DAVOS

The sky was still quite dark when Davos was awoken on the morrow, but dawn's rosy fingers were wandering over the horizon. A boy was shaking him but that was not the cause that he no longer slept. Warhorns were blaring all across the camp, loud and clear and angry. "Another outrider arrived," the boy was saying. As Davos's eyes grew accustomed to wakefulness, he recognised him for his son Maric. "Lord Renly's host prepares for battle."

Grim-faced, Davos had Maric help him don his arms and armour, including a new-forged sword. King Stannis had insisted on it. "If I would that my lords treat you as a knight," the king had said, "I needs must treat you as a knight myself. I cannot closet you from battle like an old man, a woman or a helpless cripple." Davos had never been a warrior, but he had received some training in the two moons they had spent here before Lord Renly's arrival, and the king had seen fit to place him with some of his most experienced men. King Stannis wanted him protected.

Davos headed to their camp's makeshift armoury, taking care not to slip. It had rained the night before, as it oft did in the stormlands, and any grass in the camp had long since been trampled away, so there was naught but dust and mud beneath them. From the armoury he took up a pike more than twice his height, with a cruel hook and a vicious half-ax blade as well as the usual spearhead. He did not expect to use it for the whole battle, but for the initial response to the charge, when facing twenty-thousand men ahorse arrayed against them, Stannis Baratheon needed every man. Even the haughty lords and knights, those few of them he had, were fighting mostly on foot for this battle. The king had poorer than a thousand riders. Unless he wished to lose the battle ere it had even begun, he could not permit it to be a gallant clash of knights against Lord Renly.

The king's camp was alive with clattering and chattering as slumbering men awoke, prepared themselves and rushed to their positions. On the other side of the Vale of Ranimon, far to the west, they could hear the sound of hooves, distantly thundering. "The rebels near us," King Stannis was shouting. "You have your orders. We await them."

"Fools wi' more dragons than brains," Davos heard one of the grizzled Baratheon veterans near him tell another. "Chargin' up into the sun. Well, I reckon we're like to teach 'em pretty boys a lesson abou' tha'."

There they were. Some were hard-bitten old soldiers of Stannis's guard, many of whom had served House Baratheon back when Mad King Aerys sat the Iron Throne. Many had fought with Stannis when he won great victories for his House during the Greyjoy Rebellion. But many were green and untested, the fisherfolk of the Narrow Sea, ordered from their homes by the will of the Lord of Dragonstone and commanded to face the fury of the gathered knighthood of Westeros.

They were outclassed and outnumbered. Perhaps all that they could do was scream against the storm. But if so, Davos thought, where better than Storm's End to do it?

It was mayhaps half an hour more when men appeared in sight, passing over the tough muddy scrub-land of the valley that had guarded the quickest way westward to Storm's End since the time of the Durrandon kings. Some green young fool of an archer sent an arrow at them. It fell far short. "Hold!" Stannis cried from behind the lines. "Hold! Hold till they are in range and I give the order!"

A quarter of an hour later, as Lord Renly's knights and freeriders drew nearer, their beautifully woven banners flying, bold tall knights with the golden rose of Tyrell and the stag on gold of Baratheon streaming riding at the head of them, King Stannis gave the order. "Loose!"

Murder soared o'erhead, flying well this day of mild wind. There were few tall trees or other such to block the sight of men or flight of arrows and quarrels.

Stannis left no time for gawping. "Nock!" he was already barking. "Mark! Draw! Loose!"

Stannis's own Westerosi bowmen were formidable, but there was greater effect from the Myrmen he had hired as sellswords. Their Myrish crossbows were ungainly, ugly things with odd recurve shapes and strange interplays of strings and wood and iron on the top that Davos did not understand, but whatever they were, they packed a punch: three quarrels at once, and with horrific speed. They aimed not for the armoured knights, but, largely, for their horses. A warhorse was far bigger than a man and took far more steel to armour properly in plate, and the Myrmen were experts. Arrows and quarrels pierced into the charging ranks of knights. Horses screamed. All men knew the joints of armour were where it was weakest. The bold young knight who had ridden ahead of the others, followed by a rose banner, saw three Myrish quarrels at close range tear straight through his fine white well-bred horse's throat. The stallion collapsed. With the gods alone knew how many horsemen hurtling behind him, and with the sun in their eyes to make it hard for them to look at him, the knight let out a scream as he fell face-down in the mud and was trampled by some colossal number of his fellows. It must have been a horrible way to die.

