Wolf of Númenor

Chapter 56: The conquest of the Storm's End

It had been two weeks since they left for Westeros and followed the Imp's plan ... They attacked the "Stormlands", conquering some castles until they reached the ancestral seat of House Baratheon Storm's End.

The knowledge that the Usurper's ancestral castle was to be reclaimed filled Connington with happiness and satisfaction.

But first ... He needed to regain his ancestral home ... The Gryphon Nest.

To do this, Connington sent the archers ahead.

Balaq the Black commanded a thousand men armed with bows. As a young man, Jon Connington had the same disdain for archers as most knights, but exile had taught him much. In its way, the arrow was as deadly as the sword, so he had insisted Strickland divide Balaq's troops into ten companies and send one on each ship for the long journey.

Six of those ships had managed to stay together long enough to discharge their riders on the shores of Cape Wrath. The fledglings assured them that the other four had been delayed and would not be coming, but Grif thought they might have sunk as well or landed elsewhere. At the moment, the Golden Company had six hundred bows. Although for this, two hundred would have been enough.

"They must be trying to send crows ... This is the Maester's tower. You have to watch it and shoot down any birds that come out of the castle," Connington pointed out on the map he had drawn in the mud of the camp to Black Balaq." Connington said

"Yes, none shall escape my gaze", replied the summer islander.

Balaq commands a thousand bows, with a third using crossbows and another third wielding double-curved horn-and-sinew bows common to Essos. The archers with Westerosi blood use big yew longbows, while Balaq and his kin use great bows of famed goldenheart. But regardless of their weapon, all of Balaq's archers were eagle-eyed veterans who had already proven themselves in a hundred battles, and they demonstrated that again at the Gryphons rest.

Small but strong, Griffin's Roost is located on a lofty crag jutting out from the shores of Cape Wrath. The castle lies surrounded by red stone cliffs on three sides, which descend into the stormy waters of Shipbreaker Bay. The land-facing approach is a long natural ridge called the Gryphon's throat. The entrance to the Gryphon's throat is guarded on one end by a gatehouse and by the castle's main gate and two round towers on the other end.

Besides faded tapestries, Griffin's Roost is also decorated with arched windows displaying myriad diamond-shaped panes of red and white glass. The bed in the Lord's chambers sits below a canopy of red and white velvet. Finally, the great hall contains the carved and gilded Griffin Seat where fifty generations of Connington's have ruled.

The east tower, the tallest of the castle's, offers a view of the surrounding countryside. The castle also contains stables, armoury, barracks, and a master's tower with a rookery. A secret stair beneath the Sept's altar of the Mother leads to a bolt-hole, while another stair under the northwest tower goes to a hidden cove beneath the crag, which appears when the tide is out. A well-provisioned garrison can hold the castle against twenty times as many men.

Jon Connington assumed they would lose a hundred men, maybe more. They lost four.

The forest had been allowed to engulf the meadows leading to the gatehouse so that Franklyn Flowers had only to camouflage himself in the undergrowth to present himself with his men twenty paces from the gates before emerging from the trees with the battering ram they had prepared in the camp. The creak of wood against wood caused two men to look out onto the battlements; Black Balaq's archers shot them down before they had time to rub their sleepy eyes.

The door, it turned out, was closed but not locked, and it gave way on the second knock so that Ser Franklyn's men had already gone half their throats before the warhorn sounded the alarm in the castle.