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.”

   But Lord Stark was no more inclined to listen to such talk than Aegon II and Queen Alicent had been. “Small boys become large men in time,” he replied, “and a babe sucks down his mother’s hate with his mother’s milk. Finish these foes now, or those of us not in our graves in twenty years will rue our folly when those babes strap on their father’s swords and come seeking after vengeance.”

Lord Velaryon would not be moved. “King Aegon said the same and died for it. Had he heeded our counsel and offered peace and pardon to his foes, he might be sitting with us here today.”

“Is that why you poisoned him, my lord?” asked the Lord of Winterfell. Though Cregan Stark had no personal history with the Sea Snake, for good or ill, he knew that Lord Corlys had served Rhaenyra as Queen’s Hand, that she had imprisoned him on suspicion of treason, that he had been freed by Aegon II and accepted a seat upon his council…only, it would seem, to help bring about his death by poison. “Small wonder you are called the Sea Snake,” Lord Stark went on. “You may slither this way and that way but, oh, your fangs are venomous. Aegon was an oathbreaker, a kinslayer, and a usurper, yet still a king. When he would not heed your craven’s counsel, you removed him as a craven would, dishonorably, with poison…and now you shall answer for it.”