The Dragon of Duskendale -- A Song of Ice and Fire Fanfic

Chapter 2

He had been born and raised in King's Landing, but Duskendale was his city.

Aelor had first laid eyes on it five years past, riding with the great host assembled by Tywin Lannister to rescue his father, imprisoned there after attempting to treat with Lord Denys Darklyn. She was built on the shores of the Narrow Sea, the castle itself—the Dun Fort—overlooking the port the Darklyns of old had built in the natural harbor. It was a squat castle, it's thick stone walls a near perfect square dotted on the corners with large drum towers. While no match in elegance to the Red Keep of his youth, it was a comfortable, defensible keep. Aelor loved it.

The city was walled as well, a strong curtain of stone that connected with those of the Dun Fort to the north and south and shimmered palely in the light of predawn. Innkeepers, carpenters, tradesmen and the like made their homes and sold their wares behind their protection, and the road from the harbor to the Shadow Gate, the only point of entry to the city proper from the docks, was heavily traveled at all hours. The captain of that gate house, traditionally titled the Shadowkeeper, kept the peace on the docks while the City Watch patrolled the streets and alleys regularly.
Though Aelor liked to think he had always been a somewhat grounded lad, it would have been a lie to say he hadn't envisioned himself storming those walls with fire and blood and rescuing the king when he first lay eyes on them. He'd been a young man and unbloodied, and a self-admitted fool.

Lord Tywin had instead settled into a siege that lasted half a year, the Hand of the King unwilling to assault the city and risk Lord Denys executing King Aerys. Negotiations, doomed from the start, had taken that amount of time to fully die, and the assault young Aelor had been envisioning had gone as far as to be planned. Instead of being carried out, though, Ser Barristan the Bold had conducted a rescue the night before, scaling both sets of walls and saving the king despite taking an arrow wound in the effort. Lord Denys had surrendered soon after, and died not long after that.

Aelor had gone to sleep envisioning the assault the next morning and woken to his father's angry curses outside. He'd also gone to sleep the night before landless, and by the end of the next day was a high lord of the Crownlands.

I was relieved then, even if father was never sane. That half a year broke him, though. Considering what he became since...there are days I wish we had just attacked immediately and called his death a tragedy.

The Prince shook his head to clear it, letting a small smile cross his lips as the smell of the sea as it blew across the Rosby Road beneath him. It was the same sea and the same winds that blew that supposedly same scent to the Red Keep, but here...here it was different.

"Manfred wasted no time." Ren, riding with Aelor and Barristan at the head of the prince's retinue and the growing herd of levies they had begun raising in the villages since entering his lands, gestured to the sandy beach south of the docks. There, in long and uneven lines, men trained with staff and shield. From the clumsy stances and general disarray, visible even from this distance, they were clearly peasant levies raised from the streets of Duskendale.

Aelor nodded, pleased. "He never does." He reined his palfrey, a fine animal he'd won at the tourney in Rosby a year past, to a stop. "Ser Willis, Ser Alester!"

Ser Willis Lyberr, a stocky man in his forties from a knightly house in Tumbleton who had made the Targaryen's acquaintance in the training yards around the siege, quickly galloped to his prince's side. He had joined Aelor's retinue the moment it had been formed, that red evening in this very city where so many had lost their lives and the prince had gained a lordship. Ser Alester Turnbuckle, a towering former hedge knight and lifelong friend to Willis, as well as another founding member of Aelor's retinue, rode alongside. "Take these levies down to the join the others. Give Ser Manfred my thanks for his quick reaction to my raven."