Battle of the Bells

Robert was coming off the defeat at Ashford, on the border between the Reach and the Stormlands, and was trying to reach the Starks, the Tullys and the Arryns. Almost nothing is known about that stretch of the road, except that he arrived at Stoney Sept wounded and chose to hide there just before the fighting began.

Jon Connington, Hand of the King, took the town and had it searched house by house. Robert still hadn't turned up when the combined army of Eddard Stark and Hoster Tully arrived, and the clash was brutal: Connington wounded Tully and killed Denys Arryn, heir to his cousin Jon Arryn. Robert then appeared and cut down Myles Mooton himself. With the battle lost, Connington pulled back with what was left of his men. Years later, Harwin would tell Arya Stark that Robert always maintained the victory had belonged to her father, not to him.

That the royalist army managed to retreat largely intact, after such a vicious fight with its troops scattered across the town, was close to a logistical miracle. King Aerys II Targaryen didn't care: he stripped Connington of his lands and titles and sent him into exile. The defeat made it clear that Robert was more than a simple outlaw now: to House Targaryen he had become the gravest threat since the days of Daemon Blackfyre. Aerys then sent Jonothor Darry and Barristan Selmy to Stoney Sept to gather what they could of the scattered royalist forces.

In exile, Connington kept turning the outcome over in his mind. He thought Tywin Lannister, in his place, would have put the whole town to the torch, ending the rebellion outright — Robert dead before Stark, Arryn and Tully could reach him. He chose instead to search door by door, hoping to take him alive: he didn't want to go down in history as the man who burned a whole population alive.