meet them and give them the tale.

"We began mustering the moment the raven came from Strongsong, my lords," the old knight said, his face grey with soot and grief. "Sent patrols north and west, toward the mountains, watching for them."

"And?" Galad asked.

"And they came from the south." The man shook his head bitterly. "In the dead of night. A great host of them, out of the dark where we'd never thought to look. We formed up as best we could, held them off the walls long enough for most of the townsfolk to run up into the castle. But the town…" He gestured at the smoking ruin below. "The town they burned to the ground before they melted back into the night."

"How large a force, ser?"

The knight considered. "No more than two hundred, I'd judge. Perhaps a touch fewer."

The lords looked between one another. Galad understood it as they did.

Not the main host, then. A screen. A distraction, sent to burn and harry and to keep the castles closest to Gulltown too busy and too wary to gather their strength and march to the city’s aid.

He turned back to the Waynwood knight.

"Gather every man you can still put on a horse, ser. And do it quickly. We ride for Gulltown within the hour."

xxx

Ser Arys Oakheart

Their two ships slid into Gulltown’s harbor, the crowned stag of Baratheon flying alongside the falcon of Arryn, carrying a hundred and fifty men between them. King's men, and men of House Arryn drawn from Lord Jon's own retinue. Standing at the rail of Lord Stannis's ship as it warped in against the wharf, he looked out across the busy docks with excitement. 

Before the Greyjoy’s Rebellion, he’d never so much as left the Reach, and now here he was pulling into the fourth city he’d ever seen, with a white over his shoulders to book.

Unfortunately, the view from the ship was the most exciting part of the day. He spent the rest of it trailing after Lord Jon Arryn and Lord Stannis Baratheon and Ser Davos Seaworth from one meeting to the next, as the Hand and the Master of Ships questioned the men of House Grafton, and the Arryns of Gulltown, and House Shett besides. But there was little enough to be learned that they had not already carried with them from King's Landing.

A ship called the Laughing Urchin had won free of Heart's Home, so the story ran, after its port was taken and the castle put under siege by a great horde of clansmen out of the mountains. Then Snakewood had fallen too, and for a time it had been feared that half the nobility of the Vale might have perished if Heart's Home had shared the fate of House Lynderly's seat, with every lord and lady gathered for the wedding butchered inside its walls.

But then, while they were at sea, a raven had come from Strongsong, which told the tale of what had truly happened at Lord Corbray's wedding, while also warning of a coming clansmen incursion into the whole of the Vale.

Having done no more than stand around fully armored like some puppet, Arys had perked up when he heard who had signed it. Ser Brynden Tully, aye, and Ser Symond Templeton. But Ser Galad of Dunstonbury as well.

From the letter the king had received before they left the capital, Arys had known his friend would be somewhere in the Vale. But he had rather thought Ser Galad would steer well clear of Lyonel Corbray's wedding after what had passed with the man's brother at the Lannisport melee. To find him there in the thick of it did not truly surprise him, though. Clearly, trouble had a way of finding Ser Galad, or Ser Galad a way of riding straight into it. And since they had plainly won free of Heart's Home, with the letter saying they meant to ride out and break the siege, Arys suspected the whole matter was likely well in hand already. It usually was, with Ser Galad at the front of things.

Still, Lord Jon and Lord Stannis had insisted they sail on to Heart's Home themselves, to properly assess how matters stood. And so it was decided they’d do so in the morrow after the ships had taken the proper provisions.

That night they lodged with a distant cousin of the Hand, a Ser Arnold Arryn, in his family's manor within the city.

Arys had only just begun to strip off the day's armor in the chamber he'd been given when the bells began to toll.

He was moving before he'd fully understood the sound, hauling his sword belt back around his waist and not even bothering to pull his pauldrons back on. Coming out into the passage still buckling it, he found Lord Stannis already at his own door with Ser Davos at his side. Together they hurried to Lord Jon and to Ser Arnold, and soon the whole party was starting down the tower stairs when an guardsman came pounding up toward them, red-faced and gasping for breath.

"My lords—" the man wheezed. "My lords, the gates—" He fought for air. "Someone's taken the gates."

Arys felt his stomach tighten to a fist. Ser Galad had warned an incursion was coming. Was this it, then? Already?

xxx

By the time they reached the western gatehouse, it had all come to madness.

Most of their own men had remained aboard the ships, so Lord Jon sent Ser Davos running back to the harbor to rally them. The rest of them pressed on through the city, the Hand and the Master of Ships with their personal guards with Ser Arnold Arryn's men besides.

Fire blazed where the gates should have stood.

Through the smoke, Arys could make out the shapes of carts driven up close against the gates and set alight, the flames climbing high into the night. Along the street and close to the gates, the bodies of guardsmen and townsfolk both sprawled cut down and half-burned. There was fighting too. He could hear it ringing out from either side of the gatehouse and up along the battlements above, where figures struggled in the dark, trading blows atop the wall.

