Riding beside them, from the banks of the Trident to the gates of King’s Landing, was an even younger man: Benjicot Blackwood, Lord of Raventree. Bloody Ben, as his men had taken to calling him, was only thirteen, an age at which most highborn boys are still squires, grooming their master’s horses and scouring the rust from their mail. Lordship had fallen to him early, when his father Lord Samwell Blackwood had been slain by Ser Amos Bracken at the Battle of the Burning Mill. Despite his youth, the boy lord had refused to delegate authority to older men. At the Fishfeed he had famously wept at the sight of so many dead, yet he did not flinch from battle afterward, but rather sought it out. His men had helped to drive Criston Cole from Harrenhal by hunting down his foragers, he had commanded the center at Second Tumbleton, and during the Muddy Mess he had led the flank attack from the woods that had broken Lord Baratheon’s stormlanders and won the day. Clad for court, it was said, Lord Benjicot was very much a boy, tall for his age but slight of build, with a sensitive face and a shy, self-effacing manner; clad in mail-and-plate, Bloody Ben was an altogether different man, and one who had seen more of the battlefield at thirteen than most men do in their entire lives.

There were, to be sure, other lords and famous knights amongst the host that Corlys Velaryon confronted outside the Gate of the Gods that day in 131 AC, all of them older and some of them wiser than Bloody Ben Blackwood and the brothers Tully, yet somehow the three youths had emerged from the Muddy Mess as the undoubted leaders. Bound by battle, the three had become so inseparable that their men began referring to them collectively as “the Lads.”

Amongst their supporters were two extraordinary women: Alysanne Blackwood, called Black Aly, a sister to the late Lord Samwell Blackwood, and thus aunt to Bloody Ben, and Sabitha Frey, the Lady of the Twins, the widow of Lord Forrest Frey and mother of his heir, a “sharp-featured, sharp-tongued harridan of House Vypren, who would sooner ride than dance, wore mail instead of silk, and was fond of killing men and kissing women,” according to Mushroom.

The Lads knew Lord Corlys Velaryon only by reputation, but that reputation was formidable. Having arrived at King’s Landing with the expectation that they would need to besiege the city or take it by storm, they were delighted (if surprised) to have it presented to them as on a gilded platter…and to learn that Aegon II was dead (though Benjicot Blackwood and his aunt both expressed disquiet about the manner of his death, for poison was regarded as a coward’s weapon, and lacking in honor). Glad cries rang down the field as word of the king’s death spread, and one by one the Lord of the Trident and their allies came forward to bend their knees before Prince Aegon and hail him as their king.

As the riverlords rode through the city, smallfolk cheered them from rooftops and balconies, and pretty girls scampered forward to shower their saviors with kisses (like mummers in a farce, says Mushroom, suggesting all this had been devised by Larys Strong). The gold cloaks lined the streets, lowering their spears as the Lads rode by. Within the Red Keep, the Lads found the dead king’s body laid out upon a bier beneath the Iron Throne, with his mother, Queen Alicent, weeping beside it. What remained of Aegon’s court had gathered in the hall, amongst them Lord Larys Strong the Clubfoot, Grand Maester Orwyle, Ser Perkin the Flea, Mushroom, Septon Eustace, Ser Gyles Belgrave and four other Kingsguard, and sundry lesser lords and household knights. Orwyle spoke for them, hailing the riverlords as deliverers.

Elsewhere in the crownlands and along the narrow sea, the dead king’s remaining loyalists were yielding too. The Braavosi landed Lord Leowyn Corbray at Duskendale, with half the power that Lady Arryn had sent down from the Vale; the other half disembarked at Maidenpool under his brother, Ser Corwyn Corbray. Both towns welcomed the Arryn hosts with feasts and flowers. Stokeworth and Rosby fell bloodlessly, hauling down the golden dragon of Aegon II to raise the red dragon of Aegon III. Dragonstone’s garrison proved more stubborn, barring their gates and vowing defiance. They held out for three days and two nights. On the third night the castle’s grooms, cooks, and serving men took up arms and rose against the king’s men, slaughtering many as they slept and delivering the rest in chains to young Alyn Velaryon.

