Tygett rode through the wreckage, shouting until his throat tasted of blood.
“To me! To the trees! The king commands it!”
Most of the westermen did not so much flee as scatter. Some ran for the forest King Loren had chosen, throwing down shields and spears as they went. Others stood frozen in place, staring at the golden horror moving through their ranks. One man was calling for his mother. Another had fallen to his knees and begun reciting the Seven-Pointed Star.
The dragon lifted its head.
Its roar passed over the field like iron grinding against stone. Horses reared. Men clapped their hands over their ears. A pale light bloomed within the creature’s brass chest and swept across a knot of spearmen beneath Lord Falwell’s banner.
White shapes came tearing out of them.
For an instant, Tygett saw men within the light. Faces stretched in silent agony, mouths open, hands reaching for bodies that had already begun to fall. Then the shapes narrowed into streams and vanished into the great jewel set within the dragon’s breast.
The corpses struck the earth together.
Souls, Tygett thought.
He had seen men burned, drowned, trampled, disembowelled, and opened from throat to groin. He had watched a knight search the mud for the fingers he had lost and a dying boy try to push his entrails back into his belly. War possessed a thousand cruelties, and Tygett had believed himself acquainted with most of them.
But this thing did not merely kill. It ate at their very souls.
His horse was one of the few still answering the reins. Foam flecked its mouth and neck, and blood striped one flank where a broken shield had caught it, but the beast carried him through the ruin. Tygett seized every man he could find and pointed him toward the trees.
“Go! Do not stop!”
A young archer looked back toward the wounded crawling among the dead.
“Leave them,” Tygett told him.
The boy stared.
“Leave them, damn you!”
The order sickened him. Men who stopped to save the wounded died beside them, and then there were two corpses where there might have been one survivor. That was the cold arithmetic of retreat.
The dragon roared again.
Green fire swallowed Lord Crakehall. Ser Brax vanished beneath one brass claw. Ruttiger and Falwell were pulled screaming from their own flesh, while Lefford’s men broke and left their lord alone beneath a torn yellow banner. The dragon’s tail went through horse and rider together.
He could leave. The thought came without shame or urgency.
The forest was close. His horse could reach it. Beyond the trees lay roads leading west, and at the end of those roads waited a wife, a son, and three daughters.
He imagined their faces when another man came home carrying his sword.
Tygett turned his horse back toward the dying.
No.
He was many things. Proud, quick to anger, too fond of battle, if his wife was to be believed. Yet he was no craven.
He had sworn before gods and men. Loren wore the crown, and Tygett had given him his sword, his blood, and whatever remained when both were spent.
A king’s command did not cease to be a command merely because obedience had become inconvenient.
He found a dozen spearmen huddled behind a shattered wagon and drove them toward the trees. A riderless horse charged through the smoke. Tygett cut it across the face before it could trample three archers, then caught one of the boys by the collar and hauled him upright.
“Run.”
The boy ran.
All around him, men Tygett had known since youth were being reduced to ashes.
Near an overturned wagon, Lord Reyne knelt beside his fallen heir. A dead horse had trapped the young man from the waist down. Reyne pulled at him with both hands, armour scraping uselessly against the earth.
Tygett dismounted.
“Lift.”
Together, they heaved at the saddle frame. The dead horse shifted by inches. Reyne snarled through clenched teeth. Tygett felt something tear in his shoulder, but at last the body came free.
The boy gave one wet, choking breath.
His eyes remained closed.
Lord Reyne pressed two fingers beneath his son’s jaw.
Tygett looked away first.
There were words for such moments. The septons had many. The singers had more. None seemed worth speaking while a father knelt in the mud with his son’s blood drying across his hands.
A roar silenced the field.
The dragon had turned toward the lion banner.
King Loren stood beneath it alone.
His royal guard were dead or scattered. Smoke curled around him. His sword was raised, though what use a sword might be against such a creature, Tygett could not have said.
“You want me, beast?” Loren shouted. “You want the king?”
The brass dragon lowered its head.
Loren set his feet.
“I am Loren of House Lannister. Blood of Lann. Son of Casterly Rock. King of the Rock.”
The words should have sounded absurd. Yet something fierce moved through Tygett at the sound of them.
This was why Loren wore the crown.
Not because some dead father had placed it upon his brow. Not because lords had knelt or maesters had inked his name into a genealogy. Tygett was witnessing the reason Loren was king right in front of him.
Tygett climbed back into the saddle. His wife vanished from his thoughts. His children vanished with her. There was only the king, the dragon, and the distance between them.
He drove his heels into the horse.
“Here!” he screamed. “Take me instead!”
The creature did not turn.
“Come, then!” Loren roared.
Golden light began to leave him.
