Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) - George R.R. Martin Page 0,253

find himself the last dragonrider, and possessed of the last dragon.

“The Hammer’s dead, and your boy as well,” he is purported to have told Lord Peake. “All you got left is me.” When Lord Peake asked him his intentions, White replied, “We march, just how you wanted. You take the city, I’ll take the bloody throne, how’s that?”

The next morning, Ser Hobert Hightower called upon him, to thrash out the details of their assault upon King’s Landing. He brought with him two casks of wine as a gift, one of Dornish red and one of Arbor gold. Though Ulf the Sot had never tasted a wine he did not like, he was known to be partial to the sweeter vintages. No doubt Ser Hobert hoped to sip the sour red whilst Lord Ulf quaffed down the Arbor gold. Yet something about Hightower’s manner—he was sweating and stammering and too hearty by half, the squire who served them testified later—pricked White’s suspicions. Wary, he commanded that the Dornish red be set aside for later, and insisted Ser Hobert share the Arbor gold with him.

History has little good to say about Ser Hobert Hightower, but no man can question the manner of his death. Rather than betray his fellow Caltrops, he let the squire fill his cup, drank deep, and asked for more. Once he saw Hightower drink, Ulf the Sot lived up to his name, putting down three cups before he began to yawn. The poison in the wine was a gentle one. When Lord Ulf went to sleep, never to awaken, Ser Hobert lurched to his feet and tried to make himself retch, but too late. His heart stopped within the hour. “No man ever feared Ser Hobert’s sword,” Mushroom says of him, “but his wine cup was deadlier than Valyrian steel.”

Afterward Lord Unwin Peake offered a thousand golden dragons to any knight of noble birth who could claim Silverwing. Three men came forth. When the first had his arm torn off and the second burned to death, the third man reconsidered. By that time Peake’s army, the remnants of the great host that Prince Daeron and Lord Ormund Hightower had led all the way from Oldtown, was falling to pieces, as deserters fled Tumbleton by the score with all the plunder they could carry. Bowing to defeat, Lord Unwin summoned his lords and serjeants and ordered a retreat.

The accused turncloak Addam Velaryon, born Addam of Hull, had saved King’s Landing from the queen’s foes…at the cost of his own life. Yet the queen knew nothing of his valor. Rhaenyra’s flight from King’s Landing had been beset with difficulty. At Rosby, she found the castle gates barred at her approach, by the command of the young woman whose claim she had passed over in favor of a younger brother. Young Lord Stokeworth’s castellan granted her hospitality, but only for a night. “They will come for you,” he warned the queen, “and I do not have the power to resist them.” Half of her gold cloaks deserted on the road, and one night her camp was attacked by broken men. Though her knights beat off the attackers, Ser Balon Byrch was felled by an arrow, and Ser Lyonel Bentley, a young knight of the Queensguard, suffered a blow to the head that cracked his helm. He perished raving the following day. The queen pressed on toward Duskendale.

House Darklyn had been amongst Rhaenyra’s strongest supporters, but the cost of that loyalty had been high. Lord Gunthor had lost his life in the queen’s service, as had his uncle Steffon. Duskendale itself had been sacked by Ser Criston Cole. Small wonder then that Lord Gunthor’s widow was less than overjoyed when Her Grace appeared at her gates. Only the intercession of Ser Harrold Darke persuaded Lady Meredyth to allow the queen within her walls at all (the Darkes were distant kin to the Darklyns, and Ser Harrold had once served as a squire to the late Ser Steffon), and only upon the condition that she would not remain for long.

Once safely behind the walls of the Dun Fort, overlooking the harbor, Rhaenyra commanded Lady Darklyn’s maester to send word to Grand Maester Gerardys on Dragonstone, asking that a ship be sent at once to take her home. Three ravens flew, the town chronicles assert…yet as the days passed, no ship appeared. Nor did any reply return from Gerardys on Dragonstone, to the queen’s fury. Once again she began to question her