[center][h1]ARRON[/h1][/center]
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Arron had not presumed to understand the world he lived in, but he found the depths of his ignorance deeper than expected on their arrival at Wyl.  Not only was House Wyl willing to listen to Qosaerys’s offer, they were eager.  Arron had expected an audience at one of his cousins’ holdfasts, to secure a small but strong line of spears for the Brave Companions and their Captain-General.  On stepping to dry land at the Port of Wyl, though, they were received by an honor guard which welcomed them and escorted them directly to Lord Wyl’s audience chamber.  Arron did none of the talking – Qosaerys, met with the opportunity to bring his tongue to bear, gave quite the presentation to the lord and his advisors.  

They walked out of Wyl with a commitment for two hundred spears and twenty Dornish knights drawn from Wyl’s holdings. 

The bulk of this new force remained behind at the Port of Wyl, organizing the raising of the spears and knights under the leadership of Ser Qyle Wyl, second son to Lord Wyl.  Qosaerys, with some sort of mercenary business to conduct at Summerhall, left the Brave Companions at port under Black Drazenka’s command and brought his captains, Arron and a few of the Dornish knights immediately available with him on the journey.  Arron had little and less in common with his new mercenary associates, but Qosaerys gave him his pick of the knights to accompany them, and he found some old friends among the Brave Companions’ new sell-knights, as Qosaerys had come to call them.

First among those was Ser Gerold Manwoody, one of Lord Wyl’s household knights and sworn swords. He was the oldest of them, ten years Arron’s senior, and in years past had mentored the would-be knights of Lord Wyl’s court in the use of sword and spear.  He was, as ever, an unsmiling, humorless man, but he was dutiful and loyal and, as Arron could attest, was good to knock a man down if it came to it.  He was shorter than Arron, who had grown like a weed in the long years since he spent time at Wyl, but Gerold was broader, heavier, stouter, harder.  He was not a man Arron with whom would wish to cross swords.

Second was Ryon Sand, who men called the White Hawk of Skyreach.  Ryon was not a knight, but he was the best sword and spear among them all the same.  Quick as a viper with a blade and more vicious still, Ryon Sand was a dangerous man who had won no less than eight duels before Arron departed for the Free Cities and two more since then.  Half of those were to defend the honor of his trueborn half-sister, Jynessa Fowler, who, as Arron understood it, had kept her honor more for Ryon’s skill with a sword than for her own choices.  Though Arron was a Wyl, one could confuse them for brothers. They had both been towheaded boys in their youth, and when they had sparred in the yards there had been scarce a man who could tell them apart.  Arron had since grown a short and unkempt beard of wiry, sandy blonde, while Ryon seemed incapable of growing a hair below his brow, and Arron’s time at sea and east had tanned his fair skin to a coppery bronze, but they still looked alike.  Arron lacked for Ryon’s easy confidence, though, and might well have smiled as often as unsmiling Ser Gerold in comparison to the White Hawk’s oft flashed grin. 

Last of the three freeriders who joined Arron was Ser Ulrick Uller, an unlanded knight from Hellholt who had found employ as a household guard to Arron’s relations at the Port of Wyl.  Darker in complexion than the other freeriders, which bespoke his southern Dornish heritage, he was marked with vicious scars to his face, one of which had robbed him of his left eye.  Ulrick One-Eye, as men called him behind his back, had a fearsome countenance for it.  Rather than wearing an eyepatch, a ball of gilded steel had been set in the empty socket.  He was, to say the least, discomforting to look upon.  Contrary to appearances, though, Ser Ulrick was the most likable of the group.  Ser Gerold was a man of few words and Ryon was quick tempered, unforgiving and unpredictable, but Ser Ulrick, in spite of the ill turns life had taken for him, was friendly, jovial, and quick to make a good joke, and he held little against anyone.  

Unless it was about his eye. 

Altogether, Arron and his freeriders were a bevy of second sons, bastards and distant relations, all of them unlanded but ambitious and talented. 