It looked to Davos as though the Stranger itself had descended from on high in the form of arrows and slaughtered all of their foes, but it soon emerged that the onslaught had felled almost none of them. Uncountably many men had been slain, but uncountably more continued onward. Even as renewed rounds of arrows and quarrels slew ever more of them, tall, bold, mounted, brightly coloured banners streaming before them, what looked like half the chivalry of Westeros were bearing down upon the Narrow Sea folk's army in all their terrible glory.

There were several more rounds of arrows. As the charging knights drew nearer, the arrows grew faster at the points in time they struck, and thus grew their penetrating power. Men and horses screamed and writhed in pain, many of them trampled and drowning in the mud, others free of that but nevertheless dying. Yet by far the greater part of the southern knights remained alive and no less lethal, and those mounted men bore down upon the waiting folk of the Narrow Sea.

Never in his life had Davos felt such fear as he felt at this very moment, watching a gleaming-armoured knight on his great destrier galloping towards him, bearing a blue banner with a silver owl. Many of the archers discarded their bows and took up the pikes they had been issued. Stannis's commanders up and down the line were shouting: "Brace!"

Then the air was alive with screaming. Renly's knights struck the line: the line of pits Stannis had ordered dug in front of a line stretching all the way around the fortress. He had not known for certain that Lord Renly would attack him from this side. The scrub-land around Storm's End was hard, rugged and rolling, so there had been no difficulty in finding a lip of the land, a place a little way back from a high point, so that the enemy had to charge uphill towards them for a time and would then be moving downhill for a small but crucial distance as they finished their approach. Thus the pits were obscured from the sight of the riders until they were very near.

The riders were moving so quickly, straining with their eyes against the sun, that they had almost no chance of noticing the pit in the ground ahead of them in enough time to make their horses stop. Horses lifted their voices high in agony as their forelegs fell suddenly into the pits while they were charging forward at great speed. There were countless broken legs… and worse.

Bitterbridge was a faraway place. It had taken more than two turns of the moon for a lone mounted messenger from Storm's End to reach Renly's army there and for Renly's host of horse to ride the other way. It could have been quicker, but Stannis had ordered shifts of archers to watch the fortress at all times and shoot down any ravens flying thence, to gain the necessary time to entrench his defences. They could not have built traps stretching far from their lines, to slow the advance of Renly's charge. If they had done so, it would have been obvious to the enemy, so the enemy would have attacked from a direction other than the straightforward route through the Vale of Ranimon, and regardless, there was not the time to build so many traps extending far in all directions from Storm's End. Instead, they needed a trap the enemy could not see, and they made it as bitter as they could. The pits into which Renly's horsemen had fallen were not only pits. Each of them had a large spike embedded deeply in the earth. Thus, by the onrushing force of their own charge, Renly's host of horse drove themselves onto the spikes, and to their doom.

As the world resounded with the cries of maimed and dying horses and men, Davos sprang into obedience to what he had been taught. He levelled his pike toward the pit, looked for the place in the silver-owl knight's armour where his helm joined with his gorget, and drove it in with all the strength he could muster. There was a strangled yelp, a horrific gasping tearing sound, and the man with the silver-owl banner went limp. He was dead.

Davos was frozen from the horror of it. One of the old soldiers beside him thumped him and shook him by the chest, shouting, "Move, move, move!" Davos tried to draw out his pike. It came free with a disgusting wet squelch, and he gagged at the scent of death and dying.

The momentum of Lord Renly's charge had been utterly broken. Instead of bearing down upon their enemies with all the speed they had built up, a formidable mass of man and horse and steel rushing toward the foe, the foremost row of Renly's knights had sunken in the earth, most slain by the earthworks and Stannis's pikemen. Moreover, the Myrish crossbowmen whom Stannis had hired into his service had not put aside their bows like most of the rest of Stannis's archers. They did not stand with the line but behind and above it, on rocks and on mounds of earth excavated from the trench. That gave them a clear shot at Renly's army, at which they could fire from their elevated height, with little risk of hitting their own men. Now, at such exceedingly close range, their odd, squat, foreign crossbows, which many Westerosi men disdained, truly came into their own. They were a terror to behold. In another battle, a different battle, in such a lofty and exposed position they would have been in danger, but Renly's host was one of freeriders and mounted knights, without swordsmen, spearmen or archers afoot. There would be no enemy arrows to deter them. They could loose as they wished, and loose they did, in extraordinary numbers. At Storm's End for the past two turns of the moon Stannis's army had had no shortage of time to fletch and certainly no shortage of wood.

