The Ironborn Rebellion Part 2
The Neck-288 AC
Hadrian stopped his march two hours march away from the end of the Fever River, where the Ironborn were forced to leave their longships if they wished to continue on towards Moat Cailin.
Right now, Harry was assessing the situation while waiting for further information from his scouts and waiting for the rest of the force that was originally at Moat Cailin to catch up to his group. The group that retreated south from Moat Cailin swung around back into the Neck once they were half a day south and started moving in his direction immediately after. According to the skinchanger he told to keep an eye on them, they should be at his location in another hour or so, just before the sun starts to set.
The only issue that Harry had with his plan so far were the horses. Many of the horses that were originally taken to Moat Cailin from Winterfell were let go south of the Moat, as they couldn't be taken with the men off the path into the marsh itself.
"Jod." He called to the skinchanger who he had put in charge of his scouts, and if all goes well in this campaign, the first person who will start training as a Huntsmen. Jod was seventeen namedays old, fairly tall for a crannogman and eager to prove himself. He was probably the most intelligent out of all the new skinchangers Harry had interacted with during the march. The man's father was a close friend of Lord Reed who died. He was provided a basic education by the crannoglord, including how to read.
Said man looked up from where he was speaking to one of the other skinchangers who had just left his animals mind. He didn't waste a moment before he said his goodbyes and came over to Hadrian. "Aye Milord." He bowed.
"Has there been any changes since the last time I asked?" Which was a little under two hours ago.
Jod spoke. "There still seems to be one thousand Ironborn guarding the ships. The original count of Ironborn was off milord. There's closer to four thousand not three. They seemed to pack close together on this voyage. I suspect they plan to head straight back to the Iron Islands so they aren't cramped on the ships for long. Two thousand of them are now at The Moat. Five hundred have gone North and Five hundred South. The skinchanger in charge of keeping an eye on Rodrick Greyjoy says he thinks you fled in a hurry. He sent men to look for you in the south following the tracks from the horses and men who left, but later sent some men North just in case you were trying to trick him into going South, he also sent those men to raid. He says the Greyjoy plans to leave in the morning. They've already been here two days and want to leave and raid south soon.. "
Four thousand is a lot of Ironborn. Eight times the number of men he has. The way Harry sees it, he has two choices now. He can wait and hold his position letting the Ironborn flee without a fight but without gaining anything for their journey either. Or he could try and punish them for encroaching on the North.
Harry determined when he heard they were raiding some of the small villages up north that he would turn the Ironborn into a lesson for the rest of Westeros.
If the Ironborn are leaving in the morning then that doesn't give him a lot of time to work. Luckily the rest of his men should be near now. For now Harry was content to receive as much information as possible from the scouts about the Ironborn movements while he waits for night to fall.
He could probably warg into birds himself and gain a greater understanding of how the Ironborn are set out but it wasn't really necessary at this point. Most of them were in their ships and come nightfall almost all of them would be. Harry would have to wait to see how they set up the night guards.
Right now Harry found himself a little busy. He was setting up different stations to make potions. It was already late in the day and he wanted to give his men a bit more of an advantage if he could. The problem came in that brewing potions at night was no easy task. The fire would provide some light but it would be difficult to get the ingredients cut perfectly. He could use a potion to see in the dark but he decided to save that those for later. The potion doesn't last more than four hours and he isn't sure if there were consequences to taking it again right away. He could have probably asked one of the other potion makers to help him with the brewing , but Harry doesn't trust many of their skills. Some of their recipes are okay, but their techniques when it comes to preparing the ingredients was terrible. He needed to experiment a bit anyway.
He had set three stations with cheap bronze cauldrons that Lord Reed was tasked to bring. He didn't have access to proper potions equipment. Even the best tools Lord Reed had for stirring the potions was made of bronze. Silver was generally better as it was pure and didn't contaminate the potion but he would take what he could get.
