Chapter 127: Hunting in the Thorns

Along the long border between the Westerlands and the Reach, peace died quietly and without ceremony. It did not fall in some grand charge beneath banners, nor in a king’s command read before a host. It bled out in ravines, burned logging camps, vanished scouts, frightened horses, and men found dead with arrows in their throats before breakfast.

Lady Olenna Tyrell had ordered friction. Lord Randyll Tarly obeyed in the manner of a man who believed discipline could turn ugliness into virtue. Patrols thickened along the roads near Old Oak and the lesser passes toward Pheasant Hall. Caravans were searched. Western traders were delayed, fined, or turned back. Supply posts rose beneath Reach banners. If a shepherd lost sheep near the border, some eager knight could find a way to blame Casterly Rock before the bones cooled.

Arthur’s answer was simple.

He gave Smith permission to make the Reach regret its efficiency.

The new companies sent south were drawn from Battanian Volunteers and young men of noble families, most of them well-drilled and still soft in the eyes. They were divided into companies of a hundred or hunting bands of twenty or thirty. Over them, Arthur placed the men best suited to the work: Battanian veterans from the Wall, Sworn Men, Fian warriors, seasoned skirmishers, forest raiders, men who had fought wights in darkness and learned that fear was only useful if it sharpened the hand.

Their mission was not conquest. No castles were to be seized. No banners planted deep in Reach lands. No heroic charges, thank the gods, who had seen enough idiocy to deserve a quieter season. They were to ambush patrols, cut supply wagons, burn outposts, take scouts, destroy small bridges, strike where the Reach felt safe, and vanish before Tarly could bring weight to bear.

Smith gathered the veteran officers before they departed.

“Remember this,” he said. “You are hunters first, soldiers second. The roses want to prick us with patrols and blockades. Show them what thorns feel like when they grow in the dark. Strike hard. Strip what can be used. Burn what cannot. Do not linger, do not boast, do not chase glory into a grave. Let every recruit learn with blood on his hands and fear in his belly. Let Tarly’s men wonder where the next arrow waits.”

That was how the border became a school.

A cruel school, but Westeros was not known for kind instruction.

The first lesson came in Morning Mist Valley.

A Reach patrol of fifty men moved along the shallow watercourse just after dawn, light infantry and archers under a young knight whose armor was better polished than his caution. Mist clung to the creek and the low shrubs along both slopes. Visibility was poor. The men were tired of walking the same route and finding nothing but old hoofprints, broken branches, and rumors of western savages starving under blockade. Boredom is a generous host to death. It invites death in, gives it wine, and never checks the knife.

A faint rustle came from the left.

The knight looked up.

Arrows tore through the mist.

They came low and straight from less than fifty paces, not in a high arc, but as if the grey morning itself had spat iron. Most found the best-armored men first. Officers. Sergeants. Archers with fine bows. The young knight took three almost at once: breastplate, throat, face. His fine armor stopped one badly and the others not at all. He fell before he could shout anything worth remembering.

Men in grey-green cloaks rose from stones and brush on both sides of the valley. Faces smeared with mud and charcoal, shields tight, axes and knives drawn, they drove into the broken patrol without a war cry. Silence made them worse. Men expect shouting when death arrives. Courtesy should require it, really.

At their head moved One-Eye Marco, a middle-aged skirmisher with a scar from brow to mouth and only one eye left to glare with. He had earned his name long before the Wall and kept it through worse than men. A Reach archer lunged at him with a dagger. Marco caught the blade on his round shield and split the man’s chest with an upward chop of his hand axe.

“Spread,” he barked. “Three to a knot. Don’t let them form.”

The Battanian veterans obeyed without thought. The young recruits followed pale-faced but moving. Three together, back-to-back or in triangular pushes, axes low, knives quick, shields close. They struck at joints, thighs, hands, throats, gaps under arms, places where armor was honest enough to fail. The Reachmen had numbers enough, gear enough, and no shape left to use either. Their commander was dead. Their line never formed. Their courage dissolved into individual struggles, and individual struggles are where disciplined killers earn their bread.

In less than a quarter hour, the valley belonged to the hunters.

More than twenty Reachmen lay dead. The rest fled into brush and mist, throwing away shields, dignity, and occasionally both shoes. The Battanians stripped useful armor, gathered arrows, took coins, marked the dead, and collected what papers the knight had carried. Marco kicked the fallen knight lightly.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Flowery fool,” he said.

A young noble beside him was bandaging a cut along his forearm, teeth clenched to stop them chattering. Marco looked him over.

“You lived,” he said. “Good beginning. Next time, cut three inches lower and take the arm before he remembers he has one.”

The young man swallowed and nodded.

They vanished upriver before the mist burned off, leaving the valley to blood, corpses, and crows who had not asked for politics but knew how to profit from it.

The second lesson came by night.

A few miles behind the disputed border, the Reach had established several logging camps to feed timber toward Old Oak and nearby fortifications. One stood at the edge of an oak wood, guarded by thirty soldiers and worked by as many lumbermen. A simple palisade ringed it. Two watchtowers rose above the gate. The garrison believed itself safely behind the patrol lines.

That belief died in darkness.

