Whilst plots and counterplots swirled around him, and enemies closed in from every side, Aegon II remained oblivious. The king was not a well man. The burns he’d suffered at Rook’s Rest had left scars that covered half his body. Mushroom says they had rendered him impotent as well. Nor could he walk. His leap from Sunfyre’s back at Dragonstone had broken his right leg in two places, and shattered the bones in his left. The right had healed well, Grand Maester Orwyle records; not so the left. The muscles of that leg had atrophied, the knee stiffening, the flesh melting away until only a withered stick remained, so twisted that Orwyle thought His Grace might do better were it cut away entirely. The king would not hear of it, however. Instead he was carried hither and yon by litter. Only toward the end did he regain the strength to walk with the aid of a crutch, dragging his bad leg behind him.

   In constant pain during the last half year of his life, Aegon seemed to take pleasure only in contemplating his forthcoming marriage. Even the capers of his fools never made him laugh, we are told by Mushroom, the foremost of those fools…though “His Grace did smile from time to time at my sallies, and liked to keep me by his side to lighten his melancholy and help him dress.” Though no longer himself capable of sexual congress due to his burns, according to the dwarf, Aegon still felt carnal urges, and would often watch from behind a curtain as one of his favorites coupled with a serving girl or lady of the court. Most often Tom Tangletongue performed this task for him, we are told; at other times certain knights of the household took the place of dishonor, and thrice Mushroom himself was pressed into service. After these sessions, the fool says, the king would weep for shame and summon Septon Eustace to grant him absolution. (Eustace says nothing of this in his own account of Aegon’s final days.)

During this time King Aegon II also commanded that the Dragonpit be restored and rebuilt, commissioned two huge statues of his brothers Aemond and Daeron (he decreed they should be larger than the Titan of Braavos, and covered in gold leaf), and held a public burning of all the decrees and proclamations issued by the “dayfly kings” Trystan Truefyre and Gaemon Palehair.

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.