Author's Note: Hello!
We broke 1,000 favorites! Very stoked and thankful; you guys rock. This chapter is also short and probably lacks a bit of quality control-my construction job is full go full time, so the few times I have time to write I try to get something out to you lovely people. Not as pleased with the below as I have been other parts, but I think it at least starts to get us caught up on what is going on where and with who. Unlike the Dragon of Duskendale, I'm trying to keep this story to a handful of POVs, almost if not all of them on "Damon's side" (barring a few randoms thrown in for dramatic effect or teases). That means a lot of stuff is going to be up in the air, a lot of details hazy for a bit, and so on...if Damon or Tywin doesn't know it, odds are we don't either. Let me know if you folks like this, or if you'd like me to approach it differently going forward. I'll always write the story I want, but I'm always up for critiques and suggestions on how to display it.
Sorry for the long note, but please check out the second one as well. As always, I hope you enjoy and review this update!
He struck high and fast; raining blows down upon his opposite with ferocity. When his opponent tried to step backwards, giving ground under the onslaught, the king stepped forward, crowding him, keeping him on the defensive for a few long seconds.
But before he could strike home, the man's companions came in behind him. He whirled, blocking both blades while dancing sideways, barely escaping the strike of the resurging first opponent. The three fanned out in a semi-circle, much as they had when they'd first set upon Damon, advancing in tandem. The Daring gave ground warding them off as best he could, waiting for the right opportunity. It came when the far-left opponent, a teenager with the ravens of Blackwood on his chest, overextended. Damon reversed his retreat at once, darting forward and laying the riverman out before the other two could stop him.
The middle opponent, taller and stronger than the others, nearly broke his arm with a swing of her mace, the strike causing Damon to retreat a step. Blackwood, though unarmed, swung his arm out to strike the back of his leg as the king did so, causing Damon to stumble. He staggered back out of control, after two steps surrendering to his inevitable fall and turning to roll on his shoulder. He crouched with his shield held over his head, waiting for a blow that didn't come. His opponents, one tall and shapely and much too pretty to hit that bloody hard, were standing next to the sitting Lucas Blackwood.
"That was an unfair blow, Lucas," admonished Dacey Mormont, mace that had nearly splintered his shield now resting on her shoulder. She glowered down in motherly admonishment at the young riverlord, who was rubbing his neck in embarrassment.
"Nonsense, my lady," Damon said, rising to his own feet. "All is fair in war."
"But this isn't war, Your Grace," the lanky woman from Bear Island countered, still glaring at the seven and ten boy at her feet. Though if he's a boy so am I, since I am younger. If he's seen half the things I have he's no child, not anymore. "It was cheap."
"Lady Dacey is right," agreed Lucas, rising and grinning sheepishly at Damon. The second son of Lord Tytos, he stood a good three inches taller than his green clad admonisher, and one inch higher than the king. "It was a dishonorable move, Your Grace, done out of irritation at losing to you these past few weeks. If it had been war, I'd have been dead anyway."
"I thought we had you on that one," spoke the third, he who had nearly been overwhelmed by Damon's overhead strikes. Robb Stark wasn't short, but compared to the company he was currently keeping he seemed as tiny as Tyrion. "Even if it hadn't had been completely fair, it'd have been nice to beat you."
Damon shrugged. "You may well have."
Robb shook his head, turning and walking to the edge of the encampment to settle himself down on an upturned stump. "No, Lucas has the right of it. I don't think he'd have been in much shape to trip you had this been war."
Lucas had taken a seat as well, following his former king and beginning to oil the blade Damon had knocked from his hand. "I think I'd have been dead."
The king drifted towards the waist-high bank, settling down on the cold ground. To his surprise, Dacey Mormont followed him, keeping barely a foot of distance between them as the others oil the blades. She produced a whetstone out of thin air, testing the edge on her mace and sharpening any spots she found to be unacceptable.
The tall, attractive woman had, like most northerner's, mistrusted and disliked Damon in the immediate aftermath of the peace treaty. Many of them still did, but Dacey had obediently followed Robb's attempts to improve relations, agreeing to join the cadre of knights and lords who had taken to sparring together at the end of each day's ride. While Damon was convinced she had 'accidentally' almost killed him multiple times in the early days, she seemed to have warmed up to the king considerably in the time since. Damon would have found her attractive in any situation, but never more so than when she was sparring with him. Her beauty wasn't that of Margaery's by any means, but she carried herself with a grace and poise that appealed to him physically. Still, he knew it would be unwise to start bedding the daughters of lords and ladies who had only recently stopped trying to kill him, especially when the brother of his future queen was in the training cadre. Garlan might overlook Bella due to her birth, but a lady of noble blood would certainly not be welcomed.
