The Fall of King's Landing

The bells rang for surrender, and the dragon kept going.

Why it came to this

The alliance that survived the Long Night went south immediately and in poor condition. Half of it was dead, its cavalry arm was gone, its infantry was a foreign professional force in a country that regarded it as an occupation, and its commander had just spent everything she had to save a kingdom that had not thanked her. Cersei Lannister, who had promised armies to the north and sent none, had spent the same period buying the Golden Company out of Essos with HighgardenÔÇÖs gold ÔÇö twenty thousand disciplined sellswords, the best in the free cities, delivered to KingÔÇÖs Landing by Euron GreyjoyÔÇÖs fleet.

Then came a fortnight that removed every restraint. The Targaryen fleet was ambushed at sea by Euron with the rebuilt scorpions, and Daenerys lost a dragon and much of her fleet in a single engagement. Her closest friend was taken and executed on the walls of the city, in front of her, as a deliberate provocation. Her chief adviser had already begun corresponding against her; her other adviser kept negotiating for terms with the woman who had done all of this. And the man she loved had turned out to have a better claim to her throne than she did and had told his family about it.

The negotiations that followed were real. Tyrion Lannister made an arrangement in good faith: if the cityÔÇÖs bells were rung and its gates opened, the assault would be halted and the surrender accepted. He got that promise from Daenerys and he made the arrangement possible from inside by way of his brother. Everything after the bells is what the whole show argues about, and it should be said plainly that neither the arrangement nor the crime that followed it appears anywhere in the published novels.

The ground and the hosts

KingÔÇÖs Landing is a walled city on a bay with a river mouth beneath it, half a million people inside, and a fortress at the top of the hill. Its defences are excellent against armies. Its dependency, as the Blackwater had already demonstrated once, is that everything in it ÔÇö the wooden districts, the caches, the population ÔÇö is combustible and cannot be moved.

CerseiÔÇÖs defensive plan was built on three things and each of them was reasonable. EuronÔÇÖs fleet lay in the bay with heavy scorpions mounted, having already proved on open water that they could kill a dragon. More scorpions lined the city walls in numbers. And the Golden Company was drawn up outside the main gate under Harry Strickland to meet the assault in the field. Behind all of that she had brought the population of the surrounding countryside inside the walls and housed a great many of them in the Red KeepÔÇÖs outer yard, on the calculation that an attacker who wished to rule the city afterward would not destroy it with the smallfolk in it. That calculation was not stupid. It was simply made about the wrong person on the wrong week.

The attacking force was the remnant of the Winterfell army: the Unsullied under Grey Worm, the surviving northmen and Vale men under Jon Snow, what Dothraki were left, and one dragon.

The decisive factor was neither numbers nor walls. It was that the anti-dragon weapon had been proved at sea against a rider flying straight and level in daylight, and had never been tested against one who had learned from it.

How it was fought

It opened with the fleet and it was over almost as it began. Drogon came out of low cloud from behind and above the anchored ships rather than approaching across open water in the sightline of the scorpions, which was the entire lesson of the previous engagement applied once. A scorpion is a slow-traversing weapon on a fixed mount aimed by eye. Against a target that arrives from an unexpected quarter at speed it gets one shot, usually late. The Iron Fleet was destroyed at anchor in a matter of minutes, and with it the crownÔÇÖs naval arm and the greater part of its confidence.

The wall batteries went the same way and for the same reason, from the landward side and along the line of the ramparts rather than across them. Once the scorpions on the walls were gone the city had no weapon that could reach the sky at all, and the defence of KingÔÇÖs Landing reverted to what it had been for three hundred years, which is masonry.

The Golden Company was destroyed next, and this is the part that has drawn the most professional criticism. Twenty thousand of the finest heavy infantry available for hire had been drawn up outside the gate in close order, in the open, with their backs to a wall they could not retreat through quickly, facing an enemy with a dragon. There is no formation that survives that and there was no reason to be standing there. A single pass along the front, followed by the collapse of the gate behind them, ended the Golden Company as a going concern before it had received a charge.

