Alric 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.
He looked out at what was left of House Sunglass’s household and saw that it was finished.
There was nothing in those men anymore.
Thier eyes were empty.
His soldiers had already broken them in the gateway, and then the yard had gone, and then the last thing any of them had seen was their own lord turning around on the keep steps and going inside behind a barred door.
That had done what no amount of killing could have.
Broken thier spirit to no end.
Weapons started hitting the stones all over the yard.
Not in ones — in tens.
Men who had fought properly for two hours simply opened their hands and let go, because there was nothing left worth holding one for.
A few kept fighting.
Six or seven, scattered around the walls, and they were cut down for it in a minute.
Paying a very bitter price for their loyalty.
One man was on his knees ten feet from Duran Bar Emmon.
His axe was on the ground beside him.
He was not looking at anything, just kneeling in the wet with his hands at his sides, waiting for it to happen.
Duran brought his sword back and swung.
Alric’s hammer came across and caught the blade on the haft and stopped it dead.
“Leave him. He is already lost too much. He is dead inside.”
Duran’s head came round, and his eyes were wrong.
Wide and glassy and somewhere else entirely.
“Their lord abandoned them,” Alric said, cold and flat.
“Their steel is on the ground. There is no need. They are already fucking crushed.”
Duran stood there with his sword in the air.
Then his face changed as it came back to him — the yard, the noise stopping, the men kneeling, the sword, the man on his knees who had not moved.
“Oh.” His arm dropped.
“I— I did not realise it had—”
“I know what it feels like to be lost in that feeling.” Alric put the hammer down on his shoulder.
“Do not stand there hunting for it either. We have work still.”
Duran swallowed hard and nodded.
Alric raised his voice.
“TAKE THE CASTLE. Every tower, every stair, every cellar. Any man who has thrown down his weapon is a prisoner and lives — put them against the north wall under guard. Any man still holding steel gets one chance to drop it.” He let it carry.
“Nobody touches a woman in this castle. Nobody takes anything. Any man who does either will answer to me for it,”
That was enough.
Nobody needed the rest explained.
Behind him, Ser Kenneth had walked twenty paces back across the yard, put his boot on a dead man’s chest, and worked the black helm loose from where the antlers had gone into his throat.
He carried it under his arm and said nothing about it.
There was fighting in the keep, but it was not fighting so much as men being found.
The great hall doors had been barred and did not stay barred.
Alric came in through them with Kenneth and Duran and forty men, into the long dim hall of House Sunglass, and there at the far end of it, in front of his own high seat, stood Guncer Sunglass with five knights around him.
He had not sat down.
He had that much left.
“WHAT IN THE SEVEN HELLS IS THIS?”
His voice cracked off the stone.
“Look at it. Look at my yard, look at my men — this could have been settled with talk. With one meeting. There was no need for any of it, none, and you know there was not!”
Alric walked up the hall.
“I sent you a letter,” he said.
“You sent me four pages of lies and trust me I can tolerate many things but deceptions are not one of them Guncer.”
“We can still negotiate. We can still—”
“There is one way left to negotiate right now” Alric stopped twenty feet from him.
“And it is your fucking head.”
Guncer Sunglass stared at him, gritted his teeth.
Then, suddenly, he straightened.
He is tired and injured.
“How about a trial of seven,” he said.
“You offered it yourself. Or was that only for show Young Lord? Let the Seven judge it — if you have any honour left in you at all,”
He had done the math quickly, and it was not bad math.
His knights were fresh.
Untouched.
They had stood on those steps for two hours and had not swung at anything.
And the boy in front of him is bleeding from the head, and injured and dripping.
Alric laughed.
It was not a good laugh.
Several men flinched from it.
“Now you want the honor involved Guncer.” He said in mocking tone.
” When your walls are gone and your household is on its knees in the yard and there is nothing left to bargain with.” He shook his head slowly.
“You would not answer me an hour ago when it might have cost me something.”
“Then you refuse—”
“I did not say that.” Alric’s voice went .
“No worries Guncer . But it’s Just you and me, Guncer. A duel, like men, since you were so fond of the phrase.”
Guncer Sunglass hesitated.
It was only a heartbeat.
It might as well have been an hour.
Alric saw it, and put his head slightly to one side.
A grin on his face.
“What is this?” he said, and there was real amusement in it.
“Are you afraid? Of a tired and injured boy ?”
The hall heard it.
Every man on both sides heard it.
Guncer Sunglass’s face went the colour of a wound.
“Fuck you, you brat.” He drew, and the sword came up.
“Come on, then.”
Come on, then, he thought, and let us see how long you last, boy, when your arms are already lead and your leg is opened and you have been swinging that hammer since before dawn.
“My lord.”
Alric turned, expecting to be talked out of it.”WHAT”
Ser Kenneth was grinning at him.
He held out the black helm.
“Your helm.”
Alric took it, and something went out of his shoulders, and he pulled it down over his head.
“Take this shield, my lord.” Duran was already unstrapping his shield.
“Yours is somewhere under a heap of dead men in the yard.”
” Do not fret Duran, I don’t need a shield.”
“It is a duel, my lord.” Duran did not move.
Alric looked at him.
Then he sighed, and reached out, and took it.
