The fleet came ashore without a sound.
Not the faintest noise gave them away.
The knights had already muffled their warhorses’ hooves beforehand.
The young fishermen pulled on the breastplates and helms Quentyn had issued them, and took up their spears and fishing gigs.
Six or seven bodies lay scattered along the shore, every one of them with more than a single arrow driven through eye or open mouth.
Billy looked at Robb differently now.
Grudging as he was to admit it, the boy’s archery was plainly better than his own.
Two or three of Billy’s own arrows had buried themselves harmlessly in the mud, while every one of the dark-haired boy’s shafts had found its mark square in a killing spot.
“Fuck.
You win.” Billy said, none too pleased about it.
Robb said nothing.
He only fell in quietly behind Quentyn.
Quentyn took the horse’s barding from Hogen’s hands, and together the two of them fitted the armor over their mounts.
Before long, the whole company stood armed and ready.
The knights swung up into their saddles one after another, while the young fishermen traded excited whispers among themselves.
Fifty warhorses.
Fifty men-at-arms in full plate, in position at last.
Quentyn pulled down the lower jaw of his dragon-winged helm.
The interlocking dragon fangs closed around his face, sealing it away beneath the steel.
He drew his longsword and pointed it toward the distant campfires.
“Leave none of them.”
Quentyn said.
Thud.
The girl’s head struck the wooden post.
Ser Morn, hideous and impatient, hauled her by the hair as he wiped his lance clean.
“Fucking useless, the lot of you.” Ser Morn spat, his words slurred with drink.
The fine wine the camp’s own steward had hoarded for years now went sloshing down the brigands’ throats as freely as water.
It hadn’t lulled the outlaw knights into a sound sleep.
It had only stripped away whatever pretense of discipline they’d still been keeping up.
Morn flicked the blood from his sword, his head thick and swimming.
What was it he was supposed to be doing?
Ah, yes.
He was meant to go on questioning the captive villagers, the ones who’d sworn themselves to that filthy, incestuous dragon-brood and forgotten every teaching of the Seven.
It was his duty to remind these unwashed swine of the Seven’s own glory, and his duty besides to collect their ransom for it.
“Help—”
“Run—”
“Leave none—”
The clamor grew clearer and clearer, and it only made Morn’s already fogged head throb worse.
“Fuck!” Rage built in his skull until it drowned out whatever reason he had left.
He snatched up his sword and lurched out of his tent, stumbling.
“Can’t a man sleep around here without some damned—”
Thwip.
An arrow, from nowhere, punched straight through Morn’s shoulder.
The sudden, blinding pain tore the fog from his mind in an instant.
“Seven hells…
what’s happening?”
Morn came back to himself just as a brigand, soaked head to foot in blood, staggered toward him, only to collapse limply to the ground before he’d gone another step.
An arrow stood planted, dead center, in the man’s back.
The whole camp was burning.
Fire everywhere, men wreathed in flame, tents and timber collapsing all around.
Morn saw an armored rider come bursting out of the flames like some demon astride a horse of fire, longsword falling to split a brigand’s skull clean in two.
Chaos, on every side.
The brigands’ shrieks tangled together with the villagers’ own roars of fury.
Morn even caught sight of one brigand, too panicked to think straight, hacking down a comrade with his own axe, only to be cut down himself an instant later by a knight in plate.
Quentyn hadn’t expected the ambush to go quite this well.
While the company had crept slowly toward the camp, Billy and Robb had made something of a contest out of clearing every last sentry from their path.
Every kill had come in a single stroke.
Not one brigand had lived long enough to carry word of their coming back to the camp.
By the time the company reached the camp’s edge and spurred their horses into the charge, most of the rebels were still fast asleep.
They swept the fire-pits over without slowing, trampling sleeping men down into the mud.
The suddenness of the assault sent the rebels into instant disarray, and the knights found them as helpless before their charge as fattened sheep before a hunting wolf pack.
It was a slaughter, and a one-sided one at that.
The boy watched Ser Sebaston sweep his longsword in wide arcs, taking a brigand’s life with every stroke.
He watched the hired knight Edmure’s mace crush the skull of a man still fumbling to buckle on his own armor.
He watched Pate’s morningstar batter another brigand from his feet, watched Garwyn swing his gilded war-hammer like a passing storm, scattering enemies before him with every blow.