Septon Eustace tells us that a “strange euphoria” took hold of King’s Landing; Mushroom simply says that “half the city was drunk.” The corpse of King Aegon II was consigned to the flames, in the hopes that all the ills and hatreds of his reign might be burned away with his remains. Thousands climbed Aegon’s High Hill to hear Prince Aegon proclaim that peace was at hand. A lavish coronation was planned for the boy, to be followed by his wedding to the Princess Jaehaera. A cloud of ravens rose from the Red Keep, summoning the poisoned king’s remaining loyalists in Oldtown, the Reach, Casterly Rock, and Storm’s End to King’s Landing to do homage to their new monarch. Safe conducts were given, full pardons promised. The realm’s new rulers found themselves divided on the question of what to do with the Dowager Queen Alicent, but elsewise all seemed in accord, and good fellowship reigned…for the best part of a fortnight.

The “False Dawn,” Grand Maester Munkun names it in his True Telling. A heady time, no doubt, but short-lived…for when Lord Cregan Stark arrived before King’s Landing with his northmen, the frolics ended, and the happy plans came crashing down. The Lord of Winterfell was twenty-three, only a few years older than the Lords of Raventree and Riverrun…yet Stark was a man and they were boys, as all those who saw them together seemed to sense. The Lads shrank in his presence, Mushroom says. “Whenever the Wolf of the North stalked into a room, Bloody Ben would recall that he was but three-and-ten, whilst Lord Tully and his brother blustered and stammered and flushed red as their hair.”

King’s Landing had welcomed the riverlords and their men with feasts and flowers and honors. Not so the northmen. There were more of them, for a start: a host twice as large as those the Lads had led, and with a fearsome repute. In their mail shirts and shaggy fur cloaks, their features hidden behind thick tangles of beard, they swaggered through the city like so many armored bears, says Mushroom. Most of what King’s Landing knew of northmen they had learned from Ser Medrick Manderly and his brother Ser Torrhen; courtly men, well-spoken, handsomely clad, well disciplined, and godly. The Winterfell men did not even honor the true gods, Septon Eustace notes with horror. They scorned the Seven, ignored the feast days, mocked the holy books, showed no reverence to septon or septa, worshipped trees.

Two years past, Cregan Stark had made a promise to Prince Jacaerys. Now he had come to make good his pledge, though Jace and the queen his mother were both dead. “The North remembers,” Lord Stark declared when Prince Aegon, Lord Corlys, and the Lads bid him welcome. “You come too late, my lord,” the Sea Snake told him, “for the war is done, and the king is dead.” Septon Eustace, who stood witness to the meeting, tells us that the Lord of Winterfell “gazed upon the old Lord of the Tides with eyes as grey and cold as a winter storm, and said, ‘By whose hand and at whose word, I wonder?’ For the savages had come for blood and battle, as we would all learn shortly, to our sorrow.”

The good septon was not wrong. Others had started this war, Lord Cregan was heard to say, but he meant to finish it, to continue south and destroy all that remained of the greens who had placed Aegon II on the Iron Throne and fought to keep him there. He would reduce Storm’s End first, then cross the Reach to take Oldtown. Once the Hightower had fallen, he would take his wolves north along the shores of the Sunset Sea to visit Casterly Rock.

“A bold plan,” Grand Maester Orwyle said cautiously, when he heard it. Mushroom prefers “madness,” but adds, “they called Aegon the Dragon mad when he spoke of conquering all Westeros.” When Kermit Tully pointed out that Storm’s End, Oldtown, and Casterly Rock were as strong as Stark’s own Winterfell (if not stronger) and would not fall easily (if at all), and young Ben Blackwood echoed him and said, “Half your men will die, Lord Stark,” the grey-eyed Wolf of Winterfell replied, “They died the day we marched, boy.”

Like the Winter Wolves before them, most of the men who had marched south with Lord Cregan Stark did not expect to see their homes again. The snows were already deep beyond the Neck, the cold winds rising; in keeps and castles and humble villages throughout the North, the great and small alike prayed to their carved wooden god-trees that this winter might be short. Those with fewer mouths to feed fared better in the dark days, so it had long been the custom in the North for old men, younger sons, the unwed, the childless, the homeless, and the hopeless to leave hearth and home when the first snows fell, so that their kin might live to see another spring. Victory was secondary to the men of these winter armies; they marched for glory, adventure, plunder, and most of all, a worthy end.

Once more it fell to Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, to plead for peace, pardon, and reconciliation. “The killing has gone on too long,” the old man said. “Rhaenyra and Aegon are dead. Let their quarrel die with them. You speak of taking Storm’s End, Oldtown, and Casterly Rock, my lord, but the men who held those seats were slain in battle, every one. Small boys and suckling babes sit in their places now, no threat to us. Grant them honorable terms, and they will bend the knee.”