Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) - George R.R. Martin Page 0,290

out from the city with half a hundred seasoned men. At Castle Darry, he was joined by Ser Damon Darry with a like number. Rashly, Ser Regis assumed this would be more than sufficient to deal with a few squatters.

Arriving before the walls of Harrenhal, however, he found the gates closed and hundreds of armed men on the battlements. There were at least six hundred souls within the castle, a third of them men of fighting age. When Ser Regis demanded to speak to their lord, a woman emerged to treat with him, with a child beside her. The “witch queen” of Harrenhal proved to be none other than Alys Rivers, the baseborn wet nurse who had been the prisoner and then the paramour of Prince Aemond Targaryen, and now claimed to be his widow. The boy was Aemond’s, she told the knight. “His bastard?” said Ser Regis. “His trueborn son and heir,” Alys Rivers spat back, “and the rightful king of Westeros.” She commanded the knight to “kneel before your king” and swear him his sword. Ser Regis laughed at this, saying, “I do not kneel to bastards, much less the baseborn whelp of a kinslayer and a milk cow.”

What happened next remains a matter of some dispute. Some say that Alys Rivers merely raised a hand, and Ser Regis began to scream and clutch his head, until his skull burst apart, spraying blood and brains. Others insist the widow’s gesture was a signal, at which a crossbowman on the battlements let fly a bolt that took Ser Regis through an eye. Mushroom (who was hundreds of leagues away) has suggested that perhaps one of the men on the walls was skilled in the use of a sling. Soft lead balls, when slung with sufficient force, have been known to cause the sort of explosive effect that Groves’s men saw and attributed to sorcery.

Whatever the case, Ser Regis Groves was dead in an instant. Half a heartbeat later, the gates of Harrenhal burst open, and a swarm of howling riders charged forth. A bloody fight ensued. The king’s men were put to rout. Ser Damon Darry, being well-horsed, well-armored, and well-trained, was one of the few to escape. The witch queen’s minions hunted him all through the night before abandoning the chase. Some thirty-two men lived to return to Castle Darry, of the hundred that had set out.

The next day, a thirty-third made his appearance. Having been captured with a dozen others, he had been forced to watch them die by torture one by one before being turned loose to deliver a warning. “I’m to tell you what she said,” he gasped, “but you can’t laugh. The widow put a curse on me. Any man o’ you laughs, I die.” When Ser Damon assured him that no one was going to laugh at him, the messenger said, “Don’t come again unless you mean to bend your knees, she says. Any man who comes near her walls will die. There’s power in them stones, and the widow’s woken it. Seven save us all, she has a dragon. I seen it.”

The name of the messenger is lost to us, along with the name of the man who laughed. But someone did, one of Lord Darry’s men. The messenger looked at him, stricken, then clutched at his throat and began to wheeze. Unable to draw breath, he was dead in moments. Supposedly the imprints of a woman’s fingers could be seen upon his skin, as if she had been in the room, choking him.

The death of a Kingsguard knight was greatly troubling to Ser Tyland, though Unwin Peake discounted Ser Damon Darry’s talk of sorcery and dragons and put down the death of Regis Groves and his men to outlaws. The other regents concurred. A stronger force would be required to root them out of Harrenhal, they concluded as that “peaceful” year of 132 AC came to its end. But before Ser Tyland could organize such an assault, or even consider who might take Ser Regis’s place in Aegon’s Seven, a threat far worse than any “witch queen” descended on the city. For on the third day of 133 AC, Winter Fever arrived in King’s Landing.

Whether or not the fever had been born in the dark forests of Ib and brought to Westeros by a whaler, as the Sistermen believed, it was assuredly moving from port to port. White Harbor, Gulltown, Maidenpool, and Duskendale had been afflicted, each in turn;