It emerged first as a narrow thread from his chest. The dragon drew nearer, and the thread widened into a shining stream. Loren’s sword arm began to tremble. One knee bent. Then the other.
Still, he did not fall.
Tygett rode harder, though he knew he was too far away. Men often discovered their courage at the precise moment it could do no good.
The dragon’s jaws stopped a hand’s breadth from Loren’s face.
For one heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the creature recoiled.
Its great wings opened, scattering smoke, ash, and torn banners. It rose from the field with a single violent beat, climbed into the sky, and flew south.
Tygett reached the king moments after Prince Tyrek.
“My prince,” he called. “Is he…”
The words died.
Loren’s face was changing. Lines spread across skin that had been smooth that morning. His golden hair dulled to grey, then faded toward white. His cheeks hollowed. The strong hands that had wielded a sword only moments before became knotted and thin.
“Dear gods,” Lord Reyne whispered behind him.
The king sagged into Tyrek’s arms.
“Bearers,” the prince called. “Bring… bring…”
The command broke apart in his mouth.
Tygett shouted it for him. Men who had hidden among the corpses found enough courage to obey. They lifted Loren onto a broken shield and began carrying him from the field.
Only then did Tygett look properly at Tyrek.
The prince stood with one hand pressed against the side of his helm. His legs almost gave way beneath him.
“My prince,” Tygett said, “what are your orders?”
“Tyrion.”
His eyes searched the field without finding anything.
“He is there. He…”
A trembling hand pointed toward a line of corpses beneath the fallen lion banners.
“Dead.”
Prince Tyrion.
Tygett lowered his head.
He had liked the younger prince. Tyrion was a man of japes, the Laughing Lion, they called him.
Lord Reyne came to stand beside them, his hands black with his son’s blood.
“We should march on Highgarden,” he said. “The Gardener host is broken. Whatever remains behind those walls cannot resist us.”
“Yes,” Tyrek said. “We should… let…”
His knees gave way.
Tygett and Reyne caught him before he struck the ground.
“My head,” Tyrek muttered. “Take off the helm. Something is… my head…”
Reyne reached for the clasps.
The helm came free.
A mass of blood and flesh came with it.
Tygett stared into the hole in his cousin’s skull. He took one step backward.
“Ser Tygett.”
The voice came from a great distance.
“Ser Tygett.”
He blinked.
The battlefield was gone.
Prince Tyrek lay upon a stone table, washed and wrapped in crimson. Beside him rested Tyrion, younger and less damaged, though a strip of linen covered his throat. Silent Sisters moved around them with bowls of scented water.
A septon stood nearby with his hands hidden within his sleeves.
“Yes,” Tygett said.
His voice sounded like someone else’s.
“The princes are prepared for their final journey, ser. The Sisters have done all that reverence permits. With your leave, their bodies may be borne to Casterly Rock.”
Tygett looked at the dead men.
Only days before, they had ridden out hunting together and spent half the morning quarrelling over which of them would be named Lord of Highgarden once the castle fell. Each insisted Loren had promised the title to him.
Now both would return west in silence, wrapped in the colours of their house and carried into the royal tombs.
“I will send men before nightfall,” Tygett said.
The septon bowed. “May the Seven receive them gently.”
The words made Tygett think of the pale glow of the souls being torn from living bodies and drawn into the dragon’s breast.
He wondered whether the Seven had received any of those men at all.
“Thank you, septon.”
He left before the holy man could say more.
Two knights fell into step behind him as he passed into the corridor. Ser Fallon was broad and greying. Ser Lannet was younger, though recent events had put age into his eyes.
“Ser Tygett,” Lannet said.
Tygett did not slow. “What is it?”
“The men remain uneasy about the red dragon.”
Tygett glanced through a narrow window overlooking Highgarden’s outer yards. Even from within the castle, he could feel the creature’s presence beyond the walls.
“How many times must they be told? The red dragon serves King Harald. It is not the golden beast that attacked us.”
“They know what they have been told,” Fallon said. “Knowing and believing are different things.”
“A distinction beloved by cowards.”
“Cowards can still hold spears,” Fallon replied. “And frightened men sometimes point them in unfortunate directions.”
Tygett stopped.
“It is dead,” he said. “King Harald killed it. Make certain every man in the host understands that.”
The two knights exchanged a look.
Tygett saw it.
“What?”
“There have been rumours,” Fallon said.
“Rumours about what?”
The knight hesitated.
“Out with it.”
Lannet cleared his throat. “They say the Red Mountains are gone.”
Tygett stared at him.
“That the land has broken,” Lannet continued, “and the sea now runs between Dorne and the rest of Westeros.”
“Like the old tales,” Fallon added. “The breaking of the Arm. My mother frightened us with them when we were boys.”
