Chapter 11: Barristan the Bold
The fleet anchored offshore and the landing began — soldiers coming in first on small boats, boots hitting the shingle, forming up into defensive lines and advancing toward the walls. Behind them, more boats brought knights, squires, and warhorses through the surf.
When the first soldiers of the Royal Fleet stepped onto the beach of Blacktide Isle and looked toward the castle, they stopped.
There were men on the walls. The gates were standing open. And flying from the keep's towers, snapping in the sea wind, were white banners bearing a Red Lion.
The knights sent forward for close reconnaissance pulled up their horses and looked at each other.
"Did the Lannisters take this place ahead of us?" a young knight asked, staring at the unfamiliar device.
"That's not a Lannister banner," the man beside him said. "Lannister flies gold on crimson. And their fleet is ash — they couldn't have gotten here." He squinted at the pennant. "I don't know that sigil."
"I do."
The voice came from behind them — measured, unhurried, carrying the particular weight of someone who has been the most experienced man in a great many rooms and has stopped needing to announce it.
An old knight rode forward.
His armor was white. His cloak was white. His shield was white, and the sword at his hip was white-hilted. His hair and beard had gone entirely white as well, though his pale blue eyes were still sharp, and his back was straight in the saddle in the way of a man who has never once considered slouching. He might have been fifty-five. He carried it like forty.
The two younger knights straightened automatically in their saddles as he came alongside them.
"Ser Barristan."
Barristan Selmy nodded without looking at them. His eyes were on the banner.
"That is the Red Lion on a white field," he said, more to himself than to them. "House Reyne of Castamere. Their name was well known in the Westerlands, once." A pause. "A long time ago."
Something moved in his expression — not quite memory, not quite grief. Something quieter than either.
The castle gates opened fully as they watched. Six horsemen rode out — six, because that was how many warhorses remained in Blacktyde Keep's stables. The man in front wore scarlet armor, his Red Lion banner carried by the rider half a length behind him.
Henry Reyne had considered bringing more men to make a better impression, then decided that honesty was the better policy with a man like Barristan Selmy.
"Before you stands the Lord of Casterly Rock — Lord Henry of House Reyne." Maewyn's voice carried across the beach with the confidence of someone who has been practicing this.
The old knight's herald answered in kind. "Before you stands Ser Barristan Selmy, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard."
Both men dismounted. They met on the shingle between the castle and the fleet and clasped forearms.
Henry was aware that he was standing in front of a living legend and was trying not to let it show on his face, with mixed results.
He knew the stories. Everyone who'd grown up dreaming of knighthood knew the stories. Willis Manderly had told most of them to Henry personally, in the particular tone Willis used when he wanted Henry to understand that something actually mattered.
At sixteen, Barristan had entered the Winter Tourney at King's Landing in plain armor, no device, no announcement. He'd unhorsed Prince Duncan and then defeated Ser Duncan the Tall — the Lord Commander himself — before anyone knew his name. King Aegon the Fifth had knighted him on the spot.
During the War of the Ninepenny Kings, he'd ridden alone into the ranks of the Golden Company and killed Maelys the Monstrous in single combat — the last of the Blackfyre pretenders, a giant of a man, and Barristan had put him in the ground and ridden back out again. That single act had ended the Blackfyre line. His name had been spoken in halls across the Seven Kingdoms from that day on.
At twenty-three, Gerold Hightower had recommended him for the Kingsguard. He'd given up his inheritance and his betrothal and put on the white cloak without apparent hesitation.
Under Aerys — mad, suspicious, increasingly dangerous Aerys — Barristan had walked alone into Duskendale and walked back out with the king, who had been held captive for six months. He'd hunted the Kingswood Brotherhood through their own forest and killed their leader in open combat.
At the Trident, fighting for a king who'd already lost the war, he'd taken arrows and spears and sword cuts until they'd finally brought him down, and even then it had taken several men. Robert Baratheon had pardoned him personally and asked him to serve. He had.
There was no knight alive with a record like it.
"We took this castle yesterday," Henry said, keeping his voice even. "I've heard your name since I was a boy, Ser Barristan. You honor us. Please — come inside, rest, and let me tell you what we found here."
Barristan looked at him with the measuring attention of a man who has spent fifty years reading people quickly and accurately. "You're Jeyro Reyne's son?"
"Yes, ser. Roger Reyne was my grandfather."
Something warmed in the old knight's eyes. He turned and gave the order to his knights: "All troops ashore. Make camp and rest." Then he turned back to Henry and gestured toward the gate. "Ride with me, then. Tell me how you took this place."
They rode in side by side — white armor and red armor, the old lion and the young one — through the open gate of Blacktyde Keep.
Henry told it plainly as they walked the horses through the yard. The ambush on the beach at Salt Shore. The intelligence from the prisoner. Corlen's plan — the disguise, the Blacktyde sail, the slow approach through the water gate in broad daylight. The fighting inside the keep.
"Seventeen dead," he said. "Eight men who won't carry a weapon again. The rest are sailing the wounded and our fallen back to the North. Corlen Sasman — one of my men, a sailor — he put the plan together. I carried it out."
Barristan listened without interrupting. When Henry finished, the old knight was quiet for a moment.
"Less than a hundred men. A captured castle. Seventeen lost." He turned to look at Henry directly. "That is an excellent outcome, and an excellently made plan. You should be proud of it."
"The credit belongs to Corlen. And to the men who carried it."
"I heard you the first time," Barristan said, with just enough weight in it to suggest he'd noticed Henry deflecting twice now. "A commander who shares credit honestly and names the men who earned it — that is not a small quality." He paused. "Your grandfather had it as well, when he was young. Before grief made him something harder."
Henry didn't answer that. He wasn't sure what to say.
"I see more in you than you're willing to claim yet," Barristan said simply. "That's as it should be at your age. Give it time."
Henry genuinely did not know how to respond to Barristan Selmy telling him he showed promise, so he changed the subject.
"I have to ask — why bring six thousand men to take Blacktide Isle? House Blacktyde isn't a significant power even among the ironborn. A thousand men with siege equipment could take this keep directly."
Barristan's expression shifted into something more practical. "The original plan was to use Blacktide Isle as a staging point — rest the men, resupply, then push north to Old Wyk." He looked around the yard with the eye of a man already calculating its capacity as a military base. "As it happens, you've saved us the trouble of taking it."
He looked back at Henry. "Stannis Baratheon ambushed the Iron Fleet at Fair Isle and broke it. He's landed twelve thousand men on Great Wyk and the fighting there is already underway." A measured pause. "Old Wyk is the next target. I could use men who already know this island's waters and aren't afraid of a fight."
He let that sit for a moment.
"Will you come, Little Lion?"
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