Although, without Bella and her attentions the last few weeks, he had been greatly tested. Greatly indeed.
Damon, trying to ignore how close Dacey was to him, looked to Robb. "How close to Winterfell are we?"
Robb, who's face had been carefree for a moment, suddenly tensed again. "Three days." Damon hadn't spoken to him on it, but he was willing to bet that the nightly training sessions were about more than trying to associate his lords and men with the golden-haired man they'd spent moons trying to kill—and who, in many cases, had taken friends and family from them with his own blade. Robb's face showed the permanent sign of strain, the demanding pace they'd kept since leaving Riverrun deepening those stress lines on his young face. The only time the Lord of the North wasn't brooding over the Ironborn in his lands, or the wildling army who by this point may well have killed his bastard brother, or the crown he had lost, was when he was training the man whom he had surrendered it to.
Damon nodded, taking an oil-stained rag from Lucas Blackwood and running it lovingly over the red and black ripples of Widow's Wail. Not ten feet away, Robb did the same with Oathkeeper. The dispute over Ice had nearly caused Robb and Damon to come to blows that night on the hill, this time without Sansa to intervene. Finally, it had been determined that Robb would receive one of the two Valyrian steel blades made from Ice, the other remaining in the hands of the Baratheons. Damon had been preparing himself to surrender Widow's Wail, but Jaime had immediately determined it would be Oathkeeper instead.
"You're the king," his uncle had told him before shrugging. "And besides, this blade is wasted on me in my current state." He raised his golden right hand, then his left. His uncle was improving every day, but he was not yet even a shell of his former self. Jaime, unperturbed, had grinned. "You might only be half as good as I used to be, but that's still better than anyone else."
"Grandfather will be furious."
His uncle had laughed aloud at that. "I've been infuriating Tywin since I was old enough to talk. What's one more?"
Tywin had spent most of his life trying to replace the long lost Brightroar, and had thought he had done so with Oathkeeper. Jaime's 'one more' insult was bound to be a battle once the old lion learned of it, but Damon had accepted the deal and his uncle's offer anyway. He, too, had made a habit of infuriating the Hand of the King.
Damon shook his head to clear it, Dacey having spoken. "My mother reports Ser Rodrik is a day's ride ahead with an honor guard. We should encounter them tomorrow at midday."
Both Damon and Robb nodded in response. Rodrik Cassel had taken Winterfell a moon earlier, backed by a conglomeration of old men and a few outriders under Ramsay Snow, Lord Bolton's bastard. The Ironborn had surrendered the castle; twenty of them, among them Theon Greyjoy, were now prisoners insider her walls. The upcoming reunion with Theon was likely one of the stressors bearing down on Robb.
That and the pace they had set. The force now south of Winterfell was comprised entirely of cavalry, seven thousand knights and freeriders drawn from the combined forces of the North, Riverlands, Crownlands and portions of the Reach and Westerlands. A lucky number, pleasing to the Gods, though Damon saw in every turn of the road that they were no longer in the lands of the Seven. Be that as it may, they rose early and rode hard, resting and eating travelling rations at midday before riding hard again until just before dusk. Then, more as a stress reliever than anything else, they trained for an hour, slept until dawn, and rode again. It was a harrowing, hard pace, but one necessary for what was supposedly bearing down on them from the North.
Wildings. Tens of thousands of them, a larger army than had ever been assembled by the raiders of the far north. Bearing down on a depleted, weakened Night's Watch.
His infantry was following behind, thirty thousand strong, but from Jon Snow's messages that was time they may not have. And, to top all of it off, Tyrion was somewhere on that Wall as well, having sailed from Maidenpool before Damon had even made peace with Robb.
I've killed him in my attempt to save his life. I never even managed to sit down and speak with him before he left.