He was going to use two of the cauldrons to make potions of night vision. The other was going to be used to make a fire potion. A potion from the wizarding world used to make fires that burn for a very long time at decent temperatures, never incredibly hot though. As long as it was poured on a surface that wasn't flammable it wouldn't spread and its temperature was too low to melt through stone. If it was poured on wood though, that wood would catch fire very quickly. It was a very basic potion to make. Even so Harry was in a bind as he was missing fireworm thorax. So he needed to get creative and decided he would try use a particularly nasty breed of fire ants found in The Neck. He figured the potion wouldn't be nearly as strong but hopefully it should at least catch on fire easily and burn a long time before it goes out. It should do some damage to the ships. He would have around ten small sacks of the potion for some archers to dip their arrows in. He also had enough night vision potion for another twenty men. With the potions Lord Reed brought on the march they would have sixty night vision potions, thirty potions of silence and ten fire potions.
Harry wanted to capture as many ships as he could tonight and while he might be able to capture all of them he wasn't kidding himself. It would be better to focus his forces on some of the ships, while crippling the rest, his forces are still outnumbered after all. Even if he would probably be able to take all of the ships with a good enough surprise attack and the advantage of having some of his forces able to see in the dark, Harry would rather not risk losing too many men.
So he decided he would take what ships he could and then cripple the ones he couldn't. As long as the Ironborn are trapped in the North he would be happy. He just needed to wait for the Ironborn to go to sleep so that he could find out which ships had the most of them on board.
After Harry was sure his potions ingredients were ready to be brewed, the rest of his men had arrived. He used this opportunity to pick twenty of his best guards to lead other groups of men. Ten guards would each lead nineteen other men on the attacks on some of the ships. While the other ten would each have twenty five men. Each man was going to be given a specific ship to target when the time was right. Harry hoped this way they would at least be some sense of coordination in each group.
Harry had no plans of fighting in the battle ahead. He may be brave, but he is still in the body of a young boy and the Ironborn are no doubt grown men. He plans on having a strong group of ten soldiers around him for this battle in order to handle the fighting for him, while he focuses on the bigger picture. No plans survive first contact with the enemy though. So Harry is wearing a set of leather armour and is carrying a small sword.
Once Harry had finished organising all of his men the sun had set. This gave him the opportunity to finally light the fires under the cauldrons without fear of the Ironborn seeing the smoke. Without any hesitation he began. He was so busy keeping an eye on the potions that the two hours flew by. As he suspected he didn't have any problems. The potions were weaker than he would like, but with his proper technique it was probably better than anything that the rest of the crannogmen could make.
After he was done with the potions he still had to wait a few more hours for majority of the Ironborn to retire for the night.
Once that time finally came Harry was sitting on a small log with a map drawn in the dirt before him. It was composed of the reports from all the skinchangers. There were placements and numbers of the suspected amount of Ironborn in each ship scratched into the map. There were also marks showing where the guards were. There were over a hundred of them. With thirty stationed near the boats on land and the rest keeping watch from the decks of the ships.
Harry had spent the last two hours creating the map and he was pretty proud of the detail his skinchangers were able to get of the enemy movements.
Harry finally stood up once he was satisfied with everything. After that Harry gave his orders to the soldiers and he handed out the potions to the men who he felt would get the best use of them. Thirty of the night visions potions went to thirty of the crannogmen who would be in charge of escorting his men as close to the ships as silently as possible. They would also be in charge in killing any guards on shore. Each of these crannogmen assigned to take care of the guards had blowdarts with extremely deadly poison, bows and they had each drank a silencing potion on top of the night vision potion. Another twenty would go to the men Harry chose to lead each group of twenty soldiers boarding the ships. Ten more night vision potions went to the archers charged with setting fire to some ships with fire arrows dipped in fire potion. Harry took some of the best guards in House Stark with him when he travelled South. He hopes they would carve through the Ironborn on the ships with ease from having the advantage of being able to see clearly while the Ironborn cant.