As another row of riders, without nearly enough time to see and understand and halt quickly enough, slammed into the great ditch Stannis's men had dug for them, the greater part of the p;an came sweeping into motion. "Curve round!" King Stannis was roaring, again and again. "Curve round!"

This too was something they had practised many times before. Davos and the men around him near the far northern end of the line ran outwards and then down the hill, westward, jabbing at Renly's panicked soldiers. The slope of the hill aided their run; it did much of their work for them. They did not have time for large numbers of men behind the lines to rush all the way around and westward. Instead, the northernmost and southernmost parts of the line curled northwest and southwest, around the enemy host, while men from behind rushed in to fill the gaps. Thus, in a smooth well-practised motion, King Stannis's army thinned and curved around Renly's.

It was just in time. Renly's knights, charging uphill with the sun in their eyes, had little time and thought to register that the charge had been halted ahead of them and they needed to stop lest they trample their own fellows, and then their attention was consumed by bringing their horses from full gallop to a sudden halt, winning crucial time for Stannis's manoeuvre.

Now Renly's knights were in a dire state indeed. A great mass of men, reeling at the shocking swiftness with which the battle had turned against them and the suddenness with which they had had no choice but to stop, were an easy target at close range for the brutal punch of the Myrmen's quarrels, while Stannis's men surrounded them from three sides out of four and stabbed at them from a distance with their long pikes, making it harder for them to get their panicked horses under control. Like a crab's claws closing, Stannis's army fell upon them, driving their pikes into the horses their enemies were trying to calm. As it happened, Davos lost any sight or understanding of the broader scope of the battle. There was nothing but him, the men in front of him and the men around him. A facedown knight nearby, trodden on by a panicking fleeing stallion, spluttered one last time and stopped moving, drowned in the mud. A tough man of middle years with a broken leg shat himself and screamed for his mother as a man near Davos put a sword through him. An armoured knight fell unexpectedly off his horse as Davos shoved the pike into it. He could not get up. Davos tried to pull out the pike, but the horse was thrashing around and it was torn from his hand with arm-wrenching strength. He drew his sword and plunged it between the man's cuirass and cuisses, into his gut. The poor fellow stopped moving. Men were shouting orders, screaming, crying, but he could understand none of it. There was only the clamour of battle and his blood thundering in his ears.

It was a slaughter, but not in only one direction. Some of Renly's armoured knights were able to get their horses under control, or get off them without disabling themselves, and they waded into battle. Heavily and expensively armoured, they had been trained from youth to be more skilled with the sword than all but a handful of Stannis's men. There was much that men had tried to say about how to fight with a sword, about parries and footwork and ripostes. Davos remembered none of it. There was only blind, near-drunken lashing out in the direction of the enemy with swords and pikes and whatever else men had to hand, flinching away from heavy blows and seeking, often, more to beat each other to death than to fight with any semblance of skill or chivalry. Men all around Davos fell dying, soiling themselves, screaming for their mothers, filling the air with the stench of shit and blood and gore. Stannis had dispersed his knights and experienced men-at-arms throughout the line, leaving no section full of undisciplined men, for fear of breaking. Nonetheless, it took a greater cost in blood to slay the latter one man in five than it had taken for the former four.

At this point, fighting those knights who had survived the arrows and the trampling and the pits and the pikes, Davos finally heard new orders come through the morass of battle. "Curve back!" men were repeating in shouts, from the side of him closer to the original line. "Curve back!"

