Chương 4

Galad did not kill the first man with his sword. The muscles in his back flexed as he drew, the bow bending smoothly beneath his hand. He did not pause to measure his breath or count a heartbeat. Deep in the Oneness, his body knew what to do without thought intruding. He loosed. The arrow hissed through the air and took the Ironborn in the throat. The man had been hacking at the Flower Hearth's heavy oak door with a broad-bladed axe, each strike ringing loud enough to carry over the din of battle.

The sound cut off mid-swing. He dropped bonelessly, axe slipping from his fingers as dark blood sprayed across the stone threshold. Galad didn't blink. He only breathed out, slow and controlled as always, and his hand was already reaching for another arrow. The void was complete now. The world narrowed to angles, distances, motion. He felt the contraction of each muscle as he set his stance again, the faint vibration of the bowstring as he drew it back to his cheek. The longbow was familiar in his hands.

A hunting bow, not a soldier's weapon, but it might as well have been a part of his body. For most of his past life, he was never one for archery. The path of the blade a more honorable and noble endeavour then. But those last years when the war turned against the Seanchan and he led Andor's armies as his sister's First Prince of the Sword, he had met many Two Rivermen who favored the bow, and that taught him more than he had learned in years of reluctant practice in the royal palace's yard.

He stood on the terraced roof of the village's small smithy, standing tall behind the lip of fired clay tiles. From here, he could see the main dirt road running through the heart of the village, flanked by squat stone and timber houses, some already burning. Smoke rolled low, stinging the eyes, carrying the sharp scent of pitch and burnt lime plaster. The fighting was thickest at the Flower Hearth.

Some three dozen Ironborn reavers pressed the attack there, a single banner of the black and gold kraken snapping above their heads. They surged against the inn and the sept that abutted it like a tide breaking against rock. The sept's low walls were crowded with villagers—men and boys armed with spears, pikes, even shovels and wood-axes—jabbing desperately at any reaver who came too close. Fear and desperation lent them strength, but fear alone would not hold forever.

They were no warriors, Galad could see that clearly. They would break at the first breach. Luckily, most of the Ironborn were not bothering with them. Their focus was the inn. The Flower Hearth's first two floors were built of stone and bricks. Its doors and windows had been barricaded from within, furniture and beams dragged into place. A low wall enclosed its sides and back, meant for livestock and stabling horses in quieter times.

The wooden gate in that wall lay smashed, splintered inward, and there the true fighting raged. Four Tyrell guards held the narrow entrance to the back courtyard. They stood shoulder to shoulder like a palisade of limbs and steel, their shields locked, blades slick with blood. More men filled the gaps behind, striking when they could with swords and spears. Ironmen threw themselves madly at them. Shields shoved against shields. Swords and Axes slashed down in great arcs.

He could hear the shouting like a distant song, rough curses interspersed with encouragement from the men who stood behind the lines of each side. Bodies lay heaped to both ends—Reachmen in green and gold, Ironborn in mail and leather, both trampled into the dirt. Galad's eyes tracked it all with keen awareness. As he'd thought, this was no simple raid.

If it had been, the reavers would have scattered through the village, dragging women from houses, looting what they could carry, setting fires and fleeing back to their ships before a proper response could be mustered. Instead, they had burned what they pleased and then committed their strength here, against a heavily guarded position brimming with fighting men. They knew the Tyrells were inside. Surely they knew.

And if they took the Lords of the Reach Galad knew to be there: Mace Tyrell, his Hightower lady wife, and the famous Lady Olenna Tyrell, they could cripple one of the three great fleets of the Seven Kingdoms who stood against them, the largest amongst them to boot. Those thoughts came at him, tried to shake him and fill his nerves, only to break against the void of his mind. He loosed again.

This time the arrow took an Ironborn halfway up the chest as he scrambled over the low wall at the inn's side with some stacked pallets. The impact knocked the breath from him and he toppled backward, legs tangling. Before he could recover the Tyrell men on the other side of the wall leaned over and finished him with swift, brutal strokes. Galad did not watch him die. He counted instead. Two arrows spent. Four left. As a hunter, he had never needed many. One for the kill, another if fortune turned ill.

