Chapter 14: Fierce Battle on the Beach
Three longships hit the beach first, hulls grinding on the shingle with a sound like grinding millstones. Before the boats had fully stopped moving, seventy ironborn were over the gunwales and onto the sand.
The first volley came down the slope immediately.
More than fifty arrows. A handful of men went down — legs pinned, screaming. But most of the shafts skipped off plate armor or buried themselves in shields, and the ironborn moved fast, pulling into a shield wall using the grounded longships as cover while the rest of the fleet accelerated toward shore behind them.
A white-haired man with a greatsword was giving orders from the center of the line, his voice carrying over the surf. Under his direction the shield wall began moving — slowly, steadily, up toward the archers on the earthen slope above the beach, advancing through the arrow storm the way ironborn had always advanced through things they didn't like: by walking directly into them and daring the arrows to matter.
The ironborn archers on the beach tried returning fire from behind the longship hulls, but the distance and the uphill angle defeated them. Their shafts lost momentum halfway up the slope and dropped into the grass, touching nothing.
When the ironborn shield wall reached the foot of the slope, the arrows stopped.
The hunters stepped aside, opening the line, and the infantry came through — forty men with round shields of their own, moving down to meet the ironborn at the base of the hill. Both sides threw what they had across the gap: javelins and harpoons from above, throwing axes coming back the other way. Archers repositioned on the flanks and put arrows into the ironborn from the sides where the shields didn't cover.
The beach below the slope became a killing ground. Men fell on both sides. The space between the waterline and the grass was carpeted with the dead and the dying, and still more ironborn were coming ashore, crouching under their shields as they ran forward to fill the gaps in the front line.
The two sides ground against each other and neither gave.
Then the horses came.
Henry had held the cavalry on the reverse slope, out of sight. Nearly seventy riders came around the right flank at a full gallop, the drumbeat of hooves on hard ground building fast enough that the ironborn on the beach heard it before they saw it. The white-haired commander was already screaming orders — circle, form a circle — but formation takes time that a cavalry charge doesn't give you.
The gap in the ironborn line was still open when the horses hit it.
The shield wall came apart. Swords swung, armor split, men went down under hooves. The infantry on the slope pushed forward immediately, catching the ironborn between two forces, and what had been a disciplined advance became a rout in seconds.
The newly landed ironborn at the waterline broke for the ships. Men who'd never worked together suddenly found common cause in lifting longship hulls and shoving them back into the surf. Two ships further out that hadn't beached yet turned their oars hard and ran.
But the two hundred ironborn already committed on the slope had nowhere to go. The pincer closed around them and their only remaining option was to fight until they couldn't, so they did — with the particular ferocity of men who have run out of better choices.
The cavalry bogged down in the press. Ironborn hands grabbed at bridles and stirrups, trying to pull riders off their horses. The archers came up under Maester Winston's direction, moving close enough to the melee to shoot effectively at the cost of being close enough to catch a throwing axe in return.
Henry's horse was beginning to labor — the sheer density of bodies around it slowing the animal to a walk. He dropped a broken lance and drew his sword, cutting down an ironborn who'd grabbed for the reins.
The white-haired commander found him.
Henry saw the greatsword coming from his left side — a hard horizontal swing at his horse's front legs, the kind of cut that a man with a two-handed blade could make look effortless. He had no time to do anything about it.
The horse screamed and went down.
Henry hit the ground hard enough to drive the breath from his body, his armor ringing like a struck bell. He lay still for one second — assessing, not dead — then got his legs under him and found his sword in the mud.
The old man stood over him, breathing hard but steady, the greatsword held ready.
"When you meet your gods, boy, remember that the man who sent you was Dunstan Drumm." He brought the greatsword around in a horizontal sweep aimed at Henry's neck.
Henry got the shield up. The blade bit into it with a sound like a tree falling, driving the edge to within an inch of his throat, the cold of the steel close enough to feel on his skin.