With the gate down and the walls silent the fighting fell to the two infantry forces in the streets around the Mud Gate, and it lasted about as long as it takes for professional soldiers to work out that nobody is coming to help them. The Lannister garrison was outnumbered, out-generalled and had just watched their own artillery, their fleet and their sellswords destroyed in under an hour. They threw down their swords in the square almost as one, which is the ordinary and honourable end of a siege.

Then the bells rang. The bells of the Great Sept are the recognised signal of a cityÔÇÖs surrender and everyone on the field understood them. The attacking commanders in the street stopped. The garrison was disarmed. By every convention of Westerosi war the battle had ended and the sack was the only question remaining, and the terms had been agreed in advance.

What happened instead was a decision taken by one person alone on a rooftop, and there is no tactical account of it, because it was not tactics. Drogon turned from the Red Keep and began working systematically through the city ÔÇö not the fortress, not the garrison, not the surviving batteries, but the streets. The fires that followed did the rest, because a medieval city of timber and thatch packed with refugees needs only to be started. Once the burning was general the two armies in the streets came apart into their own worst instincts: the Dothraki and a portion of the Unsullied went through the districts behind the fire, and the northern contingents in the square found themselves standing between their own allies and the people they had come to liberate, unable to stop either.

There was no pursuit, no defence, no second phase. The city had already surrendered when the destruction began and continued to be destroyed for hours afterward, which is precisely why it is not remembered as a battle.

What it cost

The number of dead in KingÔÇÖs Landing is beyond serious estimate and the story does not attempt one. It was a city of half a million with the countryside crowded in on top of it, and a large part of it burned with the people inside. The dead were overwhelmingly not soldiers.

The Golden Company was annihilated, the Iron Fleet was destroyed at anchor, and the Lannister garrison ceased to exist. On the other side the losses were negligible in men and total in something else.

The Red Keep itself was brought down in large part, and the sept, and the whole of the low ground by the river. What was left was a burnt shell holding a throne.

What it changed

Militarily it ended the last war in Westeros in an afternoon and left one person in undisputed possession of the continent, with no rival army, no fleet, and no walls anywhere that meant anything.

Politically it destroyed the thing it had won. The case for Daenerys Targaryen had always rested on a distinction between her and the dynasty she came from ÔÇö that she broke wheels rather than turned them, that she took cities in order to free them. That distinction did not survive the afternoon, and the people who had spent years arguing it on her behalf were the ones standing in the square when the bells rang.

Whether this was a betrayal of the character or the destination she had been walking toward from the first city she burned is the argument that has run ever since, and the showÔÇÖs own answer is less confident than it believes. What is not in dispute is the strategic consequence: the throne was taken, and taking it that way made holding it impossible.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Varys had already been executed before the assault, on Dragonstone, for writing letters proposing Jon Snow as the better claimant. He knew what he was doing and he did it anyway, on the grounds that a spymaster who serves the realm rather than a person occasionally has to prove it.

Harry Strickland was ridden down in the street by Grey Worm as the Golden Company broke. Euron Greyjoy came ashore from his burning fleet and met Jaime Lannister on the rocks below the Keep; both men wounded each other, and Euron died on the shingle believing he had killed the queenÔÇÖs lover, which was the only thing he had ever wanted on the record.

Sandor Clegane found his brother on the Red KeepÔÇÖs stair and got the fight he had been owed for thirty years. Nothing short of the collapsing tower and the fire below it would end it, and that is how it ended, with both of them going into it. He had talked Arya Stark out of coming into the Keep with him a few minutes earlier, which is very probably the only unambiguously good thing he did in his life.

Cersei and Jaime Lannister died together beneath the Red Keep, crushed as the cellars came down on them while trying to reach the boats. Qyburn was killed on the stair by the creature he had made, for standing in its way.

Daenerys Targaryen was killed days later in the throne room by Jon Snow, who had spent the interval being told by his conscience and by Tyrion that there was no version of the future in which she stopped. Drogon burned the Iron Throne rather than the man who did it, which is either the most or the least intelligent thing any animal does in the story, and carried her body east.

What followed was a council of the surviving lords in the ruins, the election of Bran Stark as king of six kingdoms, the NorthÔÇÖs departure under Sansa, and Jon SnowÔÇÖs return to the Wall ÔÇö a punishment that was also, on any honest reading, the only place left that would have him.