A Golden Path: Design 3.7 (ch. 30)

It was strange what caught your attention when one was fighting for their lives, Rhaegar noted, his blade slick with blood, his armor caked in mud, and the sounds of screaming echoing out all around him. He had taken a blow on the arm at the elbow, and one of the chain links seemed to have broken with one link poking through his gambeson and pinching his skin. He was aware of the frigid wetness in his boots, and how his toes were cold. He also latched onto the sound of whistles through the air, leading him to look up. 

Arrows rained down from the sky like rain, thin shafts with black feathered ends stood out against the cloudless blue sky. He felt a hand grab him by the shoulder before the view was blocked. “Protect the Prince! Archers on the ridge!” 

The arrows fell with thunks, most impacting shields, bouncing off of armor, harmlessly staking themselves into the ground… a few, however, struck home and Rhaegar heard yelps of pain turn into screams of agony with his men and pirates alike falling. 

“They shoot their own men!?” Rhaegar cried out, his gaze going to the ridge of a steep cliffside, seeing no less than a hundred archers. No sooner had the first volley been released, they notched another arrow and prepared to shoot. 

“They're pirates and mercenaries! They hate each other as much as they hate us, my prince!” Arthur shouted over the screams and chaos as the second volley fell. “We must do something! Take the ridge or withdraw!” 

They had to take the ridge. Perhaps it was a blow to the head, for a moment, it felt like he was rising above his body. He became keenly aware of everything around him -- his five hundred men that were heading up a narrow pass to claim a hill to secure an advantage against the mercenaries. They had been ambushed about halfway up by a force that matched their own, but they used the terrain to their advantage. 

The attack began with them rolling rocks down from above, dividing their formation and causing injury. Then, as quick as lightning, mercenaries poured out from the passes above, and now their ranged soldiers pelted them from up high.

He saw it all in that fraction of a second. The bodies that were piling up. The blood that soaked the dirt, the formations were becoming sloppy as men died on both sides. They weren't yet losing the battle, but Rhaegar felt the tide of battle shift against him. They would if nothing was done. 

What he didn't see was a way up the cliffsides. That didn't mean there wasn't a path. The island they fought to take was a desolate crag made of the shattered remnants of a mountain, and there were countless hidden paths that made taking the island an absolute nightmare. 

Arthur had the right of it. If they pressed forward, and there was no path to the archers, then they would surround themselves. If they withdrew, the dozen men who had already died would die for nothing. Morale was already scraping at bedrock, but there weren't many failures left that the army could take. They needed progress. A victory. Even if it was as simple as taking a hill. 

“We press on! Form up! On me!” Rhaegar shouted out, raising his shield as his orders were repeated. The formation was salvaged and compressed by the enemy that beset them, and Rhaegar took the first step forward with his kingsguard at his shoulders. The mercenaries before them were a functional wall that they had to push through, and his longsword felt like a poor weapon for the task. So, he dropped the ornate sword in the mud and pulled out a long dagger before plunging it into the neck of a mercenary. 

Blood sprayed across his helmet, the man dropping like a stone, but before his body could even fall over, another pushed forward. An arrow struck his helmet but Rhaegar shook the blow off, fighting back against the tide while those behind him pushed him forward. He killed another man, his blood dripping down the blade of his dagger and soaking his leather glove. 

He thought killing would be harder. He fought in tourneys before. He had seen men die. Yet, it wasn’t until he came to this island that he took a life with his own two hands. Rhaegar never learned his name, nor could he hear his final words, but he recalled his face with startling clarity. 

Yet, months later, he couldn't even remember the face of the man who he had just slain. 

Another arrow bounced off his armor, but this one struck with enough force to make him stumble. A mercenary pounced, a dagger in his own hand, but before it could come near, Arthur cut the offending hand off before killing the man it had been attached to. Rhaegar nodded his thanks but Arthur was too focused on the battle to see it as they steadily pushed forward up the path. 

Rhaegar was sure it had only been minutes since the push began, but it felt like hours before he felt the mercenaries begin to give way. The pressure against them lessened until it gave way entirely. 

“They retreat! Cut them down!” Rhaegar roared, their men surging up the path and hacking at the retreating mercenaries. The path was narrow enough that they couldn't all flee at once, but none were willing to fight to buy another time. The result was a frenzied slaughter as dozens of men were butchered in short order and they stepped over the corpses to find the pass that led to the archers. Yet, in the time spent pushing up, they fled to only the gods knew where. 

Rhaegar was exhausted, yet he threw a fist in the air. “Victory!” 

That raised the men's flagging spirits and they roared back at him. They were bloodied, exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. But all of that was forgotten for a few seconds. For them, at least. 

“Another victory like that, and we will be undone,” Rhaegar uttered to Arthur, whose grimace behind a blood shattered helm was reply enough. He had taken five hundred men to secure the cliff, and even with a quick count, at least twenty were dead. A generous estimate would be that only a few dozen were injured, but he expected no less than fifty serious injuries. Injuries that would take them out of the fight for weeks, if not permanently.