He knew they would have to be careful in order to pull this off. If they alert the Ironborn before they are ready, there will be a fight that will lead to a lot of blood being spilled on his side.
After everyone was ready he gave the order to set out.
At the start it was easy. They made it to the treeline to the South of the Ironborn without being spotted. Once they left the treeline things got more complicated and slower. The guards that were on duty would notice them if they just walked up to the ships. Therefore Harry decided to be as stealthy as possible and made the army slowly crawl towards the ships. The crannogmen in charge of taking out the guards were crawling a bit ahead of the rest of the army. Luckily it was a dark night from the moon being covered by the clouds. This made it easier to sneak up on the Ironborn undetected.
Crawling as they were was an exercise in both patience and stealth. There were a few times that the crannogmen in charge of escorting his group of soldiers suddenly stopped and stayed still for minutes at a time. Harry could only tell why the crannogmen stopped because he took one of the night vision potions, the rest of the soldiers with him weren't so lucky and just had to watch and trust in their guides.
The crawl towards the edge of the camp might not have been very far but with crawling the way they did, the trip still took hours. There were a few moments when he feared they might be discovered. Luckily the crannogmen he put in charge of eliminating the guards were very stealthy, had excellent aim with their blowdarts and were good at coordinating with each other when guards needed to be eliminated simultaneously.
Eliminating the guards on shore happened without any problems. It was almost ridiculously easy actually. A few of them were asleep and a couple of others were obviously drunk.
His opinion of the Ironborn sank even lower.
It was when each of his groups of soldiers started boarding the ships that things became difficult. One of the guards on the ships was actually paying some attention to his surroundings because he quickly screamed.
"Intruder-"
Before his voice cut off.
Harry decided to forgo all stealth. "Attack!" He screamed. With a roar his soldiers rushed over the sides of the ships. Ten of the ships were left alone except for ten men dipping their arrows in the flame potion before lighting them on fire using some torches held by a few crannogmen and shooting at the sails. Those ten men quickly left those ships to burn while running back to the main force. Once they had boarded the ships they continued their assault aiming to set different parts of the ships on fire.
All around Harry the sound of men screaming and dying echoed through the night. Despite that, he calmly climbed on to the deck of the biggest ship in the fleet with Ser Rodrick escorting him. Harry suspects this ship belongs to Rodrick Greyjoy himself. The son of Balon Greyjoy was at The Moat at the moment. As such while it might have been the biggest ship in the fleet, a lot of the sailors were not present and the ship was actually less well defended than some of the others.
By the time Harry made it onto the deck, the fighting there was over and had moved into the bowels of the ship. Harry was pleased to see there were three corpses on the deck and none of them belonged to his men. It wasn't a surprise though.
The Ironborn were unprepared and they were suddenly rushed by twenty men. If they were skilled enough or lucky enough they might be able to take a few in these circumstances but twenty was a different story. Especially if some of those men were able to see in the dark perfectly.
The crannogmen scouts that took the night vision potions were on the decks of the ships and each of them were armed with a bow and were aiming at the ships with their sails on fire shooting at the Ironborn on the deck.
Harry commanded a few of the guards he had around him to prepare the ship for departure immediately. While they were doing that he kept a wary eye on the ships that had burning sails. As Harry watched, a few men on those ships started to make it up onto the deck. Some of them panicked at seeing the sails on fire and as Harry watched some tried to save their ships with buckets of water. They were targeted the most by the crannog archers. Others however left their ships to burn and either started preparing to board the ships his soldiers were on from their ships or from the ground. Most of them were simply carrying swords and didn't have armour or bows as it was too dark for them to see clearly.
The men in charge of setting the sails on fire had dipped more arrows into the potion and were firing those at the decks of each ship. The potion burnt too cool to melt rock or metal but it was more than hot enough to cause wood to combust quickly. By now they had each shot half a dozen arrows. The fires were constantly spreading and the Ironborn were not able to put them out with all the panic and constant rain of arrows from the other archers.