Dazed, incomprehending, pulled by his more experienced escort, Davos followed orders. The line of Stannis's men curled back on itself, swords and pikes bristling outward as if the army were some gigantic quilled beast. Moving away from their position around Renly's men, heading back uphill, the men retreated to their former place, guarded by their earthworks. Stannis's own men on horseback rode down some of the survivors. Others ran down the hill as hundreds of them—or mayhaps thousands, it was difficult to know—had already done. The sun was still low in the sky, so what had seemed an age could not have taken too long. It must still be fairly early in the morning. But Davos felt already so tired he could scarcely lift a sword. He had never known such bone-deep exhaustion. As his heart slowed somewhat and he more clearly registered the reek of death, Davos threw up.

"'Tis fine," one of the old guardsmen said to him, patting him on the back. "Happens to everyone."

It was then that Davos understood. Rushing towards them, shining, gleaming, banners streaming, was yet another group of knights, too many to count, too many to comprehend. The black birds on yellow of House Caron flew at the enemy host's left, Lord Rowan's golden tree on silver at the centre, and Renly Baratheon's own black crowned stag on gold reared triumphantly at his army's right. They had not defeated Renly's army. They had only fought the vanguard. For all the time that had passed, all the work that they had done, all the exhaustion they had suffered, they had only fought the vanguard. In spite of all the hate and fear and blood and horror, they had only fought the vanguard.

That terrifying idea was lodged in Davos's head and it would not go.

"Ranks! Order! Ranks! Order!" Stannis was yelling. The king's throat sounded raw. Davos would not obey, could not obey, but somehow he did. His sword and mail felt like they weighed as much as a house, but slowly, he trudged back to his former place. Renly's army was closing in.

The main bulk of Lord Renly's army did not attack all at once. Clearly he had conferred with the survivors who had escaped from the fall of his vanguard. Thanks to uncounted millennia of men living there, the centre of the Vale of Ranimon, though still rolling terrain of uneven height, was clear clean grass—or, at least, it had been, till it had been trampled into mud by thousands of King Stannis's men-at-arms and thousands more of those who had gathered around them: serving boys and girls, camp followers, merchants selling shoes and food, and all the others who came like ants spilt from a hill to the presence of a great host. The enemy centre remained ahorse and awaiting, but, whilst out of range of Stannis's archers, a strong number of Renly's men dismounted and struggled up the sides of the valley, the steep, rocky, rugged land to the north and the south, trying to push their way through the hardy bushes and shrubs.

That, at least, is wisdom. Davos did not know war, not as the hardened warriors beside him did, but he knew Stannis Baratheon, and so he knew Lord Renly had been foolish to charge heedlessly up what seemed to be the clear way, as if his kingly brother would ever have allowed him such an easy victory. Did he not know we had turns of the moon to prepare? Any mounted charge straight into the sun and the teeth of Stannis's earthworks was inviting death.

But Renly's choice did not come without cost. As Lord Renly's knights in shining armour shoved through the hard and unforgiving land they were now being forced to traverse, a task they were unused to in their dignity, they struggled into range of Stannis's archers. Deadly quarrels punched through the air, many of them Myrish. Myrish crossbows had not the range of the longbows of the Seven Kingdoms, but they were still lethal, especially when they had the luxury of firing downhill against slowly moving targets who could scarcely see them while they, themselves, were facing away from the sun. Moreover, those strange mechanical devices had penetrative power that not even the strongest of Westerosi longbowmen could hope to match. Calmly, and utterly out of danger themselves, the Myrish crossbowmen fired quarrel after quarrel into the men of Lord Renly's army.

Moreover, Stannis had foreseen this possibility, or perhaps he had just had so much time to await this battle that he could afford to spend some of it on many eventualities. He had not intended to give any easy way out to his younger brother. They did not have boiling oil, and in any case the shrubs were too wet with the stormlands' rainfall to alight, but they had logs aplenty, and when climbing the precipitous, rugged ground, the force of falling wood was as deadly as fire. Also, oftentimes a knight cutting and shoving past a persistent bit of low shrubbery while trying not to trip on the hard rocky path would find himself falling into a ditch or his feet mauled by a crow's-foot, a nasty pronged piece of metal that could be hidden at the ground to wound passing men. Stannis lacked a great many men from his own Narrow Sea island dominions, so he had to resort to other means, and he had prepared for long on Dragonstone ere announcing his own bid for kingship. He had brought thousands of them.

