"Donnel Haigh, I remember you being a knight. Did you not swear a vow before the Father to protect the weak and uphold justice?"
Sandor Clegane's gaze was a pair of sharpened daggers, threatening to carve the truth out of the knight's soul. His voice was a low rumble of thunder before a storm.
"Spare me your sermon!" Donnel barked, his breath a foul mist of sour wine and bile. He swayed on his feet, a mocking grin plastered on his face. "I won't be lectured by a cur of House Clegane. I've bedded more women than you've had hot meals, and the lot of them don't equal a fraction of the meat your brother butchers in a week." He raised his voice, shouting to the shadows as if to bolster his own fading courage.
At the mention of Gregor, Sandor's face went dark, the smooth, mended skin tightening.
"I knew you 'knights' were all of the same rot," Sandor hissed. He moved faster than the drunkard could blink, his massive hand shooting out to seize Donnel by the gorget.
He hoisted the knight off his feet, shaking him like a rat in a terrier's jaws. Donnel's boots kicked uselessly at the air. "You prattle about vows while your men tear the rags off a starving girl! Tell me, Ser..." Sandor's voice dropped to a terrifying, mocking lilt. "Did you recite your prayers while they broke her? Did the Father smile on your 'holy work'?"
Sandor's grip tightened until Donnel's face turned the color of a bruised plum. "Lords and knights—you're all just pretty wrappers for a pile of dung. Order your curs back to their holes, or I'll use your head to paint the Sept floor."
Sandor threw him down into the muck. Donnel scrambled back, spitting curses, and retreated into the darkness of the village hall.
Sandor didn't sleep. He sat on the edge of a moth-eaten mattress in a derelict hut, his head in his hands. The air smelled of old dust and stagnant misery. Outside, the silence between the two camps was a physical weight. No one trusted the man in the next room.
At dawn, the Frey riders vanished into the mist without a word of farewell. They left like ghosts who had never been.
The warriors of the Dawn were more methodical. They waited for their scouts to confirm the road was clear before mounting up. They were a contrast to the Frey rabble—their armor was scoured of rust, their sun-star banners high, and their eyes clear.
Jimmy, a former hunter turned scout, returned from the treeline near the Kingsroad. "Sandor. There are men in the building ahead."
"Mummers?" Sandor asked, his hand drifting to the hilt of his blade.
"Likely. There's a man swinging from a rope behind the kitchen. Been dead a moon or more. Smells like rot and failure."
Sandor's eyes glazed for a moment. Memory took him back. "I know that place. I killed three of the Mountain's pets there once. All I wanted was a flagon of ale." He thought of Arya—the little wolf girl he'd dragged through these woods. It had only been two moons, but it felt like a different age.
"Move out," Sandor commanded.
The sun was high and merciless when the first arrow flew. The sentry on the Inn's roof didn't even have time to scream; a bolt from a Dawn crossbow punched through his chest, sending him rolling down the white-stone chimney to the dirt below.
The Bloody Mummers had grown lazy. They were far from the war, feasting on what remained of the Inn's stores.
"Suppressive fire!" Sandor roared.
The Dawn crossbowmen dismounted, biting their reins to keep their horses steady. They knelt in the tall grass, their fingers flying over the cranks of their steel-armed crossbows. Bales of pitch-soaked linen were lit and lashed to the bolts. A rain of fire hissed through the air, thudding into the timber and thatch of the South Wing.
Two Mummers charged out with battle-axes, screaming in a dozen foreign tongues. The Dawn's reply was a volley of armor-piercing quarrels. One Mummer died instantly, his chest a pincushion of short-shafts. The second stumbled, a bolt through his shoulder, before a second volley hammered him into the dust.
Sandor watched the flames climb the walls. "Is this what Aldric wanted?" he muttered. "To burn the rats out?" He knew the answer. The Lightbringer didn't believe in long sieges with beasts like these.
A Myrish crossbowman leaned out of a high window, but before he could level his weapon, three bolts whistled past his head, one glancing off his helm. He vanished back into the smoke.
Then, the floodgates broke. The Mummers surged out like angry ants. Two Ibbenese warriors with hairy chests and brown shields; a Dothraki bloodrider with bells in his braid swinging an arakh; three tattooed sellswords from Volantis.
"Now!" Sandor unsheathed his sword. "Kill the dogs!"
The Dawn riders erupted from the treeline. Sandor's black-and-red cloak snapped in the wind as he spurred his stallion forward. He caught the Mummer who had wounded Jimmy, his longsword carving a glittering arc through the air. The man's head left his shoulders before his body hit the mud.
Mark and Ernst, two Solar Knights, moved like a single machine. Mark smashed through a wicker shield, his horse's hooves pulping the man behind it. Ernst parried a Dothraki's curved blade, his wrist like iron, before sliding his steel through the savage's throat.
Sandor watched them out of the corner of his eye. Separately, I could take them, he realized. Together? I'd be dead in a heartbeat.
The slaughter was swift. The "brave" companions were only brave when their victims were unarmed. Those who weren't cut down threw away their steel and begged for mercy. Two Dothraki tried to reach the stables but were pinned to the barn door by a rain of bolts.
"Bunny" Robert and his squad emerged from the burning building with eight women. They were gaunt, their clothes rags, their eyes hollow with a trauma that wouldn't mend. One was too weak to walk; Robert carried her on his shoulder like a sack of grain.
Sandor wiped his blade on a fallen Mummer's surcoat. "Give the dying the mercy," he commanded. "Bind the rest for judgment. Jimmy, is that how the Lightbringer does it?"
Jimmy, coughing blood from a shallow chest wound, nodded firmly. "Aye. The Commander demands the Law. Justice must be seen."
The interrogation was brief. These were indeed the dregs of the Brave Companions, led by a monster named Rorge. They had fled Saltpans after the sack, unable to find a ship, and had turned west to rot in this inn. Rorge himself was already a cooling corpse in the yard.
A girl named Jeyne Heddle stepped forward, her eyes burning with a cold fury. "They killed my uncle. They found the three men the 'Hound' slew a moon ago and blamed him for it. They wouldn't let us cut him down."
She pointed to her younger sister, Willow, a girl of ten who looked like a brittle twig. "They broke us. All of us."
The three Solar Knights didn't wait. They moved among the women, their hands glowing with a soft, amber Light. Wounds closed, and the gray pallor of shock began to lift.
The judgment followed. The Mummers were stripped of their stolen silks and hauled to the great oak trees behind the inn.
One sellsword shrieked in a Myrish accent: "I am a soldier! I'll fight for you! For free!"
Sandor leaned down, his armor creaking like a butcher's block. "You want to be a soldier?" He grabbed the man's hair, forcing him to look at the ravens circling above. "See your new brothers? They'll be on your eyes by sunset. That's your promotion."
They were strung up in a row. Sandor watched them kick, the scent of burning wood and old rot filling the air. It reminded him of his brother. It reminded him of the fire.
He spat into the embers of the inn, trying to wash the taste of ghosts from his mouth.
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