Arron and his new Dornish freeriders made up a third of the Brave Companions’ delegation to Summerhall, not counting a dozen servants and attendants they’d brought along.  Captain-General Nycarro Qosaerys rode just behind his standard bearer, who flew the black goat flag of the Brave Companions at the procession’s head, and Jon of Hull, a Westerosi hedge knight and the First Sword of the Brave Companions.  His captains rode with him – there was Orratis, the captain of the Companions’ Myrish crossbow component, who Arron had never seen without a plug of sourleaf between his teeth, and beside him Votys, who hailed from Norvos and led the Brave Companions’ infantry with his great bearded axe in hand.  Each of them was accompanied by their own men, one or two apiece.  Yezdhan zo Yaggaz, the Yunkishman, and Oranasio, a man of Braavos, were sergeants under Votys, and Arron thought Orratis’s man was named Thoroq, but he didn’t know much more than that.

Then there was Donnor Greyiron, the grizzled seafaring veteran who claimed descent from that extinct line of ironborn kings, who was captain of the Salt Wolf, one of Qosaerys’s sellsail ships. Calder Pyke, Greyiron’s second, captained the Salt Wolf’s sister ship, Blackcap, and rode in step with him.  Orratis and Votys were not unlike Qosaerys, though they did not have the same boisterous personality, but these two stood in stark contrast to the gallant sellsword captain-general.  They were hard men, killers, as were their sellsail crews.  

On the whole, the Brave Companions were an ugly, dirty, uncouth, hardscrabble lot, and the Dornishmen were only mildly better.  At least Arron’s freeriders bore heraldry in the Westerosi style, with names and sigils of houses that carried weight in this part of the world.  On the whole, it was not an easy thing to marry these men to the gallantry on display as they crested a hill and came upon the Summerhall tourney grounds.  

The grounds, still at a distance, were ablaze with color and life.  Flags bore lions and wolves (or maybe dogs?) and boars and other animals besides, and they flashed every color under the sun.  Beneath those flags were hundreds, maybe thousands, of people milling about here and there as they made preparations, erected tents and made ready for the tourney.  Arron spied what looked like the frames of a jousting arena in the works.

“Quite the show here, isn’t it?” Ryon’s voice came from behind him.  “Maybe we’ll take a turn at the tilts, aye Gerold?”  Gerold gave a grunt, as was typically the sum of his conversational input.

“We are not here to play at fighting,” Arron answered him, but he regretted the reproach.  Was his answer too cool?  Ryon Sand was a man quick to take offense, and leading men is a hard thing if the men to be led mislike the man leading them, Arron thought.  

“I disagree,” Qosaerys interjected, pulling Arron from his thoughts as the Captain-General pulled on his reins so as to take into step with the Dornishmen.  “I daresay we are not here, as we are not anywhere, to fight at all if we can help it.” 

“So that’s the work of an honorable sellsword, is it?” Ser Ulrick asked.  “To be paid to fight and then shirk from the fighting?”

“While you will find that fighting is, from time to time, unavoidable in this line of work, I would say that is the trick of it,” Qosaerys returned.  “What good is gold if you are too dead to spend it, eh, Ser Uller?”

 “Seems dishonorable to me,” Ser Gerold commented, looking to Arron. His face was stoic as ever, but the look made Arron uncomfortable.  Ser Gerold was not a voluntary recruit to this endeavor.  Where Ryon and Ulrick had come to the Brave Companions as eager recruits, Ryon for glory and danger and Ulrick for coin, Ser Gerold had been tasked with advising Arron on his leadership of the Brave Companions’ new Dornish contingent.  He was Lord Wyl’s man, through and through, and as the lord’s brother Anders Wyl aged it seemed to be clear that Ser Gerold would take his position as master-at-arms of Wyl.  To consort with sellswords was not his way, but again, he was dutiful and loyal, just the sort of second Arron felt he needed, if he were to be a captain of this crew.  In that moment, though, Arron wondered if the knight wasn’t disappointed in him for the company he kept.