Ser Arnold caught a passing town guard by the arm, a man so covered in soot he was near black, and so winded he could scarcely stand. The guard managed only a single word before he tore free and stumbled on.

"Clansmen."

Lord Arryn took command at once, with the calm of a man who had governed the realm through worse. Turning to the newly arrived Ser Damon Shett and his retinue, he started to give out his orders: "You, ser, take the gates. Put out that fire, and quickly, before it eats through what's left of them." Then, with the mouth of the main gatehouse choked in smoke, he turned to Ser Arnold and Arys. "The two of you, take the men and make for the nearest towers, one on either flank of the gatehouse. Scale them, gain the battlements, and clear the clansmen off the walls wherever you find them. The walls, sers. If we lose the walls, we lose the city."

Arys drew Justice, and went.

xxx

The sword in his hands sang as he fought his way up the tower. It had already fallen to the clansmen by the time Arys reached it with his dozen Arryn men. It was a small band of them who had dressed as ordinary townsfolk and held the winding stair. Arys took the steps into the teeth of them. 

In the cramped spiral there was no room for their numbers to tell; he fought upward one and two at a time, hewing at legs and thighs where his blade could reach beneath their guard, and where a man or woman fell he shoved the body down the stairs into those below and climbed on over the tangle.

At last, when he fought the last of them had given up and the deed was done, he came out onto the tower's top and into the cold night air. Only to see the clansmen along the battlements break into cheering.

His eyes went to what they cheered, out past the wall, over the dark hills beyond the city… and his blood ran cold.

A sea of torches was descending upon the land. Thousands of them. Thousands, spilling down out of the night toward Gulltown, and the leading edge of that fiery tide had already reached the outskirts of the town beyond the walls. The few hundred men-at-arms encamped outside had woken to the alarm and the fire at the gates and were already forming up now in desperate haste. But even from here, at a quick glance, Arys could see they had nowhere near the numbers for what was coming.

It would be a massacre.

And soon, if the gates truly were destroyed as he feared, then Gulltown itself would follow those men into the grave.

He seized one of his Arryn men by the shoulder. "Back to Lord Arryn, fast as you can run. Tell him a clansmen host is upon us, thousands of them out of the hills. And tell him to fire the gates again if he must and keep it alight. However long he can keep flame in that gap, the city lives. When those flames die, so does Gulltown. Go!"

When the man was gone, Arys turned back toward the battlements, lifted up Justice, and loosed a battle cry of his own before he threw himself at the clansmen along the wall. 

Justice carved through the scantily armored clansmen like a scythe through wheat, turning aside a bronze-headed mace, slipping past a wood-hafted axe, opening a throat, punching through a belly, always moving, always forward along the narrow stone. The blood ran until the battlements grew slick beneath his boots and he had to fight for his footing as much as against the enemy. He did not know how many he killed. He did not count. He only fought, on and on, until a hand seized his arm and hauled him back.

"Ser! We have to go, we have to go now!"

Arys looked down over the wall. Outside, the men-at-arms and knights had broken. They were fleeing, scattering desperately across the fields, and behind them the clansmen host surged forward in a howling flood. Already, up and down the wall, ladders were thudding into place and finding purchase against the stone.

For a moment, seeing that enormous tide of bodies surging forward, Arys almost lost heart, but he quickly shook himself. They needed the walls. Lord Jon had charged him with the walls, and he would have them. 

"We must hold," he said. 

"We can't hold the walls by our lonesome, ser!" The Arryn knight's face was wild. "The gates are gone! There's a gap where they stood and the savages will pour straight through it into the city. If we hold here, they'll take us front and back both and cut us to pieces! We have to fall back!"

Arys cursed, but the man had the right of it. "Back to the tower, then. We hold the tower."

They ran back along the battlements as the first clansmen came scrambling over the top of the ladders. Arys cut down the climbers where he could reach them, and his men set to hacking at the ladders themselves, trying to throw them down, but there were too many, and far too few of them. So Arys drew them back into the narrow mouth of the tower where a single doorway meant the clansmen could come at them only a few abreast, and there he set himself to hold.

"You," he said to one of the men. "Back to the Hand. Tell him where I am and beg him for whatever men he can spare. We'll hold this tower door as long as we're able. Now go."

The battlements were overrun within minutes, black with climbing clansmen. And with the gatehouse on the other side still choked with smoke, there was only one way for them to go down into the city. And only one way for Arys to stop them. 

He fought.

He did not know for how long. Long enough that his arms grew heavy as stone, that his face was thick with the blood of the men he killed, that the door before him became a wall of bodies he had to keep clearing to make room for the killing of more. And when the endless stream of them made him doubt, when he could not see how any handful of men could hold against so many, he thought back to Grey Garden.

He thought of Ser Galad holding the mouth of the gatehouse there against the Ironborn, calm as still water in the heart of the slaughter. He thought of the trial at Casterly Rock, seven against one, with the very same sword Arys now wielded. And he took heart.

His men fought hard and faithful beside him, and Arys did his best to be for them what Ser Galad had been for him.

