The Siege of Storm's End
A year-long siege that starved a garrison to eating rats, broken by a smuggler in a small boat.
Why it came to this
When Robert Baratheon rode off to raise the stormlands and fight his war, he left his younger brother Stannis to hold StormÔÇÖs End, the ancestral seat, with a small garrison and the castleÔÇÖs formidable walls. It was the sort of task that suits Stannis exactly: unglamorous, thankless, defensive, and requiring a degree of stubbornness that in him passed for a personality. It also came within an ace of starving everyone inside.
StormÔÇÖs End is the strongest castle in the stormlands and arguably in the realm, built ÔÇö the legend runs ÔÇö by Durran Godsgrief with the help of Brandon the Builder, with a single enormous curtain wall so thick and so high that no army had ever taken it. It cannot be stormed. It can only be starved, and starving a castle requires that you also control the sea, because a castle on the coast can be supplied by water indefinitely. StormÔÇÖs End sits on Shipbreaker Bay, which is exactly what it sounds like.
The Reach army that came to besiege it, under Mace Tyrell, could not take the walls and knew it. What it could do was sit down around the landward side and wait, while the Redwyne fleet under Paxter Redwyne closed the sea. Between them they sealed the castle off, and then the only question was arithmetic: whether the food inside would last longer than the war outside.
The ground and the hosts
StormÔÇÖs End is a single drum tower and one gigantic curtain wall, with no weak angle and no second circuit to fight through ÔÇö the whole defensive theory of the place is one perfect wall that cannot be got over, under, or through. Against such a castle a besieger has no assault worth attempting; the Tyrells did not seriously try. The siege was a blockade, not an attack, and blockades are won by whoever can endure the longest.
The garrison was small ÔÇö Stannis had not been left a large force, because the fighting men had gone with Robert ÔÇö and it was holding a very large castle, which meant a lot of wall to watch and, crucially, no more mouths than necessary but also no reserve of supply. StormÔÇÖs End had not been provisioned for a year-long siege because nobody had expected one.
Outside sat the largest regional army in the realm, comfortable, fed, and in no hurry. The Redwyne fleet held the bay and cut the one lifeline a coastal castle relies on. The Tyrell strategy required no cleverness at all, only patience, and Mace Tyrell had nothing but time. The garrison had the walls and an emptying larder, and the walls, for once, were the lesser asset.
The starving
The siege ran on for the better part of a year, and it is remembered not for any fighting ÔÇö there was almost none ÔÇö but for hunger. The food ran out slowly and then completely. The garrison ate its way down through everything a castle contains: the stores first, then the horses, then the dogs and cats, then, by the end, rats and boiled leather and worse. People died of it. The accounts that survive, mostly from those who lived through it, describe the ordinary horrors of a starving town, and Stannis BaratheonÔÇÖs refusal to yield through all of it is the foundation of everything anyone ever believed about the man afterward, for good and for ill.
This is the part of Stannis that the rest of his life keeps circling back to. He held StormÔÇÖs End past the point of reason, on the principle that his brother had told him to hold it and that yielding was a thing he would not do, while people under his command starved to death around him. It is simultaneously the most admirable and the most frightening thing about him: a sense of duty so absolute that it does not bend for suffering, including the suffering of the people the duty is supposed to protect. Every later reader of Stannis is really reading StormÔÇÖs End.
What kept the garrison alive long enough for the war to be won elsewhere was not a sortie or a relief army. It was one man in a small boat. A smuggler ran the Redwyne blockade in the dark, on a moonless night, with his hull loaded to the waterline with onions and salt fish, and reached the castle with enough food to keep the defenders breathing a while longer. He did it, by most tellings, more than once. It was not a heroic quantity of food ÔÇö onions and fish, not a relief of the siege ÔÇö but it was the difference between a garrison that starved to death and one that lasted until the war was decided.
How it ended
The siege was not broken by battle. It was ended by the war moving elsewhere. While StormÔÇÖs End starved, Robert won at the Trident and the capital fell, and the whole loyalist cause collapsed at the top. Mace Tyrell was sitting outside a castle he could not take, in the name of a king who no longer had a throne, with an army that had just discovered it was on the losing side of a war that was over.
So the Tyrells did the only sensible thing left: they surrendered. The besiegers laid down their arms to the besieged ÔÇö the whole strength of the Reach, undefeated in the field, gave itself up to a starving garrison that could not have driven a determined child off the walls at that point. It is one of the stranger endings of any siege in the histories: the winners of the blockade surrendering to its survivors because the war had been lost behind their backs.
The Tyrells were pardoned and kept their lands and their heads, which was RobertÔÇÖs policy toward the great houses generally and a sensible one. StormÔÇÖs End had held. It had never fallen, it had never been stormed, and it had been kept for the winning side by a man who would not yield and a smuggler who would not stop rowing.
What it changed
Concretely, it kept the stormlandsÔÇÖ chief castle and its ruling house in the war on the winning side, and it tied down the ReachÔÇÖs enormous army for the better part of a year outside a single wall ÔÇö an army that, had it been free to march north and join the royal cause, might have changed the arithmetic at the Trident. In that sense StannisÔÇÖs stubborn hold on an apparently minor castle was one of the quiet strategic facts of the whole war.
It also set the two relationships that define the rest of Stannis BaratheonÔÇÖs life. He held the castle and Robert gave the credit, and the lordship of StormÔÇÖs End, to their youngest brother Renly ÔÇö a slight Stannis never forgot and never forgave, and one that colours everything the two of them do to each other twenty years later. And he acquired a debt to a common smuggler that he chose, uncharacteristically, to honour, which is the beginning of the one genuine friendship of his life.
More broadly, the siege is the origin of the reputation that makes Stannis matter at all. Without StormÔÇÖs End he is RobertÔÇÖs dour younger brother; with it he is the man who does not break, which is exactly the quality that makes people follow him into hopeless causes and exactly the quality that makes those causes hopeless.
What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.
Stannis Baratheon survived the siege and was rewarded, by his own reckoning, with an insult: Robert gave StormÔÇÖs End and the lordship of the stormlands to their younger brother Renly, and gave Stannis the smaller, colder seat of Dragonstone and command of the royal fleet. Stannis held that this was ingratitude for the hardest year of his life, and he was not entirely wrong. The grievance ran under everything he did for the rest of his days.
The smuggler was Davos, later called Seaworth. Stannis rewarded him for running the blockade by knighting him and granting him land and a place ÔÇö and, in the same breath, took the ends of the fingers of his left hand for the years of smuggling that had come before, on the grounds that a good deed does not cancel old crimes and that a just man pays both accounts. Davos kept the bones of the fingertips in a pouch around his neck and considered the trade a fair one, which tells you as much about Davos as it does about Stannis. He became the one man Stannis fully trusted and the one man who would tell him the truth.
Mace Tyrell went back to Highgarden pardoned and undamaged, having lost a war without losing a battle, and House Tyrell carried on exactly as before. The memory of having surrendered the strongest army in the realm to a starving garrison was not one the Reach dwelt on, and their enemies were too polite, or too prudent, to raise it often.