Chapter 130: The Redwyne Strait
War reached the sea before the land had finished drawing breath.
Lord Jason Mallister did not wait for Redwyne sails to appear off Lannisport before acting. The old lord of Seagard knew too well what delay cost upon water. A fleet that allowed itself to be penned in harbor had already made half an apology for defeat. When word came that the Arbor fleet had sailed, he gathered the strength of Seagard, sent riders to the river mouths, and joined with the remnants of the western fleet that Arthur had rebuilt from old Lannister crews, captured captains, new shipyards, and a great deal of suspicion.
The combined fleet numbered near eighty warships of varied size and temper. Seagard brought lean galleys, longships, river craft refitted for war, and coastal ships that could turn quickly in broken waters. Lannisport brought heavier vessels, fewer than it once might have, but with good ballistae and crews who knew the western coast. It was not a fleet a singer would praise for beauty. It was a fleet made of what had survived and what had been forced into usefulness, which often matters more.
Against them came Lord Redwyne with one hundred and twenty ships, most of them large galleys, cogs, and warships of the Arbor. Their sails were clean, their hulls proud, their crews seasoned. The Arbor had wine, wealth, and ships enough to make lesser lords mistake themselves for kings when the sea was calm.
Lord Redwyne stood upon the bow of his flagship, the Sea Monster, and looked at the western and river fleet gathering ahead. A sneer curled beneath his beard.
“River loaches and mine rats,” he said. “They think themselves sailors because they found water. Form the line. Galleys forward. Rams ready. Archers and ballistae to station. We will crush them before noon.”
The order ran through the Arbor fleet. Drums beat. Oars lowered. The long line advanced.
Jason Mallister watched from his own deck and said nothing for a time. The wind tugged at his cloak. The smell of salt and pitch filled the air. Beside him, western captains waited, many of them younger than he would have liked. Younger captains had energy, which was sometimes useful. They also had confidence, which was often expensive.
“We do not meet them in open water,” Jason said at last. “Signal the turn. Draw them toward the Bloodstone reefs.”
A captain frowned. “My lord, the Redwynes will see the feint.”
“Then let them see what pride tells them to see.”
The signals rose.
The combined fleet shifted, not fleeing exactly, but yielding ground toward the reef-choked waters near Bloodstone. The channels there were narrow and treacherous, full of hidden stone, odd currents, and winds that changed their mind halfway through a prayer. Seagard ships had patrolled those waters often. River captains, smugglers, and Mallister pilots knew where a smaller hull might pass and a larger one might curse.
Redwyne took the bait.
Perhaps he saw weakness. Perhaps he saw a chance to trap the smaller fleet against the reefs. Perhaps he simply could not bear the thought of river men choosing the field. Pride is an excellent helmsman if one wishes to wreck.
The Arbor’s leading galleys pressed into the narrowing waters. Their formation stretched, then loosened. Oars had less room. Captains shouted more. The sea grew crowded.
Jason raised one hand.
“Fire ships.”
More than a dozen old hulls, packed with pitch, dry timber, oil, sulfur, and every other unpleasant invention sailors use when they stop pretending war is noble, were set alight. The wind and current took them, and western oarsmen guided them just long enough to aim their burning ruin toward the densest knot of Arbor galleys.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
For a heartbeat, the Redwyne line did not understand.
Then every horn screamed at once.
“Fire ships!”
Large vessels do not turn quickly in narrow waters, no matter how loudly lords command them to. Oars tangled. One galley sheared across another’s path. A cog tried to reverse and struck a hidden stone. The burning hulks came on, bright and hungry, trailing black smoke.
The first fire ship struck a galley near the bow. Flames climbed the hull as if delighted to find work. Another crashed amidships into a second vessel. A third drifted through a gap and brushed two ships at once, setting tarred rope and sailcloth alight. Men jumped into the sea. Others burned before they reached it. Smoke thickened. The Arbor line, so proud moments before, broke into shouting and bells.
Jason did not give them time to recover.
“Now,” he said.