The Ironborn, who had been the entire focus of Robb and Damon's military attentions, were afterthoughts now. They had fled from before the conglomeration of men and horses. Victarion Greyjoy had abandoned Moat Cailin to the Crannogmen, who had nearly wiped out his force anyway, and returned to the Iron Isles to contest for his dead brother's crown. Balon Greyjoy had died in the water of Pyke a fortnight or two months earlier, reports varied. Damon knew he would need to gather more information and give more resources to the Ironborn in the coming weeks, but for now he was torn between bigger threats; Stannis, chiefly, who Damon had no bloody clue where he was, and wildings, who had more bloody men than he thought imaginable.
Ser Rodrik had cleared Torrhen's Square and Winter's Town, but the lands of House Glover and other western lords were still under Ironborn control or harassment. Damon and his force had ignored all of them, much to the grumbling of the affected lords, and rode due north with all haste.
There had been no further messages from Jon Snow. Damon was almost as distraught over that as Robb, though for different reasons.
Ser Balon Swann, arm fully healed now from the injury received saving Damon's life a few moons ago, stepped into view. "Night pickets are in place, Your Grace."
The king nodded. "Excellent. That being so, I'll retire." When he stood, the others did as well, in a flurry of bows and nods. "Good night."
He awoke in the middle of the night in the small, canvas tent he had taken as his own. A far cry from the grand pavilion he had used when travelling with a full army, it was still stout enough to buffer him from the winds and prevailing chill that only grew colder the farther north he travelled, and was small enough to be wrapped and packed onto his destrier.
He had no Kingsguard on duty at night, the two he had taken with him—Sers Balon and Borros—protesting but surrendering to logic; they were as fatigued as Damon was after the hard pace of riding, and needed sleep of their own.
That being the case, it was the crunch of a twig directly outside his tent that woke him, not a gauntlet on canvas. Damon rose to a knee in the four-foot high tent, dagger readying out of instinct. Many were camped near him—Tyrek, his Kingsguard, Garlan—and could have been responsible for the sound, but something told Damon that no, they were not.
"Your Grace," came a quiet, instantly recognizable voice.
Damon all but bolted out of the short flap, barreling out and nearly into the short figure standing with two taller ones in the dark. Damon stared, confused, for a solid half minute before speaking. "Tyrion?"
His uncle shrugged. "Your pickets here were wise enough to keep my companions on the outskirts, but brought me here without a complaint. I suppose they saw no danger in a dwarf. Sloppy, considering I've supposedly already killed one king."
"What in the Seven…"
"Oh, they've forsaken me already, but let's not delve into that. I bring a message."
"From who?"
"Why, from my brothers of the Night's Watch." It was said with almost no sarcasm. Almost. Tyrion, who was eye level with the crouching king, lowered his voice as it turned deadly serious. "Damon…you're too late."
Whitewind had had no chance, not really.
Ser Baelon Velaryon had been keeping his ancient ship sailing through repairs and willpower, but then old cog was doomed to the bottom of the Narrow Sea sooner rather than later. Damage sustained on the Blackwater, taken while under Stannis Baratheon, had nearly done her in, but Baelon had managed to keep her in service once more by repairing her with scavenged wood from the debris. She would never be a true power on the water, but she was suitable for the task his distant cousin Lord Monterys—all of six—had given him in the Crown's name; patrolling the Narrow Sea between Driftmark and Dragonstone, keeping an eye on the remainder of the forces belonging to the man his beloved ship had nearly sank serving.
Except it wasn't suitable. When foreign sails, a forest of them, had appeared on the horizon, Whitewind had tried to flee to no avail. Sleek scout ships with vastly colored sails had run him down five leagues from the smoky shores of Driftmark, and while his crew had repelled the foreigners for a time, she was too slow and too outmanned to make much difference.
The last thing Ser Baelon saw before he was forced below decks on a Tyroshi sellsail was the Whitewind sinking, a warship behind her and closing.
A warship with golden sails, a familiar burning heart emblazoned on them.
A/N: *tease* Stannis the Mannis.
Remember when I was getting complaints that this was a canon rehash? Lawl.
If anyone is confused as to who is where and why or anything of the sort (why isn't Stannis at the Wall? Why is Tyrion south of Winterfell? Why is Kerjack so slow at updating?), feel free to ask! I'll do my best to (eventually) respond. If anyone thinks it stupid (and historically you'll be the ones to speak out) go ahead and tell me so! I'll counter with why I've done what I've done.
Hope to see you again soon!
-Kerjack