The knight came at Alric with his sword aimed low to end Alric’s life at one sweep.
He never reached him.
Kenneth stepped across his path and cut once, and the blade opened the man’s throat above the mail collar.
He went down onto the stones and did not get up.
Alric grew angry.
“Do not get in my way, Kenneth. Do not ruin it for me.”
Kenneth smiled back.
“That is a no, my lord. Not while I can help it.”
Alric clicked his tongue and moved forward.
He pushed into the line, past his own men, and the Sunglass defenders came apart in front of him.
Somebody swung a spear at his chest.
He turned it aside with the shaft of the hammer, push his shoulder into the man, and heard him hit the ground.
Before he could finish him another household knight came out of the press at him.
This one was better.
He had a shield, a proper one, and he kept it high and moved his feet the way a man does when he has been taught.
His first cut came at Alric’s helm, and Alric got the hammer up in time to catch it.
They traded blows on the quay while the fighting went on around them.
The knight was quick, and he was patient.
He slashed forward, and Alric parried it with the hammer and pushed into him with his whole body and weight.
Alric used every bit of the advantage he had.
He was bigger, he was stronger, and the armour made him heavier than any man in that press.
He drove the knight backward and swung the hammer into his chest.
Ribs went in under the breastplate.
But while he was doing it, the man he had shouldered down earlier had got back up behind him.
Kenneth saw it and moved.
But He was not fast enough, Alric has gone too far.
But he didn’t need to.
Alric felt someone coming from back with his insticts.
Alric immediately swung the hammer in a back motion with such ease that it might have weighed nothing at all.
The spike side came down on top of the man’s head.
He never saw it coming.
It arrived that fast.
It punched straight through the skull, and blood came up out of it in a spray like a fountain, and Alric let go of the hilt of hammer, and the man dropped like something cut loose from a rope.
Alric was grinning like a maniac.
He put his boot on the body and pulled.
The hammer came free on the second pull.
“Focus on your own fight, Kenneth. I can handle mine.”
Kenneth grinned, slightly dissatisfied that he had not been allowed to do his work.
But it was all right.
That was how men grew into legends.
“Alright, my lord.”
The knight with the broken ribs was still alive.
He was in immense pain, but he saw Alric standing there talking, and he decided to spend everything he had left on one attack.
He gathered himself from his pain and moved forward to kill him.
But Another man came in from his left and killed him before he understood it was happening.
“DIE!”
Duran Bar Emmon, sword already wet, helm knocked askew.
It was not much of a fight after that.
The Sunglass men on the harbour had been out skill from the first ship, and they were outnumbered worse every minute as the galleys emptied.
They had no line, no ground worth holding, and half of them had come running from their beds.
They broke in perhaps a quarter of an hour.
Some threw down their arms and lived.
Kenneth’s men took the weapons and stacked them against the warehouse walls under guard, and did not touch the men further, because Alric had said plainly what he would do to anyone who did.
Others ran for the town, and the town gate, and the road up to the castle.
Alric wanted everything secured.
No gaps.
The harbour took an hour.
Alric watched his own men do it and understood, properly, for the first time, exactly what he had paid for.
No man had to be told twice.
Companies split off the moment the fighting stopped and went where they had been assigned—the mole, the warehouses, the fish sheds, the town gate, the two gate towers.
Men climbed the harbour wall and cut the ropes on the alarm bells.
Others put out the fires that had started when the first galley rammed in, because burnt warehouses are worth nothing to anyone.
There was no raping and there was no looting.
Ser Kenneth watched them work and said nothing at all, which from him was the highest praise available.
The demon was not complaining.
He was not criticising.
That was as good as a praise Men trained in under him get.
By the second hour the harbour and the lower town belonged to Dragonstone, and the columns were already moving up the hill.
Sweetport Sound’s castle was not a great fortress.
It had never needed to be.
It had a curtain wall, two towers, one gate, and a household that had not been called to arms in years.
They got the gate shut.
That was all they managed.
Alric stood on the road below the walls in the grey before dawn and looked up at it.
“They have not stocked it,” Kenneth said.
“No time. Look at the yard—those are house servants carrying arrows up, not soldiers. And there is nobody on the eastern wall at all.”
“They could not gather many men. Well It’s not like We give them any time.”
“Aye.”
“I want a siege, but a fast one. Short. Do not give them room to think it through.” Alric turned.
“I want relentless pressure. We cannot afford a long siege. I need them broken now. Rams to the gate. Ladders on the east wall and the south. I want the walls busy everywhere at once, so they cannot put what little they have in one place.”
Kenneth smiled and nodded.
“The men are already preparing. Do not trouble yourself, my lord. They have trained for exactly this. They will do their best.”
Alric nodded, then added, disappointed, “I told you this armour was unnecessary. I could have been up a ladder myself and broken them inside myself”
Kenneth’s mouth moved slightly in horror.
“You absolutely will not, my lord.”
Duran backed him at once.
“Aye, my lord. You are destined for far greater things than dying to a lucky hit on a wall.”
Ser Kenneth’s grin returned.
“See. Even Lord Duran supports me.”
Alric looked at the two of them and gave way.
“Fine. But be quick about it. Otherwise I am going up that ladder no matter what either of you says.”
Ser Kenneth nodded and agreed.
Before he left to pass the orders, he stopped by Duran.
