Second Battle of Tumbleton

After the first battle of Tumbleton, the city fell to two men who had betrayed it from within: Hugh Hammer and Ulf the White turned their own dragons, Vermithor and Silverwing, loose on the streets. The Greens who took over looted whatever was left standing and put the surrendered Blacks to the sword. Ser Hobert Hightower found himself in command of the green army after his cousin, Lord Ormund Hightower, fell in the earlier fighting. Prince Daeron was sickened by what he saw and ordered Hobert to rein his men in, but nothing came of it.

The green army, in theory the larger of the two sides loyal to Aegon II, rotted from its own stillness. Ulf and Hugh were in no hurry to escort Daeron to King's Landing; Lord Unwin Peake wanted to wait for reinforcements from Lord Borros Baratheon, and Hobert wanted to fall back into the Reach for supplies. While the commanders argued, the men deserted or fell sick.

Word of riots against Queen Rhaenyra's rule stirred the argument up again: the younger lords wanted to march at once, Hobert kept counselling patience, and the two traitors held their ground. When Hugh crowned himself king and had his men turn on one of their own, thirteen lords — the Caltrops — began plotting to be rid of the two low-born dragonriders.

Rhaenyra had disowned Addam Velaryon as soon as word of the Two Traitors got out, and Addam set out to scrub that stain away himself: retake Tumbleton. He left King's Landing on Seasmoke and, so the story goes, sought counsel from the green men of the Isle of Faces before turning west.

He rode from castle to castle across the Riverlands, taking in whoever he found: survivors of earlier battles, old men, even children. Benjicot Blackwood, Sabitha Vypren, Lord Stanton Piper, Lord Joseth Smallwood, Lord Derrick Darry and Lord Lyonel Deddings all lent him men. Hugo Vance arrived from Wayfarer's Rest with three hundred of his own soldiers and a company of Myrish sellswords.

The piece still missing was Riverrun. Lord Grover Tully, bedridden, refused to break his house's neutrality, but his grandson Ser Elmo Tully gave in once he saw Seasmoke arrive and heard what had happened at Tumbleton. With the Tullys added in, Addam had gathered close to four thousand river men.

The Caltrops had picked that night for their coup against Ulf and Hugh, and it was the din of that fight that woke the Greens at Tumbleton. Addam's four thousand men were outnumbered by the garrison, but they had surprise on their side: horsemen from the north and west, archers loosing out of the dark, and Seasmoke's flame falling on the camps and on whatever the earlier sack had left standing.

Ulf was asleep in an inn when it started. Hugh ran for the stables to reach Vermithor but was cut down first by one of the Caltrops, Lord Jon Roxton. Prince Daeron died in his camp west of the city; no two accounts agree on how. The Blacks tried to kill Vermithor and Silverwing while they slept south of Tumbleton and failed: riderless, Vermithor tore through twenty knights and then took wing, burning both sides without distinction. Lords Stanton Piper and Lyonel Deddings burned to death.

Addam and Seasmoke had spent some time trading blows with Tessarion, Daeron's dragon, in a quick, evasive duel. When he saw Vermithor loose, Addam turned toward the larger dragon instead. Benjicot Blackwood thought Seasmoke stood no chance, but Tessarion joined the fight too, and the three beasts ended up tangled together. Vermithor killed Seasmoke and collapsed dead himself soon after. Tessarion's wounds left her unable to fly, so Blackwood had his archer Billy Burley put her down. By the time night fell, the battle was over.

The victory belonged to the Blacks, but it was an incomplete one. The river lords lost fewer than a hundred men against more than a thousand dead in Hobert Hightower's ranks, and still failed to retake Tumbleton: the surviving Greens shut themselves inside and sealed the gates, and Addam, with no siege engines, had to pull back that same night. Of the four dragons that had fought, only Silverwing was left.

The Caltrops finished their plot by poisoning the wine of both Hobert and Ulf, killing them. Lord Unwin Peake inherited command of an army already coming apart through desertion, and eventually marched what was left of it back south, ending the green threat to King's Landing.

Addam's sacrifice had saved the capital from the Hightower army, but not from panic: fear of the Greens set off riots in King's Landing that cost the Blacks the city anyway. Around the same time Lord Grover Tully died, and Ser Elmo became, briefly, Lord of Riverrun. The river army regrouped there almost whole, and within two months had added the Mallisters and the Brackens to reach near six thousand men, with whom it marched east to meet the Baratheon host at the battle of the Kingsroad.