Chapter 232

“He’s charging!” A cloud of dust thrown up by Khal Drogo’s personal riders could be seen from a great distance.

How much did it really take to provoke a warlike savage into a headlong charge? Not much at all. Just dangle a defenseless main camp in front of him, and there he goes, rushing to claim the enemy commander’s head. Of all the lords of the Reach, Dickon commanded the largest army, and he had the backing of his house’s many allies besides, so it had felt only natural for him to take command of the combined force. The situation suited the young Lord Tarly well enough: Ser Jeremy and Lord Orton made no attempt to seize control of the army for themselves and instead lent him every bit of their experience commanding great hosts. Only Lord Alekyne tried to subtly steer his nephew in whatever direction suited him, but Dickon was no fool and shut down those little schemes whenever they surfaced. To carry out the plan, the most elite units had been kept directly under his own command.

War is the art of deception, of constant feints, of spreading false information, of tricks and stratagems. The Dothraki were overconfident, and the Dornishmen thought of their allies as nothing more than cannon fodder. It seemed unlikely either side would help the other at real cost to themselves. The plan was simple but very risky: the army under Ser Jeremy’s command would tie down the three other enemy commanders in battle, while Dickon and Lord Alekyne threw everything they had at Drogo.

“Form up! Spears to the front, archers fall back!” The seasoned army shifted formation swiftly at their commander’s word. “Knights on the flanks, ready?”

“Yes, my lord!”

“Good.”

Lord Alekyne’s forces had been positioned in the center, slightly behind the main lines of battle. That placement was sound strategy, letting them send reinforcements forward wherever needed, exactly when needed. Except this time there would be no measured trickle of support; the moment Khal Drogo took the bait, the entire reserve would be thrown at wiping out his army in full.

“What?!” Right before his eyes, Drogo tore through the infantry like a knife through butter.

They had been foolish to stage such a show of weakness; it might well be the death of them. They had underestimated the savage and his cavalry both.

“The khal is advancing too fast! At this pace Lord Alekyne won’t reach us in time!”

“We hold,” though Ser Jeremy’s forces still held their ground, it was only a matter of time before the losses became crippling. If Drogo wasn’t killed, they would bleed out plenty of fine soldiers today for nothing. “Gather the cavalry, we’ll meet them head on.”

“That’s not the wisest choice. You’re our commander, not some common knight. Lose you, and we lose the battle.”

“Do it!”

House Tarly had long stood as the greatest noble house defending the region from Dornish raids, and thousands of years of unending warfare had forged them into peerless soldiers. But their true strength had always lain in their cavalry. Tarly’s heavy horse, through sheer force, managed to punch through the first wave of Dothraki riders, and at last came face to face with Drogo’s own personal guard. The same held true from the other side: the Khal of Khals now found himself standing directly before the commander of the entire enemy army.

“Zhizhig yalaatai khartsakh!” Drogo commanded, and his closest riders formed a wall around them so nothing could interrupt the duel.

“Cover me,” Dickon said, exactly as the plan called for.

At last a space opened between them. Dickon and Drogo spurred their horses and charged toward one another. The very first clash of blades made the gulf in raw strength painfully clear. Dickon managed to parry the blow, but it very nearly threw him from his saddle. Drogo was a giant in the very prime of his strength. The khal had spent his entire life fighting on battlefields, and no fourteen year old boy could hope to match him in raw power. The second blow landed even worse; the black arakh crushed through a solid block and slammed hard into the young lord’s armor, though the armor itself held, and held with honor.

The minutes that followed could only be called a beating. Drogo struck, Dickon tried to parry, and more often than not simply took the hit instead. Had the gap in their equipment not been what it was, the fight would have ended long before now. An arakh was a devastating weapon against a lightly armored foe, but Tarly wore excellent plate and carried a Valyrian steel sword in his hand. The lightness of that blade let him keep pace with his opponent’s furious speed and turn what should have been fatal blows into merely painful ones. Even so, it couldn’t go on forever.

“Protect Lord Tarly!!!” His guardsmen were seasoned soldiers, and they understood a simple truth: luck runs out eventually, and Dickon was already taking far too many hits.

To the Reach knights’ misfortune, they could make no real headway. Heavy cavalry was nearly impossible to stop once it got moving, but it was just as hard for them to build up that same momentum in the first place. Drogo’s riders shut down every attempt to reach their khal’s prize.

“Give your name,” Drogo asked, in broken Andal, after taking a brief pause.

“Dickon Tarly,” the young man managed through ragged breath.

“Good,” and then came a blow faster than any before it.

Pure instinct alone turned it aside. A second, a third, a tenth. At some point Drogo knocked Heartsbane out of position entirely, leaving the young lord fully exposed. The arakh swept toward his unguarded throat, but a gauntleted hand rose to meet it before it could reach its mark. Metal shrieked against metal, his body crashed to the ground, and pain swallowed Dickon’s consciousness whole. He could no longer tell truth from the delirium of his own battered mind. He had survived a killing blow only at the cost of total disorientation.

“Dickon, hold on!!!” Alekyne’s company crashed into the Dothraki line and drove quickly toward the center, where the duel of generals raged on. Drogo, faced with a new and stronger opponent, chose not to finish off the young lord. As young Tarly drifted in and out of half consciousness as the duel shifted from mounted combat to a fight on foot, he found both the men having been thrown from their saddles. Heavy armor offered an enormous advantage in battle, but a fall exposed its weaknesses just as clearly. While Drogo found his footing without trouble, Lord Alekyne was still struggling up from his knees, his own armor working against him now. The khal gave his opponent no chance and drove him back to the ground with a kick.

Move, or you die. Move, or everyone here dies. Your house will be destroyed, your sisters dragged off into slavery. Move!!! Right in front of him, Drogo beheaded Lord Alekyne, the uncle who had ridden in to save him.

Fighting through the pain, Dickon threw himself forward into the attack. He understood that another blow or two like the ones already dealt him, stacked on top of everything before, and he would never rise again. And yet there was no outrunning Drogo’s speed, which left only one option.

“Raaaaa!!!” Raw strength met raw strength head on.

Dickon chose to make use of his uncle’s final gift, the chance to fight his enemy on solid ground. Arakh met sword. For the first time, Tarly made no attempt to parry or dodge; he poured every ounce of his strength into that single strike, and the gamble paid off. Drogo’s weapon was cut clean in two. They say there is no blade sharper than Valyrian steel, and it was the truth. A drawn out fight against a man wielding such a weapon was always a death sentence in the making, since the longer the battle dragged on, the greater the chance of the other sword being broken.

For only an instant, Drogo stood stunned at the loss of his trusted arakh, but that instant was all Tarly needed. With a wet crunch, Heartsbane drove straight into the heart of the celebrated khal, killing him instantly. The Khal of Khals, the man who had led his khalasar halfway across the world and laid waste to an entire kingdom, had been slain by a fourteen year old boy.

Upon the bones of an old legend, a new one would be born.