“You have grown, Lord Duran. I will be honest—I was quite disappointed when you asked for Ser Willem as your teacher instead of me.” He smiled horrifically.
“Perhaps I will teach you a trick or two once this is finished.”
Then he walked away.
Duran stood very still terrified
“He will not actually do that. Will he?”
Alric smiled and gave him no answer at all.
The soldiers simply went to work.
The rams came up the road under hide roofing, dragged by men who had done exactly this in a mud clearing north of Sharp Point four hundred times.
The ladder parties went at the east wall in waves—up, thrown off, back down, and up again, without a single man having to be pushed forward.
When one fell, the man behind him climbed into his place without waiting to be told.
When somebody’s ladder broke, they picked up another one and came back.
The ram went into the gate again.
And again.
And again.
It gave a little in the first hour, and went entirely in the second.
And finally there was an opening.
Alric had been waiting for it the whole time.
He went in through the broken gate with the warhammer in one hand and a shield on his arm, Duran and Kenneth beside him.
It was the most dangerous place to fight in the whole castle.
The gate passage was narrow.
Only a few men could push through at a time, and on the other side of it stood hundreds of defenders with everything they had left, and they were pouring all of it into that one gap. Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
To be in the front rank there was to be a man betting his life on the next few seconds.
Alric was the first through it.
He went in with no fear in his eyes at all, and the defenders came at him.
Ser Kenneth on his right and Lord Duran on his left.
The two sides met in the gateway and it turned into butchery.
Spears stabbed in from the front.
Swords came down from the sides.
The Baratheon men fought to kill anything in reach and win a foot of ground, then another foot, so the men behind them could get through.
Alric held his shield up and shoved.
There was no room to swing a hammer properly—the passage was jammed with bodies, living and dead—so he used the blunt head of the hammer as a ram and drove men back with raw strength.
Men roared.
Men screamed.
Men died underfoot and were trampled by both sides.
Alric got half a swing free and put the hammer into a man’s shoulder, and the shoulder came apart, and the space opened, and he moved into it with the shield up against everything coming at him.
And in the middle of it he saw Guncer Sunglass.
Well back from the fighting, in armour that had plainly been strapped on in a hurry.
Guncer saw him seeing it, and shouted across the yard.
“WHAT MADNESS IS THIS, LORD ALRIC? THIS IS AN ATTACK ON HOUSE SUNGLASS WITHOUT CAUSE. HAVE YOU GONE MAD? IS THIS YOUR HONOUR— ATTACKING ON A LORD WITH NO DECLARATION AND NO REASON?”
Alric heard it and answered.
“I TOLD YOU I WOULD COME AND TAKE THEM MYSELF IF YOU DID NOT RETURN MY SHIPS. HERE I AM.” Alric roared.
Guncer grew frantic.
“WHAT NONSENSE IS THIS? YOU HAVE GONE MAD WITH YOUR OWN POWER. COME TO YOUR SENSES, YOU CRAZY BRAT!”
Alric scoffed in the middle of the fighting.
“I AM THE MAD ONE NOW? YOU BETRAYED MY HOUSE. YOU BROKE YOUR OATHS. IT IS YOU WHO SHOULD COME TO HIS SENSES GUNCER.”
Guncer was nearly screaming now, because the boy was not listening to a word of it.
“WE CAN TALK. WE CAN NEGOTIATE. THERE IS NO NEED TO MURDER SO MANY MEN. WE SHOULD SETTLE THIS LIKE MEN—WHERE IS YOUR HONOUR, SLAUGHTERING MEN LIKE THIS?”
Alric laughed.
“YOU TALK TO ME OF HONOUR? WHERE WAS YOURS WHEN YOU ROBBED THE BOY YOU WERE SWORN TO PROTECT, GUNCER? DON’T TALK TO ME HONOR AS YOU NONE OF IT.”
He smashed the head of a man coming at him and kept going.
“YOU WANT TO TALK LIKE MEN? YOU WANT TO NEGOTIATE? THEN COME AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN. PROVE YOURSELF IN A DUEL.”
Guncer went silent.
“WHAT IS THIS? HAS A CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE?” Alric mocked him.
“I HEAR YOU ARE A PIOUS FOLLOWER OF THE SEVEN. HOW ABOUT A TRIAL OF SEVEN, THEN? WITH YOUR LIFE ON THE LINE?”
Guncer said nothing.
He would not take that chance.
He did not need to.
His men still held the gate, and only a handful of Dragonstone soldiers could push through at a time.
Yes, there were enemies on the walls, and yes, they would take the castle eventually—but eventually was a long way off, and if Alric Baratheon died in that gateway, none of it would matter.
So he gave his answer another way.
“STOP SPOUTING NONSENSE! MEN—KILL HIM! KILL HIM AND IT IS ALL OVER! KILL ALRIC BARATHEON!”
The chant started somewhere in the middle of his line and spread.
“KILL ALRIC BARATHEON!”
“KILL!”
“KILL ALRIC BARATHEON!”
“KILL!”
“KILL HIM!”
“KILL HIM!”
Every man in the front of the defence began to turn toward the gateway, toward the stag helm, toward the one death that would end the whole thing.
Kenneth and Duran shouted it at the same moment.
“PROTECT THE LORD! PROTECT THE LORD!”
DROP THEM .
I AM HUNGRY.
I NEED THAT REACH.
ALL OF THEM, ALL OF YOU.
OR SAY GOODBYES TO YOUR BALLS.