Monfryd’s son Durran XI (the Dim) and his own son Barron (the Beautiful) yielded up all he had gained and more besides. During the long years when Durwald I (the Fat) ruled in Storm’s End, the Masseys broke away, Tarth thrice revolted, and even upon Cape Wrath a challenge arose, from a woods witch known only as the Green Queen, who held the rainwood against Storm’s End for the best part of a generation. For a time it was said Durwald’s rule extended no farther than a man could urinate off the walls of Storm’s End.
The tide turned again when Morden II named his baseborn half brother Ronard as his castellan. A fearsome warrior, Ronard became the ruler of the stormlands in all but name and took King Morden’s sister to wife. Within five years, he had claimed the kingship as well. It was Morden’s own queen who placed Morden’s crown on Ronard’s head. If the songs be true, she shared his bed as well. Morden himself, deemed harmless, was confined to a cell in the tower.
His usurper ruled for nigh unto thirty years as Ronard the Bastard, smashing rebel bannerman and petty kings alike in battle after battle. Never a man to confine himself to a single woman, he claimed a daughter from every foe who bent the knee. By the time he died, he had supposedly fathered nine-and-ninety sons. Most were bastard born (though Ronard had three-and-twenty wives, the songs say) and did not share in their father’s inheritance but had to make their own way in the world. For this reason, thousands of years later, many and more of the smallfolk of the stormlands, even the meanest and humblest amongst them, still boast of royal blood.
ANDALS IN THE STORMLANDS
Erich VII Durrandon was king in the stormlands when the Andal longships first began to cross the narrow sea. History remembers him as Erich the Unready, for he took little note of these invaders, famously declaring that he had no interest in “the quarrels of strangers in a land far away.” The Storm King was embroiled in his own wars at the time, attempting to reconquer Massey’s Hook from its infamous pirate king, Justin Milk-Eye, whilst fending off the incursions of the Dornish king Olyvar Yronwood. Nor did Erich live to see the result of his inaction, for the Andals remained occupied with their conquest of the Vale for the rest of his lifetime.
His grandson, King Qarlton II Durrandon, was the first to face the Andals in battle. After four generations of war, that monarch—who styled himself Qarlton the Conqueror—finally completed the reconquest of Massey’s Hook, taking Stonedance after a year’s siege and slaying the last king of House Massey, Josua (called Softspear).
The Storm King held his conquest for less than two years. An Andal warlord named Togarion Bar Emmon (called Togarion the Terrible) had established his own small kingdom north of the Blackwater but was being hard-pressed by the Darklyn king of Duskendale. Sensing weakness to the south, Togarion took to wife the daughter of Josua Softspear and crossed Blackwater Bay with all his power to establish a new kingdom on Massey’s Hook. He built his own castle at Sharp Point, at the Hook’s end, whilst driving the stormlanders from Stonedance and setting his wife’s brother to rule there as a puppet dancing to his strings.
Qarlton the Conqueror soon had more serious woes to concern him than the loss of Massey’s Hook. The eyes of the Andals had turned south, and longships had begun to come ashore all up and down his coasts, full of hungry men with the seven-pointed stars painted on their shields and chests and brows, all of them bent on carving out kingdoms of their own. The rest of his reign, and that of his son and grandson (Qarlton III and Monfryd V) after him, were times of almost constant war.
Andals landing on the shores of the stormlands. (illustration credit 142)
Though the Storm Kings won half a dozen major battles—the greatest of these being the Battle of Bronzegate where Monfryd V Durrandon defeated the Holy Brotherhood of the Andals, an alliance of seven petty kings and war lords, at the cost of his own life—the longships kept coming. It was said that for every Andal who fell in battle, five more came wading ashore. Tarth was the first of the stormlands to be overwhelmed; Estermont soon followed.
The Andals established themselves on Cape Wrath as well and might well have taken all the rainwood if they had not proved as willing to make war on one another as upon the kingdoms of the First Men. But King Baldric I Durrandon (the Cunning) proved expert at setting them one against the other, and King Durran XXI took the unprecedented step of seeking out the remaining children of the forest in the caves and hollow hills where they had taken refuge and making common cause with them against the men from beyond the sea. In the battles fought at Black Bog, in the Misty Wood, and beneath the Howling Hill (the precise location of which has sadly been lost), this Weirwood Alliance dealt the Andals a series of stinging defeats and checked the decline of the Storm Kings for a time. An even more unlikely alliance, between King Cleoden I and three Dornish kings, won an even more telling victory over Drox the Corpse-Maker on the river Slayne near Stonehelm a generation later.
