Chapter 231

The Reach. 301 AC. A month before the battle.

Dickon Tarly.

The main council chamber of the Reach’s army.

Tension hung thick in the air. Only recently these lords had been cutting each other’s throats with a certain satisfaction, and now they found themselves forced to act as one to weather the crisis raging around them. At the head of the table sat the man who had called them all here, Lord Dickon Tarly. To his right sat a dozen or so men of varying importance, though the key allies among them were Ser Jeremy Oakheart, Lord Alekyne Florent, and Lord Orton Merryweather. The rest carried weight enough, but none of them could truly shift the balance on their own. Across from them sat the loyalists of Highgarden’s former masters. Over the years the Tyrells had pursued a shrewd policy of marriage alliances and had gathered a great many friends throughout the Reach. Countless noble houses could claim kinship with them, but the two that mattered most were the Hightowers (through Mace’s marriage to Alerie) and the Redwynes (through Mina’s marriage to Paxter Redwyne). Neither house fell short of their liege lord in any real respect, and in some ways they even surpassed him.

“Let’s get on with this, I can’t stand sharing a tent with traitors.” Civil discourse lasted all of a moment before insults began flying freely.

“Says the fool dancing to the tune of the stag king?” The years had not been kind to Renly, and the reputation of the last Baratheon and his allies had sunk about as low as it could go.

“An oath isn’t broken by a liege’s folly, only by a vassal’s treachery.”

“Rotten grapes have no business lecturing anyone.”

The whole farce might have gone on indefinitely had the man who’d gathered them all here not finally stepped in.

“We can help our enemies by cutting each other’s throats, or we can set our grievances aside and fight back against the invaders.” The longer Dickon spoke, the more heated he grew. “Are you truly willing to sacrifice your own houses over your petty grudges? Are you willing to hand your fathers, your wives, your sons over into slavery to barbarians from Essos? If your grievances matter more to you than that, then leave this tent.” The men bristled, but not one of them dared to actually leave. Defending one’s own house was a lord’s foremost duty; if a man had no wish to defend it, he had no business holding his title.

“My lords, every man in this tent has his own grievance with how things stand, but right now what matters is rising above it. If we cannot work together, there is no point in resisting at all.” Ser Jeremy’s words found their mark in every heart present, and at last the men brought themselves back under control.

“What do you propose, Lord Tarly?” old Lord Vyrwel asked.

“The combined army of Dornishmen and Dothraki numbers thirty five thousand against our twenty five thousand. We hold the advantage in heavy cavalry and infantry, but our enemies are Dothraki, and every last one of them rides a horse. We need to play to our own strengths and deny them the use of theirs. That’s why I propose we make our stand at the Vale of Sorrow. There we’d have one flank covered, the high ground, and a clear line for our heavy cavalry.”

“Lord Tarly’s idea is sound,” Lord Stirpike concluded, and the others trusted his word, since these were his own lands and he knew them like the back of his hand. “There are even the ruins of a watchtower still standing there. Small help, but help all the same.”

“What’s to stop them from simply ignoring us?”

“If they’re foolish enough to ignore us, we’ll cut their supply lines and threaten Nightsong itself.”

“We stop them here, or the heart of the Reach burns. That much is simple enough. The trouble is that these bastards have no clear chain of command.”

It wasn’t only the lords of the Reach who had their troubles; their ancient enemies had plenty of their own. The Dothraki would answer to no one but their khal, and the Dornishmen would never suffer being ruled by horselords, whom they considered little better than backward savages. When the two defeated armies had first joined forces, it had taken them a considerable stretch of time just to regroup and cobble together some semblance of an alliance, with the dothraki having suffered huge losses against us, which was against the flow of the tide with how their campaign was going so far. What held their union together was the blood tie between Rhaenys Targaryen and Daenerys Targaryen, though one was merely a khal’s wife and the other, after a string of defeats, carried little real authority of her own.

“Four commanders lead their army: Khal Drogo, his blood rider Haggo, Ser Gerold Dayne, and Ser Archibald Yronwood. None of them is a man whose death alone would spell total defeat. But the very lack of a clear hierarchy can be turned into a weakness of its own. The fact that no single man commands them means we can kill them off one at a time. First we ought to remove the ‘weakest’ of them, Gerold Dayne,” Lord Orton reasoned, and most of the men agreed with him.

“Hm…” Dickon fell into thought; something important was slipping past him, some idea just out of reach.

“What is it?” Jeremy asked.

“Nothing, but I think there might be another way.”

“There are a great many of them. My own thinking is that if we kill one of the Targaryens, their alliance will collapse on its own. Hardly knightly, but think how many thousands of lives it could save. Unfortunately Daenerys sits safely tucked away with her spawn, while Rhaenys is surrounded by an enormous army and is no stranger to assassins by now.” The reasoning was ruthless, but then, they were at war.

“…Another death…” Realization struck Tarly all at once. “My lords, your strategy is sound, but we’ve been thinking about how to carry it out the wrong way.”

“Please, go on,” Lord Orton said, brow furrowed, but two years of war had earned Dickon a fair amount of trust by now.

“We’ve misjudged what actually holds their alliance together. We don’t need to pull off some nearly impossible task, a single death would be enough.” That drew everyone’s interest at once, since the original plan had been difficult enough to carry out as it was. “We’ve grown used to thinking in Westerosi terms, but the alliance between the Dornishmen and the Dothraki isn’t held together by the Targaryens’ blood tie at all, it’s held together by Khal Drogo’s strength. The Dothraki follow only the strong; if not for his devotion to his wife, this alliance would never have existed in the first place.”

“I think I understand,” Jeremy said thoughtfully. “If Drogo dies, the Dothraki will have no reason left to stay allied with the Dornish.”

“Exactly. All we need to do is throw every resource we have into killing the khal. He falls, the alliance falls with him.”