Chapter 5: A Hunt for White Cloaks

Chapter 5: A Hunt for White Cloaks

The victory at Ashford, or rather the victory in not fighting at Ashford, echoed through the rebel army with more force than a thousand battle-cries. Fear of Randyll Tarly's strategic genius was replaced by a burgeoning, myth-like reverence for Lord Vyrwel's. The men no longer saw him as just a fearsome warrior; they saw him as a seer, a man who could gaze into the heart of a battle before it was ever fought and pluck victory from the jaws of defeat. This reputation was infinitely more valuable than one earned by brute force alone. It granted him access, influence, and the one thing he craved above all else: control.

As the army forged into the fertile lands of the Riverlands, a green and pleasant country that belied the bloody conflict to come, Kaelen became a permanent fixture at the right hand of Jon Arryn and a trusted, if unsettling, counselor to Robert. He used this position not for the good of the realm, but to steer the rebellion's war machine towards the most promising hunting grounds.

His mind was already consumed by the next chapter of the histories he knew so well: the Battle of the Bells. He knew that Aerys, enraged by the defeat at Summerhall, had tasked his new Hand, the young and ambitious Lord Jon Connington, with hunting Robert down personally. Connington, the fiery Griffin, would pursue them relentlessly, eventually cornering Robert in the town of Stoney Sept. It was a near-run thing, a battle fought street-to-street, that left Robert wounded and almost cost them the war.

Kaelen had no intention of allowing such a chaotic, unpredictable event to occur. Chaos was only a useful tool when he was the one directing it.

His first step was to legitimize his foreknowledge. Three days into their march across the Riverlands, he hand-picked a dozen of his best men—those with the quiet competence of Horys and the keen senses of absorbed hunters—and led a wide-ranging scout of their western flank under the guise of foraging for fresh game. It did not take him long to find what he was looking for: the tracks of loyalist outriders, their trail marked by the griffin sigil of House Connington, pressing hard to get ahead of the rebel army's main column.

He didn't just observe. He set a trap. Using his knowledge of tracking, he anticipated their path through a wooded ravine and laid a simple but effective ambush. They captured two of Connington's scouts alive. The interrogation was brief, brutal, and private. By the time Kaelen was done, he had a complete picture of Connington's army, its numbers, its composition, and its fanatical drive to capture Robert in Stoney Sept. He also confirmed the one piece of information that made his cold blood sing with anticipation: traveling with the Griffin was Prince Lewyn Martell of the Kingsguard.

A White Cloak. One of the seven greatest knights in the realm. A man whose entire existence was a testament to martial perfection and unwavering duty. The potential harvest was so magnificent, so intoxicating, that it overshadowed all his previous acquisitions. The skills of Boros, Caswick, Torvyn, and Glendon were mere appetizers. This was a feast.

He rode back to the main camp, the two captured scouts conspicuously absent, and immediately requested an emergency council. He laid out the captured maps and intelligence before Robert and Jon Arryn.

"Lord Connington is not just following us; he is racing us," Kaelen explained, his finger tracing the loyalist route. "He means to trap Robert in Stoney Sept. He knows Robert's boldness. He will expect him to take refuge in the town, believing himself safe behind its walls, and then Connington will surround it and put it to the sword."

Robert slammed his fist on the table, his eyes flashing with fury. "The Griffin thinks he can trap the Stag? I'll show him a trap!"

"Patience, my lord," Kaelen said, his calm voice a counterpoint to Robert's rage. "Your anger is a weapon, but it is a hammer, best used for the final blow. Lord Connington has given us a gift. He believes he is laying a trap for a lion, but he is walking into the den of a serpent."

He looked from Robert's furious face to Jon Arryn's calculating one. "We will not avoid Stoney Sept. We will embrace it. We will turn his plan against him. We will stage a reverse Battle of the Bells."

He outlined his proposal. Robert, along with his personal guard and a few hundred men, would ride hard for Stoney Sept, making a grand show of entering the town. They would be the bait. The rest of the army, under the joint command of Jon Arryn and Kaelen himself, would conceal themselves in the forests and hills surrounding the town.

"When Connington sees the stag banner flying over the Great Sept, he will commit his entire force, believing he has his prize cornered," Kaelen concluded. "And when his army is fully engaged, their lines stretched thin around the town, we will fall upon his rear. We will be the hammer, and Stoney Sept will be the anvil. We will not just defeat the Griffin; we will annihilate him."

