Having slain the knight and seized the boy, however, the mob did not know what to do with their prize. Queen Rhaenyra had offered a great reward for his return, some recalled, but King’s Landing was long leagues away. Lord Hightower’s army was much closer. Perhaps he would pay even more. When someone asked if the reward was the same whether the boy was alive or dead, Willow Pound-Stone clutched Maelor tighter and said no one was going to hurt her new son. (Mushroom tells us the woman was a monster thirty stone in weight, simpleminded and half-mad, who’d earned her name pounding clothes clean in the river.) Then Sly came shoving through the crowd, covered in his master’s blood, to declare the prince was his, as he’d been the one to find the egg. The crossbowman whose bolt had slain Ser Rickard Thorne made a claim as well. And so they argued, shouting and shoving above the knight’s corpse.

With so many present on the bridge, it is not surprising that we have many differing accounts of what befell Maelor Targaryen. Mushroom tells us that Willow Pound-Stone clutched the boy so tightly that she broke his back and crushed him to death. Septon Eustace does not so much as mention Willow, however. In his account, the town butcher hacked the prince into six pieces with his cleaver, so all those fighting over him could have a piece. Grand Maester Munkun’s True Telling says that the boy was torn limb from limb by the mob, but names no names.

All we know for certain is that by the time Lady Caswell and her knights appeared to chase off the mob, the prince was dead. Her ladyship went pale at the sight of him, Mushroom tells us, saying, “The gods will curse us all for this.” At her command, Sly the stableboy and Willow Pound-Stone were hanged from the center span of the old bridge, along with the man who had owned the horse Ser Rickard had stolen from the inn, who was (wrongly) thought to have assisted Thorne’s escape. Ser Rickard’s corpse, wrapped in his white cloak, Lady Caswell sent back to King’s Landing, together with Prince Maelor’s head. The dragon’s egg she sent to Lord Hightower at Longtable, in the hopes it might assuage his wroth.

Mushroom, who loved the queen well, tells us that Rhaenyra wept when Maelor’s small head was placed before her as she sat the Iron Throne. Septon Eustace, who loved her little, says rather that she smiled, and commanded that the head be burned, “for he was the blood of the dragon.” Though no announcement of the boy’s death was made, word of his demise nonetheless spread throughout the city. And soon another tale was told as well, one that claimed Queen Rhaenyra had the prince’s head delivered to his mother, Queen Helaena, in a chamberpot. Though the story had no truth in it, soon it was on every pair of lips in King’s Landing. Mushroom puts this down as the Clubfoot’s work. “A man who gathers whispers can spread them just as well.”

Beyond the city walls, fighting continued throughout the Seven Kingdoms. Faircastle fell to Dalton Greyjoy, and with it Fair Isle’s last resistance to the ironborn. The Red Kraken claimed four of Lord Farman’s daughters as salt wives and gave the fifth (“the homely one”) to his brother Veron. Farman and his sons were ransomed back to Casterly Rock for their weights in silver. In the Reach, Lady Merryweather yielded Longtable to Lord Ormund Hightower; true to his word, 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 grimaced and rode past, paying no heed to the rotting dead…until the corpses sprang up and fell upon them. A dozen died before they realized it had all been a ploy, the work (as was learned later) of a Myrish sellsword in the service of Lord Vance, a former mummer called Black Trombo.

All this was but prelude, for the Lords of the Trident had been gathering their forces. When Ser Criston left the lake behind, striking out overland for the Blackwater, he found them waiting atop a stony ridge; three hundred mounted knights in armor, as many longbowmen, three thousand archers, three thousand ragged rivermen with spears, hundreds of northmen brandishing axes, mauls, spiked maces, and ancient iron swords. Above their heads flew Queen Rhaenyra’s banners. “Who are they?” a squire asked when the foe appeared, for they showed no arms but the queen’s.