“You are right. If we are doing it, we will do it properly.” He worked his ruined left hand into the straps and pulled them tight, and did not make a sound while he did it.
“Well done.”
Duran stepped back.
The hall cleared.
Men fell back to the walls on both sides without needing to be ordered — Dragonstone men on one side, five Sunglass knights and a handful of household servants on the other, and a long stretch of empty flagstone down the middle of it with the high seat at the far end.
Guncer Sunglass took the middle of the floor with sword and shield.
Alric Baratheon walked out to meet him in black plate covered in other men’s blood, hammer in his right hand, a boy’s shield on his left arm, the antlers standing up over his head with the dawn light coming through the high windows behind him.
Ser Kenneth the Ironslayer stepped out to the edge of the floor and raised his voice, and it filled that hall from end to end.
“HERE WE STAND WITNESS.”
Everything went quiet.
“A DUEL BETWEEN GUNCER OF HOUSE SUNGLASS, LORD OF SWEETPORT SOUND, AND ALRIC OF HOUSE BARATHEON, LORD OF DRAGONSTONE.” He turned slowly as he said it.
“WITNESSED BY THE KNIGHTS AND MEN OF BOTH HOUSES, IN THIS HALL, AT THIS HOUR — AND BY THE GODS ABOVE US, WHO SEE IT ALL AND JUDGE IT ALL.”
He drew his sword and struck it flat against his shield.
Bang.
Then again.
Bang.
His own men picked it up.
Tens of men, steel on wood all down the length of the hall, and it came up off the stone until the room shook with it.
“LET IT BEGIN.”
Guncer came in fast.
He has been doing for years and experienced two years.
He knew exactly what he was doing. Get faster updates on g.com.
He went straight at the left — the cut hand, the boy’s shield, the bleeding side — and he pressed it hard, three cuts and then a fourth, giving Alric no room to set his feet.
It was good fighting.
It was the best thing that anyone in House Sunglass had done that day.
But It lasted about forty seconds.
Because Guncer Sunglass had made one mistake, and he had made it before he ever drew, and the mistake was this: he had looked at a bleeding boy who had been fighting since before dawn and concluded that the boy was tired.
Alric was tired.
But Alric did not care.
He took the fourth cut on the shield and came off it forward.
There was no cleverness in it, He just over bruted Guncer.
He simply started swinging and did not stop, and the hammer came at Guncer from the right and the left and overhead and again from the right, and every single one of them had to be blocked or the fight was over.
Guncer blocked.
He gave a step.
He blocked again and gave another.
Two blows later he was six feet back from where he had started, and the boy had not slowed by so much as a breath, and Guncer Sunglass understood — properly, all at once, in his stomach — that he was going to lose.
Then Alric found the room he had been making.
He stepped out wide to the right, brought the hammer all the way back, and put every bit of his strength into one swing giving a nightmare to Guncer Sunglass.
Guncer got the shield up.
The hammer hit it square.
The pain went up through his forearm into his shoulder and his whole arm went dead to the fingertips, and the shield came away from the blow bent in half around the boss, split through the rim, one strap hanging.
Useless.
Entirely useless.
“Shit.”
He threw it off.
Alric watched it hit the floor and smirked behind the visor.
“Trouble?” he said.
“Here. Let me make it fair, so you won’t go crying about Honor about it afterward.”
And he undid the straps and threw Duran’s shield away across the flagstones.
Guncer moved the instant it left his hand.
It was the only chance he was going to get and he took it — both hands on the sword, straight in at the gap under the arm while the boy’s guard was still open from the throw.
Alric had been waiting for exactly that.
He turned off the line, and the sword went past him into nothing, and the hammer came round into Guncer Sunglass’s chest with the whole weight of his shoulders behind it.
Something inside the man’s ribs collapsed.
“ARGHHHH—”
He was still screaming when Alric brought the hammer down again, blunt side, onto the knee.
The joint went sideways in a way knees do not go.
“AHHHHHHHH—”
Guncer Sunglass went down onto the floor of his own great hall and the sword rang away out of his hand across the stones.
Nobody in the room moved.
Alric stood over him for a moment, breathing.
Then he reached down, took a fistful of the Guncer’s hair, and started walking towards the high seat of House Sunglass.
He dragged him on his side, across his own flagstones, past his own hall, his own seat through the eyes of his own knights, all the way down the length of that hall to the foot of the High seat, while Guncer Sunglass howled and clawed at his wrist with the one arm that still worked.
At the bottom of the steps, Alric let go.
He left him there.
Then he set his boot on the first step, and the second, and the third, and turned, and sat down in the high seat of House Sunglass.
He laid the hammer across his knees.
He put his hands on the arms of the chair.
He leaned back into it and let out a long breath, and there was something close to pleasure in it.
And every man in that hall — his own and theirs both — looked up at the boy in the black armour with the blood drying on it and the antlers rising over his head against the morning light, and not one of them could find any part of himself that thought he did not belong there.
He was not sitting in a chair.
He was sitting a throne, and he looked like something that had climbed up out of a cellar story to take it.
At the bottom of the steps, Guncer Sunglass lifted his head.
DROP THEM .
I AM HUNGRY.
I NEED THAT REACH.
ALL OF THEM, ALL OF YOU.
OR SAY GOODBYES TO YOUR BALLS