The sheer audacity of the plan, the cold-blooded use of their leader as bait, stunned the other lords into silence. But Robert Baratheon threw his head back and roared with laughter. "By the gods, Vyrwel, you are a magnificent bastard! I love it! To be the bait, to look the Griffin in the eye as his world collapses around him! Yes! We do this!"

Jon Arryn, after a long moment of consideration, gave a slow, deliberate nod. The tactical brilliance was undeniable. It was a high-risk, high-reward gambit that could effectively end the war in the south. "So be it. May the Seven guide us."

The preparations were executed with Kaelen's signature, surgical precision. He was the architect, designing a masterpiece of slaughter. He rode the perimeter himself, choosing the ambush sites, placing companies of archers in the wooded hills, positioning cavalry in the low-lying meadows, and choreographing the signals for the attack. He was a conductor tuning his orchestra for a symphony of steel.

Two days later, the trap was sprung. Robert and his retinue galloped into Stoney Sept, the Baratheon banner unfurling defiantly from the town's highest tower. Just as Kaelen predicted, Connington's army, seeing the bait, descended like a flock of hungry birds. The Griffin's silver and red banners swarmed the outskirts of the town, and his soldiers began their assault, their triumphant cries echoing across the fields.

Kaelen watched from a high ridge, a cold stillness upon him. He waited, letting the loyalist army commit deeper, their formations breaking as they scrambled for glory in the narrow streets. He waited until they were fully entangled, their command structure a mess, their rear exposed and vulnerable. Then, he gave the signal. A single, piercing horn blast.

From the forests and hills, the rebel army emerged. It was a tidal wave of righteous fury. The loyalist soldiers turned from the walls of the town to see thousands of fresh, screaming rebels charging their backs. Panic, sharp and absolute, ripped through their ranks. The hunters had become the hunted.

From the town's Great Sept, the bells began to ring, not in alarm, but in triumph. It was a deafening, joyous, terrifying peal—the death knell of the Griffin's army.

As the main battle devolved into a one-sided massacre, Kaelen's mission changed. He had no interest in overseeing the slaughter. He had delegated command of his flank to Horys. His focus narrowed to a single, burning point. He summoned a score of his most loyal Vyrwel men, a small, elite unit that moved with the precision he had drilled into them.

"Forget the banners," he commanded, his voice low and intense. "Forget the rabble. We are hunting bigger game. We are hunting a white cloak."

He led his unit like a spearhead, cutting through the chaos. He ignored the routing soldiers and fleeing knights, his eyes constantly scanning, searching. He followed the sounds of the most intense fighting, pushing towards the center of the loyalist collapse where their commanders would be making a desperate last stand.

And then he saw him. A figure in gleaming white enamel armor, a white cloak billowing behind him like the wings of an avenging angel. Prince Lewyn Martell. He was on foot, his shield gone, wielding a long Dornish spear with a grace and lethality that was mesmerizing. He was a whirlwind of death, his spear a flickering extension of his will, keeping a half-dozen rebel knights at bay as he guarded a furious, desperate Jon Connington.

"There," Kaelen breathed, the hunger rising in him like a physical force. "That one is mine."

He dismounted, drawing his longsword and raising the heavy shield of Torvyn Fell. "Engage his guard," he ordered his men. "Keep them off me. The Prince is my quarry."

Kaelen approached the Kingsguard, his movements deliberate, a predator closing on its prey. Prince Lewyn saw him coming. His dark Dornish eyes, full of grim fire, recognized Kaelen as a different class of threat from the knights he had been effortlessly dispatching.

The duel was on a level Kaelen had never before experienced. The skills of all the men he had killed—Boros's aggression, Torvyn's defense, Glendon's speed—were all called upon, and were barely enough. The Dornish spear was a nightmare. It was a weapon of distance and precision, and Lewyn Martell was a master of it. He kept Kaelen at bay, the spear's leaf-shaped head darting in and out like a serpent's tongue, forcing Kaelen to rely entirely on his shield and reflexes.

Kaelen felt a sting as the spearpoint glanced off his vambrace. Another thrust, faster than thought, slid past his shield and scored a line of fire across his ribs. The Prince was a true artist of death.

