Aemon POV
The road through Morne's gap was not a road too travelled by.
It must had been, once. Aemon could see where the stone had been dressed and set, years back, before the landslides and wind had made tear and worn them down. Now it was all rubble and dust, and less than five thousand men were moving across it in the dark and in silence, which was itself its own kind of miracle.
He rode near the front. Not at the very head, that belonged to the outriders, who had gone ahead an hour before the column moved and had not come back yet.
Meleys was left behind at Starfall. There were reason for her to not be here, first she was too large for the pass, and the sound of her wings would have carried for miles. So she was at Starfall. He had left her there with a purpose, and she had accepted it, which was more than most people gave her credit for being capable of.
She'll keep them safe, he told himself. She is capable of doing so.
Ser Manfrey rode up behind leading the column of Dayne knights and men, in quiet movement, that men practiced when they understood the stakes of noise. He came level with Aemon some moments later and pitched with his voice low.
"The men are steady, Your Grace. No singing, no torches. Lady Jynessa's archers are keeping pace at the rear."
"Good."
"We should reach the mouth in another three hours, if our marching speed holds."
Aemon nodded. The going would hold, three hours became four and still served. Ser Manfrey lingered, a practical man who had something he had not yet said.
"Speak Ser," Aemon said.
"The men of High Hermitage, Your Grace. If the scouts are right and they've joined the enemy-" He paused. "Some of my men have kin in High Hermitage. Cousins, second cousins. The Dayne name spreads wide in these hills."
"I know."
"It may be difficult for them. To raise swords against-"
"It will be difficult," Aemon said. "But our enemy will do it anyway, why do you think they our marching this way" He paused for a moment and looked back at Dayne men marching, "Our men should hold their ground and let Blackmonts do it, that will be acceptable. But no man breaks the line." He looked at Manfrey. "Tell them that."
Manfrey nodded once and pulled back into the column.
Brienne was on his left. She had been there since the march began, steady as a wall, her armor a gift from House Dayne, too broad in the chest for any Dayne man, but fitted to her with some adjustment that Lord Edric had arranged without being asked. She rode without speaking. She had a gift for that.
"He'll be in the camp," Aemon said.
She understood he meant Gerold. "You think he'll fight himself."
"He'll have to." Aemon kept his eyes on the dark ahead. "He can't let his men see him shrink from the very reason he had marched for, not with the Golden Company watching."
"And if you meet him—"
"I'll kill him." He said it the way he said most true things, without embellishment.
Brienne was quiet for a moment. "Have you ever fought a battle?"
"No." He had not fought a true battle in this life yet.
"My father said soldiers freeze in their first battle."
"They say that." He put one hand briefly to the pommel of Blackfyre, felt the grip under his palm. "There's no shame is fear, Brienne, what matters is how we face it."
She nodded then, having gotten her answer. She was intelligent in many ways. They rode on.
An hour before midnight, the outriders came back.
They came at a trot, two of them, the ones Lady Larra had sent out night before. Aemon pulled up his horse and the column came to a halt behind him.
"Your Grace." The first man was breathing hard, not from effort but from the thing he'd seen. "They've made camp at the mouth. Men of High Hermitage are with them, confirmed. Golden Company has no fewer than two hundred knights mounted and several thousand foot."
"How far?"
"A mile past the gap mouth. Perhaps two from here."
The second rider said, "We spotted Ironborn banners, Your Grace. They are few in numbers but we spotted many of their banners."
Ser Manfrey and Lady Jynessa Blackmont had come up while the rider was speaking. Aemon heard Jynessa's breath change when the Ironborn were named. He did not look at her.
"How many camp fires?" Aemon asked.
"More than I could count in the dark. They are jesting and drinking with each other, men of Essos with Ironborns and High Hermitage, having pitched their tents densely, Your Grace. Very dense."
A large camp, well fed, laying comfortably. They had not expected to be caught from above, in the dark, before dawn. Men who expected to be caught did not build dense fires.
"Take some food and rest. You've done well."
They went and Aemon turned to Lady Jynessa and Ser Manfrey, "Tell your men to rest, Ser, Lady. We will begin soon."
He then dismounted as they rushed back their work, and walked to the side of the road, where the mountain wall rose above him, and sat with his back against the rock. He drew Blackfyre across his knees and took the cloth from his saddlebag and began to work it along the blade.
The steel was dark. Not black, for was a trick of the light but deep grey with patches fiery color in them. The sword had been made for conquest. For the men who'd thought a sword could not hold a continent together. They had been wrong about that, or mostly wrong. But the sword was now here.
And so am I, he thought.