By the time those that wanted to attack his soldiers had gathered in enough force, some of his men were back on deck and preparing the ship for departure in full. One or two Ionborn rushed their ships from the shore or the other ships but they were easily cut down. The same scene was happening among twenty different ships.
Harry smiled as he started to feel his ship move down the river.
A little bit over six hours later he stopped the ships at a small inlet in the river and disembarked with his men. While that was happening he was looking over the results of the battle.
To say that Harry was happy with the outcome would be an understatement. The battle itself was an incredible success. He started with a little over five hundred men. He only lost eighty of them. According to reports most of the Ironborn were completely unprepared when they were boarded. Many of them were unarmed when his forces came upon them, others were isolated without any other Ironborn around and were easy to slaughter. Still there were a few on each ship who managed to get a weapon in time and fight back or there were some Ironborn who coordinated. Sometimes they would take a few of his men down before they were overwhelmed.
He gained twenty of the Ironborn ships as well as most of their provisions. It seems like Rodrick Greyjoy decided to leave most of his supplies on the ships instead of taking them to Moat Cailin. The other ten ships were reported to have been burned badly. None of them were capable of being sailed without at least some repairs.
The casualties on the Ironborn side was much higher. There were six hundred men on the ships they boarded. All six hundred of them are dead. There were another hundred dead Ironborn between the guards that were on shore and those killed by the archers. Overall, the first part of the war was a success.
Rodrick Greyjoy collected what supplies he could from his ships and was now holed up in The Moat. Harry determined to march his army back there as quickly as possible. The Greyjoy was preparing to march South with his men as fast as possible.
It wasn't the greatest plan but then again, Rodrick Greyjoy was out of options. He knew that the Northern army would be coming, he also knew that he couldn't go North or into the marsh itself. They don't have the supplies to hold The Moat so going South and hoping to make their way back to the islands seems to be the best chance they had at survival. While the Ironborn could have a last stand behind the walls of The Moat, he knows most would rather try and run and have some chance of survival than be guaranteed to die there.
It was a long walk back to The Moat. About three hours into the walk the Ironborn started to leave on their own march south. There were over three thousand of them though, so they would be forced to move relatively slowly on the narrow road through the marsh. Harry knew he would catch them.
It was two days later that they were finally closing in on the Ironborn army. The Ironborn never even bothered to send scouts to check the rear of their army. On the first day of their journey South the Ironborn came across some of the horses that his guards were forced to abandon. They used the horses to carry some of their supplies and so managed to speed up their march slightly. It wasn't enough to outrun his own men though.
As they were closing in on the Ironborn army Harry was throwing his mind into The Neck. He was brushing up against the minds of as many animals as he could without fully entering their consciousness. It was a useful adaptation of the trick Morna Snow had taught him. After all if he could share senses with another creature and maintain an influence if however small while still remaining in his body, then why could he not maintain an influence in more than one?
The first time Harry tried he managed to enter the minds of half a dozen different animals, such as a few birds, snakes and a lizard lion, before he started getting a headache and was forced to pull out. The problem was that the animals all had different instincts that often conflicted with one another. He believed he would be able to get better handling these conflicting instincts with practice but he didn't have the time to do so right now.
He decided to solve this issue by only focusing on one type of animal. For simplicity sake, and to allow him to stretch out his mind as far as possible he decided to choose an animal that had very basic instincts that was easy to manipulate and guide. An animal that he knew was incredibly common in his location.
For this he chose to focus on snakes. As soon as the small army he was leading got close to the spot the Ironborn were resting at for the night, Harry stopped the army and began building up his forces of snakes. At first he picked a random snake he saw on the ground and entered its mind. From there he got the snake to slowly slither its way to the section of the forest east of where the Ironborn had stopped. On the way that snake either came across or smelled other snakes. This allowed Harry to spread his influence to these snakes as well and the process was repeated often as the snakes approached their destination. After several hours Harry had several hundred snakes making their way through the marshes at different paces.
