Heavy darkness had swallowed the Crownlands completely. Stokeworth crouched amid blood and fire like a blood-drenched beast.
The hereditary nobles' castle had towering walls. Its stone ramparts, several feet thick, had once been a barrier capable of holding back vast armies, but now the fighting had battered them beyond recognition.
More than half the battlements had crumbled. The wooden beams of the arrow towers had been blackened by fire arrows, and corpses lay piled beneath the walls, stretching from their foot to the distant woods.
Blood, old and fresh, soaked the earth, making it sticky and slippery underfoot. Broken spears, shattered shields, and snapped siege ladders completed a horrifying vision of hell.
The slaughter never stopped.
Soldiers of the Ashen Company carried siege ladders up to the walls. The moment their tops caught the battlements, the defenders shoved them down with long poles. The sharp crack of breaking wood mingled with the screams of falling soldiers, piercing the night.
But before one ladder had finished shattering, another band of desperate men charged over their comrades' bodies to raise another and climb. Their movements were rough but orderly.
It seemed this endless struggle would never end.
In the distance, siege towers rolled slowly forward in the torchlight. Their crude wooden wheels crushed the corpses strewn across the ground, creaking with a dull, grating sound.
A battering ram hammered the castle gates again and again. Each heavy blow sent a faint tremor through the entire castle and shook loose showers of stone chips.
This was the twelfth day of the siege.
The Ashen Company under Aegon's command had orders to attack day and night. Its main force assaulted the walls by day, while small units launched feints and harassing attacks deep into the night, grinding down the defenders' resolve with the cruelest