He was aware of Brienne settling against the wall some feet away. Aware of the sounds of the column finding places to sit, men passing waterskins, the low murmur of voices under orders not to speak loudly. The mountain air felt cold and dust and the faint smell of some flowering thing that had no business growing at this altitude.
"What do you think, Your Grace?" she asked quietly.
His answered without pause. "Our archers have the high ground. In the dark, with fires marking their way, they won't miss many shots." He paused then. "The gap mouth is the choke point. If they try to push up through it, Ser Manfrey's infantry can hold them almost indefinitely."
"Almost." She concluded.
"Nothing holds indefinitely, Brienne."
He moved the cloth along the blade in slow strokes. "Sleep, Brienne. I'll wake you."
She started to argue, he could feel it in the brief silence that preceded the nod.
"Wake me when it's time," she said.
"I will."
She slept but he didn't. He sat with the sword across his knees and the mountain at his back and thought about Kingsguard and the other loyalists, and their actions for him and his kin, and about the painting on the wall of the solar at Starfall. He thought about the dreams he had, knight of Kingsguard laying down their lives for a future their prince believed in, for a babe born not moments before their eventual death.
He thought about it again now, in the silence of Dornish cold nights.
The hour of the wolf was no more than couple hours away. He felt it before anything could have told him, something in the quality of the dark, the silence of insects, the particular stillness that preceded the coming of dawn.
He put a hand on Brienne's arm.
She was awake before he finished the motion. "Your Grace."
"It's time."
Meleys POV
She had learned patience as of late.
She had not been born patient. She had been born quick and hungry and impossible to hold, and she had spent the first years of her life discovering all the ways and finally learning that the world was not large enough for what she was, and after burning several places of two legged creatures. Sometimes cage, tamers and magic. The men and women who had come to ride her, as if it was their birthright, and left as ashes. She had burned them all.
Then she had felt her rider.
She had not expected that there would be someone for her. She had not expected anything except more of the same more reaching hands, more men who looked at her as if she was beneath them, a pet, which was the worst kind of looking. She had met him in forest, and he had looked at her as if she were something more than a thing to be rode upon.
She remembered the way he'd stood, very still but unafraid. Something else, something that was fear's opposite, the thing she'd had no name for until she spend her time with him, Faith. He had faith in her, the faith that she now felt as love for her.
He had called her Meleys. She had accepted it the way she accepted the weight of her own wings, as something that was simply true, that had always been true and had simply not yet been spoken aloud before.
The men who had tried to claim her before him had called her by other names, the names they gave things they wanted to tame. She had burned those too.
Now she flew above Starfall in the dark. The tower pale against the darkness of the night. She was reading the air the way she read everything, with the whole body, hunger and heat and the pressure of her own wingbeats telling her the shape of the land beneath.
He had asked her to protect this place.
He had asked, not commanded. She understood the difference them, men had thought her a mindless creature and he had not. Other men had commanded her, some were ash and the rest in her belly..
She had agreed, for she could do anything for her rider.
The smell reached her before the sound did.
The river's mouth was miles south of the tower, where the river flattened and spread before meeting the sea, and it was from there that they came, the cold-salt stink of the northern ocean carried inland on a wrong-direction wind.
She tilted and dropped without a sound.
From above, the ships were dark shapes on dark water, she counted them not with her eyes but with the warmth of the men aboard them, the dense packed heat of hundreds of bodies pressed together on wooden decks. The watches were small and inattentive and looking at the water, not the sky.
No one looked at the sky and she breathed in.
They had come to take what was his, and thenshe dived.
The first ship went up all at once, bow to stern, in a single breath. Men screamed and they threw themselves sideways, into the river and into each other. She pulled up before the explosion could reach her shape, and she came back around without slowing. The second ship, the third, she burned them without count. She worked fast, because fast was mercy and she was not without mercy, only without hesitation, which was a different thing entirely.
The river lit up. She could see them all now, the men in the water, the men on the burning decks, the ones on the ships she had not yet reached who were screaming and trying to cut their anchor lines and understanding too late that it would make no difference.
She worked from south to north. One man had swum far, further than the others, further than she would have thought, and he was in black water out past the firelight, treading water, breathing hard, watching the burning. She felt his warmth at distance, separate from the rest. She came low over the river and drove fire in an arc across the surface, and the water boiled where he stood, their was screaming, and soon that stopped.
She was not cruel, like she was in her past. She had simply made a promise to her rider, and her rider was the only things in the world, besides fire, that she fully trusted.
