Meanwhile, his enemies were on the march. Down the Neck came Cregan Stark, Lord of Winterfell, with a great host at his back (Septon Eustace speaks of “twenty thousand howling savages in shaggy pelts,” though Munkun lowers that to eight thousand in his True Telling), even as the Maiden of the Vale sent off her own army from Gulltown: ten thousand men, under the command of Lord Leowyn Corbray and his brother Ser Corwyn, who bore the famous Valyrian blade called Lady Forlorn.

The most immediate threat, however, was that posed by the men of the Trident. Near six thousand of them had gathered at Riverrun when Elmo Tully called his banners. Sadly, Lord Elmo himself had expired on the march after drinking some bad water, after only nine-and-forty days as Lord of Riverrun, but the lordship had passed to his eldest son, Ser Kermit Tully, a wild and headstrong youth eager to prove himself as a warrior. They were six days’ march from King’s Landing, moving down the kingsroad, when Lord Borros Baratheon led his stormlanders forth to meet them, his strength bolstered by levies from Stokeworth, Rosby, Hayford, and Duskendale, along with two thousand men and boys from the stews of Flea Bottom, hastily armed with spears and iron pot helms.

The two armies came together two days from the city, at a place where the kingsroad passed between a wood and a low hill. It had been raining heavily for days, and the grass was wet, the ground soft and muddy. Lord Borros was confident of victory, for his scouts had told him that the rivermen were led by boys and women. It was nigh unto dusk when he spied the enemy, yet he ordered an immediate attack…though the road ahead was a solid wall of shields, and the hill to its right bristled with archers. Lord Borros led the charge himself, forming his knights into a wedge and thundered down the road at the heart of the foe, where the silver trout of Riverrun floated on its blue and red banner beside the quartered arms of the dead queen. His foot advanced behind them, beneath King Aegon’s golden dragon.

The Citadel names the clash that followed the Battle of the Kingsroad. The men who fought it named it the Muddy Mess. By any name, the last battle of the Dance of the Dragons would prove to be a one-sided affair. The longbows on the hill shot the horses out from under Lord Borros’s knights as they charged, bringing down so many that less than half his riders ever reached the shield wall. Those that did found their ranks disordered, their wedge broken, their horses slipping and struggling in the soft mud. Though the stormlanders wreaked great havoc with lance and sword and longaxe, the riverlords held firm, as new men stepped up to fill the place of those who fell. When Lord Baratheon’s foot came crashing into the fray, the shield wall swayed and staggered back, and seemed as if it might break…until the wood to the left of the road erupted with shouts and screams, and hundreds more rivermen burst from the trees, led by that mad boy Benjicot Blackwood, who would this day earn the name Bloody Ben, by which he would be known for the rest of his long life.

Lord Borros himself was still ahorse in the middle of the carnage. When he saw the battle slipping away, his lordship bade his squire sound his warhorn, signaling his reserve to advance. Upon hearing the horn, however, the men of Rosby, Stokeworth, and Hayford let fall the king’s golden dragons and remained unmoving, the rabble from King’s Landing scattered like geese, and the knights of Duskendale went over to the foe, attacking the stormlanders in the rear. Battle turned to rout in half a heartbeat, as King Aegon’s last army shattered.

Borros Baratheon perished fighting. Unhorsed when his destrier was felled by arrows from Black Aly and her bowmen, he battled on afoot, cutting down countless men-at-arms, a dozen knights, and the Lords Mallister and Darry. By the time Kermit Tully came upon him, Lord Borros was dead upon his feet, bareheaded (he had ripped off his dented helm), bleeding from a score of wounds, scarce able to stand. “Yield, ser,” called the Lord of Riverrun to the Lord of Storm’s End, “the day is ours.” Lord Baratheon answered with a curse, saying, “I’d sooner dance in hell than wear your chains.” Then he charged…straight into the spiked iron ball at the end of Lord Kermit’s morningstar, which took him full in the face in a grisly spray of blood and bone and brain. The Lord of Storm’s End died in the mud along the kingsroad, his sword still in his hand.*

When the ravens brought word of the battle back to the Red Keep, the green council hurriedly convened. All of the Sea Snake’s warnings had proved true. Casterly Rock, Highgarden, and Oldtown had been slow to reply to the king’s demand for more armies. When they did, they offered excuses and prevarications in the place of promises. The Lannisters were embroiled in their war against the Red Kraken, the Hightowers had lost too many men and had no capable commanders, little Lord Tyrell’s mother wrote to say that she had reason to doubt the loyalty of her son’s bannermen, and “being a mere woman, am not myself fit to lead a host to war.” Ser Tyland Lannister, Ser Marston Waters, and Ser Julian Wormwood had been dispatched across the narrow sea to seek after sellswords in Pentos, Tyrosh, and Myr, but none had yet returned.

King Aegon II would soon stand naked before his enemies, all of the king’s men knew. Bloody Ben Blackwood, Kermit Tully, Sabitha Frey, and their brothers-in-victory were preparing to resume their advance upon the city, and only a few days behind them came Lord Cregan Stark and his northmen. The Braavosi fleet carrying the Arryn host had departed Gulltown and was sailing toward the Gullet, where only young Alyn Velaryon stood in its way…and the loyalty of Driftmark could not be relied upon.

“Your Grace,” the Sea Snake said, when the rump of the once proud green council had assembled, “you must surrender. The city cannot endure another sack. Save your people and save yourself. If you abdicate in favor of Prince Aegon, he will allow you to take the black and live out your life with honor on the Wall.”

“Will he?” King Aegon said. Munkun tells us he sounded hopeful.

His mother entertained no such hope. “You fed his mother to your dragon,” she reminded her son. “The boy saw it all.”

The king turned to her desperately. “What would you have me do?”

“You have hostages,” the Queen Dowager replied. “Cut off one of the boy’s ears and send it to Lord Tully. Warn them he will lose another part for every mile they advance.”

“Yes,” Aegon II said. “Good. It shall be done.” He summoned Ser Alfred Broome, who had served him so well on Dragonstone. “Go and see to it, ser.” As the knight took his leave, the king turned to Corlys Velaryon. “Tell your bastard to fight bravely, my lord. If he fails me, if any of these Braavosi pass the Gullet, your precious Lady Baela shall lose some parts as well.”

The Sea Snake did not plead, or curse, or threaten. He nodded stiffly, rose, and took his leave. Mushroom says he exchanged a look with the Clubfoot as he went, but Mushroom was not present, and it seems most unlikely that a man as seasoned as Corlys Velaryon would act so clumsily at such a moment.

For Aegon’s day was done, though he had yet to grasp it. The turncloaks in his midst had put their plans in motion the moment they learned of Lord Baratheon’s defeat upon the kingsroad.

As Ser Alfred Broome crossed the drawbridge to Maegor’s Holdfast, where Prince Aegon was being held, he found Ser Perkin the Flea and six of his gutter knights barring his way. “Move aside, in the king’s name,” Broome demanded.

“We have a new king now,” answered Ser Perkin. He put a hand upon Ser Alfred’s shoulder…then shoved him hard, sending him staggering off the drawbridge onto the iron spikes below, where he writhed and twisted for two days as he died.

In that same hour, Lady Baela Targaryen was being spirited away to safety by agents of Lord Larys the Clubfoot. Tom Tangletongue was surprised in the castle yards as he was leaving the stables, and beheaded forthwith. “He died as he had lived, stammering,” says Mushroom. His father Tom Tanglebeard was absent from the castle, but they found him in a tavern on Eel Alley. When he protested that he was “just a simple fisherman, come to have an ale,” his captors drowned him in a cask of same.