Chapter 13: Old Wyk
Old Wyk held no particular strategic value in the conventional sense. It wasn't central like Pyke, and it lacked the mineral wealth — lead, tin, iron — that made Great Wyk and Harlaw worth holding. But to the ironborn it was something that couldn't be measured in resources, which made it more valuable than any of those things.
This was where the First Men had found the Seastone Chair when they first came to these islands — the throne that meant kingship over all the Iron Islands, carved from some black stone that predated memory.
This was where the Grey King's Great Hall stood, the ancient site of the Kingsmoot, where the ironborn gathered in times without a king to choose one by the old way. It was here that Balon Greyjoy had knelt before the drowned men and received the blessing that made him king in his own eyes.
Taking Old Wyk wouldn't win the war. But it would tear something out of Balon that gold and ships couldn't replace.
Old Wyk was House Drumm's island. Their seat — Drumm Keep — sat hard against the cliffs on the northeastern corner, the steep coastline doing half the work of defense for them.
After half a day at sea, Barristan's fleet rounded the headland and put soldiers onto the northeastern beach. The vanguard came in fast across twenty small boats, scattering the coastal defenders in minutes. What remained of the island's garrison pulled back behind Drumm Keep's walls and bolted the gates.
Barristan landed with the main force and immediately set his engineers to work — trenches around the walls, timber details sent out to find whatever wood the island offered, men building rams and ladders. He'd have preferred proper siege towers and catapults, but the Iron Islands were not a land of forests. The trees that had once covered Great Wyk and Harlaw had been cut down generation by generation for shipbuilding until the islands were as bare as the grey rock underneath. What grew here now was scrub and wild grass and the stubborn coastal plants that could live on salt spray and wind. The maesters had written about this for centuries — the ironborn reaped because they had to, in the beginning. The islands couldn't feed them, couldn't clothe them, couldn't timber them. Everything they needed existed on the green shores of Westeros, and at some point a longship and a sword had seemed more reliable than a trading agreement.
By now it had become something they called holy. But it had started as hunger.
Henry didn't join the siege of Drumm Keep. Barristan had other plans for him.
He took his company around the island by longship, following the coastline south and west until the sacred ground of Nagga's Cradle came into view — a stretch of pale shore at the southwestern end of the island, where no ironborn fortification had ever been built. In the ironborn understanding of things, the Drowned God himself protected this ground. Mortal soldiers were unnecessary.
Henry's men landed without resistance.
The path up from the shore wound through coarse grass and sea-pinks, climbing to the crown of Nagga's Hill. Henry took it at a walk, looking at what surrounded him as he went.
Forty-four stone ribs rose from the hillside — massive, pale, worn smooth by centuries of coastal weather. Each one was as thick as a ship's mast and twice the height of a man. They protruded from the earth in a rough oval, the bones of something vast that had died here long enough ago that the stone had swallowed them whole.
The ironborn called this Nagga — the first Sea Dragon, older than the world as they reckoned it, a creature that fed on krakens and could raise waves large enough to drown islands when it was angry. Their ancestor the Grey King had killed it barehanded, according to the songs. The Drowned God had turned its bones to stone so that the ironborn would never forget.
Henry looked at the ribs and thought, as he often did when ironborn mythology became too elaborate, that these were more likely the fossilized remains of some ancient sea creature that the ironborn had found protruding from the ground and decided to build a religion around. The Iron Islands were old. Strange things died in old places.
The Great Hall of the Grey King stood at the center of the stone ribs — or what remained of it. The roof had mostly gone. The walls had crumbled in sections. What had once been hung with tapestries and furnished with chairs of mother-of-pearl was now open to the sky, grass growing through the floor stones, the wind moving through it unimpeded.
A handful of drowned men were kneeling in prayer among the ruins when Henry arrived. They wore the particular uniform of their calling — ragged robes of coarse cloth with hems that trailed in the dirt like wet seaweed, hair and beards matted with salt and grit and actual seaweed woven in by hand, bare feet cracked and calloused from decades on rough stone and sharp shells. They looked, to any outside eye, entirely indistinguishable from madmen. They probably were, by some measures.
They did not stop praying when Henry's soldiers appeared. They didn't stop when the soldiers surrounded them. They looked up only when it became clear what was happening, and then two of them began shouting prophecies, and one began to laugh, and none of them ran.
Henry ordered it done quickly and moved on.
The survivors — a few ironborn who'd been on the hill when the soldiers arrived and had better survival instincts than the drowned men — fled down the other side and into the scrubland. Henry let them go. They would carry the news to Balon before nightfall. That was the point.
Balon Greyjoy was currently watching his seat at Pyke come under assault from Robert Baratheon's main force. He was about to learn that someone had taken his holy ground, desecrated his coronation site, and was sitting in the ruins of the Grey King's hall.
Ironborn followed strength. A king who couldn't protect the sacred places that justified his claim to kingship would find his support bleeding away in exactly the way he could least afford.
Henry sat in the doorway of the ruined hall and looked out at the grey sea and waited to see what Balon would do.
Two days. The men rested, ate, recovered what the fighting and the sailing had taken from them. Then Henry broke camp and marched back north to rejoin Barristan's siege lines.
They were halfway there when Corlen came riding back from the forward scout position at a canter.
"Ships, my lord." He pulled up and turned his horse. "Sixteen ironborn longships coming around the northern headland. Red sails — there's a device on them, a white hand, looks like bones."
"House Drumm," Maester Winston said, from his place in the column. He'd acquired a set of ironborn plate armor somewhere over the past week — captured kit, fitted after a fashion — and looked considerably less like a starved prisoner than he had at Blacktyde Keep. Sitting a horse in armor, he could almost pass for a soldier if you didn't look closely at the maester's chain still hanging over the gorget. "They've heard Drumm Keep is under siege and they're coming back to relieve it. They'll be looking to beach as fast as possible — they won't be expecting resistance on the shore."
Henry was already looking at the coastline, calculating distances.
"A ship's company doesn't fight well the moment it steps off a gangplank," Winston continued, with the particular confidence of a man who has read extensively about military matters and is pleased to have a practical application. "Formation takes time. If we hit them while they're still coming ashore—"
"We hit them on the beach," Henry said. He drew his sword. "Form up."
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