When the river held no more warmth that she did not recognize as her own, she flew up. The smoke rose around her, red-lit from beneath. She could see for miles in the clarity above the smoke, the coast curving south, the hills folding inward, and at the far edge of what she could sense, the dense living heat of thousands of men in a narrow place between mountains.
Her rider was in there and she turned toward him.
Aemon POV
"Get Jynessa and Manfrey," he said, moments later after she woke up and Brienne went without a word. He used the time to splash water on his face from the skin on his saddle, drank, and walked the ground.
Brienne returned with both of them. They came quietly, Jynessa with her travelling cloak over her armor and her eyes sharp despite the hour, Manfrey still adjusting his sword belt. He had slept then, good, he thought for he needed his men rested.
Aemon drew no map. The terrain was what it was, and they had all walked it.
"Lady Jynessa." He kept his voice low. "You'll form your archers in three lines along the upper slope, front rank kneeling. They'll have a clear shot down into the camp from there the fires will do half the work for them." He paused. "They are not to stop. First volley, second volley, third. No pausing for orders. They loose until they have nothing left to loose, and then they would move to the side."
Jynessa nodded, her face gave nothing. "How long before you want the first arrows in the air?"
"Hour of the wolf. Just before the night changes to dawn." He looked at her. "Can they hold that timing?"
"They've will, your grace," she said.
He then turned to Ser Manfrey. "You'll place your men at the gap mouth. Not blocking it, I want them visible. I want men in that camp to see there's infantry at the top of the path when they start looking for somewhere to go." He let his words settle. "They will push up, when men are under arrow fire in a camp they cannot defend, they move toward the threat in their confusion and anger while they'll have many of their men getting piked by arrows below, and they will be strung out along the path with archers above. The Golden Company will move, remember." He paused. "Hold your, do not advance. You will inform me when they are halfway through."
Manfrey's jaw shifted, he was a man who preferred advancing. "When they're halfway up?"
"Then I come down."
There was a brief silence. Jynessa and Manfrey looked at each other and it was Lady Jynessa who spoke. "The cavalry will be behind your archers at the start, Your Grace. The path is not wide enough to pass them before-"
"I know the path." He had seen the narrowness of it. "I'll bring the cavalry from behind the archer lines. When Manfrey calls, we go down through the left side of the gap, the path by mountain side, the rock face. It's broken enough to manage."
Manfrey looked at the darkness where the rock face was. "In the dark, your grace."
"Yes."
There was another silence. The kind that meant this is possible but not comfortable, which was a different silence from this cannot be done.
"Then there's one more thing." He looked at Lady Jynessa. "When the cavalry marches down, pull your archers back from the lip. I don't want volleys going into a mixed engagement." He paused. "Your people have done their work by then. Let Manfrey's men and mine finish it."
Hour Later
He turned back to the slope, to the dark shape of the enemy camp below with its fires burning low now as the small hours thinned the men tending them.
Lady Jynessa stood at the head of her archers looking down the slope with the expression of a woman counting things in her head. The fires of the enemy camp were bright below, for lamps and warmth both, too many to number from this angle, scattered through the dark like a city looked at from above.
Fifteen hundred Blackmont archers. They had formed lines without a sound, finding their positions on the slope, the front rank kneeling, the second standing, the third on the rocks above. Aemon had watched them move into position and thought about what it meant, that Lady Larra had spent twenty years in these hills, had made these men into something this precise.
He owed her a thanks and he would not forget it. Ser Manfrey's infantry was beside the archers, holding the gap mouth. Hundreds of Dayne men-at-arms and five hundred Blackmont spearmen, braced across the path with shields locked and torches held low to hide the number.
The cavalry was behind Aemon, thousand of Blackmonts and nearly the same of House Dayne. He could hear them, horses shifting weight, the small sounds of men who had been still too long, trying to be still a little longer.
He trotted along the front of the line.
He had not planned to speak. He was not a man who had ever needed a speech to understand his purpose but these were men who had marched through a mountain pass in darkness on the word of a king most of them had never seen, and they deserved something for that.
He pulled up his horse in the space between the cavalry and the archers.
"Some of you may not know of me. My name is Aemon Targaryen," he said. He kept his voice at the level that carried without shouting, a thing he had learnt from Mance Rayder, when we went beyond the wall in his last life and learnt it properly. "Son of Prince Rhaegar Targaryen and Lady Lyanna Stark of Winterfell."
No sound came from the lines, just attention. He had it completely.
