The battle erupted without warning.
It happened the very moment Arthur Dayne finished speaking.
He moved.
There was no battle cry, no charge. His movements were almost graceful, like those of a court dancer.
But the twin swords in his hands danced to a melody of death.
Clang!
The northern knight nearest him was killed with a single stroke.
Blood splashed across the red sand, the blazing sun instantly drawing a hot, fetid vapor from it.
Too fast.
So fast that Jon's eyes could not follow those two streaks of silver.
All he saw was Arthur Dayne surging like a white whirlwind into the formation of Ned and his six companions.
Then came a slaughter.
This was no duel.
It was a master swordsman giving a group of apprentices the cruelest lesson imaginable.
Arthur Dayne's twin swords worked in perfect harmony, one attacking, the other defending.
His left-hand sword blocked, checked, and swept aside every weapon aimed at him, while every strike of his right-hand sword precisely claimed another life.
The clash of metal came as thick and fast as a downpour.
Yet every burst of clashing steel inevitably ended in an agonized scream and another falling figure.
The second.
The third.
Ned's companions, northern veterans who had survived the bloody fighting on the Trident, were as fragile as paper before the Sword of the Morning.
The young Ned Stark roared, swinging his longsword as he tried to force his opponent back.
But Arthur Dayne's footwork was impossibly light. He always evaded Ned's blade by the narrowest margin.
"Father..."
Watching that young figure struggle beneath the twin swords, driven back again and again, Jon murmured the word without thinking.
The image of his father as an all-capable man, steady as a mountain, cracked at that moment.
He had always thought