Pushing up the visor of his helmet, Rhaegar walked up to the cliff that the archers had been, seeing evidence of their hasty retreat. He saw a beautiful view -- the ocean was so very blue, and from this high, one could be mistaken in thinking that the island was a calm and peaceful place. It was a small island, but a pivotal one. 

They had taken it once before, early in the campaign to secure their supply lines as the small island was a useful base for the royal fleet, allowing supplies to be delivered to the various forces that were securing the islands of the Stepstones. That garrison was then attacked and slaughtered… 

“How long have we been on this island?” Rhaegar asked, realizing that he didn't know. 

“... two months, or close to it, my prince,” Arthur answered after a moment of thought. 

Two months. Two months and hundreds dead for an island that wasn't worth a drop of blood. It had no natural resources to speak of. If there had been any animals other than rats, then they were expunged from the island long before they arrived. The only thing special about it was that it was mildly more convenient getting the supplies here rather than from Dorne, as it was a shorter trip, thus less likely to go wrong, either by a sudden storm or attack by ‘pirates.’ 

“In those two months, what have we accomplished? No- what have we accomplished all year?” Rhaegar questioned, a knot of worry in his chest. This campaign was becoming everything that he feared it would be. A quagmire of the very worst sort. “Any progress we made with the other islands has been undone while we fight for this miserable rock. Robert is stuck on the Bloodstone until our supply lines are restored.” 

Where was it? 

Where was the glorious victory that the fire had promised? 

The only victory of note came from Robert, but that wouldn't last long. It couldn't. The war had made so little progress over the course of a year, the recruits were thinning and it wouldn't be long before the lords of the Seven Kingdoms washed their hands of the whole affair. They fought for gold and glory, and if there was none in the Stepstones, then not even a king could command them to fight. 

Yet, strangely, every mercenary in Essos felt an undeniable urge to become a pirate at the same time. 

Naturally, this increase in piracy saw to it that the royal fleet was in a constant state of patrol. Meaning that where they weren't, the mercenaries were free to deploy hundreds to thousands of men, contesting islands, like this one, or fortifying ones they planned to take. 

Rhaegar felt… outmaneuvered. Like every choice he had was about mitigating the damage rather than winning. 

“... My Prince…!” Arthur started, pointing towards the horizon to the side of him, and Rhaegar followed his gaze to see… 

Ships. 

Ships that did not belong to the royal navy. 

“How- did they slip through?” He questioned sharply, the thrill of victory, however bloody, was short-lived. In its place was an encroaching dread as he saw no less than thirty ships. Hardly an armada but each ship could carry five hundred men or more if they overloaded them. Upwards of ten thousand men were seemingly sailing towards the island completely uncontested, and… “Where is the royal fleet?! Where are the scouts?! How could this have happened?!” 

Even for a ploy of his father to somehow cut him out from the knees, this was too much. His father sought him humbled or whatever went through that wicked mind, not dead. He couldn't have opened a route between patrols of the royal fleet, could he? Would he really sink so low? 

Arthur was beside him, pointing to a ship on one one of the flanks. “They show signs of battle -- I think they broke through a patrol,” he ventured and that was a cold comfort. He saw arrows embedded in the hulls, the sails looking a touch ragged, as well as signs of fire damage. The closer they got, the better he saw them, and the more ragged they became. 

“And no ship escaped to warn us?” Rhaegar asked, his tone bitter as he put together a plan. Or tried to. They roughly had an hour, perhaps two, before the ships made landfall. On the assumption that there were ten thousand men on those ships, they would be outnumbered three to one. They arrived on the island with three and a half thousand, and in the months since, that number had been whittled down to around three thousand. 

That wasn't taking into account the one or two thousand mercenaries that were already on the island and bleeding them dry. 

“... perhaps they were chased down? Or they went to Lord Robert first? They come from that direction,” Arthur reasoned and a bitterness welled up in the back of his throat. “What will you have us do, my prince? However they got here aside… they are coming.” 

He considered a thousand possibilities in the long few seconds that followed. They had ships of their own, but he questioned if they could ready them in such a short time and make it to the Bloodstone island before the sellsails reached them. If they couldn't, then the sellsails would descend on them like a pack of wolves. The most he could hope for would be to die fighting. The more likely case would be that he would be captured and held for ransom, and that would be a shame he would never be able to wash off. 

“We burn the ships,” Rhaegar answered, knowing that he needed to eliminate all thought of retreat if they were to see this through. “We gather whatever supplies that we can, and we pull to the top of the hills. We hold them until a relief force comes.” 

Arthur, knowing that there was no time to waste, bowed and moved to carry out his orders. And it was only once he was alone did he allow a bitter remark pass his lips. 

“If one comes.” 