A few more for the sake of it, gathered over the years. He had not come here expecting a battlefield. His second shot did not go unnoticed. A reaver close to the one climbing over the wall scrambled out of view, and he must've passed the word. One man in full plate armor looked up and spotted Galad's silhouette against the smoke-darkened sky. He pointed at him, screaming, and heads turned.

Some, the ones battering at the doors and windows of the inn, abandoned their posts to seek cover, hiding behind houses and outbuildings nearby. Those locked against the Tyrell guards at the gate fought on, too committed to break away. A line of shieldmen pulled together behind them, a little bedraggled in form, but Galad was surprised at the responsiveness. He had not heard good things about the Ironborn's discipline in battle.

But three men broke from the press and charged down the road toward the smithy, shields raised over their heads. Galad had expected it. To reach him they had to cross open ground, the width of the street, with no cover but their shields and their courage. In the Oneness, there was no hesitation, no flicker of doubt or fear. He drew and aimed at the first man. The arrow flew true, slipping beneath the rim of the raised shield and biting into the man's ribs, just below the arm.

He cried out and fell, shield clattering from his grasp. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. The other two faltered, and the hesitation cost them. A rider erupted from a side alley. Lorne burst into the street at a gallop, polished helm gleaming despite the smoke choking the sun. Leaning from the saddle, he cut one of the reavers down in a single savage swing, steel shearing through mail and flesh alike. The last Ironborn barely had time to turn.

Lorne's mount, Galad's own horse his caretaker had bought some years back, hit him full on. The trained destrier reared and struck, iron-shod hooves smashing the man into the dirt. He tried to raise his arms to defend himself, but the horse stamped again and again, until there was nothing left to defend. Galad lowered his bow. With only three arrows left and the certainty that at least a dozen eyes now knew where he had been, he did not linger on the rooftop.

Sliding back from the edge of the roof, he took the narrow stairs down through the smithy, the steps creaking beneath his weight. The sound seemed oddly loud and echoey considering the roar of battle outside. The modest home stood empty. No voices, no signs of the smith and his family. Just the faint metallic tang of iron and oil that always clung to the place. That told him enough. Bryen would be fighting, then. Or dead. The thought came and went without ceremony.

Bryen the smith was one of the few villagers Galad knew well. He had sharpened Galad's tools, forged iron shoes for his animals, sold him arrowheads—some of which were lodged in Ironborn flesh even now. Galad had known the village as a whole, of course. He did business with any open to it, trading meat and hides and anything else he could get his hands on, but he had never truly belonged. In his past life, he had wrapped himself in a righteous certainty that was as rigid as any armor.

He had travelled through many roads, his days crowded with causes and conflicts and mistakes that still haunted him. But for the seventeen years he lived in this world, he had chosen to live simply. Long hours in the garden with his hands in the soil. Days alone in the woods, stalking game, measuring his patience with that of prey. Practicing with the old man, Ser Garin Sand, his only true company for all this time.

Lately, other company had tried to find him in the form of marriage offers, families with daughters of age testing the waters. He had declined them all, of course, politely and firmly. He wondered, now, if the girls he had turned away were huddled behind the sept's low walls, or barricaded inside the Flower Hearth, praying the stone would hold. He hoped they were. He well knew the reputation of the Ironborn. Exiting the house, Galad stepped out into the street.

The dead lay where they had fallen here, scattered like refuse after a storm. The baker's second son lay facedown near the corner of a house, his spine split by a savage blow that had opened him nearly in two. Galad remembered him as a boy mooning over Ser Garin whenever they came into the village, begging the cantankerous old knight for sword lessons. An older woman was slumped against a wall, skirts dark with blood, both hands pressed to her belly as if still trying to hold herself together. Her eyes were closed.

Peaceful, if such a word could be allowed. Close by, a young woman he had once seen going to the sept lay on her side as if only sleeping. Her dress was torn open, her legs bare. Galad looked once and then no more. He hoped she had died quickly, before cruelty had time to find her. Others lay scattered along the road, at least half a dozen villagers, along with one or two Tyrell guards and Ironborn who had fallen in the first clash.