Yet it is an error to assert that the Storm Kings turned back the invaders. For all their victories, they never stemmed the Andal tide; though many an Andal king and warlord ended with his head impaled upon a spike above the gates of Storm’s End, still the Andals kept coming. The reverse is also true; the Andals never truly conquered the line of Durrandon. Seven times they laid siege to Storm’s End or sought to storm its mighty walls, history tells us; seven times they failed. The seventh failure was seen as a sign from the gods; after that, no further assaults were made.
Seven-pointed star carved in stone. (illustration credit 143)
In the end, the two sides simply came together. King Maldon IV took an Andal maiden as his wife, as did his son, Durran XXIV (Durran Half-Blood). Andal war chiefs became lords and petty kings, wed the daughters of stormlords and gave them their own daughters in return, did fealty for their lands, and swore their swords to the Storm Kings. Led by King Ormund III and his queen, the stormlanders put aside their old gods and took up the gods of the Andals, the Faith of the Seven. As the centuries passed, the two races of men became as one … and the children of the forest, all but forgotten, vanished entirely from the rainwood and the stormlands.
House Durrandon reached its greatest heights in the epoch that followed. During the Age of the Hundred Kingdoms, King Arlan I (the Avenger) swept all before him, extending the borders of his kingdom as far as the Blackwater Rush and the headwaters of the Mander. His great-grandson King Arlan III crossed both the Blackwater and the Trident and claimed the riverlands in their entirety, at one point planting his crowned stag banner on the shores of the Sunset Sea.
With the death of Arlan III, however, an inevitable decline began, for the stormlanders were stretched too thin to hold this vast kingdom together. Rebellion followed rebellion, petty kings sprang up like weeds, castles and keeps fell away … and then the ironborn came, led by Harwyn Hardhand, King of the Iron Islands, and it all befell as previously related. Even as the stormlanders reeled back before the ironmen in the north, the Dornish came swarming over the Boneway to press them in the south, and the Kings of the Reach sent their knights forth from Highgarden to reclaim all that had been lost in the west.
The Kingdom of the Storm shrank, king by king, battle by battle, year by year. The fall was halted briefly when a fierce warrior prince, Argilac (called the Arrogant), donned the stag’s crown, but even a man as mighty as he could only stay the tide, not turn it back. Last of the Storm Kings, last of the Durrandon, Argilac did just that for a time … but near the end of his life, when he had grown old, King Argilac made a clumsy attempt to use House Targaryen of Dragonstone as a shield against the growing might of the ironmen and their king, Harren the Black. Never grasp a dragon by the tail, the old proverb says. Argilac the Arrogant did just that, and succeeded only in turning the eyes of Aegon Targaryen and his sisters westward.
When they came ashore at the mouth of the Blackwater Rush to begin their conquest of the Seven Kingdoms, with them came a black-eyed, black-haired bastard named Orys Baratheon.
HOUSE BARATHEON
House Barathe
on was born amidst the rain and mud of the battle known to history as the Last Storm, when Orys Baratheon thrice turned back the charge of the knights of Storm’s End and slew their king Argilac the Arrogant in single combat. Storm’s End, long thought to be impregnable, yielded to Orys without a battle (wisely, given the fate of Harrenhal). Afterward Orys took King Argilac’s daughter to wife and adopted the Durrandon arms and words as his own to honor Argilac’s valor.
The arms of House Baratheon (center) and some of its vassals (clockwise from top): Buckler, Caron, Connington, Dondarrion, Estermont, Penrose, Seaworth, Selmy, Staedmon, Swann, and Tarth. (illustration credit 144)
The favor that Aegon the Conqueror showered upon Orys Baratheon made many credit the rumors that he was Aegon’s bastard half brother. Though never proved, that tale is widely believed to this very day. Others suggest that Orys rose so high because of his prowess at arms and his fierce loyalty to House Targaryen. Even before the Conquest, he served as Aegon’s champion and sworn shield, and his defeat of King Argilac only added further luster to his name. When King Aegon granted Storm’s End to House Baratheon in perpetuity, and named Orys Lord Paramount of the Stormlands and the Hand of the King, none dared suggest that he was unworthy of these honors.
