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

Chapter 13

Loren Lannister hated sieges. It had only taken an hour to realize that, and Loren had been in the Siege of the Sept for three days.

He thought it was three days at least. Truth be told everything had been blurring together.

Seven hundred men of the Westerlands were holed up in the home of the High Septon, trading arrows with Targaryen loyalists at the foot of the hill. A score of septons and half again as many septas had been in the Sept of Baelor when Lannister men had stormed up the hill, but only a handful of the former had been allowed to remain, tending to the wounded. One was being used as an envoy between the two sides, though House Targaryen was refusing to answer. The rest had been forced out immediately, having fled towards the south of the city where the High Septon had been before the attack. Less mouths to feed.

Loren didn't have to attend the councils to know it was a hopeless situation, no matter how many mouths they expelled. The dragons weren't talking because they didn't have to; the lions had nowhere to go.

But not a word of surrender had been spoken aloud, nor was it likely one would. Tywin was utterly calm, unflappable despite the fierce turn things had taken, keeping his council and the men focused. They built calvary spikes out of pews. They collected and reused fired arrows from the stone courtyard or bodies that they struck.

There weren't enough tasks to keep all the seven hundred busy, but it kept enough of the beleaguered men occupied to avoid a complete breakdown of discipline.

Except in me. I was never disciplined to begin with, and then they went and tried to make me sober. I haven't been sober in nearly thirty years.

A guard of twenty was kept in the northeast tower, which had been turned into a supply depot. Though they had taken much from the city, Tywin had immediately instilled a strict ration of food and wine. Loren didn't really care much about the food, though he loved it as much as any other man; it was the limited wine that was killing him.

His head was misery, his stomach terror. His body stank with sweat and trembled with chills. Other soldiers avoided or openly mocked him, but Loren paid them no mind, in too much suffering to worry over slights from walking dead men. More than one had openly asked Loren how someone like him could have survived to rally to the Sept while so many other, stronger, better men had died.

It was a fair question. Loren didn't know the answer any more than they did.

He'd been helping himself to wine on the Street of...Sugar? Honey? Some such frilly name. Another Lannister, one of his numerous cousins of Lannisport, had slit the baker's throat and begun raping the man's daughter, but Loren had been much more invested in helping himself to the wealthy merchant's generous stores of Arbor Gold. But mere moments into either activity, a big knight in Banefort grey had burst in barking orders, loading Loren down with the wine he'd been drinking and forcing him to haul it up a hill filled with terrified smallfolk dead or dying.

His cousin had killed the girl. In between bouts of puking his guts out, Loren kept seeing her empty eyes as Gerold violated her, then the blood on his cousin's dagger after he'd slit her throat. It brought back long suppressed memories, ones of muffled screams that, while certainly only in his head, seemed to quake the ground around Castamere. He'd done nothing then. He'd done nothing for the girl, either.

All Loren wanted was to drink. He'd used that these last thirty years to drive away the demons of what they'd done at Castamere and needed it now for the demons of what they'd done three days ago. So many drinks that he could pass out and not wake up until this war was long over and he was back in his branch of the family's mansion in Lannisport, surrounded by Arbor Gold that he could kill the hangover with.