…

Lyanna Stark crouched out of view, her head turned to better hear the conversation happening between her father and brothers. She had gotten her hopes up when their father demanded their presence, hoping for… well, she was swiftly disappointed when the secretive conversation began. 

“The war is going exactly as predicted,” their father said, and she heard him sit heavily in his favorite chair. 

“Robert and Prince Rhaegar have been isolated -- that's far worse than we suspected. They could be captured- or killed,” Ned protested, openly worried for his friend. She had met Robert during the royal wedding -- Lyanna wasn't sure she would go as far as to say that she liked him, but she did think he was good for Ned. He didn't have many friends, but he did have good ones. Robert. Paul. 

“That won't last long. The royal fleet will chase the rabble off. They likely already have,” Rickard assured Ned with a patient tone. 

“Can we assume that? It's clear that the crown is not taking this seriously. Nor is the war being contained to the Stepstones -- how many ships coming to and from the North have been attacked?” Ned argued, and Lyanna nodded along, as if she were part of the conversation. 

For the past year, all along the coast had seen pirate attacks and raids. Normally, the worst they had to deal with were the Ironborn, but as of late… from the Wall down to Dorne, there wasn't a fishing village that had been spared. The flow of trade, especially the goods coming out of the North, had suffered. Which was something that angered their father to no end. 

More than once he wanted and raved about the importance of each ship and their meaning for the North. He had been especially wroth when King Aerys denied a repositioning of the royal fleet to protect their coast from piracy. 

Which then had their father doing what no Stark had done in a thousand years -- building a fleet. The Karstarks were the ones chosen for the dockyard, as they held plentiful timber and were located near the sea. As far as Lyanna was aware, it wouldn't be long until the first of the Northern ships were done, though it would be longer still before the North had a proper fleet. 

“Well, it's clear what Ned wants to do,” Brandon remarked with some amusement. It was good to hear. Like he was getting closer to his old self. 

There was a pause and Lyanna could all but see them trading looks before Ned spoke, “I'll go. Though, Robert has a made a strong claim for the Bloodstone. And so far, the Free Cities seem content to let this all happen under the guise of ‘pirates.’” 

“Aye, that is worrying. I thought the pretenses would drop by now,” Rickard admitted. “But that serves just as well. It gives us more time to prepare when the curtain is dropped and the marionettes are revealed. Bloodstone could be traded, but if we take Lys? That would be the true prize.” 

“In any case, we need to get down there. Will you call the banners?” Ned asked, and the words made Lyanna still. 

It had seemed so very far away until she heard those words, but the pieces clicked into place. They were talking about war. That chaos of a Melee, but real. The thought of Ned or Brandon heading off to a real battle twisted up her insides and she couldn't quite swallow the lump in her throat. 

“No. At least not formally,” Rickard answered. “I'll send letters to the lords affected by the pirate raids and have them volunteer some men. It won't be many, I think -- at least, not at first. They'll want to keep their soldiers close at hand rather than galavanting on the other side of the Seven kingdoms. But I suspect when they hear Lord Atreides committing more than a token force, more will come. A thousand men. Perhaps two, if they're particularly stubborn.” 

She could also practically see Ned nodding, accepting the duty. “When do I depart?” 

“For word to spread and the men to march? I'd say give it a month,” Rickard replied. Ned started to protest, likely because by the time he arrived in the Stepstones, two months would have passed and he wanted to be there now. While he could make a difference.

But, he swallowed the protests down. It was then that she suddenly heard footsteps, making her scramble back a half step before the door swung open and she tried to make it seem she had just approached the door rather than having her ear pressed against it. Ned looked at her for a moment, his eyebrow climbing up, but he didn’t rat her out. 

“Lyanna. Eavesdropping, are we?” He called her out, making her scowl. 

“I just had to speak with father about something,” Lyanna lied with a huff, but turned away from the door when he pressed a gentle hand on her back, guiding her away. And giving her the impression that the following conversation between father and Brandon wasn’t one she was meant to hear. In response to that, Ned tilted his head at her and she folded. “Fine. Are you really… are you really going to war?”

Men tried to shield her from it, thinking that it’d offended her ‘delicate woman sensibilities’, but she still heard the rumors that swirled. Robert had won a great victory at the Bloodstone, but it came at great cost. Islands were gained, then lost, and dozens of men were slaughtered in their sleep against an enemy that didn’t know the meaning of the word honor. Worse than death, she heard that the survivors were enslaved to the twisted evil magisters of the Free Cities. 

It sounded like a nightmare. One that she had put out of mind, as it was a world away. Now her brother was walking straight into that nightmare and she felt a fear unlike anything she had felt before. Even when Ned was in the South for years at a time with scant visits in between, she always knew that he would be back one day. 

This was different. She wasn’t sure if he would come back this time. 

Ned, however, offered a gentle smile and ruffled her hair like Brandon used to, “There’s no need to worry about me, little sister.” He uttered the words with such confidence that, for a moment, she almost stopped worrying. “The Stepstones won’t know what hit them. I promise you that.”