During Aegon’s invasion of Dorne in 4 AC, however, Lord Orys was taken captive whilst attempting to bring his forces through the Boneway. His captor was the Wyl of Wyl, known as the Widow-lover, who struck off Orys’s sword hand.
Afterward, all accounts say that Lord Orys became crabbed and bitter. Resigning his office as King’s Hand, he turned his attention to Dorne, obsessed with the idea of revenge. His chance came during the reign of King Aenys I, when he shattered part of the Vulture King’s host and Lord Walter Wyl, the Widow-lover’s son, fell into his hands.
The Baratheons remained closely connected to House Targaryen and played a significant role in the troubled reigns of Aegon the Conqueror’s successors. Lord Orys Baratheon’s grandson, Lord Robar, was the first great lord to openly proclaim for Prince Jaehaerys against his uncle, Maegor the Cruel. For his loyalty and courage, he was named Protector of the Realm and Hand of the King following Maegor’s strange death upon the Iron Throne. During the remainder of King Jaehaerys’s minority, Lord Robar shared the rule of the realm with the king’s mother, the Dowager Queen Alyssa. Half a year later the two wed.
From their union sprang the Lady Jocelyn, who married the eldest of the Old King’s sons and became mother to the Princess Rhaenys—“the Queen Who Never Was” as the glib jester Mushroom called her—and Boremund Baratheon, who succeeded his father as Lord of Storm’s End. At the Great Council of 101 AC, convened by King Jaehaerys I to debate the matter of succession, Lord Boremund was outspoken in supporting the claim of his niece, Princess Rhaenys, and her son, Prince Laenor of House Velaryon, but found himself on the losing side of the argument.
FROM THE HISTORY OF ARCHMAESTER GYLDAYN
Orys Baratheon, known now as Orys One-Hand, rode forth from Storm’s End one last time, to smash the Dornish beneath the walls of Stonehelm. When Walter Wyl was delivered into his hand, wounded but alive, Lord Orys said, “Your father took my hand. I claim yours as repayment.” So saying, he hacked off Lord Walter’s sword hand. Then he took his other hand, and both his feet as well, calling them his “usury.” Strange to say, Lord Baratheon died on the march back to Storm’s End, of the wounds he himself had taken during the battle, but his son Davos always said he died content, smiling at the rotting hands and feet that dangled in his tent like a string of onions.
The power of Storm’s End and its close proximity to King’s Landing and the Iron Throne made the Baratheons the first of the great houses of Westeros whose support was sought by Princess Rhaenyra and King Aegon II after the death of their father, King Viserys I Targaryen. By that time, however, Lord Boremund had passed and it was his son Borros who ruled, and Borros was a different kind of man entirely.
Where Lord Boremund had been staunch in support of Rhaenyra’s late husband Laenor, Lord Borros scented opportunity and proved reticent when courted by Lucerys Velaryon, Rhaenyra’s second son by Prince Laenor. When Lucerys flew his dragon to Storm’s End, seeking support, he found that his cousin Prince Aemond Targaryen had arrived before him and was busily arranging his marriage to one of Borros’s daughters.
Lord Borros was infuriated at the message Lucerys carried—wherein Princess Rhaenyra betrayed an unseemly arrogance in assuming Storm’s End would support her cause—and by Prince Lucerys’s refusal to take one of his lordship’s daughters for his bride (the prince was betrothed to another). He angrily ejected the young Velaryon from his hall and did nothing to prevent Prince Aemond from following him to take revenge for the eye he had lost to Lucerys years earlier, so long as said revenge was not enacted within the walls of Storm’s End.
Prince Lucerys tried to flee on his young dragon, Arrax, but Aemond pursued him upon his great dragon, Vhagar. Had a storm not been howling through Shipbreaker Bay, Lucerys might have escaped, but it was not to be; the boy and his dragon both died, tumbling into the sea within sight of Storm’s End as Vhagar roared triumphantly. It was the first royal bloodshed in the Dance of the Dragons, though much more was to follow.