Watching them fight through the rough, treacherous land, their numbers thinned by crow's-feet from below and quarrels and logs from above to which they could make no reply, not fallen in the heat of battle but coldly slain by an enemy they could not touch, Davos thought that Renly's knights must surely break soon. But the knights of the Reach and the stormlands did not scare easily. Whatever insane principles had been instilled into them as children, whatever follies they believed of chivalry and courage, it availed them now, for it too was a form of strength. Davos marvelled at their bravery, even as he hated it. While their fellows fell in their hundreds or mayhaps their thousands, Lord Renly's men struggled up the sides of the Vale of Ranimon.

Stannis's soldiers awaited them. "Assemble to repel," the king shouted. Men were gathering at each side of the line, thinning it, though there were enough still there to discourage any foolish attempt at a repeated charge.

Soon after the king spoke, Renly's men came close enough to be within range. Now, in addition to the hellish rain of Myrish crossbows' quarrels and the occasional log flung to knock away Renly's soldiers, spear after spear flew from the ranks of Stannis's army towards them. Davos had never counted himself a man of prodigious strength, but his position aided him. Throwing from above, with the spears' own weight strengthening the speed of their blows, it was common for them to knock Renly's men off-balance, and in the harsh rocky terrain and full plate armour falling was as easy as it was dangerous. As more of Renly's men died, slain by the timber the king's men had gathered and carved over many days here, Davos saw Stannis Baratheon allow his hard-pressed lips to loosen slightly. To achieve such triumph against an enemy that so outnumbered them was almost worthy of a smile.

Now the men were coming closer still. Lord Caron's nightingale banners flew menacingly before them as the standard-bearers followed their master up the treacherous ground he trod. Spears and bolts and pits and crow's-feet slew them, yet nevertheless they came, and with a screeching clash of steel on steel they met in battle.

All disappeared but the men to his sides and the men before him. Metal rang and people screamed as they died, be it by the fall or by the sword. Renly's men had the better armour, but Stannis's they could attack them with long pikes and swords and push them stumbling away from their own stable, well-footed position above. Blood and shit were everywhere. Davos's arms ached as they never had, even after the worst of voyages, but he did not want to die so he kept fighting. It was more reflex than otherwise. There was no thought to it, no glory, nothing but savagely beating other men away and trying not to die.

After a thousand years, or a dozen seconds, the foe fell back for a while, seeking to recover their strength. Then they pressed forward again. Again the din filled Davos's ears, and again he somehow found the vigour to lift his sword and push against the enemy as best he could. Davos had heard much from his sons of the glorious clash of arms of a knightly charge. This seemed nothing like it. It was more akin to a bar brawl, a mob of wrestling men with weapons that were scarcely weapons, but on a grander scale. The battle was like a vicious struggle between two giants, each with fingers of steel and fists of dead men.

It was during one of these lulls in the fighting on the northern side that Davos heard it. There was a sudden thundering of feet, and men from behind the line rushed to the south, to the left of Stannis's army, with their swords and spears and pikes and shields at the ready.

"What's happening?" he shouted over the din.

"The left's hard-pressed!" one of his escort shouted back. "The king's called upon the reserve. We needs must throw them back, or we are lost!"

Now Davos could see it. There was nothing clear in the identity of men on the far other side of the line, struggling, but he did see Lord Renly Baratheon's stolen banner being paraded further forward. There must have been a bulge of Renly's men against Stannis's line. They had not yet fully gained the flatter, less rugged lip of the land on which Stannis's men were standing, but some of their foremost men must evidently be onto it, or close.

"Call the guard!" Lord Velaryon hoarsely bellowed, who commanded Stannis's host's right. "Send to the castle! Make all haste!"

The silver-haired Lord of the Tides did not wait to be obeyed. Grim-faced, he turned to his men, though he seemed distracted, his eyes flickering. "We must stem the bleeding." He was looking for someone, Davos realised, though he did not know for whom or why. Then dark indigo eyes met his own. "Ser Davos, you have the command."