For a moment, the corridor held only the distant movement of soldiers and servants.
Tygett would have laughed a week ago, and yet it was all true.
King Harald had told Loren much the same tale. Tygett had been present when the king of the Heartland described his battle with the golden creature and the ruin that followed. It had sounded impossible, but impossible had lost much of its meaning over the last few days.
Every man in the western host had felt the earth convulse through the night. Highgarden’s towers had swayed. Cracks had split the courtyards open. For one long moment, Tygett had believed the world itself meant to die.
“King Harald has no reason to lie,” he said. “We all saw what that creature could do.”
Shouting rose somewhere ahead.
Tygett broke into a quick stride. The noise grew as he passed beneath an arch and emerged onto a gallery overlooking the main courtyard.
A crowd had gathered before the inner keep. Reachmen filled most of it, though Tygett saw western levies among them as well. Lannister spearmen held a line across the courtyard, shields locked and spearpoints wavering as the mob pressed closer.
“What is going on?” Tygett shouted.
No one heard him.
He descended the steps with Fallon and Lannet at his heels. As they drew nearer, individual cries separated from the uproar.
“Bring out Edmund!”
“Give us the archmaester!”
“Justice for the dead!”
A woman in a torn green dress pointed toward the castle windows.
“It was the Gardener king and his maester! They brought that monster from the seven hells!”
“Hang them both!”
“Burn the Citadel!”
That cry spread faster than the others.
“The maesters made it!”
“Pull it down!”
“Stone by stone!”
A rock struck a shield and bounced into the mud.
Tygett forced his way through the soldiers until he stood before the line.
“Enough!”
The nearest rows quieted. Those farther back continued shouting.
“King Edmund and Archmaester Eddard are prisoners of the Crown,” Tygett called. “They will face judgment.”
“They must die!”
The crowd surged.
A Reachman seized the edge of a shield and tried to tear it aside. The spearman behind it struck him across the mouth with the flat of his sword. Blood sprang from the man’s lips.
The sight frightened the crowd more effectively than law, kings, or gods.
“Clear the courtyard,” Tygett ordered. “No killing unless you have no choice. Drive them back and secure every entrance.”
The shield wall advanced.
Men retreated as wood and iron pressed into them. Those who resisted were struck with spear shafts and sword flats. A few fell and were dragged away by friends before the soldiers could trample them. The mob broke into smaller knots, then streams, fleeing toward the gates and the damaged outer wards.
Tygett watched them go.
“Double the guard around the dungeons,” he told Lannet.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Fallon, secure the eastern wall. Every gate is to be watched. No one enters the inner keep without written authority.”
The knights departed.
Tygett remained in the courtyard while the last of the mob disappeared.
He should have expected anger. The surviving Reachmen knew that their king and archmaester had unleashed the golden dragon.
Some survivors claimed they had watched King Harald battle the golden dragon across the heavens. They described stars falling and lightning splitting the sky. A few swore they had seen the red dragon arrive and help King Harald destroy the beast.
Others remembered none of it.
Half the camp now called King Harald their saviour. Some claimed the gods had sent the red dragon to aid him. Such tales were spreading faster than any raven could carry them, changing with every retelling.
Tygett remembered only the dragon flying south. Yet many, including some of the men under his command, swore they had seen the king kill the golden dragon just outside Highgarden.
Tygett crossed the courtyard and entered the throne room.
Highgarden’s great hall no longer looked like the seat of the Gardener kings. The banners had changed. The courtiers were gone. Mud from western boots stained the floor.
A broad table stood before the Oakenseat, covered by a map of Westeros. Someone had crossed out the Red Mountains in charcoal and drawn a sea in their place. Small islands dotted the dark water.
Lord Reyne and Lord Serrett stood near the table, two of the few great western lords who remained alive.
King Loren sat upon the Oakenseat.
His king looked better than he had after the battle, though better was a poor word for it. The dragon had left him with white hair, hollow cheeks, and the face of an old man. Yet some strength had returned. His back was straighter. His hands shook less.
Near the hearth, two armourers helped King Harald into a suit of steel unlike any Tygett had seen. A double-bladed axe rested across his back.
“Cousin,” Loren called.
Tygett bowed. “Your Grace. You seem stronger.”
Loren laughed. It became a cough before he mastered it.
“Harald could not return my youth, but he has put enough strength into these bones that I need not be carried to my own privy.”
“Do not test that too eagerly,” Harald said as an armourer tightened the final strap across his shoulder.
Loren dismissed the warning with one thin hand.
Harald sent the armourers away and approached the map.
“Edmund Gardener and Archmaester Eddard must stand trial before all the kingdoms.”
