“KILL HIM!”
Every spear in the front rank swung round toward the gateway, toward the antlers, toward the one death that could end this.
Kenneth and Duran roared it in the same breath.
“PROTECT THE LORD! PROTECT THE LORD!”
The defenders came at him with nothing held back.
They knew what was coming.
They knew the walls were going and the ladders were up and that in an hour there would be thousand men in that yard and none of them would be theirs.
But an army with a dead commander is not an army.
It is men on a road going home.
So they came for the boy in the stag helm, all of them, and they did not care what it cost.
Alric was furious and frustrated but Not at enemies.
He had never once turned from a fight in his life and he was not going to start in a gateway.
He liked this, he craved this.
Some part of him had wanted this ever since he was 12.
He was furious at his own men.
They are supposed to be breaking into a castle.
They are the attackers.
They are not supposed to be standing in front of me like a bloody wall.
He shoved a spear wide and put his boot in a man’s knee.
The men they are guarding me from are the defenders.
We are the ones with four thousand and they are the ones with six hundred, and my own commander has just stopped my assault dead to build a shield around me.
Kenneth was one of the finest knights in the realm and he was too protective and too attached about him to think straight, and it was going to lose them the gate.
Alric clicked his tongue behind the visor.
Fuck this Then I will lead this shit myself.
He could see it all at once — the enemy pouring toward him, his own men closing up around him, the whole push grinding to nothing in the throat of that passage.
“FOOLS!” he bellowed.
“JUST CHARGE AT THEM!”
Then he went.
He did not wait for anyone to hear him.
He went straight into the enemy line alone, through the mouth of the gateway, into six hundred men who wanted nothing in the world but him and his pretty head.
It was a stupid charge.
It was reckless past the point where courage means nothing, It did not matter how good he was — no man is good enough for that many, not on foot, not in a yard, not with every one of them coming at the same target.
It was a wager, a gamble with his own life on the table.
If his men came in behind him, if they kept up, if they trusted him — then it broke the line and the castle fell in the next hour.
If they did not, he died in that yard.
Alric Baratheon did not think about the odds for one heartbeat.
If did he won’t even try it.
The odds are stacked against him.
He is charging at the enemies
Three men came at him.
He swung fast — faster from what a man would expect a hammer speed to be — and he was not trying to kill.
Killing will just slow him down.
He wanted them down.
He just smashing hammer to men to knock them into a ground to make room for his men.
He is striking two of the men with the hammer.
The other one with the flat of the shield, straight into a face and smashing his nose bloody.
Three down but that wasn’t the end.
They just kept coming, one after another, shoulders and knees and arms, and every one that fell was another foot of ground
Kenneth heard fools, just charge at them and understood in that same breath that he had made a mistake.
Then he looked up and saw his lord thirty feet inside the enemy line with nobody at all beside him.
He had made two mistakes.
“WITH ME!”
He went in after him and did not look to see who followed.
On the other hand Lord Duran Bar Emmon on the left did not spend any time thinking about it.
He saw Alric go and he went in behind without overthinking it.
“CHARGE”
While charging he saw a man coming from behind to attack Alric’s back while Alric fought three in front of him, he didn’t think.
He put his head down and ran at him and hit him with the shield with everything he had.
The man went into the stones and Duran went over the top of him and did not stop.
“CHARGE!” he screamed, and his voice broke on it, and nobody laughed.
“CHARGE!”
Alric was in among them now and he did not look behind him once. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
He had no idea whether a single man had followed.
He just kept swinging his hammer towards his enemies.
A knight came at him from the right with the sword already coming down.
He notices there is no No time for the shield — Alric got the hammer up crossways and took the blade on the haft, and then smashed the shield into the man’s face and felt the whole front of it give.
But he had no time to breathe.
It is a pit and men just kept coming.
One came with a sword.
One came with a spear.
The spear came first, straight for his neck, a good thrust from a man who knew his business.
Alric read it coming and pulled back to dodge it and it went past his throat through empty it though only barely, and he broke the spearman’s chest with the hammer on the return.
But The sword was already there.
Alric got the shield across and took it high on the rim and it slammed back into his shoulder.
The spearman was on the ground.
So Alric drove the hammer into the swordsman knocking him down but it’s just a endless lines of enemies coming at him.
There were always more.
The line did not thin, it just kept feeding itself into him, and away to his right he could see another group of them — coming across the yard at him fast.
Alric did not wait for them this time
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
Instead He ran at them.
Shield forward, head down, all his weight and all that armour, and he hit the front of that group like a galley coming into a stone floor.
It worked.
They went over — four, five of them, off their feet and into the ones behind.
He went over with them.
The armour took the ground and the ground took the wind out of him, and there were boots and bodies and someone’s arm across his face, and when he came up out of it the shield was gone.