Snakes were simple creatures. They were almost entirely driven by instinct, so Harry found it easy to disguise simple mental suggestions as nothing more than instinctual urges. He didn't even have to push very far to have the urges appear. He simple had to give them urges of food. Of feasting and the snakes were eager to follow the path he laid out for them.
As Harry focused, hundreds of different urges from hundreds of different sources all whispered in the back of his mind. Sleep. Some seemed to think. For those he sent a sense of anticipation and bloodlust in order to encourage them to keep going. As he watched many of those snakes suddenly started to move with more energy. Kill. Were the urges on some snakes minds when they came across others that Harry was influencing. For those he sent through a strong wave of patience. Of having a greater feast later. Harry found these snakes to be the hardest to control. Many times their instinct to kill and eat smaller snakes nearly consumed them. He had to act swiftly to drive those instincts away and to get the snake back under control.
Even once those snakes were under control, Harry found it was hard to keep them there. He was constantly having to sooth, to guide, encourage, discourage and anticipate the snakes. It was a constant battle to get them to act as he wanted them to but he is sure it would be worth it.
Harry fell so deep into his trance that he never noticed how time seemed to move by and before he knew it Lord Reed was shaking his shoulder and telling him to do the final preparations for the battle. Harry used this time to get his snakes ready for the challenge ahead and started sending them off to the East of the Ironborn. For now he wants his army to remain where it was.
Once he and the men were in position Harry started his attack by panicking the horses. To do this he made a few dozen snakes move towards the five different groups of horses. He tried to make the snakes move as close to the horses as possible without being seen. Just before the horses had a chance to notice the snakes, he left the snakes and brushed up against the mind of the horses. The horses had more complex minds than snakes so he was only able to touch two dozen of their minds at once. Still it was more than enough for his needs.
He grunted at the exertion of jumping from so many different minds at once. He knew he would have a major headache after this.
As the first horse noticed the snake, Harry felt the instinctive fear come over it. He stoked that fear as much as he could and the horse reared. One of the snakes shot up hissing and before he knew it many more horses noticed it. He stoked the fear in those horses too. He also stoked the instinct to flee.
The result was instantaneous. Dozens of horses were rearing and moving about erratically. After the first horse started running north, it didn't take long for the rest to follow. There were some Ironborn who tried to calm the horses, but too many of them were in a panic. Some were kicked but many more were trampled when the horses started to stampede North. Some horses were injured in this of course but the majority of them escaped. There were only three horses that were left. These ones he wasn't stoking the fear of and some Ironborn managed to calm them in time.
While the Ironborn were reeling from the sudden flight of the horses and while many of them were away from the lights of the fires, Harry began the next stage of the attack. He made the snakes advance. Within a few minutes, hundreds of snakes started slithering across the Kingsroad. They moved out of the trees right into the mass of panicking Ironborn where Harry stoked their bloodlust and their instinct to kill as high as possible.
Hundreds of men were bitten in a few moments. Some men tried to flee into the marsh, those would be hunted down by some of the crannogmen he set to the task, others tried to fight, hacking and slicing as many snakes as they could while the majority of the men abandoned all of their supplies except for what they had on them and fled to the South as fast as they could.
Harry was content to let them run for now. Without supplies, they wouldn't last long.
Once all of the Ironborn had either fled or died he and his men waited for a few hours for the snakes to feast. Harry had pushed hunger and bloodlust into a lot of snakes and they would not be controlled now until they were allowed to feast. Even if only on each other. Once they calmed down he made them slither off and he and his men marched past where they were staying.