“Agreed,” Loren said. “Let every lord in Westeros hear how the Gardeners defended their throne by summoning a monster from the seven hells.”
“I expect little from Dorne,” Harald said. His eyes rested on the black sea drawn across the map. “I do not know what remains there or how greatly those lands have changed.”
Tygett stepped closer.
“Your Grace.”
Harald looked at him.
“Men throughout the host claim they witnessed your battle with the golden creature. Some describe events that others swear never occurred. The same stories are spreading even through the nearby villages.”
Loren tapped one finger against the arm of the Oakenseat.
“I meant to ask you about that. You said the world had changed.”
Harald lifted a wine cup from the table, poured a little onto its surface, and drew a line through the wine with his finger.
“Think of this as time. The past leading to the present, and the present to the future.”
Tygett studied the line.
“When I destroyed the soul gem, the power trapped within it did more than escape. Dragons are bound to time. Their souls are fragments of the Time God. The brass creature was made to imitate dragons and destroy them. It was our opposite.”
He drew several lines branching from the first.
“When those opposing forces met, the world could not contain the contradiction. Time ceased to follow a single path.”
Lord Serrett looked from the wine to Harald.
“What does that mean?”
“It means several histories occurred along these new branches.”
The hall grew still.
Harald touched one branch.
“In one, I fought the creature in the Stormlands. In another, I may have fought it above Highgarden. Perhaps in another, it reached Casterly Rock. In one history, Loren may have lost his war. In another, the Red Mountains may still stand.”
Lord Reyne’s eyes remained fixed upon the branching lines.
Tygett knew what he was thinking.
Somewhere among those impossible paths, perhaps his son had risen from beneath the dead horse.
“Men who died in one path may have lived in another,” Harald continued. “Places may have been destroyed in one history and preserved in the next.”
“And which history is ours?” Loren asked.
“All of them.”
No one spoke.
Harald drew the branches together again.
“When the break ended, the separate paths were forced back into a single course. They did not merge cleanly. The world kept pieces of each. That is why men remember different events. That is why the land itself has changed.”
Tygett looked toward the map and the sea that had replaced the Red Mountains. Even with the king’s explanation, he could not comprehend the idea that they were simply gone.
“Will it happen again?” Loren asked.
“The break is over,” Harald said. “Its disorder remains. We may find places where years passed in a night or where time moved backward. Men may remember wives they never married, children who were never born…”
“It is a complete clusterfuck.”
Lord Reyne turned away from the table.
“Ha. Clusterfuck. No better way to describe it,” Loren said, laughing a little.
“I do not expect another change as great as the sundering of the mountains,” Harald continued. “But there will be smaller ones. Many.”
The explanation answered much and eased nothing.
Loren studied the map for a long while.
“Then we proceed carefully.”
Harald took a cloak from a nearby chair.
“I leave for the Stormlands today. I must learn what became of Argella and my legion.”
Loren nodded. “Before you go, I require a favour.”
His eyes moved to Tygett.
“Carry my cousin to the border of the Westerlands.”
Tygett stiffened.
“Your Grace, I am needed here.”
“No. You are needed in the west.”
Though age had weakened Loren’s voice, command remained in it.
“You are to raise another army. I need men to hold the Reach, and we must prepare for the southern offensive. Learn what this Dragon Break has done to my kingdom.”
Tygett wanted to object. Tyrek and Tyrion were dead. Half the great lords of the west had perished. This was precisely when Tygett should remain at Loren’s side.
Yet Loren was right.
Tygett bowed.
“As you command.”
Loren looked again at the map.
“The Seven Kingdoms,” he murmured. “Five now, perhaps. Four, if Dorne is truly severed.”
“Three,” Harald said.
Loren glanced up. “Three?”
“Artys Arryn murdered his queen and butchered her sons. Now he marches against me.”
Harald rested one armoured hand on the table.
“Within a year, the Vale will belong to the Heartlands.”
Loren considered this, then smiled.
“The Three Kingdoms, then.”
“And Loren,” Harald said, glancing back toward the Oakenseat, “the Citadel must not be destroyed. Whatever crimes its maesters committed, there is knowledge within those walls that cannot be replaced.”
Tygett saw his king frown. Many in the Reach and the west wanted to burn Oldtown and the Citadel to the ground, yet King Harald was correct. The knowledge lost would be immeasurable.
Loren nodded.
Harald turned to Tygett.
“I will carry you as far as Lord Swyft’s lands.”
Tygett looked toward the open windows. Beyond Highgarden’s walls, something vast shifted in the fields. A red wing rose above the trees and folded again, followed by a low rumble.
“Do not worry, Ser Tygett,” Harald said. “Flying is a wonderful experience.”
Haralds new Armor and Weapon
Wuuthrad