The Last Storm

The one battle of the Conquest that a dragon almost failed to decide, because it rained.

Why it came to this

The quarrel predated the Conquest by a couple of years and was, in its origins, a marriage negotiation that went wrong. Argilac Durrandon was the last of a line that claimed descent from Durran Godsgrief himself, an old warrior with a great deal of reputation, no son, and one daughter. He was hemmed in by the Reach on one side and Harren the Black on the other, and he cast about for an ally the way any cornered king does. What he offered the lord of Dragonstone was his daughter ArgellaÔÇÖs hand and a stretch of disputed land along the Blackwater ÔÇö a serious offer, and a compliment.

Aegon TargaryenÔÇÖs reply was the sort of thing that starts wars without meaning to and possibly while meaning to. He would take the land, he said, and he would gladly see Argella married ÔÇö to Orys Baratheon, his oldest friend, his best commander, and a man widely believed in Westeros and never once confirmed by anyone in a position to know to be AegonÔÇÖs half-brother on the wrong side of the sheets. To Argilac this was not a counter-offer. It was an assessment, and the assessment was that a Durrandon princess was worth a baseborn soldier. He had the envoyÔÇÖs hands cut off and sent back in a box with a remark about the only hands the bastard would ever have of him.

So when Aegon landed and the war began in earnest, the stormlands were not a kingdom to be negotiated with. After Harrenhal burned and the riverlords changed their allegiance overnight, Aegon divided his strength three ways: north to the Vale under Visenya, west and south into the Reach under himself, and down the coast into the stormlands under Orys, with Rhaenys and Meraxes above him. Argilac did not wait to be besieged. StormÔÇÖs End is arguably the most difficult castle in Westeros to take and he had every reason to sit inside it, but he had spent his entire life not sitting, he had the larger army, and he had noticed something about dragons that nobody else had thought worth noticing: they are animals, and animals dislike weather.

The ground and the hosts

The stormlands are named for what happens to them. Weather comes off the narrow sea and piles up against the coast, and the country between KingÔÇÖs Landing and Shipbreaker Bay is where it lands. The storm that broke over the two armies as they closed was severe even by local standards ÔÇö rain coming sideways in sheets, wind strong enough to take pavilions off their pegs, and within an hour a battlefield of running mud with visibility of a few dozen yards. Every account of the day, from either side, begins with the weather, because everything else on the field was downstream of it.

Argilac had the fuller strength of the stormlands: his own household, the marcher lords, the coast houses, and a heavy weight of horse. The numbers that come down are not worth quoting and were probably not counted at the time, but the disparity ran his way and he knew it. Orys had a mixed host ÔÇö AegonÔÇÖs household men, the crownlands lords who had knelt in the first year, and riverlanders whose enthusiasm was recent and untested.

And Orys had a dragon overhead who could not do very much. This is the part of the battle worth dwelling on. Dragonfire in rain does not behave the way dragonfire in dry grass behaves, and a dragon trying to hold a low pass in a crosswind is a large animal being pushed sideways over ground it cannot see. Rhaenys and Meraxes were in the sky, and their contribution to the day was real but nothing like decisive ÔÇö the more useful thing they did was make Argilac hurry, because a commander who believes the weather is his ally will fight before it clears.

The ground Orys took was a ridge across the line of march. It is unremarkable country and it was chosen for one reason: mud runs downhill, and a horse coming up a slope in mud arrives slowly.

How it was fought

The battle was conventional, long, and fought almost entirely with steel ÔÇö which makes it the only major engagement of the Conquest that a Westerosi commander of the previous generation would have recognised. Argilac attacked, because there was never any prospect of Argilac doing anything else. The stormlander horse came up the ridge in the rain and were held; they pulled back, re-formed, and came again.

That cycle is what killed his army. A cavalry charge is a single expenditure of momentum, and momentum is exactly what mud takes away. Each successive attack arrived at the top of the slope with less weight behind it than the last, into men who had spent the interval standing still. ArgilacÔÇÖs advantage in numbers was real but it was being fed into the hill a few hundred at a time, and the ridge was doing to his charges what water does to anything.

Meraxes worked the flanks and the rear where she could, which in that weather meant intermittently. The effect was less burning than herding: a stormlander wing that felt a dragon somewhere behind it in the murk did not always break, but it did not manoeuvre freely either, and it could not be got round the ridge. That, rather than fire, is the dragonÔÇÖs actual contribution to the Last Storm, and it is a useful corrective to the impression the Conquest usually leaves.

