his lordship did no harm to her or hers, though he did strip her castle of its wealth and every scrap of food, feeding his thousands with her grain as he broke his camp and marched on to Bitterbridge.
When Lady Caswell appeared on the ramparts of her castle to ask for the same terms Lady Merryweather had received, Hightower let Prince Daeron give the answer: “You shall receive the same terms you gave my nephew Maelor.” Her ladyship could only watch as Bitterbridge was sacked. The Hogs Head was the first building put to the torch. Inns, guild halls, storehouses, the homes of the mean and the mighty, dragonflame consumed them all. Even the sept was burned, with hundreds of wounded still within. Only the bridge remained untouched, as it was required to cross the Mander. The people of the town were put to the sword if they tried to fight or flee, or were driven into the river to drown.
Lady Caswell watched from her walls, then commanded that her gates be thrown open. “No castle can be held against a dragon,” she told her garrison. When Lord Hightower rode up, he found her standing atop the gatehouse with a noose about her neck. “Have mercy on my children, lord,” she begged, before throwing herself down to hang. Mayhaps that moved Lord Ormund, for her ladyship’s young sons and daughter were spared and sent in chains to Oldtown. The men of the castle garrison received no mercy but the sword.
In the riverlands, Ser Criston Cole abandoned Harrenhal, striking south along the western shore of the Gods Eye, with thirty-six-hundred men behind him (death, disease, and desertion had thinned the ranks that had ridden forth from King’s Landing). Prince Aemond had already departed, flying Vhagar.
The castle stood empty no more than three days before Lady Sabitha Frey swooped down to seize it. Inside she found only Alys Rivers, the wet nurse and purported witch who had warmed Prince Aemond’s bed during his days at Harrenhal, and now claimed to be carrying his child. “I have the dragon’s bastard in me,” the woman said, as she stood naked in the godswood with one hand upon her swollen belly. “I can feel his fires licking at my womb.”
Nor was her babe the only fire kindled by Aemond Targaryen. No longer tied to castle or host, the one-eyed prince was free to fly where he would. It was war as Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters had once waged it, fought with dragonflame, as Vhagar descended from the autumn sky again and again to lay waste to the lands and villages and castles of the riverlords. House Darry was the first to know the prince’s wroth. The men bringing in the harvest burned or fled as the crops went up in flame, and Castle Darry was consumed in a firestorm. Lady Darry and her younger children survived by taking shelter in vaults under the keep, but her lord husband and his heir died on their battlements, together with twoscore of his sworn swords and bowmen. Three days later, it was Lord Harroway’s Town left smoking. Lord’s Mill, Blackbuckle, Buckle, Claypool, Swynford, Spiderwood…Vhagar’s fury fell on each in turn, until half the riverlands seemed ablaze.
Ser Criston Cole faced fires as well. As he drove his men south through the riverlands, smoke rose up before him and behind him. Every village that he came to he found burned and abandoned. His column moved through forests of dead trees where living woods had been just days before, as the riverlords set blazes all along his line of march. In every brook and pool and village well, he found death: dead horses, dead cows, dead men, swollen and stinking, befouling the waters. Elsewhere his scouts came across a ghastly tableaux where armored corpses sat beneath the trees in rotting raiment, in a grotesque mockery of a feast. The feasters were men who had fallen in the Fishfeed, skulls grinning under rusted helms as their green and rotted flesh sloughed off their bones.
Four days out of Harrenhal, the attacks began. Archers hid amongst the trees, picking off outriders and stragglers with their longbows. Men died. Men fell behind the rear guard and were never seen again. Men fled, abandoning their shields and spears to fade into the woods. Men went over to the enemy. In the village commons at Crossed Elms, another of the ghastly feasts was found. Familiar with such sights by now, Ser Criston’s outriders