Davos had little idea what to do, but he could hardly refuse such an order. He did not think one of the mightiest lords of the Narrow Sea would have entrusted him with such a duty if there had been another man of sufficiently high stature to take it up in his stead. "To me!" he cried, his voice as loud as he could make it. It did not possess the instant, decisive authority of Lord Velaryon's, the voice of a man who assumed and expected to be obeyed, but for now it sufficed. With a ragged cheer, men gathered around him. Some were his old Baratheon guardsmen, ordered to protect him by King Stannis, and somehow one of those near him still bore a small ship-and-onion Seaworth standard—in the Father's name I wish they never made that thing—but not many. Most of those were gone, some dead but more simply diverted away in the chaos of battle. The bulk of his new command were red and green men, green for that they were the fisherfolk of the islands of the Narrow Sea, taken from their homes to fight at Stannis's command, red for that they had been tested now, pruned now, blooded now, hardened now, but still they feared, and still they clustered around a man who seemed able to lead them. I am not able to lead them, Davos thought miserably, I am not a knight, I am not a lord, born to such duties as this. I was born as low as they were. But King Stannis had made him a knight, no matter what he had been born as, and he had a duty, and perhaps that was enough.

"To me!" he yelled again and again, ensuring his new followers could hear him, as he headed to the defence of Stannis's left. As they rushed behind the lines he caught a glimpse of the king, coal-black-haired, Baratheon-tall, looking straight at him. Davos spied a single nod of royal approval, then Stannis Baratheon vanished as he ran, and Renly's banner, though not moving, came nearer.

Davos's sword met one of Renly's with a shriek of steel, high and shrill as the wailing of the damned in the seven hells. The man against him was a highborn knight, but he was less burly than Davos was, and as the man tried to force him away with his sword Davos knocked him over. He tried to pull Davos over with him. Davos tried to resist the man's grip on his leg. Unable, he kicked open the young knight's visor and plunged a bloody sword into his fair-haired face.

Breathing heavily, Davos pulled himself up and hurled himself against another man of Renly's, battering at him with a sword that even now, after all the help Stannis had ordered given to him, he did not feel truly confident to use. The man fought back, and so they continued, fighting, killing, screaming, for more than a little time.

The struggle was getting brighter, better, Renly's men being shoved away from the foothold they were trying to attain on the central valley's smoother land. There had been a moment of great peril, the line at the left buckling, nearly breaking, but nonetheless, stiffened by the influx of new men, the line had held.

Then, hearing, Davos dared the briefest of glances backward. Storm's End, so distant it seemed almost small but its great tower still reaching above the horizon, clamoured faintly with the sounds of battle.

"Fuck!" swore the man beside him. Davos understood why. Clearly the messenger boy had reached the guard Stannis had left around the castle and the reinforcements Lord Velaryon had ordered from that guard had come to them at last, but the garrison had attacked the remaining men in an attempt to sortie from the gates. They had no choice but to leave them to fight as best they could. Reinforcements from here to the castle could not be sent now that the battle was in such a perilous state.

And then he heard the shouting. In that instant, uncertain, terrified, weakened by being deprived of some of their men to bolster Stannis's nearly broken left, faced with yet another deadly scrambling rush of Renly's left, the right side of the line faltered. Somehow, after all the hours of fighting, it happened in seconds. One moment the men of the right were standing, shields locked, against Renly's host. The next, many of their shields had been cast aside and many of them were fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them. Those of the Narrow Sea fisherfolk who had remained steadfast cried out in sudden terror as Lord Caron's heavily armoured men spilt, like wine from a broken glass, onto the clearer land. One of them held aloft a silver-haired head that Davos supposed must have belonged to Monford Velaryon, though the blood was drying already. It was clear the Lord of the Tides had not been slain anew.

Somebody sounded a horn. It was a dreadfully loud and clear ululation. Then the silver banner with the golden tree was surging forward, several thousand highborn mounted knights in full magnificence, destriers snorting, armour shining, lances pointing, seeking to surmount the high ground through the breach in Stannis's line. Renly's centre and reserve, Lord Rowan's host, had committed at last.

"Hold the line! Hold the line!" Stannis was roaring, but other lowborn men were already throwing down their swords and taking to their heels. Their discipline had been broken. Trained, carefully prepared, conditioned, they may have been willing to fight and risk their lives for a living cause, but not to lay down their lives for a lost one. It was almost instantly clear that the situation was unsalvageable. All of them knew that if Renly's men were to gain the stable ground the battle was over, and now they had.

