Chapter 230

The Reach. 301 AC.

Dickon Tarly.

“Forward!”

“Death to the Reachmen!”

“Dogat! Adrivar!”

Gripping the hilt of his Valyrian steel sword, Heartsbane, tightly, the young Lord Tarly watched the battlefield and carefully committed every moment of the fighting to memory. The combined forces of the Dothraki and the Dornishmen faced the army of the Reach. This was the battle that would decide the fate of the whole region: whether this blessed land would fall beneath the weight of arakhs, repeating the fate of the Stormlands, or would hold firm against the barbarian hordes the Targaryens had gathered. Everything would be decided here.

“Watch, the Dornish light cavalry will try to harry our infantry now.” Even in the middle of the battle, Ser Jeremy Oakheart never stopped teaching his future brother by marriage (soon to be his sister’s husband). “We anticipated this, which is why there’s a company of archers waiting in the center. They should be able to thin out a good part of that cavalry.”

“So in the end it does come down to the cavalries,” Dickon concluded.

Despite having already taken part in a good many battles, Dickon still felt a knot of nerves. This was his first as Lord Tarly, master of Horn Hill. His father had held his own particular views on how to raise a military commander. The late Lord Randyll had believed that only by passing through every rung of the military hierarchy could a man become a truly formidable commander. In his youth, only a couple of years back, Dickon had marched alongside the common infantry, taken part in scouting missions, lived among the soldiers themselves. From an ordinary foot soldier he had risen to command ten men, then fifty, then a hundred, and most recently he had led a cavalry company three hundred strong. He had never been kept safely in the rear, but neither had he ever been thrown into battle without thought.

When Randyll Tarly took Highgarden, it marked the fall of House Tyrell and the rise of House Tarly. Few voices rose in protest at this turn of events. In truth, only those bound by blood to Highgarden’s former masters offered any objection at all, and even that went no further than words. Next to such a celebrated commander, the “Champion of the Seven,” the “Savior of the Reach,” Mace Tyrell had always looked rather pale by comparison, but once Lord Tyrell tied his fortunes to King Renly, and Renly went on to thoroughly disappoint the lords of the Reach, the roses’ popularity sank about as low as it could go.

The final step was meant to be the sworn allegiance of every lord of the Reach, uniting the full strength of the region, Tarly loyalists, the neutral houses, and the last of the Tyrell loyalists alike, followed by a combined fight against the invaders. No one wanted to repeat the fate of the Stormlands, and so even former allies of the Tyrells stood ready to rally behind the Striding Hunter, but his murder had very nearly put an end to the whole effort at unification. Lord Randyll had been a man of great respect, which was more than could be said of Dickon, a boy of fourteen. The lords might well have scattered back to their own holdings, or fallen to bloodshed over who would claim the paramount seat, had a powerful outside enemy not kept them from sliding into ordinary infighting. The threat of the Dornishmen and the Dothraki had not gone anywhere.

Dickon had his father’s prestige working in his favor, the most battle ready army in the Reach, a share of his father’s allies, and the alliance with the Lannisters. That was no small thing, but it wasn’t enough on its own to let him take command of proud noblemen without resistance. He had been forced to come to terms with Lady Arwyn Oakheart. His father’s old friend had asked for only a single condition: Dickon’s marriage to her younger daughter. The Oakhearts were an old and powerful house; marrying into their line would have brought no shame even to a king. And besides, Lady Anya Oakheart herself had thoroughly captured the young lord’s heart in her own right.

With Anya’s older brother, Ser Jeremy Oakheart, despite the considerable gap in their ages, he had struck up a genuine friendship. Jeremy was intelligent, level headed, spoke to Dickon as an equal, and never once talked down to him. Such qualities were rare, especially in celebrated battle commanders.

“The Dothraki, every last one of them, count as light cavalry. Losing a single company won’t hurt them much.”

“True, but a bird fills its belly one seed at a time,” some old saying about slow, steady work, Jeremy noted, and fairly so. “And right now we have a different task ahead of us. We need to stick to the plan.”