streets, Moredo Rogare had great difficulty communicating with his own troops; the men did not understand his commands, and he did not understand their reports. Chaos ensued.
At the other end of the Vale, meanwhile, the high road through the mountains proved far less open than had been assumed. Ser Robert Rowan’s host found itself struggling through deep snows in the higher passes, slowing their advance to a crawl, and time and time again their baggage train came under attack by the savages native to those mountains (descendants of the First Men driven from the Vale by the Andals thousands of years before). “They were skeletons in skins, armed with stone axes and wooden clubs,” Ben Blackwood said later, “but so hungry and so desperate that they could not be deterred, no matter how many we killed.” Soon the cold and the snow and the nightly attacks began to take a toll.
High in the mountains, the unthinkable happened one night as Lord Robert and his men huddled about their campfires. In the slopes above, a cave mouth was visible from the road, and a dozen men climbed up to see if it might offer them shelter from the wind. The bones scattered about the mouth of the cave might have given them pause, yet they pressed on…and roused a dragon.
Sixteen men perished in the fight that followed, and threescore more suffered burns before the angry brown wyrm took wing and fled deeper into the mountains with “a ragged woman clinging to its back.” That was the last known sighting of Sheepstealer and his rider, Nettles, recorded in the annals of Westeros…though the wildlings of the mountains still tell tales of a “fire witch” who once dwelled in a hidden vale far from any road or village. One of the most savage of the mountain clan came to worship her, the storytellers say; youths would prove their courage by bringing gifts to her, and were only accounted men when they returned with burns to show that they had faced the dragon woman in her lair.
Their encounter with the dragon was not the last peril encountered by Ser Robert’s host. By the time they reached the Bloody Gate, a third of them had perished in a wildling attack or died from cold or hunger. Amongst the dead was Ser Robert Rowan, crushed by a falling boulder when the clansmen toppled half a mountainside down upon the column. Bloody Ben Blackwood assumed command upon his death. Though still a half year shy of manhood, Lord Blackwood by this time had as much experience of war as men four times his age. At the Bloody Gate, the entrance to the Vale, the survivors found food, warmth, and welcome…but Ser Joffrey Arryn, the Knight of the Bloody Gate and Lady Jeyne Arryn’s chosen successor, saw at once that the crossing had left Blackwood’s men unfit for battle. Far from being a help to him in his war, they would be a burden.
Even as the fighting in the Vale of Arryn continued, the promise of the Lysene Spring suffered another grievous blow hundreds of leagues to the south, with the near-simultaneous demise of Lysandro the Magnificent in Lys and his brother Drazenko in Sunspear. Though the narrow sea lay between them, the two Rogares died within a day of each other, both under suspicious circumstances. Drazenko perished first, choking to death upon a piece of bacon. Lysandro drowned when his opulent barge sank whilst carrying him from his Perfumed Garden back to his palace. Though a few would insist that their deaths were unfortunate accidents, many more took the manner and timing of their passings as proof of a plot to bring down House Rogare. The Faceless Men of Braavos were widely believed to have been responsible for the killings; no more subtle assassins were known to exist anywhere in the wide world.
But if indeed the Faceless Men had done these deeds, at whose bidding had they acted? The Iron Bank of Braavos was suspected, as was the Archon of Tyrosh, Racallio Ryndoon, and various merchant princes and magisters of Lys known to have chafed under the “velvet tyranny” of Lysandro the Magnificent. Some went so far as to suggest that the First Magister had been removed by his own sons (he had sired six trueborn sons, three daughters, and sixteen bastards). So skillfully had the brothers been removed, however, that not even the fact of murder could be proved.
None of the offices through which