In the early part of the war, Lord Borros proved reluctant to face the dragons personally. But toward the end of the Dance, he and his stormlanders seized King’s Landing during the Moon of the Three Kings, restoring the city to order and winning promises that his eldest daughter would become the new queen of the widowed King Aegon II. Then he boldly led the last of the royalist host against the approaching riverlanders, who were commanded by the young Lord Kermit Tully, the even-younger Benjicot Blackwood, and Blackwood’s sister Alysanne. When the Lord of Storm’s End learned that the host was led by boys and women, he grew confident in his victory, but Bloody Ben Blackwood, as he was remembered after, broke his flank, while Black Aly Blackwood led the archers who brought down his knights. Lord Borros was defiant to the end, and the accounts claim he killed a dozen knights and slew Lords Darry and Mallister before he himself was slain by Kermit Tully.
With his death and the defeat of his stormlanders, the Dance of the Dragons was all but over. House Baratheon had gambled greatly in supporting King Aegon II, and it was a choice that brought them nothing but ill during the reign of King Aegon III (the Dragonbane) and the regency preceding it.
As the years passed, and king followed king upon the Iron Throne, these old rifts were forgotten, and the Baratheons came to serve the crown faithfully once more … until the Targaryens themselves put that loyalty to the test. This occurred during the reign of King Aegon V Targaryen (known to history as Aegon the Unlikely), when the Lord of Storm’s End was Lyonel Baratheon, a swaggering giant of a man known as the Laughing Storm, one of the greatest fighters of his day.
Lord Lyonel had always been amongst King Aegon’s most leal supporters; so firm was their friendship that His Grace gladly agreed to betroth his eldest son and heir to Lord Lyonel’s daughter. All was well until Prince Duncan met and became smitten with the mysterious woman known only as Jenny of Oldstones (a witch, some say), and took her for his wife in defiance of his father the king.
OF LORD BORROS, SEPTON EUSTACE WRITES
Lord Boremund was stone, hard and strong and unmoving. Lord Borros was the wind, which rages and howls and blows this way and that.
Ser Duncan the Tall of the Kingsguard facing Lord Lyonel Baratheon in single combat. (illustration credit 145)
The love between Jenny of Oldstones (“with flowers in her hair”) and Duncan, Prince of Dragonflies, is beloved of singers, storytellers, and young maids even to this day, but it caused great grief to Lord Lyonel’s daughter and brought shame and dishonor to House Baratheon. So great was the wroth of the Laughing Storm that he swore a bloody oath of vengeance, renounced allegiance to the Iron Throne, and had himself crowned as a new Storm King. Peace was restored only after the Kingsguard knight Ser Duncan the Tall faced Lord Lyonel in a trial
by battle, Prince Duncan renounced his claim to crown and throne, and King Aegon V agreed that his youngest daughter, the Princess Rhaelle, would wed Lord Lyonel’s heir.
As the Seven in their wisdom would have it, it was the match that King Aegon V agreed to in order to appease the Laughing Storm that ultimately led to the end of Targaryen rule in the Seven Kingdoms. In 245 AC Princess Rhaelle fulfilled her father’s promise and wed Ormund Baratheon, young Lord of Storm’s End. The following year she gave him a son, Steffon, who served as a page and a squire at King’s Landing and became a close companion of Prince Aerys, eldest son of King Jaehaerys II and heir to the Iron Throne.
Sadly, Lord Steffon drowned in Shipbreaker Bay whilst returning from a mission to Volantis, where King Aerys II had sent him to seek a wife for his son Rhaegar … but Steffon’s own firstborn son, Robert, succeeded him as Lord of Storm’s End and grew to be one of the finest knights in the Seven Kingdoms—a warrior so strong and fearless that many hailed him as the Laughing Storm reborn.
When the madness of King Aerys II became too much to be borne, it was to Lord Robert that the lords of the realm turned. In 282 AC, at the ford of the Trident, Robert Baratheon slew Rhaegar Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, and shattered his host, effectively ending three centuries of rule by the House of the Dragon. Soon thereafter he ascended the Iron Throne himself as Robert I Baratheon, the progenitor of a glorious new dynasty.
The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones Page 39
