Chapter 17: Into the Fray
"Stay on them — don't let them reach the inner gate!"
Henry's voice carried over the noise of the pursuit, Red Rain swinging as he pressed through the main keep's corridors. The King's men poured through the broken gate behind them in a flood, and the ironborn defensive line had stopped being a line the moment the portcullis went down. What remained of it was running — down corridors, across the swaying rope bridges, toward the Blood Keep on its separate rock across the water.
Henry followed. Several knights came with him, keeping pace through the narrow stone passages, the group moving fast and tight in the way that combat produces — instinctive, unplanned, everyone responding to the same pressure.
They were deep into the Blood Keep's outer corridor when the portcullis dropped behind the last of the fleeing ironborn.
The crash of iron on stone cut off the pursuit completely.
Henry stopped. The men around him stopped. The sound of the main fight was behind them now, on the other side of an iron grate they couldn't lift.
He looked around.
Four of them. A hundred ironborn filling the corridor and the hall beyond, forming back up now that the chase had ended and the situation had reversed itself entirely.
The four moved without discussion — backs together, facing outward, weapons up.
Henry took a moment in the sudden stillness to look at who he'd ended up with.
To his left: a broad man in brown armor with a surcoat so bloodied its original color was gone, though a standing bear was faintly visible at the center. No helmet — lost somewhere in the pursuit. Hair dark and soaked with sweat. A kite shield in his left hand with two arrows still in it, and a hand-and-a-half sword in his right, the blade grey-black, the pommel carved into a bear's head. He looked like someone who had been in worse situations than this and had developed a calm about it.
To his right: a red priest in voluminous robes with a few pieces of armor attached as apparent afterthoughts. The longsword in his hands was on fire. Not metaphorically — actually burning, steady and roaring, the light from it illuminating the man's broad face and the wineskin hanging from his belt.
Behind Henry: a Kingsguard knight in white plate, white cloak, white shield — all of it considerably less white now, mapped with the blood of the past hour's fighting. Sword out, shield up, standing in the particular way of Kingsguard knights that suggested the training went all the way down to the bones.
One of the ironborn reached for the throwing axe at his hip.
Everyone moved at the same time.
"For the North!"
"Lord of Light!"
"King Robert!"
"Kill every bloody one of them!"
Four different battle cries, no coordination, complete agreement on the objective. The ironborn came in and the four went out to meet them.
The Kingsguard drove his shield forward first — a hard shove that sent the nearest ironborn stumbling back — and followed it with a thrust that opened a man's throat. Henry went right, inside the arc of a swinging axe, and drove Red Rain through the axeman's chest. The backhand that followed — valyrian steel through ironborn plate, through the man's helmet, through the man beneath it — cleared the space to his immediate right.
The broad man in brown armor — the bear, Henry thought — worked his kite shield like a weapon, catching a cluster of thrown axes on it and then driving the shield's edge into the thrower's face, following with his sword through the opening. The Red Priest kept the rear clear with fire. The ironborn didn't want to get close to the burning blade, which meant the four had a protected back and two fighting fronts instead of four.
They worked toward the side hall door. Thirty feet. Twenty. The ironborn kept coming and they kept cutting them down and it was going to work, it was almost—
A throwing spear came down from the spiral staircase above. Nobody saw it until it was already through the Kingsguard's back.
The white figure stiffened. Henry and the bear caught him before he fell — one arm each, moving without words, pulling him through the side hall doorway while the Red Priest backed in behind them with his burning sword sweeping the ironborn back.
The door closed. The bolt dropped. Henry and the bear built a barricade from everything in the room — tables, chairs, a heavy storage chest — while the Red Priest stayed at the door.
Then they turned to the Kingsguard.
The bear looked at the wound for a moment. He'd seen enough wounds in his life to know what he was looking at. "He's done," he said quietly.
The Kingsguard's eyes were still open. His mouth moved. Blood had filled his airway and no words came out — just the sound of a man trying to breathe through something that wouldn't let him. Henry knelt beside him and stayed there until it stopped.
The three of them stood in silence for a moment.
Then the axes started on the door.
"Jorah Mormont," the bear said, gripping his sword in both hands, eyes on the shaking door. He said it the way northmen say things — name, house, done.
"Henry Reyne."
"Thoros of Myr." The Red Priest was already working at his wineskin. He took a long pull and passed it to Henry, then to Jorah. "Drink. You'll need it."
Pale morning light came through the hall's narrow window and fell across the three of them and the dead man on the floor and the door that wouldn't hold much longer. They passed the wineskin and finished it.
Thoros dropped his burned and warped sword — the blade had taken more than it was built for — and knelt beside the Kingsguard's body. He worked the white sword from the dead man's grip and stood with it.
From his belt he produced a small vial of thick liquid, green and faintly luminescent. He poured a measured amount along the blade, working it from forte to tip, and let it flow.
Henry and Jorah watched.
Thoros struck the sword lightly against the stone wall. Sparks. Then the entire blade caught — a roaring sheet of flame identical to the one that had just burned out.
He looked at their expressions and smiled. "Wildfire. Just a trick I know." He turned back to face the door. "Handy in small rooms."
The door gave way.
The furniture piled against it slowed the ironborn for about three seconds — enough time to draw breath and set feet. Then they came through in a mass and the hall became everything at once: firelight and steel, screaming and the crunch of impact, the particular violence of a confined space where nobody has room to miss.
Henry fought by instinct. He stopped counting what he was doing. Red Rain moved and things fell and he moved to the next one. At some point a small hammer — not a weapon anyone would design, just what someone had grabbed — came off the spiral stair and hit his helmet hard enough that the world went white and then dark and then grey and spinning.
The sword stayed in his hand. His legs didn't.
He went down into the blood and the bodies on the floor and the sound of the fight went distant, muffled, as if heard from underwater. He could see Jorah's boots close to his face. He reached up with one hand toward the man — wanted to say something, couldn't produce the words.
He lay there in the spreading grey and watched the underside of the fighting happen around him and thought, without particular emotion, that this was probably a bad place to be.
Then the sound changed.
A crack of timber from the far side of the hall. A second crash. Then a voice that needed no amplification, that had crossed battlefields and tournament grounds and throne rooms and had never once modulated itself for the comfort of the people around it:
"DIE, YOU DAMNED SQUIDS!"
The ironborn scattered. Not withdrew — scattered, like a flock of birds from a thunderclap, men moving in every direction away from the doorway where Robert Baratheon stood.
He filled the doorway. Antlered helm. Black stag on gold at his chest. Warhammer in his right hand, still swinging from the last thing it had hit. He looked at the room — at the bodies, at Jorah and Thoros sagging against the walls, at Henry on the floor — and stepped over everything in his path without slowing.
He reached Henry, crouched down, pulled the helmet off with one hand, and looked at him with the particular assessment of a man who has been pulling wounded men up off battlefields since he was nineteen.
"Henry." He shook his head once. Not in mourning — checking. "Little Lion. Can you hear me?"
Henry looked up at him and nodded.
"Can you stand?"
Robert set the warhammer down, gripped Henry's arm in both hands, and pulled. Henry found Red Rain, found his feet, found his balance — unsteady, but present.
Robert looked him over. Then he laughed — the full laugh, the one that had nothing restrained about it, filling the hall and going out through the broken door and down the corridor.
"Good man." He clapped Henry on the shoulder hard enough to rock him. "Good man. Now stay close — I haven't finished yet."
He picked up the warhammer, turned to the door, and walked back out into Pyke.
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