Chapter 6: First Blood
The meadow half a league north of Salt Shore was sparse and wind-scoured, the dead grass bending in steady gusts off the water. Henry had called a halt here with the sixty-odd men who'd stayed with him while the rest fanned out along the coastline in both directions to scout.
The men sat on the cold ground in loose clusters, gnawing on travel bread and not saying much. Horses stood ground-tied nearby, heads low against the wind.
Henry had used every hour of the march to drill them. It hadn't been elegant work. Sailors were capable men — strong, used to discomfort, unafraid of a blade — but riding in formation and fighting from horseback were skills built from the ground up, and these men had started from nothing. Basic column movement. Mounted strikes, the mechanics of driving power through a swing when the horse is moving under you. How to hold a line instead of scattering into a mob the moment contact happened.
They weren't knights. They weren't even close. But they could hold a formation now without being told twice, and their strikes had stopped looking like men trying not to fall off.
It would have to be enough.
The three villages they'd ridden through on the way south had made the purpose of all this very clear. Henry had seen burned buildings before — in paintings, in stories. He hadn't seen what came after the burning. The bodies in the ruins. The women and children. The particular smell of a place where people had died badly and been left where they fell.
The ironborn followed the Old Way. Raiding was worship to them, killing was craft, and the lives of fishing villagers on someone else's coast registered as nothing — less than nothing, as obstacles between a longship crew and whatever they'd come to take. Henry had known this as a fact. Standing in the ash of the third village, the rage that settled into him wasn't hot. It was cold and very specific.
He'd turned away survivors who wanted to follow him — thin men in torn clothes with wood-axes and old rust-eaten blades, weeping and furious in equal measure. He couldn't take them. Leading unarmed civilians into a fight against ironborn in full kit wasn't revenge, it was just adding to the body count. He'd told them to wait. He'd told the hunters with bows to stay close and listen for a summons.
The sound of hooves came in from the east at a canter.
The scout pulled up short and dismounted in one motion, breathing hard from the ride. "My lord. Three leagues east, there's a longship anchored in a cove. Hundred feet, maybe a bit more. Men on the beach — ironborn, cooking fires, no camp structure. They've got captives. Couldn't get a count on either group, there's a rise between the beach and where I was watching from."
The men around Henry immediately started talking over each other.
"Hit them now, while they're eating —"
"We don't know their numbers —"
"Ride to the nearest town and conscript —"
"What town? Every able-bodied man between here and Barrowton rode south with Lord Stark. There's nobody left to conscript."
Henry rubbed the pommel of his sword and said nothing. Not knowing the enemy's numbers was the problem. Sixty men charging blind into something twice their size, with captives in the middle of it, was how you got everyone killed and rescued nobody.
A figure hunched over and approached from the edge of the group — one of the hired sailors, dark-haired, lean-faced, with pale blue eyes that had the weathered look of someone who'd spent most of his life squinting into sea wind.
"My lord. I know ironborn ships." He said it plainly, without performance. "A hundred-foot longship runs about fifty oarsmen. She can carry infantry on top of that — a hundred, hundred and fifty if they pack in. But they're raiding. They need space for loot on the way back. I'd put the headcount at a hundred, give or take."
Henry looked at him. "Your name."
"Corlen Sasman, my lord. Out of White Harbor, mostly. Ran cargo ships up and down the coast for twelve years."
Henry nodded once and turned to look at the coastline, thinking it through.
"We go along the beach. Sand will muffle the hooves." He pulled on his gauntlets and reached for his helmet. "Corlen — take ten men from the ships' crews, get aboard that longship, and cut her loose from shore. Get her far enough out that nobody can swim to her. Bring her back in once it's done." He looked across the assembled men. "Everyone else mounts up. We ride them down while they're still chewing."
Nobody argued.