But Kaelen was a monster built of stolen artistry. He pressed forward, a relentless, implacable advance. He used Torvyn's shield-craft to weather the storm of spear thrusts, and Glendon's speed to close the distance inch by painful inch. He needed to get inside the spear's reach, to bring his sword to bear.

He saw an opening, not in Lewyn's defense, but in his circumstance. One of Kaelen's own men, a young Vyrwel boy, charged recklessly at the Prince's flank. Lewyn, his instincts screaming to counter the new threat, shifted his stance for a fraction of a second.

Kaelen did not hesitate. He did not warn the boy. He used the sacrifice.

As Lewyn's spear flicked out and impaled the Vyrwel soldier, Kaelen lunged. He charged forward, under the extended spear shaft. He was finally in range. His longsword lashed out, but Lewyn was a Kingsguard for a reason. He dropped the spear, drawing his own sword in a blur of motion, and parried Kaelen's strike.

The fight became a brutal, close-quarters affair. It was Kaelen's strength and speed against Lewyn's experience and flawless technique. Sparks flew as their blades met again and again. But the Prince was tiring. He had been fighting for an hour, holding off an army. Kaelen was fresh, fueled by a dark, relentless hunger.

Kaelen broke the rhythm. Instead of another sword strike, he slammed forward with his shield, a raw, brutal shove that sent the exhausted Prince stumbling back. Before Lewyn could recover his footing, Kaelen's dirk was in his hand. He drove it with surgical precision into the weak point where the cuirass met the tasset, punching deep into the Prince's abdomen.

Prince Lewyn Martell gasped, his eyes wide with a pain and surprise that cut through his warrior's composure. Kaelen held the dying Kingsguard, his lips close to the man's ear. "Your watch has ended," he whispered.

The absorption was volcanic. It was a supernova of pure, refined power. He felt the mastery of the spear, the fluid grace of Dornish fighting arts, but it was so much more. He felt an influx of… duty. A lifetime of vigilance, of selfless dedication, of the sacred vows of the Kingsguard. It was a purity so profound it was almost painful. His psychopathic mind, however, did not embrace the duty; it consumed and perverted it. The selfless instinct to protect a king was twisted into an absolute, unshakeable, paramount instinct to protect himself. He was now his own Kingsguard, his own most sacred charge. The ultimate survivor's instinct, forged in the fires of another man's honor.

He let the body fall. In the chaos, Jon Connington had seen his champion fall and had fled, just as the histories foretold. Kaelen's men finished off the last of the loyalist guard. Kaelen bent down and, with a steady hand, unclasped the blood-soaked white cloak from the Prince's armor. It was the most glorious trophy he could imagine.

The battle was a rout, an unimaginable victory for the rebellion. When Robert finally rode out from the town, unharmed and exhilarated, he was greeted by the sight of the Griffin's army utterly broken. He found Kaelen standing on a small hill, his serpent banner flying beside him, the captured white cloak draped over his arm.

"They told me you slew a Kingsguard," Robert said, his voice hushed with a rare sense of awe.

Kaelen held up the cloak. "Prince Lewyn of Dorne fought with the valor of the Warrior himself. He died protecting his commander."

Robert looked from the bloody cloak to the cold, calm face of Lord Vyrwel. This young man had averted disaster at Ashford, engineered a legendary victory at Stoney Sept, and had personally slain one of the mythic Seven. He was no longer just a useful asset; he was a force of nature, the rebellion's dark, bloody angel of victory.

Later, Kaelen stood alone, feeling the new power settle within him. He was a symphony of stolen skills, a monster clad in the armor of a lord. He now possessed a strategic mind that rivaled Jon Arryn's, and a personal combat prowess that, with the addition of a Kingsguard's essence, perhaps had no equal in the rebel army.

The road to the Trident was now clear. The final confrontation was coming. Rhaegar Targaryen, the Dragon Prince, was the ultimate prize. But a new, darker thought, a greedy fantasy, wormed its way into his mind.

Ser Arthur Dayne, he thought, the name itself a taste of power. The Sword of the Morning. He knew Dayne was supposed to be in Dorne, guarding Lyanna Stark. But what if the timeline had been altered by his actions? What if a desperate King Aerys recalled his greatest warrior for the final battle?

The possibility of harvesting the essence of both a Dragon Prince and the Sword of the Morning in a single battle… it was a prize worthy of a god. The thought filled him with a hunger so profound it was almost rapturous. He was no longer just a player in the game. He was aiming to devour the board itself.