Harrenhal’s own knights rode the camp alone or in pairs and threes, hooves trampling everything in their path.
Whether they were rebels who’d only moments before been swaggering before terrified villagers, or the very men who’d twice broken House Strong’s own army, all of them went down alike beneath those hooves.
Quentyn didn’t think he’d ever felt anger like this in either of his two lives combined.
The sight of an infant impaled on a spearpoint had already stretched his patience past its limit; when Pate crushed the skull of the man standing guard over it with a single blow, Quentyn’s fury reached its very peak.
“There now, there now, old mother, Lord Quentyn of Harrenhal has come to save us…” An old man was murmuring gently to a woman who had plainly gone mad with grief.
“My baby…
my baby…
no!
No!
Give me back my baby!”
The old woman could say nothing else, over and over, but Quentyn could see clearly enough what she cradled in her arms.
It was a human head.
The head of a little girl.
“Forgive her, young lord…” the old man stammered.
“Ever since my granddaughter was taken from us by that devil’s own beast, my wife’s been like this…
she was only nine years old…”
Only nine years old.
Something rose in Quentyn’s throat all at once.
He clenched his teeth and forced the burning feeling back down, fury blazing through him.
How dare they.
Setting aside whatever pity a modern man might carry in his heart, every soul suffering here was his own to protect.
Rage churned inside him, nearly enough to burn away all reason, but the boy mastered it all the same, forcing his face back into a mask of calm.
He needed to steady his people.
He needed to show them that everything here remained firmly in his hands.
“I will avenge you.” Quentyn rose in his stirrups and swung back up onto his horse.
“In the name of Quentyn Qoherys, in the name of the old gods and the new, I will make the men who did this pay.”
The boy rode on through the camp.
He felt his horse pitching beneath him with every stride, and with every jolt came a scream in his ears, or the sound of something breaking.
Robb and Hogen rode at his side, one to each flank, shielding their liege lord between them.
His horse cleared a burning corpse, and there, Quentyn caught sight of a tall, hulking shape.
Morn stood outside the largest of the tents, hacking wildly, an arrow standing out plainly from his shoulder.
Quentyn dug his heels in without hesitation, and his horse surged forward with a roar.
He leveled his longsword and drove it forward like a knight’s lance, exactly as Master Sebaston had taught him, again and again, to do.
Clang.
Not the sound he’d braced for, flesh giving way beneath steel.
Beast though he was, Morn was a practiced fighter all the same, and the instant he saw Quentyn bearing down on him, he’d already shifted to meet the charge.
Sword met sword.
Morn managed to turn aside most of the blow’s force, though the impact still sent him staggering back several steps.
“The Seven curse you!
Slave of the dragon-spawn!”
Ser Morn caught his footing and raised his blade to hold Quentyn off.
Quentyn pressed his knees to his horse’s flanks and wheeled around the hideous outlaw knight in a tight circle.
“Bullshit.”
“You dare defile—”
“It’s you who defiles the Seven, you animal!” Quentyn’s voice came muffled and furious from behind his helm.
“The Father teaches you justice.
The Mother teaches you mercy.
Where’s your justice now?
Where’s your mercy?
Fed to the dogs?”
Using his horse’s momentum, Quentyn turned the outlaw knight’s blade aside with ease, leaving him reeling, swinging wildly and blindly.
Every one of Quentyn’s own strikes cost the man everything he had just to turn aside, while Morn’s own blows only skidded harmlessly off his horse’s barding.
“The Maiden teaches you to guard the weak.
What did you make of the weak instead?”
“Every slave who serves the dragon-brood deserves death!”
The outlaw knight lunged, trying to drag Quentyn down from the saddle, but Quentyn only let his blade pass through in a single stroke.
Morn screamed, and a severed hand went flying into the mud.
“To prey on the weak is cowardice.
The Warrior curses you for it.”
Quentyn’s blade swept the man’s own aside.
“You brought darkness to the weak, not light.
The Crone and the Maiden both will curse your name for it.”
The stroke left the outlaw knight’s guard thrown wide open.
“You…”
“The Father scorns your shamelessness.
Even the Smith has cast you out.”
Quentyn cut down without mercy, the blade crashing full onto Morn’s breastbone.