The beach was wide and flat, the sand damp and firm enough to ride on without bogging down. Henry kept the column tight to the waterline where the sand was darkest and most compacted, the sound of hoofbeats swallowed by the crash of the surf and the constant push of the sea wind.
The ironborn had made camp on the landward side of a low rise, sheltered from the wind coming off the water. Smart enough as far as that went. Not smart enough to post a watch worth a damn.
Henry could see them before they saw him — men in small groups of two and three, heavy armor piled beside them, some with clay cups of something cheap, some eating. A few were already lying down. They looked exactly like men who believed they were in no danger.
He'd fought on a battlefield exactly once, at a training tournament that didn't count. He was about to do it for real. The fear was there, underneath everything, but it was far enough down that it wasn't in the way.
One of the ironborn shifted against the hillside — Henry saw him tense, suddenly alert, looking down at the ground like he'd felt something wrong through it. The man raised his eyes.
Henry's column was already at a gallop.
"Raid!" The ironborn came off the ground shouting, grabbing for the axe at his hip.
The captives on the far side of the rise scrambled upright with their hands still bound behind them and scattered in every direction, moving away from the camp as fast as they could manage, which was the smartest thing they could have done.
The ironborn camp went from rest to chaos in under five seconds. Men grabbing for armor with shaking fingers, not finding the buckles. Men looking at the incoming horses and making the calculation that the ships were closer than any defensible ground.
Henry took the shouting man first — couched the lance, let the horse carry it through, felt the impact travel up the shaft as the point drove home. The man went back and down and the lance went with him, wedged fast. Henry released it without thinking about it, drew his sword left-handed across his body, and brought it across the neck of the next man in his path before the first one had finished falling.
Blood hit his red armor and disappeared into the color of it.
The line behind him crashed through what remained of the ironborn attempt to form up. It wasn't a battle in any organized sense — it was a rout from the first second, and the men who ran for the ships found Corlen's crew already pulling the longship away from shore on a pair of oars, the anchor rope floating cut behind her.
The ironborn on the beach looked at the open water where their ship had been and stopped running.
The cavalry caught them there.
It didn't last long.
When it was over, Henry walked the field while his mercenaries worked through the bodies for coin and valuables — that was part of their pay, and he'd known it going in. Maewyn had the captives gathered, was cutting the ropes off their wrists and moving them away from the bodies.
Henry found the one ironborn still alive — a man whose leg had been crushed under a horse, lying curled around the wound, breathing in short pulls. Henry stood over him and put his boot down on the break.
The man screamed.
"Who commands your company?"
"Belon!" The name came out fast, between gasps. "Belon Blacktide — lord of Blacktide Isle —"
"Where is he?"
The man's shaking hand pointed to a body a dozen yards away. Henry's lance was still in the chest.
Henry looked at it for a moment. He'd killed the lord of the island himself, in the first seconds of the charge, without knowing it. He supposed that said something about what kind of lord Belon Blacktide had been — the kind who yelled very loudly when the horses came.
"How many of Blacktide Isle's men are here?"
"All — all of us. Ninety, maybe a few more. Everyone who could fight. King Balon took the rest for the main fleet."
"Who's guarding the island?"
The man swallowed hard. "'Blind' Belon — he's a servant of the Drowned God. Him and the lord's son, Baelor, eleven years old. And some sailors too old or broken to make the voyage." He was speaking very fast, clearly under the impression that answering quickly would keep the boot off the wound. "That's all. I swear it."
Henry removed his boot, stepped back, and drew his knife in a single motion.
He walked to where his lance was still embedded in Belon Blacktide's chest, set his boot on the dead man's ribs, and pulled the lance free. The tip came out dark.
He stood there a moment, looking out at the water, at Corlen already turning the longship back toward shore.
Where do these people get the nerve, he thought. A handful of rocks in the middle of the sea and they raid half a continent. And the moment you hit back, it's mercy and pleading and I'll be your slave.
He turned back to his men.
"No survivors."
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