Around this time the Ironborn had started coming off of the panic of being woken up by hundreds of snakes and charging horses. The army turned around and started making their way back for their supplies, realising they couldn't last long without it. A competent commander would never have left their supplies in the first place but Harry was finding Rodrick Greyjoy to be anything but competent. So Harry decided to spring another trap. While it would be easy to poison their supplies, Harry decided not to. Too many lords would have an issue with such tactics.
He and his men hid in the marsh on either side of the road while the Ironborn came to fetch their supplies. The Ironborn seemed to have a supernatural fear of walking off the path, so Rodrick Greyjoy never sent any men into the marsh itself to scout. Most of the crannogmen were armed with bows. Some of his Stark guards were too. So when the Ironborn started collecting their supplies his men opened fire.
Hundreds of Ironborn died on the first volley.
Panic set in immediately. Some of them attempted to fire back but his men were in the woods protected by tree cover. A few died to some stray arrows but nothing compared to the Ironborn. Some tried to charge into the woods but they died immediately. By the time Rodrick Greyjoy had regained control of his men hundreds more had died.
If he was smart he would charge with his full force and try and force a confrontation with his greater numbers. Not that such a thing would work of course, Harry's men already had orders of where to retreat to if that happens.
Rodrick Greyjoy didn't do that. He had his men collect as many supplies as they could before running.
Harry noticed a lot of his men looked at him with fear in their eyes when, during their journey pursuing the fleeing Ironborn army, they started coming across more and more corpses as men starting dying from the venom coursing through their veins. By the time men stopped dying there were hundreds of corpses.
Still, there were many more of his men who looked at him with utter awe. They were looking at him with awe after they had captured the ships without major losses but now they seemed almost reverent. Especially the crannogmen.
They were counting the dead but doing little else as they kept pace with the army. The Ironborn were completely blind to their movements. He sent fifty crannogmen ahead of the army to kill any scouts that might be sent to keep an eye on their rear. After the first few dozen scouts disappeared they stopped sending anymore and increased their pace even more in their panic. At this stage they were easy prey.
With that in mind he decided to send all the crannogmen ahead of them in order to set up some small ambushes to whittle their numbers down further while his men just kept pace with the army for now.
Five days later Harry was in the marsh east of the Ironborn waiting to attack with all the crannogmen and a few of his Stark men. The rest of the Stark men were North of the Ironborn waiting for the signal to begin their charge on the 134 horses they were able to gather of the two hundred they came to The Moat with. He had chosen a particularly dry, flat piece of the Kingsroad to stage this attack in order to make cavalry more effective. The point of this was to kill as many as they could before pulling back.
The Ironborn were in a terrible condition. There were only a little over a thousand or so left after the crannogmen had whittled their numbers down and everyone had died from their snake bites. They were tired due to the fact that they were constantly getting small raids by snakes at night that killed a few dozen of them at a time. By now they were all incredibly paranoid and had a definite phobia of snakes. Harry made sure not to control that many snakes at once again though. The last time it put him down for almost a full day, his head was so sore. Luckily the horses that fled North from the Ironborn camp ended up in their hands again. So Harry could ride the horses while making sure to keep an even pace with the Ironborn while resting.
The Ironborn had also ran out of food three days before. They still had stuff to drink though and occasionally a couple would try to kill a lizard lion to eat. This just gave the crannogmen good opportunities to kill them. There were constant fights amongst the Ironborn and even a few deaths. Harry doesn't know why he expected better from the pirates. At this stage the Ironborn had been fleeing south as fast as they could for seven days. In another day or so they would clear The Neck. At this stage he had a few opportunities to kill Rodrick Greyjoy but he decided to let him stwen in his fear a bit more. Besides, he wants him alive.
Harry signalled to a runner that the attack was to begin. He would run to Ser Rodrick to tell him to begin his charge. Afterwards he had the crannogmen creep closer to the Ironborn. Harry would meanwhile stay where he was and watch the battle through the eyes of some of the ravens that were following the Ironborn for the last few days.
