Port Market Street was filled with roughspun and steel. What started a glare and a shove turned into posturing and shouts. The Faith Militant swelled in pride and posture. The Knights of the Golden Rose simply stood their ground. In the center of it, Lady Vittoria and her intended, Lord Baratheon, were having a heated discussion with Morgan Hightower. It should have stayed that way. It would have stayed that way.
Then from somewhere up high the sound sent a shockwave through the haze of noise and kinetic tension: thrum.
No one quite knew where it came from, or what it was…but she did. From a nearby second story overhang, Vaera Balaerys saw it. Before the bolt even flew, her face tightened, and her jaw set in a kind of anger that was never a good thing—not for her, not for those around her, not for anyone. But the moment the woman’s howl of pain echoed?
The very heartbeat that crossbow bolt hit Vittoria Tyrell and the sound of pain clapped through the crowded street like a shock of thunder in the dark? Vittoria screamed in pain as she fell. The Faith Militant and their poor followers cheered, jeered, and hollered. The Knights of the Roses howled in anger.
Vaera Balaerys howled in pure bloodlust heat. By the time Baratheon, Tarly, Redwyne, and those closest to the fallen High Marshall closed in like a shield of armored men, the melee was already aflame. The ground was bloody by the time Vaera was on the street, across it, and bathing dragonsteel in the blood of the Faithful.
At first they barely saw her; their eyes so focused on the Knights of the Rose, they almost missed the smaller but lethal woman in leather and mail cutting through man after man, leaving limbs and guts and brain in her bloodlust wake. By the time they realized she was behind their line and cutting them apart, the Knights of the Rose were showing their thorns. Maybe not even fifty of Vittoria’s knights were ignoring every command given to them by anyone that might try to give it.
This wasn’t the battlefield, and their High Marshall was down, bleeding. It was now a bloody free-for-all melee between Faithful and Noble Knight. Tarly tried to scream something. So did Hightower. No one heard. They wouldn’t have listened even if they had. Vaera didn’t even notice Vittoria’s inner circle start to move her off the street, or that the City Watch started to come in from behind the inns the Knights of the Rose had stayed out, coming from some hidden maze back-alley access to the street pulled from the terror of a child named Dake.
No, in that moment, all Vaera Balaerys noticed was the dark eyes of the tall, armored, man slowly pushing through bodies towards her, wearing armor that looked like an officer of Oldtown’s City Watch. Dead men stood between them, swaying and falling and crying out in misery as they collapsed from the bite of Valyrian steel.
“YOU SHOT HER!”
Vaera pointed with a Valyrian dagger in her off-hand. Lord Alaric thin lips smiled as he pushed a dying man out of his way and draw the longsword he carried. Her booted heel slammed into the side of his knee as he checked a quick thrust from her sword, snarling in pain as he unleashed an elbow that caught her between neck and collar. It was almost enough of a shock to allow the pommel of his blade to crash in her fine Valyrian featured face but for a last moment back stumble, and a quick rediscovery of her balance allowed her to simply turn away from one heavy cut, and side step another, landing her off-hand dagger a taste of the man’s blood along his left side, cutting straight through his mail under the breastplate of the City Watch.
Vaera smirked, winked, and Alaric straightened; outright denying pain access to his mind, murder in his black eyes.
---
“GET HER UP!”
Dennet Tarly bellowed as Vittoria Tyrell looked sheet white and blind drunk in pain. She was trying to say something, but nothing was heard as Davos Baratheon kept her either on her feet, or just off them, secure in his arms and following right behind Tarly. Ryam Redwyne was a pale figure in pale armor, round shield and sword acting in the kind of precision that a knight his age had no business possessing. The Faith Militant went for Vittoria, to take her, or to finish her—it never mattered. They never got close with Ser Ryam holding them off like the jaws of a dragon.
Tarly felt a pang of relief until he saw the men pouring in from the back alley behind the inn weren’t Knights of the Rose, but City Watch. “COME DIE, CUNTS.” The giant of a man unleashed his large blade, discarding the sheath to the ground as if he would never, ever, have need of it again in this life. One swing, two, a giant shove throwing two Guardsmen reeling in reverse, and more blood. Vittoria Tyrell screamed.