"Hold, lads!" he roared over the din. "Every soul in this city lives or dies by what we do at this door! The people behind us, the women, the children, they're depending on you! On your courage! On your hearts! Hold!"

And they held. A half hour. Perhaps more. But they held until Ser Davos Seaworth came up the stair at last with fifty Baratheon men behind him and Arys could finally fall back and let the fresh men stream past him out onto the battlements.

He sank down against the inner wall of the tower's top chamber, his chest heaving. Ser Davos pressed a waterskin into his hands, and Arys drank like a man half-dead of thirst.

"The gates?" Arys managed, between swallows.

Ser Davos shook his head grimly. "Gone. Burned through. But Lord Stannis has set himself in the gap with the Grafton forces, and he says he'll hold it or die in it. If these mountain men knew him, they’d have brought twice the men. Now come, Lord Arryn has called."

They left the tower in the hands of a Baratheon knight and made their way to where the lords had gathered inside a stout stone inn a block back from the gates that they'd taken for their command.

Inside, Ser Arnold Arryn was arguing for a retreat deeper into the city. Ser Damon Shett offered his own seat, Gull Tower, as a refuge to fall back upon.

Lord Jon Arryn shook his grey head. "That would leave the whole of the city to the sack. I'll not allow it. We will not abandon Gulltown to save ourselves."

Lord Stannis stood by the cold hearth, armored and bloodied, his jaw set like iron. "Have ravens gone out yet?"

"They have, my lord." Ser Cley Grafton, eldest son of Lord Gerold, nodded. "To every castle we have the birds for."

"Then we hold until help comes," the Master of Ship said as if it was a matter resolved.

"That could be days, my lord." Ser Arnold had gone pale. "Days."

Lord Stannis' eyes were hard as flint. "Then we hold for days." 

Arys nodded his agreement. He had not known the king’s brother for long, but the stories about him were certainly true. The man had steel in his veins.

Ser Davos put forward that they begin loading the women and children of the city onto whatever ships still lay in the harbor. A precaution, he said, should the worst come and the city fall. Stannis agreed and gave the Onion Knight himself the task. And to Arys, as a knight of the Kingsguard, he gave command of the men who had fought beside him at the walls, and thirty more besides, with a single order.

"Retake the walls, ser. And hold them. Whatever it costs."

xxx

That night, the walls fell into clansmen hands twice, and twice Arys took them back.

Each time with fewer men than the last. Each time against a tide of the enemy that seemed to have no end to it, no bottom, no limit. Near morning, the tower itself was lost, with the clansmen spilling out of it and down into the streets of the city. 

Arys had felt his heart nearly fail him then, and he had to be dragged back by his own men when a bronze axe laid open a gash on his shoulder. But then the people of Gulltown themselves came into the fight, common men and women armed with whatever they could snatch up, cleavers and boat-hooks, fire-irons and cobblestones. With them, and being able to use only his right arm, Arys took the tower back and began to contest for the battlements once more.

Three times through the night he heard that the gates had fallen. And three times he heard of Lord Stannis Baratheon charging into the breach with his household knights to take them back again.

Arys clung to that. For he knew that if the walls here fell, the clansmen would be able to come at the king's brother from both the gap and the streets below at once, and he could not let that happen. Whatever it cost, he could not let that happen.

He had never in his life fought so long, or so hard.

His arm was numb as dead wood as he cut down yet another clansman coming up over a ladder's top. Justice was slick to the crossguard in his fist. His left shoulder, hastily bandaged and still seeping with blood, felt as if it was afire. His ears rang and thrummed inside his dented helm from a blow he'd taken to the head, so that he could hear little beyond the roar of his own breathing.

But he kept fighting.

The white cloak over his shoulder had gone grey with grime and dark with blood, no longer white at all, and yet the defenders at the wall took heart from it still, from the knowledge that a knight of the Kingsguard stood and bled among them. So Arys did not allow himself so much as a moment's rest the whole night through. He owed them that. Ser Galad would have given them that.

And then, as the first grey light of dawn crept up over the eastern sea, all along the walls his men began to point toward a hill in the distance.

Cavalry was drawing up upon its crest. Line upon line of horsemen, gathering in the dawn light, and above them flew the banners of the Vale, all of them, every house, the wheel and the tower and the arrows and the bronze shield and a dozen more. And there, at the very center of them all, another banner. A single spreading tree upon a field of charcoal grey, and above it a golden sunburst.

The banner of the Woodsman Knight.

Arys Oakheart very nearly fell to his knees, so great was the relief that washed through him.

Distant trumpets blared across the fields before the horses came, thundering down off the hill in a great bright wave. There weren’t many, a part of his mind quickly noted. He could not count even three hundred men descending from the heights, and there were thousands outside still. But it had to be enough. Had to. 

Drawing himself against the parapet, Arys lifted Justice high above his head, finding somewhere within him the breath for one last roar to rally the men beside him—Baratheons and Arryns and the ragged, bloodied folk of Gulltown alike.

"For the King and the Vale!" he bellowed into the dawn. "With me! With me now!"