Chapter 9: Raid on Blacktyde Keep
Seven days of training. Then Henry marched them out of Barrowton and down to the river.
They left the horses behind, as Corlen had recommended. Everyone changed into ironborn gear or plain dark clothing, the salvaged round shields lining the gunwales of the longship just as Corlen had described. Henry pulled a heavy cloak over his scarlet armor and kept his helmet tucked under his arm.
With the Blacktyde sail unfurled and the sailors settling into the oar rhythm, the longship slid down the Saltspear, through the coastal waters of Salt Shore, rounded Cape Kraken, and turned west into open sea.
Four days of sailing. The Iron Islands appeared on the horizon like dark stones thrown into grey water, low and unwelcoming, the kind of place that looked exactly like what it had produced.
On the walls of Blacktyde Keep, an old man stood barefoot at the battlements in a sea-blue robe, one hand on a smooth-worn wooden staff, his eyes turned toward the water with the particular attention of a man who can't quite see what he's looking at.
"Is that our sigil on the sail?" He reached out and touched the arm of the boy standing beside him. "Has my nephew come back?"
This was Blind Belon — not truly blind, but far enough gone with cataracts that his eyes had taken on the clouded, filmed-over look of old ice. The boy was Baelor Blacktyde, eleven years old, dark-haired and sour-faced, standing at the battlements with the expression of someone enduring a situation they've decided is beneath them.
An ironborn with no fingers on his right hand squinted at the approaching ship and nodded, left hand tight around a short-handled axe. "Aye, Lord Belon. That's the Nightwalker's sail right enough. Lot of people on deck — must've taken a good haul of slaves for the oars. Full hold by the look of it."
"Some of those men on deck are wearing bright armor," said another, a limping man who leaned hard over the parapet to get a better angle, his voice uncertain.
"That's loot, you idiot." A one-eyed ironborn with a wooden prosthetic where his left arm ended below the elbow smacked the limping man across the back of the head. "Stop gawking and go turn the windlass. You keep the lord waiting at his own gate, I'll throw you in myself."
Baelor stared at the approaching ship and said nothing.
"You don't see my father."
"Too many people on deck," Blind Belon said gently, patting the boy's shoulder. "Hard to pick one man out at this distance. Go down to the dock and meet him. If the raid went well he'll have something for you." A pause, the particular pause of an old man deciding what an eleven-year-old is ready to hear. "He'll want to show you he came back well."
Baelor didn't move immediately. His eyes stayed on the ship. "He came back this time," he said flatly. "King Robert is going to bring every fleet and every army on the continent down on us when this is over. Balon Greyjoy started a war the Iron Islands can't win, and everyone who followed him is going to hang for it." He said it the way children sometimes say true things — without cruelty, without drama, simply as fact. "My father will hang."
Then he turned and went down the stairs, because he'd been told to.
The longship came in slow and steady, the way a crew comes home when they're tired and full and thinking about food. The windlass ground and complained as the iron portcullis of the water gate rose in fits and starts, chain links clanking, until the gap was wide enough to take the hull.
On deck, Henry kept his hood forward and his head angled down. Beside him, the fishermen gripped their weapons inside their ironborn surcoats and breathed through their noses.
"Steady," Corlen said quietly from the prow, not turning around. "Slow the stroke. Easy."
The longship nosed through the water gate. The channel walls were dark stone running green with moss, close enough to touch on both sides. Ahead, the interior dock opened up — a torchlit cave of a space, the water black and still.
Seven ironborn were waiting on the dock. The one-eyed man with the wooden arm was in front, and the rest were in varying states of physical incompleteness — missing fingers, a bad leg, one man with a cloth bound over where his ear had been. Between them they had enough whole limbs to account for perhaps four full men. The one good eye swept the deck with frank commercial interest, cataloguing the bundles and cargo, not looking at faces.
"Quiet return," he said. "Your lord get shy?"
Twelve harpoons came off the ship in answer.
The sound was brief and ugly. The ironborn went down on the dock in a tangle, some still moving, the torchlight catching the blood spreading between the stones. The archers on deck — sixty of them, hunters from the Barrowton villages with bows they knew how to use — were already drawn and aimed at the walls.
The volley went up.
A dozen ironborn on the battlements above took arrows and fell — some backward off the wall, some forward onto the stone walk. The shouting started a moment later, the surviving guards grabbing axes and bows, processing what had just happened.