“Honor will neither fuck you nor feed you, Ser Gerold, but I do take your meaning and I salute your morality,” Qosaerys said, and Ryon barked with laughter.  

“I like this company, Arron, I think I should have made for Essos with you when you left,” the White Hawk said.  Arron could not say Ryon would not have made a poor sellsword, from what he had seen.  He was certainly more like the Captain-General than himself.  

“You would have been sorely missed at home, brother,” came a woman’s voice then.  It was the voice of Jynessa Fowler, Ryon’s trueborn half-sister.  She was a great beauty, blonde as a Lannister and fairer than any woman Arron had laid eyes on, he thought.  She was young, a year or two Arron’s junior, but unwed still.  A willful woman, she was recently estranged from her lord father’s court for refusing yet another match, as Arron had heard it, and had for the time being taken up with her bastard brother at Lord Wyl’s court while the Lord Fowler’s temper cooled. 

“I am sorely missed wherever I am not.  I am sure you would carry on in my absence, sister.  I daresay you could quick replace me as your champion if you had need of one.”

“I like this one,” Qosaerys said of Ryon. “You’re the one they call White Hawk, eh?”

“They do.”  Ryon leaned back in his sand steed’s saddle to make more prominent the hawk emblazoned on his tabard.   It was not quite the symbol of House Fowler.  The colors were reversed, a silver-white hawk on blue, and rather than being hooded, the hawk’s wings were fanned to suggest flight.  “All across Dorne men know me as the White Hawk of Skyreach.”  Arron thought he caught a smirk touch Jynessa’s lips, together with a roll of her eyes. 

“Very nice,” Qosaerys complimented the White Hawk, and looked to Arron.  “We need a name for you, eh?  Arron Sand lacks a certain,” and he made to wave a hand, “sense of bravado to it, eh?  You need a name to build a reputation around.  Something with a dash of brio, if you will.  Redsand, maybe, for all the blood you’ve spilled in the sandy fighting pits of Meereen.  How’s that sound?”

“I’ve never been to Meereen,” Arron said, dumbly, he thought no sooner had the words left his mouth. 

“Irrelevant details, my friend.  Who is to say where you have or have not been, eh?”  Qosaerys gave another airy wave.  “I’ll make a proper sellsword of you yet, I promise.”

The Captain-General returned his eyes to the tourney grounds then, which loomed larger as they continued their approach.  He was looking far into the distance, searching, Arron thought. And then he seemed to spy what he was looking for. 

“Orratis, Votys, you lot make your camp on that side there, and take the banner” he directed, somewhere vaguely to the right.  “Greyiron, you and yours are with me.  You too, Arron, together with our new Dornish compatriots.” 

Qosaerys took the lead then, and the Captain-General led his selected companions to the thicket of tents and flags that marked the Westerlanders’ place in the field.  Banners of red and gold dominated the town of tents that had sprung up before Summerhall’s fortified walls, together with the banners of their sworn houses.  Blues and greens and yellows fluttered about, together with a notable set of blue-and-silver flags, each adorned with a similarly colored seven pointed star. Qosaerys made a point to seek those tents out, and they made their camp not twenty strides from the most southerly of them. 

As the servants made to set up the Brave Companions' tents, the black goat flag conspicuously absent. Instead, at Qosaerys's instruction they flew Lady Jynessa's banner, the blue hooded hawk of House Fowler on silver. A curious choice, Arron thought.  What was the Captain-General's angle here?

[hider=Summary]
After securing a pledge from the Lord Wyl of Wyl for two hundred spears and a score of Dornish knights, the Brave Companions arrive at the Summerhall tourney grounds and make their camp near House Tarbeck’s tents under the banner of House Fowler.  Nycarro Qosaerys brings his captains and a few of their men, and Arron leads a trio of the company’s newly recruited freeriders – Ser Gerold Manwoody, Ryon Sand and Ulrick Uller - and Lady Jynessa Fowler, daughter of Skyreach. [/hider]