Torn off, wrenched away, somewhere under three men in that mess.
He didn’t have a time to breathe when men already coming at him.
He came up onto his knees, then his feet, and put both hands on the hilt of the hammer.
Both his hands on the Warhammer and he roared.
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
He did not stop swinging and he just did relentlessly.
The men coming through the gateway behind him heard it.
They saw their lord — the Young Man fighting more fiercely and ferociously in thirty yards deep in the enemy line with no shield, tired and going forward like some madness engulfed him
Something went through them.
A energy, a boost to thier morale and thier ego as a warrior.
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
They started yelling.
It came up out of the gate passage and off the walls and out of the ladder parties on the east side who could not even see what was happening, and it did not stop.
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
The whole castle could hear it.
Alric was still swinging.
The armour was doing its work and the armour was not enough.
Nothing gets through good plate cleanly, but everything gets through eventually — an axe on the pauldron that numbed his left arm to the elbow, a spear that went in under the arm and skidded off the mail and out again, something that took him across the back of the thigh and came away wet.
The damage was piling.
The pain was arriving.
There was blood coming off him now and some of it was his.
But He did not slow down.
Then a sword came in from his left.
High.
Fast.
Perfectly placed, straight for the neck, and there was no time to move.
Alric caught it with his left hand.
The gauntlet closed around the blade and held it, and it bit into the palm through the mail of the glove, and he held it anyway.
His Right hand already swinging.
Left hand full of another man’s sword.
He didn’t have time to think or survive for a matter of facet , So he drove his head wearing the antlers helmet forward towards the men whose sword he was holding.
The antlers went into the man’s throat.
They punched in and stuck, and the man came off his feet, gargling, both hands scrabbling at Alric’s helm, blood pumping down over the black steel and into the eye slot.
“Argh — ARGHHHH — argh—”
Alric let go of the sword, got that hand under the helm and shoved it up off his head as it still attached to the dead man, and He didn’t want a dead man pulling him down to the ground literally a dead weight.
If he went down he as good as a dead.
Then he was bareheaded in the middle of the yard.
He looked at what was standing around him.
Fuck.
There was blood in his hair and blood in his mouth and no helm and no shield, and eleven men between him and any friend he had in the world.
I am fucked aren’t I, He thought.
And yet there is a crazy grin in his face.
They came at him and he swung, because it was all there was left to do.
He got one across the jaw and one in the ribs and something opened his cheek and he did not feel it.
And then death got very close.
He could feel it.
He knew what it was.
He was not frightened of it and it was there all the same, three feet away with a spear in its hands.
The spear never landed.
Kenneth arrived.
He came into the men around Alric the way a man comes through a door he has decided to stop knocking on, and what he did in the next ten seconds nobody who saw it ever described properly afterwards.
There was no skill on display in it.
There was no honour in it either.
He killed the spearman from behind, and then the next one on the ground, and then the one who was trying to get away.
Duran came in on the other side with men howling behind him, hitting anything that stood, and behind them the whole column finally came through the gate.
The chant came with them.
“OURS IS THE FURY!”
Guncer Sunglass had been watching from the keep steps and for one bright moment he had been happy.
There.
There, you stupid boy.
Caught in the open like the arrogant little brat you always were.
He had watched the ring of men close around him.
Full of yourself.
Too full.
And now they have you.
Then the Ironslayer came into his yard.
Guncer Sunglass watched a man he had not heard of for years take his household apart in front of him, and the anger went through him like a sickness.
Why are you here?
Why in the name of the Seven are you here?
He had gone quiet.
The yard was lost.
He could see it was lost.
He turned to the four knights still standing near him.
“We must go Back into the keep.” His voice was not steady.
“Bar the hall. We are done out here — if we stay in this yard we will be cut down in the heat of it and there will be no talking to anyone. It can be reasoned with once the blood cools. We go inside, we sit, and we negotiate with a calm head.”
None of them argued seeing Baratheon doing the slaughter of their men.
They went up the steps and in through the hall doors, and the doors shut behind them.
Out in the yard, the fighting was ending.
Alric Baratheon is still standing in the middle of it.
He had no helm and no shield.
His left gauntlet was cut open and running red.
There was blood down his face from somewhere above the eye, and blood in his hair, and blood on the black plate — his own and a great deal of other men’s — and the dawn was coming up over the east wall behind him and catching all of it.
He stood in the centre of what he had made and he was breathing hard, and the men still moving around him gave him a wide space without anybody telling them to.
He looking like a death with blood shinning on his dark armour.
He picked up his hammer, wiped his eye with the back of his ruined glove, and looked up at the keep doors.
DROP THEM .
I AM HUNGRY.
I NEED THAT REACH.
ALL OF THEM, ALL OF YOU.
OR SAY GOODBYES TO YOUR BALLS