Chapter 169

The Iron Plain. 299 AC.

Axel Arryn.

"PUSH THEM BACK!!!"

"HIGHGARDEN!!!"

"THE VALE!!!"

"CHAAAR..." but before the knight in gaudy colors could finish his order, a greatsword split him in two.

"HA HA HA," carefree laughter rang out in stark contrast to the carnage of the battlefield, and men could not help but turn their eyes toward the rider and the newly arrived company. "ATTACK ME, I AM LORD AXEL ARRYN, COMMANDER OF THIS ARMY!!!"

"Arryn?!"

"The Falcon's eye?" The enemy commander's arrival shocked the Tyrell knights present, but they recovered quickly.

"KILL HIM!!!" To the enemy soldiers, Arryn's words were a red flag to a bull. Heedless of everything, they threw themselves in a mad charge at the towering figure. Honor, duty, the hunger for glory, they had a dozen reasons between them, but not one of them managed to reach Axel. With mighty blows the Falcon's eye cut down every enemy who came near, though most were stopped short by his personal guard, killers who carried hundreds of death matches on their backs.

"My lord, Eyris will flay the skin off me if anything happens to you. Please, don't make my job any harder." Ser Arthur, the second in command of my personal guard, offered the plea more out of habit than any real hope it would land.

"Don't kill my buzz." Still, I reined in my enthusiasm a touch. "Don't you want a real fight yourself? It's just us, our swords, and enemies who need killing. Come on, like the good old days."

"Ehh," Arthur's sigh said everything about the hopelessness of his position.

However one looked at it, a gap of five thousand men was no small thing. I'd decided to shave that gap down a little with my own performance. If you can't win on numbers, win on tactics. I had good reason to doubt the crippled little rose commanded the kind of authority and respect among his knights needed for unquestioning obedience, and my actions were designed to pull the bulk of that attention onto myself.

Glory grows on the bones of others, and the finer the bones, the greater the glory a man earns from them. Without false modesty, I count myself foremost among the men half the world would love nothing more than to overcome. Killing me was a guaranteed path to riches, rank, and fame that would last for years to come. Put simply, most of the self willed lords out there had simply stopped caring what Tyrell ordered and gone hunting for my head instead.

"Ha ha ha!!!" Watching a stream of a thousand men change course and come pouring toward me, I felt a joy beyond compare.

…

Willas Tyrell.

Meanwhile, a strange mood hung over Willas Tyrell's command tent. The lords present rated the Falcon's eye's generalship highly and understood the battle would be no easy thing. Since few of them believed they could fully crush the Vale's forces, the command staff had settled for certain, more modest goals. The situation with the Riverlands had turned out badly ambiguous; the river lords' oaths of fealty did more to hinder King Renly's bid for dominance over Westeros than to help it. The river lords had no strength left and nothing to offer in return, yet that never stopped them from begging to be protected from the Falcon's eye's tyranny. For political reasons, King Renly could not refuse them, though he had little appetite himself for a bloody battle against the Vale.

So they'd settled on a fairly simple plan: hold the border, keep the Vale's army from launching a full ruinous campaign through the region, and if they attacked, engage and thin their ranks. And for now their numbers gave them real confidence. Fight steadily, wear the enemy down, and the men of the Vale would retreat, but something had gone wrong, and the field commanders had begun abandoning their positions on their own.

"What's happening? Why has Ser Johan's company moved toward the center?"

"His company keeps shrinking, but they're still driving stubbornly toward the center."

"Lord Preston's led his men in an attack on the center..." The lords had no idea what was happening, but the situation had them badly rattled.

"Our advance has clearly stalled. The left and right flanks have all but eased off, everyone's throwing weight into the center instead. Some are even ignoring orders outright and shifting there." Willas had recently come to understand, through hard practice, that he had no particular gift for war. Unpleasant, but not fatal, and so he preferred simply to read the situation as it unfolded. "The only thing that could drive them this mad is Lord Arryn's arrival."

"The Falcon's eye's in the center. Send Graham and Lance's companies, have them reinforce the pressure there."

"At once." But three steps later, the guardsman stopped short. "My lord... something's approaching from the right."

"Bloody hell..."

…

Axel Arryn.

"And there's Jasper." A glance at the sun, a quick calculation, and a conclusion. "Earlier than expected, but no complaints there."

"FORWARD, LADS, TIME TO CARVE UP A FEW MORE REACHMEN!"