The day was decided in the dark and in the rain, when ArgilacÔÇÖs wings finally went. His right gave way first, by most tellings, and once one flank folds on ground like that the rest is a matter of time and drowning. What the old king did then is entirely in character and was probably the only thing left that could have worked: he gathered what he had around him and drove straight at the enemyÔÇÖs standard, on the theory that a host with a dead commander goes home.

The accounts agree that he got there. They agree that the two men met, that it was the last fighting of the day, and that the Storm King went down in the mud in front of his own banner with a dozen men of consequence around him. They were also written afterwards by people with a professional interest in that particular version, and single combat between the two commanders at the climax of a battle is exactly the shape a story takes when it is retold often enough. What is beyond argument is that Argilac did not leave the field and that Orys did.

There was no serious pursuit. The stormlanders who could still walk went south toward the castle or scattered inland, and Orys had no cavalry left in condition to chase anybody through that country in that weather.

What it cost

The stormlands lost a very large part of their nobility in a single afternoon ÔÇö not on the scale of the Field of Fire a short while later, but heavily enough that the region spent the first decades of Targaryen rule with an unusual number of young lords and dowager mothers. The Targaryen host took real losses too, which is worth noting because almost nowhere else in the Conquest did they.

House Durrandon ended in the male line on that ridge, after a span of rule that the stormlanders themselves measured in thousands of years and the maesters measure more cautiously. Unlike the Gardeners, the Durrandons were not burned out of existence in one place; they were simply reduced to one unmarried girl in a castle.

The castle itself never fell, because it was never assaulted. Orys marched on StormÔÇÖs End and found the gates shut and Argella Durrandon inside them, declaring herself Storm Queen and promising to burn the place around her rather than yield it. It is one of the better speeches of the period and it was answered by her own garrison, who had done the arithmetic of a siege against a dragon and reached a different conclusion. What happened at StormÔÇÖs End belongs in the fold below, but the outcome is that the strongest castle in the south changed hands without a stone being thrown at it.

What it changed

It created House Baratheon, and it created it in a very particular way. Orys took StormÔÇÖs End, took Argella to wife, and then took the crowned stag, the black-and-gold, and the Durrandon words as his own. A conqueror adopting the arms and motto of the house he destroyed is not standard practice; it is closer to an admission that the stormlands were being handed a change of surname rather than a change of identity. Three hundred years later, when a Baratheon takes the Iron Throne, a good deal of his support in that region rests on a family that the region never entirely stopped regarding as its own.

It also settled the southern half of the war before the Field of Fire was fought. With the stormlands under a man Aegon trusted absolutely, the Targaryens had a secure flank and a second army, and the Reach and the Rock were left facing the dragons alone.

And it left one lesson lying in plain sight that almost nobody picked up. Dragons are weather. They are enormously less useful in rain, wind and cloud than in a dry summer, and the Last Storm is the demonstration. The number of Westerosi commanders over the following three centuries who successfully arranged to fight the Targaryens in bad weather is, on the record, zero.

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

King Argilac Durrandon, the Arrogant, died on the ridge in the rain, the last Storm King of a line that had held the stormlands since the Age of Heroes. He was old, out of temper with the world, and correct about almost everything except the size of the problem; had the storm lasted one more day he might well have won, and the histories would read very differently.

Argella Durrandon was bound, gagged and carried out through her own gates by the captains of her garrison, who delivered her naked to Orys BaratheonÔÇÖs tent as a peace offering. By every account Orys covered her with his own cloak, had her fed and clothed, apologised for the manner of it, and treated her from that moment as what she was. He married her. The stormlandsÔÇÖ subsequent loyalty to the Baratheons is not entirely a matter of policy; a good part of it descends from that girl.

Orys Baratheon became the first Lord of StormÔÇÖs End and AegonÔÇÖs first Hand of the King. He would go on to a much worse day in Dorne, where he lost his sword hand to the Wyl of Wyl, and to a long, patient, unattractive settling of that account years afterward. He never once claimed in public to be a Targaryen and never once denied it either.

The names of the garrison captains who tied up their own queen and handed her to the enemy are not recorded, which is either an oversight or the most eloquent thing the chroniclers of the Conquest ever did.