Anger rose within him, sharp like a hot blade, only to wash against the void of his mind and fade as quickly as it had come. He had practiced the Oneness since childhood here, long before he could form the words for why he needed it. For years, it had been the only way to live with the knowledge that he had died once already, that everything he had known had ended, and that he had awakened beneath a different sky with memory intact and no answers given. He lifted his gaze and looked around.

Lorne had withdrawn back into the side alley, out of sight, waiting for the moment Galad would draw the enemy's attention again. Good. His plan was simple. Lorne would charge only when the Ironborn were already committed and distracted, even if it meant Galad would be outnumbered before the guard came. While skeptical at first, Lorne had seen enough of Galad's handiwork back in his home to question his skills.

He walked forward at an easy pace, boots crunching over dirt and splintered wood, passing the three Ironborn corpses he and Lorne had made moments before. He considered reclaiming one arrow, but the shaft lay snapped beneath the weight of the dead man's body. No matter. Movement above drew his eye. An Ironborn had climbed to the second floor of the inn, using a ladder set against the stone wall—out of Galad's sight from the smithy roof.

The man was hacking at a shutter now, axe biting into wood already split and cracking Galad drew as he walked, fired without pausing, and the arrow took the man beneath the chin, drove upward, and burst out through the back of his skull in a spray of blood and bone. The body pitched forward, bounced once against the stone, and fell with a dull, final thud onto the street. The two men holding the ladder turned to stare at him, but Galad did not stop moving. He drew again and loosed.

The arrow entered one man's open mouth and exited the back of his neck, snapping his head violently backward. The second screamed and charged, shield raised over his chest and face. Galad shot him through the thigh. At such close range, the impact must've shattered bone. The man's leg folded beneath him and he fell hard, screaming in pain. Letting the bow slip from his hand, Galad drew his sword and removed the man's head in a single, practiced stroke. It rolled once, then came to rest against the ladder.

Once again, his actions had not gone unnoticed. Those battering at the windows and door turned, shouting warnings. One window gave way in a crash of splintered wood as he watched. An Ironborn tried to force himself through the gap, only to die screaming as a pot-bellied cook inside, apron pulled tight against his gut, drove a long iron roasting fork through his chest and pinned him there, impaled against the frame.

Without waiting for further invitation, Galad ran straight at them, blade raised, and the first man fell with his throat open cleanly. Another died a heartbeat later to the same parry and slash, Galad's sword slipping beneath his helm and through the soft flesh under the jaw. Four Ironborn broke from the door and charged him together with axes and shields. He gave ground deliberately, as they likely expected. It drew them away from the press at the entrance and further onto the open street.

The first blow he blocked, steel ringing. The second he parried aside. The third man he killed outright, driving his sword through the eye slit of the helm, then kicked the body into the fourth with enough force to stagger him. Hooves thundered behind, then Lorne crashed into them from the flank, blade flashing as he swung in a brutal arc that split the first man nearly in two. Blood sprayed across the dirt. The second Ironborn froze for just an instant too long.

Dashing in, Galad evaded an awkward thrust and cut him at the hamstring. The man screamed and collapsed to one knee, clattering from his grasp. He turned at once to meet the fourth, and this one knew what he was doing. His guard was tight, his stance disciplined. They traded blows in quick succession, steel rasping against steel. He pressed Galad back a step, then another, forcing him to work. After a moment, Galad let himself stumble. The Ironborn believed it and overcommitted, swinging wide for a killing blow.

Galad twisted aside at the last instant and drove his sword into the gap in the mail at the groin. The scream that came was high and piercing, and he had the mercy to finish the man cleanly. Behind him, Lorne finished the hamstrung man without ceremony. He took a moment to breathe. The Ironborn numbers were thinning now. At a quick glance, Galad counted perhaps a dozen and a half still fighting at the side gate. Their formation was ragged as men died on both sides, and he wondered how many still lived inside.

Turning back, he nodded once to Lorne, and the guard dismounted. He handed over the reins quickly then moved toward the broken window, shouting to the people inside. They would need coordination now, to pincer the Ironmen from within and without. Galad mounted. From his seat, his eyes easily found the well-armored Ironborn shouting orders near the gate. His helm was crested with spikes, his heavy axe already darkened with blood, dents on the blade. That was the one.

He gathered the reins and turned the horse toward him.