He released the shield — the sword was stuck in it — dropped and rolled left, came up with his sword in both hands and thrust.
Dunstan disengaged the greatsword from the ruined shield and parried the thrust, but he didn't press forward. He stood, leaning slightly on the blade, his chest heaving with the effort of the last few minutes.
He was old. Whatever he had been in his prime — and Dunstan Drumm had clearly been considerable — age had taken the stamina if not the skill. He had his experience left, and his reach, and the greatsword's weight working for him. That was enough to be dangerous. It wasn't enough to be unstoppable.
Henry came at him without the shield now, sword in both hands, using the weight and reach Barristan had told him he was wasting. A hard downward cut, committed, all the force he had. Dunstan brought the greatsword up across the line of it.
The impact was enough that both men felt it in their arms.
They traded three more exchanges, each one heavy and deliberate, neither man giving ground. Then Henry swung again — and on the collision, his sword snapped at the forte, the blade tumbling away into the mud.
Dunstan's eyes showed something — not quite contempt, but close to it. He'd seen a hundred disarmed men throw down what remained and run.
Henry threw a shoulder into him instead.
The impact drove both of them into the mud in a tangle of heavy armor. They grappled in it — no room for weapons, no room for technique — just two men in steel trying to find purchase on each other in wet sand while the battle raged around them. Dunstan was experienced enough to counter Henry's attempts to pin him, but he was old and his strength was going. Each time Henry worked to the dominant position, Dunstan found a way out, but each time he did it a little slower.
Eventually he didn't do it fast enough.
Henry freed his right hand, reached to his belt, found the dagger, and drove it through the eye-slit of Dunstan Drumm's helm.
The old man went still.
Henry stayed where he was for a moment, kneeling in the mud with his hand on the dagger, breathing.
Then he pulled it free, picked up a short-hafted axe from the ground beside him, and went back to work.
Afterward, Henry sat on a rock above the beach and looked at the sword.
He'd found it on Dunstan's body when they were stripping the dead for armor and weapons. It didn't look like other swords. The blade was dark, almost grey, with a faint pattern in the steel — a rippling, flowing quality, like water moving under glass. The hilt was wooden, painted red, the crossguard and pommel worked in gold. It was an old sword, old in a way that most things that claimed to be old weren't.
Valyrian steel. The pattern in the blade was unmistakable to anyone who'd ever seen it described, and Maester Winston confirmed it without being asked.
"Red Rain," Winston said, from beside him. "The ancestral blade of House Drumm. They've carried it for generations."
Henry turned the sword in his hands. The red hilt. The gold crossguard, shaped not unlike a lion's claws. The dark blade catching what little light the Iron Islands sky was offering.
"Not anymore," he said. "It belongs to House Reyne now."
Winston looked at him, then at the sword, then decided this was not a debate worth having.
Henry was still looking at the blade when Maewyn came up behind him. He could hear the exhaustion in Maewyn's footsteps before he spoke.
"My lord." No helmet — his face was a map of blood and mud and a bruise across his forehead from where he'd gone down at some point in the fighting. "Final count."
Henry set the sword across his knees and waited.
"Still able to bear arms — seven Castamere cavalry, thirty sailors, fifteen fishermen, twenty-six archers." Maewyn paused. "Counting myself, that's seventy-nine."
The ironborn had left two hundred and ninety bodies on the beach. Ten longships taken, each good for twenty-five men.
Henry looked at the numbers and felt the joy of Red Rain drain away completely.
He'd started this campaign with nearly two hundred men. Seventy-nine could still fight.
"Collect the dead," he said, after a while. "Use the longships to send the wounded home. The dead go with them."
"The Castamere men—" Maewyn stopped. Started again. "They don't want to be buried in the North, my lord. They want to be cremated. They want their bones brought back to Castamere someday, when—" He didn't finish the sentence.
Henry was quiet for a long time.
He nodded.
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