He had not counted on the dog.
The quiet work was over.
Ten sellswords and a hound.
He still liked his side of it.
Some of them showed their teeth.
Some of them laughed.
They opened out and put him in the middle of the camp.
The lame one could not run.
He came on crooked with the axe up.
“You four had Harrenhal in your mouths.
You called more.
I came to the right fire.
This isn’t wasted.” Both hands on the longsword.
He gave ground toward the trees.
The lame man shouted and let the axe fall at Rhaegar’s head.
Rhaegar stepped left, both hands high.
The sword ran a half-circle along his body and took the haft.
The head slid down the blade and dragged the right hand with it.
The hands stayed up.
Thumbs shifted.
Wrists turned.
The sword spun on that axis and came down on the wrist that still held the axe.
Steel and the palm that gripped it hit the dirt together.
He was not done.
The blade kept its circle overhead.
He slid, turned onto the man’s left, and put the twist of his hips and the spin of the sword into a second cut from high.
The lame man was too slow.
An empty left hand in the air did nothing.
Bone went.
That hand fell too.
He sat down screaming, both stumps jammed against his belly, blood running between them.
The hands were finished.
Rhaegar did not spend more of himself on a man who could not hold steel.
“I’ll take ten!”
He shouted it at his own blood.
The burst was in him: heart, breath, the bright edge of it.
He put the sword back in the high line, found his air, and looked.
Nine.
The scar let the rope go.
The dog came with its mouth open.
The rest closed with iron swords, shields, spears on wooden shafts.
Three turns of a blade had taken two hands.
Another would have taken a head.
They had the measure of him now.
“Die, you little bastard.”
Men killing in the trees put the roosting birds into the air.
Nine men who had never stood a line also had to miss each other’s steel.
Four at a time was the most that could get around him.
Iron on iron.
Sparks jumped.
He moved his feet.
He turned his wrists.
The sword changed hands.
A block on one side became a cut from the other.
Hands.
Shins.
Feet.
The fork of a man.
He was short.
The low line was what he had.
They had not met a blade that left a guard and came back at a belt before the first cut had finished.
They struck.
His wrist turned.
The sword was already there.
Before the arm recovered he was cutting up between their legs.
Night takes the eyes.
In black wood, with the fire on the iron, they saw a chain of blades and not a single one.
The light was poor.
The work was fast and not a style they knew.
Often the hole was in them before they had the sword placed.
He could pay in skin.
He lifted on a slant, beat a cut aside, and went back to a thick trunk, dragging air.
Blood ran out of the black hair on his shoulders.
The leather was red through: theirs and his.
He used the spin.
He took blows on the angle when he could.
He was still spent.
Four men were down.
One had a neck that was only half a neck; the air in him blew blood-bubbles at the cut.
Two held their wrists and rolled.
Add the lame one.
Of ten, six could still stand.
He put his back on the bark and kept all six in front of him.
He breathed the way the Kingsguard had shown him and waited for the body to come back.
Rhaena had never bound him to a lord’s knight.
He had not learned his steel in a yard that way.
He knew white cloaks.
The realm called them the best of it.
Lucamore Strong and Ryam Redwyne had lived at Harrenhal nearly two years. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Later there had been family gatherings.
When they put a blade in a prince’s hand, Rhaegar asked.
Lucamore was a big man: sword, and also flail, hammer, axe.
Ryam had beaten five of his own brothers in white and was named first sword in the Seven Kingdoms.
A sentence from either of them saved a year of stupid work.
In the world before this one he had trained bodies for pay and read anything he could steal on how a weapon moved.
Put that with the Kingsguard and with a blood-bar that let him drill as if dying were a rumor, and in a few years he had a style that was only his.
He rocked with the breath.
The stamina-bar climbed where he could see it.
He had watched them in the hall.
Four in common cloth, one in leather already rotting.
The steel they had left at the door was shop-iron.
The way they stood said plow before sword.
The dog had a mouth and no nerve.
If they had been the men they named themselves, some lord would have given them a knighthood.
Sellsword work was what you did when the other doors were shut.
He had eaten at Rhaena’s table and grown up on a knight’s hours.
A knight trained or he fought for a lord.
That was a soldier’s life.
A harvest-hand did not become that in a season.
Numbers and a hard face worked on smallfolk.
A column of proper knights and this lot would come apart in the first charge.
The bar.
The work.
Their emptiness.
That was why he had come alone.
“Fuck—”
An arrow stood in his thigh.
“Put him down!” The scar was screaming it at his men.
The lame one blew white foam and died.
The two without hands rolled their eyes and shook and started to shout that the sword was poisoned.
“Come on, then.
Leave the bows.” He went at them.
Six went backward into the trees.
Every one of them had a bow.
The air filled.
“Fuck.”
He cut at three shafts and missed all three.
All three found him.
Too close to choose.
This many, and bows.
A blood-bar fighter was not a god.
The exchange at the tree had taken half the bar.
Enough arrows would finish the rest.
He could not close.
He turned downhill and ran for ground he knew, to make them come to him there.