The Battle of the Honeywine

A land battle in the Reach that a boy on a blue dragon turned at the last hour.

Why it came to this

The Dance is usually told as a war of dragons over the Crownlands and the riverlands, which is where the famous names died. The Reach is the part that gets left out, and it should not be, because it is where the largest green army of the war was raised and where the war on the ground was actually won. Oldtown and Highgarden were the two poles of it. HighgardenÔÇÖs Tyrells were a child and a regency and effectively sat the war out; OldtownÔÇÖs Hightowers were rich, numerous, and firmly for the greens, not least because Queen Alicent was a Hightower and the whole green cause was in a real sense a Hightower family project.

Ser Ormund Hightower raised the strength of Oldtown and the southern Reach for King Aegon II and began marching it up toward the fighting. This was a serious army, one of the largest fielded by either side in the whole war, and its mere existence was a problem for the blacks, because if it reached the riverlands intact it would tip the balance of numbers there decisively. The blacks needed it stopped in the Reach, and they had partisans there to do it ÔÇö Reachlords who had declared for Rhaenyra and who now tried to bring Ormund to battle before he could get clear of his own country.

So the black Reachlords, under Thaddeus Rowan and others, moved to trap OrmundÔÇÖs host against the Honeywine before it could gather its full weight. On paper it was a reasonable plan and it went reasonably for exactly as long as the battle stayed a matter of men.

The ground and the hosts

The Honeywine is the river that runs down to Oldtown, and the fighting took place on its banks on the seaward side of the Reach, close enough to the city that the outcome would decide whether Oldtown itself was threatened. A river battle constrains both armies; it fixes their flanks and it makes manoeuvre expensive, which tends to reward the larger and better-supplied host.

That was the Hightowers. OrmundÔÇÖs army was big, well-found and drawn from the most populous stretch of the most populous kingdom in Westeros. Against it the black Reachlords had assembled a coalition of houses that had declared for Rhaenyra, smaller in total and ÔÇö the recurring weakness of the black cause everywhere ÔÇö less unified in command.

The one thing the greens did not initially have on the field was a dragon that could fight. That changed during the campaign, and the change is the whole point of the battle. Prince Daeron Targaryen, the youngest of AlicentÔÇÖs three sons, a boy in his early teens, had been fostered at Oldtown and rode a young blue dragon named Tessarion, the Blue Queen. He and his dragon were with or near OrmundÔÇÖs host, and the blacks either did not know it or did not weight it properly.

How it was fought

The opening went to the blacks, or at least did not go against them, which for the smaller army was the same as winning. The two hosts met along the river and the fighting was hard and even; for a good part of the day the black Reachlords were pressing OrmundÔÇÖs army and there was a real prospect of pinning it against the water and breaking it. This is the phase the black accounts dwell on, because it is the last part of the day that suited them.

Then Tessarion came down. A dragon entering a land battle that has been fought to a standstill does not need to kill many men to decide it; it needs to break the shape of one army while the other holds together, and a fresh, frightened animal ridden by a boy with everything to prove is entirely capable of that. Daeron brought the blue dragon onto the black host and the black host came apart. What had been an even fight became a rout in the span it takes a formation to decide it has had enough.

The greens turned the collapse into a proper victory. With the black Reachlords broken and running, OrmundÔÇÖs army was not merely saved but freed ÔÇö the force that had been sent to trap it was destroyed, and the road up through the Reach and out toward the wider war was open. Several of the black leaders were taken; the coalition that had tried to stop the Hightowers in the Reach effectively ceased to exist as a field army.

What it cost

The black cause in the Reach lost its army and, with it, the ability to keep the largest green host in the war penned in its own country. That is the concrete cost and it was large: everything Ormund HightowerÔÇÖs army did afterward ÔÇö and it did a great deal, some of it catastrophic for both sides ÔÇö proceeds from its not having been destroyed on the Honeywine.

It made Daeron Targaryen. He was knighted for the battle, given the byname Daeron the Daring, and became for a season the great hope of the green cause in the Reach ÔÇö a boy who had won a battle from the air the way his ancestors were supposed to, at a point in the war when the greens badly needed a dragon victory that did not also cost them a king. The reputation was real and it was earned. What it led him toward is a fold-below matter.

The material cost in men fell overwhelmingly on the black side and is not recorded with any precision, which is the standard state of affairs for every number in this war.

What it changed

It secured Oldtown and the south of the Reach for the greens and it released Ormund HightowerÔÇÖs host to march north and become one of the decisive instruments of the later war. The Honeywine is the reason the Reach ends the Dance as green country, and the reason a great green army was loose in the upper Reach and the riverlands in the warÔÇÖs worst year.

It also, in a smaller way, is a corrective to the way the Dance is usually remembered. The famous engagements are the dragon duels, and they were mostly ruinous for both sides. The Honeywine is one of the few battles of the war where a dragon was used the way the Conquest used them ÔÇö decisively, from the air, against men who had no answer ÔÇö and it belonged to the greens, and it is almost never mentioned.

For the boy who won it, it set a trajectory. A thirteen-year-old who wins a battle and a byname in the same afternoon is a thirteen-year-old who will be at the next one, and the next one was Tumbleton.

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

Ser Ormund Hightower survived the Honeywine and marched his host north to further victories that made him, for a brief while, one of the most successful commanders of the war on either side. His run ended at Tumbleton, which has its own entry; he did not outlive that field.

Prince Daeron Targaryen, Daeron the Daring, came out of the Honeywine a knight and a hero at an age when most boys are still squires. He fought on with OrmundÔÇÖs army and with Tessarion. His war, and his life, ran on into the two battles of Tumbleton and did not survive them; what became of him and his blue dragon belongs to that account.

The black Reachlords who were taken were, on the whole, dealt with less harshly than the losers of most battles in this war, largely because the greens had bigger problems elsewhere and the Reach still had to be governed. Thaddeus RowanÔÇÖs own road ran on into the warÔÇÖs uglier back half and ended badly, at the hands of his own sideÔÇÖs regime rather than the enemyÔÇÖs.