Chapter 191

Late autumn had settled in. Once only maesters and lords had taken proper notice of its arrival, but now common folk too had begun to reckon with the unpleasant reality of it. Hard to miss, honestly: the air had turned cool and damp, a thin mist crept low over the ground, and clouds hung heavy and gray above King's Landing like a shroud. Puddles pooled underfoot, the trees stood bare, trunks and branches gone black with moisture, and here and there a lone dry leaf still clung on, trembling in the wind. The first frosts bit at night now, and by morning the puddles along the roads wore a thin skin of ice.

The season's final days were slipping away. A brief, precious window in which common folk could still bring in one last harvest before the winter closed in. No one knew how long it would last. The Citadel offered only a rough estimate, six years at the very least, and it promised to be the harshest, cruelest winter the realm had seen in a hundred years. In this narrowing window, people should have been readying themselves to weather nature's cruelty, not tearing each other apart in war.

Tens of thousands had crowded into King's Landing, hoping to escape the horrors of the war outside its walls, and tens of thousands more had come to bring pain, death, and suffering straight to the capital of the Seven Kingdoms. The moment King Renly Baratheon's army reached the city, it moved at once to storm the walls. A war horn sounded, and one of the most decisive turning points of the war began.

...

Renly Baratheon.

Outside King's Landing.

"ATTACK!!!" His words were answered at once by the horn call every son of the Stormlands would know anywhere.

Long past were the days when Renly stared out at a battlefield with fear gnawing at him. Now the last of House Baratheon carried, somewhere beneath the surface, a quiet certainty that failure simply wasn't in the cards. His army outnumbered the enemy's at least three to one, and quality wasn't even worth discussing. If the Lannisters had been reduced to relying on barefoot fanatics for manpower, their situation had grown truly dire. Renly had gathered the finest commanders in the realm around him, men with real depth of experience. He knew his own weakness in tactics and strategy well enough, and so, taking his Hand Lord Mace Tyrell along with him, he'd simply stepped back and let the professionals do their work undisturbed.

They hadn't let him down. Whatever it might have looked like from the outside, his trusted commanders had prepared for this assault with real diligence. Countless siege ladders had gone up, sturdy rams built, siege engines readied, and for dessert, two full siege towers waiting for their moment. Renly couldn't begin to guess how his commanders had managed to build all this, but his respect, and his gratitude toward certain men in particular, had grown considerably for it. Once the war was won, his loyal lords would see rewards to match their service.

The Lannisters had burned every structure standing near their gates, clearing the ground for their own archers to sweep the field of attackers. But the defenders weren't the only ones to benefit from that choice; now nothing stood in the way of the royal army (Renly was king, so his army was the royal one, naturally) bringing its siege engines up unobstructed. The catapult barrage accomplished little of note, a few dozen barefoot fanatics dead, hardly a triumph worth mentioning. After a brief bombardment, the ladders and rams went to work.

Even an enemy can teach you something, if you're paying attention. The Falcon's eye had plenty of both virtues and flaws, but no one dared deny his skill as a soldier. Every major power in the realm had watched that particular man closely, studying his methods. His tactics during the storming of Grey Glen had left a real impression on Renly's own loyal commanders, and it had inspired them to attempt something similar. The plan called for a relentless assault using their numerical advantage, building toward a final, brutal push spearheaded by the siege towers.

Both the Lion Gate and the King's Gate came under attack at once, and the assault unfolded exactly as planned, with footholds even taking shape on the wall itself here and there. The tension mounted, the defenders wearing down further with every passing wave, as the valiant knights of the Reach and the Stormlands crashed against their crumbling positions again and again. Victory seemed close, the engineering marvel of the siege towers poised to settle the matter once and for all, when the damned lions pulled a filthy trick. With the ugly screech of rusted mechanisms, plain looking clay vessels came sailing toward the siege towers' positions. There were only a handful of them, and no one, Renly included, could have guessed at their real danger. The moment one struck the ground, a violent explosion followed, and tongues of green flame swept across the battlefield in an instant.

The roar of raging fire, the screams of men burning alive, the rising murmur of panic among those closest to him, all of it left the last Baratheon frozen in place. Who in Westeros didn't know of wildfire? After the death of the last dragons, the Targaryens had taken a keen interest in the "pyromancers' piss," and King Aerys Targaryen, known as the Mad King, had turned that interest into a genuine obsession. There was no counting how many smallfolk, sworn knights, even lords, had burned in the alchemists' foul creation. It was fair to say that the rebellion that ended nearly three hundred years of Targaryen rule had begun with the death of the previous Lord Stark, in no small part because of it. One might have thought that with Aerys the Mad King dead and the Alchemists' Guild put to the sword, that unnatural substance would have died with them. Instead it was burning loyal men alive right in front of him.

A shout, and a sharp shove from Lord Rowan, snapped him out of his horrified daze. Renly understood then: sound the retreat, before his men burned alive where they stood. Just as he was about to give the order, flashes of wildfire erupted along the walls and inside the city itself, and now it was the defenders reaping what their own treachery had sown. For one moment it looked like a chance to end everything with a single decisive push, but Rowan's firm grip on his arm and a slow shake of his head pulled Renly back to his senses. Wildfire still burned beneath the city walls, his siege towers lay in ashes, and his men's morale had shattered. Pressing the attack now would be nothing short of suicide.

"Fall back."