Throwing axes came back. They were not accurate, but they didn't need to be — they were heavy and fast and the deck wasn't large. An axe took one of the archers across the shoulder and opened him to the bone. He went down screaming. Another caught a man across the face and he was dead before he hit the planking, his body sliding into the channel with barely a splash.
"Shields up — onto the dock!" Henry threw the cloak off his shoulders, settled his helmet, and drew his sword.
The shield wall went over the side and onto the dock, the warriors angling their round shields overhead against the spears and axes still coming down from the walls. The footing was wet stone and it was treacherous and two men slipped in the first ten seconds, but they got up.
"Maewyn — the gatehouse tower! Corlen — clear the yard!"
Henry took the fishermen toward the gatehouse stairs, the key to controlling the walls.
The shields weren't enough for everything. A spear punched clean through one man's shield and through the man behind it — both the iron tip and six inches of shaft coming out the man's back, pinning him to the dock. He died without making a sound, simply stopped moving mid-stride and went down. Another man took a spear through the thigh that left the bone exposed; he tried to keep moving on it for three more steps before his leg gave out beneath him, and then the arrows found him.
Henry kept moving. The gatehouse stairs were narrow stone, worn smooth, the kind of staircase designed to make attackers come up single-file. He took them fast anyway.
An ironborn came out of the gatehouse at the top swinging a hand-axe overhand. Henry stepped inside the arc, felt the axe head graze his pauldron, and brought his sword up in a short diagonal cut that took the wrist off at the joint. The axe hit the floor. The ironborn hit the wall and slid down it, screaming.
She was a woman. Henry registered this without stopping — ironborn custom made no meaningful distinction, and the sword that had come at his head hadn't asked his name first. He finished it cleanly and moved on.
Three more ironborn held the gatehouse, all of them old or injured, none of them equal to what was coming up the stairs. Henry worked through them quickly. It wasn't a fight so much as an ending.
In the keep's yard, Corlen came through the ground-floor doorway of the tower and ran directly into a boy pelting down the stairs. Baelor Blacktyde, eleven years old, moving fast with the specific urgency of someone who has heard the noise from above and made a decision about where he'd rather be.
Corlen caught him by the collar, drove a mailed fist into his face without particular ceremony, and caught him as he went limp.
"The leader's son," he said to the men beside him, looking down at the unconscious boy with the practical assessment of a man who has spent years working out what things are worth. "Don't mark him up more than necessary. He might ransom."
When Henry came down from the walls, the yard was nearly quiet. Scattered bodies. A few men still moving who wouldn't be for long. The sounds of fighting had compressed into something sporadic and were fading.
The last figure standing was Blind Belon.
He was in the center of the yard, barefoot on the cold stone, his robes moving in the draft from the open gate. His arms were spread wide, wooden staff in one hand, his clouded eyes aimed somewhere in Henry's direction with an expression of complete composure.
"We come from the sea, and to the sea we shall return!" His voice was strong for an old man. "What is dead may never die! The Drowned God receives his own — feasting in his Watery Halls, mead and plenty, forever!"
Henry stopped a few feet away. His sword was at his side, blood dripping from the tip onto the stones.
"Men who burn fishing villages and murder children don't go to any hall worth the name," he said. "They just die."
"We paid the iron price!" Belon's free hand jabbed the air. "This is the Old Way — the will of the Drowned God himself! We do not sow — we take! As it has always been!"
Henry looked at him for a moment. An unarmed old man, half-blind, preaching a dead faith at the man who'd just killed his entire garrison.
He turned to the fishermen standing behind him — men who'd buried neighbors and family members in the burned ruins of villages up and down that coastline — and jerked his head toward Belon.
"He's not worth my sword. Find a rope."
"What is dead may never die — but rises again, harder and stronger!" Belon didn't stop. He swung his staff at the first fisherman who stepped toward him. It hit the man's mail hauberk with a sound like a stick hitting a fence post.
The fisherman looked down at his chest, then up at the old man, then at the men around him.
"Reckon I've taken worse from my wife," he said.
Someone behind him laughed. Then several men did. It broke the tension of the last hour like a seam opening, and even Henry, who hadn't intended to, felt the corner of his mouth pull.
They took Belon while he was still swinging and still shouting, and that was the end of the battle for Blacktyde Keep.
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