Stop! Stop it!
For the first time in years, no one listened to the Lady’s commands. The mammoth Tytan of the Wilds berserkered his way through a wall of flesh and steel, taking a Guardsman up by the back of the collar, and smashing him like an egg against the stone wall of the nearby inn, smearing blood and bone and death against the inn that had been their refuge in the city. Spears hit the giant of a man, but only a prick or two before Tarly cut them down like boughs to be splintered before him as the men worked their way off the street and towards the back alley.
The Tytan twitched as crossbow bolts bit into him, Tarly directing Redwyne to switch them him as they moved one bloody, besieged, step at a time. Redwyne’s shield and blade began to offer some cover to the massive wildling turned Knight of the Rose, though the sweat and the blood were beginning to slow the man as they neared the alley. As the Faith gave chase, the Knights began to fall in upon them, crushing them between the anvil of their ad hoc flank and the hammer of Dennet Tarly’s armored fist and longsword.
“Shut up, we’re saving you, love,” were the words Davos Baratheon offered his pale and growing paler betrothed High Marshall of the Reach, in a tone equal parts anger at her attackers, and irritation at her stubbornness, “stay alive, woman. Up, keep moving,” he said, pulling her up as her eyes rolled back, and he feared poison on the bolt given the coming and going of full consciousness on her pretty face. If something were to give him hope in that moment, it was the awe striking display of martial prowess before him as Ser Ryam Redwyne made every step, every motion of that shield, and every flash of steel against Guardsman look as if Ryam were moving at twice the speed of their attackers.
Behind them Dennet’s brutality was unleashed, as the man nearly the size of the wild giant named Tytan helping Ser Ryam up front bathed the wake behind them in blood. Before long there was nothing between Dennet and the push of Knights of the Rose that had collapsed on the flanks of the Faithful trying to reach Lady Vittoria.
---
“FUCK!”
Vaera Balaerys growled as her eyes rolled in searing pain, the length and reach and technique of the Watch Commander allowing him a piercing strike into at her left side. What felt like a gush of sweat or water at her hip was blood, and she knew it as her pretty purple eyes narrow, and her mind simply shut down the pain. She was too stubborn, she was too determined, and her legendary pain tolerance was on full display as she left a badly angled blow from the tall man deflect off her mailed upper arm, allowing Valyrian steel to bite at him again.
Once became twice, became thrice as she moved in a blur of quickness that the melee should have long robbed her of. The imposing figure growled low in anger and pain as fury nearly caught his mind…but to her surprise, he simply stepped back once, then again. She nearly moved forward before she saw it out of the corner of her eye; dagger and sword catching the Faithful coming at her from either side with just enough to allow her to stumble back.
When her back ran into something, someone, behind her, she cursed to herself and prepared for the worst. What she found was Knights of the Rose surging around her. “Get to her!”
“She’s off the street, get to your DRAGON!”
Saeryx. The sound burned through the street as screaming began, and heat emerged. Fuck. Black and purple spread like a midnight shadow over the street overhead. Dragonfire had half the street ablaze before any of them knew what was happening. By the time Vaera looked forward again, the tall Watch officer was gone, and half the Faith with him. She nearly tripped over the dead as the ground trembled upon the dragon’s landing.
Before she moved, she grabbed the Knight who had told her to get to her dragon, who told her Vittoria was off the street, “IS SHE ALIVE?”
The man nodded, and exhaustion atop relief flooded into her body. “Thank fuck.” She barely recalled making it back to Saeryx, but the dragon craned his neck to all but scoop her up. Dragonfire had a way of ending a melee, leaving both sides of the street burning as the Faith pulled their dying and dead to safety, while the Knights of the Rose did the same.
All she could imagine was the face of the tall, dark, man. And the image burnt into her mind of him letting loose the bolt that struck Vittoria Tyrell. This wasn’t over, she had a feeling, and in the back of her mind she had some idea that perhaps it was just beginning…but for now it was time to leave the Reach.
It was time to head for the Rock.
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