The Seagard ships came out of the smoke like hounds from cover.
Small galleys and longships drove into the scattered Arbor formation, not to trade volleys at polite distance, but to board. Grapnels flew. Rams struck. Planks crashed down. Mallister men leapt across with axes, short blades, spears, and harpoons, shouting for Seagard and the new Warden. Western ships hung at the edges and fired ballistae into any Arbor vessel trying to reform or break free, their bolts smashing rails, snapping masts, and tearing through packed men.
The fighting became ugly and close. Decks slicked with seawater and blood. Archers shot from yards. Sailors wrestled among ropes. A Redwyne knight in fine mail took a harpoon through the thigh and was dragged screaming from his own ship. A Seagard captain lost three fingers and kept fighting because apparently the remaining two were offended by the suggestion they stop.
Lord Redwyne, shocked and furious, tried to restore order. His flagship beat drums and raised signals half-swallowed by smoke. The Sea Monster turned toward Jason’s vessel, and the old Mallister, seeing it, ordered his own flagship forward.
The two ships met amid drifting fire.
Their rams struck glancing blows, hulls grinding together. Grapnels locked. Men surged across both ways. Redwyne guards in good armor met Seagard boarders with shields and spears. Jason Mallister stood near the foredeck, sword in hand, shouting orders with the authority of a man who had spent half his life fighting Ironborn and had no patience left for wine sailors discovering inconvenience.
The duel of flagships did not end in a clean capture. Few things at sea do. Smoke shifted. A burning galley drifted too close. The Sea Monster’s rear oars caught fire. Redwyne’s captains finally began pulling their ships away, not in rout, but in the strained retreat of a fleet that had learned its enemy was not obliging enough to die properly.
Jason let them go.
Pursuit into open water would favor the Arbor’s larger surviving strength. He had not come to win a song. He had come to keep the sea road breathing. More than twenty Redwyne ships were burning, sinking, crippled, or taken. The combined western and river fleet had lost men and hulls of its own, but it remained afloat, formed, and between the Reach and Lannisport.
By dusk, the Redwyne fleet withdrew toward deeper waters, its pride smoking behind it.
The victory did not end the naval threat. The Arbor had more ships. The Reach had more coin. But the blockade had been checked, and the route between Seagard, Lannisport, and the river mouths remained open long enough to matter.
That was the most any man could demand from a battle. More than that and the gods start laughing.
While smoke still rose over the strait, Diana reached Pheasant Hall.
Randyll Tarly’s army had already thrown its first assaults against the walls. Siege towers stood half-built beyond bowshot. Catapults hurled stones toward the battlements. Arrows came like locusts, blackening the sky in gusts. Smith met Diana in the inner yard, both of them coated in dust, both too tired for ceremony.
“You have the walls,” he said.
“You have the field,” she answered.
The transfer of command took less time than most men needed to argue over precedence. Diana climbed to the battlements and began taking the fortress apart in her mind: walls, gates, towers, arrows, wounded, oil, water, food, carpenters, fear. Especially fear. It seeped through stone more easily than rain if left unattended.
“Archers fire only on my command,” she ordered. “No waste. Oil jars wait until ladders are a third up the wall. Stones to the east tower first. Move the wounded down the rear stair, not through the gate court. Civilians to the repair lines. Any man shouting rumor loses his place and carries water until he remembers silence.”
Her orders were sparse and exact. Men listened because she sounded as though she had already measured panic and found it inefficient.
“Tell the soldiers,” she said, “that the Bannermen Guard is outside the walls. We are not alone.”
By nightfall, Smith had taken the twenty-nine thousand men out through a concealed postern and into the hills, woodlands, gullies, and abandoned villages around Pheasant Hall. Under cover of darkness and diversion from the walls, the Bannermen Guard vanished from Tarly’s sight.
They would not meet the Reach host head-on. Not yet. They would cut, burn, delay, ambush, and bleed the great beast outside the walls until it grew tired, angry, and careless.
The siege of Pheasant Hall had begun in earnest, by land and sea alike.