The Fian warrior called Night Owl led twenty Volunteers through the trees with their faces and hands smeared in wet mud. He had earned his name on the Wall, where he had shot wight scouts by starlight and once put an arrow through an eye that did not belong to a living thing. Against Reach sentries, he was almost insultingly overqualified.

Two climbers reached the first tower under cover of wind. Grapnels bit wood softly. They rose, slid knives across the sentry’s throat, and lowered him before he could fall. On the second tower, the watchman woke just long enough to see a muddy face and regret sleeping.

Then the fire arrows came.

Pine resin and sulfur took quickly. Timber piles caught first, then a storehouse, then the barracks roof. Men stumbled out coughing and half-dressed into the killing lanes Night Owl had marked earlier. Heavy hunting bows thumped from darkness. Soldiers fell with arrows through chest, neck, and belly. Those who tried to rally found no clear enemy, only firelight, smoke, screaming horses, and shafts coming from places the forest should have kept empty.

Night Owl watched, counted, and signaled withdrawal before the garrison was fully broken.

Their purpose was not slaughter for its own sake. That was for fools, madmen, and kings trying to prove a point. The purpose was supplies, terror, and proof that Reach safety had borders thinner than mist. By dawn, reinforcements from Old Oak found burned timber, looted stores, dead soldiers, and tracks that led nowhere useful.

Fear spread faster than the smoke.

The third lesson was crueler, because it struck the mind before the flesh.

A convoy of ten wagons moved along the packed road toward Old Oak under guard of a hundred Reach soldiers. Half were spearmen, half crossbowmen. Their sergeant was old enough to distrust quiet hills, which meant he was not entirely doomed. He watched the brush, the dips in the land, the gullies to either side. Every man along the road had heard of ghosts by then. Ghosts in grey cloaks. Mountain demons. Western barbarians who killed from the scrub and melted into stones. Soldiers love rumors until they have to march through them.

The road ahead was blocked by a tangle of fresh-cut branches.

The sergeant raised his fist. “Hold. Shields out. Crossbows left and right.”

The men obeyed. Nothing moved. Wind stirred the grass. A bird called somewhere beyond a low hill. The sergeant waited, eyes narrow, then sent a small party forward to clear the branches.

When the men bent to pull them aside, the ground roared.

The devices hidden beneath the branches were crude, leather-wrapped charges filled with powdered fire, grit, caltrops, and sharp stones, adapted from hunter’s tricks used to scatter and lame game. They were not strong enough to destroy the convoy. They did not need to be. Sound, smoke, flying gravel, and screaming horses did the work. Men threw themselves down. Crossbows fired blindly. Wagons lurched. Mules kicked traces apart.

From the low rises on either side, three lines of young Battanian archers stood and loosed in arcs.

The arrows fell over the center and rear of the convoy. Armor kept many men alive. Horses were less lucky. Packs split. One wagon toppled. A crossbowman took an arrow through the thigh and shrieked that he was dead until someone told him to stop being hopeful.

“Back!” the sergeant roared. “Back to Old Oak!”

The convoy began retreating in ragged order, shields up, wagons abandoned where wheels had broken. At the bend behind them, they found a second roadblock. Beside it lay the stripped bodies of six Reach soldiers from a patrol missing three days past, posed stiffly with their hands over their eyes. On a nearby stone, someone had drawn a grinning wolf’s head in charcoal.

No attack followed.

That was what broke them.

The sergeant would later insist the withdrawal was orderly. It was not. The men abandoned two wagons, three mules, and a good portion of their courage, taking a muddy track through the brush rather than touch the second trap. From first arrow to final flight, they never saw a Battanian face.

After that, the names multiplied. Ghosts. Ridge wolves. Green devils. Casterly shades. One idiot swore they were dead men from the Wall, sent south because winter had run out of work for them. Randyll Tarly had men flogged for spreading that one, which naturally helped it travel faster.

Tarly was no fool. He tightened patrols, rotated captains, sent trackers, brought better scouts, punished laxity, and tried to force the hunters into battle. Sometimes he succeeded. Western men died too. New recruits learned that mud did not stop arrows, that fear could freeze hands, that veterans could make mistakes, and that the Reach was full of disciplined men who did not plan to be hunted quietly forever.

But the exchange favored the west.

More importantly, the recruits changed. Boys from noble houses who had arrived eager for command learned to crawl through wet leaves with common Volunteers. Battanian Volunteers who had never killed learned how quickly a man died and how long the memory remained. Their eyes hardened. Their movements shortened. Their hands became steady. The border took their innocence and gave them competence in exchange, a poor bargain for the soul, but war is a notorious cheat.

Inside the Westerlands, reports were shaped carefully. The smallfolk heard that Reach provocations had been repelled, that western patrols held firm, that trade continued despite hardship, that new soldiers were proving brave. The worst details remained with commanders, scribes, widows, and the men who woke at night with mist in their dreams.

Smith sent regular reports to Arthur. Tarly adapts. Losses acceptable. Recruits improving. Enemy morale worsening. Convoys disrupted. Border pressure contained.

Arthur read them all.

Between Pheasant Hall and Old Oak, the border became a chessboard played with knives in the dark. No glorious charges. No noble single combat. No songs, unless some bard later ruined it by inventing one. Only hunting, fear, discipline, and survival.

The Reach had wanted thorns.

Arthur gave them hunters among the brambles.