The discipline of the left and centre did not long outlast the right. With Lord Rowan's mounted knights bearing down on them and Lord Caron's knights afoot tearing their way through the left, now no longer at a great disadvantage of ground and making full use of their better armour, any but a blind man could have told the way of the battle. King Stannis's army broke. Davos lifted a hand against a man of mayhaps six-and-ten namedays, a wispy-bearded boy in leathers screaming for his mother. "Stop," he tried to say, trying to stop him, shake him, but there was a silvery glint and a short sharp pain and he fell, shitting himself and gasping. His chest felt at once cold and warm, and when he looked down he could scarcely see for blood.

Renly's knights had no mercy to the defeated. Surging onto the clearer ground, many of them ahorse, they butchered the men fleeing from them with great swipes of lances and swords. In flight many times more men were dying in each moment than they had in battle. Some of them, rather than dying in the chase, tried to fall to their knees and beg for mercy. It availed them naught. Davos caught sight of Lord Renly, the rebel's helm's fancy antlers catching the light, roaring with rage as he mauled one after another of his royal brother's people.

Davos tried to breathe in shallow rasps. Instead he shat himself and he found himself coughing. As he knew his time had come, he cursed Lord Caron, cursed Lord Rowan, cursed the deserters—such godsdamned cowards!—cursed the gods, even, for letting King Stannis fail. Perhaps it was his fault. He had never prayed enough to the Warrior. A knight he may have been, but that god had never been the most pertinent of the Seven to a life like his. Still… a knight. That, Stannis had given him. But most of all he cursed Lord Renly, cursed him for what he had done to his brother, cursed him for his scheming, for his ambition, for his overweaning pride, and he prayed fervently to any god that would listen that they would remember this day, remember Renly's choice of power over family, remember the needless slaughter perpetrated on highborn and, mostly, lowborn by the supposed flower of the south's chivalry, and one day another man would see revenge.

Author's Note: I've been working out all the timings for this story (though I don't think it would be a better story if it were full of calendar dates, so I haven't been showing them) and it turns out Catelyn wouldn't arrive in time.

Believe it or not, Renly's main mistakes are canonical; this is what he intended to do. Stannis's preparations, of course, aren't, since we never got to see them in canon, because the battle never happened and Catelyn Stark, the PoV character through whom the reader observed these events, never visited Stannis's camp as she did Renly's. Basically, Stannis did what one could reasonably expect of a commander in his position, once the choice to fight that battle has been made (though that's a questionable choice), and Renly screwed up an awful lot, but it wasn't enough. I'm not very good at chess, but I'm certain I could beat a grandmaster if we only started playing most of the way through the game and the board was sufficiently unfair when we started. Of course, in any real battle, the two sides don't start with identical capabilities, as in chess. That sums up the problem Stannis faced against Renly here. It isn't easy to defeat twenty-thousand well-armoured cavalry with five-thousand infantry who are mostly conscripted fishermen, especially when the local castle (a useful force-multiplier) is garrisoned by your opponent, not you.

It would be possible, just about, with a healthy helping of luck, for Stannis to defeat Renly in this battle. Basically, what it would take is for Renly to get killed. If that happens, Stannis wins by default. But that was never a very likely outcome. In spite of all the social pressure for a king to be gloriously leading a charge, Renly chose not to. I don't think he's the sort of Robert-esque warrior-king who personally rushes into battles, that is to say, real battles where there's a genuinely serious possibility that he might get killed; he doesn't strike me as that sort of man. In my opinion, nineteen out of twenty times this battle was fought, Stannis would have lost it. One can choose to write a story where he gets super-lucky and wins it, but that was never intended to be the premise of Knees Falling. A great part of the initial motivation for this work was to think of just how important Melisandre's shadowbaby—not the one that killed Ser Cortnay Penrose, the one that really matters, the one that killed Renly—was to the outcome of the war. I like Stannis as a character—his willingness to do his duty to the realm, and place that above personal power, makes him my favourite of the five kings—but putting aside my partiality, realistically Renly would have defeated him if it had come to battle. If Renly hadn't been such an incompetent commander, it wouldn't have been anywhere near as close as this… though one could also argue that if Stannis hadn't been so socially inept, so poor at getting lords onto his side even when he clearly had the right of inheritance over his younger brother, it wouldn't have been so uneven in the first place!