It was with a yell of "Attack!" that the carnage began. Arrows rained from both sides of the Kingsroad onto the pirates once more.
It seems this time they weren't prepared to just take it and run though. The Ironborn started to scatter immediately. Many of them charged into the woods at his men while trying to use the trees for cover. While this was happening others grouped together and raised their shields while charging towards the source of the arrows with slightly more coordination and some still stayed on the Kingsroad with Rodrick Greyjoy. Most of them were disorganised though. There was no coordination between most of the Ironborn or even any of the groups. The Ironborn were raiders, used to having the advantage of surprise and fighting on ships. They were all but helpless when they were ambushed on land. Not as many died from the arrows as the first time he pulled this trick on the Ironborn but a lot died from the first volley regardless.
As many of them charged into the woods his men scattered. With hundreds of Ironborn charging into the woods the rain of arrows stopped and the Ironborn left on the Kingsroad started calming down and relaxing.
That's when they started to feel a tremble that Ironborn everywhere had learned to fear. Eyes went North where they saw horses rounding the top of the small incline they were on. "Cavalry!" The hill was tiny really but there was enough of an angle to hide the approach of the cavalry and it also hid their numbers. It is understandable then, why the Ironborn acted as if they were being charged by numbers many times greater and panicked.
The cry went up echoed by dozens of other voices. Before they had a chance to do anything else, Ser Rodrick crashed into the first Ironborn followed by the rest of the men. The Ironborn weren't known for being very brave and not everyone had the will to stand their ground. Many Ironborn in the front fled into the marsh leaving big gaps in the formation. The cavalry charged through the Ironborn like a scythe through wheat. Hundreds more died before Ser Rodrick started losing his momentum.
The Ironborn in the forest that went after the crannogmen turned back at the sounds of their comrades dying. This is when the crannogmen counter attacked. Shooting the Ironborn in the back as they made their way back to the Kingsroad. They then went and started on the attack for real. Peppering the Ironborn left with arrows.
The fighting was fierce. Some of his soldiers who didn't have bows and arrows charged the Ironborn with their swords. Pressed from all sides except the South it wasn't long before something had to give.
When Ser Rodrick successfully captured Rodrick Greyjoy by cutting off his arm, the Ironborn broke. Those that were still alive fled South as fast as they could. Leaving behind their dying friends and their crippled prince.
An hour later Harry was adding up the casualties. It was estimated that around two hundred Ironborn fled South. Another hundred fled through the marsh. There were around seven hundred casualties on the Ironborn side of this battle and Rodrick Greyjoy was a prisoner.
There were a little over one hundred and fifty injuries on his side and around ninety deaths from this battle. Forty of them from the cavalry charge. He lost a few more men when the crannogmen were harassing the Ironborn forces over the last few days but they were nothing major. Due to the Ironborn being exhausted from a lack of proper sleep for five days and not having eaten anything in well over three days, as well as the fact they engaged the Ironborn in an ambush, his men had all of the advantages and it showed in how they slaughtered their enemies. Over the course of the whole conflict Harry had lost one hundred and seventy men.
This would have been much more difficult had Rodrick Greyjoy been a more competent commander. If he was competent he never would have had his main army leave the ships in the first place. The remaining three hundred Ironborn were hunted as they ran. Some would probably escape but Harry decided it was perhaps better to leave some of them to tell the story.
He had lost less than two hundred men destroying an army of four thousand.
The only issue he had now was how he was going to explain this to his uncle Ned.
Sorry for the delay. My wallet was stolen earlier this week so I have been spending most of my free time trying to get replacements for my ID, Drivers licence and bank cards. Then I kept rewriting a lot of the newest chapter as I was unhappy with it. Next week I should be back on schedule though.
As always criticism is welcome as long as it's constructive.
Next chapter Thursday 13 April 2023.
To read ahead of the update schedule: Pat_ (slash) TheLifeandTimes19.