“Let the Stranger judge your sins.”
Another stroke.
Quentyn felt the edge tear through the man’s coarse clothing, through flesh, through the bone of his chest.
The hideous outlaw knight went down screaming.
The second blow all but shattered his windpipe, and blood came flooding into his lungs, so that whatever words he tried to force out came instead as nothing but a wet, gurgling rattle.
“No…
hhh…
gllk…
gllk…”
Quentyn’s horse brought its hoof down hard on Morn’s chest.
The outlaw knight coughed up a great gout of blood and moved no more.
Quentyn reined in his mount and swept his gaze once around the battlefield.
They had won, completely and utterly.
The whole camp lay drowned in fire, brigands’ corpses strewn everywhere.
The young fishermen had reached the field themselves by now, spears and fishing gigs in hand, skewering any stragglers who’d slipped through the net.
Still, their own numbers had simply been too few.
A handful of brigands had already fled, in disorder, into the shelter of Milkwood.
It scarcely mattered now.
Quentyn swung down from his horse and walked to where Morn’s body lay.
The boy raised his longsword and drove its point through the corpse’s throat.
At that very moment, quite naturally, Quentyn felt the signal come from the door deep within his own mind.
He closed his eyes.
The great door spanning earth and sky rose up before him.
This time, for what?
His first kill?
Quentyn reached out, the question still forming in his mind.
The doors creaked open.
What greeted him this time wasn’t the familiar tree, nor the stars and streaming knowledge he’d seen once before.
It was endless night.
A single shooting star tore across the darkness, streaking in from the edge of the world, and in the space of a blink it had fallen to land before him.
As its light faded, what remained hovering before Quentyn’s eyes was, of all things, a longsword.
“A sword?”
Quentyn closed his hand around it, and a familiar feeling flowed up from the blade into his arm.
All at once, he felt certain that this wasn’t the first time he’d ever held a sword, but that he’d taken one up countless times before, drilled countless forms, fought countless men to the death.
His own arm’s muscles seemed to remember, over and over, contracting and stretching to answer a hundred different styles of swordplay.
For the first act of vengeance, for striking down a man both cruel and guilty: the gift of Sword Mastery.
Quentyn quietly filed away what he’d just learned.
Counting this one, he had now pushed the door open five times in all, and each time, for a different deed done, he had come away with a different gift.
Once he was back home, he’d have to sit down and work through it properly.
Perhaps then he could finally puzzle out the pattern behind whatever this gift of his truly was.
His awareness returned to the world around him.
In the eastern sky, a faint red had already begun to bloom.
The sun was rising.
Just then, the brigands who had fled into Milkwood came screaming back out of the trees.
Quentyn lifted his head, and through the hollow eyes of his dragon-winged helm, he saw at once what had driven them back.
His own blood stirred in that same instant.
A vast, bronze-green beast came gliding slowly over the treetops of Milkwood, its drooping dewlap and sparse crown of horns marking its identity beyond any doubt.
Vhagar.
When that great dragon, who had flown through the Conquest itself, spread her wings wide, even the newly risen sun seemed to dim before her.
Blazing dragonfire fell from the sky, swallowing the fleeing rebels whole in an instant.
“Aaah—”
“Seven save me—”
Their screams tore out, raw and desperate, but to no avail.
Vhagar’s fire burned their voices to silence before the sound had even finished leaving their throats.
Ash makes no sound, no matter how it burns.
From the northeast, House Strong’s own army came arriving on the battlefield at last.
Whether it was Prince Baelon, high on his dragon’s back, or the Strong soldiers hurrying in on foot, every one of them found their eyes fixed on the very same sight.
A burning camp, strewn with the dead.
A ring of knights in full plate, standing fast, while the sun climbed slowly in the east and cast its light across the battlefield.
Quentyn stood among his knights, leaning on his longsword, its point still buried in the throat of the man responsible for it all.
“Quentyn of House Qoherys.
The rebellion of the Faith’s remnants has been put down.”
Vhagar came down at the camp’s edge with a thunderous crash.
The great dragon lowered her head, and there upon her back sat Prince Baelon, small as an ant against her vast bulk.
Quentyn looked up at the prince on the dragon’s back, and beneath his helm, he opened his mouth to reveal a flash of white teeth.