"I know what they say happened the year I was born. To my mother, to your Princess Elia. To my brother and my sister in King's Landing, when Tywin sacked the capital." He let that sit. "Many will say that I marched to Dorne today to make sure it doesn't fall in the hands of pretender and invaders from across the narrow sea but it is wrong, I marched for this is where I was born," He looked along the lines. In the dark, he could not see most of their faces. He spoke to the shapes of them. "This is Dorne, this is the valley of the Torentine and those" he gestured toward the fires below, "are men who have marched on it behind a banner that has no right to fly in this kingdom or any other. And they have brought Ironborn reavers with them, who have already burned two villages in the north. Villages." He paused. "Not armies. Villages."
Something moved through the ranks. He felt it more than heard it.
"I was born at the Tower of Joy," he said. "That is a day's ride from where we stand. Dorne is as much my home as it is yours." He looked at the fires. "Let none of them leave this valley."
He turned back.
"Lady Jynessa. Begin." The arrows went down like clouds pouring their heart out.
Aemon heard the first volley, not the loose, but the sound it made when it was unleashed, the sudden eruption of shouting from below, the way a sleeping camp became chaos in the span of a heartbeat. The second volley was already in the air before the first had landed. The third before men below had finished screaming at the second.
He drew Blackfyre.
The steel caught no light, there was no light here. But he could feel it, the weight and the balance and the edge.
Ser Manfrey's voice came up from the gap mouth. "They're coming up, Your Grace. They're on the path."
Of course they are. Men under arrow fire moved toward it or died where they stood. The Golden Company would not die where they stood. They were too good for that, too disciplined. They would push up to the pass expecting infantry, expecting shields and spears at the top.
They would find him instead.
"Cavalry," Aemon said, not loudly but it carried in the air.
He put his heels in and rode.
The path down was too narrow for a charge. He knew that, he had not planned a charge. He had planned something more like a flood, a press of horsemen driving down through men on foot, Blackfyre working left and right at the men who tried to hold the path, the horses doing the rest by sheer weight. It was ugly and bloody was not the kind of thing the singers turned into ballads.
But it worked.
The first man he cut down was wearing Myrish half-plate, the kind of armour that said this was a man of middling rank who had saved for a year to buy something above his station. He had a spear and time to raise it and not enough time to do anything else. Aemon took him low, below the gorget, and kept moving.
The path opened as he descended. Below the gap mouth the ground widened and the camp spread across it, and it was chaos; tents collapsing, men scrambling for weapons, horses maddened by the arrows still coming overhead. He heard behind him the sound that armies made when they stopped being separate men and became one moving thing, the deep percussion of hooves and boots and voices merging into a roar.
"For House Targaryen!"
"For King Aemon!"
Brienne was behind him. He could not see her in the press but he could hear her.
He rode deeper into the camp. Men came at him from the right, three of them, in Golden Company colors. He took the first one's sword arm and wheeled left to put his horse between himself and the other two, and when the horse was taken from under him by the arrow he did not panic. He hit the ground with his shoulder, rolled, came up. He had experience this, he was not afraid. Brienne rushing from behind took the two in surprise.
A man in golden armour came at him out of the smoke, and he was large and quick, quicker than his size suggested, and he came with a curved sword held in both hands in the Free Cities style. Aemon circled around him and it took all but a faint in wrong direction to make him confused that his sword found the neck.
And then a man came rushing, "Pretender!" the man was shouting. "I am Gerold Dayne! I am the lord of Starfall! Look at me when I kill you!"
The man was fast, blazing fast, but not as quick as many that Aemon had fought in his lives. The man wore a helm and armor, and in his hand the sword of his was a whistling blur, a steel storm that seemed to come at him from many directions at once. Most of his slash were aimed at his head.
Gerold Dayne was no fool, he knew a man lacking helm was a great weakness and he tried to turn it to his advantage. Aemon blocked the blows calmly, his bastard sword meeting each slash and turning it aside. The blades rang and rang again and Aemon let the battle between then continue. The man was getting impatient and he cursed and turned a high cut into a low one, trying to slip a slash to his chest but Aemon parried it with ease. Gerold not able to control his pace with Aemon's last parry slipped from his place and, Aemon gave his shoulder a cut, something that went right through his armor. "Only cowards bring Valyrian steel against steel," Gerold declared, circling around him.
"This coward has no helm and armor, Dayne. Try harder." Aemon said, the man was no true knight, and Aemon will bring no honor for an oathbreaker. Gerold came on again, while the army of Starfall and Blackmont watched, slashing with repetitive move, one to head then his chest, then back to chest from an angle and back to head. Aemon blocked the slashes with ease, whilst his own blade made gaps in his armor, blood dripped of his body, coloring the ground red. That only seemed to make him wilder and then the sun came up, Dawn. It was time and Aemon wasted no time, he turned sideways as if looking away from him and Gerold believed his lack of attention and rushed with all his strength. Aemon wasted no effort then as he parried the sword with much more strength that Gerold lost his grip over the sword, that was all the chance he required. He slashed open the his armor together with his belly, and soon everything inside began to rush out.
With a scream Gerold knelt in pain and disbelief, "I am the Darkstar, and I am of the night."
"There is only Dawn that the world needs, Gerold." Aemon said as he raised Blackfyre to his neck and brought it down in one smooth slash, and the headless body fell down.
By now the fight had stopped. Men of High Hermitage had stopped, men of golden company were either dead or injured. Aemon walked through the aftermath.
He had learned this too, the walking. To show your men the their importance and to look at their pain and death. The camp was fire and ruin and the filled with the smell of blood. He stepped around bodies. He made note of where the Dornish wounded were sitting tying their wounds and injury.
It was Lady Jynessa who brought his attention to a man. "Your Grace." She touched his arm briefly, then pointed.
The man was standing by the edge of the battleground, alone. He was not in Golden Company colors, nor in Ironborn leathers. He wore a captain's coat of oiled blue-black, and he had one eye, the other covered by a patch, and he was standing with his hand holding a horn.
The moment their eyes met, he blew the horn but it was not the sound of horn that alarmed him but the loud roar of his dragon. Meleys.
Meleys circled in the air, she spiralled in the air, doing motions unwanted as if gotten tangled in rope. And then it landed, near the one-eyed man.
Then the man's hand were on Meleys and he began caressing her. She had went still and her eyes were looking at Aemon. The man did not appear to understand what that stillness meant.
Brienne had gone rigid beside him and Aemon walked toward them.
He was aware of the men around him stopping. Aware of the field going quiet as people noticed dragon's stillness by the enemy. He walked at the same pace he always walked, as if he was in no particular hurry.
The man heard him coming and turned. He had a cruel smile that reached everywhere but his remaining eye. In one hand, Aemon saw clearly now the horn he held. Grey and ancient in color, banded in gold, that looked like something that had been old when the Doom was all but born.
The man looked at Aemon and began to laugh.
"King Aemon," he said. He opened his arms in the manner of a man presenting a gift. "You've arrived just in time. Your dragon and I have been getting acquainted. Such a magnificent beast, so much more responsive than I expected." His smile did not change. "You have lost your dragon to me Aemon, the pretender. I am Euron Greyjoy, the Crow's Eye, your One-Eyed God, kneel to m-"
Then a tail came from behind him.
Meleys moved the way she always moved when she had decided something, without preamble, without warning, and with the absolute certainty of a creature for whom the meaning between intention and action had been closed long ago. Her tail came around and took the man across the body, and the sound of it was not the sound of a weapon striking a man but the sound of a force of nature making contact with something that was most fragile in nature.
Euron Greyjoy's feet left the ground. He came down from a height back to the ground with such speed that all present heard his bones break.
Aemon stood over him.
The man's eye was open. His mouth was working. He tried to speak and what came out was not words.
"Anything else," Aemon asked.
His mouth moved. "Ho-"
Meleys still had anger left and she was thorough, as she always was, and she released her scarlet breath on the abomination who tried to control her, she rained fire on both man and his horn. Moments after he raised one hand and set it against her neck, just behind the jaw, where the scales were thin enough that he could feel the heat of her directly.
"At ease Meleys," he said quietly. "You've done well today."
She breathed out once more, a long controlled exhale that was not fire, and leaned into his palm the way she had done when they had rested at the forest by the Wall in the North.
He looked at the ground where Euron had been.
The horn was gone, the gold had survived, left all but a metal slag, twisted and half-melted, but the horn itself was ash. Whatever you were for, he thought, you'll do nothing now.
Brienne was at his shoulder. He heard her take in the scene; the battlefield, the ash, the gold on the ground. The Armor was there too, though it has melted from places.
"Your Grace," she asked, the question was not needed to be spoken aloud.
"I know." He walked toward, where the armor lay, the body long turned into ashes. Looked at Meleys, who was watching him with complete attention. He turned his eyes back to armor, melted from many paces "It seems we have found a Valyrian armor. See that the wounded are treated and prisoners are counted."
"Yes." She paused. "What of Gerold Dayne, your grace."
"He'll be taken back to Lord Dayne." Aemon thought of the boy, waiting in the tower with his hands loose at his sides and his purple eyes full of quiet purpose.
He put one more hand to Meleys' neck, brief and certain, and then turned back to what remained. There are many wars to come.